skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I liked this essay, but I also wanted to rant for a bit about how the state of the Linux Desktop is just one particularly glaring example of a bigger problem, which is that instead of building something that works for most use cases, it seems to be popular to build things that work really well for one use case and not so well for others. Which in some cases is fine, but when we're talking about infrastructure like operating systems or programming environments or APIs, it's a big problem for anyone who wants to build on top of this infrastructure because then they have to pick a technology stack that limits who will use the thing they write because it was built on top of stuff that only works well in its little niche.

I write software. Suppose I want to write a program and have lots of other people use it, and want good confidence that those people will continue to be able to use it for a long time into the future. This is a pretty basic thing to want to do; how do I do it?

The first question is what kind of software is it? If it's a desktop application, then I'd need to write it for Windows and/or MacOS. If it's a server application, then Linux would be a good choice. If it's mobile, then iOS or Android.

Writing in Java might be a good choice for OS portability, but then I'd have to educate all my users on how to run java apps on their platform.

So, what we have is a lot of walled gardens and the un-walled wilderness of Linux, and these are all incompatible with each other for various reasons and I can't really say that any one of them is what I would call a good general-purpose platform for writing general-purpose programs.

It seems like something that's missing in the open source community (and something that would combat the walled-garden balkanization of user communities in both proprietary and open-source software) is an effort to create portable, carefully designed binary formats and APIs that we intend to be stable and usable for the next fifty years or so, and that "just work" for almost any common use case, whether it's a desktop app, a mobile app, a server app, an enterprise app, an embedded systems app, whatever, and then we make sure that there are tools available on every open platform to run these portable binaries.

(Java did attempt this before, but their early efforts were slowed by being a proprietary single-vendor platform; once they opened up, Java was kind of old and less exciting. It should be possible to do better by creating a new platform that isn't part of some maneuver by one tech behemoth to take market share from some other tech behemoth, and by building from a more modern foundation.)
There is CJDNS (https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/blob/master/doc/Whitepape...) which has distributed routing table and addressing based on public keys.
Irony of only focusing on tech jobs when talking about H1-B is two-fold:

1) Tech jobs (especially in software fields) are some of the easiest to do remotely. Creating higher barriers to H1-B visas will only create higher incentives to let those same workers work from their home countries instead of bringing them all the way to the US. The unintended side-effect of course is that this is actually cheaper for the employers, siphons spending outside the US economy and to the extent this is believed to be zero-sum market (it's not), you have to believe that this will depress the job market here.

2) Software is not the only field H1-B jobs are used in. There are whole categories of jobs where $130K salary is absurdly high even for top candidates (without any visa restrictions). Case in point, academic researchers and scientists.
Author here, no, it doesn't support TCO and you'd have to resort to trampolining here too. In another post[1] I've talked about this and I agree it's definitely not an elegant workaround.

[1] https://www.uraimo.com/2016/05/05/recursive-tail-calls-and-t...
You must not be from China or India then.
It is also a system with some very dangerous externalities that should not be ignored simply because you dislike admitting all philosophies have blemishes.

Capitalism, alone, requires all participants to be omnscient in regards to present and future circumstances to be correct. It is a deep flaw you likely ignore along with the externalities involved in the process when such omnscient power is denied to most market participants.
Sonique, I still have skins downloaded for that somewhere.
In a similar vein as dirtyaura's comment, it's not a technology or tools problem. It's a people and relationships problem.

Successful businesses are built on the backs of relationships. Your product is important, your tech is somewhat important, but THE most important part of a building what many would call a "successful" business is the relationships you create.

It doesn't matter what you're trying to achieve -- convince people to buy your product, convince people to work for your company, convince VCs to give you money, convince Google to buy you -- all of these things may begin on the premise of merit, price, features, value, but they end up based on the relationships built between the people involved.

Deals are closed over drinks. People work for people they enjoy spending time with. VCs invest money in people they trust. Yes, all things in life have exceptions, but the longer you stay in business, the more you realize that businesses are run by people -- they are not opaque fact-driven entities -- and people are social creatures. The actual reason that people in San Francisco still cling to an age-old culture of doing business together in person instead of over Slack is because humans enjoy spending physical time around other humans. Maybe it's communication bandwidth, maybe it's something else, but until VR replaces physical intimacy, there is no perfect substitute.

