skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had trouble getting past the first sentence. That NYC has the finest skyline in the world is a fact? Well, I think it’s ugly and uninspiring. And that’s not a fact. Also, seems extremely odd to not just ask developers why they don’t build skyscrapers in the middle of the island? They would be able to tell you whether it’s lack of feasibility or that no one has asked them to do it.
The grandparent was saying why Google should be less ambiguous: because more people will build on top of their apis if the legal situation is predictable. The comment was written from the point of view that Google is setting up bad incentives if they want developers to use their apis, not that developers have a moral right to Google being reasonable.
Huge baby boom? From where? Just because they've relaxed the one child policy doesn't mean everyone is in a rush to have kids. A more common phenomenon is men saving every penny to someday afford a house, because the few single women refuse to date a man with anything less.

Every single economy that transitions from agriculture to industry experiences the same fall in birth rates. Having a lot of kids goes from being an insurance against elderly poverty to an insurmountable burden on your focus and finance. Most of the Chinese couples who have one child are happy to leave it from that.

How will China experience a baby boom any time soon? Why 3 years? Where's your evidence?
I don't understand how keeping taxes on gas prices meant that he is all marketing gimmicks? Did he promise that he'll keep gas prices low? Gas is neither cheap nor costly with the current price in India[1]. It's midway compared to most of the countries and almost the same as China. India is not a oil producing country and keeping it cheap will hurt its economy. Btw INR/USD in 2010 was way stronger than today.

[1] http://www.globalpetrolprices.com/gasoline_prices/
Is it really? UXKit has not moved at all. It has remained relatively static in the Photos app. It's a serviceable patch-work that Apple has done for their specific purpose, but I don't think it's actively being pushed forward for a possible AppKit replacement.
I'm in the middle of reading "Punished by Rewards" and it's interesting to cast this particular predicament in light of the proposition of that book.

If you're writing code to get the reward of a salary, you're not going to enjoy it nearly as much as if you do it for its own sake! Rather, you'll enjoy less the more you're doing it due to extrinsic motivation.

I'm not sure of the solution, but I suspect you need to cast any of these challenges, whether they are really coding challenges, or rather team communication challenges, as something you're excited (rather than anxious) to overcome and improve your skills at doing. Forget (in those moments) that you're doing it for a salary, but decide that, in order to later improve strictly coding skills, you are wise to currently work on improving your communication skills, your ability to discovering the capabilities of existing code and frameworks, and perhaps your ability to document anything you learn for future reference (for yourself and others.)
Single molecule detection of contaminants, explosives or diseases now possible
An oldie but a goodie:

Are You a Sharecropper? If you’re developing software for the Windows platform, yes. Or for the Apple platform, or the Oracle platform, or the SAP platform, or, well, any platform that is owned and operated by a company. They own the ground you’re building on, and if they decide they don’t like you, or they can do something better with the ground, you’re toast. They can ship their own product and give it away till you go bust, then start charging for it; and use secret APIs you can’t see; and they can break the published APIs you use. All of these things have historically been done by platform vendors.

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePl...
Starts at 10am Pacific, 1PM Eastern.
MLB and NBA play ball with new technologies
The annoying thing about this analogy is that if I'm going to be the next president, the probability of my being president is 1, and for everybody else, it's 0. But we don't know anything about it until we go through the process of observing the outcome. Or do we? I bet somebody does know with 100% certainty who will be president, that's how undemocratic I believe the process has become.
You don't use Slick's code generator? How big is your schema, then?
Show HN: Newsletter about bots, NLP, chat interfaces, machine learning, and more
They will kick the drivers to the kirb when auto driven cars are available. Currently they are just getting the people trained to use apps for calling taxis.
Nasdaq's is written in Java. The London Stock Exchange's engine is written in C++, and the previous version was C#.
Please, reread carefully your initial comment and the one by prodigal_erik (the two comments I've answered to in this thread) and you will see that you've made a gross generalization, while now you're narrowing the field you meant to apply your words.

Do you believe that security software or browsers are better writen in other languages than C/C++? I won't dispute that, even if I'd have some questions about relative merits. Please think of some well known Perl and PHP applications and their security record.

Anyway the unqualified:

That's because correct C-style memory management never† scales up to large software projects in a way that doesn't result in crashes and, worse, vulnerabilities.

... and talking about manual memory management in general...

And pretty much all of them are unreliable garbage that we as an industry should have been too embarrassed to ship.

... are simply not true. Worse, they're insulting for everyone who has worked in this kind of application.
Ask HN: Company merging, what can I do with stock options?
My company is in the process of merging with another company and I received a letter urging me to sell the stock options. This is only my 2nd job out of college, I've never gone through anything like this.

The price they are offering is only a few cents higher than the original strike price, doesn't seem like it would even be worth it to exercise them.

