skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
20 years ago in the US was an anomaly. Remember "The Matrix" when Agent Smith said that 1999 was our society's peak? He was right, the movie makers just didn't realize how right they were at the time. Many things have indeed gone downhill since then, thanks to Bush.

For the stuff about war, what you're forgetting is all the stuff that came before: Vietnam, Korea, WWII, various other police actions, Beirut, etc. The 60s and 70s were a particularly turbulent time in recent American history. Do you see the National Guard out, shooting American protesters today? Nope. But they did exactly that in the 60s.

You're factually wrong about many things here. Civil/human rights were much worse in the past; just look at how hard it was for black people before the Civil Rights Act of the late 60s. You think today's incidents of cops shooting unarmed black people in the back is bad? It was a lot worse in the past, people just didn't care and no one had cameras to record it all. Rodney King was the first big instance of this being recorded by a bystander. Someone else mentioned gay marriage; 30+ years ago gay people had to hide in "the closet", many of them marrying heterosexually just to hide themselves. Crime is lower today than in the past, despite what some alarmists would have you believe. Go look up the actual stats. Crime in America has been on a downward trend for decades.

Income inequality is not at an all-time high. It's a lot worse than it should be, I agree, but go back to the Gilded Age and compare. It was worse back then. They didn't even have simple worker protections like 40-hour work weeks and OSHA to keep from getting maimed or killed on the job.

Yes, in many ways (but not all), things are definitely worse for Americans than in 1997, but overall things are a lot better than there were in the past before that. The 90s were simply an exceptional time, especially if you were a white American: the economy was booming, we were in a big lull between military adventures, the Soviet Union had collapsed and the Cold War was over, the Internet was becoming a household item (much like electricity or the telephone or the automobile became commonplace decades before, radically changing society). It was a great time to make money, buy a house, not worry about nuclear annihilation, etc. About the only people who were having a really bad time were the people in former Yugoslavia.
First off you don't get to just handwave away the conclusions of a group with a 72 year track record of engaging some of the best minds in the world to reach their conclusions. I urge you to take a little bit more time and familiarize yourself with the organization, it's goals, and it's methodologies before making baseless assertions that their conclusions are equivalent to astrology.

Your claims regarding the reliability of food and medicine sources are questionable. They are predicated on a fragile system of international logistics that if disrupted would result in mass starvation worldwide. Geopolitical instability raises the odds of just such a disruption.

Your assertion that existential threats like the threat of nuclear war were worse in the 90s is objectively false. All three of the world nuclear superpowers have active military operations with theater overlap. With these militaries operating in close proximity and occasionally bumping into each other the odds of an accidental escalation are greatly increased.

The fact that the majority of the world has identified global warming as an existential threat is heartening but as other commenters have pointed out the world industrial superpowers have to get on board and start pursuing aggressive policy changes for meaningful change to take place. Unless or until that happens what the rest of the world chooses is largely irrelevant.

TL;DR: I'm glad things are better for you now. It's not about you.
It's looking good, one thing that bothered me as it's css only is that form elements like checkboxes and radio buttons need to be styled separately (https://github.com/jgthms/bulma/issues/44)
20 Donald Trump Bankruptcy Memes
I'm not sure it applies. You can still be well educated and greedy/egotistical and not work for your constituents.

But within elections, what else SHOULD we vote for other than merit?

What really bothered me when Obama was elected was people throwing the word "elitism" around, because he was smart, eloquent and well educated, like that was somehow a bad thing.

I sure as hell hope that the people elected are smarter than me, because I would have no idea what I was doing in office.

But I guess we'll now see what happens when you elect someone that's "just like us", except born with money.
M.xkcd.com added HSTS
So how am I supposed to trigger wifi captive portals now?
I'd say you don't since stress is a subjective and qualitative thing.
I'm amused this came up today, simply because I'm currently reading The Fountainhead.
Because it is and given its prevalence that has important health implications for everyone on earth even teetotalists?
Here's an interesting podcast claiming the Dow is meaningless: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/01/04/508261371/episo...

The article might have already discussed this, but I can't tell because of the paywall.
As the saying goes, the graveyards are full of indispensable men. Life will go on without you at your old job. It may go well; it may go poorly. Either way, it's not your problem. You gave them plenty of notice already, if it was a big deal to them they'd make it worth your while to stay and they haven't. Don't feel guilty about treating employment as a business transaction; your employer doesn't.
Elon Musk Will Start Digging a Tunnel Under Los Angeles
After reviewing several of the newer tools on this list last year I decided to go with JQuery. I wanted to upgrade a fairly large web app that I had used Prototype.js and Scriptaculus.js for client side work.

