jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
"Nevertheless the Economist made it sound that she was only persecuted for accepting financing from unofficial sources, not that she was doing anything improper with the financing."

I can't agree with that. I read only the Economist article before coming to the comments here, and I managed to figure out that she was being charged with active fraud. I figured it out from things like mentioning a promise of an 80% return on investment, or possibly lending out money she received at usurious interest rates.

I think you may be missing the point of the last paragraph, which is that the plea bargain is to plead guilty to the crime of raising funds in the way Chinese entrepreneurs have been doing, not that she actually did it. She didn't, which why it's a plea bargain, but it's concerning that what she bargained to is a death-penalty crime, apparently.

To be fair, this article seems to be a little shorter than it should be; it requires closer reading than it should. And I'd also point out that she still appears to be getting the death penalty for that charge, which is worth reacting to.
I know people hate this answer, but this is how I look at that: LTS.

Seriously, I install LTS for several things: servers and non-techies. Why? b/c I view non-LTS releases as awesome for me, you, people on this site but not for my grandma.

What I've seen Ubuntu do is they have given people who want to be on the bleeding edge a way to be on the bleeding edge every 6 months, and that is freakin' awesome. But if you don't want to be there, and frankly, most people don't, they give you an LTS and 10.04 is a pretty freakin' good OS for people who check their webmail and need a writer/spreadsheet with minimal fuss.

Using this model, it is the best of both worlds.
This is what indieconf was set up to help address last year, and we'll be doing another one this fall. Videos of some of the sessions will be coming soon - http://indieconf.com and sign up on the email list to be notified (yes this is a bit of a blatant early plug!)
Think of it as the wild west of financial system. People can skew the rules or laws by setting up saving and loan "banks" with promise of high return. Of course these are Ponzi scheme with the latecomers paying off the earlier ones, and eventually the "bank" collapses and the "entrepreneurs" simply disappear while many people lose their money.

So many "entrepreneurs" raising funds outside of the rule and law because they can't satisfy the financial regulations that protect the lay investors. And financial scams are lucrative?

She has "raised" hundreds of millions in this case. People losing the their life savings are furious. I'm sure in this case, these people have asked for her head. People who have had millions to start with are usually in the position of power, and they seem to get their wish this time.
Some people allocated memory, copied out the input, then put back the bits they wanted to keep. That is not "in place". "Some people" implies more than one.

I would have done it in place because that was the simplest approach and not doing so would have been silly. However, just because it seems that way to us does not mean everyone knew you required more than just output in that fashion.

Anyway, I was more commenting on the style where you mix the requirements for an interface with the requirements for the algorithm. IMO "I need a function / API that does X efficiently" is much better than saying "does X using hash tables". AKA, if you don’t' want someone to use malloc then you can say so, but giving the reasons why you don't want malloc is more useful.

PS: It’s really a minor point and I thank you for doing this bit of research. I was simply trying to help you communicate in a more clear fashion.
> Maybe we are long overdue for an open standard protocol for social interactions on the web

This exists as a W3C recommendation (ActivityPub), and before that you had pioneers working on things like StatusNet and GNU Social, way back in 2008.
You can book a mentor at https://www.mentordial.com. We have several mentors who are engineers at top companies. They can guide you through the interview process.
Be careful, because sometimes disabling Aero actually makes the system slower. With Aero enabled, rendering the desktop and window UI/compositing/etc is done on the GPU. With it disabled, all that UI is now contending for CPU time.
I work in a warehouse and my first thought is that would be a haven for bugs and spiders.
You have a very short username - could be that someone was looking at the "send a new password" page and made a mistake or was just plain curious.

I don't think I would worry about it too much unless I started getting lots of these emails.
I seriously think the idea of charity is flawed. There are so many things wrong with it, that it's really hard for me to put that into a comment.

Another point, quite important and often forgotten, is that people actually think, if they put some money in charity they did a great thing today. With a bright smile they walk on the street of their own city, letting drugs, raping, bad school education, homeless people and so on just happen. But that's okay. They come in heaven now, because they did charity...