That was the only option they offered me. Are there more? They've talked about IPO for quite some time now, but they went the merger route. Am I just out of luck now?

I realized that options aren't a guaranteed payday, but this has left a sour taste in my mouth after all the big talk from my original employer.
Higher Order Functions in ES6
The lights are going out in night clubs all over Europe
I only know really know about it from memory and even then it's from reading PC-World, not direct experience.

The Bundle was one of those great ideas for users that got kicked in the nuts by Copy Protection methods until signing and activation was bult into the OS proper.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundle_%28OS_X%29

Even on early Windows all you had to do was xcopy a directory to share it with friends. My Quake2 folder still follows me from machine to machine.
It's all well and good to say "never use a Google API again because they might eliminate for any reason at any time" but there might not be an alternative. It's hard to get the data. Concentration of data is made concentration of wealth through APIs (or, slightly more indirectly, through the apps that use the APIs, perhaps internally). No-one concentrates data more thoroughly than Google (it's hard to appreciate how much data Google has; it started with scraping the web, but now they have real-time data on millions of sites through analytics, pictures of streets, WiFi ssid against lat/lon, and of course detailed video-viewing habits).

The short-term consumer cycle is feeding a long-term data cycle that strongly favors consolidation. That's bad. Personally I think it's okay to "feed the beast" for a little while, but as soon as you get uptake and can afford the time you can and should stop feeding the beast.
Explore? I expected some animated table. My browser didn't do anything but show a static gif.
That episode was pretty interesting, and it gives a whole new perspective on traditional medicine and science.

TLDR - a microbiologist and a historian decided to try a very old cure for a stye (staph infection in a pore of the eyelid). After brewing it and testing it several times it proved to be extremely effective against staph (including MRSA).

Why did the cure stop being used? Likely the same problems we're facing today - resistance. After nearly 1000 years of disuse, the cure has become effective again as staph has lost that specific resistance.
Gangs netting millions from house purchase email scam
They are not routes. They are pins connected by straight lines. The screenshot in the post doesn't reflect the reality of the service. Try clicking on NYC, Washington DC, Detroit and Boston and see the route. Prepare to do some swimming :-)

That's by design. From the FAQ:

> How come if I click on two points along a curvy road, the line doesn't follow the curvature of the road?

> Two reasons. First, Google doesn't provide an interface to the road data, so I have no way of knowing if you clicked on a road or not, nor do I know where the road twists and turns.

> Second, many people create routes that go off-road (e.g. to plot a hiking path). These people wouldn't want RouteBuilder to follow along a road anyway.

From the wording of the mail and of the ToS [1] I don't think that it would make any difference if he used the Google Directions API [2]. Actually, after reading that letter I wonder what developers can use that API for, if not for eventually getting that letter.

[1] https://developers.google.com/maps/terms#section_10_4

[2] https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/directions/...
What are you talking about? It hasn't done anything of the sort. It's made some of the AppKit APIs similar to how they operate in UIKit, but it's a long way away from "work the same"
Yes! Thank you. I've never really thought about the phrase, despite having used it (probably) hundreds of times.
I went through high school in the mid 00s, and just recently graduated from college. Every classroom I've been in for the past 10 years has had a "smart board", which is basically a giant whiteboard with touch recognition. They have "markers" you can pick up and write on the screen with, and an eraser that lets you erase what you've written. They were very successful, and incredibly useful- plus teachers could save the images they drew and then put them up for the class to access later.

Where I work now we have one as well- except instead of a projector it's just a big LCD touchscreen.
> Really, what has changed about cars, besides automatic breaking?

Great question.

- Electronic stability control (ESC) (required from 2009).

- Anti-lock braking system (ABS) (in most cars from 2004 due to EU regs, although not required in the US until 2011).

- From 2003 the IIHS started rating vehicles for: rollover risk, side impact, and frontal offset impact. So car manufacturers started improving their designs to score better in these tests. The whole "top safety pick" thing is an IIHS rating.

- From 2009 the NHTSA required a greater roof-crush load (3x the vehicle's weight, from 1.5x).

- Safety Cell improvements: Crumple zones are less likely to trap in the driver or front passenger's legs/feet during impact.

- Anti-intrusion bars: Are more standard. The IIHS tests kind of pushed them into mainstream.

- Additional air bags (side impact).

- Whiplash reduction seats and headrests.

Overall regulations aren't why cars are safer in 2016, consumer demand is. People decided they didn't want to compromise on safety, so as a safer and safer vehicles became available consumers flocked to them. Manufacturers had a financial interest in not only be safe but the absolute safest in the road, and that competition pushed vehicle safety forward.
You can be a kernel hacker too
> Junior dev

> Monolithic java codebase

> "we already wrote something similar"

Sometimes it's not even them who wrote something. I was working on a Java codebase where decimal numbers always had the separator be a period (e.g. 1.2).

