jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
Well, this is what free market capitalism is for. If it weren't for the loads of regulation whole neighborhoods in SF would have been replaced with high-density housing a decade ago.

However, California has decided that "housing as investment" supersedes all else. It's not that there's no viable alternatives: this is by design.
You can improve lead generation by 6.8% without ML too. A/B testing a few changes can easily accomplish the same thing.

The AI could be optimizing to attract people who are willing to give out their email address than actual potential customers so it doesn't help the business. We tried using Google ads to optimize for leads before and we saw ads were on sketchy websites promising people free stuff.

Lead generation was a bad KPI to use but it was chosen can't optimize for sales because the volume is to low to train the ML models. This is the reality of many businesses that experiment in AI and they produce junk.

ML does work well for certain domains where you have the scale of data to pull it off, but now the hype has spread where it is not appropriate.
For the pythonistas out there, does the table of content cover enough breadth for intermediate level python
Why would you attempt to upgrade any computer without having a backup? I can understand Joe Six-Pack not knowing that backups are important, but you're posting on HN...
Thanks for the great write-up.
In addition to straight-up language features, what draws me to play with Nim is the full environment that has already been built up including module packaging and debugger (particular pain points when moving from Python to Golang).

Additionally, having compiled executables solves a Python pain point. I love Python, but distributing packaged executables is an ongoing pain point.
In places we didn't invade such as Mongolia and Japan, they're actually doing quite well.

Americans occupied Japan for years, not to mention first destroying her military, and razing a few cities with fire bombs and then nukes. Mongolia's GDP (PPP) per capita is less than $10k. On average, a Mongolian is four times poorer than a French. The same is true for Russia which has immense natural resources, dwarfing those of Europe. Their ability to manipulate natural gas supplies hangs over the EU to this day. Soviets used to control what was once the breadbasket of Europe. Didn't do them much good. Actually, they managed to induce a famine there.

Europe is rich because of industrial revolution and stable governments (more stable than elsewhere anyway). Invading other places was largely made possible by the technological advances rather than causing them. Before, Europe was nearly conquered by Muslisms[1]. Twice[2]. It was regularly raided for slaves (in 16-17th century[3], no ancient history), and starved of precious metals for much of its history.

What kind of prosperity is that?

The kind billions of people living in poverty today would take in heartbeat. They do whenever given a chance. Going as far as risking their lives to cross the Mediterranean or Florida Straits.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tours

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Vienna

[3] http://www.jstor.org/discover/25818051
bs. India has always been backwards, so nothing different or new. Again, who cares?
I appreciate your perspective, but would argue you are overestimating the stability of our system. Also its not like those "jackasses" came out of nowhere... they were part of a protest organized by the sitting President to protest... the outcome of a typical election.
Interesting. Are there any references or good articles you've seen that go into those details about Belgium? Never heard that before.
I did not get trick questions, which is good. The focus was on if we were a good fit for each other. I wanted to know as much detail as possible about projects I could begin work on, to see how much value I could bring, and to confirm that I could perform. We spent a lot of time discussing that.

Netflix does like to hire senior staff, who often have previous public accomplishments they can refer to, and discuss in interviews.
> I'm curious to hear the viewpoint of an American on this. [...] From the perspective of a heathen foreigner

Hey, that makes two of us ;)

But I'm also European, that means apart from the religious aspect, we're pretty much in the same boat as the US, and often times that boat is a heavily armed gunship. In the end, countries are not monolithic entities, or even single ideologies for that matter. People in power are susceptible to atrocious ideas, wherever they live.

> Would you mind elaborating on what societal impact you think participating in torture has on the US?

For what it's worth, I think the impact is that we (US and allies) become a society of torturers, as banal as that may sound. Once we internalize the fact that we are people who torture, our entire values compass becomes skewed.
Having group or ring structure isn't too surprising and isn't too intimately related to the idea of metacircularity or the Y-combinator. It's actually more interesting to really see that matrices encode linear transformations, and multiplication is function composition.
I definitely agree with the Schemer series. I wouldn't leave off the The Reasoned Schemer, I've been working on that book for over a month now. Better than coffee. Might actually finally understand monads.

SICP is astounding. Thoroughly worked through the first three chapters years ago. I'm constantly revisiting the later chapters.

I haven't worked through CTMCP, but that book is written in a lovely, compelling style with eye-opening statements on nearly every page. I'm also also finding that it's the ultimate Clojure book.
Well, think about it this way: would you want your children reading a publication about Android?

Because hey - if you're cool with that, go ahead and get them an Android phone.
Once you're a regular, it's hard to change your karma avg that much.

