skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"A better recruiting model IMO would be to recruit people on short-term contracts (e.g. 6 months) with the contractual agreement that the worker will transition to a permanent job at the end of the 6 months providing their performance is inline with expectation."

That already exists. And it leads to abuse of those contract workers, because they think that if they bust themselves just a little bit more, they'll have that carrot (the job). But they're so burnt out at the end of the contract period, and the employer inevitably says "No", and then brings in a new class of fresh faced hopefuls.
Christian Science Monitor's new project to provide more positive takes on news
Is there any reason to use PIC instead of ARM at this point? You can get similarly priced dev boards for Cortex M0 microcontrollers.
> Returns it has to find, otherwise you lose out due to inflation.

That's my concern really. Money is running out of places to go.

* stocks (overbought)

* real estate (still recovering from the last failure; already overbought in major markets)

* auto loans (I hear murmurs we're in a subprime auto lending bubble)

* oil (obvious!)

If you're chasing returns, and you can't beat inflation (because you can't find those returns), your cash is slowly becoming worthless.
Note my concern isn't because I have cash to invest: its because of the damage that rush of money has as it races into new "investment opportunities".
Greed of Glory Hack Tool 2016 No Survey
Often stories of this sort are used to advocate a more permissive immigration policy, particularly toward those from Mexico and South America who have entered the US illegally seeking economic opportunity.

Rational arguments seldom make their way into this discussion, if it can be called that.

On the one side we have the empathetic liberals, who in many cases ultimately wish to see the complete abolition of national borders and global inequality. Joining them are corporations, which want abundant labor in order to reduce the costs of employment.

On the other, we have low-skilled citizens, who don't wish to see their quality of life reduced by admitting large numbers of people willing to work for very little. Along with them are those concerned about the political and cultural consequences of admitting a massive, homogeneous, and very different group of people into their homeland. There are probably some racists among the group, though probably far fewer than the other side often claim.

Whichever side you find yourself on, I think the following must be admitted:

1) The ordinary citizen currently in the United States will likely experience a decline in quality of life as a result of a permissive immigration policy.

2) Massive economic migration to rich countries from poor ones is not a solution to the problem of global economic inequality or poverty.

3) Historical instances of immigration, colonialism, and invasion do not justify or necessitate permissive immigration policies in the present day.
False assumption in a proof?
I think there can exist a perhaps rarer beast that values BOTH perfection and viability.

What this one does is keep his/her obsessive-compulsive eye on what is the perfect goal, knowing full well it may never be reached, then she turns to making the process itself perfect -- where a perfect process is defined as this: perfectly viable while maintaining a minimal distance to the perfect goal.
I've been really liking PHP lately. PHP 7 has awesome new features and performance improvements. Of course, PHP isn't right for every application, but I feel like PHP needs to be taken more seriously, compared to Ruby and Python, for large-scale applications, and fast-response web services.

It's hard to break an old stigma.. but.. PHP7 is NOTHING like PHP4, and a LOT better than PHP5.x.
That's a very illuminating analogy.

Users of high-level languages, typically do not think about what the compiler is doing, and if in fact they do not know the compiler action--often the only way to find out is by reading the compilers source code.

This is akin to looking a math paper seeing "it trivially follows..." and your only recourse to find out why it so trivially follows is to get a mathematics degree.
NASA / JPL put out some beautiful stuff. I used one of their space images from http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/ as the background for a small game I made a year or so ago.
Yes, it's a human dynamic. In other spheres of interaction we've evolved mechanisms to cope.

I wrote about this a few years ago[0]. But for the day to day situation, Stephen Fry has made the sensible choice. There's no point drinking from a well people keep re-poisoning.

[0] http://chester.id.au/2013/03/22/why-the-law-is-slow-imperson...
that could also be the case. Or the increase could be a combination of changes in supply and changes in demand.
Pixelmator ($30) is a much more usable alternative on OS X
Thanks for the share, that was a very illuminating read (accidental pun).

As an aside, why do they all spell laser as "l@ser"? There's 3 instances of "laser", two are from the title repeated, and one is in the body. This means that that the common spelling is not banned or masked on that forum. Yet everyone else spells it with the @ sign, about 79 times, which is egregious.
Is there really no official press release from Adobe?
The site completely breaks the back button
because people don't exist on a continuum of smart and dumb.
I've been accused of being sexist exactly once in my life, by an anonymous male friend of a woman on Twitter because I dared to answer a question she asked. I didn't realize she was asking in jest. Her friend said I should have known that she was a very knowledgeable person (I didn't) and her question was a joke, and because I answered it I was implying that she didn't know the answer and therefore was manspainling and generally being a sexist dick. This person wasn't satisfied and pursued me for several tweets until I apologized. I did apologize, but I've noticed that it kind of soured me on Twitter. I'm proud of my record of working women in tech and raising an independent daughter. I use my real name on Twitter and I don't need some anonymous busybody attacking me in public for dubious reasons. Perhaps if Twitter had a real name policy it would level the playing field. I'm sure a famous person like Stephen Fry is under constant attack from anonymous trolls.
Cheap money. Plenty of people have had years to buy assets with cheaply borrowed money. The Fed increased interest rates, people started to unwind their positions in oil and the stock market, that sets off a self reinforcing cycle that pushes prices lower forcing more people to sell in order to break even or limit losses.
Doing more with less: the economic lesson of Peak Paper
> But HNers aren't.

