skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I remember puzzling over the mathematical definition of "implies" in first year CS. I understand why it is defined the way it is in the context of mathematical logic, but I always puzzled at a deeper issue: when were we going to learn how connect symbolic logic to reality? Combining the truth values of P and Q seemed relatively straightforward. But how did you work out those truth values in the first place? How did ambigous words apply to a complex reality?

I later found out that Aristotelian logic held the answers, and modern symbolic logic was a weird set of mathematical formalisms that wrenched out one part of classical logic (propositions) but omitted the theory of terms (concepts), without which, logic becomes a system of meaningless symbol games. This is the book that showed me a world of logic both perfectly rigorous and perfectly descriptive of human cognition: https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Objectivist-Epistemology... (if the author's name triggers you, obviously this book is not for you, but if you enjoy far-out intellectual adventures, you'll be in for a mind-blowing ride).
Tax avoidance is mostly happening because tax rates are seen as too high by the rich. Paying 40% tax on $50,000 is different to paying 40% tax on $10m. Past a certain point, setting up an avoidance mechanic (if one exists for the investment you want to make) will be cheaper than actually paying the default tax rate. Avoidance can never be stopped, because it's mostly structuring transactions in legally allowed but clever ways and you can't stop that (or you would block normal, legal transactions as well).

Say I have $10m I want to invest in an international company. If I do it in the most obvious way, by capitalising an entity, I might get a 30% return on my money after 3 years after paying all taxes. Alternatively, I can structure it in a different way, and make 50% in 3 years, because I end up paying less tax. The difference is an extra $2m on $10m. If the amount to set up a structure/attorney fees/possibly litigation fees < "normal" tax to pay -> avoid.

The only real solution is to lower rates across the board by getting rid of most deductions. If you remove the incentive to avoid, it'll be less worthwhile to avoid, and most people will stop doing it. How much people would put in an effort to avoid taxes, if the actual tax rate was, say 10%?
This is the saddest example of "natural" selection I've heard of.
What do you think Twitter do given consistency doesn't scale currently? Only obvious answer is to unban banned accounts, right?
This is just part of the decision making process. If lower taxes out weighs the downside, the decision becomes obvious.
Here's how we do it:

All the databases and other data are backed up to s3. For mysql, we use the python mysql-to-s3 backup scripts.

But the machines themselves are "backed up" by virtue of being able to be rebuilt with saltstack. We verify through nightly builds that we can bring a fresh instance up, with the latest dataset restored from s3, from scratch.

This makes it simple for us to switch providers, and can run our "production" instances locally on virtual machines running the exact same version of CentOS or FreeBSD we use in production.
I've been working on a side project for the last 3 months and it has finally gotten to the point where I am making more than $1000/month with more than 25 active customers 100% through word of mouth. I am working on a Show HN with some of my learning from the process so I won't get too deep into it here but here are a couple of highlights:

* You do have time. I work a time consuming job, have a wife and kids, and still found 1 hour per day to work on it, and that was enough.
* Automate everything that you can. Early on I automated the deployment, the creation of new accounts, the management of the sales, and soon the marketing.
* Have a plan and stick to it. I planned to use 1 hour per day and I did. I have a backlog and I work against that always.
* Pick a market you understand. I help a lot with my kids schools and this is software to help with that.
* Drop bad ideas when needed. I have started more side projects than I can think of. Sometimes in the past I have felt bad because I didn't want to give up on an idea. So I worked on a bad idea for way too long. Don't do that.

It turns out that when you have the right idea and are scratching an itch that real people have, it's not that hard to get people to pay you to solve their problem.
I know this is all very anecdotal, but I certainly have seen developers that I wonder for months how they could have ever been hired, and given time become quite capable. I first started to notice with out of college developers, but eventually saw beyond that too.

In my experience, the ones that were 'capable' from the get go either had a lot of experience programming on their own, or had some internship or other real world work experience. The ones less capable didn't.

Then I realized that my measure of 'capable' was probably unfair, because I expected people without having worked before to be aware of all the complex details that working with other developers entail. All the annoyances you have to deal with about writing real code that needs to evolve and change that only a stable work environment provides.

Then I took it one step further. What if the ones that weren't out of college were just never expected to really improve. They never had the chance to be exposes to a stable work environment that required growth. They just either were let go from previous jobs before being allowed to grow, or weren't put in an environment that neither required nor promoted growing? I think not all jobs do a good job of demanding and providing space to grow. And that's a problem. It's possible to 'get good' on your own, but it shouldn't be expected; and it's far from the only way.

So maybe we are being a bit unfair when we say a candidate is weak. Maybe they just haven't been in an environment that would require and allow them to improve.
Alright, I'm game. Where's the C library repository, and what's the manager I can use to handle dependencies automatically?
Because I use Docker Cloud, I use Dockup to back up a certain directory daily to S3 from my DO VPS. https://github.com/tutumcloud/dockup

I just use a simple scheduled AWS lambda to PUT to the redeploy webhook URL.

