skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> My problem with people so desperate for money, is they come here illegailly, or just happen to somehow get some bogus paperwork by the federal government, and will do practically any job.

Why have a problem with those people? To me, that makes about as much sense having a problem with the relative economic success of the United States, which is why the US has been (until the recent economic crisis) an attractive place for such people to seek to go.

Why not, instead, have a problem with the features of the system in the US that fail to address (or actively make worse) the social costs of such desperation, including, but not limited to:

(1) a legal immigration system with, in most immigrant visa categories, hard per-country numerical limits which are not aligned with demand, creating the incentive for illegal immigration (simply eliminating per country limits in most visa categories and assigning available slots from one global pool would vastly reduce illegal immigration; removing hard numerical limits and charging fees to mitigate the social costs of excess immigration beyond existing caps would reduce it even further and allow surplus immigration demand to be a source of public revenue rather than a cost hole.)

(2) poor enforcement of labor rules, both where it comes to enforcing who-can-legally-work requirements, but also wage, hour, tax, and benefit rules (without poor enforcement on both sides of this equation, the effect of illegal immigration on wages and working conditions would be far less, and the draw for illegal immigrants would be far less.)
I think you underestimate the advantages of marriage for people living on the margins. I suppose my suggestion sounds quaint, to some. But a partner in the struggle makes a life-altering difference to marginalized people.

So, yes, I think we should better educate children about the importance of this decision.
​Ubuntu's new take on Kubernetes
Hi, I'm the co-founder of Order Healthy. We just released our iOS app (working on Android) and would love to hear some feedback.

Our website is www.orderhealthy.com, and feedback on it is also greatly appreciated.
The term 'business value' is hard to measure for any given developer I think. The easiest measure is to say your managers define 'business value' and you deliver what they want or deliver to their strategic objectives, but that equates 'business value' to 'management whim'... if the manager is a perfect guide to maximizing profit then I guess that's ok, but I doubt most managers have that perfect ability to detect how to create profits. Alternatively, you might suggest that some cash/profit measure determines 'business value', but that's both hard to measure and not always strategic... some businesses need the best developers to build the systems that lose money in order to make money in other areas.... it's hard to measure.

With the way you've outlined it I think you've emphasized that a 'Senior developer' is someone who can be both social and technical, that's a good thing and would be very beneficial for any person who can do those two things well... but I wouldn't discount people who are exceptionally technical but need someone else to help them prioritize and define their work and focus.
SETIIBMCloud: SETI data, publicly available, from IBM
Modern """""""enterprise""""""" solutions in a nutshell.

lul. My Java project with a bunch of maven dependencies and a slightly unwieldy number of superfluous classes doesn't have anything on modern startup's tech fetishism to over-complicate operating a website "at scale" these days.
Yeah, the free monad structures involve lots of lambdas. It's not so much that information is "lost", more that you cannot see beyond the next lambda abstraction.

From a DSL perspective, it's like you can only inspect the program so far as to know the next statement in the "do" block. To see what the next statement will be, you need to actually evaluate the current one.

Instead of free monads, if you want very analyzable structures, look at free applicative functors.

"Applicative functors are a generalisation of monads. Both allow the expression of effectful computations into an otherwise pure language, like Haskell. Applicative functors are to be preferred to monads when the structure of a computation is fixed a priori. That makes it possible to perform certain kinds of static analysis on applicative values. We define a notion of free applicative functor, prove that it satisfies the appropriate laws, and that the construction is left adjoint to a suitable forgetful functor. We show how free applicative functors can be used to implement embedded DSLs which can be statically analysed."

http://arxiv.org/abs/1403.0749
Example Jupyter notebook: https://github.com/ibm-cds-labs/seti_at_ibm/blob/master/note...
At the lowest levels, the pattern can be reversed: you provide a nice functional shell around a little bit of imperative core (e.g. implementing "map" with a loop).
What money are the unemployed going to invest?
Ask HN: Sites for Practicing Object Oriented Design
Hi HN,

Are there any sites like hackerrank, hackerearth, which focus mainly on object design oriented solutions in languages like Java?
It's okay for port 25 to go down for 2 minutes because standards-compliant senders will retry when your server is back up.

