skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Another acerbic article from Richard Eng critiquing javascript.

Granted that javascript is inconsistent and poorly designed. But what does he expect a beginner programmer to do? Learn a language has neither widespread acceptance nor community support, in an attempt to get away from javascript's deficiencies?

Even Google could not wean sophisticated programmers (who appreciate the issues way better than I and many others do) away from javascript despite its incredible efforts.

I for one am interested in getting the job done quickly and as painlessly as possible. I dont make the tools I just use them.

Thoughts anyone?
Spam is a problem everywhere except Gmail. People have an illusion that the battle against spam is won because Gmail did the job. All the other email providers struggle everyday. SpamAssassin is worthless, it is a piece of shit that does nothing.

We desperately need a service that helps filtering email -- like, for example, something simple that just accepts reports about some email being spam or not, and creates a list of spam addresses.
> I do this willingly to sacrifice battery. NOTHING CHANGES for people with 8/16GB configuration.

Did you not read the article? Everyone would be affected because they would have to use a completely different RAM technology. Even for people with 8/16GB configurations.
"forceful" probably means those jobs would not exist in pure capitalism.
I note the president elect has said in the past:

>"We must have universal healthcare...I'm a conservative on most issues but a liberal on this one. We should not hear so many stories of families ruined by healthcare expenses...

I know he flip flops all over the place but maybe if people lobbied, something could be done.
On 1.5 billion cows with an average release of 70-120kg per year (I went with 90kg) you'll get a reduction by
1,350,000,000kg of methane. Thats a difference. A single percent drop from one of the main contributors of green house gasses is huge.
He's literally asking us to disregard the health outcomes for a particularly vulnerable section of society. That strongly implies that these people aren't worth factoring in to our evaluation of a healthcare system, that their health simply doesn't matter.

On a purely statistical level, it makes very little sense. Does he believe that poverty and drug addiction are uniquely American phenomena? Does he believe that the healthcare system has no impact on the number of people with drug addictions or chronic poverty-related diseases?
There's no objective answer to that, therefore no such "limit" exists. Just pick one that looks reasonable to you, continuously review its validity through the course of your life.
Agreed. Or force the user to have two registered e-mails in a GCE account at all times, unless they're explicitly deleting it. Doing things implicitly with no warning is simply terrible UX.
Counter-conspiracy: after the Reddit AMA in which most redditors were pissed off and accused WikiLeakas to act in Putin's interests, Assange engineered this drama as a way to regain his previous cult status among the digerati.
Neither of these is exactly what you asked for, but both are awesome in their own way, and both are (narrow and somewhat dated) histories:

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy.

The Pulitzer Prize Winning) The Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder. The second one literally changed my life in leading me to computers.

Links:
https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution-An...

https://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder/dp/0316...
I tend to agree with both you and OP in different ways. Perhaps this Epictetus quote will contribute to the discussion:

>I must die. Must I then die lamenting? I must be put in chains. Must I then also lament? I must go into exile. Does any man then hinder me from going with smiles and cheerfulness and contentment?
If i read it correctly the paper says the effect comes through bromoform contained in the algae, which inhibits the enzymes participating in the methane production.

It's only fed in sub-toxic amounts to the cows I don't think it bio-accumulates, so the meat should be safe for consumption.

in other words, it has nothing to do with antibiotics.
Both of these!

With the healthcare being paid for by taxes, there is a lot more incentive for governments to push healthy eating. It also means that policies for bike/walking routes pay off more.
Except it counts against you for mortgage applications so in one very important way it is exactly like a debt.
Personally I mostly find the scheduling of announcements annoying. Often it will broadcast generic reminders in batches of 2-3 and sometimes repeat them another time for good measure.

The pronunciation of city names is also rather lacking in many instances, and like you say often doesn't match the surrounding speech.
I understand what you are saying. It's like asking people who don't have a car to pay for car insurance. And I agree generally.

But the whole point of insurance is that you make it work because most people wont be needing their insurance so it's a question of interpretation.

And yes I think you are right about your solution. I can compare same treatment in Denmark with those of here in the US and the difference is just too big to be true.
Where is the source? It's not science until you can reproduce their result.
I just got the best gig of my life through LinkedIn. But I was abroad so not really able to physically network as such.
Drones, microfurnaces, sorting robots... Quite a bit of "stuff". Theoretically, the perfect recycling machine would break even on the raw materials used when it has processed the trash equivalent of itself. But that would be Diamond Age level technology, and even then ignoring all energy demands and plain old monetary investment.

