jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
When done well, articles like this subtly switch tone from beginning to end.

At the beginning, the tone is something like "we live in a great society, where wondrous things are possible, but we have problems"

At the end, the tone is something like "Progress hurts us. It is better to avoid modernity in its entirity"

Of course, the second statement is never fully fleshed out: to do so would show the many problems it has.

Everybody dreams of a simple world, living close to nature, part of a community and practicing a long-lasting culture. To see a native people in the South Pacific go from fishing to Big Macs and spam in a generation is ascetically displeasing.

But remember: the average life expectancy of an Afghan is 39 years. These supposedly fit and healthy societies had entire generations that never saw the age of 50.

I used to be a big fan of a certain culture -- until I read modern doctor's accounts of members of that culture who relied on traditional remedies instead of modern medicine. I used to be a big fan of going back to some of the old ways of primitive peoples -- until I read "Culture cult" (A must-read if you are interested in this sort of thing) http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0813338638?ie=UTF8&tag=...

The fact is -- it's never a simple comparison. You can pick and choose and make the case that such ways of living are better -- or you can do the same thing to make the case they are worse. Doctors can tell you horrific stories about all sorts of cultures and societies. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, that is, we always think the other culture or way of life is better. Many times it is not.

I am a firm believer that some trade-offs are better for societies than others. It's not all just the same. And these are extremely serious health issues. I do not mean to make light of them at all. Perhaps we can learn some lessons from more traditional societies that we can apply. But we need to be very careful about when performing such analysis that we don't step over the line from selecting good things to frank prejudice towards any sort of traditional or primitive society. We romanticize peoples instead of looking at them the way they really are. It's a feel-good thing, sure, but our feelings rarely match up to the actual state of things, no matter how many good essays like this we read. (And this was a great essay)
Yes - Lou Gerstner was a very rare bird as a CEO. He was a consultant who became a great executive, then a CEO, then led a transformation the likes of which he'd advised on as a consultant. What's needed is of that order of magnitude. How do you find folks like that?
Hasn't linux benefited by the backport of Android code?
Not likely but that would be funny and awesome.
I chose that book because: engineers love it. Engineers don't necessarily love Marlow's Faust, or the Ring Cycle, or any other great achievements of the arts. Also, there's a significant anthropological and sociological component to GGS. OP's sort of engineer hates "soft sciences" like these.

"The arts" was probably a bad choice of words, because few people are brazen enough to say art isn't good. Instead they'll say art is a good hobby, surely you can program by day and still write some little operas or something at night. Of course, this completely understates the dedication and focus required to produce a work.

I really wanted to defend the soft sciences: psychology, socioligy , anthro, and other things people on HN don't see the need for.
It's sort of like the games where the graphics are also done by the guy writing the code, resulting in fun but ugly games. There's no shame in that. You gotta work with what you got. I for one would rather have great software and ugly graphics than the other way around.
No need to get pissy - nothing is above mockery and open source is not an exception.

> If you don't like them I'm sure most of those project would welcome a new design.

Funny you should mention that, I literally did this - once. Wanted to improve the landing page for an open source project and improve the logo. The maintainers wouldn't have any of it. In their eyes the project was fine the way it is.

And this isn't just one project. I bet if I were to go to cgraph with a better logo they would reject it. Open source folks are stubborn as a donkey 90% of the time.
Please don't, Techcrunch quality is already low enough even without charts based on bad statistics.
Why is it okay to sit back and do nothing as Iran builds nuclear capability while shouting "Death to Israel" and "Death to America?" Why is it okay to sit back as Iran forces other regional powers such as Saudi Arabia to restart their own nuclear programs?

Iran's leadership is under the grip of a expansionistic, fundamentalist religious ideology. If nothing changes, this could result in a nuclear war within the next fifteen years.
I do not even see where 'walking and drinking' comes in. The poster clearly said he took a drink of water out of his water bottle.
Ahhhhh... I wish I could answer this.
With all the fuss about phalates and BPA as you mention, I don't get why UV-hardened polyethylene isn't much more widely used? Anyone have an explanation?
Unit testing is a leading indicator. The higher the coverage the better the quality of the product is a good broad rule. Engineers hate unit testing to 100% until they do, and then they don't go back, it becomes the norm for their development process. The confidence and assurance you get from that level of coverage is amazing. It takes the stress out of software.
So just point out where it's wrong, instead of making a fairly disingenuous appeal to non-authority or however you want to call it?
Your meaning is correct too: "treacherous; crafty" and synonyms include "stealthy, shifty, underhanded, sneaky." I think you did a fine job separating the machinery of bureacracy from the malice (or lack of).
I know, I was to implement a modal on the 'getting started' button. But in the end had to do without it for time reasons. But I would still like to have it soon.
Not just created, but bundled and installed with default by Java and Flash updates some of which also install the Google toolbar into IE. Many folks that I had converted to Firefox from IE back in the day use Chrome now and have no idea how it ended up on their computer. This explains the steady rise of Chrome, not the few percentage of tech geeks that installed it by choice.
...and don't believe that hoary old well-known medical advice (ulcers caused by stress; fat is bad for you; salt causes high blood pressure).

