skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not very knowledgeable in history but I find this interesting:
In his book, "We Are Not The First (Riddles of Ancient Science)", Andrew Tomas argued for a possible knowledge of the existence of other continents, particularly North America, by the ancients.
He writes:
"Plato must have been cognizant of the great size of our globe, and of other continents, because he said in Phaedo that the Mediterranean people occupied 'only a small portion of the earth'.
'Besides the world we inhabit, there may be one or more other worlds peopled by beings different from ourselves,' wrote Strabo (1st century BC). He even mentioned that if the parallel of Athens were extended westward---across the Atlantic, these other races might live there in the temperate zone, clearly alluding to North America.
...
Did the scholars of antiquity know about America?
Seneca (1st century), the tragedian, confirms this supposition by his famous verse in the Medea:
There shall come a time
When the bands of Ocean
Shall be loosened,
And the vast Earth shall be laid open,
Another Tiphys shall disclose new worlds,
And lands shall be seen beyond Thules.

New lands 'beyond Thules', or Iceland, could be nothing but Greenland and North America."

That's inspiring. So, before the Vikings, the New World wasn't an impossibility. It was in fact as old as any other point on Earth.
Academic journals' price gouging is despicable
"Good Job" is an oxymoron
No. This is true for colocated, but absolutely false for dedicated.
Trump is considered racist for wanting to secure the borders. Both parties leadership, made up of out of touch elites, have decided that illegal immigration is good for their interests, voters be damned. Dems need to have more people on gov assistance and the GOP wants cheap labor with no rights. I dislike Trump but if both sides are demonizing him then he is probably on the right track.
It reminds me of something Neil deGrasse Tyson once pointed out. You or I might not stoop down to pick up a nickel off the floor, because it's not worth it. But maybe we would for a quarter. As a fraction of a decent middle class salary, a quarter is worth picking up. A similar fraction of Bill Gates wealth is worth about $35,000.

For some people, what's big money for you or me is small change.
The first version of Reddit, after 3 weeks of programming
Which is why it's so odd that she doesn't want to discuss race, which like economic class is merely a first-order approximation of social class.

In general, of course, I find the idea of announcing 'derailing' topics to be ridiculous, meaning something like, 'here are my thoughts on a topic: you are free to talk about your thoughts in these related areas, but not those related areas, because I don't want you to, and will consider you rude.' It feels childish to me.
The truth of the essay is illustrated by studies that show lower social mobility over longer generational windows, i.e. ones grandfather's income quintile is a better predictor of ones owns than ones fathers's. The intangible cultural inheritance of social class is more lasting than fluctuations in material wealth.
This court decision is a result of the change of law that in part was motivated to happened to get piracy back in 2005. When it was amended there were many, many more restrictions placed on digital distribution than before. The law in question explicitly say "Artwork can be depicted if contained in a collection or catalogue, but not in digital form". So a book detailing famous art is allowed, but a website doing the same is not.

This also means it is not illegal to post Facebook photos with a statue. Since clearly that is not a database, just a random photo.

The paragraph in question: https://lagen.nu/1960:729#P24S1]

And the full law: http://rinfo.stage.lagrummet.se//publ/sfs/2005:359/pdf,sv

(This law - 2005:359 - is also the law that added the "data tax" in Sweden of 0,4 kronor per MB.)
This is a bad case of "the grass is greener on the other side...".

I learned long ago never to chase the money. Do what you enjoy and you will never work a day in your life. Obviously, life is never quite this simple and in any job you will have periods when you do not enjoy some aspects, but the point is, do what makes you happy, follow your bliss.

Of course there is another point to this the author does not seem to be considering, just because you go into management, does not mean necessarily you will be good at it, or be prepared to do the things that might be needed to get ahead. For example can you fire a friend just because it is what is best for the company? You get good managers and you get bad managers. Good managers can make a lot of money but there is no guarantee he would have made a good manager.
I've been developing game scripts with Lua and I've professional Javascript experience so I'm familiar with both. I actually find Javascript way more readable and easier to work with in general, especially with the new additions. I mean, it's yet another anecdote but just wanted to share.
> > The ban on smoking in restaurants – which, let me be clear, I am wildly in favor of, being someone who can't patronize a business with cigarette smoking in it

> Can't? Given that tobacco smoke contains no allergens, methinks the mot juste would be 'won't.'

I cannot speak for the author, but my asthma is severe enough that indoor cigarette smoke (or being in the home of a smoker) is sufficient to cause discomfort.
I'm sure that you are not getting a lot of upvotes for that comment, but you hit the nail on the head regarding programming being the translation layer between entropy of the real world and automated efficiency of computers. That is a very valuable service, but there are implications as to how this profession evolves long-term.

