jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
I encountered a very annoying-to-track-down "pseudo" Heisenbug in a mobile application I'm working on a few weeks ago.

Once you logon to the application, it downloads product data (ID, description, quantity) for sales reps for that day. To cut a long story short, I'd just finished implementing a new piece of functionality and I logged on to the app to test it. The application started behaving very unexpectedly. I double-checked my code, but couldn't see anything that make it act the way it did. Then I tried logging on as a different user, et voila! It worked! Tried the old user and the problem occurred again. Tried a 3rd user and I got different behaviour again, but not the same as with the original user I was testing with. I thought it had to be a data issue, so I uninstalled the application and cleared the cache and app data, reinstalled, and the bug was gone. Whatever I tried I could not replicate the problem. I shrugged it off as local database corruption and continued working.

A few days later, the same thing happened. Same symptoms, but this time the bug disappeared without me even having to reinstall the app. After a few hours of frustrating debugging and source code reviews, I remembered something. I ran into the problem at the same time of the morning as I did before - around 12am. It turns out that the process that populates the server with daily product information that usually ran at 11pm was rescheduled to run at 12am (we weren't informed about this change). It ran for 5 to 8 mins. At the time I logged on, the data for the first user was not available yet, but the data for the second user was. To complicate things, if the server can't find daily product information for that day, it sends data from the previous week (the products are essentially the same, but the quantities may be slightly different and the IDs are tied to older stock batches). But the user I was testing with didn't exist 7 days ago so he didn't have data to fall back on. The 3rd user's daily product data also wasn't available yet, but he did exist 7 days ago so he received data with product IDs that I did not expect.

In the end I "fixed" the problem using a scheduled task that emailed tech support if the product data was not in our databases by 11:30pm.
Count me in! The last time I wrote Perl, the Camel Book was a thing and I thought it was cool to have the least number of digits in your slashdot id as possible.

I find it pretty fun to try to modify code that lives in a world that I'm largely not part of, this is a nice little impetus!
> This leads me to believe you are probably more the businessy/MBA type, rather than the engineering type.

Sorry to disappoint I'm of the engineering type. I'm also of the paranoid type though ;-)
Meteor should be metioned here. It embraces both virtual dom and reactivity [1]. When FRP, Angular, Ember or React are talked about I always feel Meteor is unfairly treated and underrepresented. Meteor imperative style and the patterns it provides are a joy to work with. If you are interested into FRP from a web development perspective Meteor is a good framework to experiment with.

[1] http://docs.meteor.com/#/full/reactivity
I never stated that these types of "private" enterprise aren't different than traditional Chinese state owned enterprise, they absolutely beyond a shadow of a doubt are.

The Chinese government does not operate them directly, but it has a direct hand in how they are run in a way that simply does not have a parallel in the west.

An analogy might be an American company appointing high ranking government people (who are still active in government) to their board of directors, accepting special government run departments, and working closely with the government on goals and policy.

That sort of thing is entirely unheard of, outside of perhaps defense contractors in the USA, but even there, there is clear division between private and public interests.
I have no trouble believing this. I should probably have said "even on hacker news polls, Java and PHP get a substantial showing..."
Offering a straight-up refund is more than most retailers would give you.
An interpreter is handy. I don't remember any Pascal that had an interactive environment.
Yes, but practically how many of us use a computer with 64mb of ram (or even 256mb)?

Also, if you're ok with installing an older version of windows there is nothing stopping you from installing an older distribution of linux (I used linux on a 100Mhz Pentium with 16mb ram just fine back in the day).
My guess is based on the fact apps will retail for more than iOS apps, so the gross sales will hit $1B quicker. Think $20/app vs $2 though iOS apps probably benefit from impulse shopping a lot
Sorry for the off-topic post:

Is there a good way to get non-paywalled access to this?
It says I can read it if I register but today that's just one step too many for me ("_Another_ account? Really? sigh" :) )

I'm kinda curious to know why anyone is trying to start a new search engine(s), given both Google and Bing.

(But apparently not curious enough to give my email address to Yet Another Website :) )
There are Bitcoin atm's in Vietnam as well as OTC, if you know where to look. It isn't that difficult to find in the expat FB groups.
Do you have a poll for that claim, or are you just stereotyping based on party?
That's been a question I have no answer to: What do we do with all these smart people?

