skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One interesting thing that I found out, having renovated a loft in a brick building from the early 1900s, is that modern mortar is much more friable and shorter-lived than older mortars (specifically, European recipes) made with a higher proportion of lime. The old mortars flex more effectively, while moderns compounds crack and spall. When we repointed our building, we found an English stonemason with a background in historical buildings (it's not cheap, architecture). He had worked on renovating Roman-era buildings in Bath, where they found that mortar laid down thousands of years ago had survived completely intact, requiring often very minor repairs. It's sobering to think that Roman building technologies will outlast those of our own age.
Maybe that's DC, then? I dunno. I live in Southern California, and I haven't seen a home built here in the last 30 years that was remotely well constructed. They're all made out of ticky tacky, as the song goes. And it seems to be getting worse year over year, especially in homes built after the Great Recession. The only exceptions seem to be the double-digit-million-dollar luxury homes.

As for the pros and cons of old construction...

Pros: generally more durable, more attention to detail, nicer materials used. Will suffer from age-related maintenance issues, but unlike modern construction, is unlikely to suffer from issues related to fundamental structural or design failure.

Cons: design and layout choices that no longer fit a contemporary lifestyle (small or no closets; tiny bathrooms and kitchens; closed floor plans; etc.). Generally poorer insulation. Depending on the age of the home, it may also have issues with old plumbing and, having not been designed for central heating or A/C, will sometimes be a bear to deal with in that department.

All things considered, having lived in a c. 1920s home and a series of c. 2000s and c. 2010s homes, I'd take the older house 9 times out of 10 and just gut/retrofit as necessary to remedy layout issues (not construction-quality issues). I don't enjoy living in a drywall box with a superficially nice looking kitchen.

And I say all of this as someone who, all things being equal, greatly prefers a hyper-modernist aesthetic. I just have to accept that I don't get a Tony Stark house until I have Tony Stark money. :)
makes a lot of sense to subsidize childcare heavily, it's one of the most pro growth policies one can come up with - let's people actually work and not worry about what to do with the kids. Norway is oil rich, though, so not clear how relevant this is for US
>Webview apps cannot have self-modifying code.

JavaScript is eminently (almost too much so) able to modify its own running code.

It's true that it's limited to whatever APIs the WebView exposes. Then again, this thing (yours?) is limited to whatever API the OS exposes. The ultimate, I suppose, would be to have a self-modifying OS - and then your thing is limited by whatever the hardware exposes.

All applications only take input from hardware sensors and then have (screen, storage, network) side-effects. That's all a program ever is. That's Facebook and Google and WoW and Angry Birds and Wolfram Alpha, and so on. You can try to bust out of each layer (OS, JVM, Browser) but that in no sense requires "self-modifying code". Self-modificaton with a compiled language on a mobile device is a neat trick, but it's self-modification is no more or less profound than that provided by a browser, modulo performance.
Those are scalar instructions, not the SIMD instructions. With x86_64 the fpu stack operations are basically for legacy purposes only, and normal floating point operations are expected to be done with the SSE/AVX scalar instructions. SIMD instruction used the packed variants of the commands allowing you to multiple say 4 floats in a single instruction.
There is an excellent and simultaneously light hearted Nat Geo documentary on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qO11bdsWvOo
There's a pretty big difference between emscripten and compilers that specifically target JS. The ones that target JS will generally use JS memory management and attempt to use JS language features whereas emscripten targets asm.js and manages memory itself within byte arrays.
Further furthermore, is any non-parasitic industry paying that kind of money for anything?
Inflation is growth in the money supply. It has nothing to do with wages or prices or any of that other stuff. Those are affected by inflation. But inflation, by definition is changes in the money supply.

That is the economic definition of inflation.

Redefining inflation is a common acting of politicians et. al who want to obscure what they are doing to the economy.
Do you have floaters in your left eye? Retina detachment? Your case sounds similar to mine.

Recently diagnosed with cataract in right eye. Few years ago, retina detachment in left eye, followed by cataract in left eye, and then losing pupil controlling nerves in left eye during cataract surgery.
Yes there has but not enough to get out of the alpha tests and into at least beta tests.

I think they have a lack of funding, plus a lot of API calls are undocumented and they don't know how to implement them yet.

If any company decides to give them money they might get sued by Microsoft or IBM over IP rights.

As I recall ReactOS once had a source code audit to make sure they didn't add in any of the Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 or 2000 source code into it. Someone had leaked Windows Source Code to the Internet, and there was this big issue that ReactOS might have copied it into their source code. http://slashdot.org/story/06/02/01/1944257/reactos-code-audi...

That code audit slowed things down a bit.

