skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure. And when I was a kid, $2 was a lot of money.
Suvorov is a very interesting author, however, he is being known for twisting historical facts and producing various conspiracy theories not accepted by majority of historians. For example in one his most famous books "Icebreaker", he claims that USSR was about to invide Germany and Hitler attacked USSR only for defensive reasons.
Hah, foiled by gas taxes!!
شروع وبلاگ نویسی با محوریت طراحی سایت و سئو با قالب خیلی ساده
Author wrote a follow up in 2013.

https://www.ciaonet.org/attachments/23981/uploads
I know this is the standard argument against state participation in the economy, but in the particular case of the BBC, i have never heard this argument seriously presented.
You're confusing causation and correlation even if your premise is valid (which is totally questionable).

First, Google and Apple have nothing to do with personal wealth, they are corporations. The fact that have lots of corporate wealth means they have resources to put into innovation. They can do that completely independently of whether they pay absurd salaries or stock-dividends. Corporations can profit off their activities and put the profits back into innovation, and when that happens they are business expenses that aren't even taxed!!

So the entire issue about taxation of wealthy incomes is only about wealth that people take home as personal profit and do not reinvest in business.

Now, let's accept the questionable premise that these people with high incomes produce the greatest innovation. That simply means that innovation correlates with high income. It does not tell us anything about cause. Maybe these are people who would be innovative no matter what and our system happens to reward that with riches. If that hypothesis holds, then higher taxes would have zero impact on their innovation. There's tons of evidence that innovative people are motivated in other ways besides getting richer, i.e. that the promise of further riches isn't the cause of their innovative work.
If the author of this is reading, it might help to make the first reference to "Alexa" be a hyperlink to "what the heck is Alexa". (I know I can google it, but...)
Worth it for this alone:

"Yes, I would have worked on project SLAM: as far as I can tell, it was the most epic redneck project ever funded by the US government. Not that we should have built such a thing, but holy radioactive doomsday smoke, Batman, it would have been a fun job for a few years."

Reminds me of this old bit of Backwoods Fun: http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/89q2/origtopfus.366.html
Uber’s Expansion Strategy Fizzles in Germany
Very cool. I really like the command line interface.

I've been dealing with a lot of recruiters over the past year. I even wrote my own Rails app: https://github.com/klenwell/recruiters-on-rails.

I have found it pretty useful in tracking the ones I deal with more substantively but one use case I have had trouble dealing with is in initial encounters and deciding whether it is even worth the effort of adding a new recruiter to my app. I get enough recruiter spam that the cost of simply filling in the form on my app to add each recruiter could be prohibitive. Nevertheless, I'd like to keep a record with any recruiter I deal with, even if it is just spam or template email.

I currently have a de-facto solution that involves the autocomplete feature in Gmail search and Mailchimp mailing lists. But I can see this solving this problem much more neatly and coherently. And as a Ruby gem, I could imagine even integrating it with my Rails app.

Great work!
https://www.noisebridge.net/
> Apple was a product of that system, not a cause of it. Companies like Apple do not happen in a pure deregulated neoliberal market paradise because markets don't have the kind of strategic intelligence that can fund projects like Whirlwind, TX-0, and the original Arpanet - all of which are essential steps on the road to making an Apple or a Google.

The book Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy [1] really hammers in this point. I highly recommend it to people who have an interest in this. I wrote a review that captures a lot of my reflections on the book itself and the subject matter [2].

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Doing-Capitalism-Innovation-Economy-Sp...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/review/R2SCHS5SXNDF30/ref=cm_cr_dp_tit...
Yes, this.

Too many people think of post-WW2 as this huge time of prosperity. And it was.. for Americans primarily. All of the formerly-industrialized nations had to be "rebooted," primarily on the back of the Americans through efforts like the Marshall Plan. And this was a good thing.

The thing is that when you have ZERO competition, even a broken system looks pretty good and performs pretty well by comparison.

But conditions are fundamentally different now. The industrialized nations are still industrialized. New nations have become industrialized since. People travel easier and further. Capital flows easier and faster. News and information travels the fastest of all.

