jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
> A common wisdom in database design is “never using floating-point numbers for money”

Common, and in my experience totally wrong. It's the most pervasive cargo culting I've experienced amongst developers, where people with 0 experience with financial applications will recoil if you argue against it. In my time developing applications for front office at an investment bank, floating point often works best.

Of course in your case though, for a billing system, the method you describe is obviously the right one.
How do you deal with the complexity of taxing suppliers and customers of businesses?

How do you determine the value of goods exchanged and ensure these are equitably taxed?

What happens when you've got a mega-corporation that is both supplier and customer to another business?

What happens if they just decide to exchange goods well below market price and only settle the surplus/deficit of those transactions?
Antitrust is an intended outcome, progressive taxation is one way to (try to) accomplish it.
>Shoe me the html document where I can search through a 60 page text.

epub.

>An EPUB file is an archive that contains, in effect, a website. It includes HTML files, images, CSS style sheets, and other assets.

Search works just fine on ereaders.

The flexibility of html is that you can render it however you want, for whatever viewport or feature. If you want pagination, just render it differently.

>But if you read longer documents you want pagination

For long form works, I do actually prefer having them on my kindle, but that's because I don't want to read long-form text by staring at a screen, and I want a lower line width. PDFs tend to be worst case scenario there, because they often render with the assumption that you're trying to read it on standard letter paper.

Also, we've had "pagination" for text files for decades. It's called "less".
Minds change over time. Back before the USSR disbanded and their decades of various problems were revealed, there were a sizable number in the US with some sympathies with the Soviet Union (if not for its then-governance, there was at least sympathy for the possibilities and future of the communist country). Even Bernie Sanders decided to have his honeymoon in the Soviet Union to improve relations and find lessons to bring back home.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-bernie-sander...
Shipping proprietary software to end-users is unethical.

The user wants to use the software, the developer wants to provide it. I'm really struggling to see what is unethical about that.
The best practices that encourage you to minimize content and maximize whitespace on your screen. To change text for icons. To hijack the scrollbar. To replace perfectly good default controls with custom alternatives that look prettier, but lose most of the ergonomic features the default controls provided. To favor infinite scrolling. Etc.

Some "best practices" articles discourage all this, but in my experience, that's ignored. The trend is in ever decreasing density.

It all makes sense if you consider apps following the practices I mention as sales drivers and ad delivery vectors. Putting aside the ethical issues of building such things, my issue is that people take practices developed for marketing material, and reapply them to tools they build, without giving it any second thought.
Gets me thinking: I wonder how good Intel CPUs are with dealing with this sort of thing. Can the CPU detect repeated jumps to comparators and in-line them from there? I’d be interested to see a comparative benchmark.
The premise that backs this approach seems to be that there is a black and white “genetic standard” but the reality is surely very subtle shades of grey. What are the parameters for deciding between genetically viable and genetically unviable?
I know, but also that's reality. We were (and still are) pretty brutal when it comes to getting our way with the powerless.
Just setup mailcow. Not bad at all to setup. It uses SOGo for the web client.
Just as an additional data point to the conversation, I didn’t know who the author was (I don’t live in the States) and I think this was my first time visiting the website on which the article was published, and as such I thought the author was more on the left of the political spectrum.
So incredibly in favor of this.

I love python, it's probably my favorite language. I taught a class on it in Boston. But these exact questions have indeed brought doubts into my mind.

Year after year I'm disappointed by what python simply cannot provide in any straightforward way. The options are very few for making games. The options are very few for desktop GUI (I tried to do PyQt and then discovered QML with JavaScript and quickly left python behind for that project). The options are few for back-end web development-- yes, there's Django, but it just doesn't have the clarity, documentation, and community that Rails has, or Wordpress (different type of entity, I know), or many others. Flask is amazing but small in scope and community.

I'm a professional JS developer by day and I used to think JS was awful for teaching, because the functional side of it is nightmarishly confusing IN GENERAL, let alone to someone new to programming. Its objective/prototypal system takes quite a bit of getting used to, also, and it has many other quirks.

But, for the EXACT reasons mentioned in this linked post, I changed my mind. The fact that JS can be used for almost anything nowadays, is ubiquitously in demand, has a massive, massive worldwide "community," and allows easy GUI manipulation via HTML/CSS, makes it the best candidate for teaching by far.

It'll just take some careful consideration as for how to approach it best.
I would actually solve the game/show problem a different way. I would teach kids how to build MVC web apps and set up a cheap server so that apps could be "shown" to anyone on any device. If you use a mobile-first design philosophy for the webapps then phones are not likely to be an issue.

Yes, there is still the issue of response time but no language works for everything. You have to accept certain limitations and make compromises.

