skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I will work customer support at a company sometimes just for fun. I work in completely unrelated field but I love the psychology of customer support, to me its a video game with very well created bots.

Over 1000+ online chats I have never been given a negative review and any customer can leave one through the live chat feedback. I have never had anyone complain about my service on phone either.

A couple things I find key, do not let anyone's words bother you, ever! You are immune to damage from words.

To me its like, do I get mad at a video game because the level is hard ? or do I enjoy it because its a challenge. That is probably the hardest part for most people. To me they are "crabby bots" that you want to defuse and brighten their day.

I never let someone's mood effect me, I consider that giving someone control over my emotions. They are forcing you to act a certain way by their actions and that to me is losing control, Which I find to be a weakness for many reasons. Once you are immune to them having any effect on your emotions you cannot be dragged down or taken off point, so you operate from a position of power.

Then, Empathy, Empathy, Empathy, and personalize your response almost as if you are friends. They are mad because their package is late ? "I am so sorry for that, I cannot stand when my packages are late."

They hate that their package is late ? well you realllly hate it when packages are late. They could not reach tech support, called and couldn't reach anyone so they are mad ? "I really have to apologize for that, it is unacceptable, I completely understand why you feel that way".

You adopt their sentiment that they are expressing and relate to it. It lets them know you are in their corner. They bash your companies customer service ? you reply with "I cannot stand poor customer service, so I will make sure we get this right because I know how frustrating it can be.

It's a game! You take no damage and get to play with someone's mind!! how fun is that!

Another subtle thing, Is don't just use copy paste responses that make you sound like a bot. I actually leave some typos and grammar errors in when I do customer support, and use smiles and lol sometimes (makes you human). Remember its your friend who you are talking to and they are trying to give you money, Help them do it.
> "These all seem like parasites to me."

Your impression is wrong. Search engines and other services based on web data provide great value to society. They don't create documents they link to, but they deliver relevant links to people's queries. That's a great service. Without the search engine service, people may not even find the web page. That's why large portion of website owners and webmasters are glad search engine crawlers visit them and even expect indexing to databases to be fast and smooth.

If you publish anything on your web, you're facilitating free use and duplication of it in the whole world. If this was not your intention, but you still published your stuff on your web, you misunderstood the original intent and reality of the Web for sharing information.

There is a widely known standard of communication between robots and web sites called robots.txt standard. It is a file where you can state your intent to restrict crawler downloads. There is also html tag <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"> that signalizes to crawlers your wish that the page should not appear in search engine results. If you want to prevent people from accessing and using your documents, use these. Both Google and Common Crawl seem to obey them. If you want to _make_sure_ nobody accesses and uses your documents, don't publish them on the Web.

There is no practical way to achieve your documents are accessible only for some limited period you want. If you release them to the world, you always lose control over their distribution and use.
Good eye for assumptions, those are them. I'll defend one and weaken the other.

I. 5BY

I had a somehow longer version where I explained why I chose the 5 billion year figure. There are a lot of factors that could make life on Earth harder than it currently is, but really only a few that could make Earth less hospitable than Mars. Mars is basically just a gravity well. Maybe with usable water. An Earth worse than that is a long way off.

On the other hand, if Mars isn't enough, and we need interstellar travel, then we need either near instant travel or generational ships.

Generational ships mean we've mastered living in space without a planet. If we're sustainable in space without a planet, then orbiting destroyed Earth (for minerals) is as good as leaving it, unless the sun is expanding.

Near instant travel obviates the need for learning lessons about survival in space.

(I suppose we could get a tech that could take us to any planet in the galaxy in a FTL but five year long trip similar to sublight trips. That seems unlikely though.)

Impacts could destroy Earth. So sure, we should spend good money to look for asteroids (telescopes in space!) and learning how to divert them (with robots!). Note though, mammals somehow survived a mass extinction event from a massive asteroid before. So it'd have to be pretty big to prevent us from just making (maybe underground) shelters.

If the atmosphere or magnetic field weakened, there'd be a huge radiation hazard. Underground or undersea habitats would be more technologically feasible for us than space, though, and would provide better radiation shielding than anything we could build.

II. 1000:1 was silly.

Tech costs though, yeah. Good call. Maybe more like a factor of 10. Possibly as high as 50:
http://www.tellmehowmuch.net/how-much-did-the-hubble-space-t...

http://www.businessinsider.com/mars-rover-curiosity-cost-eac...

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/14505278/ns/technology_and_science...

http://www.space.com/12166-space-shuttle-program-cost-promis...

