skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why don't more non-white people become futurists then? Why don't they write their own stuff? If white people do something why is there the implication that they are simultaneously suppressing that output from everybody else? You know why you don't find more black futurists? My guess is they spend their time on anti-white rhetoric, and hypothesizing about fictional oppression. Frankly speaking, black people in the western world have it better off than almost everybody else. I'm really getting sick of reading these type of comments. Black people in the west have it better than black people in Africa. Where else but European countries, or North America would they be better off? Maybe if they spent more time DOING things and less time complaining about white people there would be more futurists/engineers/painters/doctors etc instead we have BlackLivesMatter doing die-in's in shopping malls or protesting the deaths of career criminals...
Well, I'd fly more often if I had 185k miles to spend.
‘Coming to Congress from Silicon Valley Is Like Going in a Time Machine’
Yep, with the only thing seriously missing being search.
Wouldn't the same level of rationality required to create and sustain that huge and complicated marketplace, when applied to a micro level prevent all the participants from wasting their lives trying to acquire blue ray guns?
that's redeemable for about 4 round trip flights from the US to Europe.
The 'functional people' are currently anti-reusable code. It gets in their way and complexifies their function graph. Which are bad things for them.

As a lifetime C++ guy I find this new paradigm (inline code a-la structured code) brittle and fragile. App assumptions are laced throughout; nothing can be changed without a rewrite. And my go-to code-reading techniques (follow a class through all its incarnations with grep etc) fail - they rarely subclass, just overriding existing classes locally to create callbacks etc.

So I'm not a fan of the new order. I see it's a productivity tool for the app writers out there. Especially with the one-off code that startups write, expecting to do a rewrite once they're funded. It really makes sense for them.

But I weep for the craft.
I fiddled around with the code and I think I found the reason for the lags:

The "stylesheets/styles.css" file contains the following rule at the beginning:

body {
...
background: url('data:image/png;base64,...') fixed;
}

If you remove the "fixed" attribute it's... fixed! (Oh, the irony...)
Rep a Cause with Facebook’s New Temporary Profile Pics
Beware when you use with metaprogramming goals, subtle piece of data might get "lost": http://apiguy.github.io/blog/2013/06/03/the-dark-side-of-dec...
Show HN: A motion game – Do the Opposite (iOS)
Some of the airlines have really clamped down on those itineraries now.

They either have an automated system which will cancel the booking (typically within 24 hrs). Or they have altered their loyalty system to give diminished returns for "pointless" stop-overs.
Remote Agile at GitLab
I don't think they were actually "exploited", because the money just came from somewhere else. From your article:

"Because the airlines sell the frequent-flyer miles to Healthy Choice for the promotion for about two cents a mile, they aren't out a thing. Healthy Choice likely also made on the deal, because the value of the publicity surrounding Phillips' pudding run probably exceeds the actual dollar cost incurred by the company for purchasing those miles."
Well oftentimes you can invest (at least some years ago you could) in a nice stay in a local hotel. Nothing says I love you like a surprise trip to a nice hotel on 14. Feb.

And if you do it like him, you can have a nice (gamified) trip to Funchal as well. By the way a really great place to visit...
Yeah, but in theory, the NSA/CIA are foreign surveillance and not to be used to gather evidence on domestic citizens.
>> I'm always a bit weary, when people rely on physics or rigid math to derive economic conclusions. In this case the author assumes causation between energy production/consumption and economic growth.

No, the author assumes energy as a prerequisite for economic activity - not a cause. That much is true. There are no significant economic activities that do not depend on energy. The author even suggests that more non-energy activity will be required to sustain economic growth and has a hard time with that.
I miss SoftICE. Was great for helping making game trainers..
"some can't experience romantic love"

Completely unrelated, but this struck me.. is this an actual thing? I have a lot of difficulty believing it
The surprising number behind the iPad's size
He deviated from the safe expected route of being a doctor, even after he was one, and started his own business or had side enterprises.

That's seen as very risky, albeit he had a huge safety net when he decided to do so given he already had enough money to retire.

It's not so much about taking risks as being in a position to take risks.
When the companies do it, it's not exploitation. When the consumers do it, it is?
Decorators are very easy to understand. They take the arguments going into the decorated function, do work, then call the decorated function, receive the return values, and then take the returned values and do more work.

This could mean validating function inputs, changing inputs, raising exceptions, doing cleanup, etc. I use them liberally for web service endpoints to validate security, data integrity, etc.
That seems like an alarmist statement. For everything you do [for the most part], there is someone that is going to take that to the extreme. The people who do those mileage runs are fairly rare in the grand scheme of things. They are fairly annoying.

