skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why is nearly every culture against it, with the exception of mostly indigenous tribes?
> I can't really imagine it's for any other reason than to have a firmer control on the population, or an excuse to imprison people or criminalize them in a convenient way

That's hardly an explanation. Then why would nearly every culture like to have an excuse to imprison people or criminalize them?

These kind of cultural traditions represent the lessons learned over many generations: it's because drugs tend to cause trouble. Not for everyone, but for enough people to cancel out the benefits.
Absolutely, but those are secondary markets for most American businesses because there are an abundance of issues with delivering any application to those areas. Whether its political, cultural, financial, etc. Priority for most businesses and website owners is to serve the people you know you can serve first, then work on supporting those other areas.

Twitter, like most companies, exists to make money. If you're busy shaving off every bit you can from your requests, you're spending a lot of money. You're also losing money because I'd expect you wouldn't be serving ads, etc. as well.

Most blogs that exist to make money aren't targeting those without good internet either, so I don't really see the problem.
>When I was at Google, someone told me a story about a time that “they” completed a big optimization push only to find that measured page load times increased. When they dug into the data, they found that the reason load times had increased was that they got a lot more traffic from Africa after doing the optimizations. The team’s product went from being unusable for people with slow connections to usable, which caused so many users with slow connections to start using the product that load times actually increased.
That's pretty cool, it's great to see GM not sucking at bleeding edge software. They're getting their money's worth out of that billion dollar acquisition last March. I think Kyle Vogt is GM's MVP.

Looking at the 2016 California DMV disengagement reports, Cruise is at 181 disengages in 9,776 miles of testing in California for 2016. This can be compared crudely to Waymo's 124 disengages in 635,868 miles for 2016.

Waymo's operation is 2 orders of magnitude more advanced than Cruise, but in terms of video demos, we haven't seen much of the environments Waymo's cars are capable of navigating. Waymo has only revealed their cars driving on suburban roads, it seems only Cruise is tackling hectic downtown driving head-on.

GM, with their Lyft partnership and Orion assembly plant is, I think, in a great position to deploy early fast with 1st gen robotaxis.
... on their system, not in the general sense.
High packet loss and slow connections frequently go hand in hand (TCP over cellular modems).

This effect is exacerbated if the web site you're connecting to changes congestion control and TCP ramp up settings.
Show HN: A Very Serious Experiment with Data Visualization in VR
Twitter engineer here.

Our engineering culture is actually pretty great - diversity is something we strive for and have made great improvements at, but definitely not at the expense of hiring talented people.

Check out this article published yesterday from a relatively new manager to hear what it's like on the inside:
https://medium.com/@kathleencodes/the-surprising-things-ive-...
Why aren't they? One of the great strengths of the internet is that information doesn't usually go away; most of the time, you can refer back to something said 10 years ago with little extra effort. Slack breaks that.
what are you trying to say here? that all designers are good at designing for people with different backgrounds? therefor we don't need to keep diversity in mind when hiring them?
"Mark also said that what happens in the next 5–10 years is just going to blow everybody away, especially in the field of automation. He thinks even programming is vulnerable to being automated and reducing the number of available programming jobs."

He's talking out of his ass here. This won't be happening anytime soon (if ever)
Having used both, I'll take the 2G mobile over the 56k modem every time.
It seems totally reasonable if you're not operating a company to be altruistic.

* Pushing all the rendering to the client makes development easier, eases the transition to native apps, and uses fewer resources on the back end.

* The fancy site drives more conversions and makes the stakeholders happy.

* Not having fast internet is a crude filter for disposable income and losing those users probably goes unnoticed and might even increase the value of ad placements.
Highlights from the article:

> BlackBerry Ltd. is preparing to turn its once-proprietary BBM secure-messaging system into a subscription service that app developers can build into their software to allow for seamless, encrypted communications.

> Developers who deploy the BBM SDK will be asked to generate their own encryption keys, meaning BlackBerry will not have the ability to turn over to law enforcement any messages sent through this system, even if compelled by a court order.

Essentially it appears that they are turning it into a Secure Messaging As A Service so that people can quickly add messaging into their apps without requiring the infrastructure.
I still maintain that MooTools was the superior system over jQuery.

jQuery won the war, in the end, because it catered to the 'get it up and running now' crowd over the 'do it right' crowd. It was always easier to understand off the bat, especially if you aren't a trained developer, while MooTools makes for a more long lasting, quality codebase.
That's exactly it. A knowing falsehood on your green card application invalidates your greencard- whether they find it now, tomorrow, in 10 years ..

