skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I run a bookmarking site, which is an ecological niche in the world of lists.

The pattern I've seen over the years is that a bookmarking site will arise, based on some fairly specific idea of what managing bookmarks should look like. As it catches on, the owners will discover that people have distinct and curious ways they like to manage their bookmarks. In an effort to grow the site, they will add features that try to please these different constituencies, and eventually end up with a kind of insipid and aggressively social product that no longer appeals to the initial audience, and resembles a lot of other sites.

At that point people move on to something else, and the cycle begins again. Sites that break out of it (like Instapaper or Pinterest) seem to succeed by picking a very specific vision of bookmarking and sticking to it.

I think of this as "abstraction syndrome", where you are tempted at every step to build a more abstract version of the product because of the diversity of uses people put it to. But that very process makes the project generic, boring, and less useful than the original niche idea.

I believe a similar dynamic explains why no one has "solved lists". It's like "solving social" or "solving writing". The details are where the fun is.
Yes; I've seen several small adapters that plug into a single USB type-C port and provide charging, displayport, and USB type-A ports. So, you could plug in a single type-C cable and get power, display, and keyboard/mouse.

A similar adapter that includes audio seems plausible, once the type-C standards for analog and/or digital audio get wider adoption.
Can I get a citation on that? Houston has both a low cost of living and a high immigration rate (including undocumented immigrants), neither of which are really germane to the conversation. I'd like to see if those numbers take those things into account and, if not, how everything looks when taken together.
Wow, that PGM course looks exactly like what I need to get my head around GMs! I'm using Andrew Ng's class to support my learning for my MSc in Data Science, and it's been an invaluable resource. There is nothing like hearing the same material explained by different people to really hammer the topics home, I'm looking forward to getting stuck into that PGM course.

Thanks for these!
What bothers me about Dropbox is that many of the complaints I had 7 years ago are still there...

For instance, I can't exclude folders and extensions, which messes up my workflow a lot (e.g. I can't exclude .git folders)
> 2. Perform genuine, rigorous auditing of participating in NCAA sports for cost-benefit analysis and completely shut down programs which do not recoup or actually cost money.

As far as I understand things, this would be grossly illegal -- Title IX is interpreted to require schools to devote equal budgets to men's sports and to women's sports, but women's sports can't earn any money back. You could just charge that against the men's sports, but you might end up canceling really popular sports, like basketball.
Dropbox = real time, automatic, versioned backup of all files in your entire project, making you and your work safe from deleting files, accidentally overwriting files etc, all the time.

Git = not that.
Agreed. I love that this came from noticing a "gap" and coming up with something to fill the hole. I wish I thought like this more often!
This ‘clean up’ company will delete ANY revenge porn for you – for a price
Terra: A low-level counterpart to Lua
The President technically has that power, but in reality the DOJ's policy is set by the Attorney General, and the historical relationships between Presidents and their A.G.s has tended to be fraught.

Mostly, what the President can do in reality is fire the AG. But if Obama does that, he'll have to find and get confirmed a new AG. If you're outraged by NSLs, the new AG Obama could confirm in this climate is unlikely to be an improvement.
I'm mostly impressed that this kind of Poe's Law material is the only comment on a 1400 day old account.
I'm not sure I'm able to visualize this correctly. Let's say we have an array of strings containing the top 20 movies from Rotten Tomatoes:

The Wizard of Oz
The Third Man
Citizen Kane
All About Eve
Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari. (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari)
Modern Times
A Hard Day's Night
The Godfather
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
Metropolis
It Happened One Night
Singin' in the Rain
Laura
The Adventures of Robin Hood
Inside Out
Repulsion
Boyhood
North by Northwest
King Kong
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

What would this data structure look like?
Thank you for the clarification.

