skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
related: Isaac Asimov's scathing review of 1984

This is not science fiction, but a distorted nostalgia for a past that never was. I am surprised that Orwell stopped with the steel pen and that he didn't have Winston writing with a neat goose quill.

Nor was Orwell particularly prescient in the strictly social aspects of the future he was presenting, with the result that the Orwellian world of 1984 is incredibly old-fashioned when compared with the real world of the 1980s.

Orwell imagines no new vices, for instance. His characters are all gin hounds and tobacco addicts, and part of the horror of his picture of 1984 is his eloquent description of the low quality of the gin and tobacco.

He foresees no new drugs, no marijuana, no synthetic hallucinogens. No one expects an s.f. writer to be precise and exact in his forecasts, but surely one would expect him to invent some differences.

In his despair (or anger), Orwell forgets the virtues human beings have. All his characters are, in one way or another, weak or sadistic, or sleazy, or stupid, or repellent. This may be how most people are, or how Orwell wants to indicate they will all be under tyranny, but it seems to me that under even the worst tyrannies, so far, there have been brave men and women who have withstood the tyrants to the death and whose personal histories are luminous flames in the surrounding darkness. If only because there is no hint of this in 1984, it does not resemble the real world of the 1980s.

Nor did he foresee any difference in the role of women or any weakening of the feminine stereotype of 1949. There are only two female characters of importance. One is a strong, brainless 'prole' woman who is an endless washerwoman, endlessly singing a popular song with words of the type familiar in the 1930s and 1940s (at which Orwell shudders fastidiously as 'trashy', in blissful non-anticipation of hard rock).

The other is the heroine, Julia, who is sexually promiscuous (but is at least driven to courage by her interest in sex) and is otherwise brainless. When the hero, Winston, reads to her the book within a book that explains the nature of the Orwellian world, she responds by falling asleep - but then since the treatise Winston reads is stupefyingly soporific, this may be an indication of Julia's good sense rather than the reverse.

In short, if 1984 must be considered science fiction, then it is very bad
science fiction.

http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm
Relevant:

"Reddit board member and YC president Sam Altman announced that Yishan Wong was leaving after being unable to garner support for a proposal to move the Reddit office from San Francisco to Daly City.[12] Wong, who thought newer employees would prefer to work in a less expensive area, stated that before the disagreement he had considered leaving due to an abundance of stress."[1]

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yishan_Wong

Edit:

That quote is a little disingenuous, and you can read more about the situation in these links if you're curious. The Quora link is the ex-CEOs response which puts a good frame on things.

[2]:http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/13/ex-reddit-ceo-wanted-to-mov...

[3]https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Yishan-Wong-resign-as-Reddit-C...

Edit2: It's also telling just how many people were championing Ellen Pao as the replacement. I have to think nobody really knows who'll be a good CEO until after the fact.

[4]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8603845
I wish there was a way to whitelist known contacts only on my phone, and shunt all unsolicited phone from strangers to a passcode-controlled answer bot.
> The article did a great job highlighting three interesting situations and their challenges/opportunities.

Yes it did and I agree with all you said.
As a German I just wanted to point out one thing that might not be clear to many readers not familiar with the situation in Germany:

And as you said the article was "highlighting the interesting situations". These life stories are highly atypical.

Mr. Huber was an Engineer at Siemens. Even if he didn't make quite a career there, he had certainly one of the better paying jobs in Germany. He inherited a house at Tegernsee, which is wealthy area. In contrast to most other Germans he had all the chances he could have, but somehow (the article doesn't say) he lost everything.

The Ehlers' trouble started with the birth of their forth child.
Only 3.5% of all families with children in Germany have four or more kids [1].

Mrs. Kramer is seriously ill. She is a single parent but has (apparently) otherwise no family to support her. She lives in her own apartment and has a good education. Her case is certainly the most typical of all three.

What does typical poverty in Germany really look like?

15.4% of the German population is considered poor[2][3].

