jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
The second part of your question is thought-provoking. There are a lot of works of fiction that have inspired me due to broad themes, but there are a lot fewer whose inherent "structure, language, [and] composition" have inspired. So I'll try and focus my answer on this latter idea.

Also, I'm going to list these from 1 to 2, but the first is an order of magnitude better then the second, so think of them on an inverse log scale.

1. David Foster Wallace's short story "The Awakening of My Interest in Annular Systems". DFW is a brilliant writer in general, but his writings on math and logic have always been so unique and powerful to me. This one is my favorite. There's this combination of melancholy, and mathematical precision that was one of the first times I started to think about the beauty of analysis, and in particular, abstracting n-dimensional geometric space.

2. Peter Watt's novel "Blindsight". Blindsight has a very different mathematical feel to it, compared to DFW's stories. It's almost the opposite. Very sloppy (stylistically, not in terms of accuracy), filled with jargon, and always slightly outside the limits of my comprehension, (actually a lot of times just plain outside the limits of my comprehension). But that layer of overwhelming, rapid-fire technical description ends up creating this very interesting, frenetic, cyberpunk/dystopian aesthetic, as the plot builds momentum.

Honorable Mentions/Other stuff:

- Watt's "Echopraxia" (sequel to Blindsight)

- Neal Stephenson's "Anathem"

- Arthur C. Clarke "Rendesvous with Rama"

- Greg Egan's "Permutation city" and "Diaspora"

Art/Architecture:

- Philip Beesley's Hylozoic Soil installations (my advisor in uni!)

- All of Junya Ishigami's installations/architecture.

- All of Rafael Moneo's buildings & writings.
Sorry I caused offence I was trying to give feedback and sounded brash.

On a slightly different topic (srsly) would there be a way of saying what I said without it sounding snarky? I was trying to be polite.
Well, the PS4 is certainly better than the PS3 and I'd say the Nintendo Switch is certainly better than the Wii. Modern ARM chips are certainly better than what we had in 2009 in every respect. There are certainly things that did improve, though I agree a lot of things did regress-- I'm just saying that not EVERYTHING regressed. It's all about perspective.
> If you want to do business with EU citizens you must abide by EU regulations.

No, no more than if I want to do business with Saudis I'm liable for punishment if I drink a beer.
I have no contacts at all on my phone, I created something by myself. Now I think it would be funny to brute force Androids contacts and just add every number of my countrys phone providers :-)
When you run a business, you have to go where the people are. If my customers are there, I have to be there.
>From this perspective, Buffett doesn't understand how price movement works in tech companies.

For someone who allegedly doesn't understand that the recent $89bn gain on Apple stock is nice going. Luck perhaps?

Incidentally he's also talked about poker as a model for investing. After telling the Mr Market story in the 1987 letter he goes on:

>But, like Cinderella at the ball, you must heed one warning
or everything will turn into pumpkins and mice: Mr. Market is
there to serve you, not to guide you. It is his pocketbook, not
his wisdom, that you will find useful. If he shows up some day
in a particularly foolish mood, you are free to either ignore him
or to take advantage of him, but it will be disastrous if you
fall under his influence. Indeed, if you aren't certain that you
understand and can value your business far better than Mr.
Market, you don't belong in the game. As they say in poker, "If
you've been in the game 30 minutes and you don't know who the
patsy is, you're the patsy."
The goal of OSS is not 'getting something for nothing'.
As a technical co-founder, it took me a little while to really see the full value in having an awesome biz dev co-founder. I finally arrived at when she told the team she was going to secure us a number of key partnerships in a matter of weeks, that would be a huge boon to our user acquisition strategy. I said ok, but totally did not believe that she would be able to deliver.

Over the next few weeks I didn't have to think about any of the work that went into the partnerships: responding to emails, making decks, prepping for meetings and building relationships. I was free to continue work on the product without distraction. And in the end she delivered in a huge way.

I love thinking about and building product, but building sales and distribution partnerships is well outside of my wheelhouse; having someone on our team who I trust to execute on that half of our business is invaluable.
I think saying, "we think it's a good idea because.." or "it's not a good idea because.." or "hmm, that's interesting, we'll need to think about it." are all better responses than any of your quotes.

If somebody cluelessly expresses urgency and wants it fixed now, it's perfectly ok to say "if you need it soon you should consider paying someone for it". But I find "submit a patch" often used when people disagree with your suggestion but can't articulate why.
One counterargument might be that it is unhelpful to prevent default event behaviour depending on its type or target. Events normally bubble - that is the expected behaviour. Clicks are just another event.

In life, rules need exceptions. In programming, it is usually nicer when there are as few as possible.

