skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I received a B.A. in History thirty years ago from a second-tier school. It included lots of coursework in history, of course, but also lots in philosophy, economics, literature, art, law, and archaeology. My favorite definition of history came from a professor: "History is the study of everything."

It is not at all like a technical degree, and does not produce the same kind of thinking. It is aimed at developing the ability to reason, make cogent arguments, evaluate evidence and sources, and becoming aware of your own biases.

(Edit: Yes, technical fields require many of the same skills, but the application of those skills is to different kinds of problems which develops habits of thought that are quite different from historical thinking.)

(Anyone who says they are unbiased has clearly not made it that far in obtaining the historical mindset. It's not that becoming aware of your biases makes them go away; rather, you become more attuned to your own blind spots and so work to develop the ability to compensate for them, especially when evaluating historical evidence.)

I have found that technical people frequently think they are highly skilled in critical thinking regarding the "liberal arts" subjects (history, literature, philosophy, the arts, etc.) but frankly their skills in logical thinking about "hard science" (programming, mathematics, physics, etc.) usually far exceeds their abilities in other areas and so they tend to rate themselves too high in those areas.

I attribute this to the fact that while they have been challenged to defend their findings in a hard science field, most have not had to do so in the liberal arts, and particularly in history.

(Other than in internet forums such as this, which is very weak tea compared to a class of people majoring in the subject and a professor with years in the field. It's a bit like the difference between being competent to comment on the comparison of BSD and Linux on the one hand, and being competent to submit a diff for the kernel on the list for OpenBSD or Linux where Theo or Linus is going to look at it and give feedback.)
I was self-employed for 5 years. Ran my own consulting company and was then an EIR for a bit.

My advice: give yourself time to make the switch back to full-time employment. You may find your skills and interests don't necessarily make you an ideal candidate for many roles. When you run your own business, you're the ultimate full stack developer: doing everything from marketing through dev ops.

This makes you a less than ideal fit for a lot of full time employment opportunities, where companies aren't necessarily looking to hire people who are passionate about wearing many different hats and doing a lot of different roles.

I found smaller startups were generally the best opportunities for me.

That said, there are some real benefits to going back to full-time employment. Taxes get simpler, mortgages are easier to get, you can focus on the work you enjoy doing and not the accounting / paperwork stuff that you have to do when you run a business.
I'm excited by prospect of The Guardian Project and Copperhead collaboration. https://copperhead.co/android/
Exactly.

* When I bought my laptop 5 years ago, Apple was a candidate. It lost out because I still wanted an optical drive (and was interested in Bluray specifically, at the time), I wanted a 1080p screen, an HDMI output, and at least 3 USB3 ports. Upgradeability is a plus; I've upgraded the RAM, hard drive, and wifi card since I bought my laptop, as my needs have changed.

* I like having choices (in terms of software and configuration), and they often don't match up with the best options for mainstream users.

* I've got a Windows partition, but it's not my first choice for general computing. I don't have any particular interest in Apple's technologies or services, so I feel like a lot of their ecosystem would be lost on me anyhow. I do generally find Apple's software to be well-designed and aesthetically pleasing. I'd be worried about fighting the software to get what I want done, though.
Agreed about the usefulness of history! It also teaches the useful skill of inferring truth from multiple sources of varying reliability.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem optimized for drawing in the right people. Professional/academic historian work is very different from all the "history" you take up to that point; before that level, it's mostly "memorize a bunch of stuff that happened, as inferred by historians doing the interesting work".

How would that draw in the people who have aptitude for real historian work?
The Genius of William Shawn, and the Invention of the New Yorker
Oh cool, thanks! I wasn't aware of DateTimeOffset.
I'm not sure why you've been downvoted. This is generally true, and it's a point made several times in the article -- if policies aimed at taking money from the rich end up damaging the economy, the poor will suffer more than the rich once it all shakes out.
How would the city even keep track of such one-off requests? There is no database for such minute details.

You'd be amazed what municipalities are using ArcGIS for these days. Well, I was, at least.
My biggest fear is about failure modes. It seems that there is a great deal of trust being placed in ML output but what happens when it is wrong?

Remember it's not infallible and should not be treated as such.
Every day most of the crimes committed are against women from the Port Moresby slum areas.

Ah, systemic poverty rears its ugly head again. This is, no doubt, related in part to the fact that 97% of the land is owned as tribal land, which seriously hampers modern economic development:

The PNG legislature has enacted laws in which a type of tenure called "customary land title" is recognised, meaning that the traditional lands of the indigenous peoples have some legal basis to inalienable tenure. This customary land notionally covers most of the usable land in the country (some 97% of total land area);[56] alienated land is either held privately under state lease or is government land. Freehold title (also known as fee simple) can only be held by Papua New Guinean citizens.[57]

Only some 3% of the land of Papua New Guinea is in private hands

American indigenous peoples also face this problem: You cannot get a mortgage to build a house if the land it sits on cannot be taken by the bank if you default on your payments. This is part of why indigenous peoples are so very poor.