The questions are precisely so they can be held against you - at any time.
I'm glad someone mentioned Half Life since looking around in the various "someone is talking and you're not going anywhere" scenes was the first thing I thought of while reading this article.
I've sat in interviews for most positions (at where I work, anyway). The only one that requires actually knowing who the person is (gender wise, race wise, etc) is sales. Even in that case, it's only because of preexisting prejudice.

These companies will figure out sooner or later that anonymous interviewing is the only solution. Those who benefit from the status quo will protest, "rightly so". Those who don't won't be around to complain, and so a kind of survivorship bias persists.
No offense but MLK did not agree with you, would not agree with you, and taking some words that are easy to white-wash out of the context of his true political philosophy is insulting.

[1] http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2014/04/martin_luther...
This will be so helpful to track my steps while debugging! Very nice.
Thanks!! First I heard of purecss. Will use asap
Take a look at http://bitfunnel.org/, an open-source version of some of the algorithms from Bing. It's not ready for production use but you may enjoy following along in the implementation of a large search engine. The design notes and blog are also worth reading.
Every person in the history of the world has a million unspoken, unidentified assumptions based on where and how they were born and raised. Our (early) experiences shape us profoundly, and it's impossible to overturn that even if you try.

Nobody is "neutral". It's simply impossible. Therefore, diversity.
I think thats probably part of the point of the article. I would read it less of a statement like "make you webpages smaller", and read it more as "be aware of the bloat of modern webpages".

If your target audience has great internet, then ignore optimising for size. But be aware that people travel, and your market may change, so what is ok in SF may become unusable if they go on holidays, move offices or need to work of roaming data due to an outage.
I'm guessing greed plays a factor. You see the price go up by a magnitude several times. Then why sell at 1k per coin when 10k might be round the corner.
The ATT lawsuit stopped BSD development for a year or so and many people moved to the Linux community during this time, because of the uncertainty caused be the lawsuit.
Thats the normal in e.g the U.S but in sweden we say '8 to 5' about the "normal workday" (actually 8-17 of course but you get the point).

So in reality the standard work day is 8-12 plus 13-17 so 8h work in 9h total.
> how will stuff even remotely work when we are a interplanetary species

IPFS or similar. Basically, make all public content content-addressed (give me the article with SHA 0xabcdef) rather than connection oriented (give me the bytestream that comes from http://news.ycombinator.com/foo/bar)
It also lets MS override the manufacturer driver in the future via an update.
> And there's a big group of academics, nearly all of them, that refer to lisp as a family of languages with many dialects.

Certainly Doug Hoyte, the author of this phenomenal ~400 page book on Common Lisp programming, is aware of that.
The Python on-line documentation is really outstanding. I don't use any Python books at all.
This would be a great article to read... "Hackers Guide to Astroturfing Your Shiny New Product"
I'm very impressed with Dan's methodology here, and it matches my own experiences with dialup.

One thing I wonder about is, it seems many dialup ISPs these days provide some kind of "accellerator", probably a web proxy that avoids some of the issues with timeouts, perhaps compresses some content etc. So it might be that many of the remaining dialup users don't experience quite as many problems as Dan found.
When we started the project, we did write tokenizers by hand. I mention that in the blog post. You can write some very fast tokenizers by hand, even in JavaScript. Of course they won't be as fast as hand written tokenizers in C, but you'd be surprised how well the code of a hand written tokenizer in JavaScript can be optimized by a JS engine, at least I was :). IR Hydra 2 is a great tool to visualise v8's IR representation of JS code [1]. It is a shame it is not built into the Chrome Dev Tools.

In the end, we simply could not write tokenizers for all languages by hand. And our users wanted to take their themes with them when switching to VS Code. That's why we added support for TM grammars and TM themes, and in hindsight I still consider it to be a very smart decision.

[1] http://mrale.ph/irhydra/2/
> The cost however, in supporting people so far behind as to only be able to serve them text is quite frankly unmanageable.

No, no it's not, it's really not. You're already writing your SPAs with a REST backend, right? Well, guess what: static HTML & REST go together like burgers & beer! All you need to do is add an HTML content renderer to your REST backend, and you have _something_ someone can use to interact with.

> The web is becoming a platform delivery service for complex applications. Some people like to think of the web as just hyper text, and everything on it should be human parse-able. For me, as someone who has come late to the game, it has never seemed that way. The web is where I go to do things: work, learn, consume, watch, play. It's a tool that allows me to access the interfaces I use in my daily life.

True fact: learning, consuming & watching are all well-supported by static HTML.

> But to stop technological advancement in order to appease the lowest common denominator seems silly to me.

