skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Please elaborate on how they are being selective with their history.

It is demonstrable that during the post-war period when the suggested policies were in place was the period when the middle class was ascendant and wealth inequality was lower than today. Contrast with the post-1970s when such policies were progressively abandoned, and the middle class is shrinking, and wealth inequality is rising, and the structure of the economy has changed, notably a decrease in manufacturing and an increase in the financial sector.

Learn some more history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Business_Administration#...
Nodejs is actually pretty easy to pick up. Any reason you don't want to get into it?

Elixir and Clojure are also fascinating to me. Is there anything in particular you feel would help you more than the existing tutorials? Projects/quizzes/follow-ups/...??
"was the real moment Google gave up on team communications"
I believe so too and Wave might have failed because Google said "this is instead of email". Had they markeded Wave as a "team communications suite" like Microsoft is doing today with their team communication tools, and all the aother players too (we're getting used to hearing about communications suites especially at work, right?). But the world was probably not ready to hear about communication suites until maybe 2010, så Wave was also too early. And it definetly wasn't a email replacement.

Maybe this high-lights the drawbacks of being too focused on your core business, so focused that you cut of an arm (gchat) because it wasn't in line with your philosophy of having a totally open, standardized protocol that you (Google) hoped everyone eventually would be using. The players of today do not care about these things, they care about getting traction and a massive user-base and about encryption and privacy and claim their place in the spot-light because users love them.

Google knew we loved gchat. They must have know why. Google Drive + gmail + gchat, tailored towards businesses: good bye Office 356, see you never. Microsoft would be limping without Office... how could Google fail to make this happen?
Take a look at Microcorruption [0]. If this post intrigued you, I think you'd really enjoy it.

It's a series of challenges by tptacek that task you with exploiting the firmware for a digital smart lock. It starts out by assuming no knowledge, with the first level literally just requiring that you read a memory dump, but by the last level you'll be reverse engineering custom heap implementations, injecting shellcode into ASLR'd binaries, and bypassing memory protections.

It really is the best introduction to this sort of material that I've ever come across.

[0] https://microcorruption.com
there's a whole lot of room in between. every modern nation state produces a super class, but it's a question of how super they are, and whether possible checks exist to their superness. there are few checks to vast wealth in the US today.
Oh man! I _so_ identify with this problem. I've been struggling with it for ages. Lately I've been trying some voice exercises and they have helped a bit but I still slip back when I'm not thinking about it.
In contrast, I strive to avoid flow. I find that when I get into flow, I skip over things and write overly-clever code.
TypeScript starter kit, using Rollup, and Bublé
Is there anything beyond the existing Rust tutorials/blogs that you would find helpful/useful?
archive.is is your friend:

http://archive.is/DhM0e
Yeah, Wave created quite a buzz, at least within developers/early-adopters. It was complicated and heavy though. I didn't get fond of its features, for the few weeks that it existed.
The only major problem I still have with Vector is that despite Matrix the protocol specifying ways to register and authenticate accounts using various web apis like oauth[1] Vector is always pushed as the premium Matrix webclient but it doesn't support anything but username / password.

You would be amazed how many people simply refuse to create new username / password pairs in 2016. And its a good thing. We should be past username / password. Support oauth2, openid connect, and for the privacy minded... keep complaining to Mozilla that they shutdown Persona.

http://matrix.org/docs/spec/r0.0.1/client_server.html#oauth2...
Living costs are similar in Denmark where I'm from, where the lower middle class frankly can't afford to live in the cities, even with two working adults. Being in IT I'm able to pay for our three room apartment even though my fiancée is still attending university, but I make as much money as two lower end jobs and we had a million Danish kroner to get us started. This is the kind of income and startup capital you need to live in the cities.

There are two problems with moving away. The first problem is that cities are where the jobs are. If you're unemployed you could benefit from moving into the wild lands, but you could easily be 4-5 hours of public transportation away from any job interview. The the second problem is that you actually have to move pretty far away. Most of the smaller cities near the city centers are already occupied by the wealthy class who wants nature + a short drive to work.

