skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How much did spreadsheets influence how we think about the structure of data? I know (well, I read in Wikipedia) that RDBs were proposed in 1970, but probably weren't in popular consumer use by the time VisiCalc came out. While row-column can't perfectly encapsulate objects and attributes in our world, they do a good enough job that I wonder if they compelled us to think in flat tables?
Working in IT in Japan is a bit of a joke in general.

It is about 2-4x LESS than what you would get pretty much anywhere else in the world. They have long overtimes and in many places quite a conservative attitude toward decision making i.e. not fun. And the startup culture is really poor.
No, your comment had to do with redefining value based on whether you think something is good for someone. Like coffee.
Awesome. What fail safes do you have?
I've been having a great time the last few weeks working on a niche product database website for flashlights. Since my new operations engineering job has me moving away from doing web development full time, it's been a nice break and a good way to stay sharp on the application development side of things.

https://github.com/flashlightdb/flashlightdb
There are legit tech companies and there are shitty VC-backed hype machines. The former are unconquerable forces of nature and latter should be culled before public investors are harmed.
I don't see the rational basis. You keep repeating it exists but at no point have you explained how it follows that a failure rate of startups in any way whatsoever to any degree at all leads to them not creating any value. You have simply assumed this link - that's nonsensical

In fact, simple economics teaches us that a high failure rate is a good thing. Low failure rate would be consistent with very low risk projects that tend to be about some form of rent seeking or regulatory arbitrage. High failure rate means people are actually working on things that are hard to do. That's very valuable
>If the problem is about lack of adequate education, opportunities, etc. then let's discuss those concerns directly.

That is a large part of the concern and it is happening because of inequality. Funding for public education gets cut > rich people move towards private education > more education funding gets cut, partially swayed by rich people who have no vested interest in public education > public education gets shittier and shittier > private education becomes leagues ahead of public education > only rich can afford great education > only rich can afford nice jobs.

Things like this happen slowly over decades in all sorts of areas. That is how the middle class in the US has been hallowed out. It's not about the rich becoming richer, it's about the lower and middle classes becoming poorer. And in many cases, though not all, the poor becoming poorer is directly tied to the rich becoming richer.
You have a good point but I think you're reaching too far with it. They're not $3,000 less well off, because the value of the purchases is more than the value of the money. (From the buyer's point of view, which is all that matters here.)
Realday. "A tool that helps you plan your real day"[1]

I got frustrated with GTD a long time ago. I was super frustrated that my todo apps would eventually be full of useless information. I loved the ideas of some bloggers to basically just pick a few tasks for the day and do them. I thought: "Why not mix the calendar events and tasks in such a way that you have software that actually encourages you to focus only on the tasks you have time for?" Hence, you have your "real day" as opposed to the day you thought you'd finish 20 huge tasks and end up with none attempted.

realday.co (Had MVP up like a few years ago but scraped in favor of current Golang/ReactJS version I'm building now)

1: Work in progress
I have no idea, ask Piketty. I personally don't agree with any taxation at all, just giving you hypotheticals as to how they'd calculate it.
Just a remark on credit cards in Europe: yes, they are less common than in the US. However, this is mostly because Europeans use "EC cards" instead, which mostly work like debit cards except that they are issued by the banks themselves without an intermediary like Visa or Mastercard.
I agree, but Prime's quality has been slipping a lot for me in the last year. My last few orders from Amazon have been a complete shitshow.

I ordered something on Friday night, got offered free "same day shipping" with "guaranteed delivery on Saturday" because I'm a Prime member and it was over $35, Saturday at 5pm I get an email saying there was a problem with the order and now I'm guaranteed delivery on Sunday, and now I get an email that OnTrac claims my "business" was closed at 11am today. The leasing office here is open from 9am-7pm every day. OnTrac has a 25% success rate for delivering on the correct day for me so far.

Even if the package does arrive tomorrow, I can't get it until Friday now because I'll be at work when the leasing office is open. I should have picked the free two day delivery so I would have gotten a far more reliable carrier like Fedex/UPS to deliver it today. I'm tempted to cancel my Prime membership after having had it since 2009 or so.

It's awesome that it's reliable for your mother up in the mountains, though.
To some extent. There are many factors though: (a) children often live with parents to a higher age, (b) Japanese are quite conservative about sex in general, (c) there are plenty of alternative options for guys in the cities.
MaaxMarket – Machine Learning AI for Marketing Is Now in Public Beta
> "But, a maximum wage is a ridiculous rebuttal, IMHO."

Of course you're entitled to your opinion, but let's look at why a maximum wage can be used to tackle economic inequality, perhaps you'll not think it's quite so ridiculous after that.

> "The actual problem, as I see it, or, at least the variable that needs adjusting is the other side."

