skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> I can’t help but feel a little sad at how much harder it is to learn to program today.

>> Back then, with a few lines of code I could write a program that ran on practically any home computer.

Pop open Chrome and you can write almost the same program from that magazine in Javascript. You'll have to figure out how to do the input, though.

Magazines like Linux Format even have multi-page coding tutorials for different languages all the time.

http://www.linuxformat.com/archives&listpdfs=1

>> There’s so many more steps to reach “Hello World” in any of today’s major languages

>> There’s also so much more distraction. With no Internet, no video games

There were TONS of games for the TRS-80. I used to sit in Radio Shack as a kid playing them all day long. You didn't have the Internet back then but you could dial into BBS's. That was a real time-waster.
Linode is suffering on-going DDoS attacks
q.v. another blog by a fantastic marketer-who-codes, Cody Boyte: https://medium.com/@codyboyte
This is great. Particularly appreciate the "forest kindergarten". As I grew up, I felt so much of my schooling missed out on applying the knowledge we learned in the class room, and of course, the scope of what we learned in class felt at times arbitrary and irrelevant.

My parents would takeus camping from a very young age every summer. We learned how to fish, set up tents, and all the tools associated with those tasks. We learned to respect the meat we'd catch, not be afraid of the water, be innovative with the tools around us when we forgot something, and of course -- be adventurous.

I'm a large fan of the urban environment and I think raising children in cities has clear social benefits. We must also respect, and embrace the nature in and around our cities to foster that other side of the spectrum.
Well, people who speak up against cop brutality, corruption, etc have a big possibility of being targeted for harassment and intimidation, especially in they live in a small town, or they know who they are in their neighborhood etc.

Of course people without experience with the police force, and without historical knowledge of other incidents and their frequency, often have no idea that this things even happen.
Learn how to build totally transparent secure PINs delivery flow
didn't the xbox do this 3 or 4 years ago?
Perhaps the poster meant cultural North India, which (in my experience) is only contrasted with cultural South India, which is comprised of the states in which Dravidian languages are spoken by a majority, namely: Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, AP, and Telangana.
It's not the same thing at all. Android first makes a process template, then takes clippings for each process it wants to run. That's not the same as running different applications in the same process.
> The fed has posted a large profit , a 30% gain in 2015 for a profit over over $100 billion, which is sent back to the treasury.

Yes, those are profits on assets they have on their balance sheet. How much QE had to be done to achieve that profit. It's like the invisible negative side of the balance because the cost is socialized and delayed by years, by the time the damage is done few will correctly identify it as the dominant source of the problem.

It's easy to post a profit on select assets when you're pumping it up with the other hand.
Fractional reserve is really great. How about giving private individuals the right to print money? Or perhaps any organization? It is a great enabler.
This is the kind of impact that start-ups rarely have, in spite of the 'make something people want' and 'lets go and improve the world' mission statements.

Kudos to these three, it's the kind of development one would be proud to be a part of. Watching the watchers is badly needed, not just in America, elsewhere too.
Physical commodities trading is still ripe with issues at least at some of the ags majors (if you don't know who runs this industry, pick up Merchants of Grain - not much has changed).

For example, as recently as about 5 years ago (when I left), freight prices were sent by brokers on Yahoo Chat to a fresh grad who could then rapidly quote prices when traders needed it.

There's a bunch of things associated with a trade that need to get done - the futures position (it might be worth structuring something interesting, instead of just going for vanilla - the market makers in that space are WAY behind equities/fixed income/currencies), the FX hedging, compliance, etc. Market risk is another are just filled with opportunities - the key is to focus on UX, or they'll stick with Excel.

These processes are not, or badly, automated because the IT departments are large, political animals and the traders (who run the companies and are the major shareholders) are the type of people happy to deep dive into a war zone and have kalashnikovs pointed at their belly in the hope of a 20-30% discount, or who can trek 10 hours in the jungle to meet and charm the extended family of the man responsible for a country's grain exports, thus impressing him and securing a monopoly for life.

Still, since the work is by its very nature extremely human intensive, saving any time from the trader point of view, even for work that is traditionally passed down to the new guys, is very valuable, and the companies make enough money not to need to worry about the size of the bill, if the product is of a good enough quality. Adding reliability is another great angle. Catching a mistake on the FX hedging (traditionally one of the biggest sources of mistakes amongst the less technically inclined) as it happens, rather a few months later when the trade is unwound, might mean a few years' salary saved.

Of course, that would require gaining the trust of the traders. Good luck with that. Half a decade working closely with them should do it... and then you're up against the CTO defending his domain. Trust is way more valued than skill, although both are important.