It's not okay for a widely used web service to go down for 2 minutes until you can update your DNS. Failover needs to happen within a few seconds, and most importantly, while the client is still connected to the load balancer. You can't do this using DNS with short TTL values.
"The guarantee does not apply when late delivery results ... from events beyond our control ... or the exercise of any lien in accordance with our Terms and Conditions of Carriage."

If you can void your guarantee based on "forces outside your control" in something like shipping, where you're at the mercy of traffic, weather conditions, and human error, it's not really a guarantee.

The UK is a substantially easier country to ship in logistically than the US. I don't doubt that Royal Mail's guaranteed delivery works.
VA has fairly good emission tests every two years which keeps the old clunker pollution down. Without those I can see the temptation to let things slip a little.

At the time I would go weeks without driving / riding in a car. This was really for weekend trips where Uber is not really an option or once a month going for heavy things like water I did not want to carry home. I looked into car sharing services, but at the time there was no good ones in my area.
Relatively low margin, fragmented service jobs. Waiters/waitresses, fitness instructors, barbers etc. Those jobs are often still better than the jobs being automated away (truck driving), just less economic to build such specialty robots, at least in the near term.
Show HN: Stroke of Genius Comics Book
> acronyms ... where you would normally pronounce the set of letters as a word

If you wouldn't pronounce it, it's not an acronym
We use Xapian to search over millions of documents. We are thinking of switching to PostgreSQL built-in FTS to simplify our system. We ran an internal benchmark which showed that PostgresSQL can be competitive with Xapian, except when you need to rank results (in that case the performance is bad).
Many companies have a separate "Product Manager" role for that business, so that the brilliant engineers can brilliant SENIOR implementors. Have a dedicated professional worry about the customer impact, product requirements, etc., along with other non-programming tasks that many developers understandably prefer not to get bogged down in.
Sample size of 1, no blinding, no verification of the substance received. Quite worthless.

Placebo effect is strong enough children recognised as more intelligent by chance do act and measure smarter.
Ok, thanks. I would call that a problem with not having block scope, not a problem with hoisting. Not trying to be pedantic; I was just confused about how hoisting could be such a problem. A language could have variable/function declarations hoisted to the top of block scope rather than the top of function scope.

And as I'm sure you know, JS now supports block scoped variables through `let` and `const`.
> billions of people just shrug their shoulders

As they have been doing from the beginning. The masses only act contrary to top level input when desperately hungry. Even their righteous anger is scripted and handed down.

What has been the problem is that the critical non-elite core (say 10%) of society was ignorant of the consequences of these technologies and they are now getting a better sense.

We only have to educate the 10% and only need to provide secure software for these same 10%. Societies change when the 10% no longer accepts the rule of the 1%. This is the primary critique against geek efforts to get "grandma" using crypto. If grandma is part of the 10%, she'll be able to follow step by step instructions.
PiinPoint (YC W14) Is Hiring Full Stack Engineers and More (Waterloo, Canada)
Jason Grigsby on the future of responsive images
When I did the calculations a few years ago on the Toyota Camry vs the Camry Hybrid, the payout on a cash-basis was over 100K miles, assuming 2/3 highway, 1/3 city. (That means the NPV payout is even longer.)
IIRC, I stored the plain text too because the engine can return contextually marked up plaintext after finding it in the ts_vector.
4-part Series on LegalTech, Featuring YC Alums Casetext and ROSSIntel
Wow I guess you are lucky. If I died today, there's probably less than 10 people who would come to my cremation. Sad I know but I'm okay with that.

