skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> My understanding is that health insurance originated in this country as a means to plump up employee compensation in a situation where paying more wages was not desirable. You could not entice good employees by offering them a pay raise because it bumped them up into another tax bracket and it just wasn't worth it to them.

Really hard to take the article seriously when it crams so much misinformation into one paragraph. There is no such thing as "bumping you up into the next tax bracket." The marginal extra dollar might be taxed at a higher rate, but the dollars below that will be taxed the same as before.

Moreover, the fact that health insurance isn't taxed now can't explain the origin of the industry. Initially, health insurance was taxed just like any other non-cash benefit. A tax break on health insurance was implemented as a way to offer some relief from the wage controls of WWII: http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/12/04/16643424.... But such a tax break wouldn't have come about if the industry didn't already exist.
Yes, an add is easy as you say. However, it will be reverted nearly all of the time, and that is where the trouble is.

Why contribute when the idea of others actually seeing the benefit of doing it is so painful?
What's there to argue about over names? Pardon my ignorance, I'm very poorly-travelled.
Cell 411: Emergency alert system for friends, family, and neighbors
Putin dissolves Roscosmos, will restructure it as a state-run corporation
It is indeed a problem to not have enough time. Just throwing in some facts in an article is often not good enough, it must fit with the flow of the article and not repeat things that has already been said and be in order, and with references etc etc. Some people might not have the time for that additional work to make the contribution "good enough".

I haven't followed Wikipedia for a while but I assume that some rejected changes are due to that people throw in some changes that might be correct but are not worked on enough to fit in with the rest of the article. And one can't in general assume that someone else will do that work for you. Than the easy way out is often a revert instead of leaving a more unfinished article live.

I did most of my contributions to Wikipedia when I had that extra time.
This is something Jerry Pournelle used to complain about. He edited some pages relating to the US space program. Events in which he took part or knew the people involved. Then he'd come back a month later and find the page had been edited again with the incorrect information re-inserted. Eventually he just gave up.

And then there are political problems. The Tyson affair is a good example - Neil deGrasse Tyson spent many years spouting made-up quotes supposedly uttered by political opponents (Like this one, for instance - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_jG5kKfacY). Eventually someone compiled all the nonsense and it was something of a mini-scandal. The wiki editors refused to allow any mention of it on his page, so the whole affair is mostly down the memory hole now, just like they intended.

Wikipedia is good for historical references (pre 1900 or so), and a good place to start if you just don't know anything about the thing you're looking up. But to rely on it for anything that's the slightest bit controversial is daft.
If the Old River Control Structure Fails (1980) [pdf]
Sure there we're definitely improvements in music quality.And sure 1mbps wasn't enough , But it was easy to forecast demand for bandwidth - it's reasonable that people will want higher quality music, we had decent guesses what's the maximum bandwidth that would require , and the amount of music people listened to stayed about the same - i.e. a lot.

But sure, BitTorrent definitely had a bigger impact on the music industry.
Down for me
private schools with reputations for nerdiness and difficulty

Which schools are those? As a homeschooling parent, who emphasizes to my children that they should THINK, I would definitely encourage my children to apply to schools (public or private) that are genuinely nerdy and difficult. I'd be delighted to hear suggestions of good colleges and universities like that.
> Using smart pointers makes it really hard to have dangling pointers.

No, it doesn't.

std::vector<std::unique_ptr<int>> x;
x.push_back(std::make_unique(1));
auto& y = *x[0];
x.clear();
std::cout << y; // use after free

This is, of course, a toy example. For lots and lots of real examples, search Web browser engine bug trackers for UAF vulnerabilities. (They have been using smart pointers exclusively for a decade or so now.)

> A good STL impl will have iterator debugging, which catches iterator invalidation.

Valgrind and ASan catch UAF too and have been around for years and years. Yet we still have a ton of UAF vulnerabilities.
Suicide statistics are tricky. What you do or don't count as a death by suicide isn't always obvious. And there's a bunch of data that isn't always collected, or has only just started to be collected. (Was the person gay? Were they trans?)

