jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
Well, to be fair, I don't think "Anyone can code" is an identical statement to "Programming is easy."

Programming involves having a purpose and understanding the architecture and so on. Writing code isn't, per se, about all that.

Kind of like saying "A five year old can learn to write." and someone having a cow about "A five year old cannot go from not knowing their alphabet to being an award-winning author overnight!" Well, okay, but that wasn't what was meant when someone said "Any five year old can learn to literally write."

Programming is more of a big picture thing and that fact is largely unrelated to the simple fact that, yes, if you wish to write code for some reason, you actually can just look stuff up online.

And I think for some people who are used to needing permission, socially, to do anything, it actually is a significant detail worth commenting on that You don't have to ask anyone or get permission to do the thing. You can just look stuff up and do the thing because you decided to do the thing.

I know a little HTML and CSS, but I don't self identify as a programmer. I am self taught and it's useful because I blog and it's helpful for that domain, but, no, I still can't, say, write an indie game (an actual goal of mine).

It is literally true that anyone can code by looking up stuff online and maybe for some people what they are kind of trying to say, to build on a metaphor used in this piece, is "You don't have to go talk to the head chef and fill out forms requisitioning eggs. Anyone can crack a couple of eggs and start cooking!"

Which doesn't in any way imply that cracking a couple of eggs and frying them up makes you the equivalent of a trained chef in terms of the quality of your work, the complexity you can handle and other pertinent stuff (such as ability to manage a staff in a commercial kitchen).
> That’s the view of people who have grown up during an ever rising market like the last 12 years and think that’s just the way it always is.

No, which number is the right pcomparison to be apples to oranges before considering risk has nothing to do with that.

Interest rate on debt is directly most comparable to nominal return on investment, not real return.

I haven't discussed at all what the correct risk premium to assign to stock market investment based on its historical volatility and what interest rate that would suggest is appropriate to consider equivalent on a risk-adjusted basis, either for some presumed generic investor (which would be meaningless in concrete terms) or in any concrete investment scenarios.
According to the article, SolarWinds doesn't seem to think that the password itself is a problem, only that it was leaked. And they "took it down", that sounds as if they deleted the leaked document. It doesn't sound as if they changed the password.

Amazing.
Indeed, the ridiculous and absurd way they are worn with seemingly no effort.

A black toga[1] is traditionally worn in Dutch court cases by all the legal masters, but it does look rather stylish.

[1]: https://www.win-nieuws.nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Student...
Perhaps we should add “Don’t say things like ‘The most leveraged way to learn how to CTO’.” to the list.
Or remove the battery, or use hardware killswiches where possible.
Possibly. I recently interviewed for an infosec role at a SV medical device manufacturer and China was involved in a few ways above and beyond being a major part of the supply chain.

I had to nope out.
They aren't comparable.
Not really. I'd say the necessary elements are:

+ A choice between two "games", each losing on average.
+ At least one game has periods of local payoff great enough to overwhelm the long-run losses in the other game
+ Some flow of information between the games so that playing one game will help you predict the payoff periods of the other game.

The example that flies to mind is investment. Game A is to lose value of money you hold on to via inflation. Game B is the generally losing game of day trading. The net game can be profitable as long as you spend time in A learning to accurately predict game B's upswings.

Of course, the real information flow from game B to game A is already heavily capitalized making the net game even more difficult.
I'd be careful about concluding it could not have been accidental. The chemical industry isn't the only one that tries to prevent incorrect connections by using dissimilar connectors, but there always seems to be a mechanic that thinks he knows better and tries to "fix" it. They can and do find adapters or even make adapters.

There's no malice involved, just pig-headed stupidity.
does using Rietveld mean that one has to use the app-engine ?
That's giving Windows Mobile too much credibility.
" Apple would have no interest in partnering with T-Mobile, heck, their service is worse and spottier than AT&T."

I've had the opposite experience. And T-mob customer support is far nicer.
How does this stuff get to the top of list? It's 700+ words that ignores basically anything shown today by Apple and instead says only "AT&T sucks!"

More generally, flamebait articles that paint this as the great Android vs Apple war are maddening. They are pieces of software, not wrestlers. One does not have to fail for the other to succeed.
Yeah. I realized after writing that it might appear to mean "in what ways have you changed" but I really did mean "how did you affect change in your life?"
I think it's great that Apple puts so much effort into usability and aesthetics. They put a lot of polish onto their devices and apps that put almost everyone else to shame.

It's true that the iPhone was a game changer. It's not surprising to see other companies stepping up to the challenge.

As an Android user (myTouch, 128MB RAM sucks), I often wish for the polish of the iPhone and for access to some much better apps, but in the end I can do things that the iPhone could never do.

