jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
If it doesn't strike down the $10,000 civil fine (which could make you lose your house, think about it) it's pointless.

Is there a record of how many bills Ron Paul has gotten passed? Because if he's as loony as his son, this is never going to get serious attention (anyone can introduce a bill and anyone else can put a hold on it too).
Then does it make sense to say "that light took 50,000,000 years to get here"? Or is the black hole 'truly' 30 years old?
> Whether the naive implementation of map can be easily parallelized across multiple machines/threads/processes is not relevant. In fact, he even says that you need a 'super genius' to write the scaling map and reduce operations.

I think this brings out why I wasn't just "nitpicking." Even though you're presumably pretty savvy, Joel's article has confused you. You're thinking that the easy parallelization is an attribute of the implementation of map, and that a sufficiently smart implementor could make it work.

In fact, the implementation of parallel map is pretty irrelevant here. The important thing is that the function provided to map create no inter-loop dependencies. And given that, you don't need to be a super-genius to implement MapReduce. The super-genius was in coming up with the interface constraints in the first place and recognizing that they were applicable to a large class of problems.

So there are two problems with these "details that are not relevant to the article".

One is that Joel is presenting these details in order to convince you of his point of view. But since they aren't actually true, any confidence they inspire in you is misplaced. You'd be better off with a bald assertion of the importance of functional programming, backed up with "trust me, I know better than you." Admittedly, that's not as much fun to read.

The second problem is that, although Joel has achieved his goal of convincing many people of his point of view, he has done damage to their models of the world in the process. I fully expect to see newbies for years believing that you could never possibly implement MapReduce in C or C++, or that Java requires you to create a whole new file instead of an anonymous function, or that Google Search works by invoking a MapReduce job. And these false beliefs will do real damage to their lives.
A good chance to teach both Machine Learning and Python, should be interesting to see if any lecturers actually try it..
Also, Fortran has long been used for parallel programs (on mainframes). Guy Steele is working on Fortress, and he has some interesting insights on the issue.

But I do think that a practical solution will have to rethink not only programming languages, but the concept of programs. It will be made by a young and naive tinkerer, trying to solve a specific problem on actual parallel hardware, not by guys who have been entrenched in the field for decades. So it won't happen til that concrete technology (eg. 100 cores) is widely available. While there may be similarities with functional and object oriented programming (Alan Kay's version), it won't be based on them.
Alan Kay makes reference to Doug Engelbart's 1968 "Mother of All Demos."

I show that demo to all the new members of my UX team at work, to remind them of where we come from, and to show some brilliant ideas in computing that still don't work as well today.

In it, he is able to manipulate data without "opening" and "saving" documents, he just writes data as naturally and seamlessly as one might jot a note on a pad of paper.

Also, and this is what really floors me - he is able to share his screen with a remote user, and vice versa - it's built into the system. In 2011, we still need to install software on each machine to do this, and there's no universal standard for the action of simply sharing your dang desktop with someone else.

Englebart, Alan Kay, Ivan Sutherland, Jef Raskin - all giants. I'm so happy to see their work continue to be studied and celebrated.

Edit: I didn't say, but should have--thank you old_sound for sharing this, I would have never seen it otherwise.
The article is written from an American perspective: War is something happening far from home and the participants are men in the military, which (if they survive) may return to peace and safety after service have ended.

The perspective is very different when war is happening in your own country, where victims are not just trained military personnel. Neither men nor women love the war that destroy your home and livelihood and kills your parents or children.
We nearly always post a comment when we change a URL: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... The most significant title edits get comments too: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... If we published a title log, URL changes could certainly be included.

The idea of marking every single edit on the site itself feels like asking for trouble. I fear that it would lead to more objections of the litigious, bureaucratic, meta type. Even though it's a tiny minority of users who make such objections, they have a lot of energy for it and there are many more of them than us. That kind of thing could quickly burn us out, like an unintended DoS attack. On the other hand, maybe it would just work fine; it's hard to know.

Also, I'm skeptical that it would create more confidence in the site, because the users who want to feel that way basically already do, and the ones who don't probably wouldn't be persuaded by more data. There's always going to be something that's not included, or the suspicion that there is.

Because of this, the way we address concerns is to answer people's individual questions, here and by email. We're happy to do that, and there basically isn't anything we aren't willing to explain. That's by design. We try never to do anything that isn't defensible to the community. Even when there are genuine secrets that can't be spelled out, like how the anti-abuse software works, we can say what they are at a high level and why a secret is needed. Those cases are rare.
Right now we take JavaScript code and we compile it to ObfuScript (obfuscated JavaScript).