None of these are easy to compare though. Is the Hubble platform equal to the ISS? How many shuttle launches equal one rover? I don't know. Maybe that brings them even further in line.

But if you ask me, at what exchange rate would I change unmanned tech points for manned tech points, based on the relative contributions to science from each, I think it'd be like 5:4 in favor of unmanned. Even if unmanned was more expensive, I think it's tackling some pretty interesting problems right now. I'm weird though, I know.

N.B. - Musk's point was really interesting too, thanks, kind of like "Foundation." I'm not sure where it takes me. It's like, "If humanity could develop only one more technology, what would it be?" Interstellar travel would be pretty compelling. I can think of interesting alternatives, but sure, interstellar seems like it might win.
True enough, I suppose. It did break some stuff though. Go apparently encodes the syscall table.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8817568
Don't sell your efforts short...sometimes the advice we give others is, at a minimum, the presentation of potential path(s) a person may choose to follow...

Being given options, or even being made aware that there are options, especially in the case of children, is a gift that can produce amazing outcomes...

How many of us have been given direction, even if unknowingly, by a single sentence uttered by someone trying to "help"? (e.g., "you're really good at organizing things, solving problems, etc...)

Individuals are often not very good at identifying their best, and most marketable, talents...sometimes others can offer perspective...
I like the idea, but in practice, we'd all likely see our rates changing inscrutably as the insurance companies change their models.
Assuming a central elite of politicians is uniquely qualified to define and fund 'social good' through legislation is just like assuming a central elite of billionaires is uniquely qualified to define and fund 'social good' through philanthropy.
It's obvious to me based on my own experiences. Of course I'm talking about a "French as a Foreign/Second Language" major, not "French" like they teach in American high schools. And I'm talking about Computer Science or Software Engineering majors, not self-taught webpage developers. The rough visual-verbal spectrum for learners is obvious for me, and when teaching, we need activities that utilize both the visual and verbal faculties. I'm surprised you haven't encountered this continuum.
Why Incentive Plans Cannot Work
I've often used a similar technique driving, but it has backfired. When someone gets angry, flips me off, etc. I will usually wave exuberantly, with a huge smile. Unfortunately making an angry driver angrier gets scary quick.

Once in a while, I catch myself making some kind of mistake on the road that angers another driver.

I really wish there was some kind of international, "Sorry, my bad!" gesture. If there is one, I'm unaware of what it is.
> Yeah, but we can grow corn and can't grow sugar.

Both Florida and Hawaii would like a word with you. For that matter, Utah, Idaho, and Colorado (at least) used to grow large amounts of sugar beets. That ended in the 1960s or 1970s (I wasn't old enough to know if government policy changes were responsible).
Physical gold?
Learning C is intimidating to me because every time I see a post written by a long-time C programmer, there are 10 more long-time C programmers explaining how the post is incorrect. Most C books on Amazon have reviews wherein credible-sounding programmers criticize the mistakes of the author.

If publishers and programmers with popular blogs can't get a consensus on what constitutes correct C, how could I ever hope to produce it?

Case in point https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10864601
VRBO 2.0 -> Airbnb
> for any non-trivial property, there is no general decision procedure that, for all programs

> all but the most trivial axiomatic systems

This is about non-trivial properties on arbitrary programs, and non-trivial axiomatic systems proving arbitrary statements. It is not about non-trivial programs or non-trivial statements.

Rice's theorem states that, for all non-trivial properties P, there exists a program S where you cannot compute P(S). (The Wikipedia phrasing puts the negative in a different spot, but this is de Morgan's law for quantifiers: ∀P ¬∀S P(S) is computable = ∀P ∃S ¬ P(S) is computable.)

Gödel's first theorem is that, for all non-trivial formalizations P, there exists a statement S where you cannot prove P in S.

You are claiming, for all non-trivial properties P, for all non-trivial programs S, you cannot compute P(S); for all non-trivial formalizations P, for all non-trivial statements S, you cannot prove P in S.

This is not what Rice's or Gödel's theorems are, and not what the texts you quoted say.

> Then Gödel shows up and says, "On which shelf shall we put the index?"

You keep it outside the library. The index tells you where every single book is, other than the index.

In particular, Gödel claims that, if the index has any chance of being correct, it must be outside the library. The fact that Coq cannot be proven in Coq does not decrease our confidence that it is correct; in fact, Gödel's second theorem means that if it could be proven in itself, we'd be confident it was wrong!
I think that the issue that a lot of BSD people have with systemd is the development model and consolidation of projects around systemd only APIs which are difficult to integrate into non-Linux platforms.