But hey, when it is a company it must be better. Because they at least themself should know that it actually is a marketing campaign they are doing and not helping people.
Something @chrislloyd and I found in Github. Nothing too serious!
It felt like a very unreal situation — working for a supposed “top-notch” company only to discover that some of my coworkers (including senior artists and management) wouldn’t even have been hired as interns at other companies I’d worked at. I’m not exaggerating.

Is Rockst*r considered a top-notch company? I know their output is quite respected but like Mel Gibson there is a difference between looking good on TV and being Good. Mostly it sounds like a bad case of hero worship.
I agree. In pretty much all of my theoretical computer science courses, whenever it came to the math there always seemed to be a lot of hand-waving and noise, but not a lot of content. Some were better than others, but when I consider some of the scores I got on tests (much too high!) for basically just puking up random math formulas, I was beginning to suspect that the TAs (and possibly the professors) didn't understand this stuff much better than I did.
How's that a downside? I believe some websites make signing up invite only. See Lockerz, Squarespace(?), Jackthreads, etc.
Where are you from? The US?

Is it normal to do potty training so late?
Which kind of defeats the purpose. I use Vim plugins to reduce my keystrokes.
One problem: you did this test on Dec 21, well after Hanukkah had passed (it was December 1-9 this year).

So for a big portion of the folks who are supposed to appreciate your PC-ness you missed the holiday by almost a month. Hardly surprising the remaining segment liked "Merry Christmas" better.
A divorce is a broken promise. Who would be pro-divorce?
3G is better
Because there aren't 100 separate wifi channels (frequencies) so if you put big powerful routers with lots of signal then people from the other end of the room will try and connect, if you put little low power ones then they intefere with each other.

Then you have the overhead of 1000s of people trying to connect, their wifi cards not receiving a response because the router is busy so they try on another channel tying that one up as well.

Wifi really isn't designed for this sort of setup - it's amazingly difficult to get it right, throwing hardware just makes it worse
What I find interesting is that, according to those pie charts, in 2007 men were less educated and yet managed to make significantly more income than their wives.

Note that I do not draw any conclusions. Just pointing out an interesting fact.
Some ofthe problem, at least in my part of Australia, is there isn't really any outdoors to play in anymore.

When I was a kid, house sizes were smaller and blocks were larger. The house I grew up in would have been < 100 square metres, and the block about 1000 square meters or so. This meant loads of backyard; we had a large workshop (loads of wood, tools etc), a chook run, a few fruit trees, some trees for climbing, paved area (concrete slabs) for bikes, some grass and a veggie patch. Now most houses are well over 200 square metres, and land much smaller. Many new housing developments near us call anything over 500m2 'large'

And beyond the house... when I was a kid there were large areas of natural bush land to play in/explore. Now they're pretty much all gone, replaced in part by (what we call) ovals - a grass playing area for footy/soccer and with perhaps a swing and slide in the sun. Not much fun.

Roads are busier too. We built a go-kart (non motorised) and my parents had no problems letting us tear down the local hill road in it. Street cricket or footy was also very common, but again, just not possible now
I've never understood the programmers that write off design as fluffy stuff for the "creative" people who wear black turtle necks and berets. As if design was somehow beneath them, or as if it's wallpaper that you can plaster over a project once the code is written to "pretty it up".

To answer your questions:

Why are you interested in learning more about design?

Because I want to spend my career making people feel the way I felt when I first used an iPod. I picked the iPod here because it seems to be the stock example that gets trotted out whenever someone needs to reference good design, but you can replace it with whatever well designed product you like. We've all had those experiences in our lives where we use something new, and it makes something that was previously difficult easy. That's the kind of stuff I want to spend my time creating, and a sound knowledge of design is a means to that end.

What have you found confusing about design?

When and how to break the rules. I'm a fan of Robin Williams' Non-designers Design Book (http://www.amazon.com/Non-Designers-Design-Book-Robin-Willia...), but as a consequence my projects can look a little sterile because I follow the rules exactly as she lays them out.

