skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
in general with code, if it needs explaining with comments then its not written cleanly. sometimes there are confusing external considerations, like mathematical algorithms or additional constraints - that is what comments are for imo, explaining things external to the code that are required to understand it.

comments like "does this" are telling you the name of the function that the following code should be in.

... so unless your scripts/configuration data are written in a very esoteric language or format i'm inclined to agree with your point very strongly.
The Wisdom Race Is Heating Up
This is probably in the realm of "if you're subject to this level of attack you have bigger problems", but, I wonder if it would be possible to laser drill after-the-fact micro vias through the PCB to get at all the BGA pads with absurdly small probes.
I'm pretty sure that with HSAs you're not tied to a particular administrator. I think that you can get one from any administrator you want. If it's through an employer then they might only do direct paycheck deposits to a particular administrator, but you're able to opt-out of that and do the deposit yourself.

Don't listen to me though, I could be wrong, but it's worth looking into if you're considering an HSA.
Is it Paul Graham's job to fix those problems that cause inequality?

I don't think it is.

I do think that it's great that people like Bill Gates invest their billions into improving the healthcare system globally, and the Zuckerbergs have invested large amounts into improving education.
Ask HN: Learning Korean
What are HN's favorite resources for learning Korean?

I've picked up a 2 year Rosetta Stone subscription, installed Korean keyboards on everything, and ordered a keyboard cover. I live with somebody that speaks Korean so I have people I can practice with both written and spoken.

I've found r/Korean and the beginner's list (https://www.reddit.com/r/Korean/comments/rq3th/the_ultimate_beginners_resource_thread/).

What else would y'all recommend for developers and entrepreneurs learning Korean?
That post is linked to in the first sentence of this post.
Google definitely could've done a better job addressing concerns quickly. But while a red light, sure, would be more recognizable, I doubt it would be any more reassuring if it wasn't on.

Again, almost anyone who complained about this issue had never actually encountered a Glass Explorer IRL. My experiences interacting with people for real were entirely different than the comments of those online expressing such concern.

Google allegedly did select Explorers based on what they said they'd do with the device. But then it turned out they outsourced evaluating or completely not reading responses to the contest, and pretty much selected randomly. The person who said they'd use it to "cut a b----" won one.

Honestly, the best thing they could've done to dissuade concerns was to have more events in more places where people could try them on, and see what the thing was about. (And early, before selling them widely.) In my personal experience, nearly everyone I encountered wanted to try them, and wanted to know more about them. I encountered zero people with strong concerns about the device in my daily travels.
"This is terrible, and must be stopped!"

Grand theft is already a crime, how else do you 'steal wealth'??

"Do CEOs create or steal wealth?"

CEOs don't 'steal' wealth.

They are paid to do a job that pretty much nobody can actually do, which is why they are paid so well. If I know a good CEO can make my company $30 million dollars, I have no problem paying him $5 million/year.

This is like saying a general has no purpose in the military because they aren't actually fighting.
Saddest SaaS Pricing Pages of the Year
But I'm still a lot less likely to accept crap work just to hope that I get promoted later. The expected value of the upside is smaller, so should the downside be.
Saying Person B "stole" the wealth is not exactly helpful.

I'd say just that Person B inherited or otherwise did not personally create the wealth that they currently own.

You can tell an organization's priorities by it's finances. For a country, it's main revenue stream is taxation. Fix the unequal taxation (i.e. capital and inherited/transferred wealth being taxed at a lower rate that earned profits & direct work) and you will begin to repair wealth inequality.
As a Canadian, I am astonished at how expensive even the cheapest of these plans are. My monthly healthcare cost amounts to $178, once you factor in the taxes I pay that go to healthcare. That's cheaper than any of the plans in this article. How do people find these prices bearable?
Ask HN: How does one find a mentor?
So I read the Passionate Programmer [1] and one thing it mentions that I really want to do is find a mentor or several mentors. Ideally one who's 5-10 years more more experienced and one at the top of their gain, with like 10 - 20 years experience.

The problem I have is that I find it very difficult to find these kinds of people. I go to meetups but it always seems awkward to ask someone to be your mentor or meet with someone at a semi-regular interval. I'd be curious to see what tips all of you have.

P.S. I'm in the Boston, MA area if any experienced programmers are willing to meet and discuss their experiences.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Passionate-Programmer-Remarkable-Development-Pragmatic/dp/1934356344/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1451951511&sr=8-1&keywords=passionate+programmer
Which puts us back at square one with upnp to open up holes on the router.
Does postgres have any use at Google? When I was there, they had many ex-mysql people and used mysql internally (e.g. for YouTube, iirc.)
Watch Ikiru. Be enlightened.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/215850
> We'd have preferred if you'd waited until the 7th

Ok, let's bury this thread so that we can have a proper thread on the 7th. There's no hardship in waiting a couple days.
Flowcharts are Turing-complete [0] so, theoretically, can represent any valid computer program. Programming is about a whole bunch of things but, as regards the actual coding bit, flowcharts can do 100%.

