jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
I'm not convinced you understand how representative democracy actually works. Are you really arguing for establishing a monarchy in the US, as you seem to be?

> They earn revenue through taxes, which they get to collect regardless of how well they govern.

Who is the "they" earning revenue? What does "how well they govern" mean, and who is the "they" doing the governing? These definitions are important. What are you actually complaining about here?

> If a politician passes an overly generous pension plan that ends up bankrupting the state several decades in the future, the politician will suffer no consequences whatsoever

Really. Gosh, that sounds very different from every corporate executive ever.

> That means they are incentivized to extract as much personal wealth out of the state as rapidly as possible during their short tenure.

Really. Gosh, that also sounds very different from every corporate executive ever.
It wasn’t a social commentary, just an observation that way many more people are at the intersection of can code and can work in the US, vs have some serious Haskell/FP bragging rights.
Not at all. Think of it this way, you're a small company with a limited budget. You have a very difficult problem and your existing engineers haven't been able to figure it out. Hiring another engineer could help but it's no guarantee and you can't keep hiring indefinitely until it's solved. Why not have a contest with a known payout (ie the prize). That way you're not paying for all the work that is a non-winning idea. You get the solution, for a fixed amount and are able to spread the time and effort across a vastly greater resource pool without having to pay for it.
In the mean time, here's the Wikipedia page for it, which has a decent overview and a couple of examples: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_interactive_shell

You can download it from Sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/fish/
Code Complete by Steve McConnell, and VBA Excel for Dummies. I think the latter was a very well written book, and VBA programming is underrated because for many people it's a good place to start in terms of practical application and it also has the benefit of being an interpreted/scripting language, so you can get instant feedback like in Python. Beats typing main string(args[]) or whatever the hell it is before you even know anything
Sure, but if you're a personal user using BIS the email experience on the BB is pretty poor compared to the other phones out there today. With BIS connecting to IMAP it doesn't actually do a two-way sync so if I read and delete an email on my BB it isn't reflected when I get home and check my mail on my laptop. Total fail. All because they're trying to push BES server licenses onto people. I think it's actually this pig-headedness that will kill them in the end. In fact, they're too focused on extracting BES money out of businesses to properly address personal IMAP/POP mail properly.
This paper was submitted nearly two weeks ago.

One would expect Dr Penrose to have issued a statement by now if he wasn't involved.

Instead, ten seconds on google reveals him discussing the research in question with a reporter from the BBC ...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11837869
In his book "ANSI Common Lisp" PG gives an account of designing reusable software from the bottom up i.e. "changing the language to suit the problem. In Lisp, you don't just write your program down toward the language, you also build the language up toward your program." (as opposed to exclusively top down design) http://www.paulgraham.com/progbot.html
We already have enough problems with people "mirroring" Wikipedia, rewriting the article with BS or it's outdated, then not crediting the original authors.
Yep, exactly! Any thoughts on opposing this approach?
Apple took what they learned from iPod, created a business logic tied to their counter-culture. Generated and harvested it into loyalty.

RIM all but abandoned their core audience (business folk) to find the mass market and got lost in the middle doing poorly for both.

When RIM releases a new feature (app store, touch screen, etc) it is to mirror what is already being provided. "Me too!" isn't an encouraging sign for a market investment.
I felt guilty because I always read at least some of the comments first.

Liberating to see other people are the same :D
The fact that the meeting organizer in Chile does not imply that the key constraint for the meeting time was in Chile, rather than in the schedule of the Australian attendees.

(Of course, its actually possible that there were essential constraints on both sides, in which case, the problem is more difficult, or that the key constraint was that the call needed to immediately precede or follow an event in a timezone different from Australia or Chile.)

Really, determining the key intent here is hard, and there is no one rule that makes it painless in all cases. There are lots of different possible intents with timing, and there is no single general rule that handles all possible changes in local time rules between the time an event is scheduled and the time it occurs.
Tangentially related, soviet-era sci-fi illustrations (mostly of the space race and the era the brothers departed from) is really great! There are lots of articles at http://www.darkroastedblend.com
I'm not sure their characterization of the past is accurate; all of those tactics have long been practiced widely. Hitler was elected and had genuine support. The Soviets and many others held periodic fake elections, as did many other dictators, and even today there are people in Russia who love Stalin. Saddam Hussein had the Sunnis and Baathists. Every dictator has sufficient genuine support, or they would be overthrown; you can't imprison everyone. Propaganda and harassing political opposition are very old tactics.

> replacing comprehensive political ideologies with an amorphous resentment of the West

Interestingly, isn't that the outlook of the Tea Partiers? The only consistency I see is a rejection of the West: Science, liberty (for groups other than Tea Partiers), tolerance, democratic government (if they are outvoted, government is illegitimate and to be violently resisted), environmentalism, organized labor, secularism, etc.
Found a video of the "perfect drug" demo mentioned, uploaded with notes by the author to Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LHpaGSb3JQ
It's just the opening ceremony.