Nevertheless, I feel like there should be some recourse in the system to appeal to a branch of government other than the secret judicial branch in circumstances like this...
Collaborative filtering is the obvious way to make a scalable restaurant ratings service. Google tried to do it and apparently failed; then Yelp tried to do it [http://officialblog.yelp.com/2013/06/whats-nearby.html]. Not being a Yelp user myself, I don't know if they are still doing this. Anybody have insight into whether Yelp is still personalizing recommendations or why personalization hasn't worked in restaurants (in contrast to e.g., Netflix)?
I did 2 years at community college [1], and it was great for me. At the community college level, calculus 3 and calculus based physics classes were small and there was a lot of instructor time. At a larger university, calculus and early physics are often large lecture classes, which can be more challenging to learn in.

Some community colleges are better than others, so if your plan is to go to community college for two years and then transfer, it's a good idea to go to one that has a high transfer rate, even better if it has curriculum alignment with the school you transfer to. I ended up doing 3 years after transfer because I also changed majors, and didn't get into the school I wanted to transfer to, but I had completed almost all of my general education credits, so I could concentrate on the major classes.

[1] http://www.orangecoastcollege.edu (if it matters)
Seconded. Brought my linear algebra and probability theory up to scratch within a day. I don't know what it is about how he explains the material, but it just clicked for me first time, every time.
You could argue data structures represent business models and that a startup's true nature is how their data structures are tied to their customer's needs. Or lack thereof, in some cases.
A Look Inside Intel's Future Knights Landing Systems
To me, this means asking the following: when you do something, do you feel guilty after? Do you hate yourself for playing 5 hours of video games every night when you know you could be productive? That's a guilt-laden activity.
I find this very strange, as the major file synchronization client that I work on doesn't have this problem. We use the fsevents API, and it's pretty localized to the folders we monitor.

(I will admit that we have performance issues when users sync more than 100,000 files; but that's more due to fundamental limits of what you can do in a user-mode application.)

Perhaps Dropbox is just trying to trap deleting / moving / renaming the Dropbox folder? That's something that's tricky to do; and we had to disable our technique to do it because it had too many side effects.
I'd like to see something close to a solution where a fresh install of a common distro just works on the hardware... debian, ubuntu or similar preferred. It takes enough work to do so... what almost surprises me, is that there hasn't been an effort to make Ubuntu work out of the box, fresh after install on a macbook. There are a lot of macbooks that won't be seeing updates, but are more than servicable linux desktops.... I'd likely change mine over (mid-2014 rMBP) to Ubuntu if the post-install challenges weren't quite so daunting... that and Ubuntu seems to have removed the natural scrolling option.
> TLA+ has them, too.

Like I said, modus operandi matters. If I have to perform another model checking routine (possibly on an infinite state space) to slightly generalize a theorem, then in many cases that means I never really had a useful proof of it in the first place.

Also, Coq's mathematics library is extensive and often closely follows the proofs found in graduate mathematics text books. Last I looked into TLA+, it was squarely focused on algorithms and hardware (not even CS-related mathematics more generally -- specifically algorithms and hardware).

> So you think some people are more familiar with type theory than with undergrad-level set theory (ZF)?

Do I think there exists some population of people who are "more familiar" with type theory than with ZF? Yes, starting, for example, with every researcher whose primary area of study is type theory. In fact, I think that anyone who doesn't honestly believe there are such people must have an extremely low opinion of quite a number of very smart people.

(Also, set theory qua set theory gets really disgusting and kludgey really quickly, and is something that almost no undergraduate (or even phd student) is exposed to these days. The "set theory" you see in a discrete math course kind of barely scrapes definitions. I think most people who posit that "set theory" is nice and simple must've never really dove deem into the actual theory of set theory...)

(Also, most real math these days quickly abstracts away from germanely set theoretic constructions. Mathematicians don't work in ZF. They do not. Most will tell you they do not, if they even know what ZF is. Which a lot won't, because their undergrad discrete math course is probably the last time they saw a truly formal derivation. And the mathematicians who do know what ZF is often can't regurgitate an axiomatization of ZF. If you tell a mathematician that all of math is just set theory, most will chuckle and wink and say "why, yes, yes it is", and hopefully you're in on the joke...)

