skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Regarding the premise: Liberal return policies used to be rare in the middle of the 20th century—something that a few smaller retailers offered as a perk.

I'm curious how much this applies say pre-WWII era (before the majority of goods were produced far from their sale). Maybe I've got some Hollywood-influenced idea of what life was like, but I would think a small town would have some sort of a general store where refunds would be no big deal (within reason). This would probably be less of an imposition when the store owner knew the majority of the customers. Even the big-city department stores would probably take back merchandise, since there wasn't exactly any concept of opening a shrinkwrap or a restocking fee. Unless you had something like a tailored dress, I don't see why a late 19th/early 20th century American store wouldn't have a liberal return policy.

Also, in terms of shipping returned items, I believe that the "money back guarantee" was a major selling point of catalog-based retailers such as Sears Roebuck, specifically to compete with local department stores.

Someone with actual historical knowledge should weigh in, but it seems to me like the mid-20th century was the first cultural shift in return policies, and the present decade is a shift in the other direction.
Ayez peur, Apple
Life After ‘Honey Boo Boo’: Inside Discovery’s Fight to Grow Up
Possibly, not sure. I don't think I dreamed much before taking magnesium.
I think you hit the nail on the head early in the post. C++ is what you are most comfortable with. I believe that is the number one reasoning, at first at least (prototype, mvp stage), in deciding that language/stack to use. Use what you know the best as the tech lead, everything else will fall into place.
Sure, but not in response to this particular comment, IMO
How to Start Your Own Country
A month ago in Shenzhen I've seen better-looking RC cars that can drive up the walls. They're being sold on the market like any other toy. I really thought that product has already reached the US, so I'm surprised that a wall-climbing car is considered something new / original in this article.

EDIT: Chinese cars are similar to [0], only bigger. I thought they were a relatively new thing, given that I've first seen them suddenly appearing in late November, but if you believe the upload date of this video, the idea has been in the field for at least 5 years.

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_nYNuoZteA
Guesstimate, a Spreadsheet for Things That Aren’t Certain
Rust's ecosystem is super young, and up until May '15 the language had breaking changes occurring pretty frequently (daily? I wasn't using it back then so I'm not sure). I've been really enjoying using it, but I imagine that this startup began work before Rust hit 1.0, or very nearly afterward.
NoScript, at least, has an option to catch and stop redirects of this kind. They can be quite funny when you can see a perfectly loaded page that wants to send you elsewhere.
Show HN: Free android game Tap Tap
• Tap candy as fast as you can.
• Every time you tap all the candy with the same color you earn more time.
• Bonus can help.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.igbow.candytap
no.

We have spent last couple of centuries shoehorning every single problems into scientific solution fanaticism. Ofcourse there is no denying science and tech has paid us big dividends.But this single-groove thinking has failed us a in solving more fundamental of human problems. People feel lost/purposeless, people are joining ISIS/blackwater for adventurism, trying to give some meaning to their existence.

People are lost/stressed/bored. We have replaced spirituality/religion/family with a pictures of self-driving cars and missions to mars.
I learned long ago that when managers see an equation in a report, they assume that the work is incomplete, otherwise you would have solved the equation and reported the answer.
How is this any surprise that Oracle don't know how to package their software?
It's not like they have track of good packaging, even for their main product,
the database.
I wonder if the changes are eventually reverted. How long would it take? Does it always?
I've been on T-Mobile for quite a while. I was just in Germany for a week, and was absolutely thrilled not to have to buy a local prepaid sim card.

I seemed to be on 3.5G networks but it said it was throttled to 128kbps. The fees for unthrottled data were kind of obscene, though - $50 for a '30 day' pass including only 500MB of unthrottled data.
Aha, that explains it.

Could we borrow John Legere for a bit here in the UK?

