jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
I've a friend who spent a good deal of time recently in Khazakhstan, and she was very amused by my attempts to express my fears of the United States becoming an authoritarian police state. She laughed and said that no, I did not understand what it was to have secret police following you about and all these other sorts of issues.

The distressing thing is that we've been putting so much machinery into place, and gotten the noose so well fitted, that when the bottom drops out we'll only have the briefest of short, sharp shocks before we find ourselves in a terrifyingly efficient machine of oppression.
Not on speed-dial, but I would not need too many calls to get one.

In that situation, you don't need to have him on speed dial. It's enough to stop talking and demanding one and you have to be given the opportunity to call one (in my country including internet access for research) - it was my understanding the the US justice system has the same rules.
The thing is, senior people don't eat their dogfood in anything. The CEO of Ford probably drives a Benz. What has worked in all industries is quality control. Government has always had a problem in doing this (the DMV) but that's where startups should step into to educate the politician that it's good for both public and for the politician's future elections (using said startup's product).
> It's predicated on 'if people were rational'.

No, it's predicated on "at least one person is rational".
I'm curious what metrics you use to determine that the market is currently overvalued as a whole?
Well until then I'll whine under every Amplify post for bad PR since this might affect promotions.
Wow this looks interesting!
Detailed, 6 step instructions on how to open a ballot and mark no? Thanks, amazon. This is almost as scummy as asking the city to change traffic lights so union organizers have a harder time talking to workers in between shifts.

https://www.al.com/business/2021/02/jefferson-county-now-say...
So you choose the US?
It's not even necessary to mention China and Russia, the NSA is equally interested in placing a backdoor in the Linux kernel. People were paranoid about it already 20 years ago [0], but according to Linus' father, NSA actually tried to pull it off [1].

[0] https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2013/10/09/the-linux-backdoor-...

[1] https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/11/nsa-ask-linus-torvalds-i...
> I cannot easily think of an example where changing the order of clauses (not "goals") in a predicate definition prevents the program from "runnign backwards".

It's bad enough to use "directions" for what are properly called "modes", but it's positively counterproductive to say that anything in Prolog runs "backwards". Prolog always runs top-to-bottom, left-to-right, and this is precisely why it's easy to write nonterminating definitions. As a community, we are doing ourselves a disservice by claiming that anything can magically run "backwards".

As for your question, the canonical example for clause ordering being a problem is where the incorrect order prevents generation of answers because a recursive clause precedes a non-recursive one.

Example:

xs([x | Xs]) :- xs(Xs).
xs([]).

This recognizes lists of xs:

?- xs([x, x, x]).
true.

But it cannot generate them:

?- xs(Xs).
ERROR: Out of local stack

Contrast with:

ys([]).
ys([y | Ys]) :- ys(Ys).

?- ys(Ys).
Ys = [] ;
Ys = [y] ;
Ys = [y, y] ;
Ys = [y, y, y] .
Perhaps. But that’s just speculation, while for NSA there are solid proofs.
If you want to keep the 'events' capability but remove your newsfeed then it's possible to write a bot that unsubscribes from all of your friends. This also works well for LinkedIn I find.
> And you have a strange definition of ethics given the amount of IP piracy going on with the blessing of occidental politicians.

What IP did Huawei steal? 5G?
Everybody is critical, of course. That's why they're hired.

But not everybody is easily replacable. That's why they have different pay. And that is indeed a very good reason a doctor earns more.

Doubt that? Then get your cleaner to take out your appendix.
Would be cool if they had emulated it in VHDL/Bluespec/Verilog, then you could run it on an FPGA.
I was perhaps taking a little license. But as things stand now, I think a child's chances of contracting polio outside of a handful of remote war torn areas is in that ballpark.
"Once you get down into final generations you can start running optimisations
[...]
but DNA doesn't come with an optimiser."

It better not, as DNA isn't planning to "get down into final generations". The Borg would be long dead if it ever stopped adapting.
You can add third tier spinning rust for very little extra money, but latency may be an issue.
No. I'm not.

I'm just saying that while we're debating, be civil. It's not just about being nice. Thinking in labels like "denier" makes us dumber, less likely to be correct.

Hold your position. Argue for it. Just, do it intelligently and reasonably.
Outrageous claim(0)

(0)This is a fact
The coreboot X60 is interesting.

I have a non-core boot X61s Lenovo that happens to have an ath5k wifi card built in (there are various different configurations of the X61s so don't assume they will all have an Atheros card) and I have not seen a Linux it could not run. OpenBSD works fine, so I assume that other BSDs would.

