skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I very much understand the frustration on display here about the setback to science from this decision. But (admitting up front that I don't know a lot about the specific cultural context) I'm surprised by the lack of sympathy being shown for the people who evidently hold this space sacred.

All the (great!) scientific rationale in the world doesn't change the fact that this fits really well into the age-old pattern of Western societies barging in and imposing their will on other cultures. Pretty much every step of the displacement and marginalization of native peoples in history was seen as perfectly justified by the Western societies carrying it out. Now, personally, I'm much happier with the argument "we must seize this unique scientific opportunity" than with "we must seize these natural resources for a profit". But I expect that from the point of view of the native community, the result feels pretty much the same either way. I'm not happy with the pattern in Western history of condoning this sort of imperialism, and I'd very much like us as a society to quit it.

(And for the record, I can't shake the feeling that if it turned out that the Temple Mount in Jerusalem had turned out to be the ideal site for this telescope, most people would not be so immediately dismissive of the voices raised in opposition to building it there. Heck, I even expect there would be more sympathy if the best place for the telescope were a "secular sacred site" like Mount Rushmore: "Don't make Honest Abe wear a flying saucer for a hat!" the nation would cry, and nobody would accuse them of "tribalism".)
Nix is far different than everything else you mention. It's not tied to a particular Linux distribution or OS (well, Windows/Cygwin support is shaky but nobody is stopping you from improving that). It provides a foundation (functional package management) unlike any other package manager (except Guix), which solves and allows you to solve many problems that are inherently unsolvable in other PMs (just read the docs ;).

The reason people keep flocking to the favorite language-specific package manager is that it is seemingly the easiest way to solve their immediate problem - get the dependencies installed so they can get on with coding. And the reason not many people go with Nix is first they don't know about it, second it initially seems scary, third the particular package they need may not yet exist.
Yes. I think we can say that the carbon owning companies are winning the fight so we need to do something different. Let's stop fighting them and let's start working with them.
SEEKING WORK

Location: Lagos, Nigeria

Remote: Yes

Technologies: Python/Flask, Node.JS, AngularJS, ES6, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, mySQL, HTML5, CSS3, SASS, LESS, GIT

Resume/CV: http://goo.gl/RR2Uw5

Email: writeudo [at] gmail [dot] com

GitHub: https://goo.gl/oYbi8F

Hi, I am a full stack developer with and enjoy working with JavaScript and Python. I have extensive experience building systems from scratch to deployment on Azure. I enjoy learning new technologies and tackling challenging problems and working remotely with excellent communication skills. I am passionate about startups and would love to be involved in an early stage startup.
Without either GADTs or type families, two types `Foo` and `Bar` with mappings `fw :: Foo -> Bar` and `bw :: Bar -> Foo` that compose in both directions to the identity, are “effectively indistinguishable” from one another in a precise sense. If you have a definition `qux :: T Foo`, for any type function `T` not containing abstract type constructors, you can construct `justAsQuxxy :: T Bar` by applying `fw` and `bw` in the right places.

With either GADTs or type families, this nice property is lost.
Most coding standards don't like that, and if you can't autoformat your code then you have bigger problems. I do agree that some of the problems are cultural rather than inherent to the language, but even if we do that,

public class Potato {
private final int size;
public Potato(int size) { this.size = size; }
int size() { return size; }
}

makes poor reading in comparison to

class Potato(val size: Int)

(I didn't mean a thousand getters/setters in a single class, but across the codebase as a whole)
Is that seriously the only site with this layout you've seen?
PTC acquires Vuforia
Ask HN: Will you be interested in Beta Testing Hacker News ios client
I have created a hacker news iOS client.

* It uses the Hacker News API.

* You can upvote, follow and comment on stories / comments

* Receive notifications as stories/comments you follow update

If Yes, Please sign up for the beta by visiting:

http://karanjude.github.io/hnbuzz/
Given that he gets tax credits, it feels more like he's rich enough to single-handedly decide how to spend a decent chunk of the government's money (not that they can spend it effectively, but normally thousands of people work to squander that money).

He's so much exponentially richer than everyone else that whatever thing he thinks is worthwhile is effectively free to fund (and lost money otherwise).

His net worth is ~50,000,000,000; in 2013 the median net worth of a college graduate across all age groups (Zuckerberg is normally in the lowest age group) is 365,000. Just a cool 136986 times the median. A little over 2^17 times more seems pretty reasonable. And I'd expect it to increase at a greater rate (percentage) than normal person's income. Honestly, I'm not sure he even knows HOW to spend that money, nor does he have time to determine an effective way of doing so. Capitalism has worked well, but it seems to have an odd way of dealing with certain things at an exponential scale.

Charitable giving does make all the inequalities and injustices defensible of course as the author has said.

