skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Exactly. It is also interesting for as much as free market and competition is touted as the golden standard of organizing things, most large multinational companies are really run in hard line Communist style command economy: top down bureaucracy and planned allocation of resources.
What Is the Right Phone Screen Size?
The Mighty Power of Google
The binaries don't support Postgres (though it's a 2 minute job to add) because the drivers aren't included in the build, though the library can support it.

The underlying SQL uses "?" as a parameter binding placeholder, Postgres uses $1, $2 right?

Seems like an obvious oversight, I can put up a build if you're willing to test it?
Intel Leverages Chip Might to Etch Photonics Future
Ask HN: What octobat.com does?
> Because it's worked pretty well for Medicare and Medicaid? Large portions of both were privatized through Medicare Advantage and Managed Medicaid. The gov't pays private companies a flat rate per patient who selects their plan.

Yeah, Original Medicare is pretty awful - I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who's able to get a Medicare Advantage plan. It's not just the cost-of-care and the overall expense to the patient (even though Medicare Advantage tends to win out on both of those aspects as well). It's that Original Medicare is a horribly frustrating experience for the patient as well.

Of course, most people (especially most people under the age of 65) don't understand the difference, and when they think about Medicare, they think of a publicly-run program, even though around 40% of the Medicare population is on a Medicare Advantage plan.
> People don't value the protection as much as they value the freedom of being able to quit, and you only get one or the other.

That's not true, at least not in Holland (and I suspect much of Europe).

As far as I know, I cannot be fired without good cause, but I can quite any time I want. So clearly it's not necessarily one or the other (outside of wherever you're working).
How much gold is in an Olympic gold medal? (Not much.)
IMHO Ada violated the most fundamental principle of programming, which is DRY (Don't repeat yourself). You have to invoke the name of every function twice while defining it, etc. The language seems to be designed for multi-page blocks, which are a bad idea to begin with.

It also lacks memory safety, despite being a safety-oriented language.

If someone added a better syntax to Ada (probably easy) and Rust-like memory safety (probably hard), that would make it a higher-value proposition.

EDIT: There's also an article demonstrating a hole in Ada type safety: http://www.enyo.de/fw/notes/ada-type-safety.html
They're only there as an easy-to-read example, the library fully supports binary keys if that's what you're getting at?
Shoptiques (YC W12) Is Hiring a Senior Software Engineer in NYC
I have gay friends and most of them agree, what about trying telling that to a poor person? elections are -on its current form- a very unrepresentative way of democracy.

There are concrete issues that can be addressed by electing certain persons but generally speaking, change and elections(especially with money involved) it's like the traffic buttons... you think the light changed because you pressed it.
> Insofar "culture" is a polite way of talking about race, it can can be pretty bad.

That's true, and unfortunate.
Or brilliant. That explains exactly how I understand it. Didn't know the phenomena had a name associated with it.
I read an article about how you don't need to go to the doctor anymore for most problems (persistent cough, fever, etc) because you can just pull up your smartphone and video-conference with a doctor 150 miles away.

For the most part, that doesn't really eliminate medical jobs, though; the doctor will spend the same time whether the patient is local or remote.

What could reduce those jobs would be automated diagnosis systems, but I really doubt they'll be allowed to issue prescriptions autonomously for a long, long time.
A Dozen Things I’ve Learned from Naval Ravikant about Investing
> Why do Americans not look at public provision, paid for via your tax system? Canada does it, so it demonstrably does work in North America, Europe does it, with varying degrees of efficiency, but it basically works.

This article presents a good argument for why Single Payer won't work well in the US: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-04-30/single-pa...

> Americans are happy to send their children to school

Americans are, on average not happy to send their children to public schools
Searle's Court
A perfectly reasonable observation but I'm sure there have to be counterexamples of engineers who are great product designers. Now I just have to go and find them :)
"The C compiler made me feel adequate. Unlike Ada, I regularly got my programs to compile. And so, I made my choice and went with C."

I think this dynamic plays out in a lot of technology evaluation decisions. It's probably why techs like Javascript, MongoDB, Ruby on Rails, Java, PHP, MySQL, Wordpress, etc. have gotten widespread adoption despite numerous technical flaws. They have a very low barrier to getting something useful up on screen, and feed peoples' need for instant gratification. When you feel good about yourself while using the language, you feel good about the language.

The interesting thing about the software industry is that network effects are often so strong that it's rational for a disciplined, expert developer to use one of these technologies rather than something more niche that plays to their expertise. You may hate Java, but if you need to use Hadoop/Storm/SparkML/OpenNLP and the myriad of well-tested libraries, it may be a lot better choice than building your own distributed big-data stack.