If you want to succeed outside of San Francisco, begin building the relationships you need to do so. People can claim that Slack, Hangouts, and the phone match the effectiveness of physical presence, but try switching to a permanent long-distance relationship with your significant other. Good luck.
It's exhausting and quite frustrating... As a 27 year old, I have no idea what I'll be doing over the next several decades, but if there is any chance of it touching the public sphere, I feel somewhat compelled to think about the long term impacts of all my online activity (and even some offline activity). I know much of the data will be lost over time, but a lot of it won't.

I try not to worry too much, but it's undeniably had an affect on my behavior.
Yes, but look to the use of them. California is hotter than other states. It is also subject to heatwaves in the south, short periods of intense heat which are uncommon elsewhere. People in LA basically live in AC during such times. Washington state may have more machines but doesn't get the heatwaves and so doesn't need the same reserves.
Interestingly missing: Tesla, SolarCity, and SpaceX
Must Have WordPress Plugins for Business Websites in 2017
One of the founders (Max Temkin) has a podcast with a Cards' employee (Alex Cox) and Merlin Mann (Merlin Mann). It's called Do by Friday.
Overcast: https://overcast.fm/itunes1169249168/do-by-friday
iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/do-by-friday/id116924916...
I stopped using Winamp since '04 or later after discovered foobar2000. I prefer the outlook of foobar2000 than Winamp, especially its text-based layout, and it has more audio codecs (FLAC, APE, ...).
> Companies pollute our environment externalizing costs on society.

Interestingly, historical experiments in communism have led to vastly increased rates of environmental destruction as compared to market economies. The reason is fairly obvious if you have a some economic background and think about it for a bit; in a market economy with resource ownership, people who own resource rights (e.g. to fell the trees in an area) will notice that they can make a lot more money if they spread the resource sales over time; if they sell all their trees now, they'll push down the market value of lumber and have decreasing marginal returns on each tree they fell. In the presence of a rich market system including market mechanisms like futures, market participants make a lot more money planning for the future than just trashing the environment as fast as possible.

Compare this to a communist state. The people in charge of resource management don't make money anyway, so they don't really care about the same optimization a capitalist would. Of course, they can buy political favor at little cost to them by pushing way down the diminishing marginal returns curve and exhausting a resource way faster than a self-interested capitalist would. Great job, commissar, look at all this wood! After all, if you can make your peers happy for a few years you'll get a promotion to a better government position (or retire early on your pension) and the fact that this area is now barren is someone else's problem.
https://hourlynerd.com/ is an interesting model, if a different industry
One way is to model the call stack explicitly. I.e. you will need objects (or structs, in Go) representing a stack frame, and have a stack of those (the actual call stack). Evaluation works very different that way, since you can no longer piggyback on the implementation language's call stack. It does mean that you can now do the desired tail call optimizations, e.g. if you're evaluating (if cond a b), and you've evaluated 'cond', then you can replace the if's stack frame with one containing just a or b, and continue evaluation there.

One benefit of this is that continuations become trivial to implement (they're just a snapshot of the call stack at a given point).

Admittedly, almost all write-your-own-Lisp tutorials omit this, and use a bunch of recursive calls (in the implementation language) instead, which makes it very hard to do TCO, continuations or anything else that requires a real call stack (exception tracebacks, for example).