In reality, even conventional mining tends to use a lot of "helper materials" that are consumed in the ore processing but do not end up being part of the product that is sold to the next step of the supply chain. Reducing the scale from industrial to laboratory only worsens the efficiency of that material use. Energy efficiency of micro vs macro is a lost case anyway, but for the sake of utopianism I'm willing to not dwell on that to much. "Miracle energy source" would be one of the less fantastic assumptions required to make these microfactories actually rise.
I get dependent already on computer games (not a bad thing for Nethack and the Dark Souls series of course). It might be easy for me to get dependent, so I avoid drugs and other dependency causing things religiously -- like social networks.

But I am now a heavy FB user despite that, as an expatriate it helps a lot with keeping the fluency of my native tongue. The ease with keeping in contact is also really good for me, quite a bit away. I just wish there were fewer cat pictures.

The relevance for work and career is zero, of course. But the personal value is high.
Inside Gmail for Android: ads. Lots of ads.

Disclaimer: if you haven't seen ads in the Gmail android app yet, please consider yourself lucky and kindly buzz off from this comment.
What I find interesting in this PRO debate is that most +16GB users don't even use Apple, but brands like Dell, HP, Siemens and others.

Apple is not stupid. They know the market. And imho the anger here on HN is mostly HN bias.
This reads more like adjusting how you use social media than quitting it altogether. The overly sensationalist headline probably obscures what the actual point of the article is.

If you're trying to turn social media into your career - say, being a journalist but only tweeting about things - then, no, that's probably not going to work. This seems to be what the article is railing against.

If however, you're using social media to help your work elsewhere find a wider audience, and then providing added nuggets of value on social media, then that's valuable.

The era of someone producing one piece of work that defines them for the rest of their career is now probably over. Theres an expectation now that you're continually engaged.
Obamacare was designed to shift the cost of healthcare for the old onto the young, by capping the maximum difference between the premiums paid by the two groups. This had the predictable effect that young people didn't sign up for health insurance in the numbers predicted. So insurance companies lost money and left the market, and the remaining companies are hiking prices at an astronomical rate, far beyond what even its critics predicted. Obamacare is failing because its creators failed to grasp either economics or insurance, and then shot the messenger rather than fixing it.

Worse still, Obamacare was structured with a bunch of subsidies that expire over the next few years, lasting just long enough to push the pain into someone else's presidency.
I think they don't exist because there are minimum wage laws and it simply doesn't pay off to employ someone for ~8.50 (EUR or USD) an hour to do this because it generates less than it costs. Combine that with labor laws, unemployment benefits, food stamps and other "poverty fighting schemes" and no one is ever incentivized to take such a job for such a pay.

Summing up, my conclusion is the opposite of yours - those jobs would probably exist in pure capitalism.
Swift 3 and OpenGL on Linux and MacOS with GLFW
Interesting how he critiques something cryptic in Scheme and doesn't show the Smalltalk equivalent. One thing that should have its own full section is performance as it is slower than Java, compiled Scheme, and I'm guessing V8 optimized JS. I know the whole hotspot JIT thing was maybe pioneered in Smalltalk though? I do like certain things about Smalltalk (Pharo looks nice), but it is hard to do certain things with it like a GUI. Well I mean it is hard to find out how to do that....not necessarily hard to implement.
Nicely done talk. Great presentation, fun enough to keep listeners engaged through a lot of horrifying details. I also agree that we, the people, have a (final?) say in how this all goes down.

Let's run with the conclusion a bit - What would society be like for there to be a critical mass of critical thinkers, aware of new developments, in a position to act and motivated to speak up?

The cynic in me sees that list and despairs. How can we expect the average parent of 2 to keep C-SPAN on throughout the day, calling their senators on lunch breaks, and boycotting products that would give them an extra hour back every week that could be spent playing with their children.

That's how it would look, right? Instead of skimming political/technical news that entertains us while validating our viewpoint, we'd be parsing legalese like it's a pull request. Instead of binge watching Netflix, we might be driving to a store to buy something that could have arrived yesterday via Amazon Prime.

It's all quite doable. It's just not immediately comfortable. It's also not a priority in our lives, since it's so easy to prioritize anything else with immediate feedback or gratification. However, humans are very good at internalizing and normalizing. When motivated, we can make virtually any behavior livable, or even comfortable.

So that's the trick. How do we normalize critical thinking, due diligence, and active engagement?
Only in * (fear of Godwin point reference) society do you fear to have opinions.
> In fact, you might even say that real neural networks are approximating the computational properties of artificial neural networks

There's little to no evidence for this currently. To my knowledge, there's nothing to indicate that the brain uses anything like backpropagation, which is the mechanism by which artificial NNs learn. That's such a fundamental operation for ANNs that I think it would be premature to claim anything like the above.
Quit the NY Times. Your election may depend on it.
Funny: since the 80's they've been able to take off and land too. Which could avoid most of those crashes. But the pilots (and FAA) won't allow it.
This industry is one of the least aware of its own history, everyone is focussed on tomorrow. We should really include History of Computing as a discipline. Round and Round and Round we go.