When we look at work we think that jobs affected by economic downturn are risky (builders, vets, farmers). We also think that some other jobs are risky because they provide access to means and methods (doctors, vets, farmers).

There are some risk factors for programmers: young; single; male; intelligent enough to research methods;

For England there are these sources:

Office of National Statistics.

these numbers are robust, and good quality. They very clearly define what they do count as suicide and what they don't count. They also clearly define how they define the year - the year of registration, which may not be the year the death happened.

Searching for suicide returns a lot of information, some of which is provided under FOI request.

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/search/index.html?newquery=suicide

Suicides in the UK (2013 registrations) http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/subnational-health4/suicides-i...

Suicides in the UK (2012 registrations): http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/subnational-health4/suicides-i...

National Confidential Inquiry into Suicide and Homicide by People with Mental Illness

http://www.bbmh.manchester.ac.uk/cmhs/research/centreforsuic...

There's also information available from Public Health England.

http://fingertips.phe.org.uk/profile-group/mental-health/pro...

http://www.phoutcomes.info/public-health-outcomes-framework#...

EDIT: Here's the link to the CDC stuff: http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/suicide/statistics/

http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/suicide/definitions.ht...
It would be cool to have a Wikipedia spinoff but articles have to be explained like I'm five. You might get a lot of contributors from that. It's important because some articles have a lot of jargon and feels like it was written by a bureaucrat. SOME people are only willing to invest a few minutes of their time.
A Few Things We Learned from Airbnb’s NYC Data
Maybe he just wants to engage in the conversation. I don't think it deserves to be called out like this.
https://medium.com/@tikhon/founders-it-s-not-1990-stop-treat...
What a great video, thanks for the link.
I was wondering about that mess just the other day admiring the weirdness of our borders there. I guess one reason why those enclaves and miniature counter-enclaves exist there, is because it makes for a nice tourist attraction; the local community won't give that up without a fight.
They've since updated the title, and it had me wondering if it was a typo, so I came to the comments first.
to be honest I am. if you told NPM to install the latest 1.x and you were on 1.1 and now got upgraded to 1.7 I would put my money on something breaking than not.
The article argues against that proposition.
The personal attacks in your comments are completely out of line. If you don't stop doing this I'm going to have to ban you, which I would hate, because we've both been around here for years and I've enjoyed your HN comments (especially about Smalltalk) since long before I became a moderator.

But you've been breaking the HN guidelines over and over again, and I've asked you to stop many times. You need to stop categorically if you want to keep commenting here. These rules apply to everyone, and it wouldn't be fair to other users to let you get away with it.
Good idea; I agree that that's better.
Well I think you may have defined what is a potentially awesome and scary product: mental state tracking over the life of a Twitter poster....

Make a bot that will analyses tweets over time and connect it with something like Talix.com's nlp medical coding ability...
Ask HN: What new non-technical thing are you looking forward to in 2016?
Political contention isn't as big a problem, as spam and inaccuracy. Those are the problems that make such sites generally unwelcoming towards newcomers. Both Wikipedia and Google Maps demonstrate this. OSM doesn't.
13 + 23 + 33 + …63 = (1 + 2 + 3+ …+ 6)2

Is this confusing anyone else?
Probably not a serious one, but a lot of people write their own little scripts and utilities to do this. So definitely more than zero. Perhaps not a significant number, but I'd still be concerned about changing a user's entered password without letting them know. relearn's solution is a good one though.
after banging my head against react-router for a side-project the past couple of weeks, reading that one of their motivations for 2.0 was to clean up the interaction between history and router was a sigh of relief. looking at the docs, however, made it clear that they are doubling down on their strange and confusing history API:

import { useRouterHistory, hashHistory } from 'react-router'
// useRouterHistory creates a composable higher-order function
const appHistory = useRouterHistory(hashHistory)({ queryKey: false })
<Router history={appHistory}/>

if i wanted to change the scroll behavior of router, then i'd have to do something like this:

import useScroll from 'scroll-behavior/lib/useStandardScroll'
const appHistory = useScroll(useRouterHistory(hashHistory))({ queryKey: false })

how does this make using router/history any clearer?

