skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It might be incidental but the history of mathematics is rich with dissent and conflicting methodologies and syntaxes. Just even the initial mathematical symbols that started to be used were quite the ambitious effort by Peano. [1] That reading will take you down the wormhole of efforts for a "universal language" between mathematicians based on latin. And then you'll end up reading about 20 different other takes on the ideas. No, it's not just incidental -- there were international congresses of mathematicians about these issues and the adopted solutions were mostly elegant and looked upon favorably. There are always going to be some dissenters though, and they have some validity - but well, conventions are usually a compromise between effectiveness and majority opinion. There is still huge rift in mathematics on the issue of constructive proofs vs intuitionistic proofs. There are a lot of camps in formal mathematics. Kinda like functional programmers and the constant "tripes" they'll knack on. Whimsical stuff :-)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Peano
House lawmakers work to replace the hated H-1B lottery
I've had similar ideas, and I've tossed a couple back and forth to my Dad but the problem that I've always run into is that it is REALLY hard to sell those sort of solutions to companies already locked-in to COBOL and Rexx and PL/I, etc.

Retooling all of that is hard, and while avoiding that problem they kind of set themselves up to those legacy problems. Java shops kinda have seen the same thing except that while Java grew with the times, COBOL and friends just stagnated. The world kept turning though, and that's brought us to the situation of these 40 year programmers leaving behind forty years of code that basically only THEY can really understand.
There sure are an awful lot of interpretations of quantum mechanics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mec...

:)
Agreed, I don't think the 'average programmer' is writing new kernels or ... advanced job'. The average programmer is working at an SME or Agency, getting systems to run, sales to happen and be tracked.

I'm basing this on the amount of jobs and interviews I've been to where the tasks are normally completely uninteresting from a technical stand-point. I now work at a government science and technology research agency and much of the work here is still quite rote.
It's a free version of Windows with Bing installed as the default search engine. Meant to compete with Chromeos.
It's very obvious that many of the people and organizations active in San Francisco politics do not understand economics 101. They say some really stupid things, and voters believe them.

There are certainly productive conversations to be had within a rational economic paradigm, but too many of the participants reject the paradigm, and therefore no productive conversation with them can occur.

For example, here is one opinion piece from the Examiner, in which the author writes, "But supply and demand does not apply to housing": http://www.sfexaminer.com/nato-green-do-the-math-you-cant-bu...

Here is another paper, by the founder of the Coalition of San Francisco Neighborhoods and the Council of Community Housing Organizations, which denies that supply and demand operate in the San Francisco housing market: http://www.sfhac.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/calvin-welch...
As usual a completely inaccurate and oversold misinterpretation of quantum mechanics.
It sounds like you're saying that investment alone doesn't make a bubble. But investment (or speculation) is another kind of demand, and it's well known that speculation can create bubbles when investors predict future demand that turns out not to exist. So I'm not really sure what you're getting at?
Traversing Knowledge Graphs in Vector Space (2015) [pdf]
The shame is that they waited so long to do it. There's very little San Francisco left.
Which statement? All major browsers can work with it. Apache and nginx, at least can also work with it (encompassing 85% of all internet servers).

That users aren't connecting to http/2 web sites is no indicator that http/2 is not available.
Our civilization is slowly getting to the point where that advice will get taken seriously.
I love the modification that pipes the output of cat into sed; doesn't he realize that cat is redundant at that point?
This is the first time I've seen something like this. I use Firefox full time for development and personal use and do a lot of front-end work. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I don't mean to belittle your choice as I assume you're happy with it. But please understand that, for a lot of people, living an hour north of SF is too far for their taste. Even to the point of being worth the extra money.
FWIW, where I was you didn't need the power of a big mainframe anymore and because of the size of the database you could actually buy a super beefy x86 machine with hundreds of gigabytes of RAM that could store the entire DB in RAM.

However, rewriting 30+ years of legacy code was very difficult. The place had tried and failed on two occasions so far to do it.

It seemed a bit like the airline reservation software system GDS and how it's still around.
Horizon is an open-source project. Horizon Cloud (currently in development) is a business -- http://horizon.io/cloud/
Windows 8.1 with Bing is sold at a very low price with a 100% rebate (I.e it is free).

Google shares ad revenue from bundled searches, if you use Google on Firefox then Mozilla takes 20%. Likewise for Windows OEMs and Apple Safai.
google play music
What are you talking about? The Grid is on-schedule and doing fine.
There is no decoherence in MWI.

Yes there is. Decoherence provides the theoretical framework to explain why the superposition of parallel observers can never meaningfully interact with themselves again, even though a superposition of simple particles can.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence#In_interpr... for more.

