skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It is true that if you sum many /independent/ random quantities, then the result is approximately normal...

Don't forget defined variances! The end result could be more generally levy-alpha (alpha < 2.0), as it is with many financial instruments.... Normality requires defined variance.
If you were to win a settlement and get what you wanted, would you immediately start running your mouth and riling up the other party? I don't think so. I'm sure this was fine for everyone.
Your point jumps over my broader argument to address the original thrust of the article however. In that context we aren't in disagreement on this point.

I was however addressing the question of "should technology guide our existence" - and I think you agree with my emphatic response of yes but don't realize it.

And for many of us, the ultimate goal is to live a better life by reducing these distractions.

My guess is you are compartmentalizing things like social networks etc... into those "distractions." I might also, but would also place in there "hunger", "pain", "confusion" etc... the things that distract us from understanding the fundamental nature of the universe.

Our goals likely align - but on different points along the scale of time.
Not yet. Great user name by the way - always up for a business hug.
Well, I'm not a programmer so let's hope that this gets some traction, it's an interesting subject ¡gracias!
Thanks for the great article! It echoes most of my thoughts.

And thanks for Dotset - didn't know it exists, but it looks very, very neat.

In most but the most basic configurations, however, I found myself missing some of variables, inheritance, dates. TOML solves the last two, but as you point out it has limitations. YAML solves the first two, though in a bit of an ugly and obscure way. No wonder Salt and Ansible, two heavy users of YAML configs both pass it through templating engines to reach their goals.

For the lack of better alternatives, I usually end up with a Django-style Python module holding the configuration when I want it to be powerful. It still freaks (non-Python) people out though.

Lua is not a half-bad choice if you ask me. It takes some time getting used to, but it's fast to interpret, and at least one project that I know of - Lsyncd - is making an absolutely great layered configuration on top of it.
I think that ignores that there is always a spectrum of people who want differing levels of control. Even if there apps to suggest all our actions, there will be people that use them sparingly or not at all, because they want to feel in control. This is acceptable and normal, and also leads to situations where some people do maintain survivalist skills. Our population is homogeneous in almost nothing, which is one of our strengths.

What happens in a catastrophe? People probably die. Depending on the scale, possibly a lot. Will everyone die? Probably not, but there are cases where it could happen. The ways to mitigate that have nothing to do with less automation of simple decisions in my mind, and possibly quite the opposite.
My company's large Java codebase has hundreds of zero-width spaces in the middle of method names. It's sad.
Ethereum is a platform for decentralized applications. I think of it as a giant scroll in the sky that everyone can write to, but each line has to be cryptographically signed to identify its writer, and existing lines in the scroll can't be modified.

A giant digital scroll in the sky is meaningless, but Ethereum lets you write actual programs as entries in the scroll that define what new entries actually mean. The DAO defines entries that mean "I'm funding the DAO", "I'm voting for a DAO proposal", and "I'm withdrawing my remaining funds from the DAO". Since these entries can't be modified, any app can evaluate the scroll and display conclusions about what has happened in history.

Since Ethereum is Turing-complete, any interaction between people can be defined as entries in the scroll. Ethereum is the raw material for social coordination. Instead of dreaming of ways the world should work, you can build new ways and see if people want to use them. It's incredibly exciting, and I hope more people join us in building social software that users control.
Under the documentation section for "Ambiguous Methods"[0], why does the example compile? I would expect it to barf at compile time, not runtime.

[0] http://lbstanza.org/chapter4.html#anchor52
The Mind Behind Linux – Linus Torvalds (TED)
I as also trying to understand this.
I think	what they're saying is that MtGox had more demand for bitcons than supply -- and the whole market did	generally. When demand increases faster than supply, the price must rise. So by losing 80kBTC, they were in the	same situation as if they had shorted 80kBTC. They benefit from the price going down,	and suffer from the price going up.

And moreover, to act as	a liquidity provider when the market movement isn't random, but instead most	people are buying BTC which is going up, is also a money losing position -- MtGox is the only seller of BTC which keeps rising. I think this implies they were buying BTC off-exchange.

But since MtGox users are buying more than selling, MtGox doesn't have to convert their cash back into BTC -- MtGox's losses are occurring in BTC and are essentially invisible,	but when they lose money in BTC, they are effectively increasing their short position.

I'm not	fully seeing how the feedback loop would operate, I think you'd need to factor in MtGox's total capital, their short postion, and the market size ... I can see how their position gets worse and worse.

I can't	think of any historical	precedent though. The final result is kind of like the Salad Oil Swindle, but the path taken is different.

edit: maybe a bucket shop in bull market would be a similar mechanism.
It's not very nice looking. For aesthetics, they will need to ship it with a case or skin that's thin & strong.

