skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> have you heard about the Library of Alexandria?

Yes, of course. What a huge loss. Your source says "may", so it looks like the exact time the library was destroyed is up for debate. Even if the Muslims did destroy it, keep in mind that no civilization is perfect in hindsight. Racial segregation was still common less than a century ago in the US.

Have you heard of the library of Baghdad? The Mongols threw so many books into the Tigris (or Euphrates?) that it turned black. Arguably the greatest loss of knowledge ever.

> Muslim translators are the influencers behind renaissance, not the people who actually did it? Then why didn't it occur in the muslim world?

No idea. The Golden Age of Islam was due to a wide variety of factors including, good leadership, stability and strong economy, and the availability of nobles willing to support scientists in their learning.

Why the Renaissance took place in Europe and not in the Middle East, I don't know. One reason could be that Europe at the time was waking up from the Dark Ages, while the Islamic Empire was declining because leaders and citizens started to get a bit too comfortable with their achievements. I'm no historian though.

> I've heard this muslims preserved shill many times. Ok, they did. What did they invent? Not inventions by ancients or far-eastern people, but as a genuinely muslim invention. Kebab?

I'm on mobile, so I can't type much. Plus your tone isn't very respectful, so I'm not going to waste my time.

Look up Al Zahrawi. Some of the surgical instruments he invented are still in use to this day. You can find many more such examples through Google.

More importantly, scientific progress isn't measured solely through inventions. Inventions are built on knowledge, and knowledge is built on learning and research. Even if Muslim scholars never invented anything (they did), the amount of knowledge they acquired made the work of their successors much easier.
The point is more that intuition isn't something opposed to rationality, rather it is a decidedly deterministic logical process that you merely lack conscious insight into.
Disclaimer: I work at DuckDuckGo so I'm a bit bias. I won't turn this into a sales pitch, but here are a few common misconceptions people have about privacy and search.

1) Many people don't realize that tracking isn't just about having something to hide. But, it can cost you money. From Airline tickets to staplers you pay based on a profile:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873237772045781893...

http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-you-cant-trust-youre-getting...

2) People don't realize what's being tracked. I usually send them to http://history.google.com/history to have a look. Or http://webkay.robinlinus.com/ to see what their browser can access. That makes a lot of people realize just what is out there.

3) People feel they can't search without personalized searches.

The example is often a matter of disambiguation. For example, if I type "Python" I want code, not snakes. But, really, when is the last time you only typed 'Python' and wanted something generic about Python? You probably wanted a package lookup or the latest news on a release. So if you become more specific there is no issue.

Plus when you get a bit more specific on Python you can trigger things like package lookup:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=python+numpy&ia=about

Or NumPy Cheatsheet:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=numpy+cheat+sheet&ia=cheatsheet

At the end of the day some people may truly be ok with all the tracking that takes place, and that's ok that's up to them. But, at DuckDuckGo our goal is to educate people on online privacy, and provide a trusted way to access information as best we can. (Not to mention Instant Answers and Bangs which are super addicting)
Yeah, screw progress. Breadlines for all!
There was also a SCO Unix port of MS Word.

http://www.informatica.co.cr/unix/research/1990/1201.htm

https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-word/5x-unix
Ray-Casting Tutorial for Game Development and Other Purposes (1996)
Any time I read someone saying something like that I internally replace the subject with food. "Why would anyone buy food professionally made at a restaurant when you could make something similar at home?" Because I want something nice and I'm willing to spend some cash to get it. C'mon..
Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, they all have something in common: EaaS. Ecosystem as a Service. DDG should start offering email first, then news, stocks, maps, social, and finally ads. You don't survive with search alone, you need to monetize it on one hand and keep your users coming back on the other.

Oh, I wish it was called something simpler like "Ducker" or "Duckit", but whatever, bikeshedding territory.
Yup, that is literally HN's community in a nutshell.

Not passing judgement, mind you, but at least it isn't a Goddamned echo chamber like most other websites. Well, at least, not nearly as bad.
>> There is absolutely nothing new about this.

Not new, but it's getting worse.
Uber and Airbnb business models come under scrutiny
Shitty based upon what? I would say they could improve, always room for improvement but DDG handles most of my searches with ease.
Have you tried the bang searches?

https://duckduckgo.com/bang?c=Tech&q=django
Clojure's loop/recur is pretty much a degenerate version of Scheme's named let, which has been part of Scheme since long before Clojure was a thing:

(define (sum xs)
(let loop ((acc 0)
(xs xs))
(if (null? xs)
acc
(loop (+ acc (car xs)) (cdr xs)))))

It's often used in Scheme for iteration, including cases where you would otherwise need to define a helper function to implement an iterative (tail-recursive) version of a function, as I did with sum above.