That said, the order in which an observer notices decoherence events has no particular physical importance.
Surely there are people who see the equivalence of the interpretations, and don't paint themselves for color war?
What does he propose as a replacement for C++? Did I miss that part? IMO, there's currently nothing mainstream that can replace it. Of course, C is just as fast, but has the same expert problem he cites and lacks many of the safety features found in C++. If you need a very fast, relatively safe, mainstream systems language, there's not much else out there.
There is the small standard library that ships with the compiler. And then there are more extensive ones such as Batteries and Core. It is easy to generate docs in Reason syntax from OCaml projects using `redoc` tool. Here is Reason docs for:

- OCaml compiler's stdlib: http://kcsrk.info/reason_stdlib_docs/index.html

- Batteries: http://kcsrk.info/reason_batteries_docs/index.html
The weirdest case at my tenure as a neighborhood computer tech was a personal notebook computer that would not boot up at the customer's apartment. Of course we assumed user error, but further investigation revealed that if the computer were running as it approached the home, it would bluescreen about a block away.

We guessed it was due to some kind of RF interference from a transmitter on the apartment building. Removing the WiFi module and the optical drive had no effect, so we further guessed it was interference within the motherboard or display. Rather than investigate further, we replaced the notebook at that point.
Wow, you can get $14.42 an hour if you have a 4-year degree!

https://home2.eease.adp.com/recruit2/?id=19091802&t=1
Definitely agreed. Tech work/office work in general tend to be a bit more flexible.
Yes, and "useless" is not exactly a precise term - it's obviously being used for the inflammatory clickbait-y title, not for the sake of "precision".
CIA ‘Accidentally’ Destroyed Its Only Copy of Senate Torture Report
There is currently no EventSource/SSE support, but this came up a couple of times. It should be pretty easy to add, and is currently on the roadmap (though for now still unscheduled).
A little silly to speak with such overconfidence considering the only similarity is the "table" paradigm. The actual periodic table is poor for its use anyways, and there have been valid criticisms that call for a more abstract grouping, like a spiral/ring table [1] [2]
But in any case, the properties of numbers are intrinsic to the relationship between space and time - the ability to store a number physically [in memory] and then act on it at a later time. You can try to claim that physics transcends mathematics -- but I would argue that the properties of numbers, and hence algebras, are more fundamental than even physical field theories are.

[1] http://www.chemistryland.com/CHM130W/03-BuildingBlocks/Chaos...
[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/The_Ring...
The idea that you can build something and then tweak it until you find customers is deeply flawed. You built something that nobody needed or wanted. Don't do it again. Don't try to validate a product or an idea, identify a need and then find the best way to fill it.
I feel sorry that you needed to include an insult in your comment. You could have just contributed your historical understanding.

The Stamp Act and Tea Act were opposed as taxation without representation in Parliament. They were not opposed because Americans didn't believe in taxes on principle. The spread of that belief is very new delusion.

In 1776, the freedom to use slaves to run your business was absolutely an expression of economic liberty for half of America. Thomas Jefferson and Democratic Republicans opposed the growth of the budding federal government because of the fear that a federal government could curtail local business practices, namely slavery.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11710829
My favorite was the server that couldn't send email further than 500 miles away.

http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
Chef Manage deserializes cookie data insecurely
Jaynes's argument applies equally well to Newtonian mechanics, even if SR/GR/QM didn't exist in the universe.

There is always a yearning for "what is really happening when", and a desire for results that feel real but that is metaphysics and psychology, not physics. It isn't so different from wanting to "feel God's presence", which has been discovered to be a neurologically mechanism.

See:
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1914#comic
Don't worry, the natural stuff is probably just as messy, or worse.

If it helps, remember that grey-goo already took over the world, and you were born part of it.
> My favorite was a story from the 1980s of a program which would crash depending on the phase of the Moon!

Do you have a name for this program? It sounds a lot like an urban legend - when would you ever find it easier to parse a date out of an astronomical program than to use actual date handing capabilities from the system or a library?
I totally agree with everything in this article.
For a more advanced concept with a working prototype, see [1]. The Applied Superconductivity Laboratory of Southwest Jiaotong University has a maglev train in a glass tube about two meters in diameter. Their goal is 3000 KPH.

Here's a technical paper on the maglev system used.[2] They discovered a problem with bumps in the magnetic field at rail joints, and figured out a way to fix that.

Maybe that's the future. If you're going to have a maglev system, you may as well go all the way and ditch the air turbine propulsion.

[1] http://english.swjtu.edu.cn/public/viewNews.aspx?ID=154
[2] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40064-016-1965-3
Absolutely awful awful idea.

To quote one of the comments...

