jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
Sure, but I think that there was an implicit assumption that the person under consideration was explaining something within their area of expertise. Otherwise the article would be claiming that a smart person can explain anything simply, which amounts to equating "smart" with "omniscient".

The other assumption I made about the article was that it was discussing a useful heuristic, not a 100% reliable test. The inherent complexity of the world is one of the things that can make it give the wrong result, but not the only one.
Stories like this are why I didn't buy a Drobo. Instead I got a ReadyNAS NVX and have been incredibly satisfied with it. It's been rock solid so far and hasn't given me any hassle at all.

(Incidentally, Netgear UK are doing a "free 2 x 500GB drives" promotion until the end of June: http://www.netgear.co.uk/freedrives_nvx.php)
> For no obvious reason people

Lack of front camera sounds like a pretty obvious reason for lack of video chat.

> So a big hurrah for Apple's sudden embrace of "open standards"

Sudden? Are you joking?
> Apple has a pretty good headstart but they have to compete against a whole industry, they don't have a shot.

iPod.
I've had my Thecus N5200 running solid for around 3 years now. When I first saw the Drobo demo videos I feared I'd made the wrong purchase, but having the Thecus as an open platform (Linux installed on a CF card; you can SSH and run whatever) has proved a win. Support lately has gone by the wayside (they had a new beta firmware a few months ago that was later pulled), but the community is strong.
I was considering buying one of these to back up media files. Thanks for saving me cache and a headache!
If you have a spare PC to turn into a SAN-lite, OpenFiler supports iSCSI http://www.openfiler.com/
Let take him away and put Alan Greenspan instead.
The state of the software tech world according to a skeptic, misanthropic, curmudgeon BOFH who is definitely buying iPhone 4:

Software is mostly on cruise control today, and much like pop-culture endless eating itself, dying, and shiting itself forth again, software is fast converging into a bland, daytime TV amalgam of Facebook-Apple-Amazon-Google. (Or as 4chan'ers will call this new multi-corporate-entity: "new FAAG".)

Exciting!! The kind of software just around the corner makes you want to nerd rage, amirite? I mean, can you imagine, by 2020, we will still be writing HTML, CSS, JS, arguing about browser standards and Canvas2, while struggling against the Telco's crippled, quicksand-slow network speed, and juggling an ever changing incestuous brood of gatekeepers who hoard our data to scrape pennies from the advertising equivalent of the world's biggest penny cup. 2020, welcome to 2010. "Innovation" is the biggest weasel word in software.

Most new software is going to be an incrementally trivial variant of something you've already seen, probably decades ago. And it's all because we've nearly reached the inflection point of "peak hardware." Like the prescient chief of the US patent office back in the 1800's, I will now modestly paraphrase and state that 99% of all software that could ever be invented has already been invented. The rest is just "filling in holes." Caveat #1: that hardware doesn't break out and improve at a faster rate than software for the next few decades. Caveat #2: it may not even be possible to quantify "the rate of improvement of software compared to hardware."

You want to get me excited by some software? Show it to me but running orders of magnitude faster than everything before it could. All that matters at this point is better hardware because the software doesn't have much more room to radically change.

I know that 'round these parts daring to ask "what's in the software startup kool-aid?" gets down votes. But I don't really care about becoming the biggest, most profitable ad-spammer in the world, nor video chat, nor overvalued and pointless web startups, nor browser animation recreating the state of the art from the 80's, nor the ability to play CD-ROM multimedia content, or Apps, or whatever you want to call them this decade. (This is the part where you get off my lawn.)

The only thing that can prevent software from ending up in its own post-apocalyptic "Nuclear Winter" of suburban doom is a big bump up on the hardware:

a) better batteries.

b) more ram.

c) faster CPU.
Did anyone else wonder if they were supposed to be looking for the moonwalking bear? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTv4yD6BKlA
I'd be concerned that the approach you laid out is something of a proxy for lines of code delivered.

