skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm in Canada and a friend of mine was working in a government call centre; her job description could be summarized as 'deny people benefits in 9 minutes or less'. Her role as enforcer of state brutality eventually led to clinical depression and she quit. She couldn't handle turning down people who were more often than not in dire straights.
> If the Big Bang happened everywhere at the same time then does that mean the universe was infinitely big at the start?

Not necessarily; there are models with a spatially infinite universe and models with a spatially finite universe. In our best current model, the universe is spatially infinite; but there is enough wiggle room in the data that a spatially finite (but very, very large) model is still possible (though unlikely).

> Every time I watch a science program about the big bang they say that everything was contained in an area smaller than an atom?

They are talking about the observable universe, not the entire universe. Unfortunately, many pop science treatments don't make the distinction clear.
This will create weed breeds that look more and more indistinguishable from the crops.
I would offer that there is a definite correct answer to this in most, if not all, cases. It can go either way depending on what is going in your company and market.

I would consider a few things before making your choice:

* Likelyhood of Pivot while Repurposing Codebase

Obviously, people don't just go into a startup thinking that they are going to pivot and they aren't easy to predict because it means something unexpected is working well. Your architecture should allow for services and components to be broken out, e.g you will suffer massive technical debt if you want to pivot a service that is dependent on a schema based mysql database with a very rigid data model. All of this is set up on docker instances with crazy services and held together with a staple gun.

If you want to carve out a small service that is working, it will be impossible as it is inextricably tied to your bloated deathmachine. Death will quickly catch up before your revenue does if you have to port and rewrite your entire application and redeploy it. Make sure you can be sort of agile, in the sense that you at least have a componetized modular structure for services large enough to charge for.

* No One Likes Your Product

If your product is not great and no one wants it, having an immaculate and eloquent codebase will kill you as well. Something that does a great job performing a task no one will pay for is also negative.

my 0.02, tolerate technical debt at the micro level, but never at the macro level. E.g you can do refactoring if you need to, your code is not extremely dry, there are plenty of optimizations available but your code/functions work.

DO NOT TOLERATE IT AT THE MACRO LEVEL
You used the wrong tool, are trapped on the wrong database structure, your application is extremely unstable because of a major design choice, etc.

Lot's of small errors are better than a few big ones.
> Extensions can see the entirety of every page a user visits. This includes their bank account, what they searched on ...

At this point why do you even trust your browser, or the OS it's running on both of which have access to all of that and more? I browsed through the code of uBlock and uMatrix and found nothing suspicious, it's not exactly a large code base. Sure, it's not a formal audit or anything but it's enough where I trust it.

I have to trust a single piece of software whose source is totally transparent to me, compared to trusting every single ad network on every site I visit, and every agency that data is sold to, and every state that data travels to. From a privacy standpoint it's a huge net benefit as all that data the extension has access to is never recorded and doesn't leave my machine.
because, as per the article's theory, "hep" is not a sensory metaphor
> Oh and there is also networking/NAT, user management, logging, artifact distributions, service discovery, etc. to worry about as well using tools that are just as half-baked.

Oh the good old times when I was learning to program. Configuration was just a simple INI parser written in two hours from scratch. Networking was done by Apache, user management meant a database table, logging was done with a function wrapping over fprintf(), "artifact distributions" meant res/ folder, service discovery was done on paper. And somehow everything worked. It worked better and was infinitely more manageable, and was mostly dependency-free.

I can see how the above would cause problems for e.g. Google. But 99% of companies and open-source projects are not Google.

Web development is insane.
The author's approach is brilliant in that it exists at a layer above the productivity tools and techniques themselves, to check if they're being employed effectively (if at all).

I can also relate to his experience. Momentum is everything.

Getting into a productive state is hard, and once you start losing momentum, the deceleration tends to snowball. Next thing you know, you have no momentum, and depression is there waiting to pick you apart like a vulture. Becoming productive again is now harder because you're depressed from not being productive. It's a vicious cycle that feeds into itself.
> What if Apple ends up putting a GPS and a phone in the watch?

Then I still won't be able to text, which is 90% of what most people do on a modern smartphone.

That and watch videos.

I wonder how many people would even notice if Apple removed the Phone app from the iPhone ...

Oh and I assume taking selfies with your wrist would be hard too. I tried to position my wrist like that right now and my elbow wasn't happy.
Its a shame. Wish there were alternatives that worked for me.

Nothing else in the market has a comparable "Smart Alarm" like the Jawbone UP devices.
I used to use Moodscope to record daily subjective ratings in some key areas, like whether I felt "strong" or "productive" or "powerless" or "scared".

