skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's not quite true. The profitability comes from increased density. Instead of one business with a huge parking lot generating 1,000,000/year in revenue, you get three businesses with sidewalk traffic and street parking only generating 400,000/year each for a net gain of 200,000. Investing in the neighborhood - eg, with streetlights so that people will feel safe coming out after dark, thus effectively increasing the businesses hours of operation - might push up revenue for those three businesses to $600,000/year each, and the increased taxes will pay for the improvements.

However, a more usual pattern is for the three existing businesses to be torn out and replaced with a single retail space that's up to code, beautiful, clean, modern, and a financial drain on the city.
How can you accurately comment on something that you don't even know the name of? You are almost certainly referring to LabVIEW, which is a graphical programming language commonly used in instrumentation applications and also serves as the foundation of the LEGO MINDSTORMS software.

I have built many large applications in LabVIEW (>1,000 VIs), and I can easily state there is no inherent fault in being to build large systems with a graphical language vs a text-based one. Why? Because I have actually done it, resulting in extensible and maintainable code. The dataflow nature of the language makes it easy to understand how data flows through your system. It even has by-value OOP and an actor framework.

Physicists complaining about it have no merit because they have zero idea about software development, architectures, design patterns, etc. They love Python for whatever reason and don't complain about it, yet it's still terrible code. I have seen LabVIEW sworn off by top of the line physicists only to be shown their Python program that was a single file with about 15,000 lines of code and such atrocities as functions with greater than 20 arguments spread over 10 lines. It was an atrocity.

I have written multithreaded applications in Python, and the equivalent LabVIEW application would be far simpler because you get multithreaded behavior for free.

Many software engineers swear graphical languages are only for toy applications, but yet they've never actually built anything of note themselves in one. So it's a poor argument to listen to (as in the person you replied to) when it's purely speculation based on no real data. They somehow forget that they spent four years in college getting it drilled into their head that linear, text-based files are the only way to program a computer. It's interesting to note than any high level thought (e.g. mathematics) bears more resemblance to graphical notation than pure text-based notation.
Yes I think "data race freedom" when I see "thread-safety" (I despise this one term for being so vague).

In the punchline, "prevent segfaults" is framed in negative terms. If you put "provides memory safety" it will be a bit less evocative of specific pain, but will give a warm feeling.
Debt is a powerful weapon: it can build wealth or destroy it
Sidechains still require the bitcoin network to validate eventually, otherwise they are just another payment system. They also don't scale with users.

Ethereum & Monero have become popular enough that most people would just switch to that rather than go to lightning. Then the whack-a-mole begins.
* on Amazon purchases

Looks like a neat deal to me, but it's a bit weird to say there's no annual fee when you need to have a Prime membership...
> How will you avoid having two variants of each and every lib ?

The python community is also struggling with this problem. The emerging approach, which seems to me to be the right approach, is to write the libraries such that they do not do any IO; then you can use them anywhere, with some integration. So basically it's just the principle of separation of concerns.

See more here: https://sans-io.readthedocs.io/how-to-sans-io.html
+3%? Well, that's less inspiring news than I'd hoped. Still, it's something, I suppose.

Anyway, that's another very interesting link you've got there - I knew about SSL Labs, but hadn't come across that report before. Looks like something worth keeping an eye on. Cheers!
Yeah. The article is like "everyone at BitTorrent Inc said Cohen is brilliant, so he's brilliant". BitTorrent is a shit way to move files that only makes sense if your users are willing to subsidise your bandwidth for you. If you look at how big files are moved on the net in practice it's all professional CDNs. BitTorrent is hardly used outside piracy.
Casebolt- now that's an evocative name for an industrial designer.

Kind of grim news for a possibility of a Mac Pro refresh coming out anytime soon.
Technically it's on a Tuesday because back in 1845 people needed a travel day to get to the ballot box and another day to travel back, and you can't travel on the Christian Sabbath, so that only leaves Tuesday - Friday as options.

https://www.bustle.com/articles/192414-why-do-we-vote-on-tue...

