skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow, not well done.

Author glosses over Watchmen, Stranger in a Strange Land, Neuromancer, The Stand, Snowcrash, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, The Left Hand of Darkness, and several others that actually had some very interesting things to say on gender roles and treatment of minorities.

Author also ignores entirely the actual depiction of homosexuality and gender roles in The Forever War, and the various ways the protagonist treats (and is treated by!) them.

Author was clearly looking to be offended, and in their zeal ignored both things that countered their position (not surprising) and things that would've substantiated it!

Lucifer's Hammer, for example, can be read to literally depict African Americans and urban youths as savage cannibals. It's a good story otherwise, but there is certainly some facepalming in there.
US strategy to create a new global legal and economic system: TPP, TTIP, TISA
Here's the closest thing to a definition he gives:

> the concept of reference, pointer, or indirect address into the language as an assignable item of data

I think it's wrong to say that ALGOL's pointers are so different to today's pointers. After all, if he were right about their horrors, C/++ style would have moved away from pointers.

Later languages have shown that his criticisms of pointers are actually problems of the semantics one can apply to them. Java, Python and similar remove the ambiguity between `x = y` and `*x = y` by disallowing the later. Functional programming removes the danger of indirect side-effects by disallowing mutation. Rust removes the danger by disallowing shared mutation.

Rust is actually a very good example; its pointers have almost all of the power that traditional ones, and a very traditional syntax. Yet Rust is a decidedly modern and very safe language.
>More people will be killed in traffic accidents involving large trucks this year than have died in all of the domestic commercial airline crashes over the past 45 years

This is such a slimy apples to oranges comparison. Clearly commercial airfare is far safer than ANY road ground transit.

After this comparison, I don't feel like reading the rest of the article.
If you can work remotely and can stomach the process of relocating then you can really choose anywhere. On my list are grand cayman, Lisbon, Tokyo, Seattle. Being from NYC, I don't know if I can recommend a small town.
Agreed. And even in the small world of my college, this happened for a student writing some filesharing code.

http://dailyprincetonian.com/news/2003/05/peng-riaa-settle-i...
Modafinil is classed as a Schedule 4 narcotic. It's definitely not an OTC medication. Examples of other Schedule 4 medications: Xanax and Valium.
If your legal standard is "no more than 10 hours driving in any continuous 24 hour period, and at least 9 hours of continuous rest period" you don't know for /sure/ that the driver will sleep in the 14 hours they're not driving, but why wouldn't he/she?
That's not really disagreeing. You are talking about other things than what he is writing about.
They have made inroads in the past, but lately copycats have been cropping up in results (iswwwup.com is one I've been seeing a lot) again. I imagine there's a ranking algo update in the future that might fine-tune this more. To be sure, it's going to be an arms race, since the only purpose of these sites is adsense siphoning.
Tiny nit, but from Wikipedia and [0], road damage goes up closer to the fourth power of axle weight. Just further support of your point: rail is absolutely the way to go, especially as it's all in place already.

[0] - http://www.pavementinteractive.org/article/equivalent-single...
Sometimes they link back, sometimes they don't.
... So obviously the solution is to keep killing motorists so you can get a paycheck. Gotcha.
Since establishing provenance is such a big problem for Google, perhaps it might be a good idea for Google to offer a time-stamping service itself?
I suppose it's mostly a social/legal problem. Google could get rid of 90% of those scrappers by basically hardcoding a preference for StackOverflow if it has the same content than another site. Same with sites like Wikipedia. But then obviously people will call foul play (probably scrappers and SEO people will be the loudest to complain). So whatever solution Google makes has to be general enough people won't call it unfair, and that makes the problem much more difficult.
you can be expected to go from working days, to working nights instantly, and it can really fuck hardcore with your sleep schedule

The same thing happened to me when I was working the Halibut opener in Alaska. Switching to a midnight to noon shift can wreak havoc with your sleep cycle, and it is very hard to avoid falling asleep while driving. Happened to me.
> What happens when the government is unable to meet its objectives ?