My most fulfilling and interesting career stories were about listening to people and reading their needs between the lines, un-kinking silly workflow knots, finding non-tech solutions to seemingly technical problems. Not constructing pristine castles of code (that ended up not even being used, ultimately).

This is also why I have tried very hard to define my identity around my general values and mission as a human being rather a specific career choice I serendipitously rolled into when I was 15. It has been very gratifying and liberating as a change of worldview.
I would not bet that West African technology in the Middle Ages was leagues ahead of West African technology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mali_Empire

Viking ships weren't that advanced. What they could do was navigate at sea better than their contemporaries, incredibly fierce armies that understood the phalanx, and by far most importantly, ships that were both seaworthy (for short spells), and had a shallow draft, which allowed them to sale up rivers.

The Mali Empire left written records, clearly had more seaworthy ships, and some strange ambition with regard to the Atlantic. These are the basic undisputed facts.

Then there are the Mali expeditions into the Atlantic. Consider,

"The last Kolonkan ruler, Bata Manding Bory Keita, was crowned Mansa Abubakari Keita II in 1310. He continued the non-militant style of rule that characterized Gao and Mohammed ibn Gao Keita, but was interested in the empire's western sea.

According to an account given by Mansa Musa Keita I, who during the reign of Abubakari Keita II served as the mansa's kankoro-sigui, Mali sent two expeditions into the Atlantic.

Mansa Abubakari Keita II left Musa Keita as regent of the empire, demonstrating the stability of this period in Mali, and departed with the second expedition commanding some 4,000 pirogues equipped with both oars and sails in 1311.

Neither the emperor nor any of the ships returned to Mali. Modern historians and scientists are skeptical about the success of either voyage, but the account of these happenings is preserved in both written North African records and the oral records of Mali's djelis."

There's also very odd sculptures from around that time that suggest cross-pollination of native culture with African and Arab cultural practices, including ear-shaping and gauge earrings, which made widespread appearances in the Mali Empire and South America in the same time period. (1200-1300)

The Mali Empire also had far larger ocean-going vessels, more knowledge of celestial navigation (although not the semi-mythical "sun stone" technology), and wrote down epics that seem every bit as credible as the Viking sagas.

Someday I suspect we'll identify little dots of attempted colonies by various cultures in North America. I remember when the Viking visits were considered "racist myths."
Nigeria plans to send an astronaut to space by 2030
Geography plays a huge role in determining social classes and the perceptions of them. It also influences spending habits.[1]

In New York, for example, it has been shown that people across the income spectrum there will pay more than the national average for shoes and watches. New York is very wealthy and urban, so you are always walking and being seen in your shoes (and checking the time) and it confers a sense of class. The more people think about the quality of their footwear, the more they will be concerned with keeping up appearances. Even poor New Yorkers spend a higher part of their income on shoes than most poor Americans.

Contrast this with, say, San Francisco. The shaggy-looking dude in jeans and a Hard Rock Cafe t-shirt could be a multimillionaire, you'd never know. But it is more likely than not that the given individual is physically fit. It's always bikini season in California, whereas New York's long and snowy winters allow for big meals and bigger coats. The more fit people you encounter, the more you will be concerned with your and other's fitness, because it is more readily on your mind. ("It's warm and sunny all year round and you don't even jog or bike? Get off your ass."). Consequently, the Bay Area sees a disproportionate amount of income spent on health clubs.

[1] The New York Times had an excellent Op-Ed from a few years back, called: "What People Buy Where" http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/12/14/opinion/sunday/what-peo...
Point is there are exceptions, but they are just that, exceptions. While I'd agree that mental induction into a field does happen, that unlike in many fields, law enforcement has a very primal nature, and many that take on this domain are predoposed to it; within nature, the domain would be the relationship between predators and their prey.
I share the sentiment that there are plenty of products going the subscription route without any meaningful justification. However, one argument the author doesn't account for is the increasing prevalence of apps that involve cloud services - which, even in the case of something lightweight like a sync mechanism, will still incur ongoing costs for existing users indefinitely. This situation does go some way to justifying subscription pricing - though plenty of apps use subscription pricing without any cloud involvement (looking at you Parallels).

That said, one counterpoint to this is that too much software depends on the cloud unnecessarily - in many cases there's no need to use the cloud, what the user wants to do should be perfectly possible locally and therefore the lack of any ongoing expense would remove the need/justification for subscription pricing.

