skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A few years back I tried listening to the audiobook but couldn't push myself to finish it, even though it's fairly short. As I recall, I picked it up after completing Snow Crash. Unfortunately it's been so long that I barely remember any details. I just vaguely remember having a hard time getting into it, as well as finding it hard to relate to the characters, and thinking the slang was confusing.

For Neuromancer fans here, I'd love to read about your perspective on the book. Maybe when I picked it up I didn't have the right mindset. What aspects did you enjoy most? Do any details stand out? How did it impact you?

I'll take this opportunity to remind the Americans on HN that your local public library has access to audiobooks and many other resources, free of charge. I've been living in Santa Clara for a while but I only just found out about all their perks a few weeks back. Just by having a library card, you get access to SO MANY high quality online resources [0]! It includes stuff like eAudiobooks, eBooks, digital magazines, research databases, etc. Two services which I suspect will be of interest to HN readers are: (1) Safari Books Online, which contains technical and business eBooks; and (2) Lynda.com, which has tons of videos for learning new business, software, technology, and creative skills. Although it's sadly worth noting that Safari Books Online only provides access to a subset of their full catalogue :(. Better than nothing, though!

Another great resource you gain access to is this Point of View Reference Center [1] service. It lists controversial issues. Inside each, you find an overview of the issue, along with some background and contextual info, and finally points and counter-points. It provides the information in a way that's very approachable, while remaining fairly unbiased. Oh, and the best part is that everything includes sources, so you know where stuff comes from! If something seems fishy, you can inspect the source. The topics have varying levels of detail, but it seems to be an overall good starting point for trying to understand current events or issues.

[0] http://santaclaraca.gov/government/departments/library/resea...

[1] https://www.ebscohost.com/us-high-schools/points-of-view-ref...
I think it's interesting that Guido went from being opposed in June 2011 [0] to supporting it in August 2016 [1] without any real indication of why he changed his mind, and bringing the issue back over three years after the last message to do it. Does anyone know of a reason why he changed his mind?

[0] http://bugs.python.org/issue12345#msg139338

[1] http://bugs.python.org/issue12345#msg272287
I don't take my kids to movies to prepare them for life, I take them for fun, to be entertained.

Yes, in a magical unicorn fairyland.

Sounds like you either don't have kids or you're prepping them for doomsday.
Great work and glad to hear it. Do you have any thoughts on a post-password internet? What are some cool not-password-login-schemes, if you've ever thought about it?
Lately I've been picking up the soroban[1], the Japanese abacus, and it's been tons of fun. It feels a little like solving a Rubik's cube with arithmetic, or maybe like working with a finite state machine. There are different algorithms to apply depending on the state of the soroban, and applying the right sequence of these algorithms will get you to the right result.

I find it to be a little addictive, and sometimes find it a bit hard to stop. I always feel like wanting to improve my skills a little more, become a little faster at it, and increase the number of digits I can handle without making a mistake.

The soroban is a great tool for developing concentration, a memory for numbers, a facility for performing a relatively complex series of steps in a certain sequence, and eventually for lightning fast mental arithmetic.

In Japan, soroban use is taught to young kids[2], who after a while develop enough proficiency not to need the physical device any longer and can perform the calculations on an imaginary soroban, and eventually can achieve some really amazing feats of mental arithmetic, such as this example from their national competitions: [3]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soroban

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Px_hvzYS3_Y

[3] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ktpme4xcoQ
Not a problem this time because the capsule has a launch escape system
As far as I know they're still reviewing it.
I cannot edit anymore but I meant to say;

>I would NOT suggest .NET for a b2c social
Skepticism is a good thing, but I think you are painting with an pretty broad brush. Penelope Boston was not an author on the arsenic extremeophile paper. The only connection I can come up with is that the lead author of the arsenic paper was affiliated with NASA's Astrobiology Institute and Boston is now director of the institute.
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No, I understood the article to state that washed eggs shouldn't be stored unrefrigerated at all (except to bring up to room temp just before cooking). The "1 week for unrefrigerated eggs" referred to eggs that still had their cuticle.
We've been mostly at a balance of production/demand and only occasionally given them away to friends. Now that the days are getting longer and the "new flock" that we got last spring is hitting maturity we're going to have to start putting more effort into giving them away or start selling them. It's common to see a cooler at the end of the driveway with fresh eggs for sale in the area I live.

re: snakes - not so far, and the other comment about them keeping potentially dangerous insects (ticks) in check is right on. Hawks and foxes are more the concern as predators around here, we've lost a few to foxes in the last two years.
"The importance of a single vote is easy to illustrate: On Hacker News, a popular post can receive 500 votes, which can generate ~50,000 visits depending on how interesting the title is. (I’m pulling data from Algolia.) Using simple math, this equates to"