Why is it still on a Tuesday? I think your reason is spot on.
Nice post. Thanks for that.

> You can control how you spend your free time / what you learn about in your free time (How much do you know about investing? Tax law? Corporate/economic/governmental trends?)

Good advice, there is always stuff to learn. It feels like my problem is that work drains so much out of me that I am too tired/unmotivated to do anything else when I get home. I know it's a discipline issue but that doesn't make it easier. It's hard to come from a day spent working "for the man", straight into more work for yourself at night.

Good luck, I hope we both end up beating the system.
Was excited for a while...but US only. I need UK...
There's already the 'Amazon.com Store Card` which offers 5% back on purchases at Amazon.com. It can only be used for Amazon.com purchases.

There's also the 'Amazon Rewards Visa Card' which offers 2% back at gas stations, drugstores and restaurants (all other purchases are 1% back).

So unless I'm mistaken, this just looks like it combines both benefits into one card.
> 2. Futures/promises/tasks are first-class values. You could pass them along, save them for later, await on all or any of them and so forth.

Can you explain why this is unachievable other than by tagging your yield-capable call sites?
UC Berkeley | Programmer | Berkeley, CA | FULLTIME, ONSITE, http://r-nimble.org

The NIMBLE software development team at UC Berkeley is looking for a programmer to help develop the core features of the NIMBLE platform (r-nimble.org). NIMBLE is a framework built in R for writing general statistical models and algorithms. NIMBLE includes a domain-specific language embedded in R for programming statistical algorithms. The language is compiled by automatically generating and compiling C++ code and interfacing C++ objects to R. This position includes work to harness parallel processing and automatic differentiation, to generate interfaces with other languages such as Python, to improve NIMBLE's scope and efficiency for large statistical models, and to build other new features into NIMBLE.

Please see https://r-nimble.org/nimble-is-hiring-a-programmer for details and the link to the application.
> - New solid state home button

I personally consider this a reduction, not an addition. I prefer the old button.
Please read the rest of my comment. It's not used for input errors.
> Collaborating IRL is more effective IMHO

I've done a lot of both, and what I've found is that in person works better if the company isn't "remote first". Being one or a few remote people sucks, lots of stuff happens in the office without you. But having the right tools for remote work makes it in some cases better.

But even in the case of an office, when everyone goes remote, suddenly it's not so bad.

At reddit, since when I was there everyone else was just out of college, we always worked the last two weeks of the year from home because we had "winter break". So for those few weeks, we were a 100% remote company, and it worked out ok. BUT, we didn't make any big decisions or do any deep collaboration because even though everyone was remote we waited till we got back to the office, not because it was better but because we weren't set up to do it remotely.

It's really all about having good processes for remote work -- ie. as much async as possible. And once you do that, even if you go to an office later, you've get better systems set up for tracking what happened and seeing history for new employees.

The worst thing for a new employee is having to get up to speed when all the meetings were in person and not recorded.
> and the tax they pay locally is going to come from the local customers.

That's going to depend on the business. I doubt a significant fraction of googles revenues come from the city it's located in for instance.
Do you take umbrage with "free shipping" being used to describe shipping with a Prime membership?
Richmond (BC, Canada) to enforce ban on short-term Airbnb rentals, says mayor
Rotating nodes is an easy way to reduce line crossings. Here's a comparison [0].

However, it does seem that vertical and angled text is harder to read than horizontal text, so there is room to improve here.

[0] https://gist.github.com/rgleichman/f812150151b549ca9f634832c...
True. But 3% even without Prime on Amazon.com which isn't shabby.
I hope what you're really saying is that they need to do a better job of marketing to folks not already familiar with Haskell or similar ML-derived functional programming languages.

And that's probably true.

As for specifically competing with Clojure... frankly, who cares? The two are so different as to render such a comparison fairly useless: Lisp-y s-expressions versus ML-style syntax. Strict Hindley-Milner-style type system vs Lisp-style dynamic typing. Lazy evaluation versus strict. Pure versus impure. The list goes on and on.