- Single Parent 41.9%
- Family with three or more children 24.6%
- Unemployed 57.6%
- Low level of education 30.8%
- Foreign national 32.5%
- Migration background 26.7%

[1] https://www.destatis.de/DE/PresseService/Presse/Pressekonfer...

[2] http://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2016-02/armut-deutschland-2016...

[3] http://www.der-paritaetische.de/index.php?eID=tx_nawsecuredl...
I think you missed a zero, it'd be 100 a year, and then of course they don't need to buy new ones every year.

I'd imagine they probably use them for more than just MacBooks as well but I'm just inferencing and don't have any real idea.
You don't. I've never heard of this happening.
Could ethereum be used to create verifiable transparency in investment funds? Something that would prevent fraud, such as the Bernie Madoff ponzie scheme, from occurring.
hahaha i am not 100% sure. However, in terms of starbucks, you could probably respond with, write Abraham Lincoln, on my cup. Thus what you have said is technicaly simply a command but not a claim.
One of the major problems I see is that people are generally bad at distinguishing "can't" from "won't". Things like major depression (which, for anyone unfortunate enough to experience it, feels as physical as being chronically poisoned) have a way of turning in to "you're just being lazy".
Yes, be wary of hiring geniuses if you have poor management.

Why do we expect that someone who is fantastic at twiddling bits, to also be good at documentation? It's like saying to a Program Manager "great, you specified how it has to work, so now just take a few hours and code everything up". Or "how come you weren't coding as you went along?"

The solution is to pair these 'unbalanced' developers with people who are good in other areas. Where was the technical writer who was talking with him on a near daily basis? Or the SDET who worked with him to make sure the important aspects of his design were codified into tests?

You can have 10 reasonable devs spend a year getting something to work and have it be reasonably maintainable/documented/tested/etc. (If you actually even have 10 reasonable devs in the first place). Or you can have 1 'genius' do something fantastic in 6 months with minimal support and hope that your other devs can fill in the gaps.

Remember, you don't go to war with the army you want--you can't say "this person would be great if only they __". You can only work with them or not work with them. If they are genuinely doing what they think is best for the company, then I recommend you figure out how to work with them. Their challenge is to figure out how to be effective in an organization that doesn't understand, and your challenge is to figure out how to make an organization that can understand.
Is it possible to go sans cell phone?

I ditched the land line about 17 years ago. I'm now wondering, in an age where land lines and email is obsolete, a cell phone number is also obsolete because of so many other available forms of communication.

With just a google voice (or similar) number it might be possible. I just need a connected device that I can use to receive those 2-factor access codes, but other than that I am down to ditch my cell phone at this point.
Two Jet Skiers at Maverick's reef faced deadly 100-foot waves (2007)
Finding Clients – A Freelance Writer's Guide to Getting Work
being insensitive is now being conflated with being racist/sexist etc etc
Yeah, especially the Northern varieties are particularly expressive. To add to your examples, I was on the receiving side of this particular gem from a fisherman friend of mine up North: "Din skaderunka måskuk", which roughly translates to "you're the penis of a seagull, which has been whacked off in such a manner that it became damaged".
Austerity policies do more harm than good, IMF study concludes
97% - is that good or bad?
Personal bankruptcy didn't exist in Europe in the '90s (AFAIK it's still not in the law in many EU countries).

Limited liability companies have the option of bankruptcy (by definition), but as a business owner it will leave a black mark on your credit rating in most countries... And typically in a small business, the bank required that company loans were guaranteed by the business owner or close family anyway, so a bankruptcy didn't really solve anything.
Yes, I have mental illness, please lock me up. If you love them so much, sponsor them with your own money. I dont see why public welfare programs should be tunneled to do that.

Germany government even had boldness to ask other countries to provide the same benefits as Germany does. Otherwise their guests would not stay in country there were assigned to, but would return to Germany.
Also genuine question...