OSFree uses many opensource projects that were made to supplement the real OS/2 and combine them together to try and make an OS based on the L4 Microkernel using an OS/2 personality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family

Since they don't have the source code to the OS/2 Kernel they have to use an existing Kernel and modify it to run OS/2 code. So that makes it a lot harder.

There was a Windows 98 clone called Freedows 98 that tried to do the same thing, but it got abandoned and even the Wikipedia article got deleted. If you Google for Freedows OS you might find some sources on it. Links go to a domain that is for sale, as it was abandoned a long time ago.

Trying to make an open source clone of any commercial OS is hard. GNU/Linux was only possible because the FSF made the GNU part to rewrite Unix tools from scratch and Linus made the Linux Kernel to use the GNU tools to make Linux.
There seem to be so many things wrong with this.

How about if the person didn't deliver? Would the project be delayed and reauctioned?

Haven't the problems of lowest-bidder quality been illustrated over and over?

Wouldn't they garner a lot more good will if they just ask for volunteering?
DDoS attack on ProtonMail for extortion
They are a conspiracy to break the web of hyperlinks we all use to navigate.
This happens in middle east countries a lot, and applies to many white collar workers too. Unless you are in a really good company/position the employer will keep your passport.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/22/abu-dhabi-migra...
"Those are roughly 40% and 55% increases. How is that not exciting?"

Why are we even discussing this if you can't see that it's been essentially unchanged since the '70s? Similarly rents has gone up as percentage of income and housing prices just went through a boom and bust cycle and has been far higher on average the last decade than before.

Sure, there are other factors to look at, but you are very much skewing the numbers to you liking as you accused others of having done in you first post in this thread.
One of the things the author brings up is that the old worksite would've had senior craftsmen - and that the standard of work of the ordinary laborer would've been higher.

Have these skilled craftsmen moved into other careers - for instance, software engineer?
Please explain how Apple a company that made a computer in china, and then sells that same compute run china, and keeps the profits from selling the computer in China is "stashing its profits overseas".

This argument presumes that all money made worldwide should be taxed in the USA.

No country does that.
...well you wouldn't have those problems with XML tags/HTML being used in an app with a framework that uses a custom layout system.
(Dog|Cat) urine, on the other hand: a delightful bouquet.
The group of people chasing the javascript framework of the week, writing text editors in javascript.
> But in the last 30 years, during which A People’s History has arguably had a greater influence on how Americans understand their past than any other single book, normally voluble scholars have gone silent.

This doesn't ring true at all. If the influence of People's History was as large as this author suggests, America would be nowhere as jingoistic as it is today.
The article presents a good technique for handling situations, but I can't help but feel the solution breaks a rule. You are supposed to only be able to ask a single question to each god, but a biconditional question is really two different questions. You can see this simply from the structure of the English question (as well as in the conversion to NAND logic):

> “Does ‘da’ mean ‘yes’ if and only if you are True and if and only if B is Random?”
IMHO the basic fallacy of this essay is that ideology is not reality. It sets the goal to be communism as classically envisioned(worker's paradise), and only some people are absolutely convinced that that's the culture they want. We still largely have a strong belief in private property, for example.

In making this case, the author raises a bunch of bogeyman images of everything else being sacrificed on the altar of UBI. This is a paranoia tactic. The real exchanges made are done at the level of individual politicians horse-trading against rivals and various interest groups. It's possible for something to be popular enough that capital is told to go get dunked, despite all its other advantages, because the alternative is political suicide. It doesn't happen often, but this is one of those issues that captures people's imagination in a big way.
Almost every single Indian movie goer agrees with the hero not following any rules and doing things according to what he feels as justified in the movie. Movies exaggerated the imperfection in the Indian law and encouraged everyone to judge everything based on their own limited view of the things. Herd mentality only got worse with all social connectivity made possible by technology - fueling more opionated and wrong views.
I want one of their hyper-aggressive rats: http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/04/17/004234
Because the primary increase in median salary for women are their increased participation in the workforce and not actually higher salary? If you look at median real income per hour you find a similar results as men.
Thanks for mitmproxy, used it for the first time the other day :-)
Sounds like we're at least a decade away since it's not to the point of human clinical trials.
GoFundMe Gone Wild
Both Marxist and Austrians agree: intermediate socialist policies are doomed to fail. Marxists would say because they weren't Marxist enough, and Austrians would say because all socialist systems must fail because they lack a means to calculate relative value sufficient for anything other than robbery, and certainly not sufficient for directing activity fit for an industrial society.
Minority rights is nothing but religious discrimination. There is no difference.
They were kept for fur so culling would have been the normal outcome. In regards culling for breeding purposes you don't have to physical kill the unwanted individual, you just don't let them breed.
I'd take 15 humans over 15 dogs ANY day.

