skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd rather say that the "pure" is a source of inspiration... which can be good or bad.

For a kind of outlandish but strong example, look at how monotheism can inspire people to extreme struggles.

Or look at how the idea of a coherent and final constitution inspires American politics and the struggle for "a more perfect union."

And yet with all of these things, there's a lot of plumbing and compromise and evolution and war required, too.

Sometimes the pure ideal turns out to be, in hindsight, just a kind of arbitrary notion. Like if your whole ideology is based on God, and then people start to just not believe in that God at all. Then you get a renaissance, but also confusion.

So, like, I love Haskell, and I love to see it grow and develop, but I'm also aware that its strong ideals can from another perspective be considered false idols. Still, ideals are great for rallying around.

Some of what I'm trying to say here is articulated by Richard Rorty, through his concept of "ironism" in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, which I recommend!
> Well knives are banned

Well, you must be from the UK.
So What Is the Right Level of Burn Rate for a Startup These Days?
Affordable Cloud-Hosting, in Switzerland
Yev from Backblaze here -> That would be cool, though there's no real "requiring body" to require post-mortems. The company has to want them. We do them ALL the time internally at Backblaze, they help us piece together what the hell went wrong and gives us next steps to work on. We find it really useful, especially with software/hardware issues (less so UI glitches and stuff).
I've been on this one for a pretty long time. A little over 7 years according to my user page.

The quality has not noticeably gone down. There are a lot less technical articles now than I feel like there used to be, but that might very well just be because I've gotten more technical, and now everything seems like an opinion.

I think it's because HN is actually willing to defend itself. We used to have days where everybody would ONLY submit articles about some obscure programming language (although I have forgotten which one it was...not arc, I don't think...scala maybe? I think it started with an S).

We don't seem to do that anymore, but I think the culture is still there. People are willing to tell you to leave if you're not a good member. That's really important.
The real improvement in development will be when code generation is automated to the point that writing an application is as easy as writing an word document. Remember when editing a document in a computer with editors like wordstar used to be sort of programming but now editing a rich document in computer is a no brainer. We need that kind of revolution in programming. Programming still requires high skillset but there is huge oppurtunity for disruption we can develop something that is is as easy for end users to "write" up an web or distributed or any kind of application as editing a word document. It's time to automate coding!!
The problem is twofold: low bar to grabbing torches and pitchforks, and a high bar for recognizing someone else's humanity.

In the old days you might not agree with your neighbor, but you had to live next to them. Now with the flick of a thumb you can denounce someone's entire existence before breakfast.
> Okay, it looks like I'm going to have to do this the hard way. Is the Sun up in Melbourne?

> Let me find a webcam somewhere in that city.

Seriously? Can't just Google "sunrise time in Melbourne"? Sure way to lose credibility fast with writing like that. In fact, finding out the sunrise time was all s/he needed to do to figure out if it was a good time to call the uncle.
Πως Να Ξεκινήσετε Με Το Digital Marketing Στο Ίντερνετ – SEO – WEB DESIGN
Really cool article. Posts like this always make me wonder what the state of the programming would be if browsers hadn't sucked up almost all of the world's compiler optimizers.
I completely agree. Fixing the run time would be a large effort to addressing one of the big complaints.

However I want to see packaging addressed as well, if not first.

Unfortunately packaging has gotten so wonky, it is easier for me to shove my small projects into huge docker containers and liberate my sysadmins from maintaining virtual environments on servers. Servers that need to be rebuilt with more modern versions of gcc and other system libs.
I've always found it odd that the video game industry hasn't put as much focus on improving speech synthesis as they do on 3D graphics. They would be the ones to benefit the most from more natural text-to-speech.

Seems to me that back when games used to be in text, you got to have more elaborate storylines because the developers and writers themselves could just add and improve the dialogue at any time. See Planescape: Torment [1], regarded to have one of the most complex stories in a game, with enough dialogue to rival a novel, but most of it is in text. Same for Star Control 2 [2] which was the inspiration behind Mass Effect.

Now, when everyone wants to be Hollywood and voice-acting is the norm, and expected by players for a game to be considered high-quality, stories are locked in to whatever was recorded in the studio at the time. This is also probably the reason for the discrepancy between the dialogue choices you see onscreen, versus what your character actually says (such as in Mass Effect and Fallout 4 and many others, where you just to get choose between something like "Joke" or "Threaten" and it sometimes spawns a very unexpected chain of conversation.)

Better speech synthesis would not only empower solo developers to write engrossing stories and complex dialogues from the comfort of their bedrooms, like they used to, it'd also open up better player customization in RPGs and online games, when whatever you type would be spoken to other players in your preferred voice.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planescape:_Torment

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Control_II
Thanks, I did wonder if she is a native-English speaker or not. It didn't have any of the telltale grammatical or sentence construction errors, just really weird word choice.
I don't know if it will prevail in the end, but I think that Reddit approach by splitting the community in small subgroups/communities has a better chance to last in the long run.