How does one get a job when they're completely unskilled?
I agree, I think this was a great write up.

Unfortunately, the company I currently work for has begun adopting and exhibits many of the behaviours and poor choices this article warns against. And is actually on a path to employ more of them, quelling any objection that might come up.

Sorry, it's just frustrating watching a company make such consistent poor choices.
Thank you for sharing context, details, and links! Very helpful.
Since they're already spoofing caller-ID anyway, it's trivial to make your phony area code recipient-specific.
To go even further, approximately 90% of calls that originate from my same area code and exchange (first 6 digits match my own phone number) are telemarketing calls. They're spoofed.
Do you think those publications became dumbed down, or did you come to understand their viewpoints thoroughly enough that you no longer found them stimulating?
Uber using direct mail advertising
Just a quick check, if you click on three dots on top right and go to "About", does it say TakeMeasure 12?
Thats not teaching, its basically just being present while people teach themselves.
I think it unlikely that you can get money or credit/ownership from them for an idea - at least not without spending money on patents and lawyers to enforce that patent.

Basically, ideas are worthless without execution. Now if you can make a product that performs this improvement you might be able to license it to them. I created and licensed some software to a company once.
3 grams is between about 1/6 and 1/8 once.

Of course, only a small portion of uranium in a reactor core is converted to something else. After that, they replace the fuel as its output drops a bit.

Disclaimer: I don't know enough to check the "grandparent" post's math. I'm assuming the calc is right in that it's the fission energy, and not total destruction of matter E=mc^2 / matter-antimatter style.
>> "Microscheme has a robust FFI (Foreign Function Interface) meaning that C code may be invoked directly from (ms) programs. Therefore, the power of the existing wealth of Arduino libraries is available within Microscheme. "

Arduino is c++, and c++ FFI's are really hard. So how does this FFI work ?
Is it really that bad in the USA?

Over here in Russia it's the SMS of all sorts, can't remember ever getting called like that.

But there the difference ends - the "no advertisements" lists tend not to work too, and asking a friend at the cellphone company to put your number into the hardware works too well - the messages with the bank codes stop getting through.

There is no middle ground, and the only salvation is to turn off the SMS sound.
Why do you mention DINK? Parent didn't say you should avoid having kids, even if you have a good dual income. He said you should not have more kids than you can afford, taking into account child-induced career changes. That seems like a very reasonable statement.

The net effect of that attitude is not that larger families break up. Larger families break up because they are trying to do something infeasible (i.e. trying to support more children than they can afford to support)
That was an oddly confusing segment about Huber. In the third to last paragraph of the long story are we (finally) told that "He's chronically ill", though I suppose one is supposed to decode his health issues from the earlier "By that point, he had already been unable to work for two years and was on welfare." What are the opportunities for independent IT contractors, as he apparently was, in Germany today? Isn't there strong demand for IT skills in Germany, for a salary that pays above welfare?
Part of our review process automatically compiles the new code, then runs unit and integration tests. The review is mostly for checking that new tests properly cover the change, the style and structure of the new code, and other problems that can't really be replaced by CI.
Enabling policy that helps citizens inside and outside his/her constituency in life-changing ways. Highly ethical, not afraid to make unpopular decisions if its for the greater good (gay marriage in a conservative region etc.).
Downvoters: so it's a good thing that we are transferring technology/manufacturing expertise away from the US and to potential rivals???
How much of it is prestige versus the convenience of not having to change numbers? I have the same cell number from an area code that I moved away from over a decade ago. It's nice knowing that anyone who calls(not counting spam calls) either is meaning to get me or is the rare misdial.
If they use a CDN that CDIR doesn't belong to FB you're screwed. afair they're using Akamai
I want to get my 8-year-old son a phone and I see the same problem. My dream would be that I could put a password on calls to him - that is, if somebody phones him not on a whitelist, they get a request for a PIN. If they can't do it, it gives them my number.
Really good question, but I suspect both are happening.