From the article: "Proceeds from the concert will be used for 20 Centres for 2010, a charity campaign devoted to building twenty Football for Hope Centres for public health, education and football across Africa." I wouldn't expect a fight over this.
Like others said, current research suggests that being good or even expert in something is the result of the right kind of practice and lots of it.

Here are two good books about it:
The Talent Code:
http://thetalentcode.com/book/

Pragmatic Thinking and Learning by the Pragmatic Programmers:
http://www.pragprog.com/titles/ahptl/pragmatic-thinking-and-...
Same experience in the UK.

3G video calling was so unpopular that even when some of the carriers started including video call minutes as regular minutes (making video calling essentially free, anywhere) no one used it.

Apple has some advantages that might give it a chance though:

- The user experience is better. Convert to video mid call is nice, and it tells you when it's available.

- No one in the US has seen it on a large scale yet, so it'll have a novelty factor that will help get people to try it out.

- The video quality is better, because it was designed for newer systems and newer codecs.

But counting against them is the relatively low penetration of FaceTime capable devices. Almost everyone in the UK has an inter-operable video call capable phone.
FIFA (and the other football governing bodies) takes the management of their rights/content/trademarks very seriously.

I wouldn't want to get in an argument with them over whether it was permissible to rebroadcast their content. Saying in advance that you're going to do it is like prodding a cage of rabid lawyers with a stick.
Having been involved in litigation over copyright where we were 100% in the right but the other side had fundamental misconceptions about how copyright actually works I can understand why you'd just give up when threatened with legal action.

It took us a long time (about six months) and a considerable chunk of money in lawyers fees just to get them to go away - even though their case was totally groundless.
Don't use google.com, particularly in Chrome (and most over browsers, epiphany for example) -- just typing anything in the URL bar leads you to a search engine.

Edit: but thanks for the pointer, I would have missed it.
Hahaha nice reference to "Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy" in #5. Douglas Adam would be proud ;)

I agree with you on the smartphone, I use an android flavoured device myself.

The online calendar is a win as well, and it integrates great with the smartphone.

I would add Evernote (or similar)!! For online note-taking.

Didn't know about Goldtouch keyboard before, I'll have a look.

Duct tape!! McGyver lives in our heart ;)

Thank you
At one point data structures were tuned to work fast when loaded from disk (avoid seeks, try to read linearly).

Then they were tuned to work fast from inside main memory (avoid jumps).

Now they are tuned to work within the typical cache of a CPU (keep reads near each other).
Actually, a lot of people who have an WP 8 phone do like the OS a lot.

I know I do at least.
So convert it to an airbnb and rent it out for 1 week a year?
What's so special about housing that you need an extra special tax like this? We don't have it for cars or machinery or other kinds of capital goods.

I'll answer my own question: the root problem of too high rents is that governments:

1) have outlawed the construction of enough new housing to meet demand.

2) many places (CA especially) have property taxes that are drastically too low (and in CA's case, radically unfair).

Vacancy taxes are a bad hack. As you note in your comment you have to build in all kinds of grace periods or exceptions and even these can often be easily gamed or ignored.

Cities will be much better off if they fix the real underlying problems.
Yup - there's another thread related to this breach. A comment led me to do a google search on my phone number.

I found FastPeopleSearch.com, which not only had my current phone number and physical address, but my previous cell phone number, land lines (from back when those were a thing), my Vonage phone number, and previous addresses, all dating about 20 years. If you know my name, you can get a lot more... thanks to these aggregators of public records.

You can attempt to have yourself removed but there are a lot of these types of sites.

Of course, if you take "a" phone number, and use the google search technique, you'll find one of those sites like FastPeopleSearch and learn a lot more about who the phone number belongs to. But presumably anyone who's trying to make use of all this information could do all that without the Facebook breach, if they automate the process.

Of course, the Facebook breach ties a bunch of information to a phone number in a, perhaps, tidy package?
For remote landlords, local management fees can be higher than rent revenue. It can be less risky to just wait for capital gains.
Could you elaborate your solution please?
I know Oracle has some data mining module and decent stats functions in the database engine, but what's their end-user BI offering? Or is it just baked into their ERP offerings, so it's not branded separately?
So it's an un-edited Podcast you can only listen to live?

Or I guess if you're closer to my age, it's like a radio station you can't listen to without a password?
We're kind of talking in two threads and I wasn't able to directly reply in the other, so I'll repost this here:

Over prescription of pain relievers is widely regarded as what caused the opioid epidemic. Sedation causes lots of deaths every year. Back pain is highly avoidable with basic lifestyle changes. I don't know much about MS.

