skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hmm, interesting question. Not sure how well I can answer, given that I probably either internalized or forgot most of the lessons learned by now (I worked on this for years and abandoned it almost a year ago), but I'll try.

Working on something I was passionate about and sticking with it for a long time was definitely good. Even though it wasn't successful in the end, it was way better than all those projects that I thought would be a "good idea", but never finished because I didn't really care.

Rust is awesome. It was already awesome when I started using it for the project in late 2013/early 2014 and it's way better now. It has become my go-to language for everything.

Setting up a simple website with a newsletter signup form was a very good decision. I wrote a short blurb on the home page (still there), put the signup form right under it (no longer there), and de-emphasized all other content. Even though I did near zero marketing, that approach got me to almost 40 subscribers. Not a lot, but apparently enough to get to the front page of Hacker News. (To be clear, I did nothing to get this on Hacker News. One of the subscribers must have posted this, and it went from there.)

The newsletter also attracted my only co-developer, even though I wasn't looking for one at all. He was a huge help, and the main reason the project wasn't abandoned half a year before that ended up happening anyway.

During the course of the project I changed direction a few times. Some of those changes couldn't be avoided, but others could have. In the beginning I thought that the technology not working out would be the biggest problem, so I started out by putting the fundamentals (rendering, user input, networking etc.) in place first, then build the game on top. The technology never was the problem, however, the game design was (and all that networking code made it harder to iterate on the game design).

If I were to do it again, I would start out much simpler. I probably would build a simple single-player game to work out the basic building blocks first, then extend that step by step towards the MMO that I always envisioned. Ideally, this approach would have led to a series of small releases early on, which could have had a lot of benefits.

It was pretty harmful to put most of my professional life on hold for this project, as I ended up doing. I did enough consulting work on the side to survive, but didn't put much effort or thought into the long-term viability of my business. As a result, my business today isn't very viable :)

I think it would have been possible to choose a more synergistic approach, for example by polishing and releasing parts of the backend technology along the way, and trying to leverage that into well-paying consulting engagements. I'm actually trying out a similar approach right now, although in the field of embedded software.

That's basically all I can think of at the moment. I hope it's helpful.
The sections with ES6 vs output compiled with babel is amazing. Javascript really has come a long way.
The parent comment has been completely rewritten.
The Cost of AI [pdf]
Then perhaps he is the sort of person who reads HackerNews...
It would be better if we knew they weren't using it for evil.
This is why I wish PostgreSQL just had explicit hints. Their argument against is sensible as it does increase the maintenance cost, but when features become defacto planner hints then readability suffers more.
This is interesting. I do think there can be a problem around the concept of "competent" vs "average". For instance, consider a poll like this: On a scale of 1-10, where 1 is inexperienced, 2 is competent, 3 is above average, and 4-10 are various levels of good-brilliant, where do you rank yourself?

My guess is that even with these explicit instructions, people are reluctant to rate themselves a 2. I can see a few reasons why higher scores would actually indicate that people see themselves as average. For instance, some people might view anything under 5 is incompetent. In this case, a 7.5 would indicate the middle of the range, which is actually 5-10. Alternatively, people might think of grades in US based schools, where 75% is a C, technically "satisfactory", but essentially failing in an era of grade inflation. In many PhD programs, an A- (91%), is a shot across the bow, and a B+, (88%), is meant as a vote of low confidence. This could lead many people to rate themselves as an 8 or 9 simply to indicate their averageness.

Lastly, programming is still a young field with a wide variance of talent, but I think we need to be more of a "paper hat" distribution than a "pyramid". To explain, I don't think we're a field that works well with a large, unskilled base, that slowly narrows to a tiny elite at the top. I think the baseline to be a competent developer is quite high. I know, I read about these "CRUD" apps, and what can I say? The framework churn, the challenge in communicating with clients who understand business but aren't familiar with the unforgiving logic of a program, the need to deal with deadline pressures under uncertainty, the challenges of data integrity and testing coverage... honestly, simply reliably deploying a relatively simple web app is considerable, in my opinion. This is why I go for the "paper hat" distribution - devs are largely on a long, flat curve, with a small little mini-pyramid in the middle, where the true innovators live. In short, maybe we are a field represented by wide, short rectangle of 1's-3's, with a minuscule steep and thin little triangle of 4-10s popping up at the top. However, the 1's really are smart people who are learning, and 2-3 represents quite a valuable and talented developer.
The reason you bought yours with a warning label on and not as a toy for children is because the regulators forced that to happen.
Martin Fowler - http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/
Broken Image Link Pin
While an interesting observation, I'm not sure this really addresses the point. The conversation was implicitly about passenger rail, and the US is clearly bad at that.