I guess this is the idea behind "Worse is Better" [1]. It makes me wonder if "better" will ever be "better" (perhaps after the pace of adoption in the software industry slows down, and we start spending time getting known product architectures right rather than finding the next big unknown product architecture), or whether by that time the entrenched base written on top of ad-hoc technologies will be too big to change.

[1] https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html
Two different things here: previous versions of the compiler got slower as it was moved, in automated fashion, from C to Go. Code compiled with Go was not slower. The new version of Go has both improved compile time (though not quite to the speed of the first few versions of the compiler) and improved code generation, so code is faster than any previous version of Go.
> one such analyst can ultimately generate millions of models

Right, just like one programmer can ultimately generate millions of programs. That's why now that computers are so cheap and abundant, there are so few programming jobs left.
Yes, automatic connectors would solve a lot. Some users might insist on a bidirectional solution, though it's not necessarily a requirement. In fact, I personally wouldn't want Gitlab to request permission to modify the github copy. At most, I would be okay with it subscribing to feeds and email-replying (no need to oauth) like any github user can.

Speaking of disabling, if gitlab allowed disabling pull requests, wiki, issues, etc. and act like a pure git repo, it would solve a problem github refuses to address, namely a project's users wanting to use github/gitlab but the maintainer hosting the primary repo somewhere else. It would also play well with the D in DVCS, which github sort of breaks by leading users to centralize for convenience. I mean, one day github is down, another day gitlab, and so on, it's just how our networks operate.
It's the same reason the poor often vote against their interests

Wow, into being condescending much? How about this... maybe, just maybe those people know what "their interests" are better than you or I. Have you considered that?
> Another example is Coursera and the like. You have Ivy League schools recording their lectures. Well... if I can learn CS 101 from MIT for free...

True! Abstractly, 100% perfectly true for everyone.

However... most people don't really learn well in a non-interactive environment where they most be completely self-directed. So in practical terms, it's far from ideal for most learners. It's not a coincidence that non-completion rates in MOOCs are quite high.

"I can watch recorded CS 101 lectures from MIT" is really not the same as "I learned CS 101 while attending MIT and being in an instructional environment".
Why does management deserve a toolkit? Why should it remain a secret?

And is the toolkit really that much of a secret after it's been posted on HN?

I think it's safe to say that the cat's out of the bag.
Business media drivel. I can't seem to find the public answer to "What happens to the share prices of energy companies when oil trades above $100 a barrel and political unrest has recently occurred in the Middle East?," but I'm pretty sure the answer is unsatisfactory (relying on a pretty impoverished, massively overfit causal model) for anyone making actual investment decisions.

It's a great time in AI and ML, don't risk another AI winter by creating unreasonable expectations.
There are a number of areas:

Most message passing on BEAM is done via copying. Pony can share the memory directly because the compiler enforces safe sharing via deny capabilities. You can only send 3 basic types to another actor:

iso -> mutable memory that you have the sole reference to
val -> immutable reference. you can read but you can't write
tag -> an opaque reference. good for sending messages to actors or doing identity comparisons

The type system certainly helps as well. It allows us to give LLVM hints on optimizations it can make. The type system also helps because we can do "dangerous but fast" things safely because we can prove they are safe in this instance.

Compiling to native code via LLVM is another area for performance wins.

That said, Erlang has over 20 years of rock solid production usage behind it and that unto itself is a quite a selling point. At this point in time, I'd suggest Pony to Erlang/Elixir users if they need more performance, otherwise, I'd stick with Erlang for now.
> The argument is that simpler is better at scale.

Parametric polymorphism is simple and well understood. And not exactly new either: it has been understood for some 40 years already.

> I could see an argument for parametric collections and parametric sorting in Go.

C++'s <algorithm> header is proof that there are lots of algorithms that benefit from being expressed generically, not just sorting.

> In your experience, what kind of "cost" has there been in unsafe casting to use collections?

Without type safety, there's a disincentive for decomposing things into smaller parts, because the cost of manually verifying that the parts are compatible is greater than the benefits of decoupling them. Would a Go programmer even dream of bootstrapping fancy data structures from simpler ones?

> Even in environments like Smalltalk, where all use of collections amounts to "unsafe casting," I've rarely seen situations where a mistake of this type wasn't found trivially.

At scale, the law of large numbers says that even improbable events will occur every now and then. Unfortunately, a program with even one bug is still incorrect.
pony is compiled to native code, and to highly optimized code.
beam is just interpreted. even if most of the time the code has to wait, it has to wait much less. that's why pony can beat C++ with OpenMP in comparable tasks.

It's garbage collector is superior, having to do much less work than in beam.

The data workload for each thread is much smaller. objects are tiny, messages are mostly referenced (shared) and not copied.

erlang does more. it already supports distributed actors, so there's a little overhead also.
"Hospitals are required to take care of you, even if you have no insurance in the US."

