skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, I guess that effectively disproves the "utter lack of success of publishers trying this".

I have no qualms about paying subscriptions, and you won't find a post in which I'm "bitching about" subscriptions.

Instead of trying to create an alternate reality in which I'm somehow demanding things for free, how about you respond to my actual arguments?
I have had many tests where the material tested is not a strict subset of the material taught, and some problems require creative generalization or insight during the test.
>The comment you took your quote from already mentioned that I'm German.

Hmm, you're right, kind of read past that! I was still thinking I'm replying to an American as in my first comment.

>Your argument is basically: "The Nazis did X, hence we should never do X - for all X". I think this is a fallacy.

That would a fallacy indeed, as the Nazis also did some good stuff (cheap cars, some good welfare laws IIRC, etc), and also neutral stuff.

But I didn't say that for "all X" -- only for specific X which I, for one, think are of the Nazi's bad heritage -- "one global monoculture" I'd say is one of these, even if the culture is the English one.

>I don't think choosing a standard language is any more sinister than choosing standard units of measurement or base 10 numbers.

I guess our difference is mostly in how important we see language as part of culture and/or how sensitive we are to mightier cultures/languages taking over others.

For me losing a language would be as bad as losing a country's literary corpus -- that is, a huge part of the culture (where another might consider the whole literary corpus as something to be dispersed with, or not a big deal if it just survives translated or even forgotten).

On the other hand, something like "units of measurement" I agree are inconsequential -- and could be unified without much impact.
Because an application is also composed of resources and each distribution has its own directory tree, configuration scripts, init system,....
The biggest issue with Esperanto, is that it's (from the wp page):"The phonology, grammar, vocabulary, and semantics are based on the Indo-European languages spoken in Europe."

While that puts it in the same boat as English - it strikes me as slanted heavily towards the "European dialects", rather than say, Farsi.

I actually think Japanese might make as good a "universal" language: it's an old language - and has few sounds. I think (but am not certain), that one would be hard pressed to find anyone that wouldn't be able to distinguish all the phonemes of Japanese (while many have issues distinguishing between "tap" and "flap" ("r" and "l" - right vs light)).

A big caveat is that I'm completely unfamiliar with African languages in general, as well as "old" American ones (both things like Navaho and Tupic or Macro Je). For use as a "universal" language, one would probably want to limit the vocabulary and reform the writing system in some way though. Perhaps choosing a subset of the existing Kanji and updating them to be more classic iconographic again.
> Something as simple as a multi-step transaction process

Amazon UK has an horrid check-out process that omits any clickable bail-out links, should you want to back-up to change something you have to edit the URL bar.

They also only provide a total for all postage, on one page, with no break-out of what applies to which item ( from multiple vendors ).

I assume it's meant to be slick and non-distracting but it feels like a greased laundry chute through which you are sliding...
New Web bot/crawler creator
So we are excited to show out new service. So basicly the idea is that we can create web crawlers and bots within minutes.

Website url: http://bestbotsforcrawl.com/

We have developed scripts in multiple languages that speeds up the development for a great bit( you can literary type visit that, fill_in that etc. ).

We will release source code( open source, YAYY! ) of the crawler shortly( we have to finish few tweaks ).

Let me know about the idea and cheers!
>When ULA was formed, Boeing and Lockheed were not only battling each other for launch contracts, they were also locked in a legal battle over rocket technology. For the Pentagon, the joint-venture was a way to settle the bad blood between its top contractors and make sure that both could remain in the space launch business. ...

> In his remarks, Tobey referred to that payment — about $800 million per year — as a carrot to “sweeten the deal” for the “shotgun wedding” the Pentagon forced on Boeing and Lockheed. ...

> Shelby continues to defend the original concept of ULA, noting that Boeing and Lockheed were battling each other in court over rocket technology before the merger.

>“There was a lot of trouble at one time between Boeing and Lockheed,” Shelby noted in a brief interview.

Strange that the article never comes out and says it: Boeing committed industrial espionage and bribed Air Force procurement officials.

http://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-probe-intensifie...

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9802E2D9103BF...

https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2006/June/06_civ_412....
When a state is printing trillions, what is a "measely" billion anyway ?
Hope they didnt bring something outside :D
We can work out the math easily. Given a 100% success rate for $350 million each for ULA and assuming a SpaceX cost of $100 million and assuming a 95% success rate (I have no idea what the actual rate is) then, per launch, the true cost to put something in orbit per launch is:

$350x1.00 = $350 million for ULA
$100x(1/.95) = $105.2 million for SpaceX

The difference is then $245 million or so. So, the government needs to justify why reducing their risk from 5% to 0% on losing a payload is worth $245 million. Purely economically, the payload would need to be worth about $4.9 billion to justify this cost. If we start talking about State secrets, actual production time for the payload on top of the economic cost, redundancy requirements for intelligence gathering, technological advantage over rival powers (China/Russia) that could be lost if another country recovers the wreckage, and the worth of a citizen's/soldier's life on the front line (e.g. - items that are hard to quantify economically) and you can see how easy it is to justify $245 million.

