skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In this bit, Hanson indulges in pure fantasy:

"Rural living historically has encouraged independence, and it still does, even in the globalized and wired 21st century. Autonomy and autarky, not narrow specialization, are necessary and are fueled by an understanding that tools must be mastered to keep nature in its proper place."

In reality, the rural areas of the USA are wards of the state. Without government subsidies for water and electricity and telephone services, and without government subsidies for the food that farmers grow, many of the rural areas in the USA would have stopped agricultural production back during the 1930s.

This is strange:

"urbanites have argued that farmers can make do with less but wildlife needs ever more"

I would have thought that a conservative like Victor David Hanson would have been angry about the massive subsidies that the government offers to farmers, but apparently he doesn't care about that. Thanks to those subsidies, the USA typically produces too much food, not too little of it. Scaling back on those subsidies a bit, for a good environmental cause, seems like classical stewardship in action: the state is suppressing the demands of a greedy special interest, in favor of a project which benefits all of society.

I am disappointed that Hanson seems to support government subsidies when it comes to farmers (in the form of water subsidies), but then turns critical of government subsidies when it comes to helping an individual woman. Hanson writes this criticism of the fictional "Julia":

"Looking to cement his lead among urban unmarried women during his 2012 reelection campaign, Barack Obama ran an interactive Web ad, "The Life of Julia." Its dependency narrative defined the life of an everywoman character as one of cradle-to-grave government reliance — a desirable thing. Julia is proudly and perennially a ward of the state. She can get through school only thanks to Head Start and federally backed student loans. Only the Small Business Administration and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act enable her to find work. In her retirement years, only Social Security and Medicare allow her comfort and the time to volunteer for a communal urban garden, apparently a hobby rather than a critical food source."

So helping big agri-business with government subsidies of water is perfectly acceptable, but helping a woman go to college is a terrible thing?
The concept of energy makes motion easier to reason about, but it took some of the greatest scientists in human history to come up with that idea.

So I guess you'd have us all read Aristotle and be arrogant and proud of our state of ignorance?
Should driverless cars kill their own passengers to save a pedestrian?
Compare http://time.com/3394403/shylock-biden/
Rails 5 allows setting custom HTTP Headers for assets
Read How Rails 5 allows setting custom HTTP Headers for assets and how it solved some Caching Issues for us on Heroku and Fastly.
Rejecting the gender binary: a vector-space operation
Remember that vezzy-fnord was responding to a comment that made the following erroneous statement:

> systemd is NOT making the change to manage cgroups from PID1. Kernel is...

I've heard systemd proponents assert that both udev and the cgroup manager must live in either kernel space or in PID 1, because to do otherwise would expose systemd to races or something while PID 1 started udev and/or the cgroup manager.

These are also erroneous statements. It's rather important to correct such statements, as we're dealing with a (sadly) highly politicized technical topic.
"This one's actually kind of cool: you step on your laptop and it weighs you, it tells you how much you weigh, like a scale. Scale.com."

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Ul4geRaM5dY
This is incredible! Also, just noticed their homepage: https://www.livecoding.tv/

http://imgur.com/ryBikOY
Shame. I was really enjoying streaming while I coded. Not so much the livecoding platform (very buggy from my experience), but the activity itself.

I don't think I'll stream on their site again after this. Can't stand to support founders who treat their users like this.

Twitch.tv it is.
I agree that passion is what you can't not do but I think there's more to it. A person may not know what they are passionate about until they are right up against it.

Passion is what you care about. If getting a job done right keeps you up at night and you go the extra mile to do, then you have passion. If you can let it go then you don't.

I think better advice is: if you have a passion, then try to find a way to make it profitable if it's not and get into a position that you can act on your passion so it's not a detriment.

Having passion in an environment where it is not wanted is an awful experience and get a person fired really quick in an employment situation.

When a passion is profitable and works with others then it builds a fire that feeds itself and can be very fulfilling.
Better than before. Keep. But continue work.
The US Guantánamo atrocities: our very own witch trials.
What you just said is this new thing isn't as good, and probably never will be, but you imply we should use it, even though the current tools are better.

See my complaint? If they are going to introduce a new tool, it must be better than the current tool. It's not and it's worse and not as mature.
Rule #1: spammers lie.
Much, much better -- please do keep! In fact, I just deleted the old iOS app I was using for it and just saved the webpage to my homescreen instead.
> "What if the next time I have 2 minutes at a traffic light, instead of checking Facebook, I say a prayer to the God of the universe?"

here we go...
>I'd have less problem with dense housing (especially since I don't actually care about the stereotypical "yard and a white picket fence") if said housing started including -90dB or better soundproofing.

Yep. Instead of having a thousand of single-family houses, I would rather have a beautiful 30+ stories castle surrounded by a park of ~1 km radius. Cars are expected to live underground and reach the surface outside of the park.