Clojure is an interesting language, no doubt. But your response would seem to imply it's the end-all and be-all of programming languages, and given how subjective such an assessment would be, it strikes me as a fairly vacuous claim...
I have added My Worst Interview Ever to the list of podcasts that I will listen to on a regular basis. I have had the honor to have a conversation with Tim Sinclair on my own podcast.
> What is required is a good theoretical explanation for why investors fail to predict the point they are in the bubble and rein in speculation, since obviously this cycle has happened many times in the past.

I think the problem is human nature. People forget. Sure, this has happened many times before, but the most recent time was, say, eight years ago. That's a long time in peoples' memories.

And, while there may be this nagging memory of trouble, right now there's money to be made...
That's what it sounded like to me. He said they'd take a block of 50k houses to turn into 55k houses which will pay more taxes (and since the area is poor it requires less funds to service). So it's a better investment than affluent areas from a direct profitability metric.

Of course, the bump in those home's property tax revenue wouldn't drive other revenue like investing in making a downtown more upscale would: more local homeowner values (and property tax revenue), corporate business tax revenue, sales tax and tourist revenue. He brushes off simplistic arguments but his argument is simplistic as well - and he advocates for squeezing the poor! The poor would rather have lower taxes than a bump in home value.

> We see this trend everywhere we've done a model. On a per acre basis, neighborhoods that tend to be poor also tend to pay more taxes and cost less to provide services to than their more affluent counterparts. How is this possible? Some of my planner colleagues will say it is density..

Then he goes into how it's cheaper to service but really offers no argument about the density especially as it relates to the 2 photos he proposes as evidence (the 1.1M poor block vs the 618k affluent block - it's actually 803k on his other article). Clearly there are more structures and less parking on the poor block. The poor picture has this: "two liquor stores, a pawn shop, a barber shop, a bankruptcy attorney, a campaign headquarters, a retail establishment, a cafe and a vacant building." How can he shrug off density?

> Poor neighborhoods subsidize the affluent; it is a ubiquitous condition of the American development pattern.

Bold claim with no evidence. Perhaps he meant to say "poor neighborhoods are more profitable on a property tax basis than affluent neighborhoods"
Why Are There So Many People in Jail in Scranton, PA?
Eta will still be "Haskell" because they conform to the language spec, even if they don't have all the features of the latest version of GHC (the flagship Haskell compiler).

I agree with the grandparents disappointment somewhat though. At the very least there is still room for someone to build a JVM compatible backend for GHC, since this is no longer a goal of Eta.
P2P streaming solved a problem when bandwidth cost a lot. Now that it's so much cheaper everyone just chooses to serve it themselves. Even for small operations there's tonnes of cloud options like DO, Scaleway, OVH, et al that offer cheap bandwidth. 10 years ago I paid $12/mbps for dedicated servers just for streaming, now I can get ~200mbps for $5/month (0.025/mbps).
You can't get 99% of a population to leave their homes where they grew up without hard push factors.

Especially since their assets were confiscated...
It's common for cards to have a roughly $99 yearly fee that gives you nothing other than the ability to have the card. It's a stretch, but I don't think it's dishonest to say the card is free* . *With an Amazon Prime membership.
When I remark that President Obama had eight years without any ethical shadiness, Mr. Thiel flips it, noting: “But there’s a point where no corruption can be a bad thing. It can mean that things are too boring.”

I gasped when I read this
Regarding this line:

let addr = "127.0.0.1:12345".parse().unwrap();

Is Rust like Ruby in that devs and library authors can add methods to and redefine built-ins? And that merely including a library can alter the definition of those objects everywhere in your project's code?