It was only the last 50 comments, I believe. But it did update too slowly, as other people are saying.
Effective Java was, for me, one of the programming books that was simply unputdownable! I've always been a fan of Joshua Bloch's work and this book is a real gem for any practicing Java pro!
You can keep your privacy in the world by keeping your product, not your personality, the star.

- Sarah Lacy (@sarahcuda)

http://startupquote.com/post/1702259295
Regardless of how your genome sequence is read (by genotyping or sequencing), there's the potential for gene patents to be filed based on associations that are discovered between certain genetic variants (e.g. SNPs, which are the variants typically read during the genotyping process) and traits of interest, such as diseases. The big question is whether the USPTO will continue to grant such patents--the ACLU is challenging this premise now in a case against Myriad Genetics, http://www.aclu.org/free-speech-womens-rights/aclu-challenge....
Spoken like a person who has never actually taught a college course. There's a tremendous amount of work involved, from both students and faculty. Most students go to class, and most professors give lectures that aren't directly taken from the book. So can we please stop elevating the cartoon, straw-man portrayals of the incompetent lecturer and the lazy student? Please?

I spent about 5 years teaching college, and I have a hard time disagreeing. Teaching is a lot of work the first couple of times, but it gets easy very quickly. Calc 1 is no different the 10'th time you teach than the first, and at that point all you need to do is show up and repeat. Teaching is not a difficult job [1].

As for the students, they are mostly just there for the grade. Some of them may need to do a bit more than just cram for 2 weeks, and many attend class out of a sense of social obligation, but they are just there for the grade.

[1] Research is far more difficult, and I'll agree that most research professors are very hardworking. But teaching is just a minor task research profs are saddled with.
Programming books are rarely page turners. I cannot think of one book to add to the (currently empty) list here. I find most programming books to be boring and discursive. Far too many fall into a pattern not too far removed from romance novels where, inevitably, the alpha male hero beds the heroine by chapter three. And if software engineering is considered programming, many of those books seem to be anchored in the occult where certain spells produce magical results for arcane reasons.

Personally I dislike tutorials and the pedagogy that comes along with that style. Even when well done they seem wordy presentation of the trivial and obvious.

Serious computer science books (e.g., Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, Hank Warren's Hackers Delight) take careful reading and study; I read them for pleasure, but it is a different pleasure that I get from, say, a Lee Child's Jack Reacher novel.

I think there are good reasons for this situation. The interesting aspects of programming are complex, involve a deep understanding of multiple levels of abstraction, and require considerable background knowledge. This is incompatible with a mindless read.
Why not just visa if amex is not accepted? They offer (at least mine done) the exact same purchase protection and I’ve called up my bank and had charges reversed too.
> I don’t know what you consider a “serious ISP”

I understood this as referring to their definition higher up in their answer:

> > ISPs that have 50,000+ customers, or are supporting more than that through other smaller ISPs that are downstream of them
Not exactly what OP mentioned, but something like that did happen in the past:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jul/14/russian-s...
Words don’t redefine themselves.

Describing low-paying jobs as “slavery” is a metaphor. Saying “certain aspects of X are like Y” does not mean Y ‘is’ X.

But, of course, that is often why rhetoricians use metaphors and similes… to dupe and confuse people into a false equivalence.

There are slaves in this world… diluting the meaning of the word to include Uber drivers does not help them.
It's not uncommon and no bad practice at all to fully specify a language before it is fully implemented. There were a couple of languages where the compiler took even many years to come into existence after the language was published, or was never finished. Other people - like e.g. me - develop the language specification and compiler in parallel. Just different ways to look at it.
Capitalism (as practiced by democracies) allows you to start an alternative site that doesn't censor results as well. Totalitarianism (Communism) would not have. Choose your poison from amongst the various governments that have succeeded (for a while) in the past as I don't think Utopia is a possibility with humans as messed up as we are.
> a lean SaaS company that sells Uber's software as a service to ordinary taxi companies, takes a cut and makes a profit

This destroys a lot of value. Most taxi companies suck for reasons independent of their tech stack. (The fact that they’re better post-Uber shouldn’t obscure the effect of that competitive pressure.) Moreover, having a transport app that works in most countries is a value add for such a service’s most-profitable customers. Finally, the claim that taxi companies treat their drivers better than Uber applies in some markets, but it doesn’t in most, e.g. New York and New Delhi.

Uber isn’t profitable as a company, but they’re profitable in some (and a growing number of) markets. There is a recurring set of Uber hot takes that get recycled every few months that ignores this.
To be clear, this is just a simple summary of the source. I agree with your statement, though. In fact, as Rudolf Flesch said in his book, How To Write Speak And Think More Effectively, "So here we have the secret of plain conversational talk: it is not difficult ideas expressed in easy language, it is rather abstractions embedded in small talk. It is heavy stuff packed with excelsior. If you want to be better understood you don’t have to leave out or change your important ideas; you just use more excelsior. It’s as simple as that." The point his is making that the few clear simple points can be packed with some excelsior to improve clarity.
Feel like you would like this[0] article that goes extremely into MMO economies.