Copying the decisions of the 1950's 1960's without acknowledging that conditions are different is foolish at best and suicidal at worst.
In the past, I found that the person testing your software has a half-life.

After a period of testing, they know your software as well as you and can't bring innovation anymore.

I think songs are a bit easier to iterate than novels. Most people listen to songs they like multiple times, but they won't read a novel they like as often.
Windows 95 on a Nintendo 3DS is as strange as you'd think
The Firefox performance increases were (are?) tangible. I don't really remember which version first delivered them, but a long time ago I used Opera (9?) because it was much faster when opening a lot of tabs. Then Firefox became a lot more responsive.
If you are into subversive, I don't think you'd find anyone who doesn't love Chaos Communication Congress (https://events.ccc.de).
Ask HN: What are you currently building?
During my christmas break I started building an automatic investment system.

What did you start?
Very similar to patio11's writeup. Note the same caveats apply, more or less: this is working at a big Japanese company, which is far from all of them.
I also just wanted to clarify about scaling: taking some (semi-large) number like 120 and claiming this means "pairing does scale" seems totally wrong to me.

"Scaling" does not refer to taking some large number and dividing it by 2 (120 engineers -> 60 pairs; 1200 engineers -> 600 pairs). That is emphatically not scaling.

Scaling is about leveraging the expertise of one of your most dramatically productive engineers by dispersing that person's help, wisdom, advice, etc., to more than one other person at a time.

Pairing doesn't scale precisely because the best person you have can only assist the exact same number of people that the worst person you have can also assist (namely, 1 in each case, since they are both part of a pair).

And, as Brooks noted long ago in The Mythical Man-Month, adding more people to a given task often just slows it down. Communication overhead tends to grow as O(n^2) or worse. So if you generalize a "pair" into a "triple" or a n-tuple, the process of pairing suddenly no longer helps and often dramatically hurts.

So when I say, "pairing doesn't scale," what I mean is that the best it can ever provide you is a 2x improvement in information transmission (and often it's far worse than that, and in all the cases I've seen it used first-hand it has actually been less than 1x).

I think it's a little disingenuous to just say, "Hey, we did it with 120 people! So it scales!" That's just not what scaling is about.

By way of comparison, one single, well-written quick-start guide can have almost an arbitrarily large improvement factor in terms of information transmission. You can hire one engineer who is good enough to write that document, and then send it to all of the other 119 engineers.

In my experience, even if that document is just so-so, it's still miles better than having to mentally context switch out of coding mode and into social conversation mode every few seconds to elicit the same info verbally out of a pairing partner sitting with me.
For what it's worth, I experienced the same thing in Burkina Faso more than three years ago. It is far poorer than Ghana and pretty much everyone living in a town had a cell phone (or two or three) and used top-up services. Even in remote villages, usually at least one person would have a cell phone to share in places where network was available.
> IF it were found that Google were sharing student information with anyone, including the government

Well, Snowden has shown us exactly that. Google participating voluntarily in PRISM.
I can only imagine if a bureaucracy began to codify "modulating emotional state" as a "skill"

This tends to be run through a gendered filter and then labelled "professionalism".
Lost a bunch of files after switching to the Mac due to the ridiculous 'replace' (OSX) vs 'merge folder contents' (Windows) feature when dragging a folder.
After upgrading my Mac with a bigger hard drive, I dragged a projects folder from the backup drive to the computer, interpreted the "...will replace..." prompt as "duplicate files will replace" which was fine. Lost a lot of work. Just confirmed this destructive behavior is true to this day.

Long live dropbox with rat-pack option.
Netflix is super cheap, and obscenely easy. It's more difficult to pirate than to watch something on Netflix, which should really be the goal of any service.

