jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
Makes sense. As more of the population ages, needs technology, lives longer but is also still interested in using technology, catering to this market will be both necessary and useful to companies.
Personally i don’t think what happened in Canada is anywhere near on the same level of “genocide” as what is going on in China, but it is impossible to truly know. I Was hoping to get some discussion on the comparison between the two situations, but I got two apologetic Canadians who agree with the prime minister and the upvote/downvote roller coaster.

It is a difficult topic to discuss without aquiring a label, and obviously very few are willing to wade in to those treacherous waters.
I'm very happy with the managed DB service. A few gotchas, but the service itself has been incredibly stable with 100% uptime from what I can tell.
The point where cryptocurrency meets the stock market is untested territory, because investor mentality re: stock value is closely tied to a highly volatile, easy-to-manipulate, unregulated, zero-storage-cost commodity. Anticipated or not, it's hard to predict where Coinbase stock will go even relative to other publicly traded securities. Not surprising they'd take money off the table at a discount.
My experience in school was similarly miserable, for similar reasons (though I don't think I had as much self-awareness about it; at the time I just thought that was how things were, that most people felt similarly)

The problem with the anti-school rhetoric ([cough] Peter Thiel) is that learning is still very important. And not just learning the skills you need to make money: even the people who drop out (or skip college) to start a successful company miss out on a huge amount of important, formative learning. We've got a growing number of powerful people who lack crucial life experience, which affects the decisions they make about what they do with that power. That's an issue.

The core problem is the way school currently works in our society; what I don't know is where to find the will and the funding to change it. The school system is already on life-support; it hobbles along with barely enough funding to continue the status quo. And the main things that need changing, IMO, are a) higher teacher-student ratios (so that the only way to manage the students isn't treating them like prisoners), and b) more multifaceted curriculums (that allow different students with different learning styles to learn in different ways). Those are expensive changes to make, no matter how you slice it.

Just spitballing here: maybe what we need is an increase in online courses/self-teaching materials for non-STEM subjects? Humanities, etc. Maybe book clubs or experts/mentors that you can ask questions of on a case-by-case basis instead of having them read off a whole lecture several times a week. Force-multipliers for teaching, enabling a person can get a real education, and not just technical skills, without the help of a failing institution?
There is no such thing as a defensible satellite installation. The only way to make a satellite really difficult to shoot down is to put it in a high orbit, but that makes it less useful for reconnaissance. While launch costs have come down slightly, the total cost for building and launching a large military satellite remains far higher than an F-35. Even large satellites carry very little maneuvering fuel and have small thrusters which don't allow for effective evasive maneuvers. Adding more fuel and larger thrusters would drastically increase costs and reduce the mass available for useful payloads. And that's not even the biggest problem. Satellites lack the sensors necessary to detect when they are under attack. It's just not practical to load them up with multiple radars and IRST sensors that would be necessary to detect an incoming antisatellite weapon.

So in short your idea won't work in the real world.
That's pretty much every employer ever in our economic system. Your labor force is a necessary evil and means to an end in far too many business leaders' minds. Any way they can reduce labor cost, the better, unfortunately they have to tiptoe around laws to do it and invent new clever approaches to achieve the same ultimate goal: labor rights and wage supression.

It's not just businesses though who are employers. If you've ever hired someone to do a contract job for you, say a plumber, electrician or some other small construction project, you probably thought about and devised all sorts of ways to reduce the time and material costs of their efforts to save you money. I see this happen with a lot of people. Our culture has a deep seated disregard for other humans when money is involved. For those who can easily afford the cost, I don't understand. For those who have to pay someone out of necessity but can't really afford the costs, I understand.

Successful businesses fall into the former category. They are not charities, they have a profit motive and margin so they can afford it otherwise they have a failing business model. It all becomes a matter of how much success of that model they want to share with those who make their model possible and how entitled they feel in deserving of reward for their models success. To me, a lot of it is sheer coincidence and luck. I say you should contribute back to those who enable and make you successful. It's all about balance though, again, a business (well, most) isn't a charity and its reasonable to expect them to garner rewards for their efforts and success, whether it be luck or innovation and hard work based. A business also shouldn't be on the other extreme operating as a sweat shop driving down others rights to benefit those in charge.

There's a healthy balance somewhere in between and many captains of industry or investors holding the purse strings seem to have forgotten this. In addition, hyper competitive markets have forced these sort of optimizations. If you take two identical businesses with identical cost structures, products, etc and one decides to better compete and lower costs to consumers, they can reduce their labor costs, then other participants in the market will have to follow suit to remain competitive or fail in a low cost driven society. So even if you understand the value of people and want to share the wealth, it would be quite difficult.