In (most of) continental Europe, the character they use to separate the numbers in a decimal is a comma (e.g. 1,2). So I coded something up to do a location-specific separator.

Woops! Actually java.text.DecimalFormatSymbols().getDecimalSeparator() will do that, and has been a Java core API since Java 1.1.
You feedback will help to improve the blog. Thanks.
I was thinking more of something like "I'm drunk, so I'm going to voluntarily give my car control to take me home." Basically turning it into a driverless taxi.
"No seatbelt, no car move" is restricting in that it's always enabled. Something like what I've dubbed "drunk mode" or "taxi mode" gives you more options.
This is a brilliant idea. Thank you.
I've used this for a place database and really liked it. They provide data dumps of the database (as well as diffs between previous dumps) so we don't need to rely on their web APIs, and still have the data in case geonames ever shuts down. They also offer a paid service, which should guarantee some sort of protection against a random shutdown.

AFAIK they don't have path/street data, just a massive location dataset, so you can't use it for directions by itself.
Great comment. It's a bit hazy when you say that code is a liability and also that they've got an ideal codebase because you can add value easily due to the existing code. Maybe something more like: "new code is a liability, and tested, extensible code is an asset."
They should just have a war over it, and fight each other on the island with paintball guns to see who gets it.
Scientists should be careful when staring into the abyss of politics, that the abyss does not stare back into them.
this also applies for people who use their cdn for fonts or scripts. developers, please stop using google as a cdn.
Odd conclusion.
When I was first learning the ropes as a developer, I found myself in similar situations, and it was equally frustrating (for both myself and my coworkers). What changed was I learned how to separate myself from the code. Programming is a team sport. You're all building a codebase together. And good code should be objectively good so it doesn't matter who writes it. You'll impart maximum value to your team once you learn how to cooperate. That's step 1.

Step 2 is learning how to adopt an engineering mindset. Spend time in analysis and ask your coworkers for feedback on your approach. Critical thought should not change from person to person. If the engineer before you applied critical thought to her/his code, then s/he encountered the same problems and made the same decisions you would, if you also applied critical thought. So spending time reading code and understanding it is a huge time saver.

The critique of re-inventing the wheel isn't "hey you just made a wheel... we already have one of those". It's "hey you spent all your time thinking about wheels and working out all the details... we've already done that thinking and here it is written down. Save yourself some time and catch up to us. We did the heavy lifting for you."
Successfully bootstrapped a product, then what?
Let's be honest, humans are pretty bad at driving in snow too.

Sadly, I feel like people won't accept self driving cars until they can drive in the snow as well as in dry, clear conditions, which won't happen for a long time, if ever.

Honestly it's a bit silly that self driving cars have to do better than humans to be trusted -- as long as they are doing as well as us, mathematically, we should want them.

Maybe the insurance companies, which are mathematically inclined, will end up fixing this by providing lower rates for self driving cars, even in snowy climates.
Sleazier sounds: electric guitar solos are descended from saxophone solos
Looks interesting, will be good if it is free and open for developer usage
This is great! Are you the first one to build such a component for angular 2?
Correct, iterator-based-streaming, as java6 was the norm when I wrote this. And yes, you're obviously at the mercy of your JDBC driver. Though I'd argue if your results are fitting into PostgreSQL's default preload size (whatever it may be) you don't really need to worry about it. But I promise you it does stream. (TS is not known for it's small datasets...)
For those out of the loop you can get a glimpse of this guys life through the movie "The Internets Own Boy"

Paid Streaming services:
http://www.takepart.com/internets-own-boy#watch

Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXr-2hwTk58
This is a little paranoid if you're at least trying to stay within the TOS and not overtly get in a fight with the big entity whose API you're using.

(And having the LLC gives you great protection against lawsuits!)
Virgin Galactic is suborbital, but the scheme has nowhere near the velocities necessary to cover any distance. It's just a rollercoaster. There is little point in launching a transport from a plane. Getting to 10,000m is nothing compared to the speed needed for london-NY.
Pairing helps me figure out large code bases quite a bit.
How so? There are no legal resources for acquiring Z/OS as a student without paying absurd (for a student) prices.

You could take a class for cheaper, but formal classes are poor substitute for interacting with the system on your own terms. (Ask any programmer)
Seems like the problem is that people are being given more responsibility without the necessary power.
Here's a related and fairly contemporary piece by a China economist I read sometimes: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-01-10/china-isn-t...
Ask HN: Why use GitHub rather than a Wiki?
I've noticed that many people are using Github for 'living' documents. Isn't this what Wiki's are good for? Why the preference to use Github rather than a wiki? It is just because Github is considered "stable and persistent"?

This is the post that started my wondering:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10880726

You can see it here:
https://github.com/jlevy/og-equity-compensation

It is a great looking project with lots of good data, but reading it on Github leaves much to be desired.