Currently most just go inside hierarchical workplaces where they have to learn to play office politics and carry out meaningless job functions in exchange for financial security.

We don't have a Bell labs anymore, science is getting more expensive and most of the venture capital money goes to software rather than to the more capital-intensive lab equipment plus salaries.

We as a society train all these phds that then leave their field of expertise because there's no opportunities. You can try your luck as an underpaid postdoc and hope that you get an amazing article on a high reputation journal and at the same time a faculty position has opened up (because the faculty died) for the particular niche field you are an expert in. That's a lot that's utterly outside of your control. So most just go into finance/consulting/tech and move on. All that training, for nothing.
Some notable countries are missing
Hey, sorry, I googled but he has a lot of work and I couldn't find where he talks about fraud (or lack thereof) in science. If you have a link handy would you mind sharing?
Doesn't China need relatively the least recovery from this?
In practice, executing a prisoner in the US is far more expensive than imprisoning him (and it's usually a "him") for life.

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/costs
Nice README and tech! I like these projects in theory and I get the technical motivation, especially in reference to similar p2p tools that rely on a centralized peering server. But I'm having trouble understanding what people use these tools for in practice. I'm betting there are good use-cases, but I haven't seen any yet that wouldn't be better served by s3, airdrop, or BitTorrent.

Anyone here using pcp, croc, magic-wormhole, etc.?

What are you using it for?
Alzabo Soup is great, as is the urth.net mailing list someone else mentioned.

https://ultan.org.uk/ is another fantastic resource for Wolfe fans.
A question I don't see in the FAQ: why the fork?

Although I already see that it has a ton of features on top of the features of DOSBox, and their scopes differ quite a bit.
> This fascinates me, as I have wondered how some sellers on Amazon (or eBay but no thanks) become so large just by reselling other people's things on Amazon -- at the same time Amazon is the one who really wants to be that middle man.

All the evidence I see indicates Amazon does not want to be this middle man. Amazon wants to be the payment and platform middleman, that’s where all the profits lie due to infinite scale-ability and near zero marginal costs. They removed the ability to let you filter search results for items sold by Anazon.com years ago.

Amazon does not want to be in the 2% profit margin retail business where they are liable for inventory risk and other liabilities like product safety, etc.

They want to be like Visa and take a cut of each transaction. I would too, considering Visa’s profit margins versus Walmart’s.
You can sink virtually infinite resources into healthcare. There are always going to be more things to research and develop treatments for. At some point you have to draw a line, because the cost to the system can become enormous.

Take some of the gene therapies as an example.[0] Zolgensma costs over $2 million per treatment or Zynteglo[1] that costs $1.8 million per treatment. Maybe US healthcare can afford this, but poorer countries can't. The hope is that the existence of these treatments means that they will eventually come down in price. 20-50 years from now I expect these treatments to be part of basic healthcare in most countries. On the other hand, if we limit the existence of treatments like these right now, then maybe 20-50 years from now these treatments simply wouldn't exist.

Healthcare systems always play with limited resources. We should first start covering dental care, glasses and eyesight surgeries as an example of something that's missing in a lot of countries.

Furthermore, regardless whether the system had the money or not, some 'treatments' will still be niche and not considered 'healthcare'. Traditional medicine can help with some problems, but it might not fall under healthcare. Most things related to diet are basically a pseudo science, but some of them work for some people. You'll never cover all of this.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-novartis-genetherapy-idUS...

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-gene-therapy-priced-at-1-8-...
That's not the simplest model of chess with the fewest assumptions. The simplest model of chess with the fewest assumptions is that white always wins. It's also a terrible model but is significantly better than what the author proposes. It seems very strange that you seem compelled to defend this point.

The author proposes a deliberately terrible model presumably in the hope that he is illuminating a wider point. Sadly I don't think he's doing that.
I don't think this is the reason. It is ingrained in Apple's ethos to prevent users from tinkering with their "perfect" devices, it was a core belief instilled by Jobs from the earliest days of the organization.

Certainly, that could change given that he's no longer around, but change in a large organization often takes a long time or some external force. Since it's the most profitable company in the world, I don't expect them to go to the trouble of changing something that works for them.

