skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I have yet to come across any concept in any human language that can’t be expressed in English.

That's an extraordinary statement; how many languages do you speak? In my home we speak a melange of three, different ratios depending on who is speaking to whom. And mixed in are other words that my wife or I acquired from other languages used when younger. Some concepts are just simpler or more intense in one language than another. Even though I have been speaking English from birth, use it every day, and live in an English speaking country, there are some things that are simply not natural in it. It would be like trying to write Lisp code using C -- possible (there are lisp compilers that emit C), but painful.
There is such a thing as "rational ignorance". It's all about the cost benefit analysis.
The general price of goods plummeting would be seen by most modern economists as something of a disaster -- so occupied are they with engineering inflation. I don't think any mainstream economists have models or theories of economic development or social organization that would take us to a Kardashev level 2 civilization.
Networks of specialists is more robust than disorganized bands of generalists. You don't have to go too far back in human history to find food insecurity and disease dominating all other problems.

You get rid of those through specialization.
> the situation has to be VERY bad for you to get off lightly.

The problem is that self-defense is not explicitly protected. Feasably if someone pulls a knife on me in my home, I manage to get a gun and shoot them (assuming I've managed to tackle the 500 locks the NZ Police mandate you have on them), and shoot back I feasibly be sent to jail. I personally don't like that.

> I think you're looking for the word "nationalize", rather than "socialize".

I think the root of the problem is the different connotations of the words from your country to mine. When medicine is "socialized" to me it means that it is funded by public funds.

> Save yourself a $2000 excess and goto the ER.

What if instead of a nasty gash I need a surgery that is not covered by your health care? I still need to pay the hefty fee. I'd rather just go with a private insurance company like I always have here in the States.

I've always gotten great care from my parents plans and from plans I've gotten through the college I'm attending.

> The argument that people on average are very happy here.

Well I can say that about almost anything. The problem is that you have not proven direct correlation between these two statistics.

I could also say that Switzerland has high gun ownership and people there are happy! But I would be being disingenuous about this. It is not because of the gun ownership, it is a combination of many factors. All of which I cannot specifically exclude or attribute this characteristic to.

> I'd like to point you to:

I would very much like it if you could read through my post here so we can discuss this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12028025

> But not being able to fire RPG's and AK47's

RPGs and AKs are very different. A semi automatic AK is almost completely identical in mechanical operation to a M1 Garand (or better yet the M1A1 carbine). The only reason why I'd assume you are ok with one and not ok with the other is the look of the rifle. Functionally they are the same.

It is stupid to ban something's looks. Ban, or make it extremely difficult to obtain, functionality that makes sense to regulate such as full auto.

For example: ban the use of nitrus tanks in cars, don't ban hotwheel flame stickers. One makes something very fast and the other just makes something look like it moves fast.

It is smart to regulate one, and it stupid to regulate the other.
> soccer players who came in with bruises that you'd associate with a severe beating

I was a lacrosse goalie in high school and didn't have the sense to wear shin pads. If you run your fingers along my shin, you'll feel divots where the bone never regenerated. I too used to walk around with bruises on my legs that you'd associate with a severe beating.

> Is this because of Mountain Dew commercials and 1980s GI Joe body image stuff?

It's considerably more primal than that. Sports are the modern equivalent to tribal rites of passage. We're not allowed to kill our rivals anymore, so we settle for beating them in a physical sport in order to establish our physical dominance. It's empowering in a way that few things are, especially as a teenager and extra especially if you were bullied throughout elementary school.
How energy efficient is the recycling process? This includes transporting old electronics to somewhere else to be "recycled".
Samsung Clear S-View Flip Cover Review for Galaxy S7 Edge
I suspect it does matter what their motivations were, at least a little. It is about not distorting the truth Vs distorting the truth in two opposite ways that hopefully cancel out. It is still distortion.
What we are actually interested in is eg industrial output and unemployment.

Stable nGDP growth seems pretty closely correlated with those two. Inflation less so.

The standard examples are: the oil price shocks of the 1970s gave us inflation, but nGDP crashed. The IT bubble and the housing bubble saw nGDP grow above trend, but not inflation.

Nominal GDP is relatively straightforward to define and measure; inflation comes with all kinds of thorny philosophical questions about quality improvements.

That being said, targeting the trajectory of the price level (=`level targeting') might still be a better idea than the current system, where the central banks see their inflation targets as ceilings instead, and don't make up this year for the targets they missed last year.

Scott Sumner argues that targeting aggregate nominal labour income might actually be slightly superior to targeting nGDP, but it's wages that are sticky. But the labour share of GDP is pretty stable over time in rich, diversified economies, so it doesn't make too much of a difference.