I don't know what the answer is. Perhaps there is some answer that preserves the tribal lands system and also alleviates the stranglehold that has on development. But I have pondered this on and off over the years and come up with no ideas on how to fix it and have not yet seen anything written up that sounds plausible.

In the US, tribes that have improved their economic status seem to mostly do so by taking advantage of the legal loophole that they are sovereign states, not subjected to state laws, and they create casinos on their lands. This provides employment as well as becomes a cash cow for paying for schools and the like.

Most people do not think casinos represent serious economic development per se. It is a way to filch some wealth from the pockets of the white men that stole their lands, but real wealth is generally rooted in industry and commerce. Casinos are largely a means to redistribute money, not create new value. Merely redistributing money is very much decried as a bad thing when we do it in the form of welfare.
I don't think that's true based on personal experience working for foreign markets. Who exactly would be calling these engineers racist?
Oh my god. Even in this app's broken, buggy, unfinished state, it is already better than the official youtube app in some respects. Given the fact that I tend to use subscriptions a lot, this doesn't really work for me yet though...
You're right. The Hayward fault is a right-lateral fault, striking northwest (parallel to the San Andreas) and the west side moves north relative to North America. The reporter made a booboo.
Show HN: Fabulous: Print images in terminal with Python
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor
And this will probably be blocked soon also, unless they make an agreement to harmonize their service for a Chinese market and partner with some princeling's tech company.
Sure, though that only starts after pre-k and k, which tends to be much cheaper.

Anyway, if you compare starting a family with ~1M in the bank and 1 income at 50k vs. dual income 220k in the valley and no savings outside of home equity there are benefits on both sides.
There is a really big company nearly
everyone in the world has heard of for
decades. I know the founder, COB, CEO,
and saved his company twice.

Once I asked the founder for an
introduction to a VC, and the
founder turned me over to his
also famous CIO. We chatted about
old times and my startup.

He gave me a warm introduction to
a Silicon Valley VC.

Did it help? Nope. Did the VC
seem to care about the introduction?
Nope.

So, for a VC, what might be the role of a warm
introduction? Sure: Keep down the
e-mail traffic.

Next, given a warm introduction, what
does an information technology
VC really want to hear? Sure,
an easy way to make a lot of money
quickly, i.e., an information technology
company with some good barriers to entry in a
huge market with significant
traction growing very rapidly
and with founders desperate for
some cash and ready to sign
an onerous term sheet?

I never imposed on that very
busy founder or his CIO again.

Yes, some VCs regard a contact
without a warm introduction as
something contemptible from "over
the transom". Well, sounds like the
VC is so rich they don't want any more
money, is having trouble handling their
e-mail, or would be a total pain to
have on a BoD.

And, just what is the VC going to
bring except fungible cash? Do they
know how to manage high end sites of
Windows Server and SQL Server,
grow a large server farm,
manage software development with
100 developers, protect against
nuisance law suits, do well with
publicity, etc.? What do they
really know?
Wrote this quora answer on resources for learning about the adtech landscape: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-resources-to-learn-a...
> Not using your @company.com email.

Really? Who the fuck cares? If I reach out on twitter nobody bats an eye - but use zachaysan@gmail.com and everyone loses their minds. I used to use my @company email for my startup that was acquired. Now I can't find any email exchanges I know I remember having. I'll use zach@venn.lc for stuffy clients, but I thought YC partners were kinda above this kind of outdated thinking.
>will forget all bluetooth paired devices on reboot

OT but asking because I'm genuinely curious, if your goal is to have a "secure phone," why would you be pairing it to peripherals via Bluetooth? Or maybe am I misunderstanding "secure" in this case? The marketing speak on the the Blackphone 2 site seems more about "privacy" than security.
Seriously mind-blown, what an effort.

I So hope he donates it to the science museum or something I would love to see it.
I just don't see them doing that to an elected (or even newly elected) President but I do think they're holding that card should she not win the presidency.
Thanks for letting me know, looks like I'll have to find some time to implement some of these recommendations.
Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube are all very popular in SE Asia, especially the ones that are just getting into the internet now (Cambodia, Myanmar, even Vietnam).

Most internet companies in the states have more Asians working there from these countries than in say, South Korea and China, which often have NONE (they are all pretty homogeneous ethnically). To say western internet companies don't have any multi-cultural affinity isn't accurate given the make up of most tech companies.
All languages begin as special-purpose group languages.
Its actually very common in the United States to use 2 letter state codes. I think the other comment thought you meant Alabama as well because he asked if you had ever worked outside the United States.