Poor people are obviously much better off here than they are most places. They can get medical care, they can get education for their kids, and the system will even help pay their rent.

The stigma remains though. Perhaps especially so, in a society where we haven't yet gotten used to inequality.
Clarity, both on my understanding of the problem and in my understanding of my tools.

Simplicity and readability of my code, my tests, and the notes that accompany my code. That way someone (including my future self) can understand the system.

And writing tests first. I've become convinced that there are very very few cases when I can afford the luxury of not insisting on writing a test first.
> The largest 10 cities are home to 16M Americans, the 10 largest cities in the UK are host to 12M Brits. The 100 largest cities in the US are home to 59M Americans, the 100 largest cities in the UK are home to 34M Brits. The US is 5 times as populous but there is only 30% difference between the top 10 cities in the US vs UK and 50% in top 100.

This is a nonsensical statistic to use, irrespective of whether the numbers of right or wrong. Imagine taking the UK and copy-pasting it 10 times. Make the new deca-UK a single country, let's call it 10UK.

Obviously, 10UK has exactly the same proportion of people living in "major cities" as the original UK. Obviously, the infrastructure serving the 10 copies of each major city is equally affordable for a country with 10x of everything (or even more affordable, due to more economies of scale).

But the 10 largest cities of 10UK are the 10 copies of London, and thus the proportion of people living in the 10 largest cities of 10UK is equal to the proportion of people living in the single largest city in the UK. Clearly, this is the wrong number to use to estimate anything related to the problem at hand.

This is one of those rare situations where avoiding the wrong conclusion requires zero knowledge of the world; cognitive ability on its own is sufficient. In other words, you are demonstrably stupid.
FlashForth: A Forth System for Arduino and PICs
> have to grep

Have you tried out the Silver Searcher? http://geoff.greer.fm/2011/12/27/the-silver-searcher-better-...
> Are you implying here that curiosity and intellectual abilities are genetically inheritable ?

And you think they aren't? Like there's no difference between humans and amoebas?

> If so, what stops eugenics from being morally indefensible ?

Now, are you implying that eugenics is defensible? I'm getting lost :)

If you're asking why eugenics is considered indefensible, I'd say it's because nobody really knows what's good and what's bad. Lots of the time people can't even decide well for themselves.

Also, if we took the idea of killing people considered "worse" to the extreme and killed everybody who is considered worse by anybody, there would be probably no one left. So people are somewhat reluctant to try.
gchat was great. I really wish Google build on Hangouts to integrate SMS like iMessage. Having a proper desktop SMS client is the only reason I ended up going back to IOS a few months ago.

I can understand why they dropped XMPP. I'm not sure if they really violated their 'don't be evil' motto as much as they recognized that other services were improving on their dime.

I like Slack for corporate environments, but IRC is still top dog when it comes to interest-based real-time communities.
Common-tags – useful template literal tags for dealing with strings in ES2015
Thiel's multiple cases against Gawker are a death knell for American journalism. To be clear, I don't like Gawker's approach to journalism, and I disagree with their decision to out Thiel and expose Hogan. If Gawker goes under, the world will not be a poorer place. But the PRECEDENT that Thiel is setting is deeply disturbing, and it will hurt US democracy. When any billionaire can sue any publication into bankruptcy anonymously over any story they ever wrote, all publications will eventually belong to another oligarch, because that is the only way they'll survive. And the stories that publications write are a reflection of their owners, which means the oligarchs will exert even more influence on the American mind than they already do. This will cast a chill on independent journalism, and limit the voices that we read. Thiel is right as an individual case, and horrible if you go one layer of abstraction above that.
It gets even more complicated than this - the gene could be identical in sequence and still have a different function because of a change somewhere else in the genome. The genome is the ultimate spaghetti code that is the result of 3.5 billions years of hacks upon hacks upon hacks.
Why didn't you take Bafög?
I haven't been to the Oakland airport before, but they opened a BART line to the Coliseum station in Oakland from the OAK airport in 2014. I don't think they offer the shuttle anymore, based off their website.
There's a community forked version with more active developers, features, etc here: https://github.com/thelounge/lounge. Plugin support is still sparse, but there is a packages[0] POC branch, along with a wiki page detailing the ideal plugin/extension/package system[1]