> I don't see it... I fail to see anything that isn't readily expressible in simple classical logic + temporal logic. Could you explain?

Did you read this dissertation's explanation of why separation logic is important?

To the extent that this observation is remotely reasonable, it's only in the sense that you can code up one logic in another. Which, well, all the world's a TM, as they say...

Anyways, I think the argument over whether type theory is a successful foundations for CS research and practice is already a closed issue. It demonstrably is. So is set theory.
Well, Chromebooks do linux, sort of. And they are pretty fast, sort of. It would be have to have a hardware that's faster and supports full OpenGl. Nvidia does have their linux for Tegra thing. But yeah, better software would definitely be nice, too.
A 1TB drive going 2 miles in one hour would still be a decent transfer rate.
From what I understand, this is how Medium organizes the fast retrieval and editing of their rich text. You might want to read this for more information: https://medium.com/medium-eng/why-contenteditable-is-terribl...

I may have missed something, though :-|
Community collages have historically surved this population and they have maintained lower administrative costs than Universities.

It's hard to get exact numbers in large part because collages don't want them broken down and administators are the ones releasing statistics.
Age Discrimination in the Job Market May Hurt Women More
> I find Daesh far scarier than other Islamic fundamentalist movements because their techniques are more sophisticated and their aim is much higher.

Daesh are basically the same people with the same goals as the other Islamic fundamentalist movements you are familiar with. Read the history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_...
The Pettis post under discussion in this subthread is straight-forward analysis according to standard textbook models of international trade. Everything he says is right out of an intro undergraduate course on the subject.

I don’t understand why you find it confusing. Perhaps you could elaborate a bit? (Admittedly, this stuff is clearer when spelled out over 100 pages of a textbook with a bunch of examples, clear formulae, and discussion of competing theories, vs. condensed into a blog post.)

Wilson and Riley’s argument is pretty hand-wavey, full of entirely unsupported assertions. (Which is fair for a very short blog post, I suppose, but isn’t very convincing.) I’m not sure what they have to do with “Modern Money Theory”, which from what I gather in a quick web search disagrees sharply with their analysis.
I think the chromebooks have shown that ARM is perfectly serviceable in a low end laptop... I really like the smaller form factor, but really need more speed... x86 VMs are unfortunately an essential requirement for work.
Spotify seems to be the antithesis of this. It offers a really good UX for creating, sharing, and consuming playlists.
“On Bullshit” by Philosopher Harry Frankfurt (1986 PDF, Cited 622 Times)
"I'm still optimistic that FPGAs will gradually gather more software engineers into the fold."

I'm really hopeful that Open Source software will one day be the norm for EDA tools as it is for software development tools. How do we get there? One thought is that you need more software engineers to start designing hardware and then they will scratch their own itch for better tools and the rest will be history (similar to how we got Open Source compilers, OS's, etc.).

I don't see that happening. More likely the software developers who are already in the field will see the light and start sharing code. Who are these software developers in the field? Well, the Big 3 EDA companies employ quite a few, but really everyone who writes Verilog or VHDL is already a software developer. Sure, they probably need to learn a new language before they go hack on a logic simulator (vhdl isn't the write language for that job), and maybe a new technique or two, but it's not as huge a stretch as everyone makes it out to be. They design microprocessors, networking chipsets, caches, PCIe root complexes for crying out loud, they have a better foundation in computer programming than the vast majority of "programmers" do. They can do learn how their tools work and how to hack on them.
I thought that Daniel Drezner's rebuttal to this (also in the Washington Post) was pretty good:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/11/30/...
This. Reducing the size of the security apparatus is a very politically costly move. Politicians sometimes do politically costly things, e.g. Merkel and the refugees, but it really has to be tremendously important for them to do that thing for them to put their political life on the line.

