skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Democracy is not some magic solution. It's often described as the best of a lot of bad options. It can only be as intelligent and effective as a mob of of its average citizenry - which if you look at democracies in the third-world and developing world where your average person is uneducated - doesn't lead to good results.

The best form of government has often been described as a benevolent dictatorship. This is closer to the form of governance of corporations and open-source projects. The problem is, there's no easy way to guarantee the benevolent part.

I see no problem with people like Bill Gates having amassed power, money, and influence, because he can use it far more effectively than a mob of your average citizens would - the average citizen being a lot less educated and less intelligent than Bill Gates. Now, among the wealthy and powerful you also get types like the Koch brothers, who use their power for dubious ends - that's inevitable in a capitalist system. There's no way to prevent that aside from very strict socialism - which has the same economic problems seen in any communist country past or present. So for better or worse, I think we have to accept the influence of the wealthy.
Recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10824665
Do some research, and you will find evidence. Maybe it's not just the evidence you are willing to believe in?
The Worst way to extend your wifi
Cached: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:LVDmwhw...
Netflix and Chill(the ef out)
>"As we've seen in all countries migrants especially those with families end up being massive positives for the country and its biggest defenders."

What you're seeing also includes a lot of selection bias.

Just as you claim that a few bad apples shouldn't tarnish all migrants, you also have to accept that the "good apple" migrants that you're speaking of can't speak complete good of all potential migrants.

I.e. you're making the exact same type of generalization, just the opposite way.
7 Ways To Express Gratitude As A Man
> I’ve never met the legendary “10x jerk”. Anecdotally the outperforming engineers are generally nice and humble.

Anecdotally, I have.
That happened in 1996. People make mistakes. Give it a rest.
Why Do We Expose Ourselves?
Author of the Wired article seems to think that Anonymous Coward is an actual Slashdot user :)
Its a pretty important project.
Is Amazon Dash Button Really Worth Your Money
A1 and b1 too
tl;dr? The people. The author indicates that the LibreOffice community is filled with people of good humour who help those not as expert as themselves.
Ask HN: Please suggest good examples of the Kawasaki pitch deck
I have some VC interest, but no deck. They suggested this format, but I'm looking for real world implementations of it - or other suggestions. http://guykawasaki.com/the-only-10-slides-you-need-in-your-pitch/
Yes, and maybe these lifeforms are also much more evolved in many other ways than just intelligence. Maybe they live on a total different plane of existence from the one we operate on.

Which would mean us as humans would not have any way to verify this, unless we ourselves elevate ourselves to the level of these possible lifeforms and observe from there.

Like, do the fish in the deep sea believe that humans exist? Probably not, but we do exist. These fish just have no way of reaching us or perceiving us, unless we visit them with probing lights and everything.

And what would these fish think if they saw one of us, they having no point of reference, perhaps not even any way to model our presence, as they have never seen such thing ?

Ps. I've seen a bright light fly in a spiral motion, and then quickly accelerate off to the distance. Here though, I probably get downvoted by anyone who only believes what is written and not experienced.
> the incremental improvements have been increasing at a rate of knots and folks are beginning to notice the positive effects

Right on. I see this at $DAY_JOB too; after a certain amount of cleanup and dead code deletion and whatnot suddenly things start getting implemented faster, small bugs are fixed more easily, TODOs and FIXMEs start disappearing from the codebase, etc. Good stuff!
I would love if imperfect #includes (what I understand this tool is supposed to point out) simply became a compile warning and part of the toolchain. I would love such a feature and would use it a lot.

However wrt this project I just looked at the "Instructions for Users" and it tells me how to build it and that I need to observe this and that and a lot of other things for it not to go wrong. Sorry, I just don't have the time for that. Why not just provide binaries for the most important platforms?
What were they like?
Europe Moving into Meltdown?
I switched from desktop Linux to Windows entirely because of Lennart Poettering. Audio was a complete disaster, as you mentioned. (This was only a few months ago.)
Google agrees to pay £130m in back taxes to the UK
Just tried the V2 demo, and it looks great, with both themes. I used V1 a year or so ago, and this is definitely a step up.

However, since Firefox added reader view, I find I don't use services like this any longer. I was a very longtime Instapaper user and then also used Readability.com, but now I just bookmark pages I like (and/or save them to Android Firefox's reading list).
Big libraries like Boost and OpenCV usually have meta-headers for features and components that just include all the other headers for that particular part you want to use.

(e.g. https://github.com/Itseez/opencv/blob/master/include/opencv2...)

A tool like this would see right through that and walk the tree all the way to the final leaf headers that actually implement the parts you use. This not only means one single include will balloon to many smaller ones, but when the library moves things around internally your code will break.