JQuery was easier for me to just start using than the others. I didn't need to learn anything and the docs and example code available are extensive and top notch, and there are very few questions I ran into that weren't already answered on Stackoverflow.
You're in good company. Relevant XKCDs:

https://xkcd.com/725/

https://xkcd.com/1108/
It's a mildly interesting psychological milestone.
There are at least a couple resistant varieties ("Princeton" comes to mind) but none are fully immune. Resistance seems to depend on the type of beetle infesting the tree and other stressors.
We couldn't find a new, updated periodic table, so we created one! I think you'll love the video.

Leave a comment saying what you'd call the next element that get's discovered and we will pick someone to send a free poster.

We'll be giving them to schools and also sending a few of our postcard version to various Trump folks expressing the need for science ed!

If you want to skip Product Hunt, the Kickstarter page is here: http://kck.st/2j4TeeY
Another apropos line: "So don't be vain, and don't be whiny, or my brother I might have to get medieval on your hiney!"
Most current wealth is not in the form of natural resources.. Buildings, machinery, intellectual property (including trademarks) are not natural resources. We could charge every appropriator of natural resources a fee commensurate with the value that they are appropriating, and there would still be vast amounts of private property in the world, and that socialists would still think they have a right to forcibly redistribute.

>And your first paragraph is pretty much "all taxes are theft", that is usually the mantra of fanatical libertarians.

One person's "fanatical libertarian" is another person's human rights advocate.

>The economic illiteracy required to come up with your conclusions is astounding.

Worthless ad hominem.
Top 100 Tech IPOs of the last 10 years [Dataviz]
Correct me if I'm wrong, but was Dijkstra not known for never actually using a computer. He wrote code with pencil and paper. There's a gulf between academic code and the needs of the day to day programmer. That said, I agree with his statement about one liners. Code should be parsimonious. It should never be a puzzle to understand what the code is doing.
When science is a partisan issue, what else can you do?
8 basic income experiments to watch out for in 2017
Have you read the same interview ?

It's like you try to get a job and the ask "what's you biggest weakness ?" and you answer "I can't say, but people usually say I'm too invested in my work".

Why do I even have to explain that ?

Gates PR works so well I even have to rewrite the list of all the horrible stuff he's responsible for in the 90's because people keep forgetting. This is terrible, and a reason politicians and big companies manage to get away again and again with bad behavior.
Considering how anti-science republicans tend to be, I'm not surprised.
This is a duplicate.

The previous discussion is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13462865
The 3 month notice period doesn't make it difficult to dismiss staff.

The rules about dismissing staff make it difficult to dismiss staff, and aren't much affected by the notice period.
A natural waterslide in the middle of Winter? OK
Yup. We lost two, massive elms in our yard this past spring to Dutch Elm Disease. By the time you spot it, it's too late.
I can't recommend "Amusing Ourselves to Death" enough,
especially in the light of the most recent election processes the world is witnessing. Neil Postman's thesis is both timely and - unfortunately - eerie.
Astonishing speed given the scale...
My approach is:

Learn and do. Do and learn.

Learning (to me) is the process of applying theory to the real world. To my circumstances and situation. Not some perfect scenario that I have to wait for in order to be able to test. No. Test right here and now. Thats learning.
I mean, an app like this does have value imo. Maybe not this one, but like this. Ie, i'd love to meet other people trying to meet other people, but like online dating, i want the right grouping.

I don't want friends with no common interests. Right there that means going to a bar and making a friend is not likely to fit my profile desire. I could go to a common interest ground, like a sports bar or gaming center, but then i'm with a group of people who are not all looking for friends/etc.

I think there's room in this scape for most people. A dating site for friends. However i'm not sure what good features or UX is needed to wrap this concept in.
Nice writeup. If you are interested in learning KDB/Q, please take a look at this book:
http://code.kx.com/mkdocs/qformortals3/
Be careful if you decide to do this. If you help out & don't have a consulting agreement / contract in place + the correct insurance, etc... then you may find yourself on the hook for any problems that can be pinned on the work you do after you leave.
People should also read Down and Out in Paris and London - a fantastic book about being a poor vagabond in England and France.
What Trump voters said when asked to compare his inauguration crowd with Obama’s
College courses are a great option too (my school district allowed "dual enrollment" where you could take anywhere from one to all of your classes at one of the local community or state colleges). There are definitely some cases where the AP equivalent is "harder", better taught, or better suited to high-school age students, though.