----

Why do these people exist? I think that this in a way is a protest in response to the airlines and the way that they do business. Realistically, individuals have little power in exercising their disapproval of treatment by the airlines or from the effects of business decisions. (I.e. Award devaluations, stripping out connections to hubs at airports, monopolies over airports (I.e. CLT pre Southwest) Even as a group.. an airline won't respond to a person not flying with them.
Accomodation 4 nights: €42

Camping?
Slightly off topic, but does anyone know the name of the ASCII Art font used in this application's banner?
That's a pretty strong claim. I condemn a lot of economic behaviors that prey on people who just aren't as good at reading legalese or terms and conditions. Banks reordering deposits and then charging overdraft fees that are far above their actual costs is one example, or contracts with hard to understand add-ons are another.

I don't think this behavior is at all like those shenanigans though. Companies that offer frequent flyer miles spend plenty of time trying to offer the maximum apparent benefit while limiting the ways they actually pay out. It's a game where they're often trying to screw you. Screwing them in return (without violating the law or even their own terms) seems fine.

If they had a simple system with decent (or even bad but predictable) rewards, like x miles per dollar spent, none of this would even be an issue. But they see an angle from a more complicated system. Sometimes it works for them, sometimes they pay more than they expected.
I have deep respect and envy for some people's executive function. I would be far too lazy to do this. :)
I did a business fare from ORD-MKE, to take the train back to Chicago.. just for the silver status at the end of the year. At the bare minimum status does count for things.
The source code (linked from that page) is at https://github.com/spotify/spotiamb and the license says copyright Spotify (https://github.com/spotify/spotiamb/blob/master/LICENSE), so it seems that it was at least made by Spotify engineers, even if it's not "officially supported".
Besides an obsession with doing everything asynchronous, we stumbled upon this workflow. Not sure where we'll be in 6 months, let alone a year or two.

I had an experience at a company doing very intense extreme programming and felt the strong contrast with GitLab's way of doing things. I'm not sure how we can effectively introduce typical agile practices and even less whether we would want to do that.

Love to hear what you do and think.
"The needs of the European settlers in America outweigh the needs of native savages."

Seems pretty much the same to me.
these are not keys to get into a secure facility, they're for fucking luggage. a rusty hammer or discount $1 pliers will break these things.

Consider me not impressed.
> These things are interesting to read but it's also these kinds of things that cause companies to not do promotions like this anymore.

Or they just spend five minutes thinking about attack scenarios. For example in this case, if they had added "one offer claim per customer per day" it wouldn't likely have impacted any of their normal customers (or sub-1% of them), but would have stopped stuff like this.

The dollar coin thing was always going to bite them in the butt. They were literally selling money at a loss (it was a dollar coin, effectively sold at a dollar not including postage). There are numerous ways to exploit that, it was moronic.
It seems to me there only needs to be one init system, otherwise it is a fragmented mess. Windows is gaining fast on Linux in the cloud/server space (SSH support, docker/container support, "Nano Server", more open source components).

Windows has no fragmentation issues in the core system.

Whether it is Systemd or System XVI im not really that bothered. Something needs to be decided fast however, and Systemd has a big head start.

I just hope it dosen't end up like the KDE/Gnome mess.

One kernel.
One init.
One desktop.
That's in an econ seat. It's about 120k round trip for business/first.
It is why we can't have nice things.
Perhaps we should use the definition of exploit that pertains simply to making full use of and to deriving benefit from a resource rather than the definition of doing something selfishly and in an unfair manner?
WADL is an description language for REST services.
Just yesterday I saw a silver ragtop Sebring hitting a kid on a scooter in my apartment complex, and immediately backed out of the street and sped away. The kid was fine but the earlier we bring these cars into mainstream the more lives we will save.
The headline on Slate, "The Creator of the Internet Archive Should Be the Next Librarian of Congress," is better than the proferred headline here on HN, and the HN guidelines say to use the original headline unless it violates one of several rules (this doesn't).
Wow the cops shot another innocent, unarmed civilian? Don't see that happening every day... It's just not safe to violate peoples rights anymore. Might get photographed or something. Dangerous world we live in.
2015 California Fire Map
On the intro page it mentions the guest blackboards were prepared in early 2005.
> It boggles the mind that it's even possible to manufacture such a charge.

Well, y'see, you were accused of a crime. If you don't admit you are guilty and save us the trouble of due process, well, you'll be punished more severely than if you bent over nice and quick for good ol' Uncle Sam.

Its basically a way for prosecutors to pressure people into plea bargains. It helps them maintain their 90%+ conviction rates.
Either way the victim just paid for his kids education. I hope he sues and hits the jackpot.
Was the argument that the economy never had downturns? Because I don't think that's what's being argued against.

Obviously the economy would be affected. But would it die forever?
> But IMHO it's another thing to behave like a parasite.

Is the name calling/vilifying really helpful?

Also companies remind us all the time that they're amoral, but when people treat companies in an amoral fashion suddenly everyone gets upset about it.

