jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
There are _huge_ economic, cultural, and military benefits to being the sole superpower that don't exist for country number two.

These benefits are, in essence, virtuous cycles that give the superpower a advantages on the world stage just by virtue of already being in first place. Think of it like compound interest, or a really big ball in Katamari Damacy, only for geopolitical power. That is, the US can arrange things in its favor to make it more powerful just because it's already quite powerful and no other country is.

As an example, the United States Dollar is the de-facto reserve currency for the rest of the world. That means that the US can purchase things without having to first go through (expensive) currency exchange, giving the US an economic advantage. The reserve currency status is also a major factor that also allows the US to borrow money pretty much at will.

Similar arguments can be made about cultural, military, diplomatic, and other power.

That means that countries aspiring to be the superpower have the deck stacked against them. So when, despite this, China overtakes the US, the US will have an awful lot of catching up to do. It's not fighting for food in the streets, but it would be a fairly serious blow to the US.
Nice - the location features are something I definitely wanted while messing around on Chatroulette and Omegle.
How does that make the article terrible?

He's not saying that this is a good thing he's using this as an example of how broken the medical system is. Did you read to the end? Or did you just get annoyed after the first few paragraphs and write this screed?
I was reading that whole story waiting for a punchline. He repeatedly set off the explosives sniffer while trying to go through airport security, and speculates that someone searched his place while he was away.

And?

I'd imagine that repeatedly setting off a bomb detector would be probable cause for a warrant to search his place. I'm not sure what the "is" is here, other than it's a major hassle caused by a screening machine throwing a false positive, which machines inevitably do.
I think this is why Portland's tech scene is really booming. Much lower cost of living, supportive tech scene, and still a cool city to live in. Though the weather isn't nearly as nice...
We all go a long time without water or realization but on a regular usual day when we are not under pressure by the TSA or police or what not. This situation is not a hyperbole.
If I sent a thank you note to my interviewer, I would certainly expect a thank you note back.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/gratitude-for-thankyou-note...
You say that as though "asking for read access to your email" was a reasonable request that a company might ask for and get. I mean, who knows what non-technical users would be willing to give out, but if any service asks for read access to your email, it should be called out here and the entire technical community should make a real effort to let everyone know that that's giving away the keys to the kingdom, letting that entity basically steal your credentials for every web services you use.

Obviously, if you use any kind of remote email service, whoever provides that service has some kind of access to your email. But nobody else ever should.
So how does the 360° review process help people who are on the chopping block? Can they request an appeal or re-evaluation? What if someone at an obstructed angle files a review? Just what happened in IT that caused those "two really good people" to be fired? Good sports teams don't let their really good people go. Why didn't you file a review for the two really good people in IT?

Who has final authority to determine that someone is adequate or extraordinary? Again, the idea is subjective, and can be biased toward not performance but individual compatibility, socially or professionally.
Others in these comments have discussed or questioned if Python/NumPy is the best language for recommendations, due to scaling/speed. What if there was a project to translate Python libraries to run on LuaJIT? I suspect a lot of work could be done using sytax-directed automated translations, and there's also Lunatic Python as a fallback, in case a needed Python library hasn't been translated yet.

Does this seem to be a worthwhile project?
Jerkcity is still using it, and that's good enough for me. HUGHUAHALAGPHMPPH.
On my 1440px wide screen one line has about 200 characters (maybe 30 words) if I maximize my browsers. It’s not so much a problem with the scriptures site because every sentence gets a new line and every line is numbered but there can still be sentences which go on for several lines. Your eye (and neck) has to travel all that distance and then go back and hunt for the right next line which is harder the further you traveled.

The guideline is to have about 100 or so characters on one line.
I love VirtualBox. Its allowed me to test on various platforms all from my Mac. Kudos also to Oracle for continuing with its development - I was concerned that it wouldn't be, so I'm pleased to have been proved wrong!
I know that this comment section isn't supposed to be about the church itself, but I can't help but be baffled by the way people are able to separate analyzing SEO optimization from the fact that the church itself is a fundamentally terrible organization. The church is full of racist scripture, institutionalized sexism, and dangerous sexual repression; and has been a major proponent of denying rights to gays. As long as they continue to have such regressive and backward policies, I don't care how good their SEO is.

Again, it's not that I doubt their SEO prowess, but how are people able to separate what an evil organization the LDS is from their SEO practises? I don't want to side-track this thread too much, but I'm genuinely curious about the way people are coming at this.
Rails 3.0

- Brand new router with an emphasis on RESTful declarations

- New Action Mailer API modeled after Action Controller (now without the agonizing pain of sending multipart messages!)

