skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Gamification is a demand dropped on users, seemingly forcing self-promotion and social reciprocity in an endless circle.

And for what? In the end there is absolutely no gain, but many like and favorite and heart primarily to ensure that people like and favorite and heart whatever they do. We follow to be followed. We comment to be noticed.

Because the metrics are front and center. I stopped using Flickr when I couldn't post a simple picture for any random passerby or my own storage without having the embarrassment of a low view count sitting highlighted on the page, the site imploring me to evangelize for me.

If you build a site and try to leverage users by forced social metrics to encourage them to become ambassadors and self promoters...well I'd like to pretend it will hurt you, but sadly it won't.
> Over the course of the next century programming will become a blue collar profession

more kids than ever have access to computing devices (tablets and smartphones) but very few actually know how to do anything with them at all. I don't see that future you are talking about.
Where there's smoke, there's fire.
Small, safe spaces.

That is... I went onto the streets to escape poverty, violence and sexual abuse.

For me a hostel was not a safe space, so I didn't even successfully make it onto the first rung of support. It was hostels that distributed information on where to get food and such, so I missed that too.

So there needs to be a better support system for those sleeping rough, and that needs to recognise the flaws in the offerings today and also find better ways to distribute information.

Then, I've made the argument before that we should have a better way to migrate someone off of the street. It's not enough to give a council flat, someone I knew at that time eventually committed suicide because he couldn't cope, fell apart, and suffered from the isolation.

I think instead of that, there should be spaces smaller than a studio apartment that are transition spaces. They should be private, but perhaps clustered so that there is a support network there. People should be given help on how to do things, simple things like how to shop and eat better, how to take care of a home and manage the utilities and bills, how to basically live normally again and construct those routines. How to not shrink into that space and be alone.

I did meet a lot of people with mental illnesses, I don't believe anyone can wave a magic wand and get them off the streets. But we can have the structure in place to help them so that when they are ready, it's possible.

The vast majority of the people on the streets in the UK aren't there because of drugs and alcohol, that's just a visible symptom of a small minority. Most I spoke to had normal lives, good lives, but a trauma occurred and they ended up on the street. There seemed to be a lot of divorced or widowed males. A lot of the young who were physically and/or sexually abused.

Anyhow, a link http://crackandcider.com/ . These people are good, it's no magic wand, but they will take monetary donations and turn it into basic things to help keep people warm and alive even if they are rough-sleeping. I like that they're challenging those misconceptions too.
Wow that site actually had a ton of stuff in a good structured way.

just go to:
http://www.fileformat.info/format/${file_extention}/internal...
An awesome web-based machine to sleep easier and work harder
The other side of the coin is that a manager of a company that allows an ex-convict to work in sensible areas can and will be held accountable if something goes wrong.

If you were a person that has put 20+ years of hard work into your career at some company would you be willing to risk it all (and by extension the life you built for your family) to put someone who as been convicted for hacking or fraud in the past in a position where he/she could cause considerable damage?

I think this can only be solved by laws that forbid employers to use or acquire this data. In that case no one could touch you for giving someone that chance.

The question is if the outcome of such a law would be positive and where there should be exceptions to it. (for example convicted hackers being employed by banks)
SHA-1 Deprecation: No Browser Left Behind
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Yahoo!-owned_sites_and...
What a graveyard.
Their answer is "media" but I'm not sure what that means and apparently they aren't either.
I started reading HN because I thought I was joining a community of hackers -- technical people who were using their skills to make their way in the world. I came here specifically because of startups. At the time (HN was new), people who participated were supposed to be better-known by the YC folks and have a better chance of getting into YC.

Not only did I not get into YC, the conversation quickly became "stuff that hackers like". Folks got tired of marketing, business models, coding, and other detailed startup stuff. Startup stuff became less about "Hey, I'm doing X, how does Y work?" and more about celebrity bloggers. Then MSM posts, then the rags, and so forth.

Now it's like a reddit-lite. I'm not complaining, just pointing out that yes, there has been a big drift from where it started to where it is today.

And if anybody knows where the new HN is, please email me. Sure would be nice to hang out someplace like that.
Awesome 2 year old golf swing
It makes things easier for investors. Imagine a company with two divisions. One is a solid boring industry with a long history of stable growth and of turning small but consistent profits. The other is in a smaller niche industry, showing impressive growth numbers, but yet to make a profit. As in investor it is hard to value such a company. Will the large old slow growing part hold back the new fast growing part? Will the losses in the smaller division lower the potential dividends of the solid part of the company? By splitting out the parts you can appeal both to investors who like low volatility and reliable dividend payments and to investors whom are willing to accept huge risk in exchange for the chance of 10x returns.
Yea totally. I suppose a lot of people are actually using Facebook for work and their businesses (and Tinder) and so can't really get rid of their account.

