skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Haha, exactly my question! I wrote out that same table and got the same results.

Their calculation seems to be something like

sumOverRunLengths[P(runLength)*(1 - runLength)].

I also wish I knew how to get HN to keep my newlines like you did.
Gorgeous project !
I like the delay-your-mind idea.
If you share some more information about your blog, maybe we could help. Tell us about your readers persona -

who they are
why they are interested in reading your content
where do they hangout online
Gorgeous project ü
Or utilitarian people drink more than non utilitarian people!
Affirming the consequent. Jumping to conclusions. Appeal to emotion.

Also, there's a reason they use language like this. Namely, say they wrote the sentence you arrived at; what do you think the reaction would be? Riots, right? Violent, righteous riots. Sounds good - up until the mob gets to the hospital and finds the involved officer's partner there being fixed up after getting shot three times in the chest. Feels silly, right? You don't do major things when you don't know what happened. And that's why they use this language: they don't know what happened either, and until they do they're not going to say what happened.

Don't jump to conclusions.

Finally: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
Agreed. I feel like I'm tripping over the ego of some writers trying to read their work; I can practically see them with the thesaurus out trying to make things sound grander and more complicated than they are.
I'm not always own code. Simple example:

getCharsetOpt("UTF-8")

There is no way this code will return None in this particular case. So any additional checks are unnecessary and make code less readable.
> Researchers have often overlooked the obvious – that almost all cannabis users also smoke tobacco

Is that obvious? Out of the people in my life that smoke pot, less than half smoke cigarettes.
They'll trip very infrequently, sure, but they're not forcing constant re-balancing minute by minute or hour by hour.
On the proliferation of ninjas, evangelists, and hackers
Not a very interesting article:

1) it's only been six months

2) doesn't say whether a $70,000 minimum is particularly high for the jobs that are at his company
Two major drivers of the cost, as I understand it, are geography and geology of the region and existing land values, especially near the termini (eminent domain, in the US, requiring fair compensation to existing landholders.)
Kinetic: Verifiable Dynamic Control for Software Defined Networks
pypy fixes python's slow class instantiation. The HTTPRequest request parsing is probably much faster on pypy because it creates a new class within the loop.
>if you use ifPresent(), you have to live with the fact that you cannot return from Java lambdas

That's what map/flatMap is for, ifPresent is really only useful for side-effects.
May be as a first step you should post your blog url here
PyDev of the Week: Jaime Fernández Del Río
>Gonna have your function return an Err if an internal invariant is broken?

Absolutely you should return an error. Whether the caller wants to panic or handle it or print unicorns should be left up to the caller, not your function. Functions should not be expected to tear down the thread in case of an error. Nothing that panics should belong anywhere in exported code
The equivalents are not celebrated in other languages.
Would be handy if I could filter out all medium.com entries from the front page for me. Never read anything mildly researched or balanced there...
Go and Rust still need to find their way into OS vendors SDKs.

Many of us only use first class support languages, regardless of other options might exist out there.
I really wished C# would support Nullable for reference types too. This + the new traversal operator (?. ) would be a great combo to get rid of NullReferenceExceptions.

To me Optional<T> without pattern matching seems crap.
I'm more libertarian leaning and agree with you. It's a private business doing what it wants with its money. I imagine it helps the business find the best employees up and down the chain and ends making people super loyal. Turnover can be a huge expense because the cost to hire and brain drain.

It's also in no way related to an actual minimum wage. Letting companies do it on their own like this one is what makes the higher wage work.
I'm a little sceptic about that narrative.

It's very common but do we have any proof?

Surely, personal circumstances are very important if you are going to try to start a business.

There is psychological circumstances like: did you grow up in a family or an environment where the idea of start a business was present?

And more practical like:
Do you have technical abilities that you can sell if your project fail?
Do you or your parents, wife, etc. have money that will stop your fall if the project goes wrong?

Was really Bezos or Gates or Page really "taking a risk"?
And I mean a real risk.

Anyway, even if we, as a society, want to reward the "job creators", we probably don't want to live in winner take all world.
To be honest, what he did is completely fine with free market capitalism.

He had enough excess money so he choose to give higher salaries to all his employees. He does what he believes the right thing to do. Plus side, giving higher salaries usually has a positive effect on your job after all, as long as you can afford it. It seems to work for him and hopefully it will lead some others to do similar things.

But just by looking at this and universally forcing higher minimum wages may create unwanted consequences (Such as Lay offs, increase in un-documented exchanges or tax evasion simply because employers with already razor thin profits cannot afford salaries anymore.). Especially for small and medium sized companies.
I would agree with and extend your remarks that getting a title of nobility from a brick and mortar uni gives you a vocational meal ticket, so you can motivate grinders by asking if they like money of if they like eating food, and then they'll grind away for letters on a transcript.

