jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
> I am sure that you can pick apart a global conflict spanning (at least) two decades, with many reverses and triumphs by both sides, to show that one side and one hero was destined to win, the other side's defeat inevitable.

I agree completely. Napoleon's defeat seems much less inevitable than, say, the Confederacy's or Imperial Japan's in their respective wars. The point is, however, that if one wants to claim Napoleon was great, one needs to make the challenges he faced seem larger, not smaller, and so his strategic "genius" must rest on the proposition that his strategic problem was insurmountable. I am willing to concede that it may have been, but even so, I think Wellington was the more effective battlefield commander (that said, Napoleon was running an army and an empire, and doing a lot of delegation; Wellington not so much).
I think that the difference is that Puerto Rico is subject to US laws but Turkey is not subject to EU laws.
As someone who went through Stanford CS in 1983-1985, when the "expert systems" people, led by Feigenbaum, were in charge, I can say that the expert systems crowd was stuck by then, but in denial about it. Feigenbaum was testifying before Congress: "The US will become an agrarian nation" if Congress didn't fund a big national AI lab headed by him. The expert systems crowd were claiming they were headed for strong AI in the near term. They were in complete denial about the fact that expert systems mostly give you back what you put in. You can code up some kinds of "how-to" information as rules, but it's just a form of declarative programming.

It was frustrating hearing those professors. I'd spent time in industry before going to Stanford for a MSCS, and I could tell that they were stuck and covering for it.

A few years later, Stanford moved computer science from Arts and Sciences to Engineering. This pushed the CS department into more practical directions. The School of Engineering had deans, supervision, and planning. CS under Arts and Sciences was sort of what each professor wanted to teach. There was no undergraduate CS at Stanford before that move; prospective undergrad students were told "get a liberal education".

That didn't end the "AI Winter" at Stanford, though. It took the DARPA Grand Challenge, in 2003-2005, to do that. The head of DARPA, Dr. Tony Tether, used the Grand Challenge to force the big-name AI schools to get some results. DARPA had been funding automatic driving work at Stanford and CMU since the 1960s, with disappointing results. The big-name schools were quietly told that if the private sector and amateurs outdid them in the Grand Challenge, DARPA was turning off their AI funding. Suddenly entire CS departments were devoted to the Grand Challenge. Stanford had to bring in machine learning people from CMU to compete. That's what turned the department around and finally pushed the logicians into the background.
Creating good UX is certainly an iterative process, but the millions-and-years claim is a bit dramatic. It is definitely possible to 'over-spend' on UX, for example Google Maps was nearly perfect 3 years ago, but is increasingly unusable because "we did nothing, everything is already awesome" doesn't look good on a progress report. The trick is achieving a happy balance of features and usability while not wasting time/money/goodwill in the endless pursuit of an idealized global optimum.
I don't have any references for it, but evolving correct syntax should be doable I think, at least for smallish scale problems.

Others have mentioned that people have evolved "Hello world" in Brainfuck, so it's definitely possible to do interesting things. It's just too ambitious right now to shoot for actually useful programs.
Regarding #1, it took a phone call and two emails (the last of which was CCed to my boss) to convince someone in another silo of the company that yes, I do need all 3.5 million rows of a particular table and that no, he wouldn't crash the network drive if he dumped it there.

If all that you use is Excel, then there are a lot of huge datasets out there.
Is making the key options or UX variables open in Settings a way to short circuit these testing expenses? Your OSS target audience should be more than comfortable customizing their own experience.
Not saying Java is the best language ever, just that it passes a certain minimum bar that JavaScript does not.
You mean low enough to the ground to be undetectable - and there is already hobby-level advanced technology to do this out on the intrawebs. I myself am building drones (planes, mostly) to do things like auto-navigate the neighborhood and so on, and am actively seeking ways I can get involved in a startup to use this technology for positive effects. I'm not at all surprised to see the drug cartels already making headway on carrying loads - there are a near infinite number of other good applications of this technology, which I sincerely hope governments allow to prosper, anyway, in spite of this ...
I really like A Small Orange. They have basic hosting for $35 a year that supports Rails. You don't get full control over your box (shutting it down, blowing it up and starting from scratch, blindly installing gems) but they have extremely responsive tech support. I have never had any problem with them installing a gem quickly and they are generally pretty helpful if you don't have much DevOps experience. It was a great place to start until I got more experience and felt more comfortable with administering my own instance on AWS.

