jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
This is not an interesting perspective, nor is it new.

Americans have been politely deplatforming each other for a long while. It’s only become an issue now, and attracted a nice term for it.

I’ll skip the issue that one side isn’t really there for a conversation in the first place.

Instead I’ll demonstrate that the cable news era already built its own filter bubbles and significantly reduced the ability for one side (the left) to Influence the other (the right).

I clearly remember that climate frauds were given air time on Fox. When that air time resulted in politicians pushing anti climate views, actual climate scientists came to FOX to make their case. Instead they were faced with ridicule, in the same way that throwing people to lions was a fun spectacle for the audience.

This ability to divide reality kept evolving till America showed the world that its possible to undo science. Remember Creationism? An anti science argument, designed to confuse children and adults with the goal of disproving evolution!

“Teach the debate”, that most fraudulent of arguments, implying that scientific debates on evolution meant that evolution itself was not a solid idea.

And it worked!

When the right filter bubble avoids reporting things in a manner that allow for a fair middle ground to be reached, then what?

I’ll tell you now, you need to remove money from the news, which even to me sounds like an insane idea.

I would heartily recommend that people stop worrying about deplatforming. It’s worked great for the American Right. While people here may decry Trump, he managed to snag 2 SC seats, unknown numbers of other judges, defunded everything, fought China, and even today has a 42% approval rating!

MORE people came out to vote for Trump this election than they did when he ran against Hillary.

Worry instead that deplatforming works.

And then realize that while this will go on to be a massive comment thread, there are entire countries under the thumbs of despots or regions ruled by local leaders who never get heard about, and who will never get deplatformed, because it will never get the attention of the people running Twitter/FB.
Trump is not the first one this happens to. Alex Jones faced a similar situation. The Gab app was also taken down in coordination.

And besides they were itching to ban Trump before this already. Twitter was very clearly hinting that Trump would be banned the day he was no longer president. This protest just made it happen two weeks early.
I don't disagree with anything you said. But terrorist violence & sedition are not protected speech. Whether they banned him for the right or wrong reason, he still needs to be banned.
Also, CLisp is not a language, it's an implementation of a language named Common Lisp: http://www.gnu.org/software/clisp/

(It's common misconception, and a confusing name)
I barely know the basics of Haskell and this is very easy to understand.

This is supposed to show you which tools you should use, how to organize and publish your project. This tutorials does this quite well.

If you want to learn Haskell read http://learnyouahaskell.com or something similar, it explains the language and how to build a simple program using GHC, if you do anything more advanced you should start reading the documentation of your compiler anyway.
It seems like there is a new business model reflected by a subset of the app store catalog that just intends to serve as a cheap/free distraction for the user, with the real goal of raiding as much data as possible.

Otherwise known as the facebook app business model.
Exactly. Don't show scores for active threads if you want, but please, after x days or so, let the numbers show so searchyc can cache it correctly and people who come back to old threads have a sense of direction from the discussion.
I'd prefer a system that reveals the score of comments you've already either replied to, or voted on. Gives you some kind of feedback on where the rest of the community's mind is with regard to that comment.
Very interesting list of partners - some decently-sized deal sites but no Groupon or Living Social, the two behemoths in the space.
Like it, what's the revenue model?
so why cant we start down voting with less karma, as opposed to now it being 500. so more people could counteract your issue. AND i think that if a comment has more upvotes, then they DID win the argument and that should be seen that they won.
I think you've just restated his "Blub" position exactly.
Why go to that effort? Did you really save any money, or more importantly time/effort? Paying for the shipping on the other books alone would seem to negate any higher profit margin that resulted in not having to compete with their prices.
bordeebook was effectively increasing their price by a factor of 1.2684/day, and as of Apr 8 priced the new book at $2,198,177.95. I'll guess that the used price ($35.54) implies that the initial pricing of the new book was about $50.

Log base 1.2684 of the ratio of the Apr 8 price to the estimated original price = log($2198177.95/$50)/log(1.2684) = 45 [days]. Ergo looks like the two algorithms started competing around Tuesday, Feb 22.

I'm sure my original price is off, but that actually won't make much difference. If it was $40, then the initial date was Feb 21; if $60, then Feb 23.

[EDIT] By the way, if the price was originally 99c you would still see the $2.2M price after just another two weeks (61 days total). Ah, exponents.
Actually, there was a heated discussion on such an issue a month ago at Reddit [1], when AWS started acting up back then. Someone was asking why cann't Reddit buy beefy servers and co-lo them. The arguments were that considering the traffic Reddit is having, it's very difficult to DIY technically if not possible. Looking back, it looks like co-lo is still the way to go, especially for big sites like Reddit. Anyway, if StackOverflow can make it, why cannot Reddit, both have comparable traffic?