It would be much better to have a variety of languages as front-ends and a real assembly language as a back-end.
$30 is 5 hours of pay? Wow. $30 is more like one hour for a new grad first beginning a job.
Any time there's a discussion of Indians or Hindus, why do people bring in caste? Do US universities admit students based on caste? Does the visa officer in the US consulate admit only people of a certain caste? Does a company hiring in the US ask for the applicants caste?

Most of India doesn't care about caste; it's time that people _outside_ India stopped caring about Indians' caste too.
If you really want to dig into objects in irb, you should check out https://github.com/matthew/method_lister

It'll give you a really good idea of where all those methods on your objects come from.
"If you're looking for an hourly rate or a salary before funding, you've missed the point."

I hope you are offering 50% equity. If not, it's not worth my time. This looks like every other business guy looking for a tech founder: you want to offer almost nothing for doing all of the hard work.
What's wrong w/ whois(1)?
I use punctuation for my home servers.

Solidus /
Guillemet >>
Pilcrow ¶
Interrobang ‽
Snark .~
Numero #
Caret ^
Bullet *
Tilde ~
After nuclear wars, asteroid strikes, AND super volcanoes, the environment on earth might just be comparable to the next best planet we can find in the next Xk years.
Exactly right. And even if I hadn't heard the word before, somehow in arabic you can actually intuitively reach the meaning of the word, based on its structure. It's really an amazing language.
If it is well known human behaviour, is it their personal responsibility? Especially combined with the deliberate exploitation of said behaviour by corporations?
All too often premature optimization is brought up as the antidote to carefully think about what you're implementing prior to actually opening up the IDE and start coding tests madly.

Thinking is hard, and takes time, and we want to get the feature out now, immediately, and worry about performance later. If at all.

And, sad to say (for an engineer), it's not clear that from a "business" perspective it's wrong. Hard to argue when accumulating features seems to matter more than crappy software. We have a lot more software these days, to run all of these bright new pieces of hardware, and perhaps because I'm an old-timer, the general quality seems to have degraded significantly. But the novelty of the stuff certainly has exploded, and I'm continually delighted by the twists and features that folks are coming up with, while being saddened by crashes, slowdowns, need for restarting, etc.
These should all be personalized, yes.

Nobody should directly copy these templates but use the concepts that work.
groups and communities are too regressive these days, i think individualist media like twitter is the place where most original voices are
I can drive from Como to Lugano in Switzerland in 30 minutes.

I guess the Alps are not a big issue.
So much of American attitudes toward food are a result of our last great famine -- the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Back then, parents made their children "clean their plate" because tomorrow there may be no food at all.

This also extends to our fondness for processed food. Processed food may be bad for you, but it's easier to store and ship, keeps for longer, and tastes better when it reaches your plate. It provided greater food security at a time when massive crop loss still loomed in recent memory.
Interestingly, their hands were somewhat tied when it came to coordinate system precision [1] because they had eight 7-bit words to encode with data.

They couldn't say "34.20 N 118.17 W", which would indicate they're talking about the whole campus and industrial park it's in, because that's only 6 words.

Instead, by defining it to a precision of one arcsecond, they imply that JPL is located within the 30-by-25-meter rectangle [2] between 34°11'58.5"N 118°10'31.5"W and 34°11'57.5"N 118°10'30.5"W, which is basically a turnaround and associated parking lot island.

[1] Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2170/
[2] Rectangular [3] because the circle around the earth at higher latitudes is smaller than the circle at the equator.
[3] OK, approximately rectangular. It's rectangular on a Mercator projection map!
And it's arguable that the original vision for the LWF was mistaken. Its goal was to be able to counter the Warsaw Pact airforces, airframe for airframe in a quantitative battle. But the Soviets were in the process of introducing the Fulcrum that would have outclassed such a simple fighter. A radar-less aircraft would have relied upon GCI, which the Soviets would have been quite successful in jamming/spoofing.
>I'm saying that the exponential rise of technology coupled with the same exact type of mind our ancestors had 2,000 years ago is a significant source of the issue right now. The solution to create even more powerful technology to solve this problem will likely only lead to a bigger problem in the future.

I don't think that's obvious. It could be that we're at a part of the techno-societal landscape that happens to be bad, but if we keep working on technology, we'll get to a new part of the landscape that happens to be better. For example, as VR tech gets better, maybe it will replace social media with something healthier. ("If you're going through hell, keep going" as they say.)
This might be a bit naive but doesn't a cold war by definition imply the possibility of it getting hot?
Or in other words: Isn't a cold war that is impossible to get hot just peace?
Skimming these, neither of those papers appears to document any demonstrable links. They're relying on self reporting in surveys and case studies that seems to produce what is at best correlation, potentially heavily biased by the self-reporting from people who at least judging by the case studies I skim appears to have to some degree self-diagnosed issues they may or may not have been right about.
> Amazon’s market share in e-commerce is greater than 40%; the next closest competitor is Walmart at around 6%.

