skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I sleep way better when I use a sleep mask or sleep in a blacked out room. Even moon light is a problem for me. When I remove all light, I wake up less at night and can sleep in longer.

However, I have always wondered why when we talk about getting better sleep by sleeping like our pre-tech ancestors, why is the light from the stars and moon rarely mentioned. I'm sure much of our ancestors were not able to sleep in black out conditions. And in the summer months, many places would not have enough hours of darkness to get the recommended amount of sleep. I know its not "blue light" from screens, but it is enough to disrupt my sleep.
Mapping Election Press Releases with Word2vec and T-SNE
> "so there's nothing technically wrong with it, your objection is purely fear based; keep tabs on that fear and let me know how it goes"

Wow, that seems quite patronising on the face of it, are they interacting in this way to get you to keep your distance?

> "shaking the tree" with every code commit

Out of interest what do you mean?
Command line apps work pretty well on android, I use them every day.
Just weighing in on the Olson thing: Why is it considered unprofessional or inappropriate for a company rep to speak openly about the illegal/unethical practices of now former employees? Isn't that a good thing to hear about that a company you do business with is culling the ranks of those stealing from it, or whatever they happen to be doing?

If he admitted it and resigned over it, sounds like a pretty cut and dried case that he did it. Screw his reputation, and screw him. Maybe if this stuff was made public more often so that misbehaving executives got more punishment than a tiny ass fine and a huge sum of money, we'd have less of a crony-capitalist system going on these days.
A lot of the "negativity" is more like blunt constructive criticism. I think a founder could post a "Show HN", get blasted with "negativity" in the comments, and then address any issues he thought had merit, and end up with a better product.

Also, purely "positive" comments such as "Cool idea!" don't add anything to the conversation.
>So now a professional programmer also has to program as a hobby too?

If they want to get hired easily, yes. (NB: I don't have any code up on github)

Hiring sucks, interviewing sucks. Existing code on GitHub - which can be discussed makes it easier. It creates an online reputation that an interviewer can judge you on without asking 20 extra questions. People are people and are going to take the easy way out rather than come up with good ways of interviewing people who don't have their hobby projects online.
As they[who?] say:

Sometimes "20 years of experience" turns out to be just "one year of experience, 20 times over".
Moreover, it's easy to argue that counting the number of positive and negative comments on any subject on any "social" platform can't be treated as more than immensely biased sample of the sentiment of the users of the platform momentarily interested in commenting the specific topic.
In my experience, a significant portion of the hobbyist operating systems community is highschool or college students, actually.
Apple Launches Quality Program for MacBook Pro Anti-Reflective Coating Issues
I appreciate your healthy outlook toward your hearing loss. With my family background, it seems inevitable that my hearing will continue to get worse than it already is. I want to take your attitude as an inspiration rather than the less healthy attitudes that I often see.
It's not surprising. The whole point of the discussion about "media representation" of minorities is about role models, and about how it's easier to put effort towards a goal if you see yourself there.
My very favorite interview question ever, from when I was 41, posed by a fresh UCLA grad: "do you think a gentleman of your age can interact with programmers today?"
I can't imagine a corporate legal team on Earth that would advise someone to publish something libelous because they expected a former employee to not sue over it.
Apple spends a few minutes reviewing any given app. The developers have much more time to examine this stuff.
> If you need multithreading (not multiprocessing), you cannot use Python.

If you need multithreading of Python code for parallelism, you cannot use CPython (and, consequently, can't use Python 3.)

Both IronPython and Jython use native threads without a GIL.
China Tried to Hack American Companies Since Agreeing to Cyber Pact
Heh, and their samples even use "The quick brown Firefox jumps over the lazy dog". :)
He gives examples of real systems including Git and CFEngine, but I was disappointed he didn't talk about blockchains / Bitcoin.
Yeah, I clicked the link because I was wondering what math has to do with Cinderella. Upon seeing the article, I'm now left wondering what Cinderella has to do with football.
This is a really great communication hack! It's a pretty poor comment on society at large that you've had to mitigate your communication based purely on how people judge your appearance, but thank you for sharing it.
Apparently, that's the amount of time you need to polish a turd before it stops smelling.
Editing of Pig DNA May Lead to More Organs for People
> What The New York Times Didn’t Tell You

Am I the only one tired of click-bait titles that don't tell you anything about the article? Had to read the comments here to understand what the article was about and decide if it was worth reading.