I do relate to the dog though, they are amazing companions. I would really worry about depression if he passes away.
"I don't think this time is the same" its another big moto for industrial revolutions
While it's ok for our purposes, I would wish for a bit better customisability of the text parser and it definitely needs better support for compound words to be perfect.

The first issue is with relation to https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.6/static/textsearch-parser...: The documentation says

> At present PostgreSQL provides just one built-in parser, which has been found to be useful for a wide range of applications

and it really means it - changing the behaviour of this component is not possible unless you write a completely different parser in C which, while possible is no fun experience.

We're using the full text feature over product data and we're having to work around the parser sometimes too eagerly detecting email addresses and URLs which messes with properly detecting brand names which might contain some of these special characters.

The other problem is the compound support. A lot of our data is in German which like other languages likes to concatenate nouns.

For example, you'd absolutely want to find the term "Weisswürste" for the query "wurst" (note the concatenation and the added umlaut for the plural in wurst).

Traditionally, you do this using a dictionary and while Postgres has support for ispell and hunspell dictionaries, only hunspell has acceptable compound support, which in turn isn't supported by Postgres.

So we've ended up using a hacked ispell dictionary where we have to mark all known compounds which is annoying and error-prone.

Also, once you have to use a dictionary, you end up with a further issue: Loading the dictionary takes time and due to the way how Postgres currently works, it has to happen per connection. In our case, with the 20MB hacked german ispell dictionary, this takes ~0.5s which is way too long.

The solution for this is to use a connection pooler in front of Postgres. This works fine but, of course, adds more overhead.

The other solution is http://pgxn.org/dist/shared_ispell/, but I've had multiple postmaster crashes due to corrupted shared memory (thank you, Postgres, for crashing instead of corrupting data) related to that extension, so I would not recommend this for production use.

Lucene and by extension ElasticSearch has much better built-in text analysis features so we could probably fix the parser and compound issue, but that would of course mean even more additional infrastructure, plus, probably some performance issues as we, unfortunately, absolutely cannot return all the FTS matches but instead have to check them for other reasons why they must not be shown which, of course, uses the database again and I'm wary of putting all that logic somehow into ES as well.

This is why we currently deal with the postgres tsearch limitations. But sooner or later, we'd probably want to bite the bullet and go dedicated solution.
An interesting new approach. Let's wait for the studies to follow.

He is mistaken about "nothing" in case of brain trauma. Racetams have been shown to be mildly effective.
Off topic.

The original developers blog post was submitted 17-22 days ago, multiple times. Previously multiple submits would trigger upvotes, but in this case they created multiple new stories and in turn greatly decreased the chances of front page. Bug or working as intended?

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=intervening%20document.write&s...
Why Miners Are Lowest in the Hierarchy of Control Over Bitcoin
Which jobs has the invention of car manufacturing robots created? Was it anywhere near as many jobs as were lost in Detroit? We still manufacture roughly the same amount of cars per capita, so these robots didn't enable any new industries.

The only reason to automate, is because buying robots is cheaper then paying employees, for the same amount of output produced. Since those robots were built by people, who had to get paid... Clearly, at the end of the day, you are employing fewer people.

New jobs get created when the amount of produced goods grows, as happened in the industrial revolution. Unfortunately, we are currently in a supply glut - we are demand-limited.
Of course. Overall this is good news.
I'm guessing it's John Slough of Helion http://www.helionenergy.com/?page_id=704
Uber's wayfinding logic in Manhattan is actively dumb. With billions of dollars they could just hire a thousand locals to sit in a passenger seat to give navigation instructions.

If a car is ahead of me on an avenue, even by half a street, it will send them around the block instead of suggesting I walk forward a bit.

Or, instead of asking me to cross an avenue, it will send the driver down a different avenue for multiple streets to loop back to my position.

It is obsessed with getting on to the expressways. It will happily crawl past relatively free-flowing avenues to squeeze into an expressway full of cars heading to Westchester.