In antitrust law, the case is won or lost on the definition of the 'relevant market'. Mr. Lonsdale seems to think that the relevant market is limited to e-commerce. I imagine Amazon's lawyers would point out that Amazon competes with brick-and-mortar stores (though during the pandemic, a bit less).
If school starts in september, around christmas.
> if we just require long passwords, no other requirement

... then I bet lots of users will choose passwords like "passwordpasswordpassword".
Google is under attack from all sides. Antitrust scrutiny at home, regulations from Australia and Europe. Apple anonymizing iPhone users. Brave picking up steam...

Is their moat as wide as they think it is? They don't exactly have a healthy revenue diversity.
The article mentions the importance of comments and documentation inline in code. I tend to agree - well-written code is great and all, but a good comment can bring in context external to the code and make _why_ code is what it is more clear to future readers. And reviewers. Comments explaining _what_ code does largely aren't needed - that's evident from usage. But the _why_? Some people would say code which can't be explained by one liner comments is "too clever". Well, I'm inclined to disagree - it's hard to fit a full historical justification for an awkward handling of an edge case into a single line. I once wrote a 17 line long comment above an 8 line diff; that much context felt justified to explain the odd code. A reviewer, hilariously, had this to say:

This right here is "here be dragons" commenting level Double Dragon.

When I come back to code I've written long in the future, I think I'll be happier to have written the detailed "commenting level Double Dragon" long comments, over the more ambiguous yet still traditional `// HERE BE DRAGONS`. Mostly because that comment will give me the context I need to know if any of that _why_ has changed and thus in what way it's likely safe to change the commented code.
K-9 is a really great mail app for android! In my opinion it's the best app if you want to use a custom SMTP/IMAP server instead of using a solution like hotmail/google/etc.

It also has PGP support (with the help of OpenKeyChain to manage certificates) that works great! There are no other well known solutions for applications supporting PGP in Android; this is huge.

People that either want to avoid walled gardens or need proper encryption to their mail need to support this project!
Great interview, what a brilliant guy.

As an aside, I wish there was a simple/standard way to link to podcast episodes.
I really don't mean to be dismissive of your contribution, so please take this in the best light possible:

Yuck. Use continuations with anonymous fns that tell the GUI what to do next. The state is in the closure implicitly!

I wish I had an articulate counterargument, but just look at this: https://xstate.js.org/docs/#promise-example

Statecharts are a formalism for modeling stateful, reactive systems.

Beautiful is in the eye of the beholder, and never moreso when the programmer is blind to the cost of repetition and state.

Arc got it right. http://www.paulgraham.com/arcchallenge.html

Write a program that causes the url said (e.g. http://localhost:port/said) to produce a page with an input field and a submit button. When the submit button is pressed, that should produce a second page with a single link saying "click here." When that is clicked it should lead to a third page that says "you said: ..." where ... is whatever the user typed in the original input field. The third page must only show what the user actually typed. I.e. the value entered in the input field must not be passed in the url, or it would be possible to change the behavior of the final page by editing the url.

(defop said req
(aform [onlink "click here" (pr "you said: " (arg _ "foo"))]
(input "foo")
(submit)))
Of course it is a point in "school should be open" debate. It's just that kids don't vote and lack political power.
The cannon itself has already been test fired on the ground. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KD_A69B1cyg for video of that.
I strongly disagree with the boss section. People leave bad bosses not bad companies.

She also assumes that a manager/boss is definitely doing a good job and therefore an employee leaving is a hiring problem. Not really... it's interesting if this is a common logic among HR
The counteroffer argument is weak and simply not true. And it led me to think that this Guthrie guy seems to believe that the only way of people leaving a job is looking for another one.

This is particularly not true inside the tech industry: good employees are constantly harassed by other companies. They will offer higher wages, shorter hours and tons of other benefits to make a wanted engineer turn. Sometimes those offers are hard to turn down, even if you are pretty happy with your job.

What I've seen happen to me and friends is a simple matter of chosing to be honest or not. Last time it happened to me I sat down with my boss and told him:

- Boss, these guys want me pretty bad, they have been harassing me for months now and I turned down every offer. Problem is, they gave me this X offer now and, taking into account that I'm getting married next year, the extra money would be handy, this is getting hard to say no.

He gave me a counteroffer and we lived happily ever after.

Bottomline: sometimes the employee does not really want to leave, but it's a tough market out there. If you want to keep your engineers (and other employees as well) you simply have to be a better workplace than the others. This includes money, benefits, hours, bureaucracy, stress levels and every other possible aspect that your employee might take into account.

It's not really that different than building a product which is better than your competitor. Problem is that H&R and Hiring guys want so bad to make a case for themselves that they try those magic and golden rules that simply won't work.