I don't often wish for mandatory bundling, but I hope that's what this is about: http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/14/google-now-lets-you-design-...
Oh, duh. I always forget those are there. :)
Government used to be a source of leadership and innovation around issues of economic prosperity and upward mobility. Now we’re a country disinclined to invest in our young people.

Our society is corrupt, but not quite in the way many of the loudest activists proclaim. There is quite a stark cultural disconnect between groups and between socioeconomic levels in this country. The media comprises a middle class that's starkly disconnected from the lower classes. (It's also starkly ignorant of science.) Teachers also comprise a weird in-between social class.
It's a pretty huge deal, at least in my eyes. Chromebooks have this enormous following because of the price. Now, every app in the Play Store is installable to this huge group of laptop users. That means when a company wants their app to be on Android, they consent to it being on laptops as well. This means Microsoft Office and Apple Music are on ChromeOS laptops. It's a very effective strategy to vastly increase the viability of Chromebooks for regular users using other companies' apps. I never expected to see Apple developing apps for a Google-controlled laptop OS, but here we are.
It's very dishertening to see people get pushed around by their employers loke this.

Does censoring the opinions of your employees not count as evil?
As engineers I think we can all see the benefits of having a standard language to back keywords.

I mean, culturally it's nice to have many languages throughout the world but imagine how easier everything would be if everybody on the planet spoke the same language. Now imagine if you had to relearn the name of "true", "false", "if", "for", etc. each time you change language… Bonkers.

Anectdote: As a non native speaker myself, I learned to use the while loop before I knew what the word "while" meant. The subset of English words used in programming can be learned pretty quickly.

So, yes, it is not worth it IMHO. For better or worse, English is the way to go.
I don't know what it's like in DC, but in my city the worst districts have to pay quite a bit more for personnel (teachers, admin, substitutes, everyone) and still don't usually attract the best, because working in a place with multiple violent disruptions in each classroom every week and where the 2nd graders yell at their substitutes and call them names that 2nd graders ought not know is frustrating and dangerous. It's way easier to feel like you're effective and appreciated in the good districts, even if you're making 20% less.

If DC paid the national average it's possible no one would work there, not even mediocre teachers. So yeah, there may tend to be an inverse relationship between spending and quality, but it's (likely, in most cases) not that the money is causing the problem but rather that the problem is forcing more spending just to tread water, let alone improve anything.
They don't stand a chanse because we're so good in inventing bullshit jobs http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
It is an unfortunate reality that, for whatever reason (and there are several clear ones in my mind) software - which is a technical discipline, make no mistake - has so, so many technically unqualified people in management

What reasons?
You can increase density only so far. It's not like you can just make streets wider or stack them on top of each other. Not to mention all the other infrastructure that you need.

In addition to that dense housings can lead to social problems and therefore crime, which is highly undesireable.

Especially in Europe you also have the problem of having a lot of old buildings that are protected, so you can't change or replace them.

Housing is a very complex problem and supply and demand only gets you so far. If it were really just all about that, places like London, NY and SF would never have become so expensive.
Facebook Strikes Out in Attorney Deceit Case Against DLA-Piper
Kickstarter has shown that the former isn't a good filter. Perhaps the latter?
> The big difference now is that the progress is fast enough for people to start to understand that their job may be automated in their life.

The other big difference is that US hourly wages peaked in the 1970s, and there are enough people experiencing the divergence between expectations of continued improvement and reality since then that its no longer a prediction of harms that might occur in the future, but an explanation of harms that are being experienced in the present.
The past few days has seen a spike up to prices near the all time high. The media focus on the DAO and ETH in general has no doubt brought in new speculators and investors.
The United States is the richest country in the history of the world, and there is no competition. Second place is the U.S. last year; third place is either the U.S. in 2014 or 2007 ...

The debate should be long over. Every person in the U.S. should have,

1) Food

2) Shelter

3) Education

4) Health care

The country can easily afford it. To leave people suffering for whatever political ideology or greed or other rationalization is absurd. It's time to stop wasting resources debating it and juggling the consequences, and time for the world's wealthiest nation to start delivering to its citizens.
Maybe in the US, but not in Sweden.
Rock climbers in Ontario tend to be taught quite well in their training about the environment. At least I was. We tend to be quite strict about it to the point of instructing others if their actions are having a negative impact on the environment. It requires some education but that's one thing Canadians tend to be good at.

Though I won't deny we have some gung-ho climbers who don't care. Those guys tend to be shunned by the climbing community and are the kinds of people who have and cause accidents.
I haven't read the Reddit comments (and I don't even own an Android phone) but... aren't those the things you would MOST want to upgrade in the future?
It's definitely weird at first, but the aim of atomic CSS is to not have a CSS file that just grows and grows and grows.

