jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
I cannot understand how nation states can willfully enter into an agreement that actively curbs their sovereignty and moreover empowers global corporations to leverage profit mechanisms that can hurt their national interests.

Sure, western capitalism especially in anglosaxon countries has always been neck to neck with foreign policy and had been able to leverage considerable national resources (including military) to the benefit of their shareholders. So this is a continuation of that tradition.

I understand bilateral treaties where USA has considerable leverage but this... this is so many countries unanimously lowering their pants expectantly to wallstreet. What the fuck. Sure, most of the corporations that benefit from this have issued stocks so in a way 'everyone can benefit' but what I do not understand is this: why are so many countries passing away their sovereignty to companies. Or, to look this in another way, enable companies to tax countries for legislation that is incompatible for their nexy quarter strategy.
I find it interesting that many high profile "noders" have switched to Go (example [0]), but now its very creator? Wow!

As someone who's switched from (C++/Java to) node to (Python then) Go, I can understand where they're coming from though.

0: https://github.com/tj
But in this case there are no meaningful browser differences:

var tag = document.createElement('script');
tag.src = 'https://github.com/greatfire/';
document.body.appendChild(tag);

This works on any browser. Even IE6.
I'm currently working on a Java project. The more I read about how much safety one can reap from a decent type system, the more I want to be working on a project that uses one.

I do think, though, that learning about what's possible has helped me to get more benefit from Java's type system -- there are several classes of bugs that our system could suffer from, except that we explicitly designed our types with safety in mind so that code which would fail will fail at compile time rather than run-time. Mostly this involves heavier-than-usual use of generics and lambdas, so we have type information where we need it, and structuring our classes such that it's just not possible to reach unsafe bits of the framework from regular code.
You took several years of French and never read a newspaper?
Do you want us to say, "Congratulations, you are clearly an extraordinary person for overcoming greater poverty than the author and we should all defer to your wisdom." ? Fine. I've said it. Let's move on.

Everything you've mentioned is how you avoid getting stuck in poverty - and all of what you've said seems like sound advice. But what happens when you've already made many mistakes, when you're already in debt and have children to take care of? I think that's where the author is starting from. She's trying to explain why she continued to make terrible choices when she became poor; not trying to justify her decisions, just trying to explain her faulty logic.

Ultimately, it would be better if we never had people get stuck in poverty. But what do we do once they're stuck? Should we just give up on them? Yeah, they fucked up. But if they feel like there's no way for them to get out of the hole they've dug, why should they even try?
With all due respect your comment seems to be coming from an extremely privileged position. In many parts of the world, people do not have the luxury of basic banking, where storing and sending money is fraught with risk due to corruption and a lack of infrastructure. Take a look at M-PESA [1] for a "last-gen" solution using SMS.

I think what Signal is doing with MOB is pretty important work for many non-western countries, and I wish them all the best.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa
IMO high scores were a necessary but not sufficient condition. It was definitely a data point used
Depends on the circumstance
Please do not let this become a repeat of the "literally now means figuratively" situation...
It might be international, I'm not sure but I blame myself for sticking with Wells after their fake account fiasco. I just love that stagecoach logo...
Most important thing is to buy these HEPA filters now. They will all sell out next fire season.
If two people with $12K salary make a household, that's $24K household income.
> Genuinely curious, is this true for most people?

In my experience, understanding the code 6 months later isn't the challenge, but rather understanding why I made the set of decisions I did with regards to any tradeoffs I made when writing the code.

The best way I can think of to try and keep that from happening is to comment, comment, and comment some more. Specifically, I try to explain not just the HOW but the WHY of a certain approach that I took. The way I see it, if using a little more disk space for comments saves me a little time from having to try and remember why I did something 6 months later, I'm cool with that. :-)
A couple good comments here, but I'll add my $0.02.

Video game programmers often need to be very deep generalists. It's a combination of 1) the reality of small teams working on ambitious games, 2) increased expectations for what a videogame can do by default ("what do you mean I can't join a party with my friends?!"), and 3) video games are deeply, deeply bespoke software, and to implement one feature means you need to know the limitations of many subsystems.

A good friend of mine works on the World of Warcraft gameplay development team. They have ~50 engineers, and they're almost all full-stack to some degree. He said that when he was an intern on the team, to build a feature he needed working knowledge of:

1. Blizzard's battle.net network layer

2. The way textures were rendered onto character models, pixel-by-pixel

3. The intricacies of their in-house Lua engine and parser

4. The way that NPC AI was written

None of these requirements, by themselves, are too crazy; but he was using all of these, every day, as a junior in college!

And that was for a three-sprint project! As an intern!
At least give me the choice. Like a switch in the settings screen saying "let Apple police me and others". I would even be ok with it being ON by default.
Those are two different arguments.

It is true that a small number of apps matter to any given person. That was his point.