It's going to crash. China's government has a more "hands-on" approach to their economy and to their financial situation so they can hold it off for quite some time. That's why they haven't crashed yet even though people have been predicting it for some time. The problem with that, is the longer you delay the inevitable (and it is inevitable, no economy can grow forever, there has to be dips, lulls and down time), the worse you make it when it does finally crash.

And China's safety and "attention to detail" isn't helping things.

A buddy of mine was in China for 16 months teaching and doing seminars on safety regulations. He said that what he saw, "scared the living piss out of him". He was genuinely scared for his life, and he's not an easy guy to scare. Things are relatively safe in the touristy areas, but in areas not designated for tourists, he said safety regulations & protections are simply non-existent. It's like modern area industrialism with regulations from 1895. Sure, environmental protection & regulations are "on the books", but that's it. It's all lip service he said. He brought up some fairly common sense regulations during a plant visit (the toxicity of something they were working with) and the guy in charge didn't know what he was talking about. My buddy said he was horrified. Everyone who had worked with the stuff will be dead in less than 20 years because nobody was wearing any protection. He said he was watching dead people work.

After the first explosion, he told me that it's more than miracle that an event like that hadn't happened sooner and more often. He told me that from what he saw, that there should be accidents happening monthly. He said they probably are, but the PRC is keeping them hush hush.

He also told me that much of the good news coming out of China regarding their environment and green energy was almost all hogwash propaganda. He laughed when I asked about it. He said it was specifically targeting foreign investors.

He said he would quit his job if forced to go back to China.
Many people who use the internet see themselves as global citizens.

The idea of a modern nation state exists due to the weakening of religion and tribalism and creation of nationalism.

The internet is very threatening to nationalistic values - just like scientific thinking was to religion - and a weakening of nationalism is the ultimate threat to all world government.
Just for perspective:

There isn't any kind of issue where people aren't getting water to drink, but yes, growing almonds is fucking stupid in a drought ridden state.
In which case I'm nobody.

I've criticised a number of projects for overcompressing the problem domain. Larry Wall's written on this eloquently.

And I'm not criticising HN's server infrastructure. Earlier discussion of style/presentation somewhat. Though for that I'm as inclined to criticise overdesign as well -- mostly on other sites, though arguably table-based layouts are a kludge.
YeSPARQL 0.1, a YeSQL inspired Clojure library for SPARQL queries
At least some of that risk needs to be realized by the other drivers on the road. I don't know how many times I've seen a little shit-box commuter car zip into the safe following distance that a heavily-laden truck is maintaining, then stomp on the brakes, forcing the truck driver to burn their brakes and down-shift abruptly to avoid going right over the top of them. You don't stop 100,000 pounds in the same distance you can stop 2000.
I have to drive an interstate on my daily commute. I always wonder why the state troopers, almost without fail, have a semi pulled over on the way in.

Also, I have noticed that truck drivers seem to be as dumb/bad as the average driver, and there is no particular need to single them out. People in general are fucking stupid behind the wheel.
Yeah, I agree.

Maybe the author should have added the percentage of these truck accidents compared to all road accidents.
An Uber for truck shipping, I See A Great Need.
A brief study in knowledge documents
Implementing a lightweight task scheduler in C++
A toll for semis on the highway could be a good start. It would at least let them pay for the damage they cause. Weigh stations are already in place which should make tolling pretty simple to enact and it could even be variable based on the size of the truck / weight of the load.
Quite. Though it's less the sniff tests and more the banishment from workplaces / sites / tools I use that get to be draining. Again: systemd. Which risks fucking over an entire massive (and otherwise highly useful) resource.
It's not directly a problem for Google — it's primarily a problem for sites that create original content.
> As for functional programming, the use of pointers seems like an implementation issue. As far as the programmer is concerned, you're just passing around values.