Its estimates of ETA seem to assume that there is no traffic. They are hilariously bad.

Drivers, who have been burnt by customers getting mad at them for not going to an exact location or for "ripping them off", follow the map religiously. No matter what I text or call. They follow an app which was presumably written by people who've never set foot in this city.
Citation on horse slaughtering in the mid-1900s that probably was relatively unrelated to the Great Depressions? Legitimately interested.
Could? It's already happening.
No, treat your infrastructure as code. Define it programatically, version it, have a standard, automated process for recreating it.

If you're using AWS then Cloudformation (maybe with an abstraction like troposphere), will do what you need.

If you are pressing the big blue 'launch instance' button, you are doing it wrong.
... And you expect a "senior" to be able to understand, negotiate and resolve this, as well as understand when and how to escalate, etc.
I hear some people still use these things:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_95LX

I played around with one recently and it's a pretty cool little device.
The Fed adding improving employment to natural zero to it's mandate post Great Recession alongside controlling inflation, seems to imply that the ideological opposition isn't that strong.
I don't know; there were a hell of a lot of horses. Cars took generations to get up to that number. Not a good example?

And cars were preferable precisely because they took less effort/expense. It was actually cheaper to build a car than raise equivalent horse(s).
> "How does Uber Pool even work during rush hour?"

I haven't used it during rush hour myself, but I know some people who have. The short answer is: it doesn't work during rush hour.

All of the issues you've highlighted are issues, but even without some exceptional traffic just picking up and dropping off multiple people makes the whole thing interminably slow.

Not to mention that Manhattan below 125th St is subway central - I can see the value for people in Brooklyn and Queens who live in subway deserts, but Manhattan? Even regular non-pool Uber is already slower than taking the train during rush hour.

I can appreciate that uberpool is a great thing for people in other cities, but the product market fit for Manhattan is exceptionally poor. I wonder why Uber is bothering with this market when there are many others (see: SF) where this "unlimited pass" would be actually useful.
Non-Profit Organizations and Bots: A Few Thoughts [List]
There's something called 'keto flu' where for the first week or two you can feel a little off while adjusting, but afterwards you have plenty of mental energy, as long as you keep your electrolytes up.

All previous diets for me failed because I always felt like I couldn't think and do my job and needed to flood my system with calories in order to keep going... on keto I haven't had that feeling even once.
A senior developer doesn't say things like "I don't know how", they simply figure it out and do it. A true senior developer is fearless, but also pragmatic.
Personnaly it's at least three trips, work, going out and home and sometimes more on the weekend so this is pretty amazing actually.

It's much more comfortable than taking subways (which is also 100$ a month)
In my twenties my friends and I were into it, and without exception all of us who were white, or just light-skinned, were never so much as asked a question about anything related to pot, by a police officer. I was pulled over once and my friend had just smoked in the car, and it stank... cop didn't even blink.

Now at the time two of my friends were black, and one was Sikh, and they stopped smoking first out of all of us, because if they so much as smelled vaguely of pot, they'd get hassled. When we all get together now over dinner or drinks, we still go back to the old joke my Sikh friend came up with, "Being white is like a superpower in this country."

It's not that simple of course, and the factors which determine whether the police will bother you are also based on socioeconomic status, and if you have a criminal record or not. In terms of actually catching the eye of the police though, my white friends and I just never did, while any of my friends who couldn't have passed the infamous "paper bag test" always seemed to have to explain themselves a lot more.

Note: NorthEast US, I cannot speak for the rest of it.

Sidenote: My Sikh friend normally has a decent time of it, but after 9/11? He and his family who had moved to Georgia, ended up moving back East.
Useful seeing as they dont know how to drive trains over there
Exercise Ideas to Help You Lose Weight
It's been about five years since I bought this laptop (refurbished ThinkPad) and I'm sure I'll be using the same laptop another five years down the road. Many people are still using relatively old hardware and it meets most or all of their needs.
Older usually means simple and simple is usually more reliable than complex. Think about it for a moment — these guys don't have a problem with auto-updates, viruses, or network intrusions.