Especially the Alternet pieces on Salon are just... what they are - effectively low-grade propaganda.

There used to be intelligent writers, but these things seem to be mainly preaching to the choir, of questionable provenance and least common denominator.
That's probably relevant only to the companies that work in the same field as their customers. But there's another issue that applies to all: it makes that layer of managers relevant. If they'd let the developers talk to the customers directly, they wouldn't be needed anymore.
> It just gives an out for idiots to call as soon as the word Nazi comes out

Something even worse happens on Reddit. Whenever anyone mentions Nazis or Hitler, someone is absolutely, certifiably guaranteed to fall over themselves trying to be the first (in the thread; the 876458430854th overall) to post: "Hitler killed Hitler".

Followed inevitably by: "But he also killed the man who killed Hitler".
This is interesting, but the data is only from Hipmunk, which will filter out certain types of people. It doesn't prove that Trump hotels are doing worse than they did last year (although they probably are).
Yep. They're moved on to the next project that needs their speed and expertise. Cleaning up the mess is usually left to those who don't pump out new lines of code quite as fast.
Isn't your time worth more to you than theirs?
Yes, copyright 2014!
This is interesting, but it's not the hard part of exception handling. The next step is doing something to the state of the process that got the exception. If the exception comes from a userspace process, that's OK, because those processes aren't part of the Rust OS. But if the exception comes from kernel code, there's a problem. Rust code has to mess with the internal state of Rust code.

Signals have the same issue in ordinary Rust programs. See [1]. What's the state of the Rust world when you're in a signal handler?

[1] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/11203
Detroit architecture exhibit sparks international curiosity
There are in fact some refactoring tools available for Python, but yeah, personally I have ag (find + grep like tool) installed with the ag and wgrep-ag Emacs packages, and don't consider renaming a major hassle. There's a pyflake integration thing for Emacs too, where it underlines errors.

One benefit of grep is that it lets me spot things in different languages (Python, Javascript, HTML, CSS, documentation).
The code fetches some sort of number serverside, and then randomly updates it.

It's pointless anyways, my guess is the marketing company that made that page has no actual integration with the IVR system.
Interesting, got a link?
Open floor plans are ~80% of the time about cutting cost but only about ~20% of the time is this actually admitted by executives. There are plenty of problems at my current job but being cattle caged in an open floor plan is not one of them. Almost 100% of the time my introverted self performs an order of magnitude better within the sweet sweet sanctuary of my door-locking, fully-enclosed, window-with-some-mountains-in-the-background office. To the point of feeling golden handcuffed by it. I'm sure I'm not a minority in this. I wonder why more companies don't pay the extra, yet in many cases workable, expense.
The Ultimate List of Software Engineering and Development Books
The article gives a brief sketch of Huber's downfall:

But at the beginning of the 1990s, his life came crashing down around him. One of his main customers stopped paying. He fought for years to get the unpaid money and restructured his debt to get seed capital for his new business plan. He fought desperately -- and ultimately in vain. In 1997, he was forced to capitulate. By that point, he had already been unable to work for two years and was on welfare. He lost his family home in a foreclosure and his pension and retirement insurance plan was seized. His landlord evicted him. Manfred Huber was ruined.
Is it possible to apply this at the network level? I want to update my home router easily so that all devices in my home can benefit, not just my own laptop (since most of these lists are just updating /etc/hosts)
Mutual funds are not hedge funds. They cannot just invest your money in anything.
It won't happen all at once. There will be a long process of elimination of more and more layers, leaving more and more developers available for the work on the less automatable (more fuzzy and chaotic) side of spectrum. It will take years. At the end all of them will go home and do something else, of course.
Not sure why you got down-voted. Even if it's necessary, the costs are still pretty amazing. A bullet costs the same as a pretty nice car.
I bet you an Ether it's also highly vulnerable to polarized voting.
whatwg-fetch polyfill works well
Germany has a Transsexual law from 1987. Currently I'm undergoing the name change process, since all paperwork has to go under my old name (who is this guy?? Why do I have to sign for someone else?). They won't even change my bank account name, which would be a start (I've been a customer with them for over 20 years and they don't trust me and my "transgender passport").

