skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
US 'got it so wrong' on Saddam Hussein, says CIA agent who interrogated dictator
Thank you too, at least now we've worked down to what we really disagree about. GG
Kindergeld in Belgium (Flanders) is about 120€. That's a little over 10% of thr minimum wage. In this Polish story it was 33%, big difference. What ratio is it where you are referring to?

For reference, full time day care in Belgium will cost you about 500€ per month if you are not poor.
For context: I travel between Cologne and a city near Gütersloh, which means switching trains in Hamm.

The National Express trains I'm talking about are the RB48 and RE7. There are two ways to get to Hamm besides the ICE: RE7 (National Express) and RE1 (DB Regio).

Although the RE1 is a double-decker, most of the extra space is wasted on first class seating. They do have toilets but they're tiny and usually extremely filthy. Maybe I'm particularly unlucky but as I said, the average train seems to have at least one door marked as out of order at any given time. I've actually seen an RE1 leave Hamm with an open door once (I was too surprised to take a picture though).

The main reason I prefer the RE7 is the ability to charge my laptop (allowing me to get actual work done). I also find the trains much nicer in general. The only exception was during Karneval because there is sadly no ban on drinking alcohol on regional trains (unlike trams in Cologne).

My worst experiences with DB Regio have been on RB and S trains though. I had a daily from Cologne commute to Neuss for a year and a half and none of the trains had toilets even though some of them still had signage directing you to non-existent toilets. Officially they were no longer offering toilets on S trains because travel times were short enough that passengers don't need them -- which certainly comforted me while routinely spending roughly an hour on those damn trains.
So apparently that has perfect grammar?
> Also its true that taxes make 2 people get different net income but that comes from their wealth, not their nationality.

Most (all?) western countries tax income, not wealth[1]. Wealth has no impact on income taxes. If I have $1M in the bank go work for minimum wage and earn $10K for the year, I'll get taxed the same as someone with $0 in the bank earning the same $10K. The contrast I was making was someone with two jobs that make $10K each. With a progressive tax structure, each they are making less net at each job than a person working for $10K at either job. That's because the second $10K would be taxed more than the first (okay maybe not at $10K but it's true at $25K to $50K or $50K to $100K...).

> Someone with a house and a mortgage might get more income than an immigrant that has nothing.

Again that makes no sense. A house and a mortgage are expenses. The only impact on your taxes would be deducting the mortgage interest or real estate taxes. They're not increasing income, they're lowering taxable income.

> That makes it a regressive tax (the immigrant pays taxes that goes to the richer guy).

That makes no sense. There's nothing immigrant specific about that. Unless you think all immigrants are renters. Yes interest and real estate tax deductions (and really deductions in general) are regressive in that higher income people who are already paying higher taxes benefit more, but there's nothing unfair about it from a born national v.s. immigrant basis.

Last I checked, immigrants are allowed to buy houses too.

[1]: The one exception to that is taxing real estate but on the whole cash, investments, or even piles of gold are not taxed.
I love this. Someone please try and get one published!!

also... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
The author is trying to replace one system of thought with another, that's a fact. I think it's baseless to assume if the intention of the author was to originally pursue this motive or to suggest improvements after being apart of the community for a period of time.
I submitted a similar story earlier (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13206344) and it was flagged to death because it was just an excerpt from the book in the Daily Mail. So I'm submitting this version because it's an actual story from a more reputable outlet.
Yes, and the cost savings go well beyond a Windows license + SA. Being able to leverage an existing toolchain for configuration management and deployment is a huge cost savings, given that the Windows alternatives are both expensive, more difficult to use, and break a lot more (IMHO).
That looks very interesting, especially the competition aspect. He might have to brush up on his Python a bit. He also enjoys CodeCombat, which I forgot to mention in the post.
> Accessibility requires extra code. In Windows 10, UIAutomationCore.dll is about 1.3 MB, and will no doubt get bigger as Microsoft continues to improve the accessibility of Windows. But you can't write that off as bloat.

I'm convinced that's not true. Consider the case of CSS and ARIA roles. You could very easily write CSS/JS components defined on roles using CSS 2.1 attribute selectors, and accessibility just follows naturally. For instance, define your tab panels using role="tab", and screen readers should immediately understand it, while for visual designs, your CSS and JS just select on the appropriate roles. You then use classes for non-semantic content, like font and colour instead of using classes for everything as is currently standard.

So you're not duplicating code, you're writing better semantic markup once which can be properly interpreted multiple ways in different media.

Not how it's currently done, but there's no reason it can't be done that way, even for desktop UIs.
The difference between JS and Swift is that Swift compiles everything with static types. So JS just plods along and does one of it's funky things with types when encountering the next instruction, but Swift actually needs hard types to be able to compile and run at all. So you need to provide them, or it figures them out by itself. There used to be this famous error about "too complex" statements. They still exist but got a lot less:

"swift expression was too complex to be solved"
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/29707622/bizarre-swift-co...

