skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've read 13, which is half my goal of 24, but it's still more than the year prior so I'm satisfied.

I was a little disappointed that I only got through 24 this year. My goal was 75, which would have represented a stretch beyond the 53 I got through last year. But it turns out that I picked a couple of really long books this year, AND I spent a lot more time this year doing stuff like taking Coursera classes and what-not, which cut into my reading time.

All in all, I guess it just shows that a simple number like "titles read" isn't really all that meaningful. :-)

Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky

I really want to read this. Maybe in 2017.
The exception for Germany is to account for subsidies that are given to East Germany, which had to be "pulled" to the level of the West after the reunification, but which still lags behind even to this day. BTW the commission is currently pursuing Germany for being too lax with Volkswagen after Dieselgate (and I'm happy they do this). So, for me the fact the EU commission can do this is one of the positive sides of the European Union.
"Free improvisation" is kind of a misnomer. A lot of improvisation is done within very strict structures - limitations, to use phrasing I used elsewhere. For example, most traditional jazz music is in 4/4 time, with circle of fifths western harmony. You can noodle over ii-V-I changes with a swing beat until the cows come home. Because you're settled in this warm bed of familiar grooves, chords, and tunes, everyone has a common language. Any random group of jazz musicians can get together, open up the Real Book, and perform group improvisation. And the audience, also accustomed to the conventions of jazz, can make value judgments and enjoy the performance, unencumbered by needing to figure out a 17/8 ostinato or the sound of just intonation.

I played for years in a free improvisation duo. One of the constraints we used (only for gigs) was "set lists". We would write titles for "songs", and interpret the titles. This helped us have beginnings and ends and moods.

If you're interested in this stuff for serious, seek out the book "Improvisation", by Derek Bailey. He was a famed improviser himself, and wrote a moderately academic book on musical improvisation in a wide variety of different contexts around the world.
> (...) it would take many times more compute resources than the Earth has for longer than the Earth will likely exist to break.

Claims like these are often misleading as they assume that i) malicious parties' capabilities, ii) what is and isn't possible, and iii) implementation correctness, are all static known factors. Cryptography is more akin to putting a lock on a fence - it's going to keep most people out or perhaps deter prying eyes, but it's all probabilistic in the end and depends on who's doing the prying.
Thankfully, virtually no DNS queries use DNSSEC.

https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/01/15/against-dnssec/
According to this undated nuclear energy source [1] New York State gets 36% of its electricity from natural gas, 31% from nuclear, and about 20% from hydro. Meanwhile, recent data (from September 2016) from the US Energy Information Administration [2] reports 46% natural gas, 31.7 nuclear, and 20.4% "renewables" which includes hydro, solar, and wind.

Stats for NYC itself are much more difficult to find.

[1] http://casenergy.org/nuclear-basics/energy-in-your-state/new... [2] https://www.eia.gov/state/data.cfm?sid=NY
Emphasis on spoken language in programming education
You don't need much in the way of AI to design and build simple web pages. Existing templates and wizards already do that; those jobs were automated away years ago.

Patching all but the simplest software bugs will require real AGI. Understanding a bug and the side effects of a patch goes way beyond current AI technology, and there is still no defined R&D path which is likely to produce an AGI.
Only as far as efficiency can displace entrenched companies anywhere. That is, almost universally not, but it will happen in enough places to make some difference.

Why new companies run by competent people don't displace current companies today?
The two direct deaths where from an insufficient sea wall not the reactor design. Saying future reactor designs fix the problem is a mistake. Because again it was not the reactor design that caused their deaths.

So again, saying some hypothetical perfect design exists and it would obviously have a large enough see wall, and that is what your defending is a true Scotsman argument.

PS: Remember, future designs also have future defects.
This is a gigantic amount of area just for 2030! The compound grow don't stop there. Compare this view of the US from a satellite at a much closer zoom, if you can't see all the concrete even in Boston-NYC-Washington area. But from a world view you would need that square of solar energy.
https://goo.gl/maps/wWpFW7nRZSq
Most hiring by most companies is not based on research. There is a huge body of research on how to hire effectively, part of the filed called industrial and organizational psychology, that goes back a full century all over the world. There is also a lot of legal regulation about what can be done and what cannot be done in hiring procedures. I wrote a FAQ about this issue a few years ago that lives on as a well liked Hacker News comment[1] that I welcome you to check. The FAQ links out to a lot of useful online resources about the research and law on hiring procedures.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613413#4613543
Your emails are among the few that I consistently open. Thanks for doing what you do!
If only ad hominem's refuted claims. What a tender world that would be.
Ask HN: Which programming langauge should I learn in 2017?
Some people believe that vaccines cause autism. Experts assure us that they do not. If we vaccinate children some of them will be autistic and vaccines will be blamed, which will reduce confidence in experts. Therefore we should stop vaccinating children.

