jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
I am not an accountant, but I wrote accounting software for some time.

There are two basic parts to accounting: one is very much following an algorithm. Okay, this real transaction occurred in the real world. Now you have to update your books to account for that transaction. If it's a routine transaction, there is pretty much a straightforward way to record it in your books, and you just do that until the transaction is fully recorded, and you're done.

That part is at this point in our lives fairly quickly being automated away. It's what was to a large degree responsible for the super-boring old-style image of an accountant being this person bent over mouldering books carefully noting down numbers. You guys are all programmers, I imagine you understand pretty quickly how that used to be necessary and used to involve a great deal of very routine work that none the less had to be done with great attention to detail.

The other part of accounting is essentially deciding HOW you are going to record certain kinds of transactions. Setting up the algorithm, basically, that you will then follow a thousand or ten million times each time you do a sale or a purchase or get new investment or buy more office furniture. This is definitely high-talent work! A lot of it has already been done -- if you just want to do a sale, then well, there are a few different algorithms that you more or less take off the shelf and use them. Kind of like how sorting algorithms work in our field. You don't start from scratch and reinvent sorting when you want to sort an array, you just grab quicksort or mergesort or whatever -- choose the one that's most convenient or works best for you.

What's left to do, then, is decide how to account for novel situations, or stuff that's unique to your business, and to mind the machines -- make sure that data gets fed properly into the routine algorithms.

I think that there's room for a very talented accountant, though in many businesses the accounting might be routine enough that there's not much use for a very talented accountant.
Obviously you don't need to know this but others might not be aware that certmagic is a great middle ground between Caddy and rolling your own ACME.
Currently reading Greek and Roman Naval Warfare
A Study of Strategy, Tactics, and Ship Design from Salamis (480 B.C.) to Actium (31 B.C.) by William Rodgers (the 1964 edition).

While in general I agree with you that experience is the best way to gain understanding, there are rather a lot of topics that are hard to get experience with.
With all due respect I do not believe that is real-politik. “In 2019, the United States produced2 about 19.25 million barrels per day (MMb/d) of petroleum, and it consumed3 about 20.46 MMb/d.” (1)

We have energy independence, and cutting off the pipeline and going green improves that. You know who isn’t energy independent? China. Why is China staking out the area around the Spratleys? Oil is a huge part of that.

I think real politik entails telling the Saudis no más and becoming pals with the Iranians instead. The Persians aren’t our enemies and they aren’t selling peoples organs out of death camps. If they become our homies we have a line from Iraq to India of people who will work with us and force the Chinese to secure a very long and mountainous border. Then if the Saudis don’t like it? Let them sell their oil to China and be on their squad - now China secures their own Oil source and that takes a shit ton of pressure off the Vietnamese and everyone else in the area, with the Iranians still having the Strait of Hormuz as insurance. Peace can be had.

Our biggest rival has triple our population and is rapidly catching up in capability - and any armchair historian knows that the Soviets overwhelmed the Nazis despite their sophistication.

(1) https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...
I agree, Krita is quite good. Out of curiosity, what do you not like about the layering? AFAIK it's pretty similar to PS, no?
I don't think most proponents of UBI are suggesting we give people enough money to push them into the "rich asshole" level of wealth.

But I do agree that UBI proponents have to come up with an argument against the "pay people just enough to do drugs and play videogames all day" example. Most of the population is not made of highly motivated self-starters, despite what every job posting looks for.
"Recent" "2013"
Facebook is evil. It harms societies for various reasons, for instance by enabling spread of misinformation, and it hurts individuals alike.

Every measure that weakens platforms like FB is to be welcomed.

Apple is big enough to confront FB and harm them. That alone makes Apple even more valuable in my eyes and makes me keep buying their products although I dislike their walled-garden-approach and their philosophy that is against open systems.

Edit:

A couple of years ago my impression was that FB is so big that it‘s futile to fight them. Recently more and more people seem to realize how harmful these kind of platforms are, and it seems there is hope in confronting them.
> In Russia there's a small but active group of academics who are trying to bring (force?) Blackbox as a teaching/learning environment to schools and universities.

That's astonishing. The most recent English-language textbooks using Component Pascal are about 20 years old. Is there much newer stuff in Russian?
Meanwhile, everybody else is building their business on Apple too.

I hate FB like the next guy, but I don't like the idea of Apple playing government.
Your work is impressive, I don't see why you wouldn't get into that school. I do wish I had those opportunities/skills at that time frame though.
Stop looking at others so much and concentrate on your product and you'll have a much easier time of it. All success is relative, it's not so much a yardstick as an 'these were your opportunities and this is what you made of them' thing.
Once you realize that you'll have an easier time of it. And keep in mind that what you see in the press is quite rarely the unvarnished truth. It tends to be a lot more glossy than reality.
What's the next big thing in social networks? Are there new social networks apps that are trending right now?