Part of the problem is that we're not advancing technologically: we're getting bogged down in the La Brean morass which is modern web development. HTML is a terrible but acceptable markup language; CSS is an ugly but somewhat acceptable styling language; the DOM is as hideous as a Gorgon; JavaScript is approximately the worst language ever; the combination of all the above is grotesque, and an ongoing indictment of our entire industry.

A cross-platform application-distribution standard sounds pretty awesome, but that's not what web pages are supposed to be, and it's not what web browsers should deliver. The web is a web of hyperlinked documents. It's right there in its name. And anyone who demands that his readers enable a somewhat cross-platform, highly insecure, privacy-devouring application-distribution tool in order to read his text is welcome to take a long walk off of a short pier.
Thanks for asking, it's a few things, most of which are most likely a bias on my part.

(1) YC has a bias against solo founders; research shows this is not a signal of future success and to me it feels like I'm giving up 17-53.5% of a venture just to get in; YC gets 7% of any venture it funds and YC requires a cofounder have at least 10% equity, but suggest going 50/50.

(2) I personally don't agree with YC doing R&D and feel like this is YC admitting the yield it's getting from backing startups is under performing it doing its own thing, which to me is not a good signal.

(3) Majority of YC's billion dollar startups have all gone through a single VC; why not just deal with them directly?

(4) YC should focus on enabling mentors to expand it's deal flow.

(5) YC should have campus within 60-miles of the Bay Area with free housing, food, super-speed internet, etc. so startups don't have to spend the funds on commodities like this and are able to focus on growing. Free healthcare for a year for founders would be impressive too.

(7) I'm opinionated, largely do startups to learn, not be the next billionaire; personally, done more startups than 99% of founders, do it full-time, and have spent 15-mins plus mentoring 1000s of founders.

(8) YC should set the precedent for making the Bay Area not be the center of the universe for startups.

(9) I miss PG.

__

(Above are just a few of the reasons.)
Etlworks Integrator - cloud data integration service
Tepco to send sediment-cleaning robot into stricken Fukushima reactor
I think the more effective approach to preventing parts of a city from being overrun by drug use and violence, is to find out why people are turning to drug use and violence in the first place and then address those underlying issues. And yes, there are ulterior motives behind criminalizing certain activities, especially if you know the actions you take will disproportionately harm a specific group of people.

edit grammar
Installing Arch Linux on a 2015 Retina (12,1) Macbook
Are they still using TCE[1] to manufacture semiconductors? That stuff is the major pollutant in silicon valley left over from all the early semiconductor manufacturing. There are a lot of really expensive homes and offices in Palo Alto that are built over sites where this stuff has leaked.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichloroethylene

[2] http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/07/05/palo-alto-stanford-can...
Spare me, there's nothing difficult about deciding whether or not to blow up hospitals and children. This mission is not about freeing people from terror and was never about that. Rather, quite the opposite, we are there to terrorize them into being profitable to the hegemony. The propaganda about minimizing casualties is to keep civilians protected from the atrocities that they are sponsoring.
Website I'm currently working on has no JS and weighs an average of 15 KiB per page. Loads in <20ms.
Sorry, I'm a little confused: is this a chat app client that still requires a central server to route messages around?
There's two main reasons I can see: performance is impacted by the implementation language and because officially supported SDKs/client libraries are usually written, and get updates, in the implementation's language first e.g. Elasticsearch and Java.
Ring Ring...

Hello?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12454634

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9497721

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10412284

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9086689

---

As for whether or not it's easier or harder than being young, who knows. Isn't being younger an advantage in getting almost any job?
It's useful to add to this that "interacting with itself" in a way that allows clumping implies radiative dissipation of momentum or elastic collision or both. Without that it takes much longer to ditch enough momentum to fall into an orbit closer to the centre of mass around which it's moving.

That is, the non-clumpiness implies that if there is dark chemistry, the reactions must take a long time compared to the present age of the universe.
> Because we have the capability to work beyond that capacity now in most cases. That's like asking "why shouldn't we allow horses on our highways?"

Horses on highways would cause accidents. I have yet to see a fast-moving web page crash in to a slow-moving one and shut down the router. Analogies work better when there is connective tissue between the concepts in play.

More generally, the vast bulk of the problem is not human readability or interactivity over http, but more a matter of insane amounts of unnecessary gunk being included in web pages because of faulty assumptions about the width of pipes.

More generally, I find myself moving in the opposite direction. I find that many SaaS services' interests don't align with mine, so I'm going back to local applications. I don't trust others with most of my data, so the only service that sees much of it only sees encrypted blobs (for offsite backup). I've always run my own mail, and have slowly been expanding the services I host as I bring more of this stuff in-house. And so on. But I realize I'm in a minority.

