skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you haven't read it, I highly recommend:

Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem by Simon Singh

The proof of Fermat's last theorem has a long and intriguing history, and Singh's writing is accessible and entertaining for anyone with an interest in math and science, regardless of education level.
Reminds me of a fun Obfuscated C Contest winner:

https://github.com/c00kiemon5ter/ioccc-obfuscated-c-contest/...

The author, Stephen Sykes, submitted a program that encodes a message into the whitespace of another file. Since whitespace doesn't matter in C, he encoded the encoder into the source of the decoder and only submitted the source for the decoder. Neat!
Why Homejoy Failed
Check out any of Dijkstra's handwritten papers. He uses this variation when signing his own name.
We have Sass partials for that but not as a part or official extension of the language itself.
I understand that but there surely must be a way to account for that, I'd imagine something like telling the tool to "don't override this section", or "this one overrides that one, but not the other way around" should be an option.
A browser extension is handy, but requires your browser to be open in order work. A script on the other hand can just be thrown up on a server and forgot about.
> they are ideologically opposed to a fairly paid society.

The problem is that there isn't one universal definition of fair. Conservatives, liberals, libertarians, socialists, they generally all (with individual exceptions of course) want a society that is fair, but with different, mutually incompatible definitions of fair.

Conservatives tend to preach that in a fair society, everyone gets what they deserve. Harder working, more talented? Then you deserve more. Socialists tend to preach that in a fair society, everyone gets what they need.

The group who need the most doesn't overlap with the group who is most talented and able to work hard, so conservatives and socialists will never agree on what is fair, or even that the other group believes in fairness.
The Tech of Back to the Future Part II
Great Leaders ARE Different
First of all, there is not "far less personal risk" for employees. If the company you work for goes under, every employee is hurt by that, not just the founder.

The founder may have lost more money, but he had more money to gamble with. The employee does not, and losing his personal income stream is probably equally or more damaging to him.
An autonomous car lets me get work done while I travel just like the train.

You're lucky; many of us get terribly motion sickness from reading anything in a car. For me, train is fine, though.

Taking a train 90% of the way there, then spending an hour walking or finding a taxi to get the last 10% is borderline useless.

Why would you take an hour? If we're assuming autonomous cars, then reliable and cheap taxi service for the last mile should be fairly common.
Nanobox Intro – Focus on Apps, Not Configuring Dev Environments
Probably because PATH variable was considered deprecated. You are supposed to put paths to your executables in the registry:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ee8...

> We recommend registering your application in the App Paths registry subkey. Doing so avoids the need for applications to modify the system PATH environment variable.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/07/25/10189...

> On top of the difficulty of adding more directories to the PATH, there was the recognition that this was another case of using a global setting to solve a local problem. It seemed wasteful to add a directory to the path just so you could find one file. Each additional directory on the path slowed down path sarching operations, even the ones unrelated to locating that one program.

> Enter App Paths. The idea here is that instead of adding your application directory to the path, you just create an entry under the App Paths key saying, "If somebody is looking to execute contoso.exe, I put it over here." Instead of adding an entire directory to the path, you just add a single file, and it's used only for application execution purposes, so it doesn't slow down other path search operations like loading DLLs.
I prefer using rems over ems, as ems are a pain to deal with for large applications (due to the nature of compounding).
https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/unikernels-in-rust/2494
It's an interesting article:

1) It's been six months. I've recently wondered how it's going.

2) The article did say starting wage was $35K at his business.
I think I missed the context on who Ben Fathi is. Can anyone fill me in?
Using sass splitting files is not a big deal. The author is living in the past, component based CSS is becoming the norm. For more info I'd suggest reading about SMACSS by Jonathan Snook.
Effective Campaigning – The art of changing what's possible
The real hard part comes after the initial novelty and the quick progress fade away: Staying motivated to do regular workouts without getting faster or lifting more weights every week.

This also applies to healthy eating habits. Once you've reached your target weight and the novelty wears off, it's much harder to eat clean. Personally, I like pizza once per week, usually on Friday, as celebration and reward that it's finally weekend.

For exercise it boils down to discipline. At least for me. Plus, I feel really, really bad and get in a terrible mood if I cannot physically exert myself every day.
Try building an email client that supports presence (online/offline/busy/custom state), subscriptions, group chat with different admin levels (owner, admin, member ...), message receipt and read notifications, chat state notifications (composing, active, inactive ..), VoIP including video chat (XMPP Jingle), public chat rooms, buddy lists, and many other features that I didn't list.

Surely someone can model it on top of email too, but the effort would be enormous and it would be proprietary.

XMPP on the other hand is a standardized protocol that supports all of this with great library support on many platforms and that's why most chat clients today use this protocol.
I recall going round a nuclear power plant once and they had a display showing that fresh coffee beans were radioactive enough to be considered nuclear waste had they been produced by the plant (whilst obviously not being considered materially at risk outside).