My younger girl cousin told me it's still Snapchat for her and WhatsApp is so 2013. The artificial restriction to one device bothers her (no website version).

A friend lost his WhatsApp chat conversions as someone stole his phone.
Same rule applies to water as to wine. If you'd drink it you can cook with it. If you wouldn't, don't.
Marking is concurrent. The read barrier trap only has to mark the immediate reference. If the mutator that triggered the trap proceeds to reference one of the reference's children before the marker thread has gotten around to it, that will trigger another trap.
I have little doubt that AT&T failed to mention that calls would cost $5/min. Anecdotally, I have an english friend who moved to California for 2 years a little while back. He was sold a UK-calling plan at some dollars / month (much more than 5, enough for him to assume it was all inclusive). Anyways, 3 months later he gets a multi-thousand dollar bill for call charges to the UK. Ended up having to pay it, although he was never told of the additional per minute billing.
so, what's the alternative?
do you have a nice typesafe library for external lists?
Not bad I guess.
Submitter here. I decided to take my own advice and use a strong, unique password on every site that requires authentication.

That's easy to say, but hard to do. I can't imagine how non-technical people cope with all the security advice about passwords they receive. The horror stories (such as Gawker's password compromise) don't help matters either.

The requirements of SHA1 Pass are:

0. Focus on sentence based passwords only (not long, complex passwords that no one can remember).

1. Generate passwords (do not store them). Nothing to safeguard or to backup in case of failure, corruption, or loss. All the end-users have to do is remember sentences.

2. Password generation must occur locally on end-use devices (not in web browsers and not in the cloud on some other company's server). Sorry, I just don't trust that.

3. SHA1 Pass must be portable and reproducible so others can implement the idea in the absence of SHA1 Pass or even perfect the idea. OpenSSL, crypto++, sha1sum and various other programming libraries and apps do SHA1. There is no secret/closed encryption.

I've been using SHA1 Pass for quite a while now, but I wanted to polish it up a bit and really start using it (especially after the gawker compromise) and share the application with Hacker News.

I realize that there is already excellent password management software available that has solid reputation and many features. I've used Password Safe (Bruce Schneier originally) and heard good things about 1Password. However, both of those tools store passwords and don't focus on sentence based passwords (I'm not sure about portability).
So maybe whats important is striving for an greater equality of power to speak? Power is both politics and money, and if you have enough of it, you can control the narrative and cause problems.
This is a good landing page. Every open source project should have something like this.

And this is how you create useful software. Looking for something to work? Try solving a problem you have. This is a so basic feature and so useful too.
It wasn't meant to be forward motion. It was started shortly after Commodore's bankruptcy as a way of providing continuity

In fact there was a split between factions at the time who wanted continuity vs. something new. Nothing came of the attempts to create something new, but AROS persisted.

It wasn't retro when it started.

(Also this is the difference re: qnx: AROS persisted because of the then large, committed Amiga userbase and nostalgia... How many people have used QNX knowing they were using QNX?)
One of my favorite uses is concolic testing which has really been enabled by SMT solvers (of which Z3 is one of the best): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concolic_testing

Check out MS's Code Digger, which uses Z3 as well: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/codedigger/
Agreed; reminds me indirectly of Arthur Jensen's speech to "off the reservation" media star Howard Beale in Network.

"It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet -- it is the order of things today"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sySuIXG_IM
I thought he was just being funny on a Sunday morning.

I was going to guess something like $10K for a PG breakfast.
I didn't think it was hard either, and although my solution differed from yours in a few particulars, the core remained the same, as you mention: defense cuts, and returning taxes to pre-Clinton levels. If you have those two things in place, the rest becomes a pretty simple Chinese menu to pick and choose from.
If you could quantify the actual effect each change would make, it wouldn't be that hard politically to reach an actual solution. The problem is that political noise makes it very difficult to convince anyone that you are making a reasonable estimate.
Thanks for the advice. I would add more sentences to the pitch. What do you think about trying pay per post reviews.
I wonder what the earliest historical mention of "mass uprising" is? Does the idea go back to Egypt? What's the earliest revolt?
True. However, we don't need to be able to compare two arbitrary chunks of code. As long as our algorithm provides no false positives, I would settle for something as simple as a checksum.
checks date. Are you sure this isn't an April Fools' joke?
Thanks for the link, this looks interesting… I recently tried to have lunch more often with my existing connections (former colleagues et al), but it would be great to expand my lunchmates.
You think they'd use this as an opportunity to use HTML5 pushstate.
The sexism was one story, the utter lack of safety regulations was another. While OSHA is frequently (and in many cases rightly) vilified for their bureaucratic nonsense and conflicting rules, watching people saw copper plates apart sans hearing protection and without any guards blew my mind.
> Google likes to solve tough problems on a global scale. People work hard...and love it. Most nights I work late and eat dinner at Google. Last night there were at least 400 people eating dinner at 8:00PM. Larry Page was there too, sitting at the table next to me. This is not unusual. When you are achieving goals and being recognized for your work...it doesn't feel like work. Again, to use the New England Patriots analogy, you put everything you've got into it every single day, but when you are doing it alongside the best in the world, it is a privilege and doesn't seem like work at all.