EDIT: If you desire to preventDefault on multiple handlers and you don't want to type it out every time you can simply add a line like

$("a").click(function(e){e.preventDefault()});

to your document and stop click event bubbling for every link.
The larger the number of people who know a secret, the more likely it is that someone will spill the beans. If the government went to Siemens, they'd then need to worry about the possibility that word gets out internally, and someone leaks the plans in time for the target to take preventive action.
In other words, don't just sit there with your hands in your pockets waiting for your friend to figure out the answer!

"How do I learn to program?" "Pick a language, start building something, ask around (with good, detailed enough questions) when you're stuck." Larry's message could have been written by anyone posting on StackOverflow.
"Although Swift To-Do List is awesome ;-), good old physical paper has an intricate quality that no software can offer: It exists outside of your computer. When I have 1-3 super-important tasks, I often write them down on an actual physical paper, and put the paper in front of me."

Do you really think software cannot replace pen & paper completely? Shouldn't that be the goal of any task management software? Why not build this way to focus on the top 1-3 tasks into your product?
Yup, I always try to indicate in the initial response whether or not such a feature would be considered for inclusion as well. I.e. "Sounds reasonable. I'll try to get to this when I can. Feel free to submit a patch in the meantime." or, "Not sure this would be a good fit because of ____. Feel free to submit a patch and I'll give you a more detailed review."
If third parties followed up by offering estimates to do the work, would that be well received?

Yes, by the people who matter: The ones with resources and the willingness to spend those resources on solutions to their problems.

Other people won't receive it so well. These people are neither your customers nor your teammates. The sooner you figure this out, the better. Decline their requests politely, suggest some alternatives if you can, and move on.
You don't even have to be a non-programmer to get it. "Submit a patch" is the classic passive-aggressive non-sequitur response when someone's feeling defensive.
I can't figure out which bothers me more: Microsoft being so underhanded with these updates to software it doesn't produce or that they allow pretty much any company to install an add-on within Firefox without user consent. This has happened once before with Microsoft and it's even happened with Skype, a company founded by modern, savvy entrepreneurs. Why won't Firefox add a feature to disable an installed add-ons until flagged as wanted by the user?
If you're willing to put in the time to learn a whole new keyboard layout then you should be willing to put in the time to change any default shortcuts that you don't like!

But personally I haven't found them a problem at all, even in Emacs.
You can? Great! Sorry, I would have tried this myself, but I'm not home yet to do so. That's good news though.

Thanks for letting me know. =)

Edit: After further reading, I've discovered that this is not the case. =( There are apparently means to fix this via third party apps, however.
All they need is a botnet of at least 256 computers, which can be rented for a small fee off any number of shady forums. Now what are you going to do?

A much better solution is to put a proxy in front that can hold lots of connections very cheaply. nginx and other evented servers can hold 10,000 trickling connections without using significant resources.
I think the point is that they actually don't solve any practical problems in liquidity or price discovery.

Does anyone on earth care about the price of lumber within even a 24 hour window? Why should we care about a sub second window? We don't. Wall Street refers to the high frequency game as "taking the dumb money". I call it "ripping off the value investors who actually serve a role in the economy".

Finance serves an important function in the economy, routing money to where it's needed. Are they doing a better job of that now than they were in 1985? Not really. So why are they extracting 10X the money in bonuses and profits?
I have in fact sent both e-mail, fax and snail-mail (with delivery confirmation) to a number of customers.

Even though it's possible and legal to sign a contract by completely electronic means, snail-mailing a hardcopy is still the norm.
When government is in ascendence, the results are unstable.

When commercial interests are in ascendence, the results are equally unstable.

Neither lower taxes nor more regulations are a solution.

Nor higher taxes, nor less regulations.

And for those that hadn't noticed, government did step back from its designated regulatory roles, and we then saw the largest economic crash in a half century, we saw lies and fraud, profits from the increasing privatization of two wars, and (what should be distressing to any capitalist) socialized losses.

Reprehensible numbers of (legal) techniques for bypassing taxes, including the so-called "Double Irish" of recent reports.

And what has been one of the largest transfers of wealth seen in the US. (Which seems good if you're among the rich, until you realize you might not have an economy nor enough potential customers.)

The numbers of corporate leaches is as troubling as the numbers of folks claimed to be government leaches; commercial organizations that are increasingly extractive, rather than productive.

As a startup, I want a level business playing field. As part of that, I want cogent and adaptive regulation. And I don't choose to operate a business in those regions that are increasingly or entirely commercially-focused; that have ineffective or failing governments.

As with all things, balance. Less government is as bad as more government. But that's just not a good sound bite.
So does anybody know of a decent cheap android tablet? I'd really like to have one so I can browse the internet in my bed before I got to sleep and I don't want to pay ~600€ (iPad,tab) for that (and I don't live in USA where this is "pocket change") ...
Microsoft in particular has a horrible record with acquisitions work.