I didn't realize the platform blocks you by location, but I guess that makes sense if that is what the customers want. Thanks for the explanation.
Can you find any cause of action against the government that you feel is worth dying for, which is not actually a complaint about a majority-ish segment of the population?

I don't believe you'll find any rallying cry for "the citizens" vs "the government," just opposition among citizens that gets expressed in government.
If GTK had the same status in Linux distributions as the Win16/Win32/etc API does in Windows then Linux distributions would carry every API-incompatible version of the library necessary (and maintain old ones).

As it stands, GTK more closely resembles the "Microsoft C++ Redistributable" situation in Windows -- an awkward hybrid of library and API.
Not the food one. That was driven by the agricultural revolution.
If our concern is about ending racial discrimination, it might make more sense to target the irrational behaviors of those discriminating against blacks, rather than finding more ways for black people to blend in better with the people discriminating against them.
Regarding how talk therapy and meditation could have similar effects on the human brain to medication: we have cognitive subsystems whose behavior is is partially determined by our 'schemas' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema_(psychology)), and partially determined by something like coefficients that scale chemical responses to certain mental states arising.

Talk therapy (and cognitive behavioral therapy) work by modifying a patient's schemas. For example, suppose you have a schema for human relationships that effectively says "in any relationship there is a winner and a loser"; holding that belief is going to direct the patient's behavior (and interpretation of events) in ways that probably lead to unhappiness. So, by modifying the patient's view on that point (i.e. altering a schema of theirs), this cognitive subsystem that uses schemas to interpret events and decide behavior ends up behaving differently. Drugs (e.g. SSRIs) seem to effect something like the 'coefficients' I mention above—but potentially you could have similar net changes by modifying this cognitive subsystem's coefficients or the schema input it operates on.

The importance of schemas in this kind of dynamic seems under-appreciated, though there's evidence of thinkers honing in on it from way back (William James' "The Varieties of Religious Experience", for example, is basically a study of this cognitive subsystem I mention. More recently I noticed Carol Dweck discussing schemas as foundational to the theory behind her work on learning styles.)

(P.S. I believe learning meditation is essentially non-discursive, totally experiential/empirical schema modification [your beliefs can be modified by arguments or new observations; CBT uses arguments, meditation observations], so that's how I see it relating to the rest of this.)
How to sleep sitting up
Well, the sheer deluge of articles proclaiming an impending exodus every time the idea of raising taxes is mooted and the lack of any evidence for these so called exoduses has made me... skeptical.

Historically the highest US income tax rate was 95%. Guess what?
You didn't read the article. You're partly wrong. He explains why you are partly wrong and much more.
The Pizza-My-Heart in Palo Alto on University (the only one I've been to and can speak to) serves these curled pepperonis consistently.
You can have backward compatibility while fixing the foundations. The trick is to add a "compatibility layer" that works well enough for existing clients, then slowly phase it out. Apple in particular is very good at this. They've gone from 68k to PPC, PPC to Intel, "Classic" Mac OS to Carbon to Cocoa, 32-bit to 64-bit, Obj-C to Swift, and so on by maintaining compatibility for old programs on top of new foundations. Unfortunately, these compatibility layers aren't very fun to write and can be difficult to test and maintain, so people (in open source projects especially) tend not to be very interested in the concept.
Show HN: Do you know what emails your competitors are sending? Beetle does
> Requiring the calculus sequence prior to courses that contain no calculus strikes me as a silly historical accident, for example.

Sure, but I haven't said anything about that.
Every time I see Dennett deliver his, "free will exists, but it's not what you think it is" line. I imagine him in a Santa suit, with his grandchildren, when they realize that that is grandpa Dan in there. He must certainly say, "no no children, Santa exists, he just isn't who you thought he was."
Bluebeam Software’s awesome engineers develop intuitive applications that revolutionize how people collaborate and share data in real time. As part of the Bluebeam team, you will use your expertise to design and develop customer-centric applications.
We are hiring for our Pasadena headquarters and remote offices in Boston, San Diego, and Chicago:

•	Lead Developers (2)

•	Mid-level/Sr. Web Application Developers

•	mid-level/Sr. Frontend developers

•	Mid-level/Sr. Developers for our Xamarin / Mobile and Mac teams

Learn more about these and other opportunities (and our culture) here: http://careers.bluebeam.com/join/engineering.

Please apply through the appropriate posting or reach out to laura.marks@bluebeam.com.
I spent a lot of time resurrecting this project with a major overhaul. This should be OK by Show HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html The project was basically dead for the past six years. You couldn't even install it with pip before. So you can barely say it existed it all. Now it's polished up with documentation, CI testing, clear kosher licensing, and ready to be used by actual people. Thank you for allowing me to share this with the community.
Honestly I'm just not that familiar with async/await. I'll look into modifying it when I get around to making some other changes.
This suggests that more than a little bit of global warming is due to pavement.
I hear you, but recently I was doing a thing where I need $5M on a $15M pre-money raise. I called the front desk and was told by the secretary that "we only do introductions".