(I hope this answer makes sense; it's 3 in the morning here, so clarity might suffer a bit. ;-) But as it happens, I am writing a (hopefully non-toy) Lisp interpreter myself, in Go, so the question attracted my interest.
Hacker Noir / Development setup phase
Figuring out the best place to live in Helsinki
Still using winamp 5.0 with MEXP plugin: the best music library out there: http://www.mexp.dk/
For tech it could be a nice add-on to Stack Overflow, since they have a reasonable amount of data of people's knowledge/quality and a reputation system
Hope you have an flame retardant suit.
To add, you don't really need that many lambda call for it to be the same price to just have a small always running instance. You can still use it lambda style if you wish, with automatic deployment.
Can you give me an example of where my experience as an end-user in the UK is different from what it would be in the US? Currently in Thailand where there's noticeable censorship.
I second this. While I still will keep pointing out flaws of the market economy, there's no doubt it pretty much lifted us to this age of prosperity most humans enjoy today. It's, I think, something often forgotten. It's easy now to point out problems with capitalism, because we're all used to the parts where it works well and for the benefit of humanity. We should not forget about that, but we also shouldn't stop trying to correct the market in areas it fails.
You dream, come up with different perspectives, learn, come up with creative ideas, etc... At least that is the case for some people.
Not sure. the diff between 12 to 14 years experience is not like 2 to 4 years.
One more: stop directly manipulating the Fed Funds rate -- in fact, get rid of it altogether. You could argue that the Fed can safely provide a backup reserve fund with an above-market interest rates for banks, but to set direct price controls on the rate at which private banks lend to one another is absolutely ridiculous -- on par with failed Soviet-era command economies (or Venezuela). Eight years of near 0% interest rates has put us in the same situation that we were in back in 2007. The interest rate problem is actually worse, although we don't have Fannie Mae snatching up bad mortgages like they were during the last boom.
> I'm a musician, so I can hear this happening; music played through VLC sounds like it's going in and out of tune, like an old cassette deck but more subtle. (This is worse on Windows for whatever reason, Linux is much less audible.)

I occasionally hear this on MP3s or Oggs (never FLACs) on the Android version (my phone media player of choice), but never on the Desktop version. It's pretty obviously a bug, though I can't get it to happen with any reproducibility.
I've done those sorts of jobs, admittedly when I was a student so they were only temporary....

It remains the case that lots of Americans do not have jobs, while lots of immigrants do have jobs.

I'm sure there are many complex reasons for this, but it's still not obvious to me that unemployed Americans would do the jobs that are currently done by people who are so "poor and desperate, they will usually take any work they can get regardless of immigration status or citizenship".
This is no issue with a VPN. My "real" number is registered with a VOIP provider, and I just buy a new SIM card from a vending machine at the airport with cash every so often. I'm not even trying to be particularly anonymous, it's just easy.
Disk Usage Visualization for MacOS
The tech worker salaries are completely unreasonable compared to other jobs. The characters from the article could just agree to work for $60 000/year (which still is a lot) and wouldn't lose their jobs.
"Writing code in terms of small, composable, reusable functions with a clear single intent (through good naming), that you can then mix, match, and reuse to compose into larger functions is what makes good functional code so much easier to write, test, and reason about than imperative code."

Absolute, that holds for non functional code as well.

It just does not matter whether the smallest function inside that system of functions has a loop or a map inside it. Loops are as easy to tuck into reusable functions as maps or anything else. Notably examples in the presentation you link have functional version shorter, but harder to read - they have more features however. Even the first one pipe(..., reduce(add, 0)) just does not read fluently.

But again, this low level has very little influence on maintainability of the larger program. In anything that is not computational library, how you compose them matters more. It is as if you assumed code with loops can not be split into smaller composable units.

I worked with codebase written in largely functional style. It was hard to read at first, but then I got used to it. However, it never became all that much easier to read them loops nor easier to work with. It gets bad when people get clever with composing functions.
Makes sense as Elon is a Trump advisor. Also interestingly missing: Amazon.
Here is the ad:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gcWW-pN_niE
oh God, RealPlayer. I'd suppressed the memories.

That said, Real's open-source version, Helix Media Player, was not awful (and didn't have the same tentacular behaviour).
What are the best resources for studying AI/Machine Learning?
I'm interested in AI/machine learning and have started reading 'Deep Learning'. Was wondering if this is a good place to start off. Any recs would be appreciated!
> Capitalism also drives greed, destruction and human misery

Interesting you say this, because (by a huge margin) the worst instances of all these things took place under non-capitalist governments. Here's a good rundown wrt destruction and human misery: http://necrometrics.com/20c5m.htm

The most incredibly flourishing of human potential has, around and since the renaissance, occurred in market environments. It looks like greed and destruction and misery are probably going to happen no matter what (at least, no one has figured out to prevent them yet), but they seem to actually be minimized in market societies.
An additional detail is also the expansion of the panama canal which allowed more and larger ships to travel through it cutting down the travel time for larger cargo ships eliminating a primary advantage of smaller vessels.