Great industry though. Meritocratic, fast paced, high stakes, really interesting people. I miss it often.
Ask HN: What is the name of the online text game that was on HN a few months ago
A few months ago I saw an online text/interactive fiction game on HN but I just can't find the link again. The website had a white background and was of a minimalistic design. It had an almost-gothic style flowery decoration near the borders. Does anyone have the link?
I met my partner on the Internet, and we spent two months (before I could afford to fly to Australia) talking over video-chat and we talked about everything, nothing was off limits, all the while just staring at each other, because it would be rude to do otherwise.

We've been together now almost ten years.
This reminds me of an old project of mine[0], this generates Arabic names.

[0] https://github.com/RaedsLab/Tunisian_Name_Generator
Somewhere around 1991 or so we got a 386SX with DOS and Q-BASIC. Here I was stuck with all these Apple II and Commodore books from the library, most of the games wouldn't work because the peeks and pokes and functions that weren't available.

I later found some GW-BASIC books which helped a little bit, but I wish the library had some newer stuff. C compilers were $500 back then so BASIC was all I had.
I meant the Texas tech industry.
Except if they confuse (or "confuse") the cellphone/camera with a gun, and shoot you.

Don't try it if black or in places without much people and in relative darkness.
Thanks for that, I hear what you're saying and appreciate you saying it.

Hopefully my followup comment adds some substance - though not links to one-off studies, as it's to broad a topic for that.

For you or anyone else interested, Lipton's The Biology of Belief explains the principles very well on a cellular biology level. Tanzi's books with Deepak Chopra (Super Brain and Super Genes) are probably more of an affront to credulity given the Chopra connection, but are there for anyone who can get over that.

Yes they are all pitched at the new age self-help market because that's the audience that's into this kind of stuff at the moment.

Hopefully that won't be the case forever, and signs are there that attitudes are starting to change.
> I shudder to think of Amazons CFO shuddering to think of that.

Care to elaborate? Cash-on-delivery is a common payment method in Japan, and Amazon Japan and many other online marketplaces have been using it for years. It can be problematic operationally, but how is it worse than credit card settlement for the finance department?

Payment at the convenience store is another common method here, and it's arguably more problematic than COD as the marketplace/merchant has to wait for the payment to go thru before shipping.
Show HN: Scaling ImageView for Android in ~300 sloc
Show HN: PeerGym – A Health Club Database Made with Elixir/Phoenix
Astronaut calls wrong number from space
Wyndhamhotelgroup – Days Inn
So, many more students are attending college, median salaries for college educated folks haven't budged, tuition is more heavily subsidized, and yet college is many times more expensive. Hate to challenge hn libertarians but something doesn't add up here. Where's the money going in that equation? Are school administrators just vacuuming up all the extra money? Are professors mostly less than high school educated?

There are more students in college because high school education does limit your job opportunities, and wages for non-educated jobs have not only not risen, but have fallen since the 1970s. Tuition may be more subsidized in the number of dollars touched by the state, but education budgets often haven't risen to meet demand and the only subsidies anyone's getting these days is loans. Grants and scholarships from the state have shrunk and shrunk and shrunk. A college education is more likely to lead to pulling you out of poverty than a lack of one.
After some inspiration from this post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10784089) I got motivated to finish a side project I'd been working on and off for a little while. I've been wanting to play with Elixir and Phoenix since the Phoenix 0.13 release, so I had starting messing around with the framework over the summer.

I had also noticed that when trying to change gyms or travel, I could never find the info I needed from Google Maps or Yelp when it came to trying out a new gym, so me and a friend started collecting some more in-depth information on the health clubs in the US. So naturally this seemed like the perfect opportunity to test out Phoenix and stretch my knowledge a bit.

Right now we have over 4000 gyms and health clubs in the database, with about 150 that have pretty complete profiles in the major metropolitan areas. We're testing out picture reviews with a few friends we showed it to over the weekend.

It's definitely still got a few kinks to work out, and there's a bunch more features I want to put into it, but I felt that the holiday weekend was the perfect time to wrap it up enough to show to the world!

Would love your feedback and any advice/tips on working with Elixir/Phoenix - I'd also be happy to share my experience programming in Elixir/Phoenix as well, it is a lot of fun and very easy transition for someone with a functional and/or Ruby background.

EDIT: Mods is there a way to change the link back to HTTP, I accidentally put in HTTPS when I don't have SSL set up (yet!)
Nethack?
Could be used for both. I've used it for generating test data in unit/integration tests and also for obfuscation where production-dumps are needed.

It's useful for having in development as well, when you need to have X number of forms and X number of users but you don't want to have to manually create that every time you re-create the environment.
for PHP https://github.com/fzaninotto/Faker
I don't think they're targeting customers, because they have attacked almost every datacenter... strange behaviour...
Fourth one since Christmas. Two were on Christmas - that was fun.
47 Filipino teens invade island China claims as its own
we use it for writing fixtures for tests
That's fair, and I'd agree that mixins and decorators can be more closely related to FP than I initially took them for.

