jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
That's not entirely accurate.

Imagine a dozen 20 pound wild turkeys flying together. They are quite a bit more efficient than a single 240 pound craft/passenger because air displacement grows by the surface area of an object (by the square) while weight grows by the cube. That's why birds get off the ground easily while a human powered airplane needs a hundred foot wingspan.

Mathematically, the efficiency of a helicopter rotor is roughly proportional to its length. Double the diameter and fuel usage falls by roughly half for the same lift. However the lift for an array of rotors grows by the square of length, even though efficiency stays constant. So if you start with a quadcopter running on batteries that’s 10 times as efficient as a full-scale helicopter running on gas, an array of them with the same lift will still be 10 times as efficient. It will also have a smaller cross sectional area at the cost of greater complexity.

So the future of high efficiency lift is almost certainly in using arrays of rotors. The reason that hasn't happened yet is that most aircraft are designed for high speed travel, not hovering. I still want my reactionless drive though!
this all sounds great for entrepreneurs, but what about the software engineer that just wants to work on cool projects and have a nice home/kids/car and isn't really interested in networking much, having a "mentor" or raising capital to start a company?
> But as far as I can tell, being a good accountant is mostly a function of good training. I don't hear people described as a "born accountant". I don't see people arguing about whether one accountant is 10X more productive than the average.

Unless the author is an accountant or otherwise close to the field (e.g., talkative friend is an accountant), this is a weak statement. I doubt people not in tech know that people in tech write articles arguing about "born programmers" and "10X" programmers. Such talk is internal to our field.

Most people do know a lot about sports, because sports is very interesting for most people. Accounting and programming, on the other hand, are opaque and boring-sounding to most people. When the author talks about accounting, then (again, unless the author is an accountant or close to the field - I see no mention of either) that could be talk about a stereotype of the field of accounting, not actual accounting.

Just for fun, a non-stereotypical super-accountant is Lewis Litt from the TV show Suits. He's clearly a rockstar accountant in that show, capable of achieving things 100 average accountants can't. Is he a realistic character? I don't know, just like I don't know if the "all accountants are about the same" stereotype is true.

All of this doesn't necessarily undermine the entire point of the article, of course - maybe accounting is not a good example, but some other field could be.
You are asking for the holy grail of information quality. If such a thing existed, you could eventually eliminate all misinformation.
In actuality however, the contrary happens: people develop bias and prejudice (aka "heuristics") based on incomplete or already misinformed provisional knowledge, which only steers them further away from the truth.

Of course there are fairly universal or simply just sound criteria by which you can judge the quality of someone's opinion, but they are not some gold standard and likely most people are already using them. I would say you can even distinguish multiple tiers here, with the higher tiers not being used by less intelligent people.

For the lowest tier, take for example good spelling: It can be a weak indicator of someone's intelligence, but then again people might not even speak the language natively, or they were typing on a phone, or they were attending a conference call while reading a paper on matrix factorization at the same time. The same way you could say that quoting reputable sources is only a matter of making the effort and attributing more attention to it. All the while someone who bases their opinion on very weak and unsound arguments might put a whole lot more effort and attention into supporting and solidifying it with such superficial means as spelling or citations. In the end having it or not having it really tells you not much of anything, other than that the author is not totally stupid.

Of course we can judge opinions a whole lot better than that, but this literally involves all that we have got and it just can't be pressed into some easy universal ruleset that would work in another person's mind.

Something I personally do watch out for a lot is fringe opinion and also someone's attitude speaking to you. You see, someone who is speaking to you on equal footing and who is mostly replicating and reiterating on what most people are already favoring to believe is not very likely to be exceptionally smart and hence unlikely to say anything of substantial value that has not already been said many times over elsewhere (be that for good or bad reasons). People who are really smart have a certain disturbed attitude when communicating about things that are not trivial to us, that stems from the fact that they can't build reciprocal relationships to people who are vastly inferior to them. On the other hand, precisely for that reason very intelligent people can voice opinions that are extremely purposefully engineered to change people's behavior and not to speak out open and honestly on a subject matter. This does of course not apply to fringe opinions that average people discard anyway, which is why I pointed this out.

Motive and honesty are very important to consider, but VERY tricky to interpret and most often and easily interpreted wrong or even more often wrong than well by less intelligent people.