I use an IAM role with put-only permissions to a certain bucket. Then, if your box is compromised, the backups cannot be deleted or read. S3 can also be setup to automatically remove files older than X days... Also very useful.
OTOH, continuing to develop that infrastructure may be continuing to place money on a losing bet... If they're actually running their own infra cheaper than cloud would allow, they should absolutely keep going with their own. But it's foolish to keep doing something simply because it's what you're already doing.
But also because they won't join incorrectly. That was the biggest win in explaining it to other devs.
In no way do I think that. I don't think there is value in letting some assholes back in because you haven't shown every asshole the door. The correct answer is to continue showing assholes the door. You are bailing out the ocean--but that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.

Now, can you please provide those threatening tweets? I would like to report them.
I currently use https://github.com/backup/backup on my Digital Ocean instances, but https://github.com/bup/bup also looks nice.
An irc network can have several servers. If one goes down if the others are online you can connect to any one of them and still be ok. A net split will happen but they tend to resolve fast.
It ultimately boils down if you accept John Searle's Chinese room argument or not. (BTW his claim is not that conscious machines are not possible - we are such machines, but they cannot be implemented as digital symbol manipulators; we first need to figure out what exactly makes the biological machines conscious).
Diaspora* is surely better off that way.
I would argue "rights" are not a thing.
Air Pollution Disproportionately Impacts Minority and Low-Income Communities
attend it yesterday and was inspired and amazed ... We need more of these type of events, trying to push the limits of tech with competition and sportsmanship.
> jq stores all numbers as doubles, which means it can't handle 64 bit ints (or larger integer numeric types).

JSON = JavaScript Object Notation.

Javascript do NOT have integers. It's representing all numbers as double, which causes all kind of weird bugs and rounding errors.
It's a classic "let's make perfection the enemy of the good" headline... clickbait and unhelpful at the same time.
That's a pretty easy mistake to make. Care to enlighten me about the difference?
On OVH I rsync to another VPS in a different data center. I pick the lowest priced VPS with enough space. I also rsync to a local disk at my home. I would do the same with DO.

OVH has a backup by FTP premium service but the FTP server is accessible only by the VPS it backups. Pretty useless because in my experience if an OVH VPS fails the technical support has never been able to take it back online.
Elon Musk promises to introduce an ‘unexpected' product on October 17
There is a local metadata API for Azure but it is fairly simple right now.

Some limited instance info about your host ID, fault domain, and update domain:
curl http://169.254.169.254/metadata/v1/InstanceInfo

Poll this regularly to find out when your VM is about to go down for maintenance:
http://169.254.169.254/metadata/v1/maintenance

Those are the only two endpoints I know of. I encouraged them to require a special header for access to this API before releasing to the public but it looks like it was not included. A special header would help prevent your app from being able to access this from a user specified URL.

Google requires a header to help prevent this: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/storing-retrieving-met...
Please summarize physics for me.
Hi There,

I have a zany idea, but you're profile is empty so I cannot contact you :(

Send me an email (in my profile), I could use your help - certainly in the medical field!

cheers
> Heck these are the sort "clean code" practices which make your debug build run at 5 FPS

No. Quake and Doom were both extremely performance optimized, and still had clean code.

Avoiding commented-out or otherwise dead code; naming things well; writing concise but thorough comments that explain what's going on: none of those habits hurt performance.

Great code is not just meant to compile, it's meant to be read.

Inlining code manually should almost never be necessary today. Modern compilers inline automatically.

If you do feel the need to uglify code for performance, it should only happen after profiling, not as a habit.

There is no reason, performance or otherwise, to have the main entry point of your program or the render loop for your game be in a 5000 line spaghetti file.
Honest question, what does Heroku offer over Elastic Beanstalk other than being more expensive? I switched to EB and it seems more flexible and a lot cheaper, and I haven't wasted hours on admin.
Good to know. Yeah, that's one of the ways JSON kinda sucks. If you have 64-bit numbers, you have to quote them to be safe.
> He liked the can, too – more environmentally friendly than a plastic bottle

Say what? Plastic bottles are much more environmentally friendly.

Sigh, if people can't even agree on what is and isn't good for the environment there is zero chance of actually improving it. (Or maybe we've reached the max and the only things left to argue about is little irrelevant things.)
I'm not sure why you'd flag my reply for disagreeing with you sharply. I don't think I've done anything inappropriate, as opposed to discussing a sensitive topic and not agreeing with you. (The reason you can't is precisely that: because you'd flag appropriately expressed views that disagree with you in ways that make you feel uncomfortable.)