Of course, you'll create feuds between communities but at least it is somewhat confined and not always spilling in the common public space.

Unfortunately it also greatly increases the echo chamber / filter bubble but it seems you can not have a peaceful community without an heavy dose of groupthink.

A long time ago, at the dusk of the XXth century, I used to believe that Internet would usher a new age of Enlightenment since every one would have access to many different opinions and unbiased sources. Arguably that was a pretty naive view, and instead we got new tribes disagreeing on almost everything conceivable.
Yeah, I thought it was pretty established that even before sanctions against Iran had been lifted production already had gone up especially in the US through fracking.
Twitter is far more open than that. It's probably the only thing I liked about Google+ vs Twitter or Tumblr. You can choose to block certain people and limit your posts to certain circles or to just one person, thus it never shows up in the public feed. It's sad no one else replicated that aspect of Google+ or that it took off. It really designed better in terms of how content was dispersed from your account POV.
The question is whether children should be blamed for what their parents did. Many people would say no.
When I use the word done I mean done to the point that I'm marking the task/project/module done and telling someone it's done. It's not like a PM is checking the CI server and noticing the build is green and the unit tests pass and telling me to get on to the next task...

There's done as in the spirit of the assignment is completed to a satisfactory level of cleanliness and then there's perfectly done, which means you'll never ship it. I think that's hard for a lot of people to come to terms with, people of all skill levels. The code needs to be easy to navigate and the patterns should be as easy as possible to learn and emulate for others entering- but you don have to start there, you just need to wind up there before you call it done.
As an anarchs-capitalist I'd be happy to have a society where anarchs-communists had their communes and lived under their own rules.

This may seem off topic but its directly relevant- we regularly have these debates in the anarchist community.

But at the end of the day, it seems the anarchs-communists don't want to live under their own rules for themselves, they want us to live under their rules too. (Yes, the irony is lost on them.)

For people who are conditioned to believe it-- the others must be forced to live the way they think is appropriate--otherwise things are not "Fair".

Jealousy, fear, all these emotions are easily manipulated by propaganda.

To the detriment of tolerance.

So, while I want to see gay married couples defending their marijuana crops with fully auto machine guns, and saying whatever they want online, because I believe in human rights, I must admit I am surrounded by two groups of people who do not believe in human rights and are increasingly seeing the other group as less than human.

This will not end well.
We already know the current designs "don't work". If it weren't for turbulence, JET would have broken even a long time ago. Now there are better tools to predict when they won't work.
I wonder is it so hard to build an automatic "insult" detector with all recent progress with deep learning. Quick googling gave quite a couple of older papers:

"Offensive Language Detection Using Multi-level
Classification"

http://www.eiti.uottawa.ca/~diana/publications/Flame_Final.p...

"Automatic identification of personal insults on social news sites"

http://labfs.eecs.northwestern.edu/~sara/Site/Publications_f...
If you take a moment to look around, you’ll realize that a lot of socially progressive people are saying the exact same thing about Twitter, that the “professionally offended” are becoming too influential.

Mind you, they’re talking about what happens when a woman criticizes video game culture and winds up with death threats and snuff porn choking her mentions.

I am not saying this to suggest that one “side” or “the other” is right or wrong or has it worse than the other, but just making the general observation that Twitter does have a problem, and it seems to provide a terrible experience for all sorts of people with all sorts of social views.

We blame it on the people dogpiling, or brigading, or whatever, but that shouldn’t prevent us from recognizing that Twitter is doing a terrible job of providing an environment for anything except “Interacting with Brands” and sharing low-emotional-content memes.
Good to see the Webkit team (mostly Apple) continue putting serious energy into JS performance. Take a bit of guts to throw out the whole LLVM layer in order to get compilation performance...

It's also encouraging to see them opening up about future directions rather than just popping full-blown features from the head of Zeus every so often. (Not that they owe us anything... ;-)

(Edit: it's also damned impressive for 2 people in 3-4 months.)
By "professionally offended", I assume you mean mostly marginalized people who are the recipients of torrents of abuse/death threats/rape threats/sexual harrassment/etc nearly every day they are active on twitter.
The Saudis are doing it not just to counter Iran - they also have to compete with South American, Canadian, American, and Russian oil. They've increased the volume of production to keep the prices artificially low in order to squeeze all of those players out of the market. It's also why Russia has a vested interest to act in Syria, propping up the Assad regime - to keep their oil under the control of an entity friendly to their interests.
So at the end you finally acknowledge that what really matters is how other people actually feel. Thanks for confirming.
Your comment is accurate, but you need supporting messages for it to be an actual argument.