Also check the second answer, it's actually the best.
A single web page. My point stands, is there an equivalent page for JavaScript?
Who cares if the earth cools down 100000 years after the ice caps melt.
It might be for aircraft construction but not aircraft design. Since programmers aren't typists entering already-complete programs, programming is more asking to the latter, not the former. You want aircraft to be lighter and programs to be shorter, and measuring progress by movement in the opposite direction is foolish.
We don't need to do anything, you need to learn self control :) So do I, but I've gotten much better in the past 2 years. Start deleting accounts and apps, all of them, it's an amazing feeling. Note: HN won't let you delete your account, something that wouldn't have bothered me if I hadn't used my real name, but since I did, it drives me nuts. Looks like you might have the same problem.
Possibly. One of the pretexts of postmodernism is that no privileged reading of a text exists, not even the author's. Thus the reader of a text can interpret it in any way that is internally consistent with the rest of postmodernism's rules and norms. So it doesn't really matter what you intend it to say, as long as the grader can and does interpret something consistent from it.
You can take a look at pendulum: https://github.com/sdispater/pendulum

A lot of effort has been put into getting DST right so I hope it will be what you are looking for.

Disclaimer: I am the author of Pendulum :-)
An anecdote about motivation: when I was in grade school, I made custom maps and scenarios for Starcraft (the original), with if-then-else conditionals, and the like.

The official editor had a wizard where you would enter these, but it was extremely tedious to use, requiring lots of mouse clicks. Alternate editors were starting to come out that would let you enter these events as a script, so I turned to scripting instead.

After a while, hand-writing the script was becoming a chore, so I wrote a code generator. I realized that the browser had a script interpreter and I could just use checkboxes and form inputs and lots of Javascript to manipulate a bunch of 'document.write()' statements to produce copy-pastable code.

I had no interest in programming, and yet I using programming as a tool without realizing it.
https://github.com/Mamun/spec-model
Being lazy evaluated, Haskell, makes it hard to reason about performance in more than trivial code (as a rubik cube solver would be).

All those suspended computations may eat your RAM for no good reason at all. For example:

sum (replicate n 0)

has a space leak O(n). While:

foldl' (+) 0 (replicate n 0)

works fine O(1) space wise.

My point is that it is easy to eat all your RAM using haskell even in the simple `sum` case above. More so in more involved computations.

Of course, if you can compute your solution in constant space using C, you can also do it in haskell. But writing it in Haskell would require careful thought in how your code is evaluated.

EDIT: It is about trade offs.

If you want declarative and readabe code, with little memory layout noise (allocate memory, assign variables, etc...) then haskell is a reasonable choise. You can write fairly readable clode for complex algorithms. If you are an expert, you can also make it efficient on the first go (speed and space wise). If speed is of upmost importance, then you can write more compiler specific code but with a lot of added noise.

Or you can start with C, write less (than haskell) declarative code and less readable code. It would be harder to get right(the more complex the computation the harder to debug), but when you are done you probably have efficent code. If you have the experience, you may be able to make it fairly readable too.
Holy cow! Did anyone else see the comments section on the actual article? Dumpster Fire is a term that gets banted about a lot, but that part of the site is surely flaming raw sewage. My god, is that what my uncles see as 'informed' readers? Jesus, the Economist could really use some more heavy handed mods.
Do you take 90°C showers?
Why would you think that? Information is stored in the configuration of neurons, not in the neurons themselves. Neurons are constantly being replaced, and you don't wake up one morning not knowing how to bike because your "bicycle neuron" died.
I would need to write up a bunch of new analogies for Haskell. I only recently started to make sense of functional Javascript and it's changed the way I think about code. Haskell is definitely on my own list of things to learn.
Resource Oriented Computing
Actually I use a habit tracking app, where one of the habits is "no news but HN". HN is an improvement compared to reading any other news source or various reddits.
WoSign and letsencrypt.cn
It got a B+!

https://www.gradeflex.com/graded/5856d8d3de6a2008572d2baf
Build a React Chat App in 4 Steps
True, which is why I intentionally framed the second line as "take more control" and "change how it works", implying a change from the current status quo. Maybe that's too subtle though.
Maybe but this also gives you more hosting options if you are in the cloud.

Also tools like puppet and chef for example have an easier time provisioning Unix like machines than Windows (although this has been changing, and the situation could be much better I haven't dealt with it for a bit).

Also you don't have to deal with licenses for Windows server instances which can be another huge painpoint.
That story is a little flawed as well. They first compare 2.8 million truck drivers (a specific job) to large categories like "food services".