Yet clearly the answer is not to stop vaccinating children. That's letting the terrorists win. The answer is to do the right thing even if loud people are wrong about it, and answer them with facts and evidence when they object.

If the opposition is reasonable then the truth will out. If they're unreasonable then you have to fight them because you always have to fight unreasonable people. You can't get out of it by giving them what they want because in five minutes they'll find some other irrational thing to want and if you keep giving in, by the end of the day the world will be on fire.
If there's anything we've learned from the election, it's that we must engage substantively with people that disagree with us. We can not dismiss people as trolls just because they hold a different opinion.
Our tool could be part of a solution... For example, Taobao could work with us to:

(1) Require sellers to get their items authenticated, and provide a link to the authentication certificate in their listings. This would require sellers to take photographs of the actual items rather than using stock photos.

(2) Train buyers to request authentication certificates from sellers before proceeding with transactions.

(3) Setup a dispute process (like eBay) where buyers can get their post-purchase items authenticated and have financial recourse in the event of counterfeits.

I'd be happy to speak with people at Taobao about how to setup a partnership and/or implement ways to dissuade bad sellers. But it will require concerted effort and will on the part of Taobao.
Phantoms - Dean Koontz

Good call. Even though he's famous and all, I still sometimes feel like Koontz is very under-rated and doesn't get enough respect.
That's another problem with Nuclear. After investing a large capital stake into a nuclear plant, the operators are unwilling to make hard decisions on safety because of how deeply they're invested. The Fukushima reactor design was "safe" for the time it was built, and flaws were found afterwards, yet the plant wasn't taken offline.

Modern passive safety systems are safe as far as the designers can anticipate, just like Fukushima, and there is a lot which can go wrong.
What? 9%? Check table 1 in your source.

"Table 1: Voter Turnout Among Citizens November 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012

18-29

40%
49%
51%
45%

[...]"

It was 45% in 2012 for the age of 18-29.
Concrete5 v8 adds powerful “point and click” database functionality
Why not traditions? Why do we have to make progress? There are musical traditions that started in the second half of the 20th century, along with recording and radios, that I think will last for centuries. I wouldn't be shocked to hear electric blues, bluegrass, or thrash metal 300 years from now.
So now they are making exceptions for employees to drive? Pretty sure that the employee handbook and HR made it crystal clear that employees can't be drivers because then things get real fuzzy legally...
Not a downvoter, but I also don't see Alibaba as a "problem" this fixes. I know a few people who buy luxury fashion goods on there entirely because it's fake/replicas. If you're buying $900 boots for $90, I hope you don't believe they're real.

It's like downloading something from thepiratebay and being surprised that it's not a legal means of download. It's more of a problem on Amazon or eBay, where prices are closer/equal to retail and things are falsely listed.
I'm absolutely amazed that there isn't a single mention of referencing in here. It's by far the most important thing we do in our hiring cycle.

Here's what we do, which is a little different:

1/ We'll spend in the order of 5-6 hours with a mid-to-senior hire before we recruit them. We pick one topic from their CV (the project they're proudest of or happiest with), and dive into it in huge detail: everything from the people involved to the outcomes and recognition of success. It helps to illustrate what the person is truly like.

2/ Where it's possible, we'll pay the person a pro rata salary equivalent to spend a day with us actually working in the role. I know a couple of other companies doing this and it's really great.

3/ If we like the person we immediately throw out whatever references they provide and spend a few hours dredging up people they worked with from our networks. We also look at the people they named in the project example. Once we've got a list of 6-10 people, we ask the candidate if we can reference using those people.

4/ Typically at this point we've decided that on paper we want to make an offer. Referencing is the last opportunity we have to really assess the person's ability to cope under pressure, how quickly they drop their "new job" act and get into being themselves, and crucially what "themselves" is like. I nearly always only ask questions which could be perceived as negative at this point -- what makes them throw their laptop across the room? What stresses them out? How do they communicate when under pressure? What are the things you told them they need to work on in their last review?

Referencing probably only accounts for 10-20% of the time I spend on a candidate, but the weighting I give it is huge when it comes to working with and managing that candidate when they're on the team.

A million different ways of doing things -- but referencing is so often overlooked and I've never understood why.
Interesting to think of this in the context of psychoactive drugs. If someone gets hooked on heroin or crack, they're 'no longer themselves', but if they take anti-depressants or add medication, they're somehow becoming their truer selves.