I can tether via USB or WiFi, install apps from websites without using the Market and use free turn-by-turn navigation all while while taking a phone call. With Android I feel like I have freedom to do what I want with my pocket-sided computer without being treated like a baby and told what I can and cannot do with my own personal computing device. I have the freedom to choose phones with keyboards or without, with more RAM or less, from any carrier that I want. For me, that freedom is worth a lot.

I think the iPhone 4 is a great device from what I can see and certainly outshines most Android phones, but not by as much as the iPhone outshined BlackBerry at the time. If Google can take time for the next OS to work on the polish, I think they have a chance to really be a solid competitor. Heck, the Droid outsold the iPhone 3G in the first 30 days of sales. That says something.
> That one was interesting in that it seems to indicate they don't tune the spam filter using all the personal profile data they have

Yeah, this is infuriating. I had gmail silently spam-filter an email on the grounds that it came from an @qq.com address (QQ is a large chinese social network). While I had never corresponded with that particular QQ address, I had correspondence from several other QQ addresses in my inbox. Also in my inbox: correspondence with an @foxmail.com address displaying the same sender name as the mail that was supposedly spam. I don't see how it could have been more clear, contextually, that I wanted to receive that mail.
According to HSBC's US site, there's a fixed $30 rate for a signle wire transfer. Mexico's rates are probably less (for reference, here in France it costs me nothing to do a wire transfer within Europe).

I sincerely hope they didn't come out on top of this.
"The "scripting" languages that serve as entry-level tools for today's aspiring programmers -- like Perl and Python -- don't make this experience accessible to students in the same way. BASIC was close enough to the algorithm that you could actually follow the reasoning of the machine as it made choices and followed logical pathways."

Wow, and here I thought I was using conditions in P&P all these years--I'll have to run a "grep if *p[ly]" when I get back to the office. Though I do agree that there is a certain satisfaction in coding at a lower level, if the level is assembler.

I don't know what the story is in the Mac world, but as far as I can tell most of the Windows boxes out there will let you code and run VBScript if you have a passion for that sort of thing.
I will never give up on writing "e-mail" rather than "email"
A very hard book to get through the middle of :(
The Georgist or geolibertarian positions on this center around a Land Value Tax, sometimes believed to be the only necessary tax. Someone does own the land, but is taxed at a rate that captures the entire value of the (unimproved) land, so in some ways it's more akin to rent, which neutralizes some of the historic advantages certain groups enjoyed.

This tax is essentially paid to the public to compensate them for being excluded from the land. The tax moves up as the value of the land increases, so idle landowners do not capture the value themselves, and may be forced to sell to people who will put it to more productive use.

That's just scratching the surface, though!
If you go inside, most stations have been replacing their POS device with a newer one that'll take ApplePay, etc
Really? All those trippy visuals?
If you are periodically checking coworkers manually and then said coworkers got doxed externally you would be in the same troubles with the company for creating hostile workplace
The real inflection point was around 1975. A few years before that and there wasn't such a thing as a pocket calculator. A year earlier and a 5 function (the basics plus square root) was still $100 in 1974 currency. Then TI scientific calculators were around $200 or so. Within a couple of years even HPs were at around that price point.

In college (late 70s) I still took a slide rule to exams as a backup; LED calculators could run out of juice. But I never used it.
Such is life in the npm world, unfortunately.

I've tried to be minimal with my dependencies while providing a rich user experience, but I'm sure we could do better still. Any dependencies in particular you'd like me to look into removing?
Well congrats on the small videos, they are well done and show some highlights. For me it looks like a standard chat group in one of {Whatsapp,Signal,Telegram,Threema,Facebook,whatever-social-network-on-mobile-phones-look-like}, but with a few more lovely details. It's the details which make the difference, in the end.

Nevertheless, it looks that even kind-of-industry-standards such as end-to-end-encryption are not implemented. And I would like to see something without a central server. Something which makes matrix.org and friends more user-friendly, for instance.
I'm not sure why I would need this when Java EE does most of this already. The Enterprise Edition has made a lot of progress with version 6 and 7 and greatly cleaned up the XML descriptor nonsense and instead relies on convention over configuration and annotations where necessary. Things like CDI for DI, JAX-RS for webservices and JPA for persistence just work out of the box with minimal configuration. As far as web pages go, JSF works well and is nicely integrated with the other technologies. But server-side web applications are obviously outdated in 2015, you could easily get something like Angular to work with the Java backend and ditch JSF.
The decline of "It just works" is one side of the problem. The other, more painful side (driven by the iOS-ification of the OS, I suppose) is: "When it doesn't work, you're helpless".
Location: San Francisco, USA

Remote: no

Willing to relocate: yes

Technologies: Java, C#, PL/SQL, TCL, XML, DevExpress, WinForms, UML, IDEF, MATLAB, C++, .NET, Verilog, SQL, CSS, Bash, HTML

Résumé/CV: https://www.dropbox.com/s/6hgk8rs5no0rlcs/resume_Valery_M.pd...