For me, it's almost entirely that it's easy. Aside from Daredevil and a handful of their comedy specials, I haven't watched any of their produced content, and I'd be just as satisfied if it didn't exist.
I'm curious about this. Do you have any references?
Sure, but you've replaced a very strong (implied) claim with a weak one that would be true of anybody.
What do you like to use?
What is DI?
You may enjoy Strange Loop: http://www.thestrangeloop.com/

Videos: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_QIfHvN9auy2CoOdSfMWDw
Don't forget http://www.freecol.org/
Cameraphones Gone Wild
Startup idea: use ambient radiation from nuclear fallout to power bigger IoT devices. Also cheap communication and cheap heating.
I really enjoyed strange loop this year
uberconf was pretty sweet in 2015
About: Freelance Developer/Designer with experience bringing real world products to market for clients the world over (http://tajddin.com).

Location: Las Vegas, NV

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Possibly

Technologies: Objective-C/Swift/Xcode/C#/.Net/VS/Node/JS/HTML5/Photoshop/Illustrator/AWS/Azure

Email: hi@tajddin.com

Portfolio: http://tajddin.com
I think the more sinister thing about it is that it will hinder any of the developing ISP markets in these nations, kind of like how Toms Shoes put shoe makers out of business.

Throw in that this is Facebook, not internet, where Facebook is free but everything else is charged, and you're making an obvious monopsonic grab on these people.
(Haven't read the essay.)

That's true. So what can we do to fix that? And is fixing this particular cause (child abuse) the best possible investment to guarantee equal opportunity/ undo the unfairness of economic inequality?
About: Freelance Developer/Designer with experience bringing real world products to market for clients the world over.
Location: Las Vegas, NV
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Possibly
Technologies: Objective-C/C#/.Net/JS/Node/HTML/Photoshop/Illustrator/AWS/Azure
Email: hi@tajddin.com
Portfolio: http://tajddin.com
http://www.voobly.com/
I suppose it's full of Newell references. Found this when browsing the renderer:

GameRenderer::~GameRenderer() {
// oh noes, release hl3 before that!
delete this->gaben;

https://github.com/SFTtech/openage/blob/master/libopenage/ga...
Anything with snapshots (ZFS/btrfs, Linux' LVM, etc.) can get you some of the way there; e.g. (Open)VMS apparently had/has versioned-by-default files; the HAMMER filesystem explicitly makes this a feature.

Alternatively, run something like tarsnap once per hour.
Generally when new spending is proposed it needs to be budgeted and either money repurposed from somewhere or new taxes introduced. This is sometimes referred to as "pay-fors".
That's only ever true if you have other potentially-higher return investing your resources in other ways or if you're getting into talking about risk issues and bankruptcy law.

If you have enough cash to buy a car and enough left to be an emergency buffer and cover other needs and don't have something to do with that cash which promises a higher investment return than the interest on a car loan, then it does not make sense to get the financing. It doesn't matter that the value of the car to you is spread out over time. Buying the car outright is better unless you needed the money for something else or didn't have it or had some investment that would outpace the interest on the loan.
Ways I would fix the App Store: Beta Tester Limit (part 2 of 9)
Link to patio11's post? I'm curious..
There's been a fair bit of discussion about this over on reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/3z9t7k/open_source_p...

https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/3z5ue8/open_sou...

I'm a cofounder of lowRISC, a not-for-profit working to produce a fully open source SoC implementing the RISC-V ISA, in volume silicon. If you have questions then fire away.
The Age of Anxiety: Alan Watts on Happiness and How to Live with Presence
The BBC is the only widely-consumed source of serious political journalism in the UK that is not controlled by a plutocrat. Naturally, the Conservatives want to destroy it.

Not that the last Labour government were very keen on it!
Ask HN: SW product to assist investigations
Suppose you want to write a book involving a complex set of events, documents, characters and places.
In any given moment you want to be able to reconstruct (as much as possible) where everyone was in order to see if a given hypothesis (e.g. "X was the masked man in the bank robbery on April 3rd, 1972...") can hold or not ("wait, on the day of the robbery Mr.Smith was in Rome, but he had just returned from a 2 months stay in France (i.e. his flight arrived in Rome at 22:30 on the night before), it looks improbable that he was able to take part in this even if he had remained in contact with Mr.Black (the only guy who was arrested) by phone and mail..."