So, currently, a judge is deciding on my fate on this. I've done their interrogation, visited two psychologists now and one of the letters has some crap written in it, which might, at worst case trap me another 1 1/2 years in this situation.

Without the legal name change done, work life is limited:
- I have to tell any employer my old name
- If I start/join a startup, I have to use my old name. Plus it'll cost lots of money to change it once my name change process succeeds.
- If I want to do freelancing, they want my old name for all paperworks. Then the thing with my bank account..

Using my old name is discouraging to any job I do. Also not being treated as an adult who can make their own life choices is highly discouraging.
Wrong. Fitbit's stock value has nothing to do with the underlying value. Follow the markets lately?

There is no fad here. These companies are attempting to lay down the pipes for the upcoming sensor and IoT revolutions.
Microservices, They scale when requirements arise not when workload increases
It's scummy journalists all circling the wagons as they feel one of their own is under attack.

that's why you won't find logical or reasonable arguments from them.
Breaking into a wordpress site without knowing wordpress/php or infosec at all
This is why the picohitler is such a handy unit of measurement.
Thanks, that's really odd, because stuff should lazy load until you browse to a particular page fore viewer. Will try and dig up something to test on. Really appreciate the feedback.
Not going to disagree with you. The only people who benefit from offshoring are the people making the money and the areas with the best ports to import from those areas.

In terms of China, that means the west coast.
Do the occupants survive? When I first saw this video, I assumed they got roasted.
I've pretty much gone this route, though with a few caveats.

I've got a tablet, WiFi only. It's possible for that to be used for various messaging and email, where necessary (though email is also badly polluted, and a sufficient surveillance / profiling / security risk I've all but abandoned it as well). A 4GL hotspot extends the tablet onto wireless services when needed.

There's voice chat systems. I've used Google's, which is good, though I usually remain logged out of that, simply because I hugely dislike any distractions.

I'm leaning to the idea that Google, Skype, and Apple iChat simply bite the bullet and interconnect. At this point they could take down the existing POTS and Mobile service in another few years.

I've a fallback phone message service through an organisation I've been associated with for some time. Absolutely crucial messages can come through that, though I don't make it easy.

The result is an exceptionally high level of nondistraction.
Is it actually 100% necessary to hand-craft assembly for bootstrapping the OS?

I suppose it could be that it's simpler to write it out in assembly, since the C (/etc) code would look basically the same - just a lot of assigning cryptic variables to cryptic pointers?

Or, based on a quick Google search (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3022046/is-it-possible-to...), is it because you cannot write to these registers from C, thus needing to drop down to assembly?
Show HN: MAZTR: Instant Online Audio Mastering
The all-conquering Wikipedia?
I didn't mean to imply that people who are 'welfare dependent' are workshy layabouts, far from it. I meant it in the 'non-pejorative' sense of "somebody who is dependent on welfare for a majority of their income for a significant period of time". That might be because of illness, or some other reason - I make no judgement.

So, going back to the original comment, moving to a small village to make your benefits go further makes it harder to find a job. Thus, you remain on welfare for a longer period of time. On the other hand, if you stay in the city, you're more likely to get a job, but it's also harder to eat and find good accommodation.

So these things are difficult. It is clearly a big social problem that people have to face these kinds of difficulties.
Fun fact - "microscheme" means "integrated circuit" in Russian. Oddly fitting.

So far i don't like the fact it can't handle interrupts (unless by C code), and that it seem to ignore the C++ FFI completely.

That, and the fact that a garbage-collected language is to be run on a microcontroller - a device that is mostly used for realtime tasks. It won't be good for a quadcopter to go into a garbage collect subroutine during the control loop calculations.

Not a problem if you are aware of the issue, but how many people are?