The Times has an article about a nine year old boy, already blind in one eye, being given as laser pointer by his parents as a toy. The child damaged his working eye, and the parents felt comfortable enough in their own actions to speak to a national newspaper about it.

Edit: Times version is paywalled, but here's Daily Mail:

> Nine-year-old William Jackson was injured two years ago by one of three devices bought for him and his two brothers by their parents as a Christmas present.

> The schoolboy, who is now 12, already had a lazy right eye and wore an eye patch. The injury to his other eye left him unable to read.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3393159/Laser-pens-b...

Times paywall URL: http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/uk_news/National/ar...
Considering Photoshop just erased an entire folder of files, it can hardly be called non-destructive. You're basically at the mercy of Adobe to not mess up and not delete everything when "the cloud" updates. The workflow being slightly more convenient doesn't matter at this point.
Why do people keep saying this? I thought it was agreed on that production had already gone up a lot months ago due to fracking and now due to Iran. Many posters also seem to completely ignore the supply side of the equation. Why?
Nuked my 8 year old buckets 'o karma reddit account last week, felt brilliant.
In Toronto it is based on assessed value. You get a letter each year with a fairly conservative estimate of the value of your home, and your tax is a flat percentage based on the line item in the budget (city, education and transit).
Calculator: http://wx.toronto.ca/inter/fin/tax.nsf/tax?openform
I think this is a tricky problem to properly solve. Or rather: An opportunity for Twitter to really mess up attempting to fix this.

A big part of what makes Twitter interesting/worthwhile is the ability to interact with lots of different people you wouldn't have stumbled upon.

But also, especially when you're just starting out on Twitter, people you otherwise wouldn't have been able to get through to.

On Twitter I get to have a conversation with someone famous (in the industry but even bona fide celebrities like the author). People who I could never send an email, letter, call and actually get a response. On Twitter, I have a really good chance someone like Stephen Fry will actually read my tweet and even responding. I'm guessing the odds I'd be able to get him on the phone or have him accept my Facebook friend request are rather low.

If Twitter builds a filter bubble around all famous/verified users, it loses a big chunk of it's a appeal to the nobodies. Which includes both trolls and decent people. And I think Twitter can't do without the civilized nobodies.
When I was studying, I went to two schools, one using semester system and one using quarter system.

With the semester system I had plenty of time to read the material and really explore the mathematics behind what I was learning. With the quarter system I was so busy running around and catching up in different classes that I never really had the time available to sit down and do that. It sucked. I think the quarter system kind of 'beat' the interest out of me because now it is hard to get back into that state of mind.

semester > quarter :(
The problem isn't that this is a Twitter problem. It's that this is a cultural problem. People kinda suck. People kinda suck a lot.

I was having a conversation with a friend at lunch, when I started putting ketchup on my hotdog. He looked at me and incredulously questioned, "really? What are you, like, 8 years old?" I had never even heard of the idea that "only children put ketchup on a hotdog." Yet here was someone I had originally thought of as a rational human being elevating it to a serious issue.

A lot of this stuff gets defended as "just a joke", but I don't see anyone laughing. If you're so bad at making jokes, maybe you should just give up the practice and stick to being generally pleasant to be around.

I guess I'm lucky that I'm not famous enough to get any randos following me on Twitter. The people who follow me are interested in my work, they aren't hero-worshipping me. I get to have excellent conversations with people on Twitter. But that is only because--even though it's not 100% in my control--my lack of celebrity allows me to guide and design my Twitter sphere. For a celebrity, they just get inundated with folks they don't want to hear from.

Just read the replies to Notch's tweets sometime. I'm surprised he hasn't become a complete recluse. Almost every single one has some 13 year old complaining about "Minecraft sucks now that you're gone", even though he's been gone longer than they've been playing it.
Flickr killed Pro several years ago, removed restrictions on the Free tier, offered paid options to go ad-free or add a second TB of storage, then later killed those options and brought back Pro as stats and no ads.

Flickr's free tier is no longer low. What their audience is these days, who the hell knows.
Stereotypically, it's the woman, not the man, who falls for the silly marketing trick.
In-fighting within communities is one of reddit's biggest problems.
I guess they should probably amputate all four of my limbs, seeing as how I have an amateur MMA record /s
But are the values of the participants really the goals of a free market economy and what it leads to? I think absolutely not - it's earning as much money as possible.

The things we actually see as good are just side effects. Free market systems work well, seem fair most of the time and have lots of positive side effects. However they also have negative side effects and I don't think participants alone can really avoid them. There are some cases of executives later on regretting that they couldn't act in another way because they had to keep shareholder value in mind.