Actually, I might no longer even use webapps. Nowadays it is pretty cheap to give every kid a Raspberry PI so WxPython or Pygame can be used for everything. The showing problem boils down to borrowing a monitor, keyboard and mouse. You could actually carry around a small portable bluetooth keyboard and a mouse in your backpack with the Raspberry PI.

So, why stick with Python? It is because Python is a leader in moving up the evolutionary curve towards functional languages and functional reactive programming. I still think that Python is easier to get into that Erlang or Scala because you can "make mistakes" but still have a working program. And by examining the implications of mistakes you have a learning opportunity too. Note that Javascript has been following Python's lead in adding more functional features.

There is a general language evolution going on and Python is in the thick of it, maintaining compatibility with the old imperative style beloved of data crunching scientists along with the functional goodies that Haskell, Erlang and Scala focus on. It is not out of date. It is not mired in the past like PERL and PHP. What was good about Python 5 years ago is still good.
> To see this most clearly, try to imagine a situation where you would find it acceptable for an American soldier to be tortured by some foreign power.

Sure: If a company of US soldiers has infiltrated an area and is planning to blow up a church during a wedding, and one is captured, it might be acceptable to torture him for the information of the plot, so it might be averted. "Might", only if that is the very last resort and has at least some chance of success.

The reason it's hard to come up with such a scenario is that probably most of us assume American soldiers are acting on orders, and those orders are at least well-intentioned, even if they end up doing wrong.

That's not bigotry - it's perhaps naive.

edit: clarify the end
What do people expect of an industry where supply and demand is completely out of whack?

Supply of programmers in the games industry is almost completely inelastic. No matter how little they get paid (relative to tech standards) and how poor conditions become, young programmers will continue to flock to the games industry because it's perceived as "cool."

Why people make employment decisions based on what they play in their free time I will never understand. I also love reading books, watching movies, and eating food—but I have no delusions that those would be good career options.

More generally, I think the best way to improve working conditions across the tech industry is to kill the meme that working on "sexy" tech is important. So long as companies are able to attract talent through silly stories or sexy projects, rather than a good work environment and competitive salaries, programmers are going to continue to be abused and perceived as unprofessional.

Lawyers don't choose which firm to join based on who has the coolest name. It's time that programmers stopped chasing cool and started acting professional.
Prior post still on front page:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8919901
>It's a common reaction displayed by the proponent base of many languages, even here on HN, to advocate the use of their language for every conceivable need. This can't possibly work well.

Is that some law of nature, or merely a consequence in how we've designed languages thus far?

A well designed type-infered statically typed language with a REPL/interpreter, a fast AOT compiler, an optional GC, good documentation and IDE support, and a big API library could work well for all kinds of domains, from scripts and websites, to network application servers and systems programming.

Note also that the money we spend on language and tooling development are miniscule and laughable compared to the IT industry's size.

When there have been some decent money involved we had good results. Namely:

With SUN/Java we got the fastest, more mature VM out there, with very good GC and a ton of tooling available.

With Javascript, we got V8/JSC/etc, that made the language 10-100x faster compared to the nineties.

With MS, we got C#, a great language that can cover tons of ground for what its designed, modern, with a huge ecosystem of tools and APIs.

And from Apple, we got the great Cocoa libs and Swift (still a work in progress but very promising).
You may not care but that curve you are talking about is called a bimodal distribution. Just writing for information not pedantry. :)
Housing (and healthcare and education) will never be included in US inflation metrics because the inflation of those cost categories is a government priority. In particular the US gov wants homeowners to experience a consistent annual return on their investment, aka it wants housing to inflate. The CPI hides these issues and enables them to lie by omission, why would they change it?
Union Avoidance Consultants, historically, have been Pinkertons with machine guns that would not hesitate to gun down union leaders, so, if anything, this is a soft touch approach.
Check Entlin's previous comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2478475
Because founder wants to keep all the equity. Very few examples where early developers got share of success.
How do they decide which copyrighted content to delete? The files in the Dropbox are by default not public. Merely having copyrighted files in your Dropbox is certainly no violation of copyright law.

At which point does it become illegal? Is sharing it with one or two people ok? I would think that even putting it in your public folder is not necessarily illegal: What if you don't share the link publicly (or only with one or two people)?

Services like Rapidshare thrive on those ambiguities. They let you upload any file and give you a link, only after this link really becomes public will they take down copyrighted content (which introduces a time delay).

I have actually never seen that happen with Dropbox links (which, I think, is the right strategy for them: It would be bad for their brand if they were to become "that piracy website"), so they must be doing something different.
Relevantly, FSF's new executive director is asking for feedback, and specifically criticism:
http://lists.fsf.org/archive/html/info-member/2011-04/msg000...
It seems it'll have a theoretical range of 70km. It's more a toy than a real plane (like JetSky vs. real boats).