Plus your buddy works at ULA and it would suck if he had to work somewhere else because they went out of business.
How has the OpenPandora fared with time? Been thinking for a while about grabbing this for writing notes, and playing old emulated games, (as well as ssh+tmux+neovim)
I can't speak for caffe, but I got a new machine up and running with keras in about half an hour last week without having to compile anything :

- install the nvidia drivers, cuda and cudnn which all come as ubuntu packages.

- use anaconda for python

- conda install theano

- pip install tensorflow as per the website

- pip install keras

And voilà, I got my keras models running on my shinny new GTX 980.
> Alternatives like donations or PWYW have been tried and they almost always fail.

1. Most businesses fail, period. I think you would be hard-pressed to prove they failed because they doesn't have ads.

2. You conveniently ignored half the alternatives to ads that I listed, probably because there are numerous examples of successful subscription-based content providers.

> In a world complying with your rules, most of the modern web doesn't exist, because no-one would "ethically" be allowed to contribute to it without falling short of your standards.

This is true, but I'm not sure why you see this as a bad thing. Most of the modern web is noise that makes it harder to find signals I care about. Sites that get their money from me are more likely to give me content I want than sites that get their money from ads and malware.
'They just made it hard for no reason'. LOL. Osper has raised over 11MM. It takes a lot more than a kickstarter campaign to fire up a card program like Osper or GoHenry. Give Marqeta a call and check out their fee structure.

If there is constructive feedback here, it is that there were smaller, cheaper hops PiggyBank could have taken to get a smaller product out there earlier to validate assumptions. And if they had taken a few of these hops, they would have learned along the way, and maybe one day would have had a chance to pitch for a 10MM raise. But they didn't.

It feels like a typical 'first startup' experience - as founders, not employee. At least there is some really great collective feedback in this thread about how they could approach things differently if they were to try again. Unfortunately, little of it is on tap when there are just two people in a room trying to navigate a path.

Thanks for sharing Oscar.
As someone that maintains a huge selection of packages, and an automated installer, for a very complex and interdependent set of OS vendor and third party packages, I think this is amazingly cool.

This solves nearly all of the problems with container-based distributions of software (like Docker), while providing all of the benefits. It doesn't give up the capabilities of traditional package managers (which are very good for their purpose and in the right place), nor does it impose downloading huge image files for every new thing you install (no matter how small they make the container OS, it's still bigger than being able to share a few and having filesystem level de-dup and snapshot capabilities).

I'm going to start working on a Flatpak version of our installation pretty much immediately (or, next week, once I get some other stuff rolled out). It is potentially a huge long-term time-saver for me, and a nice improvement for our customers, too, in that it would make every deployment look identical.
A 3 or higher is considered a pass
What is worse, is that I don't know what is worse, if it is real or satire. Poe's Fork?

I do like that developers are trying to do something about this framework mess.
If you read my link then you'd realize that society is subsidizing all your free shit. There is no free lunch.
WordPress extends free HTTPS to all domains
While your nitpick is technically correct, we were talking about the language of the internet. Where chinese pretty much dwarfs english.
No! Just look at how many people bought $80k teslas who previously only had <30k cars because they did not care about cars at all until a nice electric car came along. They want to save the environment and are willing to pay $$$ for it. According to a study I've read (can't find it sorry) 80k is a significant amount of most of those buyers but they are willing to lease a car for $800 a month to help the environment. So they are not millionaires who have more money then they can ever spend. Why should those people be punished?

Furthermore, most people who can afford those cars already pay more then 50% of their income in taxes so they should have every right to be rewarded for buying a "green Car".
I appreciate this measured response, but want to make very explicit that I did not mean to criticise you or your advice, much less deny its value to the novice programmer; I certainly apologise if I did so unintentionally.

I always enjoy your writings on Perl, even if I sometimes disagree with specific opinion-based recommendations (as is, almost by definition, the prerogative of Perl programmers), and I hope that I didn't seem to be knocking you or them. I was not even disagreeing with this particular advice, just saying that it didn't necessarily establish the attitude of the broader Perl community on punning in variable names. (There always will be code golfers who will value cleverness over maintainability—and there should be; without them we would never have such gems as `[$a => $b]->[$b <= $a]` for `min($a, $b)`.)
If you're generating suitable income, which many college students are not, and have a suitable credit history, which many college students do not. Credit card companies want to make sure they'll be repaid. It's pretty common for them to require parental co-signers (or just issue an additional card on the parent's account) for people who don't have a full-time job.

