jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
> data's collected primarily to build better products

That's may be true today, but one of features that distinguishes modern forms of surveillance from what was possible in the past is that truly massive amounts of data can now be stored "forever"[1].

Google itself may change what it wants to do with its data in the future. Worse, the fact that data was captured at all means it will be available for a subpoena or "national security letter" and Google will have little say in what happens to the data.

[1] the value of "forever" generally varies by the size of the available budget, which is "large enough" in the case of nation-states and companies the size of Google (or Apple)
There's an Estonian movie about it. I haven't seen it but the music is very haunting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTlISg0Oyv8
To all the tourists that want to stop people from talking to each other in order to have the vague aesthetic feeling that "the world is diverse" or whatever floats your tourist boat: Why don't you go and do that with your own child?

Go on, raise them in a language that will limit their life choices and potential. See how that works for them. Then have them tell us how that went. Oh, sorry, that won't happen so easily, now, would it?

"Linguistic diversity" Is just another way to say "Communication barriers".

Funny how is is always something that should happen to other people.
It is crazy what people will throw money at. I can see how people might try this, but can't see wanting to use it more after novelty wears off.
So much of the treadmill seems to be about reinventing existing computer science concepts. People learn about a particular concept and become enamoured with a particular pure implementation of that concept.

Just because you need asynchronous I/O doesn't mean that you should exclusively use node.js. And a lot of the hype tends to ignore the underlying CS concept that makes the software worth using. You don't need ElasticSearch because of "search and analytics" but because you have queries that benefit from an inverted index.

But you can find yourself spending too much time coercing technology to do things that it was never designed to do. If you have huge SQL queries to implement basic faceting you should probably just learn ElasticSearch. If you need to completely retrofit a language to do async networking maybe just learn Go.
As I read it is basically says you can use Facebook's patents unless you turn around and sue them in which case the deal's off. I'm not sure it's that awful - I mean how many companies are planing to use Facebook's patents and then sue them?
Also, X-men toys are "toys" not "dolls" because they're non-human. X-men fans got mad, heh.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Biz,_Inc._v._United_States
"Is it something I should start looking into?"

No. Don't bother. The only BSD that has a security edge over linux is OpenBSD and you're probably not happy to lose the performance (and often hardware support) it would entail. It's also lacking a lot of the platform management linux systems have (package management stone ages - you won't have fun upgrading it).

It's great for critical systems, though. It's just the majority of the time I'm not willing to give up the niceties I would have to.
> Well... you may need to care, because one of the problems you may have to consider is long-term maintenance as well. Using Ruby for "project X" in a team of 15 .net developers with extensive C# experience, simply because "Ruby is best for this problem" is probably just trading one problem for another.

I'd like to reiterate this point. At some point, somewhere down the road, a different programmer than you is going to have to read your code and try to figure out what it does. If you don't learn your languages well enough to be idiomatic, then you'll be contributing to technical debt load instead of helping to pay it off.

Unless you're doing big enterprise consulting. That's an entirely different sport.
This is a Hollywood/James Cameron extravaganza--the mediocre love story and CGI are just assumed. "Titanic" is, in fact, the complete and full idea behind that movie.

Michael Bay tried the same thing with Pearl Harbor, but his execution was very sub-Cameron. Also, there's nothing romantic about the Japanese bombing a fleet in port. The Titanic is probably the best disaster you could do this with. There's still the Hindenberg, but the target audience for these types of movies would get distracted and confused by all the swastikas. So "Titanic" wasn't that bad an idea after all.
Intellectually curious? Wouldn't every profession/work have some level of advice for startups/entrepreneurs based on experiences? I believe stories from a full time fisherman will be as helpful as a stock-trader's - to anyone who wants to learn. Same may hold true for a drug dealer. (imho)

Why filter it with "intellectually curious"? How do we define 'intellectually curious'?
Well, all memes are possible to change. They're just ideas. Software. The difficulty level is an open question, but the bare capability isn't controversial. So when people talk about impassable limits, I take them to be referring to supposed genetic limits -- genes are commonly supposed to be adept at putting strong limits on people.

Here is something relevant I wrote, about changing emotions (raw emotions aren't memes, but ways of interpreting and reacting to them are memes. emotions can also be triggered by ideas or memes.):

http://fallibleideas.com/emotions

The basic, overall problem is that parents and educators are extremely coercive and destroy the ability of (most) children to think for themselves (to a good approximation -- again, it's possible to recover). If you'd like to discuss that more, I'd urge you to come post your thoughts or questions on this list and I will reply (HN is not a suitable forum for longer discussions):

http://groups.google.com/group/taking-children-seriously
MS purchased www.JellyFish.com for $50M which became cash back live. Here is a post from the Jelly Fish founder a few months back of how Cash Back is working for MS: http://flywheelblog.com/2009/05/why-microsoft-cashback-is-wo...