Fine, good enough, but I was on a clock and I knew who I was and I knew who they were and they could have been a great part.

About the time I am signing the paperwork (2.5 weeks later?), I get a call from one of their partners: they heard about it and want in.

No can do. Unfortunate, because I still think two of their partners could/would add value.

But I always wondered: why do VCs make founders jump through hoops that don't matter? Are they to prove the founder can sell? I remain baffled.
You have a curious way to call my point "garbage" and then proceed to agree with me. You must have parsed it in some odd manner.
This is incorrect. They are much more worried about Chinese people talking to each other than talking to foreigners. Quora is not blocked in China because its mostly Chinese arguing with foreigners, where Chinese are a pretty nationalistic lot when it comes to external interactions. But get two Chinese talking together, and the conversation can quite quickly move to rebellion.

So the gov wants to maintain control over Chinese interactions with each other, hence any major site in Chinese will get blocked immediate (as soon as Quora allows for Chinese content and it becomes popular, it will be blocked in favor of a harmonized Zhihu).
Other Americans, of course.
By "unchallenged", I presume thescribe means that the professor gave only the pro-Marx side of the story, and gave it as if it were The Truth. They called it critical thinking, but it was really just propaganda.
Yet another super long article that could be summarized in a couple of lines.
You wrote in the context of the devil being

> the source of every single evil, cruel, horrible thing

and used Pan and Dionysus as a counter-example.

If you're saying 'well, Pan and Dionysus both have horns like the bsd mascot' I don't find that compelling either because the identifying characteristics don't line up (different types of horns, the tail, the pitchfork, and so on).
Win a Copy of the You Don't Know JavaScript Series
You see this in so much commentary on education. People point out that something has a benefit, and they're absolutely correct, but they fail to examine if it's superior to alternatives.

If we want critical thinking skills, is a history class the most efficient way to go about it? Maybe one of the other humanities is superior in this regard? What about those classes we've titled "Critical Thinking"?
>The changes in that period were so dramatic that we even forgot how we slept before it.

Are you referring to the idea that we used to sleep in two stretches each night? I've yet to see any credible evidence for that claim.
Hi guys,
This is a project I've been working on on and off for the past couple of years. We recently hit the 1 million email mark and I realised I hadn't posted it on here!
At the moment we are primarily catering for UK clients, so you may find the emails a bit more UK focussed, but if there are any companies you'd like to see emails from please let us know via the Add s site nav link on the left after you log in.
Any feedback is very welcome :)
Yeah, tell that to the guy who wrote "ISIS beer fund" on his PayPal transfer to his mate that we have an "independent judicial system".

No - we have an outsourced judicial system, where Facebook and Google will spy on you more than the USGov, the bank will control your money more than the Government, and the insurance company will have you in an autonomous car faster than a mandate will. That's modern neoliberalism.
good luck creating a fried chicken filter targeted at south korea and convincing people it wasn't part of some thinly veiled "fried chickenz and watermelons" plot to insult a large percentage of the american population...
I speak for myself, and not the company.

As soon as you said "I work for that company", you speak for them, whether you like it or not and no amount of disclaiming changes that in the mind of the reader. Additionally, you went on to explain things that only someone that works there would know, so you are explicitly speaking for the company. I'd normally recommend that an employee delete such a post, perhaps explaining the error. Given that it involves an NSL, I recommend this action more strongly than I might normally. Ask yourself, "what do I and the company have to gain from such a post, other than getting to sound like an 'insider' on HN?", and then ask "what's my worst possible outcome of posting such a thing?" Weigh the two, choose a winner.

As a warning to others, one should always ask themselves if they are posting outside their wheelhouse for an ego boost, or if it truly helpful information to others and to the company. Useful advice in the general case, IMO, but especially if you're posting in reply to "my company's in the news". I generally just shut the hell up and let the PR people handle it. Especially when you're an IC or middle-manager, 'cuz odds are that you don't have the full story.
I doubt it. The past 5 years have been somewhat unique in that companies were given lots of cash with liquidation preferences and 'fake' valuations.

A good example are T Rowe Price's 'unicorns': http://www.marketwatch.com/story/uber-airbnb-and-other-unico...

If UBER IPOs for any less than $12.5Bn, what will the early employees get? Probably not much compared with the value they helped create. Right now, that looks impossible, but who knows what will happen?

My point is that there is not a historic president for what has happened in the private markets and I would do anything I could to cash out of equity if I held it in a unicorn and I was liquid.

I would love to see YC step up and encourage founders to issue employee friendly stock options.
What does that even mean?

Replace anonymous crypto-currencies with cash, and realize how ridiculous you sound.