jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
While the policy change does fundamentally allow the company to determine what content to keep and to remove I'm not sure how that provides you with a valid concern about opting in your data for the transfer.

IE, if you don't opt in you're basically self censoring yourself as none of the data will get used. If you do opt in, then the majority of it may remain [or be stricken depending on the content you favored bookmarking].

Rather your statement should read "Think twice about opting-out of the delicious-avos transfer. If you opt out then NONE of your data will be kept".
> 1. This implies that there is a direct way that everyone who runs Folding@Home could, instead, have donated their electrical costs directly to a charitable organization.

Either you are paying for all of your electrical bill or you're not.

If you are paying for all of it, then yes, you can donate your electrical costs! just don't run Folding@Home and send Oxfam or whatever a Paypal donation at the end of the year.

If you are not paying for all of it, if someone is sharing the bill or footing the bill entirely, then donating directly may harm your pocketbook, yes. But in such a situation, does it really still make sense to force the other to pay for all the electricity you are using? The overall economics are bad per the original note, it's an inefficient way to turn someone else's money into charity. What right do you have to burn the electricity like there's no tomorrow, for that matter? (If you weren't going to use a year's worth of electricity, then whomever is paying for your electricity is poorer by that $10 as surely as if you had pick-pocketed him of $10.)

> 2. The article fails to address how Folding@Home eases scientific contributions by the masses.

'Scientific contributions'? What contributions? If you just mean, let the masses feel like they're doing something useful, then Folding@Home could do us all a favor and make the main loop of the daemon a call to sleep()! If you mean, actual scientific progress, that overlaps with your point #3 which I'll get to.

> I agree that $12.65 million can save many lives -- provided it was not split across scores of charities.

A dollar is a dollar, no matter where it comes from. If you and 99 other people each donate $100 to 100 charities, then it's the same as if each person donated $10,000 to just 1 charity. The only difference is whatever overhead there might be; and even if we say that our Folding@Home contributors lose 50% to overhead and the charities wind up getting only $6 million in their bank accounts to use, that's still thousands more lives saved than by running Folding@Home and wasting the same amount of money!

> 3. Folding@Home has the potential to save hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives.

This is the key question. If Folding@Home has expected value of thousands of lives a year, then running it is fine. But if it's not producing...

For these sort of stakes, one would hope that one had really good evidence. But let's lower standards and merely ask for ordinary evidence. What reason do you have to think Folding@Home has such extraordinary potential? It has been operating for nearly 11 years. 11! And nothing that has saved a single life. (You are free to provide a counter-example.) At what point do we stop talking about its potential to save millions of lives and about the possibility of teapots in orbit around Mercury?
The only good thing that may come out of this tragedy is that suicide prevention gets taken more seriously.

Unfortunately, the opposite may also happen, with disastrous consequences for anyone who people suspect of having a depression.
I have access to a machine with TeX installed, but I also have a machine that weighs less than two pounds, gets eight hours of use on battery, and supports websites a whole lot more than it does TeX. If I wrote more papers, this would be quite useful.
Incoggo | Software Engineer | https://incoggo.com | San Francisco | Full-time | Hybrid (Mostly Onsite)

Incoggo is building a platform + marketplace for a new kind of extension that works in browsers, desktop apps, and mobile apps. Our mission at Incoggo is to empower users to 'extend anything'! (We'll be updating our site very soon!)

You'd be our very first hire (we're currently just 2 co-founders, one engineer and one biz dev; we're VC-backed) - looking for an experienced software engineer to help develop the platform - (Networking + Golang experience are a plus, but not required) - lots and lots of greenfield opportunity, and some very spicy technical challenges!

If you're interested, shoot me your résumé or GitHub: ian[@]incoggo.com
In other news, a lot of people are using Google to search the Internet.
I love checking in with this slide deck from time to time.

I'm not a language nerd by any means, but I wonder how much of the reliability issues are now "solved". It seems that Scala would do a lot of what is required, if only checked exceptions were enabled (why the Scala compiler doesn't have this as a compiler flag, I don't know). I understand why the author wants his static compilation cake, but sometimes sucking down some syntax for practicality/doing stuff now might be OK ;)
This analysis seems right to me. MSFT's annual cash flow from operations is in the $24 billion+ range. MSFT has $44 billion of cash in the bank. What is MSFT going to do with all that cash? Watch Google slowly eat its business? I'm surprised MSFT hasn't invested more in web services -- $2 billion seems small given its resources. Could it be a shortage of opportunities?
The details are helpful, thank you. I've been pondering what to do about my room when I leave next week.
UNIX:
edit /etc/hosts

Windows:
%SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Set foo.local to 127.0.0.1
No matter how unique a restaurant's website is, it cannot satisfy a customer to that restaurant: only the food can. Thus there is little impetus for the restaurant to try to create a good experience online.
And while you're at, write some better X-ray and tooth-photo database UI for them. I cringe at the program my dentist plods through every time she takes pictures or X-rays of my teeth.