> openly racist and sexist people are deplorable

I mean, I obviously disagree. I think it matters a lot why they're doing those things, as opposed to that they're doing them. If it's because they're mentally disabled and we've failed to teach them socially appropriate behaviors as they matured, how is that their failing rather than ours?

Your lack of concern for that possibility -- that we're just discarding the disabled because they didn't develop under their own power in to normal adults -- is what troubles me about your stance.
Does that follow? "Existing" doesn't strike me as a sufficient prerequisite. Building something that scales is easy. I do it all the time. It's all the non-technical stuff that matters, and open-source/decentralized services don't seem to really be good at that.
Right, when not online.
Pretty sure they are already on AWS, also
OStatus appears to be de facto deprecated. The new hotness is evidently pump.io, JSON Activity Streams, and the W3C Social Web Working Group [1].

[1] https://www.w3.org/Social/WG
> I think nobody's done more damage to the developer hiring market than Joel Spolsky.

You're not giving enough credit to the whoever came up with the infamous Microsoft why-are-manhole-covers-round style of interviewing.
I ran an IRCnet server for 15 years or so and when the PSU crapped out I decided 15 years would be enough.

If I were to give one piece of advice: forget IRC. If you want to make a free, large scale chat system, just forget you ever saw IRC. There are no solutions in that neighborhood.
I read IRC v3 and assumed they were making major changes to the wire by bumping the major version, which is why I said what I said. I've been using IRC for 24 years but haven't implemented it before, maybe I'll do that now so I can have a better idea of what I'm talking about.
> Paying 40% tax on $50,000 is different to paying 40% tax on $10m.

You're right. It's way different to charge 40% on $50k, because the person making 50k probably can't make ends meet if you charge them 40% tax. The person making $10MM has no such trouble.
> The main addiction is to the caffeine.

I'm not so sure. I think there is something else about it that makes it habit forming. When dieting I sometimes get into a 10 can a day habit with fairly strong cravings despite a high caffeine intake from coffee.

The cravings are not too hard to overcome - a few days of abstinence and they go away. I don't notice health/well-being differences with or without it. The main motivation to quit is because lugging crates of the stuff home is a damn nuisance!
The Political Slant of the Nobel Prize in Economics
> I have absolutely no problem with hiring someone who's a good VB programmer and teaching them to do web programming. What people generally dispute is whether you can hire someone who's a bad programmer in general and "train" them to be a good programmer.

How do you know if a programmer who is in a field you are not familiar with is good or not?
12/12 is an indicator that the test was likely filled by a person who do not understand what do the checked items mean.
I honestly just run a raspberry pi that has Weechat running all the time in a tmux session. So I just SSH whenever I need from wherever, pretty much (with obvious security settings configured).

It works really well and is a cheap solution.
That is a claim I saw, Electric cars are reasonably competitive now even though production numbers are a tiny fraction of the market. Every time the number of cars sold doubles the cost drops by 15-20% (learning rate). Doesn't take a leap of genius to realize gasoline cars won't be competitive in 15 years.
After some years, it seems that the most fundamental thing in programming is not Bubble or Quick Sort, but naming and organization.
You can actually set up app folders in Dropbox so that a particular API key effectively chroots you to that folder. The attacker would only get the backups.
Because it's only thing which is clearly separated as "the actual words of god" in the Bible, compared to the Quran which is "the whole separated book of the actual words of Allah." If we'd count everything from the Bible, we'd have to count everything from the Hadiths ("The life of Muhammad," much bigger than the Quran) including all the killings ordered by Muhammad (once, 900 Jews were beheaded at once after they surrendered) which are described there but not in Quran.

Now the life of Muhammad was actually used by Muslim law makers to produce the Sharia Law, but what did Jews and Christians do with the "every Jot and Tittle," in the words of Steve Wells:

http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/EJAT/intro.html

"Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law. Matthew 5:18

If Jesus really said these words, he wasn’t much of a prophet. Because nearly every jot and tittle of biblical law is ignored by his followers today, as it has been throughout the history of Christianity. Even the Jews stopped obeying most of the commandments after the temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE.1 And yet despite Jesus's prophecy, the earth is still here."
What strategies can a startup use to boost small to medium enterprise sales?
There are so many articles on how to crack enterprise sales but I could not find any on small to medium enterprise(SME) sales. Any creative suggestions on how an early stage startup can crack SME sales?

Would be interesting to know how companies like QuickBooks, Xero, Square and Apple (sold PCs to SMEs in the beginning) were able to grow so fast. SaaS startups too!