So? The article's context is the UK.

> I was quite surprised seeing someone say matter-of-factly that knives are banned until I recalled this weird UK law

Welcome to being most of the world every day of the week?
Half of all people are below 'median' intelligence :P
> Projecting their l33tness, which literally no one cares about or wants to here.

On the contrary: I showed that the original author of the submission was projecting the main premesis of his article.

And I showed how subjective projection is absolutely meaningless at any scale above yourself, by sharing my own projection of the same thing.

Basically how this was an utter rubbish article.

I think it was quite successful and absolutely demonstrated my point beyond my wildest expectations.
> The point of the posted link is that worse is better than nothing.

No, that's inaccurate.

For instance, one example the article used to support WiB was that x86 (a CISC architecture) beat out RISC architectures. There were many RISC architectures: MIPS, SPARC, DEC Alpha, PA-RISC. So it's not a case of worse is better than nothing. x86 won against real competition, because it took advantage of evolutionary pressures.
Is the point of this article is that hosting non-php sites is too expensive or difficult? That really isn't true.

If you just need to get a LAMP stack there's thousands of inexpensive options. If you want to something free and scalable like heroku, openshift would work.
http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1999-15054-002

Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.
Combine this with stories that rise to prominence based on a limited set of facts, distorted truths, or outright lies, and it's particularly pernicious. That people are instantly willing to offer the absolute worst wishes (and actions) they can muster, on a few words posted over a picture, and personally involve themselves in something they know NOTHING about is disheartening.
Yes. Extraordinary people are significantly less common than ordinary ones. Therefore, admitting large numbers of people indiscriminately will result in admitting significantly larger numbers of ordinary people. Perhaps I was wrong to say "many" orders of magnitude, but other than that I stand by the remark.
Thanks for putting this together. I think you did a great job summarizing and explaining things. I've bookmarked this so I can go back and review.
I think this is interesting from a legal perspective, and quite impressive.
HIV-1 treatment and mutations
I think you would need to invest quite a bit in bodyguards for that scheme to work.
> kids these days are just stupid and don't have any interesting thoughts to convey.

It's not kids these days, it's always been like this for everyone.
We disagree (and I get the impression this is the root of much strife) on the definition of the word "safe" in "safe space".

Safe from what? From having your views challenged? From someone calling you an asshat? From people making non-credible threats (Think navy seal copypasta)? From people making legitimate threats?

Talk to 10 different people and all will have different definitions as to what the meaning is there.
Love work like this.

Somewhat related, I also love these vintage posters of planetary missions by the Chop Shop Store.

http://www.chopshopstore.com/collections/space-exploration-t...
I'm surprised to hear that, considering the story on HN the other day about how educated woman don't marry down. It seems a non-insignificant number of people want to partner with and befriend those of the same or higher intelligence.

Anecdotally, I gravitate towards above average intelligence people for friendships and romantic relationships.

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/07/06/has-being-si...
One of the best things a person can do with their intelligence is try and understand the perspective of other people.
Because you live a different life than they do, they have experiences you don't and they know things you wont.

Doesn't mean you should uncritically accept their ideas, but it does mean you should at least give them some weight.
> Erlang is one of those languages that is objectively superior -- I've yet to meet another language that does concurrency right-- yet many hackers just ignore it because it's not got java's syntax. Which is silly.

What do you think about Elixir?
I agree, branding and style would be important. Having a celebrity or two use for their engagement wouldn't hurt, either.

I think you'd want it to work kind of like a cashier's check. If you have the ring and your identification matches what's on file, then cashing out your investment is easy. If you've lost the ring or you're not the primary on the account, there are delays (of perhaps months) but cashing out is still possible.
Take a look at what was actually said:

"Only one of the great cinematic costume designers would come to the awards dressed like a bag lady."

If people weren't so quick to jump on the "blame the white guy" wagon... you'd see that it was actually a pretty clever statement.
> I left Twitter last year when it looked like the 'professionally offended' were becoming too influential.

