skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Colossal waste"? It's 81 lines of changes to the documentation.

BTW, this is from 2014. People wasted far more time talking about how their feelings were upset by the PC nature of the change. It's as if they want the Django project to be a safe space where they don't need to think about how metaphors might affect other people.

There are many possible metaphors to use. https://current.workingdirectory.net/posts/2011/master-slave... lists "parent/infant, boss/worker, guard/prisoner, king/subject, landowner/serf, top/bottom" [I'll add 'primary/secondary', 'primary/replica', and 'leader/follower'], then asks:

> What does master/slave convey that the others don't convey?

> Or, maybe they all convey the same thing, so it doesn't make a difference which one you choose (after all, it's just a metaphor). In that case, how about replacing master/slave with the metaphor husband/wife? ... At one point in history, the role of the wife was to do as her husband says.

This was meant as sarcasm, as an example of how culture does change. The author also makes the observation that perhaps "the role of the master to abdicate and the role of the slave to revolt." That's not something I want in a database replica, so perhaps master/slave isn't really a good metaphor in the first place?

Nor is this a new issue. I first heard of this 13 years ago, when Los Angeles requested (but did not require) that equipment vendors avoid the "master/slave" description. It's described in Snopes, at http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/outrage/master.asp .
At the very least, personal privacy rights be clarified and encoded into law. Even if disreputable surveillance continues, it should then be formally classified as corrupt if not straight-up illegal activity.
This may change as the plaintiff's bar gets more sophisticated. Many probably remember the Home Depot data breach a few years ago. The card issuers brought a class action against HD and the complaint (under MDL No. 14-02583-TWT) reads like a nice treatise on causes of action in various states implicated by a breach.
Wave was too ahead of its time.
Bots in channels that could translate and issue arbitrary actions? In 2009? Nonsense.
That's a relief! Glad to hear the plan is on hold.

Hey, noted you writing about not being into this "fight this thing" ("neighbor") but curious how this turn of event alters your views. Just purely in the emotional and psychological sense, does this all of a sudden having an extended expected horizon, doesn't [it] seem like future could be anything in the realm of possible. (I apologize if this is too personal.)
I'm rather fond of Arabic numbers also. Imagine multiplication using Roman numerals!
I'm not very surprised. If you've ever reviewed papers for an academic conference, you'll find that the vast majority of them are just very bad. The average ACM conference has a ~20% or so acceptance rate - and the remaining 80% isn't just a hair away from being accepted. For a big chunk of it, it's just garbage.

Ill defined research problems, vague statements, poor methodology, many grammatical mistakes... given the nature of peer review, it's only natural that people who author nonsensical papers would nod at nonsensical reviews.

For people saying that this is because academia is an old boys network: not quite so. While it can definitely be like that when you get to the top, the vast majority of peer reviewers for most conferences are just grad students, post docs, or junior researchers who don't really discriminate by trying to guess who wrote the paper.
> You're entirely ignoring the fact that there's no way Krebs could've possibly been paying Akamai enough to tank the attack.

They were hosting it pro bono. He never paid them enough to do anything. And yet...

> Only an utter moron would be willing to sell Krebs DDoS insurance.

But a smart person would cover him for free as a way of proving that they could handle the worst the DDoSsers gave out. To prove that they stick by their customers.

Most people who buy insurance never really use it. So what are they buying? A feeling of safety. Just think about the various insurance company slogans that come to mind.
There is no need to complain about Javascript once again, we know it all, the Flow criticism about the percentage of .js files is ridiculous, what is the percentage of Xamarin C# in all C# files ? The whole number is more important that the ratio. Also the portability of Xamarin is overestimated, you choose to use native non portable components or non native one but portable. The longevity of Xamarin is also overestimated, this is closed source software where React Native is open.
This is not a good article overall.
I would have said that the de-integration of Google+ from YouTube was a good example of them learning from their mistakes, except fucking Allo shows that they're still rather clueless about a lot of things related to people communicating online.
Money isn't everything.