This article(written by the creator of Tachyons) helps to explain the issue: http://mrmrs.io/writing/2016/03/24/scalable-css/

Where I work, we're using it on a new project and while it definitely requires a lot of learning(and just generally understanding CSS), it's faster to debug with, easier to take care of edge cases, and the total size for our app is incredibly small.
The Business Card Raytracer
London and SF are not very dense, all things considered, so... yeah, you do hit limits, but the limits there are mostly political.

Some of those political limits are understandable, like not wanting to tear down an ancient building. Others are pure NIMBYism.
Only because I fell hard financially first.
Totally agree.

Functions are a design pattern in assembler, but a language feature checked by the compiler in more advanced languages.

Classes are design pattern in C (called ADTs), but a language feature in all OOP languages.

Generalizing the concept: A design pattern is something the programmer has to check himself/herself for correctness, instead of being automatically checked by the compiler or interpreter.
I'm so glad you mentioned Edward Bernays. It's interesting how he was very helpful in promoting his uncle's book in the US, bringing Freud some much needed cash. At the same time, Sigmund hated Bernays, and Anna, for using a lot of his psychological work to change the face of advertising into what it is today.

Bernays created the very first _Public Relations_ office (he made up the term because "Propaganda" was a bad word). He helped get more women smoking (torches for freedom!). I'm sure if it wasn't him and Anna, someone else would have come along and made these discoveries anyway.

Capitalism, Consumerism and Planed Obsolescence will be what brings down the current world.
Yes! You're completely right and I've argued something similar against sites that like to set 62.5% font size on body. Thank you for calling out my poor example! I'll update it if it lets me.

For those who don't yet know why this is a big deal, I made a Codepen to illustrate why: http://codepen.io/anon/pen/eZwxam

Change the font size from 18px to 12px and then to 24px to simulate users with varying default font sizes set in their browser. Note how the containers change. While it will vary from person to person, a fixed 800px width of a container with 12px font size is far too wide for my taste and far too narrow for 24px. While I find 44em is better for both.

Note: I do not suggest ever changing the font size of body but it makes the example easy to use.
It might be worth adding to the summary that this compiles into native machine code. Using its own code generator, by the looks of it --- that's hard core! But it doesn't look like there's an optimiser yet.

Plus it's fully self-hosting, too; the sign of a properly grown up language.
The alternatives to C/C++ are so popular that most programming is not done in C/C++ anymore, so your premise seems off. The alternatives have done stunningly well.

Rarely, RARELY is someone going to make a language that's radically better than what's currently available. But every new language is a chance to step in the right direction, or confirm that nope, no one wants something like this. We need MORE languages. Hundreds, a thousand more. Mostly they won't be used, but sometimes things will move forward.
Well, I live in Stockholm and I will need a house soon
They should build some more apartments.
I thought the limit/split was 1080p in browser, 4k only through certain channels?
L. Bob Rife is behind all of it.
I'm not seeing how an office environment for coders would not be included in "general business offices".

Also, IANAL, but does a single city council member actually have the authority to make such determinations? The council as a whole can certainly approve/reject specific development projects, but one members opinion does not set policy. A vote to clarify things would be required, would it not?

EDIT: I re-read it... it is the mayor, not a council member, but the question remains -- does he have the authority to make such declarations?
Please (everyone) stop posting scientific press releases regarding a single study. They are always massively suspect. If this work is correct then there will soon be replications and meta-studies and we can talk about it then. The assumption for an unverified single study, especially one using phrases like "scientific dogma", should be that it is probably incorrect.
The chatbots on HN and Reddit are pretty smart, but yeah, you can find them when they complain about having to have human emotion and intuition to interpret a comment.
While ago I wrote that Sweden is expensive country in decline (and was promptly down-voted to oblivion). Similar queues are in health care, schools and so on.
You won't and can't be forced. You can state your objections, and your refusal to make a public judgement, in which case you will not be selected to be on the jury. Even if some unreasonable judge still put you on the jury, you can refuse to vote guilty or not guilty, in which case there would be a hung jury. No court wants someone with such an attitude on a jury, so it won't ever get to this.
In my school everyone had to memorize a PIN number. How else do they know who gets free lunches or not?
No windows support? Shame.
I'm not too worried -- we write all our code with Python 3 in mind (and import future) so the transition will be easy. It's just frustrating when I can't take advantage of some of the newer language features.
Nothing wrong with a little Mondrian.
You can be above the poverty line and still be poor. Based on the document you posted, you qualify for reduced-priced meals if your family of four lives on $44,955 per year or $865 per week.

If I understand the article correctly, more than half of public school students come from families poorer than that. Wow.
> The highest performing teams I've worked with were small groups of highly skilled, talented (IQ and EQ) and passionate people.