Its been at the top of my list of software I have basically no interest in working on yet feel like I could do a hell of a lot better at anyway. Of course, I haven't researched what's out there, there may already be much better options available.

Besides being ugly, my main beef is that I have watched her drag photos, one at a time, into their proper slots in my "file" from the incoming area, even though they were already clearly labelled as to what tooth they were pictures of. It's maddening. It's only a minute or two, and she doesn't take pictures every visit, but it's the kind of thing that just screams shoddy workmanship... and opportunity.
how it should be done http://www.fivesenses.com.au

same market, but different approach
I think almost everyone would agree with the crust of the argument, but I don't think CS degrees need to be eliminated. I think there's room for reform.

As in any other engineering discipline there are two distinct aspects in Computer Science. One is the "more theoretical" part, which deals with topics such as complexity, AI, operations research, language construction, databases, etc. Then, there is the "more practical" part, which deals with the application of the above theories to produce real solutions (what we usually refer to as "programming").

I think clearly universities are well-equipped to cover the first part. It fits well with current teaching methods and there's no reason to believe the courses would be substantially different from courses in mathematics.

The second part, which is what most students arguably want to learn how to do, is where I think universities really struggle. Firstly, many academics in the field aren't really qualified to teach the stuff since they have very little, often outdated knowledge of the industry. Secondly, to effectively teach "programming" you have to take on board a lot of subjective criteria. What makes good design or good code is inherently ambiguous. To my mind, effective "programming" courses have to be a lot like writing courses, where teachers lack objective criteria and teach their students best practices based on their experience of reading and writing good code. This is something CS academics are reluctant to accept, but if they did we could finally have effective CS education.
People also like houses because they've seen them go up all their life. In their anecdotal experience, it was the best investment. But the fact that house prices rocketed up in their lifetime is exactly the problem! People think it's a good investment for precisely the reason it's a terrible investment!

The property bubble in Australia hasn't burst yet, so I'm still listening to this. It's painful. Sometimes I find it hard not to advise people to sell their houses now...
Or "myusername has no skills". That way you encourage people to add their skills.
I get the same thing, and I am using Snow Leopard. (Even though the message references Leopard.) 10.6.4, TextMate 1.5.10.
API breaking changes such as Rails 2 -> Rails 3. Read the article.
Unless you are a female student in physical sciences or math, I don't think you can really understand what its like to be told, implicitly and explicitly, for most of your secondary and college education, that you are inferior to your male peers.

I'm a woman. My undergad major is "Environmental Resource Management" and I have a certificate in GIS (a 2/3 male field and my classes were all about 2/3 male). I don't know if I am just oblivious or what, but it was the last week of GIS school before it dawned on me that the majority of women consistently occupied the last two rows of seats in class and a few other women floated around the classroom but I was the only woman who usually sat up front (assuming a seat was available up front, which it usually was). I occasionally wonder why I seem to live differently from other women and why I seem to not hear or not take to heart (or something) such "messages". Where are women hearing these messages? (Serious question -- I've wondered about this for years. What am I missing??) Anyone have any thoughts?

I've had practical obstacles to my success that were related to being female. Most of those disappeared with my divorce. But I really don't get where or how such brainwashing occurs for most women (even though it seems pretty clear it does occur).
Very valid points - but I suspect the main barrier to this kind of thing is that every single "social" site out there wants to be the aggregator and sees others only as potential input for its own service.

Smart aggregation would require some degree of collaboration and standards, and anyone supporting it risks making their own service a subordinate source.

Even though this kind of thing would be extremely useful to users, companies will only embrace it if the added value helps driving users to their own service more than to others.
It's money. Its value will come from people willing to exchange it for other valuable things. People agree to do this because it makes doing business a lot more convenient. It works fine if everyone cooperates and the system is well designed. Bitcoin seems to be much better designed than any established monetary system.
I think the poster you’re responding to is just asking the person to check in with themselves about where they’re at mentally. The original post sounds a lot like myself when I was burnt out and depressed. Sometimes when you’re in that state, you’re looking for a bandaid rather than a fix for the things you’re feeling. I thought it was valid advice, even though it sounds like the original poster is very happy outside their job.

Sounds like you might be burnt out yourself looking for a different job? It’s tough to know you’re a good worker, but feel like companies are passing you up. I’m sorry if you’re going through that. Hang in there. It can take a while, but it gets better eventually!
The issue with this is that tax code is often used as a proxy to fix all sorts of social problems that lead to inequality. We give tax breaks to subsets of populations who really need them. We also push policy through tax incentives, for example solar related deductions.

