skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A response for each of you points, not really for starting an argument, but for stating my view of the matter.

1) The language allows you to emphasise either the object or the subject. Either way, though, both a passive and an active version of a given sentence can hide or tell some information equally. Compare:

The pizza was eaten.

Somebody ate the pizza. (The amount of info these sentences give is practically equivalent.)

It's more about the author, whether or not he wants to tell something to the reader.

2) Passive need not be formal in all its uses, nor does every text need be formal and accessible, and a formal text is not necessarily inaccessible.

3) That's a crazy nitpicking and a silly exaggeration. Copula-heavy text is boring to read, but while the copula verb and the auxiliary verb for passive forms are the same (to be), in its second role, it is not also acting as a copula. The verb 'to be' is not the copula, but one of its uses is as the copula. So if one wants to give up on copula, however mad that may be, he need not give up on all the uses of the verb to be. That said, if it is an artistic choice to avoid copula to the extent possible, I can't really criticise that. It can't be affirmed as a general rule though.

Edit: Oh, also, in a sentence like "Bob seems terrible.", 'to seem' is basically a copula. Copula is basically any verb that links the subject to a predicative.
Here in London we are building the crossrail, which is 118km in length deep under London. It costs around £15bn, so that's £125 million per km. That's including the 40 planned stations.

London is far far older than NY, it's also more congested underground and a lot harder to organise logistically.

Blows my mind that the NY subway costs this much to extend.
Alex the parrot could communicate.
Confirmation bias. Once you start looking for confirmation bias you see it everywhere.
(I work at Stripe) Have you checked out https://stripe.com/connect? We created this product to help solve this problem (creating a multi-sided marketplace).
It's personal, but Duolingo has gone a bit south for me. They are (understandably) focusing on getting users to pay. It just hit me in an unfortunate way: Duolingo is all about "streaks". After a fifteen day streak, I was greeted with "You broke your streak! Buy it back for $3.50." I hadn't broken it, I remembered the exact lesson I did, 100%. Sent them an e-mail; no reply. A week later, I'm talking to my sister, exact same thing happened to her 180 day streak... Another e-mail, again no reply.

All in all, a petty detail, of course. It was the lack of response to support e-mail that got me, not so much the situation itself.

Used to be a fan, but that wasn't a great moment. :(
Too late for what? That would arguably be a marginally better outcome than the current situation at least. I don't think many expect powerful, wealthy people with guns give up without a fight - but regulating a previously dark market will lower the bad guys' margins. Of course they will need to move their assets to some other trade, like "avocado protection". But we need to create friction wherever we can, I think.
To be clear, this paper looks great. My concern is the poeple pushing deep learning before the theory is worked out—it's an AI winter waiting to happen.
Efficient Parallel Scan Algorithms for GPUs (2008) [pdf]
I think a problem with this is that when you bring an actual database into the test, it ceases to be a unit test and becomes an integration test (not that integration tests aren't useful). I would prefer for the application to be separated enough from the database that I can test the business logic entirely on its own.
I think the "can communicate with poor vision" is the most important as its dark in about 50% of the day when sign language doesn't really work.
Not to mention that you first need to call the other's attention to start communicating with signs, possibly by making some sort of sound so they look at you.
The second most important benefit is (IMHO) that you can speak while you are focusing on something, e.g. waiting for the prey to come closer while everyone holds their weapons.
Apple was one the first to license the "technology".

https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2000/09/18Apple-Licenses-Am...
And to be fair on these calculations, I was really just comparing to "turning off an hour early every day." I don't think many people leave lights on 24 hours a day. But, assuming a 60w from 8 to 7 hours a day of use, saves 60w (480 down to 420) a day. Leaving a CFL on for the full 8 hours uses only 112. So, with a savings of 368, is is almost 6 times the savings of an hour's light.

Now, I also confess I have not looked into these much lately. I just find it interesting how so many of us assume that "moderation" is more effective than other factors. Even when seeing the difference in clear numbers (60 to 14) indicates a huge gulf that moderation would have to overcome.

We have a similar problem at our house, where I've now calibrated the other direction. Rather than be concerned about keeping a window closed, I'm more interested in a better heating/cooling system.

Edit: Forgot my point at the top. Converting from energy costs to actual dollars, it can be seen that the cost of early CFL/LED lightbulbs was the dominate factor.
The base has nothing to do with it. The "pattern" (it never looked like much of a pattern to me) arises from putting it on a grid, not from the choice of base. You can pick different sorts of grids and get different versions of "patterns":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulam_spiral#Variants
I could live with that. One scenario I could imagine, a program "dreams up" a movie. Critics then proceed to interpret it and explain what it's about. This is already pretty much the situation for some movies... http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0166924/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
Okay, but why throw the baby out with the bathwater?
Why do you use two?
Bad products VS products full of bugs... which one is which?
r/AskHistorians has some of the highest quality research you're going to find on the internet, at least if you're not a history major yourself. The mods there are amazing, and the posts usually have sources you can look into yourself.