YouTube is a hugely popular service, driving lots of data, traffic and brand image towards Google.

Could be the same for Twitter.
How we built a YouTube clone in minutes
If the income is deferred, I would imagine that it wouldn't apply to AMT calculations. It'd be nice for that language to be explicit though.

Regardless, the Obama Administration "strongly opposes" the bill in its current form since it would "increase the Federal deficit by $1 billion over the next 10 years."

https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/legislati...

I wonder how often bills with this "strong opposition" still end up getting passed anyway.
From the article:
> Last year, Christina Quasney was close to giving up. A biochemistry major at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Quasney's background was anything but privileged.

People with little family money get free grants and low-interest government backed loans to attend college. She is attending a public university. In NYC, there are many students that are attending City University of New York and I meet some. They are studying biology, engineering, and other sciences. They generally but not always live at home.

The annual tuition and fees are less than $7000 and for transportation, the MTA subway/bus is $115 per month, unlimited rides.

Students like those mentioned in the article get Pell Grants and Stafford government backed low-interest loans.
Pell Grants are $5,800 per year.
Stafford Loans are 5,500 the first year, 6,500 the second year, and $7,500 for the remaining years.

In my particular case, I paid for 90% of tuition/housing/living expenses by programming computers beginning in high school. I was not eligible for Pell Grants nor any form of loans including Stafford Loans.

So, I really don't understand these arguments. Public universities provide a first class low-cost undergraduate education and of course have PhD programs and so on.

Once one has an undergraduate degree with good grades, in the sciences and engineering, if they are admitted to a PhD program so they are fully funded for both tuition and housing.

CUNY Tuition and Fees:
http://www2.cuny.edu/financial-aid/tuition-and-college-costs...

Pell Grants:
https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/about/announcements/pell-2016-1...

Stafford Loans:
https://www.scholarships.com/financial-aid/student-loans/sta...
Hack Guide for Peugeot/Citroen vehicle. Super neat!
This isn't necessarily a problem--open source apps could be made configurable to aid people in controlling their behavior toward almost any goal, with focus on goals that fall into forms of morality. The most basic forms of this are apps that just provide data--what decisions people make with that data are up to them (although there is an underlying problem of how filtering and presenting data shapes people's decisions). But in a larger sense, a behavioral modification tool could be used equally by pro-smoking and anti-smoking advocates.

It's a bit off-topic, but I'm curious about your pro-smoking stance. Could you give your reasoning? I have some reasons of my own why I'm not as anti-smoking as most people, but I wouldn't go so far as to say tobacco is a social good, and I'm a bit confused by you also saying cigarettes are a social ill.
Building an Autonomous Vehicle with Rust and the Raspberry Pi
Well the discussion was about the FDA. But I completely agree that people at all levels within government may use their privileged position for personal gain.
nice, but does it compile and run on armhf? I don't see any binaries
The liquidity of startup shares has gotten better in recent times. I'm an engineer at http://www.equityzen.com, a marketplace for pre-IPO shares, and I believe more shareholders are starting to see that selling before an exit is a viable option for faster liquidity.

We helped lobby and push for this bill and I'm glad to see it making progress in providing better options for startup employees.
YouTube isn't profitable either.

http://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-still-doesnt-make-goo...
Compiling it to try right now...

Some discussion over on /r/rust: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/544hnk/ripgrep_is_fas...

EDIT: The machine I'm on is much less beefy than the benchmark machines, which means that the speed difference is quite noticeable for me.
This might make an interesting blog post, particularly if supporting data was exposed. Applying the Russell-Norvig definition of an artificial intelligence as an actor capable of action in the world based upon its perceptions, then what we may have is the manifestation of narrow perception.
This probably assumes you're willing to get a job in SV, NYC, Chicago, or Seattle. I doubt I could spend months learning deep learning and have any decent chance of a job in San Antonio (Texas). I don't live there - just an example.
The good news about this breach is that it will greatly increase their "active user" count because of password reset logins. That looks good for the buyout deal.

