skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> And on the flip-side, big banks are a lot more efficient than small ones, for the same reason Wal-Mart and Amazon are more efficient than mom-and-pop stores.

I don't care much for efficiency when it allows for the penalty-free violation of the law. Efficiency isn't the end all, be all metric.
Not necessarily.

Alan Kay: Yes, that was the big revelation to me when I was in graduate school—when I finally understood that the half page of code on the bottom of page 13 of the Lisp 1.5 manual was Lisp in itself. These were “Maxwell’s Equations of Software!” This is the whole world of programming in a few lines that I can put my hand over.

Lisp, and a few other languages including Smalltalk, were not so much designed as discovered.
Before Growth
No, it all still comes back to licensing. They offer different catalogs per country because they are not legally allowed to distribute certain content in certain places, because they don't have the rights. If they go "oh you live in the US, have some US content while on vacation in AU!", then they are actively distributing that content in AU. If they don't have rights to do that, it's illegal.

They'll never do this based on billing address because they don't care where you're FROM, they care where you ARE.
Why are "rights" and "complaining" related? It is generally the case that my rights include both things I should do and things I should not do, and it is generally the case that a healthy, free society encourages people to figure out what they should do via discussion ("complaining"), instead of via suppression of rights.

For instance, an employer has the right to fire under-performing employees, and the right to make the decision about that on their own (as long as their decision does not conflict with other fundamental rights, such as equal protection, that society has recognized). They are explicitly permitted to make bad decisions. A society that only gave you the right to make good decisions would not be a free one; a society that prohibited discussion about whether it was a good decision would also not be a free one.
Just use a headset that supports echo cancellation in hardware?
Yes, this could be interesting but that one's a dealbreaker for me. Guess I'll keep using Valgrind.
I don't know if it is the "biggest" blind spot, but it is a useful insight. The original open source manifesto (from RMS no less) was adamant that people should be paid for creating software, but once created it should be free. The idea being that the action of creating (or improving) the product had the value. But there has yet to be a break out mechanism for funding work on FOSS. Sure there are various attempts, Patreon or Flattr or something along those lines. But they are irregular and you cannot count on them.

Historically, infrastructure was funded by taxes on the users. You use the road, you pay road tax, and the road tax is used to pay people to keep the roads maintained. But there isn't a FOSS tax which is then redistributed to the folks doing the work. There isn't even a mechanism to make that possible. So using FOSS gives you tremendous advantage (work is done that you don't have to do) but working on FOSS gives you no advantage (you don't get paid for it and everyone else gets it for "free" when you are done.)

Perhaps the party is about to end, we shall see.
Wow I love this idea! Can't believe I haven't thought of it
I've experienced the mirror image of this: shopping for a good, long-lasting pillow, I found that every promising-looking pillow had plausible-sounding, highly negative reviews from people who just happened to have no purchase history, and to have reviewed nothing except pillows...
That's true. Though I suspect in some cases, your downloads might be slower with a VPN than with throttling.

I also believe that in the US, it's technically illegal for ISPs to do this.

http://www.cnet.com/news/fcc-formally-rules-comcasts-throttl...
Sure, end disability and exacerbate inequality. Additionally, I don't see us all being the same type of cyborg. If anything, becoming cyborgs we'll realize that there is more than one way to become "physically functional" and so stop labeling everyone that is not typically physically functional as disabled.
> that they are unprepared for

Certainly the people working on this are clowns that know nothing about safety countermeasures, and don't care about their whole industry going belly up if major accidents happened.
John Conway: Genius Behind the Numbers (2016)
I can assure you the Bitcoin Core developers see it the same way as you. But it seems that view is not universal among the userbase.
And yet, miners still had the choice whether or not to run XT.

If enough did so, then isn't that a vote?

If Bitcoin can't survive without centralized control over miner software, isn't that a sign of broken decentralization?
Could you be a bit more definite about those? What were they, how would more arms have helped, and which side should have had the arms?