All it takes is 4 extra words to give the title context:

> What The New York Times Didn’t Tell You [about working at Amazon]
> The famous examples being the slashdot dismissal of the iPod

Or more recently, Dropbox, which was Ycombinator financed. Someone linked to an old thread about them and it was largely dismissed as "just FTP" and destined to fail. The famous HN quote is "For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software." Yes, trivial for just about anyone, right?

I'd also add a 3rd bullet point about these forums being echo-chambers. I know I personally rarely write anything against the libertarian loving majority nor do I ever criticize any FOSS projects because in the past when I have, its been downvote central. This has a chilling effect on speech and forums like these just become extremists cheering each other on over time.

>will lean towards the Asperger/autism spectrum.

I like to think that techies come in all sorts of neurotypicalities, but the ones obsessed with fighting on the internet over politics/tech news are the ones well into weirdo territory. There are lots of techies with moderate views and with great horse-sense. They're just not spending all day on HN and Reddit "correcting" everyone like a real life Sheldon. The non-weirdos seem to be the ones who get shit done and are out there being successful or spending too much time creating to be bothered by online forum debates. The weirdos just have higher visibility.
Just ask how they would do X. They'll either be appreciative of your engagement, or appreciative of an opportunity to show off. Never fails.
Squire: The textarea of the future
Yep, that I draw a paycheck from your company does not mean that I am paid to put up with your shit. I don't care that your wife is cheating on you, or your kid set your dog on fire, or your mom is dying of lupus. If you can't keep that shit at home where it belongs, then you need to stop trying to manage people because you can't even manage yourself.
On the Popularity of GitHub Applications: A Preliminary Note
Homan Square, Chicago police's off-the-books interrogation warehouse
Most companies I've seen when freelancing as a web dev in Germany either used git or were in the process of migrating from SVN to git.

That said, there's selection bias involved.
To be honest, I don't really have a good intuition or hard data on where the context switching overhead (or other limits) starts to bite, because I have always avoided architectures that go into the hundereds or thousands of threads.

Maybe you are right and it's one of those urban myths that we sometimes carry over from times long past based on assumptions that are no longer true.

I would love to have more hard information on that one, because I think that the currently fashionable async/event based way of doing a lot of things makes programs much harder to understand and write.
> (have you ever tried the joystick control on an electric wheelchair?)

I have, and they suck. But the main reason they suck is because they've been neutered so they're useable for a wider range of people.

Many people who use electric wheelchairs also have problems with fine motor control, seizures, etc. so the joystick has a lot of filtering with associated slow response and staggered acceleration.

I know people in wheelchairs who otherwise had no problems with fine motor skills that had electronically-minded friends help them to upgrade the chairs and replace the control unit. Those wheelchairs go fast after some modding.
Let's say you have a REST request come in. In order to fulfill that request you need to make 10 REST requests of your own to various back-end systems. If you can make some of those requests asynchronously you'll greatly reduce your response time. While I suppose you could mangle your way through it multi-process, it seems like a bastardization of the model.
I'm not arguing that! I'm just laughing while the kettle calls the pot black. And not just this post, half this thread is this stuff.
From Rejection to Product Hunt
Looks great. Does it allow fractional size blocks?
The headline seems very click-baitish and uninformative. Can we be more specific? The New York Times doesn't tell me a lot of things.

Jay Carney Rebuts New York Times Article About Amazon's Work Culture, perhaps?
What is your pay cycle supposed to be? once a month, once a week or every two weeks?

No matter what you are owed money and they should be paying. Honestly you shouldn't have been hired if they didn't have the funds to support your salary/contract. I have sadly been in the shoes of being a founder and having to pay people a few days late and I scrambled and felt horrible that it happened. I also wound up making some tough decisions and cut head count to make sure it wouldn't happen again. Problem being clients don't always pay on time, or pay at all, so you have to be able to support the head count for at least some period of time to cover those times.

The founder may have good intentions, but honestly after 3 years, like others have said, these issues shouldn't happen so something else is up and you need to look for other work likely. Not sure what the rules are in Spain but in the US being late on a payroll if it hasn't yet reached the next pay period won't get you in much trouble (if any), but it is still bad business and a sign to you. And an employee could easily report you to wage and labor. I am not saying I'd cut and run for someone being a little late, but if I had other feelings things weren't right I'd bolt.

Also, the fact you say "we have been promised" makes me thing there are multiple employees in this situation and likely means you are all out of luck and need to find new work.
Alexa Fund backs France’s Invoxia to expand use of Amazon’s voice technology
> In particular, the PR person at Amazon is saying that they would have shared employee's personal records (including evaluations) as well as other employee's termination conditions (which I consider unrelated to their quotes).

