skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps they are downvoting because of your own ignorance? The aforementioned code does depend on ActiveSupport (or similar library), but has absolutely nothing to do with Rails.
I'm not arguing against Universal Basic Income - provided that, in practice, the proportion of people who elect to work for money remains relatively high.

I am arguing against the idea that we don't need money to create incentives.
You are the only one cared to elaborate, thank you very much!
Cuban youths self-injected HIV as a political protest in the 1980s
plenty of people experimenting with what you're describing - see the work of Xenakis, Roads, Brun, etc.
class Walkman < Troll

def comment
self.ignorance += 1
end

end

Pretty sure that's standard ruby.
That's fair, and definitely warrants skepticism, but was there anything in the article that you found counterfactual? I'm no RoR expert, but I do enjoy looking at how other people solved problems. Is there anything in the article that's counterfactual or that you've experienced causes headaches down the road?
You should've seen socialism in 1952. That force was far greater than any capitalism today. And it will return.
French Revolutionary Calendar – Converting Dates to the Jacobin Calendar
Also, via Radiolab: http://remezcla.com/features/culture/los-frikis-cuba-hiv-rad...
I've written about this before [1] but i think the higher level message here is about Ruby on Rails developers expanding their database understanding and/or reliance. Given how cleanly ActiveRecord abstracts database porcelain, many devs who started with Rails don't lean on the database enough.

This, along with validators, table indexing and foreign keys are some of the more common shortcomings i see in devs who learned on Rails.

1: https://blog.benroux.me/be-the-better-rails-developer/
This account has been posting many unsubstantive comments recently. Please stop and re-read the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. We have to ban accounts that continue on like this.
I agree on their code quality/their coding practices are bad, but that doesn't matter for this context. They (GM) are not software companies, so they don't set out to write amazing, clean, modular code.

This isn't about writing great code, it's about the culture surrounding release.
I know you're being glib, but a lot of people voting for him actually hold this to be true. He is successful, therefore he is competent.
Can we agree, that there's no one 'best interest for the people'? That there's a multitude of different opinions and interests that may be good to some and bad for others, that can be 'good' and still mutually exclusive?

I assume the benevolent dictator would be someone, who allows different opinion, and who allows his policy to be changed by his people. And if they want to be governed by someone else, he would step down, have his own power limited or stripped. That wouldn't be a dictator then.

And you'd still have to deal with his administration which has it's own momentum. The 'benevolent dictator' could simply be replaced (killed) by his own clique with someone more in line with their interests.
Please be civil regardless of the behavior of other users.
> Try to change things for the better.

Change arises closest to home. Instead of setting up straw men to knock down on the internet, why not quietly work to change your own work environment? I'm working on a Node.js code base I'm not particularly enthused by, but I'm trying to make it better by pointing things out and speaking up about inefficiencies or unprofessional coding practices.

> At the very least, there's a benefit to highlighting the issue and generating conversation.

That is completely false. The issue she's highlighting is that she doesn't like the way reality is, and that reality should change. That's not going to happen, especially with that attitude. The only conversation this should generate is "Ok, we all have things we have to deal with. Stop complaining and make smaller, local changes rather than dumping your feelings all over the internet in elaborate prose. That is worse than useless, it actively advocates against your cause. Who would want to be on your side when all you do is complain illogically?"
This feels very INTP vs INTJ. Both are stereotypical engineers, but INTP typically values understanding the problem. INTJ is stereotypically more interested in leveraging just enough understanding. The world needs both. I'm not surprised that the ESTJ managers and such don't value the INTP style...
That claim about the Wirth languages surprises me, because AFAIK all of his compilers used a lexer (called like get_next_token()) and you'd need to look at multiple characters to e.g. tell an identifier apart from a keyword. Maybe you're thinking of how his grammars only need one token of lookahead -- they're LL(1)?

I guess I'm quibbling. I do agree that they seem easy to parse with a scannerless parser too.
Reading may be just another form of "time-wasting" but it requires far more focus and brain activity than watching television and it doesn't have a fast reward feedback loop like video games or physical activity. For many people sitting down to read a book takes less energy and focus than the other activities but for many (or even most) others the lack of external stimuli and social engagement means reading requires more of an investment. Books are no more or less useful than other communication medium, they just require different parts of the brain to engage.
Can anyone think of other industries where this is the case? Imagine for a moment if grocery stores injected small amounts of lead into the food, or if gas stations injected water into the fuel (for bulking).