The way to protect against this is through baseline legislation like minimum wage, overtime limits, etc. When all competitors in a market have to comply or be fined a cost with too high of risk (the punishments for violation need to be high to dissuade abuse), it's not possible to undercut your competitors in these aspects because you can't optimize beyond these constraints. We need more robust labor laws and enforcement to fix this issue, IMO. Let businesses optimize outside of labor because labor is already incredibly optimized as is and will only reduce quality of life for most if it continues the ongoing trend.
Used Couchmate during the Election debates in the US. Was a great way to sync up with friends and family on the couch.
No, but since ebooks are just HTML documents the layout the code generates isn't particularly bad. It depends on the renderer of course. Renderers like iBooks even support fancy things like automatic ligatures and so on.

CSS is growing to include more typographic details like the ability to specify lowercase numbers, etc., and when the epub spec and ereader renderers catch up to that we'll be doing pretty well for ourselves. Maybe not TeX-well, but pretty damn well.
The only time I've been left owing bills was when it my was gig. I'm not sure I'd be willing to come in to a situation with someone else where I'm signing my name to something where I'm in a position to be personally responsible. Why is the other person (the original founder) not being required to pay on the debt?

Maybe you're meaning something else by 'paying their bills' - do you have some example(s) you can share?
2010's not over yet! Don't wait until the next year to be productive, start NOW. You all have 5 days left.
This all comes down to psychology.

Society will be shaped in whatever way the powerful wish it to be shaped.

Right now power comes from the ability to control the minds of the masses - to lull them into sleep and avoid their wrath.

No system is ever going to solve this issue. The issue will be solved when enough people decide that they prefer to live in a society with free markets.

Right now the public does not enforce that.
On my machine, that looks like the Euro symbol.
You can find both Fugue and Fatcow icons + many more here: http://www.iconfinder.com/browse/alphabetic
I don't really think this is very clever, either, but unlike you I can't quite put my finger on why. Has either the poster or the originator of the idea really tried to measure the effectiveness of this technique?

Furthermore, why are people in a coffee shop sitting around without coffee, waiting to be bought a cheap drip drink (as you mention)?

I think the dishonesty makes some sense as people are nice and have a natural tendency to sugarcoat or outright lie, but I am entirely uncomfortable with it.
It might feel that way to you (or me) but you can do quite a lot with cash - such as bring in different devs with different skills. I could say I'm worth $120k and my contribution should be worth that, but I only have so many skills. Taking $120k and bringing in 2-3 people with various skills for different stages of a project has a different strategic value - in most cases it's a greater value than the contributions of one person. Obviously not always, but probably in most cases.
Indeed. Very surprised by http://www.swapmeetdave.com/Ahl/Albums/Synecdoche-6-07/index...

I hope he does release a full collection of scanned/OCRed Creative Computing issues.
Known problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack .
Cool! I thought Sibley, where my wife grew up, was small. Marne has under 150 people!
Investing in an index fund (US or otherwise) is going to be your best medium risk investment (with middling to good return). There is more QE on the horizon for the euro, though the dollar is strengthening. Minimal fees, relatively minor risk (If you lose half your investment you'll have bigger things to worry about than 2.5k quid), and pretty okay returns. Plus you'll learn a bit about the market so that you can become a better investor in the future.
HTC Desire. It matches the Nexus One in hardware spec and rooting the device is just as easy (if you want to develop on custom ROM's).
I love OpenID too, I use it on every single site that supports it. However, I hear that people don't like it very much, probably because of the reason you mentioned. It's very sad, I think it had (and still has) great potential. Another problem with OpenID is that non-technical users can't really understand it :/
Pedantically, SQL is built around bags. It's one of the worst misfeatures.
From what I understand, no one at Google is making under market rates. Most likely they could get away with that, but from the salary information posted it seems they pay what most companies trying to hire good software developers pay.
I sell e-books and they almost all get pirated. I don't care, I just focus on the people who want to pay for my stuff. No skin off my nose if they don't.
Yeah, it looks like the author is a dickwad with a big ego. I don't plan to invite him to any parties.

However, the scientific criticisms of his methodology hardly look damning (according to wikipedia). It doesn't look perfect, but it doesn't look terrible either.

The criticisms wikipedia lists: he used cocaine prices rather than cocaine consumption as a variable, if you remove smaller counties +florida the drop in murders becomes statistically insignificant (drops in assault and robbery are still significant), and a couple of critics believe the model has bias and coding errors. As I said, I haven't read it in detail, so I won't comment on how significant these are.
I like using votes to determine whether or not it's worth devling into a deep thread. If there's a conversation that goes 5 levels deep, you can just scan the bottom layers - if they're getting votes, then it's likely to be a worthwhile conversation.