Also, I feel quite smug when someone asks to add me and I can say I don't use it... Maybe that is douchy...
About 1, having installed the JDK dozens of times I have never seen the ask toolbar crapware, could be true with the browser plugin (that should have died a long time ago) or the JRE (that I never needed to install).

About 3 to be honest I don't care at all of having braces, I actually dislike python because its lack of braces and what says if something is in a block is the indentation (I don't want to care about it when writing code, there are IDEs for that, specially when I move code around a lot), unless I am doing some quick tests on something and I dont have a minimal environment I do need a REPL at all (Java 9 may take care of that).

True that Java is not exactly truly open source, I have to agree with that.

Java being owned by oracle may be bad but being owned by a bad company does not make it a bad language.
I think you've totally missed the point why people hate marketing. It's not because of a lack of understanding on it's mechanics.

> From this point of view, there is no "travesty" to thank marketing for. The reality was that probably personal computers were more appealing to men, so it made more sense to spend marketing resources towards them. Why it was more appealing to them is a good question to ask, and it could be because of many reasons, including culture and society. But marketing probably didn't create that desire, it just used it.

Marketing is absolutely about the manufacture of desire. Though above you make the connection between Coca-cola and the harmless association of this beverage to "happiness", this is over-simplifying things somewhat. The psychology of the brand, upon which modern consumer society is dependent, and which marketing ruthlessly exploits, is based around the construction of a self solely through conspicuous acts of consumption rather than through human experiences, relationships with friends and family, or other pursuits traditionally considered to be more laudable.

Though arguably it is required in keeping the wheels of capitalism spinning (and by proxy food in our bellies); in reality, marketing is the process of co-opting, subverting, and ultimately extinguishing joy and the human experience.
Make Pendrive Bootable without cmd command
I have daughters as well. I tried to get them interested in computers, I really did. I tried to show them how they could make web pages with HTML. I tried to show them some basic Ruby to ask them questions on the command line that they could answer (thinking that if I could emulate a social aspect of computers they might become interested).

Nothing I tried worked.

I talked one daughter into taking the AP Comp Sci class in high school this year because I assured her that I would be able to coach her through any problems. The summer before the class, I did my best to start going over basic concepts that she would cover in class - just so she could hit the ground running... she adamantly refused to waste her summer on that subject.

Meanwhile, a neighbor of mine called me because his son had taken up programming their home computer on his own and wanted some advice on languages and projects to pursue.
This War on Math Is Bullshit
except that there were countries without such marketing, and the trend is still the same. I doubt that US marketing had any effect on USSR. And keep in mind, that in the USSR there was some push for the women to take "male" jobs and be proud about being e.g. miner or harvester driver.
Ha, interesting trick! : )

The GitHub API allows up to 5,000 requests per hour. I currently poll once an hour, so there's a bit of headway. If that becomes a problem, I think I can always space out checks for less-active repositories (there's also the option of allowing users to authenticate with GitHub and use their own quota so they don't have to share it with anyone else).

Cheers
Yahoo had to do this. They had been hanging onto the belief that the IRS wouldn't tax their Alibaba spin out, a belief that they and their tax accountants alone believed.

Most telling is that Yahoo was up after the markets closed on this news. Heck Bloomberg just sent me a note saying the sentiment of the news on Yahoo was very positive, even the machines like this news:)

Sadly this probably means 3 things are going to happen in the next 6 months:

1) The CEO leaves, and is replaced by an interm CEO from a PE firm who will negotiate the wind down of Yahoo.

2) There will be a lot of companies coming to look at Yahoo. If a deal can be done quickly then I don't think there will be layoffs right away. If no deal can be reached quickly then in 6 months I'll bet there is a very large round of layoffs as the company shutters what it can't sell to make the rest of Yahoo look more appetizing.

3) If Alibaba buys the holding portion of Yahoo( Alibaba and Yahoo Japan) then look for Alibaba to seek to acquire the rest of Yahoo Japan.

From teh article:

> Yahoo’s shift in strategy comes as Ms. Mayer and her husband, Zachary Bogue, are expecting the birth of twin daughters this month

I hope she takes a full year off, if not more. The past 4 years couldn't have been easy on her. It will be interesting to see what she does next.

It's clear she's great at product design and not so good at people skills. Unfortunately, that doesn't fit well with becoming a CEO again.
That wildly depends on the community. Often enough, they are mostly composed of teenagers who got into scripting their favourite game. Which is awesome but unfortunately it means that they lack a lot of experience, end up in bad terms with the developers etc.