At least Bill Gates knows how to effectively target and solve large problems.
Show HN: Business Card Brainfuck, a brainfuck interpreter in 512 bytes of C code
Suppose we want a tax of $50 / ton of co2 emitted. Then we do some chemistry and figure that burning 5 barrels of oil emits a ton of co2 into the air. Then the government adds a tax of $10 per barrel. Every producer who buys from the gasoline refiner has to pay the tax.

Individual gas stations and consumers wouldn't have to think about it, since they aren't purchasing from refineries directly. But the prices they pay would increase indirectly.
Because those people are already giving most of their money away to causes that benefit the world. The "other" rich people are still, on average, creating wealth though, via the companies they start and run. If you disincentivize them from doing those things, you eliminate that wealth, leaving everyone worse off on average.
Why not both?

#1 is essential, but you really need to cater to #2 as well because "crypto nerds" are likely those who will eagerly adopt the software and advertise and praise it to others.

Here is a simple non-exhaustive list of changes to better achieve #2:

1. If the phone number starts with +xx where xx is a reserved/invalid country code, the rest is the client's base10 public key. Verification happens by signing a challenge or simply successfully performing a DH handshake instead of by SMS.

2. Provide a "pull" notification socket in the Signal server, use it if GCM is not available

3. Package the mobile-sync Chrome app with node-webkit or simply as a standalone server that auto-opens your browser to localhost:port

4. Use libtextsecure-java to make a simple standalone desktop client that could either have a command line interface or a localhost web interface (please don't use the C library, since C is not suitable for secure software)

Obviously these changes could be done by third parties, not necessarily by Open Whisper Systems.
I've just opened this thread and doubled my knowledge about wind power generation before morning coffee. Thanks, 'jacquesm!
> "This is only true if you make a series of very large assumptions about the people involved. Such as that voters individually choose to consume an inclusive variety of media, instead of filtering to just the media that caters to their tribe.

This is the sort of assumption that seems easy if you are utopian and don't really understand tribalism in nearly-hairless primates. Suffice to say it's not nearly as simple as you think and far from the guarantee you clearly believe."

Content filtering is possible, but it's equally possible in a representative democracy with a corporate media, you could argue it's pretty clear that it happens (news outlets catering for left-wing, right-wing, etc...).

Educating the population to think for themselves and to be open to conflicting views is the key to mitigating against this. Agreed?

> "Implicit power structures are worse. This is because they lack accountability mechanisms and centralize power, making corruption easy while also making it difficult to get rid of. This is in no way an improvement."

I attempted to clarify what you were referring to by implicit power structures, please give an example of the type of power structures you are referring to.

> "Frankly, it's becoming painfully clear to me that you simply don't understand power."

> "Bully for you."

> "I'm afraid I'm done with this conversation. If I believed in God, I'd be praying very hard that you never find yourself near levers of power. You have no conception of how much your naivety terrifies me."

Is it really necessary to resort to ad hominems? I've tried to be polite, we clearly disagree but have I said something that offended you personally?

As for the underlying substance, yes I'm well aware that humans aren't perfect.

> "I imagine you think it's just a coincidence that without exception, every single historical case wherein sincere attempts at Communism were made the result was a dictatorial bloodbath. You think the examples aren't relevant."

No, I don't think it's a coincidence. Why is that? Marx suggested that it was necessary to have a 'dictatorship of the proletariat' as an intermediate step on the way towards communism...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletar...

I disagree that such a step is necessary, I believe instead that you can bring in communist ideals gradually. There are some examples of how this works in practice, Chile under the leadership of Salvador Allende offers a good example.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Allende
I didn't mean to cast Exxon and co as villains, just explain why. Yes I think we need to recognise that they have a very strong hand and deal with it head on. Trying to fight them will only mean we all lose.
Maybe because of sunk costs and inherent advantages, maybe because 'the natives' are not a monolith (I live in Hawaii and I have heard overwhelmingly pro-telescope views from people I know), and maybe there are similar interests against development everywhere else too?
Chemistry in Patents – Markush Structure
yes, I see what you mean: gambling is a good trait to have in a population, but it sucks if you're the guy who has to pour all his money into fruit machines.
"CEO says he has your best interests at heart" is a fairly common line though.
Ways to boost traffic to your website by 300%
The only situation where I have found disk (SD) IO to be lacking on the RPI is when running apt-get install or upgrade. I have not run any services that generates a lot of log entries or random writes in general. Maybe it is because I don't think of the RPI as a small server but as an embedded development platform.
Sorry, for some reason the “reply” link didn't appear below your post until after I had written my reply to Peaker. My reply to you is exactly the same:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10668568
Not really, what I'm saying is more like DO, atop of secured container.