I think we'd be better off fixing the deduction of such problems, but just pointing out that part of the reason taxes are so complicated are to enable this. Another reason is to create corporate tax loopholes...
Email me. I am visiting my Dad next week.
> I'm NOT @ (nameless)

`@Mu9mbBdCp1t9rPL` is its name, even it call itself "nameless".

[0] https://nitter.42l.fr/Mu9mbBdCp1t9rPL
I kept a daily diary on a site called kuro5hin back in the first half of the 00s and my 20s, and it was an amazing stream of consciousness that writing was perhaps even more helpful to me than the community there that read and commented on each other's diaries. I managed to download them all and reading back such intimate and mundane thoughts from an otherwise blurry period of my past is... strange and enlightening. It's amazing how your brain retells the story of your past to paint things in a better light.

Writing your thoughts in that style is up there with exercise for healthy management of ADHD IMO. Glad you've found such a tool, I've something I've struggled to get back since I stopped writing my diary.
If you think war is inevetiable anyway it makes sense to nuke first while the otherside is still weak.

Luckily the war didnt happen, but it was a reasonable possibility.
So only in hindsight do these beliefs look stupid (and evil).

Von Neumann also influenced the Goverment on Military Strategy and basically invented MAD. Which worked great so far.
I'm extremely curious about this from a practical perspective. (Disclaimer: American, so probably not the best work-life perspective)

As far as company / coworker expectations, how does this work? Are responsibilities / work adjusted to fit the hours provided? What about being on-call?

It seems like something a lot of companies should be taking advantage of, but the desire to own souls fights against it.
IF you're using chrome, install this:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hckr-news/mnlaodle...

It highlights new comments and makes threads collapsible
I'm referring to irrational numbers with no pattern. Square roots can be described and the digits can be enumerated by an algorithm. The diagonalization argument shows that there can't be a description for all irrational numbers.
> Except that IE was just a clone of Netscape and XBox was an attempt to duplicate PlayStation. Neither of these were original or ground breaking products.

This is completely irrelevant. By the same logic, iPod was nothing special, just another mp3 player.

IE and XBox managed to muscle into an established market. This is harder than making a new market, and should very much be congratulated.

> In fact with IE 6 he so badly misjudged the market that he assumed the game was over and didn't even bother continuing development. IE 7 didn't come out until 4 years later!

Not so much misjudged, but started seeing as a threat. IE development hit a wall because the meme that web-based apps will replace windows-based apps got popular, and Microsoft didn't want to wipe out their own monopoly. IE4-IE6 were, at the time, absolutely crushingly good. IE6 is now remembered as the really bad browser, but that is because they stopped updating it, and in the later years it had to compete with much, much better browsers.

> You count XBox as a success, yet MS is in the hole over XBox by over a Billion dollars and will probably never make money on it, taking past losses and write-offs into account.

XBox also supports windows game development, strengthening their main money maker. What is that worth?
I can't really speak to XBox as it's not my field, but IE 6 was definitely not a clone of Netscape. I hate it with every fiber of my being, but Internet Explorer invented a bunch of stuff we take for granted every day -- the iframe tag is the first one that comes to mind, and they were also the first browser to adopt CSS, way back in IE3. People forget that for a hot second in 1995 Netscape started swinging its weight around as the dominant browser and introduced a bunch of half-baked ideas (the layer tag, for example).

IE6 was a terrible browser, but it was the best browser at the time. The anti-competitive behaviour helped, and then of course they sat on their laurels for years, but the best browser won.
That's because that has been Microsoft's strategy from the beginning: let someone else take the risk of proving whether a market for something exists, and then, if it does, get in there quick with their own offering. They got into the PC OS business with MS-DOS after the Apple II; into the GUI business with Windows after the Mac; into the word-processor business with Word after WordPerfect; into the browser business with IE after Netscape, etc.

This is an established enough business strategy there's a name for it: "fast follower." (See http://www.businessinsider.com/youre-better-off-being-a-fast...).
> we can measure the wave function at any given time

We can't. Nobody knows how to measure a wavefunction. Instead, what you measure is one of the eigenvalues of a linear operator that acts on a wavefunction (which particular eigenvalue? You can't always predict this; hence the randomness in QM). For each "observable" you want to measure (position, momentum, spin), there is a specific linear operator associated with it. For instance, in position-space, the position operator is just the identity operator.

If you haven't taken linear algebra, I can clarify this further.
At least in the US, fertility rates are affected by recessions. http://www.prb.org/publications/datasheets/2012/world-popula...