As a counterpoint, the community I founded around Hearthstone (http://hearthsim.info/) is extremely open source friendly and on excellent terms with the developers. It's really about how you decide to manage it.
I realize for an outsider it may feel like a support group or a bunch of complainers ranting, but I'd like to add here: Me Too!

I left facebook late in 2011, for various reasons, but mostly because it was making me sad and depressed. I was an extremely heavy user before that. I can say for sure that leaving facebook has made me objectively happier and less sadder.

I remember that XKCD comic about social network effects. Our minds are 'trained' to 'compare' ourselves with 10-15 of our friends, and assert that we lie around the 'average'. When we look at facebook, where everyone puts on their best (and in the hundreds) our brains 'think' we're doing a lot worse than the average, and we feel bad about ourselves. I've heard a lot of people talk about not comparing to people on facebook, but... you really can't help it.

Full Disclosure: I opened a different facebook account. JUST for family, because my mom didn't _believe_ that I didn't have a facebook. I open it maybe once in a couple of weeks, and have gone for many months without logging in.

Here's something I'd tell to other people: if you feel depressed after using facebook, delete it. Forget about 'not keeping in touch', 'being a loner', etcetera. Your mental health is way, way, wayyy more important than knowing what your freaking high school acquaintance's third child had for lunch on a random day. Have a small group of close friends, and call them, hang out with them. Your larger group of friends will always be yours. If you need social networking, get snapchat (I'm a critic turned fanboy). It's fleeting, so you don't feel as bad about yourself, and people are not as annoying.

Addendum:
Here's how people make non-FB friends. A friend of a friend wanted help with grad schools, so I agreed to talk to her. We chatted on Skype (second encounter, EVER), and we ended up talking for an hour. She wanted someone to talk to and asked if we could talk again soon, and I didn't mind one more friend so we're skyping again soon. You make friends out of nowhere; don't need facebook for that. Facebook gives you the illusion you're 'in-touch' with everyone, when all you're doing is gathering 'intelligence' on their lives.
Exactly, and I find not being invited to social events gives me a lot of time to do other things...
Employees should be able to grade themselves and monitor their productivity
> Apologies if my comment was overly critical; I am genuinely interested in your opinion; I am just unable to dig into the meat of your argument.

Criticism is the name of the game, no apologies necessary.

> ... a modernist at heart, I see this as a good thing; towards that fabled "Common Standard", that goal of least subjective interpretation possible...

So much juice there–too much for today. I have strong disagreements with modernist thought, as you know. But if the majority of designers were aware of what a principled modernist approach was, at least there might be a bit of coherence in the output.
What really killed Mailbox
Major discussion of this whole issue/story/event:

Here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10699846 (133 comments)

And here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10701785 (107 comments)

Other submissions of this story:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10702397

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10702441

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10702505

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10702673

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10702861

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10703192

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10703525

There are more ...
You're right, it varies. I'd posit that most of the time however, you get reimbursed.
Major discussion of this whole issue/story/event:

Here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10699846 (133 comments)

And here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10701785 (107 comments)

Other submissions of this story:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10702397

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10702441

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10702505

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10702673

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10702861

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10703192

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10703517

There are more ...
If you want to revive Chess you should play Chess960.

It was such a bummer for me to explain to my son that you don't really have a choice of moves in the opening...

A little study of openings definitely improves your games, but in ordinary Chess the opening is about as interesting as bowling or watching golf on TV.
2015 Global Open Data Index Rankings
A good summary of the problems with the IARC classification on Glyphosate
> The notion of innate grammers has been pretty much replaced with evidence that you get much better and more human like performance (and the ability to actually learn the bloody things) out of RNNs and the like.

No not really. Barring concrete physiological evidence, innateness is simply an unfalsifiable position. I do think you can say that consensus among scientists might have shifted against innateness, but that is definitely not because of some computational model such as RNN with some passing resemblance to observed behavior of human neurons. The way these networks are configured and trained has nothing to do with real brains, nor does the abstraction in neural nets leave room for any electrochemical effects.

> The interesting question is why RNNs are able to produce things that resemble formal languages at first pass.

Is it? A neural network can achieve that by simulating a Turing machine or simpler automaton. I don't see what that brings to the table? That's just doing something we could already do, but less efficiently. I think the interesting thing is the opposite: if the RNN can do something which couldn't be done before with other models.
Hard to say if it was intended or not. But observe how this shifts the discussion towards some sort of "outsiders". Nobody here is to blame and the life is beautiful again.
You should check the devices made by Tinno Mobile.
Haha, the smugness seems pretty common around here. Each to their own I say. Still, I do secretly envy the ones like yourself who have managed to escape!
In a perfect world we would have the social plumbing without the psychological manipulation. But we're not, so here's how I've found how to make do with Facebook without it poisoning my brain. And yes I do benefit from it a lot, which is why I'm not leaving.