Unfortunately, it's not only Twitter where radfems and other (insert favorite swear word here) grab a stranglehold on public conversations. It's mass media too.
Did you just suggest we send a hellfire missile after someone shining a laser pointer at a plane?
A casual perusal of the comments on any popular youtube video will disabuse you of this.
Understanding the bias-variance tradeoff
You may be right, but without references this is just a content-free sneer.
How to Better Use Twitter
Not even Lenovo's behavior -- their build quickly has tanked. My 13mo laptop's hinge is cracked and bowing.
I guess i'm a 'right thing' developer.

I'm sure there are multiple constraints besides economic viability that could drive you to seek the 'right thing.'

I've noticed there are two types of developers: those that find fighting fires rewarding and enjoy the accolades that come with 'saving the day' and those that find fighting fires punishing, and that perceive requests to fix code in a hurry to be an intrusion.

I'm going to call them 'extrovert' and 'introvert' programmers.

I am an introvert programmer, and for me the 'right thing' has always meant code that I can put in production and forget about.

I also believe that introverts are in the minority, which means that when on a team introverts have to fight fires along with all the extroverts, even though their own code runs mostly without incident.
Nice work, Fil. Looks cool.
Gomanthakam (ഗോമന്തകം)
It’s not a takeover – it was a takeover when the trademark was used to force everyone to fork.

But the majority of the project, the people owning the servers, technology, coding the most part, etc – those were the ones renaming to libav.
Mobile web, app, or device?
Oh, well played sir!
Alternate view:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_over_inheritance
Also German, Ukrainian, Romanian, and Dutch, and, if you count speakers who are geographically outside of Europe together with those inside it, Turkish.
It wasn't capitalism that co-opted communities, it was the end product of modern politics which strives to play people against each other to maintain the power of those who govern. By subtle and some not so subtle phrasing they can turn people into irrational actors which makes them all the more easy to manipulate. There have been some really good areas for the technically inclined to congregate that were destroyed with politically driven conversations took over.
Edison didn't figure out how to draw tungsten. Edison figured out a way to make a cheap lamp without tungsten.

Frederick de Moleyns, who invented the electric light bulb in 1841, had the right idea - use a metal wire with a really high melting point. He used platinum. Worked, but cost far too much. Edison and Swan figured out how to make a cheap electric light bulb, using carbonized paper. There was a long detour through various forms of carbonized cellulose, including paper, bamboo, and extruded cellulose. Bulb life was short and efficiency was low, but it worked. Then there was a brief detour into tantalum wire around 1902. Finally, Coolidge's process for making ductile tungsten wire was developed at General Electric, and thin tungsten wire could not only be made, but worked easily. Filaments could be coiled up into compact forms. Ductile tungsten lamps came out in 1908. That was it. Incandescent lamps didn't change much over the next century.

[1] https://archive.org/stream/menandvoltsstory00hammrich/menand...
Not everyone deserves a microphone. Yet as an industry, we have built billions of them. (Comment sections, including this one, are the place to start when thinking about that.)
Heroku's free tier seems to be built for hobby or small scale projects.

All it requires is that your application not receive traffic for at least 6 hours per day and have less than 10,000 rows in the database.

Granted it is easy to go past these limits, but it is also very easy not to. Lots of school projects have no need for this. Most hobby sites really don't need to be up 24/7. Generally, if you aren't making money from it, you have to question: does it need to be live 100% of the time? If not, then Heroku is great and you pay $0.
True, but on the other hand this seems something useful to keep researching.
They had me. That video made everything look so polished.

I was about to pull the trigger when I did a bit of digging and I can't get past the cloud processing. Not that I would need to use the engraver offline regularly, but that is a concern. It's also concerning that they could develop some sort of DRM that inspected what I was wanting to "print" and not process it.
Most of the cheap mass hosts support basically everything else in addition to PHP. The world where shared hosting only supported PHP ended quite some time ago.
> ridiculously large TIFFs

These are oddly not available for "51 Pegasi b" and beyond though. Only PDFs for those.
And in a normal distribution--which measured attributes like height, IQ, and birth weight typically have--median, mean, and mode are all the same.
Don't Work Alone (Excerpted from DEEP WORK by Cal Newport)
If we applied this to traffic laws, people would insist upon traffic laws that better reflect the way they wish to drive.
What?!?

Masses usually act like morons. That's a well known phenomenon, old enough to become jokes in movies, and the entire audience (a mass) to get it.

When people are acting smartly, they each do different things, and don't form a mass at all.
I've seen this mainly with non-native English speakers. It may have migrated from there too.
hm. i started using python instead of php as soon as i discovered web.py.

>'Leaving PHP is too expensive'

seems the opposite in my experience.
Personally I don't think there's any such thing as 'irreconcilable differences'. The idea of secession in that instance kinda scares me because it leaves you with a new foriegn nation on your doorstep with the exact same set of 'irreconcilable' differences and nobody to moderate them.