If you haven't browsed it before, I highly recommend looking into it.
While it's not difficult to imagine scenarios where we create bioweapons of unprecedented ferocity, state actors have probably already done this to some degree.

I argue that outside of engineered diseases it's difficult to imagine existential risks that could be posed by genetic engineering. Except, of course, making a better human which would almost certainly and immediately pose an existential risk to old Homo sapiens sapiens.
Still a good read: http://philip.greenspun.com/business/internet-software-paten...

"I was asked 'Why didn't you patent this yourself, if you developed it first?' My reply was 'It only took me an hour to build; if I went down to the patent office after every hour of programming, I wouldn't get very much done.'"
This also holds for n = -1. Not much real benefit; just extends the set of n to 41 consecutive integers.
>billions of years now and nothing too awful has happened

Depends on perspective. Millions of species are extinct. Which is to say some mutation actually don't work out so well.
How exactly do you generate those "fractal" caves, "echoes" and sequences?
2nd avenue subway is muuuuch deeper than most of the 100 year old stations in manhattan, for just this very reason. And also because no one would stand for cut and cover anymore.
Think Like a Futurist to Be Prepared for the Totally Unexpected
The Steersman, Self Steering Gear for Yachts
I've been recruited by both and learned they both pay below market unless you're in the top 1% and have a messianic-like following. My choice would be neither, and find somewhere that pays more.
Zero to One by Peter Thiel.
My linear algebra was rusty so I bought "Linear Algebra and Its Applications" by David C. Lay. from a college student.
The book is amazing, I highly recommend it.
The ironic thing is, most of Walt Disney's biggest hits were all based off of others' works in the public domain. A fact whose implications are sadly lost upon the people who continue to rubber-stamp copyright term extensions.
The Scapegoat, René Girard.
> We are spending ridiculous amounts of money on the war on drugs

As a society yes, but there are clearly some actors of the "war on drugs" that benefit from it, such as the police with asset forfeiture laws. Since they have a huge influence on politicians it's very unlikely the rhetoric ever changes. On top of that local police have also gone against state laws legalizing some specific drugs so the resistance goes far beyond just law-making.
Resilience - Eric Greitens

Pretty much changed a lot of things about how I view my motivation and self discipline. You'd think it's just another "Navy SEAL" book, but it's actually very philosophical and motivates you in different ways.

https://www.amazon.com/Resilience-Hard-Won-Wisdom-Living-Bet...
The Effective Treatment for Uremia-Kidney Disease Service in China
Web link worked for me incognito mode.
The export function on osm.org is a pretty expensive operation on the live database and not the best way to download OSM XML data for most people. If you're looking for a city-sized extract, https://mapzen.com/data/metro-extracts/ is a good source. They have pre-built ones for commonly requested areas, or you can select your own bounding box.
That link doesn't go to the full article either. It gives you a link to the paywall of the article though.
How to tie a Bowline Knot
This sounds like a bad way to salt, depending on what you're cooking. I think it's better to salt parts of the dish independently during cooking. That brings out flavors individually like the dish intends. Salting at the end tends to make something taste salty rather than just enhance flavor.
Ask HN: If you could live and work somewhere, where would it be?
If you could pick one place or city in the world where you'd live and work (software dev) for the next 10 years. Where would it be? And why would you pick that place?
Contrary to mistaken public opinion, union members are paid commensurate with their skills and seniority. It's foolish to require a company to pay all employees the same regardless of ability and unions make allowances for that in negotiations.
I wonder what those other cities are built on. The Second Ave subway's bedrock is schist [1] -- which is an extremely strong, durable type of rock.

A quick glance at this [2] engineering book indicates Copenhagen is limestone. Apparently the same is true for Paris. Any engineers here who want to chime in about how that affects cost?

[1] http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/magazine/tunneling-belo...

[2] https://books.google.com/books?id=6UAqS62NJDMC&pg=PA2616&lpg...
Side note, the 4th edition is exactly the same as the 5th, so it's much cheaper to get that on Amazon if anyone's looking to get it.

Great book that explains the major concepts concisely.
I don't trust anything integrated with the browser. I could probably use two separate databases of KeePass, but it's browser integration sucks.
The reverse is true for Qobuz. They don't want my money because I live in the US.
A part of me wishes I had bought back when it was still only a few hundred. At the same time, I still really don't see a future for bitcoin. Sure it can be good for hedging against currency falls, but that's not a good long term prospect. For it to succeed on the long run it needs to be a currency which needs stability and the willingness of a large group of people to exchange it for goods and or services. Progress in that area has been slow.