Similarly, if there's a bunch of responses with a score of 1 with replies forking off all over the place, having a visible score lets you catch that at-a-glance and avoid bothering with a conversation that is clearly digressing.
Oh no, what you're doing is awesome. I own three or four domain names that I'm not using yet myself.
> Slovenia was told to take a prisoner if it wanted to meet with President Obama, while the island nation of Kiribati was offered incentives worth millions of dollars to take in Chinese Muslim detainees, cables from diplomats recounted.

It's a little hard to tell from the wording, but that might be explicit evidence that the Obama administration is continuing the Bush administration's practice of extraordinary rendition. That or it's just banal, and the Obama administration is trying to find places to take our prisoners we can't release because of bureaucracy and fearmongering.
I know I shouldn't, but the prospect of consistently colder and snowier winters makes me very happy.
...if you're about to build a good scientific/numerical/statistical/(...)
library for Clojure -- I'm all ears.

Presumably you're aware of Incanter (http://incanter.org/), which wraps scientific libraries for Java.
Dates back to when messages were transmitted by telegraph - transmission via cable was for really urgent stuff that couldn't wait for the diplomatic bag.
Before disparaging wikileaks and/or the person of Julian Assange for whatever shortcomings they've got it would be good to contrast this with the opposite, say a leak from inside the North Korean or Iranian regime.

Such a leak would be applauded and the perpetrator would be declared a hero by those exact same governments that would like wikileaks to go away.

Don't shoot the messenger.

And realize that whatever your government does it does so in your name too. If it can't stand the light of day because it is illegal or embarrassing then maybe it should not be done.
I find it a bit odd that all of them bar a couple like Papyrus come out as Times New Roman on Windows. Even Trebuchet MS which is supposed to be an MS font.
Or we can just not like Mr. Assange for needlessly putting peoples lives in danger?

I don't know why but when I read the headline I chuckled. It is so apropos.
What if the reason it's kept out of the light of day is that it makes the already difficult job of people working in my nation's interest even more difficult?

Much of what's here is not in the least surprising, but having official confirmation just makes it that much more complicated for people out there trying to make things better.

Not all secrets are eeeevil, you know.
This article leaves unasked the real question: Why doesn't linux attract the plague of malware that Windows does (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/13/malware_threat_lansc...)?

Sure, Windows runs most of the desktop computers, but it even attracts more malware proportionately than Macs do. Linux runs a goodly proportion of the "high value" server installations, so you'd think that would make linux worms (at least) a lot more valuable than Windows worms.

So, does anybody have any pointers about this real question?
There's little "probably" about it.

I assure that most office furniture is absurdly over-priced and indeed would dwarf a $500 license. Just a desk chair with modest comfort and ergonomic features will be priced in that ballpark, with anything that you'd consider "nice" being higher than that.
some of the sweet spots where it _might _ be better in than postgres are:

- horizontal scalability

- flexible datastructures

- map/reduce
I'm learning a handful of construction skills while building my own tiny home on wheels. I think everyone should have the basic skills to fix things around their home and or do simple renovations. I installed the last window last week :). Also diving into Python with my girlfriend.
Images of the build.
https://plus.google.com/photos/117374232859136026472/albums/...
was it peter-thiel's talk that mentioned that you are not a lottery ticket ?
As I understand this, the CMU team allegedly deanonymized SR2 in the course of their research, and then shared the information with the FBI. Once they had done that, they were allegedly forced to withdraw their Black Hat presentation. There's also the issue that the CMU team had NSA funding. I haven't seen any claims that the CMU team was initially focusing on SR2 and other "illegal" sites. But I wouldn't be surprised by that.

If that's what happened, it wasn't a wiretap. It was a tip.
This doesn't surprise me. When I was in college we had a daily paper I worked at the photo dept. We has a box of "feature Photos". they were kind of filler (campus life, people playing hacky sack, feeding ducks , setting up for events etc..) I figured out one day could look at the photos and tell who took them by the style (the photographer name is on the back).

At one job I had we called uncommented, poorly formatted code "curtis code" for some reason.....
This is known as UNCOL, and many attempts at it have been made, dating back to the 1960s.
Is this article about engine or exhaust noise?

I prefer quiet exhausts, and it's nice to hear the engine itself sometimes when I deliberately select too low a gear.

I look at loud exhausts with disdain, and think they show childishness, insecurity or narcissism.
Federer seems like a decent enough guy...
But can they tell us if TJ Holowaychuk is really only one person?
I think I read that the project was fully funded in only 8 minutes of going live. And within 7 hours it reached $1Miliion

He also managed to raise that insane amount to building a Tesla museum.
> He has single handedly revolutionized professional sports and marketing...