The ironic thing is that Avis as a company has TONS of complaints. Just google "Avis is a scam" and read all the stories about hidden charges, misleading headline figures, and so on. Pages and pages of them... Because they're amoral and only care about the bottom line.

Why is it wrong for people to only care about the bottom line?
I wish Meteor nothing but the best, but React is no longer just a UI framework. Relay encroaches significantly on Meteor turf; and its optimistic update mechanism is arguably more flexible that Meteor's syncing protocol. In addition, there's React native and deep integration with tools such as Flow and Include.

There should be space for Meteor and I don't mean to be discouraging, but this is generally a good time for framework authors to internally debate how the competitive landscape has changed and the best path forward.
I got the M1530 back in 2008. Not my primary machine, but it's definitely reliable.
> (murder = locked up to prevent future crimes)

I find it a particular pity that more correctional institutions aren't focused on exactly that: correction. I have the impression that even the examples you cite of "other proceedings more on [sic] deterrence .. or prevention" are rather retribution-based. I would be in favour of less incarceration and more rehabilitation and reinsertion into society as happy/useful participants. Aside from a minority of actual sociopaths and/or sadists which might or might not be a result of nature as opposed to nurture, i believe that most people would not commit the crimes they commit if they had access to better welfare/education/neighbourhoods/etc. It seems like much (even violent) crime is more of a symptom than an end in itself...

But i may be wrong there.
Decorators were easy until I tried making decorators which would work directly with parameters as well as when being invoked as individual instances with parameters. Then things got quite messy and it was hard to understand why it works as it does.
If the game seems to be frozen, someone has probably hit select which pauses the game.

And oh, I confirmed that it works on Internet Explorer 6 and Netscape 6 if you feel like playing on your old computer.
At what point does the framing of the issue become disingenuous enough that the proper response is to stop the conversation?
Rather than two pointers I would probably have pointer + len. Storing the length of your arbitrary memory block is no bad thing, imo.

In any case, having a sensible copy constructor on the memory_block (and any necessary associated data) would at least make the copy constructors in the client classes (assuming you have more than one user of this pattern) cleaner.

It's a really good pattern, though. Excellent blog post.
Sturgeon's Revelation: 90% of everything is crap.

David Graeber wrote "On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs" http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ , where "bullshit jobs" are defined as those "that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones."
Find and share ridiculous app ideas
A lot of issues were because of laws/policies required to install software on the premises... And making such complex software to perform well, when school sysadmin manages it, can be hard to make bulletproof. As laws and mindset changes, Blackboard moves to SaaS model with much more precise control over configuration, deployment, etc.

As for software itself, if you are interested, google "new learning experience blackboard". This is 1 year old initiative to bring friendlier UI and as much as possible focus on student, instead of schools. And with acquisition of MyEdu there is push towards students owning their data, not schools. It is hard from both political (schools hate idea of not owning data) and technical standpoints, but we are slowly getting there :)
I would venture a guess that the publicity generated by something like this far outweighs the REAL cost to the company. For people who collect air miles (and especially on FT), the value of the miles is very important, but it never takes into account the wholesale price (which, from my research, is a closely guarded secret). I would assume, at some point, Avis must have to pay the airline where these points are redeemed (whether that's through a few different intermediaries or not), but you would assume that they are NOT paying the retail cost of the flights. This is why you can do things like trading loyalty points from flights for car rentals and vice versa. They are so heavily diluted by these programs, and people are (I assume) drawn in by the promise of points, it's all still a great deal for these companies, even if someone ocassionally figures out a way to beat the system. Much the way one lucky gambler doesn't exactly break the bank at a casino, but insteads give everyone else a bit of encouragement to try and beat the system themselves.
Algae is future fuel for thought for big business and government
Can HN folks help me come up with a catchy name for something here? In particular, when somebody enriches themselves in a way that's a net negative when you look at the whole system.

Here, for example, the guy says he "earned" €3k in a way that was almost perfectly wasteful. I'm not so worried about him; crazies gonna cray, and he knows that this is ridiculous. But there are so many people who have jobs that are equally wasteful but don't know it. E.g., all those people flooding in to the US mortgage industry to help inflate the 2004-2008 housing bubble with dodgy loans.

I want a punchy word or phrase that can a) help the rest of us talk about the problem, and b) at least occasionally puncture the bubble of self-justification that lets this go on. "Quack" and "scam artist" are good examples of what I'm after, but I want one specific to this phenomenon.
When I worked at my last company, we had to expose an easy-to-use API for an optimistic-concurrency database that required cooperating clients to retry operations in a variety of situations. Rather than asking every client to implement correct retry behavior, we tried to expose a simple retry loop in an idiomatic way in each client language.

Python was far and away my favorite, since we could take advantage of decorators to make everything relatively seamless.