Not even the half of it. I ran an experiment on /newest once, and just a single random upvote (mine) had a substantial effect on the odds that a submission would reach the front page, and since a front page appearance is worth anywhere from 5-20,000 pageviews, my single upvote was driving thousands of pageviews! And I've noticed when submitting my links and then browsing /newest for other meritorious links, this phenomenon doesn't appear to have gone away.
They are usually sold refrigerated in Italy
Not sure about Op's setup, but an easy one to get into is uRad[1]. Along with logging it'll share it around the globe for finding any kind of event like this. Though I'm not sure that they've got any kind of statistical analysis going on.

http://www.uradmonitor.com/
https://taskwarrior.org/
Here's one that's interesting. At the last conference I went to in SF several folks at one of the evening events had to leave early. They worked for a large Fortune 100 company but were unable to find a hotel in SF that was company approved and cheap enough to allow them to stay in. They had to BART back to Oakland. I don't know how many people are affected by that but I'm sure it's annoying.
I consider myself an introvert as well, and quite frankly don't even think about things like company retreats etc. in my business. When we had lots of employees, even things like company Christmas parties or after work drinks would fill me with dread and I would just turn up out of duty. I would never organise them or enforce them, but simply go along when someone else did.

However, I've learned in all these years that for some people, this is actually what makes them tick. They thrive on such 'company culture' and the chance to let loose a little outside of the workplace. Each to their own. The sight of other people doing things they love shouldn't fill you with toxic feelings. Make you slightly uncomfortable or disinterested perhaps, but anything more than that, and there are probably deeper issues at play that probably need to be resolved in yourself, rather than externally.
Hey thanks! I'm Jacob's co-founder at Optimail.

We only just launched yesterday, so I think we are still working to find that exact product-market fit. At the moment, however, we're targeting medium- to large-sized businesses that use drip email marketing campaigns, such as onboarding campaigns, lead nurturing campaigns, and retention campaigns.

Thanks for the feedback on the copy! If you are feeling extra generous and have a second, shoot me a PM and let me know what parts you found confusing. We want it to be accessible to non-technical marketers who might be using older software like Mailchimp, etc. (After all, a main benefit of using AI here is that you don't need to get into confusing automation-building stuff like multi-branching decision trees.)
There doesn't seem to be much of anything interesting here. I do think there's a lot to consider in a new system design, but the fact (brought up at the start) that you can't send any new protocol over the internet, and can't send anything but HTTP through half of it, really limits you.

If I were designing an API, the RX side would be asynchronous and batch multiple connections, and the TX side would let you assemble your own TCP packets. This rules out ideas like sendfile() which IMO became nonstarters when we moved to HTTPS.

And obviously the accidental complexity like fcntl vs. setsockopt, bind/connect, shutdown/close, multithreading+signals, have to go somehow. It doesn't really matter though. I can't imagine any major world crises are being caused by BSD sockets.
hello everyone here
I don't know anyone, American or otherwise, who would rent a car at SFO to drive it downtown and leave it parked in a hotel for a week. I've done BART or when in a hurry a cab/Uber, but renting a car is just nuts.
Elon Musk at the World Government Summit 2017 in Dubai
Yeah, my wording wasn't the best.

My dream would be for "TLS sockets" to be integrated into the system socket API as a first-class citizen next to (plain) TCP and UDP sockets, ideally as part of a POSIX standard. If that were done under the current BSD socket API, it would require at least some kernel support, because that API revolves around file descriptors and system calls like setsockopt, read/write, poll, etc. On the other hand, if it were done as part of a broader revamp of the API, like the one proposed above, well, ideally that revamp would support custom user-level protocols, so TLS could be implemented as one of those rather than involving the kernel.
tab 2
Better link:

http://strawcamera.com/cliff
that picture is not that great of an example, answer is right in the question.
Embryos in fertilized eggs start developing at ~27 C ;)
Arbiters of collective intelligence: How Wikipedia admins mold public opinion [pdf]
I'm a volunteer CS teacher with the TEALS program in Seattle. We taught Snap (based on Scratch) for Intro to CS in our high school class, mostly teenagers 14-16. I like that it gives kids a quick and fun way to see immediate results without being annoyed by syntax errors. I also feel like we should have moved on to Python or JavaScript about halfway through the semester. The kids who are most excited about programming eventually want to learn a "real" programming language that is used in industry. So I think teaching a combination of Scratch and Python (or perhaps JavaScript) makes for a good Intro to CS class.