Few politicians has hitherto had privacy as their personal favorite value and therefore few politicians has been willing to put his political life on the line for privacy. Anyway, it's not a very inspiring thing to care about - some security hawk is probably going to just reverse everything you've done afterwards.
Ten amazing entrepreneurs who had accomplished nothing by age 30
Let's hope the "gig economy" people will actually be able to get a safe cubicle job in a decade. To me it looks like this option is systematically being eroded. Pensions are gone and I think steady employment for good salary will slowly go away too. And the node.js hotshots who think there will always be high paying jobs for coders like them should have gone through 2000. The fall can be quick and deep.
Years ago I tried to buy a gift subscription of Dropbox for a friend so we could collaborate.

Still impossible.

These guys can't even manage GIFT CERTIFICATES, I'm not surprised they have trouble with actual technical issues.
I must say also that if you need a code of conduct, you are on the wrong track.

A code of conduct shows that you (as a project leader) or your community can't deal with human issues using common sense, so you need a list of guidelines for that. So codes of conduct are better avoided.
But they don't square well with other facts we know, such as Ashcroft's hospital-bed refusal to reauthorize STELLARWIND.

More info:

In March 2004, the Justice Department under Ashcroft ruled that the Stellar Wind domestic intelligence program was illegal. The day after the ruling, Ashcroft became critically ill with acute pancreatitis. President Bush sent his White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andrew Card Jr. to Ashcroft's hospital bed. They wanted him to sign a document reversing the Justice Department's ruling. But the semi-conscious Ashcroft refused to sign; Acting Attorney General James Comey and Jack Goldsmith, head of the Office of Legal Counsel for DOJ, were there to back him up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ashcroft#As_U.S._Attorney...

Original Source: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/09072007/transcript2.html
> It's impossible to keep people there...

Seems like that's a problem that could be solved with a big enough compensation package, right?
It's somewhat shocking that smart people will believe this with the only proof being a man who died over 40 years ago.
I don't think security is as much the barrier here as access - localized servers provide 24/7 access by local employees, and until every part of the stream (employees, clients, HQ, mobile, and cloud) have near 100% internet uptime, access is going to prevent this. But it does seems likely that 100% internet uptime is possible, so I'd say eventually this is how most companies will operate.
I use ProtonMail because Lavabit shut down.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10300447
This story is also featured in Barton Gellman's _Angler_, which is a great book, and if you're following the Snowden drama Gellman's name should be familiar.
It is not dead, it is just resting.
Err, how is a debugger a functional fold?
Being educated does not mean you're above believing in bullshit. There are a lot of highly educated people with a college education or a PhD who believe him ghosts, crop circles, bigfoot, alien abductions, the 'dangers' of GM food, conspiracy theories or think that vaccines cause autism.

That doesn't make those beliefs more plausible, regardless of if a certain amount of smart people believe in them. Similarly, it doesn't shield people from religious extremism, or any other form of extreme view for that matter. People are irrational, some lack critical thinking skills (and everyone forgets to use them at least some of time). You don't become a Vulcan the minute you get through college.
LA+MASACRE+EN+LAS+BANANERAS+(I)+LA+UNITED+FRUIT+COMPANY+|+Pepe+Comenta
If you reasonably expect to lose your job for expressing the opinion, you're not free to express that opinion in any meaningful way.
Tell that to my cat who refuses to eat wet food, but loves kibble. She opted to not eat most of her kibble when I mixed the two.
It's not, the issue is that the market is so small, that even if you are paying really well, no one else is. So if things go south, you're going to have to move.
>>clearly Perl5/6 has been an even bigger mess

The migration path from Perl 5 to 6 is like going from C to C++ or D. Basically there is no 'migration path'. C didn't go away after C++, neither did the whole rewrite C applications to C++,Perl 5 is not going to go way after Perl 6.

>> because they haven't even managed to release the interpreter, much less start moving to it.