Probably fun though!
Far edge of that wing hits the water first, you are going for a 180 degree tumble at full momentum.
> Pre-allocating an array using new is measurably better for performance in some browsers.

If you need to create a new array and populate it with values, then using new Array( size ), and then looping through it to populate it will be faster than using a literal or new Array() and then looping through it.

It should be noted though, that the difference is negligible unless you're working on creating and pre-populating a lot of very large arrays.

This situation is rare to begin with, and even then in most cases it's not a big difference.

In perhaps the most common case, creating an empty array, a literal is generally faster than (or equivalent with) using the Array constructor (at least, in tests I have done).

I would go with the syntax you believe is cleaner unless you have a demonstrable perf bottleneck....speed shouldn't even be brought up until then (unless you are trying to decide between two truly equal options, then picking the faster one is reasonable, but that's not the case here)
As I said, its too early to tell, especially with all the talent at Color Labs. Most of us might be wrong about their product.

Regarding those 41 million dollars, VCs invest to make a profit.
"we’re close to resolving the issue"

Is it just me or does this ping change to whenever you loaded the page? It really annoys me and I was duped when I saw it at 5:30. I checked a few minutes ago and now It says 6:47pm EST. Yeah. You guys are "close to resolving it" huh.

— https://reddit.com/r/xbox/comments/lskia2/were_close_to_reso...

I suppose if analytics show vast majority only check once, it “works”.
Yeah, I think thats the point though. Kubernetes enables the orchestration and observability of a PaaS in a much more flexible way so that you can get all of that while still matching the requirements of your business.

I think Heroku and DigitalOcean App Platform are still going to be popular for small setups (as will things like Amplify) but when you outgrow those (or realize you are paying too much for them) then Kubernetes is a reasonable option.
But what about GP's point regarding mirrors? Your IP will be transmitted to potentially a wide range of effectively 3rd party hosts. Looking at my /var/log/dnf.librepo.log I can see requests from a number of hosts, including:

http://fedora.mirror.constant.com
http://mirror.arizona.edu
http://mirror.atl.genesisadaptive.com
http://mirror.genesisadaptive.com
http://mirror.lax.genesisadaptive.com
http://mirror.math.princeton.edu
http://mirror.siena.edu
http://mirrors.syringanetworks.net
http://mirror.us.leaseweb.net
http://mirror.web-ster.com
http://repo.radeon.com
https://codecs.fedoraproject.org
https://d2lzkl7pfhq30w.cloudfront.net
https://download.docker.com
https://ewr.edge.kernel.org

I never explicitly agreed to connect to all of these hosts (some are from repos I did manually enable), and it wasn't made abundantly clear to me during install they would be used. As far as trying to keep GDPR hygiene up, I don't see why this is better than configuring a default DNS server if you're worried about IP address transmission.
Yes and no. They leverage mobile devices to report data.
It's like an entire population is wardriving lol.
Each time I see that prompt I have to pause and consider the otherwise wacky theory that there evil forces trying to cripple Mozilla from the inside.

Why. Just why.
Because Facebook is the most vocal opposition. There is a bit of media bias too because a headline with Facebook gets more attention, but there is no doubt that they are putting themselves in the spotlight by publishing big pieces in the NYT etc.
>How do Super Singles deal with punctured tires?

You sit on the side of the road waiting for the tire service to show up.

>there's a higher likelihood of the truck remaining drivable?

"DOT would like to know your location"

You're technically not supposed to be operating with a blown tire. That said, driving to the nearest place you can reasonably get or wait for a replacement is the correct course of action.
Yup.

Feedback loops. Hypothesis, experiment, compare expected vs actual. Lather, rinse, repeat.

QA, test, analytics are for verifying you're on track, that your predictions are useful. Nothing more.

They're not for charting a course, planning a journey.
There are definitely cases where it would work better than other cases.

Even if we can't use it for some cases, we should still use it in the cases where it would work.
That's how it's being spun now, and perhaps in the email that went out today that I have not been privy to (probably because I voiced my disagreement with the idea at the time).

That's not how it was being discussed at the time.
A problem with jury nullification is that the interactions between laws is complex and can easily have unintended consequences. I am overall in favor of jury nullification, but it requires an educated jury. The complexity of our system of laws makes that very difficult.
Certainly not me. I had to tie it to my shoelace when I was going for a run, as my running shorts don't have pockets. Now, of course, as technology has caught up, I bought a lock from Home Depot that allows me to just remember a combination and not use house keys. Much nicer.
There's so little payoff to this scheme that we can safely assume it will never happen, as opposed to bickering about its merits. Here's a couple issues:

* The hashes are themselves password-equivalent, so we've changed browsers and introduced a random crypto dep to arrive at a solution that doesn't improve the security of the app itself (anyone who can see the hash can log in).