There are exceptions of course. Hotmail worked out well, and back in 1999 they bought my startup for $60M, and it worked out great. But eight years later, when I left, we were still being used as the rare example of when it actually worked out. Almost all the other much bigger deals since then had foundered badly, killed by politics or the NIH syndrome or management incompetence.

Google's had some successes, most obviously YouTube, and they're probably a better cultural match for Twitter. I can see why Twitter turned down the $2.5B but it seems like a fair offer.
Hmm... That's a good point. I think listing all of the information about all of the items when you're viewing one of the lists does take up too much space.
You face the classic problem of the 2-sided market.

You need clients to attract developers and you need talented developers to attract clients.

This model normally fizzles out due to 1 or both sides of the market failing.

Good luck though, I'd use something like this.
From the description you gave in your original post, your trademark was being infringed rather than your copyright.

If that's the case, you could be liable for criminal prosecution under the DMCA. It only applies to copyright and not to trademarks.
Praxeology is a fringe theory espoused by radical libertarians. I'd even go so far as to call it a just-so story.
> What would be even better is if smaller companies / start-ups just did 83(b) elections up-front (say on day one or year one upon cliff). Another (for larger companies) option is to just offer RSUs.

I was giving the choice and I elected 1/2 RSUs and 1/2 stock.
> By not firing immediately and by not requesting 100% of options be cancelled out, Zynga was actually playing nice.

That's not why Zynga did it. They weren't playing nice, they wanted people to stay on with a reduced compensation.
If you are in an area requireing a car, move in another area.

Unfortunately in the US, areas that don't require a car are so much more expensive that you would be paying more not to have a car.

A lot of the reactions to poverty that would fix it have an "activation energy" that may not be available.

We must also always remember that dualistic free will is an illusion.
The point about temporal coupling is not solved by asynchronous messaging either. If the client requires a response before proceeding then client will block regardless of type of messaging used and the responding service will have to be available for the client to receive a response.
I know a few people who speak Arabic as a first language.

Perhaps weirdly we don't chitchat about bombs and death and murder. We talk about the soccer and about the roadworks and about what they watched on telly and how their allotment-garden is doing.

Why, when you hear "Arabic", do you think a natural topic of concersation is "terrorism"?
Interestingly, this was the same reaction Aldous Huxley had to taking psychedelics. He wrote about the experience in "The Doors Of Perception", the book from which "The Doors" (band) got their name. I believe the quote originally comes from William Blake.

> “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”
I got great results with Vespa.ai
https://blog.vespa.ai/using-approximate-nearest-neighbor-sea...
Not only did they enable the gopher protocol (whitelist) but they added TLS for it too. https://git.ffmpeg.org/gitweb/ffmpeg.git?a=search&h=n4.4&st=...
You could try Tile. Should be possible to attach one to a glasses necklace.
Their margins are much tighter than Apple’s. This outcome is far better than having a ton of unsold stock depreciating in dealer yards. That quickly leads to bankruptcy as it did in ‘08.

Limiting their downside risk was the right call given the information.
That's not a plus sign, it's a crossed-out hyphen
GUI can work across multiple windows/contexts while CLI commands are bound to just one context.

For instance:

I can open two file browsers in different directories and simply drag and drop a file from one to the other.

But there is no command (AFAIK) that allows you to copy a file from the current working directory of one terminal session to another. If for instance tmux or some other terminal emulator would allow something like:

cp file.txt <<other-sessions-id>>/file.txt

to copy from one window to the next, that would be useful.

On linux you could sort of write a script for that, which uses the pid and gets the cwd from /proc/<<pid>>/cwd.
https://www.nestybox.com/
My be im not target audience but from website i didnt get any idea on
1) what this thing actually does?
2) why exactly am i gonna need one? What’s the value.
3) why exactly should i forget Excel?

So on the surface it doesn’t feel like a painkiller product, that just lacks marketing power.

More like “I didn’t want to waste time learning other solutions so just created yet another one mine, with blackjack and hookers”.

If there’s a strong value inside the product- you should put 100% effort to make this value clear from the first page of website through to uninstall/unsubscribe screen.

And yes, best way to do that is to try make 100 sales personally before even bothering with marketing stuff.
> You seem to suggest those people train everybody around them to change behavior.

Yes, I would prefer that as well. Instead of indefinitely (and rather defensively) change the names of things that might be deemed offensive, educate people that there are contexts in which they shouldn't give in to their infantile impulses.

I mean, doctors can do it.. SW engineers too, probably.
It would be startling if they overlooked a threat vividly described in a best-selling novel seven years before, Debt of Honor.
Already submitted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2480387
> You mean, in that case tolerance to partition and availability should be perfect.

No. If a network is never partitioned, you don't need to write algorithms that can tolerate partitions. Therefore consistency and availability are possible.

