jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
> I never "underplayed" the importance of this, which would suggest some sort of "well, yeah that's bad, but no big deal".

Okay, you don't think you're underplaying the importance of a person's support of torture, but in saying things like this you are lumping all a person's transgressions together:

> if you are going to write someone off every time their decision has a downside

This is absolutely not "every time," this is the time the guy used his influence to provide public support for the institution of torture by America instead of using his influece to condemn it.

Incidentally, I'm not talking about writing someone off. I'm talking about excluding him from the very enthusiastic category person we should admire as an exemplar of good which pg created for Ronco. (seriously, he invoked the Bible)

> they can't win, no matter how good they are, and so the existence of such downsides isn't a strike against their goodness at all, any more than a politician is evil for recognizing the existence of tradeoffs between funding for hospitals and funding for schools.

I agree that if we regard all moral transgressions as being equally serious then it makes no sense to draw the distinction between good and bad acts, or perhaps even good and bad people. I just think that is an absurd premise.

> Why the focus on the case of the outcomes being equally bad?

A choice between equally undesireable alternatives is usually what is meant by "dilemma." Some of that is just the dictionary, but more intuitively it's just not usually worth arguing about the cases where one choice is regarded as worse than another.

> That's the same thing I'm criticizing on your part. You could equally well play the game of "he advocated letting millions of people die! Bad!"

In much the same way that I do not believe all moral transgressions are equally serious, I do not believe all arguments are equally sound.
As you say, in a phone screen might be suitable place for it. And I certainly don't think there's any point in iterating on it, the only real optimization available is to eliminate the third check for 3 and 5 simultaneously. Truly rocket science.

My main problem is that, as a candidate, I would interpret being asked this question to mean that the interviewers have already undervalued me (or worse, have no idea how to value me).

One weak question in hours of interviews isn't bad, but now I'm mentally preparing for more weak questions. Making a candidate disengage is a sure way to get a bad interview, or a good interview that results in a "no thanks" to your offer.
Submission from 2 days ago, although minimal "discussion":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8907627
If you look closely enough at anyone, you will find something to dislike about them. Funny thing about people. Funnier thing: if you look closely enough at anyone you dislike, you can find something to like about them.

People are probably mostly the product of their environment and I doubt anyone here knows Ron Conway well enough to discuss his position on torture. Let his actions speak for him; you can be opposed to torture under pretty much any circumstances, as I am, and still regard someone with a different point of view as basically good.

I really wish your comment didn't get so much of the attention in this thread, it's a bit of a distraction from what should've been the main point of the article.
The biggest reason is it is unnatural material that your body is not used to.

Irrelevant, our bodies are capable of handling quite a lot.

These people who study the effects are mere scientists.

And the only people qualified to study these effects are then... what? High priests? Quacks? Astrologers?

They have no way to know how your genetically evolved body processes things at a detailed level, they can only look at it at one tiny narrow perspective.

Uh, science has mapped the biochemical pathways of a lot of substances, and science learns more each day.

To be safe its generally best to avoid unnatural food and drinks completely.

How about perfectly natural toxins, then? Should we avoid those? Or are they safe because they are "natural"?

To argue that something is natural or unnatural is a sure sign that you don't really know what you're talking about.
As with many other crimes, it's done by many entirely different people for many entirely different reasons.
The hugely long disclaimer at the bottom is rather distracting.

One can only assume, the creator has had some problems before with previous sites, or has had extensive legal dealings in offline world.
"This better way of computing variance goes back to a 1962 paper by B. P. Welford and is presented in Donald Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, Vol 2, page 232, 3rd edition. Although this solution has been known for decades, not enough people know about it."