Trouble is, that only applies to emergencies. If you just want to see the doctor about the funny lump you have to pay first.

"We need to get rid of the bloated government-supported insurance companies and let the free market decide the price of everything."

So when I break a leg I should pay the ambulance to drive around different hospitals collecting quotes for the treatment? This doesn't work for a number of reasons:

1: Most obviously, urgent treatment is urgent. Collecting quotes will take time.

2: Hospitals won't give a quotation for medical treatment. They prefer a cost+ situation, partly because they then make money no matter the outcome, and partly because the costs are so variable that you can't estimate the cost. Just how much is that funny lump going to cost? After a few $K of tests you might be able to put a lower bound on it, but not an upper bound.

3: Medical costs for something serious are bankruptingly large for most people. One serious illness and you have to remortgage your house. Insurance is the only option, but then people at serious risk of illness or injury are more likely to take out insurance, and people who are already ill can't get it or change it. Imagine if you have epilepsy: every few months you wake up in ER and they hand you a $5,000 bill. No insurer will touch you.
Similar to http://mapillary.com.

It's great to see more open data like this, lots of uses for creating maps by hand or even machine learning.
How can you ensure the data remains useful in the face of construction, tree growth, and other changes? I think if we are to allow drones to fly unsupervised, they will need to be limited to annotated environments (that is, locally broadcasting navigation beacons) and will need full sensor suites anyway.
I grew up with snakes in Texas from Water Moccasins and Coral snakes to Diamond Backs... they aren't safe, if you're sleeping on the ground, walking around in brush and can't see, or are climbing a rock wall you can easily be bitten. It's easy to get thrown from a horse too.

The worst are young children and pets who don't know better, which can be killed or lose a limb, especially by a baby rattler (they don't strike and release... keep pumping poison), if you're not within 30min of a hospital. Most hospitals don't carry anti-venom any more either, because it's expensive and it goes bad.

I saw a 2-3foot (baby no rattle) western diamond back cruise through our camp of ~20 people, 3 children <6yr, and 2 dogs at 5pm over last Perseid weekend. It wasn't safe, and I was much more careful walking in the brush after. No one tried to kill it, but I'd put the chance of it biting someone/dog at more than 1/100 not 1/100k!!

We never saw Mama.
Pressing twice in case you "didn't depress it enough" is perfectly fine and understandable.

However, standing there repeatedly slapping or pressing at the thing like a rat trying to get another dose of heroin is crazy to me.
Thank you for sharing results of other benchmarks with the Phoenix framework. It significantly changes perspective if we speak about Phoenix performance, but still Go has very good results [1][2] (Gin) in case of throughput, latency and consistency.

You made me curious how release 1.7 affects performance of popular routing packages for Go (Gin, Echo, Httprouter).
A secure storage system shouldn't allow passwords as keys. If passwords are a thing that is going to happen, the API should be structured so that those passwords get run through a KDF. That's what he's getting at.
>Medication is fairly inexpensive and if I have major surgery, I will only be out a couple thousand (the cost of a laptop).

Have you actually ever had a major medical problem? Medication can run in the thousands (or be $5, it varies) and even minor surgery is several thousand dollars out of pocket minimum and certainly more expensive than any laptop. It's also a struggle to afford even the premiums for some people

I don't know how accurate this is but I recall hearing that something like 40% of personal bankruptcies in the US are due ot medical debt.

I'm speaking from experience. If I wasn't high income I dont know how I'd be able to afford my bout of illness.
We would want to see what a bluffing shrimp did _when called on its bluff_. If it ran away then what's happened is different to the small dog which appears to actually _believe_ it's bad enough for the fight. And in this case I would say that the shrimp had managed to "tell a lie", while the small dog had managed nothing other than total honesty.
+100 Go is super boring and that it's a selling point. Code is a tool, not a device for entertainment. I'm yet to meet a 20+year developer who is wowed by extensive/unique/complex features, which makes me think as I also mature as a developer I'm going to find those things less important.

However, the Go version is way easier to understand. Mind you, I have very little experience with Elixir. In the interest of being pragmatic, the easier code is to understand, the easier it will be to maintain, and we spend much more time maintaining code than writing it fresh.
It's impossible to have a market for healthcare.
I suspect the parent is wondering why it isn't using a KDF.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_derivation_function
That would be a bad idea, since (a) 1Password (at least in standalone mode) has been vetted crypographically, and (b) most of the security problems of password management aren't cryptographic.
Pros and Cons in Using JWT (JSON Web Tokens)
"It is simply a matter of familiarity."

Your comment focuses on how fast the compiler generates lines of assembly, after the programmer has constructed a solution.

But unless I have misunderstood the author was focusing on how fast the programmer can construct a solution.