[0] https://github.com/thelounge/lounge/tree/packages
[1] https://github.com/thelounge/lounge/wiki/Package-system-desi...
Yes. I'm sure all of the Germans of Turkish familial origin would agree... They aren't Germans. Even though they were born in Germany and speak German.

You can be non-Caucasian and still be German. That is what you were getting at right?
Like this? https://getfreewrite.com/
I knew Google was "evil" long before then, but the biggest middle finger to me as a customer was dropping ActiveSync. Seriously, try to get Outlook to work with Gmail, it's a totally nightmare. Absolutely unnecessary in its complexity to get it to work (lots of buried settings in Gmail, lots of blocking your sign-ins, Calendar syncs only work one way.) I deplore Google Apps for Business, just a complete nightmare, unfortunately I'm stuck with it.
The difference between 3D TV and VR is staggering.

I hate 3D TV (and movies) but was instantly amazed and wanted more of VR.

VR's biggest problem is tech needs to catch up - i.e. the race is towards doing retina-resolution VR, at which point it's game-over for monitor tech.

3D TV is about as good as it's ever going to get, with a lot of really obvious limitations.
You can buy an external Lenovo keyboard https://jet.com/product/detail/46d2f67ba52346b79674d4b60358c...
2 solutions:

1. Save to pocket and read it there.

2. Stop reading forbes.

I've decidedly to click out of any forbes article here on out.
Do you mean end users, as in the type of people systems like Slack market to, or are you referring to the failures of previous systems that made open specs and interoperability a goal?

If the former, Matrix the specification and overall system is not what would be sold to the end user. Like you say, most of them don't care how it works or about the philosophical or political reasons why you might choose a system like this. They just want to be able to talk to friends, family, and coworkers and have a good user experience. That's something any company could package and sell in a way that resonated with people, using Matrix as its underlying system.

In other words, Super Awesome Chat, Inc. could create a really slick hosted Matrix service and client with great usability, and the end user wouldn't necessarily know or care about how it worked. In mentioning the open specification, it's not for the benefit of that type of user, but at the HN reader who is likely more informed or interested in the details of the technology, the philosophy, or political/sociological implications.
Wikis in general will be a part of human culture until, more or less, the end of time... but Wikipedia specifically feels like it's already begun a slow decline of bikeshedding, endless reverts, and territory claims by predatory editors.
Sigh, nobody has a credible power source for a humanoid type robot, we don't even a decent source for a 'dog' robot that can save power by just standing there. You can deploy a gun on a rolling platform, but if you armor it so that it is resistance to small arms fire it gets to heavy to move and can't navigate rubble that you find in every war zone.

Basically, aerial drones are it for now. Maybe some "flying grenades" in the near future but probably just spotters for finding sniper perches etc.

And nobody is letting these things loose yet as fratricide is waaaay too likely.

Someday killer robots will be a thing, but thankfully that day isn't today. I'd be more impressed if the Russians decided to field a sentry gun. They are a reasonable force multiplier.
"Decentralized persistent communication", as long as you either use a centralized homeserver you don't control, or run a hugely resource-hungry and crash-prone homeserver yourself.

I tried running my own for a few months, and resource demands for even a single user in a few moderately popular channels brought down my small ec2 instance.

Eventually I had to shut it down, but now I've lost my ability to authenticate as the user I identified as during that time, until I set up my homeserver again.
I really really like the ideas of Matrix, but the problem is none of my friends are on it. I had the same problem when I started to use Signal.