Or in the case of insanity pleas in criminal trials.
It would wipe out threats to the species.
The Safari view controller is a very different beast to UI/WKWebView, though - if you want to do any kind of integration between the webview and app you're pretty much locked out.
And gruseom seems to agree. He is ruling with an iron fist in this thread.
The Circle by Dave Eggers. This one was scary.

I enjoyed it and would recommend it, but at the same time, I felt a little disappointed in it. I think I expected a bit, more, somehow, given the premise. I dunno, it's hard to explain, but I just felt like there was more that could have been done with the setting and the premise.

Still, worth a read for sure.
i have same problem. android chrome
What’s New in Ruby 2.4
Ah, 54:00 is what I was looking for. Thanks.
IMO, you should set up an analytics funnel to measure landing page conversion or (for web apps) usage metrics based on browser version.

Whenever the cost of supporting old, ES5-only browsers (measured by the amount of time spent debugging/adapting code * dev hourly rate) surpasses the income brought in by users on those browsers, it's probably time to make the switch.

For the web app case, you obviously don't want to just cut out access to those users (that would be pretty bad customer service! that can totally ruin your reputation), so you also need to factor in the costs of educating your users about the upgrade, giving them enough time and/or providing an alternative means of using your app. (ex: an Electron-based app installer)

Considering how good the polyfills and transpilers currently are (assuming you already have those set up) the maintenance costs of supporting ES5 are very low. It makes very little financial sense to not support it for existing applications ATM.

If you're just starting with an app, that is going to launch in one year or more (assuming you're focused on a general audience , instead of a specialized market like corporate where browsers are updated more slowly) then I'd probably already start without worrying about ES5 at all.
In the first case you can sell the land in some cases for more than 1/2 the value of the house, thus making them different.

Not to mention the number of homes destroyed in a gas explosion world wide is tiny by comparison.
DNA origami
Don't... don't give them ideas... They come up with such crappy ideas on their own, we don't need this horror suggested to them.
* It makes the language much easier to work with

* Most people familiar with JS will pick up on them very easily

* It makes "patterns" like immutable data and some straightforward async code MUCH easier (object spread, async/await, etc...)

* node.js supports it (with a slight speed penalty, however it hasn't bottlenecked us yet so we aren't worrying about it yet)

* Most modern browsers support many of the features, and those that don't the polyfills and compilation is pretty much "drop in" with the rest of our build system.

* Dead code elimination has completely changed how we architect our projects for the better

* const gives us less bugs by preventing overwriting and scope confusion

* One of the main applications we are using it on only supports newer browsers that support ES6 natively anyway (due to needing certain browser APIs), so using the full extent of those browsers doesn't seem like it's going to cause any issues.

and finally...

* There doesn't seem to be any downside. We are only using stuff which is already in the spec, or close enough to being finalized that we are comfortable. If performance is an issue we can just not use it in performance critical code, and it's just nicer to work with.

I will say that it's not all daisies and roses though. We are worried what will happen if the module loading spec goes in another direction than we think it will, not to mention that interfacing with external ES6 libraries is either done through transpiled common-js code (which loses most of the benefits of ES6), or through "hacky" solutions like a "nonstandard" field in the package.json which lets something like webpack load the ES6 version (which we have no idea what features they are using, might need transpiled, might need fixed, etc...).

Like anything, it's a bit of a gamble. But I'm confident that we will save more time and have less bugs by using the new features than we will lose to fixing modules to be inline with the spec or dealing with incompatibility problems.
How does this relate to the existing Windows support for JS apps via wwahost and the WinRT JS projection? Does that not work on HoloLens for some reason?
Next step for egypt could be to MITM the whole country's traffic
Build a Live HTML/CSS/JS Editor
>My original plan was to find a job, but most of the companies I contacted didn’t even want to interview me.

If you happen to be in a position of authority in a tech company in the bay area, I would personally contact this guy and ask if one of these companies was yours. If it was, you have some serious work to do because your hiring practices are costing you more than you can easily imagine.
> I agree, but this only leads to more questions: why? And is it permanent?

Our rapid technological progress in the last 2 centuries was an anomaly. We have 200,000 years of history as a species, most of which did not have nearly the same level of progress. The burden is on to you to explain what made those 2 centuries so great.
Secular stagnation
I looked at CloudFoundry as an option, but I was underwhelmed at the platform seeming like it was more designed for companies to provide their own PaaS with it as a base for orchestration than it being a ready-to-go solution. It's great that Diego can support Windows apps, but CloudFoundry doesn't look like a great solution for a team like ours who just wants a set of nice tooling to deploy and manage our applications without having to jump to the CLI for everything (I may be comfortable with this, but I do work in a primarily .Net shop).
thanks ill check it out!
Flexibility is for browser compat, not sure how this helps.
> Comcast's goals are to maximize shareholder profit

It's nitpicking, but no, no big company has the goal of maximizing shareholder profit.