Edit: Here's a perfectly timed example of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11439001
..and Andy Warhol turns in his grave.
It's fun to note that British royal family have a direct line of descent from Rollo in Vikings. And Vlad the Impaler.
Yeah, the overloading on "left" is definitely an issue here. I agree the Jacobin types are much more likely to have some self-awareness here (though I've unfortunately met a cluster of counterexamples).
no one has any view on this?
Buildings are explicitly from the law banning databases of depictions. So Street View for example would not be affected (or any photo of a unique building).
React Authentication Is Easy with Auth0
I made a similar choice, now at 45 years, have not been unhappy at all. My last few jobs i've actually removed experience from my resume, and applied for jobs that pay less than what my experience could demand (i don't NEED six figures) and it's worked out very well. I still enjoy programming and working with new technology, less responsibility, more time for the things i enjoy working on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjvazX03EOU
is there someone who can share some hints?
Money buys time and freedom and security.
No. The law in question explicitly allows depictions of building, they are seen as separate from artwork.
How to Use Let's Encrypt SSL Certificates with Heroku and AWS CloudFront
Not my point. What isn't available to everyone is the sheer amount of real life images that Facebook has access to, which people are uploading of their lives as we speak. You could get an unprecedented view of almost anyone's life from that, seeing as users have past the 1 billion mark, and it's all in the hands of a company who sells your data for profit.
> It might even just be the case of a vocal minority of people who think everyone else doesn't work as hard as them.

I worked in a grocery store (in the US) back in the day. People complained about the smallest stuff -- that I wasn't as conversational as they wanted, or that I wouldn't process their coupons in the order that they expected, or even in one case that I wouldn't help them steal from the store.

Maybe 1 in 10 complaints I received was even remotely close to something a sane human would be even mildly inconvienanced by (and even for those I can't imagine ever caring enough to spend my free time complaining to a grocery store manager). It wasn't just me or just that store; management had an entire formal process passed down from the corporate office for figuring out which complaints should contribute to evaluations and which were spurious. I never had less than 10 complaints per quarter and only two of those were mentioned in my evaluations over a several year period. Other cashiers had similar numbers. Interestingly, friends who worked at non-grocery-stores encountered these sorts of things far less often.

I'll never understand the psychological reasons for why people behave like this. It's probably the same reason people troll. But I do wonder whether it's a US-specific phenomenon wrt grocery stores specifically.
There is also a book of the same name. It's very thought provoking.
Like you, I don't think the author of the blog post wanted money or power for their own sake. Relevant to your final paragraph: People Want Power Because They Want Autonomy [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11340137
I would love for "happy" to win in this market and would settle for it staying in the game.
The Web Bluetooth Security Model
A post on why the bandit is not better: https://vwo.com/blog/multi-armed-bandit-algorithm/
The thing is, you "tried some other options - teacher, artist, entrepreneur". I think "trying" is the key. It helps you be more satisfied with the road you are on when you've been on the other roads (at least a for a little bit).
The Ultimate #Lifehack apps to beat London's cost of living
Can I recommend Tsarine over both Veuve Clicquot or Dom Perignon?

I know it's personal opinion and all, but I find it to be much better than both of the above.

Jeroboam for 183,64 € [1]

[1]: http://boutique.tsarine.com/catalogue/formats-speciaux/jerob...
I think people choose frameworks because they _prefer_ them instead of _needing_ them. If you think you _need_ a framework you need to reevaluate your programming skills.
I think writing notes helps us remember things because we're concentrating on the information being recorded, and because in order to record it we are forced to create a well structured representation of that information which will also be easily remembered.

However, when I take a picture, I'm mostly concentrating on the camera and the spacial aspect of what I am photographing (getting it into frame), which doesn't help me remember any of the details, which are the genuinely important bit.

I do like your explanation though. I wouldn't be surprised if people who are more (for lack of a better word) artistic than myself, focus more on the details as part of the photo-taking process, and so retain those details better.
It'll change if/when you have kids. You'll probably have a half-dozen calls a day coordinating things. And having a high quality connection for those calls is really important.
I think this is it ATM. I agree, I'd pay a good chunk of money for an actuall-Debian phone, but AFAIK, they don't exist
> The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

TL:DR: There was no road less traveled by they were equally the same, but he fooled himself into think he made a special choice.

Just some poetry discussion. "The Road Not Taken" is considered the most misunderstood and misinterpreted poem. (It was great to make freshmen tackle this poem in freshmen Theology Class. Then we went on to most misinterpreted scripture verse :)

So, in the end, while he was very clear in the present that the two roads were identical with no real reason to take one over the other, later in life he knew he’d once again fool himself, this time successfully, by instead remembering that one road was “less traveled by” and that this influenced his decision, when in fact he really decided on a whim. http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2015/09/robert-frost...
If you have 1000 jobs that pay $100/hr each and 100 jobs that pay $1000/hr each, and you qualify for both (the former more easily than the latter), which would you rather try for?
Micro-Organisms Discovered Replacing Oxygen with Iron Oxide
LIV closes at 5AM, guess you left early, likely a wise idea... :-)
What's an example of a "not real language" then? I'm feeling a little hard pressed to find an academic language that is not used in industry. I always thought of Lua as academic because I associated it with Torch, but Facebook and Google are both heavy users of Torch, besides Lua has been heavily used in gaming as an embedded scripting language outside of machine learning applications.
I have programmed, and I have worked in factories, such as a door factory.