For a debit card - yes, you can just open a bank account and get one. You need money in the bank account. If you arrange a way to automatically transfer money into a kids' bank account at the touch of the button, you end up with an app much like this postmortem.
Lambda expression comparison between C++11, C++14 and C++17
The problem with all of these app bundle systems is that you end up with 500 MB - 2 GB binaries for every app. Because dependencies in OSS are generally quite coarsed grained, you end up pulling in almost the entire user space of an operating system into your app.

Disk space, memory space (process size and lack of page sharing), and the size of app updates are all an issue (you don't want gigabytes of app updates every night).

Moreover, there is no standard format for dependencies -- that is completely distro dependent, or you have to grovel through the README of every project and hand-tune it (boiling the ocean).

Does Flatpak address this problem at all?

A couple years ago I was trying to write a system that addressed this. You basically use content addressed storage and chroots in the fashion of Plan 9 namespaces. And you can also use differential compression for slim network updates.

But I ran into the problem of boiling the ocean... I wrote like 2000-4000 lines of shell scripts just to build one kind of app (involving R, which involves Fortran...). I had to duplicate all the work of groveling through the dependencies, which is more difficult than you'd think for any non-trivial application. Debian dependency metadata is full of surprised like virtual packages and all that. The algorithm is to enumerate them is not straightforward and generates huge app bundles. Also many projects have non-trivial build time config options and downstream patches.

Is anyone else working on an app bundle system that solves the problems of disk space, memory size, and update size, as well as versioned dependency specification and resolution?

To me Docker seems to punt most of the problem on to the user, and then everybody ends up with OS-sized applications because they can't be bothered to trim dependencies. This isn't good for many reasons, but it's particularly bad for security. Then you have to pile hacks upon hacks and try to scan containers for vulnerabilities that you shouldn't have put there in the first place.

EDIT: I haven't looked in more detail, but it seems like Flatpak creates an artifical separation between "runtimes" and "bundles". Maybe that is a little hack that will work in practice -- my suspicion is that this will simply recapitulate the dependency versioning problem at a more coarse grained level. The natural tendency is for the runtimes to become bloated and thus require frequent updates.
It fine and common to buy a new car from a certificated car dealer or build officially a house with cash money - it's a major legal payment option after-all.

Your experience is different, as you live in Italy which was hit especially hard by the 2008 crisis has high dept, is fighting against corruption, etc. You would need a truck for your €50 notes which makes it unreasonable.
A simple, open source and file based alternative for Evernote is TagSpaces (https://www.tagspaces.org), with native applications for Windows, OSX and Linux.
High-stakes testing need not be terrible. You just have to be careful:

1. High-stakes testing requires exam security. One must assume that the teachers and administrators, if rated on student performance, will assist cheating.

2. High-stakes testing should be spread out across the year, with the result being a running average that discards the low values. (sickness and other bad luck should not be punished) Instead of a week or two of solid testing, do an hour every other week.

3. Tests should not come from companies that sell textbooks. This is a conflict of interest. It's not good to have an incentive to use non-standard terminology to give an advantage to schools which purchase the matching book.

4. If you can't test something, and you don't mandate hours for it, it will be removed from the schedule. Ideally you'd test for everything, but testing some subjects (band, shop) is difficult. The hours must be mandated to protect the untestable subjects.

5. You get what you test for. (see #4 above) High-quality tests are a must. It shouldn't be practical to cram for a test.
Flatpak is a much better name. Also, better name than dnf or apt-get or rpm or dpkg, too. (But, not a better name than yum, which I'm still bitter about the Fedora/RH folks changing.)
Why not forward it to the technical contact of the domain and/or ip address?
>> Why then aren’t people screwing up when using other FP languages such as C#, Clojure, Dart, Elm, Erlang, F#, Julia, Haskell, Scala and Scheme?

First, none of those languages are required when writing for the browser. The author even states later in the article that people are indeed "forced" to use JS.

Second, who says people aren't "screwing up" when using those languages? How would you even know? Badly written JS is often public for the world to see because it's running on the client side. Those other languages are not. How would you even know if people are "screwing up"?
Is this that unusual? I'm sure there are many teachers out there whose entire classes passed.

I'm pretty sure in high school, my entire class passed. It was unusual for people to fail APs. (My high school only admitted the top 2% scorers on an admission test, so it was biased towards high exam scorers.)
If you found this interesting at all, you have to sample the master of country house humor, PG "Plum" Wodehouse.

(His most famous series being the Jeeves and Wooster books and stories.)
Note that all the manufacturers aren't actually saying the URE is X. They are saying it's less than X, it's a cap. Therefore it isn't a rate. The actual rate for two drives could be very different, maybe even more than an order of magnitude different, but so long as it's below the spec's cap for such errors, it's considered normal operation.