Most have the goal of maximizing board members profit, what is mostly aligned, but different in a non-obvious way from maximizing shareholder profit.
Currently Reading : Goldfinch!

Best Book I read this year : Deep Work by Cal Newport and One World Education by Sal Khan.

Best fiction : Laughter in the Dark by Nabokov.

## Deep Work by Cal Newport

## The life changing magic of tidying up by Marie Kondo

## So good they can’t ignore you by Cal Newport

## Serious men by Manu Joseph

## Strangers on a train

## One world education by Sal Khan (Highly recommend it)

There are several wonderful takeaways from the book which I will try to list :

- The current model of education is broken. The Prussian system was designed to isolate workers from thinkers and factory laborers from office bearers. In an era where we need lots of original and creative minds to solve problems, it just doesn’t work.

- Conventional education system leads to a lot of gaps in learning, which are not addressed. For example, in spite of scoring 90% in math, you might have missed out on a key concept which will come back to haunt you later on.

- The system of homework is broken. It prioritizes quantity over quality and is meaningless.

- The testing system is just a snapshot of the student’s learning and does not says nothing about a student’s potential to learn a subject.

Sal goes on to propose a futuristic schooling system where students would use Khan Academy or an equivalent medium to progress at their own pace and use their classrooms for pursuing creative activities and enhancing his/her learning. Another interesting idea which he proposes is to dismantle age-wise segregation and group them based on the levels they are at in terms of progress made.

I think Sal Khan is a fantastic role model for kids and adults alike. A former hedge fund analyst turned educator is shaking up the fundamentals of our education system and tackling problems which are deeply rooted and slowly turning political as well. Here’s to a bright Sal-led future for education!

Overall, I would give the book 4.5/5. Visionary. Excellent. Ambitious!

## The Invisible Hand

## Disgraced by Ayad Akthar

## Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

## Laugher in the Dark by Vladimir Nabokov
Maybe it's a statistical thing, because there are more people who will hate strangers than people who love strangers?
For used stuff there is. You can save a ton of money buying lightly used goods. This would probably be great on a site like Grailed.
The True Story Behind the Biggest Fake News Hit of the Election
That's my point. I have a contrarian analysis. You have the conventional analysis. I think the conventional wisdom is wrong. It's frustrating that people just throw out economics and history and go for some sort of post-modern analysis of "things are so different now. No one could ever have imagined robots! We can't apply classical economics to the situation" Yes they could have, yes they did, and yes we can.
Recommendations:

Non Fiction: White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

https://smile.amazon.com/White-Trash-400-Year-History-Americ...

It sometimes reads like "A People's History of the United States", but the chapter about Andrew Jackson's election would seem like they were forcing the analogies to the 2016 election if not for the fact that it was published beforehand.

Fiction: American Gods
https://smile.amazon.com/American-Gods-Tenth-Anniversary-Nov...

I think lots of people will like this book, but certainly those who are into road trips across America.
One of the fattest landlords is now President
Amen! Even companies like Spotify that support full offline mode do a terrible job of testing their actual software in intermittent connectivity areas.

Think about a Metro North train traveling underneath midtown Manhattan in tunnels until it gets to 125th st. in Harlem. While underground, even the best wireless carriers like Verizon and AT&T can't get much of a signal through layers of earth and the metal faraday cages that are train cars.

The most infuriating thing is that if Spotify thinks it should have a network connection, because it has a 1xRTT signal with only 1 bar, but no data is actually flowing, the app will just hang and spin trying to connect forever, and become completely unresponsive. You have to enable airplane mode to convince the app that yes, there really is no data access underground.

In general mobile developers do a terrible job of actual real-world testing connectivity under a variety of packet loss and latency scenarios.

I would strongly recommend that you automate unit testing that inserts random amounts of packet loss and latency into the network connection to see how your app performs. There is open source software like WanEM (WAN emulator) that can do this for you: http://wanem.sourceforge.net/
Implementing public facing SQL API using PostgreSQL
Enchiridion - Epictetus : the best practical piece of stoic philosophy that I read (Marco Aurelio or Seneca are good too).

The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It - McGonigal, Kelly. Great book

The Feynman Lectures on Physics - Feynman, Richard - He is a great teacher, you will love physics even if you didn´t like it.

Stumbling on Happiness - Gilbert, Daniel Todd - Great book about how our mind works

I had to survive - Roberto Canessa: He is a survivor from the the Andes tragedy, half of the book is about that and the other half about what happens next, he become one of the best paediatric cardiologists in the world.