As I write this, I'm looking with growing trepidation at the menus on my new TV, especially the "Anti-Virus" section. Seriously?
I wonder whether they are using the heat for surrounding buildings. Otherwise it would just be wasted, which is sad.
A Phone Number Is Not Sufficient Proof of Identity
Microsoft Forms New AI Research Group Led by Harry Shum
I thought they used google. Anyway, NYers are notorious for having strong opinions about the 'right way' to navigate any given route. Grain of salt.
Maybe someday AIDS will just be a harmless virus that doesn't bother anyone, since mankind will have acquired an immunity to it?
ORWL – The first open source, physically secure computer
Much worse! Completely, strategically dominant replacement of human and animal muscle with the steam engine.
> Calling to mind the famous wave-particle duality of quantum mechanics

Come on, quanta. You of all science news publications should know not to throw this misleading metaphor around willy-nilly. Not everything that seems contradictory ought to be compared to wave-particle duality, especially when so many people have the wrong idea about it.
I don't think people really grasp what is going on here, people won't have any other jobs to move to, even if new type of jobs are created, AI will be able to do them too.
Just as cars replaced almost all functions horses had, AI will replace all functions we humans have.
I still have a Commodore 64 with its original box and booklet (which includes lessons in programming with BASIC).
> All queries still flow through SQL and unlike PG, we can force whatever execution plan we need. We do lots of PK lookups, and InnoDB is really good at that.

Being able to force the execution plan is more useful in MySQL than PostgreSQL because MySQL's optimizer is not very good at planning queries.

If you do a lot of PK lookups, then you don't need to force the execution plan.
New Prusa multi-material with 1 nozzle
So instead of known lower maintenance costs with unknown high cost in the future, especially given the Tesla Gigafactory, you chose known high maintenance costs (brakes, oil, transmission) and less certain future fuel costs.

Charging is an issue. However, I don't personally know any plug-in hybrid that is actually plugged in at night. They still get the government subsidies, and they can plug in at certain mall parking lots or appropriately equipped parking garages, but I think they're mostly driven as normal vehicles. That use brake pads and low-RPM gearing less than normal vehicles.
This doesn't even strike me as being all that old. I still see plenty of IBM 3270 systems in warehouses and suchlike places in the USA. Those are at least as old as a C64.
Yet, without brains.
We spend lots of money investigating and prosecuting murders. We have a non-perfect system that sometimes throws innocent people in jail.

And if banning murder did not lower the murder rate than banning murder would be a piece of legislation with no benefits and only costs. Not sure why we want to pass legislation that puts innocent people in jail and sets money on fire for no benefit.
the quality of life in san francisco is absolutely abysmal unless you are the top 10% in either wealth or income.

being able to spend $300 on a multi-course crudo and wine prix fixe dinner for 2 is not 'quality of life', that just means you're rich and you like nice shit. you can do that anywhere there are other rich people, texas included.

most people consider quality of life to be cleanliness, low crime, affordable property, personal freedoms, etc., all of which are in dramatic short supply in san francisco.
> I'd argue passing AP calc in high school is 90% of the battle. If you can tackle that the basics of programming are nothing.

As someone who was programming long before I took AP Calculus, I don't think there's a whole lot of relationship between the two. Certainly, the scope of AP Calculus includes material which is necessary preparation either fairly directly or through other math that builds on it for some of what is covered in a normal CS curriculum, but its certainly not a prerequisite for either basic programming or introductory computer science (which aren't really the same thing.)
why not just an increase in the earned income tax credit?
No its simply sharing a regular uberX ride on demand. It's not for (necessarily) daily carpooling.
Qi Lu is leaving the company due to health issues
Those won't be called meetings but gatherings and exchanges of ideas,so they won't have to be publicly available.