I know this kind of thing happens in China (think about toxic products added to baby milk, for example, to cheat protein tests). But that's at the "website" level, not the "ISP" level. I suppose healthcare (at least in the US) is the most likely industry to see attacker behavior.
Cool demonstration of IMMUTABLE functions (TIL), but there's a reason people have moved away from stored procedures/functions in RDBMSs in favor of moving this stuff into much slower application code -- you now have business logic living inside of the database. From there, you have to now think about how this affects:

- Testing

- Deployment/Migrations

- Day-to-day tooling to work on it

- Switching costs (mental overhead, using multiple languages)

- Documentation

- Probably more stuff

The ruby code is just like all of your other ruby code and can be grokked and worked on by anyone who is up to speed on your ruby stack. The DB function meanwhile requires jumping through lots of hoops and will always feel like a second class citizen relative to the vast majority of your application code, unless you do a lot of work and maintenance (unlikely to happen without feeling distracting if this code is a relatively small slice of your code base.)

In some cases, this can be worth it for massive optimization wins. But the article doesn't really touch on why this might be a bad idea.

I do think it highlights the potential of systems like MADLIB [1] where you can push the data crunching into the database, while having that be abstracted away in your primary programming language (in this case, R.) One could imagine a world where you wrote the ruby code and it was somehow mapped in to be run on the database. But that's not the world we live in today unfortunately. It's really a shame, because people using a database as capable of PostgreSQL but with a fairly dumb ORM on top are under-utilizing its potential, for sure, but there's not really a great path afaik to leverage it. (I remember years ago MS introduced running C# inside of SQL Server, I am not sure if that ever ended up panning out into being something smarter than the dumb "upload code to database manually" model we are used it.)

[1] http://madlib.incubator.apache.org/
Can you explain that? How does does the source of the money affect what I do with it (dividends & interest vs. pay from the sweat of my brow & intellectual output)?

If consumption today is more valuable than consumption in the future, why would you want to favor doing something else today, e.g. investment?
... you can watch the live feed. They're not digging up someone's backyard. Just because I happen to live in a city doesn't mean that I have no imagination for what things are like outside cities.
reflect on how trivially chance could intervene and turn you into a net negative.

All of us are a net negative some of the time. The question is, how many can be net negatives all of the time? 10x? 100x? One person supporting the entire rest of the human population?
My knee-jerk reaction was that this sounds like a terrible idea. It sounds like something that very wealthy people would lobby for, in order to make themselves even wealthier and increase inequality.

I had no idea that economists are almost unanimously in favor of this idea. (I listened to the NPR podcast mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13043744).

So now I'm not sure why the majority of these comments are so opposed. Do people here not trust experts in the field of economics, in the same way that many people don't trust the scientists who warn about climate change?
No, the last 10% of completing the house, car, machine, or meal preparation is still the most difficult, just like in software.

Finishing always requires more attention to detail, and a tougher sense of good-enough than the first 90%.
So basically anything critical of standard US foreign policy or centrist neoliberalism is all a big Putin conspiracy. Got it.

There does appear to be some kind of Russian propaganda machine online but it's voice is mixed in with all the rest of the noise.
This is such a massive simplification of what a designer does it's actually amazing. You're first and last paragraphs are simply wrong.

First of all a designer doesn't get to live exclusively in photoshop or some other tool. They don't get to ignore the "reality of usage". In order to be a competent designer they have to not only completely understand the problem domain, but also the given software solution and how a user can use the software to achieve the desired goal in the most concise manner. They have to worry about how to signal to users how to perform any given interaction and the overall complexity any activity has. Also they absolutely do test designs with real users. There is like a whole field of study in design around exactly this.

As to your last point, drawing != designing. Designing is actually really hard. This is a problem I see with programmers all the time. The oversimplification of others contributions. Yes you can put together a UI with drag and drop tools. You can build a website with drag and drop tools too and you'll probably get the same quality as the drag and drop UI. A drag and drop design will probably have most of the various pieces. But will it be obvious what actions a user can take from any given screen? Will it properly optimize screen space, and be color correct? There are a 1001 questions that a designer has to ask that most programmers wouldn't even think to ask. There are many challenges when writing an app, and good design has proven over and over again to matter just as much to the success of a business as solid code.
HN users will also down vote for tone and complaining about receiving down votes. Please strive to contribute constructively and in keeping with the guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm not the author but I'd guess almost nothing. Basically you just need to calculate the result of the function and index it by the result, should be almost completely unnoticeable.
So who's starting the fundraiser to decide what to put in the tremendous hole?
http://supercollider.github.io/
Recipe for Getting Started with Spring Boot and Angular 2
I'm sympathetic to the 'not this time' argument but I don't think it has to do with the scale of technical disruption. At the beginning of the 20th century nearly half the labor force was in agriculture; now it's somewhere between 1-2%.