I guess you shouldn't believe any nutrition advice at all.
> Securing Bitcoin is a solved problem.

Trezor has solved Bitcoin's security problems in the same way that PGP has solved internet messaging security; that is, amazing technology exists that addresses real problems, but in practice the problems are still prominent. Security is a major problem for the internet, and a much bigger problem for bitcoin since the incumbent system provides nearly identical services with a substantially smaller risk of losing real money.
I was always wondering what CloudFare does.
I think a lot of people would trust people over a completely disembodied piece of software with no skin in the game.

Drivers are careful because of others, but also because they too will suffer in an accident.

As one of my teachers used to joke: 'If you want to see an enormous improvement in the accident rate put a very sharp stainless steel spike on the steering wheel and remove the seatbelt from the drivers seat'.
sounds interesting and useful.. is your code open-source? Can we see your work?
> Today, he simply connects a serial port between the CoCo and a PC, with the PC acting as a virtual disk drive emulator.

From the third page, I find this fascinating - does anybody know more about it? Is it an FTP or something else?

EDIT: here's his website, http://users.axess.com/twilight/sock/
I quit Wikipedia many years ago when I recognized that opinion-pushers willing to dedicate way more time that I had could dominate articles.

That's really all it takes. Opinion-pushers can work completely within the rules of Wikipedia, and if they collectively have more time to dedicate to pushing their opinion than their opponents, they can use the Wikipedia process to push their view to the exclusion of others.

Arbitration and referendums are often ineffective against this; especially when long, long threads with lots of technical details, citations and counter-citations are involved, and when the arbitrators or referendum participants are themselves biased.

Most people just don't have the time or interest to read through long arguments. So arbitrarors and voters often make decisions with scant knowledge of what they're deciding on, or do so with a foregone conclusion in mind and without consideration of the evidence.

Frankly, I'm surprised that Wikipedia works as well as it does, and I still find it useful. But I just don't have the time or energy to endlessly fight off all the opinion pushers. As a consequence, I try to take what I read on Wikipedia with a big grain of salt.
I contend that Randi would also have been against the claim that a mentalist uses extraordinary mental powers of any kind (except normal brain power, of course). Not just supernatural powers.

This is just trickery and misdirection. You seem to be under the impression that I don't appreciate it, but I do! I love a good spectacle. I just take issue with it being called some display of specially trained mental powers when it is not: it's just trickery, misdirection, confederates and sleight of hand.

PS: I recommend you read user fooblat's comment. They claim to also own a bunch of books on mentalism, and it's 100% deception and trickery, of the same kind of magic tricks. The claims of "heightened powers of observation", etc, etc, are all misdirection to make the act more appealing.
They spent twenty years experimenting with different approaches to marketing Solaris x86.

It was not a lack of persistence
It shouldn't be a problem. Checking the classic C10K article at http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html ...

> In 1999 one of the busiest ftp sites, cdrom.com, actually handled 10000 clients simultaneously through a Gigabit Ethernet pipe

HTTP isn't that heavier (if at all) than FTP, so 100 visitors for static content shouldn't be a challenge for 2008 hardware
i don't want answers. i just want improvements. i spend hours a day dealing with gmail. it would be nice if they considered how much time people spend using their software and had a desire to improve things.
Don’t forget that 38400 baud serial is 3840 bytes/s…
"Frequently asked questions

What's your business model?

The goal of the company is to equally value the customer, environment, and profits. In other words, [...]

How do you make money?

The goal of the company is to equally value the customer, environment, and profits. In other words, [...]"

What?

https://slowsocial.us/about#business-model
>and you said no

You're assuming you have to answer them; the 5th amendment allows you to refuse to respond in any way.

Refusing to respond isn't lying.
I worked for an industry-specific 3D cad company at the time. We wanted to create some kind of web-enabled version of our software circa 2003-2005 (totally guessing at the time frame but seems right). It feels like every choice we made was wrong and the product was never viable. VRML sort of worked with a plug-in but there was insufficient control over navigation (let alone object selection) so you couldn't really build an app "on top of" it. We also had 2D drawings, displaying them as SVG via a plug-in wasn't super good and no way could you do things like allow the user to add a fresh annotation to the SVG interactively. UI? Well, someone had the grand idea to write a mock version of Tk that would output HTML instead of X Windows API calls. That worked about as well as you'd think. Ouch.