That combined with the systemd developers saying 'Systemd is a Linux-only project, we'll only be accepting patches for Linux and we'll only be supporting Linux. If this breaks on non-Linux systems, you're on your own.'
Granted the community has adapted very well, as Gnome Shell running on OpenBSD demonstrates, but the non-inclusive attitude must have left a sour taste in a lot of people's mouths and you can understand why they feel bitter.
> much worse than they actually sound

UI is usually bad indeed, but I wouldn't really care that much if the actual effects would be done alright. They are not.

> I'd personally like to see a real contender for open source clone of Propellerhead Reason

Well, doesn't really matter: the point still is there's no decent FOSS DAW. Ardour is not terrible, but… just no. And there still is no real use for DAW without any instruments or effects anyway.

But, as a side note, I've never heard of a musician writing some more or less sophisticated music (that is not Prodigy) with Reason. I've used it for a while, and it's pretty nice, all this "hardware interface" concept is really cool, but it's very limited and very limiting. It's like, well, using Mac or Windows vs using Linux — what I can do is strictly defined by the developer, no much freedom out there. Cubase is complicated and glitchy as hell, but with it I really can do pretty much whatever I want. Simpler (and much cheaper) alternative to Cubase I would say might be Reaper, but not Reason.

> Sample libraries aren't "source code"

No, that's not the problem. Sample libraries for KONTAKT are sample libraries for KONTAKT. It is not a bunch of .wav files, it's a proprietary format, which wouldn't work with some other sampler out of the box — unless you specifically make it to, which (I guess) might be not trivial, as it's made specifically to avoid competition. So even if you buy sample libraries for that, or download it from torrents or whatever — it's not about library licensing, it's about being unable to use it with anything but KONTAKT.
If we want to be specific about driving, I would not unless its unavoidable. It never even popped in my mind that the complaint about drivers was in reflection of having driven there. If thats the case, agreed. It is so easy and cheap to take a radio taxi I would never even think of taking a taxi. Plus for $100 you can usually get a private car for the day with a driver.
Even if, in theory, you can have a static society by forcing everyone to keep doing what they're currently doing--which you can't, because many peoples' business is providing services to new or closing businesses, and any unexpected events will cause cascading effects that your static society can't accommodate--I don't see how that's at all desirable or relevant to real economic issues.

And of course the profit motive is central. It's the whole reason why anyone makes products in the first place.
strncpy is fine if you wrap it with a length error check or explicit 0 terminator.
He achieved all those things before his illness though.

He had financial independence, status, and a career before he became paralysed.

This means he could pay for his own nursing, and that's exactly why people see him as an adult.

Here's the thing: what people are calling "adult" is nothing other than the traditional definition of "man"

A "man" is a person who is independent, powerful, free, makes his own decisions, pays his own way, has others depend on him, etc.

What's interesting is that you have clearly indicated that, despite being female, you feel like a man! Meanwhile there are many males who do not.

I think it's a very interesting discussion. Too bad my bringing up the housewife/paraplegic angle got me 18 downvotes and counting.
As a Londoner who did the last set of Olympics I don't think I could disagree with you more. Sure some things changed and we lost a few places to 2012; but on the whole we gained so much more. Maybe we got lucky through politics, but I don't think many people in London would like to have the Stratford and East end we had prior to the Olympics back.

Hopefully 2020 works out well for Japan, but I don't think you can write off the Olympics all together. The UK gained so much out of them, if at a minimum we took a huge amount of nation pride forward which is probably worth the cost alone.
JQuery 2.2 and 1.12 Released
>I'm personally doubtful we could detect our own civilization today if we had a clone of humanity orbiting Alpha Centauri, and that's still well within our RF light cone.

This interests me. Could we launch a sufficiently weak sensor(I'd suggest my first-gen Moto G) into far solar orbit and try and perform the same kind of analysis we perform on extra-solar objects? Wouldn't it be useful to have a platform where we can perform control experiments?
I've noted that app is expecting to start with "www." in the url.. which is not the case for my url.