Thank you!
Indeed, but there is something to be said for sane defaults--look at the thread on HN a few weeks ago about SSH cipher defaults. Yes, TLS and the CA ecosystem has its faults, but my stance is that any chat protocol should be using auth and encryption, especially group chat protocols like IRC. I'm less upset now after seeing that the proposed spec for IRC 3.3 includes something similar to HSTS.
Useful when one is travelling and stops in places that insist blocking everything but port 80. Thanks!
Decentralization won't stop information flowing to the US. We'll just have to buy additional peerage points. Our budget and desire to spy on the world is greater than the world's resolve to not be spied on.
Honestly, if I need to use a third party service like irccloud, isn't the benefit of IRC lost at that point? Why use irccloud when I can just use Matrix or Slack?
You think it's fair that the government should punish the frugal for not spending every dime they make?

If you and I earn the same but I spend all of my money on alcohol and pot, while you set aside to pay for your kids' college, how is it fair that you pay more tax?
->There's a LOT that the phone OS and hardware manufacturers can do at the hardware and firmware level to make things better.

Yeah, like not issuing phones with intentionally compromised baseband processors.

In fact, any phone that has a direct connection from the mic to the baseband processor is not just "hackable" - it's designed to hack your life (hint:all of them).
> It's no more innate than any skill. The only innate aspect to it is the desire to do well at it.

... and the autism to sit at a computer all days and week-ends to practise.
IAM instance roles were only added in 2012: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/iam-roles-for-ec2-instances...
I wish Twitter's walls were higher, so that they keep the shit they produce inside and it does not contaminate the worlds of journalism, politics and even real life.
How to run Jekyll 3 on Windows
I thought we were talking about fairness, not legality. They are different concepts that are only sometimes related.
N.B. The problem with using enterprise sales tactics like cold calling for SME sales is the large number of SMEs. Often times the cost of calling every SME outweighs the profits from a single SME. So any growth hacking strategies that have a low cost and distributed approach would be perfect examples.
It's not "very simple" - it's just that with Slack, someone else is running ZNC for you.

Chat apps don't magically "just work" - either you run your own infrastructure, or use someone else's.
Unrealircd is imcredible, as far as irc servers go. I ran it with 300 concurrent users at a local LAN and was able to do a lot of excitimg things like load balancing between servers other cool things, already back in 2001.
> … generally written in low-level C …

Maybe we should focus on that? Why are we writing OSes in C when more-secure alternatives have existed for decades? Why don't we consider writing our phone OSes (which don't actually require backward-compatibility to 1960s OSes) in something higher-level and more-secure?
In all walks of life, people with more experience are expected to be more formed, more of a known quantity, than people with less experience. The distinction between a junior candidate and a weak programmer is mostly down to the length of their CV. If someone has been programming for a few years, it's a bad sign if they're not very good at it.
I'm intrigued that you're unfamiliar with the idea of a sunk cost.
I've had lots of problems with surrogate primary keys where people don't put enough constraints on the natural key and then duplicates (sometimes slightly different) get in.

Unless you're using innodb, primary key is not special, it's just another index. If you decide to use surrogate keys you also need to enforce the natural key too (if possible).

There are also some nice performance advantages you can get from natural keys with covering composite indices in the case where you only want the key. But in general a table can have multiple keys in all but the highest levels of normalisation.
Wikipedia entries on philosophy are uniformly bad. Unfortunately I've never read a phil sci introduction that I liked, but if you're interested here is a sampling of notable phil sci books that occurred to me now. Note that many people who write phil sci might have professorships in other departments than philosophy and typically have an advanced degree in the science they specialize in. They just have more of an interest in speculative issues that build off already existing results or second-order questions or broadly integrative work than most practicioners, as well as at least enough background in the broader philosophical tradition to avoid basic gaffes or self-inflation resulting from narrow vision.

Judea Pearl - Causality

John Earman - World Enough and Space-Time: Absolute vs. Relational Theories of Space and Time

James Woodward - Making Things Happen

Jeff Bub - Interpreting the Quantum World

Peter Godfrey-Smith - Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection

Jesse Prinz - The Conscious Brain

Kim Sterelny - Thought in a Hostile World

And some historically important works:

Carnap - The Logical Structure of the World (in a loose sense, the first attempt at an AI program)

Popper - The Logic of Scientific Discovery (the philosophy of science practicing scientists now inherit and unquestionably assume)

Kuhn - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (a ubiquitous work on scientific practice)

Readers of HN might also dig up Scott Aaronson's paper on how complexity theory might be applied to certain philosophical questions.
Strangely. Companies read the blog post about hardcore hiring but not the blog post about that.
Let me sum it up for you: it is yet website generator that allows you to spend an entire weekend making something that almost works while reading reams of boring documentation.

The next weekend you will already have forgotten how to work it and you think "fuck it" and either install Jekyll (which is also a piece of shit, but it is a piece of shit that has a bigger community) or you think "screw this" and sign up for some website generation service your slightly odd uncle uses.

Wake me up when someone makes a website generator for people who really aren't interested in website generators.