jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
> Most cosmologists believe that the Universe, and with it space and time, exploded into being some 13.7 billion years ago at the Big Bang, and that it has been expanding ever since.

I read things like this, and I can't help but think it's just wrong (and that whatever science is saying is being distorted). Time did not start 13.7 billion years ago, and space didn't just pop into existence then. To suggest that suggests something came from nothing.

So I can only assume that when science says space and time, they don't literally mean space and time, sort of like how science and laymen differ in their use of the word theory.

In this case, I assume "space and time" being created 13.7 billion years ago means space and time that we can see, as we know it, and following our rules (whatever that is).
So I give kudos to linkedin for being proactive, but I actually do create a different password for every site (stored in Password Safe/LastPass), so I'm not looking forward to having to change all my passwords for no reason.

But yeah, I'm sure for the majority of users this makes sense.
Interestingly, Richard Feynman tells a similar story. I think it's in "Why do you care what other people think?" It also is depicted in Matthew Broderick's movie "Infinity."

He was working at Los Alamos on the bomb, and his wife was dying in hospital. He had to make long drives back and forth to visit his wife. He picks up a hitchhiker, a Mexican who speaks no English. IIRC, he rambles on and tells the Mexican about his wife and how she's sick, but the Mexican can't understand him. The crux of the story is when they break down. They aren't in danger of dying in the desert, they get to a gas station, where the Mexican suddenly speaks perfect English and explains how to fix the car so that Feynman can make it to see his wife in time.

Feynman deduces that the Mexican pretending to speak no English is actually a spy, and asks him why he broke his cover. The Mexican answers that he was moved by Richard's plight.
This only works if all the major exchanges go down. Is there any evidence of this conspiracy?
There are some significant disadvantages as well, though. One is that there are fairly large cost/access disadvantages for healthcare compared to being part of a corporate group plan, although Obamacare has improved the access part.
Two-player games are attractive for a couple of reasons. First, by definition, half the players win. People like winning, and are likely to replay and rate highly a game they think they have a chance to win. Also, with just one opponent, there is little downtime. You don’t have to wait while the turn gets passed around the table to three, four or five other players. That’s boring.

I can give some insight into why 2-player games are popular. (ETA: when I wrote this, I missed that 3-player games do slightly better.)

I'm a guy who engineered (optimized?) the fuck out of a 4-player card game (to minimize card-luck in a trick-taking game) called Ambition: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S7lsZKzHuuhoTb2Wj_L3zrhH...

I succeeded in the design challenge, and I think it's a damn good game, but the game hasn't caught on and player-number (or, for math people, player arity) is almost certainly the biggest culprit. It takes exactly 4. (There's a 3-player variant, but it's not as fun and I'd rather just play a game designed for 3, like Skat.) The reason I bring this up is that I have insight into what 2-player games do so well. It's cultural. A 2-player game (or a 2-party game, like Bridge which has 2 teams of two players) is a showdown and it's decisive. It develops a "mind sport" culture. There's less of a feeling of decisivity in a 3- or 4-player game because you can't always separate "A outplayed B and C" from "B played best but C's mistakes unintentionally advantaged A over B and A won".

Game outcomes generally have four components: Chance, skill, strategic interaction, and flux. Flux is minute-by-minute engagement in the game (which can be modeled as a fluctuation in skill). Skill and flux are what we care about. The "strategic interaction" term might seem odd, because "strategy" and "skill" are often used interchangeably, but it actually refers to the scenario in 3+ party games where A, seeking his own strategic goals, unintentionally advantages B over C. This is sometimes called "strategic luck". (Or, it can devolve into a king-maker scenario. Or it can become an influence of table position, as in Puerto Rico, that some dislike. Or it can be made a part of the game, as in Diplomacy, where people pre-arrange interaction effects-- but might defect.) It's inevitable if you have more than 2 parties. And it makes it easy for people to feel "screwed", just as chance does, so while you can have that element and still have a good game (just as I'd argue that random chance doesn't make a game "bad", even if the Euro aesthetic eschews it) you're not likely to develop the "mind sport" culture of Go, Chess, or Bridge if that's the case.