"I hope these people and others who work in the displacement industrial complex go bankrupt and end up on the street begging for food. Maybe they can design a app so those of us who want to donate food can give it to the most creative candidate."
It is always so obvious when you have similar experiences(founders, maybe):

#0:I left my job to work on my side projects.

Never quit your real job unless you gained traction from your project.

#1: the project does not motivate me any more.

I had exactly the same problem from my previous startup. Later I found out it is because of long hours work without enough exercises.

From my experiences, you need to prepared to explain your project/company with 2 sentences at most. Otherwise you will get lost during the development, also your project is probably too complicated.
Reminds me of my favorite bug story from my own career. It was in my first year or two out of college. We were using a commercial C++ library for making HTTP calls out to another service. The initial symptom of the bug was that random requests would appear to come back with empty responses -- not just empty bodies, but the entire response was empty (not even any headers).

After a fair amount of testing, I was somehow able to determine that it wasn't actually random. The empty response occurred whenever the size in bytes of the entire request (headers and body together) was exactly 10 modulo 256, for example 266 bytes or 1034 bytes or 4106 bytes. Weird, right?

I went ahead and worked around the problem by putting in a heuristic when constructing the request: If the body size was such that the total request size would end up being close to 10 modulo 256, based on empirical knowledge of the typical size of our request headers, then add a dummy header to get out of the danger zone. That got us past the problem, but made me queasy.

At the time, I had looked at the code and noticed an uninitialized variable in the response parsing function, but it didn't really hit me until much later. The code was something like this:

void read_status_line(char *line) {
char c;
while (c != '\n') {
c = read_next_byte();
*(line++) = c;
}
}

Obviously this is wrong because it's checking c before reading it! But why the 10 modulo 256 condition? Of course, the ASCII code for newline is 10. Duh. So there must have been an earlier call stack where some other function had a local variable storing the length of the request, and this function's c variable landed smack-dab on the least-significant byte of that earlier value. Arrrrgh!
The plus side is that modern mainframes are really cool. It's not like they're still systems from the 70s, they are practically supercomputers with some of the fastest hardware ever made. (zEC12 was a 6-core, 5.5Ghz processor with very competitive IPC and monstrous cache; I believe it even had functional transactional memory too coughIntelcough. Now stuff 20 of those into a computer.)

Downside of course is COBOL, Java, etc. But it's not like it's going anywhere soon. Nobody really wants to replace millions of lines of COBOL that work, and work well.

Writing a compiler for an ML-ish language that targets COBOL would be kind of amusing. Just because they're stuck with COBOL doesn't mean it has to be hand-written, right?

Disclaimer: I don't work with mainframes but I know people who do. Friend of mine quite likes writing assembly for z/Architecture. I don't know if she's totally sane.
Code to analyze results from the Slowpoke nuclear reactor at the university of Toronto: 1994.
Flux: a new political system for the information age
No, you've simply been lucky.
Real demand for housing is here in Portland and in San Francisco. It's not created by real estate speculation. Real people, by the thousands, come to these metro areas, faster than the housing stock grows to accommodate them.

Before asking ourselves if price surges are created by the smokes and mirrors of speculation, a second-degree hypothesis, we ought to look at the simpler hypothesis first: is there a real demand for housing? Yes, there is. Is the housing stock growing fast enough to satisfy that demand? No, it is not.
I like this answer best, but I want to go back on something I said prior many months ago; I said I hated gesture interaction.

I was Windows years ago, then have been exclusively Linux for years up until now where I am on Mac - it was super clunky at first - but I really like some of the gesturing.

I'd love a gesture (configurable) Cli.

Type something then swipe to pipe to grep or something. It would be an interesting look into the two...
This is a life-changer for me ever since I installed it a few years ago. With Vimium and Alfred, my hands are on the keyboard 95% of the time.

P.S. If you tweak the settings, you may even be able to browse/navigate the web with just one hand on the keyboard.
Like any Internet Explorer on any non-Windows 10 systems?

If 47% of all CloudFlare users are not connecting via HTTP/2 (even though it is supported server side), I believe it means that those users do not have client side support (or are behind a proxy, etc. which doesn't allow it).

At the end, if someone is thinking about making a website which would be much slower for non-HTTP/2 users then right now it means around 47% of their users.
Ever read a math paper /s

Seriously though, most of the papers I've read require significant interpretation, filling in gaps and dealing with ambiguous terminology or use of symbols.
Amazing listening to all of the HN coder apologists here come up with excuses for why they aren't going to lose their jobs, too.

If anything, abstraction, ever-tighter vendor lock-in, and improvements in static analysis will kill off many coder jobs.