- New Active Record chainable query language built on top of relational algebra

- Explicit dependency management with Bundler

http://guides.rails.info/3_0_release_notes.html

Rails 3.1

- Better organisation for public/*

- Preprocessing CSS and Javascript with .erb templates, helpers for sprites

- Automatic down migrations
I cannot get connected, is this a SHA-1 (root) certificate by any chance?
I did not know that. Thank you for editing.
Are you nitpicking legal semantics (including something in one agreement or another), or saying it's possible to legally use React-Native while suing Facebook for completely unrelated patent infringement?
It's already public! https://github.com/facebook/react-native
This article agrees with you:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/102537722
I realize they're going for the dramatic finish and all, but they could've just turned out the lights... then people would've seen "BMW" everywhere they looked. Like BMW was following them, surrounding them, and omg they're gonna EAT ME.

OK, maybe not such a great idea. Could be good for circus clowns, though.
Maybe they rewrote malloc to make a http call to a session provider which keeps track of the allocated memory on the machine? :)
> The resources used PER CAPITA in suburbs will be greater than the resources used PER CAPITA in a dense urban core, other things being equal.

True, but the question is not resources used, but cost of resources and the value of the benefits received.
The problem is "artificially fail". You need to ensure that the systems work in production even after real failures.
OK, enough people have asked, so the snowing is gone...
I couldn't find much online about this essay. Is the text online anywhere?
I work in IT, and I've only seen one person using any tablet ever. It was an iPad, and it was someone I work with. And when I asked them about it, they said they it was neat but that they didn't really know what they were supposed to do with it. That was the one time I've ever seen somebody using a tablet.
Looks good, but I wish the authors of Netflix apps would include a region selector: there are huge variations in the catalogue depending on where you are.

As a UK resident, this is currently useless to me. It includes stuff that isn't available in the UK (e.g. The X-Files) and excludes stuff that isn't available in the US (e.g., the Shield, the Hobbit, Up). There is overlap, but most of the best content is region-specific.
I mean you seem to discredit "incrementally adding annotations" as a feature.

You're correct that anyone that would like to statically analyze a part of their code would want all of it analyzed. However, you're totally disregarding the biggest problem. Large existing code bases.

I'm not sure if you've ever had to deal with a large, deployed to production code base, but it doesn't seem like you have. I can tell you there is no way to refactor all of it at once.

The only realistic way forward is to refactor a single function, perhaps full file, one at a time.
Yep, this exactly. If you want to make sure something is removed, like from a customer upgrade, leaving it in the configuration for a while is reasonable.

Really I wouldn't want untracked resources to be automatically removed - because someone might have had a reason for installing them.

Though, yes, the question of removal of cruft does come up.

However, if you are doing immutable systems, it's likely you are doing Ansible builds from something like Packer or aminator, and are doing red/green deployments that completely replace the OS.

I think immutable systems are likely the future for applications, they just take some extra work to get your brain around them, that may make them be viewed as "not worth it" in some capacities - those dealing with a lot of data, needing to "stay around", legacy applications, etc.

However, this is also why Docker is popular - because it's providing people a quicker way to get into the immutable system workflow.

People have tried to make a better RPM in the past - I worked at a startup that did this at one point (rPath, now defunct). Though, ultimately, I think people want to work in higher level primatives than package managers, and the use cases involved in migrating a system from version A to version B are often not entirely clearcut.

Configuration is also manageable by things like etcd - I think a new package manager is ... I guess conceptually interesting. But it's kind of the last thing I'd want.

To control what versions you install, it can often be easier to just maintain good software repos, rather than enforcing it on each individual system.

(Think databases).

disclaimer: wrote Ansible
> Their current environment required overcoming tremendous technical hurdles on earlier versions of SQL Server

Jeff Atwood's goal was always "performance is a feature," and that means rendering your pages faster than anybody else's. With that in mind, you're always going to have technical hurdles to overcome on any platform - because you want to get faster results than anybody else is getting.

I remember when I first got involved, and Jeff told me something along the lines of, "This slow query runs in ~500ms, and we want it to run in ~50." That statement alone is a huge leap over what a lot of RDBMS users say - usually when people refer to a slow query, their unit of measurement is whole seconds, not milliseconds. They were serious about performance from the get-go.

> Luckily they were able to get the Microsoft SQL team engaged to get them through this.

Nothing against Microsoft - I love 'em dearly and make a great living with their tools - but Stack's success is much more due to their own internal team's dedication to performance. When we open bug requests with Microsoft, the time to resolution is typically measured in weeks or months. During that time, Stack Exchange's team has to come up with creative, impressive workarounds. They're the sharpest SQL Server users I know.