Also, if you need to expand because your system is the new Instagram, they can support all the way up to managing your own instance.
I personally was too lazy, and just texted from my phone, and kept thinking that a confirmation msg would be great (I lost a couple of questions from dropped texts no biggie). I'm glad to see that its in place.

That's a good point. I occasionally get texts that my GF sent eight to twelve hours earlier... literally enough time to have come from Voyager 2. Confirmation messages are absolutely mandatory in any text-messaging application that matters.
"You should buy a house - it's the best investment you can make!" This was the advice I was given countless times when I lived in Nebraska in the early 00's, at my first job out of college. Thank God I didn't listen.

It just didn't make any sense: I was 23 years old, had plenty of talent, and could't wait to get out of Nebraska, but I was supposed to buy a house? I couldn't think of a worse way to spend my money, time, and freedom.

Instead of spending my evenings fixing up my "house," I was blogging and learning to code. Instead of spending my money on a mortgage and property taxes, I bought GOOG & AAPL.

After a few years, a startup in Silicon Valley found me, liked my blog, and moved me out to California. Once I was done working for other people, I had enough of a stock portfolio to fund starting my own business.

If I had followed that advice, I would still be in Nebraska, would owe more than my house would be worth, and would hate my job/life.

"The best investment you can make" is always in yourself.
I think a lot of techies feel that way and IMHO they're wrong. Ironically it's because they always respond to this feeling of inadequacy with "time to learn new skills" is why they're wrong.
Many schools around here already have a second major that focuses on the profession of programming instead of theory: Software Engineering.
damn. all things are supposed to happen properly in sequence. what could possibly have gone wrong. maybe you can share your data and we'll figure it out
It sounds like you're recapitulating HGMD. You should check that out first before redoing it yourself.
This concept doesn't do the question justice. It's just a digital repackaging of the standard once-daily newspaper. The problem with newspapers isn't the packaging.

The periodical arose because of printing costs and distribution time. You need to run the presses all night to print a morning edition, so at most there's going to be one issue per day.

If the newspaper were reinvented today it wouldn't have those constraints. It certainly wouldn't be a once-daily edition.
What's much worse than that is when "cross-platform" apps have cargo-cult integration into the environment's native behavior.

When you middle-click on any blank space or text in Firefox on X11, by default it takes the contents of the select buffer, and does the equivalent of pasting it into the address bar and hitting go. Some jackass that doesn't actually use it read that middle-click == paste and smeared it all over the app.

When combined with its magic address bar that does "I'm feeling lucky" searches for random text, the user-perceived result is that Firefox is stalking you and taking you to random pages that tangentially have something to do with what you're working on.

Added bonus: For many years the result for any invalid URL-like string (like a missing semicolon after http) was the Microsoft homepage, because there were a lot of old high-pagerank sites linking to it with the URL as the link text. Instead of blacklisting it or fixing the underlying behavior, they just googlebombed it to point to the Wikipedia article for HTTP.

Infuriating!

I'd much rather have the same bullshit everywhere than inane platform fealty that results only in different bullshit everywhere.
I get scared shoving stuff into a field that has a limited length.
Unfortunately, I've been close to a couple of companies where the founders, while they did have the original drive to create the company, have no idea how to manage a business. These are companies founded by 23 year old kids with no management experience or really anything other than some college - like many tech startups. The company cultures have needed up poisonous, the companies have no structure. Customer service and general organization is abysmal and it's visible from the outside. So, not all founders should be CEOs.
If only I knew the answer to that question...

