skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I grew up in Brooklyn in the late 60s/early 70s and spent most of my first 30 years in Brooklyn and Manhattan. I can tell you it used to smell a lot worse.

When we were young gutter snipes, we used to jump the wooden turnstyles, and if the cops chased us, head into the tunnels. We then spent our youth exploring the tunnels (the old station just off DeKalb Ave.). I miss those tokens with the 'Y' punched out in center! They cost 0.35 cents, and you could ride the subway to Coney Island, and still have money left for a slice of pizza when getting home by end of day when you started out with a $1.25 or so.

I was just visiting in January 2016, and it seemed great to me, and I am coming from having lived 8 years in SE Asia. I still go home 1 or 2 times a year to Brooklyn and Manhattan. Still I am amazed at the Hong Kong MTR. The cars don't have doors between them, so you can see all the way down to the front and back. They have sliding doors on the platforms, so no jumping in front of an oncoming train! Very clean too. Hong Kong is very vertical, and lot of wiring is alongside buildings in exposed trays or bundles. I am not sure about the rest of the infrastructure. Don't get me started on Vietnam or Indonesia. I have photos of electrical 'routing' that would give a NYC union electrician a stroke!
I've recently taught myself programming and am now working as an apprentice at a local web firm. Can you point to some specific concepts you think I might have missed?
Why? It's like pressing some button on scientific calculator twice. It's just a function.
> more dollars will go to them and draw people who don't have the aptitude to be successful in the field. Then those people will - rightfully! - be pissed when they don't get $100k+ jobs and demand that "something be done about this!"

I don't think those WITH the aptitude are qualified for a $100K job. For those who know just what they learned at a bootcamp, I'd think they're prepared for a $20-30K job where they apprentice and OJT their way up to the junior level.
I am actually. I've seen many jobs go to cheaper on-shored labour with no regard for quality or technical ability. I've seen many millions of dollars pissed away and removed from the investment pool.

That money could have been spent on competent people and the investors may have even come out with something to show for it.
What developers can learn from No Mans Sky's failures
This is great! These are the ones I literally use everyday...
I'd forgotten computer science was only taught in Ivy League schools and top 15 universities.

I think at quite a few companies this is certainly the case.
>Their office product is no longer relevant (vis. a vis. Libre Office, Google Docs, and others).

You have no idea just how wrong you are. Excel has no competitor worthy of even talking about. Libre Office is a mess. Google docs doesn't do everything word can and is in the realm of a toy web app.
> he/she never carries good news

That's kind of subjective. Every once in awhile, the stars align, and your slow local C train is now running express all the way to your stop at 145th...

... which is great, unless you're actually really trying to get to 103rd.
The principle is beyond the Nuclear policy. It's a famous winning strategy in game theory called "tit for tat" which can be considered as the foundation of all moral principles of human society.
NY Times reports that the "public officer" (actually an off duty prison guard) did brandish a gun, and demanded money. Vandalism or not, that's precisely the definition of armed robbery.

Lochte certainly lied about the details, but two wrongs don't make a right, and only one of these wrongs carries up to a 20 year sentence with a 5 year minimum, at least in the US.
That's a common factoid about San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge -- so oft repeated that it appears in the halls of LAX airport.

The Sydney Harbour Bridge is also mentioned, but the fact they chose for that one is that it is "affectionately known as The Coathanger".
> People literally take shits in subway cars, especially at night.

Yeah, boy, I sure do hate my morning commute, just ankle-deep in shit, while the Robot Overlords whip the Poles and Italian immigrants bloody.
The Rules That Make Airline Passengers Crazy
The constraint isn't the amount of raw land, but rather the necessity of productive density if we are to afford the level of public services that most of us are accustomed to.

I have nothing against people living in sparsely populated areas, but the people living there now are mostly not seeing true costs of their lifestyles. If they weren't so heavily subsidized, they would probably have a lot more wells, septic tanks, and gravel roads; the school buses would not run to their houses; and they would have slower emergency response times and less police presence.

