skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The American middle class has been quite the overall force for positive change - in the dimensions where it can change things.

Oh no! They got to you too! :-)

If you have an opportunity take a gander at "Ben's Mill" It's a short twenty minute documentary on youtube. I think it is very revealing about the kind of self confidence and respect the working class used to have in western countries but which is now lost.

If nothing else it is a beautiful illustration of how things were, it's well worth the watch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2KJbRHO76s

To render all those people unto 'trailer trash' 'white trash', is despicable. You can tell a lot about people by how they treat others they consider their inferiors.

Doctors are responsible for killing their patients by virtue of not being efficient and by preventing technological adaptions. Even properly done digital medical records are impossible in the present world. I'm sure you read recently on HN that medical staff error is responsible for an incredible number of deaths. When I think: heart disease and cancer, it seems incredible that you should add 'Doctor' into the mix of things most likely to kill us, yet it is so.

Lawyers are harming the economic progress of in the main. Don't even think that is very controversial here. Niall Ferguson has outright accused them of this, that's the establishment!

On balance saying doctors and lawyers are a positive force for good is a crapshoot. Maybe so. Maybe there's objective evidence against the intuitive position. Just maybe, they're parasites in a parasitical system that is getting worse with their intransigeance.
'Several days' doesn't sound like enough for a lot of drugs.

Aside from quoting employers complaining about not being able to find employees, I wish the NYT had covered some more on the topic of, does drug testing even meaningfully help with finding better employees? Yes, it may be mandated or legally required of employers in a few cases, but that's far from universal; so are the rest doing it because it works, or because they just assume it works because everyone else has always done it?
It's a conscientiousness filter (particularly the pre-hire, never again variety).

Also, at one point (perhaps even still) there were regulations on federal contractors above a certain size promoting drug tests.
If you want a contract, loan, tax benefit or anything else explicit from the federal government or any contractor of the federal government - you have to institute drug screening policies, which are audited.

edit: The implication I am making is that this is literally the only (IMO) good reason to have such a policy.
Just because something is really hard (or impossible) to do right, doesn't mean we should do it wrong and then pretend that it was done right.
Iraq shuts down entire country's internet to “prevent cheating”
Economic theory says rent control should create shortages, not necessarily drive up rates.

But, since rent control is only on a few building, it increases rents in the rest of them.

The options are:

1. rent control everything, and let there be shortages, old buildings, etc

2. rent control some, and let half the city be expensive

3. build housing.
List of VFD Solutions
some cool ones you could add

* CP-mono

* Oxygen mono

* Fira Code
If a prospective customer refused to buy your
product unless you could prove no employee used
Percocet or Vicodin while working, would you
drug test your company for them?

This is what hundreds and thousands of U.S. government intelligence contractor companies do. Of course for many of the smaller ones the USG is their only customer.
The Google link? It's a nonsense query that I figured would have no results (better read it quick, before Google indexes this page ;-)), which is the only way (outside Google) to show off the no-results page.
…what? They call it "supply and demand" for a reason, because prices are affected not only by desirability but also by availability. Maybe prices are high because San Francisco is just doing a really terrible job at building enough units to keep up with demand. Maybe it's because many people want to live there.

Or… if we want to be really crazy… we could say it's a combination of both factors.
Sure! My email is in my profile.
Really hope that link isn't your only source for such a strong claim.

Isn't rent control being bad one of the very few things that almost all economists agree on?
I like how it has that big ass orange clunking power switch front and center as if to say "this is absolutely the most important switch on the machine".

The exact antithesis of today's smartphones designs.
> I think we can see such statements as examples of the Noble Savage sentiment

I think considering all primitive societies to be "noble" is probably not accurate. Probably most of them had serious issues.

My impression (which is just from reading various material over the years) of these small tribe-size communities is that some of them evolve very advanced social structures - where there is low violence and high compassion. The emotional side of me "likes" this. But also my intellect suggests that more harmonious/supportive communities are probably stronger and more productive.

Other communities diverge into states that I consider to be "sick" perversions of what communities "should" be like. Things like honor killings and it being ok to sell your nieces and nephews into the slave trade are things I would personally consider sick and I hope they are sub optimal from a survival perspective.

If I had to guess, I'd say a big reason she considered them socially advanced was the matriarchal component. I speculate that its hard to develop a matriarchal society because men tend to be more aggressive and physically stronger. However, my impression is that matriarchal societies tend to be less violent and more harmonious. It could be argued that less violence and more harmony are components of a more optimal social structure.
How do you get from admitting Chinese use spies to rob American companies of R&D to thinking anyone avoiding that is a Trump supporter? You have a powerful imagination or loose standards of logic to make a leap like that.