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/g66f0/why_reddit_was_d...
.. or better yet, make it work!
My dad had a similar experience. His very obscure, self-published, out-of-print book was showing up for something like $1000, while at the same time he was mailing out free copies to people who emailed (plus shipping), just to make more room in the garage.
Amazon should put an upper bound on the maximum price a product can be. Can credit card companies even process a transaction in the tens of millions of dollars?
But cost of healthcare is astronomical in part because malpractice insurance is expensive, because too many people abuse it.

If we increase (already high) risk of being a cop, then we will have to be ready to pay 200k-300k salaries.
Brilliant. I was going to post this but you posted it first, I read this while learning to program in C, and then looked at my compiler with extreme suspicion.
Aah, yes, of course. I'd call it 'blue sky thinking'. I definitely came at the expression and not what it was saying. Thank you.
Not exactly. I am reminded of n3557. The ability to write a library like TBB is a positive. But much richer libraries are just barely over the ridge. std::thread is not much more interesting than the abstractions provided by Boost in the early 00's.

http://www.open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG21/docs/papers/2013/n355...
> I went through the control panel several times - it is/was a huge mess, obscure by policy obviously - and finally in some far distant corner found something still turned on. I did not understand what it was at the time and can recall no details, but I turned it off with great relief.

Using IAC (Terraform) would solve this in an instant: "terraform destroy". Done.
> Because Coding is not Working.

Implementation is work. It's a phase in the SDLC.

> Coding is not Accomplishing Goals.

If the goal of a particular task is defined as a code deliverable, then coding will help you accomplish that goal.
The idea to stuff paths into attribute strings instead of using elements came from Microsoft's VML (one of the competing vector graphics standards that influenced SVG).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Vector_Graphics#Devel...

Pragmatically it was a brilliant practical compromise in response to one of XML's horrible flaws as a serialization format (it's way too fluffy), saving enormous amounts of memory and fragmentation by using one string per path, instead of creating thousands of DOM objects with tens of thousands of attributes and text nodes. But you're right, that's the "original sin" of XML that SVG is doomed to suffer with.

PDF is basically just the PostScript imaging model without the Turing-complete stack based programming language.

SVG is just the latest expression of PostScript graphics model (if you ignore all the stuff about fonts), which is based on the Stencil/Paint imaging model with Porter Duff Compositing, and descendent from Interpress and Jam).

The canvas 2d api is pretty much just immediate mode SVG / PostScript graphics, with a few new features added.

JSON's a much better format for structured graphics in some ways, but has its own set of flaws and limitation, like not having comments, and being terrible for binary data. But at least JSON arrays are a bit more (but not much) memory efficient than XML elements, and JavaScript itself has typed binary arrays, although standard JSON doesn't support them (using base 64 strings sucks). So representing paths as flat strings like SVG, instead of JSON arrays of numbers, is probably still a win for JSON if you're mainly drawing static paths, but not if you want to read, process or edit those paths a lot.

Now, instead of using SVG, it's usually easier and more efficient to just use your own (or some standard) JSON format for structured graphics, and draw it with the canvas api. But there will never be one universal JSON graphics format, just many special purpose ones. For example, d3 has a lot of different JSON formats (domain specific languages) for representing different kinds of graphics and data.

More on PostScript and its history:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21968175

>Brian Reid wrote about page independence, comparing Interpress' and PostScript's different approaches. Adobe's later voluntary Document Structuring Conventions actually used PostScript comments to make declarations and delimit different parts of the file -- it wasn't actually a part of the PostScript language, while Interpress defined pages as independent so they couldn't possibly affect each other:

https://groups.google.com/g/fa.laser-lovers/c/H3us4h8S3Kk
Mostly yes.

Japanese people can vaguely infer the meaning of mandarin, given the simplified characters, without prior exposure to the language before:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzJqXd-1dEU
How does it relate to the fact they all do mistakes?
It’s an interesting alternative history idea though - what if the disease pressure was flipped but the technology was left as is?
I would consider the FT8 family of amateur radio encodings to be the SOTA. Many of them like WSPR are able to be decoded below the noise floor using forward error correction. It is very limited bandwidth, short messages with callsigns, etc. https://physics.princeton.edu/pulsar/k1jt/
Agreed. I can't remember the details but I was listening to a podcast lately (Sam Harris maybe?) where the guest was talking about an example of an ML-driven system that was being used to determine whether or not to approve mortgage applications, and upon closer inspection it turned out to be latching onto some data that gave clues as to the applicant's race and using that in its decision.