[0]: https://www.desogames.com/virtual-labor-and-lessons-from-eco...
Nice writeup! I think Taiwan will remain free for at least a few years, as China would pay a very heavy cost for not too much gain invading Taiwan in the near future. We'll see if Taiwan goes nuclear in the interim. The Hong Kong experience might be pushing things in that direction.

I completely agree about space being a viable new frontier. People don't seem to get that with effectively unlimited energy, habitats throughout the Solar System and even out to the Oort cloud can be arbitrarily luxurious and enjoyable.

Advances in spacecraft design and propulsion will only accelerate things... heh
using the fingerprint reader on a phone to accept any job?
Because the scientific evidence overwhelmingly shows that artificial sweeteners _are_ better for you. They have no proven health impact and eliminate calories. The idea that they're somehow "just as bad" (or even worse) only comes from sugar and corn industry lobbying and marketing efforts.
>Substrate independence - whether it's connections or something else - is a very strong claim that should be subjected to empirical testing before being accepted. (And IMO is almost certainly wrong for good practical reasons that have nothing to do with souls.)

Care to mention any of those "good practical reasons"?

Penrose gave it a try (though even there, there was nothing about how it can't be modelled with code for example, in which case, rocks are fine too for a simulation a la XKCD, just not as a direct substrate for an Android).

>Of course you can't test it empirically, because there's no empirical test for subjective experience. You can only test for the appearance of subjective experience - specifically for external behaviours, loosely defined, which might be considered to imply subjective experience to you as an observer.

It's not really that we can't test it, it's more that we can't measure it. But we can, and do, test it, e.g. with psychological tests, the same kind we give to people to understand different aspects of their personality (which we also can't just measure with some equipment or simple measurement). If it quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck, and cries like a duck, and has other sentimental duck qualities, it's a duck. We only accept the subjective experience of other people from its appearance (their actions etc) too, anyway.
Does subrepo break when you rebase both a commit and its parent? I recall doing something like that in the past, and subrepo stopped working.
In my experience, "RTFM" is often a manifestation of the frustration that the person asking for help hasn't even begun to do the most basic thing to try and help themselves.

It's extremely wearing having to deal with people with a problem who have apparently put precisely zero effort into figuring the problem out on their own.

"RTFM" isn't always a useful response, but I have sympathy with people who express it and its friends ("Have you read the manual?", "What have you tried to do to solve this problem before asking for help?").
Discussion in progress from several hours ago here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21624316
It compiles to bytecode, of course it is fast - we are specifically discussing language features and developer experience.
If you reread my argument, you will see that I never said the fact that fascists invented moral relativism makes it false. I rather argued that those who adopt this viewpoint are aligning themselves not only with fascists but with all manner of other tyrants and dictators who commit what most people regard as horrid atrocities, and that moreover moral relativists are required (insofar as they wish to avoid hypocrisy) to morally and philosophically support these acts.

I believe that most western moral relativists do not realize this. I am pointing out that moral relativism is not an inherently leftist or "nice" viewpoint, contrary to common opinion among western intellectuals. I said nothing about whether it was true or false.
If you have suggestions on improvements to the docs then that's awesome. It's really easy to make suggestions :-)
Well, I've never used postgres, but from the documentation v9.4 it does not look that different from the others db engine: 'Read Committed is the default isolation'; 'applications using this level must be prepared to retry transactions due to serialization failures' (plus the one you mentioned already: 'Serializable transaction isolation level has not yet been added to Hot Standby replication targets')

Not exactly what I like to call 'simply works' ;-)

But I didn't want to say that a NoSQL database is always better than an traditional one. Just that Isolation is complex on traditional systems when dealing with volumes & concurrency. And, typically, transactions between tables or even rows are difficult/impossible for a distributed database, as these rows can be on different nodes (the 'multi-key operations' you mentioned)
Hurray, I've been looking for that Larkin poem since college.
If the wind infrastructure can be weatherized to effectively prevent such a scenario from happening (which it's my understanding is the case), then the claim that wind is to blame is still an untrue allegation. The blame would lie with not weatherizing the equipment, not with wind.
Emoji?
Do you mean agoraphobic?

I think it can be re-framed like a feeling of freedom and possibility. For instance, if you managed to live one million years and visit all the galaxy, you would have not even started.
It's not complex to code a proof of concept good enough to check assumptions with a possible implementation. Now, for the implementation and roll out as a product you would be probably months to years away.