Twitter did this to me right after their last not-so-great quarterly report came out: sent an email saying they have noticed "suspicious activity on my Twitter account and have suspended it. Click this link to reset your password." Which is kinda funny because I never posted one thing to my Twitter account. So locking it for me was the next best thing to deleting it.

When I got the LinkedIn breach email, I too just deleted my account there. Wasn't worth the fretting about security problems.
SolPad – New Solar Start-up comes out of stealth mode
That you need an IDE to make a language bearable speaks volumes to the design of the language.

Go is doing well because it realizes we can strip so much away, stay with the standard lib, and get real work done quickly.

That's not to say that Java, in particular the JVM, isn't an impressive piece of engineering, but more that we should be careful when we choose our tools so as to not overly complicate things.
Isn't the problem with NNTP that people are being pushed away from it rather than not wanting to use it?
Exactly. I found myself using GIMP for exactly those "quick" scenarios because PS, especially before CS6, was just bulky and overcomplicated.

GIMP: Roughly select something, zoom in to make it pixel-perfect, see the size of the selection in the bottom left, and just drag until it fits your need.

PS? Roughly select something. Figure out the size of the selection. Zoom in. Dig into the menu.. Transform selection? Adjust. What's the size now? .. Nope, thanks. I am done 5 times over in GIMP by the time I did that.

I get that GIMP is not perfect, but some people treat like the PHP of graphics software.
This is creepy. I just opened a PR on GitHub and set the description to ":-)". Then I opened HN and saw this.
GIMP, Inkscape, Blender and other open source art production tools have a big chicken and egg problem. To really improve, they need more professionals using them and a part of them should be developers or willing to chip in by other means. But because there are issues (education included) that are deal breakers for pros, you can't expect it to get better quickly. The situation is much worse for art production tools (than e.g. programmers' tools), because a smaller portion of professionals in the field are also capable programmers.

This is a pretty sad situation and I can't how it would change, apart from giant (in open source terms) donations that would allow a developer-year or few full-time.
> There are many examples of complex professional systems that prove a decent UX is still possible

...and Adobe PS is not one of them!

People tolerate its UX/I because the functionality is unequaled and, after you commit to visual and muscle-memory all the shortcuts and locations of commands and options, you can be extremely productive despite the UX/I.

Also, people coming from the "physical arts" category are kind of used to horrible UX/I... I mean, the "UX/I" of a paint brush is pure horror story, even if you use acrylic paint... so the "suffering leads to great art" mantra when applied to tools too, carried into the digital world, makes artists pretty "masochistic" which pairs well with Adobe products' UI "sadism" :)
> Whether the skill sets remain the same is not so sure; manual wet lab work will always be inefficient compared to a programmer controlling an array of robotic lab devices.

I've already seen this happening in certain labs. It can be an odd experience walking into an empty lab. In one particular bio lab, they employed one particularly talented tech who knew how to do experiments that weren't yet being done by robots. The other guys were all programmers or doing bioinformatics. They're all well-paid and getting papers in NEJM, Nature, Cell, etc. (I didn't get the job :-/ )
The Making of NimYAML – Why Nim Is a Cool Language
Clichés about nations govern our actions
Kind of dropped the ball on the url. days.to is great, but days.to/until/christmas is kind of wonky. I'd remove the /until/ part so it's just days.to/christmas
It would be better if the income tax was zero and we had a higher tax on consumption (allow a base deduction for poor people if you want) since what you tax you get less of, and we don't want less investment in human capital or physical capital, but less consumption is okay (though obviously still undesirable).