Email: see resume
I would liken the AI with a photo camera. I can't paint very well, but I can take this miraculous machine and create a picture on the press of a button. Yet there is still artistic expression in deciding when an where to press the button, and at which angle you hold the machine when pressing the button. And we universally agree that whoever pressed the button owns the copyright of the created picture, even if most of the work is done by the machine.

With AI in general and neutral networks specifically the same applies. There's some nuance to decide if the copyright belongs to the person who trained the network or the person who prompted this specific output. The easy solution is to say "both", and let people handle it with copyright assignments and license agreements.

When we have AGI that thinks for itself we might want to rethink this, but that's in the far future.
> Why do so many new languages launch without what I'd consider to be essential functionality for any language

Maybe because what 'you consider' is not a universal metric of utility?

I, personally, care not one whit about the useless stuff you mentioned. (Probably because I never programmed in Java and intend to keep it that way while I live.)
I don't understand what you find offensive with that statement.

Do you mean to suggest rich people are always hit as hard as poor people?
Just to make this clear: This is a trial registration, not a result.
Keep in mind though that this resilience is at the expense of thousands of workers who have to forego their own social distancing and risk their own healths so that we can get our next prime delivery in 3-4 days.

Amazon isn't run by robots. There are real humans who are going through hell to support this increase in demand.
Exactly. Since the risks and side-effects are well-established, it’s more ethical at this point to experiment on humans with an “off label” usage. Doctors do that all the time with other meds.
I stopped using onenote years ago. What is good and bad about onenote now in your opinion? Why leave it?
I can't say that I've followed what's going on in Belgium but I think that at the moment that's probably the wise thing to do. It sucks but even starting a lockdown right now the number of cases in ICU is likely to grow by more than 10 times over the next 2 weeks or so.

It would be great if we could count on personal responsibility - in theory we should be able to go out and bike/hike without interacting with any people and avoid total imprisonment that way. But it doesn't look like that's working, people are still gathering and socializing quite a lot. Most people are just not aware of the urgency and don't fear for their own health, thereby discounting other people's health. Even this lack of personal fear is probably unjustified by now - by the time they'll get sick the hospital system will be overwhelmed.
Real is the only bigger one I late last week was still able to buy from a decent selection of non-food stuff here in Berlin. Kind of funny, since this particular business model doesn't seem to have run that well in Germany pre-epidemic, with them just recently announcing to close down stores.
I have 0 clues about clinical trials and the procedures. My questions is: Why are so few studies done on this?

I think so far we have 2 studies. (from China and France).

However, we've had hundreds of hospitals around the world with thousands of patients. And the drug is cheaply available.

What is preventing us to have studies around this in tens of different hospitals? Wouldn't WHO be able to budget this, or actually send people to conduct these studies all across the globe and report back day to day, so within 2 weeks we get a pretty significant set of data?
It is absolutely not a fallacy, as Naval Ravikant points out, given the large numbers of slippery slopes that have played out in the historical record. I have no idea why the belief that it is a logical fallacy is so widespread.
Were the people attempting to derail the confirmation armed and committing property damage? Did they have zip ties to confine government officials? Did they assault and overwhelm police officers on the way in? If not then I don't think the two are comparable.
Coke vs Pepsi are different. Same basic category (cola soft drink) but they taste different. Same with McDonalds vs Burger King. There are differences, you’re buying different products in the same category.

But if I take Lyft, Uber, or use a taxi app it’s all the sane in the end. Start at point A, get out at point B.

It may be a different car. One driver may be better. The only REAL difference is the price. In fact we know a lot of drivers drive for multiple services, so your experience may literally be identical!
Nope. I know that I was that person on the other end of hopelessly vague casting of suspicion. And I know that a lot of people nod and get suspicious themselves.

I'm not concerned about the woman in question. I'm concerned about everybody else who gets treated poorly because they're "a bit strange". And because of that, I'm concerned every time I hear that sort of "different equals scary" talk, as it normalized poor treatment of perfectly good people.
> So far the ruble hasn't been decimated but this could still go south

The ruble was worth 0.14 dollars before the war and now is worth 0.12, which is just below a 0.014 reduction in its value, so it has quite literally and almost exactly been decimated, as it was done in roman tradition.
If union voters have the same distribution of that of public voters, then the most active and vocal will be those with retirement in mind. I think it would be hard sell to get these voters to agree to a change that will immediately affect their near-term future.
Again?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1357390 <<<-- This one has the comments.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1360285

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1370134

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1376655

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1383943

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1385999

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1388904

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1389955

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1390588

and there are more, but I ran out of patience.
> That's not to say their C&D is valid or enforceable. It just enters into another legal bin that's a bit more hairy.