I'd generalize that to "although Knuth's book has been around for decades, not enough people have read it yet."
He didn't get the "famous hacker" label for this incident. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Lamo
I quit drinking soda a few years ago, and instead switched to carbonated mineral water. Recently, I bought a soda stream and make my own instad. Just carbonate tap water, add some concentrated flavour, and there you have something that isn't as boring as plain water. A can of CO2 lasts about a month, and it's so nice not to have to carry all that damn drink home everytime you shop.
Actually, now I can't find the "elsewhere" either and I wonder whether I misread. Having looked again, I agree with you: standard-according-to-Snellen vision means being able to resolve features corresponding to (e.g.) an "E" on a 5x5 pixel grid with pixels of size 1 arc-minute.

Matching that up with the resolution of a display device is still a bit subtle. For instance, suppose you're trying to display an "E" of that size on the display, but it's offset by half a pixel vertically. Result: you get a grey rectangle that's a bit darker along the left edge. :-)

(I think my conclusion from all this is: what Apple are claiming about the iPhone 4 display is about as close to the truth as it's reasonable to expect in marketing materials. That is: everything they've said is at least defensible, but they've put a very positive spin on everything. Seems fair enough to me. And as a pixel-freak who isn't currently a smartphone user, I'm awfully tempted by the new iPhone...)
youtube-dl is great. It has a bunch of functionality, like "-x" to extract audio via ffmpeg (very useful for saving space).

I also like the "whitey" CLI interface to youtube, which uses youtube-dl to get the video URL and can either download it, or feed it straight into mplayer.

For iplayer, there's also get-iplayer ( http://www.infradead.org/get_iplayer/html/get_iplayer.html ), which is pretty fantastic; except that sometimes they enable some new feature by default, which breaks the old behaviour (eg. automatically transcoding everything to the same format, which is IMHO a waste of time and quality).

Unfortunately the BBC have recently removed the programme feed that get-iplayer uses, so it's no longer possible to list available programmes as text (useful, eg., for grep). Instead you have to actually visit the iPlayer Web site and navigate around to find each programme, which is a pain.

If the worst comes to the worst, it's usually possible to find the URL of a Flash video using a Web inspector tool like Firebug, and perhaps a bit of URL-unescaping. Protip: lots of Web sites don't care about user agents other than (the most popular) Web browsers, so set the user agent of your download tool (wget, cURL, etc.) to match some version of Firefox, to avoid inconsistent behaviour.
Not to bail Trump out because I have found his reactive leadership bad (all he had to do was get out of the way of the experts), but America--in my humble opinion--has always been bottom up. The idea that >300 million people can agree on anything always amazes me, and the design of the country is to allow as much autonomy to localities as possible while maintaining broad collaboration and cohesion. This is already shining where the US testing capacity has gone from basically zero to the highest in the world (>40k per day) in a matter of 2 weeks. Yes, the Federal government dropped the ball (tapping Scott Gottlieb instead of Pence would have made a big difference), but the private sector stepped up big. Two weeks from now I expect N95 masks, other PPE, and vents all being made in huge capacities.

So back to your "people on the ground" comment. I totally agree. It's the bottom up Americanism that will get us through this, as usual. It reminds me of the famous Abba Eban quote often misattributed to Churchill, "Americans Will Always Do the Right Thing — After Exhausting All the Alternatives". This totally holds true right now, and likely always will.

The really amazing thing is going to be three American companies proving through clinical trials in the next 6-8 months that we invented a new technology (genetic-based vaccines) that produced a functional vaccine by the end of the year (Moderna), that we have a potent anti-viral compound ready to use in two months (Giliad), and antibody therapy ready 8 months (Regeneron). That's nuts. If we go through the motions this time, we will be prepared to dramatically increase the speed of approvals and testing when the the next viral pandemic comes.
> I see the antiviral drug remdesivir as the best option.

and

> I don't see any real alternatives. Neither the malaria drug chloroquine nor the HIV drugs ritonavir/lopinavir. Both have been the subject of clinical studies, but the results haven't been convincing.