I'd love to get rid of the landline, but I need it for a couple of gigs worth of data a month. Believe it or not, it is cheaper to pay line rental to BT and £10 a month to EE than to get that from a mobile supplier using a mifi.
I was glad when Python added type annotations, but the Python community is aggressive about preferring dynamic typing. Don't think the chances are that great to use them in a real project.

Perl 6's gradual type system seems interesting and one plus of Go is that it brought some well-deserved attention to concise static typing.
"The wealth generated by this astounding leap of productivity went entirely to the shareholders of the John Deere corporation."

No, it did not.

Mechanization makes food much cheaper, which benefits everybody.
>>… that we have and JRuby and Rubinius do not.<<

Do JRuby and Rubinius even have performance tests that cover those aspects of Ruby?

(I don't track Ruby implementation, I don't know the answer.)
The key part of my statement is "non-infringers." Yes, you can lose your trademark if you don't go after people who infringe it. But you don't have to go after people who aren't infringing, as is the case here.
Judging by the downvotes I got, there are people on HN that must think you should expose your router's control plane to the Internet. That or they expect transit providers to not protect their network.

There's no intelligent discussion left here. It's devolved into a sympathy vote. "You said something mean about Linode. I love Linode. Downvotes for you."

If Linode had posted the update to NANOG, it would have been more productive. I don't often say that.
I wrote this essay.

I linked the Reddit thread because there are some good thoughts there, but I'd also love to hear what HN has to say!

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3z1pfp/the_sad...
I think with a large, diverse (in terms of jobs possible to do) company that's possible. Someplace like Google, you could move teams every few years and learn new skills, do interesting work. (Assuming you enjoyed working for Google).

Conversely, if I had a job that paid well enough I knew I could retire healthy and happy, and in the meantime I didn't actively dislike it, I could tolerate a little monotony.

Unfortunately, most jobs couple monotony with long hours and think money will make up for it. This becomes a viscous cycle - the few hours you have to yourself are not a state where you are prepared to go out and learn new concepts, so you get locked into moving up the career ladder to get higher pay, rather than switching careers.
I think the new thing is that it can drive on the ground and then go up the wall, and probably can deal with uneven surfaces better. All I've seen before (and you are right, those haven been around for ages) really have to suck to a even surface.
A tldr on this one would actually be appreciated. :-)
Central thesis (hidden a bit): "ending economic inequality would mean ending startups". So, who is the straw man who advocates completely ending economic inequality? Even left wingers in Europe (far to the left of anyone mainstream in the US) talk mainly of reducing it.

So, if economic inequality were substantially reduced, would there still be startups? I believe another piece of common advice in this field is that you should only do a startup if you want to change the world, not just to get rich...
Well also very often a retailer's return policy will be more generous than is required by law because their research shows them that it ultimately increases profit. In the US you can expect to be able to return opened and slightly used merchandise. It's easy to abuse, but it doesn't get abused nearly as often as one might think. It's frowned upon socially to buy something with the intent of likely returning it, except in some cases like online clothing stores where the nature of the product being purchased and the method of purchase necessitate returns (in this case it could be said that the returned product was defective for the purposes of the customer).
Games graphics engine guy here. I'm very happy to move text rendering from the CPU to the GPU. Done well it moves milliseconds of CPU work to tenths (or less) of milliseconds of GPU work.

Also, I care quite a bit about power draw because my customers on laptops and mobile are very sensitive to it. If my game is a battery hog, it doesn't get played as long or as often.
You're definitely right that concatenation is less composable, and I agree that parser combinators are more powerful. I was just pointing out there are somethings you can do in regexes to make things more readable.

And about captures inside repetition: I don't see any reason they couldn't capture a list of strings instead of a string in dynamically typed languages but in all regex libraries I'm aware of they do something that seems useless to me: they only capture the last occurrence! (They probably just overwrite the capture on each repetition.)
I'm not sure why my question in getting down voted.