Saying that as I have lived a few years in a very similar setting, while being at a university: http://cdn.absolutevisit.com/blog/photo-of-the-day/100075/Mo...
"...this seems pretty atypical for someone living in the middle of nowhere. Most people grab their gun if someone they're not expecting comes to the door at 10pm regardless of where you live."

Only around 1/3rd of Americans own a gun or live with someone that does, so no, "most people" don't grab their gun if someone knocks after 10pm - most people don't even have a gun.

If someone knocks on my door at 11pm, it's probably someone looking for a neighbor, if someone knocks at 3am, then I'll peek out the upstairs window to see if it's a neighbor, and if not, I might call the police or shout out the window to see what he wants.
Agreed, that would have been a far better term if that was the meaning he was attempting to portray.
> On a separate note, I wonder how much Netflix's and YouTube's CDN boxes cost, given that Netflix and YouTube tend to subsidize them

I worked at a large ISP for 4 years, and for us, both the YouTube and Netflix CDN boxes were free.

However, the boxes consume a massive amount of traffic to keep themselves in sync. For us, YouTube wasn't worth having until we had over 15,000 customers, and we still don't have a NetFlix box because it syncs the entire NetFlix catalog and all changes, every 24 hours, so they actually use less traffic not having one.
In order to see the quality difference, you have to compare the docs to another project that you make extensive use of.

I know that Postgresql's and Erlang's documentation is really rather good. So, go use Postgresql or Erlang for a slightly non-trivial project, then -now that you know about the topic that the docs cover- compare the quality of the systemd documentation to the documentation of either other project.

Pay special attention to the documentation provided to folks who want to understand the internals of systemd, Postgres, or Erlang. AIUI, [0] systemd's internals documentation is woefully lacking.

[0] And as has been repeated by everyone I've ever seen try to use said documentation.
Have you actually looked into stock markets (in other places and other times) that did not penalize trading on insider information?
These people are shooting deer with .22LR revolvers because a .30 (both gun and ammo) is too expensive? How many a day are they shooting? It's downright irresponsible to hunt deer with a .22, any hunter will confirm - this is not a case of 'urban' v 'rural', it's a case of 'responsible hunter' v 'idiot'.
I see cowardly HN'ers downvoting my post without commenting on how they think I'm wrong (I'm not and I'm better than you) but I restrained myself on what I really thought. My grandmother could write better markup than this; and she's been dead for 50 years!
Welcomed by rural residents until rural subsidies dry up and farmers find that they are competing with produce grown in other countries so they are restricted in how high they can price the food they sell to cities.
> Not sure why I would want to self host what is effectively a phone system

That's an interesting parallel. I suppose it would technically be possible for a company to out-source their internal phone system to an external third-party using VOIP. But I've never seen it done and I don't know how I would persuade a CTO that it's a good idea to make internal communication reliant on the Internet.

Yet companies are falling over themselves to out-source internal IM... why?
The author is a liar.

To pretend the water crisis is about food is a giant lie, if the given subtext is we need to eat. The author is smart enough not to outright lie, but he definitely leaves a wildly incorrect impression.

We piss away acre-feet of water per orchard to irrigate almonds, using approximately one gallon of water per almond. I love almonds, but we will live just fine without them. No-one will starve if they don't have almonds.

We export a hundred billion gallons of water per year via alfalfa. ie a year's water supply for a million families. I'm sure Japan will whine if they have to figure out some other way to feed their cattle, but that's their problem. Nobody in California or the US will go without food if Japan and China have more expensive beef, or are forced to internalize the the environmental impact of their food choices.

We grow fucking cotton in the desert. You don't eat cotton.

etc...

I've posted about this before, but pretending that the water crisis in CA is a choice between food, where the subtext is people will go hungry, and environmental concerns is a flat out lie. It's a choice between 2% of the economy that is wildly, ludicrously wasteful with an increasing precious resource and is pitching a tantrum that they may not be able to treat water as effectively free.
You don't believe different rates of economic growth are possible?
Hawks that spread fire to flush out prey in Australia
I think the author wants the developed nations to send in their fire fighting aid.
And the idea that someone is going to poach a deer and throw it in the back of the truck on the way home from work is also laughable. The penalties for poaching are far too harsh for anyone who cares about ever hunting, fishing, or owning a gun for the rest of their lives. It's not something that happens in broad daylight for sure.
Keep -- and keep improving. Thanks!
VCs don’t have to lock up every entrepreneur, just those they think are world class with a bad idea. If the team truly is world class then they should be as rare as unicorns. To let a world-class team explode over just because they had a bad idea is silly if 50K would keep them going until they came up with a good idea.