More like a company acting in rational self-interest should keep any IP they depend on away from the Chinese. Or expect to be cloned but leverage them and dominate their market as much as possible before displaced by homegrown offering.
MXparser: Math Expressions Parser for Java and .NET
What sort of training do you give people to get into the mainframe world?

Where I worked people were always saying how they'd like mainframe people and would train them up but when actually asked about training, well, things became quieter.
Absolutely stunned that they are saying that incorrect information couldn't prove harm. I wonder if this sets a precedent for more invasive and potentially harming inaccurate data collection?
If you liked that, you should also read Kevin Poulsen's Kingpin. Absolutely enticing story.
I wonder why no one studies the placebo effect. If it was understood better, we could perhaps factor out the effect for cases where it would be difficult to administer a believable placebo (as in the case here).
It's actually more about what was the bleeding edge of C++ 10+ years ago. The examples of "recent developments" he gives are all quite dated, and one is even outright obsolete as of C++11 (the safe bool idiom).
Wow these seem cool. Thanks!
Is it just me or does this get posted every month?
I use this dark theme with rectangular tabs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ft-deepdark/
Every good rule has an exception.
Also it can definitely be about looks or the person, as opposed to behaviour. Really comes down to how shallow the alleged-victim is.
A similar language might be Haxe, which can target C++, Java, C#, PHP, JavaScript, Python, Lua, and Neko languages, and make use of the tooling/build chain for those languages.

So you can abstract the syntax from the runtime, but the semantics are often different per target - e.g. accessing the filesystem in Node.js will be different to C++, due to the non-blocking I/O mechanism.

As an aside, the Haxe compiler is written in OCaml. I think there'd be a delicious juxtaposition if it was re-written in Reason. Writing Reason to generate OCaml to create Haxe to generate Java to generate bytecode...
The evidence presented in the article you linked is really not strong enough to support your conclusion with reasonable certainty. It's using a massive "post hoc ergo proper hoc" fallacy to prop up a weak argument.

"Ties up supply" is also a statement that is not necessarily connected to "increases price". I'm not entirely clear on the economic theories behind rent control, but from what I understand, it affects availability more than it affects price.
>>Ya I wouldn't make the mistake of saying that it's the death-knell of the smart phone. I just think we'll be seeing a significant contraction of the market that has driven the insane profits apple has had for the past few years. Certainly smartphones will be a massive and massively profitable product for years to come.<<

I'm unsure my point came across clearly; if it didn't then the fault lies with me.

The GTR and the 911 (in all its variants) are in the performance segment. No one is saying just because the GTR exists, all other segments like SUVs, MPVs, saloons/sedans etc will no longer exist. To reiterate: despite Porsches costing more and GTRs costing less, and on an objective level the GTR is a better car in terms of performance, 911 sales are not flagging off. They have instead increased. And the 911 is already more than 50 years old. [1] So your conjecture that premium luxury smartphone sales like the iPhone will level off or even be reduced due to "commoditization" is not very well-supported. In fact the inverse is true: Porsche is one of the most profitable car makers on a per-unit basis. [2]

>>I don't expect Apple to lose significant market share in places where they're already established. I mostly expect that the upgrade rate will slow, and they will not gain new market share in India and China. The sum of those two things is a substantial decline in profits for them over the next couple of years.<<

I think this is where we fundamentally disagree. In my experience I have never once met a person who said they aspire to own a Hyundai, Kia, Lada etc or have a poster of these cars on their bedroom wall. Nothing wrong with these brands of course, they bring in profits for the manufacturers. But these are different markets we are talking about.

It is true that Porsche had to come up with the Cayenne to stave off bankruptcy, because at that time SUVs were in demand and they did not have one in their lineup. Yet this is instructive as it only reinforces my point because the Cayenne is now the #1 selling Porsche. Chevy, Ford and all the other makers combined can continue to sell more SUVs than Porsche does Cayennes but they are in different markets. People who buy Cayennes don't even consider these other brands. They might consider Land Rover or Mercedes/BMW or even sister-label Audi (essentially the same chassis). Same applies to the iPhone vis-a-vis Android "replacements". Who knows, perhaps the iPhone SE may one day become the #1 selling iPhone?

tl;dr it is possible for a premium luxury manufacturer to continue to grow and expand its business, despite being in a mature industry like autos.

[1] http://press.porsche.com/more_about/statistics/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche#Production_and_sales
In terms of rights and law - of course it's right. If you don't own your home, then you don't have a legal right to stay there - apart from a few short term eviction restrictions.
There's almost no companies that I know of that give off MLK Jr. Day or Presidents Day off. It's even a joke that only govt workers get those holidays off. Most places are not going to change their time off policy no matter what federal holidays are, if it's important for a company to have election day off they would already give it off, some official stamp of Congress isn't going to change anything outside of public office.
They've thought about it. Such questions are kind of funny, because they take for granted that the scientists' standards are akin to the pop science stuff that everybody else writes. They aren't, and that is what makes good straw man arguments.