The Tesla (and other vehicles) were specifically mentioned in "Proceedings from 3rd International Conference on
Fires in Vehicles - FIVE 2014 October 1st-2nd, 2014 Berlin, Germany"

http://publications.lib.chalmers.se/records/fulltext/204919/...
Siemens SAB80199: 16-bits for Europe
"Obviously the spread of computing power was a precondition for the rise of startups."

If you live in San Francisco (or are visiting) you can visit the USS Pampanito - a retired WWII submarine.[1]

One thing I think you will notice is the manufacturers plaques attached to every little piece of equipment in the submarine ... every one of them the plaque of some tiny little supplier that you have never heard of. Some little Detroit Turbine Supply Company or American Radio Corporation of Maryland ...

Seriously - every single component has a label on it from a firm you have never, ever heard of.

I guess I don't have a deep knowledge of military procurement and supply circa 1942 (or whenever) but it sure looks like startups to me ...

[1] http://www.maritime.org/tour/index.php
SEEKING WORK

Location: REMOTE - I am currently in NYC and can occasionally meet F2F if located in the area.

Experienced software architect and engineer available for contract, full-time, or part-time work. I have over a decade of experience in the design and implementation of extensible, low-cost, and scalable products. Having worked in the industries such as education, e-commerce, financial services, supply chain management, and entertainment, I've garnered diverse and eclectic business domain knowledge. I am equally comfortable working with fast moving agile teams possessing a culture of continuous delivery, or complex enterprise environments where quality and compliance are paramount.

- Language and stack agnostic, but my highest level of expertise is with the Java ecosystem

- Extensive AWS experience

- Open frameworks and products such as Grails, Spring, JEE, Solr, Lucene, Tomcat, Hibernate, Drools

- Full stack development experience, with an emphasis on the backend

- Platform and API design

- Have published mobile apps for both android and iOS

- Data modeling and database design

- Systems architecture and integration - making it all work together

- Agile technology planning

- Team building/leadership

- Project recovery

- Great sense of humor

- Delivering results, period

Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/maabruno

Email: contact [at] apollonarius.com
> The wealth generated by this astounding leap of productivity went entirely to the shareholders of the John Deere corporation.

It's worst than that. Only a very small portion goes to the machine maker.

Most of money that used to goto the cost of the labor displaced by the machine (which came from the harvesting of crops) goes to whomever reaps the rewards of the farm itself. It might be the farmer, or if the farmer is a simple laborer running the machine on behalf of another, it's likely a multi-national company with the capital to purchase the initial machinery and amortize those costs over many years.
And they are made out of tiki taki and they all look just the same was a historic fluke.
Thanks for the tutorial!
Yes. This is a very strange article. When you think about what goes into the startup ethos, of independent hacking and really a passion for work, there's nothing antithetical about that and being turned off by massive income inequality in America. I, for one, would prefer to be an entrepreneur in a society that strove to make it harder for dynastic companies like Wal-Mart to accrue power.

The "polynomial curve" historical argument is naive and I would have expected better. Movement toward free markets has been precipitated on political intervention, c.f. the shock doctrine, and conservative moves to increase income inequality (repealing financial regulation, Citizens United) do not occur as a historical inevitability.

I am also weirded out by the "hunter" metaphor. The people fighting income inequality are not predators out to get pg's billions, they are working class people who can't afford healthcare or to send their kids to college.
> For example, let's attack poverty, and if necessary damage wealth in the process. That's much more likely to work than attacking wealth in the hope that you will thereby fix poverty.

This seems like a pretty healthy mindset to me.
I'm sorry you had to handle such situations. I always had the feeling that we (Portugal) are very good at producing engineers, but not so good at producing citizens.

I work for a rather big german company and they dislocated some stuff (software development, mostly) here. They're very happy with the overall result, but you can easily tell that there are guys which work around 1-2hrs per day. For the company it's OK-ish, they're still paying way below what they paid elsewhere. But for the other employees, it's somewhat shitty.
I think HNers might be working from an ingrained assumption that failing to pass a maths test is a terrible, terrible outcome. In court, the terrible outcome is losing your client's case. Given the choice between admitting the error and looking like an idiot, it's very possible he did the right thing.
> if this machine can climb up a wall straight up, does that mean it could also climb up in the air?