Thoughts or opinions?
> How about "No seatbelt, no car move".

I like the concept but what if the sensor fails? Suddenly you're stuck who knows where...

I believe Chevrolet has a "teenage driver mode" which allows you to disable the radio, AC, and for it to bug you if you drive without a seat belt. I like that concept far more since it doesn't leave you stranded because the seat belt failed to be detected. It also allows you to set a maximum speed, a maximum radio volume, and for parents to get a report later if they wish.

I never drive without a seat belt. I just don't want to add more points of failure to a car than it absolutely needs.
I have a Mercedes Benz with adaptive cruise control, and was driving on the highway this weekend in a snowstorm. At one point, it basically gave up. It gave me an error message to the effect of "you're on your own now."

It is a challenge for a human, I feel for the algorithm folks trying to test the obscured vision.
Title: What if the Small Life is Actually the Epic Life?
I accept your apology. I agree that your 25 years of experience is by no means universal.

"60 percent of women in tech say they've been sexually harassed"

I'm not a fan of surveys, but even 10% is still unacceptably high.

http://recode.net/2016/01/11/60-percent-of-senior-women-in-t...
I have no evidence I can't see into the future and no one else in this thread can. It's pure speculation, all I know for sure is the official birthrate will go up and I'd bet any amount of money on that. I picked 3 years because if you didn't know it takes 9 months to have a baby so that'd be a good time frame to see the rate up. Any other questions?
Inflation is good for debt holders, because they can pay off their debts with devalued money. Inflation is bad for those that save and invest because they have to earn a higher rate of return to offset inflation. Traditional economics tells the right story that inflation is not a good thing. Political economics (which is why economics is nowadays) tells you what fits the situation, so don’t work about it, eh?

Look at deflation pre-WW1 and not that not only was this a period of growth, but also one where downturns were sometimes severe but over very quickly. You have the Panics of 18xx, but not any panics that last years.
I'm more interested in who we classify as people. Remember, the word person comes from persona, meaning an actor's mask.

In 2014 it was discovered that a species of Long-finned pilot whales (a type of dolphin) has more neocortical neurons than humans by a factor of two! The neocortex is an area of the brain associated with language and conscious thought.

Do these dolphins count as people? Should we afford them "human" rights? What about other species?

The pig you eat has the same amount of neurons in her cerebral cortex as your cat and dog put together. The cow, more than all three put together. Are they people?
So the study confirms that people naturally trust what their friends are posting, which then confirms that trust is what bonds friends together.

I view Facebook as a means to strengthen existing "physical" friendship, rather than a place to get unbiased information. So in that sense this is neither surprising, nor detrimental. Imagine what will happen if your friends start correcting your political views...

For less biased information, please refer to twitter. And please don't mix Facebook friends with twitter followings.
ISS is not geosyncronous. Also, I don't think there is a repeater there.
Natural nuclear fission reactor
I was just imagining an autopilot lane with cars flying into the city to pick up their owners.

You could also have parking garages with a much higher capacity per sq. foot if all the cars were smart and could work together. (Or even sections designed for this) Instead of single or double car rows, you could have them 4 or five cars deep, and self-rearranging to let each other out.
Correct me if I'm wrong, and not to downplay China's incredible advances in the last few decades or so but hasn't a lot of China's "tech advancement" been copying, sending their citizens abroad to learn and hoping they come back, and in many instances down right espionage?

To be fair, whenever I try to learn something new, I generally have to do a decent amount of "copying" in a sense to get started before I can improve and make my own contributions to whatever it is that I'm doing and learning so I suppose that's to be expected and is even a sensical approach at a societal level. Why invent a touch screen when several implementations exist? Reverse engineer or find research papers and build the same one. From there you can have the experience to tweak and make your own contributions to the touch screen world, etc, etc, etc ad nauseum until you're making contributions all over the place.
I recall seeing on Twitter that Springer said that this was a mistake. In any case, seeing all those books - pretty new books, too - available online without any official announcement was... odd.
Releasing an Indie Game on 3 Consoles at Once and Failing Financially
It's lucrative if you're a professional trader, otherwise, no. I've lost count of how many times I've read of someone blowing up their trade account because they thought it would be easy. Give someone who has no idea what they're doing a lot of leverage and yeah....
Children's Motivations for Video Game Play in the Context of Normal Development [pdf]
I know it's not on a mainframe but if you think 8,000 vms is a lot (which it is!) Ron Minnich ran 1,000,000 Linux VMs on the Thunderbird supercomputing cluster with Dell supplied 4,480-nodes.

https://share.sandia.gov/news/resources/news_releases/sandia...
Part of the ethos back then too:
"Apple Computer Inc. will explain how to use any of the equipment you have or give demonstrations before you buy one"