The named let construct is more general than loop/recur, since you can supply a name and properly nest the forms.
Thanks for the summary; helpful as I've not checked out Crystal at all yet. Maybe they can steal it as their everywhere blurb.
https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8034-build_your_own_nsa#video&t=...

It is really easy to identify a majority of users of such a dataset.
Hmmm this was just on the homepage then quickly removed.. top of the page then boom gone? Any reason why this is?

Also I've been on statins since 37 after feeling my heart race and not being able to catch my breathe after being with girlfriend at the time. That was some scary stuff and after the statin and change of diet I no longer have those type of bouts anymore. So maybe it's my change in diet (cut out 75% fried food and sugar intake is 50% less) and the statin combined and or maybe the statin is just a placebo and my change is diet helped eliminate those heart racing attacks?

I had a lot of those attacks from 37 to about 39...im now 41 and haven't dealt with any such attacks unless I eat a say Five Guys or In and Out.
Also, if you're curious, we're building it on Node, React/Redux, and Mongo DB. We also connected to Firebase for real-time chat and used the react-google-maps component for Google Map integration. Sendgrid for email, and Stripe for payments.
It's sad they didn't learn from other libraries making similar transitions from public to private structures - introduce accessors, introduce a build macro to mangle fields so code building against these fields generates warnings, and then when code has been sufficiently ported, pull the rug, remove the accessor macros.

This approach makes it quite apparent where missing accessor functions exist, where loss of functionality might come from, and it's easy to do over an intermediate period of time while not being too obnoxious to work with during the period.

But good software engineering practices and OpenSSL seem to be mutually incompatible so I guess I shouldn't be all that surprised. Leave it to them to do the most obnoxious thing every time.
If you need money to prioritize your desires

No, one needs money to prioritize one's desires relative to the availability of resources. Two persons might have the same order of preferences (A > B > C), but one person might rather have (A) alone, while the other prefers to have (B, C). By having an universal credits system, the two can bid on stuff and come out with a good compromise.
Yeah, any large-scale self-driving car automation is going to take at least a decade to have a large effect, possibly more. Between the inevitable hiccups, upgrade/replacement costs and safety/labor regulations, it's not going to happen overnight. Even that White House study that said those jobs were going to disappear gave no time frame.
By 2050, we'll have AI Luddites, who'll be able to predict that this time, no really this time for real you guys, automation is going to put everybody out of work and crash the economy.
The Boring Stack – The Better Way to Ship
>Slack is just a glorified IRC

A lot of smart people who are old enough to be familiar with IRC see it differently. See comments from old HN thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10486541

Many many not use Slack but they certainly can see the value of it over IRC.
Meta-search is a type of search engine that goes way back. They avoid the cost of maintaining a full, search service by sending the query to all kinds of other search engines, running some analysis on their results, and presenting a condensed form to the user optionally with value adds. DuckDuckGo's value add is privacy. Here's some others to give you an idea for what they do:

http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/10-meta-search-engine...
I've been following Patrick since the old BoS days. He is great at marketing, but isn't a very good example of a 'solopreneur' or a bootstrapper.

If any of his companies were making him a good enough living, I don't think he would have gotten a day job at Stripe.

"when he didn't have the 'fire in his belly'y any longer"

I've been running my own company for almost 5 years after 5 years of side-projects and failures. To actually go from a project to a successful company, you need to do lots of boring work that has nothing to do with technology or development. Most of it is a slog, but is still required. You can eventually outsource this and hire other people, but this will take some time.

You will lose your fire at some point, but you still need to push through this. I've tried to partner with many different friends over the years on different business ideas and ventures. They all failed at some point because my partner (usually another developer) would get bored when things got tough or they had to work on something other than a cool library.

If you can't get through this, it's probably better to stick to working a job.

The other problem with Patrick is that everything he builds is from a developer perspective. Starfighter was a cool concept, but much too complicated for most people (from the business side of things. You need to spend time and money with tutorials attempting to convince business owners why this new concept is better than what they are currently using).
True, but is it regulations that keep the bank from stealing your money and using your financial transactions against you - or is it the prospect of losing billions through loss of customer trust. I would guess it's the later because banking regulations are fairly toothless and bank lobbies are extremely strong.
Show HN: SoundDown [Chrome Ext]: Adds Download Ability for SoundClound
But you'd have to argue it, it isn't self-evident that more education is simply better. Look at the number of PhDs who can't secure post-docs let alone tenure track. They may feel some personal satisfaction from the letters after their names, but it's very questionable that "society" benefits from churning them out. Once you educate people to the level of basic literacy and numeracy, say age 16, it's diminishing returns after that.
My First Game on Android
Or, instead of having a grand people's subsidized agricultural regulatory capture program, we could just recognize that the open food market has made food so inexpensive and plentiful that anyone in the free world can already afford to eat.