Prof. Drosten doesn't share the optimism regarding chloroquine, that many on the Internet hold.
Articles like this are missing an important point. Namely, that generic data structures in programming languages are used to represent rich semantic data models. This is done by a process that I would call 'implementing'. It is a mapping of a certain semantic model to, often a rather limited, set of primitives. Some languages, are completely optimized for one type of data structure. Take for example the relational database, in which everything is a relation.

During the implementation process some knowledge is lost. What the author is describing is a kind of merge operation. If you would know the semantic meaning of the data that is being represented, it is rather obvious what choice should be made. When a number represent a quantity, it is obvious they should be added, but when a number is a kind of identifier, like an article number, it is obvious that they should not be added. And yes, maybe in that case the number should have been better represented as a string. In the process of implementing it is often smart to represent it like a number, because it is much easier to deal with a 64-bit number than a variable length string.
These satellites should be in low enough orbits that any junk from them burns up in the atmosphere as their orbits decay. Maybe there could be an issue from collisions in low orbit pushing objects into higher orbits but those likely would be erratic orbits with low points that still subject it to decay.
At a certain point, external oxygenation (heart-lung machine) may be more appropriate. But hyperbaric chamber, elevated supplemental oxygen, and repiratory assistance might be an approach.
There's both partial pressure (O2 concentration and overall atmospheric pressure) and repiratory function. Forced-air respirators (most current models) and iron lungs (operating with partial vacuum) both address this mechanism.
I guess that it would cost a lot. Technically you can do that with traditional coal plants.
Yea, sshmitm makes sense also, but I wouldn't consider that a 0day exactly. :P
> Even if you find that you're in a very special universe, you need an explanation of why it is that way.

Emotionally "need", perhaps. Scientifically, not really.

> The multiverse hypothesis helps, by giving a plausible answer which avoids belief in gods.

The multiverse conjecture is -- by your own description -- not a hypothesis in the scientific sense, because, as you say, it cannot be falsified empirically. Like any belief in God that is compatible with science, its simply -- from a scientific perspective -- superfluous. It has no advantage, except the emotional advantage it provides to someone with an emotional bias to (1) have an explanation even if it is untestable, and (2) to avoid that explanation relying on belief in God.
true, damn, let me fix that... I was thinking of using sie in the accusative rather than the dative ... hopefully 'ich mag sie' works better, right?
Any feedback would be really appreciated. You can leave feedback on Gitcuss http://www.gitcuss.com/r/beydogan/gitcuss
I totally agree with this, and LISPs have always been pragmatic about state, although I get the feeling that Clojure emphasizes purity a bit more than other LISPs. I was replying to two separate points from parent, the points weren't meant to go together :)
Totally worse. free(NULL) preforms no action so there is no requirement for the if statement. ;)
I recall reading an article (was linked from HN some time back) about people nearing the end of their lives. Nobody wished they had spent more time at work.

Startup culture focuses too much on money and fails to look at the many beautiful, important things that money cannot buy.

Contrary to the aphorism; he who dies with the most toys / money didn't win. He missed out on living a life to the fullest potential.
So you work on a laptop? Not only do studies show that open offices decrease productivity, they ALSO show that less screen real-estate decreases productivity.
I'd be more impressed by his advice -- in order to be able to afford anything you need, be frugal about what you don't -- if he hadn't happened to mention the time that his wife bought a house for $2.8M (and returned it, whatever exactly he means by that). If you can afford houses that expensive, your ability to afford nice stuff is probably not entirely the result of frugality.
> you will still want to hand off your records to an accountant to sort out taxes and generally get counsel.

Ditto. For instance, if I had talked to my accountant soon enough, I could have saved half of my company registration costs - he knew about a special, not too well advertised, local program, which my in-house lawyer did not know of. Also, tax legislation looks like a minefield to me - a competent[1] accountant is a mine-sweeper that may save your bacon.