But a larger number of apps gives coverage to a greater segment of the populations. This is why Windows still locks people in even though we all use very few programs and we all know it sucks.

For example, I only really use about 6 big programs - browser, Word, Excel, Eclipse, a media player, and SolidWorks. There can be a million other programs in the Windows world, and aside from a few utilities, I'm not using them.

But switch to Mac OS X? I can't. Not completely anyway, because I need SolidWorks. I can't do my job without it. I used Ubuntu almost exclusively for a while, but I could never get rid of that pesky Windows install because I need it for Solidworks.

So at that point, why the pay the premium for a Mac if I'm going to be using crappy Windows on it anyway?

It is not quite the same in the mobile world. There are few big programs (exceptions: browser, primary phone functions like dialer, contacts, email etc), and most of the time they are used by everyone. So # of apps really is a long tail thing. I might want a ski trail map app, or a golf app. Those are small apps that can be on any platform, they're not make it or break kind of apps. We have yet to see a big killer platform specific app.
Some chips can be incompatible with features due to physical reasons

I think this is good point. So far, I think the AVX/AVX2 distinction is based only on release date --- the newer chips support the newer instruction set. This is a good sort of improvement. And it's probably only practical to support AVX and AVX2 if you have 256-bit registers to work with.

Does the lower end mobile Pentium branded line even have full physical support for 256-bit vectors? That is, are they supporting 128-bit SSE instructions in a full 256-bit register but not providing any instructions that use the upper lane?
I believe he's referring to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/180-degree_rule
Slavery still seems more of a colonial (hence Mercantilist) feature than an industrial (hence Capitalist) feature - to me, anyway. Michener's excellent "Caribbean" discusses this in some detail.
I have an atom dual core small PC connected to my TV (it runs windows 7, yeah I know) and it's 'ok-ish' with performance, but starting a browser is a tad slow (chrome) and adblock makes it even slower as it's a plugin which is particularly slow to start. So I don't think blocking ads for performance reasons on slow machines is still cutting it if you take into account the performance penalty of abp.

All things considered however, it's IMHO a small price to pay for having the freedom to decide which content is fetched during page rendering and thus which services won't know whether you're visiting a certain webpage.
Would've loved it if they had open sourced their real-time graph solution.

I still don't quite know when I should use graph database but I imagine for social networking type of websites it is a must (since a standard RBDMS or NoSQL gets too verbose).
does pressurenet even work? i can't find any news about it, the site (http://pressurenet.io/) is down for at least a couple of weeks and it looks like nobody else is using it since my map is always empty (which may be an artifact of the site being down). all this is a little bit disheartening.
Totally agree, and the BLE peripheral mode only support Nexus 6 and Nexus 9. It was working on Nexus 5 on L Preview, and then unsupported...

https://code.google.com/p/android-developer-preview/issues/d...
I wouldn't say "clearly". They make reference to doing something about harassment but give no outline what that might be. The post is tagged feminism. Believe it or not, not everyone supports this type of feminism. I'm not comfortable with Tor being so overtly political.
I always have cognitive dissonance with the irony, that most of the rapid progress in science was a result or resulted from war and human misery.
Yes - the first was it. Thanks!
From the AMS study, Table 1, PhD math departments, 420 female out of 4669 total is, by most calculations, less than ten percent.
To find out, you could, for instance, read the second sentence of the wikipedia link the other poster posted for you and for which you thanked him.
I met Dan only once, despite working in some similar areas and living in the same town. I wish I'd had the chance to spend more time with him. He was very bright, very energetic, and very friendly. Mutual friends have said he was like that most of the time. He just wanted to understand stuff, and thought I could help (I'm the author of a blog post he says inspired this one), so he simply reached out and made a new friend. What a great hacker.
It's alright and fun enough, but there are a few things that frustrate me:

- The fonts throughout. Having big "pixelly" fonts doesn't look good if they're not blocky pixel fonts, the anti-aliasing just makes it look like you've slapped any old font on there. If you're going for blocky/pixelly then do it well.

- The controls. Though I get that it's the gameplay mechanic, I couldn't find any correlation between where I hit the screen and the direction the foo moved. Am I missing something? does tapping on the left of the screen make the foo move left, and likewise for tapping the right?
I didn't. Instead, I manually subscribed to hundreds of newsletters myself to get started. Eventually thousands. It wasn't until 4 years in that I added the ability for brands to add themselves. Prior to that, they could only request to be added via an email form.

The thing keeping me sane was a lot of work on backend tools to streamline the process. A ranked queue of brands that I had sourced from various places, and automatically-generated email addresses.
> and they still have the best search in the world.

Which is disappointing, since Google of ten years ago had a distinctly better search.
So weird that people take the design here personally. This thing looks FUN. It seems just as ridiculous looking as an F-350 to me, and more practical than a Hummer.