Ok, I can definitely see that. On the other hand... if I weren't home for dinner, my daughter would wonder where 'dada' was.
> It's not always easy to estimate large prices . . . that doesn't mean there isn't one.

There isn't one. There are multiple guesses all based upon assumptions and limited knowledge.

Here's an example:

m: I have a book, how much will you give me for it?

f: Uh, nothing, I don't want a random book.

m: I forgot to mention it's a first printing Tom Sawyer.

f: Oh, ok. I'll give you $10 for it.

m: Collectors regularly pay $5000 for it.

f: OK. How about $1000?

m: It's signed by Mark Twain.

f: $2000?

m: It's missing a cover.

f: $500?

etc.

Which value was the true value of the book?

Value is entirely contingent upon knowledge, which is always imperfect. Given just two pieces of information - the oil spill is damaging the environment and a species may become extinct - it is entirely within the realm of reason to state that there is no dollar value that can be assigned to that extinction. Therefore that species becomes priceless. Given more information the value of the species may become something less than priceless. And given even more information the value may become priceless once again.
Because I'm curious!
> You've just changed the hypothesis in order to ridicule it.

No, what I did was demonstrate my point. It doesn't appear you understood so I'll be as clear as possible: accurate value is impossible to determine as it requires perfect knowledge, itself impossible to obtain. Although far fetched, the progression of the hypothetical is nothing more than a demonstration of the lack of perfect knowledge.
This seems to involve handing out my name/address/phone/company and that's only step 1 of 4.

Yes I'm being an awkward git but I hope you understand.
I'm 35 and I've never not worked at a startup.
I don't think that many older guys apply to startups because the pay is usually shit.
> So you’re making a super strong statement that’s not very justifiable

We don’t think of each annual flu as it’s own disease, but they are caused by closely related strains not a single virus. Similarly, COVID-19 was originally named SARS-Cov-2 due to it’s close relationship with SARS-CoV also known as SARS. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/types.html

Which is why the vaccine could both be developed so quickly in the first place and we can make reasonable predictions about the vaccine. They didn’t create a successful vaccine in under a week from scratch without a lot of knowledge of closely related diseases. It’s that same knowledge which is behind the dosing schedule, and why it was tested like that.

> Why does the US need global herd immunity?

Ending the vast social and economic harm from social distancing efforts. With local herd immunity things go back to normal even if the rest of the world is dealing with the disease.

PS: The demographics of the developing world even support a staggered approach. First a focus on vaccinations for the elderly and medical workers globally then local herd immunity based on population demographics. Local herd immunity protects those who the vaccine can’t, but evenly spreading out vaccinations to the younger population accomplishes little.
I think this is slightly off-topic, as TeamFlow doesn't address big time zone differences AFAIK, but now that you've brought it up I have to say I have used TeamFlow. It's a pretty amazing product. Would highly recommend.
Indeed, it's almost a meme at this point how many people on r/AskHistorians ask the same questions about the Roman Empire repeatedly yet it gets a fraction of the questions (or interest) in the Islamic empires. The entire Middle Ages and Renaissance were sharply defined by the Western response to the Islamic empires of the region, from the Reconquista to the Crusades.
So, Clubhouse is iPhone only? Are developers so lazy today that they don't even bother to build a simple form to create a profile and wait until your mobile platform is supported?!
It's true that most people who aren't doing sensitive work don't need cryptographically secure random number generators, but if you use something secure by default, it probably won't cause problems, and to the extent that it does you can catch them with some profiling. If you use insecure RNG by default, it probably won't cause problems but if it does you'll find them when a black hat hacker compromises your system in production.

Very few people set out to roll their own crypto. The issue in my experience is less about someone writing their own hand-optimized password hash function and more about people having overly-narrow views of what counts as security critical code.
You missed the point of this story. This was in the very, very early days of vaccinations in Harris County. There was hardly any system. Harris County Public Health had to toss their first vaccination registration system, when it turned out signup invitation links could be shared and hundreds of invalid people showed up for appointments.[0] You can be sure this didn't happen after January 1, and protocols for handling extra doses are now very well known.

[0] https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/...
> flags are placed on top of the background and need an alpha channel

Ok, that explains the huge PNGs; can't they be rendered as-is (i.e. include part of the background in the foreground picture?

> first paint is still under 3s

That's really slow. The jankey animation (yay Apple) and rasterized image rendering is horrible; it's a throwback to the late-90s internet.