Question: is there any product that could be used for this kind of investigation/hypothesis validation? Mindmapping SW or stuff like The Brain I am not sure would help, because "closeness" in time and space is not very easy to represent there.

As an example, let's imagine a UI where time is the X axis and space is the Y axis.
You will see a widget where the X axis is April 3rd, 1972 (the Robbery) and a line (Mr. Black's life) that remains "in Rome" for 45 years... then shortly after the robbery moves to the prison where he will stay for 3 years.
The line of Mr. Smith stays in Rome or close to it for 34 years, every documented meeting of him and Mr.Black is somehow represented along both lines, but the line moves far away (Paris) for two months and gets back close to Mr.Black's only a fraction of day before the crime.

Events, people, documents etc. are all represented by specific widgets, can be zoomed up by clicking, but the main point would always be distance in time/space among these.

Any suggestions? It does not need to be the same as my example, as long as it provides an equivalent functionality.
Yes, I agree, "manned up" didn't used to be considered rude. I'm sure a lot of people still wouldn't consider it rude.

I'm not personally offended. But still, if you knew Spanish and someone gave their product a name that was rude in a common dialect of Spanish, you'd tell them, right?

Especially when the language is changing, not everyone is going to know, and opinions about what's rude sometimes differ. It's still useful as a writer to know how different people interpret things.
building a brand new Learning Management System (LMS) or simply call it Course Builder. Planning to make it open source for self hosted but not quite ready to put it online yet. Building it with API first in mind so technically you can build your own interfaces on top of it. Backend including API portion built in PHP Laravel. Default Front end in Angular 1.4 but lets see how it turns out overall.
You seem to accept that the powerful elite will work to push down wages (broadly including providing healthcare and the modern social democratic benefits) but are ignoring the possibility that the quickest and easiest way for them to achieve this is to divide and conquer the poor by race, and its working beautifully for them.
BSDCan (http://www.bsdcan.org/) is always good, and incredibly cheap compared to most technical conferences.
Creating Personalized Jigsaw Puzzles (2014)
Quadrantids meteor shower peaks  08:00 UTC (03:00 Eastern US time)
"Alexa" is the assistant-in-the-machine that comes on the Amazon Echo (just as an iPhone 6 comes with Siri). You activate the Echo by saying "Alexa". The author is probably guessing that in context, you'll make the connection between the title "The $10 Echo" and the Echo's hotword (Alexa).

I agree it'd be useful if there was a brief explanation at the beginning of the article.
It depends. Some locations or cultures will favour one page, while others will prefer more information on why they should care about you. But in my experience, the cover letter will have way more impact than 1 vs 2 CV pages.
Yeah. Sorry. You are right. Should have kept my tone civil.
True. It's more centered around communications, but with Twilio expanding their product line recently (Video, IP Messaging, etc) I would think this is going to become more general. Last year it was a great conference and I'm sure it's just going to get better.
Thanks! I'd love to hear how well/poorly this integrates with your (very cool) app. Do feel free to create GitHub Issues if there are things you think should be changed to allow easier interoperability.

In particular I'd love to hear how this works as a standalone Ruby library (the `Introvert` class should help you more directly than the shell commands), since I tried to separate the internals from the command-line interface (which is in bin/friends) but I think that separation is somewhat blurred at the moment.
Started making a 1200 piece, 5k resolution jigsaw puzzle app.
This latter bit is exactly what modern 2D display drivers already do, or at least what the NVIDIA binary X driver does. It keeps a glyph cache in video memory and just blits from it to the extent that it can. It's still counting on the software to do the rasterization though, and I don't think there's a way to do the rasterizing on the GPU and then feed that data straight into the glyph cache.
When you think you know which xkcd is being linked to by context you are nearly always correct.
> Normal voice from the other side of the room.

High end smartphones have a similar high quality mic. It's no problem at all talking or using e.g. GoogleNow.
Right. Ocean shipping, before containers and faxes, used to be much more expensive, much slower, required far more packing, and was far less reliable. As the graph points out, US foreign trade was under 5% of GDP in the 1950s. Much of that was raw materials, not manufactured goods.