Little humans are typically very controllable and well-behaved, and even more so after a few days in a good system.
Grand Plans: Le Corbusier in the USSR
I have never seen a childcare that feeds cheese puffs.
ProtonMail pays $6k ransom, gets taken out by DDoS anyway
Apple's design influence reaches everywhere. While Android apps don't visually mimic iOS, the tons of designed interactions that were introduced on iOS (not necessarily by Apple but it's dev community) are frequently replicated on Android apps. It's just now that Google has a good enough design language that we can all be proud (depending on who you ask) to implement on all platforms
Cure for Diabetes best way
Bringing in a dog from overseas is a 6 month and very expensive exercise. I very much doubt that AQIS is going to let me bring in a known noxious pest.

Edit. In most of Australia it is illegal to keep a pet fox, but in NSW you can if they are desexed and not released back into the wild [1]. I still doubt AQIS will let me bring one in.

1. http://sydneyfoxtails.tumblr.com
> The "piss-on-wall" urinal with recessed floor drain is the... golden standard.

?!?

The piss-on-wall urinal is horrid. There's splashback no matter how you stand. The problem is especially exacerbated if the user is wearing sandals.

The golden standard (imo) is a water-flush bowl-style urinal mounted at an appropriate height and with wide dividers between users. TBH though, I still prefer a stall.
> Half-man, half-beast “chemirochas.” Far from the popular conception of the myth is the deliciously ironic truth: the Kipsigis villagers are the ones who actually thought the white Europeans were savages.

Hah, wonderful. Chemirocha. This has to be the best submission I've seen on HN ever. Thanks for posting!

I'm really curious to hear the songs that were recorded by Hugh - are they available to listen anywhere?
Article does not answer the question implied in its title. Where is the money going?
I think it has less to do with typing difficulty and more to do with annoyance. Sometimes what people like is less about technical differences and more about previously built mental models that reduce cognitive overhead. In other words: It let's them simply start playing and experimenting without having to relearn things they take for granted.

If most people (let's say 99% for argument's sake) expect "string".length to refer to character count and only 1% need something like "string".utf8.count why not just accommodate them and make the language more accessible? This reminds me a bit of UX design. I've seen people time and again make the mistake over the years of designing their UX in a vacuum. What they produced wasn't bad or hard to use, it just broke expectations.

All that said, sometimes breaking expectations is exactly what you should do because someone has to for things to change and move in the right direction. And sometimes when you do that you're taking one for the team, so to speak. Of course I don't know shit, but if I were looking at making a language popular I'd weigh doing what's "right" against my desire to increase the popularity carefully.
Solving FLARE ON Challenge #2 Reverse Engineering detailed walk through
There's a lot of inconsistencies here in your comment and a lot of deliberate omissions.

> India didnt have a lot of private organizations to work for before the 80s.

A good chunk of our planet didn't have that prior to 80s, not just India.

> Post Independence in 1947, govt jobs have been held in very high regard and no one gets fired from those jobs. They're mostly patronage.

Nothing changed in this regard.

And, no

> People with six months of managerial experience are getting paid $40,000

is an exception and not a norm. Your comment makes it look like, it's the norm here. I work in one of the blue eyes Indian startups (which translates to yes, it's burning money like most of the Indian startups but has more hope riding on it than the others) and I see these salary figures from up close.

What TinyOwl's founder(s) did is very simple - fraud! That's why they were held hostage knowing that being moneybags they would be untouchable once they are out and they (the employees) would probably never get their wages. You didn't even mention this issue in your comment. Or are you deliberately trying to spin the story? Is it a PR attempt, considering the age of your account? Anyway, that's another debate.

Also, the people holding the founder hostage were not at all those "management graduates" with that kind of salaries. They were the people who were kind of making ends meet, of course relatively speaking. They saw they were being cheated and took matters in their own hands, which, IMHO, even though illegal was/is the most effective way here.

What I have noticed in Indian startups (where I work included and maybe this is how it is worldwide), the founders wants quick numbers - by the hook, or by the crook. Well, the difference is in the west (US/EU) there's the law and the watchdogs who bring the crooks to the book, in India everything has a price and you can buy it if you can pay including the law and the courts. So that's there.
Except that the Supreme court doesn't think so.
If India could fix its court system half the problems are over. You need to have someone to complain to and get it remedied and that someone takes 10+ years for even routine matters like land(partition) disputes. It is not a good sign. No one will even bother questioning people flouting rules, and when no one is there to question them the rule flouters continue to subvert the law.

Like other Indian institutions, judiciary too is corrupt (but I don't see it represented as such in the media) at the lower levels.
Making a business out of open source is hard. Especially for front-end related stuff. I think it's much easier to build a business around backend technologies - On the backend, there are more opportunities for things like enterprise plugins and integrations (as-a-service).