My grandma took a weight loss drug called Fen-Phen and had heart issues late in life because of it. It was a low-grade form of speed used by house wives in the 70s for appetite suppression and increased energy.

US history leans overly medicalized and drugged IMO.
I disagree. It is substantially and unequivocally better to hold onto memory until the end of scope than to leak memory by default. How can anyone argue that leaking memory is a better default? That’s a ticking time bomb. Maybe someone is so optimistic as to believe they’ll catch every leak before shipping new code?

You can easily add a manual “drop” call in Rust at any point if you want to force an allocation to be freed sooner, but I speak from years of experience using Rust for work when I say that Rust’s RAII model is not problematic in practice. I’m not simply speculating or theorizing, and I have professional experience with a variety of languages at all levels of the stack. I personally don’t mind garbage collectors most of the time, but Rust is great when you need more control.

In C++, RAII can absolutely be problematic because you are able to easily do things that cause undefined behavior by accident, which is arguably worse than either leaking by default or the mere act of holding onto memory for the duration of a scope.

If you can propose a system which cannot be contrived to have any downside, that would be fantastic! In the real world, Rust’s approach to memory management is extremely pragmatic and beneficial. I’m sure someone will eventually improve on Rust’s approach, but “leak by default” isn’t it.

I honestly do enjoy following Zig… it is a fascinating language taking a really interesting approach to solving many problems, but its memory safety story is not where I want it to be yet. Leaking memory by default is technically safe, but it's not exactly endearing.
I doubt they would start charging developers to publish to their app store. This seems completely out of line with the rest of their Android strategy. I wonder why the VC said it?
I tried some out at a hackathon and they look cool, the technology still has a long way to go. The resolution and display quality is pretty shitty.
Definitely. I'd put it on and add some info about what you've learned since. It must have grown you in immeasurable ways, so why hide that?
I've been working from home for the last 9 months, and my experience has been that you have to be disciplined about working hours.

Initially my sleep cycle (and therefore working hours) shifted by a couple of hours, so I'd get out of bed about 11am, and start work somewhere around 12, which effectively meant I had an hour before I stopped for lunch at 1, and then ended up working until 9 in the evening.

If I were single I could probably be quite happy with that, but it meant I only really got a couple of hours with my wife before she went to bed. That alone gave me the motivation to get back into the habit of starting work at 9, and finishing between 5 and 7.

I'll also second the comment by the person who said that it helps to have something planned for the evening, if only to force you into stopping work by that time.
On the other hand (and I'm slightly playing Devil's advocate here), books and other physical media go out of print eventually. It can become difficult to find a copy of some archaic technical manual that interests you. (Anyone selling any Symbolics manuals? :-))

There is no reason for a digital publishing to stop creating new copies of a digital work (once they finally develop an economic model that works.)
This comment is the exact embodiment of what the article calls the 'culling', and which it advocates is the wrong way to approach the issue.

Plus, he wasn't saying one should actually skip those books, he was just making the point of how many books there are, and how few of them one can read, even with a lot of devotion.
Define "technical limitation"?

The most obvious issue that springs to mind is the difference in voltage supplied from country to country. In the US it's 110V, elsewhere it's usually 220V or 240V. So I suppose replacing every electrical appliance inside, or outside, the US isn't a "technical" limitation, but it's certainly a limitation of some kind.

That aside there are losses when electricity is "moved" - they further you move it the more you lose. (that's a simplification, but it'll do.)

Politically of course, there are limitations as well. Assuming the grid was mostly on land, each country becomes vulnerable to another country cutting it off. I'm not sure that the US for example would want to be dependent on Canada, or Russia, and I suspect the rest of South America may not like being vulnerable to Panama, and so on.

Most of the generation would probably occur in desert regions, and I'm thinking that's already a problem with an oil based economy.
Related: this game grew out of Seth Cooper's PhD dissertation [1] "A Framework for Scientific Discovery through Video Games", which won the ACM Dissertation Award in 2011. Although a lot of the content is Foldit-centric (protein algorithms, etc.), it still has a wealth of information on game design and gamification, well worth looking at for anyone interested in game development.

[1] http://grail.cs.washington.edu/theses/Cooper2011PhD.pdf
You're quick to dismiss but you games and tech "journalists" collude, push agendas and fail to recuse yourselves from conflicts of interest all the while seeing nothing wrong with that. https://twitter.com/leighalexander/status/556905004632920064

Games "journalism" has always been a stones throw away from advertising and you all don't have an ethical bone in you. Basic journalistic values such as skeptical inquiry, critical thinking or independent judgment are foreign concepts.
What's the endgame here? "Wi-Fi 20: expanding Wi-fi to gamma rays"?
No one is offerring 2%-3% when the fed rate is at zero. You're about a year behind relity.
It depends what level of skepticism you are applying there. In the sense of "do I have the full story", "is there another side to this I am not hearing", etc. I think its absolutely reasonable.