I actually bought into it. It seemed like it was working.
This is a good approach. Noone enjoys explaining face-to-face why they owe you money, and will probably do what they can to avoid this potentiallly embarrassing phone call.

If you come off as a really nice guy that really needs the money it'll help your case. You're a student and you don't have any money for the summer.

i've noted over the years that the people you deal with mirror your mood. If you act as a nice guy they act nicely. If you send in a lawyer they'll send in their lawyer. If you scream and shout they'll do the same. And screaming and shouting gives an excuse to believe that you're an idiot and don't deserve the money anyway or if cash is the problem for the company that someone else is first in line.

Act nicely but be firm. Make it clear that you're not going to go see your aunt Betty before she dies of lung cancer this summer if you don't get the money. (OK, maybe that's a little thick but you get the point) Make him feel guilty.
Do you really want to distinguish a site by the title attribute? Think about it, a site already has two "branding elements": favicon and domain. Why not leave the title for just content, the thing that the site visitor is most likely interested in?
A lot of people have suggested this, we certainly have the technology, it's getting the database of barcodes that's the hard part!
This was a big concern of ours, we thought long and hard with our lawyers and got a rather detailed terms of service to mitigate the risk in this, and we don't ever make badges that are like "Drink 10 beers in one night"
I don't know what makes you think that you've achieved anything. Or, in other words, your main problem remains unsolved. :)
I can distinguish the icons of every site I visit on a semi-regular basis.
Techcrunch always guesses that price. I wouldn't put a lot of stock in it.
Do you really regularly visit billions of sites?
Thanks, Patrick. I meant to exclude consulting. I'm thinking of something that happens in your sleep, like a "safe" investment would. Web apps/niche software are where I would lean as well but that's why I'm asking. I'm hoping the collective experience of HN can expose other options.
It's a nice tool and you can install it with just apt-get install slurm on Debian. The graph part is not too informative though.
As a brilliant billionaire businessman with three cable news networks behind him I’m sure he’ll survive.
No he’s pointing out a logical consequence of Sunstein’s argument. The experts can calculate a probability and it may be wrong or right. But elected officials at the end of the day are entitled to do things like err on the side of caution because that’s what their constituents want. They’d rather leave some productivity on the table in a false alarm rather than suffer worse in case the experts are wrong.
True, but even a blunt arrow will put out an eye. And depending on where it hits you, it can put quite a damper on your day.
They aren't very draconian about overages — they won't shut you down if you go over.

$0.10/GB if purchased in advance, $0.15 retrospectively.

Also, if you have multiple linodes your bandwidth is pooled.

http://www.linode.com/faq.cfm#what-if-i-go-over-my-monthly-n...
I left Austin for Denver. Two pretty similar cities but (for me at least) Denver has a much nicer climate, with even more to do nearby. While there is a (low) state income tax, property taxes are MUCH lower. We pay a bit less in Taxes than when we lived in Texas overall. I also much prefer the neighborhoods in Boulder/Denver to what Austin has to offer.

Here is a nice chart with effective tax rates measured various ways:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_tax_levels_in_the_United_...
I've been watching an old scifi series this days, called Starhunter. They had that obvious (but unusual) concept of drones that gripped on prey and delivered it to the mothership.
If you're already familiar with Manhattan Project histories, check out "Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall" (http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Uranium-Club-Secret-Recordings...), by physicist Jeremy Bernstein.

It's an account of the German nuclear programs, with the centrepiece being a curated set of transcripts from secret recordings of the candid conversations of a group of German scientists detained after the war.

Some vaguely YC-ish lessons on how their failure to produce could be attributed in many ways to seemingly mundane organizational structures that were debatably inherent to Nazi German society and internal politics.

Also some borderline pornographic payoff when they find out about Hiroshima. At the time, they were convinced they were 10 years ahead of anyone else, and were being detained as a prelude to being showered with honours and put in place to bring American and British science into the modern age. Then they set about convincing themselves they failed on purpose for moral reasons.
>1) Is the German education contract implicit?

It's quite explicit, in the sense that Germans vote for a government which funds university education with taxes.

>2) How are the Germans deskilling Americans?

No, it's the American firms deskilling American workers (by lobbying for and winning lower public American investment in education and training in order to get lower taxes).

>Unless you believe that existing citizens should have protection from this competition, this seems a net loss for Germany and a net gain for the US.

That's my point: the Germans voted responsibly to invest in their countrymen and have their investment consumed by Americans who are staunchly refusing to produce what they need themselves.

>3) And if Germany needs these people more than the US, aren't there better (more moral) ways to go about this than preventing them from leaving by force?

