skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's so much opportunity for Orwellian abuse in this new archival model.

Sure there's archive.org - but in the old model, you'd say something in print, copy it a million or so times, then distribute it on paper around the world.

If an evildoer wanted to change a claim from say, 20 years ago, they'd have to create a forgery that looks like it's 20 years old, then secretly swap out all the archival copies in libraries and get large-scale mass obedience from librarians or manually make the swap at each library individually.

These days, you need to add an exclusion to the archive.org bot in robots.txt and then flip a few bits. It's a different ballgame.

In the traditional model, someone could find say, an original copy of the 20 year old newspaper and present that as evidence. Forging that document would be sufficiently hard for a single individual. But in the new model, claiming something is an "original copy" of a web page can be easily disputed because such a forgery can be trivially crafted.

Think about the implications in places with large civil unrest, very little free press, and mostly state-owned media. What's the solution for those societies?

It's a problem.
I see a strong conflation of "older" with "lots of personal responsibilities" that affect job performance.

It's clearly true that 30 year olds are more likely to have kids then 20 year olds, but it seems 40 and 50 year olds get "blamed" for being unproductive because of things like kids, mortgages, etc, than do the 30 year olds.

The interesting study is the 45 year old with no kids, house or marriage. Are they "old" too ?
T. Rowe Marks Down Dropbox Stake 51%
Again, you are looking for bounds on voluntary behavior that every civilization - and all its members - must satisfy. It only takes one to choose self-replicating probes to make the wilderness disappear in very obvious ways, visible in neighboring galaxies.
Maybe for some that's true. But not for me.

When I was laid off, I learned Python, and Verilog, designed hardware and firmware several projects on Github. I've not been sitting around idle.

The problem as I see it is a lack of good opportunities. There used to be lots of companies in San Diego looking for hardware or electrical engineers, but in San Diego, now it's only medical device companies and defence contractors.
(Both of which I'm not fond of).

I've also been looking into starting my own consulting business, but within my network, the opportunities aren't there.
Snowden has stated that he doesn't think modern encryption algorithms have been compromised.
Get Ready for a Smaller iPhone 6s Mini – AmazingBestBuy.com
The other possibility is that going to the parties is a good use of time, and that is where many students develop their networks. In addition to that, signalling theory would indicate that what classes you take and how well you do are much less important than the university you attend and the faculty you graduate from.
Just like there is a piece on Musk every now and then. I dont mind either way but these articles are really shallow in substance.
My dad returned from combat in WW2 where 80% of his group were casualties and he expected to die in combat. He said he was amused at the triviality of everyday concerns. "What's your problem, you're not going to die tomorrow!"

And really, if you're able-bodied and able-minded and nobody is trying to kill/maim/imprison you, then life is good. I went to retrieve the mail this morning, and was greeted with a bright blue sky, and an eagle sitting on top of a nearby doug fir tree giving me the eye. Pretty damn awesome to be alive.
Ask HN: What emerging technology do you think is the most interesting and why?
Following on from the same topic, almost a year ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9577830

I'd be interested in software topics as well as broader topics.
IMO, it is the attitude to take a leap at difficult and off-the-beaten-path projects ("MoonShots") that sets Google apart from many other large companies.

Are they looking to profit? Sure. Does that mean that profit is the only motive? I don't think so. It takes guts to jump into a totally different area from what a company primarily does.

It is probably an attitude that needs to be powered by the founders themselves. That way, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are appreciable too.

Apple has its strengths, but they don't score well when you look at it from this perspective.
I went to your website before reading this, because I like things like Blue Apron, and I like desert, and I had the exact same reaction as all of your other customers: it's just too expensive.

I feel like I would be your target market: in theory, I enjoy cooking and baking, but I never do much.

Have you considered repackaging your product as a "mail order pastry course"? I feel like I would be more likely to pay more if this is framed as "learn a new skill" than "here's a kit that makes delicious pastries".
That's the formal definition, used when being scrutinized. The angrier one is far more common in real life debate.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-word...
Do you still think the earth is flat? This is how it sounds when you try to ridicule something that you don't know or probably don't want to know for various reasons, you should read more on the subject with an objective mind.
I've been a full time developer for 8 or so years now, and I can say, the most complex personal projects I ever finished were when I started in BASIC, before I knew what an array was.

That is partly due to lack of motivation to work outside of work, but partly due to analysis paralysis when I try starting a new project. I get pretty far in, and then realize all the things I should consider and scaffolding I need to build, etc, that I lose interest.

So in other words, I agree.
I have heard that the Uber driver app will only work if its in the foreground.
> Then why the fuck do we keep killing ourselves?