I don’t think the team at Homejoy was world class, but I also didn’t back them. We have to assume that the VCs that did back them thought they were a world class team or else they would not have given them the money they did.

I am more lenient towards delusional founders (especially young ones) than delusional VCs. The team at Homejoy would have done very little damage if they had not been backed.
Why don't the people of democratic Indonesia choose a president, a government that cares about pollution, cares about the lives?

The author may expect with more intense coverage from the renowned international media community, the government of Indonesia will pay more attention to the problem, and perhaps the government will take effective measures to tackle this problem.

Due to the coverage on air pollution of China from domestic and foreign media, especially on PM 2.5, the majority of Chinese people slowly become aware with the health risks posed by the air pollution. This put pressure on the Chinese government, and since then the government has promised to clean the air, and they really are taking steps to reduce pollution.
As the tree grows, the weight distribution changes, and things move. Trees grow from the leaves. Leaves are not just at "the top".
I do like the sugary white New England "regular" :) ... also, of course I'm only referring to the major chains.
On the other hand, people in rural areas tend to be on friendlier terms with their neighbours than people in high-density areas.

For various reasons, including the fact that it's much easier to be on good terms with your neighbour when he lives way over the other side of the hill and nothing he does really affects you or vice versa.

Also because of necessity -- if there's only two people in a ten-mile radius who can help you if you have a problem, it's nice to be on good terms with them.

And finally just the fact that the fewer people you come into contact with, the easier it is to become friends with them. If you keep running into the same fifty people over and over again you'll get to know them, but most of the people I see in the city are people I'll never see again.
This assumes (quite wrongly) that the same goods have the same utility across the population. It's similar to saying, in a perfectly efficient economy, there would be no trades. There are, because there is a benefit to that trade -- and there is no reason for that benefit to be evenly distributed.
Show HN: What movies from an IMDB list can you watch on Netflix?
> Nobody wants to live next to transients, but each person individually benefits from renting their property to them while they're away on business or vacation.

I've lived in actual full-time hotels in Asia for months at a time and never encountered any of these "transient" problems people keep whining about. Maybe once a month there was some noise at night. And these weren't high-end hotels either.
For all you hear about the Salem Witch Trials, it was a surprise when I found out that the total number of people who wound up killed was only nineteen. The amount of emphasis put on this one event, compared to many others long forgotten, is surprising.

Is it just the fact that people have been finding the Salem witch trials a convenient narrative to hang their contemporary political points off for the last 300 years?
Neovim-hackernews? Coming soon, an email client in your editor...
I assure you that you could keep America famine free for far less. Indeed pretty much the entire support structure is only 80 years old at the oldest, so america managed just fine for a far longer period of time without supports and without a famine than with them.

Also there are some products (like rice) just shouldn't have 100% availability of US grown products. It isn't like the US will starve without US grown rice, and the US long supported far more rice than was profitable. Importantly the US dropped lots of subsidies on rice, and production wasn't all that impacted (3% declines).

So yeah, you might also say that US support of auto makers is good because never have you been completely unable to find a new US made car to buy, but that doesn't make it necessary and certainly doesn't make it good policy.
For large parts of history it was, the literate people write history.
> Unlike our brothers and sisters in the other engineering disciplines, though, software engineering does not have the same history of mandatory formal education.

Was there a time when other engineering disciplines were not formally schooled? Did they develop into having formal education or were they born that way? Is computer programming moving in the same direction via organizations like the ACM?

Can we learn from other fields who have in fact experienced similar issues on some level? Do we need to reinvent the wheel of creating an effective culture that rewards all the values humans desire? What are those? Success, ability to express oneself, ... ?
Transemployment: creating jobs out of thin air
>"Everybody knows what the temperature of the Earth would be if it were a black body."

Not really true, or at least that black body temp is not useful in determining the "extra" warmth. The 255K number is the result of a "simple educational tool" that makes for "a good algebra lesson". I haven't seen what the correct number would be, but probably closer to the mean temperature of the moon ~200K. So there is some combination of atmospheric effects that raises mean temperature ~90K, rather than the usually quoted 33K.
https://www.skepticalscience.com/postma-disproved-the-greenh...
I wasn't going to go there, but you are correct. No part of the story makes sense.
This works very well:

@media screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio:0) {
select:focus,
textarea:focus,
input:focus {
font-size: 16px;
}
}

It uses a css selector only available on iOS devices and enables a larger font to prevent zoom.

[Original concept] http://stackoverflow.com/a/16255670/209005
The test pg suggests was also proposed by the economist Gary Becker [1]. Like many people here noticed, the catch is that the test only works if you compare marginal performance and not average performance. Economists call this the inframarginality problem [2]. There are a number of solutions to this problem to restore pg's result:

- As pg himself says, if we assume certain statistical distributions of ability and selection rules, the inframarginality problem goes away.