i LIKE react-router, i think it's pretty damn good, but I just don't understand the rationale for their API choices. combine that with the velocity at which they're changing the APIs, it makes me wish that they'd just take their time with the design
I was in the same boat, I went with a personal project not related to work so I could have more control and learn new things. It ended up improving my skills at work so it was a win win.
I think Blair could claim to be Scottish or English if he wished - but ultimately, he identified as English, says he is English and does so with good reason because after his very early childhood he was raised there (although sent off to board at Fettes).

My second point was not aimed at you in particular, apologies if it came off that way, just that it is common for some (perhaps right wing) people to tediously repeat the "Blair is Scottish, Scots have an outsized influence on the UK" mantra without reflecting that actually it isn't as clear-cut as they state and that Scots don't have an "outsized" influence on the UK politically and never have.

They have an influence in proportion to their share of the population, over the historical piece - sometimes higher and sometimes lower (as now) but it all comes out in the wash.
My dentist's office offers this. My work didn't offer dental coverage but the clinic itself offered "coverage" in the form of paying a flat fee and getting your cleanings and exams taken care of for the year (with discounts for other care). I was on that like white on rice: my money went directly to the dentist, no middleman taking their cut out of my paycheck, and my basic dental care was paid for.
> I haven't seen anyone implement it in the wild, but it'd also be cool if there was a wordlist of the 25 most common passwords that the site matched against and refused to accept

It's now in django[0]. And it's a hoot to read...

[0] https://github.com/django/django/blob/master/django/contrib/...
At the federal level, there's an organization called IRS.

Yes.

I'm not sure if you're aware, but sales tax is already ubiquitous in the US.

The taxable entities are far fewer than income tax, making for less administrative overhead. Tax evasion rates also lower.

Of course there are tricky questions, but they're already being answered, IMO better than the personal income quagmire.

Having both today is a complicated tax structure (corporate taxes and sales taxes). Between the two, sales tax is the simplest choice.
Yeah, I really detest the idea that more people carrying guns will make us safer. I mean, just look at how often cops make mistakes. I believe most cops have good intentions, but the urgency of an apparent life or death situation triggers that good ol' fight or flight response and spikes adrenaline. This inevitably leads to accidents and bad judgments in the moment.

The self-reported hit rate for bullets fired from police weapons is only 30-40%, in the US. Some 3rd party estimates put it around 20%. That means at least 60% of bullets fired by cops miss their target – and these people are generally well trained with firearms (if not other parts of policing), usually required to re-certify their marksmanship multiple times a year, etc.

I personally do not want to trust some rando with a gun to a) make the right decision about when lethal force is prudent and b) execute that decision competently.

Anyway, I'm preaching to the choir here. I'm sure gun people can raise counterexamples of where some citizen with a gun saved the day. So, I know I'm just wasting keystrokes.

On that note, I think I'm done with Internet comments for the day. :) Have a happy new year.
Oh, I misread you. Sorry. I thought you didn't believe that such cases existed at all. As opposed to not believing this case was such a scenario. That's why I gave an unrelated example. Sorry!

And of course reality is what it is. No shit! Saying that isn't an argument.