Because the knowledge that "us killing ourselves" collectively is bad for us collectively does not affect the decision for an individual to kill another individual.
Pick a healthy hobby that is also as addictive as screen time. For me, it's martial arts. I look forward to my work outs, and it drives me to eat better so I can win. Yes there is winning in the gym! Well, at least there is still losing :)
Show HN: nfssh (golang) - Managed ssh-tunneled NFS mount (osx)
The only companies named in the article are Google, Apple, and GM. What's "big on the horizon" for tech and auto companies? Autonomous transportation.

After "horse-and-sun-powered agrarian economy" and "electricity-and-motor-powered industrial economy" and "silicon-based information economy", it seems we're going to "automation-based service economy".
Why don't you go And build your own software Company? Time To believe in yourself And put your balls on the table To prove To yourself that you are right !
Circumstancies were a bit different but i left a bc for the exact same reason (i would not care about my work after being repetively shot down by my top management on ideas I believe were the right things To do). I started my own company 6 years ago. We are now a team of ten worker And I work for some BCs who believe what i say is the right thing To do because of my xp and the trust relationship we have...
These 13 startups have raised millions – but no one knows what they do
Your claim doesn't make sense to me. The author does not prove there isn't privilege and inequality in SV. He only shares his story of how he overcame a decidedly unprivileged background. If the expected value of my bet in a game of craps is negative and I still win, that doesn't mean the odds weren't against me.
Not particularly surprising, the government has ways to get around the encryption anyways, it just takes longer than if they had the backdoors to go through.
In my experience in scaling applications, I've noticed there is a very big difference between measuring actual performance in production and taking a look with an open mind, and making wild-ass guesses.

You don't have enough data on other people around you, or even how they view the world, or feel about the world. It's like taking a wild-ass guess, and being proud of it.

I don't really care much for following sports teams either. I used to turn my nose at it, as if I am somehow a superior person for not giving two shits about who is winning. One day, I read Michael Lewis's Moneyball and flipped through Blindside and realized I had been an idiot. I still might not care about which team is winning, yet there are a lot of hidden depths to sports. How many other things have I missed by not looking with an open mind?
I use Go on App Engine and have never been able to SSH or GDB those machines. Nevertheless, I am still able to debug issues in my app.

I admit that debugging is easier on platforms where you get more control.
That's correct, and one reason this is relevant for Docker (which is very developer-oriented). You should expect Docker to give applications much more control over their own infrastructure.
Agreed, but stars are very fragile in some ways; surprisingly small disruptions in some of their transitional layers can cause novas. Stellar modeling is entertaining in that way.

So in place of "dismantle star" perhaps "provoke extreme mass loss" would be a more obviously net energy-positive goal for the engineers. Still, one should run the back of the envelope calculations on what you'd have to do with a stellar mass to produce greater energy than it emits in its current form, and whether the difference can be enough to make it a net positive to nova the star. My intuitive belief is that the difference in efficiency of use of materials can be huge, more than enough to justify large investments in stellar engineering at the stage when technologies means molecular nanotechnology plus nucleosynthesis: factories capable of taking in hydrogen and turning out anything.
If panspermia does happen in the universe, I bet that it happens with the sheltering of asteroids and meteors. Life develops on low-gravity planets with turbulent atmosphere -> some cells get into space -> get caught by comets and other objects -> slowly propagate within comet -> comet has an unstable orbit that sends it to another system, where it has an encounter with a habitable planet.

An icey comet could provide radiation protection and it could accidentally go through a gravity assist to increase it's speed.

I suppose that the best evidence we could collect to prove or disprove panspermia is to see if it's happened between planets/moons/objects within our own solar system.
Extreme Vectrex multicart
Show HN: Handpicked, Curated, Randomized Idea Generator for 3D Printing
The problem with 'just coding something' is your stuck with tiny problems and lessons related to those tiny problems. IMO, once you get past the basic, I can program tick tack toe by hand, you need to take a year or two and learn from other peoples mistakes. Otherwise, most self taut programmers have a world of bad habits that only really bite them when part of a team.

The only real exception to that is when you have someone on hand to read your code and offer real advice. Don't use a for loop here use a foreach. Functions should mean something, don't just cut a program up and stick the top half in one function and the bottom half in another. etc etc.

PS: Number one thing to look for in a first job is a company that does real code reviews by competent people.
Less and less people are using CoffeeScript due to ECMA2015/ES6 being released with the large majority of functionality that CoffeeScript was created for.

You're probably better off just switching to ES6, but that's just my opinion.
Atari is bringing 100 classic games to PC
These Are the Most-Watched Vines of the Year
The comment about using it as a reference for an OS class greatly disturbed me. Hopefully it was facetious.
30kyu -> 1kyu (amateur)

1dan -> 9dan (amateur)

1dan -> 9dan (pro abbrev. to 1p -> 9p)

I think 8d ama can start to have competitive games with 1p or 2p... I mean they're getting into the same ball-park in terms of strength but averaged out over time a rank above _will_ beat a rank below, that's why they are in the ranks they are in after all :)
The mental training poor people, middle class people, and rich people get is completely different.