> Finally, their team was world class. BrentOzar, SamSaffron, MarcGravel (and others) are highly respected members of the SQL & .NET community.

Awww, shucks, but I'm not brown-nosing Stack when I say that their current team is ridiculously good. Their Site Reliability Engineers know more about SQL Server than most career DBAs I know.

> I'm not sure many teams would pursue this architecture if they knew the effort (and luck) involved.

It sounds like you're implying that other architectures are faster by default and with less effort, and I would disagree there. I haven't seen any big sites (big being top-100-in-the-world[1] type stuff) where the persistence layer was set-it-and-forget-it. Scale - especially millisecond performance at scale - is seriously hard work on all platforms.

[1] https://www.quantcast.com/top-sites
Where would you typically park them for an extended period of time? Is that what you mean with zoning problems? Do people usually try to hang out in a large parking lot for long enough? Or perhaps just get outside the city limit in what looks like abandoned land?

Also, how do you deal with the waste water in the long run? Stop by RV parks and empty out your septic tanks?
The big ideological thing that both these comments miss is the they don't question the presupposition that we need to be 'natural'
Male nurses is probably the most glaring example of that.
The Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth seems to uncover exactly this relationship.

www.vanderbilt.edu/Peabody/SMPY/DoingPsychScience2006.pdf

In the bottom quartile of the SMPY cohort (99 percentile) less than 0.5% received tenure at a top 50 school. Of the top quartile, it was a bit over 3%.

---

A throughout read of the SMPY literature should be required reading for discussions of this nature online. Also a good read:

"Cross-Cultural Analysis of Students with Exceptional Talent in Mathematical Problem Solving."

www.ams.org/notices/200810/fea-gallian.pdf
No, bullying would be to involve lawyers.

Apple has enforced the (unregistered) trademark of a fellow indie game developer the same way. Documentation was provided, the other party changed the name of their app, and everyone continued on their way without tears or lawyers. All quite civil if you ask me.
Bingo. I'm female, and a comp eng student. The problem might not be the gender bias among researchers so much, but the attitudes little girls face when learning. If you grow up hearing that girls can't do computers, can't do math, can't do science, cos science is a boy thing, while hearing that language is something girls are good at, you get a lot of female language majors. "Encouraging workshops" sounds a bit condescending to me. If they'd treat people the same from the start and let it go on a bit so that even a parental generation has grown up with it, it'll probably even out the numbers a bit. Okay, so more boys than girls have good abilities in the STEM fields, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't treat everyone the same.
I am no coder so pardon my naive question.

Is it possible for chrome and safari extensions to be interoperable, especially as they both have the same underlying web-kit technology? Surely, we do not want another platform fragmentation and battle. I am sure developers would love do no more work than recompiling the extension they built for Chrome. It will be a win for everyone.
HP must now realise that it bought a hangover of legal woes when it bought EDS. The British High Court ruled that EDS had been deceitful and deliberately misrepresented how long it would take to complete the CRM contract. This case has repercussions for all IT providers: An over-enthusiastic sales team can lead to being sued for fraud.
For those interested in the legal side, this is an in-depth breakdown (although it is very dry reading): http://www.law.com/jsp/lawtechnologynews/PubArticleLTN.jsp?i...
On the flip side, it still leaves you vulnerable to Flash-based exploits and consumes related resources (thus increasing overall load time), which is one of the biggest benefits of a pre-block system.
10 years ago, users could identify a link from underlined blue text or a highlighted blue border around pictures. We did so much visual progress since, and hover (especially in css) is good design and a good interface tool, in that it lets people know something might be clickable. For any user, hover means 'link', so i wouldn't start digging its grave anytime soon.
Do we really need to break something that works here (mouse+display) because it doesn't work there (touchescreen)? somehow it doesn't make a lot of sense, and probably calls for more thinking
I'm wondering if I can use HAML with this. If Windows support really comes, it would be very handy as well.
Safari Reader ♥
Is it specifically this sort of useless tool that has no possibility of use because it's just the tip and no torquing handle, or is it multitools in general? I get the former. I've never understood micro-multitools. You'll break your knuckles before you ever get a screw undone without something to grip.

But I use my (proper) multitool very regularly. Not regularly enough to bother packing a toolbox in my car, but regularly enough to keep my multitool on my desk and put it in my pocket if I'm going out to anywhere other than "just the movies." I'm actually on my second multitool, front wearing out my previous (admittedly cheap) one.