You are dealing with people, be nice to them and they will be nice to you in return. If they don't, you don't want them in your ranks anyway.
The article mentions trusting HR with the company's deepest, darkest secrets... Company secrets are probably one of the biggest factors of my work satisfaction.

If there are hush-hush meetings and rumors circulating, that's a huge red flag. Run your business transparently. You never know which of your employees might have a solution to whatever problem the business is facing.
that seems awfully dangerous, though? if you drive yourself and have no sign there, you can at least argue. if the published information tesla is using is claiming 100 miles an hour is the limit, the car will speed up?
Those products are clearly called out on its website.

I'm also impressed with how much cheaper Walmart is than Amazon for a large number of the things I just ordered.

We need an aggregator that compares prices between Amazon, Walmart, Target, etc. for the same or similar SKUs. It'd be even better if you could build your cart with it and then it put together the relevant orders with each service. (This maybe already exists, I just haven't searched for it.)
Eneba | Kaunas, Lithuania | Full Time | Onsite (remote while quarantine is in effect) | Backend, frontend developer | https://www.eneba.com/

Eneba.com is a newly established marketplace for games. With a huge selection of titles at the best price, Eneba is quickly becoming a go-to place to find the best game deals. While game collection in the market grows by the day everyone can find something for their liking - fresh new games, world-renowned game titles or various console giftcards.

Our merchants rave about us and we're steadily growing a loyal client base.
We had one the biggest seed rounds in the Baltics and we're in the gaming market that actually grows in recessions/quarantines.

We have a very strong team (tech and business wise) and are looking for people that are willing to join and learn.
We're looking for

* mid level backend developer. You'd be working with php (symfony) most of the time, a bit of golang and occasional devops tool.

* junior/mid level frontend developer. You'd be working with react and apollo

Hiring: we do a <1h meet to get to know each other (video conf. due to quarantine) and ask to spend a few hours on a coding task at home.

Mail to karolis@[domain from above] to talk
In late January my wife and daughter visited Disneyland, and there were a handful of COVID-19 cases reported in SoCal around the same time. On the Sunday they were due to fly back, my daughter came down with a very strong cough (she said it was even "hurting her throat") and a high fever of around 102F. We had been following the outbreak in China and my wife called the CDC to inquire about getting her tested for COVID-19.

They said they had no ability to get her tested, that we should not be concerned at all that it might actually be COVID-19, and she should visit a clinic. The clinic said it was probably just the flu, and told her to go ahead and fly back but to wear a mask.

This was absolutely criminal incompetence on the CDC's part.
I would pay to watch a remote-piloted robotic Trackmania if there were good enough systems to transfer track feel to the remote controls.
This is a far better dashboard than the arcgis nonsense that John Hopkins wrapped in an iframe. Still, the one thing it needs (that's missing from others) is the time series graph data for fatalities; just a simple graph of `csse_covid_19_data/csse_covid_19_time_series/time_series_covid19_deaths_global.csv` in the John Hopkins data.

With the lack testing on any meaningful sample sizes outside of South Korea, the only really useful number is the fatality rate. The number of infected is just a total shot in the dark guess (it could be a few million by now; many asymptomatic or who won't get sick at all).
Take it with a grain of salt but I am hearing (through finance podcasts) that a lot of hedge fund managers and investment bankers are working alone from home and without physical proximity with their teams, the panic levels are setting in. I think it makes sense to me - when we are not physically banded together, we have a lost sense of safety and security.
Why wouldn't the OS manufacturer bundle required drivers?
If marketing was all it took, .Net would have destroyed Java back when Sun was dying and Microsoft was still the monopolistic gorilla of the corporate universe.
And, at least, better than starvation.
Nice collection.

Also, seeing people add and edit each other's comments and insights in this doc gave me an idea for a fintech app: basically a social app that would let people put forward their personal cases for why you should buy or sell a particular stock at any given point.
Agreed. The US surgeon general lied to the population about the efficacy of masks to try to preserve them for healthcare workers. It would have been better to ask people to preserve N95 for healthcare workers and instead improvise their own. Any reduction in droplet transmission is going to drop the R0 of this and help flatten the curve.

As an alternative see Hong Kong, where they are encouraging the population to improvise masks: https://www.consumer.org.hk/ws_en/news/specials/2020/mask-di...
"Why Telling People They Don’t Need Masks Backfired: To help manage the shortage, the authorities sent a message that made them untrustworthy."

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-...

And some data back from SARS: "Always wearing a mask when going out was associated with a 70% reduction in risk compared with never wearing a mask. Wearing a mask intermittently was associated with a smaller yet significant reduction in risk."

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/10/2/03-0730_article

I saw a lot of people sanctimoniously talking about fit tests in normal healthcare settings as if an imperfect fit dropped effectiveness immediately down to 0% from 100%.