The main reason that a maximum wage impacts the poorest amongst us is that it provides a mechanism by which poverty and wealth can be linked.

For example, let's say every US state adopts a $15 per hour minimum wage. Let's now state that the maximum wage is set at 500x the minimum wage, so $7500 per hour. If the minimum wage worker works 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, they'll get $31,200 per year (before tax). If the maximum wage worker works the same number of hours they'll earn $15,600,000 (before tax). Let's say the bottom rate of tax is 15%, and the top rate of tax is 40%. What does that leave us with...

The minimum wage worker earned $26,520 a year.
The maximum wage worker earned $9,360,000 a year.

What we've set here are upper and lower bounds on how much someone can earn. Notice that we still have the rich and the poor, and we haven't taken away the incentive to want to get rich. What we have done is slowed down the rate at which the gap between the rich and poor grows, which is at the core of economic inequality. Inherited wealth is also an issue, but at least it would tackle the rate of change in newly generated wealth.

What does this do to an economy? First of all, the rich now have an extra incentive to raise the income of the poor. If the rate between the minimum and the maximum wage is fixed, raising the minimum wage will also raise the maximum wage. Secondly, it channels money that is more likely to have been hoarded back into economic activity. Money only works when it is traded, not when it is hoarded, hoarding past a certain level of security is a waste of economic potential.

> "Almost nobody who is poor wants to limit how much money someone can make; it's an irrelevant detail...most poor folks just want an opportunity to escape being poor, themselves."

I'm reminded of this...

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/328134-socialism-never-took-...

Being on the poor end of the spectrum leaves you more vulnerable to economic exploitation. If a maximum wage reduces the incentive for economic exploitation, then I see no reason why it wouldn't be welcomed. If you want a concrete example of economic exploitation, take a look at Walmart:

http://www.alternet.org/labor/ugly-walmart-truth-some-manage...

> "rents are being driven up through a variety of circumstances mostly outside the control of the people those rising rents most impact"

Setting a maximum wage would impact the concentration of resources such as housing. More landlords = more competition = more price stability.
Interesting that the OECD ranks Denmark quite well:
http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/denmark/

But they specifically call out inequality as an issue:

"..there is a considerable gap between the richest and poorest – the top 20% of the population earn close to four times as much as the bottom 20%"
Exactly, and I'm not sure why you're downvoted. PG and the author of this Medium article are basically arguing for the SAME thing. They want policies that allow the poor to have more economic growth opportunity. The main point of contention is the terminology "income inequality."
That sounds interesting! A lot of UI libraries want bursts of CPU time that are longer than acceptable in many real time systems, despite the amortized cost being very low.
> The Soviet education system was pretty good, by WW2 it had turned a territory with <28% literacy (for Women it was ~13%) into an empire with >75% literacy.

Note that it was fairly easy to improve literacy by a lot, because the starting point was so low, after the reactionary and eventually dysfunctional rule in Russia proper.

But of course the progress during Soviet rule was still quite remarkable.

But already before that, Finland, where I live - what was a Grand Duchy under the tsar, a part of the empire but not part of Russia - had literacy rate 98 % in 1880. The duchy was self-governing within the empire, the central government just taking care of foreign and military policy.

The tool to reach this was religious/church control of sexual lives: here you couldn't get a marriage permission unless you'd acquired enough literacy to read religious texts.
Sounds like a failure of planning. Those thing don't disappear suddenly. (I know, a lot of people suck at this, and it's good for them to have options.)
Article is low on numbers

"An air quality expert in Britain reported that much of it was “stale diesel” from traffic emissions generated in European cities."

how much is "much of it" ?

and big on personal observation like

"As anybody who has seen the black smoke spewing out of the pipes of a big rig as it changes gears can testify, diesel has a fatal flaw."

IMO a fluff piece.
Taxis in Germany are just different. From someone who has lived in both SF and Berlin recently, here is the summary:

Berlin: almost all taxis are Mercedes E-Class. super clean, drivers are very friendly, interesting to talk to, seem educated. they drive calmly and professionally. the experience makes you feel good and I always tip generously.

SF: taxis are nasty. I don't want to touch anything inside the car, the seats are covered in plastic "puke" covers, the seat belts are hard to use, the driver claims he does not take credit cards even though he has a credit card machine. he might refuse to take you to certain areas, just cause. sometimes the drivers themselves are dirty, they smell like they haven't showered in a week, they are eating while driving. the car smells like pot or cigarette smoke. I feel bad for the drivers, they look like they are just barely getting by, and they are often angry and drive extremely aggressively. I guess when you are just scraping by financially as a taxi driver in SF, every second counts. I'm always surprised we didn't get into an accident.
You're an entryist. I hope anyone reading your comment reads the rest of the thread to which you link. Much sanity is to be found.
> Tell you what, why don't you start your rant with a list of these rich politicians who will grow even richer. Just a single name please.