But if you change that portion, LinkedIn will still find my profile, and the page seems to be working; as always YMMV
$800M is Not Enough
Sorry, it was LinkedIn's rate limiting :( try again!
Immigrant Entrepreneurs Apply for Funding Through Unshackled
Oh. That really explains a lot and reinforces the point. But still it's very successful open source project.
I think it's worth noting that perceptions of these "world conquerors" depend a lot on whether you live in one of the countries that were conquered or the country that did the conquering. Perceptions of Genghis Khan are much more positive in Mongolia than in the Middle East, for example.
Are you an immigrant entrepreneur working on an idea? Apply to Unshackled
At least in a democracy, you can vote people out, so in theory, the general public has a say in what 'public good' billions are spent on. The problem with relying on philanthropy to fund the public good is: How do I, as a member of the public, influence what the Koch brothers consider to be 'public good'?
This is how we do it. My wife would also baulk at the idea of 'asking' me for money, even though it's my job that brings money in for the fam. To me, it seems strange that a couple would consider some money 'his' and some 'hers' regardless of where it came from. I've seen hints of that type of spousal relationship here (including in GPs comment) and other places and it's very foreign to me.
I believe Google was already in the millions of searches territory by that point. What made Andy a risk taker in that case wasn't the traction (which would still be significant in todays terms with a vastly larger internet population) but rather that search was seen as a dead space. It would have been the equivalent of investing in podcasting in 2013, a space considered played out and dominated by existing players with no significant upside.
> The difference between an angel and a VC is that angels are amateurs and VCs are pros. VCs invest other people’s money and angels invest their own on their own terms. Although some angels are quite rigorous and act very much like the pros, for the most part they are much more like hobbyists.

That's a pretty broad statement I would take issue with calling angels as a group, amateurs and hobbyists. Especially since some well know VC's also do angle investing.
This example makes it really clear what's going on. Could someone translate it to do reverse automatic differentiation? That's the one I never quite understand.
Facebook Hacker Cup (starts today)
I think you're probably an adult when you transition from the role of being "protected", by some one, or some entity, to the role of "protector"...

That is, you've managed your own affairs so that you're now in a position to help others who need help managing theirs...

That's the cornerstone of a healthy and productive society--accomplished elders mentoring the young on a consistent basis...
This has bugged me for a while, too. People look at the trend from 2000-2008, and think that it was the long-term trend. But we were blowing a bubble then; why does anyone think that that growth rate was sustainable?
It is, of course, possible. It is just rarely practiced, I think. It is as necessary as it is in any other language, which means either not at all, absolutely necessary, or somewhere in between depending on your point of view...

I have seen a few approaches: google test (actually a C++ framework) used to test C code, "custom" test frameworks (makefiles, test-runner shell scripts, and small main() functions that actually run tests), etc.
C is one of the easier languages to do unit testing in:

1. write a new one file script which parses function declarations from a source code file

2. have the script find all function declarations which start with "utest_", accept no parameters, and return "int" or "bool".

3. have the script write out a new C file which calls all of matching unit test functions and asserts their return value is equal to 1

4. have your Makefile build and run a unit test binary using code generated by your script for each source code file containing greater than 0 unit tests.

Writing a script to parse function declarations from your C source code is useful because you can extend the script later on to generate documentation, code statistics, or conduct project-specific static analysis.
Looked it up, but couldn't find it. Who's it by?
It's hard to say. I know both were very important to me, but both also became apparent to me very young. That was still my favorite as it allowed me to stand beside my elders rather than below them. I could finally fit within their shoes and try to understand why they did or said what they had.

No doubt, it's different for us all. I've had gobs of insight at a young age for better or worse, but the moment at which I personally started truly feeling like an adult was when my net worth inched past zero and stayed there for longer than six months. This wasn't due to making more money, but rather overall managing life better.

As superficial as that may be - it was clear to me, at that point, that I was actually paying attention to the easy, banal maintenance work most of us know has to be done to ensure a stable life, and eventually, family. And I think that was my motivation - a hope for my own family.
The comparison is between a digital computer and an organic one (i.e. a human driver). Furthermore, one can't just assume that a car can drop a person off and head out to the suburbs to wait. That's a huge potential cost in both congestion and energy.
> So a program that “validates itself” simply doesn't make sense.

The language comes from Gödel's incompleteness theorems, in which there exist true statements that cannot be proven true, i.e. validated.

A given non-trivial computer program can be relied on to produce results consistent with its definition (its specification), but this cannot be proven in all cases.

It's not very complicated.

> This is precisely the rôle of the foundations of mathematics (or perhaps I should say a foundation, because there exist many competing ones): to provide a system whose consistency need not be questioned, and on top of which the rest of mathematics can be built.

This is what Russell and Whitehead had in mind when they wrote their magnum opus "Principia Mathematica" in the early 20th century. Gödel proved that their program was flawed. Surely you knew this?

> Also, it seems you misunderstand Gödel/Turing/etc.'s result.

The misunderstanding is not mine.
I feel like it's been clearly demonstrated that the average consumer does not care about privacy.
Retirement accounts aren't money given to the government. Vanguard/Fidelity/Schwab/etc are companies.

Unless I misunderstand your meaning?