I think you might want to give some credit to the marketing team at nike that more or less told him what to say/do, promoted him + the products, cleaned up after all his messes, and prevented bad press from coming out. Which all lent to his further successes.

At least that's what I've heard.
Frankly, the technical implementation.
The walled garden and app store seems to work in their favor then. Microsoft saw that 30% cut that Apple got and decided to throw everything good away in an attempt to get that for themselves. It apparently never occurred to them that this wasn't something you could just bolt onto an ecosystem that went all the way back to the 1980s.
I see your point, but who would benefit most from making loans function the way you're suggesting? It obviously would be businesses.
>Aka, that you could clone Harry Potter's plot, characters, and story while not copying each word of the book verbatim, and it still be a copy of Harry Potter.

Would that be a copyright infringement? Probably just trademark infringement at that point?
>You can't have it both ways. If APIs are copyrightable ... then Google's copying was clearly not fair use.

You seem to have misunderstood the idea of fair use. Fair use is a specific doctrine covering the acceptable ("fair") use of copyrighted works. Fair use of a non-copyrightable work would be, technically speaking, a contradiction in terms.

See, for example, the US copyright office's explanation: https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/more-info.html The first sentence is "Fair use is a legal doctrine that promotes freedom of expression by permitting the unlicensed use of copyright-protected works in certain circumstances."

Furthermore, there is no requirement that fair use be non-commercial. It is more likely that the courts will find that non-commercial use is fair, but that is not a hard and fast rule. An easy example here is book reviews quoting passages from the text.
Can you please not post unsubstantive comments or flamebait to HN? You've been doing it a lot, unfortunately, and we're trying for something different here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Why must the masses be tethered to a monopolized ephemeral value store?

None of us owe servitude to old debts, contracts, wives tales, sonnets, limericks, hymns, poems, stories.

When the world changes it does so because society decides there are different words to better represent its goals.

Laws are no longer based upon the words of Gods. The rich are not Gods. They don’t represent meritorious effort when they’re inheriting and being gifted wealth with no strings (see Trump admin and covid payouts, it’s still happening under Biden; he’s just less gaudy.)

Why not just logistical distribution of materials to boost communal health, etc.

The masses are already used to only being able afford a vacation every X months. Working off a home for X years.

Why do we still enable a minority to shrug off the same responsibility in deference to old contracts none of us are legally obligated to mind?
Because innovative != ethical!
Hopefully it would stifle innovation that depends on tracking users and platform lock-in. I think there would certainly be space for innovation beyond that, possibly with even better conditions for competition as it would be easier for users to move between platforms.
Stopped using WhatsApp 2 years ago. I can contact most people in telegram but I’d like to uninstall soon. They make it hard, you need 1 month inactivity. This means 1 month of potentially lost messages you will never see.
> Thousands of National Guard troops, in addition to police in riot gear, were dispersed to clear the Capitol.

Were it a left wing protest, the National Guard would not have been delayed by the federal executive until after the insurrectionists had spent their energy and either failed to achieve their violent goals because the targets had escaped immediate threat, and would hace acted violently to disperse the crowd earlier, and the right-wing counter-protestors that would have been present (left-wing counter-protestors were specifically told to avoid this event by major left-leaning groups because of the risk of violence) would have been permitted by law enforcement to freely act violently against the same group targeted by LE. We know all that, because we've seen it time and again over the last year, across the US, including specifically in D.C.
While on the whole you are completely correct, it's worth remembering that the risks associated with taking recommend doses of vitamins are negligible.

The only plausible confounding factor is people behaving less responsibility in the belief that they are somehow safe. On a personal level, try not to do that.
Chase is pretty good about giving me debit cards, credit cards, FDIC protection, e-checks, safe/reversible transactions, and fraud protection. They also do actually answer the phone when I call.

Maybe you just need a new bank? Bitcoin provides none of these solutions.
Network externalities in communication networks make it so that you can create a 10x better application and still have 0 chance of competing.
Is that really "SD cards won't last 100 years" or "...won't last for 100 years of read/write operation"?

That's solid state storage. If it won't last 100 years just sitting around, what possibly could? I think we just have to assume some amount of archivist activity is inevitable if we want data to last decades or even centuries: someone must copy the data periodically; and the data needs error correction built in.
I built a web based intercom to stay connected with my parents: https://pagernation.com/

:)
People: parent is a factoid. What's the point in downvoting that?
I guess it makes sense. Doesn't make a difference if you deliver the chest with the key to the lock or the chest without the lock.

> For example, if you use a data backup service integrated with our Services (like iCloud or Google Drive), they will receive information you share with them, such as your WhatsApp messages.

https://www.whatsapp.com/legal/updates/privacy-policy/?lang=...

Looks like you're right, it must be unencrypted.