But in MOOC land I get nothing. I did the complete automata class mostly to see if there's much new since I did a brick and mortar version some decades ago, and the "reward" was not exactly fulfilling. I'm not expecting Ullman to fly out and shake my hand, or my phone to ring off the hook from recruiters seeing I jumped thru some hoops, but something more would have been nice? Actually, anything would have been nice?

Since the grind factor was aggressively burned out of me, I haven't completed a single course. I did watch the videos and did the assignments for computational neuroscience and one of the multi-class algo series and the functional programming and the famous AI class.

There's a lot of talk about how grinders don't grind therefore grinders suck or grinding sucks. However what really sucks is the playground presented to the grinders. Its not their fault they aren't being given something worth grinding.

By analogy most MMORPGs that tanked and died, tanked and died because the grind experience sucked. Its not the fault of the grinders that the businessmen couldn't or wouldn't present something as enjoyably grindable as WoW or Eve.

To some extent the whole market segment of MOOCs smells like a freshmen psych class lab experiment, "what happens to grind performance when you leave all the annoyance factors of grinds in place but remove all the rewards, with the hypothesis that almost every rat in the box stops grinding"
If you're going to draw such sweeping conclusions about how obviously evil the right half the people in the country are, you should probably avoid doing it from third-hand reports on Slate. It's more than a wee bit probable they're stacking the deck.

Personally, I'd observe that if "he has sold all his stocks, emptied his retirement accounts, and mortgaged his two properties—including a $1.2 million home with a view of Puget Sound—and poured the $3 million he raised into Gravity." actually translates to "all that was necessary to fuel this", then it isn't exactly out of line to complain that a grand unsustainable stunt being used for the purpose of trying to force this on everybody else is a very silly thing to do, and has little to nothing to do with the problem of "wealth inequality". Everybody already knows that if it were possible to just pull wealth out of thin air everybody could have more. The problem is precisely that it isn't.

If it does turn out to be sustainable, then of course more power to him, but I'll wait for that judgment when the millions of dollars have run out and either have or have not been replaced by revenue. Seriously. I will in fact wait for that. Paying people well doesn't bother me, and I doubt it actually bothers anybody. But I'm certainly skeptical in a way that, say, a report from left-wing Slate about how this didn't work would leave me less skeptical, because they'd clearly be reporting it against their will, and probably have examined it within an inch of its life.

And even through what I would consider substantial bias, the article's own text leaves a lot of room to be concerned about this maneuver. He's basically spending almost the entire profit of the firm on salary, then promising not to lay anybody off or cut salaries even if times turn bad. Well... guess what that translates to... if the company hits problems, he'll end up going out of business and these people will suddenly not have their jobs at all. Or his glittering promises that you're so excited about will turn out to only have been words. Or something that does not involve everybody keeping their jobs at way above-market pay in a company that can't make payroll.

He's welcome to do this experiment, but maybe we should all wait to make sure it succeeds before getting too excited about it, and demanding that anyone who thinks it likely to fail consider themselves bad people who should feel bad. All the best to him (again, no sarcasm at all), but the most likely outcome is that he goes out of business in the next recession.
I'm not sure whether it's a Belgian or Dutch thing and what the context is, but I've seen it written as something very similar to ÿ (both in handwriting and in print) and I've also seen variants of a broken Ü as uppercase ligature.

I'm not saying it's particularly widespread or widely accepted, but I've seen it in real-world use by native speakers. For all I know it was just a stylistic choice or very experimental, but the same could be said about German uppercase SZ (ẞ -- vs the lowercase ß) and that one even has its own Unicode codepoint (although most people pretend it doesn't exist).

It doesn't seem too surprising either. German umlauts for example evolved a lot throughout fairly recent history (by European standards) -- we used to have a tiny superscript "e" instead of the two dots.

EDIT: To clarify: I was apparently wrong about the uppercase version (doesn't seem to have dots) but the case for ÿ seems pretty solid.
> PostgreSQL has had index organized tables (aka clustered indexes) for a long time.

Index ordered and clustered tables are different. Postgres' CLUSTER command simply rebuilds the the index after sorting the underlying data, in a on-off, blocking, operation. That means further operations will slowly reduce the "sortedness" and that it can't be relied upon when correctness is relevant (e.g. to skip a sort step for an ORDER BY).

Real index ordered tables would be nice, but I don't see them in the near future.

> Odds are poor that there is such low-hanging fruit the PostgreSQL team simply ignores.

I'm not aware of any really low-hanging fruits that we know of. While I'd like to improve INSERT performance a bit more, I think at the moment real bottlenecks are elsewhere. I mean on a halfway good single server I can do ~240k INSERTS/sec, without pipelining and about 1100k with. That's not exactly nothing. With COPY instead of INSERTs you can do a lot more.