---

You want to make your way in the CS field? Simple. Calculate rough time of amnesia (hell, 10 years is plenty, probably 10 months is plenty), go to the dusty archives, dig out something fun, and go for it. It’s worked for many people, and it can work for you.

— Ron Minnich
I live in Thailand. Private healthcare is excellent here. In fact, hundreds of thousands of people from around the world come here every year to take advantage of it - Thailand is a huge medical tourism destination.

There is also a public healcare system here which is quite terrible.

Interestingly, some public hospitals offer "special clinic" hours where you can get treatment on a cash basis instead of using the public healthcare system. Since the "special clinics" are not so heavily oversubscribed the wait times are shorter and service is better. Not luxurious like the private hospitals (which are indeed luxurious) but solid care by excellent doctors. I had foot surgery at Siriraj Hospital (oldest and largest public hospital [0]) by an excellent specialist [1] who also practicies at Bumrungrad (pricey private hospital). Total cost of everything, including two nights in hospital, was USD700.

I guess that's a sort of hybrid of public and private and is an excellent value. But the private healthcare is outstanding and (again) luxurious, and while more expensive still only a fraction of western pricing. The thing is, the prices are known and even advertised in advance and you can just pay out of pocket. Wife had surgery at Bumrungrad to remove an ovarian cyst, three nights in hospital with pampered treatment, total cost a little over USD2,000.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siriraj_Hospital
[1] https://www.bumrungrad.com/doctors/Bavornrit-Chuckpaiwong
People don't usually have a choice about becoming homeless, but their environment will affect how they respond to their homelessness. It's a cliché that some homeless people in America will choose to travel to California or Florida for the warmer climate (whether that's true or not I have no idea - would be interested in seeing data on that subject).

If someone becomes homeless in a place where homelessness has a significantly increased risk of death (such as freezing to death in Berlin), then either they move away, they engage with local support services, or they carry on as they are, risking death (and some of them will die as a result). Either way, the effect is a reduction in the number of homeless people at that location.

Thankfully a lot of places recognise some of the risks and try to address them. In the UK, many cities have a cold-weather response: when the temperature drops below Xº, additional shelters are opened, and street-teams look for people sleeping rough and guide them towards the shelters.
But that's not what people are saying: they are saying there is no reason to upgrade.

That's not what the grandparent was saying. She was saying that the new MacBook was inadequate for her needs.

Your argument is silly anyway

No yours is. Clearly, yesterday's hardware is inadequate for the software of today. But what I am saying is that hardware of today is probably ok for the software of yesterday.
Actually, I know exactly what's going to happen (to me) in the future: I'll eventually grow old, get sick and die in pain. Or maybe I'll just get the "die in pain" part. That's how it goes, right?

And in the past I was very young and couldn't yet fend for myself. I benefitted from being born in a developed nation and, like you say, if my parents had died while I was young, I'd have been taken care of (though in my country's case it would probably be my extended family that'd have looked after me, first, and the state would only intervene if I had noone to care for me).

Like, I totally get what you're saying, but a significant number of people don't see it that way. Maybe they forget they were once too young, or that they will one day be too old. Maybe they just think they can do well enough for themselves that they'll just wing it.

My point is that for many people contributing to things like public healthcare doesn't make sense.

For instance- in the UK education is not free, and you will hear lots of people saying, indeed "why should I pay for someone else's education?". That's much more common than grumbling about having to pay for the NHS, but in the end it's just the same thing.
>it's easier to find first-world-ers which experience less adversity.

What kind of adversity?
20th century too. The Foundation series was originally a serial.
100-Day Plan of Action Survey
I think there might be a culture clash between you and the grandparent.

As I understand it, no one is getting taken advantage of by the grandparent. eBay's a marketplace and the seller put their items up for bid. Fair dealing does not require a buyer to tell a seller what their item is worth to someone else. When a buyer gets a bargain, we celebrate.

Fair dealing does require sellers to be truthful about the quality of their goods though. Lying about a lemon and pawning it off onto someone then profiting off that lie is a bad deal.

I'm speaking as an American, and that's my understanding of how we trade. Your word is your bond, handshake deals are as good as a written contract - that sort of honor code is pervasive.