If one is looking for a specific narrow skillset, the best avenue is to go straight to where people hang out. For example, advertising a mainly perl job on jobs.perl.org. In general I have found that approach to be very high signal-to-noise.

The real problem I find is what to do with "soft" jobs like project management. The situation seems pretty dismal there.
Is "torious" the new "ly"?
Would you guys mind posting your "horror stories" here?

http://www.iphone4forum.net/forum/iphone-4-news-7/apple-taki...
It's an interesting suggestion. However I perform execution end of deals (system integration, analytical methodology development, etc.) while he handles the paperwork behind the scenes. If he spends 60 minutes in direct contact with a customer it's amazingly long for him. We also do not have interchangeable skill-sets. As much as I'd like to do the "let's change places for a day" exercise, it just isn't plausible.

I believe I respect him when he says part of his job was particularly challenging and time consuming (like getting contracts executed). I don't particularly feel respected when I say something took a lot of time and effort and get asked, "like what?".

I'm not sure that's a bridgeable gulf.
The win is _also_ about scale. The server CPU usage went down significantly - see http://bit.ly/1vqp1ki

So, more request can be served with a smaller number of servers.
Instacart is still fairly expensive here in Portland. If you're living in the city proper you should have a grocery store located < 5 blocks from where you live. Just in the pearl I have walking access to Safeway, whole foods and food front.

If you're in the suburbs it might be worth it.
There is a coursera course called "Learning How to Learn"[1] by Barbara Oakley that is starting soon. I took the previous session and it was very interesting. I liked the science[2] behind each part of the course (procrastination, memory, modes of thinking etc). The weekly interviews were certainly a big plus (however they were usually long at ~40 minutes).

It's a fun four week course with very little work and I recommend it.

[1] https://www.coursera.org/course/learning

[2] After each lecture there was a list of references to check out for more info.
I've mainly seen it come up on Tumblr, Reddit, and Twitter.
Deserts are nice. I prefer low humidity like Salt Lake City, Denver, Reno, or even the bay area (not technically a desert, but pretty dry). Even Seattle has a nice climate since the mountains push the humidity up so high that it rains rather than gets bogged down in the air.

Beijing is technically dry but can get really humid in the summer (dry windless winters, humid windless summers, go figure).
I'm not typically a gun person, but this seems like a really flawed idea. As the article describes it, it's a gun that only works against an unprepared enemy. Anyone with an RF jammer could completely stop its use, if I understand it correctly. It wouldn't be much more complicated to make a device that could pick up its frequency from a distance and use it on a stolen weapon either. Of course some cryptographic exchange between the watch and the gun would fix that, but it still doesn't prevent you from jamming it.

In cases like many school shootings, where the gun was stolen ahead of time, all it does is require the culprit to steal the watch too. A physical key (old-fashioned or cryptographic) would do the same thing but more reliably.

The term "smart gun" brings to mind a development that I think most users of HN would agree is a bad idea. Making a gun that tries to automatically determine who's authorized to shoot whom, like a Dominator from Psycho-Pass, seems to open up a whole mess of problems. Making more reliable non-lethal weapons is the direction I'd rather see the problem attacked from.
Your sarcastic and denialist schtick got old about a year ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6469701

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6360115
These copyright notices are mostly-useless boilerplate anyway, but if you're going to have one, it should have specific, fixed dates, not dynamic ones as this site suggests [1].

As a thought experiment: if a date is not actually in the document, but is updated dynamically by the document, what legal purpose could it serve? It seems an exhibit with no more legal relevance than a pocket watch.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/a/2391555/4323
The game selling well in part thanks to its copy protection is what allowed to finance sequels after that.