> So this is the really interesting question. All the CAP theorem says is that (C,A,P) != (1.0,1.0,1.0). How close to (1.0,1.0,1.0) could we make (C,A,P)? If infinitely close, then we have achieved perfection by the limit, and the CAP theorem is rather pointless. If not, then what is the numeric limit?

I think you have misunderstood the theorem (at least, if my bachelor-degree-level understanding is correct). C, A, and P are not variables you can multiply together or perform mathematical operations on. They are more like booleans. "Is the web service consistent (are requests made against it atomically successful or unsuccessful)?" "Is the web service available (will all requests to it terminate)?" "Is the web service partition-tolerant (will the other properties still hold if some nodes in the system cannot communicate with others)?" These questions cannot be "0.5 yes". They are either all-the-way-yes or all-the-way-no.

> . . . and the CAP theorem is rather pointless

Not really. It is pointful for networks that experience partitions. It just doesn't apply to reliable networks. It also sort-of doesn't apply when an unreliable network is acting reliably, with the caveat that since it is not possible to tell in advance when a network will stop behaving reliably, you still have to choose between these three properties when writing your algorithms for when the network behaves badly.
It'd be more like Red Hat or SugarCRM. Now take your insults and shove 'em.

Correction: even those aren't good analogies because they are self-installed. But open-source and commercial do mix: everyone's in it for a different reason.
I definitely hadn't expected as much feedback and discussion as the post got; thanks, everybody! In case you're curious, I got an email back from RMS: http://alexeymk.com/dear-dr-stallman-the-aftermath
This looks great. It builds on Nokia's strengths (people loved them for their durable low cost phones).

I hope they get the UI right; old Nokia phones had a great UI before they added all the 'smartphone'-crap.

And I hope they'll sell them in Austria too; this looks like a great backup phone.
The title is misleading - it's not actually facebook's community is it?
Can anyone reference some community that was destroyed or is being destroyed by the quote

"Deactivating apps without warning, and with no recourse, will seriously hinder Facebook’s ecosystem growth amongst “real developers,” leaving just the scammers and spammers.
"
Is adwords and adsense in this same trend? Does the need for spam and scam control outway the cost?
Not hacker news worthy.

(And I heard a rumor that he is actually from New Jersey, not New York. We should check his birth certificate)
I think saying 'think of all the wonderful books I won't have time to read' is a bit like saying 'think of all the great wine in the world I'll never get a chance to drink!' It's something to enjoy in your liesure time, you don't need to worry about consuming it exhaustively. The only sad thing would be if you never had any liesure time at all (you missed all your opportunities to have some).
I think this is the best of both worlds, and probably the right way to go for startups in cities with a huge urban sprawl.
This is my favorite pronunciation of Hyundai:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-AXTx4PcKI#t=2m35
Having worked at CDnow back in '98-99 and being part of one of the grand front page re-designs, I had to deal with every department (of a company of only about 350 people, mind you) that wanted a piece of the above the fold space.

• Operations wanted order status

• Affiliate marketing wanted a promo

• Corporate affiliate marketing wanted a promo

• The merchandizing people wanted…merch promos

• The bizdev people wanted ads and partner logos.

• Ad nauseam.

Balancing the interests of all these groups, who seemed not even dimly aware that they existed only to the extent that the whole thrived, was difficult. (CDnow was eventually bought by Bertelsmann and turned into a redirect to Amazon, by the way…)

I can imagine similar conversations regarding the content of the Microsoft front page title. And there's probably extensive internal front page title page kremlinology, where employees track the waxing and waning of various business groups by watching what the keeper of the page title deems worth highlighting, and in what order.
I have to say that OpenBSD is my favorite of the *BSDs. The only thing that it lacks, that I wish it had, is a journaling file system (fsck takes forever on today's large hard drives).

EDIT: And whole disk encryption. I am really surprised, given OpenBSD's security goals, that no one has implemented this.
not my downvote, but

Realistically his cash liquidity has been dramatically rising but has not ever topped $150 billion:

https://ycharts.com/companies/BRK.A/cash_on_hand

So you're about $100 billion off-target in paper value, but what's $100 billion betwen friends?

OTOH your perception could be quite accurate as to how powerful an effect he may be able to enjoy with so much cash.

Probably could get more accomplished than someone having "only" $250 billion worth of credit.

Of course one is parking lots full of 18-wheelers full of hundred-dollar bills, and the other is a promissory note.

A convoy like that coming in to any city could initiate changes that could not be stopped.

Look at what drug cartels are doing and they usually don't even fill one semi-trailer with cash.

Buffet's huge stake in America itself puts him at an order of magnitude not often seen, not much differently than when the dollars were backed by gold, and for him his position in the US does not come under threat even as the currency becomes devalued. He can stll afford to build cash reserves faster than they are being devalued internationally.

For the Saudis and their convoys of world currencies, there would be pressure to sell the lowest performing one(s) so they could buy more of the notes having a more positive outlook.