That's why we have regulation in our actual economic systems. Of course views on what has to be regulated and how widely differ, but this is where our morality comes into the economic system (and all the other rules that act as a counter-measurement for the cases where free market economy isn't working).
Yes, that was the solution I sketched out in my last paragraph. Do any databases actually do this?
Because nowadays there are tools just to make sure the tools are making the tools that monitor the tools are monitoring the tools correctly.

In short: there's a web app for seemingly everything nowadays, but devs stick to mailing lists. In my opinion, mailing lists are very old school, not the easiest to wade/search through and most new programmers are baffled by them (or at least by how to post to them).

You could argue, though, that most new people just use things like StackOverflow nowadays...
> to be offended on behalf of others they do not even know

Never thought about it like this before. Sounds really strange when you put it this way.
You might also check out spaced repetition software. I've started putting anything I want to remember for the long haul into org-drill, an SRS package for Emacs, though Anki and Mnemosyne are more well known. I even schedule articles that I want to return to.
Soundbites created by speech writers other than themselves, for that matter.
> You can't choose your followers

Can't you? I thought protected feeds were a thing (wherein subscribers would need the account holder's permission to follow / view their tweets)?
This is not a common programming mistake to make at all, I'd also say it has everything to do about being invasive. The EVE reference you mentioned was 9 years ago for a video game in an early release stage.
How many false positives would you be willing to put up with before you left a platform altogether?
the AI and law movement began more than 40 years ago. There's an AI and law journal, a bi-annual international conference (ICAIL) and tons of other work (such as LDRI from the UK National Archives and the automated legal reasoning research from Stanford, CMU, and MIT.

http://sites.sandiego.edu/icail/
Leaving PHP is too expensive
The article is from the UK, the ban call comes from the British Airline Pilots Association.
> Well knives are banned.

I'm surprised. You can't own a kitchen knife? Or a hunting knife? Or pocket
knife?
Oh I see. Still sounds mad to me though, I mean what's the alternative appending something like

> or, you are under 18, and not to blame for your illegal residency

to citizenship requirements?
>> writing programs is actually equivalent to doing a mathematical proof

> Only in the sense that writing in brainfuck is equivalent to writing in Python...

Actually, in the very concrete sense that a program is a proof for the forumala that is equivalent to its type[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry–Howard_correspondence
To be fair, GPU vendors sucked up a ton too.

But considering that optimized scalar code performance has moved, what, maybe 40% over the last two decades, I'm going to say "not much". Compilers are sexy, but they're very much a solved problem. If we were all forced to get by with the optimized performance we saw from GCC 2.7.2, I think we'd all survive. Most of us wouldn't even notice the change.
Prosecution based on such information has been done frequently in the past. Basic geometry convicted a man near me about 6 years ago for shining a green laser pointer at a pilot taking off at a local air force base.

Don't shine lasers at pilots from your backyard.
In addition to the points mentioned by others, for PDE based codes like this we have the very powerful "method of manufactured solutions".

http://projecte-hermes.upc.edu/Optatives/B%20-%20Analysis%20...
Yes, but then those who don't enjoy that infighting can, and often do, leave and form their own.
I have a theory about FB and Twitter -- or maybe more of an observation. Anyway, back in the stone age, people had bumper stickers with little slogans on them. And in the break rooms of various places of work, there was always a bulletin board an on a corner of it there was always some faded-from-to-many-xeroxes bit of humor/racism/sports fandom/sexism/dirty joke or other us-vs.-them thing on it that people would look at and amuse themselves with.

Now thanks to Twitter and FB, these little types of tribal territorial markings are just about all that's left of public discourse.

I see things get passed around and think, 20 years ago this would have been mimeographed and hung on a break room bulletin board, where it might have acted as a crude conversation starter about some aspect of "who are we?". But now people consider sharing and liking these things as their /contribution/ to a conversation.

It's like the way that millennials communicate with emoji, except it's image macros and memes and slogans and "gotchas" and hot takes that we consume, copy, and share. The copying and sharing of all that stuff is what passes for discourse now.

Me, I think that this development is double-plus bad.
Show HN: Yargs 4.0 released
Indeed, I joined 9 days after you (and have within 1% of your karma (!)), and my experience is the same. HN was founded with a keen awareness of how online forums tend to go downhill over time, and there are specific rules to avoid it.

But IMHO, the saving grace is the fact that HN is not built to grow. Growth is what ruins every online community. There are still plenty of small communities have have been going fine for years or even decades because they didn't experience explosive growth. As soon as you have something like Twitter with massive investment and market expectations, you know the community is done for. To Twitter's credit though, the mechanic of following individuals does scale much better than a forum though. Subreddits were also a good idea that allows some community while scaling. But in both those cases it works because they create sub-divided communities rather than one massive one which inevitably breaks down.