Also I can think of a few practical reasons why Europe might have less developed long distance freight rail off the top of my head. Not least the fact that most of Europe is a lot better connected by sea than opposite coasts of the US (especially before the Panama canal was built).
The thing that really strikes me about this list is how nearly everything on it is offered at a premium price.

One thing I loved about the tech world while I was growing up was that it was consistently doing more with less. Wikipedia displaced Encyclopaedia Brittanica by being both better and free. Hotmail was a clear win over AOL and Yahoo's offerings and then Gmail was faster and handled spam better while giving more at every price point (including free). Computers became both faster and cheaper. Amazon and Netflix broke down even the movie industry and ended the $70 per tape movie sale price.

The offerings on the linked page are mostly things that would be out of the budget of an American family living on a median income. I won't call out any specific examples or hurt feelings, but a random sampling of several companies of any part of the list (other than non-profits) will show a clear trend.

It's hard to say if the same was true 20 years ago and those few companies that broke out into famous successes happened to be particularly aimed towards a broad appeal, but it's clear the current trend is doing more with more.
Measuring success on Snapchat
Visual Studio now has a Data Science focus
There are circumstances in which Gift Cards are acceptable. For example, gift cards for online stores (iTunes, Amazon, Steam, etc.). This is particularly acceptable for children, as they are otherwise unable to purchase items from such stores.
All the contributors have rather cryptic usernames: https://github.com/orgs/gchq/people
Why you should start using Google Keep right away
As it stands, I'd agree with that---but the characterization definitely depends on who you talk to. I might be in the minority among "PP people," since the hype is still going strong and some smart people seem to see more potential than I (and you) do.
Well, I agree with your last paragraph, which is why is draw the line before even starting the ridiculous line of argument. But since you started it with Jews, if you don't want to be seen as an anti-Semite, you probably shouldn't endorse such an exclusionist position for the Jews and no one else.

Or if, as you say, you Just Don't Care how you are seen, then stop complaining when your overt and blatant anti-Semitism is rightly called out as such. I mean, for someone who doesn't care, you seem pretty darned sensitive on that point.
Anger Rooms: A Smashing New Way to Relieve Stress
What you fail to comprehend is that your contemptuous attitude is the very thing that isn't working anymore. In fact, the more you crank up the rhetoric, the more you will be ignored.

If this election has taught us anything, it is that if we continually scream at and belittle adults, they will eventually ignore us. Every epithet, every word of shame-speak will then fall on deaf ears. We will find ourselves in the very position we placed them in: powerless and irrelevant.

You should be asking yourself: Why was the birther and the racial element so prominent during the Obama years? These things do not happen in a vacuum. They have a root cause, and it is not, as you might conclude, because every Trump voter is a racist, a bigot, or stupid. Think more deeply.

I might also add that by pigeon-holing the entire body who elected Trump into the category of ignorant racist bigots, you are committing the very act of stereo-typing you are decrying. You are discrediting yourself by accusing people of things they know they are not guilty of, and reinforcing your own irrelevance. If empathy is your concern, perhaps you should start with your own.
It was, like, totally there all along. Am I right?
I think the source is lacking larger context. For example, postwar reconstruction in Europe ushered in an unprecedented age of European states not going to war with each other all the time. So if you measure absolute numbers of war deaths declining, you can't attribute them directly to nuclear weapons.

Also, advances in medicine have significantly reduced the number of deaths in war. It's worth noting that in the American civil war, the vast majority of deaths on both sides were attributed to non-combat disease.

So maybe you have a point, but I doubt that it's as simple as more nukes = less deaths.
Some of these concerns aren't valid (for instance: the baseband of your phone is less powerful, in its systems design, than is supposed by open hardware advocates), but mostly the issue is: security is about costs and prioritization, not absolutes. The systems people propose instead of Signal are likely to cough up secrets directly to adversaries; switching from Signal to something else reduces security.

If you believe people with state-level adversaries should exclusively use transparent and open hardware, that's fine; you should see Moxie's comment on this thread to learn how you might go about ensuring that the tiny minority of users with that hardware have access to Signal on it.
Crows will learn basic techniques from each other, like the crows in Japan that drop nuts on crosswalks so car tires will crush the shells, which seems to have started in a single area in Tokyo and spread out from there.
Some of these look pretty cool, I'd never have put most of them as YC companies. I wish there was a way to filter by location I'm in, or even just say "Not in SF" and see what's still visible. I assume anything subscription is out, and I'm not going to click individually through everything that requires shipping and see who has sane/any shipping prices to the UK.
I really like Signal, at least as far as I can tell from the UI and the single conversation I've managed to have using it.

The biggest problem that we (my whole friend group) seem to be having is that we can't find each other due to the fact that we don't use phone numbers for communication.

Are you thinking about ways to resolve this problem?

Is it any less secure to use email addresses for identification and discovery than phone numbers?