The best advertisement for nGDP targeting I've read was Scott Sumner's slogan that it's making the world safe for laissez faire capitalism: it's much harder to organise political opposition to creative destruction, if everyone knows that full employment is almost guaranteed, and there won't be any recessions. Let the banks fail, abolish tariffs, let the immigrants in, review restrictive licensing requirements, etc.
My guess is that the general audience / user base simply doesn't care.

It's similar to the experience I had when I had to look for a replacement for rdio, which was closing down last year. I was shocked to learn how inferior and lacking all other services were - yet rdio was the one that had to close shop. One of the most obvious issues is the fact that you can't filter/browse releases by label on any service but rdio. Being able to see a label's catalog and new releases is an essential feature for music enthusiasts, yet the general public apparently couldn't care less. It seems if you use these features, you're already part of a very niche crowd. I guess it's not too different from searching by actor or director on Netflix.
People might like the novel "Rose" by Martin Cruz Smith (he of Gorky Park fame) who wrote a book set in Wigan which features (naked) clog fighting aka shin kicking.

https://www.amazon.com/Rose-Martin-Cruz-Smith-ebook/dp/B006Q...
It isn't necessary to have only one language for people to communicate. Humans are perfectly capable of learning multiple languages, and and it may even be good for a child's cognitive development to do so.

It's also unlikely that it is possible to have one global language. People acquire language from the people they grow up around. They get it from their parents, friends, neighbors, etc (note that I omitted teachers). Even if everyone had the possibility to communicate with any other person in the world, from birth, they wouldn't, and so dialects would form and eventually become languages.
> The whole "security" thing is a sideshow; the real goal here with "Secure" Boot is to make it harder to install unlicensed copies of Windows.

How does that make sense? The Lenovo laptop in question, like most non-Apple PCs sold in the West, came with a licensed copy of some version of Windows; and Microsoft's strategy lately has been to offer (almost coerce) free OS upgrades, apparently valuing users being up-to-date over the revenue it could gain from the meager fraction of users who'd pay for upgrades. So there's little reason for users to ever install pirated copies of Windows on such devices, or for Microsoft to care if they do (in order to downgrade or whatever).

In China and elsewhere the situation is different, but since the manufacturers are "in on" the piracy, there is no reason they'd enable any firmware features that could hinder users from installing pirated Windows; and even if a future version of Windows requires Secure Boot, that would just be patched out along with the activation checks. (That is, if China ever gets off Windows XP!)
Some of the things attributed to capitalism have nearly nothing to do with capitalism itself. I'm starting, for one, to think that there's probably less concentration of wealth and power than we think. Bill Gates is a heck of lot wealthier than was JP Morgan, but Morgan had a lot more concentrated power and wealth than Gates.

Not to quibble, I just think our analysis is deeply flawed.
Why can't we ask people to give up their identity?

You're not willing to give up your identity. It's a lot of work, among other things.
> I don't understand why you'd use Pascal today when you could use C++.

Here are some "whys":

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11005203

2. http://ian.hixie.ch/programming/

3. http://ziotom78.blogspot.com/2015/01/lfi-data-analysis-with-...

4. http://freepascal.org/advantage.var

5. https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/features

Object Pascal has changed a lot in the last 25 years. You should check out modern Object Pascal. It's pretty nice.
there will be deaths and accidents from the computer controlled cars. that is pretty much inevitable. the question is where on the x of y miles driven per accident/fatality does it make sense to accept that computers and algorithms are fallible just like humans but in aggregate the system works better than just humans doing all the manual control inputs. it's the first of its kind and we only have one datapoint w.r.t. the deadliness of autopilot used without oversight but it seems to indicate that the autopilot is safer overall in aggregate.
English is not my native language, and I can barely tell the difference between Indian, Kenyan, British and American English. Cadence and idioms are all equally off. Certainly it's not "weeks of practice".
I think termites and fungii are above us on the evolutionary ladder - they're more by count and by mass.

If we cease, we had a good run.
Why use Object Pascal over C++? Ack! Thbbt!

Compared to any other OOPL, C++ is simply ghastly -- a grossly overcomplex mishmash of hacks in the key of C inspired to repent for the multitude of sins that historically bedeviled C, and have since led to a never ending cascade of ill-fated hacks to shoehorn a nearly 50 year old unsafe high level assembly language into the guise of a modern type safe OOPL. History has since shown this to have been a tragically quixotic quest which inevitably and catastrophically spun wildly out of control, mutating and metastasizing into a disgusting chimeric monster that now strikes fear and loathing into the soul of even the most stouthearted digital denizen, who only when lit by the faint glow of a failing CRT, oft have been heard to admit furtively and only under duress in the faintest of whispers:

"Yes. I admit it. I code in C++".