The process of entering the data about myself each day actually made me significantly more depressed, because it was like a constant reminder of how depressed I was, and how the external circumstances that caused my depression weren't changing (even when I was doing all of the things I could do from my end, like exercise, see friends, listen to music, and so on).

So we should keep in mind that this sort of thing isn't a panacea. In some cases, at least, it could make things worse rather than better.
Thanks - I did not the advice negatively. I've gone down that route and plan to pursue in the future. A lot of it is perception that I'm not good enough.
Heroku is pretty straightforward for most stuff. Python, for example, is basically "make a requirements.txt, a Procfile to tell it what the entry point file is, and then push to the Heroku repo".
I made an app to help me with my problem. I open it and it says "Don't drink, fuckface"
No, but it depends. One thing to remember about technical debt is the concept of interest. Each time you have to go into a part of the code with high technical debt, you pay interest.

There is also something to be said for building a v1 MVP to prove product/market fit, and then build an entirely separate v2 that is refined to what you have learned.
>The texture is a bit different, but the difference is quite small.

Hmm. Boletus mushrooms are much more meat-like. Also sometimes prepared as schnitzels. However, the rarity and popularity of mushroom picking makes it uncommon to have so many to eat them like that..
We use Jira Agile, like a lot of startups. The metrics portion is really sophisticated which is a plus for management, but from my experience most devs hate working with Jira.

I've also used Trello with teams which I find more pleasant especially if designers need to give you assets, for comment threads, etc.

I mostly use a simple todo.txt for my own personal projects. Though I've been by somewhat migrating these into Bitbucket issues.

A few months ago I wrote a Python script called Jello (Jira + Trello) to copy our sprint tasks from the Jira API into a Trello board via their API. This was pretty awesome and satisfied the devs, but I didn't find the time to build 2-way sync, so someone manually updated Jira at the end of the sprint. Someone built an even better version called Gitlo (GitHub + Trello) [1] which front paged momentarily last week.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10572701
seems my newly created account is shining

there were CRAZY ideas that changed the world but this BS isn't one of them. the math simply doesn't doesn't add up. if everyone (except people that can't walk) is making money (3 USD/day is max) without actually contributing back to society ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

how in the hell did they get funding is what I want to know

Bitsleeping™
huh! well yeah it was a pretty daffy story, thank you for correcting me.
Randall Munroe of Xkcd Answers Our (Not So Absurd) Questions
Case Study: Outlier on Creating the 21st Century Jean
> Does anyone know of strong proofs of galaxy red shifts being due to relativistic Doppler effect?

Actually, they're not, they're due to the expansion of the universe. Pop science treatments often say the redshifts are due to the Doppler effect, but that's sloppy terminology. The redshift doesn't really tell you "how fast" a distant galaxy is moving away (although the pop science treatments talk as if it does); what it really tells you is how much the universe has expanded since the galaxy emitted the light you are seeing. So if we're seeing light from a quasar at redshift z = 1, the universe has expanded by a factor of 2 (i.e., a factor of 1 + z) since that light was emitted. And the cosmic microwave background has a redshift of about 1000, so the universe has expanded by a factor of about 1000 since it was emitted (for redshifts this large, 1 + z and z are pretty much the same).

As far as "strong proof" that the redshifts are in fact due to the expansion of the universe, and not some other cause, see Ned Wright's cosmology FAQ for a good discussion:

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmology_faq.html#QZ
Well, that was certainly an enriching read.

More seriously, we've done this before. Old Usenet thread about asynchronous PDP-10s and PDP-6s:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.sys.pdp10/wqWlZQ...
The only practical application I see is it being a loyalty card for a gym. Members would earn points for exercising at their gym which could be redeemed for tchotckes. If the app implements geofencing it could be practical.
Yes, you have one unnecessary OS there, and it isn't Linux running Docker. :). Personally, I run Windows because for some unknown reason that's what I get issued at every company I join. This Windows runs a VirtualBox with Linux, where I do actual work. Docker is amazing operated directly, and you get all the benefits of your dev and production environment being essentially the same.
This is cool. Do you update your sheets for the dashboard via an API?
I've approached my boss several times about this, and any changes are temporary - it's a management issue (same management at both places). I have a need to be on high profile high performing projects (I've lead development on the last several at our company) but then there are low activity periods where management does not provide direction. I can work on my own but it's hard to gain traction (technology company that's doesn't understand technology).
There's no reason a Girl Scout troop can't do all sorts of adventure activities. My wife led a troop that did all their meetings at a GS camp where they usually cooked over a campfire as part of each meeting.

The biggest blow to Girl Scouts is how they're organized. They're almost always single-age troops, which means there's no scout-to-scout mentoring and there are a lot less scouts per unit. It's much harder to keep a troop alive as the girls get older and there's a lot of consolidation. It's hard to grow new leaders when you only have a dozen parents involved in each unit. Then when a troop breaks up or ages out, the leaders almost always leave scouting.