Not to mention the community debates over hard forking which threaten the future of the currency entirely.
I will name two: Remote and Rework, books by BaseCamp founders
This guy's stuff is phenomenal. I regularly consulted his hexagonal grid guide when doing certain simulations. Hope he doesn't give up completely.
So you're totally fine with workers getting exploited as long as your life is fine? Good to know!
What do you mean by top %1? If you worked at both you should have been in the %1 category at some point right?
I use KeePass (MacPass on OS X). It's open source and saves to a single encrypted file. I stick it in Dropbox and it's available everywhere I need.
Barcelona, best beaches with a fantastic city as a backdrop. One of the best City's in the world. Great food, great nightlife, amazing vibe in general.
Bitcoin hits $1000
The other thing is I tend to be kind of exploratory in style and if I have written a bunch of tests I'm more hesitant to change something, even if it isn't really working.
Well Amazon was famously quoted that 100ms delay cost them 1% in sales, so 1 click speed would make me think they are benefiting from that functionality to some degree

I'd love to see the actual studies (if they exist) for both claims. I'd be more willing to buy the 1click than the 100ms
I find myself doing the same.
Only in so many words.

It was a block. It was made of wood, and it was a real thing you could hold in your hands.
This feels like one of those articles where the author justifies the truth of some non-obvious "fact" without first showing that it is true.

Like is it really a thing that "only Americans are interested in searching for alien life" -- I am American, and I wasn't aware (and many of my friends aren't American).
Tesla Rolling Out Autopilot Software Updates to 1000 Cars
Is there an actively maintained fork of Open64 anywhere? Also, I recall PathScale being open-sourced a while back, but it looks like newer releases are proprietary again and I can't find the source code for the open-source one.
> The code-coverage approach, in contrast, is very cost-effecitve. For example, roughly speaking, it triggers all possible exceptions that your code can throw.

Well, unless you count uncaught exceptions from things your code calls.
Drupal 8 is very user friendly out of the box. (For publishing, you could maybe go further and use a distribution like Thunder - http://thunder.org/)
The last time I was recruited by a Google or an Apple, the offer was nearly $30k below what I'm being paid now, and I'm not overpaid by any stretch. I'll never be able to afford to buy a house or even think about starting a family at these rates. For reference, I live in the Bay Area.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13297455
Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail in '72.
Do try www.halfchess.com also - I plan to post it on HN once iOS app is released.
this is the problem. the law dept at Disney never has any interest in weakening copyright law in any way. no matter how reasonable.

lawyers only see degrees of risk
Leading Apps That Power the Gig Economy
I've skimmed it, looks like a guide on leading a blameless postmortem of an event (ie. an accident). That is, a postmortem where the goal is to figure out how the systems in place allowed people to make the mistakes that caused the problem, instead of placing blame on people who (may or may not have) made the mistakes that led to the problem.
> One objective way is to look at average height, which increased throughout the 19th century in the US, and increased in other countries when they adopted free market agriculture. Height is a good proxy for having sufficient nutritious food.

An insightful way to look at it; thanks. However, the question at hand isn't about the average, but the low end: Was there malnutrition or starvation? Yes, there was and is.

EDIT: See this post for some numbers:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13298775

I'm not debating whether free market food works very well for 90% in wealthy countries (just a guess at a number) and far better than whatever was done in the 18th century, but that doesn't mean we should call it sufficient or the 'best of all possible worlds'. If millions (tens of millions?) of people in wealthy countries and (hundreds of millions? billions?) in other countries are not getting sufficient food, that's failure - just less failure than we experienced before.
Totally love the cardboard "case" held together with some rubber bands. LOL, this is real hacking. I spent a bit of time learning 3D printing and printed a few cool looking raspberry pi cases but always looking out for cool case ideas.
Seveneves - Neal Stephenson
The one place where I've had good results from meta programming / DRY for tests is table-based validation; where you have a large cross-product of different states to test, mapping to expected outcomes.
In order to support a line running 24/7, you have to build a lot of bits and pieces to include more redundancy. For example, the two miles of Second Avenue Subway has three crossovers, all of which need multiple switches, so that trains can run on either track, allowing maintenance crews to cut power and safely work on the train lines during more quiet hours of the day with minimal disruption. Conversely, BART in San Francisco has very few crossovers. That was cheaper, as signalling and switch infrastructure is expensive, but also makes it much less granular, and as such, harder to do any sort of maintenance.
If the businesses they control are legal, they have more incentives to avoid illegal activities "controlling" them. I wonder if a cartel could remake itself into a private security company?