It's stuck with me (though I merely presume it to be true).
Hm, that adds up to ~20%; yet the project went 50% over. So the bulk of the overrun is ... something else?

Anyway, the point of these large project is, we will need them. We can build them easier now, than later as congestion and land prices go up even more. When calculating overruns, I'd like to compare the ultimate cost with, what would it cost if we hadn't? Congestion, choked commerce, slowed economic growth all cost something.

Sometimes you have to buckle down and actually build the brave new world. "Skate toward the puck" is how its sometimes called - build the thing we will need to be a functional, thriving society in 100 years.
> what's the advantage of Rust over other systems language?

Memory safety without garbage collection is Rust's core feature.

> Do you have a paper? It is a research project?

I'm not the author.
Next gen XMPP social network on Android/desktop soon?
No, I am actually agreeing that this is a valid example, though it is not really a matter of science. As for all the other examples that you allude to, I will consider them case-by-case.
Show HN: SDK.finance a back-end soft for 14 FinTech products
Should cyclists be required to get licences?
Sorry this took a while to post. (Dang has already censored me in another way after a regrettable spat some months ago -- I can only submit about 5 posts a day.)

From wikipedia:

> Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication or other information which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by governments, media outlets, authorities or other groups or institutions.

So no I used the word with it's correct meaning.
Show HN: Letsencrypt-nosudo is in beta
Received a request[0] to upvote this post from Pete Soderling <pete@hakkalabs.co> and I am pretty sure every member of Hakka Logs also received the same.

Not cool, guys.

[0] - http://i.imgur.com/YIQvomv.png
5 Keys to Rebounding from a Failed Business Strong
Create View Delete Contacts – Android App
unwrap() is not unsafe in Rust, and I don't think Haskell has anything similar?
So the OP I replied to should have been the one you censored. That post was ideological. I highlighted it true but that doesn't change anything.
Yeah, except you can change a tag and it is still verified.
Half of all small business fail in the first 3 to 5 years. Imagine taking a job where you had to pay for your office, office supplies, computer, and every thing else out of pocket. And oh yeah, half the people are fired within 3 to 5 years without being reimbursed for their expenses. While some people have more resources or come from a more privileged background that is a social discussion. It's still pretty risky in terms of cash, assets, and time no matter who you are.
You can build small renewable systems with all sorts of different capital costs, and all sorts of power generation abilities. Price ranges from $100 to $9billion. Nuclear projects do not happen for less than $Xbillions (and about half bankrupt before completion).

Got data? Seems that most of the renewable energy is being used ok. Smarter energy management, and using salt/aluminium/steel aluminium molten lakes allows for storage/adjustment. In many places aluminium factories use up a LOT of power. They can be used as batteries of sorts. CSP solar can hold power for over 8 hours. Wind farms over provision to allow for baseload generation. Then there is storing energy in car batteries. Biomass solutions offer different power generation abilities too. All this is being done today, and systems are continually being enhanced.

The point I was making though, is that you can have power generation (including batteries) at a much smaller cost for it to be useful. For example, even installing solar on a factory roof and installing batteries can be done for way under $100,000.

Working nuclear plants have to close 38 days every 17 months for refuelling and maintenance. How good are they at generating baseload then?
I don't understand his claim that B-tree write amplification is O(1). If I want to write one key to a B-tree, I only have to write O(1) nodes (amortized), but each node is presumably of size B >> 1, right?
The idea is that Err is good if it's a recoverable error, but if it's not recoverable, you should panic!.

Most errors are recoverable. panic! is an antipattern in a library. Or at least, provide both a panic-ing and a non-panic-ing variant.
Great comment! Just to add:

The definition of fairness is subject to research under the name equity theory [0]

The three extremes are (AFAIR):

- equal distribution

- distribution proportional to contribution

- distribution proportional to need

The problem with extreme 1 and 3 is that they provide no incentive to increase your contribution which is why "capitalism" is superior to "socialism" in terms of productivity.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equity_theory
I was obsessed with trying to understand it ever since I read the book.
How many years of math studies one need to make sense of it? (I'm doing a CS master degree but I'm not even close to feeling that I know anything about math, imposter syndrome or more likely not enough math skills...)
Any chances? Or should I probably give it up?
Yes, PV solar is not so good with waste either. Yes, the costs of removing broken solar panels should go into the costs for a project too. But that has nothing to do with judging weather Nuclear plants are a terrible investment.

Last I read none of the closed plants in the USA had been completely decommissioned. Which is why I think the estimates for decommissioning are wrong. But perhaps there are cheaper ways to do it in the future... I don't know.