Faced with those painful realities, I expect more people would choose dense living. That's not to say they'd have to. Me personally, I just hate driving and love eating, in both cases too much to commute by car.
For one, utf-8 is a variable-length encoding, which can cause all sorts of subtle bugs and sometimes leads to security issues because somebody failed to parse a character correctly somewhere.

UTF-8 is nice in that extended characters, despite consisting of multiple bytes, will never contain a low-ASCII character amongst them. Unless you're dealing with byte offsets, splitting and scanning UTF-8 strings by delimiters works just like ASCII.

because unlike something that encapsulates functionality alongside the data, text input into a program might do anything.

On the other hand, that "encapsulated functionality" is even more hidden and non-obvious. Unlike a stream of bytes that you can easily inspect simply by dumping them into a file, PowerShell objects are far more opaque entities.
Thanks! Wow. That's some tough hardware to work with. So, both Fortran and LISP developed on the same machine. Guess I just never thought about the LISP hardware given I started with the AI books & went straight to modern work. Had I done so, I'd have wondered less about whether it could work in constrained environments haha.
When something becomes cheaper, demand always increases.

By how much varies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticity_(economics)) but not that it happens.
I caught an uptown C without air conditioning tonight. It was hot, but not as hot as the stations, and I got a seat. It happens, but not very often on that line.
I'd forgotten with current 1bn transistor counts that it ran with just 4k!

See http://www.visual6502.org for a great visual sim of a chip operating.
It's not pleasant, but it beats the hell out of sitting in traffic for 45 minutes.
NVMe makes sense only if you are either pushing bandwidth limits (e.g. processing large RAW 14-bit 4K/8K video on a scratch drive) or have hundreds of threads with concurrent I/O operations. In real world, you are barely going to notice any difference between SATA2 and SATA3 SSDs, not to mention M.2 PCIe ones.
Every big city smells like urine to me. I don't know how people stand it.
A big "Yuuuuup" to this thread of rebuttals / context. I'm completely pissed off at media entities for refusing to acknowledge the school district was legally prevented from responding. Bringing this lawsuit is, to me, without a doubt the worst possible thing the family could do. Now all the narratives they could prevent from hitting the media will become matters of public record. In my personal opinion, I don't think a jury will be sympathetic at all - and probably quite the contrary - it's as though a lesson wasn't learned and is being used as an opportunity for exploitation. As Hank Hill was fond of saying, "That boy ain't right" and Karma is owed its due.
Fun fact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Clara_County_v._Southern...
Citigroup’s Last Proprietary Trader Walks Out the Door
For me, the coolest part was this bit from the end of the article:

When Oetzi was discovered in 1991, famously well preserved in the ice of the Italian Alps, this type of ancient DNA analysis was impossible.

"25 years ago, the study of ancient DNA was in its infancy," Mr O'Sullivan told BBC News. "It would not have been possible to infer, to the same extent, the species of origin or how domesticated the leathers were."
We're not talking about entire cells having quantum fluctuations. Just single molecules within them; exactly the scale where you expect such oddities.
Homotopy Type Theory by Vladimir Voevodsky is another possibility. This is an attempt to link Topology and Computer Science

https://homotopytypetheory.org/book/

Back in the day there was Feynman's Lectures on Computation. Hint: pdf can be found by searching

https://www.amazon.com/Feynman-Lectures-Computation-Richard-...

See also nLab

https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/higher+category+theory

one should never forget Jacob Lurie's "Higher Topos Theory" which is 1000 pages just like that

http://www.math.harvard.edu/~lurie/papers/croppedtopoi.pdf

Actually I recommend against readin it as it only covers 2 of the 4 topics you discuss (Topology and Logic). However it certainly has applications to the other two.
Fair enough. I think that falls into the category of "what if someone does something evil with my code?", to which I don't really have an answer.
> Firstly, it is important to recall that in the entire span since the United States acquired nuclear weapons it has not seen fit to use them.