> the audience for this page is 90% software developers,
> with powerful machines and high bandwidth.

I.e. me, and I find it horribly slow. I'm using a year old rMBP and I have a pretty good internet connection (20MB/s, 10x what I could get in the UK and I actually get pretty close to the max all the time; for a comparison: http://www.webanalyticsworld.net/2014/08/internet-speed-gap-...).

Sure, I'd love fiber, but that's not exactly broadly available (though if I could move my house 1km to the east I'd have it).
Nah, but I’m sure they’ll be shouting about how wonderful coal is vs that unreliable renewable power.
Per capita, rural and suburban are much less efficient and more costly. Infrastructure is orders of magnitude more expensive and resource demanding to build as distances spread. Water, sewer, electricity, internet, roads, etc. That’s without even looking at the supplies and movement of people.

Sure, if you can afford to build yourself a self sufficient off grid home, you may perceive it as more efficient in day to day costs.
I remember when I turned 16 and all I wanted as birthday present was a license for Delphi 2009. If I remember correctly, it costed more than €1k at that time.
Obviously I got something else.

When I learned about the free Visual Studio Express, I switched to .Net development and never used Delphi again.

This experience shaped me and all tools I will ever create will be available for free to students and kids.
The C# WinForms UI builder is a nice ripoff of the Delphi UI builder.
He shares the demystified code here:

https://bellard.org/otcc/otccn.c
the TCC documentation sheds further light:
https://bellard.org/tcc/tcc-doc.html#devel
I work in technology and part of the wisdom of experience is knowing certain ideas are X years too early.

After people over 100 years ago realized materials could compute, some were immediately theorizing about objects we now call ‘smartphones’.

It was a learning curve for me to realize it isn’t yet worth pursuing some technology efforts because society won’t be ready for them for another 10-15 years. (usually readiness is some combination of baseline technologies available, competencies, etc.)
If you have the time give WebRTC for the Curious[0] a read. I try and explain what WebRTC is and how it actually works. The big advantages that I see are.

* Can do P2P (and Client/Server)

* Mandatory Encryption

* Handles codec/track negotation. You don't need to know ahead of time what is being sent.

* Data channels. Can also be configured to be lossy/unordered for kind of performance needed for gaming.

* Uses existing protocols. Really easy to bridge with SIP/RTSP. This software/hardware goes all the way back to the late 90s

* Multiple implementations and available in the browser. No other protocol comes close in availability.

[0] https://webrtcforthecurious.com/docs/01-what-why-and-how/
I would say the self-criticism is happening: even the President of the Europeen Commission is not happy [1].

My favorite part is this:

“We were late in granting authorisation. We were too optimistic about mass production. And maybe we also took for granted that the doses ordered would actually arrive on time”

As of wether the "restructuring" is happening, too... we'll have to see [2].

I suspect in the EU vaccine rollout, in the end, will only be a couple months overall behind that of UK and USA. I'm not sure historians will notice.

If "being late by a month" is such a terrible feat, than everyone should be ashamed of not being Israel or Bahrein, anyway;)

Now, let's hope we don't get any bad surprise in the future. (I know, I know, more knowledgeable people are reassuring us, and I have to trust them, but my guts are still not ready to fully picture a "happy" ending anymore.)

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-eu-vaccin...
Platform for freelance journalists. Pitch your articles directly to outlets with just one click. No more spamming e-mails praying for a reply.
A developer from India would be an educated guess here
You have sufficient skillset to build what you need. If you want to stick within them, you can go with Flask for Python. You can keep things simple by going "old-school" and rendering most of the UI on the server-side.

For more interactive UI on the frontend, you can go with Vue.js for a lightweight framework or stick with pure javascript. As you mentioned the tradeoff is more familiarity with the code. I find that is important to keep things maintainable.

For simple crud apps, often pure javascript with server-side rendering is sufficient.
Is the link your best available evidence?
For me the magic trick has always been side-projects. I have a lot of them, and each one is an opportunity to learn new tricks.

(Over time I've learned that it's best to avoid side-projects which have user accounts and store data on behalf of other people, because that's not a side-project: it's an unpaid job.)
Since you're in Germany, how do you handle VAT, EU tax returns, invoices, etc?

What about taxes and invoices to other countries?
On the contrary, Handshake is very much alive. A couple hours ago, Namecheap (the second largest registrar in the world) just claimed their name!
"I can assure you I have more capabilities than I currently present to anyone, including my employer"

"please advise me on how I can begin to impress my employer and prove to them that I am a capable employee".....

You have the answer right within your text.... present more to your employer (more of the stuff you have that he/she cant see now..) Go the extra mile in all tasks.
I've often thought about that, actually. I think I proposed the idea once in a comment thread. But most users seemed to be against it.