A little underpowered by today's standards, and tends to get warm if you are compiling a lot of stuff or other processor intensive applications, but fine for what I do most days.
And you were plused by Opentext/Hyland/Alfresco? just curious...
Just disable users to view their and other people their karma totals because the only thing it does is promoting the writing and submitting of content for the common denominator just to collect karma points.
If you mean "protect these units from bad guys so they don't threaten our electrical system," that's kind of the point of having a decentralized system of smaller reactors: if one or two get sabotaged, others in the system can easily pick up the slack.

If you mean "protect these units from bad guys so they don't steal the thorium and weaponize it," that's one of the great things about thorium reactors: thorium and its byproducts are very hard to weaponize. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reacto...
Umm, we're already there. Chinese knockoffs? There are entire industries that attempt to replicate original. The originals still stand and are more profitable than the knockoffs.

People in first-world countries fail to realize that for most third-world economies with very little IP enforcement, the era of cheap replication and no IP has been around for decades, yet none of the nightmarish worst-case scenarios have appeared.
Is there a sim where I can go an blow these places up in a simulator, eg anti terrorist training ?
No worries. It happens.
Government Builds Free Cloud-Based Backup for an Ungrateful Nation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6012941
Microsoft does have an up-or-out policy, but they take pains to try to avoid the problem you point out. Management is not considered "up" from dev, but a parallel track (whose bottom rung is a little higher than the bottom rung of dev). The top rung of the dev ladder is "Distinguished Engineer" and these people are spoken of in much more hushed and awed tones than any VP.

Also the up-or-out policy has exceptions: there are "stable" levels where you are allowed to stay for the rest of your career. IIRC the lowest stable level is Senior Dev (level 63) so if you are hired at level 59, the expectation is that you have the potential to make it to 63; if you earn promotions too slowly or not at all, you'll eventually be let go. This is true even if you do a perfectly adequate job at levels 59-62.

It's not a model that would work for every company, obviously...
NO............! Not US!

/s
Set up a straw man, then knock it down with graphics (pathos, "I've seen it") and links (logos, "it's researched, and true"). Oh and ethos too, because it's a response to a villain with "arguments", rather than being an unprovoked attack.

Simple and beautiful. Just don't think it's only happening in Russia.
> Kids come first
It's not so sudden. HN itself is written in a LISP [1], and Paul Graham's pre-YC claim to fame was Viaweb, a store platform written in LISP that became Yahoo Stores. This community has been above-average LISP friendly for a long time.

LISP's also has a long history of popping up all over the place because they are extremely implementation-friendly (if you want to write a simple language; if you want to make things fast they get trickier, thought by no means impossible) given the simple syntax.

So you'll also find a lot of people (like me) who don't really like LISPy languages, but who still end up dabbling with related technologies occasionally (my very-slowly-in-progress Ruby compiler uses s-expression syntax (though no LISP semantics to speak of) to express a tiny language to implement some of the lower-level plumbing to bootstrap the Ruby core classes, for example)

[1] http://arclanguage.org/
Rejected, doesn't know the market:

It's much safer and more reliable than flintlock, which is what people are using now.

In the enterprise of war, we use percussion caps these days.
The person who warned me about Amazon -- before I ever applied there-- was not an engineer. She was a receptionist. She'd worked in the main office in a low level office job. She told me the company had no respect for employees.

I was foolish (and a little desperate) when I applied at Amazon. Because I had been told.

This has nothing to do with them not being a tech company-- I just don't like tech people misclassifying them.

This is all about them disrespecting their employees. Not having competent managers for engineers is a form of disrespect. But all the sexist, obnoxious and rude things done to my friend who was non-technical are also disrespectful.

This isn't about me being "arrogant" at all.

This is me just warning you about a terrible experience I had!
I'm pretty sure we have a century of training people/kids to stay off the roads because roads are dangerous. Flying drones /everywhere/, including your fenced in yard, makes /everywhere/ dangerous.
If you manage to combine a x% inflation with a x% rise in welfare payments and of worker's income, people with relatively little money in the bank will not suffer much. That includes the poor and the very rich (who likely will have invested a large fraction of their savings).

The clear winners will be those with relatively high debts, the losers those who have been saving, but not investing.

Is it fair to tax the ants while rescuing the grasshoppers? No, but if the country as a whole is a grasshopper, it may be the best one can do.

A side effect of this strategy is that it teaches ants to invest, rather than put money in the bank. That's another reason why many countries aim for inflation.
> the fact that you need to differentiate behavior for numbers and strings

That's actually not exactly right: for example in Forth you really have no types at all.

Also, if somewhat uses a word such as "unityped" or "type with infinitely many variants" you should immediately know that any mention that "there are types, alright, just checked on runtime" will be immediately rejected. Majority of static typing fanatics are like that.
What does it mean for a game engine to be data oriented or data-driven?
The previous post on the blog has an observation that applies to languages as well

> Software has a Peter Principle. If a piece of code is comprehensible, someone will extend it, so they can apply it to their own problem. If it’s incomprehensible, they’ll write their own code instead. Code tends to be extended to its level of incomprehensibility.
I take no joy in the continuing radicalisation of the law enforcement authorities in the USA.