WhatsApp actually seems like the lesser of two evils right now - even though it's controlled by Facebook, they've added encryption and some of my friends are on it.

Who'd have thought we'd look back on the days of MSN, AIM and ICQ as the golden age of interoperable messaging? At least I could talk to everyone I needed to through Gaim (Pidgin) or Trillian.
I disabled my ad-blocker, and they gave me an "ad-light" version of the site for 30 days.

Their "ad-light" version (that people can actually choose to pay for) displays more ads than most sites, and the entire site lags when scrolling (on a beast of a computer no less).

I'm never going to read a piece of Forbes content again. Let this be a lesson in how not to Internet.
I've been hoping to play Dactyl Nightmare on something this generation (as well as Descent, which had 3d support at the time).
> "It's already pretty well acknowledged that if Russia wants to invade the Baltics, they can do it in 24 hours and NATO can't do much about it," Asaro said. "Them having some super sophisticated robot isn't going to change that."

Really? It takes that long for a rocket to fly to Russia? Don't Baltics have some groups of American soldiers, strategically placed right in the harm's way, and wouldn't Pentagon react on harm to them? Won't NATO honor its obligations to defend its members? Does it REALLY take 24 hours for UK arms to reach Russia as well?
Don't forget ternary content addressable memory (TCAM), which is common in contemporary network routers because it turns out having a third state to mean "don't care" is incredibly useful:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-addressable_memory#Ter...
Mata Hari
True. My comment is not a response to the particulars of this article, but more about the area of software of which GChat was a member. Apologies for turning it into my own soapbox.
The military industrial complex is at it again, trying to scare up support for more funding by waving the russians around.

Meanwhile the koreans already have autonomous gun turrets in field testing and the Us operats something like half of all the carriers in the world.
Not poo-pooing that video, but not sure if you read the short FAQ in the description:

FAQ

- No, i can´t see my hands or the steering wheel while playing, it´s done in video editing

- I´m using the Oculus Rift DK2 with runtime 0.6

- The block dot comes from unwarping the Rift video, I´m sorry for that, but i couldn´t get rid of it

- Greenscreen is to make my room invisible so i can edit real and virtual view together

- The poor resolution is because i record with 1080p but then have to crop the picture down the the view of one eye in 16:9 so i get less than 720p. This will get better as soon as i get the final verion of the Rift or the Vive

That said, I'd totally buy into VR if I could do that. For now I think I'll wait for a bit.
Yes but each requires its own username/password combo!
I live in a town that got municipal broadband at the turn of the millennia. Since about 1999 they have offered 10/2 up to 10/10 speeds for $25-$50 a month over coax.

Except... that is all they have. All they have ever had. And as the population has risen, they have no budget to deploy more servers to meet demand, so every night the speeds crash and you have intermittent outages. Especially on weekends. They are running 20 year old switches that have to handle Netflix loads on a nightly basis.

So you go to town council meetings to find out whats up and it turns out that over 15 years later they still owe some ~3 million on the original bill of 22 million, and the whole town is 10 million in the red (with a population of 3 thousand) so it cannot spend money on practically anything.

So main street is like driving on a cobble trail with potholes that go unfilled for years, and school taxes are the highest in five surrounding boroughs and its still not enough for them.

Sure, you can be certain they got ripped off with whomever they bought the original deployment from back then, given its just coax and not even fiber, and the municipal ISP is only a small piece of general budget mismanagement, but it is a reflection on how bad in general politicians are at budgeting, and nobody should ever be surprised when someone cannot make a reasonable budget when they are doing it with other peoples money and they have no consequences to themselves besides possible reelection issues.

