skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
google: 'sugar subsidies''corn subsidies''milk subsidies'

In particular, sugar should be taxed like tobacco, with a sin tax, rather than subsidized. But that's not what we do.
"Set a timer for 10 minutes" or "Set an alarm for 10:00am tomorrow" is faster than any other interface. But other than that, I don't use it for anything else.
These are problems limited to C, C++, and assembly language. Even C programs can be kept reasonably secure by following the MISRA-C standard.

Very secure and reliable operating systems have been written in existing languages such as ESPOL (MCP) and PL1 (MULTICS). There's also Zetalisp (Genera) and Oberon (Oberon), though they might not appeal if you dislike garbage collection. You might also consider Ada, designed with type and memory safety in mind and used in defence and avionics.
Ask HN: What book changed your life in 2015?
I'm just compiling my reading list for the next year and found some great suggestions in threads from previous years (the same question was asked in 2012, 13, 14)

So here's this year's attempt to find out what the HN community has been reading in the last year.
Obligatory reference to Plato's Phaedrus.

> Socrates: At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
I don't have much experience with marijuana. Does it actually have the kind of brand dynamics wines have? Can we expect people to prefer indulging in the pot equivalent of 10 or 50 years old wine if they can afford it?
I replied to a similar question here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10824205
>I blame the MBA's - the cultureless hoards of middle management that suck the life out of everything that's not quantifiable and can be entered on a spread sheet.

Oh please. You were doing fine up to that point. There's always been a tension between theory and practice.
One is "unum" in latin.
Google founder Larry Page’s top 6 tips for making your dreams come true
Interesting that the build instructions refer to Cygwin. It's a bit surprising, I'd have expected something more native. What does this bring to the table that regular Cygwin OpenSSHd couldn't do 10 years ago?
Ditto. Sadly, this got posted three times to HN already and hit my twitter feed without seeing anyone say "you're wrong, there's a book everyone should read!"

At this point, my hopes are low.
Kind of sort of. The way the Vegas books are made are to make consistent profit while mitigating as much risk as possible. Which means, although not quite like the zero-sum markets which exist in securities, you still have to have more or less need the scales to weigh out.

What you can capitalize on is human emotional -- i.e. the Dallas Cowboys are notorious for being bet heavily in favor of, even if statistically they're not going to win because of sentiment or what-not. Let's say statistically they're underdogs by 10.5 pts. Let's not talk about covering the spread or parlays or anything complicated - just pretend the market is limited to solely 'bet to win'. If it were the Bengals as the underdog at the same 10.5 against the Raiders (just teams where the fan base doesn't skew the book), you might see -170 to win 100 , and conversely if the Raiders win, it might be bet +140 to win 100. (I haven't bet on sports in years, so I'm not sure how the actual numerics work out). Either way, as underdogs, since so many people will be betting on the Cowboys even though they're predicted to lose by greater than 10.5, the line will only be at -120 due to the volume of bets being taken. Vegas has to move the line accordingly to adjust for the contingency that the Cowboys actually do win, paying out 170 on those upsets could bankrupt them.

Being successful at fantasy sports is probably a lot easier than being successful at trading crude oil, because John and his buddies will all throw down 40 bucks each for the Cowboys to win even though the odds are heavily skewed against them. And unlike in Vegas, you can consistently be profitable and not get black-listed. (Counting cards should be legal if you are not colluding with anyone, but I digress).

Interestingly enough, 'betting schemes' might not work for the average player, but there's a reason why the same 10 players make it to the final table of the World Series of Poker. In fact that's how those daily betting fantasy poker gaming sites are in business. It doesn't violate the unlawful gaming act because games like poker[1] and fantasy football clearly have consistent winners and losers, even though those attributes often can't be quantified via any sort of metric, it's enough for judges to rule that certain forms of gambling are games of skill.

[1] http://www.npr.org/2012/08/22/159833145/judge-rules-poker-is... I've seen the same ruling at the highest circuit of tons of states, and I'm guessing it must be federally recognized as the fantasy daily line-up games are making literally billions off it now.
In Silicon Valley Now, It's Almost Always Winner Takes All
No. Even if she has been victimized, that does not give her the right to engage in sustained harassment and blacklisting campaigns against third parties. If she is suffering from such terrible PTSD that she cannot keep herself from lashing out at undeserving victims, I feel for her but she needs psychiatric care, not enabling comments such as we are seeing on this post.