The best performing teams you were on were the highly-skilled ubermensch? That's cherry-picking, really. "We don't really need good management practices because the cream of the crop, in small numbers, do well without them"
UNSW researchers create radically efficient new solar cell
Interesting advertising. It shouldn't be that long though, unless they expect us to spend 100 years too.
Well yeah, that was basically his argument: propaganda is too effective to be left in the "wrong" hands, so the "right" people better get on it, and quick.

I'm sure it dawned on him that it wouldn't take long until everyone was using it and there would be no discernible difference between the good or bad.

"Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely."
I do that every week
Open hardware, or closed hardware? Can I run what I want on it, and will I be able to buy modules from unlicensed third party developers?
Are you really sure you need to steer this conversation towards dispute? Because basically you're criticizing someone's experience of how they gracefully integrated ajax once upon a time. Like, in the past. I don't want people on HN to stop telling me what they did and how they handled situations, in the past, because they keep seeing that whenever someone like Smudge does that, someone like gkya really, really, urgently feel the need to tell them how they did it all wrong.
People who dig ditches work 10x harder than me, yet I make 10x more money than they do. So how does this fact fit into your bullshit story?
I chose that title because "invisible" has a lot of meanings and "zero-width" is more precise here. Brainfuck is an invisible language -- and so is COBOL because so few people think about its widespread use today.
Python 2 is not only legacy it is deprecated.
The Powerful Voice: Scalia, Standing, and Narrowing the Spokeo Class
"Stanza compiles directly to native code and runs faster than any scripting language because it does not suffer any interpretive overhead."

Show us your benchmarks.
Oh, awesome! And yeah, I know plenty of them don't get that big as they age, not every tree can rely on being fed the way the giants out west are haha. It's an unfortunate situation here these days, pollution, disease, and invasives have really damaged things, and it's pretty clear to see.

I guess I was mostly thinking about the general conception a lot of people tend to have that when they go to something like a national park (particularly in the east), that it's been completely untouched by time, when in fact we had fairly indiscriminate industry and war that giant swathes of places that were only received protections in the early 20th century and beyond.

Oh, and if we're sharing pics of big/interesting trees I would be remiss to skip the road trip where I was fortunate enough to see fat trees[1], dead trees[2], and rare trees[3].

[1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/23215983@N02/26863377690/in/da...

[2] https://www.flickr.com/photos/23215983@N02/26863377830/in/da...

[3] https://www.flickr.com/photos/23215983@N02/27069305001/in/da...
Four-Junction Solar Cell Claims Efficiency Record
Or, if you build lots of housing, then you can get moderate rents, no waiting lists, and no exclusivity.
>This is the usual privacy hysteria knee-jerk reaction: "Watch out, the big companies are going to get data on you!".

Whether you care about privacy or not, I don't see anything "hysteric" about it. Indeed, big companies ARE going to get data on you (and they already have too many).

That said, not caring about privacy seems to me a first world privilege. And only because most people are so boring. Sure, if all you do is work, sleep, buy stuff from Amazon, Whole foods and Costco, go for the occasional holiday, watch some Netflix, rinse and repeat, who even cares if the government has data on you?

Try being an activist of any kind however (even someone like MLK who had tons of enemies at the local and big government level, and volumes of FBI files), rubbing the police the wrong way (e.g. being in some group against police violence etc), or even a regular citizen with some democratic views in any place from Egypt to several shady Latin American "democracies", and see what happens...

>Also, I'm not sure the author of this piece understands what encryption is about since he laments that most people don't search with https on. Er... what? If you want Google to search something on your behalf, they have to be able to read the words you type. Encrypting these words so Google can't read them would be comically useless.

No, but encrypting these words so third parties can't read them would be extremely important (that said, Google has https on by default IIRC).
But we are giving them free lunches and education. The poor get lots of subsidies in the US. I ideally would like a basic income, but it currently isn't affordable.
Ask HN: Client asked about paying for bug fixes
I had a client today asked me about why they should be paying for bug fixes when it seems like it should've been written correctly the first time. They were very understanding with the answer that I gave but I'm curious to know how others have dealt with it in other projects.
This is painful to read. After working in IT for five years, I am convinced that for the majority of "normal" people, computers are actually too powerful. Apple tries hard to make "appliance" computers, but it's all too easy to break even OS X.

iOS is much better. I am convinced that for the set of "normal people", the iPad is the ideal home computer. (Especially the Pro, where the stylus is an intuitive replacement for the mouse, and there is a pretty good external keyboard.)
Or you could just build more housing.
>It is actually incredibly, mindbogglingly, difficult for someone who can't even get a job where they live -now- to relocate to someplace completely unknown with zero resources and no job even lined up.

Certainly I can't be the only one to look at that map and wonder how much of the cause for increase in the free-school-lunches is first and second generation immigrants from Mexico.
Морской бой! My favorite as a kid while waiting for connecting flights at airports.