IMO, it is just a more fundamental reflection that politics and political office as it is arranged in the states is both systemically intentional and attracts people who are not technical, not actuarial, and often lawyers and other "people" persons who can talk big to get elected and then go into an echo-chamber of self-reinforcing superiority with all the other elected officials such that they never attract the kind of critical thinking or knowledge to approach anything close to municipal... anything, really, with any degree of competence. They just defer to their friends friend at a teleco wiring company or a water treatment operator or a civil engineering corps and get turned into a money faucet for terrible results. I'm not saying every government has to behave that way, but at least from my observations all the ones I have been under have, at best, been incompetent, and have often been of malicious intent towards its own citizens at their expense for corporate donors and insiders to their social circle. But it is certainly systemically intentional.
You are correct that you want to move to a configuration management system like ansible. I wrote up a tutorial on configuration management that has automated tests at every stage and has the student write some tests.

https://amfarrell.com/saltstack-from-scratch/

I should sit down and put more emphasis on testing when I have more time, but if you work through that it will teach you the basics of configuration management and get you to doing a deploy of django+postgresql+gunicorn+nginx on a digital ocean machine.
Ask HN: Do you or anybody you know need my programming video course
Hi Guys and Gals

I am working on a 2 to 3 hour video course, to teach basic coding principles for newbies. I plan to teach 4 languages and the promise is to teach it all in one day. The course is not about getting someone a coding job in one day but it is about getting someone from zero to three in a scale of one to ten in one day.

I'm targeting newbies who are having hard time getting through the basics and non technical people who want to know the basics of programming. I'm planning to price the course at $99.

I'm wondering if there is demand for what I am making. Please tell me if you need this or know some one who might need this.
Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for mine to ship at the end of June / start of July :-(

I love flight and racing sims, so I expect to get a lot more use out of it.
> I really really like the ideas of Matrix, but the problem is none of my friends are on it.

Build a whatsapp bridge for matrix? I mean, it's built for the exact case where people aren't "on" it.
People in power in today's Russia understand the only kind of arguments - force. Force of different kinds, but still - overwhelmingly force. This approach shouldn't be underestimated.
Insurance is a business with a strong, predictable, and constant cash flow. People are paying premiums virtually every day of every month.

Payouts are more sporadic. So you're able to invest and make money on those premiums until needed for payouts.

But wait, you don't need to liquidate those investments to make your payout. Just don't invest your incoming cash flow, and pay out from that instead?

Bigger blip than usual and not enough cash flow to handle outgoing expenditures? Borrow against your illiquid assets at fantastic rates because of your predictable cash flow and solid asset portfolio. Gives you enough runway to either pay that debt down with a longer timeframe of cash flow or to liquidate those assets, if servicing that debt is worse than your asset return.

^^ General thought process of insurance. Geico is special in trying to maintain a breakeven on premiums vs payouts and source all profit from investment income. But doing so allows them to have competitive premiums in most risk pools, amass a large amount of market share, and provide Berkshire Hathaway with enormous liquid assets to invest. Many insurance companies bake a target profit margin into their actuarial models, and derive profit from a mix of premiums and investments. But the higher your premiums, the lower your market share, and the less capital/leverage your investment arm has available. So it's a balancing act based on business priorities.
VR is going to be somewhat like the advent of the 3D television in 2010-ish. Every manufacturer will make one, few people will buy one, and the people who do will likely only use it on novelty occasions. VR is really only a stepping stone to augmented reality, and mixed reality mobile operating systems. On a side note Oculus and WhatsApp seem to be some of the dumbest expenditures Facebook could have ever made. 13 billion dollars for a messaging app. Thats 13 trips to the moon and back... But fuck it, we will just eat Cheetos and do a computer simulation of a moon mission in an Oculus. #MillennialLyfe
Introducing denture Capital:India's first startup show Episode on Bitcoins
in the US and Canadia where the mobile/cell call receiver also pays for minutes

That has changed in recent years. My postpaid cell plan (Verizon) now offers "unlimited talk" and "unlimited text". The only variable is how many GB of data a month you want to pay for. AT&T is similar. Just choose the amount of data.