Would you characterize them as being part of the respective civil conflicts? Or were they more like the aforementioned "now heavily armed and well organized drug gangs"?
Just being pedantic here :)

Banks are fractional reserve because at any given time they don't have enough cash to pay demand deposits but that's because they've lent that money out. So while banks don't have cash they do have _assets_ that could be sold or borrowed against to fulfill deposits.

If I have an uninsured, full reserve bank and somebody steals half the deposits I don't become fractional reserve, I become _insolvent_. Just like a fractional reserve bank whose assets drop significantly in value is insolvent.
This seems to go back to the question of if inaction is an action (or if it counts as partial action). If acting causes harm, but stops greater harm, does it count as more or less harm than not acting? I've never seen a definite answer either way.
Bitcoin is long dead; the blockchain - not so much, but it won't survive in its present form as it's highly inefficient.
> Back in 2009 when I was getting into bitcoin, it was widely described as a "stateless currency" and not just an alternative to Visa or credit cards. Having a background in economics, bitcoin looked to me like a truly revolutionary technology and if it was adopted en masse would change politics forever.

No state or political entity will EVER support en masse a currency that it does not control and/or is NOT backed by another state with larger economy!

In Sept 16 1992 the BoE withdraw the Pound from the ERM as a precaution after the most fierce attack the BGP ever received. The cost was ~ 3-5 Billion pounds. The GBP came out wounded, but it came out in one piece because the government had a say. Millions of people in the UK lost money indirectly, but the government was able to minimize the losses. Now imagine if the UK that day had the bitcoin, what would you have them do, block ISP traffic? How would you explain what happened to the population?!

Using BTC as a state currency is not just anti-democratic, it is pure insanity.
> a big part of that may be questions of who exactly is "involved" with the letter.

Being someone who's helping with the `dear-github` repo, why does WHO is behind the repo matter? Does it change the reflections of the community who've come out to support it and sign it?
I would be careful to be so confident in declaring the end of bitcoin, especially if it's based on yesterday's article on the matter.

Unless you are trying to drive prices down before a big China event...
Honestly I've reviewed a lot of applications, working for a small non-profit, then a large tech company, and now a tech start-up. I never read the cover letter, and the recruiters rarely pass them on to me. And it never makes a difference.
Let's make a covert channel
I'm often amazed how many people simply are not aware of address sanitizer.

It's orders of magnitude faster than valgrind - and it can find bugs that are simply impossible to find with a runtime-only tool (e.g. most stack oob accesses). However it can't find uninitialized memory (there is msan for that, but that's a bit tricky to set up and not available in gcc).
Google's Project Abacus to kill the password
Embrace the Pace of Change – Taking Action on Shopper Data
I bought two T&N mattresses (queen, 10 inch) and I've been super happy with these mattresses.

I believe T&N was the first one to start with this concept. And I have feeling several of the new ones that are similar, but also expensive, are probably some of the incumbent S brand mattress companies.

I like the firmness of T&N. I guess if you are in the market for a 10" thick mattress, this is an ideal choice
There's also TSAN for detecting race conditions as well. Personally I've been using valgrind less and less since ASAN and TSAN were released simply because they're so much faster.
It's not the mileage. It's the fuel and lack of regulation.

"The fuel used in ships is waste oil, basically what is left over after the crude oil refining process. It is the same as asphalt and is so thick that when cold it can be walked upon . It's the cheapest and most polluting fuel available and the world's 90,000 ships chew through an astonishing 7.29 million barrels of it each day, or more than 84% of all exported oil production from Saudi Arabia, the worlds largest oil exporter." [1]

[1] http://www.gizmag.com/shipping-pollution/11526/
[2] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/apr/09/shipping-...
Research spotlight: needles in a haystack
It seems like there are a million different ways to say the same thing: early on focus on retention.