I agree that defining "advanced" is very challenging, and goes beyond just the academic as well. There's also something to be said for being academically engaged with people similar to you (ie - some (most?) high school kids may learn more from peers in a self-selected AP Calculus class than they would from a Calc 1 class at the local college taken by kids looking to fill a requirement).
It got really bad the past 10 years or so with the "look at what I can do, ma!" blog posts where someone spends 4 pages violating the language in order to get clicks. It's especially endemic in Ruby-land, I find.
Leave as planned.

You don't owe them anything you scheduled leaving when the app was supposed to be in production. The schedule could keep slipping.

Plus your new employer is where you need to keep things positive. That's where your future is.

Fellow devs will understand.

You will look back on this in 6 months and be thinking why did I even think about hanging around any longer.
Yes, but not all humans have a concept of 'property' the same as all other humans, nor do some humans have a concept of 'property' at all. Look at Marxism, that idea of 'property' is very different than in capitalism. It is thought [0] that up until ~4k BC that no-one had an idea of property and we were all just gathering and hunting our way through life. If that is true, then the idea of 'property' is relatively new to humans as a species. So, we must define 'property' in a better way than I think is currently done. Unfortunately, the act of defining exactly what 'property' means can lead to conflict, such as the 50+ years leading up to the Civil War.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stateless_society#Prehistoric_...
I remember reading somewhere that the high percentage of chestnut was likely due cultivation / encouragement of growth by Native Americans. I think it was in the book 1491. A plausible theory but hard to prove, I guess.
"I agree with todd8, but would like to add that the next paragraphs were not added for two simple reasons: the quote itself was already too long and I felt it summarizes well enough the gist of the argument: programming languages should not allow 'clever' tricks."

It still seems intellectually dishonest to leave it out. Clearly, what Dijkstra in 1972 considers too "clever" may in fact be tools that are now basic building blocks of everyday software. We can all agree that "too clever" is bad. We can't agree on what "too clever" is.

"But, lets discuss the 'for clause' and 'do loop': these constructs were made specifically for one kind of simple loop. It is not a systematic solution for an iterative process."

I'm fairly sure (from what I remember him writing) that he doesn't like it because you can do the same thing with existing constructs, so you'd be adding complexity to the language that isn't strictly necessary. History has shown that actual programmers prefer having for loops like Algol.

"To me it seems Dijkstra specifically aims for languages such as LISP (which, with the renewed interest from Clojure is one of the most oldest successful (semi-) functional programming languages)."

Probably not, or else he would've talked about LISP in a different manner (he does talk about it in an earlier paragraph).
Wow, as a member of a blue-collar family this is downright insulting. The gross generalization of an entire social class is anything but healthy.

Funny enough, I just finished reading the article and comments from the story on what it's like to be poor at an Ivy League (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13480802). Personally, I thought that I never really felt disparate enough where I actually stuck out to my peers, and that the thoughts everyone had were more akin to class anxiety. It seems that the thoughts are not always unfounded I guess. Oh well.
> having to provide for the support of common infrastructure

If that were the only way taxes were spent, then taxes would be very low indeed, and we may not even need to have this discussion.

> and needs

Taxes pay for way more than "needs." Do we need to bomb people in the Middle East? If there no other way to pay for things than by the threat of violence?

> You're free to choose another place to live.

Am I? The United States must grant permission for you to renounce your citizenship, and until then, they claim taxes on your income no matter where derived. The government also controls the movement of people and may detain me if I attempt to leave the country. Of course I must also have the consent of some other government to gain entry and a work visa.

I did not freely choose to live in my country of birth. I did not consent to the obligations of taxes.

> You can object to paying 25% of your income, hand out tracts to that effect, and vote for politicians who may change that. You can't be bought and sold.

But in the end, you must pay...
Yes, just because a boss is expert doesn't mean they're innovative. The best bosses, IMO, know the state of the art, the state of the practice (both cutting edge AND reliable), and place a high value on invention and creativity, esp. toward improving on the status quo. Support for learning and exploring AS PART OF THE JOB is central to that zeitgeist.
Obama seemed a little embarrassed by the prize, although he handled it in a graceful way. It would have been a bigger blunder for him to reject the prize. I certainly don't think that anyone can call him a hypocrite for receiving the Nobel Peace prize though. If anything, it reflects badly on the Nobel committee.
AWS CodeBuild Jenkins Plugin
When I read comments like this I wonder if the person posting is trying to justify their own development decisions or seriously trying to "enlighten" the person they're responding to.
It's still important for the Dow Theorists (if there are any left).
Wouldn't that come with its own can of worms?