I don't know what someone operating at a more expert level would have been able to do; I was entirely self-educated in everything about browsers and had no peers to learn from. As it was, it was an exercise in frustration that was mostly shown at one trade show and then better forgotten.
Neat idea but literally no one wants that. You think the average Joe wants to explicitly configure his social media algorithms?

Get real.
What you want and what is the best way to communicate are not always aligned.

And I'm not dictating anything, or being dogmatic and condescending, but I guess it's easier to think I am if you're trying to have an Internet Argument Moment.
use what douglas adams used, james fallows uses, and dan brown would use: www.brainstormsw.com
Because once you leave hypotheticals behind, money is an object.
Now I'm just imagining what is essentially a hacker frat house. That would be sweet for some sort of incubator or whatnot to set up a 10-20 bedroom house in SJ or SV or somewhere and get like 5-7 startups to all work out of there. You could pay their living expenses +stipend and such in exchange for equity and they could get the benefit of living with a bunch of hackers. Eta Alpha Kappa!!
If/once these become public record, does that create any legal issues for the university? Given how easy it is to twist informal speech like an e-mail out of context it does make ya wonder. A boderline-defamatory remark made public seems quite different something kept private.
I'm not saying that there can't be artistry in the darkroom. I'm saying that in this particular case such artistry would likely not be appreciated. And since you don't know what is on the film in the first place it is very hard to manipulate it in such a way. That requires a lot of pre-existing knowledge about what is on the film.

I spent a ton of time in the darkroom of my dad when I was a kid and it's all lots of fun but in the end what wasn't in front of the camera lens is not going to magically appear on the developed film or the prints. At best you'll end up with a derived work, at worst you're destroying a bit of history.
I thought it was obvious that I did not mean copyright of the exhibits but of reproductions like scans. Thanks for your clarifications.
What I don't understand is why the markets doesn't create a new order type, a delayed one that is created with a set trigger time. That way bulk sellers and buyers could set up big distributed trades in advance without having to resort to the same game as the arbitrage players are doing with locations close to the market and whatnot.
Which operating systems does systemd support? Few that don't have gcc as their official compiler, I would have thought?
It's definitely not for the lack of trying. It mostly is because it really is a hard problem.
Those seem more like arguments against FreeBSD than an argument against using those special symbols.
Even without ARM, I can see them using AMBA or AXI for the bus because there is so much existing IP out there built to that interface.
Isn't transfer learning just a faster way to fit a curve by starting with a curve that's partially fit instead of a random vector. So under this interpretation, transfer learning is also "curve fitting."
Does being good at Dota count as being a genius?

I think you are confusing financial success with contributing to artistic/scientific/intellectual progress.
It's still TDD but a specific subset: issue/bug reports instead of feature requests.
I could not agree more strongly that working on code, docs, and tests as a single unit is an excellent approach to development. I think the best way to convince most developers of doing this is to create tools which make it as automated as possible. If using a tool actually makes their lives easier to accomplish something they already do (write tests? write docs?) and they get the other for free, then that is a huge selling point.

I had a similar idea about using JSON Schema to validate my API. However, a few issues that I thought of and a few I discovered while researching:

1) I am not aware of a decent JSON Schema editor. It has been on my wishlist/TODO list for a looong time to write one myself which has similar capability to something like Oxygen for XML [1], but I have not had the time. Do you plan to write and update the JSON Schema by hand?

2) I have not researched them in great detail yet, but Swagger [2] and API Doc [3] seem to have already defined something similar to what I had in mind with JSON Schema. Have you looked into those tools yet?

[1] http://www.oxygenxml.com/index.html
[2] https://helloreverb.com/developers/swagger
[3] http://apidoc.me/doc/gettingStarted
When I TA'ed a course that taught networking fundamentals, I always pointed folks at this guide when they were struggling with assignments. Can't believe that was 8 years ago.
> [0] This is odd,

I suspect by "odd" here you just mean "american". US consumers really don't like having to convert units.
> That’s so cute how everyone is afraid of the IRS boogeyman

Its so cute how everyone is afraid of a government agency that is opaque and can charge you fines or jail time for not correctly filling out their documents :)
Haha, if you think that's bad, try driving a jeep. You don't even have to drive it for it to break!
Saying C is easier to secure than Modern C++ is just confusing. The point of a lot of recent C++ features is to make memory safety easier to achieve. I personally don't think it gets anywhere close to safe enough for me to recommend, when Rust is such a competent option that people can choose instead. I would still rather people have the tools of C++ at their disposal instead of having to do everything themselves in C.

Please find me a well-known C code base that doesn't suffer from memory safety CVEs. You're the one making the claim that they exist... I can't prove that such a thing doesn't exist, but I can point to how curl[0][1], sqlite[2][3], the linux kernel[4][5], and any other popular, respected C code base that I can think of suffers from numerous memory safety issues that memory safe languages are built to prevent.