Why we developers like to be so optimistic about our own creations? I can definitely hack a lot of PoCs in short time if I don't have to care about security, other users and so on, the moment you start to introduce the real world into your little PoC is usually when a hack that took 1 day explodes into a months-long project. And for good reasons.
In Ireland, the Data Protection Commissioner (DPC)—which has the power to levy a fine of up to 4% of global turnover or around $3.5 billion—has slammed the company for failing to inform it of the breach.

In the words of a famous Irishman "they'll do nothing".
A lawyer friend of mine told me that it's a well known thing (at least in WA) that state patrol deliberately tries to ticket people at the end of their shift, because then they have to go through with the whole rigmarole of writing a traffic ticket, and it goes into overtime, triggering the payment. Supposedly, if you look at the statistical breakdown of tickets written by time of day, you see a clear spike there.
The Web After Tomorrow by Nikita Tonsky: https://tonsky.me/blog/the-web-after-tomorrow/
Do you have any supporting evidence for these claims?
This is great advice. I often catch myself not writing bad code by not writing any code at all. That's just being chicken.
>> Climate change will inevitably result in a reduction in biodiversity on Earth.

Do you have a source for that claim? Things like the ice age and deep sea lifeforms spring to my mind whenever someone says that.
Why do people insist on using the term "zero-day"? It means nothing other than an unpatched vulnerability.
The article suggests this book: http://gustavus.edu/+max/concrete-abstractions-pdfs/index.ht... before embarking on SICP.

Can anyone comment on the text please? I've not heard of it before.
Interestingly, the same thing could be said about using a powerful type system or not.

It's easy to assume that the compiler errors you are getting are just wasting your time, forcing you to put arcane type declarations, annotations, and constructors around your code. But that time might reduce the testing burden, because the compiler can make more guarantees for you; and therefore it might actually save time.
This clip from the british TV show IQ goes into those kinds of numbers. It's staggering. Especially for black men.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8E7wgFcCefE
the term "public commons" doesn't appear in the article ... "public sphere" has a different meaning, tying back to Habermas and others. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_sphere

the original title "Wikileaks Exposes Internet's Dissent Tax" is a much clearer summary of the argument.
I'm becoming more and more convinced that the politics of intelligence is one of the most potent and unspoken. It's far more of a touchy subject than gender, class, or race. In fact, it precedes them: people seem to get the most upset when groups of people are called intellectually inferior (they don't really seem to care about what you have to say about cultural vs genetic roots). It seems to rule everyday interactions and organizational decisions.

In America, I can't think of something more insulting to say to someone than to call their heritage intellectually stupid.
I'd absolutely love to use it on my secondary machine, a desktop PC running Windows 10 – just hibernate and pick up right where I've been a few days later without leaving it in standby blinking its super bright LED aggressively. Sadly if I send it to hibernate the PC will always turn itself back on in the night, so no hibernate for me...
The vast majority of phone calls I receive are spam calls by people/robocallers which I did not give my phone number to, but apparently someone else did. I don't want people sharing my phone number with random other people
This is not achieving anything positive. I don’t which privacy threat it’s fixing, other than adding a new app into the mix that could at some point in the future suck up the contacts itself:)
The point is that you pay 0 tax until you sell. That’s better than being forced to pay long term capital gains every year on a dividend.
For cabins, the property has to be zoned as a recreational space. On agricultural land the structure you build has to be with an agricultural purpose and you can only apply for such a building permit when you are a registered farmer.

Pretty much everything is regulated in Germany which sucks at times, but also this is the reason why things work quite well even though we are densely populated.
Typically, when there is demand the price goes up, the stock price is not hard linked to the company value, it can lag, lead or even temporarily be correct but generally speaking it takes a while for an over or underpriced stock to catch up to the real value, long enough that there are whole industries dedicated to spotting these differences.
> Anybody with a general understanding of how blockchain works should not find this conclusion surprising. Each subsequent block in the chain gets larger, increasing the cost of the necessary resources to sustain the cryptocurrency.

This is 100% incorrect. Energy is spent mining Bitcoin, which has an adjustable difficulty to average mined blocks at rate of ~once per ten minutes. A basic home computer could easily mine all of the blocks if the difficulty was low enough (i.e. there were no other miners).
Dig him up and fire him again.
I agree with your observation, most people are nice.

What I realised growing up is that every day someone is forced to give a percentage or their profits or face jail time, someone gets killed because we socialise the cost of war, people get spied on by state actors and surveillance systems.

All of this despite most people being nice.

The centralisation of power is a weakness and it's being exploited by those who are not nice.
This is so outrageous a claim that it warrants the technology community responding to it. Where is Bruce Schneier?