In terms of magnitude of displacement, I don't think what we are seeing now, or anticipate seeing in the next decade is of a different kind than what we saw with the mechanization of agriculture. What concerns me is:

1) The rate at which these disruptions are occurring, and
2) The ability for displaced labor to find other opportunities in the economy.

The shift from agriculture to manufacturing took place over decades and didn't require significant retraining. The shifts we are seeing now cut across a wide swath of 'unskilled' labor which is appears to be in a general decline. (I recommend checking out EconTalk episodes with David Autor and Erik Hurst: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/econtalk/id135066958?mt=...)
>Her stops along the way at the gender and racial discrimination questions were also relevant

They were not relevant at all to the topic. I don't think it would be a stretch to say that her purpose of including gender and race would be to attract more eyeballs.
Car Wars: Cory Doctorow on the near-future world of self-driving cars
> So far, nothing of that happened

He wrote that it was already happening a year ago: at this moment I'm working within Mozilla's Electrolysis team and with other add-on authors, involved in the design of mechanisms and processes helping developers experiment in directions not supported yet by the "official" the WebExtensions API

I'm not an add-on developer but I've read about it happening in other places too, and I know for a fact that Giorgio is working on Firefox WebExtensions issues in Bugzilla.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellas_Planitia
The article is a classy piece of shallow anticommunist propaganda. The Atlantic was once always great reading, but over years its common sense and erudition seems evaporated.
For those interested in this unusual event, the book Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 chronicles the run-up to the disaster and the enormous court case which followed, in which USIA attempted to blame Italian anarchists for the tank's destruction.

The book also suggests that the behaviour of warm molasses was a likely factor, notably the effect of combining it with the cold molasses already in the tank. So this new research fits perfectly.
That was more civil than outright calling multiple users ignorant.

Instead, I acknowledged demonstrated ignorance by cheekily posting a valid ruby class definition.
Have you tried the "web" link below the submission title? That should bring you to a search results page that includes the article, allowing you to click through to the article, avoiding the paywall.
While you're right of course, I think you also just described why people have been switching to SOA (cough, I mean microservices).

If you encapsulate the database and related logic behind its own service interface, then as you get big enough to care about query performance, then only the team working on that microservice needs to care about how complex/tricky/whatever the optimizations become!
HAAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

There is nothing more database-coupling than Active Record. Other ORMs may have decoupling as a goal, however.
Seems to me Intel is placing their bet on the compiler doing the lion's share of the work here -- and where hand optimization is needed, another bet that having a consistent instruction set across their big Xeon cores and these MIC devices will make things easier for developers?
That certainly sounds right -- though I guess I still am very skeptical that the complexity tradeoff there is the right one (at least until you hit the scale that dictates it.)
At my last job we finally got our front-end devs to move all client side db work to calls to stored procedures or views. After doing so, nearly all of them fell completely in favor of this method. This is escpecially true with large, complex DBs or data warehouses, where the model is subject to change and reliance on back-end devs better knowledge of the database is more important.

That said, despite some of the tradeoffs - for example with testing, or migrating to a new db (which is extremely rare anyway) - it is ultimately far better for client code not to have to know back-end implementation. I think things like graphql are finally making this abundantly clear.

What I have been dying for is a real time DB BAAS that is ACID compliant, preferably relational, has a simple rest api, and allows me to write stored procedures that I can call from my client code. Horizon is probably the closest thing out there. Right now using firebase, and sick of the absurd amount of client side code I have to commmit to to pull data from various parts of the database. Requires huge amounts of overfetching, unecessary coupling of client-server code, horrible consistency support, overly loose type structuring, etc.

If somebody writes a postgres version of horizon I will pay big money to use it :)
Are you really saying that the only value to reading is to have something in common to socialize about?
This is a more powerful critique of rampant consumerism than I've seen in my University courses.
> I was hoping Edge wouldn't go down the same path that IE did with "special" tie ins to the OS

Any app on Android, iOS or Windows can register themselves as a handler for an URI scheme. There is nothing "special" about that. It's up to the app author to ensure this does not expose an attack surface.
American Time Use Survey Summary
I think it was slashdot where years ago there was a comment lamenting the DRM-free digital downloads from purchased O'Reilly products.

The user was complaining this wasn't good enough. He actually wanted O'Reilly to publish MD5 hashes of all their works, so he could very his download had no traceable watermarks.