While prosperous women may have less, overall if the economy is good, more kids are born.
The most important skill for a programmer is to learn to think before you code: http://www.wired.com/2013/01/code-bugs-programming-why-we-ne....
I suppose you object to the phrase "Men who do nothing but think"? While sexism might have been prevalent in most companies during the time of this ad by modern standards, this phrase is not necessarily sexist. Sure, if you'd publish this ad today the silhouette would depict a woman and the text would be different, but "men" can be used in a gender neutral way [1] as in "All men are created equal". Take it as an artifact from a different time and don't read too much into it.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_pronoun#Historic...
Especially since they're using the primes to encode N = 26 independent variables within a single number. On any modern CPU, you already have 32 (or more) independent variables in each number, they just happen to be called bits. And you can test them and set them in much simpler and faster ways than integer multiplication and mod.
All parallel tasks can be efficiently serialized on a fast CPU but not all serial tasks can be efficiently parallelized on many slow CPUs.

From http://lesswrong.com/lw/k5/cached_thoughts/ :

Can you imagine having to program using 100Hz CPUs, no matter how many of them you had? You'd also need a hundred billion processors just to get anything done in realtime.
There's a tuner called gStrings that looks very good, but I haven't had a chance to try it in action yet.
Think about it for a minute. We're talking about hardware and software installed by companies who now charge for pillows on many flights. They no longer provide meals. Their employees, in particular the flight attendants, are paid something like $25-35k per year and they deal with all the crap that we as human beings can make another person go through.

They cut costs at every corner, while charging more and more money to fly. That's why its a terrible idea as an investor to put your money into airline companies. Very little chance of long-term return on your investment.
> Google Talk is already limited to those who use gmail.

You realise that Google Talk uses Jabber, and is, thus, the only IM I know whose protocol is open? You can use it with basically any client developed in the past 10 years. Trillian should work well...
Theo is smart about a lot of things, but crypto may not be one of them. Unlike software security, simpler crypto protocols are not always more secure than complex ones.
Would you say this is a weakness of element or matrix itself? In principle you could made a clone of signal, WhatsApp, telegram etc. using mobile APIs right?
Laptop microphones are obviously problematic, but boom mics have their own issues. None of my coworkers know how to position the microphone properly, so whenever one of them talks it's riddled with plosive whooshes of air whenever they make a "P" or "B" sound.
Interestingly, my browser detects the page as Windows-1252 and displays that quote as â€
I think that scenario would work out if:

- Notch is not too busy. At least not too busy to temporarily shift his focus to supporting an iPhone version.

- He was disappointed that the game wasn't growing fast enough, not being on the iPhone.

- He's delighted to see other folks cloning his game.

- He doesn't want to wait a few weeks for @minecraftapp to release theirs.

- He's happy to do what he needs to in order to make an international business transaction work out.

- He didn't really have the money or game industry connections to contract with someone to make a really good iPhone version anyway.

So I'm thinking that would require a lot of luck.
I understood that sentence to add to the incredulity of being able to play 120 tables at once and still hold a conversation
Interesting idea. I wonder if it would be worthwhile to store server information in LDAP, add a field for environment type, and then teach your server components to act on that information. Then when the dev app server connects to the prod database, the database checks the server name, sees that it's dev, and refuses the connection.
Maybe we can finally get Java off of GitHub.
require 'singleton'; class Foo; include Singleton; end

Can I have money now?
I only used containers in HP-UX back in 2000, and back then they were pretty much configured in all HP-UX boxes I had access to.
Upvoted for this remark.

If I'm interviewing you, it means that we already think you are worth talking to. I don't want to waste either my time or yours. If what I'm asking you to do makes you uncomfortable, TELL ME! I can think of the last two people I interviewed who gave me a series of immediate "I don't know..." answers to a bunch of questions. They're happily (I hope!) working here now because we changed the interviews to go down productive paths to find out what they do know instead of beating our heads against a wall!
Believe me, your DBA or the person who writes queries doesn't need to know how exactly B-tree index works. Or even "B-tree" term. Just being aware about indexes and knowing when and where to add it would be sufficient.
Lucky you don't live in Iowa. The Cubs, White Sox, Brewers, Twins, Cardinals, and Royals are all blacked out. That can be up to 40% of the entire schedule on many nights.
Show me the money! (Jerry Maguire)
The most interesting thing for me about the frameworks is how they all use different methods of rendering the bar itself.

So far I've seen straight css, canvas, and css transitions.
Not sure why it's a surprise that languages inherently require metasyntactic operations. This has been clear since Church and Gödel.

There's lot of good work on programming languages that allow metasyntactic runtime extensions, going back to Brian Smith's work at PARC.
The precursors to TeX (1978-82) and Metafont (1979-83) are good examples of complete, non-trivial Sail programs. Both were written by Donald Knuth; the sources for prototype-TeX are in http://www.saildart.org/[TEX,DEK] (see the latest rev of each TEX*.SAI file); while prototype-MF is in http://www.saildart.org/[MF,DEK]
Still egregious (and no derivs) compared to large Asian exchanges. No real trading firm wants to trade on CB right now.
/me looks at GameStop