I just tend to keep my objects as, basically, structs, and functions bound outside of them, rather than treating them as objects, so questions of composability in such a manner don't come up. Rather than have to write a lot of abstracted out code to support mixins, and then know what assumptions a mixin has about the object choosing to mix it in, there are instead just functions; you want them then reference them, and what they take is spelled out (somewhat more) clearly in the function header, if you can pass in the right arguments, the function can be reused. If you want a set of functions that all work together, then composition, sharing state, etc, falls on you, rather than being implicit in assumptions the mixin and mixing class may make about each other. As you say, a question of taste (especially as to what steps you take to avoid those assumptions).

But that said, I've done similar things in merging two objects prior to serializing them out across a REST endpoint. So there it was less a design consideration of composable function containers, and more one of data transformation (not that they're separate beasts; functions as data and all that), but at the same time a lot of the complexities were avoided.
this one ?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5961205
Sorites paradox
>If you can teach your own immune system to combat cancer by either teaching it to attack certain markers, or by disabling the "stealth" mechanisms which many types of cancer use to fly under it's radar you've effectively created a vaccine.

All of that is known, and they've been trying that for half a century with not much success (besides the occasional report for a "cancer vaccine"). What makes you think they don't know the logistics involved already?

>Also vaccination is one of the most logistically complicated processes in medicine they are extremely short lived require very precise refrigeration and proper administration is considerably more critical than most cancer treatments, 80-90% of the cost of vaccination programs in developed and developing countries alike go into logistics.

Not really relevant. Being short lived and requiring "precise refrigeration and proper administration", is not the same kind of problem as the research for cancer vaccines.

The former is actually a solved problem, and something that even all third world countries are able to do just fine anyway...
I was lucky---when I was born in 1930, I won the ovarian lottery. You know, I was born in the United States. The odds were 30 or 40 to one against that. I was born white. If I had been born black, my life would have been different. I was born male. My life would have been vastly different if I had been born female.

So, I had all kinds of lucky things.

-Warren Buffett, 4 Oct. 2011 [1]

Certainly Michael Burry had enormous luck. But there were plenty of others with the same amount of luck who did not see the crisis coming or who did nothing about it.

[1] http://fortune.com/2011/10/04/warren-buffett-at-fortunes-mos...
The bias is justified. When you commit a crime, it is this single worst action that you are judged for, ignoring any positive contributions you have made. So judging cops based only on their worst behavior is quite valid, especially given the power they wield (which seems to include the power to be judge, jury, and executioner).
The article was upvoted to the front page of HN by more than 1.
Nice statistics.

Just because an officer kills, doesn't mean it was a crime and it doesn't mean the officer overstepped his bounds.
How Service Oriented Architecture Helps Enterprises to Embrace Change?
Can you give any examples of how FPGAs helped SGI? I'm aware that a certain Voldemort-like .gov liked them at one time, but I never saw any uptake in the real world.

Intel is a volume player; this makes FPGAs a bit of a head-scratcher, since in the Grand Scheme, products might get prototyped as FPGAs, but they jump to high-volume, higher-performance ASICs ASAP.
Nice. Where'd you get the numbers?
The 11th century book Lebor Gabála Érenn [1] (a Tolkein-esque attempt to provide an epic history for Ireland) claims that the Gaels (Irish) originated in Scythia (modern Eastern Iran and *stan) and migrated to Ireland via Spain.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebor_Gabála_Érenn
> many postdocs that are both academically and software-engineering capable can easily convince themselves that this isn't the cold truth.

Thanks, this (and your other answers) is very useful. I'm about to finish my PhD, and have a recently open-sourced code I've written that's also a bit tangential to my PhD work (it's for molecular dynamics, "raaSAFT" on Bitbucket/PyPi). It may be easier for this type of code, though, in the sense that it's an application rather than a library, but I am aware that I may have to down-prioritize working on it in the short-term. (I'm not in CS either.)
Of course, if you don't conform, Oracle will sue you into oblivion. Java is free software as long as you use it in exactly the way Oracle wants, right? It's for this reason that Java is poison to any of my projects. I'll choose Node-fucking-JS over Java, because nobody is going to sue me for using JavaScript the way I want.
Distributing a search engine index with Strus
> There shouldn't be that many "bad ones" to report, period.

You're absolutely right! But that's NOT what I was arguing against.

>They also represent some of what is worst about the US, day in and day out, every single day.

NO THEY DON'T! Only a few!!! That's my POINT.
But if they can borrow from the European Central Bank what's the problem?
It's about making money from the Internet :-D
I used to believe this but now I'm more careful - there are several biases that rear their ugly heads in problems like these. On the one hand, what GP alluded to is that bad interactions will be overrepresented in any kind of police reporting app that doesn't force you to rate every interaction you were in. On the other hand, you have the usual publication/media bias and availability heuristic working against us.