There aren't too many jobs out there for recreating basic UNIX tools like sed or grep -- soon, this will be true for higher level tools as well, until what you're doing now at your desk as a coder becomes a "tool" or already exists as a library.

It will eventually be like self-driving cars: Not totally automated, but enough to make the job of programming like a modern-day pilot's -- throw it in autopilot, and then step in whenever (rarely) necessary. Then people will realize fewer people are needed to keep watch and step in, and that one person is enough to do the same thing as many people.
By taxes, I meant tax money that the state uses to subsidize public universities.

The easy money of student loans is a federal program, not the state governments. And conservatives like it because then the big financial corporations that make student loans can make lots of money. And the more expensive education is, the more money they can make. So yes, conservatives think it is just great when higher education gets more expensive.
I hadn't strictly thought this out, but I guess what I'm thinking is that your basic CRUD scripts on steroids. What if it didn't need your domain knowledge to run the scripts? What if the styled output of the scripts was high-quality UI? - Not to shame your scripts, but I'm thinking back to my Rails days and though I could 'generate' everything, I then would have to manually go in and edit the code so that it did what we really wanted.

What if the person requesting whatever function (report, process, notification, etc) could have this system built without a developer?

That make developers replaceable. I'm not suggesting this is happening in the short-term, but as you say yourself, you use scripts for your basic CRUD development. What is stopping those scripts from moving up market to the point where you are not needed.

Front-end devs who used to write HTML and CSS would have said they where always needed because a computer can't make a webpage. But look at SquareSpace, Wix and the like. Again, this isn't every job, but this is a portion of the market which is no longer served by a person, and that will continue.

The new jobs will be in training and building these systems, which I think is historically how industrialization has progressed.
I am not sure exactly, but a plausible interaction would be:

Tax benefits cut forcing more students to seek financial loans for student expenses. Conservatives further protect lending institutions (and punish students) by making student debt one of the forms of debt not clearable by bankruptcy creating an artificial safety for lenders. Student loans are now a low risk lending market so lenders relax requirements for loans. Now students have greater access to financial loans of larger size so Universities are able to raise tuition without impacting operations/enrollment.

This is obviously a contrived line of reasoning, but the point is that there is a complex interaction occurring resulting in what I (personally) would consider market failure.
Nesting is getting too deep, regarding:
>"I mean, here's Harold Varmus..."

He has to say stuff like that as head of NCI. The slow progress is even noted on wikipedia, everyone knows it. This "cancer is so complicated" idea is being used as an "excuse" (not that it is definitely false):

"Though there has been significant progress in the understanding of cancer biology, risk factors, treatments, and prognosis of some types of cancer (such as childhood leukemia[2]) since the inception of the National Cancer Act of 1971, progress in reducing the overall cancer mortality rate has been disappointing.[5][31] Many types of cancer remain largely incurable (such as pancreatic cancer[39]) and the overall death rate from cancer has not decreased appreciably since the 1970s.[40] The death rate for cancer in the U.S., adjusted for population size and age, dropped only 5 percent from 1950 to 2005.[3]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Cancer

Before accepting that reason for the slow progress, we should consider that some are reporting only 10% of what gets published can be reproduced:

"Although we in the cancer field hoped that this would lead to more effective drugs, historically, our ability to translate cancer research to clinical success has been remarkably low1. Sadly, clinical trials in oncology have the highest failure rate compared with other therapeutic areas."
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483531a...

Also, people are quitting cancer reproducibility projects out of disgust for the low quality of the research:

"Early on, Begley, who had raised some of the initial objections about irreproducible papers, became disenchanted. He says some of the papers chosen have such serious flaws, such as a lack of appropriate controls, that attempting to replicate them is “a complete waste of time.” He stepped down from the project's advisory board last year.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/348/6242/1411

Others are estimating pretty much 50% of all biomed can't be reproduced:

"The deeper problem is that much of cancer research in the lab—maybe even most of it—simply can’t be trusted. The data are corrupt. The findings are unstable. The science doesn’t work.
The resulting waste amounts to more than $28 billion: That’s two dozen Cancer Moonshots misfired in every single year."
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/future_tens...
http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jour...

Even Robert Wienberg refers to cancer research as an example of "Augean Stables":

"'It’s a naÏveté that by simply embracing this ethic, which sounds eminently reasonable, that one can clean out the Augean stables of science,' says Robert Weinberg, a cancer biologist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts."
http://www.nature.com/news/cancer-reproducibility-project-sc...
To address your first question, the actual quote is:

> Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

So it's not a claim that democracy is the least worst simpliciter, but an empiric claim of history (and compared to 20th century alternatives like national socialism, fascism etc, is backed by evidence). None of that however, justifies the claim that democracy is the best form of government compared when compared possible alternatives.