The German government doesn't use force to prevent Germans from leaving: they're in the Schengen Zone. Not issuing work visas to America puts a gun to nobody.
There is a bagel place near where I grew up that had a strange link to a double homicide. Basically one partner owed another partner half a million dollars and the owed partner, along with his wife, wound up dead. The other partner faked his death and fled to California. The police arrested the murdered couple's son and convinced him that he killed his own parents, threw him in jail and locked away the key. It was 17 years before he would be let free of crimes virtually everyone in the community knew he did not commit.

[1]http://murderpedia.org/male.T/t/tankleff-martin.htm
[2]http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/nyregion/01tankleff.html?g...
> In many cases, you’d be better off running the same computation on your laptop.

Stopped reading there. If you're better off running the same computation on your laptop, you're just not dealing with real big data and so you don't need any distributed systems. Simple as that.
Another useful resource on this and other Silicon Valley issues: http://forum.stanford.edu/carolyn/
Variable hygiene is not sufficient in loops - you have to make IIFE's for that. Then you have to account that the code inside that IIFE might be referring to the arguments object of the outer function, so you have to forward the outer arguments object to the IIFE as well. It's not impossible but the end result is somewhat gnarly.
Actually my point in posting the qoute and the link was to show that it's jargon.

Anyhow do you have an issue with scalable[1] too?

----

[1]: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Scalable&year...
At extreme risk of sanctimony, but worth it to me because I follow your comments:

Maybe consider whether you want to be this glib about military prison guards. MCB Quantico is presumably staffed by the USMC. As I understand it:

(1) People don't join the USMC and then get to choose to work as a brig guard stateside; these are people who volunteered to serve at an extremely difficult time.

(2) The people who land in stateside posts tend to have first done a tour overseas; the "angry guys with guns" administering "minor beatings" are likely to be people who have already served their country in ways I can't possibly imagine doing myself.

I might consider giving these people the benefit of the doubt. (I'm anti-war, a liberal dem, but I have a healthy dose of respect for people who volunteer for the armed services.)

If you disagree, that's fine, I won't have a temper tantrum, but I thought it was worth saying.

Incidentally, there's a Reddit AmA with an MCB Quantico brig guard running right now.
My advice would be to work for a design firm FIRST, and once you grow out of it, go on your own. It takes years to build relationships with clients and accounts people who will authorize $100k projects to you. Going door to door is a waste of your time and talent and not the best way to approach building business, unless you're starting from scratch, in which case, I reiterate working at a design firm first.

Also, don't fool yourself. "Design firm" is just a sexy and sophisticated title. What you're really doing is research 80% of the time and execution 20%.
The "Download Code" button just downloads a .tar.gz of code? Doesn't link to the GitHub repo? I mean, either actually describe what 'code' is in this sense (it's a short, simple PHP script, for the curious) or link to the repository. The page itself is hopelessly broad and altruistic without giving any details of the solution, and I'm pretty unimpressed with this code if it aims to be anything more than a proof of concept.
And please, just one e-mail. Don't let a rambunctious new marketing type decide "Hey, if we find our inactive users and email them two or three times a week from here on out we'll increase our user base". And make sure your unsubscribe features work.
>Why so fast to dismiss it?

Because there are genuine legitimate questions about how this infrastructure can support a lot of fundamental web application work flows and processes?

I'd welcome a future like that too, but I had the same reservations. Raising pertinent questions isn't the same as dismissing something.
That’s a wonderful compendium of graphical proofs. Math Overflow has become such an important mathematical resource: you could imagine this thread being a pretty good short book.

Graphical reasoning can be transformative, when it’s possible. In the field I worked on as a PhD student, string diagrams are amazingly powerful (http://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/string+diagram).

(I introduced the string diagram notation into my dissertation specifically for the sake of one particular proof that would have been incomprehensible expressed any other way.)
> and rubbish lingers safely unseen on the fourth page of results.

Has the author used google lately? I'm lucky if half the time there's no rubbish on the first page of results.
The apocalypse tapestry in Angers [0] is bigger, not quite as old, but in my mind almost has a more interesting history to it. Well worth a visit.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalypse_Tapestry
agree... yea I think it's a bit of a future-tech fallacy. Autonomous systems should have the infrastructure in place that allows for accurate prediction well ahead of the time needed for risk mitigation.
I didn’t know that Twitter deleted Sci Hub account. That company already had a bad record of political censorship but now it attacks science too. Disgusting. Elbakyan is doing an amazing and important work with Sci-Hub, I hope the site will continue to exist for long.
I guess he was an influencer? Or maybe he got hacked, one of the two
It's interesting that the Java one doesn't list *.jar.
What is the address of your blog ?
I developed on both Apple II and MS-DOS. The Apple II was OK for developers, by the standards of the day: It had BASIC and an open hardware interface. In my view, the hostility towards developers started with the Mac, and may have had its roots in good intentions on Apple's part.