Yes, fuel cost isn't that much... apparently 0.52 ¢/kWh. But that could still impact the bottom line if costs were 3x as much. But with 70 years of uranium left, I'm not sure prices will stay at similar prices over the life time of a new reactor.
Anywhere else but the desert, and the ecological impact would stop such projects. Its ironic, since the desert is a more fragile environment that most others. This project would likely exterminate many species and sterilize all the land under the mirrors. If anything thrived there, it would be completely unlike what is there now, causing an incalculable rippling ecological impact elsewhere.

But desert projects get a pass on all this for some reason. I guess because, people don't like to live there. Same reason fuzzy mammals get protected status, while lizards and worms get nothing - human preference.
Simple Web iFrame based surfer / obfuscator
I agree. Coursera's approach seems to capture the worst of both worlds of traditional and online ed. It lacks the live lecture and person-to-person contact of a traditional college course. Yet, it maintains the timeboxed approach of traditional ed, which exists chiefly to provide simultaneity, to scale real-life human contact to lecture-hall size.

Now I realize that some aspects of the way some courses are run require simultaneity. Things like human-powered grading, by TAs or peers. But they don't have to be designed that way. I've taken Coursera courses that are largely machine graded. For those, there doesn't seem to be any real reason why the courses are timeboxed. And even for courses where this is difficult to design around, it seems like it should be possible to tighten the iteration cycle.
I have to disagree with the first two points and concur with the last two.

Modularity can be achieved in CSS with ease (with Sass or any other capable preprocessor) and I do it all the time and I haven't come across a problem like he cited in his prose. The extended «@import» keyword/statement handles this perfectly and you can do wonders with it, you just have to keep a mental record of the hierarchy in your head (You already do that with the order of <link> and <style> elements as well as the CSS individual rules within a single file) and aim for well encapsulated components that are as loosely coupled as possible to the surroundings in the markup and you will have a true piece of mind.

As with nesting, yeah this could be a source of annoyance and inconvenience but I usually set a ceiling of 3 levels deep maximum for any component with rare exceptions when the need arises but most of the time I don't exceed the 3 level nesting limit and the codebase is still very very manageable.
From product design to virtual reality
From the article.

> Only two employees quit—a nonevent.
I am reminded of the great George Carlin speaking on a similar thread, on language is used to mask truth, in particular the example of PTSD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAj6cXHrWdQ

Even when we recognize that something is intentionally sterile or vague, it's impressive how much we just move on.
The other day I posted to a HN piece about someone who worked for a 1990s ISP that used dialup. That was interesting and triggered a LOT of memories from that time.

I'm actually rather glad I didn't document myself at this time. It would have been far too sad: my current group of friends is almost completely different to my group of friends from that time. It's sort of like I'm living a parallel existence, only I'm still involved with tech stuff.
Since 2 = e ^ ln 2, use the identity:

2^x = (e^(ln 2))^x = e ^ (x * ln 2)
Why Personalized Learning Advocates Need to Care about Blockchain
Really succinct & easy-to-read code at only 118 sloc, very nice!
And of course checked exceptions (wrapped in a try block) are "just" the nomadic effect of the option (or "result") type.
crontab -l | {cat; echo " * * * * * if curl 'https://mysite/' | grep -q mysubstring; then echo 'found it'; fi"} | crontab -
4 Ways How You Can Make Money from Online Blogging
...they fell out of fashion because they don't work, let alone that they're horrific human rights abuses.
Typically, you'd have a css file that serves as an entrypoint that you'd then use to specify the order of the files to include.

Additionally, while it sometimes makes sense to rely on order of your CSS selectors (e.g. media queries), this can easily be an anti-pattern. Keeping a single file well organized helps as long as you maintain the organization. Splitting things into separate files can enforce this organization.
I had a similar conversation with my wife the other day. Before the kids, she was an elderly care attendant, providing care for the elderly folks who are in their sunset years of their lives, and I worked in tech. Although my salary is not high, it is still about 5x of hers. I feel rather embarrass during my discussion as I feel that she is contributing a lot more to people lives than I am, the essential services. The stuff that I make would not make much difference in everyday life if it did not exists.

She is much more valuable to society than I am.

edit: grammar
PostgreSQL on the Command Line
You might bankrupt your grocery store employer at 70k but I don't see why they can't double grocery store workers 2x (from close to min wage to closer to 40k yr). Fresh produce (and meats) come with high margins to offset waste. Aldi's and Costco come closer to a better model for their industry of grocery stores. Costco could improve it's value to employees if it went private like Aldi.

Sure higher value jobs require automation, which means their will be less jobs available but let's improve the quality of the existing jobs and figure out what we do, as a society, with all the unemployed.

I miss seeing the pride in workers eyes as they deliver me a product/service. Let's bring the pride back and figure out the rest later.