I assume from the article this meant including the consent of the employee in question, given that they were part of the article. It does seem a little odd though.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10412751
>I am dismissing this thing because it's strictly worse than the best solutions we have now: cars, bikes, motorcycles, and our own feet.

This this is for the disabled.
Because I'm sure it would hold up in court. "Your honor, my client was clearly talking about someone who isn't them." "CASE DISMISSED." cheers erupt around the courtroom
Yes you can use any fractions you want (in one row you can use 5ths and in another you can use 7ths if you want)
Ironically new iOS updates tend to break older apps anyways.

toucharcade.com/2015/09/23/bioshock-removal-2k-support-response/
Devil's Advocate here:

The people named in the article and refuted by Amazon put their personal story a public story.

If someone "slanders" a business it can't reply with evidence? Must the company say it is a personal matter that we can't disclose, which reads they are guilty and don't want the truth to come out?

End of Devil's Advocate

Seems like they were making a statement of if you talk will will fully disclose our information to refute what you said. I think this was hurting Amazon so much that they are willing to payout the "out of court settlement" and "set the record straight."
To be fair, that's exactly what it looks like until you watch the video. And some people may not be able to stream video at their work. The page talks about "personal transportation" and doesn't mention the disabled once.
25 uplifitng quotes to remember when you are going through hard times
The U2 carries pretty much every airborne sensor we've built so far, when it comes to ISR roles the U2 can fly much higher and further than any drone, and give both line of sight and over the horizon coverage which most drones cant.
The Global Hawk can almost match the U2 in altitude 60,000 feet vs 70,000 but it can carry only a fraction of the sensors that the U2 can, and it also is currently more expensive than the U2.

If it retires I hope that the US will preserve some for private sale, I would rather fly in a U2 at this point than than on the spaceship one, there's just something about a minimalistic design from the dawn of the "atomic age" which is still relevant today that can bring you to 1/8th of the way to low earth orbit that is inspiring.
Europe Has to Rebuild Its Safe Harbor
The first two objections, while they are real, are true for any agent and any decision system. Currently we live in era where people on Earth are most connected and most educated in human history. We could sure do better, but there are countries with democratic tradition that worked extremely well for much less educated and connected population.

The last objection I don't understand. The best way to know person preferences is just to ask them. If someone charismatic changes their preferences, so what? People change their preference based on other people all the time. As long as it is clearly their preference, we have to assume that it's in their interest.

The point of democracy is that people express their interest. There may be smarter people doing smarter decisions, but why should they make the decisions in the interest of someone else?

In any case, I think it's a good idea, often neglected, to structure society so that impact of any wrong decision at any level is minimized. Things like democratic decision-making, subsidiarity principle, reversibility of laws, non-discrimination, limited liability, social security, no capital punishment, time limited government contracts and free access to information all help.
They are not legal for anyone to use on public streets. I think that is the case everywhere on Earth.

Remember though, that something being illegal doesn't mean impossible, or that it will forever be illegal.
How are you going to compete with ask.fm? Or reddit? What's the utility in using your software over either of these services?
> Don't let programs have magic databases that are inaccessible by users

Maybe you misunderstood my post but that's exactly what I meant should not be misunderstood as sandboxing. Sandboxing api calls is not the same as hiding the file system.
Mathematica is a Lisp.
I'm guessing it means, with a finely-sliced tree of classes changes to any class usually changes the others in the tree. Changes are chased up and down the tree. E.g. adding a new parameter to a Read() method may require refactoring APIs at all levels.
Well yes, I meant it's the kernel's job. If the information is already in-process, then there's no access control at all and an app could just read it directly, rather than calling a private API.

I think we're talking at cross-purposes. My original question was why Apple don't restrict this restricted information. It appears we both agree that putting it behind an access control (like a syscall) would prevent this.
> They could move as much "private" functionality as possible outside of Objective-C objects entirely, which requires that you know the C function name and makes it obvious when you've linked to it.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6530701/is-the-function-...
In a lot of ways Amazon reminds me of Wal-mart, both from the market space they occupy and how terribly they treat employees. I think this is really a byproduct of chasing after low costs without other substantial service improvements. At least with Uber you get a legitimately better hailing and payment experience, not just being cheaper.
Also, success is not defined by superficial customer appeal, and certainly not by technical details.

Success is defined by a combination of customer appeal, investor persuasion, and ability to execute effective sales and marketing.

An initial Show HN typically includes details about the product and maybe the underlying technology, but doesn't usually tell you much about the other elements.

So I think it's unfair to judge HN on its prescience, when HN is as much about technical critiques as business potential.