They released a beta and production release is coming out this christmas.

Clearly you have a lot catching up to do.
Minimizing the Pain of Lockstep Multiplayer
Adjusted for cost of living, Cedar Rapids sounds much better than NYC with those numbers.
Apple was also better at making a low-end simple application-like computing device than assorted OEMs and Microsoft ever were.

Looking back, it's obvious that Microsoft dropped the ball on that one. They could have made iWindows for people willing to sacrifice power, flexibility and freedom for mobility, reliability and ease-of-use.
TLDR: Give people honest feedback, but make sure you have proven that you care about them first.

Unfortunately, this post's strong no-bullshit language is contradicted by the substance and form of the message given (magic quadrant warning). It takes a long time on the windup and goes light on the proof.

The Sheryl Sandberg anecdote, which is trotted out as an example of effective candor, is actually a perfect example of a trivial correction made in the face of overwhelming performance. Not a hard thing in the realm of hard things.

All candor is radical, and partial candor is a lie ... of omission. So the radical is just branding, and so is the culture of "guidance". Making up language is how academics and corporate gurus differentiate themselves, often needlessly.

Finally, there are deeper flaws in the idea of candor promotion:

* There is no one truth. We don't always arrive at a consensus or an objective truth by airing our differences. So let's be clear before embarking on that path, that we may just manage to create a very candid fog of strong opinions, as different subjective truths battle it out.

* In a culture that values candor, all liars are candid. That is, promoting candor does not solve the underlying dynamic, which is that one side will likely win and one will lose, and not every side is fighting for the right reasons.

* In a culture that values candor, bosses get to be candid first. That is, there is a real risk of feedback flowing from HQ to the trenches and not vice versa. Beware of candor as privilege.

Anyone who needs this type of advice should just go straight to "The Hard Thing About Hard Things" by Ben Horowitz. It's all there, without the rebranding.
Refactoring a 300-line if
Over what distance?
Hoover had plenty of apologists who were arguing that he was using these tactics only for good causes (such as against communism, today it would be terrorism or child pornography), it took a long time before anybody dared to speak out against this, he was simply too powerful.

Most likely today such direct blackmail of (domestic) politicians and other officials is not the case but you can't really rule it out completely.

The bad thing is that the reputation of the FBI and other such agencies is now such that an analogy with the Hoover days can no longer be rejected out of hand 'because they'd never do such a thing'.

They did in the past, for many years with many people, we know that for sure, and they quite possibly still do, see the thread linked here, after all what use could a decade old gag order have and do you actually believe that 100's of thousands of gag orders and NSLs can actually have a legitimate foundation?

That's to me beyond belief, that there are 100's of thousands of instances where the authorities issue permanent gag orders with respect to information gathering on individuals and that this is all somehow both legal and proportional use of powers vested in these agencies.
Depends on distance, other side of the planet is less than 0.2Mbps.
Gillmor Gang: More Gravy
Here's a related paper (on HN last month) which tries to find the arrangement of elements in an array which minimizes search time, measuring wall-clock time rather than theoretical complexity: http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1509/1509.05053.pdf. (Spoiler alert: it's not sorted order with binary search, and the answer has a lot to do with the cache).
Can't really read the whole thing at work as I feel self-conscious reading a page tiled in labradors on work time.
...so you put another $20k in your emergency fund from your much-above-market-rate salary, right? I have a hard time seeing a developer making $200k in Buffalo getting excited about many NYC or SF offers.
I almost laughed out loud when I got to number 5.

> 5. Mark Taub, Pearson: Does the emergence of "apps" (small, single-function, networked programs) as the dominant programming paradigm today impact your plans in any way for future material in TAOCP?

Surrounded by all these interesting people who have benefitted and interacted with these important books asking insightful questions, the manager from the big educational publisher asks "how can I divide this up to make more money out of it?".
Why ContentEditable is Terrible (2014)