In contrast, if you go and look at something made by Jason Santa Maria (an outstanding web designer at the top of his game) (http://jasonsantamaria.com/portfolio/) you'll see he breaks a lot of the rules, and it doesn't matter. In fact, it often times makes the work better.

Perhaps you can't codify or reverse engineer that. Jason has design talent. Me, not so much.

What is one blog post/book/movie, etc. that has helped you better understand something about design?

I'm fond of The Contemporist (http://www.contemporist.com/) for its great photography of great architecture. It's a great place to draw inspiration. My favourite post so far: http://www.contemporist.com/2010/05/20/chicken-point-cabin-b...

What software tools do you find useful when designing?

For HTML/CSS/PHP I tend to use Espresso (http://macrabbit.com/espresso/). I never mock up web pages in Photoshop. I go straight to code.

For desktop software, I'm a big fan of Microsoft Visual Studio's IDE.
If you read the code it's obvious that it uses a Python named 'rsa' which implements PKCS#1
"Slow the 'f down" is the wrong thing to say. Younger-me is totally capable of finishing in 3-hours and then lying about it for 2 more days. That results in a slow down without any improvement to the code.

The more important lesson I would impart upon my younger self is that the code isn't done until it's been committed, there's been a README written, and some testing has been done. Who cares if it works? Pft, that's the easy part!

If your commit messages after the first few aren't more specific than 'updated' or 'new stuff', you fail. If the README is 1 line long and just says 'I made a thing', you fail more.

And then there's this:

You dig up old code, and it really sucks. The idiot that wrote it should not be allowed behind a keyboard! Y'all know the end to this story - the 'blame' command points the finger... at yourself.

There's nothing more humbling than that.

Proper software engineering isn't about writing code, it's about maintaining developer sanity, especially in the face of fast-moving business requirements. Don't push back hard enough and the sale's guy's unrealistic schedules start to dominate. Push back too far and you start writing a frameworks on top of frameworks instead of deliverable code. Push back too far and you end up with lazy engineers who drop features because they're "too hard" to test (Hello Google, so glad you decided not to drop ext4 support in ChromeOS's Files app.)

But in today's fast-moving world? Run. Run as fast as you can. Keep running.
An awful lot of top down 2D tile based games.
I doubt that either Facebook or Skype could afford to buy the other.
What evidence do you have that that is actually what will happen?
What if one were to strobe the IR for each of Kinects and only have the camera's do the frame grab for depth when that Kinects IR is on?
Jailbreaking still requires work and is a potential risk to the working state of your device, even if Apple didn't disallow it.
Yes, that's true. And since I used println in the Java example, I guess I should switch the Ruby example to puts. Will do that now.
Financial ruin is okay if your family still loves and supports you. Financial success is not okay if you stepped on everyone to get there, and your family hates you.

Just a thought.
Düsseldorf still has many gas lights. I found a map of them, the information is recorded in OpenStreetMap: http://www.itoworld.com/map/69?lon=6.77375&lat=51.22517&zoom...
I find it actually improves a number of websites (an increasing number), which may be more of a comment on the number of front-end devs who seem to be able to construct a website that degrades properly without javascript.

I also can't make Lynx and Wget into a more graphical form with just a couple of clicks, and there are other reasons reasons to disable CSS[1][2] but each to their own.

[1] https://medium.com/javascript-in-plain-english/tracking-with...

[2] https://www.templarbit.com/blog/2018/03/20/tracking-users-wi...
promises, futures, etc... are much older - it takes 15 years for stuff pioneered in research to make it into general purpose langs :p

- https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/50657913/p260-liskov.p...

- http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.97....
As I was reading this, I immediately thought back to the steampunk rovers article posted on HN not too long ago. Using mechanical or fluidics technology could allow us explore places we haven't had access to before.