What about ways to share a unique user id?
The biggest problem I've seen with assert[1] is putting functioning code inside one and then not knowing why your code no longer works with NDEBUG.

[1] http://en.cppreference.com/w/c/error/assert
Why learning to program alone is a terrible idea
>The large, economy-wide negative impact of regulation are well established by academics.

That sounds like an easily made, hard to back up claim.
"Ordinary people, too, have long been using like as an appendage to indicate similarity with a trace of hesitation. The “slow-like” kind of usage is a continuation of this, and Saul Bellow has thoroughly un- Beatnik characters in his novels of the 1950s use like in a way we would expect a decade or two later. “That’s the right clue and may do me some good. Something very big. Truth, like,” says Tommy Wilhelm in 1956’s Seize the Day,"

My grandfather uses "like" often, but only in this way (he grew up in Depression-era semi-rural Canada). I've always found that interesting since I rarely see that usage mentioned.

Anyone else have older relatives who use "like" this way?
Negotiating with influencers: what is fair?
I have no complaints about prime's two day shipping but having worked at one of these Amazon Fulfilment centers, I'd personally not buy clothing or furry toys, even non perishable food.

The experience up to opening your package is great but it's seeing boxes crumpled up or package nearly destroyed with item inside it intact that really pisses me off but having been a picker before it's really hard to give a shit when you are paid a capped hourly wage walking for 10 hours in steel toe shoe and actively timed against your peers where failing to keep up means termination

I never want to work for Amazon ever again. Not even their software or tech or HQ, it totally ruined it for me. I don't give a shit, it's built on human misery and our escapism through materialism. We are voting with our "things" everytime we shop on Amazon to structurally oppress low-income bracket folks.

But I feel hopeless. I'm chained by their consistent 2-day free shipping and overall an okay experience in helping me procure "things", "stuff".

In fact as I'm writing this I get PTSD thinking about Amazon Fulfilment and the only remedy as pathetic as it is, is indulging in Amazon's Cyber Monday sales extravaganza palooza, contradicting my own gripes about Amazon but unable to overcome the general comfort of buying things on it. It's almost as if buying on Amazon on my Kindle Fire is now an entertainment of some sort :/ which shocks me to write it.
Professor Watchlist
> Same building, same street, same chained stores.

As Tyler Cowen said in Creative Destruction the cities, architecture, and culture may begin to merge and look the same but this modernization ultimately helps create a greater variation among individual people.

Subcultures still flourish they are just less regional and local. Our creativity is stimulated due to greater contact between the various global (and cross-China) cultures creating a greater variety of culture or an enhanced breadth of existing cultures. So it's not all bad, just different.

https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Destruction-Globalization-Ch...
> the film also eliminated any of the functional interaction for how Louise (or any linguist) would go about learning a previously unknown language by interacting with a native speaker. All of the guess-and-check, experimental structure that goes into this lingual interaction is gone from the film

Yikes, this was one of the more interesting parts of the story for me. Thanks for pointing this out.
QOwnNotes is the open source (GPL) plain-text file notepad with markdown support and todo list manager for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, that (optionally) works together with the notes application of ownCloud (or Nextcloud).
I'm currently nearing the end of David Marquet's "Turn The Ship Around" [1]. The author talks about this same point in his book. One of the points he makes is that different people will get the message at different stages. So repeating it and being consistent are important. As far as I remember, Simon Sinek goes through the same idea in his "Start With Why".

By the way, "Turn the Ship Around" is a great book, and pretty easy to read.

[1] http://www.davidmarquet.com/
California finally passed a $2 per pack cigarette tax increase (now to $2.87). But this is still far below NY State ($4.35) and NYC (an additional $1.50 for a total NYC $5.85).

The health care costs from smoking, including that paid for by your taxes far exceeds the revenues from tobacco taxes which means that most of the population, non-smokers, are paying additional taxes to pay for smokers.

Raising the cost of tobacco of all interventions to help people to quit smoking, contributes more than half the total effect. Thus further increasing tobacco taxes ensures that youth never start and smokers quit, thus providing a positive feedback loop for decreasing health care costs at the state, federal, and private firm level.

Additional info from Techdirt:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160926/11295235634/46-ca...
> * I actually know the answer to this one and it's actually a technical constraint.

Not really. I mean sure in the sense that they'd have to run the third rail as you mention, but that's not a technical constraint given how simple it is. And theoretically it's in progress.[0]

The problem here is plainly political. If the politics of building trains in this country weren't completely broken it would have been done long, long ago.

[0] http://www.nj.com/essex/index.ssf/2016/04/newark_elizabeth_l...