Seemingly irreconcilable differences (e.g. US rep/dem, Israel/Palestine) are created by the narratives we're fed & let fester. Sure, narratives are elusive and sticky, but they're just narratives.

In the past that's sometimes taken a global-scale event; like how the horrors of the Nazis swept away any remaining support for eugenics. Other times it's been smaller; like how Stetson Kennedy undermined support for the KKK by exposing its schoolboy ritualism to ridicule in a radio show.

Change the narrative, maybe starting with your own. Whoever the "other side" are; humanise them, don't demonise them. Be the bigger person. Admit that your own perspective on things isn't 100% bulletproof (because nobody's is).

Of course, if you disagree and want to win the argument you could always bring up Trump... I don't have an answer to that.
If ffplay supported hardware decoding, it'd be the perfect player. You could not make a more minimal player. It does not, and it doesn't seem to be high on the priority list, rather in last position perhaps.

https://trac.ffmpeg.org/ticket/3359
Another reason for "censorship", particularly on Reddit (where the aim goes against the broader cultural default of the site) is to prevent discussions from being overrun by memes and other "low-effort" posts. Most /r/science posts that make the front page end up with a lot of deleted comments, for example.
Cool abstraction, but would love to see actual code implementation.
It's not really about blame though, surely, it's just about upholding the law.

The child of an illegal immigrant is there illegally, they're not to blame, but they're illegal residency surely shouldn't be supported.

An analogy might be distributing inheritance evenly, because "children shouldn't be blamed for what their parents did [and how much they made doing it]".

Some people might argue we should do that... but even they'd surely agree it's pretty extreme.

Just seems like a rather ambivalent relationship with immigration law to me. But hey, that's just my outsider's point of view!
The other day my friend's pet died, and they put a status update on Facebook. Blow me down if they didn't get 5 sympathetic likes!
What is the web stack behind it? It's really nice.
Show HN: Placeboard – App to remember and share places built with coreobject.org
Star+Wars:+The+Force+Awakens
Keechma: new Reagent based micro-framework
Probably cheaper to just implant a memory instead.
Either YouTube shuts off API access or they get hit with a lawsuit. Nonetheless, this is a very cool idea and excellent execution!
Totally agree. PHP7's speed is awesome. And the service that the author points out (Laravel Forge) provisions VPSes with PHP7.

The author is totally right about Forge, I have never EVER had a better provisioning experience.
This is a terrible clickbait title (currently "Ten years ago they beat MIT. Today, it's complicated")
It's deplorable. I follow Adobe on Twitter and pay attention to various sites. I heard about the problem from BackBlaze.

Absolutely 100% unacceptable. Massive props to the BackBlaze team for handling Adobe's shitstorm so well.
The obvious answer: because if you're wise, you realize that raw intelligence is a fairly small part of what makes someone worth listening to on a given question. On most questions of morals or politics, I'd rather listen to someone of average intelligence, but with a humble, good and patient character, than an MIT grad who's convinced they know everything.
Can't it just be a 'list' of Postgres stuff? Do we really expect that it's generated by an algorithm if someone doesn't write 'curated'? If it's a good list, I'm going to find it interesting no matter how it was created.
It seems like there is a general trend that very strong expressions get watered down over time, and we invent new expressions to replace them.
Percieved same or higher intelligence.
Branching reality with Datomic
FB also decides who your real friends are. You normally only see posts from the friends you interact with most.
This is how people get shipped to ovens.

"Just executing the law, bro"
You can do the same for even less money and with any language - $5/mo digitalocean box and a quick hack ansible script to deploy. Maybe if you really don't understand the ops side of things you won't like even writing a little ansible script, but heck, I'd do it just to save $14/mo over this guy's scheme. I think understanding the ops side of things on your own small scale sites is quite useful sometimes though.
What is that concept called? What other languages support it? (The fact that PHP doesn't require an instance of a runtime.)
Show HN: Laboratory, a Python port of GitHub's Scientist library for refactoring
This may very well be true (I haven't written PHP since the era of 4/5-beta), but it's probably going to be a lot like Java in the sense that the older devs scarred from Java 1.0 - 1.5 basically want nothing to do with it anymore and rant and rave about the language despite the language and ecosystem evolving considerably.
I agree with this. I like Stephen Fry too, but I think his public persona of being this loveable gentleman of the people - entertaining, eccentric, erudite - quite often clashes with his tendency to make either silly or spiteful remarks in public; and the difference between Fry and the people who make their living from saying horrible things (eg. comedians in Britain like Jimmy Carr or Frankie Boyle) is that 1) there's an expectation that these people will say horrible things periodically; and 2) they can take the abuse when it's dished back to them.

(I personally very much enjoy James Blunt's approach to Twitter.)