My most productive days are the ones where I've removed huge blocks of unnecessary code.
Pity it is wasted on sham romance. If something like this took the form of a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer it might be interesting.
> The evidence isn't destroyed, it's just inaccessible.

This isn't Star Trek. You don't win by outsmarting the computer like Captain Kirk does.

The courts have dealt with these "I'm so clever" tricks thousands of times. They have little patience for them.
I had to check for dirt on my monitor on that one.
Literally everything you said rings no bells at all. That's definitely not beginner-friendly or small!

What does "focus on investments" even mean?...

Like, imagine being me. Just a hard-working guy all his life. ZERO CLUE about financial markets. Null. Nil. Void.

How do you start them up?
*24%
> that is likely to require less congressional approval on a per use basis.

Sorry, I don't see how that could be the case: Either you need congressional approval, or you don't.

And how is the technical implementation of money transfer going to have an impact on that?
I would love to see a parallel universe, where collective transportation obtained the upper hand. Where countryside railroads are still operating, and where roads/highways haven't consistently led to the expropriation of millions of people worldwide, and to the current car-oriented urban nightmare. See Ivan Illich for a demonstration that car-oriented urbanization is hostile and counter-productive, as opposed to what he calls "convivial tools" (empowering technologies).

Would we still have the problem of climate change?

Would we be on the same level of development?
I'm sure jedberg will be very interested to find out about this Reddit thing
In a lot of ways the dollar, pound and other major currencies are already digital.

Sure, we have these metal and paper represenatations too, but they aren't the majority use-case any more.
Rent per square foot in the city center where my company's office is located is at least ten times rent per square foot on a house like mine in the suburb I live in. The rent per square foot for a desk in a serviced office near where I live is about halfway between the two.

In fact the rent on a small three bedroom house in my neighbourhood and the rent per employee for office space where I work are comparable.
I was on Safari on iOS, it didn't appear until the end of the article.
Currently 500:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1853529
You have time, you can still edit the title.
When Google hit the world stage, arguably the concept of personal privacy became null and void.

When Wikileaks hit the world stage, arguably the concept of a nation state's right to privacy became null and void.

Because some people (Assange and others) have dared to release these documents into the public domain, a radical precedent has been set.

I believe it will be very difficult to go back to a time where governmental secrecy is an unchallenged aspect of modern life.
I was recently re-reading a textbook that I had in college and I realized just how much of the book we skipped in class when I noticed how many chapters were unfamiliar to me. I remembered how much we skipped around to put things in a more logical order and what questions we skipped in the tests as well... not sure why textbooks are often written to illogically that it takes a teacher to decipher them.
Good point. However, eBay was a classified and auctions site and paypal was complimenting it. The examples suggested by OP are more competitive in nature. The only case I can think of is Instagram on Facebook. However, even in that case, Instagram was providing an equivalent, if not superior, user experience within Facebook. I believe it turned out to be a smart choice in the end.
Just trying to get itunes to work on a PC was enough to make me swear off Apple products . Like windows 8, too much clutter and other annoynces
I haven't had a chance to read through some of the source, but does anyone know how the photo editing is done? Are there libs to handle those effects?
I'd bet that the 10% error isn't unknown variation of the stars' rotation, rather it's error in our equipment and observations.
Sorry, C++ newbie, why is this significant?
Complete and utter lies. Singapore long has had abuse of libel laws to stiffle criticism. Stow the anti-colonial "homegrown dictatorship is better" whataboutism about how it is so unfair that they can't get away uncriticized for repression.