The final step of depressing keys to input the solution into the computer can be sped up by using libraries and perhaps macros.

It's also possible to write programs ("code generators") that generate lines of assembly based on a "template". And that "template" need not be written in C or any other popular computer language.

It could be some "DSL", a shorthand for assembly, that the programmer creates for himself.

djb's qhasm might be considered an example.

While it may be generally true that C requires less key punching than assembly (certainly it requires fewer "lines"), this does not mean constructing a solution in C necessarily comes faster than constructing one in assembly... if the programmer is familiar and efficient working with assembly.
It varies state-to-state. I grew up in Florida, where I started learning to drive at age 14. I was taught entirely by my mother, and I earned my learner's permit at 15, then was fully licensed at 16 after passing the tests.

About five months after I was issued my driver's license by the state of Florida, we moved to North Carolina, where driver's education is compulsory for people under 18. They would not issue me a North Carolina driver's license unless I completed driver's ed., even though I was already licensed in the state of Florida.

As a result, I enrolled in driver's ed. via my high school. Classes took place in the afternoon after all my regular classes were finished. Then, while my classmates were waiting for their rides, I got in my car and drove myself home. For the on-road portion of the coursework, I drove myself to and from the school on Saturday mornings and hopped in the "Student Driver" car. My instructor, knowing I already knew how to drive pretty well, just had me drive him on his errands -- grab a coffee at McDonald's, return some tapes to Blockbuster, deposit his paycheck at the bank, etc.

It was bullshit, but I had to do it to obtain an NC driver's license.

Of course, after college I moved to northern Virginia for work, and getting my VA license was as easy as filling out a form and showing them my NC license. Done! The VA DMV puts the NC DMV to shame in many ways, including efficiency. (In NC, we also have separate DMV offices for licenses and tags. Pain in the ass!)
I'd like to agree about scientific experience, but it's tragic how much trouble many professional scientists, or ex-scientists, seem to have with anything outside their specialism, like quantitative analysis of their computational techniques. When did you last see error bars on a benchmark, even?
This is also in the new queue right now: https://medium.com/@BlockByBlock/the-ugly-truth-behind-steem...

Seems pretty self explanatory.
I looked through the project and it is cryptic indeed.

I will try to digest a little bit for people who aren't familiar with Go and by any chance read the project's README

- The examples you see there with commands like `./put ...` `./get ...` are actual Go command line apps found in the `cmd` directory.

What I mean is there are two command line applications which you actually might need to build separately one named `put` the other `get` . What they do, oh! well , never mind it should be crypting stuffs.

After being tasked to do devops for like 6 months. I understand the pain of having more secrets than those of the secret agencies we see on the movies.

Something that turn out to be true most of the times is, secrets should always be secrets. Managing secrets is supposed to be a secret.

I find the Configuration on the README to be full of secrets I mean passwords , API keys e.t.c. And wondering if cryptic is aware of that and how it is going to address this.

With my little understanding about security. I have a feeling that In some cases encryption is mistaken with secure.
No, they aren't underfunding. US government health care spending was $4,034/person. UK total health expenditures per person was $3,935.

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.PCAP

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year_spending_2014USbn_1...

For us to underfund it to UK levels, we'd have to expand medicare or medicaid to every single person while simultaneously cutting the total government budget for health care by 2.5%.
Apollo-11 issue on GitHub
An emergency room is not healthcare. I wish people that so readily trot out this retort could understand the difference.
Maybe. I was a little surprised at the amount of people I know who are watching the Olympics via less than legal means simply because NBC's coverage and commentary were terrible .
> The type system also helps because we can do "dangerous but fast"
> things safely because we can prove they are safe in this instance.

This is an area of some static type systems that I'm really interested in; it feels counter-intuitive at first. You'd imagine that flexibility is what lets you do the things you need to do to go fast, but in many cases, restrictions actually are. Cool stuff.
I'm hesitant to submit this comment, but something really rubs me the wrong way about this post. It most reminds me of the 'uncanny valley' feeling. Or Patrick Bateman, but that would be too hyperbolic a comparison.

Maybe it's the advertisement for his book at the end of the article. Maybe it's the repeated 'what happened to me was justified and I thank those who make the decisions' groveling-like contriteness, even though objectively that should be a good thing. Maybe it's the informal-but-not-like-idlewords/pinboard tone of voice. Or maybe it's just the connection with AppSumo and the general dislike I have of people who do marketing as their primary talent.

I feel like I'm being unfair and I deserve to be downvoted because I cannot properly articulate what bothers me so much about this, but at the same time it's so... unsettling that I can't keep myself from doing so. Maybe if I talked to the guy I'd feel different. Maybe I'm just unfairly biased against marketing as a profession. It's very confusing and my apologies for anyone who read this whole comment.