(Unclear if this is what this tool in particular will do, but I've certainly seen this behavior with Clion for example when it recommends what header to include.)
If there are things a 10x engineer can build, that no amount of 1x engineers can build, then "the 10x engineer" is actually a misnomer.
> An education should not cost that much.

This is true, but it is not the root cause of the problem - and it is a distraction from the issue because it places the blame on providers. In the past, there was no significant incentive for the cost of higher education to increase at the pace we've seen for the last 20-30 years.

The big mistake was pushing for individual loans for each student to pay for college rather than subsidizing the system. This created distorted incentives where schools needed to spend money on "extra" things to attract students who had money to spend, rather than trying to push down the cost of providing quality education to each student. Schools that didn't invest would not attract paying customers. Providing the level of service & extra amenities students expect is expensive, and carries a lot of overhead support cost from administrative staff.

> making the process of educating less costly by using technology

Technology is not a silver bullet. The cost of delivering education at scale is not where the waste is. Much like the healthcare sector, there is a huge administrative infrastructure at every school dedicated to facilitating a complex system of loans, grants, scholarships, individual payments, etc., for accounting. These jobs are unlikely to be eliminated with automation. The best answer is to make them unnecessary outright.

> if a degree was about what you know, not just a credential

A degree has never been about what you know, otherwise we'd award them to everyone who has equivalent work and life experience. But it's also not just a credential. The value of college is not limited to the academic requirements. A society benefits from an informed and educated populace, and from the personal growth that happens when smart folks learn together. That isn't to say that the country club lifestyle of American colleges today is providing services worth the cost...
Anecdata: long long time ago (~2005), living in central Europe, I used to use a direct-connect p2p client where you could connect to the "hubs", see the members and see the actual file lists of those members. I quickly learnt that Swedish hubs and people with [Telia] prefix in their nick were the best bets - getting stuff from them was like downloading on a LAN.

I believe those guys are able to deliver it.
China’s P2P lending boom
Ask HN: Could a phone be powered in part by betavoltaics
I've had this question lingering in my mind for some time. In some cases (like camping or traveling) you need to be able to call for help. The problem is you need to charge your emergency device. '

Would it be possible to build either a portable charger or a phone/cell phone powered by a betavoltaic cell? If it is possible then would it be possible to, hypothetically, replace the battery in a smart phone with a capacitor and a betavoltaic cell?

And finally, if all of this is possible, is there any reason why it has not been done yet? Are there laws against building such devices on a commercial or personal level?
GWT was amazing at the start, I loved it, and I agree with all your points, some of these are things JS frameworks are just starting to reinvent.

But then the project got big and it was the worst coding experience.

The compile phase was taking way too long (5m), to the point that we had to buy SSDs for everyone, this was back in 2010.

And integrating 3rd party JS was bad, just like JNI. We were missing so much of what was offered with open source JS.
It's a term a subset of women use and many use it differently. So, I can't be sure. Common threads include someone wanting to have sex with them, possess them as a wife/trophy, control what they due like property, and so on. I think she's thinking sex or dating.

Anyway, one usually logically follows from the other: attractiveness or desirability increases odds of desire and an advance to be made. Most men are hardwired to want to try. Womens reaction seems to depend on upbringing and ideology. It might be acceptance, totally ignoring it, an eye roll that's neutral, mild irritation, or irritation/anger/hate worth blog posts. Down here the latter is rare. The women let people know what they tolerate then anyone pushing those boundaries too hard is clearly an asshole. Many will gripe about how men are on occasion but their gripes usually apply to their flings, boyfriends, and husbands. ;)

Truth is, this position of anything resulting from attraction counts as an unwanted "advance" will be rejected by most men. That's because it means we either can never pursue great, smart women in our field. Or that a double standard exists where only they can initiate the process. Many of them were fine with such double standards that put their gender in control. I'm not. Nor would I want to date the types of women hitting clubs and such.

All seems to me as selfish and controlling of social situations as the guys they describe. Too extreme, too, to be realistic. They counter a situation of selfish aggression with selfish passive-aggression then justify it by painting themselves as the victims of that interaction.

Note: This all just applies to our tangent. Other behavior she describes show her to almost certainly be a victim of gender discrimination in those situations.
Of course, we are.
Yes, this is why it is illegal to determine the sex of the child before birth in India

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_sex_discernment#India
This is mostly correct, but the dynamic in USA is a bit more complicated. When one compares "donor" states to "recipient" states, by and large the donors are states with a political commitment to expanded federal spending while legislators elected by the recipients at least rhetorically favor curtailed federal spending. The transfers thus amount to a sort of "bribe" that allows spending bills to get through Congress. It's not clear to what extent the "spend less" position is actually a calculated pose to procure more transfers...
The US is like any other country in that it will act on its own self-interest. That is basically all there is to it. Now, whether the policies that it pursues to that end are meaningful or not depends on a lot of things, including, but not limited to, the State Department, White House, CIA etcetc. So, there will be some amount of inconsistency in US policy over time, depending on the nature of people who run the ship.
> There’s no such thing as a 10x engineer spending time on something that never ends up delivering business value. If something doesn’t deliver business value, it’s 0x.