Incidentally, the original definition of the word "privilege" is "private law." I'll leave that to others to decide how that applies to granting one person the permission to engage in the same harassing behaviors she wants others punished for.
The piece by Maciej (http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm) on page weight points out that a lot of sites have responded by developing desktop sites as if people are using them with touchscreens. I'm not sure that's a good idea.
That's actually trivially doable and has been done for video games and board games.
20n | San Francisco | Full Time, ONSITE | http://20n.com | Machine learning, Data Mining, Bioinformatics, Microbial engineering

Biology is severely under-utilized. 20n (YC W15) fixes that using software predictions to create cells that produce pharmaceuticals, materials and other products. We created organisms that eat sugar and produce acetaminophen -- the active ingredient of Tylenol. This is the first biological means of making acetaminophen.

20n has existing Fortune 500 customers with great incoming revenue. We are also backed by Khosla Ventures, YCombinator, and DARPA. Our core technology is a data mining and machine learning platform for biological data. We routinely distribute using Spark, write approximation algorithms for NP-complete problems, and push the software predictions to robots that build the microbes. We are looking for algorithms experts who want to see their predictions create new life!

Full job descriptions:

* Microbial engineering scientist: http://20n.com/jobs.html#team:make

* Machine learning: http://20n.com/jobs.html#team:predict

* Data mining: http://20n.com/jobs.html#team:input

* Bioinformatics: http://20n.com/jobs.html#team:sequence
Apart from Crispr, Deep Learning, Autonomous drone swarms, and Mars missions, an important development in human society seems to be the dawning of an era in which "crime" becomes impossible.

Accuracy in determining our genetic and digital fingerprints, combined with ubiquitous surveillance and predictive machine learning may make going "on the lam" prohibitively difficult. In concert with LE's newfound prowess would be a subtle but pervasive mass media campaign that targets pre-criminals with cautionary tales of the apprehended. One hopes that progress in rehabilitation and societies capacity for forgiveness matches these developments apace.

ps happy 2016 HN!
Is it just me or has there been a resurgence in cinema going as a social activity. It felt like around year 2000 when dvds were peaking and then flat screen tvs came in, cinemas were a lot quieter.
Why would a free software project leave GitHub just to run a proprietary "stack"?

You could try one of the self-hostable free software alternatives listed here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_source_code_host...
It was gigantic to begin with, and he has performed about as well as an index fund over his period in business, avoiding bankruptcy only by fluke.
The typical family farmer in the U.S. is a millionaire because of assets. They have poor earnings and they whine a lot, but they are sitting on top of land, tractors, and buildings worth millions.

The average U.S. farmer could cash out, buy a house in Miami, and never work a day again in their lives. But they don't do so. They apparently like the country lifestyle and continue their struggle even though they don't have to.

Obviously the couple in the Salon article can't cash out and retire because they don't own their own land, and it's just a sliver of land at that.
That's a reasonable theory. Marijuana is not (currently) physically addicting, though I wouldn't put it past the tobacco companies to figure out ways to make it physically addicting and brand specific in its addictive properties...I'd even bet they're working on it. So, in that regard is may be similar to wine, which though it does contain an addictive substance, most addicts are not wine drinkers as it is a very expensive source of alcohol.

I still tend to think it will shake out similarly to tobacco, moreso than wine, but it's an interesting thought experiment to consider which substance it more resembles and how it will end up being regulated, taxed, and corporatized, in the long term as legalization spreads.
Google search killed the web. Links went from how you shared content to how you spam page-rank which promoted spammers swarming any popular site not because humans would click links but because dumb algorithms would do so.

Further simply linking to interesting things became less useful so simply sharing link collections stopped being a thing.
>If people really cared about their food coming from small, inefficient, "organic" farms then they would pay for what it really costs to produce food in that manner. The fact that people aren't willing to pay for it tells us that they don't actually care as much as they claimed. This is normal: most people will tell you they care deeply about something up until the point when you ask them to open their wallet, and then they remember that they don't care all that much.

That's something I felt was missing from the article: No talk about their pricing. People pay (or not pay) the price they are asked to pay, not the price the thing costs to make (and have no idea how high that is).

Probably doesn't compare to the typical software-freelancer stories of "You should try to charge more than you think, clients pay that!", but it still would be interesting.
Anybody here having real virtual assistants (people you contact via skype/email)? Is it a good or bad experience? How much do you spend per month?
Cent OS 7 will support Python 2 for free until 2024. I would assume most patches will work without changes on other OSes as well. But if you want someone to do the QA work (and compiling) for you and no independent Python 2 fork will arise, you'd presumably have to pay someone for that.