This is nothing new, has been around since the founding of the republic one way or another.

What a shame, what a waste.
I think you may have allowed Facebook to allow other Facebook users to search for your profile via your number. Can you check my earlier comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26712835 and let us know whether or not this is/was the case?

> "Facebook Settings > Privacy > How people can find and contact you > Who can look you up using the phone number you provided?"

Is/was it set to "Everyone"?
> How does someone become a billionaire?

Typically billionaires become billionaires by gambling other peoples money and winning

"Most fortunes were made in the staid finance and investments industry...Notable finance and investing list members include Warren Buffett, the third richest person in the world and Robert Smith, the founder of private equity firm Vista Equity Partners...It turns out managing or investing other people’s money can make you rich"

https://www.forbes.com/sites/willyakowicz/2019/03/09/how-the...
Well, the ACLU has already filed lawsuits about citizens on the no fly list and won... 8 years ago. Seems like not much has changed

https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/federal-court-sides-aclu...

So why is this time “substantially different”?
Every so often, I would say like at least twice a month, someone publishes a new article regarding Goodreads and how it sucks.

And I really enjoy reading these articles, they are not wrong in any way, Goodreads sucks, yet people (including me) keep using it because I want to have all my read and to-read books in one place.

Yet none of these articles address the elephant in the room. Why Goodreads sucks, and why there is no alternative.

There is no viable business plan!

Simple as that, we can love reading, we can love making a better product, want something better, but truth of the matter is books are not really such a hot commodity in financial terms.

I personally have been tempted numerous times to build my own alternative, but as soon as I start planning, I see that it has no viable future.

Now if someone cracks the code, and finds a way to make a social network about books profitable, they have a billion dollar idea.

And if you do, please notify me, because I would love to see it.
This "swing" as you call it is, at least in the US, probably just a shift the political landscape (particularly the publicly expressed part of it).

When you get down to it, the fundamental difference between the "conservative" and "liberal", now "progressive" again world views is on human nature:

Is it relatively fixed, or as one of my history professors observed, "Original Sin is an empirical observation!"

Or is human nature is plastic; e.g. change or perfect the environment and you change the human in the direction of perfection.

Conservatives say that much of the human wreckage of communism, socialism and collectivism is due to the stubbornness of human nature: when the environment was changed, and e.g. the New Soviet Man didn't emerge, well, things got ugly after that. E.g. in this case, better hang/shoot/throw into the Gulag those counter-revolutionaries, kulaks, whatever.
Apocalyptic articles like these only continue to be published because people read them; they rarely reflect anything real except a linear projection of current trends.

Take, for example, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/poll/2008...
http://www.noozhawk.com/mark_shields/article/1109_mark_shiel...

These predictions have clearly proven false; they are mere protractions of two recent events glued together.
The thread is also viewable here: http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1011.3/00630....
Thanks for that, an excellent article. Despite its sophomoric (I hope I'm using that word right) humour, a lot of the articles on cracked.com are actually quite deep and inquiring.
It's not "really" your problem or at least you can made somebody else pay for the mistake if your users arent really health care professionals. With your app and your actual ranking you could cold call a few medical magazines and offer to them to be feature in the app for a couple thousand bucks. Advertising in medical publication is VERY VERY VERY expensive, I'm sure some big co or medias have moneys to spare on ads in your app.

If you are not confortable with that maybe you could contact them offer them that to have an idea of what they are ready to pay to be in your app. Maybe the amount will change your mind :)

I dont mean to be disrespectful with my comment but I made that mistake to wait to long before monetising my startup because I always wanted more and more data before selling ads on it. I lost a lot of time (and money) for nothing.
Chicken and egg? You think the only thing holding back the popularity of ARM based netbooks is that there's no Dropbox client for ARM yet? ;)
In addition to the things already mentioned here: Hosting companies have economy of scale. Because they are running hundreds or thousands of machines:

- They can afford to pay people to stand by on call 24/7. Do you want to get paged in the middle of the night? Incidentally, did you set up Nagios and something like Pingdom and a pager service on this box in your closet, or are you just happy to go down for hours at a time?

- They see all the common problems all the time. When you experience common problems -- e.g. database crashes and needs to be restored from backups, bad PHP configuration is eating too much memory on the box, DDOS attack needs to be parried with iptables -- you are going to spend hours reading instructions and applying them. Going to all that effort for the sake of one small box is kind of a waste. What you want is to amortize your skills over many, many boxes. That's what professional sysadmins do.