Windows 7 N is objectively stupid. The default browser choice is objectively stupid. The released Excel file formats were stupid. In fact I think you'll be hard pressed to come up with a list of changes I product or behavior brought on by the ruling that benefit consumers in any meaningful way.
Now that there's snow in the hills, there might be a good deer season in 2016. In 2015, they were all hiding in the farmers' fields at the bottom of the valleys (in eastern Washington) because all the regular vegetation was dead higher up.
I'm looking forward to a bunch of reading, starting with 'Mindset' by Carol Dweck but also 'Daemon' by Daniel Suarez for something non-work related. I read too much non-fiction at present and having a break that doesn't involve screens is important.
That's the Simple English Wikipedia.[1]

[1] https://simple.wikipedia.org
Few useful codebases are brand new. Or if they are they don't stay new. Weight accumulates and at some point efforts always shift to successfully iterating existing things of value.
It would be premature to get to that stage, given the vast gap in quality (even in the english wikipedia, articles in many domains have glaring errors / omissions and nonsense in them). First you build the world, and only when it's become a zero sum game you fight over it.
^ this guy is why we can't have nice things
I don't really think about "X safety", but rather about various quality attributes such as availability and resilience, perhaps also security in this case. These have to be evaluated and kept in balance with other attributes such as performance, portability, dev resources etc.

I would personally prefer to use various engineering practices such as static and dynamic analysis, unit tests, etc rather than change programming languages.

There's also the other side of this argument: my last project was Java. C++ would have allowed us to port more easily to other platforms (a current pain point) and get better performance in combination with OpenGL (another major pain point), however, the project constraints would have made it extremely difficult to bring a C++ project to market with the resources we had.
It would be a big help to see those tired people work in a positive way. Someone with clear domain knowledge gets met with hostility, and can clearly see there is no time to on board them, or take a swing at improving the contribution.

The default is, "go away, we have better things to do mere mortal" and while that may not be the intent, that is the impression a new contributor is often left with.

Then comes the funding page... really? Now, maintaining what is there is worth finding, but the negatives do impact the perception of this.
Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy (2014)
Ink on paper... USSR Constitution (1977) [1]. Please note articles 54, and 55. (& I am sure you know of the preferred method of boiling frogs.)

http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/77cons02.h...
Employee health benefits been tax free since at least 1954, and the top marginal rates were much higher then. So WWII controls were an early factor, but marginal tax impacts were significant too.
> I appreciate the concern about evidence, but please stop fuelling this controversy.

Quite the opposite. I'm demonstrating there is nothing to be of controversy here. It's pretty clear what occurred here (we do have many of the facts now), yet many want to go off on some wild conspiracy theory. That's fueling controversy purely for the sake of controversy.

With that said - I do believe all the cases have been made, and people will see what they want to see, regardless of the truth.
ARM designs and licenses chip/core designs, which are then bought by companies that will then further modify them to fit a specific application. They design the chips, but they don't make the entire design.
This should get more attention. I'm almost certain you have the source of the problem right. I just wouldn't be so sure and quick about your solution.

It would be really nice to have more extensive work on how to mitigate these kinds of dynamics as I'm certain we will see more and more of these projects and I'd like them to be healthy for a change.

Humanity: Evolve! ;-)
I'd like to properly understand Elliptic Curve Cryptography.
"dependency resolution depends on install order"

Does this sound insane to anyone else?

EDIT: I understand not wanting to modify node's `require` semantics, but this is an unacceptable sacrifice of consistency for efficiency. Surely it would have been possible for an `npm install --save x` to put the `node_modules` directory in a state identical to `npm install --save x && rm -rf node_modules && npm install`. It might take a little longer to shuffle some directories around, but certainly not longer than a full `npm install`.
I'm not so concerned about recalling administrators. Administrators who do blatantly bad things sometimes end up losing their position, and sometimes just end up with enough people angry at them that they leave.

What I'm concerned about is that there's no way to get new administrators, which is what it would take to bring in new ideas that break up the unnecessary bureaucracy.

The process that used to create them got entirely paralyzed, both by ridiculous inflation of metrics (I saw the edit count requirements -- they call them suggestions but they're requirements -- increase by a factor of 20 while I participated), and by the requirement to convince a supermajority of long-standing editors to vote for you.