This is fair if you're OK with time and space complexity being an implementation detail, but I'd wager that this is rarely true. The difference between an O(1) and O(n) destructuring, or an O(n) vs O(∞) size cyclic data structure, is not something I'd want to leave undefined.
Worse is when standalone keyboards do this (many bluetooth and "multimedia" keyboards do).

No BIOS to configure and the software they come with don't usually have the option either.
To suggest all atrocities are equal is weak.

To suggest they aren't is morally bankrupt. Keeping score over which atrocity is worse than the other and using that as a benchmark of give-a-fuck is suffering porn, and engaging in it is a defect in your humanity.

[edit for redundancy]
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.
The thing is growing almond is okay if its to meet local demand. But growing it in a state that is experiencing drought and then shipping it halfway across a ocean is just way out of wack.

Is there a lack of area with water in the rest of the world ??

Why cannot almonds be grown somewhere in the second largest continent of africa ? Its much closer to me than bloody California.
You're talking about implementation now. The text you quoted said "references' introduction into high level languages", not "references' use in the implementation of high level languages". The quote was about languages' conceptual models, not their underlying implementation forced by a particular type of CPU that code written in the language happens to be running on. A language can present value semantics while doing structural sharing using references underneath, as Clojure's persistent data types do.
Thanks for the tables. They also show that the 2012 rates were somewhat lower than the 2007 rates, and much lower than they ever were before 2007 (>= 1.95).

I still think it's right to expect sustained improvement over the long-term.
Wouldn't it more effective to just help the natural process of these drivers being replaced by AI?
That's not what is meant with The American Dream in this context. Stiglitz is talking about social mobility.

It's also not the first tim I hear talk about social mobility not really existing. Gregory Clark gave an interesting lecture about the topic on the RSA youtube channel a year ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyIMwzHuiCU&t=25s
Depends a lot on the staff quality. The value of a qualified waiter is much more than simply taking your order.
I'd just like to say that Mr. Robot is not a show that is enjoyable only for the HN-like crowd. The cinematography is fantastic, the plot is engaging, the aspect of Elliot being an unreliable narrator is unique, and the realistic hacking is just a bonus.

Do check it out.
Pilots have rules like that and they seem to work. But I suppose the massive regulation of airline safety makes it rather much easier to implement.

But how are they enforcing the anti drug stuff? A relative is a trucker and I recall him telling me it wasn't worth screwing around with alertness meds (speed, modafinil, etc) due to risks of getting caught. (And some similar stuff for taking on passengers/hitchhikers?) Seems like if that kind of oversight is in place then adding sleep restrictions is not hard.

Or do you mean that they'd technically have had enough time to sleep, but in reality they weren't actually sleeping, but short of invasive biomonitoring it's impossible to tell? (One could be in bed, reading, for example.)
Some of my friends have had success with VPNGate.

http://www.vpngate.net/en/

It's based on SoftEther VPN, which happens to be open-source and cross platform.

http://www.softether.org/

I'm using it for most of my VPN setups and I've generally found it to be superior to OpenVPN in every aspect (performance, usability, protocol support, obfuscation, etc).
Exactly! It seems to me Google could easily provide a proof-of-authorship API, especially for text. (You could publish a hash in some feed in case you don't fully trust Google in turn.) I'm not a big fan of conspiracies and such, but by now I'm pretty sure Google has some conflict of interest given that it hasn't offered such a service already.
> Why Lisp? Again
> It is awesome.

Why do people who write or talk about Lisp always have to start with something like this? To be honest I still can't see the appeal of Lisp. Yes everything is a function so you can add/remove 'language features' as you want, and the syntax is really simple, and code is data (a rare need of mine anyway). But Lisp sacrifices the most important thing of all; readability.