At some point, you try to fix what you think is already closer to what you want or what you have legacy code using it.
Some might argue that would be even worse.
I don't see how these results provide much useful information in terms of being able to say x is faster than y.

The hardware doesn't seem consistent across different benchmarks. He says it's fast for a "cpu system", but for practical purposes Phi competes more with GPGPUs.

Would this be just as fast with one redis system with 512GB ram? I don't know too many apples to oranges here.
> the two goals are not mutually exclusive.

Every dollar you spend on your bunker is a dollar you don't spend helping the world keep out of the sort of trouble that would make your bunker necessary.

I'm not saying you aren't entitled to spend your time and money however you like, but there is a mathematical sense in which the goals do conflict, even if only via opportunity cost.
Before I quit, I felt like I'd hit 100% stress at work. It was an unfriendly environment, my manager was so stressed that she stressed everyone else out just from talking to her, and I got a strong feeling that my project manager hated her job (and me). The work itself was tedious and poorly spec'ed out by the requestors.

100% stress can be FINE under the right circumstances. With a supportive boss and team, you feel like you won't actually drown in the work. But when the team is wishy-washy and distant... well, then you get a situation where something has to give.
> Another distinction you fail to see is that somebody who is great at finding the best or optimal algorithms (i.e. a great theorist) isn't necessarily a productive programmer.

I suppose what you're saying here is that there are a lot of business tasks which don't require a great theorist.

I don't think Dijkstra would disagree.

But still, calling Dijkstra an "unproductive programmer"? Really? I'll take one Dijkstra's algorithm over a dozen web apps. And if I can have a patent on it, I can even make a solid business case for that choice.

> If we followed his opinions on how to program, we wouldn't get much of anything done.

And yet, how many man-years of engineering effort could we waste having bad theorists who can quickly hack out LoB code try to re-invent Dijkstra's algorithm?

Perhaps software engineering is a very wide field, and it takes all types?
>If you honestly don't believe the world is unambiguously better now than it was 20-30 years ago, you've been living under a continental plate the entire time.

This is factually wrong.

You're looking at things worldwide, and while it may be true that on average, things are better than 20 years ago, in the US this is simply not the case for the majority. The 90s were an economic boom time in the US, and there was almost no military action going on at all, the Cold War was over with the Soviet Union collapsed, and people were making money hand over fist in the internet bubble (which didn't collapse until the early 2000s).

>Not to mention that the majority of the world has finally recognized and united around solving the single greatest threat to our civilization, a threat that pretty much irreversibly changed our climate by the time we identified it and became completely unavoidable by the 1990s.

This is factually wrong as well, if you accept that you're not going to get very far when the US completely disagrees with you, and this is important since the US is one of the biggest energy consumers and carbon polluters. In case you haven't noticed, the Trump administration, and the half of the nation that voted for him, does not believe in global warming, and wants to massively increase coal production and usage.
So if we say all taxes are theft, then we are left with no way to force everyone to contribute to public goods.

The normal response by anti-tax people is that all of the roles of government should be funded by opt-in systems, where you agree to pay a fee to get the service.

However, this doesn't work for a lot of public goods that suffer from free loader problems; you can't prevent people from benefiting from the good if they don't pay. Take, for example, roads; either roads are public, and a freeloader can choose not to pay and use them anyway, or they are private toll roads, and a person could be literally imprisoned because every road to move around requires payment to use.

An even more obvious example is something like pollution control. Society has an interest in preventing people from dumping toxic waste into rivers and lakes, so we create restrictions. However, someone has to enforce those restrictions, and that requires funding. Without taxes, we would have to volunteer to pay money for the enforcement; however, why would I pay? I get to enjoy the clean water whether I pay or not, so why not just freeload? This will mean enforcement funding will not be there, and people can just pollute as much as you want.

You need a way to get everyone to contribute for public goods, which is why we need taxes.
A 466M-year-old space collision is still raining shrapnel on Earth
How to Capture Attention in a Cluttered World
The government should not be running any schools at all. They can impose taxes to fund them, but everyone should go to private schools that operate on the free market. Then you wouldn't need to ask the government to build another school; you could just do it.
considering 99% install a vpn on android for two reason:

1. bypass content restrictions by geoip (e.g. pandora, netflix)

2. a vpn that is just a local traffic monitor to tweak iptables(?) and block apps from using the network (to download ads). (e.g. netguard)
If anything they should be happy to get scientifically minded people from any party. This seems stupid from the start.
How to become an ethical hacker