Civil unknowing defamation is a thing in Singapore law. In contrast US and others exclude good faith and lack any criminal defamation in the first place. Even if doing away with them is radical they are sharply limited to prevent abuse. Public figure abuse? They are covered less such that actual malice AND harm must be proven. Calling them the same is disingenuous.
Most cab authorities, and many of the drivers under them, are scum. It is hard to express just how corrupt and unprofessional Uber would have to be to come anywhere near being worse than them. I personally prefer Lyft, the app is less broken and the prices are pretty similar here in Southern Ontario. In Toronto, the transit authorities even have a cross-promotional relationship with Lyft, and I think it increases ridership noticeably. Public transit can only get you so far, even if it's as extensive as anyone can afford to run.

Uber isn't exploiting anyone: it is extremely simple to register with them, you can work whenever you please, and you can stop at any point; they pay on time and give you transparent access to their managerial infrastructure to see how you can align yourself with their business, or that you're unwilling to do that. Just because your system isn't set up to particularly support independent contractors doesn't mean that Uber's drivers fall outside that category.

In Toronto, when the cabbies were fed up with being out-competed by Uber contractors (and Uber's subsidies at the time), they decided to block all the roads surrounding a major hospital, including the emergency vehicle routes. To my mind, all of them should have lost not only their taxi licenses, but their driver's licenses as well.

The authorities promised to professionalize cabs, but in reality they did the exact opposite, and the same story has repeated itself across North America.
I used to develop something like this (5-6 years ago). By far the best (most stable and performant) solution was the following:

- Linux OS (ease of management, installation, introspectability).
- Debian (somewhat stripped down), with custom packages.
- Puppet for node management.
- runit as a process manager.
- Chromium to display videos/presentations.
- (Custom) NPAPI based plugin (shim) that would load mplayer-vaapi (nowadays it would be mpv I guess) to display videos.

It worked because one could get the X window ID of the <video> element via NPAPI, which was then passed to mplayer so it could initialize/render within the sub-window.

One of the main benefits was that this avoided lots of resource leaks. The plugin pre-loaded mplayer processes and would shut them down after the video finished playing. Transitions were near to seamless (though required some HTML hacks to avoid white flashing).

On our Sandy Bridge machines (small form factor, fanless), we could display 16 1080p videos side-by-side for days and the machine would stay cool. I was so excited when I demonstrated this. The previous interation of this software used the regular <video> (software) implementation and could barely manage a single video without overheating.

Of course, NPAPI was deprecated a long time ago and removed from Chromium more than a year ago I think. The "replacement" (at the time) Pepper API AFAIK didn't allow access to the X window which is needed by mplayer. It was also not compatible between browsers. The plugin I made also worked on Firefox.

Nowadays access to the necessary resources is so walled off that you'd really need hardware acceleration to be native to the browser. There'd be hard-to-avoid resource leaks, so I'd schedule browser restarts at night-time. I've been out of the loop for a while so maybe there's better stuff. I remember monitoring the Chromium repository to see if they would implement hardware acceleration. I recall they had a branch where this was "working" on ChromeOS and supposedly you could force-enable this for general Linux. I tried building this once, but my machine at the time could barely handle building it (took many hours). Once the binary was built, it would crash at startup. I decided it was too much effort to replace a solution that was working perfectly.
Definitely an area not explored much. Any research into homeopathy is seen either with scoff or pity.

http://www.i-sis.org.uk/DNA_sequence_reconstituted_from_Wate...
What I liked:

- Nice output layout.

- Separated directories, files, directory links and file links.

- Full path output.

- Count of objects inside directories.

What would be good:

- Accept filenames as arguments (just like directory is already supported).

- Add an option --regex, for powerful filtering (like egrep)

- Add an option --recursive and --ignore (or --exclude), allowing the user to make recursive listing while ignoring some directories.

Keep up the nice work. Thanks!
I like to answer your question from my experience.

Your point is valid. Personally I would not join a company, as a software developer for software without tests. I would consider it if they hire me to lead their code improvement efforts, but even then no tests reflect engineering and business culture in that company (which is very hard to change).
A big point I like to add is that new developers make more mistakes within a system they don't know. Having a good test suite gives young and experienced developers faster feedback about their assumptions of the system. Also unit tests act like an always up to date documentation which a developer can read to understand important assumptions about the parts of a system.
Either the commute, or the long working day. The commute might be less soul crushing on a 6 hour work day.