> it's the heavily processed stuff that is dangerous

It's this kind of ignorance that makes me not want some bureaucrat deciding what everyone eats and making me pay for it.

As an aside, did you see the article posted here yesterday about how the FDA just redacted their long-standing advice about cholesterol? The government is operating almost as ascientifically as the general public, making laws and declarations based on extremely weak predictions.

> Once AI removes these jobs we'll have serious problems on our hands with unemployment.

We'll also remove one of the biggest cost centers in food production, so feeding unemployed people will be, remarkably, even easier and we still won't need a state-controlled feeding apparatus.

> If everyone didn't have to struggle with the time and money to feed themselves

No one in the first world needs to struggle to eat. Eating healthy is dirt cheap; many people just don't know how to do it. Instead of bringing back soviet bread lines, we could just teach people practical stuff like how to eat healthily and affordably.
We always welcome more contributions. We crossed 1000 Instant Answers this year and they make for some wonderful experiences!
Optimal walking and cycling speeds to reduce air pollution inhalation
This really just puts more strength in the idea that success is largely luck-based.

No one can accurately predict success. Not specialized forums, not specialized workers in the field, and not even VCs whose sole incentive is to make money by investing in great ideas.

Even YC says as much that they have no clear idea as to what will be a success, and their strongest signal is the strength of the founders, and that there should be co-founders. I'm not sure how their experiment went with inducting people into YC just based solely on who they were, without an idea, but that's just further evidence that even people obsessed with finding success basically have no clear idea or signal as to what makes a success.
The feature I've been looking for but can't seem to find is a calendar view of when your elected officials are up for election.

Virginia for example holds their major state elections the year after Presidential elections. Local elections come up at seemingly random times. I vote absentee and remember coming home for a visit and my parents asking me to vote in some small election that was being held in the middle of summer.

Being able to add all of the offices to my calendar, ideally with important deadlines like when you can apply for absentee, vote early, and when you have to have your ballot in by would be amazing.
So basically if you order by frequency, order correlates with frequency? Isn't that just two ways of saying the same thing? Isn't it obvious? I don't get why we would need a law for that so I feel like I'm missing some detail.
Do you realise you are betting against the entirety - literally - of the automotive industry?
I'd amend the title to read "writing maintainable software is hard."

I currently work on a codebase, primarily written in C++ targeting embedded. There's an overwhelming amount of technical debt. There are literally comments in certain critical methods saying "//DO NOT MODIFY", because nobody knows what the method actually does. Don't get me started on the maintainability headaches involved with the massive amount of inline ASM.

I have extremely intelligent people on my team. PhDs and patent holders. It becomes problematic when someone who's an expert in MATLAB attempts to translate her code into C++.

Keep in mind, this codebase is used by millions of people across the globe.

/rant
> Fun3().Fun2().Fun1()

Hope you like Null Pointer Exceptions. (And poorly named methods.)
It has it's pro's and con's. I do love how I can just to !a to search amazon, or !w to search wikipedia, or !g if I really want to use Google. Kind of wish Google had a feature like that.
> Across the world we really need to start providing free food at a national level-

This is a terrible idea in my opinion, because you are going to end up subsidizing population growth in areas that aren't naturally capable of supporting that number of people. Thus you'll create a never-ending dependency on free food, which will result in even more human suffering when the free food inevitably goes away for some reason.
You're right that we produce enough raw food, but what alternative solution would you provide for more efficiently distributing it? Once there's sufficient supply all that Capitalism determines is methods of distribution.
teach a man to fish...

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&query=comments%20obsessi...
Yea, I would be much more worried about smaller companies that gets more information about you than Facebook or google. Like a lot of "free" browser plugins.

There was a talk at 33c3 about just that(Build your own NSA).
We are discussing morality and ethics here. Almost all such scenarios can be explained and accounted for by the unsymmetrical distribution of power, including that of the spying of US agencies on American citizens. Indeed, it is completely understandable and predictable given the way the US government is structured. Governments(or any institutions for that matter) tend to act in their own self interest first and foremost, not of their citizens.
Distribution is hard. We throw away so much food because it is cheaper throw it away than transport it to where it is needed. "Cheaper" in this context does not refer to a capitalistic construction, but the real resources necessary to transport (mostly perishable) goods across the world and get them to everyone who needs them.
That is a nice UI, but it seems to be for ad targeting (based on the URL). The more fundamental difference is that google knows nearly everything about you already, so this is helping them complete a dossier on you.

I think the parent poster was asking for a feature more like "I use LaTeX to document Django. This is all you should know about me. Go."