You can get this from your data at sufficient scale. You can get it from surveys like NPS. You can get it from talking to customers.

One problem I have with the word "growth" is that it implies top level acquisition. A better definition would be hitting your goals. If you want to grow your retained userbase, then getting top level acquisition isn't actually hitting your goal.
Can we PLEASE stahp already with the "open letters"!?
The China GPS shift problem
"...the W3C has already become borderline irrelevant to the future of the web, as it has been far too slow to standardise everyday technologies that have been widely deployed in browsers for a considerable time"

This is a bold statement, but one that I'm surprised to find myself agreeing with. I suppose now it's a matter of figuring out what should replace the W3C; things are only going to move faster.
Always send a cover letter. Resumes are form content, by themselves they do not offer enough differentiation from the next joker with a word processor. The cover letter is the easiest and most traditional way to define yourself as more than a bunch of facts.

Part of working at a company is getting good at written communication. It should not be a lot of work to whip up a personalized cover letter for each company you apply to, assuming you're not just putting your resume on blast. If it feels like it is, then you should work on those skills rather than just cop out of the responsibility.
gog.com is an example of the software industry (or video games, at least) eschewing DRM on an ethical/consumer rights basis. They're highly successful, and may well pressure Steam and other similar markets to follow suit if their upward trend continues.
> So because they're poor, they shouldn't be allowed to make their own decisions?

I'd phrase it differently. Because they're poor, a certain level of financial incentive to participate in a dangerous activity may fundamentally become coercion.
Show HN: The Internet Is Fast Again – Reading Mode for Chrome
I am not sure what you mean by "worked out for her." The manager is still at Google. She is the one that moved to a different team and eventually left.
Indeed, `dear-github` found this out early thankfully, so it's been migrated to a Google form that anyone can sign.
Zygomys an embedded Lisp for Golang
Well, if you are going to choose just one feature to reach for in C++, template metaprogramming is probably not going to be it. Even a lot of devs who are very comfortable with other C++ tools and idioms don't write, if any, template code. I wouldn't think that someone would avoid all the other C++ features, but then willingly go down the road of writing templates.
The Internet has a VERY short memory.
> whether that money can be used to...

Of course it can, there's no reason it couldn't. That doesn't make it a proper challenge. One would be "instead of $4B, $X should be invested on this, because of such and such". X == 0 without details is a big red flag.
Fascinating. Thanks.
Justice Has a Waiting List in New Orleans
Musk on the gigafactory: "This is going to be a very green factory. There going to be a lot of solar power. It’s going to have essentially zero emissions and there are no toxic elements that are going to come out of this factory and we will build in recycling capability right into the factory"

http://insideevs.com/tesla-ceo-leaks-out-more-details-on-lit...
I have never understood the bitcoin protocol very well, and I did not have time to read the entire posted article and its linked supporting pieces. That said, I did pick up that one of the major issues is that a few miners in China control a huge portion of the hash power and have an incentive not to allow growth. Given that computing power is so affordable, is it really not possible for some competing group to decide to save the protocol by creating some large resource pools? In other words, can miners not be evicted once in control?
My experience (working at a company where someone reported an incident to HR) was, the folks responsible for the harassment were gone on Monday. Their offices cleaned out; the entire (2 people) department's duties reassigned; their name off of all lists and meetings. As if they never existed.

This is not incompatible with HR working for the company. They did their damnedest to protect the company from a lawsuit.
You can get Fire TV or similar and install Kodi on it. You can also install it directly on many other Smart TVs (I know it is possible on Samsung) but it might take more effort.
"That means public defenders can only guarantee their salary if enough of their clients are convicted of crimes. Acquittals are bad for business. Other states impose such fees, but only Louisiana requires its public defenders to feed off their clients' guilty pleas to survive."
Awesome, classic Timo Arnall!
Invasion of the Chatbots
Thanks for the pedantry, I just updated my comment to indicate that they were insolvent. I definitely used the wrong word there.
I hope they don't catch on to this.
What a horrible headline (and a sad story). But I fail to see any outrage in people with more money than sense losing some of it if the investment goes south.
If there are any seeds, sure. Torrents are most useful for new, big, popular items.
Doesn't shipping contribute something like 25% of the world's air pollution? With only 6000 ships total on the seas? Its really, really bad.
I almost alway use Que [1] now. It uses postgres advisory locks instead of Redis so one less dependency to worry about. You probably only need Redis if you're running a tonne of jobs.