Say 1 in 500 police interaction is bad (terrorizing innocents at gunpoint) and 1 in 10 000 is, well, criminal (police maiming or killing someone innocent). That's 0.5% and 0.01% of all interactions, respectively. Even assuming that all police interactions, good and bad, are recorded in detail by third parties, in a country as big as the United States that still gives a steady stream of police brutality cases to run on nation-wide news, day after day.

So even though in my example the problem is minor and mostly random in nature, even when most people can go through their lives and never experience police behaving badly, the overall perception will be that police brutality is a big problem that absolutely needs to be dealt with right now. In fact, in this case, the only real problem is media reporting and people believing it instead of doing the math.

Now I don't know the real numbers for the police problem in the US, but it wouldn't surprise me if cases of brutality were even rarer than in my example. And even if this is a totally 100% legit problem, there are many, many others - from terrorism to immigrants to vaccines causing autism - that are simply manufactured by news reporting. This all makes me believe that the biggest danger to our civilization are we ourselves - and our massive overreactions to media-manufactured non-problems.
US Dept. Of ED: English, History, and Civics Teachers Good Enough for CS Class
people use it for building dating sites.
Been happening daily for about 5 days now. Pretty frustrating but I'm sure it's frustrating for them too.

Thinking about moving to Google Compute Engine instead.
The Piha Stays in the Picture: Misplaced Birdsong in Film and Television
Yep, this started on Friday (Christmas day). I assume Linode itself is the target of the attacks, since they have spanned multiple regions.
That's why I read the comments first at HN. Thank you.
The flaw in this line of thought is that patents don't limit access to knowledge or technology. Quite the opposite, in fact. What they do limit is commercializing of knowledge or technology without license.
I missed the dropped 's'! Thanks for making it plaintext for me.
This looks interesting and very useful. However my only question is what is the license of those generated avatar?
The case could be made that Corel did this to make it easier for users who used one product to find things in the other. I use both macs and pcs and I still get confused because the command button is on the inner while ctrl on pcs is on the outer. You need cmd-w to close while you use ctrl-w on pcs to close. I really wish one would copy the other and make the exact same keyboard.

The layout in Excel is not special or better than other layouts. The point of patents is to protect ideas that are unique and improve. By enforcing patents on layouts which are not specifically improvements, you're really just trying to create an artificial moat that makes it harder for consumers to switch products or use more than one. That is bad for consumers and it hurts innovation.
I'm not an Angular expert, and this isn't quite the same, but seems to show the same basic principles at play:

var helloWorldApp = angular.module('helloWorldApp', []);

HelloWorldApp.controller('HelloWorldController', function ($scope) {
$scope.displayName = "HelloMessage"
});

I believe you just add a directive to add a new element. Slightly more code, but the same concepts in play. React uses an MVC framework, only it doesn't use those exact words.

Seems pretty much the same to me!

Note that React may well be easier to understand, but its not because it doesn't use a singleton object to access an object factory created by a provider of factories (a factory that creates factories).
tldr; money
An extortion attempt, I suspect.
Money isn't the only valuable thing a VC can give
>No, not really the same at all. When the companies have all the political power, they do what's best for their shareholders - their bottom line. Whatever helps them acquire more profit and revenue. Here, it's all about the money. When the government controls the companies (As it is in China), the government does what's best for the people in power (the government).

And hopefully, in the latter case, the people. Because governments, even if not democratic (and I'd wouldn't call that 2-party/donations/gerrymandering system democratic either) have an interested in pleasing the population (e.g. out of fear of revolt etc). Whereas companies mostly in maximizing profit.

>The last and absolute worst thing that could happen to China is a revolution. They will commit atrocities like you can't even begin to imagine to keep that from happening.

Well, the absolute worst thing that could happen to China could actually BE a revolution. It's a huge ancient country, and it has always had its ways of government and its tradition of mandarins/confucianism etc.

Besides, places like Libya and Iraq, where "democracy was restored" are hardly success stories for toppling a stable system of power. China could well become a hell-hole, and have massacres that rival the ones in the "cultural revolution", EVEN if they manage to get rid of the ruling party easily -- the fight for the succeeding situation could make the US Civil War look like a Disney movie.
> obligatory two-step authentication

That sounds like a good thing to me.
Writing mock APIs for front-end dev.
Link says DoS, not DDOS (which isn't even a proper acronym).
Why not light it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_flare
Paypal doesn't allow you to hold balances in Indian Rupees. You can only use dollars.
Probably one of the worst disease for family and closest ones. You see someone you know and love be more and more a stranger to you and a stranger to themselves.
Database configuration issues expose 191M voter records