As for the rest, just cut all subsidies to companies and farms, as a start. Then cut the military down to what is needed to defend the US, not to waste money running an empire.
But that's exactly what is what as the beginning. Twitter spent a significant amount of its early days sitting on the Fail Whale screen. Sure, now it's stable, when you throw a complete rewrite, and millions of dollars at it.
Police sometimes intend to incite violence at these events as a pretense to breaking up lawful protests. Especially when they are the ones being protested.

edit - changed often to sometimes, since 'often' really isn't accurate. Lazy writing on my part.
Spies!
dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12562163
Pretty simple, you up the stakes until the person attacking you stops. You never watched ScarFace?
The problem is that post mortems then become politicized, which means the actual cause may not be exposed, rendering the whole exercise pointless. It's part of the reason the FAA has all kinds of safe guards around reporting aviation hazards, even if the person who reported them is to blame.
I completely agree with this. You don't need a framework for a website at all - especially if it's a small one. Saying that, you can't go wrong with https://getbootstrap.com/
Mankiw's books is the best option if you want an inferential and qualitative understanding of the subject. If you want something with more mathematical rigor I suggest Blanchard's Macroeconomics.
As a general rule, you could remove any government agency created with the increase in wartime tax revenue after the war is over. That should get you back to the pre-war tax rate.

Pre war federal spending was ~10% of GDP. Currently we're at about 25%. So you want to cut federal spending by about 60%.

Medicare is about 15% of the fed budget. Social Security is about 25%. That's the 40% you get to keep right there. You think we should cut literally everything else?

Your assessment about what it would take to achieve the cuts you propose is not based in reality.
>In Go, with proper error handling

Well yeah, if you handle errors properly, you get better results than if you don't.

The point is that with exceptions, it fails loudly and you get the cryptic message even if you forget, whereas with Go, if you forget to handle an error, you just get weird behaviour and corrupt data.

And if you want more helpful error messages, you can catch the exceptions and report the context just as easily as you can in Go.
cell tower triangulation.
There are two major shared standards, the American EPA testing cycle and the European NEDC testing cycle. Both are based on essentially taking a car out and driving it in a certain way until the battery is dead, and seeing how far it got.

The EPA range is fairly realistic in my experience, at least with a Tesla. Hills and climate control (AC not so much, but heating is huge) will affect it, but I get fairly close to the official numbers much of the time.

The NEDC test is much more gentle and provides wildly unrealistic numbers. You won't achieve NEDC numbers unless you're doing something like a steady 55MPH on level ground with no climate control.

You can see this in action by going to Tesla's design page and switching the country between the US and the UK. For the US, the Model S 60 is rated at 218 miles and the P100D is 315 miles. In the UK, those numbers are 253 and 381.

BMW says 300km, or 186 miles, for the larger i3 battery under the NEDC:

http://www.bmw.com/com/en/newvehicles/i/i3/2016/showroom/ran...

But the EPA range is more like 125 miles.

Tesla's stated Model 3 range of 215 miles is the EPA rating, and so should be fairly realistic in mild conditions, less so in the winter or with a heavy foot. The BMW number to compare to would be 125 miles.
Europe's Google News Tax Makes No Sense
You only have "generic" functionality for built in types though. Arrays. (In a certain way maps and channels).

That's fine if you only use those, but it makes it impossible to write generic functions for much else. See my comment about lack of libraries. I did miss them a lot.

Not when writing your one off app or program, but for libraries.

And you end up having to implement a lot yourself that's for free in other languages.
The federal budget was $3.8 trillion (with a "t") last year, and the deficit was $438 billion. Increasing the annual deficit by $100 million[1], or 0.02%, seems like a non-issue.

[1] $1 billion over 10 years is $100 million per year.
I thought the selling point of the i8 over the Tesla is that the i8 is a proper sports car with BMW handling, and for the i3 the selling point is that it's way cheaper.
The second market is a bandaid. In addition to sub-par prices there's a huge bottleneck in the demand for shares, which is extremely volatile. And if cofounder X decides to offload 10% of his shares it'll wipe out any demand there is.

Equity is awful for a lot of reasons, but I'll never be convinced second-market selling is the panacea.
I'm being serious.