Beyond that, apparently you can pay Red Hat to big bucks to provide you with bug fixes for really old Red Hat releases in a similar way you can pay Microsoft big bucks to get patches for Windows XP even today. I'm sure other companies will do the same if they can find enough customers that find porting costs more than such a support contract.
From the early failures, we've learned that we need end to end control in order to make products successful. So I guess the simple answer is experience.
Sure - he has done a good job so far in brand building, but his brand is predicated on him /already/ being rich - which is not anything he created for himself, rather something he inherited.
Damn the way to set up a reminder without using Siri is super annoying. Every time I have to set a reminder and I can't use Siri, I have to re-evaluate if it's worth it.
> Even C programs can be kept reasonably secure by following the MISRA-C standard. You might also consider Ada, designed with type and memory safety in mind and used in defence and avionics.

The problem with these older systems is that they don't support heap allocation while remaining memory-safe. (A quick Google search seems to confirm that MISRA-C is in this category.) Or, if they do support heap allocation, they use a GC to manage it. Both of these restrictions are often considered undesirable for a kernel, except in specific embedded situations in which you can get away with statically allocating all your variables. Rust's lifetime system can ensure that you use malloc/free correctly, so it doesn't have to wall dynamic memory allocation off into unsafe code.
London, UK - Pusher - https://pusher.com/ - Full time - On Site Only

The current Pusher product is a multi-tenant distributed system that allows our customers to deliver billions of messages to their connected users. We operate at massive scale, and this informs and affects everything we do.

Our engineering team is based in London. We are looking for engineers who will thrive in a challenging environment, working on interesting problems. Our team is small but growing, and we value people who can contribute not only individually, but in the context of the team. Our engineering team is also heavily involved in operations, so you need to know how to deploy, monitor and maintain a large production system. We wrote our code in Ruby (Main legacy language) and Haskell.

Our software stack is built around Linux, Ruby, Haskell, nodeJS, Redis, MySQL, Git and Go.

We are currently looking for:
* Platform Engineers to continue improving and scaling our core real-time infrastructure. More info on this position at https://pusher.workable.com/jobs/52789.
* Product Engineer (Full Stack) to work on our new customers facing features and improve our libraries https://pusher.workable.com/jobs/87044
* Mobile Product Engineer to help us build a great experience for mobile developers. https://pusher.workable.com/jobs/114508
"There’s a story in the Qur’an that I thought about a lot during my first eight months in solitary confinement. In it, a group of persecuted Christians find refuge in a cave. They, and a dog they have with them, fall into a deep sleep and wake up under the impression that they have taken a nap: in fact, it’s 300 years later. One version of the story tells of how one of them goes out to buy food – and I can only imagine how hungry they must have been after 300 years – and discovers that his money is obsolete now, a museum item. That’s when he realises how long they have been absent."

Slightly off-topic, does he realize that this was a fable and not a true story as human beings can't live for 300 years much less without food, water and a way to expel waste?
SEEKING WORK - Rails/JS/Python/Go, SF Bay Area/LA or Remote

Link to resume: http://www.maximlakin.com/resume.pdf

I'm a full stack, startup oriented web developer with past projects including e-commerce and online stores, social media platforms, and big data analytics pipelines.

The full list of skills and expertise includes:

*Ruby, Rails, Nginx, Unicorn
*Python, Django
*JavaScript, React, Angular
*Java, Maven, Struts, Spring, Android
*HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, Foundation
*WebGL, Unity3d, C#

Quick Bio:

Before freelancing fulltime I taught and developed teaching materials for web development at General Assembly and String Theory research during my PhD program. More at: http://www.maximlakin.com/resume.pdf
Problems with Kraken.js? I don't use Treeline.
Also how close is particle physics to generating anything in the eighth or higher periods? Is the leap from 118 to 119 greater than 117 to 118?
In college I did extensive research on this amongst Bodog, 5dimes, and another third party vendor considered 'reliable'. I'd scrape sites hourly because lines move like any market will, and I did this for all 17 weeks. I don't think there was one instance where there was an arbitrage opportunity (my algorithm would go 4 game-pairs deep, so it wasn't an exhaustive analysis but rigorous enough). Even if theres large disparity between bookies, the fact that the industry accepts -115/100 as fair would require a huge mispricing by a bookie for you to arbitrage successfully.
One thing that kept me from applying to Facebook: No remote positions.
Control theory is a thing. Causal induction is a thing.
I suppose they're also about to become experts in thermal insulation and waste heat management, given that some people got busted when their roofs suddenly become the only ones in the neighborhood that didn't accumulate snow in winter.
Given how many corporations do dwindle and fail, it's hard for me to believe that the lifespan would be categorically different. Even if it were doubled because of mergers, that wouldn't change the logic.
CA disambiguation: California.
FreeBSD Community Breathes Sigh of Relief as Toxic Activist Randi Harper Quits
Is this the USA problem or do small farmer have same problem in other country too? If all world has same problem it is very sad.
Really cool! A useful feature would be to detect whether a document is Markdown or not. I tried sharing some Go source files and they look funny because it tries to convert them to markdown.
Powershell integration. Cygwin SSH drops you into a bash prompt running on the Windows box. Powershell is much more deeply integrated with Windows, and is more useful for actual system administration (e.g. configuring IIS, SQL Server, etc) than Cygwin's bash.
Ok. $_ isn't trivial to understand, let alone explain. But nobody's claiming that. Well not me at least.

What irked me is that's just about all the author's got to say about Perl in the article. Other languages inherited this "feature" (Ruby anyone?) or equivalents, but no mention of that. Why even mention Perl if he's got nothing (solid) to say about it?
Clojure Ecosystem
This is true. The reason there's a scene in the movie, 2001, in which HAL plays chess is that at the time it was thought that playing chess well required real human intelligence.

But as soon as chess programs got good, we all took them for granted.
> All companies, projects, and developers have to move to the current version of Python eventually.

Well, yes, and that "eventually" is somewhere in ten or fifteen years.
In ‘Star Wars,’ Was the Death Star Too Big to Fail?
The more you invest in a relationship, the more rewarding it will likely to be for you but setting this analogy or aphorism aside, Google Now is built on some form of deep machine learning and thus the more you feed it, the better it becomes in its job of recognizing your voice and executing your commands.
Yes, you need to manually manage memory. But you can't do it wrong in Rust¹. It's an error at compile time. No use after free, no double free, and no dangling pointers are possible. The same applies to iterator invalidation and data races. Coupled with sane defaults for things such as array bounds checking and value initialization, it results in a great language to write a safe kernel.

¹: Well, you can mess up in `unsafe` blocks. It's basically an “I'm smarter than the compiler” annotation. You can use it when Rust can't guarantee that something is memory safe. For example writing to the VGA text buffer at the special address `0xb8000` is totally safe, but Rust can't know that. We try to minimize the number of `unsafe` and to double check each use, but of course you can make mistakes and accidentally violate memory safety. But even then you just need to look at `unsafe` blocks to find the bug, which is still a big improvement over languages such as C.
You're suggesting people send their html back to the server when they've finished reading it.
This is exciting. Not only for Ruby itself, but for the field of dynamic languages optimization in general.
Shakespeare400: marking the quatercentenary of the Bard's shuffling off
How have you heard of the Dervaes? Are you local to the area?
The ISIS cyber terrorism media hype is totally overblown
Hang on, the advice given is not "do whatever makes you happy and productive.", the advice given is "never use Python 3 until every line of Python code on your computer is written with Python 3".

And please explain why to ignore people who say Python 3 is the future, I don't understand why.
Map of T-Mobile's 700 MHz spectrum
It's easier than pull requests, to email a patch.
The pledge by Micheal Masterson
http://www.amazon.com/The-Pledge-Your-Master-Abundant/dp/047...

It showed me 3 things

1. A super-easy Goal setting system - It showed me a simple way to set and achieve goals in all the areas in my life. Actually I learnt that, we have to set goals in only 4 areas in our life. (Health, Wealth, self-improvement, and social). No other book showed me that I need to look at only 4 areas to have a great life. This was life changing for me and now I have clear goals setup for 2016.

2. How to read a book super-fast : I found the easiest way to read a book. Now I can read a book in about 1hr. Previously it used to take me 10hrs. This was not speed-reading, but another technique. I used to practice speed reading before, but this book showed me that there is a completely different way.

3. The best way to make money is entrepreneurship: I learnt that the best way to make money is not stock markets, day trading and others, but it is only through entrepreneurship. I learnt that we we don't need millions to retire in life and we can achieve the money we need by starting a lifestyle business with just one employee(me).