Apple wanted users to have a uniform, high quality UI across all apps. That required some policing and a close relationship with a small number of favored developers. Their API was probably too complex and brittle for widespread unfettered software development, and they probably didn't want their platform to be defined by a proliferation of "bad" software from developers like me who didn't care about their UI standards. Many users would accept "bad" software that got the job done: Small apps for automating business processes, engineering tools (cross assemblers for microcontrollers), games, etc. Developers turned to MS-DOS, which had a vastly simpler API. I wrote "bad" software, i.e., that respected no centralized UI standard.

I'm not sure Windows was much better before Visual Basic came along, but long into the Windows 3.1 era, programmers still used MS-DOS for simple things.

Today, I think the situation is much different. You can program an Apple because you can program any computer. Most developers have at least a dim grasp of GUI concepts, and the API's (including their documentation and development tools) have improved to the point where it's easier to use the built-in UI features of a platform than to re-invent the wheel. This doesn't necessarily produce great software, but it allows platforms to evolve without breaking existing apps. And you can write "bad" software that is utterly platform independent thanks to JavaScript running in the browser. Without the "passive curation" of an opaque API, Apple has chosen to actively curate apps
I think the actual reading of the plates is a much harder problem than "Smartphone captures license plates" otherwise, I concur, fundable.
You're a sharecropper. It doesn't matter how much you pour your heart and soul into someone else's platform it's still their platform. They don't owe you anything, they care about one thing, maximizing their profits. People sometimes appeal to the large corporation pleading that helping the "ecosystem" will make more money for everybody. But this is not necessarily true. There are many situations where screwing over the ecosystem in some way maximizes the corporations' profits while hurting everyone else, and the corporation will choose that route every time.

The only option is to stop being a sharecropper. We are incredibly lucky that their is one open platform out there: the web. It is an amazing accident of history that we ended up with the web as an open platform. And there are corporations working hard to lock it down, like Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. But so far it's still open. If you don't want to be a sharecropper the web is your only option.
a CLR on metal ?

I know all these names, unfortunately only by reading and not by experience. Some lispers are also keen on bypassing OS interface and emit binary code on the go.
It's hard to really guarantee effectively without putting up serious money.

The typical large closed-source codebase is full of undocumented things and hidden dependencies on random chunks of proprietary environment. Making it usable as open source is a ton of work.

And you can't guarantee that work will happen without putting up some kind of bond or buying insurance, given that the vendor could simply go bankrupt and not honor the contract.
We'll work on a demo video/screenshots as we continue to work on the project! Definitely agree that it's needed.
"You need to discover the moment when you actually know better than everyone around you — when you make the first move without asking permission."

I love that line - it says it all.
Recur relies on AST rewriting to turn self-recursion into a loop. The JVM doesn't play a part in this. My impression is that this is 50/50 language design (recur throws errors on non-tail calls) and compromise for the JVM as a platform.

OCaml on the JVM would have the same problems, if not worse. Eliminating tail recursion is essential in the ML family, and doing that while sanely supporting Java interop seems to be difficult.

I don't really keep up with it much, but I remember proposals to give some bytecode operations that would help here in the next Java version. Not sure if any of them made it past that stage.
If this would be a big investment for you, don't do it. You can find ThinkPads with similar specs at better price.
Architecture is why we refactor.

Just build your vision - especially when you're stretching with unfamiliar tools and languages.

Then go back and pay off your technical debt.
Of course. Did anyone ever claim otherwise?

Amazon has always had a whole list of things you can't say or do while using their service. You can't use you AWS site to "promote" child pornography even if it's hosted elsewhere. You can't promote gambling or host pyramid schemes. You can't use it to post anything "obscene."
Great work Jeremy! I've been using CoffeeScript extensively for an upcoming project, and having written 1000+ lines of it so far, I'm loving it!
Mike Konczal has posted an interesting chart suggesting a link between economic freedom and prison:

http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2010/12/23/the-conservative-w...
> HP now has a recovery manager to create recovery disks for you and the last hp computer I saw had to create 5 dvds in order to recover to that state (which would probably require something like a 6 hour reinstall).

And you can only create one set of recovery discs. I was creating recovery discs one time several years ago and the burn process failed. I had no way to start over. I never needed Windows on that computer, but if I had, I'd have had to fork over another $50 to Lenovo to get a set of discs.

That's why these days I just use Clonezilla to image the entire hard disk before Windows can even boot up for the first time. From that image, I can always restore Windows to its exact original state, and it's generally a hell of a lot faster than installing from optical media. Not to mention I can make as many copies of that Clonezilla image as I want, and store it wherever/however I want (local backup vs. offsite backup, optical media vs. hard drive vs. tape drive).