The first time you have to spend a couple of hours reading some FAQs in order to keep your box running you will burn up 100% of the money you saved by not paying for a hosting service.

Of course, if you're trying to learn what hosting is about trying to run your own box is educational. Though I'd still do that learning on a VPS or EC2 rather than struggle with a home network and a random home box.
See line 122 to see how it is used http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/shindig/trunk/features/src/main...
Wow, running a business in a third-world country without ~zero-cost over-night electronic money transfer between banks must suck... sending paper checks, by snail mail, in 2014?

"they will ... send a check to an address picked randomly from the set of them printed on the invoice. (Make sure you give them one easy, obvious option for where to send the checks, and that that mailbox is monitored for discrete envelopes containing paper worth potentially tens of thousands of dollars. You can get a check reissued but it will be extra pain and take another several weeks.)"
what about forking chromium and integrating adblock directly in the browser? +removing all the google nonsense (like disabled cross domain security for some google domains)
Critical thinking, reasoning skills, historical and subject knowledge. I'm sure you could think of more techniques if you put your mind to it.
I received 10 spam calls in 3 hours yesterday from "Chase Bank" about verifying a purchase in Ohio. All came from my area code and matched the same 3 digits of my phone number. I sometimes receive spam calls but never more than one or two in an afternoon. I was wondering what changed recently or how I got onto a new list.

Now I realize, two days ago I used this website.

Has anyone else had a similar experience? I am not assigning blame here but pointing out a coincidence. It would be great to hear if others going through the same thing.
I think analogizing with structural engineering still fits more than you're giving credit for, at least in terms of how talent does or does not scale in the absence of a formal engineering education. My dad effectively rebuilt every part of our house with only "formal" training as a plumber. My great-grandfather built his house completely from scratch, himself, and picked cotton before that. But neither of them could have built a skyscraper. There's a difference between someone who can build stuff, even incredibly useful stuff, and a true engineer.

Software, for whatever reason, just tends to lionize and monetarily reward hackers over engineers. I'm not exactly sure why this is. Maybe we just get so much more to start with? If you wanted to put up a skyscraper or build another Brooklyn Bridge, you pretty much need to put together all of it. Only the land is there already. On the other hand, with software you can seriously stand on the backs of giants. Someone else already laid fiber cables beneath the oceans, put satellites with radios on them calibrated to deal with special relativity in space, processor makers basically use black magic to hide all of the terrible, inefficient coding we do and make it fast anyway, database engines, exponentially cheapening storage, and CDNs do so much of the heavy lifting of caching and delivering content, and we profit.

I guess skyscraper builders get some pre-existing infrastructure. They don't need to lay their own roads or build new electrical stations or steel mills.

But still, software feels like a business where a lot of people learn quickly how to build their own backyard tool sheds, then go apply to design skyscrapers and get mad when the interviewers expect them to know the principles of physics underlying how it is possible to get 100 stories of steel and glass to not fall over in the wind.
Or IMS - a pre SQL database.

Or Object Star.

Or M204.

These can be done better than a seat of the pants noSQL database, but sometimes people also got creative in the past too.

I've seen all of those databases being used in legacy government departments.
It's also possible there no longer is an environment that supports these kind of people.
Oh I agree, just that the article is saying 'look the string gets sent to the server!' and making out HIBP isn't doing so.
IME over a decade, the more obscure the source is (and, to-a-degree, the content is) the more likely that the link will fail over time.

The links of big institutions used to change a lot, much less so now. Some, like WIRED, actually go to the trouble of making old content links resolve to their newer addresses.

If the content would still have value in 40 years, it will probably survive. (See the NYTimes archive.) But links themselves have little value (unless they're widely published on paper!). There may be a few big institutions thinking that far out.
Reminds me of the older versions of Opera browser, before they became another Chrome clone.

There was a “Links” sidebar, where which would list all the links on the page. You could then filter them, select a subset, and do some action - maybe open in a new tab or mass-download.
Couple more fun examples:

all([]) == True

any([]) == False
And in the last case, from English to Spanish, it puts direction as a masculine substantive, while in Spanish is feminine.
Right and you still cannot physically remove the site, you must go through the courts to have it removed. Please guys if you get into this situation do not remove the site, you are bring down a lot of trouble on yourself. I have seen too many people do this and get into a world of trouble, even though morally, I feel you are in your rights the law sees the entry into the companies system as unauthorized access. As such you can be brought up on a host of criminal charges. This is the worst thing that you can possibly do in a payment dispute!!
You guys have made Doctor Who's Tardis translation-in-the-brain come one step closer to being real. I just tried it and it works perfectly. In my minimal experience, it works great on medium sized text so you may want to advice users to get closer/further from the text if your app can't find anything to translate (i.e. OCR fails).
If Yahoo is actually shutting it down, would you want to buy it back from them?