Also the frontend space is insanely competitive.
There are a lot of really good frontend frameworks that most people have never heard of.
Part of the reason basic income is bandied about more and more is that the amount of people who is starting to believe that capitalism is eventually becoming efficient enough to drive up unemployment is rising (though most of these people are probably unaware that this is a central part of Marx' thesis of how he believed capitalism will eventually give rise to its own demise).

There is a growing fear amongst some that automation will finally overtake job creation, and that the resulting unemployment will be sufficient to throw masses of people back into poverty.

If that actually happens, then a 13% reduction in work effort might very well be less than desirable if one wishes to prevent social unrest.

There are two key benefits of basic income in that respect: Firstly, to ensure that if people are unable to find a job, they can still live a decent life. Secondly, to reduce the amount of people forced into unemployment by making more people choose to not work or work less, whether because they choose education or choose to stay home with their young children, or choose to retire earlier, or simply choose to make do with less.

Of course, the pre-requisite for that to be viable is that society can make do with 13% less work effort (or whatever it ends up being, whether more or less).
I have smelt fox urine before and while not great, it is not horrific. Apparently the tame ones don't smell as bad, but it would defiantly be something you would want to breed out.
This is the first I've heard of using blockchains for things such fraud-proof land registries. That's pretty exciting, that alone would be a huge step towards bringing the developing world into the broader formal economic system.
We don't even need govt to pay for childcare, we just need to make it fully deductible as a "business" expense.

The office janitor's salary is deductible from the business owner's income tax, but the child caregiver is not.
It beeps at you with ever greater urgency, then if you still neglect it, it puts on the hazard lights and stops the car.
Ah you must mean the good old "ceiling puncher". :)

Actually I think the pole is just the regular extension pole you'd use with a paint roller. You get a light bulb changing attachment instead.
Yes: As supply doubles, prices go down. Again, what's wrong with that?
Scala.js: Next generation front end development
The modern population reproduces elite at a higher rate, 70 to 80%, and was grown from the ~100 foxes that the breeders were able to keep in 1998.

So the 2,000 that they have today doesn't say much about how many foxes they were breeding in the earlier generations (but over 50 generations the numbers culled probably do get into the thousands).
There is a basic assumption that people aren't questioning: that older children are useless in helping teach and supervise younger children.

This flies in the face of historical experience, and it robs everyone involved of opportunities for learning and growth. It is nuts that we segregate children by birth year, all the way from preschool until college.

In a mixed-age setting, the older kids can do enough teaching, entertaining, and watching to significantly amplify a single adult's capabilities. To the point where much higher kid-to-adult ratios work just fine.

And far from taking something away from older kids by engaging them in this work, you actually give them valuable learning opportunities. You give them real responsibility to be proud of, an immediate motivation to master the things they'll be asked to teach, and a longer-term perspective on their own growth and life trajectory.
Ask HN: Switching from WordPress To? (Static Site Generator Required)
So, for various reasons, I intend to replace my old WordPress by a static site generator. However, I'm unsure which one to choose. The language does not matter much to me, I'm fine with Perl and Python and Lisp and any other language as I can probably learn a lot by just using them. After digging through "the list" and playing with some of the most recommended generators (including Hugo), I narrowed it down to:

1. Pelican (most widely known and supported and I already know some Python; has had some problems with setting up a custom theme when I tried it)

2. Coleslaw (interesting language, I guess it's fun to play with it; development seems to be quite slow though)

3. Statocles (eye-hurting default theme, no other themes provided, but the developer's future plans look bright)

4. Frog (another interesting language, a quite responsive developer, Bootstrap support, but also a rather slow development)

5. Hakyll (I couldn't find out how to theme this one properly yet, also I don't speak any Haskell)

I asked a decider web app, but of course it can't know which one would fit my needs best. As I guess that some of you would instantly reply with their personal favorite, here's what I need (plug-ins are OK):

1. A search function. (Yes, this is important for me. AFAIK this could be achieved with tipue_search under all of them...?)

2. YouTube video inclusion. (I post YouTube videos at least once a week, it would be sad to not be able to anymore.)

3. Categories and tags support. (Or: A way to make tags/categories "parents" of other tags/categories.)

4. Sitemap generation support. In 2015 Google would like that.

5. (Optionally) a way to mark a posting as a "part of a series", so I can make a multi-part article over a long time span easily.

6. Decent, documented theming support.

So - discuss! :-)
>For me, that makes it clear that, at current price level, daycare workers cannot have a middle class income. Also, if they had, lots of people couldn't afford child care.

You're assuming here that the payment all has to come from the parents disposable income. Other countries (try to) address this with government or employer subsidies for childcare, eg in Australia http://www.humanservices.gov.au/customer/services/centrelink...