This is what my redux version of Facebook looks like, using custom uBlock filters - basically just news feed and notifications. Manages to eliminate ~90% of their manipulation attempts I reckon.

http://i.imgur.com/kRTI7Un.png

Other tips: unsubscribe from anything/one whose posts you don't want to see (sounds obvious if you're disciplined about this it makes a lot of difference), stick to messages only but inbox 0 it so you aren't storing useful info there, get event requests sync'd to an external calendar, untick 'remember' when you login.

I've found it totally manageable this way, and am cautiously hopeful that one day it wont be necessary once the Silicon Valley psychopaths grow up.
Macroscale superlubricity enabled by graphene nanoscroll formation
I just tried to think back at how on earth could I have done that without looking it up on the internet. I did it. No doubt about it. Would I be able to do it today? I'm suddenly not happy with this line of thought...
Block everyone who petitioned to block Donald J Trump from UK entry from the UK
They don't mention otherwise but do we know if the attack has happened again since 1 December?
Google's search engine runs at a loss to support their advertising business, and haven't had any serious competition in that sector since they bought Doubleclick (which looks a bit antitrusty in my eyes but what do I know). Yahoo doesn't have much of an ad business so there's not a lot of value in running their own search. They're good at their core business of being a portal, with some parts implemented themselves and some parts external (or semi-external e.g. Flickr) integrations.
That's a quite small sampling of microbenchmarks, but still interesting.

One thing you failed to note is that only Rust and Swift aren't garbage collected. That means that only Rust and Swift should be considered for applications where deterministic performance is required, in other words soft or hard real time.

Many games, for instance, have soft real time requirements.
I agree that that "other study" looks at Chinese rather than Japanese students, and it's high school + grad students rather than undergrads; but, still, let's compare what Brooks says with the reality.

Brooks: "If you show an American an image of a fish tank, the American will usually describe the biggest fish in the tank and what it is doing. If you ask a Chinese person to describe a fish tank, the Chinese will usually describe the context in which the fish swim."

The study: (1) Not a real fish tank but short animated vignettes. (2) All the fish were the same size, so anything Brooks says about "the biggest fish" can't possibly apply. (3) The only "context within which the fish swim" was provided by the other fish. (4) The experimental subjects were not "asked to describe a fish tank". They were asked specific questions like "To what extent do the blue fish's movements seem influenced by the other fish?". (5) The differences were not about whether experimental subjects described one particular fish or the context in which the fish swim. (6) The differences found were far smaller than "Americans usually do X, Chinese people usually do Y".

Here's the biggest effect they found: they asked "To what extent do the blue fish's movements seem influenced by internal factors?" and took answers on a scale from 1 to 5: 1 = hardly at all, 2 = slightly, 3 = moderately, 4 = greatly, 5 = almost entirely. In one category of cartoons, which the experimenters term "compulsion", American high-schoolers gave an average answer of 3.17 and Chinese high-schoolers an average answer of 2.56. Second-biggest effect: same cartoons, but now asking "To what extent do the blue fish's movements seem influenced by the other fish?". American: 3.27. Chinese: 3.61.

These, I repeat, were much the largest effects found by the study among the several cases into which they subdivided their findings. For grad students looking at the same category of cartoons, the answers were 3.07 for the Americans and 3.00 for the Chinese (first question) and 3.77/3.82 (second question). Most of the differences they found were of this sort of size, and some of them were in the "wrong" direction.

If you think this study supports Brooks's statement about what happens when Chinese and American people look at fish tanks ... well, I really don't know what to say. It's not even addressing the right question to support (or refute) Brooks's statement, and in any case the results are far weaker than Brooks implies.
I would agree with all those points, except that Apple Maps regularly gives straight up wrong directions in terms of the infrastructure. I know of one interchange near Chicago where it consistently presents as "you need to veer right to proceed on this highway" where it's actually the left lanes you need and they spur right afterward. I've never had a similar error out of another navigation app or service.
I am not so sure about this I suspect it is perhaps more of a learned skill. Professional DJs come to mind. To match two desperate musical tracks with differing tempo and align correctly requires following two musical tracks simultaneously. Initially it is very much as you say but over time you learn to hear them both separately and together without strain. My experience with twitch is another anecdotal counterpoint. After a lot of practice I now regularly listen to multiple audio streams at the same time and no longer hand any problem following up to three streams simultaneously these days, and it was impossible for me at first. Another issue is at what point does very fast attention switching become effectively multiprocessing? If we don't notice the context switching happening is still "happening"?