(The concept of ordering something from across an ocean and reliably getting it undamaged it is quite modern. Before containers, things had to be crated, in crates so strong they could be banged around and stacked. A packed manufactured item could weigh 5x its unpacked weight. Paperwork usually traveled with the item, and maybe it got there.

Faxes helped a lot, especially across language boundaries. Purchase orders and invoices are something of a universal language; if you can read item number, quantity, price, and destination address, you can probably do the transaction.)
Gabe Newell is tongue-in-cheek worshipped in the gaming community and has been for many years. Far from a dig. Any time you see a photograph or reference to him, it's an in joke, much like the guy who used to work at Twitch and became Kappa. Why this happened is a mix of things from Half Life to Steam, and it's honestly been long enough that nobody remembers or cares.

The problem is, just like some recent folks on /pol/, the newer crowd doesn't realize it's a joke so Gabe has to be cautious how he interacts with the public now. I'm amazed he still handles his own email. He popped up on Reddit recently and amazingly corralled the discussion toward his (real world) car racing team, but it took work on his part. People hug him in public and he's said before that's taken adjustment.

I've seen a GABEN license plate, to give you an idea of how far that gag goes. Funny you mentioned MSFT, too, because most people who perpetuate the gag don't know he worked there at one point; it might even predate their life.
In my limited experience using Echo at my parents house over the holidays I was distinctly not impressed by the Echo's abilities to understand voice from across the room. We often had to repeat ourselves, only louder and slower to get the Echo to understand us. We do not have strong accents.
21st Century Science
One of my main interview questions is: Tell me about a time you thought you were going to get fired.

I want to hear about the bug they deployed, the customer issue, dropping the database, etc. I want to hear about how they realized their mistake and what they do differently as a result now. Basically, "what did you learn from it?"

Mine:

I once dropped the article table for [major news organization] which handled [large number] of updates each day. It was something stupid like "delete from articles where id = ~" and when it took more than a second, I realized my issue.. damage done.

Now, I avoid running sql queries directly whenever possible in favor of migrations. But I test those migrations on smaller/test databases which are normally backups of production to have the same structure, etc. And I always do a select first to make sure I get the results I expect.. then change it into a delete or update.
Two women lead the hunt for civil rights era killers
Quei bravi ragazzi della Casaleggio list
Well, "professionalism" is pretty much the black-hole escape valve of HR. It has to do with your hair style, your political beliefs, your religious beliefs, how much (or how little) you drink alcohol, where you choose to live, whether or not you are married, whether or not you have children, how much maternity/paternity leave you request, what types of clothes you wear, how much (or how little) you make jokes, what type of car you drive, and on very rare occasion, how you conduct yourself and treat colleagues while working.

Basically, any time the HR apparatus wants to disapprove of you, it will simply invent a reason to do so, and then turn around and say that the invented reason is a part of "professionalism" or "being a team player".

In fact, in a Moral Mazes sense, this is precisely why there is an HR apparatus in the first place -- exactly to manufacture plausible and legally defensible excuses for defending arbitrary (and often illegal and irrational) whims of executives.
Content-addressing suffers the exact same problems, they are just a little more abstract. Content addressing also contains indirection because TCP/IP is most certainly location-based. So, to map from a content hash to one or more IP addresses requires (drumroll) a service that is a new point of failure.

Edit: So, there is certainly an algorithm that lets you go from hash to IP directly in a way that evenly distributes things, blah blah - but then you'll probably end up bugging a lot of hosts that don't participate in that algorithm! I pity the poor fools who get "lucky" IP addresses for certain content. :)
Is Fashion Creating Too Many Products?
Same here. I keep checking the price hoping it drops to a level where I'd feel comfortable buying it just to play with one, but at $180, I think it's too steep when there's no real justification. Anything you'd really want the Echo for, you could do on your phone with an "OK Google" (or a few quick taps at worst).
Pequeños Negocios Consejos de Marketing