This is my current tool: http://www.leatherman.com/29.html

The only tool I haven't used on it (and I've only had it since Christmas) is the detent pin punch. It's marketed towards shooters, but that detent pin punch is probably the only part of it that is specific to such a need, as it can be removed and replaced with a barrel brush. Whatever. It's the best-built multitool I've ever had. The screwdrivers are actually useful. The knife finally locks. The "barrel carbon scraper" is just a scraper, and far better than trying to use the knife to dig at things. The bottle opener doesn't tear through caps before it removes it. The hammer is kind of silly, but then again, if it weren't there, there were a couple of occasions that I would have just had to live with a problem rather than re-set a nail. The pliers are smooth and strong. The wire cutters are sharp and strong. The wire stripper actually works.

Yeah, it's not strictly necessary to own one of these things in my life, but it makes life more convenient. I don't really need my smartphone, two different laptops, and a desktop, either. But it is convenient and I can afford it over doing without.
I think that's looking too narrowly at the problem. For example, for years Spotify used P2P tech to reduce demand on their servers - nothing stops a Youtube alternative from doing the same.
I wonder if this induces neuronal aging as well.
I wonder why he kept bringing up abortion. Is that a question in any sense solvable by observation, testing, etc? No more than the question of, say, legally requiring the use of child safety seats, though in an extremely opposite sense. Just pandering to his audience, I suppose. There are definitely a few beliefs liberals tend to hold dearly against all evidence, to the point that they would be unthinkable to the author and his audience.

Anyway, political questions are a subject of politics, which is a matter of power and practicality, not all-too academic truth seeking. If imposing carbon credits cuts GDP growth in half, gives vast power to international regulators, and provides Goldman Sachs with another 50 billion dollar-worth trading desk, I can put up with two extra weeks of summer.
Why are you sure that this ambiguity can't be efficiently detected? If it can be, it's worth doing.
If you get really good at this sort of thing you can take people's wallets just by asking
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DR4y5iX4uRY
You should consider the timescale and degree as well. A billion generations of AI will pass in the relative blink of an eye, allow for no response, and in almost every failure case will irrevocably destroy everything humans value.

GMO happens slower and is somewhat more manageable.
Has anyone a better measurement for knowing when it is mediocrity and when it is perseverance?

It's not perfect, but this is somewhat a function of the person's knowledge of history and the current landscape of both competitors and technical tools.
Yeah this is one thing I don't get about the Intel is doomed crowd. Semiconductor manufacturing lead has changed hands a bunch of times in the past, with Intel being in the lead for probably most of the past 2-3 decades. TSMC has had notable problems with nodes and has been about as far behind Intel as Intel is behind now for periods.

Why wasn't TSMC doomed then? And why couldn't Intel turn around now like TSMC did?

Intel looks nothing like other vertically integrated CPU businesses that divested from manufacturing in the past, it's still making a lot of money and gross margins are still healthy (and still higher than AMD and TSMC at the moment!) although clearly taken a hit from the mid/low 60s where they typically sat down to mid/low 50s in the past 3 years. Manufacturing silicon is still a profitable business for them.

Intel also has by some important metrics, the best performing CPUs available despite competitors being on TSMC and Samsung. I don't argue the others aren't better in other equally valid metrics. It was actually much more difficult to make that same statement about competitors back when Intel had a clear silicon tech advantage.

So definitely Intel is a leading edge node manufacturer if others were in the past.
I still think that some thinking and planning are important, but I agree definitely that speed of implementation is a critical success factor for startup. The shorter your build-and-ship cycle is, the more feedback you can get. In the worst case, if you build something that is not as useful as you expected or that has a negative impact, you didn't waste a lot of time before correcting your trajectory.
As an interviewer, I have never had a problem answering this question honestly. Anyone who shows discomfort with the question would give me a bad feeling about the company I was interviewing.

It's perfectly normal to have things about your job you don't like. What's so bad about talking about them?
Seen patientslikeme.com?
This is neat. Definitely checkout [1] if you're confused as to how it might be used. There are some good examples there.

These guys seem to have a unique perspective on human-data interaction and sharing. For example, the "Global Quick Add Feature" [2] is very intuitive. It seems like this is something Facebook is very interested in as it's essential to their product. I definitely agree with some of the other comments made here - I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook wants these guys working for them at least as much as they are interested in their actual product given their perspective and understanding.

[1] http://daytum.com/activity
[2] http://daytum.com/about/how_to/global_quick_add
Did you notice Delicous in the subject?
it's things like these that really make a difference :)

Hopefully! Depressingly frequently you can do everything right and not see the needle move. If it ends up working out for you, I'd love an email -- that always puts a smile on my face.
No doubt. I've experienced the spectrum.
> Remember, TSA's job is to spot outliers, oddities, and flag them for review. I have zero love for TSA, but I think they did their job here.

Society's job is to spot outliers and oddities and protect and support them from thoughtless bullying and cruelty; TSA's job is to support that by preventing violence in transportation.