* A Gawker-style breakin under this scheme is exactly as bad --- perhaps even worse † --- as it was before, because these hashes are also trivial to crack with an iterative password cracker (of the kind that have been the industry standard since 1990).

* It's now that much trickier to implement a real password storage scheme like scrypt.

There is already a cryptographically sound proposal to improve password-based authentication on the web: SRP. I believe it's RFC 5054. SRP systems don't store trivially cracked passwords on the server and never pass the password in the clear. I don't anticipate widespread adoption anytime soon, but that's the horse to bet on if you have to bet.

† I'm not totally sure whether DES crypt(3) is faster or slower than SHA1(salt, password), but if I had to guess, I'd guess SHA1 is faster --- speed being one of its primary design goals. Speed kills in password hashes.
Good analysis of the changing market dynamics.

One of the surprising things is that the most lucrative vertical for Craigslist, apartment rentals, still hasn't seen major disruption. It use to be ok, but the noise has drastically increased on Craigslist in this vertical as Real Estate Brokers post listings that don't represent the actual apartment, or they keep posting the same apartment day after day wasting the users time.
Well done!

Shout next time you're in London and I'll buy you a beer! :)
It's more than a little suspicious that I immediately got 5 down votes for my critical comment, but have since broken even on karma again. I'd like to think my further arguments below did it, but more likely this thread was posted in one of the hashtagstartup channels.
> Idk man, I know several vegetarians who would serve "Chicken Salad" without thinking to mention it's actually seitan

Celiacs watch out.

(Seitan is gluten. It's literally just gluten. It is pure gluten from wheat. Feeding it to someone with a gluten allergy or sensitivity would be a great way to cause them serious problems. OTOH, if the Gluten-Free person in your life eats it, you now know something about them as a human being.)
btw nice app
Most companies recognize that socially responsible activities improve their image among customers, stockholders, the financial community, and other relevant publics. Ethical and socially responsible practices are simply good business, resulting not only in favorable image, but ultimately in increased sales.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_marketing
Can you add more designs? I like the ones you've showed though.
I think they're overstating how many casinos use RFID. The last time I looked into it, only the Wynn did - and then only to track denomination, not as a unique identifier. (Perhaps someone can correct me if things have changed) The goal is to help security detect cheating by tracking bets at the table games electronically, not prevent counterfeiting or theft.
The opposition is that we shouldn't be treating people like they are incapable of making reasonable decisions.

You say "If it won't accomplish anything then I don't really see what the objection is." but that's like saying if you have nothing to hide, what's wrong with installing CCTV cameras every 10 feet? The more your step on a person's freedoms, the easier it becomes to do it more and more. You shouldn't have to justify your desire to access pornography to the government or your ISP (or any content that is perfectly legal for that matter) simply because some parents can't watch over their children when it comes to computers.
I like how Intel processors were supposed to kill the Mac. They were the greatest boon for the Mac ever.
You're thinking of a disk: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=draw+a+red+disk
I've found that it's generally best to ignore hype for any film. If you go into a reasonably good film with low expectations, you'll like it. Walk into an incredible film with low expectations and you'll love it.
Stuff like maths, programming and physics are pretty universal. A problem in maths is a problem everywhere.

However things like payment gateways, local events, feedback on startups focused on Indian markets are not very global and may not interest a large majority of hackers here.

I never implied HN will not welcome such discussions or disapprove of it. I just feel (as others do too) that its hard for these discussions to get enough visibility here (for the reasons mentioned above).
I'd agree with two here, while adding one of my own.

The Social Network - have seen it twice, both times eager to get out of the cinema and rush home to continue working on my own projects. We all know it's possible to create something and have the world take notice, but to see the journey and the all too familiar scenarios was hugely inspiring. As much as the lead character may come across as an unemotional awkward individual - you can't help but want his sharpness and drive. Oh, and success.

Good Will Hunting - Maybe I happened to watch this at the right time, during a period where I had met someone special and certain obstacles had me holding back. This movie had me book a flight the second the credits began rolling. There's similarities with The Social Network too, a special yet flawed individual, whose mistakes pale in comparison to his potential. Every line in the film is a quotable.

Hangover - This will be the first and only mention I expect of this film, but in terms of leaving a cinema and feeling inspired, this is up there for me. Would happily have left on the road trip of a lifetime if my groups of friends were to join me. Sure I'd have broken down 2 miles into the journey, broke and a little homesick but I'd have given it a go.
It's still a bit iffy.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=draw+a+green+filled+red...
I agree with Warren. The government handled the crisis very well, with the possible exception of allowing Lehman Brothers to fail. It's pretty remarkable, really, and it's unfortunate populist cynicism opposed the saving of the economy.