I think write performance can be a improved a fair bit, but it's not the low hanging fruit level anymore. The biggest things I know are 1) replacing the buffer mapping hash table with a lock free datastructure (radix tree is what I/we are experimenting with) 2) better cache replacement implementation, suitable for very large memory sizes with a high turnover 3) make buffer pins lock free (patch exists) 4) make relation extension scale better

> I'm thinking the article is accurate, even if it seems gloating to MySQL fans.

I wish we could all use a bit less adversarial tone in these kinds of discussions. Mysql does some things better. Postgres some others. For some others it's not yet clear which direction is better. Of course I personally prefer PostgreSQL, but that shouldn't make me blind that they got some things right that we didn't.

EDIT: Updated throughput number from 800k to 1.1 mio.
Well I don't know because there isn't really a mine per reactor but I can tell you how much uranium a reactor that size uses. Around 200 tons a year.

As a comparison to coal, 3 million or more tons of coal is required per year for the equivalent amount of power.
Multiple files as an antipattern? Good luck with that.

If you use BEM, one of the many React style libraries, or any similar methodology for simulating local scope, any big problems with multiple files evaporate, and you get to reap the rewards of modularity. Granted, you still inherit styles from parent document elements, breaking modularity a bit, but for my purposes, it's close enough.

As a bonus, almost any perceived need to nest styles is also obviated.

On a side note, I found the tone of the article pretty obnoxious.
It seems a really good idea, to me. The autonomous autos are good local connectors to high speed rail or transit systems optimized for lnger-range travel, but not much better than existing autos add long-range travel options.
awesome project, I like it !
Outsider vs. Disruptor
I recently received a lengthy email of minor grammar errors in a programming manual I had written. I thanked the diligent bug reporter, and expressed surprise that so many mistakes had gone unnoticed for as long as they had. He told me that he was blind, and rather than reading the manual, he listened to it through a TTS system, thus catching some problems that might have been easy to miss visually.
Agreeed. I may have remembered the uppercase form wrong. You're probably right that it was a "broken" U rather than a U with dots.
From Wiki[1] the aphelion and perihelion for Mars are 1.381 and 1.666 so I think assuming that Mars orbit is circular is just wrong. The eccentricity is 9%. The inclination of Mar's orbit is also 1.8 degrees which makes a difference as well.

Wiki also lists a closest approach to Earth of 0.372 AU and a furthest distance of 2.675. The graphs on that link do not come close to those figures. They are off by 25%.

Basically I do not understand why someone would take an orbital problem, simplify all the interesting bits out of it and then put it up on a blog. Maybe he was more interested in the maths than the physics.

(1) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit_of_Mars#Table_of_orbital...
...and to avoid TPP etc. leaks becoming traceable, now something to routinely scan for this sort of thing and perform character and eol normalisation.
There are two reasons someone would make the non-utilitarian answer to the questions:

- They wouldn't feel that they could bring them self to cause someone's death (but they could still be utilitarian in principle)

- They feel that it's not the right ethical choice

A well known consequence of consuming alcohol is "dutch courage", becoming bolder and more risk-taking. I suspect the differences seen are actually just the utilitarian-in-principle folk being a bit braver.

Rather than asking:

"people must choose whether they would flip a switch to divert a runaway trolley, killing one person but sparing five others"

They could've asked what they think the correct thing for someone else to do would be.
Programmable blockchains in context – Ethereum's future
>A lot of web development seems to be about splitting things up into manageable chunks or “components”. [...] This doesn’t work so well for CSS.

I'm not a web developer by any means but I'm pretty sure there's a way to manage CSS "components" that then are compiled into a single, minified stylesheet, no?
Here we see a rhetorical ploy that is commonly used by climate-change deniers and creationists: after spending some time talking around the issue, they switch to claiming they have already addressed it. They then say they are not going to go over it again, trying to cover up their inability to give an answer with the suggestion that they have made an irrefutable one.

Though it is hard to tell what you are thinking, I think there is a chance you did this unknowingly. If so, then there is a way for you to recover: go back in this thread to the first post of mine that you replied to, state your disagreement with it, and present an argument for your position. Be specific and to the point.

To avoid one opportunity for further confusion, the post in question is this:

"Philosophy was, of course, the progenitor of science, but it is harder to find current relevance. For example, was science in a state of confusion until Popper corrected the errors of the logical positivists? Did the development of plate tectonics have to wait until Kuhn explained the structure of scientific revolutions?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10448491
I don't think Paul Graham meant ramble, use "uhs" and "ums" and and expletives as you and other commenters have said.

I think the point was to use common and simple wording so that people can understand without doing a lot of work. People have a lot more practice understanding common and simple words. So it's much easier for them to read, no matter how smart they are.