[0] Admittedly, I haven't explored the original article enough to determine whether this one is, but that's not really my point.
> And please define "team-friendly", it is absurd to suggest that the git cli makes anything friendly.

Is this how you develop?

1. Comment out old code. Make a note of why this was removed (and maybe the date).

2. Add new code.

3. Commit.
Meta? You want meta? Try byterun [1], a full Python bytecode executor written in Python...

[1] https://github.com/nedbat/byterun
Health insurance is expensive because health insurance companies love money.
The place I worked in a few years ago handled this the best. We had a level 2/3 support team embedded in our division who handled 90% of calls.

The calls were taken by junior folks who were overtime eligible, they rotated 1 week cycles and received 20% of their hourly rate, plus a 3 hour minimum for time worked. They handled all vendor dispatch, all telco callouts.

For the resolver groups, there was a severity-1 process, with an on-call manager & call tree to the higher skill people. People were on call for two-week cycles, but any call-out to these people was treated as a defect in the process.

The average was 2-3 escalated calls to senior staff on different teams per month, out of about 5-7000 calls total.
If you don't have preexisting conditions, you can still buy PPOs from the big insurers as non-ACA plans.
Webpack is used for hot reloading otherwise Gulp can suffice to provide you with a command to compress your css and jsx files. You could do it manually with the cli to begin with but I'd use a build automation tool going forward.
This is essentially exactly what I've been wanting. I really want to start doing some real world work on open source projects, because I feel they'll be great experience. However the projects I'd love to work on (TOR among others) are just so dense and impenetrable that I don't even know how to figure out how to get started.

This will be really valuable, thanks.
Firefox will support non-standard CSS for WebKit compatibility
> "But economic inequality per se is not bad. It has multiple causes. Many are bad, but some are good."

Thank you for clarifying your points, hopefully it will help make this rebuttal equally clear. Economic inequality is bad not because of what causes it, but because of the effects it has on society. The problems boil down to issues of influence, both in the economic and political spheres. The wealthier someone gets, the more opportunity they have to game the system for their own advantage. Even if we're not aiming to eliminate the rich/poor divide completely, we still have a responsibility to ensure concentration of power is limited. This is why economic inequality is an issue.
There's problems. We need health care for people though. Obama original plan was fine.

The republicans started in with the death squads, and the scare tatics. We ended up with a system that Insurance companies exploited.

I am waiting for someone to fix it, or offer a better solution. I have heard of nothing. Nothing feasible.

See--if I get sick I go to a doctor's office, or hospital. It might be the only industry that isn't required to offer a bill in advance? Doctors, and insurance companies can charge whatever they like, or at least that's been my experience.

I gave given this a lot of thought. I don't have an answer. My only plan would be to make medical bills bankruptable--for any amount, and at any time. There would be no ten year waiting. It's not feasible because it would clog up federal courts, unless we stream line the process. Made a medical related bankruptcy so easy you could send it in on a post card. I don't want to lose my shack because I get sick. Even now, people are losing their homes in municipal court because they got sick, and didn't have the ability to pay the outrageous bill. Hospital lawyers try to keep it quiet, but they sue.

A friend's wife is recovering from stage three cancer. I don't know the type, or wanted to ask. They were in Switzerland, and she got very sick. When they got hone they were expecting a huge bill--the insurance company would balk at. It was completely covered by the Swiss government. What a country?

We need a reform. We don't need a Blowhard in office who will make things worse?
Relevant xkcd:

https://xkcd.com/927/
KVM is King(Linux/Openstack), Xen is dead, Docker is unstable.
It is sad that people even care or think that General Mills doesn't "experiment" on its customers by changing the amount of sugar or the size and color of packages or the flavor description or the premiums offered.

The author here appears to feel that Facebook should be regulated as a utility with an appointed oversight board :-) However, if you asked them "So you're suggesting the country nationalize Facebook and make it the 'US Social Network Service'?" they would probably sputter and cough and object, not understanding that what they want "a non-commercial entity to provide a service that costs millions of dollars a month to run for free" as just not being possible.

I think if someone can figure out a distributed social network where the cost of running it is born by the users explicitly then you'll at least have an alternative to suggest.
Fewer people willing or able to take a job might eventually cause a shortage of workers, leading to surge in wages and longer-term inflationary pressures, according to Princeton University economist Alan Blinder, a former Fed vice chairman.

"We're going to be running out of labor as we go through time,'' Blinder said on Bloomberg Television Dec. 31.

Oh, my. I hadn't even thought of that. I guess we'll need to expand the availability of slave-labour employer-controlled visas and guest worker programs, won't we? Let's forward this to our lobbyist.
Does it even matter?