I'm not trying to start a language war, but IMO that's too bad: this feature is, in my experience, the single largest source for difficult-to-detect errors that characterize the Ruby programming experience, e.g. anything that uses Rails. It also contributes to deep stack traces which are essentially useless, because the departure point from your actual code is some 20+ frames above the site of the error.
Extend robots.txt to specify session variable names?
To cope with visitors who block cookies, we use a query variable in our URLs to maintain sessions. In our case we use "z", because it is short and unlikely to be used for anything else. So our URLs look like www.example.com/contact?z=123456.

However, this confuses most bots because they assume the query variable indicates a distinct resource, fairly enough. So each time a bot visits, it gets a new session variable - and ends up crawling tens if not hundreds of copies of the same page. I'm aware that some bots (Google for example) allow you to specify the name of your session variable, but there are now thousands of bots and informing each one of your session variable name seems impractical.

So would it be a good idea to extend robots.txt to allow specification of query variables that do not indicate distinct resources? "Ignore-query-var: z" perhaps?
Chomsky, Wolfe and me
To me, he comes off here as completely uninformed about virtually every subject in which he is interviewed. I'm not sure why he'd agree to an interview if he wasn't going to do _some_ preparation.

Just look at this trainwreck:

> When I remark that President Obama had eight years without any ethical shadiness, Mr. Thiel flips it, noting: “But there’s a point where no corruption can be a bad thing. It can mean that things are too boring.”

Or this:

> When I ask him if he can explain to Mr. Trump that climate change is not a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, he offers a Chinese box of an answer: “Does he really think that? If he really thinks that, how would you influence that? If he really thinks that and you could influence him, what would be the best way to do it?”

It feels to me like he thinks he's just shooting the shit with a friend, not publishing his views for millions of Americans to read. Can anyone explain this apparent lack of self-awareness?
Yogthos (Dimitri) is the best, he's always helping people out on Reddit and Slack and his books and blogs are pretty helpful as well.

He's actually fairly representative of the clojure community in that respect, which is just another reason it's a pleasure to develop in.
That is the story of my first house in a every inexpensive blue collar/working class neighborhood. Five basic single story floorplans, couple different elevations. I purchased it at approximately 20 years old (that was 15 years ago), and at that point the houses had started to need new siding, roofs, etc. So generally as new buyers purchased them, they gutted and refinished them to varying levels. The end result is that its quite possible in many cases to walk into a house with the same basic floorplan and not really realize it right away because a couple walls had been moved around, the kitchens and bathrooms have been heavily updated at differing times and reflect the styles when they were last remolded. The landscaping is wildly different, back patio/decks/pools vary in size/style, etc.

I never knew it was possible to put brick or stonework on a house built with wood siding until living in that neighboorhood. A couple of the owners apparently worked construction putting in brick siding and they bricked up their own houses in a few days. Another guy covered his house in white stonework rather than just the limited front elevation with a chair rail high stonework.
> This whole mess (subprime auto, renovation, and home loans) comes from the increasingly rent seeking nature of Wall Street.

You don't support this statement at all.

>It used to be that fortunes were both made and lost on Wall Street. Now, for large investors ("whales"), it's 3.5% or I take my money to another fund.

Investors have always done this, large and small. And 3.5% isn't a great rate of return. The official CPI, which probably understates increases in the cost of living, was 1.7%.

>If I don't have a consistent positive return, then it's something wrong with the fund/firm, not the natural order of things. This behavior encourages siphoning from pensions, the retirement funds of average people and "fudging the numbers" on packaged securities in order to keep up with the expected returns of the "whales".

That's pretty illegal if true. Do you have any evidence it's actually happening?
Former employees sue Microsoft after developing PTSD
> If Hipchat was not bought by Atlassian, it will be a serious contender for Slack?

We can debate counterfactuals all day, but the potential was absolutely there. Consider:

Hipchat was purchased by Atlassian before Slack even launched. (Slack launched August 2013; Hipchat purchased March 2012.) And back in 2012 Hipchat was almost exactly what it is today: A functional chat app with searchable logs, native clients for many platforms, a somewhat clunky UI, and some persistent issues with syncing and reliability. Further, when Slack launched, it wasn't nearly as good as it is now: They've made significant improvements over the years. Back in 2013 the Hipchat/Slack race was still pretty close, and that's after Hipchat had spent the last year doing nothing.