Edit: I obviously don't or have never worked there, so I am willing to stand corrected if anyone who has refutes this.
This was on a Sandybridge Laptop from 2011: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2520M CPU @ 2.50GHz. If I read right, it has 256KB and 3MB L1 and L2 caches
Misleading title: it's only about Mail.
He's identified one course of action, and would like to see if there are other, better, options.
if you're relaying mail through smtp servers you don't trust, i think you have bigger problems to worry about than someone posting a funny message to your weblog.
Running a spam filter on posts should work well.
"So he's basically whining instead of doing something about it."

Why is asking for ideas "whining"? Is complaining about such a post also whining?

If talking about it on mailing lists is all that happens, then that's a problem. But asking for some ideas to see what options are out there? He'd be foolish not to.
Not a bug.

In standard mode Windows calculator does the operations in order (just like most handheld non-scientific calculators). You're doing (10 * 10), ((10 * 10) + 10), (((10 * 10) + 10) * 10).
2. African crop yield - If US can grow 159 bushels

One factor (apart from soil type/access and amounts of water/available tech) might also be this: maybe Gates is considering the environmental impact of growing those 159 bushels just isn't worth it. Without the heavy use of pesticides, fertilizers etc the yield would be lower, but the impact on nature would be much more reasonable and sustainable.
Great work!

But the presentation is awful. Why do sites feel the need to hijack my scroll wheel?
I am always reminded of what John Smart said in one of his lectures some years back.

America lost 2 million jobs to the Chinese. But guess who the Chinese lost 15 million jobs to... the robots.
There is also a double-standard when you append it only to Nazi and Communists discussions.
I'd be careful calling it a refrigerator. It's a box that is well insulated.
There are a couple channels in the 2.4Ghz spectrum you can use at low power. They'd have to modify the wifi drivers on the iPhone to tune those channels and modify the wireless bridge to broadcast them. Probably more likely they'd just use wired Ethernet via the dock connector. If they wanted to be authentic they could rate-shape it to match typical wifi speeds.
The Imperial War Museum has a great collection of art including a lot of propaganda posters:

http://www.iwmprints.org.uk/
Where functional programming in C++ falls apart is this step:

bind(std::plus<int>(), _1, bind(&Die::faceValue, _2))

When I first learned the STL, I worked pretty hard to figure out bind, etc., and get rid of all my for loops. The problem is that it doesn't actually buy you that much. The for loop is uglier, but simpler to maintain, read, and debug.

Luckily the lambda syntax from the new standard already appears to be available in experimental gcc. This is going to be a game-changer.
I stayed in Palo Alto Motel 6 when I went to the Bay Area. Pretty decent price and you are right next to Mountain View (2-3 Miles). I think I paid around $50 per night.

http://www.motel6.com/reservations/motel_detail.aspx?num=004...
A computer program that wrote other computer programs.

Sounds interesting. Can you share more details about it (if possible)?
You do realize this can go on forever.
:)
Was expecting.

"Don't write crap code!"
That doesn't significantly change the issue.

Whether one can cut the bill immediately or in X months time, the point is that the last thing AT&T should want is people saying, "why am I paying $X when I hardly use it?"

They should want to have mobile data usage so ingrained in their customers' lives that people wouldn't dream of cutting it when their contracts run up.

AT&T has sold a lot of data plans by making them required for iPhone purchases, and plenty of people wanted the fancy new toy. What happens when smartphones aren't the fancy new toy? How many AT&T iPhone customers, if they had to drop their iPhone and get another phone, would still buy a data plan if it was simply an option rather than a requirement?
Just listened to it; great link, thanks.
http://www.dcvote.org/
Right -- this was my initial reaction. You can generate more thrust in a higher viscosity fluid, which will "cancel out" the increased friction, but it also takes more energy to generate the increased thrust, so you'd tire out more quickly.
If you're doing SaaS and discovering your price is too low, do you raise your price grandfather in your current users for a certain period of time?

Conversely, if your price is too high, do you lower your price give your current paying users freebies (an extra month or two) for paying at the higher price?

I know at the very least I'd want to avoid another ZenDesk situation (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1357592); having happy customers seems very important. Obviously there's a certain point where one needs to cut bait, though.
Precedent:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_retrocessi...
I can't make an informed comparison[1], but check out http://ideolalia.com/performance-in-clojure-and-factor - the author uses penumbra (clojure's gl wrappers) to offload the vectorised computation to the GPU.

That plus clojures inherent concurrency support seems like a pretty awesome mix to me.

[1] I've used lots of python and some clojure but never done heavy numeric computation in either