For the second year, we are teaching AP Computer Science, so we are using Java. I think the students had more fun with animation, simple games, and web development than they have with AP exercises. I find that there are too many concepts involved in teaching Java to make it a good first language, which can be demotivating. Tons of time spent debugging syntax errors as well. While these things are important eventually, some kids get frustrated and give up too early without ever seeing interesting results.
This facebook engineer is using words like "Human Impact" and "Democratization" like facebook is an integral part of human life globally, crucial to their survival. I would tell this guy to sit the hell down you work on a boring social network that mostly old people use to perpetuate their ignoramist memes.

Next the engineer from internet explorer on topic how IE is saving the world.
I had an upstairs neighbor at my condo in Chicago raising chickens on the porch. When the association put a stop to it he moved them to the community garden next door.

That was the second chicken coop on our block.
You may be thinking of Gamer, but Surrogates also matches up with this. Both pretty interesting movies.
I wonder how different browsers rasterize tiling SVG backgrounds. Ideally they should rasterize it once to a buffer and then just blit it a bunch of times. But if any browser tries to rasterize it every repetition that's a ton of vector drawing for some of those patterns and it may be hella slow on some device/browser combinations.

It's not immediately clear that they would do the smart thing because most times SVGs are rendered only once so you would want to render it directly. It's only tiling backgrounds where this optimization makes sense. But I think as a consequence of it being treated as an image in CSS rather than a DOM SVG element it's quite likely most browsers do render it to a buffer first, not as an optimization but just because they treat rasterizing an SVG just like decoding a PNG.

If nobody has noticed these being super slow I guess browsers are doing the smart thing.
This is so cool!

Let me know if you plan on continuing it. I'd love to collaborate.
man this comments thread is making me realize I'm a closet weird al fanboy. UHF is getting a rewatch this weekend.
Only if you have a rooster..
I'm not very good at thinking of technologies that work for non-technical users. Personally, I'm happy with password store + TOTP. Some interesting experiments I've seen include SSH and PGP-based challenges. I would like to see a browser-driven solution like better client-side certificates support, but none of these ideas work well for non-techies.
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I'm not arguing we get rid of all use. I do think we should stop calling it "clean" -- at least and especially in this simplistic political and marketing sense.

Even solar and wind are not entirely "clean".

There are initial capitalization and resource consumption to construct them. There are noise and other disturbances that cause some near wind farms considerable stress and ill health. Wind farms disturb the lower level atmosphere and there are questions about what effects this creates. There are open questions about how "clean" necessary storage technologies will be.

These should be known and discussed.

One frustration after Chernobyl, was that the (Western European, not to mention Eastern and Soviet) public became concerned whether they were being told the truth by their own governments. In some cases, governments were apparently at least hedging in public communications -- afraid of panic as well as backlash against their own energy programs.

Anyway, I don't entirely know why I originally commented. I didn't bring up a particularly novel counter-argument nor set of facts.

But that "clean" moniker that gets attached to (extant) nuclear (fission) power. It gets under my skin. Because even before you talk about accidents or attacks, there's a lot about it that's not clean. From the mining to the processing (they still don't know how they are going to manager the Hanford complexes in Washington State; to the best of my recollection, the now "cleaned" Rocky Flats in Colorado still poses considerable challenges; etc.) to the whole issue of waste...

I also have another argument. The actual supplies of accessible and extractable ores are limited (though less so for thorium, another possible source). If and as we have alternative energy sources for everyday life and economy, perhaps we should be husbanding those limited and extraordinary resources for potential future use. What if they do become the one viable route / power source for larger scale space travel? Maybe we will need them -- at least until and to jump-start off-planet mining to obtain other sources.

And, nascent large-scale solar and wind production are and can be made more decentralized. This even has security implications; I keep running across arguments in favor of a distributed, decentralized, hard-to-knock-out energy/power network. (Something that can also pertain to self-servicing/autonomous smaller scale local nuclear reactors, once they are in place and running.)

And yeah, I did skip going into what CO2 becomes, once it starts reacting with the environment. Fair point.

I think we are going to keep some nuclear fission power production, but that economics are already pushing us away from large expansion of it.

I hope that will also reduce incentives and the effectiveness of efforts to "cleanse" its image and externalize significant aspects/costs of its use.
The other obvious control mechanism is AI: not one person, not every person, but no people. I really want to try that now.
San Francisco is quite walkable by American standards but certain areas are very lacking. For example the southeast portion of the city has a dearth of hospitals and the Tenderloin and Bayview neighborhoods have a startling lack of grocery stores.
Since I'm embarrassed by how many votes this is getting without any citation, I'll just point out that I probably first learned about it from something Tory Bruno (CEO of ULA, the company that launches the Atlas and Delta rockets) said, seen here:

https://twitter.com/spaceflightnow/status/776854635055284224

This morning, it was posted by Doug Wheelock:

https://twitter.com/Astro_Wheels/status/832972785152573441

It appears to be said by many people before them, in different forms - I can't find any information about who first coined the phrase.
(An Apollo Program lunar landing denial site)
If I can throw in a bit of advice in this thread - here is something that worked well in the two businesses I've founded with someone else in the past. It doesn't matter the type of business, or the relative skill sets of each founder, but it is something that I learned from "The E-Myth Revisited" by Michael Gerber. (Highly recommended reading from anyone thinking of starting a business.)