My next thought was, what about random mechanical malfunctions? We face this with electronic devices too: electromagnetic interference, cosmic rays, etc. It's all about understanding the operating conditions where the device will be used and designing accordingly. It seems like most of the techniques we have learned in the electronics world have an analogous approach in mechanical computing.

It's fun to think about the possibilities, and will be interesting to watch how old tech like this could be used in the future.
> Thanks in great part to Reddit, Ron Paul is largely associated with crackpot ultra-libertarian Ayn Rand type movements, so anyone in the know would probably dismiss anything he does out of hand as "just a stunt move".

You greatly overestimate the power of Reddit. You also misread Reddit--he's most associated with just plain crackpots there than with ultra-libertarians. Ultra-libertarians are for reduced government everywhere--Ron Paul doesn't seem to mind government, as long as it is not Federal government.
I have always struggled with log/db, can you explain your proposed system?
Yep. We all are. Sure is fun in between though.
So the headline is definitely misleading. But there is some shady stuff going on

>> Have you ever eaten something called White Tuna? Neither have I. It's a fairly unpopular sushi fish sold sparsely around the country.

Well. Not really. One or two people might eat this:

http://www.bumblebee.com/products/1/bumble-bee-solid-white-a...

"White tuna" is actually canned albacore. As the article says, "All 16 grocery store samples were labeled correctly." So tuna bought in a can from your local store is Albacore legally and "accurately" named "white tuna." That stuff is ok.

The study goes on to say sushi restaurants are the problem, where escolar is sold as "white tuna."

"The majority of the tuna samples in this study were labeled as “white tuna.” Of the 66 white tuna samples, 62 were mislabeled (94 percent). Eighty-four percent of the white tuna samples were actually escolar (52 of the 62) (Figure 10). The remaining white tuna mislabeling (16 percent) came from the substitution of one type of tuna for another or the use of a non-acceptable market name. A fish product referred to as “white tuna” is only acceptable as a market name when sold in a can."

In restaurants and stores, tuna sold as "tuna" ended up being... tuna.

To be honest, I don't know the prevalence of "white tuna" in sushi restaurants, but a google search of "white tuna sushi san francisco" returns dozens of menus with white tuna on them.

I also don't understand why they chose the misleading "tuna" headline rather than focusing on snapper, of which 100% of sushi restaurant "snapper" was not snapper, as was a large percentage of other restaurants' and grocery stores' supplies.

"More than nine out of every 10 snappers sold
in sushi venues were mislabeled (92 percent). Eighty-nine percent of the snappers sampled from grocery stores were found to be mislabeled as were 77 percent from restaurants."

TLDR: Don't eat anything in a sushi place called "white tuna" and your "snapper" is probably not snapper.
Can you prove that?

If a million people each smoke two cigarettes in their lifetimes, it's not impossible that one of them might suffer a cigarette-related health detriment.
"Traveling 10 or 20 miles by bicycle"

They only assume the accidental nature of riding a bike and ignore the health benefits. A good article highlighting this http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/06/13/bicycling-the-safe...
I considered it, but it would mostly distract from the otherwise very interesting discussion surrounding the definition of an an authoritarian police state.

For example, when ever someone say the word torture, there is always someone who would argue that simulated death and forcing up hoses into peoples noses to force-feed them is somehow not torture. By focusing on the general case rather than specific cases, the discussion in this thread has been of so much higher quality.

That said, if any of the statement sound surprising, I am more than happy to re-locate the source which inspired that sentence.
> and those who wanted to pay the premium for an IPS screen (you know, Apple still sells devices with TN screens...), GPU, or SSD could.

In the laptop arena? Not so much.

When buying my last laptop (~2 years ago) I wanted a 14" laptop, 1080p IPS screen, and a quality dedicated GPU.

I was out of luck, NO ONE made a machine like that. I could get any of those two, but not all three. I ended up with a 14" 1080 TFT and a GPU.

A few laptop manufacturers have started pushing the boundaries of quality, but it is by no means universal. Even today getting a well build (e.g. not Clevo) 14" machine with a GPU and a good screen isn't easy, you have a couple of options to choose from.