If it's your company then by all means you should listen to everyone's advice. But if it's not your company then you should give your advice, but if your employer doesn't want it then that's their issue. At that point there's no ethical imperative on your part to try to prevent your business from going bankrupt, so as long as the checks keep clearing I don't see the issue.
Like I said, Trello re-numbers when things get to close together, so you never see something like that. Obviously there are trade-offs, but very occasional re-numbering vs. a ton more complexity seems like an easy decision.

"you'd need a library" is not a solution when you have API consumers in dozens of languages.
http://include-what-you-use.org/downloads/
Richard 'Racehorse' Haynes (2009)
I understand. It depends on your organization. Firefox reader view (who works very well) is not a read it later. It's a cleaner tool ;-)
Typescript gives you an "out" to type checking using the any type. Additionally, most libraries really worth using have .d.ts files floating around the internet somewhere, in DefinitelyTyped or otherwise.
While the fingerprint background checks feel safer, it turns out that they're less accurate and less safe than the checks Uber is doing. They are doing both fingerprints as well as their traditional background check process for all the Taxis on their system in California.

"In 2014 at least 600 people in San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco—all cities that require taxi drivers to go through Live Scan—who previously drove taxis failed our background check. (2) These drivers were not given access to Uber’s platform, but may continue transporting passengers by taxi. Their records included convictions for sex offenses or rape (19 potential drivers), DUIs (36 potential drivers), child endangerment or abuse (seven potential drivers), and assault or battery (51 potential drivers)." - https://newsroom.uber.com/details-on-safety/
Baboom – mega's try at music streaming
This article is totally on-point. MVPs are the minimal viable test for confirming your hypotheses.

While running a startup consultancy, the idea that MVP is a thing you make once before going on to make the 'real' product, was one of the two biggest misconceptions I saw. The other one was "lean means cheap".

I ended up realising that most startup resources explain these crucial things with misleading terms and a confusing way. Really, the whole process should mirror the scientific method - I started teaching my clients based on that, telling them to forget what they'd already heard. I'm writing a book at the moment about this (working title: The Rational Startup) but that's a subject for another HN submission :)
Keep on living, dude. If you only gain the sort of experience that gives one such understanding late in your life, you won't be the first for whom that is the case.
Sendfile: a system call for web developers to know about
“So it's really showing the other thing -- not that the market isn't efficient, but that it can be efficient/profitable for the market to be sexist.”

“The market” is not some natural occurring phenomenon, but rather a complex mix of political and ethical choices.

It is our responsibility to be acutely aware of this and make “the market” accountable to our cultural aspirations.

That is, we must use whatever tools available to make “the market” not profitable when it encultures sexism or is overtly sexist. Find the people responsible behind these decisions and make it clear to them, and the companies that enable and protect them, that it is absolutely unacceptable.
On the other hand, not much grudging or otherwise, respect from the German women (among others) molested and in some cases raped by them. Hungarian women will count themselves lucky they have Orban as PM. 'Could be her undoing' is an understatement.
There's basically three non-reasons to hate systemd which crop up the most:
1. Its lead author is a bit of an asshole, plus lingering resentment from Pulseaudio.
2. Systemd is not sysvinit, so some of the system administration people learned doesn't translate.
3. Systemd contains functionality that people don't think it should have (usually presented without any argumentation as to why it shouldn't incorporate those features, so it tends to come across as akin to saying that Firefox is bad because web browsers shouldn't have video players built in).

The main reason that does come up that's not really a non-reason (but, I should note, is hard for me to validate as a dispassionate neutral observer) is a fear that systemd is being rammed down users' throats against their wills, partly by distros deciding "there's no alternative" and partly by systemd incorporating ever more tools.
During the past 19 years in software I have had the pleasure of working closely with five different 10x engineers.

None of them have been assholes - the opposite actually - once you've gotten to know them. If I were to generalize: most of them are not particularly extroverted, so that may be a cause of misunderstanding.

Some of the 3-5x engineers (they also exist!) have a tendency to treat people as "idiots" until they have proven themselves worthy intellectually/engineering-wise.
Late to the party and this doesn't address what the OP said directly, but the state of the video game industry actually makes me quite sad.

The last AAA game I played was Oblivion, which I couldn't finish. I haven't really played a AAA game since, and have only played two video games all the way through since (Braid, and Monument Valley).

When the OP talks about working on a project so big that no one person really "grocks" the whole thing I can relate, but I also want to say "it shows".