You can guess the outcome: the software re-invented redlining.
I don’t know that you can overstate the importance of being on GitHub. The vast majority of developers are familiar with GitHub and can quickly contribute to something that is well written and documented. I’m not familiar with Fossil, but the way you described contributions is not at all community friendly. You need to allow users to fork your repo and PR their changes back in openly. The platform must facilitate inline discussion around code changes. No, you should not allow direct write access but they should be able to propose a diff and you should be able to have a threaded conversation about each line of code if necessary. If they can’t do that, then you will never grow a community.
WSL 1 attempts to bridge all of the Linux system APIs over to Windows ones. WSL 2 spins up an entire Linux VM. Both come with nontrivial compromises when it comes to interop

Powershell seems like it tries to change some things up for the "better", but what I really want is something where a person who's used to Unix can just pop into Windows and hit the ground running with all the basic stuff without having to learn a "new" shell first
ActorDB is a distributed SQL database with ACID transactions http://www.actordb.com/ and open source. Unlike FoundationDB SQL is a fundamental component and not an addon.
TLDR - A GAE Launcher replacement with some improvements

Since I’m not a ‘Professional’ developer and I hate playing around in Command Line (Terminal), Google App Engine Launcher was a life saver. Go to a UI and see all my projects in a table. Select a Project and click a button to run it, view the logs, deploy to Production. I didn’t have to muck around with command line arguments to remember the different commands and/or flags needed to run my projects. GAE Launcher helped me talk to non-expert programmers about learning to code and building Apps. Once, I bought a laptop for someone who had just gotten into college and as as a way of encouraging (making it easier) this person to learn to code, I pre-installed Python & GAE Launcher on the laptop.

Then Google stopped supporting GAE Launcher. I kept my installed version and used it till last year when it was ‘effectively’ killed (you can no longer use it to deploy to Production). I switched to gcloud but I had all of my earlier listed problems.

I decided to build a replacement. I get to solve my own problem and learn new stuff (Electron, Vue, etc). I also get to change a few functionalities I didn’t like in the original tool e.g. typing in flags in a textbook has been replaced with checkboxes on the UI
As a developer myself, I seriously doubt we'd have what it takes to get this signed, in an analogous way to what it took to get the original signed. I get nervous when I'm waiting behind someone at the coffee machine, thinking that my presence might make them uncomfortable. Demands are things I'm not good at.
If you get registered as a reseller (I am, through opensrs) it's a good bit cheaper than that.

I don't think it's spam unless you're making money.
Not really. I am not nearly ignorant enough to imply that any of the various aspects of desktop multitasking will be viable or well suited for a mobile platform any time in the future, nor would I want it to be.

The fact that Apple doesn't support proper background services outside of the very basic 3 things they let an app do in the background, only support for bg notifications through a timer or their own push notification server.

I mean, I understand the power assumptions that Apple is making and claiming as benefits, but it just seems limited. I think of several applications I use that would not be implementable on iOS, certainly not without many major modifications including some weird use of the iOS push note-server.
The author claims, apparently confidently, that the Romans used this method but had no idea why it worked. It's not clear how he knows this.

I dare say most people who used it didn't know why it works, but then probably most people today don't know why long multiplication works. Barring good evidence to the contrary, I bet that whoever thought the method up had a pretty good idea of why it worked.

Of course it's possible that the Romans just stole the idea from the Egyptians. Or that someone thought up the method and then went to his grave without ever explaining it to anyone else, and that no one else tried to understand it. But I don't believe the author knows.

Incidentally, you can understand the method without having heard of the binary system. For instance, here's how I might explain it to an ancient Roman who happened to speak English. I might start by putting together a rectangle with, say, 10 rows of 4 stones.

If you double one number and halve the other, without any remainder, then the product of the numbers remains the same. (Rearrange the rectangle to be 5 rows of 8.)

On the other hand, if the number you're halving is odd, there is a remainder and the product of the numbers has decreased -- by exactly the value of the other number. (Rearrange the rectangle again: 2 rows of 16, with a "half-row" of 8 left over.)

As you keep doing this, the product stays the same every time you halve an even number (rearrange again: 1 row of 32) but when you halve an odd number you always lose some, as we did a moment ago. At the very end you end up with 1 times something, and of course that product is easy to do.

Now the product of the original numbers is just your final 1-times-something product, plus the bits you lost along the way. We're done.

(It's more elegant mathematically to make zero-times-something the base case, but probably harder to explain.)
Sunspider benchmark (Win XP, dual core machine):

Opera (v10.53):	299.8ms +/- 1.0%

Safari (v5):	314.2ms +/- 1.7%

Chrome (v5.0.375.55):	326.6ms +/- 7.9%

Firefox (v3.6.3):	716.4ms +/- 1.7%
Lighty/Nginx are, I found, "nicer" in general.

Easier to configure, can handle high loads with a lot less resources, more verbose configuration.

All 3 are a reasonable choice though.
They'll probably be even less happy with Apple's new Safari 5 reader:

http://experimentgarden.com/safari-5-reader-why-it-wont-work...
It’s very telling that there have been very few proposals from feminists or kinesiologists or sports marketers to come up with a way that men and women can compete together, or men and women can compete on a different kind of a playing field.