I submitted yesterday -with little success- a nice talk of Jonathan Lunine (Cornell) at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, here it is again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_mb59aQblY . This, albeit introductory, is what scientist do.

If you find a planet with an atmosphere rich in free oxygen, you can bet it's life that has put it there, because we have a pretty good idea about the abundance of the elements and other scenarios are unlikely. At the beginning of the Archean, there was no O2 in our atmosphere. All there is now comes from water, CO2 and photosynthesis. As scientists are usually serious about their jobs, abiogenesis models take into account the more likely primeval atmosphere and conditions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis

What is exciting about the search of life in Europa, Enceladus, maybe Ganymede and who knows Triton (apparently there's no will to go there ever again), is that we have very good reasons to assume that at some depth under the ice crust there are hydrothermal vents like those on Earth. And maybe chemosynthesis is enough to get things started.

Personally I find that there are more reasons to be excited about Enceladus than about... let's say Mars.
Here's the car allergic to vanilla ice cream. http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/smann/IceCream/humor.html
Snips, a new Siri competitor that promises privacy
Edit: While Horizon assigns versions internally, it looks like they are not currently used for catching concurrent client-side modifications by different users. (I previously wrote that they would cause the "losing" write to fail if it was based on an outdated version of the data, but that doesn't seem to be the case yet.)

I opened an issue against our docs to add information on this, as I'm a bit fuzzy on the detailed behavior myself: https://github.com/rethinkdb/horizon-docs/issues/50
Attacking JavaScript random numbers
Surface-Only Liquids
What enrages me to no end is that iTunes doesn't work well with my iPod Touch, a device designed to play music.

1. No, I don't want my iPod to use Apple Music by default. I'm carrying a device with 20GB of music on it, I don't need you to search for a wifi signal on this train and then try to connect with my non-existent Apple Music account. And there's no way to shift this default setting to use the iPod internally-stored music.

2. Two days ago, I took a deep breath and tried to sync iTunes with my iPod for the first time in 6 months. All I wanted to do was move my one newly-purchased album that iTunes had (the new Radiohead, if you want to know) onto my iPod. I still don't know what happened but it ended up deleting all my music, which then required a full sync to move those 20GB back onto my iPod (which, as a reminder, is a device designed to play music.)
The article debunks this:

"The claim that increased student aid causes tuition to rise was originated by William Bennett, the secretary of education under Ronald Reagan, in a 1987 New York Times opinion piece.19 Numerous academic studies since have tested the Bennett hypothesis, and though a few have found some link between rising aid and tuition in at most one sector of higher education,20 the vast majority have “…found not a shred of evidence of an empirical relationship,” as David Warren wrote in the Washington Post.21 As Warren notes, three major federal reports in the last fifteen years have each surveyed the existing academic literature, and each concluded that no such relationship exists.

The most recent, conducted by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in 2011, took advantage of a unique “natural experiment” to test the Bennett hypothesis: the substantial increases in Stafford Loan limits between 2007 and 2009.22 In 2007, the yearly loan limits, adjusted for inflation, ranged from $2,925 for freshmen to $6,125 for upper classmen. By 2009, they had risen to $5,750 and $7,825, respectively. All told, the yearly borrowing limit for all undergraduates increased by an average of $2,340. However, average tuition at public 4-year universities rose by just $540 over the same two years, in line with recent historical averages, leading the GAO to reject the possibility of a relationship between the two. Additionally, these increases in borrowing limits were the first since 1993, meaning that the inflation-adjusted value of the limit had declined for more than a decade during which tuitions rose steadily. All told, both the empirical evidence and academic consensus deem the Bennett hypothesis false."
The most interesting part of this story to me is actually that his wife noticed that the printer didn't work on Tuesdays. I'd have never, ever put that together, no matter how many times I saw it succeed or fail. I'd actually be more likely to figure it out by debugging the CUPS script than I would be observing my printer's behavior. Can a lot of people pick up on correlations like that? "Ever notice how it's always Tuesday when the printer won't work?"
> Several days from interview to test

Not enough time to piss clean from Cannabis, but enough for some of the harder drugs.

> And as the article suggests, its almost exclusively whites not passing

Doesn't that make drug tests a racist practice?
I think that getting the formal requirements is in some ways easier than programming. People can describe the things they want the computer to do, like sorting a list so it's all in order. Actually coming up with an algorithm that does that efficiently is much harder, and is where bugs come from.

I mean yes good program synthesis wouldn't replace programmers on it's own. But it would radically change how programming is done and make our lives much easier.