To me it was ridiculous he expected a company to do this, especially one of the most DRM-friendly companies to boot.
Doesn't include everything that Horizon does, but it provides a good foundation for building it http://postgrest.com/
aren't lawyers usually not allowed at arbitration? (isn't that part of the whole point)?
I don't understand when people argue like that. It's like punching someone in the face and when they ask what the hell is wrong with you answering, "Ha! I knew you would be confused!"
I don't get the impression google nor facebook really want to be the sole CPU producer. Strategically, market regulators could site that as a reason to never again let google or facebook purchase another company. If you're google and facebook you highly value the ability to buy competitors out while they're small. That threat should also exist for Apple, theoretically. Of the three, I could imagine Apple having the business model closest to making a purchase/merger of/with Intel. But it sounds like there are both technological and business reasons for Apple not wanting to become that big.
Ask HN: What do you wish digital assistants (Siri, Alexa, etc.) could do?
I mostly use Allo/Google Now but I've spent time playing with Cortana and Siri as well.
Some random things I wish they could do include:
Tell me when the high/low tides will be.
Do things at a later time (tomorrow at 5 message Jack to bring the frisbee)
Of course we'd all like a good API to make our own stuff.

What would you want the assistants to do that would make them more helpful?
Harman: How to Listen (2011)
They wouldn't pass emission tests for Mexico City for a while now, though (I was there when the ones already on the street started disappearing in favor of Tsuru there). But they were/are also very common in other cities in Mexico, even after new ones stopped being sold. I wasn't aware they made full Beetles until 2003, though I knew they made repair parts.
No, really, does anyone have a source that says that most/many/a significant fraction of undocumented workers are paid less than the minimum wage?
Successful SaaS software have the property to accumulate more cash for every minute they're online & working, they can do pure and chaste AND profitable. That's where the difference between software and the snow white stops :p
> What the hell is going on around the world?

The end stages of capitalism in which automation is about to make many of the proles redundant and make them realise it.

Lots of people are going to wake up one day and realise that all the wealth ended up in the hands of a few and they got the shit end of the stick despite the only difference been who had the capital at the start of it.

They are getting a head start on that eventuality even if they haven't expressly realised it themselves.

Governments are always frightened of the people because they know what the people might do if they found out everything the governments do.
The writing is starkly clear. The piece is also listed above, so I am confident the other readers can reach their own conclusions. Secondly, if any spectres be raised, so be it.

Scorn is a badge of honor if earned when speaking the truth.
Yup that wasn't hard at all. Also, security researchers / consultants / ___hats solve these kinds of puzzles all the time for their work and hobby. Friends I have in that business are insanely good at this sort of thing. Because apparently people always think they're so clever. One told me on multiple cases doing whitehat security consulting they studied the desk+office of the sysadmin for a bit (no post-its), pull some Sherlock Holmes magic (I don't know really) and guessed the password in 5-10 tries (no I didn't quite believe it either, but otoh this guy really doesn't like bragging nor had any reason to lie about).

Oh and if I understand the number scheme correctly:

> integer sum of the digits on either side of each digit in the Italian number

that means, when the number is "otto", meaning 8, the "digits on either side" are 7 and 9, which when you sum them, equal 7 + 9 = (8 - 1) + (8 + 1) = 8 + 8 = 16, so it's really a complicated way of saying "double that number" ... :-)
Not saying it's special, but at least on chrome it will ask if you want to open that link in another application. Here it seems at least built-in MS applications are exempt from that.
"Snows always melt" https://youtu.be/FfeytbHBPFM
You can run R code in SQL Server, Oracle, Teradata, Hana and Vertica.

All of these databases kick the crap out of HN darlings like Redshift and BigQuery. Special mention goes to Vertica which is free up to three nodes and/or 1TB data + 1 TB in flex tables. It is, like the rest, analytical AND transactional. Has proper admin features, proper edge case coverage and a truck load of features. It also has a very sensible licensing.
Reading that article feels... unsatisfying. I realize they have a technical audience in mind, but all the data crammed into english sentences feels reminiscent of the days when complex math problems were described in words.

I feel like the dense information in that post could be described much more concisely in visual form, and I'm disheartened that it is instead hidden in paragraphs.
How a Pillar of German Banking Lost Its Way
Is it really needed to declare separate functions with all that boilerplate just to multiply and add a few numbers in an SQL statement?
As far as I understand, for LMS: Those types T for which one has implemented needed operations for the Rep[T] type.

Shameless plug: For another comparison of MetaOCaml, LMS, Terra and AnyDSL (our approach) under the lens of staging/partial evaluation see our paper from GPCE'15: http://www.cdl.uni-saarland.de/papers/gpce15.pdf
Why do I get the feeling that this person worked at a Web start-up for three weeks, then decided the entire tech industry was beneath them?
NASA Guide to Air-Filtering Houseplants
I read your whole comment. you suck.