Also, it is more of a VPS or IaaS, not have to be CaaS or Microservices.
The most dangerous function in the C/C++ world
There's an old saying that "you can't fool an honest man". Where did all the Albanians who poured their savings into Ponzi schemes think the crazy returns were coming from? Drugs. Where have a 419 scammer's supposed riches come from? Usually embezzled from Nigerian public funds.
Uber color coding experiment promises smoother pickups
Well, lower taxes on poor people. Increase welfare, subsidize public transportation and other things that help transfer money to people who are hurt by the tax.

"Figure out the best way to produce energy" is not something we can figure out posting on HN, or even in a presidential debate. It is a complex and very uncertain question, but since it is a question of innovation, it is the kind of question that markets are very good at answering. A carbon tax directs the market toward finding out the solution efficiently.
No, not you. Rustynails.
Same can be said about string theory. In fact, there's an (in)famous book about exactly that statement :

http://www.amazon.com/Not-Even-Wrong-Failure-Physical-ebook/...

(Word of warning: do not indicate to your promotor that you're interested in this book's subject, or even have read it, unless you're damn sure where he stands on the subject, unless you want get a very effective demonstration that physics might be value-free, professors definitely aren't)
This is certainly the low hanging fruit.
Volkswagen was their supplier for some components, no? Buying a stake in your supplier/customer is a lot more common and non-antitrusty.
But even if he does it for his own profit, it will help humanity. Also car industry is huge so other mades after introducing this tax would introduce electric cars so Tesla would have same amount of competition.
> I am afraid that the devil is in the details and it may turn out that this tax will be paid mostly by car owners (rising delivery costs, so food prices would grow) or people in rural areas who use coal heaters. The poor will suffer most in such case.

[citation needed]
http://www.withouthotair.com/ -- this book (available for free on-line) goes into very detailed energy-math-based comparison of all major power sources, focusing especially on various forms of wind, hydro and solar. It might be especially relevant to your concerns because it focuses on various ways of combining the above to make the UK run fully on sustainable energy.

RE various problems of costs you've mentioned, I do think we're applying a double-standard here, but it's a double-standard against nuclear. I rarely see people talking just about how much solar is subsidized (two or three years ago AFAIR it was government subsidies that made PV installations make any economical sense for anyone, though I've heard it might have changed recently), or how much bribery is going on with those infrastructure projects.
A Brief History of Times New Roman
It may not be terribly straightforward, but it is possible to replace the components of many phones. I've replaced a number of screens, "non-removable" batteries, and boards on phones for myself and friends. Oftentimes they'll give me their broken devices and I'll surprise them with a fix. I just ordered a $5 headphone jack for one of my phones and will be replacing it later this week. Only tools required are fingernails and Phillips-head screwdriver.

Sites like ifixit.com make DIY repairs quite doable. Even just a few pictures of the teardown is enough to make me feel confident in the attempt.

However with that said, I'm eagerly awaiting the v2 release of Phonebloks [1] slash Project Ara [2].

[1]: https://phonebloks.com/

[2]: http://www.projectara.com/
This is why the states are sometimes called "laboratories of democracy."
The main thing that stood out for me was total sociopathic behavior. Sadly quite common in the industry.

Leave early and leave often.
Lol, you already see where this is going "market requirements dictates backdoors everywhere!"
Which is hilarious given Google´s hiring processes.

Any genius that is able to invert binary trees on whiteboards, count the balls on a vending machine, do a C++ compiler course, describe the random code in a magazine, ....

Can surely cope with a modern programming language.
Flip 1000 pennies and calculate the results enough times and you'll get a gausian curve. Some results will consistantly flip heads the majority of the time.

It's harder to model with VC's because they are measured in rewards that get exponentially better with success (money) and are self-reinforcing (better deals from recognition). My guess is that they figured out how to eliminate the absolutely horrible ones and got lucky enough times to have the best deals come to them.
Cant't say they're radical, they remind me of everything at once.

But looks good anyway.
Kiosked raises $30M series B funding to drive global growth
This is great! I really, really hope it takes off! C is in dire need of a package manager that can handle dependencies well. OS package managers do not allow multiple versions, and it is extremely difficult to get reproducible builds, because every project has available whatever is installed globally on your machine.

I have used sbt, nimble, leiningen, maven, npm, cargo, conda, and while each of those has its own issues, I would take any of them when working with C.

I have tried biicode, that was showing some promise, but it seems it is not gaining traction...
Here is another list:

http://elinux.org/RPi_SD_cards#SD_card_performance
I think that's what he's appealing to, but I have a hard time reconciling that sentiment with many design characteristics of Go. Go's type system for instance... I don't think he fully grasps "what he's trying to solve" by having a static type system in golang, when the language has things like unsafe casting, null pointers, a lack of parametric polymorphism, etc. As a programmer tool, its hugely weakened by these design decisions... there are large classes of properties about code that are simply impossible (or are much more complicated) to encode using types in golang. And yet in their literature on some of these subjects, they make an appeal to simplicity [1]. I think there's a disconnect here between theory and practice.