Everyone tries to read programming languages as close as possible to plain english in their head, but Lisp goes completely against this and makes you write things like (* 1 (+ 2 (/ 3 4))) where you have to glance back and forth to even understand the equation - is 1 * (2 + 3/4) not easier to read? Even in C# the phrase 'if (!(foo is bar))' annoys me because it reads 'if not foo is bar' when I'd like to say 'if foo is not bar'! So I think me and Lisp have no hope.
"Worse still, an indirect assignment through a pointer, just as in machine code, can update any store location whatsoever, and the damage is no longer confined to the variable explicitly named as the target of assignment"

"if x is a reference variable may change any other variable (of appropriate type) in the whole machine"

I don't see much ambiguity.
Why wouldn't the trucks in your future scenario be self driving? Once a container is off the rails a self driving truck would take it to the local distribution center. It would be fantastically more efficient.
"I personally wouldn't want to drive a truck with collision avoidance stuff, not unless I had a ton of time to spend with it to understand what it does in an activated situation..."

I have no solid information about this, but I recently heard a driver complaining about some form of collision avoidance technology that had a tendency to malfunction on a loaded vehicle and was responsible for "putting trucks is the ditch".

Any idea what he was talking about?
Well, maybe implementation detail is not a good way to put it. But as my other comment shows, I think he's even more worried about the semantics of the construct than how the machine executes it.
As an end user, I don't care about that at all. If StackOverflow does something like put up a paywall and lock it up, then it will die off and some other site will arise that will replace it, just like some other sites that came before StackOverflow which put up a paywall and faded away. Also, StackOverflow can always change the policy if they want (which probably won't happen for the reason I mentioned), so the license as an excuse doesn't really make sense to me. Especially when it comes at a cost of horrible user experience. Lastly it doesn't seem like StackOverflow is doing much to improve search on the site itself and that's what makes this even worse. I wouldn't be complaining if I could find more relevant StackOverflow results on StackOverflow than searching on Google. How is it that I can find more relevant results on a generic search engine than the site where the contents came from?
To be clear, Rust offers a reference-counted type in the standard library, it's not part of the language itself.
Google offers this service already:

http://www.labnol.org/internet/fat-pings-for-content-scraper...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PubSubHubbub

https://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/

Most of the big hosted publishing platforms like WordPress and Blogger already use it, but it's pretty common for sites that built their own codebase not to.

(This was one of my interests at Google, and I had both a 20% project [unreleased] and a real project [Google Authorship] that were devoted to algorithmically detecting copied content and providing reliable attributions. Ultimate though, FatPing/PubSubHubbub [done by another team] was a much more robust way of doing this, with the downside that it's on the webmaster to implement it.)
Not quite. The quality as a search engine could improve dramatically by letting true authors let Google know the content is coming before it's been available anywhere on the web.
Well, I think Google would prefer to send the traffic to StackOverflow instead of it's clone as it's better source?
Especially because 1 self driving rig would replace 2-3 human drivers (no sleep!).
The Last Survivor
tcomb is one of the most wonderful projects I have come across, and it works beautifully with a serialiser like transit-js.

In some sense it enables your program to resemble a type system and be able to easily serialise it at runtime. Kind of similar to how games are written, I believe. And with tcomb-form you can easily have a ui layer as well.
But theres a ton of bookkeeping and checks to be done for every transaction. Due to regulations and so on. But yes it's not an insane amount of transactions.
What do you think the weigh stations are for?
I guess it's because they might be shifting to a new schedule and it wasn't feasible to change sleep patterns? So if you get in at 00:00 one day, sleep until 08:00. Then you don't get a new assignment until 02:00 the next day day, you will have the necessary gap, but not have had any real way to have slept the right time. You would have needed to force yourself to sleep in the afternoon/evening, and, even with drugs, that is a hard thing to pull off.
I'd love to subscribe but I'm using a screen reader so can't get past your captcha!
And like many things, it's due to misaligned incentives causing a cascade affect. The farmers aren't stupid, they are simply optimizing for a system where water has little to no cost and almonds (and pistachios, I hear) are extremely lucrative. Each farmer is making a sane decision for themselves to maximize their profit based on their capabilities, and to not do so at this point just means the same end result, but with less profit for that farmer and slightly more for their competitors.