Hillary Clinton.

https://www.rt.com/usa/327689-clinton-conflicts-state-depart...

And BTW grandparent is 100% correct. This is EXACTLY how communism starts. First they come for the people who are rich and successful ...

Throwaway account because it could hurt my career to declare my political views on a public forum in the US if I'm not a liberal.
How can a seller lie about a price? Isn't the price listed on the web page and charged by Amazon?
This is clickbait. It should be called "the decline of interest in some of Microsoft's technologies, but not others, on StackOverflow". You can't call that a "fall", especially when the company is still growing and releasing products that are critical and financial successes.
Why Must Systems Be Operated?
The false positives that some virus programs return are typically due to the fact that our executable is different that what they expect. Specifically, it doesn't have all the unnecessary crap that typical compilers churn out -- only what's essential, and nothing more. Some programs also object to files with no extension (like .txt or .src). We left these off since they're not very English-like.
It's not even clear what certain parts of the GPL mean when applied to interpreted languages, like Javascript. Applying the GPL to more exotic languages like HDLs is a legal black hole; I don't think even the FSF is entirely sure how that would play out.

(Which, of course, means that no sane manufacturer would touch GPLed hardware designs.)
If a new drug to cure something is discovered, we have a new drug no matter how many other startups fail and people who might have died are cured by it.

This is completely independent of what other people are doing, or whether other people have, say, failed music startups / failed websites that fail at whatever rate.

I'd say that startups can create wealth though, as 'value' is either tied to currency or not objective at all, and funny business with numbers isn't the most important thing in life.
Link to the cited experiments give a 404 error. :-(
Rocket implementation has clocked at 1.5GHz on a 45nm process

That's not bad. How many instructions can this issue per cycle?
Some more positive memories:

- Magic Cap came from the early-1990s expectation that the future involved intelligent agents that would travel around the network, do work (e.g. searching for the best price on a flight or new shoes), and then report back when the user was connected again.

In practice, this meant that you could send email to another Magic Cap user that included executable code, like an animation or a little game, that would run in a sandbox on the user's device.

Even today, we still don't really have this -- you can't stick JavaScript (or a Java applet) in an email and expect the receiver to be able to run it.

- The Motorola Envoy ran on Motorola's low-bitrate, high-power (and now defunct) Ardis wireless network. It was robust enough to work from within an airplane!! Because almost nobody had them (in 1995), the flight attendants would not stop you from sending and receiving email wirelessly while flying. Of course today, even if Ardis still existed and still worked from 30,000 flight, they would be telling you to put your phone into airplane mode...

- I did not have a Motorola Envoy, but I did have a Sony Magic Link that I used for email from 1995-1996. It was amazing! You could leave it by your bed, and when you woke up in the morning, it would make a (free, local) call to AT&T PersonaLink to exchange email. I have fond memories of lying in bed in my PJs in early 1996, having just woken up, and flirting via email with a high-school friend who had already arrived at school at the computer lab. This all seemed like an incredible luxury at the time.

Of course "checking email when you first wake up" became much more common with the end of per-minute fees from major ISPs (AOL ended theirs in December 1996), the rise of laptops and pervasive Wi-Fi (~2001), and eventually the rise of cellular handhelds with email (~2005).
Well, Doom source ports started from Carmack's source, that's a bit different than these clean-room from-scratch reimplementations.
On Dec 30th, I built http://bucket52.com, a simple app which asks the question "what did you do in the last week that was memorable/remarkable?"

The idea being that even if we do great things and are very active in different areas of our life, we actually end up doing the same thing again and again. If we track the things we do, and look for something that was different and special, will that entice us to do more diverse and interesting things, and get outside of our comfort zone?

It's very MVP, just seeing where it goes at the moment, but so far, it seems people like the idea.

I also built it in Meteor, which I only tried for the first time on Dec. 30th, and I have to say, for prototyping something basic like this, it's been really great. Some of the poor quality of the site (like slow load time) is probably due to my inexperience with Meteor.
But before being too smug about these "stupid" regimes, it is shocking that American leadership could not see these problems. That you can't win a war with a weak colonial puppet regime. So many American policies have blown up because one tried to prop up regimes with zero legitimize whether South Vietnam, the Shah of Iran or leader of Cuba before Castro.

I also keep wondering why a tyrant like Hitler seemed to have an awful lot of talented people running stuff. Why did Hitler not replace brilliant military commanders with loyal idiots?