You can easily get a user to install some app that has all kinds of permissions, including all their contacts, camera, mic, current and past call history, phone number, etc. They wouldn't bat an eye.
I refuse to lay in it!

There is one type of correctness, it is called 'correctness' everything else, 'political correctness' included is a flavour of 'wrong'.

Its also easy to overreact when you consider yourself to have been misjudged for poorly conveying a point. :)
Agreed. Very, very few people are what you might call "evil". Everyone thinks they're the good guy and they're doing what's right (even hardcore racists).

I recently listened to an Intelligence^2 podcast where an ultra-libertarian was debating against a mainstream point of view regarding the minimum wage. Both were arguing from humanitarian angles (although the ultra-libertarian might well have been arguing cynically, it doesn't really matter).

Rather than write off Trump supporters as bigots or idiots or whatever, we should be asking ourselves what creates extremism. From what I've read, it seems that people become racist or extremist when they become disenfranchised and feel that society is ignoring their problems. This anecdote seems to support that theory.
I think most of the backlash came from the way that startup wealth was definitively placed in the "good" bucket in the prior essay.

Yes, on the whole startups create wealth and that's generally a good thing. BUT... there is a still an open question as to whether the current SV culture and associated wealth inequality is entirely "good." In other words, it's not a binary question.

There is all sorts of financial chicanery associated with startup wealth that make it decidedly unmeritocratic. I've known a number of founders make millions with unprofitable companies that hardly contributed millions of dollars worth of value to the world. As far as I'm concerned, its a virtual certainty that the current startup allocation of capital is not efficient in a utilitarian sense.
Show HN: An AST-walk interpreter for Imp, a toy language I'm working on
Top 20 most-edited pages on Wikipedia in 2015
You can pay and get something or pay and get nothing.
We already have taxis, Uber and rental cars. People still seem to be buying cars even at their high price. Why do you think that is?
Why do you think that they are, "on the whole", bad?
I think the reason the original essay was so controversial is that it set out to demonstrate that a society faces a binary choice:

* We allow both startups and inequality.

* We attack both startups and inequality.

This is perhaps most clearly articulated in this quote:

"You can't end economic inequality without preventing people from getting rich, and you can't do that without preventing them from starting startups."

And here strikes the controversy: on average the hacker community has a favorable view of startups while also opposing economic inequality (this is at least my general impression).

Perhaps the optimal solution is a compromise that allows startups and inequality while providing a system that eliminates the most undesirable effects of inequality. There are already systems in place to prevent extreme poverty, to ensure some minimum access to education and healthcare etc.

From the remaining issues the most pressing one is the problem of excessive concentration of political power. A system that weakens the link between money and political influence seems necessary.
Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise [1] is excellent.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Signal-Noise-Many-Predictions-Fail--bu...
Startups aren't good because they create income inequality. Income inequality being possible is good because it provides the incentives for people to take risks and create startups. That isn't to say the current level of income inequality we see today is good - it isn't. But to get rid of income inequality completely would drastically reduce the number of startups because - what would be the point?

Would you really rather have everyone make the same amount of income regardless of what they do?
Great!

We made a similar service for civic tech projects, pulling from a long list of volunteer groups and non-profits. It only shows the "help wanted" labels.
http://www.codeforamerica.org/geeks/civicissues
And I suspect those are the types of things PG supports though I wouldn't want to put words in his mouth.
I have one set of rules for people and another for companies, yes, so does the country I live in and most other countries I know of.

Exactly where the boundaries are for this is a grey area, as is much of law and ethics.
The White House's 2015 Year in Photographs
I think the real question is "does the existence of unicorns provide an incentive to the average founder?", and I'd say that question's a lot less definitive.

Sure, some founders have gotten filthy stinkin' rich off their startups, but those are lottery-ticket odds. Most founders seem to be aiming for either a self-sustaining small business or an acqui-hire, both of which are middle- to upper-middle-class career paths, but neither are by and large own-your-own-helicopter-class career paths.
I'm really disappointed that www.honestachmed.dyndns.org/cert.der didn't work :(
Uber and Lyft already do this in San Francisco, and it works very well.
I don't think I ever did that. Maybe I'll give it a shot, thanks.
Java programs are quite often 2x or more slower than they could be if written in C. See for example some simple benchmarks at http://julialang.org/ – Java ranges from 1x to 3.92x as slow as C. The billions of dollars that have been poured into JVM optimizations have closed the gap a lot, but by no means all the way.
I'm glad someone changed the original title to "health insurance" rather than "health care". Using the two terms interchangeably has to be one of the biggest reasons why we get the shitty system we get for the amount we pay per year.
I interviewed, made it to the paid project stage and got cut loose. Since then I've contributed to a number of open source projects and built some great things in production. Would now be a good time to apply again?
AeroFS (https://www.aerofs.com/) is built on peer-to-peer file syncing technology as well. Sad to see no mention about AeroFS on this post :(
Get 3 months FREE WordPress hosting. No CC needed
And he wrote an entire, long essay to prove his points. Maybe you disagree that he did so, but argue about the full article, not the "here's my main points 'abstract'".
>How do I know which commented out code is okay to commit and which isn't?