If you grow up poor there's a huge amount you need to learn - about law, politics, business ethics, finance, negotiation, social signalling, confidence and assertiveness, and how to find and deal with influencers - that the rich seem to be taught effortlessly.

Having more money doesn't change the basic life training, because the life training is itself a form of positional social signalling.

If you're middle class you're half in and half out. You have some idea how the world really works, but your ability to act on that learning is limited because you won't naturally have the right contacts - unless you cultivate them deliberately.

Most of the poor have no idea that any of this matters. They're caged inside a media-managed world view, and it takes exceptional ability to break out of that.

Mentoring can help some, but nothing helps as much as confidence and contacts.
I think a lot of people here feel the same way, the problem is, if nobody will pay you, how are you going to eat and have a place to work on open source projects in?
I don't think PG had to face any of this, is aware or even cares about it. That article he wrote was pretty indicative of his mentality.
The "web" link below the title links there.
You're mistaken.
I think Bryan Cantrill is referring to both STM and M:N in the context of high performance applications (aka, the norm for him, since he's a kernel engineer). In that sense, both of them do have problems.

Circa 2000, Solaris, Linux, and some (all?) BSDs had M:N threading, and all of them threw it away because there are numerous performance artifacts caused by two schedulers (OS and the M:N) conflicting with each other. Mr. Cantrill was there when this all happened, and even wrote a paper on it: ftp://ftp.cs.brown.edu/pub/techreports/96/cs96-19.pdf

This doesn't affect Erlang as much simply because Erlang is really slow. I think of it as a waterline -- the lower the overhead of the language, the more likely you will run into the serious problems that M:N typically inflicts. E.g. priority inversion, and long and unpredictable latencies when the OS swaps out a thread that M:N wanted running.

As for Haskell and STM, all I know on the topic is that some pretty damn smart engineers at IBM spent a good while trying to make STM work well, and gave up. See this ACM article: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1454466. Perhaps Haskell managed to pull it off through the language restrictions it allows, but I’d like to see some compelling articles on that by engineers who know a thing or two; just because a language has STM doesn’t mean it does it well.

Honestly, I think your comments about M:N and STM are more revealing of your ignorance rather that Cantrill's. While you might disagree with him, there’s sufficient literature to give his stance some legitimacy. Sweepingly calling his stance "full of crap" says a thing or two.
> So maybe an intelligent life exists out there, but they are so ahead of us that we are not even capable of understanding how. Like a little cat watching a car thinking maybe it's an animal.

So true. We are really bad at looking at things outside the lens of our own experience. Why would life evolve in exactly the same fashion? Would it even have DNA as we know it? There is life that could form in ways we cannot even perceive - intelligence of a type that is so completely alien that neither could every notice or understand the other.

The universe may simply be filled with life, but because it evolves so differently it may simply be impossible to see most of it.
So they can spend less time onboarding new engineers.
I didn't find the book very persuasive. The authors basically take everything that is (or might be) uncommon about the Solar System, and somehow turns them into an argument on why we are so lucky to have them.

E.g., we have big Jupiter. We don't know exactly what it does, but it might have helped the Earth survive its early days. Therefore, it might be the case that the rise of complex life needed Jupiter. Yadda yadda, multiply a dozen of these things, and suddenly life on Earth looks like an incredible stroke of luck.

The problem is, we don't know enough to make that verdict. What if the existence of Jupiter actually postponed the rise of life by sending big comets along our way?

I enjoyed "Life Everywhere" by Darling much more, though it is probably too dated to recommend in 2016. (Astrobiology is a rapidly changing field, I suppose.)
I do not plan to retire ever, at reasonable age or not.
'But since this is HTTP, you only got an 404. You're welcome'
How+To+Increase+Your+Odds+Of+Success+in+Forex+Trading
>If the company is a small company and screens applications manually, it is simple to Google a person and find their age as well as other private information about them.

You only have yourself to blame for making those 'private' details publicly accessible.
Serie a Fiorentina telah menyelesaikan
I don't see how installing a compiler would improve your understanding of the language the compiler is for. If anything, it would improve your understanding of whatever installing software (bash, makefiles, etc.).
I don't have a problem with that specific definition. The problem that arises is that we sort of assume as a society that certain privileges trump everything else and are the primary drivers in terms of the experience an individual will, or has had in their life.
There are over 300 million people in this country alone. The fact that anecdotes about ageism exist means almost literally nothing. There needs to be actual data that there is a problem.

Several people just won over $100 million in the lottery. Just because you know one of them doesn't make your anecdote about lottery players a valid basis for writing an article encouraging readers to try the lottery.