In any case, I generally refuse jobs outside Amsterdam (where I live) unless it's Utrecht right next to the station. Otherwise the commute just gets too long. Sometimes a recruiter asks if there's really no way around that, and I tell them counting the commute as hours worked, meaning I'd be present at the office less, would work fine for me. I don't want to be forced to sacrifice private time for work.
I like John Gruber, and I upvoted this article, but this point:

> Look at those 2007 Android designs compared to the original 2007 iPhone. Now compare a 2010 Android design to a current iPhone. Don’t tell me Google’s mobile strategy hasn’t changed.

I mean, he's totally right. It did change. But it wasn't to knock off Apple, it's because Google is building what consumers want and demand now.

Apple can say, "We pioneered that!" That's true. But they can't say, "We pioneered that - how dare they!" Because that's misplaced. Consumer preference has shifted, and yes, that's due in large part because of Apple's actions.

But Apple gets into trouble when they start thinking, "People want iPhones and these jerks are copying our iPhone" - because consumers don't necessarily want iPhones. They want well-designed devices which are fun and intuitive to use. Apple helped reveal that path, but they don't exactly get to plant a flag in the ground and say that's theirs now, forever, and how dare anyone else build well-designed devices with intuitive touchscreen interfaces.

Any other company I'd shrug at the misplaced righteous indignation, but Apple really should know better, since they got into this with Microsoft over "look and feel" last decade over GUI. The reaction was the same, "How dare Microsoft try to give people Apple-like stuff!" But that's wrong. Microsoft gave people what they wanted, which was pretty and and more intuitive navigation.

It's like - when you introduce a new general standard, you can't really own it. It's out there. You get a massive head start, but then people will start using that standard and innovating on it. Traditionally what companies with the head start do is cut prices to lock in market share and make it impossible for people to compete, but Apple runs on crazy margins, so they refuse to do this, get angry at whoever is making something that fills similar needs for a lower price than them, and then lose their market. And now they're doing it again.
there is only marketing but no product
Your comments in this thread have broken the site guidelines which ask you not to do classic flamewars "unless you have something genuinely new to say". This isn't new—it's a tedious trope we've all heard a zillion times and nothing is to be gained by repeating it. Please don't do this here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13821991 and marked it off-topic.
I think the widespread use of scipy/numpy is directly correlated. Python code is generally very easy to port, too, so I'm very happy when it's used for examples even though I don't "know" or write Python.
specific intel which would require city-wide CCTV? that's some pretty non-specific specific intel.
Interesting site. You know the SAT will be redesigned in a year? I tutor the SAT occasionally, and thought about making a site, but the pending change put me off developing anything major.
My guess is that some people might pay for some kinds of searches. But your engine would have to be really fast and/or summarise results in a way Google doesn't.

Can you give examples of the scraper sites you are talking about? What terms are you searching for?
reddit is significantly smaller bandwidth-wise than 4chan. reddit doesn't host images. I don't remember exactly but when I left 4 years ago it was only single digit terabytes of outbound bandwidth.
Parking consumes a huge amount of land, which isn't free in urban neighborhoods. Requiring businesses to provide it is a 'stealth tax' on goods, which raises costs for people who can't afford or don't want a car. And when a neighborhood is built out with enough parking for anyone who possibly wants it, it becomes so spread out that it is essentially impossible to walk anywhere or to serve it properly with mass transit. Requiring car ownership to be employable (or at least to access most jobs) is a far larger stealth tax!
OK, thanks -- that clarifies for me! And yeah; right now, for example, it's kind of awkward having this conversation because you've hit a post limit of some kind, which I gotta assume is a moderation thing. Irksome, since I think it's a good discussion.