By exercising judgment. Thank God that's still required, else we'd be out of a job ;)
Parrot announces new Disco drone, ditches quadrocopter design for wings
The overreaction of the title is just to pull in clicks. A friend of mine worked in the sensationalist world of internet publishing for years, and he eventually felt absolutely filthy from being forced to do this kind of thing dozens of times a day.
> Rideshare already only has 40% of the market to convince to sell their car and perpetually rent on demand. What's the conversion rate of that 40% who could use the on demand service for moving humans? 50%? That's not a massive pile of customers.

Assuming that your estimate 50% of non-truck owners adopting it is correct, that's 20% of 253 million cars, which is 50 million. Seems massive to me.

> Built in car-seats are almost a mirage, they are wildly uncommon.

What makes you think that they won't become more common (especially among car service vehicles) if there is a strong demand for them from car subscription services? It's not like it's a complicated technology to add.

> The premise still remains, overwhelming majority of people will not want to abandon a personally owned vehicle for some on-demand car that arrives and some varying condition and layout that you have to load/unload every time with your things.

I'm not sure how you can be so sure of your prediction of future demand, especially when technology is changing so fast.

Regarding the particulars you mention, I already load/unload my private car with stuff, but 90% of the time, it's just me and my backpack.

Sure, you can't use a rented vehicle as paperwork storage, but why would one use a car for storing paperwork?

Chargers can be provided in the rental vehicle (just like Starbucks does).

> Try it for a week if you drive

I routinely take the train (with the kids and all their gear), and we have to naturally take everything we brought with us when we get off. If anything, the rental car scenario is more convenient than that.
It's so much more wonderfully complicated than this. Introns can change the local conformation of DNA, act as enhancers, impact splicing, etc. The genome is an incredibly vibrant machine (ecosystem, really) -- it's nothing at all like linear code. Just because it's non-coding doesn't make it "junk DNA".
A large chunk of the hacker community is probably close to libertarian, and that was well known and well criticised. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology)

Well back in the day it was, I don't think an article like this would have been that controversial on hackernews many years ago. A lot of pauls earlier writing has similar stances.

As more people have joined, it moved quite heavily to the left.
Most jobs already have a severely restricted hiring pool because they are location-bound. When literally the entire world is your hiring pool, I'm sure they can still find the talent they need, even if there are large chunks of people who have a problem with their process.

Sure, on an individual level for someone who has this problem, it sucks. At a personal level when people at Automattic talk about individual candidates, it probably also sucks. But at a corporate level, evaluating whether their process is meeting their business needs? This issue, though legit, doesn't smell like a deal-killer.
Ask HN: Getting rid of intrusive thoughts/grudges
Hi,

since HN is limiting me to 2000 characters, please read the full text here:

http://pastebin.com/YzrzyCpD

TLDR; grew up with incompetent father, was treated in humiliating ways by my friends and now after getting away from all of this and having a decent career, am left with intrusive thoughts involving grudges towards them, which are hindering my work performance and life in general.
Love Spark! great works, folks!
2015 in review
Well, the other question is does it even need to be in the code? Could there be a documentation / spec file somewhere that uses this code as the reference implementation, and just add a comment that says "see spec file" next to the code?
That will be for nothing more than the most basic single-vision low-index lenses.

Once you start adding features like anti-reflective coatings, high index lenses, comfortable frames, and other things that are bordering on essential for constant use, the cost skyrockets.
Thank you. Actually, what I think the best way is to make it an error to use undeclared variable, unlike in JavaScript. If it's a global, is should be declared in global scope. I really like this way of declaring variables, so please consider it:

someVar := 123 //declared and assigned
someVar = 456 // reassigned
anotherVar = 777 // error: undeclared variable
I think that PG's point is that without economic inequality there is zero opportunity. So, I'd say that unequal opportunity is better than nonexistent opportunity. (This is an over-simplification.)
No, even then they really don't, do the math. 300M people, $2T total federal budget.

Everyone is so obsessed with discussing whether or not this would create disincentives to work that the gigantic cost is barely mentionned.

The moral ground has moved so far left that even the right-wing doesn't dare critic it as a massive forced, wealth redistribution scheme. Instead they fixate on barely relevant questions, such as whether it makes people lazy, or if the money is "deserved".

This drives me nuts. The problem is never giving money to people. Technological progress has the same effect. The problem is taking it away from others!