Ahem. Anyway, that's why I use Pascal.
The moral argument is simply one of valuing equality. You don't deserve to have your chosen language canonized, and I don't deserve to have mine relegated to a cultural dustbin.
React Native with ClojureScript: Summing Up
I think you may have a diode in backwards :)

Smith compared free(er) trade to Mercantilism - extremely un-free, Royal patent oriented rent seeking .
There is too much reliance on the context in determining the exact meaning of a word

That is every language in the world
Can we get a feature which lets you suppress sites from the HN listings if they prevent you from using adblockers? I am happy with just writing off those publications as if they don't exist, but unfortunately they still show up on HN and in Google.
Bear in mind though that if an older laptop displaces a comparably priced older desktop it's likely to use significantly less energy. Typical power consumption is likely to be under 30 watts even for most older laptops, with peaks still well under 100.
> It limits functions to never returning newly constructed objects, which really limits the expressiveness of APIs both in the standard library and in custom code.

How? Set the return type of the function to be the object type you want, then result := TYourObjectType.Create; and you'll return a newly constructed object.
As an R user I noticed a couple of oddities. First,

len(df)

returns the number of rows rather than the number of columns. This strikes me as a bad idea, because data-frames are better thought of as a collection of columns. Typically you want to loop over the columns of a data-frame and not so much over its rows, which is performance-wise much more costly.

Second, the apply method seems totally redundant. Why call a method that calls a function when you can simply call the function directly

df['year'] = base_year(df.water_year)

Probably I'm missing something here.
You are not a noob in the field
You can deny aircraft from an area. A TBM dragging a thermonuclear weapon might be a bit tougher to guard against.
Ask HN: Affordable dev server solution
I need to hire a linux dev server so that I have a consistent setup although I might need to use multiple machines for my personal project - I know there is plenty cloud solution like Digital Ocean but I am concern about whether their spec is being too low - it should really faster than my Macbook. is there any affordable but efficient solution out there? thanks
A note about the second link's table: Free Pascal since version 3.0 does have native unicode support. In fact it has native support for any encoding and it does on-the-fly conversions between different encodings without the programmer having to pay any special attention (but you can use different string types, such as utf8string, if you want the in-memory data to be in a specific encoding).
It's worth noting that Matrix is the only federated system which sets out from the outset to bridge together all the others (hence the name Matrix). Whilst we don't have bridges to diaspora/urbit/gnu social yet, it's only a matter of time. PRs welcome!

In terms of the community size - looking at just the Matrix.org homeserver, there are around 300K messages a day, 250K users (of which about 200K are bridged), and 30K rooms. Meanwhile there are at least 500 openly federated homeserver installations we can see from the Matrix.org homeserver.

Synapse is relatively mature as a homeserver (although it still has performance challenges; it is very cool to see Ruma progressing!) - meanwhile Vector as a flagship web/ios/android client is in late public beta and very usable too - eapecially with end-to-end encryption on the horizon.

I may be biased (being project lead for Matrix), but I'd say that it's going somewhere :)
Today it might not make much sense, given C++, Ada, Rust and a few others are around.

But the Turbo Pascal 6.0 from 25 years ago certainly was more expressive, feature rich and safer than C of today.

The verbosity of Pascal is welcomed by those that had to maintain programs written by others.
The effect is different when literally every member of society is filtering into factions though.
If the problem is that overseas investors are buying the houses, sure, that's a problem that decreases the amount of living space. But how would restrictive zoning fix that problem?

And I still don't think the flipping is relevant in the long run. It's pent-up demand sorting itself out. They can't keep flipping forever.
First Option: Donate it (as @cbanek and other have suggested)

Second Option: Put it on the wall near your door, and have it as a generic assistant. Put the days weather, your family calendar, time until next bus/train, news headlines, etc. on it. They should change at different periods of the day to give you time relevant information (e.g. I want to know the time until the next bus in the morning, but I don't care about this when I'm home in the evening).

Advanced: Have the webcam in the laptop detect when someone comes home using OpenCV or similar. Then, have that information accessible via an app (read: HTML5 webpage). That way, you should know when your kids come home in the afternoon and they forget to text you "I'm home safe". Or you can have it run a script when you come home like reading the latest news stories, reading emails, etc.

The combination of microphone, web camera, battery and screen in this make it perfect for this. Your other options are to use a tablet. You could also link to the Google/Microsoft voice recognition software to listen to your commands (e.g. add Milk to the shopping list).
This is how my wife & I moved to France, in 2006; we each got a "Titre de sejour", a 1-year, renewable, long-stay visitor visa.