Interesting question!
I think the answer is "not necessarily", particularly if the coefficient of friction of the wheels is pretty high.

Think of it this way: the weight of the machine points down. This down force needs to be compensated by an upward force, otherwise we'd have acceleration downwards. This necessary upward force can consist of two components: The upward component of the thrust generated by the propellers, and the friction.
Now, the force exerted by friction is the normal force (i.e. perpendicular against the wall) times the coefficient of friction, call it c_f. If I remember correctly, for (macroscopic) things, that coefficient of friction is less than one (i.e., a car cannot decelerate with a 1 g or more, unless there's a spoiler that pushes the car onto the road, thus increasing the normal force to something larger than the weight of the car).
Now, the normal force is the component of thrust perpendicular to the wall. (See ASCII "art" below).

Now, suppose the coefficient of friction is very close to one, and thrust is angled 45 degrees down away from the wall. Then:

weight = 1g (down)

upward thrust = 1/2 g + a bit (up)

normal force = 1/2 g + a bit (towards wall)

friction = (1/2 g + a bit) * c_f (up)

total upwards force = Upward force + friction = 1g (up)

Now the system is in equilibrium, and the total thrust is sqrt(2) * (1/2 g + a bit) = 0.75 g, say.

Thus, my hunch is that the thing can go up the wall even if it can't fly by itself, if the friction is big enough.

| weight

| |

| |

| |

| |

| V

|O\

| X <-- Normal = horizontal component of thrust

|O/

| ^ |\

| | . \

| | . . \

| | Thrust

| |

| upward component of thrust + friction

Dammit! Hard to do ASCII art here :-)
I don't think it is sad. You explained why it is necessary, C++ has been around for a while, is/was great but there are now languages that can compete in terms of performance with fewer drawbacks in terms of security and undefined behavior.

If you're starting from scratch, it is important to strongly consider which language and platform best suits your needs. Anecdotally, a lot of companies have found success using newer languages because they tend to attract a better proportion of talented people.
Cool :) "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." (William Gibson)

Any photos or keywords to search for online?
Don't be the CEO, be the Caretaker
I just announced the meetup. You can find it here: http://www.meetup.com/Miami-node-js-Meetup/events/227782873/
Graham is arguing against an enormous straw man. Nobody is suggesting that we “prevent people from getting rich” or “end all economic inequality”. The most extreme proposals I’ve seen in America are ones like, “institute an unconditional basic income as an alternative to means-tested welfare programs,” or “allow every citizen/resident into a single-payer healthcare system,” or “go back to the tax structure of the 1950s–70s”, with higher capital gains taxes, higher inheritance taxes, and higher top marginal income tax rates, etc., plus a lot of proposals that seem to be pure common sense in a democracy such as “limit anonymous spending on political campaigns”, but nothing like a reprise of the French Revolution or early Maoist China or whatever Graham is on about.
The most interesting question pg asks is one he doesn't really answer:

>> Can you have a healthy society with great variation in wealth? What would it look like?
>The wealth generated by this astounding leap of productivity went entirely to the shareholders of the John Deere corporation.