Slack launched into an opening that Hipchat created by stagnating. It's not that Hipchat could have potentially competed with Slack; it's that Hipchat could have easily crushed Slack. Slack exists now because they built the stuff that Hipchat didn't.
Ask HN: Website design builder
The website trend nowadays seems to be multiple horizontal sections, starting with a large photo as a header and continuing with various sections like "Who we are", "3 easy steps", "Pricing" etc. The only example I can think of is https://www.pagerduty.com, but basically pretty much every website that's presentation-focused looks like this.

I am absolutely convinced that I saw a tool on HN (one of the "Show HN"s) that would allow you to easily create such a website/template. You could interactively add rows and, for each one, you could specify what type its content should be: 3 icons, 2 icons, two tabs, whatever. It looked pretty neat and I could really use it right now. I think I spotted it around 1-2 months ago.

Can anyone remember what that was, please?
I did not downvote you but I think you are being downvoted because computer-aided music production and algorithmic music composition are two very different things; when using a DAW program, musicians still need to enter notes using some sort of GUI (nowadays the most common interface is called "piano roll")[1].

Algorithmic composition, on the other hand, is less common, and mostly relegated to avant-garde or art music, although there are examples in popular music such as Brian Eno[2].

[1] http://www.image-line.com/support/FLHelp/html/pianoroll.htm

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_music
15% interest rate with perfect credit? Not even remotely interested.
I had never heard this, potentially SV history changing story before...

He recalls a story from his and Mr. Musk’s PayPal days, when Mr. Musk joined the engineering team’s poker game and bet everything on every hand, admitting only afterward that it was his first time playing poker. Then there was the time they were driving in Mr. Musk’s McLaren F1 car, “the fastest car in the world.” It hit an embankment, achieved liftoff, made a 360-degree horizontal turn, crashed and was destroyed.

“It was a miracle neither of us were hurt,” Mr. Thiel says. “I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, which is not advisable. Elon’s first comment was, ‘Wow, Peter, that was really intense.’ And then it was: ‘You know, I had read all these stories about people who made money and bought sports cars and crashed them. But I knew it would never happen to me, so I didn’t get any insurance.’ And then we hitchhiked the rest of the way to the meeting.”
I just had to deal with an insecure default in our Hadoop cluster.

Hadoop, by default, enables WebHDFS, which provides read+write access to HDFS over HTTP. The service runs on name node using the same port which displays the Hadoop Jobs Web UI.

Now, it is very easy to not know anything about WebHDFS and every day authenticate/login to server, submit jobs, and track the status on WebUI (which is public). But then anyone can send a POST request pretending to be any user and Hadoop will happily execute the command (including deleting all files).

Maybe Hadoop developers believe that all Hadoop installations are behind a firewall (ours was, but an exception was made for Jobs Web UI as it seemed to be a read-only status page for running jobs) and/or have Kerberos integrated with Hadoop for authentication.

But that being said, enabling HDFS access over HTTP by default seems to a debatable choice. Also, if you have a small Hadoop cluster running, do set "dfs.webhdfs.enabled" property to False in hdfs-site.xml.
I've heard a similar anecdote about a racing game (I think it might have been in Forza) where the developer had a AI where individual racers could hold grudges and that would affect how aggressively they treated you (bump someone in lap 1 and they'll be more aggressive in lap 3). Eventually they had to take it out for various reasons, but didn't advertise that fact for obvious reasons. When the game was finally released several reviewers brought up the feature as a plus, not realising that they were just reading into the actions of the standard AI.

As a side note, the writeup of F.E.A.R's AI is a fascinating read. By combining very simple goals and actions, they created AI that is still remembered as incredibly good. http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~jorkin/gdc2006_orkin_jeff_fear....