I don't know for sure if this explains 2-player games getting higher ratings, but 2-player games and variable-player games (like Texas Hold 'em, which accommodates varying player number better than, say, a highly-engineered trick-taking game) do the best job of catching on and developing a reputation. A 2-player game is a showdown and a variarity game accommodates a group of unplanned size; exactly 3, 4, or 5 limits the audience and "catch on" speed.
One alternative is Relay. For folks interested, check it out here:
https://relayfi.com/

You can sign up for an account using this link:
https://app.relayfi.com/register?referralcode=Hackernews
I guess it's just a matter of preference, though I can't imagine someone liking the wasted screen space. If a website doesn't use all my horizontal space, I zoom it up until the screen is filled. I find vasty backgrounds that take up 50%+ of the window distracting. I don't notice any additional neck or eye strain, and in fact notice less because it's much easier to read words.
I would assume that any user interested in a product would want to see the device succeed. In fact I would say that if a user didn't want a product to succeed they wouldn't put the time in to help debug it, no?
+1. If anyone is interested in map-reduce solutions in python, be sure to check out Yelp's Mr. Job (http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/10/yelps-mrjob-poweri...)
Species and speciation can only be determined historically, anyways.
The scrollbar you get is because the footer's width. It's set to 110%. Probably a typo by the creator of the stylesheet.
I said "run-time code", not bytecodes. I'm talking about what actually executes. I've seen "bytecodes" that qualify as high-level languages by this standard, like CPython bytecode. Is that even so surprising? Single bytecodes for OO languages can translate to a lot of work to resolve.

And, what about Forth? It's a fairly low-level language by this standard. It has convenient ways to link together a lot of little functions, but one word does not dispatch on types and expand operator overloading and do the other things that can result in one line of C++ producing half a kilobyte of code, to say nothing of the functions that half-a-kilobyte may be invoking. Nor do I see why you think that's related to the syntax point.

I really have no idea what points you or your upmodders think you've won.
"For reviewing this app, consider it similar to Baseball."

I suspect that, in particular when it comes to understanding scores, that fans of either game would be quite confused about the other.

Coincidentally this is my second comment in a row on HN that quotes an old Aaron Sorkin show (this time 'Sports Night', a two-series show from a decade ago that remains one of my all-time favourites), so apologies in advance:

(talking about a player who took all ten wickets in an inning)
JEREMY It says if you compared it to baseball, it'd be like pitching three perfect games on three consecutive days.
CASEY Really?
JEREMY Not exactly.
CASEY Why not exactly?
JEREMY It says the final four batters scored 16 runs.
CASEY Doesn't sound good.
JEREMY It certainly doesn't sound perfect.
CASEY Right.
JEREMY In baseball, if the final four batters scored 16 runs, it's be hard to consider that perfect.
CASEY Right. Jeremy, I don't know how comfortable I am reporting a story I don't understand.

Rather than thinking of it as baseball for the English, I'd suggest reading that wiki page linked to.

And FYI, both baseball and cricket are great games, but from my experience... if you like cricket, go learn about baseball and watch a few games, it's fantastic. If, however, you're a baseball fan, you'll probably find cricket far too slow and subtle to keep your interest for long, though I'm sure there are people who've learned to love it.
when you develop on a "domain", you put the files on a server, which is a computer running a webserver (like apache e.g). a webserver is nothing but a program.
so you can install a webserver (and database server, whatever you need) on your own computer as well.
this way you can skip the ftp uploading part, which takes a lot of time.
you only have to put the files you are working on, in a directory which the webserver handles. so if you save a file you can reload the browser...

this is a tutorial for installing apache on windows:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/platform/windows.html

hope that helps, martin
Well I'm mainly a python programmer and a fan of the language (but refuse to use the word "pythonista" and believe that whoever coined that word deserves a punch in the face) so take what I say with an appropriate grain of salt.

Yes python has a few warts you need to aware, and when you list then they sound quite overwhelming, but having programmed in python for, on and off, 10 years, very few of them have actually tripped me up in any serious way.

The GIL for example gets talked about more than it actually causes problems (and there are python implementations that don't have the GIL if it is truly a problem). If I really need multiprocessing within python, the multiprocessing library normally solves my problem.

The string formatting "problem" you link to is hardly a problem at all in python 2. The
"%s" % (foo)
approach didn't stopped working after 2.4. They simply added a way to deal with non-positional arguments. That being said I'm not really a fan of the new python3 print syntax, but maybe I'll eventually get used to it.

as for the 2.x/3.x thing, yea I'll agree it's sub-optimal. Let's just say I still write all my python code using 2.x since most of the libraries I use still don't have stable (or any) 3.x versions.

The version issue you link to is problem of forwards compatibility rather than backwards compatibility and many languages fail at forwards compatibility. As far as I know there has only been one backwards compatibility break in python2, and that was that 'with' became a keyword.

Some syntax inconsistency is annoying I agree, but they're mostly there for backwards compatibility, and many have already been fixed. Hopefully they've gotten it mostly cleaned up in python 3.

The other issues you link to seem to be mix of personal opinion and minor annoyances.

Sure the scope rules are a bit odd a times, but I've never really had problems with them in actual real code.

I really don't get the complaint about lack of information hiding. Yes python doesn't have "real" information hiding, but you can get most of the useful parts of information hiding by adding underscore to start of your variables and method names.

The only point on that list that I actually agree with to any extent, is the lambdas/anonymous functions, complaint. But again, it is a minor annoyance rather than a major deal breaker.