However ironically though, these mega vessels are considered with quite a bit of disdain by many in the industry. This link can provide quite the rabbit hole of information. http://www.supplychain247.com/article/state_of_ocean_contain...
Hi! Seeing that the search script posted on top just shows the number of jobs that meets certain criteria and not the jobs per se, I decide to build this morning a better search and filtering engine. You can find it here:
https://jtefera.com/hn/?url=https://news.ycombinator.com/ite...

Hope it helps1 Feedback is welcomed.
> Great media players seem harder to find now that the focus in the market is on internet streaming and less on local music.

If you're serious about audio and managing your music library: Have you tried Roon? Yes, it's expensive, but I have tried them all and Roon ist the most complete package and a joy to use.
Of course it is easy to pay high salaries with investors' money. I doubt a business owner would like to pay $120 000/year from his own income.
Traditional tables won't scale.

Have each node know it's position (lat/lon) and the position of it's nearest neighbors. When you send a packet, you send it to a lat/lon, and every node that sees your packet just tries to nudge it a little closer, until it gets there. Then to speed things up on the return trip we can ask each intermediate to add their position to a list on the packet.

Of course, moving nodes present a bit of a problem. Because they will keep attaching and detaching, there returning packets won't know where to reach them. I suppose if you knew your route through space you could send "scout" packets ahead of you, feel out the terrain, and prepend those positions to the list of your packets (so that they can find you when they return).

Dealing with changes to the (static) topology and also rogue nodes (ones that misbehave, drop packets, lying about their position, etc) are interesting problems. I think they can be solved.
I've toyed with it on and off ever since the first beta. It's still not good enough unfortunately. I need a very simple way to configure an instance, version it, and deploy it in minutes. When that works frictionless I'm all over getting it pushed in my org, and once the tooling in VS supports it, it will be easier to get other developers to do it.
It's a limited data set, granted, but we're discussing the ad and it's creators.

Mostly without having seen the ad itself, and nobody has slated the company for revelling in throwing money at projects firmly straddling the ironic/moronic axis, so I guess on some level it was a success.

I am also craving a delicious jacket potato now. I feel manipulated.
No, you're not alone. There's actually an entire page maintained by a few economists on the case for open borders: http://openborders.info
DevOops Culture [Comic]
10 months from H1B not L1A?
Not sure what mathematical rigor you're talking about and I must admit I never had the patience to fully read his work, but Marx also promoted the "labor theory of value", saying that the value of a product or service is determined by the labor necessary to produce it and not by the value the owner gets from using it.

It's no wonder then that in Marx' analysis profit comes from the underpayment of workers. But it's a fundamentally flawed theory.
Lenovo's Yoga A12 Is a Budget Convertible Tablet, $299-But Only Comes in Android
I understood the question as, what makes you think: the current system could be streamlined so easily that I can hardly believe someone hasn't already disrupted the complacent firms extracting rent.

Such a question usually gets answers mostly comprised of work that is extremely boring at first glance. For example, create a system than halves the work to complete documentation for some sort of compliance with regulations.

Every one of these ideas just sounds incredibly interesting to work on. The type that gets a lot of really bright people together on a team (that I'd really want to be on too), yet they might not deliver a product, and possibly even less likely figure out how to monetize it.

Anyway, I'm not developing a friction-reducing product either, but worry about choosing something because it sounds like a rewarding, intellectual challenge.
> I know credible people who expressed a willingness to pay more than Planet, in cash, to management.

In this case, the the total value is the sale value + continued access to data (including data from Planet's other medium resolution satellites) after the sale via the contract. How certain are you that the cash offered was more valuable than the current deal?

FYI: I'm an outsider whose only source is the article
Don't be shy, what are the 3-5+ ways? Some of us aren't even familiar with the superbowl LED torches never mind the tech behind them.

Try to avoid faking surprise to make yourself sound smarter too, it doesn't work.
But the characters of the article are system administrators, not software developers.