Uhhh, did the author forget about 1945?
Privileged backgrounds? Anyone with a cheap internet connection and a cheap computer (~$100) has everything they need to start learning.

Can you name a single industry that is more accessible?
> who couldn't use the well-known mature shell tools since they were locked into a closed platform

Yeah, I remember the bad old days, when I'd download that CygWin installer and Windows would just give me the old skull and crossbones and say "You're not allowed to install GNU tools, Sucka!" One time I jailbroke XP and got it installed, but then CMD was all "You can't run grep.exe and sed.exe under CMD, Sucka! Not allowed!" I was so sad that I couldn't use those tools on Windows, so sad.
Rank 'n Classy Limited Effects
Both PS and bash are horses actually.
Malware Infected All Eddie Bauer Stores in U.S., Canada
While I loved RSS and the ncurses readers it powered for me, the ad thing was real and many publishers just put a blurb or a headline on their feeds (basically worthless), content scraping requires effort and varies by site, whereas RSS / Atom would be standardized and stupid easy for any old talentless profiteering hack to install as a source for new WordPress articles to feed their content farm.

Having the "barrier" of writing a content scraper for each site you want to scrape and figuring out a way to get that onto your crappy WP link farm blog is a high enough bar that many marketers just can't be bothered, so it "solves" the scraping problem for the majority case at the expense of the users.

Now we have things like Feedly which AFAIK maintain their own scrapers and I can still basically read most articles without looking at ads for this one new trick to get rid of tonsillitis complete with a nasty gif.
(.fsx scripts are F#, so also strongly typed)
Dating myself, the way I learned copy and paste was CTRL-insert and SHIFT-insert, and those still work fine in konsole, mate-terminal, most any other half-decent terminal program, and straight text mode outside of X.

Not xterm, but I never use that.
this is essentially the story you will hear on the "Seattle Underground" tour. Instead of raising the city like they did in Chicago[0], Seattle built taller streets[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Underground
On the role of libraries as a public service (2012)
Question: is there a market for servers twice the size they are. But a fraction of the cost.

I for example have really consolidated servers in recent years. VMs are fantastic. But the result is that I have lots of Data Center space spare.

I would love to buy servers of similar power consumption but larger foot print, for less dollars than small ones. Assuming that a lot of limitations and cost go into shrinking current systems.

Or are there other issues like distance between components that then come into play?
I just wish AMD made drivers for Win 7 as well - then I could switch from 4-core 4790k/32GB to 8-core ZEN/64GB ECC and keep using all the Adobe video editing stuff.
So, there is a difference between a boot camper and someone who is self taught. I started out as self-taught, and have since then taken courses/advanced studies to further my own knowledge.

The path you're on is very similar to the one I took. Been an apprentice or Jr developer is a smart, smart path to take.

Concepts that I've seen missed in recent code interviews:
- I know "Node", but what is the V8 engine? I've seen this a lot as Node has gotten more and more popular. It's critical, at least in my opinion, to understand at the bare minimum how Node works under the hood. Writing a few web apps with a basic set of Node APIs is great, but do you actually understand what is going on?
- AngularJS. Have you looked at the source code? Do you understand how directives work? Can you explain how the digest loop works? Can you explain the use cases for two-way binding? Why wouldn't you need two-way binding?
- VanillaJS - Can you write out some basic ways to manipulate the DOM without the use of jQuery or another framework? Do you understand how event listeners and event propagation works?

Those are just some of things that come to my mind right away.