Then, they do get specific, and show specific jobs, like cashier (3.3 million) at the top of the list...which only serves to confirm that "truck driver" is one of the largest.

Whenever self-driving trucks do get here, it will affect more than the ~3 million truck drivers. Other trucking occupations like dispatch, then related businesses, like truck stops and motels are obvious big hits. I assume there's lots of smaller ones as well...things like CB radios, custom mud flaps, trucker talk radio, porn on DVD and so on.
On the contrary, consumption changing both ways, growing and shrinking has happened quite often in history.
Public Review of my side project
Hello! I'm launching a simple side project I built while trying to become more familiar with Elastic Beanstalk and Flask applications. Its a simple password generator and would like to make it into something useful for children to use to generate better passwords. No I know there are best practices for strong passwords, but I'm thinking this is something that will help children understand how to make better passwords, so they dont learn too late in life how to create a better password.

I know the UI is ugly, but I'm opening myself up for any insight on how to make this better and turn it into something children would use. I'm not worried about making money from this, I just want to see a userbase grow and iterate on it to make something great.

Here's the live site: https://www.passfrog.com

Please provide your thoughts and suggestions here or on twitter. @realpassfrog
I feel like nothing about the conclusion follows from the problems. If I say that LA has a public transit issue and my solution is radical libertarianism I should guide my audience between those two points.
People on SSDI are not counted as "unemployed", IIRC. Which makes the actual unemployment rate much higher.
I put the Declaration of Independence through the engine. It seems the NLP has some strong views about our president elect: http://imgur.com/a/pjsQy

source: http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/
Well, the Sokal Affair [1] is famous for getting just such a paper accepted at a peer-reviewed postmodernist academic journal.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
You're familiar with the Sokal hoax [1]?

Physicist Alan Sokal got a non-sensical paper [2] with the wonderful title Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity accepted and published in the journal Social Text.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
[2] http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/trans...
Tangential, but can anyone eli5 this field of philosophy (the non generated form)? I recognize names like Lacan and Zizek but can't get far enough through the verbal cruft to interpret anything.
Apache Jackrabbit 2.13.6 released
SSDI eligibility is based on not where you can do a job or not; but whether you can do a job that's available locally or not.
I strongly agree with Cal on this. I write software and generally spend much of my time focusing on how to better design digital technologies of various kinds.

But ultimately, I think that good design is typically subtractive, not additive. The best digital products improve our lives--our lives in the physical world--while sucking up as little of our attention, mental effort, and personal information as possible.

I think it's only a matter of time before we see these attitudes become more prevalent (precisely because they are controversial/reactionary), and the general design ethos of Silicon Valley shifts as a result.

One of the key tensions of the near future may be between minimalism and maximalism in this way: should we throw more and more computation power at every single "problem", brute-forcing a solution to each for its own sake? Or should we optimize, and find the smallest, least intrusive, most elegant and simplest solution? I know which one sounds better to me. But will that drive business revenue? We'll see.

Perhaps more importantly though, at a certain point--by creating so much digital detritus and complexity, our brute-force solutions and ever-present computation create a new set of problems (such as the need to filter information aggressively to get any useful value from it--which is what minimalism is all about). So maybe this is just the realization of that. We need a new layer on top of the computation infrastructure to __reduce__, to complete our maximalist designs. Either way, interesting.
>> "Regarding apps, you can't avoid them anymore. I have apps for door locks, alarms, parking meters, taxi, food, pressure cooker, time sheets, messaging (10), etc."

How is this minimalist by any definition? None of those things need an app and work perfectly fine without one. It sounds like you are adding things in the digital sphere that you don't need and removing things from the physical sphere that you do need (for example a bed). Also - you have a bed, how is sleeping on the floor next to it 'minimalist'?

I've slept on a floor for 6 months - it is terrible for your back. We are not designed to live like that anymore.
The film seems to imply that there is a way to circumvent iCloud account protection on iOS. Is this really the case? I know there are services which promise that, but as long the phone is on the latest firmware I cannot imagine how anyone could reset the iCloud lock. So these services are either hoaxes or work only for certain phones (with old, vulnerable OS versions). Or maybe I'm missing something?
Replace "coding" with "learning to play the piano." Do you still agree?
Fair enough. My computing career started in the nineties on VMS at the Help Desk of Brandeis University, my work-study job.
Doesn't matter had <strike>sex</strike> oil.
I recall a very good article that said there are many problems with healthcare in the US which causes it to be as expensive as it is, rather than a single big problem. I would list them if I remembered a good number of them. One of my favorites is that the health care industry is not paid to keep people healthy, it is paid to treat people. As a result, we get lots of treatment and medicine, and not great health.
I'm not the best at English, tried understanding this for a good 5 minutes before I remembered what "generator" means. Oh, well.
Here's a little lighter reading from ars on the subject http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/12/how-an...
The only issue with the blog post is that most of those tools will be obsolete before you finish reading.