I'm just saying that AI is a quickly advancing field and predictions like "not in 20 years" have been defied months later. Applying deep reinforcement learning to tasks like game playing is relatively novel, and has only really started to succeed in the last 2 years.
Show HN: Socibd – Build your own social network
It didn't let you hide from your problems the first time, either. But for me, at least, it has gotten me out of my head and back into it with a different perspective on the problems. The stuff you think about it... it is basically fear (which goes away). The amazing part, I think, is that you don't even need all that much to get benefits.

I am in my late 30's now, and luckily I'm in a position to take a trip to Amsterdam every year or two - and that is after not doing it for years and years. I now find it a part of keeping myself psychologically healthy. I come back with a slightly altered life outlook. The worst part, for me, is that I usually can feel daily anxiety coming back as I come back down - but even that has become less over time and it gives me a better perspective on what those happen to be.
>Seveneves belongs in the subgenre of hard science fiction, which means it emphasizes scientific accuracy. Everything adheres to physical laws, so unlike Star Wars, no one travels anywhere near the speed of light.

A pity then that a little basic chemistry eluded both the writer and the critic - there's no carbon on the moon. Rather difficult to support humans, and carry out feats of biotechnology, without it...
Thanks for reading. If you liked that, you might also like

http://www.masongaffney.org/publications/G2009-Hidden_Taxabl...
I think this is a great project, but I don't think it will work without a strong political analysis -- that is, the installation of roadblocks to voting is an intentional political act. How do you intend to get states that are intent on suppressing the vote from certain populations to adopt technology that would make it easier to vote?
I learned years ago to always assign IP addresses to printers via DHCP but to set up reservations for them so that the IP doesn't change. Of course, this was at the time that configuring an IP address manually on a printer involved a two-line LCD screen (if you were lucky) and clicking buttons on the front to increment each octet of the IP address by one each time you clicked.

Re-addressing a couple hundred printers was not fun when each of them was configured manually via the front panel.
Intel Distribution for Python Beta
What do you mean? In the book, the moon explodes and destroys the world. Pretty much the exact opposite of supporting humans.
Someone once said that putting the power button on desktops level with the knee was one of computer industry's stupidest decisions. I had to agree. Instead of sensible alternative, they added delays and soft buttons I sometimes have to fight with for 10 seconds at a time. (Sighs)
Just another symptom of ad hoc constraint enforcement that can't happen in a language without a type system.
Well the binaries for the standalone player are out there so access is still possible. Kind of like with old consoles.
So you want to increase availability and drive down price? Recreate what makes San Francisco so great somewhere else and have everyone who wants to live in San Francisco move there. Heck, you could start with Oakland.
Oh, we only got dinged for spelling mistakes in Deutsch lessons, I think.
42, a tuition-free coding school, launches in Silicon Valley
Both garbage collected languages and rust offer memory safety, rust just trades better performance for a more complicated borrow system.

Use rust when you need the performance. Use a GC'd language like reason when you want less things to reason about.
The "do not use or you will be fired" is a common pattern in the code base at FB for deprecated functions. It's always humorous to come across, but nothing here is noteworthy :) sorry.
Front-end Hyperpolylglot
only someone who doesn't understand computers would notice it, programmers would say "that doesn't matter" :)
Yes.

Though Safari at least has their rendering engine open sourced. But really that just makes me care about Webkit.
Seveneves is one of my favorites, even though it gets mixed reactions from a lot of others who've read titles like Anathem. I can't compare it to Anathem (the only other Stephenson book I've read so far is Cryptonomicon; looking to change that), but I can say I love the technical depth. Perhaps it's because it helps me suspend disbelief much more easily, though Bill's point that "if you’re the sort of reader who doesn’t care how such a thing might work, you will find yourself skimming parts of Seveneves" is probably true for most lay readers.

The only thing that somewhat frustrated me about it, as I suspect is the case for most people, is the fact that the last third of the book feels like it could (should?) stand on its own. That being said, there's enough room for Stephenson to explore in more depth some of the events leading up to the third act in subsequent novels... so here's hoping. I figure explaining why I feel this way would be a bit of a spoiler. Bill does enough to allude to it.

Anyway, thumbs up from me. I enjoyed every bit of it, and Bill's review does a good job of selling the book without spoiling it.
Why should you be able to do that?
A guy just transcribed 30 years of for-rent ads in SF
Three reasons off the top of my head:
- Smaller cacheable objects -- every change you make doesn't invalidate the whole "bundle".
- If there are many permutations of the optimal bundles: different browsers, different pages use different scripts, etc.
- The browser does not need to wait for the "full bundle" to download to execute your app/site -- it can start once the first necessary assets are loaded.

In one project I worked on, we had 3 bundles:
- early load (inside the head tag)
- deferred load secondary (after body tag, for the other site pages)
- deferred load primary (after the body tag, for the 'hot' pages of the site)
With a optimal http/2.0 setup, we wouldn't need to make these never fully optimal bundles.