There's also a point to be made that it is easier to trust that someone who spent 4 years in coursework is committed to the career versus someone who took 3-5 months doing a boot camp.
Tesla Model S aftermarket wireless charging is almost here
Powershell is aweful
I'm in the US, and roads here are really bad for riding bikes on, unless you're in a very small town or something. (Even that isn't a great place; I live in a small town currently and the street in front of my house has a 25mph speed limit, but people are constantly speeding on it, and frequently hitting cats that cross the road near my house.) That's why I simply don't ride on roads with cars if I can help it; I mostly stick to rail-trails or towpaths. I can ride 40 miles on a rail-trail and barely see any cars at all, and frequently not even any humans.
I hear that. Are you going to be affected by this?
But they did find Cox is liable for contributory copyright infringement and needs to pay $25 million in damages to BMG, for not passing on the extortion, ahem, I mean infringement notification letters. Eck.
You're thinking "alternative".

Homeopathy is a very specific thing, where you take a substance with a bad effect and dilute it so much there's none left, in an attempt to cause the opposite effect, with more dilution being better.
"No first use" invites attack by anyone who has a stronger conventional military. This is one of those cases where ambiguity is the right course of action - if you say "all our options are on the table, and we'll decide on a case-by-case basis" potential adversaries have to consider the possibility they'll lose even if they win. They're likely to be more circumspect.
These are the sorts of things type systems try and help avoid. Having the same crappy behavior as an '80s scientific calculator isn't exactly something to strive for.

That said, this is probably such a simple use that it's not worth having Degree and Radian classes in core.
Linux ecosystem has a huge amount of different tools and scripts for most of the situation that you can imagine. I'm working with Linux more than 14 years, so I can say that text processing idea is the best way. It's pure KISS principle. If you need just to see something - type a command, for complex operations - awk/perl/python. PowerShell looks ugly because it's something between a programming language and shell. It's not KISS. It's all in one tool.
Thank you for the gif near the start - it really helped me to understand what was going on.
Star Trek Postage Stamps
I've lived just outside Adelaide, in Canberra and in the suburbs of Melbourne (Elwood then Mentone).

I now live in Thailand, but outside Bangkok.

There is definitely a hard-to-describe size difference - Bangkok as a metro area has half the population of Australia.

Australian cities have nothing to complain about when it comes to traffic. I've sat in the car in Bangkok traffic, and taken an hour to go the final 900m of a journey.

Having said that, some Australian cities are unlivable imo, because they're too "small town".

Visiting Adelaide is like a trip in time back to the 70s when shops all close at 5pm and nothing is open on Sundays.
Perception in humans seems capable of grasping data sets with billions of pieces of information each second, and distilling it all down to intuition.

All this information is serialized onto pretty much 5 channels (excluding things like one's sense of balance, or the awareness of how your body is posed), all streamed concurrently.

Sounds like a recipe for high bandwidth consumption. Many cycles per second.

Based on this, I'd wager we (and our perception of self) only exist in the ether between our body's neurons.
After a few years I'm pretty much done with the subway except in off peak times perhaps. I've been milking the ride sharing wars and Continue to avoid the subway but it's not sustainable. I am ready for the suburbs I think!
I thought chemistry operated at a higher level, as in it doesn't care how or why a atoms are structured they way they are, they just deal with the results at a higher level of abstraction. Is this incorrect?
It's unreliable, because you don't know where you'll find 'inet ' or what's the specific spacing of the output. Also, that's not the ip, because you've still got the cidr attached.

And no, fstab is not easy either. For example it fails for:

# /tmp has option_blah in order to ...

changing it to:

# /tmp has option_blah,nosuid in order to ...

Confusing the next person to look at the well intended comment.

It's no impossible to implement fairly reliably, it's not going to take days to do, but you're likely make mistakes. And in both cases you're spawning extra processes instead of just getting the information you need.

PS. also slightly annoying is that everyone is so concerned about the text processing part that barely anyone checks what the tool itself can do. (ip -4 -o a s dev eno1 | awk '{print $4}')
Removing the PowerShell curl alias?
One need not posit a theory of causation here to have a legitimate concern about the role of private industry in influencing the criminal justice complex.

In fact, one could take all of rayiner's assertions at face value and still share GP's concerns.

There are many many examples where private, for profit industry may not have nefariously instigated some governmental program, but surely fights to expand and continue it.