Consider a function something like this:

def do_something_transactionally(db, *args, **kwargs):
tr = db.create_transaction()
# do some things with the transaction object
tr.commit().get()

This code was broken in a number of ways -- there's no retry, or handling of errors from commit, etc.

So we exposed a decorator in Python to handle all of these issues for the common case:

@transactional
def do_something_transactionally(db, *args, **kwargs):
# do some things with the transaction object

This was more or less equivalent to:

def do_something_transactionally(db, *args, **kwargs):
tr = db.create_transaction()
while True:
try:
# do some things with the transaction object
tr.commit().wait()
break
except Error as e:
tr.on_error(e).get()

It was actually even niftier than that, though, because the decorator allowed you to pass in either a transaction object or a database object. If the caller provided a transaction rather than a database, then the decorator did not create a new transaction or commit it; this allowed composition of more complicated transactional calls of decorated functions.

So I will definitely grant you that if you encountered this code, you would need to understand what @transactional meant, but I would definitely argue that this was cleaner and easier to deal with than asking every function to explicitly implement the retry logic.
Ah! I recognize you! I consider "Accelerando" futurist/transhumanist cannon. Thank you for such a wonderful book!
Only the original Steamboat Willy cartoon would even rise to the public domain. The character as we know him today is thoroughly trademarked, which does not expire.

All anyone would be able to do, is distribute free or paid copies of a historical cartoon film.
Parsing speed does not necessarily correspond to the complexity of the spec. For example a lot of complexity in the XML spec is the DTD part. But if you parse a document without a DTD, this would presumably not have a performance cost.
Well, things like this did ultimately have an effect on airline frequent-flyer programs, primarily in that every program which offers status-based perks for reaching mileage totals now only considers mileage that comes from actually putting your butt on a plane (unofficially referred to as "BIS" -- for "butt-in-seat" miles, officially referred to as various terms depending on program, such as "elite-qualifying miles" with American Airlines).

And of course that also can be gamed through mileage runs, where you simply spend some time searching for cheap long-distance fares on the airline or one of its alliance partners, and use that to rack up extra qualifying miles. Which in turn has led to countermeasures from the airlines: ultra-discounted fares on partner airlines often earn only a tiny fraction of mileage flown, and two of the three US-based legacy carriers (Delta and United) now also have a minimum dollars-spent requirement in addition to the mileage-flown requirement.

Largely this is because the miles themselves, as an alternate way to purchase airline tickets, are not much of a hit, but the status perks are. Airlines do some interesting balancing acts in terms of wanting to attract people who fly a lot (and thus spend money on tickets) vs. not wanting to be so top-heavy with people entitled to free perks that you end up losing money on them.
Thanks, didn't know that (I use iCloud Photo Library), but IIRC you can disable stuff from backing up, even photos
I think we could sum up the argument like this:

1. Continued economic growth requires continued increased energy use.

2. Any energy source will eventually generate so much waste heat that the planet becomes uninhabitable.

3. Therefore, sustained economic growth is impossible.

How could the economy possibly plow through and ignore the physical limitations of the Earth? The author anticipates one might argue a larger portion of the economy goes to services of various points but suggests reasons this is implausible.
Check out "The Other Foot" [0] by Ray Bradbury.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illustrated_Man
Five Years After Launch, Database Company NuoDB Enters Rapid Growth Phase
I believe about 3 years ago, a lot of top management of Blackboard was changed. And focus right now, at least how employees see it, is on quality of software.
He explained further down in the thread. Two cheap nights in guest houses, one camping, and the last one in the airport before flying home.
Ask HN: Is it common knowledge that Yahoo benefits from (relies on?) adware?
I just installed a torrent client called "Vuze" and came out of it with a whole bunch of adware installed on Chrome, including having my default search engine being Yahoo. This is true even after having removed all of the chrome extensions that they added and all of the settings changes (including changing my default search engine back to Google).

This isn't the first time that it has happened, and it always seems like the main beneficiary of any adware I come across is Yahoo.

Do you think this is an intentional strategy? Is it a primary driver behind their ability to hold onto so much traffic despite their declining brand?
So is this an effect of byers not having to use the product, or the fact that the checklist is huge and the software has to fit a ton of distinct use-cases that ultimately makes the software bad. I've never worked on enterprise software like that, so I'm honestly not sure.

At a previous job, I had to bend Blackboard a little to do what I needed it to do and this was my only exposure to Blackboard from the admin/instructor side. I had interacted with it as a student and found it sufficient.

From the admin side, it was certainly unintuitive, like most other enterprise software. However, also like most other enterprise software, once you used it enough and/or did the necessary training, it did make more sense.

I'd be curious to know examples of enterprise software that is easy to learn and use without having to build experience or go through training.
App Ideas with commentary
Think you can't live without plastic bags? Consider this: Rwanda did it