This has puzzled me for decades. There are some sports in which men and women compete together at the highest levels (e.g. horse racing), and there are some efforts at other mixed competition at lower levels. However, these seem to be minimized by everyone, and not even referenced as a benefit of which we'd like to see more. I can't think of any arena besides sports of which that could be said, although perhaps it might almost be said of the military. Even the military is criticized to an extent for the opportunities it denies women. Yet, sports get a complete pass.

It is true that many sports would have to change in fundamental ways to allow women and men to compete together at the highest level. That isn't really an excuse, though, is it?
I would argue that Python & Ruby are pretty good general purpose programming languages & yet are easier to learn.

Hence, I don't buy your hypothesis that language has to be "hard" to learn; in-order to be useful.
The W3C HTML Working Group is working on a complete testsuite for HTML5. The WebApps working group are doing similar things for their specs. many of which are often loosely referred to as "HTML5". The goal of these testsuites is to help browsers achieve interoperability, so the emphasis is on getting high quality tests that cover the whole spec and include difficult cases.

If you want to help out, contributions are very much appreciated; see [1]. Indeed, contributing tests is probably the most effective way to reduce browser interoperability problems and hence pain for future web developers.

If you want to take the tests and start adding subjective weightings based on importance and ease of working around fails, the liberal (BSD-style) license will let you do that (although obviously you can't claim that your derived work is the official W3C testsuite anymore).

[1] http://www.w3.org/html/wg/wiki/Testing
Reluctance to adopt nuclear batteries.
Well, I've noticed that solar panel design is starting to head that way - most of the latest and greatest stuff coming out of that corner of research is about using exotic nanotech to produce better panels.

Battery technology can also stand to benefit, allowing for higher energy density batteries, and potentially reducing our dependence on lithium.

Or how about a space elevator, that makes space-base solar cells a viable solution for base energy generation?

These are just a few guesses about how nanotech is likely to help, based on current research results, but there are no doubt other avenues of use of nanotech that I haven't thought of / aren't aware of that are relevant in this context.

What we really need is a better capacity to model the properties of materials designed at nano-scale. Sadly it's the sort of research that has trouble attracting investment because it's too far away from an actual product. But if we ever get to the point where we can use genetic algorithms to search for materials having specific properties, that would turn the world on it's head.
So will/are Oracle using MS Office, OpenOffice.org or Libre Office?
Didn't Rails solve this problem? Simple apps are simple to deploy. Everyone use Apache with Passenger. And Rails itself makes it easy to get results fast. You're up and running in no time.

Of course, if your web app is advanced, Rails may or may not be a good fit. But it'd OK that it's hard to write advanced apps.
You can start here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1, and keep incrementing the ID and see who posted the first articles.
Sorry, this might be too pedantic, but I can't listen to someone saying that something "solves the scaling problem" when it doesn't. Both of those examples solve the "having more machines when you need them" problem, but scaling is a) domain specific, and b) a logical problem not a hardware one in general. A million machines and an insoluble deadlock is not a scaling solution.

I'm sure that you know this, but in case anyone out there less well informed takes that at face value I felt compelled to add to it!
On the bright-side, these things provide a nice barrier-for-entry that makes it easier to find jobs. But I agree it does feel quite 'broken' a lot of the time. I've been trying out jQuery-ahm, which lets you reduce ajax calls to one line, and send everything else back from the server - the data and the logic/functions/instructions. I'm not sure how well this scales (debugging could be a problem), but I'm using it for simple things like tooltips. I feel that writing all the normal ajax code for a simple tooltip (for instance the example given in the Rhino book) is preposterous.
Exactly. A book that I can read and enjoy is worth $10 or $20 minimum. A book I can look up for a familiar reference, maybe a bit less than that. A book that I will dismiss soon after starting it isn't worth the space it takes.

All these books under $5 are, from my point of view, priced so you take a chance on something you don't know. Not for me. However, if a book I know I will use (and therefore worth North of $20) happens to be priced at $5, then so much the better.
> What I don't get is all the companies actually setting up shop in San Francisco. If I were a tech startup, I'd actually setup shop in a nice area relative to cost of living, then attempt to draw people out.

I live in Vancouver. I can wake up in the morning take the Canada Line -> YVR -> SFO -> BART -> your SF office by 10AM.

I bet there are a bunch of other cities like that. Portland would be a good bet, too.

But intellectual density matters. It matters especially at inflection points like launches, fund raising, etc.

Serendipity matters, too. You're going to end up meeting that next hire, customer, journalist, etc the next time you are in a coffee shop.
Where can you get a bunch of outdated Thinkpads with custom hardware installed (in my experience, the T400 released four years ago doesn't come with a 128GB Samsung SSD) for that price? How would a school district go about buying a thousand of these off-market, custom-modified laptops?