In that sense, the copy protection certainly benefited the users.
They were released by Jacob Appelbaum and Laura Poitras who did a 3C31 talk about this too.
Im not sure of the legal value of having a copyright footer - could anyone explain if it would actually stand up in a court of law?
> If such tech was required by law, any criminal with a jammer would create a zone where only they could shoot.

I don't see why the system would do that. A "fail-safe" doesn't always mean failing closed; sometimes it means failing open. That is, if there is a jammer, then fall back to letting anyone shoot anyone, which is no worse than things are now. If there isn't a jammer, then let the law say who can shoot people.

(Yes, then anyone can buy their own personal jammer to make their gun "work." People can also override those breathalyzer-meters that they have to blow into to get their cars to start. But, by-and-large, do they?)
Minor nitpick nitpick: except for years, e.g., I don't remember exactly when the Magna Carta was signed, but it was somewhere in the twelve-hundreds.
It’s a feature not a product. Not everything has to be about profit and loss if it’s part of a larger ecosystem. Google Cloud Print was a feature of Android as well as other parts of Google’s ecosystem just like AirPrint is a feature of iOS/MacOS.

But Google has always been piss poor at managing an ecosystem. Just look at the state of Android updates.
There are many actually RESTful APIs out there. Some even have good documentation to accompany. I've heard Stripe given as an example that's especially notable.

Managers will care if your API's are a contract with your end customer (e.g., your product is providing APIs), and you're watching your NPS scores.
GET and POST seem a ===lot=== easier.
I hope he does Borat and Ali g.
What makes you say it was a cadvisor issue? Isn't it clearly a kernel issue?
I didn't know Eul was involved with Valve, interesting.
Virtual reality arrives. Oculus with Leap Motion, Nimble VR etc

http://controlvr.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_U3BmDlmtc

...or Magic Leap?

http://www.magicleap.com/#/company
A couple of things:

1) webtorrent [1] will be used to build the next generation of The Pirate Bay. Media companies will have to realize that suing teens for infringing copyright is not an option, since participating in file sharing is no longer a deliberate act when WebRTC is enabled by default.

2) io.js [2] will heavily influence the future of Node.

3) Angular 2.0 will probably be released at the end of the year [reference?]. People might start establishing an Angular fork (similar to what happened in the Node world).

4) Full stack Google: Angular, Dart and Go.

5) We'll find out if there is a tech bubble [3].

6) One of the following will happen: 1) Developers might tend to use bigger and bigger frameworks, or 2) substack-like extreme modularization (current situation in the npm-world).

7) People will move away from native app development. [4]

8) More frameworks will evolve to "reinvent" the DOM. DOM updates will still be expensive as hell. React was just the beginning.

9) Everything will be a SPA. Now that Google executes JavaScript [5], there is no more reason to render websites on the server. (Unless you're using HN, where 50% of the users are using Lynx).

[1] https://github.com/feross/webtorrent
[2] https://github.com/iojs/io.js
[3] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/17/technology...
[4] Disclaimer: I work for famo.us. These are my own thoughts and might not express the thoughts of the company I'm working for.
[5] http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.nl/2014/05/understand...
I waited a while to post this, because I wanted to see if anyone felt the same. It seems I'm alone - which is both interesting and a little scary!

To me it seems to me like Stallman has become a professional complainer about how programs are made and distributed, and critically, his position is weakened by not being a working practitioner.

I'd be ashamed at fumbling with the presentation software; here you are making a case for free software, and end up making a really good case against it (does anyone want to use software that befuddles an expert programmer?) I also feel that it reflects poorly on Stallman himself that he immediately throws up his hands and says "I don't know how to do this" instead of carefully examining the situation. (Of course, there's also a case to be made that that was a very mature and wise move.)

Here's the real problem. Take the market of custom software for small business. Can this be done in a free software model? I think yes, but only if you could get clients to agree to a) pay for custom software development, and b) give all of that custom development away to their competitors. One can imagine the ultimate SaaS platform (including perfect freedom to self-host, etc), open source, all modifications (hosted and otherwise) dutifully shared. Question: would such a thing be good or evil?