At the end of the day, I agree that there are a lot of odd corners in Python that have arisen from how the language has grown organically over the years, and yes there are 'cleaner' languages out there (although I'm not sure Ruby is one of them). But for when it comes to getting things done in a quick, clean and efficient manner, python just works for me.
Out of interest am I being down-voted because this is off topic, too short, or because no-one is interested in typesetting and the humble em dash?
The best feature for me is the support for unusual wireless topographies. Our house is rented, so I can't go drilling holes in things to route ethernet cable. Instead I've built a wireless mesh network out of several DD-WRT routers, with the bonus of bridging this to the wired switch on each unit. This way the xbox and the kitchen computer can connect to the internet, which comes in upstairs, with no fuss. You can also do lots of fun point-to-point stuff. With a decent aerial and line of sight you can throw wifi for 2 miles or more using consumer routers.

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Linking_Routers

a close second is the SNMP server, allowing me to use this OSX dashboard widget to get a graph of incoming/outgoing bandwidth usage at the router:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/networking_security...

If anyone is wondering which device is generally considered the best balance of price/spec for running these firmwares, its widely agreed to be the Buffalo WHR-HP-G54, which can be had for around £40/$60

EDIT: oh yeah and of course its also an openVPN server. Forgot about that. And if you get one with a USB port you can plug in a HDD and run rsync on it...
(somewhat off-topic) Sometimes FLOSS is put forward as the meritocracy in the world of software development, as opposed to big business ruled by bean-counters and arbitrary quotas. Yet when it comes to gender ratio, it's implied and/or assumed women and girls are driven out of FLOSS for some irrational reasons, and the gender ratio in the big business is the natural one. Why such assumption?

A honest question; as I don't know the reasons and reasoning behind all that.
>In math, "5" is all of those things simultaneously, but in Haskell it can only be one at a time.

How is that?

Excerpts from ghci dialog:

Prelude> :t 5
5 :: (Num t) => t
class (Num a) => Fractional a where
(/) :: a -> a -> a
recip :: a -> a
fromRational :: Rational -> a
Prelude Data.Complex> :i RealFrac
class (Real a, Fractional a) => RealFrac a where
...
Prelude Data.Complex> :i RealFloat
class (RealFrac a, Floating a) => RealFloat a where
...
Prelude Data.Complex> :i Complex
data (RealFloat a) => Complex a = !a :+ !a
instance (RealFloat a) => Eq (Complex a)

So, 5 is an Int, Integer, Rational, Double and Complex (which, actually, could be Complex Int or Complex Double).
Ruby, Python, and in the game-dev world, Lua have become quite popular without curly brackets and semicolons. I don't think syntax is all that critical to a language becoming popular[0]. What does matter is that it solves an immediate problem that simply isn't being solved by other languages, or is attached to a framework or tool that does so. Python got popular because it was a more readable replacement for Perl. Ruby got popular because it was used for a framework that eliminated half the work from the average web app[1].

[0] With certain limitations. A painful syntax will keep people away, and it remains to be seen whether Lisp is painful enough to most programmers to prevent adoption when a language otherwise solves all their problems.

[1] Compared to PHP, Java or just about any language with CGI and a hand-rolled data access layer.
That's a misleading chart, since it doesn't appear to be "per user": That single flight might carry a lot more people than the single car.
Do you consider that a good or bad thing?
People look at ISO-8601 and think year-month-day looks great! But don’t realize that it also includes thing like —month-day (yes, you don’t need to include year to have a valid iso date!) year-week, year-day and lots of other things.

So I would generally advise against accepting iso formatted dates and instead decree a single date format.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
Overall, I don't think this post is very good. It tries hard to ride the wave of several important, valuable, and popular sentiments but I think that the ways in which it misses the mark, mars its purpose.

I don't understand why Nick (the author) chose to group a bunch of unrelated stuff in to an otherwise pretty reasonable post on decreasing personal attacks in OSS communications.

The parts about systemic biases and asking speakers about them has essentially nothing to do with the first part of the post. Essentially the entire "What Can We Do About It" section reads like it was written for an entirely different purpose than the rest of the post. It is fine to promote those ideas but to tie the idea of increasing civility in communications as an idea of countering systematic biases against certain demographics is a faulty alignment of ideals.

Saying read a wiki on feminism as a way to reduce personal attacks in email threads is bizarre. The notion that people are "experiencing harassment over your identity rather than being critiqued solely based on the quality of your work." is not related at all to my experience in OSS communities.
Sean and the rest of the Jelly Chicago crew he and friends have pulled together are good people because of thoughts like this. If you're full of smoke, eventually, someone pokes a hole in you and then you're just an empty bag.
I hope not. Not everything has to be a kitchen sink.
There's no downvotes for stories only for comments. Or at least there isn't for me (3k karma).
As far as I can tell, you aren't.