But the nice thing is that it gives me an intranet and "other" grouping that is very straightforward, so that the browser instances that touch untrusted (not-mine) services can run in "bastion" VM, locked down nicely and reset to a pristine state at will, not to mention allowing some stupid networking tricks that are sometimes useful.
The robot appears to just be shifting cups around. kind of a waste of time. I thought it would be making latte art.
When the kids don't eat school where do they eat (assuming most kids have two working parents who commute away from where they live every day)?

I saw that system in some old fashioned societies (e.g Switzerland) and while it seemed good for the kids, it seemed to mean a lot of women staid home to feed kids rather than work (if they couldn't afford a nanny that is).

I think school lunches are pretty essential for getting a high workforce participation for both men and women.
Security oriented REST API
You can always ask on Expatriates Stack Exchange but I assume it wouldn't be easy. If you plan to work you're usually assumed to work for a local company.

You could probably pull it applying for a business visa and then registering as an enterpreneur (ИП) - but you should definitely ask for a qualified opinion.
A labour shortage looms in Asia
> This is currently the main use case for Bitcoin.

While this is a reasonable possibility, there is very little hard data to confirm that the use of Bitcoin being used in a significant way to circumvent Chinese capital controls... the evidence for this is very circumstantial.
I think you're right.

For the moment companies are reiterating long standing plans for US mfg jobs. But making it sound like new projects. A small number might be new. This is PR.

My guess is that this is not because they like Trump but because trade wars will hurt indiscriminately. So try to create enough cover for his base so he doesn't go "full retard".
NASA is investigating a solar/wind powered land sailing rover:
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/201500...

High temperature electronics are really what makes this possible
As soon as WebAssembly is stable and available I'm predicting we'll see a dramatic shift away HTML + JS as the target for most web apps. I don't mean blogs, I mean people who are trying to build websites that work like apps.

Most webpages today that would work fine in HTML 3.1 aren't built as massive JS web apps. If they are, it may serve a purpose (better UI/UX for most of their users being a major one.)
Practically speaking, I think it's much more appropriate to just assume the admins are lazy.
> So imagine my surprise a few years later, when I learned that disqus had, at some point unknown to me, turned them back on as part of some update. My readers at the time found themselves treated to things like this.

I don't get it, isn't this exactly what the email says? Starting February 8, Disqus will add ads to non-paying customers' feeds.

I understand the chagrin against marketing-speak, but I don't see the outright deception.
You're free to narrow your browser window — that's what I used to do, before all web sites decided that they know better than I do what width their text should be.
Regardless of connection speed it also sucks if you try using LinkedIN's new website. Nothin' but progress bars.
Tesla is testing a Model 3 mule with a 70 kWh battery pack and dual motors
>Many of these comments seem to indicate that lots of people are threatened by diversity

Because the position of "VP of diversity and inclusion" sounds ridiculous?

>These results suggest that racial discrimination is still a prominent feature of the labor market.

This surprises precisely no one. What does it have to do with the article?
I'm sure a lot of the departures are just those leaving the sinking Twitter ship, but this person leaving so soon doesn't bode well for either party.

Diversity-as-an-initiative once a company has grown to a large size is seemingly a futile exercise as evidenced by these diversity reports, year after year.

If companies are actually serious about diversity, they need to make it part of the company's culture from the beginning, before all the typical tech hiring inertia takes place.
I started using "Image On/Off" and "Quick Javascript Switcher" plugins to easily toggle images and js while traveling South America in 2014 to increase speed and save costly bandwidth.

Still using them for the side effects. Its nice to be able to start reading an article immediately without waiting for the jumping around of content to stop. And actually read until the end without having modal dialogs shoven down my the throat.
> What happened between then and now that suddenly nothing works?

Single Page Applications with dozens of MB of Javascript, Google AMP (which has a JS runtime taking several minutes to load on 2G), and so on.
Or, they assumed everyone nowadays has a browser with javascript and don't care about people who won't accept to using js or even know about these people existing
This seems obvious but somehow I never considered that you need three dimensions to replicate the feel of most paints.
This is a perfect example of why "average" metrics for such values aren't that great and are often overused as vanity metrics.

A nice chart showing how many users are in each bucket of load time would be far more useful. One that you could easily change the bucketsize from 0.1ms to 1 second and these types of 'digging' wouldn't even be a second thought.
But there is something profound here: That MicroSoft is willing to take a static informational figure (such as a date) and use it for other purposes while doing a poor job of documenting it and handling edge cases. That MicroSoft has let this system sit for 10 years is incredibly profound, in my opinion.

Just not in a positive way.
So apps developed in China or Japan or Nigeria will be at a disadvantage because they lack design diversity? Or will thru do just fine if they all went to different schools of design?