[1] https://golang.org/doc/faq#generics
> I think Kickstarter has great potential

I think it had a great potential. But they ruined their brand with allowing basically anything on it.
I'd say it's similar to Ebay in a way. Of course it's better for them ($$$)... but the "potential" is not there anymore.
I believe that garbage collection is a net win because it allows software to be composed in simple ways when it would otherwise be difficult to compose.

I can pass data from one part of the program to another without coordinating both parts to respect the same memory management convention, and without having to pass that information from one place to another. This makes it easier to compose software, and in particular to reuse software like libraries (that frequently end up as layers between one component and another). For a concrete example, in a Java program I can simply publish an event into a Guava EventBus [1] without worrying where it will end up at the time I write that code. There's no real risk that I'll end up with a memory leak. I can connect two things together that weren't designed to be used together, and I can do it while inserting intermediate layers that transform, copy, record, measure, that data.

Garbage collection significantly reduces the amount of coordination necessary between unrelated parts of the code base, thereby improving code reuse. This is what I would claim is less commonly recognized win, beyond the more commonly recognized wins from eliminating classes of obvious mistakes. EventBus is just one random example that involves plugging things together - the same effect is present all over Java libraries, from logging frameworks to collections to concurrent data structures.

[1] https://github.com/google/guava/wiki/EventBusExplained
What research do the Japanese do with whales? Actually curious.
On Bullshit [pdf]
Stereotypes That Distort How Americans Teach and Learn Math (2013)
Some juicy quotes:

> Milburn: Why do you have to use words like “library”? There are no libraries! Why do you always try to obfuscate every conversation? Model, View, Controller! That is how software is built! Model, View, Controller! It’s not a library! It’s a model!

> Milburn jumped in. “What is this? Hashmaps? Shouldn’t you be sending JSON documents?”

> I complained of this to Hinton, but Hinton hated any form of confrontation, so he excused Pranab’s behavior by saying that everyone occasionally goofs off at work.

> Hinton was not comfortable with confrontation.

> Hinton did not like confrontation, and he was eager to please, so I can imagine that when the Board pressed him to move forward quickly, he assured them that he would.

> Hinton did not like direct confrontation, so he never expressed anger in person.
It's cool; we can let a small, overworked group of people who may or may not actually be very knowledgeable in that subject peer review it first. Might as well keep the data private forever too because reproducing the work might show something different.
This article isn't original, it was originally about 37signals posted in 2009. It looks like the author took the old article, changed replaced the company with Basecamp, then republished it with a new date on Medium. Here is the original article from 2009 [1], it's been discussed multiple times on HN.

[1] https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1941-press-release-37signals-...

6 years ago, 20 points: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=841806

5 years ago, 23 points: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2153547

4 years ago, 8 points https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3196418

2 years ago, 300 points: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6744742
Whereas I'd say the problem was forced privatization/colonization.
"honestly can't even guess what problems can be addressed with something like this"

The problem is that OS package managers install things globally. This is a nightmare when developing, because

* it makes much more difficult to handle multiple versions

* as a consequence, it makes difficult to keep libraries updated, because package authors try to be conservative in what libraries they include in an operating system targeted at non-developers (in particular, latest versions of libraries are always lagging behind upstream)

* it makes it hard to be sure that what you build on one computer will be reproducible on another one

* even in the case where you know which dependencies you need (and you don't forget something just because you had already installed it), there is no simple way to document how to install them in such a way that the next user will be able to install everything with a single command

* it requires root access when it is clearly not needed
Stacking those together ("X is essentially an Y, 100K of Y are essentially Z, 100K of Z generally behave like U") is what got us the 2008 financial crisis.
That's not a theory -- given the trends in the electricity markets, that's expected.
Christian Gohlke distributes free NumPy binaries built against MKL.
I'm not really comfortable with the alteration of timestamps. Much prefer they reflect reality.

Pushing a new timestamp to a list for every edit/resubmission makes me more comfortable, and keeps the immutability aspect (a trustable record of history).

I'd also prefer being able to see the full edit history of comments, so assign weights to my views accordingly (a grain of salt).
> Also, HTTP/2 traffic may be encrypted using another scheme (which may be vulnerable to large constant blocks in known locations).

This isn’t really a situation worth caring about when designing a protocol. If you’re choosing to encrypt something with weak encryption, you had better be darn sure that its vulnerabilities don’t apply. (And… why would you do that to begin with? No compelling performance reasons, even.)