It is one of the ironies, that the Nazi regime seen as as being built on cadaver decipline had a lot of independent decision making at the lower levels.
I've been writing a wrapper around PostgreSQLs jsonb column type to make a somewhat mongo-a-like json document store: http://bedquiltdb.github.io

Not sure if it would actually be useful to anyone in the real world, but I've learned a lot about writing PostgreSQL extensions and such.
I've said it elsewhere, but I'll say it again: Uber's endgame is not in the disruption of the taxi industry. They are really a logistics company. Once the regulations catch up with them, they will be providing a logistics service for taxis (and possibly for trucking and deliveries). They are disrupting the antiquated software / infrastructure involved in the dispatching and operations of taxis. The initial competition with taxis is a temporary way of forcing them to adopt the new software / infrastructure.

In Germany the logistics of taxi management are already far beyond what we see in the US. The value proposition is lower for both rider and driver. It would be interesting to learn about the companies involved in that market. (Who makes the dispatching radios, software vendors, profit margins, etc.)
> if people aren't willing to pay between 0% and 5% for
> the extra security provided

In the context of Rust, integer overflow checks provide much less utility because Rust already has to perform static and dynamic checks to ensure that integers are used properly, regardless of whether they've ever overflowed (e.g. indexing into an array is a checked operation in Rust). So as you say, there's a tradeoff. :) And as I say elsewhere in here, the Rust devs are eagerly waiting for checked overflow in hardware to prove itself so that they can make it the default and do away with the current compromise solution (which is checked ops in debug builds, unchecked ops in release builds).
I'm a big fan of the ACCU conference. It's not too big, but packed with lots of good talks.

http://accu.org/index.php/conferences/accu_conference_2016
David Eagleman: Can we create new senses for humans?
The word "Asian" does not appear in the article.

The subtext is that the elite is concerned that traditional selection measures like grades & test scores have become totally game-able via a combination of sheer hourly input & collusion / cheating amongst certain subpopulations. This causes their kids to be outcompeted for very limited slots at elite institutions (even more limited due to massive subsidies to push people into the higher ed system, general population growth, and a desire to limit enrolment to preserve the social capital benefits of truly elite institutions).

Naturally there is pressure for those measures to be changed. Whether their characterisation of what's happening is correct is debatable, but that's where a good amount the pressure comes from.
Yes, our compiler is Windows only and generates native machine code for Intel x86 architecture. It looks and feels the same on any Windows version from XP to 10.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but the author of that article is pulling his conclusions out of his rear end. E.g. that article also shows "the fall of Linux".
I'm building micro - a microservices toolkit https://github.com/micro/micro. I was part of the platform team at Hailo which built a global microservices platform and before then spent some time at Google. I think with the shift to cloud and docker, being able to build distributed systems is becoming ever more important but the tooling hasn't caught up yet. The goal of micro is to simplify building and managing distributed systems.
If Amazon doesn't even market to your country, surely you can't think that you are the target market for it
This seems to be the third HN post of this article, previous ones:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8976227
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8476130

It's an interesting article of course, and now it seems to generate more discussion (I read it at one of the previous times.)
Japanese is a language. If you can communicate using it with a native speaker with minimal difficulty and confusion, then you can speak and understand the language.
Very snarky comment but I think the general point you're making is a good one: that too often the blame for problems like these is placed in misguided places and pushed around but we fail to zoom out and examine the very core of societal structures.
Money invested in real estate doesn't get used to manufacture goods and services or start industry or research or education or anything good for humanity. It's "sleeping money" as far as economy is concerned. In fact, it's worse because as more and more real estate gets owned by super rich and their investment arms, it puts more pressure on middle class by having to cut higher and higher portion of their income on mortgages and lowering their lifestyle standards, savings and risk taking abilities. As per some reports, as much as 30 to 70% of super rich portfolio gets directly in to real estate investments. As they buy up premium estates in major cities around the world, supply gets constrained, more people gets priced out of home ownership and must agree to pay ever increasing rents to those investors. It should be bewildering to anyone that this situation exists even though population hasn't been increasing much in western countries. This is known as "economic rent" (look up the term in Wikipedia) where investor strives to create a setup that passively generates income ad infinity without contributing to society. It's essentially creating generational entitlement system whereby suddenly usual economics like "you get what you worked for" no longer applies. The real estate has been primary tool for centuries to add phenomenal gains in to most of the super rich wealth and Piketty's data shows that it is the primary reason why wealthy are acquiring more wealth at rate much higher than overall GDP increase. It's hard for most people to see this because many times they are home owners benefiting from this while in reality they are not and also because they don't realize that real estate is basic human necessity just like air and water. No one wants Chinese billionaires or entities like Blackrock to buy up all of the water supply, inflate its price and then ration it to people with bidding wars. So the assertion that as super rich gets more richer, they benefit society by starting industries is pretty misguided. So far the data shows that this kind of productive investment has much lower returns than non-productive investments because of higher risk factors. So if rich were doing only doing productive investments, they would not be able to acquire more wealth at current pace.
Reminds me of twitter awhile back.