P.S. Out of curiosity, since he doesn't seem to program anymore, and I can't see how complaining could pay well, does anyone know how he actually pays the bills?
I prompted GPT-2 with the headline and date:

Is the San Francisco Shtuation Out of Control?
Originally posted on November 18, 2019 9:30 am

It continued:

We may be the "parking hell" of San Francisco, but at least we're predictable about it. Just like how we've been screaming for a protected bike lane all across the city, and it still can't be found. Well, we're not going to have a protected bike lane in 9 months because.. well.. UberHittingTaxis is totally derailing it and killing the entire project . That alone has me so pissy and pissed off

I tried GPT-2 again:

We will be celebrating both Thanksgiving and the 200th anniversary of Thanksgiving by receiving, reviving and celebrating the san francisco shtuation. Very few people know that the birth of frederic Felspike on the last day of 1847, resulted in the birth of a San Franciscan most certainly from all over. He was a true founding member of San Francisco history, at least a half of the San Franciscans who were still

I tried GPT-2 a third time:

by Edmund Kemper Now you can: - Save and share news and news stories from around the Bay Area - Mention SF Asks Now for special news updates when you're posting comments - Choose from many popular templates to create one of your own The San Francisco Sh*tuation ® began in early 2002 as a group of passionate Bay Area residents, many of whom had the same frustration with local politics, media, and society. Our mission is to provide a space

I'm not sure what these GPT-2 results say about the news media or the society the humans have built. At least it didn't immediately infer that the article was going to be about people pooping on the sidewalks.

(I, too, had serious responsivity problems with the article in Firefox.)
It gives the yuppies an ugly ass brodozer that out-bros the F350s and other 3500 pickups on the market, without the coal rolling.

And they'll be faster in a straight line too, so they can now get their e-peen off beating out the big, modded 600hp diesels and laughing about how they are so much more eco-friendly.
Last time I heard, insuring a Tesla is more expensive. And wait times for repairs can be ridiculously long (and expensive). For a work truck, unpredictable down-time is a serious problem. Might have changed though.
What if that's what the startup Cameo is actually offering? https://www.cameo.com/

:-)
> Not really possible. It's an internet service that talks to large number of different printers from different manufacturers.

Of course it's possible. Those printers are not getting updates, either. Nobody is changing the printer side of this. And if they were it'd be a change in the protocol. It's easy to just freeze the protocol (which already happened years ago), and if any printer manufacturer wants something new then can go fork off and do their own thing. That's very different from breaking something old which is what's happening here.

> More importantly, CUPS and driverless printing standards have solved the problem (os-specific print drivers) that cloud print was designed to work around.

CUPS still needs printer-specific drivers to do the actual printing part. And how widespread are driverless printing standards? Do such printers actually exist in consumer households? My Dell printer from just a few years ago certainly isn't.
The word is derived from "wrzos" = heather.
The only cost is virtual address space fragmentation. Which, if you're 64-bit, is pretty much a non-existent problem as the address space is so absurdly larger than the amount of memory you have. Meaning the holes are entirely free.

On 32-bit systems that fragmentation could potentially be a problem, but it's unlikely. The problem would come up if you did something like allocate 1GB worth of small allocations then suddenly tried to allocate a single 1GB allocation.

In practice this tends to not really happen, either, so the holes remain free.

Note that there is no scenario in which the holes cost actual RAM usage. It's purely the usage of the virtual address space, no machine resources are ever consumed by the holes.
Additionally, it would have been interesting to hear where the respondents fall on the moral matrices, of which Haidt --who is leveling the assertion that conservatives are less common-- is a proponent.

For those who haven't heard of Haidt's ideas, I highly recommend checking out his book The Righteous Mind: why good people are divided by politics and religion.