So yeah, I agree, the whole idea in some circles that you will get a URE every ~12TB of data read is obviously b.s. We don't know what the real world rate is because of that little less than sign that appears in all of these specs. We only know there won't be more errors than that, and not for a specific drive, but rather across a (virtual) sample size for that make/model of drive.
I develop an SaaS and a couple of apps as well as some webdev contracting work. I frequently work from the road on either an iPad via Coda or on Android using Termux and neovim. I always use an external BT keyboard. Works very well.
> Nevertheless, there may be arguments for contributory and/or indirect copyright infringement in many jurisdictions

In the United States there are two kinds of indirect infringement: contributory infringement and vicarious infringement.

Contributory infringement can occur when you know that someone else is or will directly infringe, and you substantially aid that by inducing, causing, or materially aiding their direct infringement. That can include providing the tools and equipment they use to infringe.

Vicarious infringement can occur when someone who is a direct infringer is your agent or under your control.

A very important aspect of both of these types of indirect infringement is that they make you liable for the direct infringement of someone else. If there is no someone else who is a direct infringer, then you cannot possibly be a contributory or vicarious infringer.
Tables are meant for displaying tabular data, they are not meant to be an invisible frame or grid for page layouts but this is what they were often used for.

Tables fell out of favour because many people used nested table structures which were messy and inaccessible to people with screen readers. (Note that non-nested tables are not inaccesible to screen readers.)

I actually think a table-inspired layout approach for CSS would have been simpler to understand and to implement than the clumsy, messy CSS methods we currently have. Even Flexbox has an over-engineered (or over-complex) feel for some of its rules. Oh well, the benefit of hindsight...
>Is this manipulation? The fee was still clearly stated on checkout //

That instance seems very clearly manipulation. When the cost is known people don't buy, only when they've sunk time on the process do they buy - probably because they have to assume other sites in the field are equally manipulative.

Unless the full cost is available without going through the sales funnel I'd say it's fraud.
The article is highly misleading in this respect. The restrictions are contractual and imposed upon Pfizer's distributors/resalers. State governments must also certify that purchases won't be used for executions. Likely the only consequence for violations is being blacklisted by Pfizer.

The original press release[1] states:

> Pfizer’s distribution restriction limits the sale of these seven products to a select group of wholesalers, distributors, and direct purchasers under the condition that they will not resell these products to correctional institutions for use in lethal injections. Government purchasing entities must certify that products they purchase or otherwise acquire are used only for medically prescribed patient care and not for any penal purposes. Pfizer further requires that these Government purchasers certify that the product is for “own use” and will not resell or otherwise
provide the restricted products to any other party.

> Pfizer will consistently monitor the distribution of these seven products, act upon findings that reveal noncompliance, and modify policies when necessary to remain consistent with our stated position against the improper use of our products
in lethal injections. Importantly, this distribution system is also designed to ensure that these critical medications will remain immediately available to those patients who rely on them every day.

[1]: http://www.pfizer.com/files/b2b/GlobalPolicyPaperLethalInjec...
Appears to be an alternative revenue stream traditional journalism has been desperately seeking.
...there's a fan theory that Star Trek and Blake's 7 are both depictions of the same universe, portraying the same Federation; it's just that Star Trek is pro-government propaganda, while Blake's 7 is resistance propaganda (on a much lower budget). Neither one, of course, tells the whole story...
Ben Bernanke’s “The Courage to Act:” a Review Essay [pdf]
And so the poettering of Linux continues unabated. You know, Windows once had a really solid way to install apps across Windows version too ...
I read a thought-provoking article about Venezuela: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-02-13/let-s-wat... (Watch Venezuela destroying itself)
You would have to justify not paying SpaceX however much it would cost them to do a launch at 0% risk. If SpaceX could do it for $300m then that's significant saving for the same service.
The point is that recruiters also don't do that. They often do stupid keyword searches for people without really understanding them.
I personally really like to just use plain javascript and the canvas API. I found the tutorial on mdn very useful (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Canvas_API/...), and I enjoy the simplicity of not using libraries and tools.
I've also used EaselJS, which is also pretty good (but doesn't offer me anything I really need), and PixiJS, which is supposed to be very fast, by using WebGL where possible.
For example, Debian Jessie shipped with 1.0.1 even though 1.0.2 was already out, probably because not every app had been ported to 1.0.2 yet. But their "megafreeze" development model amplifies a 6-month scale problem into a many-year problem. If they had shipped both 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 then apps could have incrementally switched over at their own pace. Naturally, each app would only link against one version of OpenSSL so there'd be no need for apache-ssl101 and apache-ssl102.
Custom Map Creator