It's not a regular tourist visa (and in fact if you're in France as a regular visitor/tourist you'll have to leave to apply for a titre de sejour). We needed to prove that we had housing arranged, means to support ourselves (savings plus income coming from outside of France... telework for companies in the US, in my case), and expat medical insurance.

Then we could stay for a year. We renewed this for 5 years and then were automatically upgraded to residence permits (with the right to work in France, actually).

--

Edit: somewhere along the way I was checking if some other European countries had similar options -- I remember it wasn't an option in most (it's not allowed in the UK. I think Germany wasn't okay either... forget where else I checked).

Ireland had some options around retiring in Ireland that seemed like they might apply for teleworkers, but I haven't checked into it properly yet.
Elections are not counted by precinct, however. E.g., in a presidential election, many states are won or lost as a block. If one candidate only gets ten votes in this precinct, so we just throw them out, and she loses by five votes over the whole state, that certainly is fraud.
13 Experts Share Their #1 Content Promotion Tips to Get More Traffic
Rocker, Better Dockerfile to build images
Something that doesn't come up very often: if you find an entrepreneur from Africa/Middle East/Southeast Asia/LatAm they're often very interested in purchasing second hand MacBooks or whatnot to power some new ideas :-) Ebay isn't great because there are steep customs charges which you don't necessarily have if you're selling privately.
You could make a smart mirror using the monitor behind a one-way mirror. Haven't done it myself but I've seen tutorials online before.
How to Create Content That Millennials Will Absolutely Love
A bit off-topic, but old phones and tablets make great clocks for around the house!

And as @haser_au suggests, great information panels.
This is something you can easily do using a script on your end. If you're using firefox, just write a small plugin that checks whether you're on HN and then excises HTML for links coming from any domains you don't care about.
Amazon Is Quietly Eliminating List Prices
This is a WordPress blog - it's just a matter of installing the SuperCache plugin and turning on mod_rewrite caching - then all page requests are served by apache out of static files. It even handles regeneration when there's a new comment, while continuing to serve the old static file to avoid the thundering herd problem.
Alan Perlis said, "A programming language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing."

Similarly, it might be said that a human language that doesn't affect your world-view is not worth learning. The language is the door to the culture.
You're essentially arguing for a "name your price" eBay. Scarcity in real estate is very much a real thing. How do you determine who gets what, if not by "highest bidder"?

I'm free to live anywhere I want provided I can find the coin; to me, that's the definition of fair.

In fact, the more you mess with that basic concept, the more you ensure someone willing and able to pay will be (unfairly) locked out of the market.
> The lost opportunities for development may theoretically reduce the output of the United States economy by as much as $1.5 trillion a year

We should also do away with National Parks and Forests, which are nothing more than zoning laws at the Federal level.

For that matter, state and local parks get in the way too.

How much lost economic output are restrictions on real estate development in Golden Gate Park costing the city of San Francisco?

How many more people could be housed there if the city simply got out of the way and let the developers build twenty or thirty thousand new units in there?

Why does Federal law even allow a local community like San Francisco so much control over its land?
Amazon is expanding the Amazon Dash product
Note that Free Pascal does have automatic reference counting for interfaces, although it is not a good idea to use it for memory management because (like with Delphi) it is very easy to pass around an instance that isn't counted and end with memory leaks.

However one of the compiler's designers has an experimental branch which allows you to mark classes as being automatically managed and any instance and use of those classes becomes reference counted. So at some point it might become part of the main compiler (although it is probably far from now since AFAIK it isn't something people really ask for from FPC and there are other things to do).
I see your point, but I want to also social engineer the situation so the officers feel like I want to help them and I am on their side, while also giving no information.
Developing niche browser is the only way to attract, may not large but enough number of users. And nowadays anti-tracking thing is in demand. Sometimes such browsers work far better than bigger ones.
Of course.

In CP/M, MS-DOS and a few other home systems, Pascal used to have more compiler variants available than C.

Pascal dialects like Turbo Pascal had all the features of C, plus modules, OOP, type safe enumerations and many other features.

If it wasn't for the rise of FOSS in the late 90's, widespreading the UNIX culture and thus C, Pascal derived languages might have been kept around.
I was 120 lbs soaking wet when I was 17. The school gently guided me away from sports. Good thing, too. Best coach I ever had.

I graduated high school close to 1980. Sure, there were guys finishing the big game on a broken bone but it seems like there's a lot more emphasis on this now, and it seems more dangerous and higher risk. I have nephews and kids of friends who are electing out of organized sports.

FWIW, I feel lucky - we had basically one bully and he didn't last. Expelled.

I remember in "Brian's Song" where Alex Karrass' character sold cars in the pro football off season.

I dunno; I saw "Bigger, Stronger, Faster" and it gave me pause.