[1] Horror story from friends: years ago they formed a company, didn't do much business, dissolved (which in itself may be hard, especially if someone moved away). Later had to keep paying fines because of paperwork improperly filed by their accountant.

P.S. The "grumpy editor" at lwn.net occasionally looks at FOSS accounting software, and readers chime in; e.g. at http://lwn.net/Articles/314577/
Wikipedia seems to think his fame is not quite as clear-cut as the man himself sees it:

This article may not meet the notability guideline for biographies. Please help to establish notability by adding reliable, secondary sources about the topic.
How many news organizations have good journalists though? I can count the ones I like on my fingers and some of them are mostly just bloggers as well. The market can support a few organizations doing international stuff, most of the rest just need reprint permissions.

The field is moving to much more federated-ness very quickly. People will not pay. Newspapers will not survive. Sorry.
I note Jobs' discourse on Apple being at the intersection of engineering and liberal arts, with an emphasis on industrial design. This is very unusual in the computer business, and I think it's a key indicator as to where Jobs wants to see his company going after he leaves the helm.

Ives is clearly the Chief Designer. And he's being called out for something.

My guess is that in the absence of Jobs 2.0, Jobs 1.0 is trying to inculcate a design-led culture within Apple, and sees Ives as the most likely successor to keep his particular design aesthetic front-and-centre. In this scenario, it doesn't matter too much who handles the business of marketing, manufacturing, and developing the products -- as long as they continue to be design-led and follow the same basic aesthetic goals. Which is not simply to make high-end PCs or smartphones, but to make stuff that is pretty and pleasant to use.

(Here on HN, we're mostly technophiles. It's important to remember that most of the public are not -- and they prefer beautiful objects to ugly but functional ones. Beauty is an important market, as Apple's market cap demonstrates ...)
Also by Sai Emrys (http://saizai.com/):

Meditation for Hackers: All-point techniques (http://s3.amazonaws.com/saizai-public/Sai%20Emrys%20-%20Medi...)
He's also International Director, and if Tesco plans on conquering USA next, it may be a logical fit from that angle.
How does a set intersection have an asymptote?
It's funny that you mentioned Windows Phone as an alternative.

The marketing pukes at Redmond are probably popping open the bubbly right now.

~~Posted from a Windows Phone~~
Simarly, x86_64 condition codes have a parity flag because the terminal needed it.
How do physicists control model parsimony, so that the number of particles doesn't keep growing indefinitely? Would it be reasonable to think of the "true model" of the universe as having infinite complexity, and we are trying to approximate it by adding features and interactions stepwise? And then some of the non-standard models (ex. string theory) tear much of it down and start over?
I remember my days as a CS student.

The single most mind-opening course I took was functional programming, where I learned LISP and Prolog.

That knowledge today is crucial as it deeply changed my mindset when tackling most any problem.
> You can't define anonymous functions in C.

You are of course correct. I have corrected the parent post.

My point is, though, that you almost can't define anonymous functions in Python, either, but you can do nearly all of these clever patterns. The difference is that Python functions are closures.

> And I wouldn't "attack" Joel for "stuffing the article full of lies". It's more like "abstracting away the details".

I agree that that's what a good teacher does, but I don't see this article as doing that.
In the meanwhile what would you do if you get placed an order for several of those?
I am currently working on the prototype of such an application :)
I had a similar idea after getting frustrated with Photoshop scripting for my last game project[1]. I'm not ready to show anything yet though, very early days...

[1]http://richardjdare.com/blog/2013/02/the-next-photoshop/
"Not eating at the computer" - was eating lunch while reading this :)
I have actually used the samples both to choose unknown books and ignore popular books. They are quite useful.

But even with that, the unknown book still felt like a risk at the $8 it was priced at. (It turned out to be really good until just before the end, then it went downhill fast. I didn't buy the sequel.)

Had the book been $3 I'd have been perfectly happy and probably bought the sequel as well. At $.99 it would have been a sure thing.
awsome or what
Like I said "Royalty is a real as the law or countries.". Claiming it doesn't exist is nonsensical.