Writing secure software is hard enough without picking a memory unsafe language as the foundation of that software.

"Just find/be a better programmer" isn't the solution. We've tried that for decades with little success. The continued prevalence of memory safety vulnerability in these C code bases shows that existing static analysis tools are insufficient for handling the many ways that things can go wrong in C.

I think you mentioned railcar elsewhere in this thread, and I would find it easier to be interested in a runc alternative that is written in a memory safe language... which railcar is.

[0]: https://curl.se/docs/CVE-2019-5482.html

[1]: https://curl.se/docs/CVE-2019-3823.html

(among numerous others)

[2]: https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/researchers-sho...

[3]: http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=SQLite

(the second link has quite a few memory safety issues that are readily apparent, including several from SQLite that affected Chrome)

[4]: https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2019-11599/

[5]: https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2018-15471/
From what I can tell getting a good air purify is all about how much air the thing is actually able to move through the filter, which is primary a combination of filter size and the design of the fan itself. At its core, an air purifier is a remarkably simple product. The biggest mistake people make when buying these things is getting something that cannot exchange enough air to keep the room it is in clean. Manufactures contribute to this problem by overstating the square footage their units can cover.

With respect to Dyson, I think that their cordless stick vacuums are pretty good, and you can sometimes find good deals on them that can make them not too expensive. They have decent suction that probably compares okay to many low-end corded vacuums, and the battery life is reasonable. If you have only a small area to vacuum, and it is mostly hard floors, the Dyson cordless vacs are a reasonable purchase. Just don't expect them to compare to a decent corded vac in the same price range in terms of power.
Their tech probably can't be imitated at the moment because they've got it patented up the wazoo. Luckily patents have a sane lifetime and once they expire I'd expect many competitors to show up with similar designs at lower price points and possibly better engineering.
It's correct - he's a quite prolific guy, and was an early investor in Skype which was sold to Ebay for a gazillion.

Right now he's broke though.
Native apps cost a lot more to develop, and WebKit frames are easier to sandbox UI-wise and are easier to integrate into other apps. Native apps has to be downloaded and installed and certificate-verified whereas html5 ads can just be launched.

So the iAd market will have to get really huge before native ads are worth the trouble.
I've also gotten good mileage out of "gen_event"; I have a protocol with a generic connection layer, then a modular part where you claim you support "Module X", which is implemented as a gen_event plugin that first verifies you can do that, then allows this connection to have that module. It makes it really easy to write something relatively secure by ensuring you can get to certain capabilities if and only if you pass a certain check to validate you ability to have them. It's a good tradeoff between typing (as in, typing things on the keyboard) and security for me.
The UA can do whatever it wants; the information given in srcset is for giving the UA the clues it needs to make the right decision. [0]

> From the available options, the user agent then picks the most appropriate image.

So if you are zoomed in, the UA can decide that a higher-res image is the most appropriate one.

[0]: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...
I think we must've worked at the same place. I took a job at a jira feature factory working on an aging, ossified code base. Literally, it was using the same tech I was using 10 years ago, almost exactly, except it was new back then.

I spent most of my time writing design documents, doing code reviews, and shepherding my relatively small changes through review. Something I could've banged out in a week would take months due to all the review and processes.
Because C is 50 years old and boring. And Rust is slightly more intellectually demanding and takes longer to get into so has a a smaller monk like comm-- oh my god.
Seems like Russia struck at a moment of vulnerability, while they were disconnected from the grid. I wonder if they knew in advance of the test.
Also see:

https://areweguiyet.com/

https://arewegameyet.rs/
I'm not a big fan of these articles. It depends on what you're doing. I'm a professor, and in order to get certain tasks done, you need a private space. I don't even know how you could grade exams, for instance, without a private space in order to concentrate and prevent others from seeing what you're doing. When I'm working on a paper, on the other hand, it's way more productive to have my coauthors right next to me.

The effect on productivity therefore cannot be determined without knowing what you're going to be doing.

I do find these articles fascinating from the perspective of an economist. Economists frequently assume workers get paid based on their productivity. Then we see that in the real world employers are willing to adopt an open office model that workers hate, even one that can reduce productivity, because they want to monitor the workers to see what they are doing. If workers were paid according to productivity, it wouldn't matter how many times they checked Facebook between 8 am and 5 pm.
I wonder if you feed a few of screenshots of the video into a Reduced Boltzman Machine if you could get it to come up with what it thinks an astroid looks like. seems like it would be perfect for this kind of thing.
The example is correct. toIndex is exclusive.

Here is Dijkstra's opinion on why:

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/E...
Sarcasm doesn't go over well online. I was just kidding around.
Haha - that's great. Here's the original HN discussion being referenced.