The tip is to draw up a company organisational chart, as if you were a 20 or 30 person company. Starting from the top, a box for CEO, then break down the other managerial roles, such as Operations Manager, Finance Manager, Technical Manager etc., then under those, further boxes for the sub-roles.

E.g. for 'Finance Manager', you might have Debtors Controller, Creditors Controller, Payroll Manager etc. Under 'Technical Manager' you might have 'Lead Programmer', 'Graphic Designer', 'Database Administrator' etc. as you see fit.

Then, it is a case of filling in the boxes with the name of the co-founder who will be responsible for each of those areas. Sure you may get one name placed more than others, but the idea is to work out the exact separation of duties and who will be responsible for what.

It is also a great technique for working out each others weaknesses - for instance I personally hate accounting related tasks, so I could never be the finance manager, but I am content doing some rote work like invoicing or bank reconciliations from time to time, so I would put my name lower in the order, but be supervised by someone with more knowledge.

In the business startups where I have done that, things have worked out well while we continually referred to it and used it as we grew. As we hired, we removed our own names in the boxes and replaced them with the employee names.

The point is, that this whole concept helps with the communications angle that we are talking about in this thread. Knowing what each person is responsible for, and knowing who is accountable for what really helps with the reduction in animosity between the founders.

But as with most things - constant vigilance is due. Things started to fall apart when we deviated from these simple principles. Human nature I know, but I hope the lessons learned here will help others.
Hey, I'm the current team lead for buzzmobile. I'm glad our repo is useful, we've been working hard to make it as clean and maintainable as possible. Definitely feel free to reach out or send feedback if you have any :)
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That's what I was talking about here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13677501

Same thing seemed to happen to me whether coincidentally a bunch of simultaneous votes or some algorithm based on karma. I know I was more careful with upvotes on new stories afterward.
Isn't the more significant question whether the 1% rule actually has to remain valid forever? Is it a law of nature or is it more learned behaviour? Why is there no 1% rule for elections? Because people have been taught that it is important to vote. People on the Internet have not been taught the same thing. The author suggests that this should change. One blog post of course won't do that. But you gotta start somewhere.
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>I don't see how they could make that argument when the DS literally had a GBA cartridge slot.

Nintendo had just released the frontlit Advance SP a year and half before the DS and had new GBA models in the queue (the micro and the backlit Advance SP) when the DS came out. And behind the scenes they apparently had a single-screen GBA successor in the works too. So they were fully prepared to drop the DS if it failed.

It sounds strange in a historical context but at the movement it really was just an experiment for them. GBA compatibility was relatively cheap so they bolted it on.
if anything they attract foxes. I've never heard of having a non-transient issue with snakes.
I have seen people looking down on any "narrow" developers. If you say ".NET developer" this implies you know a very specific stack from Microsoft -- one OS, one standard library, one framework, one IDE, one buildsystem.

On the other hand, if someone claims to be a senior C++ developer, it means they may have worked with multiple OS's, multiple frameworks/libraries (because STL is never enough), multiple buildsystems, multiple IDEs and so on.
And yet, where's the popular apps people want?
Yes, it's possible my high-karma makes my votes worth more. In retrospect, I probably should've done it with a lightly-used account. On the other hand, the implications for me are still the same - I know I take more time to do upvoting on /newest than I did before!
I know that, but there's a difference between those who do, and those who talk about it.

And all I see here is those who talk about it.
I agree with you. This post, and the comments on it, felt incredibly creepy and inauthentic. So much self-congratulations about transparency and happiness while clearly obfuscating something very simple: the two that left wanted to grow really fast and get a big exit and the guy who stayed wanted to build a longer term company that is profitable. Thats fine and can be apprehended quickly when described plainly. We don't need to see you smiling in destinations around the world to accept that some business people disagreed about business strategy.
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A sibling post said this involves cutting people out at the pre-interview stage which I agree with. I don't know to what extent recommendations should be able to help int his "ideal process". I think this where proxy metrics like highest degree earned, years experience help.

I've never worked for a company that gets 100s of qualified applications per position (edit: apart from call centre) and I'd wonder how a bootstrapped company would get so many applications?
Woolly mammoth will be back from extinction within 2 yrs say Harvard scientists
A launch escape system which uses parachutes, which will not react well to descending through a cloud of burning solid rocket fuel...
So the idea is to limit organizations from getting too large? Prevent through regulation or taxation TBTF?