You should mind your own business. I mean that to be taken politely and not as a slam. There's just no better way to say it, so I said it. There is not enough information in your sentence for me to guess at what your thought process was, so I'm going to assume you were just expressing empathy and trying to be nice.

I'd like to hear a moral justification for how you came to judge the grandparent.
Why even mention the way the iMac display works? Using the machine you would never know and its a very nice computer. The complaints about the mini and pro are legit but there is barely anything to complain about with the iMac.
This reminds me of the paper clip analogy of AI maximizing making paper clips at the expense of human life by using more matter except this is real. The algorithm didn't take into account fact checking or ethics and just kept making paper clips. I love React but Facebook, this is shameful and has to be corrected.
In Europe a country is fined if it doesn't meet it's targets. The measurement of emissions includes agriculture and is a big problem for some countries. So if they can monitor and prove that this method will reduce emissions then I think they will consider it.
Donald Trump is about to control a powerful surveillance machine
Social media was supposed to be about your social life and not about your career. And of course social life doesn't help in career (less time for working/studying). How a post changes someones social life (positive/negative) is a question, but I think must 16 year old teens are much better at it than the author.
LinkedIn works if you just treat it like an online CV; Keep your details and work history up to date, and ignore all the other social crap. My last two positions came from recruiters finding me via LinkedIn, so for some disciplines it still has merit.
Consider repricing to $99 and $299, respectively. It seems like a cheap trick but (a) it's been shown many times to work, and (b) especially with the former, you may just put yourself inside someone's purchasing limit.
I don't use it because I'm coming to the end of my working life, I don't expect to interview again. However if I was earlier on in my career I would be managing my Linkedin profile quite carefully.
The underlying issue is that we are going to see if the coming nationalist / populist policies will break down mundialism and its pretence for the educated white-collars to live in one single, global, always connected community.
70 year olds who don't have enough money to retire and can't find a better job are forced to work there.
Yeah I think the author would agree with you that moderate use of HN is probably fine, but FB, Twitter and Linkedin are probably useless and altogether harmful.
Britain spends about 20% less than France on healthcare per capita. The British National Health Service is ruthlessly efficient, for better and for worse; it's really good at keeping people alive cheaply, but it's terrible at everything else. Efficiency inevitably means that resources are spread as thinly as possible, that equipment is used until it disintegrates, that hospitals are purely functional production lines for medical procedures.

British people have both a strong sentimental attachment to the NHS and a strong aversion to taxation. They're willing to overlook the flaws of the service if it means they don't have to pay more for it. I can't say it's an unreasonable position.

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.PCAP
> In every area that I've looked, GCP is so much better than AWS that it's offensive, bordering on obscene.

I know. That's the feeling I have every time I compare them.

It's just borderline insane. There is enough materials to write an article: "100 little details that AWS got wrong but Google Cloud got right [and the 4 exceptions that are the other way around]"
It may be easy to use but hard to install if you don't want to depend on binary downloads. Since I always prefer source compilation for reproducible installations on new platforms I tried to install an up-to-date Haskell platform on Debian 7 to use stack. After being stuck in the cabal hell again I tried several upgrades and downgrads of ghc just to make a cabal upgrade. Nothing worked. I couldn't even compile the built-in cabal-install of ghc. At least this should work.

Haskell is a really nice language, and I admire the work of the developers who provide GHC for free, but installation from source is really immature and painful, at least on Linux. If the Haskell platform were just self-hosting ...
Matrix Code New Tab Page
Good, tightly written article. I think there's another reason I was expecting to see but didn't - when people say "social media" they usually mean Twitter, and Twitter seems to be optimised for creating huge dramas and flamewars. I think it must be the character limit. You can't say anything really interesting in 140 characters, so much of what's said ends up being so compressed all nuance and explanation is lost. Also the site encourages you to just blurt out whatevers on your mind without thinking about it. It's no surprise that Donald Trump had his Twitter access taken away from him towards the end of his campaign.
Minimum wage is a destructive force
I'm going to guess that a lot of HN does NOT think it is OK to fire people for their opinions - however if your core beliefs are out of line with a companies beliefs then it just might make you a bad FIT for the company. Not about your opinion, but about you fit with a group of people who's opinion and beliefs are opposite.
I'm in tech. Top 10-15% of incomes. I pay plenty of tax and I'm A-OK with that.
Would love to read the article, but paywall.
Great article :). Cal Newport has some reaaaallly important ideas. I encourage you to read his book Deep Work in which he explains how to create deep, complex stuff.
I have seen a lot of creatives switch to Premiere from Final Cut Pro for reasons other than platform support, many still use a Mac. But they claim it is a more powerful video editing system. What is it about Premiere that you don't like? I'm curious because I'm considering both platforms.