In the end nothing really saves you from your own stupidity and educating yourself with all the details on the subject.
Country-specific, but often you don't have to account for them up to a certain limit, and/or you can treat anything you buy in a foreign national currency as having been bought at what you originally paid for that currency.
Corporations and executives don't have strong opinions on anything. Its all easier when a) you understand that and b) you don't have strong opinions on anything either.
Nitpick: In the table where they break it down by category, it seems implied what percentage of each demographic says they don't use the internet (e.g. 25% of people 65+), with no mention of what fraction of non-internet-users are 65+. Both numbers would be interesting!
...because you changed the words, you will see it for yourself?
"practically all passions and hobbies can be monetized somehow (even a little)"

I disagree strongly. This is a dangerous advice. I've been watching this from the sidelines and yes, someone can get a trickle down that does not even buy you a cup of coffee. But revenue streams beyond that? Highly non-trivial, especially in the niche-hobbies (of which there seem to be an infinite amount of them). Not all things worth doing, are monetizable in my experience (or my experience is horribly skewed).
He refers specifically to possession, which is true. The arguments against it tend to be very similar to the arguments against piracy (they even include the whole "illegal prime" concept). He does not say that producing child pornography does not hurt anyone however.
MySQL has way better UX for command line users. Postgres can't get away from legacy Ingres design, with a postgres user and a horrible command line client. Also, database/schema/tables hierarchy is a penalty over database/tables in MySQL.
Please do not tell me you are so naïve as to believe that Canonical would be above this?

It has not gone unnoticed to me that many seem to think that, say, Canonical and Red Hat are not corporations in the traditional sense, for which the customer is prey.
existing dicussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26113444
Those issues aren’t unique to this problem. Courts already try to solve them. It’s the same as how you would find banks denying loan based on race. You find banks by complaints or wide search. You do an initial investigation from the outside with no warrant or subpoena. Like send in a white client and black client (or someone with a search history of fishing versus sewing) and see what happens. Then that’s enough to ask for all the secrets. Of course they could delete them, but that should be a big crime.

I’m not saying this is a perfect system. It’s not. But it’s an attempt the problem you describe.
FWIW this is written by the same authors as the 2018 pieces.

https://twitter.com/jordanr1000/status/1049684795448537088

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-09/new-evide...
no doubt that's what 99% of people do. just like terms of service, it's an automatic click through and a waste of everyone's time.
Disqus loads a million external resources

That’s so stupid, why not just take your OWN cookie and use it in the backend to send to all these resources, proxying through your own server or having a CNAME for theirs under your domain?
You have your whole rest of the day to commit it to the politics and make the difference.

Politics at job will sooner or later lead to biases unless all people involved are _actually_ mature (don't think >18 yrs old)

So, unless you're working at Facebook or Google where you have direct impact on politics, then no, we don't want politics at job.
>I don't really understand the fascination with wireless for fixed services. If you can run a wire, you should, because wireless is basically just using the air as a single shared wire, and the longer the range the more people have to share that one wire.

I generally agree, but here in Kansas we have long sight lines. On our farm we use fixed wireless to the grain elevator three miles away. The alternative would be running 1.5 miles of wire for three potential customers.

For years we had Hughes satellite service. Compared to fixed wireless it had higher latency (the speed of light is too slow to geosync), usage caps (none now), and was twice the cost.
Same - all my work is remote these days, and I’m considering dropping my JetBrains subscription because of it. I love the jetbrains tools so much, as they’re better at basically everything; except for this one feature of remoting where VS code is miles ahead, and it turns out that that's more important than everything else combined...
Actually, yeah, that would be a better term.
Context is important, things are far better now, and the Victorian era was far better than the one that preceeded.
Here's a quick link to the project page itself: http://flowtype.org/
SEEKING FREELANCER - Remote is fine, we're based in Chicago if you want to meet up in person, mainly using PHP/MySQL in various forms.

I run a small not-for-profit that does all of its work online in the field of Contemporary Art. We serve an audience of more than 1 million unique visitors per year despite having a tiny budget. We are a team of four full-time staff, but as the founder I am also the sole web developer for all of our websites. I'd like to find someone we can work with periodically on a project-by-project basis, and have some small, quick, easy projects to start. These are mainly things I could do myself given the time to focus on them, but that inevitably haven't gotten done.

Because we are a not-for-profit, we don't have a lot of money so cost unfortunately will be a factor in who we can work with and how much work we can afford to commission at a given time. The ideal for me would be to find someone great who we can return to again and again. My task list for a programmer is endless if we can find the money and the right partner.

Please email me directly with any questions! If interested, please include the amount you'd ask per hour and a couple of past clients I could get in touch with: forrest @@ contemporaryartdaily.com

Gratefully,
Forrest
Is the later position for experienced people only, or will you consider an internship as well?

This sounds like an interesting job :)
It was the reference book for game AI programmers when there were no game AI books. :) I still think it's a great baseline for any AI programmer.
> it's hugely important to use the right equipment for a specific task

Yet almost everything is built with a tool that's merely good enough for the task. Which usually makes it one of the right tools.