[1] https://github.com/chanks/que
Which I don't agree with, given the amount of pointers that fly around in C codebases.

You cannot ever known what a pointer is used for.

If the prototype has const, maybe just maybe, assuming the function doesn't cast it away, it is a read only.

So I never bought into this argument.
Me, I think 'the future' is resource-intensive delivery services predicated on blowing 10x the resources to deliver someone else's product to 1/100th the customer base winking out like so many candles when the venture oxygen tank runs empty.

But in the meantime bring me the biggest cup of lemur turd latté you can transport on your Scoot, millennial.
The Internet's supply of poseurs is far greater still.

I think Stack Overflow is the canonical example. It feels like I deal daily with people who paste something from Stack Overflow instead of reading up on a library or API. It is made worse by all those to game their score system by being very quick to paste in a semi-related "answer".
> imagine some 20 year old college student - is "Am I ready to pick a denomination and religion and read hundreds to thousands of pages of gospel?" There is no such barrier with any other language.

Haskell comes to mind. There's a denomination and a religion. I'm not sure that the gospel runs to hundreds of pages, but there are many prophets who tell you that you need to know category theory, so for that sect, yes, it's hundreds or thousands of pages.

Lisp also has a denomination and a religion, but the sacred texts may be shorter.
I don't use github enough to share the gripes in "Dear GitHub." They seemed kinda minor and I understand why they wouldn't be in the product.

What about implementing an API to let other people implement some of the needed features?
> Does this have to be viewed as a polar opposite response to "Dear GitHub"?

I can't see how it isn't. I thought the original was quite clear that they appreciated Github, but this undercuts it.

Imagine any scene where you're talking to the manager of some establishment. You say "Hey guys, this is great, but can you fix the blinds, we've been waiting an hour to not be blinded?" Someone next to you pops in with "Hey guys, I love it here!"

They've just undercut your argument without even addressing it. It is, frankly, rude.
And https://archive.org/details/usenethistorical and https://archive.org/details/giganews
when I start putting up money and he didn't and I was doing all the work. he was going to do more later but I didn't like the plan.
I remember in grade school when we got the latest winning results, we had to write our capital Qs like a large number two. Because it 'looked prettier'. I refused; I closed the circle so it would look like a real letter Q.
What you describe would be way easier to implement by handing out unique tokens to each company, and then revoking tokens on my end. You can even do that right now by using a catch-all address, or the pretty common username+companynameandwhatever@example.com technique.
Alan Kay did not invent object orientation. See Ole-Johan Dahl's paper, "The Birth of Object Orientation: the Simula
Languages", from 2001 in which he relates the history of Simula: http://www.olejohandahl.info/old/birth-of-oo.pdf.
I think the right initial metric is “do any users love our product so much they spontaneously tell other people to use it?”

Many larger companies use "Net Promoter Score", as a way of telling this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Promoter

Of course, like Agile, there are Consultants, a methodology and books, but there is some truth in asking your customers if they would promote you to another person.
Interesting to note that the current stable branch has commits a couple of days old.
What a nice slap to so called community leaders.
I wonder if a similar lesson may apply to hardware. Take 8086 vs iAPX 432 for example.
John Romero has released his first Doom level in over two decades
> And either way, it's not unique -- the "best" cover letter for a job is generally pretty discernible from the job posting. Which makes that cover letter table stakes and doesn't set you apart from the crowd of candidates they're actually going to talk to.