It's not really any different than the environment (pollution had no direct cost), except that a) consumers started caring, making a market for responsible treatment of the environment, and B) governments are starting to get involved, putting caps on pollution, trying to assess actual environmental affect, and in some cases making companies offset it (a market, yet again).
Sounds foolproof. The first time someone can't start their car when they need it because of a glitch in your software/inaccuracies in the testing method, you are in serious trouble.
Are there (non-contrived) algorithms where adding extra pointer indirection increases the complexity? I would say you could transform O(2n) into O(4n), and in practice this matters, but not O(2n) into O(2n^2).
It's not just StackEnchange. I noticed the other day there's a Twitter account and website called "@explodingAds" that tweets HN user comments and mirrors them on it's website. I imagine taking content verbatim is just a quick way to build a corpus of search indexed pages that generate page views and ad impressions.
Maybe for Stiglitz it is, but for hard-working people with real skills, America provides great opportunities.
That or use the SO docset in Dash or StackStash
https://itunes.apple.com/en/app/stackstash-stackoverflow-off...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7932477
Is this a joke?
I've lived and worked in both Spain and Sweden in both Winter and Summer, and hands down I prefer Sweden. I love both seasons in Sweden, and hate the Summer in Spain.

Personal preferences, I guess.
It's weird, I've read stories about Visual Age for Java being better (UX, speed) than the first versions of Eclipse. Unless early Eclipse were unbearably slow, I took it as a sign that ST was solid for complex programs.
Tesla and Airbnb partner to install chargers at prime rental locations
Mitscher and the Mystery of Midway
The line of an ordinary least squares fit would go from approximately 50% on the left to 70% on the right or maybe a little bit less steep than that.
Putting a developer blog post out on a Saturday just before you head off for the night (I'm on European time) is about as irresponsible as lockless multithreaded programming without a code review. So please feel very free to comment here, on the blog or to @dougbinks on twitter and I'll get back to you asap!
paywall'd
All telling me to use Chrome would do is guarantee i never visit your website again.
Because it's profitable? If the true cost of growing almonds was actually paid by the farmers (including water cost, which is the real problem, it doesn't really cost anything to the farmers compared to it's true cost to the surrounding area), they would cost more to buy, reducing demand, cost more to grow, reducing profit, and more than likely be grown in other areas.

Farmers are just optimizing for a system with cost inputs where the cost of some inputs (water) are paid by others (CA residents, via ecological and water supply problems). The quicker we can shift this cost to the true user (farmers) the quicker the system will stabilize.
It's called Bell's theorem. Try wikipedia.
I'm a webservice purist, do I absolutely have to download the app to sign up? Lol because I really don't like doing any long reading from my phone...
The Chinese authorities neither understand how FOSS works nor the Streisand Effect.
You speak French? What are you doing living in the States? Go to France. Arguably one of the best countries in the world for social insurance and benefits.
Reference counting in C++ can be done really well even in the absence of language support.

For example, with the Qt library you can pass objects around by value, yet behind the scenes everything is reference counted with automatic copy-on-write. It's the best of all worlds. You get easy, value-based coding (no pointers), speed (because deep down everything is a reference), and deterministic destruction (no GC). http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/implicit-sharing.html

I'm curious if any languages have adopted a Qt-style approach natively.
Jeff Bezos and the Amazon Way
Thank you for doing this, by the way.

It'd be nice to figure out the whole Google link ranking thing, but I don't think switching away from Creative Commons is the way.
The 'proof' you refer to is likely Bell's theorem and friends:

"Bell's Theorem states that the predictions of quantum mechanics cannot be reproduced by any local hidden variable theory.":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_test_experiments
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell's_theorem

edit: the theorem has been fairly thoroughly experimentally tested and still holds.