Suffice to say for my laptop purchase I bought my own SSD and installed it myself, much more powerful and lower cost than anything the OEM was offering at the time.
You do realize how big that $100k fish is right?
A truly incredible piece of software pavlov. Well done!
It's not exactly freedom either.
I think there are plenty of people in the world living in conditions close to slavery.
With regard to 'store of value,' there are two sides to the coin, if you will.

For something to work as a store of value, there's got to be some other aspect of it that has a value/utility in another way. For gold this is it's resistance to corrosion, millennia of history, for the usd it is its broad acceptance as a medium of exchange, I could even store value in something like canned goods, or toilet paper, or firewood, or soap, or solar panels...

With bitcoin the case could be made that the structure of its network is this other side of the coin, intrinsically valuable aspect of it. That might bear out and more people might gravitate toward that, but that is far from a given at the moment. (do keep in mind that this aspect of it is endlessly replicable open source software, so it really boils down to the community, brand, ethos... that is built up around a given cryptocoin network. Another differentiating aspect I suspect we will see more of is innovative distribution/mining models. And then the other thing that establishes a currency is that it has to be the sole coin of the realm in a given realm/economy no matter how small, which we have seen you could say in the darkmarkets, but I think something along these lines but a little more 'legit' is what is really needed to see a cryptocoin take off.)

So it's my view that by saying it is being used as a 'store of value' before it has established utility/gained currency in a significant way in other realms is putting the cart before the horse. And that's why I'm asking if all the people that are just sitting on it, so sure it's going to take off in one way or another, how is it going to take off? What is it going to being used for? Also, that sounds less like a store of value and more like a calculated risk/speculative purchase.

As mentioned in my previous comment, I also see its current primary use as a 'store of value,' i.e. a land grab in attempt to profit from speculative future uses, as being a hindrance to its use in any of those speculative future uses.
The 'm' is a type variable. This is a consequence of a difference in how Java interfaces and Haskell typeclasses are defined. (I'm continuing wyager's analogy between Java interfaces and Haskell typeclasses here.)

Here's a sample Java interface:

interface Pushable {
void push(bool shouldShove);
}

Here's a similar Haskell typeclass:

class Pushable p where
push :: p -> Bool -> ()

In type signatures, an identifier starting with a lowercase letter is a type variable. So 'p' is a type variable here, like the 'm' type variable used in the Monad typeclass. It refers to the type which, in Java terms, implements Pushable. (In Haskell you'd say the type "is an instance of Pushable".)

So why this difference? Java, being a C++-style OO language, privileges the implicit first argument. When class Button implements Pushable, you can think of its push method as having a real signature of "void push(Button this, bool shouldShove)". This particular pattern is special in Java, so you don't have to write the "Button this" parameter explicitly. But it's not a special pattern in Haskell, so you do need to explicitly write the 'p' in "push :: p -> Bool -> ()".

To drive the point home, maybe one more comparison is useful. In Java, when an interface method needs to take a parameter that has the type of the implementing class, you need to do something that looks a bit more like Haskell. Here's an example:

interface Comparable<T> {
Ordering compare(T other);
}

If you're not familiar with this idiom (which is the same as the CRTP in C++), here's how you'd implement Comparable<T>:

class Foo : Comparable<Foo> {
Ordering compare(Foo other) { ... }
}

Now compare the type parameter 'T' in our Java Comparable<T> interface and the type parameter 't' in this Haskell Comparable typeclass:

class Comparable t where
compare :: t -> t -> Ordering

They serve the same role - they refer to any type that may implement that interface (in Java) or be an instance of that typeclass (in Haskell).

Hopefully this clarifies things a bit.
Thanks for the detailed explanation, this is why I love HN.
Football Manager once got described as being a game whose gameplay seems to have been inspired by accounting software.

Think I've completed that circle by suggesting to a friend working on accounting SaaS that he look at FM as UX inspiration...