For example, we need not think that WWII was entered at the behest of a nascent aero-defense industry in order to boost revenue, but look what happened. (and ask that lefty Dwight Eisenhower, who coined the very term "military-industrial complex" in a warning speech to the republic as he left office)

Similarly, the utter buffoonery of our health care "insurance" industry is directly a consequence of some mid-century tax code finagling which made health "insurance" a deductible pretax employee benefit. Did those who would someday run the "blues" collude to create that system in some plot? No, but once it was well entrenched, the lock-in started with big money and big influence.

Did a bunch of far sighted conspirators get together to create the mortgage GSEs so that decades hence they could dole out lucrative sinecures? No, but once in place... etc.

The debunking of loosely reasoned talking points is, of course, the brand promise of a rayiner comment, but in this case he goes too far. There most certainly are self-perpetuating loops in government-business symbiote combinations and to deny them is willful blindness.
I didn't say that private prisons aren't a problem worth fixing. But every time private prisons get trotted out as the explanation for the problems with the justice system, it's yet another lost opportunity to understand the real problems.

CCA isn't the problem. They're just opportunists. Part of the real problem is all the parents and teachers shrieking "just say no!" all through the 1980s and 1990s who voted dutifully for three strikes laws, "probation reform," etc. The other part of the problem is Americans: we're the most violent people in the developed world, with crime rates that are, even after decades of decline, several times higher than in Europe.
I found in practice that is usually not enough and every distributed system I designed or worked on ended up with heartbeats of some point. It could OS peculiarities, or could be inability to tweak the times of keepalives.

Sometimes the heartbeats are sent by the server, sometimes by the client, it depends. But they always end up in the application layer protocol.
I've recently been playing with F# on the side to learn more about functional programming and his website version has been a key part of what has kept me going. It's good to see an easy-to-read ebook version!

F# is impressive and so is the website. I highly recommend reading this if you are interested in F#/functional programming.
I remember when I was in my middle school orchestra, occasionally I'd get a piece of sheet music with this problem. If it was bad enough, it might even make it impossible to read the last few notes. If you could fix this for your wife, I'm sure her students will greatly appreciate it!
How about a more general no first strike policy? If you are willing to pre-strike a country, logically they should be willing to pre-pre-strike you. A no first strike policy allows for us to reach a Nash equilibrium.
I remember listening to an EconTalk podcast (highly recommended!) after the quantitative easing started. Very interesting.

Typically lowering interest rates pushes inflation higher. When your economy is sluggish, that's a good thing, but once it picks up steam, it can cause runaway inflation.

The challenge raised is that there is a delay in the response of the economy. Usually interest rates aren't increased dramatically until inflation is already underway. Otherwise, if you raise rates when the economy is only doing "a little" better, you risk squashing the growth.

So what happens is that inflation starts to go up and by the time the Fed has the balls to really raise rates (because it's plainly obvious the economy is doing well), it's too late and you really overshoot your inflation target which causes rates to rise dramatically.

Overall, I would agree that it seems unlikely interest rates will go up in the near future. However, that can change really quickly.

Back in 1979, the interest rate when up 400 basis points from 10% to 14% in less than a year.
Apologies for the miss-type, the error has been corrected:

"Firstly, it is important to recall that in the entire span since the United States acquired nuclear weapons, outside the two instances in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, it has not seen fit to use them."
Students Fly Prototype of Potential Mars Airplane
I honestly don't understand the incentive part. Can you spell it out?

If the prison company was also in charge of sentencing people to prisons, I would get it. But as long as they merely implement the sentences the court system decides, what are the perverse incentives?
I preferred his words on achieving it: "we've knocked the bastard off".

Those words could have bee justly spake on getting this thing working. Incredible.
Teen Summer Job (Home Based/Online)
Large scale matrix multiplication with pyspark
Oh, it won't be that bad. They can rebrand the prisons as retirement homes for the less financially secure.