FWIW, I agree strongly that unclear rules are bad. You should know what parameters you're operating under. I think there's some space for judgement calls, because it's really hard to write rules that cover all possible cases, but I also think it's significantly better to make those exceptions rather than SOP.

Sincere thanks for taking the time to explain. I will not burden you further with having to edit your posts to reply to me, and certainly feel free to drop me an email if you'd like.
Sadly this is still a relevant question due to the fact that if you give your programmers every leeway they will take advantage, not work, slack for 2 weeks and do nothing. happens all the time.

As a boss nothing angers you more then paying someone 7-10k a month on top of all the taxes and costs and watching them bitch and complain about coming to the office and commit nothing until the "feel like it" under the guise of "programming happens when it happens". This is real money and it is painful to raise it and just give it away. The developer doesn't have to answer to the angry investors and have their reputation ruined forever when the company fails. They get to skate off and go work at Facebook with valuable "startup experience" under their belt.

The reality is that 99% of programmers have bad attitudes and if you find the gem that actually pulls the cart with you, hold on to that unicorn with every ounce of your being.
It has been optional because you have to pay for it. POSIX compliance has a cost associated with it. Not that I think POSIX compliance has any value anymore, mind you. I was replying to someone for whom POSIX compliance was a make or break feature.

Anyway, I sense an argument drift from "Windows" to "Modern Windows". Nice. I guess earlier versions of Windows stopped being Windows once version 8.1 was released.
Palantir's leader, Dr. Alexzander Karp, was, of course, entirely right in his prescient letter to investors earlier this year calling other big tech companies "potentially treasonous." The Apples of the world have lost sight of who actually holds their reins. We need a strong national leader to bring them to heel and remind them that serving the needs of the Western people and states is far more "moral" (and what do the Apples know about "morals"?!) than serving the needs of authoritatorian states overseas.
Just use email with autocrypt or jabber with OMEMO. Signal will always have its way because it isn't federated.
> Programming was much harder because there was no stack overflow

Oh, stack overflow definitely existed, but only the kind that makes programming harder.

EDIT: Corrected a typo.
4KB TRS-80 Color Computer, which would have been $400 in 1980. Wasn't my own computer as it was my father's and I was a bit too young to get deep into programming until 1983 or so.

First computer that was strictly mine was a CoCo 3 in 1986, and the first one I built entirely myself was a 486-66 back in 1993.

Yep, we definitely remember those first machines.
> For the transaction itself: the payment you get incentivizes you to portray it in a positive light, rather than giving your honest opinion.

That was fully disclosed in the hypothetical offer.

Why is it unethical?

> For society at large: advertising amplifies the speech of the rich, which is inherently antidemocratic.

It does amplify the voices of the rich, but you are making it sounds like it only amplifies the speech of the rich, which is not true.

It amplifies the speech of anyone who’s
business is profitable and who chooses to invest in advertising, regardless of whether they are rich or not.

That is fundamentally democratic.

It is also fundamentally anti-democratic to restrict people’s speech in general, however much money they have.

To prevent advertising, you’d have to police what the poor could say, in case they were caught taking money to say nice things about the products of rich people’s companies.

I see legitimate criticism of capitalist wealth accumulation feedback loops (which could be fixed e.g. with a wealth tax) in what you are saying, but no valid argument that advertising is inherently unethical.
I was lucky to have access to THINK Pascal and later Metrowerks CodeWarrior, and adults who would answer programming questions or tell me how pointers work.

I don't remember the Inside Macintosh books being especially large and heavy; they were broken into volumes which were a half-inch or inch thick, except for volume VI. It wasn't terribly long before these books ended up online on Apple's developer website but I don't remember when that happened.
I too spent a lot of formative years on a 286, envying my friends who all had 386s and could run Windows and play cooler games.
The 6% is real (including inflation) returns. Nominal (not including inflation) returns are higher.