You mention that "software development is hard" and even manage to talk about advancing the STEM field, but we're talking about handling some http requests and someone's weekend project that managed to register a domain name.

What is the right tool anyways? PHP as a CGI? Haskell? Does it matter?

Bottom line is that you're getting wound up by a project that has 9 commits. The last one was 2 months ago. I think your PHP job security is safe for now, my friend. https://github.com/UeiRicho/cgi-node
I hate to say it, but looking at the list of sites that were blocked, good riddance

The problem is not never who blocked but how and why they were blocked.

Freedom speech only means something if it's freedom for those whose speech we dislike.

It's natural that those who are angling for wide-ranging control would start by attacking "the scum of the Internet". In this instance, being able to take down website essentially without due-process means that ICE has a tool which can be used on many other targets.
Could you include a larger screenshot? I can make sense of what's going on in the current one, but just barely.

edit: Ah, the larger versions are on the Chrome extension page.
The government is censoring our means of communications, end of story. If they see it as their role to control my information, it doesn't matter if we find a new DNS system, their agenda is set. My DNS server is not broke, the government is. Lets fix the problem, not the internet.
Programming Pearls
K & R C Programming Guide
I hear you on this point and should have been clear that I do not approve of actions taken without due process.

But I also wish the rest of the posters here would state their opposition to piracy while they defend the pirates on procedural grounds.

It's like when skin heads march. All sensible people defend their right to hold a peaceful demonstration but it is good taste to also point out ones disapproval of the ideas those skinheads espouse.

The lack of voices making such clarifications has been notable.

And it sounds like typical apologist arguments.

To those lamenting this action: do you pirate music, movies, or software?
I learned IPA for fun and much prefer it over the English-esque pronunciation guides, both because not only are the English ones often are often ambiguous, but they necessarily leave off important pronunciation details such as forward and nasal vowels and pitch.
Is it just me or is there an unusually high amount of pointless/useless comments in this thread?

Is that what putting "Apple" in the headline does to a thread? It reminds of Digg...
At a basic level - a court order from the US (whatever level of court) issued directly to, say, a registrar in the UK would have absolutely no legal standing as far as the registrar was concerned.

The US may have a heck of a lot of swing when it comes to overall global policy, but that doesn't mean foreign entities just, like, obey their court orders - that would be absurd.
Theatrics and stunts, as you put them, can help to raise awareness for causes. Even if he is not quite harmed by his actions, that does not mean that they were for nought. I imagine many who read this article or otherwise heard about this story, such as myself, were unaware of the overall issues that are being protested against.
Everybody seems to be stuck on hand gestures and arm movement for the future, but while this looks cool I wonder just how comfortable it is to keep you arms waving about like that for hours on end. Also, it's hard to argue that 3D is always superior to 2D when presenting information. In some cases 2D is more than sufficient.

I also wonder why there isn't more talk about Brain–computer interfaces. It seems to me that the most natural UI is one that can be navigated just by thinking. It might be little Borg-like but I can't imagine HCI going in any other direction long-term.

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain%E2%80%93computer_interfac...
No, you are just borrowing a lot of the money that already exists and then you are using your large volume and sell order to put downward pressure on the security's price.
It doesn't sound like you're passionate about either idea, so I'd say neither as well.
There is benefit for a small subset of applications, applications which can gain from having 3d input. Most of the stuff he does in that demonstration is not of this category. But interfaces like that can be very nice for architecture (or computer assisted design) and 3d data visualization (medical or other). Gaming is also bound to be an interesting application. It will be nice to see what Microsoft comes up with for natal as well.

For general computing I am not sure if there is a use for this kind of interface, this stuff takes a lot of space and is long to setup while we are going the other way - towards smaller and more portable computers.

Also, let us not forget that gestural interfaces are very tiresome and it would be hard to use one for a long period of time.
Never give up on fantasy!
Holy Christ. The game seems designed to make people look like spastic dorks.
So they'll let you try to run them if you have a webkit based browser but that's it? Can anyone confirm that any non-webkit based browsers work?
Yeah, entirely depends on the barista, unfortunately. Oddly if I ask them to leave room and then ask for soy after they make my drink they have no problem giving it to me...but all this is way too much interaction to just get a damn coffee. :P
You make two errors of the same form. It need neither be the case that a zero chance of being caught means a 100% (or even "high") chance of committing crime, nor that a 100% chance of being caught means a zero chance of committing crime, for there to be a monotonic relationship between increased chance of being caught and decreased chance of crime.
The ACLU says approximately 2/3 of the US population live in those areas.

https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone
Thanks for editing your comment and posting it. It's much nicer to read. And...