I've been told it's possible to have a single Girl Scout unit with multiple ages, but I've never seen that. The best I've seen is a couple individual troops that share a common meeting time and place.

For example, my daughter's been in two Girl Scout troops. One is "huge" especially for high school aged girls and has maybe 15 girls from 13 to 15. That troop has had 3 official leaders in the 8 or so years it's been around. Her other troop folded once it dropped to three girls. My son's Boy Scout troop has over 100 boys from ages 11 to 17 and has at least a dozen adults in leadership roles and dozens more registered + background checked "at large" leaders to draw from.
> It's not that basic income discourages work more or less, but that it evens out the marginal tax rate. This might be a good or a bad thing, but your original post contains no argument either way.

Because the marginal tax rate is a separate thing. You can raise the money however you like. Tax the rich, tax the poor, tax securities derivatives, print lots of money, it's a separate consideration. What a basic income does is dramatically simplify the welfare system so that when you balance the other side of the ledger you can better see what you're looking at.

It may then also make sense to simplify the tax system and impose a uniform rate on everyone (because the level of redistribution of wealth can now be trivially set by adjusting the amount of the basic income), but there is no inherent reason why any other method of raising the money could not be used instead. Even in that case a basic income is preferable to the existing system of ad hoc means tested welfare programs.

> I think the main argument behind the current system is that low income people need the money, and therefore are less affected by the marginal tax rate.

There are three points here.

First, if these people need the money so badly, is it really good policy to be imposing high marginal tax rates on them, regardless of whether they'll bear it because they have to?

Second, the people we currently take benefits away from are not the lowest income people (who do qualify for the programs), they're the low-middle income people who only just barely don't. If the true consideration is to collect from people who will most be forced to work anyway then shouldn't we be sticking it to the even poorer people who have even less choice? (Of course this runs right back into the first point.)

And finally, if these people need the money so badly then preventing them from earning as much by working legitimate jobs that report their income will cause more to turn to off-the-books income like dealing drugs and stealing in order to make ends meat. Presumably that isn't the work we want to maintain an incentive for.
5 Markdown Editors That Bring Back the Joy of Writing
Is there a Belgium? (1999)
Being on the internet or not is no longer optional. In lots of places governments now require that you communicate with them via their website, it's the way people stay in touch with each other (and you'll be left out if you don't) and it is the way companies do business, hire people and communicate between each other.

Advertising is not an essential part of the internet, but everything else is. Remember: the internet was doing just fine before advertising rolled along.
Company is very small ~10 people, 4 devs. I manage several of the projects and resources.
My first thought after reading that he's a freelance web developer was "get an office job". I know from experience that working alone for an extended period of time can get you down easily.
One of the under-appreciated qualities of the Boy Scouts is how the National Council mostly keeps its distance, allowing individual troops to organize themselves. There are fixed requirements for advancement through the Scout ranks, but some troops are focused on outings, some are overtly religious, some are basically Eagle Scout factories for college admissions, etc.

This is a great thing. It means that kids can learn the core skills and values, like leadership, discipline, teamwork, and wilderness survival, and receive recognition for it, even if their parents' faith, political leanings, or goals aren't aligned with the National Council.

I hope the Council leaves it up to the individual troops as to whether they admit girls (or boys, for that matter). Many troops will go co-ed given the opportunity.

And as others have said, the Girl Scouts are not perceived to be as rigorous or prestigious as the Boy Scouts, and should step up their game. It's hard to blame girls for being uninterested in an organization best known for selling cookies.

(Disclosure: Eagle Scout)
The about page discusses the data sources:

http://pelagios.dme.ait.ac.at/maps/greco-roman/about.html

And also links an article describing the map:

http://pelagios-project.blogspot.com/2012/09/a-digital-map-o...
Zero years for the first one.

* https://www.bosch-garden.com/gb/en/garden-tools/indego-home....

* https://www.deere.com/en_INT/products/equipment/autonomous_m...
What about the case of using Linux in a VM? Isn't there a possible problem with the amount of entropy available?
Do you mean latitude? I remember the days being longer in the summer when I lived at higher latitudes, but I'm having trouble seeing how you could calculate longitude by looking at sunrise/sunset.
Was there even a project in which a single person was responsible for all of this? It feels that if you're having scaling issues so bad you need to do all of the things you described, you're already big enough to have 20 people on payroll handling this.
It’s fascinating how various cultures modify their children’s bodies…also a bit unsettling, since it infringes on a person’s bodily integrity before they’re even properly a person. I find infant circumcision little different from head-binding or foot-binding—but that is a rather unpopular opinion here in the US.
My grandfather tells stories from when he was a boy, about his mother getting "caps" to put on her kids so they would have a "nicely" shaped skull.
I honestly find Jawbone products to be much higher quality products than Beats. Their design aesthetic seems to fit in with Apple more than Beats as well imo. I have a Big Jambox and while it isn't an audiophile's dream, the sound is pretty good and the battery life lasts forever. Its not bad as a speaker phone as well. Worth every dollar I paid for it. I'm surprised I don't see more advertisements for their products, that seems to be the way that beats got popular because it certainly isn't price or audio quality.