I became an administrator in '06, and by '08 I would never have been considered. Basically, you have to edit every part of the encyclopedia while upsetting nobody, then inflate your already prolific accomplishments to get your foot in the door, without looking like a liar. This is impossible.

Old administrators (like me) lose interest. New ones don't take their place. The work is being increasingly done by the most obsessive people, and by faceless bots.
Harvey Mudd, CalTech, Rose Hulman, Carnegie Mellon, from what I've heard and experienced. But I expect you have heard of these institutions, and they are all on the technical side.
> Wikipedia is good for historical references (pre 1900 or so), and a good place to start if you just don't know anything about the thing you're looking up.

Whenever I see people say stuff like this I mentally replace what they said with "Wikipedia is a general-knowledge encyclopedia." Not a dig at you, but this should have always gone without saying.
Got it, thanks. Would it have been easier for you as a dev if they made this a minor version bump rather than a major version? Given that the code and documentation changes would have been the same.
Conda aspires to be exactly that. It attempts to package the entire Python scientific stack, but its general purpose nature lets you package other kinds of software as well (for instance, conda can replace compiling arbitrary C programs from source and installing them into your home folder)
In the US, do you pay taxes when you exercise your option to buy the stock?

For you example, say I exercise my option to by 1 at strike price of $100 in 2015. I hold on to it and sell it in 2017 for the FMV of $1000. Do you only pay the capital gains tax of the $900 gain?

Ignore state rules, just at the fed.
Good to know, that is pretty cool. I wish they had more stuff.
I found that it was difficult to deal with a web client connection dying, then reconnecting, and recieving messages it may have missed while disconnected. There's a flag you can set for this in Rabbit when creating a queue, but I couldn't really get it to work.

The way Firehose works the client gets a sequence ID per channel that's always counting up. If the connection drops when the client is on sequence 1, then 4 new message come in, and the client reconnects, it will get the rest of the messages up to sequence 5 and wait for new messages.
* Ilya Zhitomirski
> I would personally prefer to use various engineering practices such as static and dynamic analysis, unit tests, etc rather than change programming languages.

There is no static and/or dynamic analysis out there that effectively stops programmers from writing UAFs (to name one especially problematic class of memory safety problems) in C++ over and over. This is despite decades of work on it. The language itself is fundamentally hostile to analysis.

I also dislike "one language to rule them all" thinking. Web app and network backend developers shed that mentality a long time ago, and the industry is better for it. Java, Ruby, PHP, Python, Go, JavaScript, Scala, etc. are all used on the server where their niches are strongest, and this is great! The industry would have been in much worse shape if they all had tried to stick with C++.

I agree with your other points, though--the choice of programming language has to be balanced among many factors. Sometimes security against RCE doesn't matter or isn't relevant, and the crashes caused by memory safety problems can be lived with. But I don't think we should pretend that C++ is safe, or as safe as other languages. It just isn't, and no tooling so far has been able to make it so.
Given the nature of the work they have to do, it's pretty much a required qualification to have OCD.
I recently started a YouTube series on hacking. With a main focus on reverse engineering and memory corruption. I'm currently on episode 0x5 and I currently release them biweekly.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhixgUqwRTjxglIswKp9m...

I also record myself playing CTFs and I just created a video walkthrough of the pwnable 200 challenge from the 32c3 CTF: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLsckMfScOg

Maybe it helps somebody.
Maybe because it's not made for static HTML? Why not just use a templating language?
This seems to concern a small unpopulated peninsula with no buildings at all, so no problem in this case.
If you don't mind me asking, how much did you pay for the "coverage"?

Did it offer any kind of discount for minor or major dental work (e.g., cavity removal, wisdom tooth removal)? Or was this covered by your health insurance?
I like the French Cafe parable by Andrew Tridgell of Samba on the topic https://www.samba.org/ftp/tridge/misc/french_cafe.txt