But lets examine your "magical thinking" hypothesis.

Are some people more able to govern effectively as dictators? Is it possible that this governing ability can be effected both by a highly tailored up-bringing and genetics? If both these points are true then a hypothesis that says that an ability to rule effectively follows a particularly family/group of families who have ruled over generations and established a specific training regimen for offspring could find high validity.

As I've aged the idea of benevolent dictatorship has grown to be attractive. It seems all forms of [choosing] government are flawed and finding the least flawed is rather difficult.
A stab at an in between explanation.

Flat wings work with a positive angle of attack (EX: paper airplane). The problem with scaling this up is turbulence at the sharp edge. A gently curved surface reduces turbulence and drag. Remove enough turbulence and you get a laminar flow which hugs both sides of the wings. You can deflect a laminar flow down to increase lift. (See faucet experiment.) Control surfaces on the wing redirect the flow to push the aircraft in a new direction. Incresing the angle of attack increases lift until you reach the critical angle of attack ~15 degrees when you lose laminar flow and a sudden drop in lift occurs. Stall speed is the speed below which you can't maintain level flight by increasing angle of attack. High performance aircraft and trade efficiency for performance (EX: an F-15 landed after losing a wing http://www.uss-bennington.org/phz-nowing-f15.html)

Super sonic flight behaves somewhat differently. (See faucet with increased pressure.)
Your comment explains why the oil industry doesn't bother looking for alternatives, but fails to explain why everyone else doesn't.
This may sound like a stupid question, but if you don't want the browser to follow a link when somebody clicks it, why not just leave off the href attribute?
>Stick all your most important files in there, and forget about that annoying thing called "backups".

Good luck with that, when dropbox has its first inevitable data loss incident.

If you don't have physical control over the hardware, it doesn't count as a proper backup.
I think this is a good sign. It means everything else is so safe that if someone dies, it's probably because they chose to.
I can’t wait to plug it into my brain stem!
We're forever stuck inside a thin layer of the Earth surface. It makes me kind of claustrophobic.
I’m not sure how to respond frankly. You claimed my statements were ignorant. So in response, I provided a source that I agree with wholeheartedly. And a HN comment thread that provides even more criticisms.

I mean, I can add to what’s already been stated. But I’m not sure it’ll really help further the conversation. Especially when it’s being dismissed as “not nearly as bad”. So... yea.
For my understanding: crisper works by cutting the dna at specific points surrounding the relevant part and then exchanging, right?
How likely is it, that in the whole DNA string there are other instances this “surrounding” matches and would be cut? How is this prevented / not causing side effects?
I have a 50s-era GM Frigidaire electric stove+oven and there's no PWM anywhere. It's simply multiple choice knobs for predefined temperature settings selecting how much current to continuously flow through the heating elements.

It's by far the best electric stove I've ever used, I love it and dread the day all knobs have let the 240VAC smoke out.
For those wondering, I found some tools :
Asciio(Linux), Monodraw(Mac), asciiflow.com(Web)
Sure, but I think the point the author was trying to make was that those perks, and the way they are sold to employees, are a much thinner veneer over ultra-capitalism than might be expected.

These companies really do sell themselves and their perks to their employees and it’s pretty horrific that they seem willing to attack the victims instead of the perpetrators.
May I ask which audio book service you use?
It’s fun watching people raised in a world where all communication happens on a screen dismissing the things people used to do to communicate as impossible.

I do it myself. Even though I spent half my life in a word where the only way to talk to a friend was to pick up a phone and dial their number, today’s Jason recoils violently from the idea of doing something so rude and invasive as that.

So just in case: in a previous world, sitting in a prominent place doing superficial activity such as reading, smoking, or looking at a phone screen was a signal that one was open to casual conversation.
That tigsource article is phenomenal!