Edit: forgot to add the point of this comment, I wonder if there were ever talks of a buyout by Apple or if not why they weren't considered/didn't go through.
The budget has to balance, so the question is not how much the system costs, but what are the incentive effects on the (wealthier) people who pay for it. If you agree with me that phasing the benefit out slowly "costs a lot" then you actually agree with my reasoning.
So I can run asm.js compiled Unreal Engine in my browser then run JavaScript inside of it?

We need to go deeper!
Url changed from http://boingboing.net/2015/08/18/the-end-of-the-internet-dre..., which points to this, which is technically a dupe (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20End%20of%20the%20Interne...) but didn't have much discussion.
People can be really convincing and still be wrong. As far as I can tell on a quick skim, this theory (that the redshifts are due to differential scattering of starlight) is one that was ruled out several decades ago by cosmologists. Also, his "fundamental inconsistencies of the Big Bang Theory" would be better titled "fundamental misunderstandings on the author's part". The cosmology FAQ I linked to upthread discusses a number of these misunderstandings.
> Intel Atom

I worked that way for two years. It doesn't really matter if everything works smoothly under Vagrant if every day you want to kill yourself at your desk because you can't run an Vagrant and a browser at the same time without bringing the system to its knees.
Using UE4 fulltime for months, I welcome this.

Not that it's not ridiculous, it is, but an alternative to their C++ API is a good thing. There are already other languages somewhat in there, javascript makes sense.

How ironic is it though, that if you target HTML5, you're writing javascript to be compiled to c++ and back to javascript via emscripten.

There are things that are annoying to do in Blueprints, or that you simply can't do because the API isn't exposed. A simple javascript backend might be perfect to fill that gap.
How-To Install and Configure Redis on Ubuntu 14.04
I understand the frustration. Reminds me of the first time I tried to run something on a VPS. I wasted at least a day or two fighting with bullshit issues like botched up Unicode support on my Debian installation. I did learn something, but it was not the thing I wanted to be learning.
Yes, the Steelcase leap.
If you've participated in their program, you'll probably find that they have their fair share of issues. This is probably where their delay is coming from (but not a valid excuse). I found two serious problems in less than a hour. I reported the issues to them and was subsequently told that both submissions were out of scope and a firm warning to follow the rules. You're welcome for the free findings.
This is the problem, robots are killing the journey.

To take your point literally

Like jobs, at first it's great, highways, planes, easy to access information open up the world to everyone.

But it'll get to the stage where it's too easy. Adventures are getting harder to have. You no longer find that amazing restaurants, you yelp them and book months in advance.

In the future when you're chatting to someone about visiting county X and you realise they have only been there virtually it'll perhaps devalue your own journey, then perhaps you'll get what I mean.
Zurb Foundation 6 is here
> You're delusional.

Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News, regardless of how off-base someone else may be.
So correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that in a model of a spatially finite universe there obviously has to be a centre, right?
How to Convert Blu-Ray to DVD for Playback on DVD Player
I have built something similar, but don't have it configured to do quite the same things, although it certainly could. It's more a generic platform that these kinds of things could happen if you configured them to, so it could work for individuals as well as companies, for example. But I don't have a support structure in place that will come to my rescue when i'm feeling blue. It's just me, my emotions and my behavior.

A lot of people find benefit in quantification; I do not. While I have my house wired with doorbells that correlate to todos in my app so it knows when i have/have not done something; its really my own psychology or philosophy that has the biggest impact on when I do something. Everything else is more for management.
If basic income was implemented, then it would have to be much smaller, than current welfare payouts (because there would be 15 times more people who collect it).

Lefty liberals would not agree with the decrease of the payout for such transition, so there is no transition.
What web browser are you running, and what's its security story?
Cons: huge cognitive overhead from remembering how to reference your data structures the correct way.
Text Wrapping Around Shapes, Frames and Rendering of Arabic or Chinese Docs
Since this subthread turned into an off-topic flamewar, we detached it from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10588972.
Same is true for humanity.

Technology marching on is dooming us to becoming obsolete. Already there are people who are effectively unemployable. Once this is extended to the majority.. it won't be pretty. Life of leisure has driven even high-status people bonkers. Once it is a mass phenomenon, it's not going to be pretty.