> Raise Revenue, Not Funding

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

> Look For Something That Is Required Or Subsidized By Law

I'd like to add that you should be careful about something that requires you to need constant permission from a third party. The iPhone market is a good example. While I'm not suggesting that you shouldn't develop for that market, you just need to be aware that whatever you do, your success depends on someone besides you or your potential customer saying "Yes."
It seems a little absurd that trademarks can be used like this - I can understand for product names, and slogans, but surely if the words are different - then you're just trademarking the _idea_.

So, if I get it right, if you refer to any meat as being white meat but not chicken, then you infringe upon the National Pork Board's trademark? Just checking, I'd never heard of the slogan 'til today (not from US).
I'm planning on following this pretty closely soon. I've lost a lot of weight over the last couple of years (somewhere around 130lbs, starting at nearly 400lbs), but it's been largely due to cutting out soda and simply getting off my arse. Now I'm walking 3mi every other day or so, and the next step is to figure out what to eat to maximize my energy while keeping my weight on a downward trend, and I think that having more data will help that.
I should add that they were never so helpful when I inquired from my premium domain in the past. I only received a lot of attention when it was time to renew.

For example, I couldn't figure out how to cancel the premium account, and I sent an email asking. No response ever came.
philk -- I love your idea about forcing colleges to provide stats on how many graduates have jobs and how much they earn say 1,2,5,10,15,20, and 25 years out, but I think in practice it's pretty tricky to do -- how do you classify eg someone who got a philosophy degree and makes a living as a software developer? Don't get me wrong, I agree 100%, if for no other reason than students and the state should be able to see what we're buying for our money, but there are some hard details to work out.

But in general, I can't agree more. There's no reason for the thieves running banks to have bribed their way into risk free loans to students. Especially since we didn't have an epidemic of problems before 1998. Let's let them live by their market discipline credo.
I've listed my email address as nat@nat.org on my web page for years and gmail only lets in a few spam a day. I tweet it regularly too, and I'm not drowning in spam. I don't think there's any point in continuing to do this. From my perspective, spam is a problem Google solved for me.
I believe the most precise date they've given for iOS 4 on iPad is "this Fall".
I haven't looked into it, but facebook seems to forget that I'm logged in all the time. It's been happening for a while and on both Safari 4 and 5. Haven't noticed it on other sites so far.
big "Technology without Industry"[1] resonance! big "Computer Liberation / Dream Machines"[2] energy. we can do & become anything. we can consider ourselves, gather ourselves, understand ourselves, review ourselves, try, strive, in our imperfect ("Everything is broken, and it's ok"[3]) forms to become more.

there are a lot of questions here. a lot of doubts. but few embrace the challenge. that to me is the resounding, deep silence of this era: so many great, lovely, wonderful people all about. but so few who face, head on, the moral quandry of so much of ourselves being owned by corporate data centers, dispersed, un-usable. that's not even the point, the core. rather than highlight the negative, ask: what faculties, what capabilities are gathering for ourselves?

Tim Orielly said back in 2012, "create more value than you capture"[4]. few are focused, as Karlicoss is, so clearly, on creating value. on making is usable, on freeing it from it's many, tight, narrow confines. genuine computing has so few advocates. i think wistfully of the Tim's opening quote,

"the skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think" - edwin schlossberg

to which tim elaborates:

"a lot of what i've done is to frame things in such a way that other people can see what's important about them"

and none of our digital systems enable this. they all have an egocentric perspective, a monopolistic/platform/mainframe bent, a desire to own, control, grow prowess over the (limited domain of) data that they contain within, and to not let it free. not let it connect. they do not try to open the doors of perception, they do not try to empower and enable. they offer us all a fixed, finite set of powers, and hope to grow by out-manuevering every other monopoly of thought. no big player is out there, saying, let us organize all the information however the users want to see it. no big player is out there saying, we love you, how can we set you free.

the world direly needs the energetic, the hopeful, those who see it all, want to drink it all up, take in a much broader perspective of life & the world & data & online-ness & existence. the digital, alas, has sapped us of the connected hopeful, rather than enable that spirit of infinite endless creativity. mapping ourselves, gaining some mastery over who we have in fact already become, gaining insight into our digital footprints: it's such a logical basic simple first step, such an untapped starting place, that these endless digital regimes have never given us any glimpse of. no one is freer. we all have to free ourselves.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26268484

[2] http://worrydream.com/refs/Nelson-ComputerLibDreamMachines19...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26265907

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njpGH_IHjFg
The ability to "buy" art here is vaguely interesting, but it doesn't surprise me that the only thing denominated in cryptocurrency is an entry on another blockchain.