Nonsense. The fact that people can buy food for an insignificant portion of their annual income and were freed from grueling manual labor to pursue more creative endeavors is a benefit to everyone in society.
It should not be very hard to fork gcc and make a quick hack that dumps the AST. You don't need the latest optimizations or AST versions, just a correct one, so there is no need to update it a lot (sans fixing bugs you created with the hack). You wont see at this point bogus ASTs generated by gcc.
Show HN: Resource Booking E.g. Booking of Conference Room
Sudden insight: HN might be the world's best place to find prior art.
I've always thought a good question to ask on this subject is "If you could do something to make the wealthiest 50% wealthier, with 100% certainty that it would not negatively affect the bottom 50%, would you do it?"
If that were all that happened it would be great. But automation leaves a lot of people off the payrolls without jobs and if those jobs are paying less then less expensive food is not less expensive. And incomes have dropped more than inflation in most cases for the poor which means it is not cheaper for those less able to afford it.
Complicated problems are not whisked away with making things less expensive = benefit everyone.
No. JRuby and Rubinius both have benchmark suites, but I believe they don't go as far as kernels from real gems, and neither of them track benchmarks in any kind of continuous integration system, which is why I developed Bench 9000 as part of my PhD.

But if they were to benchmark and see that things like that pack method were slow, I think it is unlikely they would be able to implement the algorithms needed to improve on this kind of code, given their current implementation techniques.

Rubinius is essentially a template compiler, emitting a chunk of LLVM for each byte code. There isn't any sophisticated optimisation before it goes into LLVM, so nothing to for example partially evaluate a sort routine or remove allocations. The LLVM that comes out is far too complex for LLVM's optimisations to work for them.

JRuby relies on the JVM to do the sophisticated optimisations, and C2 (the server compiler) just doesn't have the optimisations or inlining scope needed to simplify code like the pack example. JRuby are massively improving on this with their IR, but they are going to have reimplement some very complex optimisations themselves to make this work on methods like pack.
Exactly. There would still be sufficient economic motivations for startups and startup founders in a world where startup founders were taxed at a 75% rate.
You have gone wayy too meta for me to understand what you are saying. OP seems to make a claim that more functions hinder readability which is not true if you are using proper editor or IDEs, on other hand smaller functions enable unit testing and extensability which are pretty worthy goals if you are working on a project with multiple people.
Some unusual forces caused a temporary change in the US during the 20th century that pushed us towards equality and conformity, but these forces have largely eroded and we can expect greater fragmentation moving forward.
> Manual memory management is the most popular misconception of C++. Since C++11, it is now recommended to use std::shared_ptr or std::unique_ptr for automatic memory management. There is a small computational cost to maintaining referenced pointers but it’s minuscule and the safety outweighs this cost.

I think another misconception is that you need pointers at all. Smart pointers are still pointers. Its better to use value semantic all the way when you can. And you usually can. Why place something on the heap if it can live on the stack?
They do have debt now, they took out loans worth tens of billions in US and a few other countries in order to avoid bringing in money oversea. I believe they're at 40-50$ billions in debt now.

Yes, they have very low interest rates on these loans and probably can pay them all off once the oversea profits come into US at a loss of 40% tax but they're technically debts.
The problem with income inequality is not related to a startup founder getting rich, its about the deck being stacked against people before they are even born, and then the super rich continually stacking the deck against anyone coming up and challenging their supremacy.
Company is giving back profits to all users in the form of student loans
I think you could start here:

"By no coincidence it was in the early 1980s that the term "yuppie" was coined."

... and then read the remaining 15 or so paragraphs - that gets you the whole gist.
Been a long time since I've read an article which says "Bitcoin first, blockchain next". Finally someone emphasises it.
Ohh... thnx!
Nothing changed since I graduated in 2001 ... I recollect Stroustrup since then.
It's still C++ bible.
I have been told to be very careful when interpreting this kind of number. There is political pressure to keep these numbers low, so only if it is really unavoidable, you'll be counted.

I am speculating here, but maybe, if a woman's spouse happens to be working, the woman will not be counted. Or who could be counted as having an early pension? Who is registered to receive benefits from the state under which conditions? Does voluntary work make one disappear from these lists?
"I am also weirded out by the "hunter" metaphor. The people fighting income inequality are not predators out to get pg's billions, they are working class people who can't afford healthcare or to send their kids to college."

+1 on that alone. I was concerned that this was completely misunderstanding those that understand the income inequality issue.