I feel that if we increase employment happiness, as a society we'd be better able to manage massive unemployment. Massive unemployment doesn't need to be a 'bad thing', labeled as 'lazy'. Instead, should be a pride thing in technology. Humanity doesn't need to work. Why must we force it to? We (humanity) can figure out how to manage the freedom of massive unemployment due to technology.
So I'm a small business founder who had to take out a bank loan, mortgage the house, and forego a salary until business is good. That's somehow less risky than a standard employee who can likely walk away with no baggage after the business shutters?
Are You Passionate About Your Blog?
I am not a lawyer. I am not your lawyer.

I suspect that the common law legal systems would approach this via case law. Unless case law exists already I think that if you wanted to claim ownership of a file you'd need to present your case including expert witnesses and persuade a judge/jury of its validity.
Hi HN, me and my bf created this little project to help me improve my programming skills. It was a great and fun way to learn about apis, spiders and how to build an extension!

I wanted to share it to get some feedback and see how we can improve it to be more useful.

There are a few out there already but we decided to make one that loaded ratings a little faster by not firing off a request to the FSA api on every page load. Their api is a bit slow and can cause massive delays when loading a page with 50+ takeaways on it. So we created our own api to help improve loading times.
https://www.linkedin.com/pub/ben-fathi/3/950/b32
India has also been experimenting [1] with putting solar panels over the (extensive system of) canals in the state of Gujarat. The panels provide the added benefit of reducing the rate of evaporation from the open canals.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal_Solar_Power_Project
yeah, but the point is that it's very easy to forget about adding these rules because of the very complexity that motivated splitting CSS into several files in the first place
Would Any Observer Anywhere Think They're at the Center of the Universe?
This has been formalized with the banana equivalent dose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose

Potassium-40 is pretty fierce stuff, enough to, in this context, get people to be call for the outlawing more than two people sleeping together. If, you know, they really cared about the level of one kind of safety they insist on, as opposed to shutting down US nuclear activities for their various reasons, and used ludicrous methods like the linear no-threshold model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model which due to common sense and radiation hormesishttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis we can even say is unscientific.
Ask HN: Would a JavaScript unit test linter be useful?
Given that code coverage does not in any way indicate you wrote GOOD tests, I am curious if a javascript karma/jasmine linter would be useful? It could perhaps check that you are following the AAA testing pattern or that you have one and only one assertion per test? Just some ideas. What are your thoughts or ideas around this?
Yeah, but the state also isn't going around breaking peoples' legs because they can't pay.
The $24B Data Business That Telcos Don't Want to Talk About
I'm on mobile, so I'm unable to link to it, but Google CSS modules. Seriously, it's a godsend for achieving true modularity.
Is that long letter what they call a kashida?
90-140g/kWh sounds like a lot when 'carbon free' is also being bandied about. Nei states c02 emissions are 4-50g for the entire lifecycle,including construction mining fuel and decommssioning. Only hydro electric is lower.

http://www.nei.org/Issues-Policy/Protecting-the-Environment/...
This where the «!important» flag shines through but it gets a lot of hate in the community but I am seriously not convinced with their reasoning and arguments put forth as they seem not fully aware of the standard order of conflict resolution in dealing with cascading and inheritance in the language.
List of bugs identified using AFL is available on their webpage[1], seem to have it bookmarked from the last time AFL would have been mentioned here. Always find fuzzing to be a pretty interesting (and impressive) technique.

[1] http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/afl/#bugs
If anything, I need to talk like how I write. I'm a writer, not a talker: I'm verbose in speech, but concise in text.
Not everyone that starts a business is wealthy. They have take on debt or sold equity to finance their venture. They may have much less money in the bank than their employees. If you're financing your business with your retirement from a previous job or from personal savings you have much more at stake than lets say, a software dev that is getting non stop calls from recruiters for high 5 or 6 figure jobs that start tomorrow. Full disclosure, I'm the second guy who wishes I had the risk appetite to be the first guy.
that is the biggest pile of steaming BS I have ever heard. Morocco is in control of all of the Sahara west of the buffer area. People in the Sahara have moroccan ID cards, vote for Moroccan elections (they just voted for locals where they participated more than other parts of Morocco).
Edit: another factor is this is near Ouarzazate, no where near the (Moroccan) Western Sahara.
Ask HN: API SaaS Data Use?
If any of the site I want to use does not have an API. Is it legal to use there website data to create an API from it and offer it as SaaS or do I have to ask owner permission first ?
Except in the 80s we all demonized fat as evil, which meant food producers reduced the amount of fat in their food but substituted sugars; or we demonized saturated fats as evil, which meant food producers moved to transfats (which was catastrophic for public health).

Keto advocates ignore any suggestion that meat may increase risk of cancer; that saturated fats might not be the thing you get most of your energy from; that controlling salt intake is sensible for some people.

Science has moved on all of those things, but keto tends to see that movement, and then reject whatever the new stance is because broscience.