Oh while we're talking about dysfunctional PATH decisions based on mindless political/organizational divisions here's another one that'll make your blood boil: http://newyorkyimby.com/2014/09/the-port-authoritys-missed-c...
From my point of view, no candidate running for President had any fiscal conservative views. Some of the them could talk-the-talk and spit out a few keywords to the media, but none of them really had it if one would look at them hard enough. The Republican party hasn't supported the notion of a fiscal conservative in decades. So the voters went with the candidate that spoke out against the establishment.

Also, there are types of Presidents that can work on a decent future without being a fiscal conservative, it's not a requirement. We'll have to see how it plays out with Trump.
A middle ground is best from my experience in lecturing. Lecturing for the first time made me realize why I had always slept through classes in HS, UG, and grad school. But as a lecturer, doing a complete 180 flip is too work intensive. I found lecturing 2/3 classes a week with worksheets in the class and 1 class a week devoted to project meetings with my student groups was most effective.

While meeting many student groups would seem like it would take a lot of time, it ended up being about the same as a lesson prep + lecture time (there is needed prep and recovery time in lecturing).

People also need to realize, college instructors aren't paid to teach. They're paid to research and so of course they'll be lazy on sharing what they've learned from teaching. Universities have teaching centers, but those can only do so much when you really need to also be talking to fellow instructors in your specific field since every topic can't be taught the same.
And marketing. The best chef, with the best ingredients, with the best equipment isn't getting a Michelin rating at home. It obviously needs to be in a professional restaurant with top-notch marketing to even get a reviewer to think about coming in.
I've seen it, I just disagree with it. IMO it's a dick move to say "no federation" and to also say "no 3rd-party clients." What's the point of GPL if you're completely locked to their official clients & servers anyway?
I strongly agree with your point in general, memory safety is a major problem with C/C++ to an extent that is not found in other languages. Even worse, these often become problems long after they are written when the compiler gets "smarter" and does a trick with your code. Call it "code rot" or whatever you want, but it happens a lot more and a lot faster on C/C++ than other languages.

However, the nature of where C/C++ code is used does lend itself to severe problems. When you have a JVM vulnerability, you shouldn't be able to get any farther than a regular user with only sandbox privileges. When you have a kernel vulnerability, by definition you have the keys to the kingdom.

Of course there are always holes that can be used to escalate, but that also comes back to the problems of having a primarily C/C++ ecosystem...
a.k.a. Darwinism
i'm looking at the site and i only see the "per test run" reports and not much else.
there's also one other big problem. although we are all programmers, it doesn't mean we don't like a nice UI. that's also one of our problems with jira/jenkins, their UI is ugly and also not very user friendly
Note that 21 halvings doesn't take you from 14nm to 0.7nm, but rather to about 7 femtometers, or about 0.000007nm. For comparison, that's roughly 10x the size of a single proton.

I'd say a better estimate would be to assume density stops increasing around the point when feature size is the size of a silicon atom. I'm sure that'll be way off, but closer than estimating 21 more doublings.
YC has funded 1500 startups. You're generalizing from a narrow selection, which is clearly bogus. (Did you expect quantum computing on a Christmas list? Well I guess this is HN.)

Also bogus is drawing conclusions about companies' long-term strategy ("problems that never needed solving") from a holiday gift guide.

Just because some of us aren't big on consumer goods is no reason to throw out basic logic!
You can argue the correctness of the ban, but saying that because there is worse problem X we shouldn't try and solve less-bad problem Y doesn't make any sense.
This is weird. Last time I really did anything with ML was ages ago, and I distinctly remember fighting with the fields... I wish I could remember the context, though.

Anyway, good to know that it's definitely not OCaml!
Talk about a commitment to backwards compatibility – you can run binaries built 30 years ago for god knows what proprietary processor on a modern POWER8 system without recompiling.

I also find it kind of amusing that IBM, a primarily consulting company, developed AS/400, given that part of its sales pitch is that integrated database requires no maintenance and you can forget entirely about your IBM i and just leave it running for a decade.

It's a neat system. I wish I had the opportunity to use one. In many ways it feels like we're still catching up to what System/38 was doing in 1979.
Or I can just say "their passenger trains are so much better" and not miss any of the picture.

Which, plainly, was the original point.
You will no longer be able to renew Starter after the 1 year period on the same account. Renewal only covers the ability to use newer versions and upgrade. The license is perpetual and as long as you are not upgrading versions -- you will be able to continue using your Starter license.

As was discussed in Datomic Slack:

"Starter was always intended as a path for customers to explore and use Datomic in a low-risk, low-cost approach as they developed their applications and moved toward production. We feel that a year is generally sufficient time to evaluate a product and develop a business application around that product. If you feel that you require a longer period to evaluate or develop against Datomic, please contact us."
Show HN: The Groundwork
My 4 year old loves her magformers sets, she's still at that age where she needs a lot of assistance with them, but she likes building "houses" and other structures to use with her small figurines.