Programming is 100% beyond a doubt harder. My brain is mush at the end of a good day of programming.

Making doors? Physically tired but mentally fine.. and I find the physical side was easier to recover from.

So I get the door making -> programming is "harder" and I make about 10x the money.. but I would not say it was 10x harder, maybe 1.3x harder.. so clearly programming is a better job for me than door making.
That may be the reasoning, but it's nonsense.

Anything done for free - picking up litter, sharing photographs online, giving someone directions - could be done commercially. Anything done commercially could be done commercially for more money.

This may be the law, but it violates my basic understanding of fairness.
> It is a contract, though.

I didn't sign it.

> Minors cannot execute contracts, but can be subjected to contracts by their parents.

They didn't sign it either. Not one of my ancestors did.

> That's not how contracts work!

That's the point?
That's one of the reasons I got out of programming, was the salary ceiling. Sure, your first job hop as a programmer will probably get you a 20% or so increase! That gets your hopes up. Then your next one will be only 10% or so, and by the time you're 20 years into your career, you're barely getting any pay raises by changing company.

And if you think that changes by just being a different kind of individual contributor, you're probably wrong. You will still hit a salary cap even if you go into project management or product management--often at a lower $$$ figure than as a programmer. Maybe that changes when you get into people management--I don't know.

If you want to break through that ceiling, you need to have a position that includes a path to significant ownership. That's why bankers and lawyers have a path to becoming partners in the firm, and doctors have a path to private practice. A handful of worthless stock options at a startup doesn't count.
Bandits are great, but using the theory correctly can be difficult (and if accidentally incorrectly applied then ones results can easily become pathologically bad). For instance, the standard stochastic setup requires that learning instances are presented in an iid manner. This may not be true for website visitors, for example different behaviour at different times of day (browsing or executing) or timezone driven differing cultural responses.
There is never a simple, magic solution for these things.
>I am free to just spew out content regardless of its quality.

Oh, that's a great goal to have...
Why would people move in just because you built a whole bunch of housing? There's an entire rust belt standing half-empty.

People don't move to where they can find expensive housing - people move to where they can find good jobs. Doubling SF housing wouldn't double the number of good jobs there.

Thought experiment: What do you think doubling the number of high paying jobs do to SF rent? Or, alternatively, halving the available housing?
Why is that answer so different? It's saying there's a 90%+ chance that the new one is better. That's also his answer.
Here's one way to find you my friend: prototyping. Go is simple enough that could give you a good idea of what your life will be like using a package in a "short" amount of time.
I will always be a programmer, no matter what. My regret is only about not being richer, that's all.

I don't want another kind of job; I want a shitload of money, so I can code whatever I want all day long, until I drop dead at the TTY prompt.

Plus do a ton of cycling, running, guitar playing and such.

Regret over not having tried this job or that seems misplaced to me. If the job you're missing out on could be done as a hobby, do it as a hobby. If you think management looks like fun, then you can volunteer in some non-profit or volunteer organization; you will then have something to manage. If that doesn't cure the regret over not having tried management, then you have to be honest with yourself: it's really about the money.
The money saved isn't nearly as important as the reduced complexity and exposure gained from a regular spring cleaning.
A variation of this is being with people but not actually being present, i.e. texting, updating Facebook status, email, etc. etc.

How often do I see a couple at a restaurant, or a group of friends at a social gathering, who are barely interacting with each other but all have their noses glued to their smart phones and frantically typing away.
Ask HN: Why are clickbait titles bad?
A lot of times when I'm reading HN I notice there are a lot of people complaining about articles having clickbait titles. I have always been under the assumption that that was the entire purpose of a title which is to grab the readers attention and get them to read the article or in other words, in the context of the internet, be a bait for clicks. While it's not an excuse to have a misleading title, some articles are less technical and meant for a more general consumption so are they expected to have a title similar to that of one more serious and technical? Even if the article is crap and the title is misleading it will either be filtered out of the front page or could even possibly insight a really good discussion. So instead of complaining about weather a title is clickbait, maybe it would be better to just explain what is wrong about the article instead to help prevent any misinformation or just ignore it and let it sink?