> Surely you don't think you should be the one going to prison

I don't think you "should" go to prison, but I'm saying that's likely how it would go down. So it's analogous to the files on a computer situation.
Dave Cheney gave a talk about error handling in Go that sheds some light on how the Go community thinks about errors:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsBF58Q-DnY
yeah, but for that $10 a month you get a free service running that checks your licensing status. No thanks, unless I'm a very high-end pro artist I'm not going to waste the time or the $10 a month when I could download Gimp for free and have 80% of the functionality.
> There is tons of money in science!

Of course there is tons of money in science. But it does not go towards scientists.

Some of my friends have PhDs in oceanography. Most of them are working in the lab, cutting fish (sampling) for minimal wage.

They are not even permanent employees, but on sliding contract extended every 6 months. Every 4.5 years they have to take one year break, because after 5 years they would become permanent employees.

Half empty building they work in has price tag over 200M euro (30M would do). Institute has over 60% non scientific stuff (all permanent of course). For example 10% of people are in HR, my corporation had 0.5% people in HR.

And if you studied 10+ years to write documentation which only needs 3 years degree... That is lot of wasted time and money.
Hm. No mortar. No ability to recover from perturbations (animals, children moving blocks; block flaws/cracks; foundation flaws). No apparent feedback at all. Just a movie showing a brick-placement bot '3D printing' part of a building. And a lot of hype - I didn't understand the entire intro, it sounded like hot-air words strung together.
With so many exceptions and corner cases, doesn't it goes exactly against the aim of a code standard, that is to make the code rigorous and less prone to errors? The prevention of weird behaviors and corner cases is exactly the reason why almost all Javascript styleguides recommend semicolons.
People whining about GIMP not being as good as PS don't appreciate what life was like on Linux before GIMP existed, or how primitive GIMP was when it first came out.

GIMP has advanced leaps and bound over what it once was.

I remember for ages PS fans were complaining about how GIMP had a multiple window layout, and how unnecessarily complex that was, and they wanted a single window layout. So the volunteers who work on GIMP eventually came out with a single window layout.

I'm not a PS user, but I heard that around that time PS changed to a multi-window layout. Whether that's true or not, now I hear complaints from some users that GIMP is not any good because it doesn't have a multi-window layout (not realizing that changing it to multi-window layout is as simple as unchecking "Single-window mode" under the "Windows" menu). Give me a break!

Some people will never be satisfied and will never appreciate the hundreds or thousands of man hours of free work that GIMP developers have poured in to this product.

Could it be improved? Of course! Anything can. Should they strive to make it better? Yes. Feature requests and help are great. But indignant insults coming from people who didn't pay for the development of the product, who don't contribute any of their own time to make it better, and who clearly don't appreciate the massive achievement that GIMP is just take the cake. GIMP developers must have skins of steel to put up with this crap year in and year out.
>At best, it introduced some dynamic language programmers to static types and static builds.

Can confirm (well, add another point of anecdote), I played with it a bit in order to get some experience with static stuff before diving into the whole C ecosystem.

Next thing I build that needs that kind of development will probably be C though.
The Forgotten Cold War Plan That Put a Ring of Copper Around the Earth
The Internet Archive Wayback Machine Is Down
It reminds me the "Postmodernism Generator"

http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/
It has the same issue Voat does: the people I want to avoid went there.
>I guess this is because every big industry runs on commuters nowadays...

My favorite typo of the week!
> But yes, things can get user-flag killed. And things can get system-flag killed. And we have no clue which happened.

You do: if a story is dead and says [flagged], it's because users flagged it enough to kill it. If you see such a story and think it deserves discussion on HN, you can vouch for it.

If a story isn't DOA because it was submitted from a banned site or user, then it won't turn up dead unless by user flags because moderators don't kill stories and neither does the software at that point.

This story (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12563192), as of now, is dead because of user flags.
It doesn't have to be BI, simply have a card that you can charge ST (and only ST) to, up to some amount, the same way SNAP works.
John Muir Biography – John Muir Exhibit