But if you're skeptical about whether they completely made it up, published a rumour without any confirmation or are deliberately substantially altering it in how they portray it - that's an extremely serious allegation for a reputable news organisation. For example, I think that would stretch beyond "reasonable" in most cases for NYT based on my observation of their practices over time.
You can backup your signal message DB; maybe not as nice as iCloud, but I guess you get what you pay for?
I joined the NASA Federal Credit Union. I joined the National Space Society, which cost about $20 and then I was able to join the FCU. Then I cancelled my NSS membership. Not a bad signup cost, plus space is cool so I didn't mind paying $20 to the NSS. I think the NSS also sent me a couple magazines, so it wasn't just like a donation.
FYI, not a single one of those (awesome) people have been here for years. I'm technically employee #2 at this point.
> 40%

A little over 28% since it is a 0’02 reduction over 0’07 non-availability rate.
As so many people have pointed out in this thread, though, crashes are far from the only thing that can keep a user from being able to take advantage of a given feature.
I totally agree. But where do we draw the line for fraud? I just ordered a $5.00 product, a pair of interesting-looking-at-first-glance earplugs for swimming, that are utter garbage. Included was something I had never seen - instructions for leaving a positive review that would allow me to receive a $10.00 Amazon gift card. This clearly appears to me to be buying positive reviews... which should not be allowed... but is not fraud... I do not think. Given that the product is cheap, I can see how people would leave positive reviews - lo and behold, the product has nearly a 5-star rating with 100+ reviews! I can guarantee nobody who swims would rate this product above 2 stars. Online reviews are a wonky and game-able system.
Who makes a fine mirror.
You can't say you're an apolitical organization when you work with China given the way running a business in China works.

The message is obvious that companies are afraid of angering the Chinese government by speaking ill of it as they commit increasing atrocities because that could potentially eat into their profit margins. Profit over people.
See, this is the kind of response that makes people not trust Politifact. This article delivers a more detailed version of exactly what I said. There's direct evidence indicating Kennedy reached out to the KGB, and indirect evidence it was tied to his political ambitions, but there's no ironclad proof and some people believe the evidence was just a complete fabrication. The "false" rating is based entirely on the specific claim that Kennedy sat down for a meeting with them, which I think you'll find I did not make.
I’d agree with you, given the chance to do so in a codebase that has vanilla dependencies. If you work in robotics or do a lot of parallel computing for example, the libraries you use are almost always based on C++, so there’s not an easy way to code against them. Even if there is such a solution, a gap between the languages can lead to non-trivial behaviors and that in itself is more costly to fix than to write in the first class language C++ anyway.
Yes, it is technically separate from the other Nobel prizes, but no one treats it any differently than the rest of them.
The form isn't working. Not being able to make a web form work doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in the neural network part. lol.
I don’t know why you’re in HN if you can’t use a search engine... but one of his violations is inciting violence.
I am working on SeaweedFS, which this simple key value store project is inspired by. This minikeyvalue is a nice simplification for George's own use case.

SeaweedFS has filePath -> fileIds -> locateVolumeServers -> lookupOnVolumeServerByFileIds. These levels of indrection give the system more control of the data management and placement. For example, one file can be mapped to multiple file ids.

minikeyvalue has key -> locateVolumeServer(by nginx) -> lookupOnVolumeServerByKey. This removed the file id indirection level. This means the data is placed on statically organized volume servers. And the whole value needs to be on one volume server. So the value can not be too large. Obviously this large value is not a requirement.

There are no need to over-engineer anything. If this is what is needed, no need to add more levels of indirection.

And no need of being critical about this project. It is efficient and it works. It is a piece of code that the author can easily fix if any problem happens. The code and the language are just tools to get the job done. His goal is autonomous driving, not a general-purpose key value store.
1. Most people can't write even Fizzbuzz. How could they possibly realise what they're missing?

2. That feature isn't targeted at most people either, it's for "users with high visibility and sensitive information, who are at risk of targeted online attacks".

AFAICT, turning the feature off is simpler than writing Fizzbuzz.
Breaking a law and being prosecuted for it does not always happen. Look at how many cases the feds actually prosecute. Small amount. They simply do not have enough resources to handle all the potential leads coming in, so the weakest are simply not pursued.
They already do, and have for a long time; what are you talking about?
You’re saying that like the other side hasn’t had to endure the entire Russian conspiracy thing (Steele dossier) for years, which has been thoroughly discredited. It was shared widely and I haven’t seen any mainstream coverage when it got discredited.

If you want to hold social media to certain standards, it should be across the board, not when your side benefits.