A future where a country is essentially carved up between several PMCs, each being a law enforcement monopoly in its sector, is kinda dystopian... but surely it beats never-ending drug-fueled war between the cartels?
A similar discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13235767
I don't think anyone is questioning that WP fills an important niche. The problem is that as used in many cases, it has some serious problems. Being able to "pick plugins from millions free ones, done" is great UX out of the box and terrible in the long term when the inevitable compromises and lack of support sets in.
Only a small portion of that 118 km will be in newly built tunnel and there will be relatively few newly built underground stations on Crossrail, which is why it's much cheaper (underground stations are very expensive to build). Also, the use case for Crossrail is very different from the use case of the Second Avenue Subway.
I have used Dashlane since the beta days, it works well. It is closed source, yet works well, the paid version ($40/year) syncs between devices while the free version is one device only. There are apps for Android, iOS, Mac, and PC. Features include autofill on websites and receipt logging when using credit cards. Their site says they decrypt and encrypt locally only, using an unrecoverable master password.
> How cheap does it have to be before it is successful?

A good question, but the fact is that many cannot afford sufficient food. A quick search turned up this article from 2014 at the top (and many others too):

Hunger in America: 1 in 7 rely on food banks

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/17/hunger-...

1 in 7 Americans is around 45 million people (I know that's taking the headline at face value, but clearly there are many people who need it).
Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss
Is Academic Medicine for Sale?
Overall they are both great companies and home to some very happy engineers. What matters more is the team you'd be joining. My advice it to talk to the hiring managers from each company and see who you think is better aligned to your style of work. If you could visit them and meet the teams in person, that would be even better, and chances are, you'd find this becoming a much simpler decision.
Confident Ruby
It's policy document regarding the company's Standard Operating Procedures for conducting post-mortems on "incidents," which is technical parlance for investigating SNAFU's, major and minor, and assigning blame if appropriate or necessary.

A rose by any other name.
The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, Benjamin Bratton.
Analyzing Java memory usage in a Docker container
And on the other hand, I'm always suspicious of code that does something programming-like that is specific to the test framework.

If you need a loop, ideally you write the loop using the language, rather than using a test framework's special loop construct. For parameterization, ideally you'd use a function, rather than a special test framework concept for parameterization.

Having duals of every abstraction feature of a language in the test framework increases the cognitive load and ramp up time to become effective in a codebase, and there's always the risk of incomplete knowledge, leading to mixing and matching different abstractions - and test framework abstractions are usually more leaky and less well thought out than language abstractions.
Take a look at Concrete5. It's a LAMP stack like Wordpress, MVC under the covers, a common sense architecture, and highly extensible. It has an exceptional, in-context UI for content editing that is the best I've seen, and a good core team and community that is very active.

One area that Wordpress wins is with respect to the overall number of themes and plug-ins, but that's pretty much it.
How to dilute equity for founders and core team
Tests written after the feature is implemented can be very useful to keep an eye on regression in the case of teams where multiple developers are checking in changes throughout the day and there is a continuous integration build and test system present.

At two companies and across three teams where I've worked as a developer responsible for automation I have found that for integration and system type tests writing tests after feature implementation and properly reporting results following high frequency checkins has been allowed me to have a significant impact on the way we work to the point where some of the leads and management are actually taking testing more seriously than they used to. It's still hard to get rid of the idea that tests are secondary but they're not so eager to cut them as a matter of saving time as before after seeing how they allow us to identify problems faster, and therefore fix them faster.

In this article the author looks he's talking from the perspective of mostly a single developer or contractor but for bigger teams tests written after feature implementation are still important so I would say based on my experience don't discount them. That said, his approach to writing tests is something I agree with, rather than rigidly sticking to a particular methodology he is pragmatic and it's better than doing nothing.

Also he doesn't mention this but solid reporting is so important. I am involved with Tesults (https://www.tesults.com) which is a test results reporting application designed for teams of 10 or more to integrate into their build/test system. If you work for a team of this size and are serious about automated testing check it out. Send me an email if you're thinking of introducing it to your team and have any questions or feedback.
This is really only answerable by the person, but from what I have heard about Apple and Google living halfway between both HQs in the Valley, I would lean towards Google. They generally pay better from what I can tell, and seem to have more respect for software. Apple also is not as friendly towards supporting employee efforts in open source from what I understand as well. I have heard some talk about unhealthy work-life balance at Apple as well, although that appears to be a mixed bag (true for some, not others) - from what I know about my friends at both employers, it feels like more work longer at Apple than Google.

YMMV may vary of course, and these anecdotes may not necessarily even apply to your friend.
That's not sample bias, that's bias blind spot.