I really don't think that most people even send a cover letter, much less put that much effort into determining what the 'best' such letter to send is.

Life isn't a poker game, 99% of your success comes from just showing up. Most people don't even do that.
Did anyone else notice that the list of signers on this letter is entirely male?
A very interested and detailed writeup! I'm forwarding it to friends who just flew to China.

One thing I was surprised to learn is the GPS shift problem - particularly that China has managed to figure out how to encrypt map coordinates[0], so that they still look right with a proper map. It looks like something trivial to solve, so I guess the only reason a solution isn't widely deployed is because it would be illegal to use in China.

Another thing, slightly off-topic:

> I learned through this experience that the GFW is unmistakably able to exploit side-channel leaks in TLS, such as packet sizes in order to detect the "TLS within TLS" characteristic of secure web proxies. This really surprised me. I had no idea the GFW had reached this level of sophistication.

Come on. This is not sophistication. This is something a 10-year-old child could figure out if you gave him a set of connection logs and told to split it into two subsets. Looking at side channels is the obvious thing to do if you can't determine something from just reading it.

I'll grant that implementing machine learning for this task may be sophisticated, but just noticing an obvious side-channel (and writing a simple check for it)? And this is not the first time I've seen people calling side-channels or looking at metadata "sophisticated". Is it because 99% of programming consists of writing absolutely trivial spec-following code that doing anything that's not in the standards is "sophisticated" nowadays?

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...
It's almost certainly an offence under RIPA.
This totally reminds me of a game I built a long long time ago using only CSS: http://ryan-kahn.com/static/onlyCSS/

Kudos! I love it.

(edit) The game's end screen no longer works, and I built a level generator for it in php (remember, years ago) and am no longer using that host.
Why are you having a problem?
Two notes:

1. Never use Google Maps in China; Google Maps in China are just hilariously wrong and out of date and will get you lost. Even if Google Maps wasn't blocked you wouldn't want use it in China. Apple Maps is the best English language solution, it's accurate and up to date; that or Baidu Maps if you read Chinese.

2. The OP is missing the point of the GFW. It's not really about censorship. It's mainly about providing a market for local tech startups and about keeping the lower classes from organizing and causing trouble. The party doesn't care is middle or upper class people access the outside internet. They know network effects will keep them using local tech and middle or upper class people are too bought into the system to rock the boat -- after all these people travel outside of China and have a decent knowledge of the world outside. Just assume anything you put through a VPN that advertises as going through the GFW is being monitored. Just like in the elsewhere you'd just assume anything you'd send through Google is being monitored. On sensitive days suddenly all these VPNs are blocked too so the GFW definitely does have the power to block them at will.

Finally I find it a bit odd that someone so concerned with privacy uses so many Google Apps. Isn't that rather counter productive?

Also, only web based gmail is blocked. Access from Mail.app or iPhone's Mail is not blocked. Sadly translate has been blocked for about a year now... all the more reason to never turn the VPN on your computer or phone off.
That's naive. The government, like any big entity that handles money, prepares a budget choosing to do A instead of B.
45 mins. is when i start hitting the wall. the muscles simply won't move!
Except the initial selection is done by an individual, which leads to a high chance of negative outcomes, since good ideas could be denied and bad ones accepted. Due to the pile-on nature of open source, good code could be killed early on and the contributor not survive long enough for it to included into later editions.
English is not my first language either. Sarcasm has no place here on Hacker News, and I was not being sarcastic. I guess I could have elaborated.

I think the way you have placed the category/categories, website domainname on each row is interesting. Also how comments are moved to a separate area which I find a fresh take!
"If you play, you can't win" is true 99.9*% of the time, with a lot of nines.

This isn't kind of gamble you use that phrase about. Blackjack or something, maybe. Non-casino gambles, like taking a new job, yeah.
in the sense that you tend to consciously reinforce perceived limits, yes