Put another way, can I fill that form out, create a google search bookmarklet that encodes my responses client-side, and then use it with all google cookies and ad domains blocked?
Also Peter Drucker (at least he was from Vienna originally).

A former boss had shared this inspiring article (by Drucker) with our team in a company where I worked:

[ My Life as a Knowledge Worker:

http://www.inc.com/magazine/19960515/2083.html

"The leading management thinker describes seven personal experiences that taught him how to grow, to change, and to age--without becoming a prisoner of the past." ]

Joseph Schumpeter, economist, is also mentioned in that article, in an interesting anecdote or two.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Drucker

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Schumpeter

I've read some of Drucker's books and like them. Very pragmatic.
I agree with the gist of the story, but I find the example poorly chosen.

The launch post regarding AirBNB set a tone with it's title that set people up to be critical..."Sleep under my kitchen table.." Even for those that understood the tongue-in-cheek there, the title is self deprecating.

I suspect the thread would have had a more positive tone with a different title.
Not a PM, but beginning to take on a few duties for an internal project, and I'm quickly realizing how much of the job involves measuring and forecasting things that are immeasurable/prone to entropy.

I always assumed PMs would ballpark things like Red/Amber/Green color codes and projections, but that "winging it" will only take you so far.

The big lesson learned from a somewhat chaotic first foray into management was record everything, and leverage that evidence in every decision post kick-off. This requires more disk space than my brain has, so my note taking and organization skills were forced to go through an overhaul.
It's something all software developer i know always underestimate when they think about mobile development. The ecosystem and tools are so abysmally bad compared to desktop or server development or even web now, that most of them don't understand the high development cost or the difficulty of doing high quality code.

Even Apple, which control everything from cpu design to compiler to programming language to IDE don't manage to have anything decent. xcode should be rewritten from scratch, swift compiler crash every two lines, iOS is becoming cumbersome and starts to show its age, new tech like autolayout is slow as hell or simply doesn't work (core data on icloud), compiling takes ages, xib and xcodeproj file format crash and burn as soon as you start to collaborate with git, deploying to the appstore still feels like rolling a dice (whenever the uploading itself doesn't bug), and in addition to all this mess, you give them 30% of your income. And when you think it's over, you realize they butcher your income report ( in pretty pretty csv file format) if you don't download them after two months.

The only thing that saves them is that android has managed to have an even worse experience.

Honestly, there's so much room today for a new mobile ecosystem, i wouldn't be surprised if either microsoft, or a newcomer from china starts to make a revolution in some way pretty soon. If microsoft were to resurrect windows mobiel together with a good phone, as well as a good C# + visual studio programming environment, i may sincerely give it a try, at least for my b2b applications.
This. In short (for me): Because I am lazy and I appreciate it if anyone else does the work for me.
>Well, no, they don't even have their own search engine.

This is false, as has already been pointed out.

If by 'shitty' you mean it has areas for improvement then yes I agree; as does your tact.
Why? It's a discussion about a search engine. The quality of the results are one of the most important aspects of it.
No offense, but how do you get $120,000 into credit card debt with the claimed $30,000 per week consulting income.
I can never remember the (short) url, so I end up Googling it so I don't have to spell it out..
You mention capitalism, but I know plenty of people in Venezuela hungry and it is because of the government. From the article "Politics creates famine, and politics can stop it".
There is always a way to show that a search engine is bad with constructive feedback rather than just replying it's "shitty".

At least, the OP could have elaborated on why does he thinks this way so that everyone could understand why DDG's results are "shitty".

Unfortunately, no one can know what the OP thinks. As a result, it is hurting the work of others without any feedback so that they can improve themselves (i.e. DDG team) and serves little purpose (no explanations on the why) except expressing a frustration.

At least, that's my opinion. Let's be elegant in how do we relate to others. Feel free to disagree with me, but I think this kind of behavior is what creates a more toxic environment in our fields.
As mentioned in the Medium article:

"The unvoiced threat I understood was that Jake was willing to (directly or via proxies) coordinate the initiation of a police investigation, leak it to a friendly journalist, and destroy my life if I talked.

We ended with a hug and a promise to engage again.

Weeks later, a German journalist published a long, well-sourced story, clearly (to me) coordinated by Jake or one of his circle, casually describing Jake providing illegal drugs to party attendees. The sword, it seems, is out of its sheath."

Who says these aren't some of Appelbaums German friends in journalism?
>He is great at marketing, but isn't a very good example of a 'solopreneur' or a bootstrapper.

This is actually the lens through which I view his writings: master solo marketer. He's managed to build a brand around these parts that, when viewed critically, is hard to explain. That's not easy. Some of the business decisions described here are baffling.