I think this was pretty clear in PG's essay, but the headline probably threw people off. Maybe he should have said it differently, such as "Make your writing as simple as your speech."
Putting philosophical approaches on the scale of drunkenness allows me to consider possibly the most fascinating corollary I can think of this whole experiment, which is to try to deduce the general level of intoxication of the original philosophers while working on their most notable publications.
Technically Sahara is still independent and Spain the official colonial administrator. It's a very tricky situation.
Visualizing the flow of refugees to Europe
Everyone getting paid the same is communism is only communism when the government forces this on everyone with laws. Some guy saying to himself "hey, I've got lots of money, I'm gonna pay everyone more" is the freest of capitalism even if (especially if) he chooses to pay them "unfairly" and is able to do so despite the objections of others. His money, his way.

Anyone who disagrees is still free to use their own money to pay their own employees peanuts from their mega-yacht.
Show HN: MunchDB – Display hygiene ratings on popular UK takeaway websites
A massive number of people are making big salaries that have risked absolutely none of their assets. Then when they suck, not only did they not risk or lose anything materially, they'll get huge severance checks.

And if you require a carrot that takes you from, say, $2M to $2.5M salary, maybe re-consider what motivates you and try to find something more intrinsic to the work & company itself.
Automating Founder Dating
Surprise that a philosophy class ranked at number two. Other then that the list mostly looks like what you'd expect.
The True Story of Audion (2004)
Three reasons why companies make “business strategy” so complicated
To provide a little more information: the standard Makefile target for generating tarballs is `dist` (which all GNU projects should implement). For those curious, go take a look at some of your favorite projects that implement this target and see what the resulting tarball may result in, versus the contents of the repository.

https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#Standard-T...
The Story of Surface Book
Drones to clean the stationary solar panel glass? Are you joking? Install something like a windshield wiper and be done with it.
Yeah paying for a gym membership is cheaper on the pocketbook, I've got more important things to pay for than a personal trainer. Like supporting my two daughters and fiancee. Sorry.
I think what author meant here is order of those compiled files. For example, when 'media_queries.css' comes before 'main.css', those media queries will be most likely overwritten.
If it's a random idea, I let it simmer in my head for a few weeks. If the enthusiasm fades I trust my gut and abandon it. Perhaps this explains why I've never pursued random ideas that aren't related to the work I do day in day out.

On the other hand, when I come up with an idea that's in my line of work, I'm immediately convinced of its viability. I always start out with drawings (tables, schematics, pro/con, etc). Then I move on to building the DB schema but I don't get too deep in the normalization. Otherwise it gets too tangled up. I then pick a framework and begin . As soon as I have a working proof of concept (not prototype), I pick a good name and website. Then I work toward an MVP.

Good luck!
Yeap, i'm using LessCSS for this. 1 less file for each "component" (classes are prefixed with component name to prevent collision). At build all less files are compiles into 1 big css file
"... OUT LOUD."

Thomas Mann did that (among other authors). He used to read his work to his family. Just look, how complex and hard to read some of his later work still is. And how complex the sentences are structured.

It is no guarantee, if you don't also think simple and clearly. But it certainly helps.
Randomized Control Trial of Pre-K on Children’s	Skills Through 3rd Grade [pdf]
Hold down alt when making the selection and you'll select in block mode instead of line mode.
To clarify:

I don't think Paul Graham meant ramble, use "uhs" and "ums" and expletives as some commenters have said.

I think the point was to use common and simple wording so that people can understand without doing a lot of work. People have a lot more practice understanding common and simple words. So it's much easier for them to read, no matter how smart they are.

Using uncommon or complicated words makes you feel smart, and might make some people think you're smart, but it makes your writing miserable work to read.

I think this was pretty clear in PG's essay, but the headline probably threw people off. Maybe he should have said it differently, such as "Make your writing as simple as your speech."
There is this strange social pressure about writing email in a formal manner e.g.

Dear, X

Best regards,
Y

This in addition to emails forcing you to come up with subject header for every conversation makes writing emails in a casual setting feel weird and wrong imo.
There's quite a lot of edge cases that can be triggered when fetching HTTP responses. Perhaps a small test suite would be beneficial in order to attract new developers that don't feel like breaking anything? (-:
This looks useful!

I've also been working on tools to make user context switching easier on the terminal (such as a project of mine called prm[0]), and I'm currently working on bringing this sort of functionality to the desktop environment.

If you (or anyone else) wants to talk about these sorts of things, or know of any good relevant research, please drop me a line here or at eivind dot arvesen at gmail dot com.

[0]: https://github.com/eivind88/prm
There's also non-cost factors involved with the PRC: for a land based empire like their's, internal lines of communication are critical, and since 1866 Prussia has shown the utility of railroads for that. Faster ones are obviously better, modulo how much heavy equipment you might need to move as well (for a lot of the PRC's issues, lightly armed troops are just fine).
Yes, the title could be updated to reflect that.
Homejoy at the Unicorn Glue Factory