- We'd also solve the inframarginality problem if we can tell roughly who the marginal applicants were. If pg could ask the VC firm, see who almost got rejected, and compare these two groups, he'd be set. pg is well-positioned to test this on the YC dataset.

Likewise, he could solve this problem if he can observe another variable that reveals who the marginal applicants likely were (for example, the startups that had the fewest co-investors).

- There's also an entire literature out there that tries to solve the problem using other ways. For example if a system follows the "KPT" sufficient conditions then the inframarginality problem also goes away.

[1] One prominent approach ... is the “outcome test,” which originated in Gary S. Becker (1957). In the context of motor vehicle searches, the outcome test is based on the following intuitive notion: if troopers are profiling minority motorists due to racial prejudice, they will search minorities even when the returns from searching them, i.e., the probabilities of successful searches against minorities, are smaller than those from searching whites. More precisely, if racial prejudice is the reason for racial profiling, then the success rate against the marginal minority motorist (i.e., the last minority motorist deemed suspicious enough to be searched) will be lower than the success rate against the marginal white motorist. (From [3])

[2] "While this idea has been well understood, it is problematic in empirical applications because researchers will never be able to directly observe search success rates against marginal motorists. This is due to the fact that we cannot identify the marginal motorist, since accomplishing this would require having complete
information on all of the variables that troopers use in determining the suspicion level of motorists. Because of this omitted-variables problem, we can observe only the average success rate of searches against white and minority motorists, and not the marginal success rate.
Since the equality of marginal search success rates does not imply, and is not implied by, the equality of the average search success rates, we cannot determine the relationship between the marginal search success rates of white and minority motorists by looking at average success rates. In past literature, this has been referred
to as the “infra-marginality” problem. (From [3]).

[3] Anwar, Shamena, and Hanming Fang, "An Alternative Test of Racial Prejudice in Motor Vehicle
Searches: Theory and Evidence." American Economic Review. (2006)

http://economics.sas.upenn.edu/~hfang/publication/racial-pro...
Agree. I don't think physical distance and density are important factors. Culture might be.

People are more friendly in the midwest, and they are more open to talk about family matters. Family matters are in essence intimate, and the topics draw the people in the conversation together. In the big cities, these topics are regarded as "more" private (they are indeed private). It is a social norm to not share them unless to good friends. The less people share, the less opportunities to make friends.

I also find it is easier for adults, especially men, to make friends in Asia, like in China and Japan.
KEEP!! This looks so much better on my note 4. No more zooming in and out.
Measurements from my device vs. Kitchen dcale:
Small clementine: 48g vs 64g
Apple: 78g vs 180g
Pear: 125 vs 200
This sounds like hard work - I think I might just have to keep running my own business :)

Out of curiosity why can’t anyone know that you built something? Do you mean for your own company, or you can’t help your portfolio companies build things?
This is really clever!
Ask HN: What non-trivial JavaScript app would you like explained in depth?
I am preparing a course to teach developers how to create and maintain a non-trivial Javascript application. It will include in depth git history, discussions on architecture (why is it important to build feature X in way Y), annotated source code, and screencasts discussing sticky issues and giving insight into both the problem and solution.

My objective is to help those who know how to write javascript learn how to build production ready applications that accomplish a business goal. My hope is that this knowledge will increase confidence and productivity in the students' careers.

Is the app something you'd like to have a say about? Do you care which tools are used?

Disclaimer I will build on the shoulders on giants and as such the source code (including git history) will be released under as permissive a license as possible while following the licensing requirements of the chosen technologies; however -- some of the material will be created with the intention of making a profit.
Did the TG crew lose their jobs? I thought that its going to keep going with a new host
Slow motion googly eye spider face
GBPJPY Bull Pressure Eyes the 186.30/72 Zone
How GoDaddy's quest for respect led to an improbable partnership with MIT
https://medium.com/@aji/robustirc-is-a-regression-a1e9b6c966... - "RobustIRC is a regression"
If you want to go further:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book
America has -- just not in living memory. The single greatest contributor to the absurd American prosperity of the first half of the 20th century is the mysterious extinction of the Rocky Mountain locust, leaving North America the only major landmass with agricultural potential and no native locust species.
when twitter bots go bad: https://twitter.com/livecodingtv/status/661046865488580610
This is incredibly cool, even though I can only imagine one real-world use for it (measuring drugs).
Yes please! Much better.
I'm also super happy with WebPass. My current building gets about 400 Mbps up/down.
Those laws vary by locality (e.g. it's typically a per state thing). I do believe Washington is pretty non-regulatory when it comes to ISPs.
And yet I'm still forced to use a heavily throttled shower head on pain of major fines, as if it makes any difference.