Without evidence, without actual data, attempting to make an argument about a societal trend is less than useless, it is just empty rhetoric that only exists to distract from actual discussions that might have a chance of encouraging positive change. "Anecdotes" and "stories" and "opinions" might have value, but in this context they can only be used to illustrate a point. Not as the basis for making that point.

Total dismissal is warranted. This guy isn't a family member or friend venting to you, this is a guy publishing an op-ed on a big website. It requires either solid logic or data. He provides neither.
Excellent point.

I think that one advantage of interstellar distance is we can effectively look back in time a great distance, so in effect we don't have a visible radius, but a combination of time and distance.

We can see thousands of light years back in time, thousands of light years away. However, we don't have that picture of Tau Ceti at 11 light years away. Perhaps thousands of years ago there was a civilization there that flourished and died - and we'll never know because their signs of life are outside our distance/time perception.

A graph of Time/distance would be Time one axis, distance on the other and a diagonal line stretching up and to the right, showing what we could see at any given time.

Thoughts?

[edit: comment formatting ate my pretty ascii chart]
There's a strong thread of meritocracy in the tech community, but there is no such thing. When you choose the clearly better developer over the other, you're often choosing the one who had better resources growing up, not just natural ability. The poorer developer may have had a natural advantage over the other one, but didn't have the money to develop it as much. So you're really just selecting for wealth all over again.

This is what's behind the achievement gap anxiety: Wise rich people don't want to perpetuate a world where only money selects success. It's wasteful and ultimately unsustainable.
Academy takes historic action to increase diversity
We keep killing ourselves because so many people are so damned reassured that death isn't the end. That or they just pessimistically assume there's no way we'll make it to eons.

I think we could easily last for eons, but yeah. We have to get people on board with that possibility.
The irony of editorials like this is that it will reduce the likelihood that companies will hire older workers. Who wants an employee who is simultaneously less productive and more narcissistic than a younger one?

Imagine the effect of government saying, "You have to keep any older workers you hire." Think really hard. :)

By the way, lest someone get the wrong idea, I'm 70 years old.
Moreso even than ageism, it's frustrating the way young and old struggle to exchange ideas. The young, I think, are to blame for not being interested. But the old need to come to terms with the possibility that the judgmental attitude which comes easily after a lifetime of forceful experiences may just be too off-putting for the young to put up with.
> Unlike var, let and const statements are not hoisted to the top of their enclosing scope.

No, let is hoisted to the top of the enclosing scope [1] ("temporal dead zone" notwithstanding). let, however, is not hoisted to the top of the enclosing function.

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
Wow, okay, thanks. I've a better respect for why Go is so hard to minimax now.
Oh yeah, didn't think about that aspect. Best of luck to you hwstar.
An Open Letter to the Web
Is this supposed to be a good thing? Something to be admired?

With over 60000 employees, only one decides what technology will receive billions of dollars. See the problem?
What journalists get wrong about social science
JS1k JavaScript Code Competition – Demos 2015
Yup, in fact I met him recently at a conference, looked great.
The term "agrees to" really bugs me...
The author didn't walk it back when challenged.
Yes Switzerland has by far highest number of foreigners because of its essentialy Xenophobic immigration system rather than anything else. Using that as an example to show how welcoming it is completely deluded. USA offers birthright citizenship and in near future will offer a path to millions of undocumented immigrants. While USA had its own problem it's light years ahead when it comes to countries like Switzerland, where kids whose parents have lived decades in the country and were born their have no path to citizenship.

As far as swiss banks are concerned the world is actually worse off because of corrupt wealth hidden in their accounts. If anything Americans should be happy that one cannot simply open a swiss bank account.
The video, I think, answers the eternal question, "why did the chicken cross the road?"
"Things have gotten so bad that the Air Force is offering retention bonuses of up to $125,000 to its drone pilots, who have long complained of overwork."

There is a disconnect, flying by wire you don't feel turbulence and changing conditions, rather you logically go about it, being overworked its not hard to see where one can whoopsie daisy it.
Who says he hasn't/isn't doing the "bad things" himself? (it's possible the article comes off like that though)
Nope. The poster proved that you CAN overcome the handicap. The fact that you can overcome some limitation doesn't mean that the limitation wasn't there to begin with.
Any indication of Apple talking to manufacturing companies in China about building cars?
It's relatively easy to quantify pay discrimination against various groups. Emotional pain and civil rights deprivation are harder to quantify, though.
YES. The key to your observation is the boasting. A competent person gets on with getting the job done. They let their results speak for their aptitude. People who boast tend to have self-esteem (and often productivity) issues.

In my experience a competent person with an academic degree has an edge over a competent person without one. But that depends a lot upon the organisation, the projects, etc. Unfortunately some managers are impressed by boasters.