This is what I imagine a luxury vehicle looking like post zombie apocalypse. Most of the world falls apart, but the 1% create disconnected suburban paradises and this is what you drive to get between them.
> And some application developers prefer having an "I don't care, just give me the backtrace" error wrapper for everything, to speed up the development and not spend time on micro-managing error types.

That's me tbh. I actually love Rust's error story atm, I always use an Error enum and I have made it do everything I want.. except one thing: Low (no?) cost backtraces.

My error enums give me all the API-level specifics I want, but often I make the variants grouped by general code area. It's guided by my program flow, not debug introspection. So if I don't need to branch a codepath from an error object, it typically just goes into a single variant and I shove some message in there.

What I'd love is to be able to easily and quickly just bake backtraces into this "non-program flow defining type". Bonus points if it could be done at compile time.

I've thought about using a macro at error creation time to make it a compile-time poor mans backtrace, but I'm unsure if just one level of stack trace is all that beneficial.

Either way I know I want something that's no more costly than:

foreign_err.map(|foreign_err| MyError::Dump(format!("some description: {}", foreign_err)))

edit: I should add, internally my perspective is coming from Go, so wrapping repeatedly in strings is fairly welcome to me. Just adding some low-cost default context to this would be a huge help.
I was being serious. Cohen plays a dangerous game of tricking people into interviews and situations under false pretenses and disguises and then ridicules their responses. This is low blow comedy but can be very funny. When you subsequently reach a point of publicly deliberately mischaracterizing and misrepresenting the tricked people it becomes defamation. You'd think the ADL would not want Cohen as a spokesperson.
An important question is how would it even be possible to have a public park without government intervention?

You have to buy and maintain your own server and pay for uptime. That all costs a continued stream of knowledge and money and it’s very hard. Maybe not for you and I, but for many other people.
Linkedin the last social media membership I have. I’ve been mulling over whether to delete my account because I’m not sure how it will look to prospective employers.
I'm always wondering how .net developers feel towards Go. Anyone can relate?
really good answer, thanks.
fun FAQ http://wufoo.com/surveymonkey-wufoo-faq/
Along those lines, my history classes in HS said Henry Ford was the first manufacturer to find success using interchangeable parts. Not true. The rifle industry got there first.
High-speed rail:

China: 5000 miles

US: 0 miles

There's only so much money. The US needs to build infrastructure, and other things that will grow its economy.
Here is an erlang version of the chaos monkey:

potential_victim(Minions) ->
fun (Pid) ->
not(pman_process:is_system_process(Pid))
and not lists:member(Pid, Minions)
end.

death_from_above(Minions) ->
Pids = lists:filter(potential_victim(Minions), erlang:processes()),
case Pids of
[] -> none;
_ ->
Victim = lists:nth(random:uniform(length(Pids)), Pids),
Name = pman_process:pinfo(Pid, registered_name),
exit(Victim, kill),
{ok, Victim, Name}
end.

The idea is to run it during load tests. Afterwards run your normal unit tests to check that nothing got permanently broken. It's good for finding broken supervisor trees.
Actually, doesn't YC suggest you not incorporate when you partner or launch so that if you apply for and get into YC, they can help you form with their preferred structure?

Someone is going to have to show me an assesment of the true liability exposure of a website with no personally identifiable user data, no financial information, and presumably no personal assets to collect against before I'm convinced that's not a perfectly sound initial plan.

We formed a partnership agreement, no incorporation, FWIW. The agreement is binding.
EC2 is built for scalability and distributed systems. The article seems to give a negative spin on something which is the authors own fault.

In most traditional hosting environments you have e.g. one web server. If this one server goes down your website stops working. A solution would be to have two web servers behind a load balancer. If one web server goes down, the other takes over and your site continues to work.

A lot of people who are hosting on EC2 place all their application components in the Virginia data-centers (because its the cheapest data center for reasons the article points out). If the Virginia data center is down nothing works any more. However, EC2 gives you the option to distribute your website over multiple data centers in case of an event like this.

If you choose not to take advantage of this architecture you're no different than running your website on a single web server. E.g. a single point of failure. With EC2 you have to ability to set up a website that never goes down.

Of course, distributing your web site over multiple data centers can be costly. But I guess it's pick and choose, not bitch and moan.
I just purchased an Aeron a few days ago. I paid $380 on Craig's List, which you can see is a pretty good deal. It took some waiting. Most of the used Aeron chairs are done by used furniture resellers. These chairs are generally in very poor condition because they were used and abused by office workers. It's much better to get the chair from a private seller since they most likely treated it as their own investment. It's not that hard to tell either. Private sellers are far more responsive, sensitive and have better customer service in a sense. They treat you like a real person. People resell expensive chairs for a living, whether they are a used-furniture dealer or not, generally list a large quantity of the same chair and reply in short, pithy sentences. In the end, they don't care too much if you end up buying or not because they have so much other inventory that another customer will come along. I still don't understand that mentality.