JavaScript as an ecosystem needs mature robust solutions rather than a new way to do things every other week.
Eh. Most research shows that only 10% of people succeed in losing weight in the long term once they are morbidly obese. The only thing that seems to work is bariatric surgery.
Hey @tribaal — and thanks for the feedback! We understand that it's important for people to be able to move the webcam cover on and off the actual cam, so our PEEPING TOMS are self-adhesive (no glue) and super easy to move around on your screen/display. Hope that answers your question :)
Yes. I studied literature in school, and I was very guilty of writing papers like these, once upon a time. If someone gave me this and told me it was real, I would believe. Hits the mark.
Pertinent Twitter account:

@RealPeerReview posts papers published in peer-reviewed journals of questionable scientific merit.

https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview
It's such a wide set of authors that any ELI5 is going to fall very short (kind of like saying "can anyone explain 20th century European literature to me?") but the Wikipedia for continental philosophy is a tolerable intro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_philosophy

Of course, actually reading Nietzsche or something would be better but that's not really an ELI5.
Okay.

But if anything is the bloat it's the true/false shell built-in.
I think JavaScript developers know how to make single web pages.

http://www.ecma-international.org/ecma-262/7.0/

But you're just trolling (and for something mediocre in the first place, sit down, he said from his lofty perch), so you should stop.
Le Startupshow – La communication
It's hard to reconcile lines like "was born in 1981, and as a young computer enthusiast I quickly became aware of my unfortunate place in the history of computing. I thought I was born in the wrong time. I would think to myself I was born long after the glory days of hacking and the computer revolution." with entryism.
Generally, no.
It might not be an effective strategy, but it would be morally wrong to do otherwise.
Everything. Including Brainfuck. JavaScript is a fking mess.
The article fails to answer the question its title poses. How has Sweden redesigned streets? "Uhh, it kinda has, and fewer people die. Also, cameras." Okay, thanks.
Cerberus gets pretty bad reviews recently on the Play Store. Seems like the developer reneged on a load of lifetime licences and locks people out of the app because "you're not using it properly" [©Apple]... also, quite a few people say it doesn't work very reliably anyway
Five Things I Didn’t Get About Making Video Games
how do you know he is the theif, and where do you draw the line on who can have privacy and not ?
You /might/ replace 'unfair' with 'immoral'. Lots of things in life are unfair and are just a part of life, so there's a mentality that unfairness is just a part of life. Hopefully those who wish to take from those who work can see that this is theft and theft is immoral.
Galileo Satellite Navigation System Is Now Operational
Who cares what ESR has to say about anything?
> The question I have is, without watching the video, is this the ACTUAL thief?

If you watched the video, you'd know. Also, from the FAQ:

"1. How do you know the guy in the pictures is the thief?
Please watch the film again, we were witnesses of the theft and filled a police report which described the person we later saw in the pictures. Besides that, there is a lot of supporting evidence for the fact the thief didn't sell the phone the fist few days. I won't go into to much detail now. If you don't believe that there is an other argument: The person who used the phone must have known the phone was stolen because it had all my pictures and accounts still on it for a whole week. If he bought it, which he didn't he at least could have known the phone was stolen because of that."
Wonder why parent was downvoted..
Pretty sure those are all generated. Seems to be a trend of people reposting these throughout the Internet without explanation.
German consortium of research libraries announce boycott of Elsevier journals
Something stuck me when I first listened to this: there was a little anecdote about how one of the radio producer's co-workers had an injured back, but continued to work at his office job with relatively little impact on his performance. The same kind of injury would be career-ending for someone who's primary job skills are in a field that involved manual labor (e.g., welder, plumber, or one of the many oil-extraction jobs). The growth of disability claims is often characterized as a case of people gaming the system to extract handouts from the government. But maybe what is happening is we're seeing aging boomers and gen-xers who work as manual laborers, and who's bodies are finally breaking down to the point that they can no-longer function at their jobs. That seems like genuine disability to me, and so isn't it appropriate for them to use these government services?
Universities are not so divided into good and bad ones. Almost nobody think that way.

Social mobility is higher than in the US but the highs are lower.

Almost nobody makes $200k in Denmark, and fewer make it year after year. Even lawyers, dentists, medical doctors usually make less. But you also don't really need it. Public services such as schools, universities and hospitals are great.

You wouldn't be able to live anywhere near Copenhagen if you are on a developer's salary and you need space for 4 kids. Most women in Denmark work. It's not a place designed for one income.
and yet... the supposed computer geniuses of the NSA allowed it to happen. whereas Google/Gmail has not, to date (that we're aware of, of course.) this was part of my point.