IMO, the current state of AAA games is shit. I think the reason they are this way have to do with what the OP is complaining about, the originating vision of the game comes from Marketing not an artist, and no one person has vision for the game. Maybe video games just have too many resources at there disposal.

I think I read somewhere that either Ocarina of Time or Mario 64 had double or triple the playable content of the released game and Miyamoto had a perfectionist eye for the game and was merciless in what made the cut.

Resource constraints are a good thing, IMO, as it forces people to make a razor focused product that trims the fat mercilessly.

Having unlimited resources is the enemy of good decision making, and it shows in the current state of video games (and film too). Games and movies are just too long/full these days.
Improved VR Films Take Viewers Around the World (and Galaxy)
Drivers with Head Shots: The New Side Job for the Creative Class in Los Angeles
LibreOffice has a pile of clang plugins for analysing their huge and somewhat smelly C++ codebase. They've caught and repaired some horrible code with these. Pretty sure they ran iwyu over it as well.

howto: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Clang_plugin...

code: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/tree/compilerpl...
I feel that the most fitting medium for rebuttal to portions or whole, is a separate article.

Having said that, I have seen projects and management lean on one or two guys out of a whole group to deliver the quick and mostly working plumbing + base work. And then pass off the polish work to the 1x or 0.5x employees.

Also, I saw no link between output and 'being a jerk', and that is highly anecdotal.

This is a similar way that sports teams work, or certain skills propel you to a different rank in army. Office work seems mundane, but management is well aware of the ghost benefits for hiring multiple-x engineers at 1.15x the salary.
The definition I found, and it works for me is:

MVP is a tool to test an assumption:

Ask:

* What are you trying to learn with this particular MVP?

* What data are you collecting about your experiment?

* What determines success or failure of the experiment?

I am not sure you can figure out in advance what is your riskiest assumption (like to OP suggests), it's more likely to be obvious in hindsight.
The graph on that page seems to say otherwise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser%27s_law#/media/File:U.S...

Just eyeballing it, from 1975 to 2005 the tax to GDP ratio in the US was always above 24% and peaked at 30% in 2000. Is the discrepancy due to State taxes being included in the graph?

In a sense you're right. Government spending is the problem: the money was 'spent' over the past few decades but just won't be paid out until grandfathered boomer pensions and medicaid payments fall due. Pretty sweet deal for politicians and boomers: buy political capital from the boomers now, and let the children pay for it later by raising their taxes in future, cutting their entitlements and raising the retirement age so that they'll be working until they're dead.

Not that Gen Y are blameless. Politicians respond to incentives just like anyone else. If you don't vote, don't expect them to give a crap about you.
aha - thank you very much.
Well the whole G thing is marketing spiel for the masses.

To me it will always be GSM, UMTS, LTE, etc.
Did you see my list in reply to that comment? Genera and Oberon are on it. I'll consider Mesa/Ceder and Smalltalk. The former was in the Hansen overview I started with. Might deserve individual mention, might not. Throw in your opinion on why if so as I just can't recall its traits.

Smalltalk, too. Especially as the topic is stuff that's still better than UNIX in some attribute. I haven't studied it enough to know what you like about it past probably safety and great component, architecture.
Yes. Spolsky has a better term for the same idea - he describes an engineer who can hit the high notes. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html
This reminds me another piece I read some time ago (google cache to rescue as site seems to be down):

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ikC6A7V...
this. and like most trends, it's shortsighted (and based upon the whims of contemporary front-end web dev fashion and not the needs of the meteor eco-system)
Internet of Things security is so bad, there’s a search engine for sleeping kids
Wrangling customers to give focused product feedback can be tough. Until now
And you should be. Shame is another facet in cultural value enforcement.
Can you use this certificate on your own server, running on for example Apache? Or do you have to use AWS cloudfront?
Chef Making Lines of Cocaine at Live TV Show
I work with a 10x engineer, I know they exist. Or at least ONE exists. We'd be DEAD without him. He's by far the smartest, fastest, and most thorough person I've worked with since starting in IT in 2000. I'm not sure he knows how good he really is and I am afraid some day he'll figure it out and leave. He's also generally nice and humble, and at the same time can be fierce and mean to get things done. He makes me feel old dumb and slow, and I love it.
That was interesting. Thanks for the link. I'll read the full papers later. Meanwhile, both Arrakis and FlexNIC are now in my collection. :)
Brilliant innovation
Brilliant innovation!! Well chosen canvas, its print is out of the ordinary. This tote bag speaks for itself-Givenchy. www.thestyledaffaire.com
Yep.

C and C++ are the outliers here.

Although C++ is moving into a richer runtime, thus increasing the likelihood to write OS independent code without relying on third party libraries.

Even C, if POSIX had been part of ANSI C, would fall into this scenario.

In a way, UNIX can be seen as C's original runtime.