Note that you do not get the famed 12-year warranty if you purchase it used. Only the original buyer receives this. For a new fully-adjustable Aeron at $850, I'd expect to get at least 50% off if I was taking this risk. Herman Miller also does a great job at part replacement so in the rare case you do have a problem, you can pay a fee to have it fixed.

The older models, which you generally find on Craig's List, aren't much different. The only difference I've noticed is the arm height adjustment is more difficult since you have to turn a wheel several times to loosen or tighten instead of just using a lever present in the new models.

Also, used-furniture retail stores are generally way overpriced. The average I saw was $600. The extra markup is of course to pay for the overhead of the brick and mortar store.

I have so much knowledge because over the past month, I watched Craig's List like a hawk for Aeron chairs, and visited nearly every used furniture store in the Phoenix metro area. I've sat in dozens and became in expert in Hermal Miller chairs. I corrected furniture store dealers on how adjustments work, and what "new" pricing really is. I did this all and only saved $400. I hope my time and effort helps you though!
You can go further. Show them the Curry-Howard correspondence:

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Curry-Howard-Lambek_corre...

"Interestingly, the isomorphism maps programs (functions in Haskell) to (constructive) proofs in logic (and vice versa)."

So not only is software equivalent to math, there are people out there actually writing the software program equivalent to ZFC (one of the most commonly used sets of axioms in mathematics):

http://us.metamath.org/index.html

If that program is math, then all software is math. If that program is not math, please tell me what is.

From what I've seen, lawyers love to draw lines in the air, creating distinctions between things that are, in fact, formally equivalent. I have no doubt that they can, in fact, write some distinction that satisfies them legally, but in doing so, they will be creating a legal fiction wholly alien to mathematicians.

I believe it was Knuth who pointed out that there's no difference between numbers and other kinds of precise information.
You also won't find the newer Posture-fit support on Craig's List, but in my experience it's not that much better than the normal lumbar support.

To answer your question though, yes it's worth the money. I go through padded chairs like shaving razors. Buying a new Staples padded chair at $100 every 6 months adds up quickly.
Google and Groupon are going to end up together. In court.
This is a great list, thanks Patrick.

The problem with these lists is that I never find time to go through them properly.
Not everyone was surprised by the SNB's action. I haven't seen the following discussion reported widely. I only have a link to a video, no transcript. But it's short, little over 1 min in length.

Some smart money started moving into CHF last month. More interestingly, there was a lot of movement about one minute ahead of the announcement.

http://finance.yahoo.com/video/traders-knew-snb-move-pro-060...

Here's the ending:

Announcer: despite everything we've heard about
manipulation of foreign exchange markets, about
the deep forensic look into these markets,
you're saying there was action before the
announcement which indicates there was some
parties in the market that knew this. I want to
be categorical about this.

Guest: It definitely looks like that to us.
There was a movement in the market well ahead
of the headlines, and a huge flow throughout
December, an unprecedented flow, in the leadup
to yesterday's break of the peg.
The premise that we need "beneolvient power" to "protect us" from "evil doers" is the oldest trick in the book. If there is no threat, one will be generated. Almost organically, it does not even take overt orginization. The players know cui bono.
Seconding this recommendation. I found a copy, used, at random for 50c. FIFTY CENTS. Easily the greatest enjoyment/price ratio of anything I own.

Have you read his later book, /Silicon Snake Oil/? It's interesting how wrong he ended up being about a lot of things.
Well, Toyota probably has the better PR team (and more of an interest in getting it's message out).

It appears as if neither theory has ever been proven. The slides argue that the standard of evidence in civil proceedings is simply "more likely than not" and not "beyond reasonable doubt".

Reading between the lines, I think this expert witness is arguing that anybody who writes code this terrible for a safety-critical application deserves to pay through the nose, irregardless of the actual chain of events.
Thanks for sharing; I think I may have to consider this for my next upgrade!
Right. And I don't get what their plan is. In academia they may leverage external support, e.g. someone outside makes generous donations to a university on monthly basis and then hints that if that wrong white male isn't fired or expelled, the donations might stop. Google can't be manipulated this way and obviously, these activists will be lucky to get any support outside their circles.
So do I.

One of my pleasures was finding someone whose Usenet post from 1995 I had saved on a computer and then backed up repeatedly over the years. The post was about a machine he built to automate letting his cat out and I recalled it instantly (even knew the filename I had it saved to) because his recounting of what happened was so hilarious. I sent him the file and the really weird thing was he had no recollection of the events. He was sure it was something he would have done, but really couldn't remember.

I'm actually surprised that I've only come across one other person I "knew" from Usenet here on HN.