Our CTO bought some as he wanted to test the waters with an stock counting program, nearly all the emails I read were about it being a demo, tech idea, contact Google for help and all that stuff.

All it looks like, Google allowed people to try out new tech, it seemed to go well, but the tech isn't great yet, Android Wear took most of the concepts with Google Now, the future will involve making it better before its a consumer product.

It seems to me Google can't win. Ah well.
Yes, formally the win was fair, on the surface, but it wouldn't happen without some preparations. The deal made with communists in 1989 made sure that:

1. Communist party members never answered for their crimes, and were free to continue their political careers.

2. Compromised communist judges continued their service in courts, effectively granting communist scumbags immunity for their crimes. Crimes which included stealing huge amounts of money, which then were used for point 3:

3. The only two private TV networks, as well as biggest newspaper were owned/controlled by former communist intelligence officers. This was a great propaganda platform.

You see, that's a downside of peaceful revolutions: you never get a chance of permanently getting rid of your former rulers. Had generals Jaruzelski, Kiszczak and maybe two dozens other top ranking communist been executed in 1989 we might have avoided this mess.
You could also expand the VA program, a healthcare coverage system serviced by the government for veterans of the military.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veterans_Health_Administration
I think the points you make are very important. Not only the "Terminator" scenario but also the "hyper-capitalism" scenario. But the solution is not to stop working on such research, it is political.
That's a problem with schooling not subjects. Industrial revolution school systems don't fit the 21st century
At a basic level, I agree there’s not a fundamental difference. But I think it’s reasonable to look at practical differences between China and the US and consider which one you’d prefer to be secretly recording your personal data. The US has cultural and constitutional support of free speech, due process, and independent judiciary. On the flip-side, the US has PRISM, theocrats, an insane president, and a history of covert violent foreign intervention. China has little support for freedom of speech, separation of powers, etc.. And is frequently accused of extrajudicially disappearing people for their speech/beliefs.

I think at present I’d still significantly prefer the US over China to secretly collect my personal data (even if I wasn’t a US citizen). It’s certainly possible that difference will further erode over time.

I don’t necessarily mean to endorse banning Chinese apps, as that seems very problematic and arguably cuts against our own value system. It’s always seemed very protectionist when China did that to us, and it seems the same when we do it to them, and comes with the same surface area for corporate corruption of our government.
Personally, accepting the meaninglessness of life was rather freeing. I don’t need to go down any prescribed path, I can do what I want to do in life.
I think GP means that data is so cheap that there won't be any money to fix the cables in case they break due to an extreme weather event.
I haven't watched the video, but from the short description this doesn't sound like universal basic income:

> it handed C$7,500 (US$5,900) with no strings attached to a number of recently homeless people

I'm absolutely all for direct cash assistance and housing assistance for homeless and housing insecure populations. I think direct cash and housing first models are absolutely the best first approaches for the unhoused and I'm glad to see more experiments in that vein.
Oh the glorious offline-first software and hardware. I miss it. Today this would've been handled through "the cloud", requiring an account, a consent to tracking and analytics, a monthly subscription, and a reliable high-speed internet connection.
"Racism", as per the progressive left definition, only applies to white men, when the same concept is applied to anybody else, it's called "progress".

Should be obvious by now.
I did not read the article as people actively calling the maintainers names. But just showing dissatisfaction that their day-to-day work was disrupted without warning by a browser feature changing.

And arguing about actively offensive people, i agree is moot and not the point of my comment. But those will exist regardless if your project is big enough, unfortunatelly.

My comment is about people disliking (in a sociably manner) the work made by open source corporation like mozilla, and that demotivating the paid coders. That is totaly on mozilla.
I'd be interested to read more about Tinder's application. Off the top of my head, i don't see how it would apply to a dating app.
There's a similar thing in France called "60 Millions de consommateurs":

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&u=https:/...

which is great, but I think DE and FR are way ahead compared to other countries in that area.

Edit: also in UK there's "Which?":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Which%3F
The commercial offerings of LispWorks and Allegro CL have their GUIs.

LispWorks' CAPI has backends to Windows, macOS / Cocoa and GTK:

http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw71/CAPI-M/html/capi...
Why put security second?

The thing is, if you need random numbers fast, then profiling will tell you "Opps, used random() when I should have used fast_random()". That's an easy change to make that'd show up in profiling if performance were an issue.

If random() never comes up in profiling, why care that you are getting the secure version?

The danger of missing "secure_random()" is that it creates a security vulnerability (Potentially leading to loss of money, information, etc). The danger of going the "fast_random()" route is that your application will run slower potentially leading to a dev needing to spend time to swap in "fast_random()" for "random()". That, to me, doesn't seem like a major problem or risk.

Programmers are notoriously bad at predicting when something will end up being a performance issue. So why preoptimize because we assume most people want/need speed?