Exactly. It will be interesting to see where things end up playing out in the "leaving yourself wide open" department.

It's very much parallel with the "using open wifi points" debate.
SF: Nowmov, YCW10 -- We need programmers! Come work at a tiny but well-funded YC startup near the ballpark. Our backend is built on top of Rails, redis, and Postgres, and our roadmap has more cool features than there are hours in the day. You'd have considerable scope to learn new technologies (if junior) or establish technical direction (if senior). We're particularly interested in your beautiful web apps; concrete experience in machine learning; or strong Ruby/Rails skills. Mail jobs+hn@nowmov.com for more info.
I've got a few invites - message me with your email for one
Once I did. Met her on Facebook. Message, message, message then asked her out. Worked.

Other than that I have not. But I never call women I met. It is either email or SMS. I try to avoid anything real time unless we are in the same place so you can read my body language.
Yea, I'm not hiding that I am involved. And yes, I'm still surprised no on has done it (:
My older brother and I tried to get our 386 and 486 hooked up over a null modem cable to play Doom when we were kids.

We had to use two gender changers in sequence to make it work. There was some kind of "More Magic" electrical situation going on that we never completely diagnosed, but it was reliable with that setup where a direct connection would simply time out over and over.
I regularly have the same problem.

When my American wife and I got married (in the UK) we joined names, which is a perfectly legal name change.

My UK passport now reads Thomas Henry Hughes-Croucher.
However her US password reads Rosemarie Hughes Croucher.
At my university, pragmatic programming courses were part of the math department. If students want to learn to program, perhaps they should take programming courses rather than CS courses, instead of compromising the education of full-time CS students. The courses do have to be available though, and not all universities provide them unfortunately.
> You want to give everyone a single vote so that the majority can agree on which transactions are valid and which are not.

That's not how Bitcoin works, although I admit it is plausible that you were describing how you would like Bitcoin to work. There's no "vote" in Bitcoin. Instead, there's a set of rules for determining whether or not a transaction is valid. Also, the distribution of hash rate does not necessarily have any relationship to the number of unique participants.
to me it looks like it's too many options that will eventually confuse normal buyers

I would think most people will want 3-6 choices like economy, business, first etc
> It doesn't go anywhere anyone wants to go, it goes close to where a lot of people want to go. It doesn't know when we want to go so it just picks times and forces us into buckets.

That's why you run a network of high frequency services (every 10 minutes or better). You turn up at a stop and wait on average 5 minutes, I think most people can tolerate that. If it doesn't go where you're going then you transfer, again waiting an average time of 5 minutes. That's convenient and you don't have to drive either.

> A proper solution would be that "public transport" consisted of a network of self-driving cars that you can schedule on the internet to come pick you up and drop you where you need to go.

Would still create congestion on busy routes and I suspect a huge number of these cars would be needed purely to cater for demand for about 2 hours of the day.
Unfortunately, when people give you money (aka investors), they have certain expectations and you have responsibilities to them. And Google needs the money that the public markets enables them to have to fund operations, hire, grow, innovate, etc.

Again, this doesn't mean Google should engage in short-term B.S. that Wall St trades in, but they will need to be accountable to shareholders in some fashion - probably through detailing their vision. And they can articulate that they're managing for the long-term which is a great and desirable thing. But just saying "give us money, we're really smart" is not going to cut it. That's part of the hassle of being a public company - you are answerable to others.

Emotional arguments about why MBA/finance guys are bad may get folks excited but the reality is that both parties need each other. Thinking they don't is myopic, naive or probably both.
If you try applying this POV to any field, it'll sound like "developing anything on any platform is broken"

If you want to develop something significant, you'll have to dive deep and spend some time boosting yourself on the learning curve.

Speaking of web development, most good MVC frameworks today solve this problem for you.

Ex: when you use rails, it makes your dev server a command away. It automatically creates an sqlite database by default. If you are building trivial stuff, you do not have to understand SQL and directly deal with the database. All you have to understand is some ruby and a bit of high-school HTML to create simple sites. Whether those bare minimal skills (i.e, minus CSS, minus Javascript) help you build a startup or get profitable is a topic for another day. But it does get you started!

Deploying... whether you use Heroku or any other platform or your own rock solid VPS, is upto you.

The blog post, IMO, sounds like the rant of a tired programmer.
For shits and giggles I took Kevin's lists and created a fun little startup name generator that you can play around with.

http://whatthefuckshouldinamemystartup.com

Visit the About page and donate to Kevin for all of his hard work :)
American urban centers are primarily inhabited by the poor -- people who have no other choices. Urban gentrification is the froth on a sea of poverty.