It could be interesting would be to look at VC judgements of startups. VCs have a pitch deck, they have some hints about the financials and of customer growth, and they may know something about the reputations of the management team.

With the extra detail, you'd expect better prescience. I have no idea if that's what happens, but I think it would be very interesting to test the hypothesis that VCs make expert decisions.
I've just built this great PostgreSQL Database. How do I get it to my users?
Envelope is a complete platform that makes it easy to build web apps on top of PostgreSQL using just HTML and SQL.

visit envelope.xyz for details.
Yeah, yeah, so are Javascript and R, right?

No, really, why isn't Mathematica an actual lisp, one with a completely homoiconic language and with (reader) macros? Why aren't people writing modern CASes in lisp?
For your convenience:

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Envelope is released under a PostgreSQL style License. http://envelope.xyz/license.html

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The HLH Orion ran garbage collected Cambridge Lisp from fairly early in its development.
>supportive parents who gave me a lot of freedom

This is the difference between successful students and students who crumble when they get a B. Parents insist on getting their children in the very best universities, when cheaper options like state universities or local colleges are viable alternatives. They push students who are not intrinsically motivated, and when these students leave their parents and go to college, they are completely lost.
Neat. Can't wait for the follow-up paper which ranks lacing patterns by simulated load profile.
It wouldn't be hard to put bluetooth on the controller and tell it "this user is a seizure risk" vs "this user is playing basketball."
How and why should we not be relying on our local schools for education?

If a student can get into the top 5% of their class by GPA, and if the university believes that school is capable of providing the standards required to judge which students make up the top 5%, how does that not help choose the most elite students from each school while giving the school the flexibility to determine how and what they can teach, as long as it meets the university's standards?

If a school doesn't have the resources to teach the students effectively, why do we even send our kids to that school? Saying "because we have to" is a cop out. The school needs to be fixed or realized for what it is- a school that is ineffective at teaching at an elite level.
Pepsi is making a smartphone
You don't think it's possible the former employee had an agenda or axe to grind after his dismissal?

People often act out when they are emotionally upset, which the former Amazon employee clearly was.

This whole HN thread is kind of amazing -- it's filled with ad hominem attacks against Carney because of his history in politics.

Very few of the articles actually addressed Carney's main idea: the primary source from the NYT had a possible agenda/bias. The NYT reporters knew that, but did not report it. They also misled the Amazon people about their objective, pitching it differently and hiding facts that would have undercut their point.

It seems like Carney presented a lot of facts. If you dispute the facts in the article, or think Carney flat-out made up the email he quotes at length (or the reason for dismissal), then you are at least addressing the content of what he says.

granted, i have no idea what his political history is, as I'd never heard his name before.
Think I'd rather use asyncio in this case. Assuming most recent Python might not be fair though I guess.
That's a great point I haven't seen anyone else bring up. It's worth bringing up again in any discussion involving startups. Many barely last a few years. Who are they to talk about what an employee will do in the next 10 years lol?

Answer: "If you're good and VC's like you, I'll be working with you on your third startup by then."
"Why do so many people seem to think that experience only counts in games?"

That would make management look bad, so ...
> One downside I can see for this: it looks like, if the user had a seizure, it would be extremely dangerous

You're right. However, I suspect there are a lot of people who want this precisely because it's an electric wheelchair that's not been designed for the lowest common denominator.

Most of the electric wheelchairs seem to want their target market to be "all disabled people". This means you have to limit the speed, agility, control sensitivity, etc. so even people with (say) Cerebral Palsy can control them without putting them in danger.

There is a market for disabled people with full arm control and no proclivity for seizures who just want a fast, efficient way to get around. Right now I think the most popular way is to buy an electric wheelchair and mod it, but there's probably a market there for an off-the-shelf solution.
"... keep tabs on that fear, let me know ..." meaning, hold him accountable when the problems arise. I consider that a healthy response: he wants you to keep questioning him!

"Shaking the tree" i.e. commits in the middle of the hierarchy will make long and broad affects in the codebase.
It's never easy to sue a major organization.
What Happened to the Crypto Dream?, Part 1 [pdf]
No, you're not crazy at all. My last technical interview(1) was the final straw. No one cared about my knowledge and experience which was actually a specialty in what the company was doing. Someone would enter the room, immediately ask for an irrelevant whiteboard exercise then leave. Rinse and repeat. I felt about 2 inches tall when I left and decided that I had to stop being a software professional if this is how it was.(2)

(1)I hate that coinage as it's no longer a dialog, but a combination of hazing and interrogation.

(2)There's also the meta-issue that if my work life is dedicated to arguments about git and inheritance philosophy, then I needed a new career.