skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cool, asking because the level _past_ the AST walking is where I'm at personally in my learnings. I feel most treatments stop at the AST interpreter step, which is what most people see in school already. I wish there was equally good treatment for everything that comes after that. Type systems, bytecode generation, JIT, optimization phases, etc.
This may sound a bit snarky, but it's actually quite a good boundary.

Current estimations for the age of the Universe are around 12 to 14 billion years, which isn't much compared to a trillion year life span of such a star.
Moore's Law applied to DNA complexity hints that life could be way older than Earth itself: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/513781/moores-law-and-the...
This is credible, but I'd guess that it'd be more accurately restated this way: if you recently learned/mastered a topic, you both have a fresh recall of the elements involved in reaching your level of mastery and what was involved in bridging that (personal) gap between unskilled ignorance and that mastery.

Whether that puts one in a far better position to teach than an expert probably depends on the expert. I definitely had math professors for whom the charge applied, and I'd speculate that an expert who's primarily focused on further mastery/development along the edges of the field might be someone who becomes less and less able to recall or relate to what it's like to take first steps into it. But on the other hand, I had math professors who clearly thought a lot about pedagogy as well as research, and practiced both at length... and I think someone who's spent significant time teaching beginners and reflecting on that as well as practicing their discipline and refining deep insights from that is likely in a better position to teach a topic than someone who just learned.

(And if you really want an optimal learning environment, put a class full of motivated learners in front of a teacher like that, and have them talk to each other. Hence the value of a good university course...)
Why 'experience' can hurt tech workers in Silicon Valley
For fun bits of API inconsistency there, would you think that...

"task.Wait()" is to "await task" as "Task.WaitAll(tasks)" is to "await Task.WhenAll(tasks)"?

Maybe it's just me, but I sure did.
Why would a person who doesn't require validation in the first place be concerned with the assumption they are fragile and need special treatment? Seems like such a 'so-called' minority is fine either way.
Oh, so that explains what happened to Jungledisk! I was an early customer, loved it, then got fed up and left when the product stagnated, bugs were left unfixed, and support became terrible.

Somehow I'd missed the news of the acquisition, so it was all a bit mysterious. Maybe I should check the product out again... :)
I have the same concern. I've heard arguments, but none that adequately address the issue.

While I'm a fan of the idea of adopting basic income eventually, I don't see how we can fund it now without serious negative consequences.

Unfortunately the studies I've read about here on HN (including this one I'm guessing) seem to only address the positive side without actually comparing costs vs benefits.
I appreciate that you acknowledge that racism and xenophobia taint the arguments you're making, even if you yourself are not racist or xenophobic. It's hard to stand up for a view when it is held by people who are widely reviled, and I suspect that courage is something our country needs more of.

However, I think the examples I provided compellingly demonstrate that issues of legality do not sit at the core of the anti-immigration sentiment in the US. In particular, an overwhelming concern for the sanctity of law would likely not motivate one to demand that a sitting judge recuse themselves because of their ancestry. Nor can it have motivated anti-refugee sentiment.

More broadly, the argument about rule of law does not have good explanatory power for the actions and statements of those who make it. It does not explain opposition to open borders, or to more expansive visa programs, which of course could both be made law with comparative ease. And it seems obvious to me that anti-immigrant militias like the Minutemen represent the height of contempt for the rule of law, but somehow find a warm reception among those who advance the very argument that you do.

Does this mean that nobody legitimately cares about the legality of immigrants? Of course not. It is possible that a broad coalition of people simply happen to agree on this wide range of narrow topics that have nothing whatsoever to do with race or ancestry. But Occam's razor suggests that the simpler argument is the better one: that duplicity and political convenience are at play.

Specifically, I suspect that the broader anti-immigrant movement in the US believes it has a winner of an argument in this one despite its lack of policy prescriptions. As a result this argument-- the one you make-- often gets advanced as a fig leaf for those "other" viewpoints. Which leaves you in the awkward position of carrying water for some truly despicable people, whatever your own views are.
Do away with minimum wage laws (no longer needed and no longer desirable with a UBI program in place, IMO), and 40% of the workforce won't end up unemployed/unemployable.
Thank you for your contribution
Different users of the "Millenial" label start the cohort, by birth year, anywhere between 1976 and 1984 and end it anywhere between 1994 and 2004, with some assigning no end point yet or suggesting a potential later end point than 2004. [0]

Depending on the which of those end points is taken, either all teens, late teens, or no teens are Millenials.

[0] A (probably incomplete) breakdown is available on Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennials#Date_and_age_ran...
Might want to fix this -> https://blog.ycombinator.com/author/elizabeth-rhodes/
There's probably a team that's responsible for Notepad. I doubt they exclusively focus on Notepad :)
> What's wrong with basic auth with HTTPS?

The only thing wrong that I can see is that it's 2017 and the browsers still don't have a good (indeed, AFAIK, any) UI for logging out.
For what it's worth I did this a few years ago and was not disappointed - great to hear other people grew up with this game too!
Divided federal appeals court rules you have the right to film the police
I personally am taking issue with parent's claim that the four liberal individuals mentioned are proof that it is "safe" to express potentially controversial opinions, especially when they run afowl of the domininant left wing viewpoint in America. Grandparent was clearly talking about ordinary people when describing the negative effects of "moral sanctimony" on public discourse in America.

I would agree with you that public speech should have consequences. I probably don't agree with you what those consequences ought to be -- what sort of "attacks" are appropriate given what is being said in what context. I don't think either of the two ordinary people I used as counter examples deserved the treatment they got for what they said.

I think it's bad for society if every difference of opinion is reacted to as being completely intolerable to the point of ending a career. In addition to creating resentment that men like Trump (and also people who are far worse) can exploit, it makes it impossible to discuss other controversial issues in the future. If we care about being good people living the best lives we can, we need to be able to discuss unpopular ideas, because we don't know which ideas that are considered unpopular today will be ones we will later find to be practically useful or morally virtuous tomorrow.
Well, if there's anything that might lure me back to Go, it's an escape hatch into another language. :b
(I work at Stripe.)

API versioning is definitely a debatable subject, and I don't think that anyone at Stripe would claim that the current state of affairs is perfect by any means, but it's one that we think provides a good compromise between the stability of client integrations and our own ability to iterate on the API's design and make progress.

The classic problem with web APIs is that unless you have a good versioning scheme, once you've published them, you can never make a backward incompatible change (like removing a field) unless you're okay with breaking some people's integration. Especially when it comes to payments, people tend to have strong feelings about having their integrations broken, so we try to take as many precautions as possible to make sure that doesn't happen.

An approach to versioning that you'll see in many places is to do "major" API versioning where you do something like prefix your URLs with `/v1/` or send in a special `Accept` header. A problem with that approach though is that you'd need an incredibly good reason to ever build out a `/v2/` because if you ever bump that major version you're going to leave an incredible number of users behind on the original. Most people want to integrate one time and not have to worry about upgrading (ideally ever).

At Stripe, we've tried to build a compromise by introducing minor, date-based versions that include only a fairly constrained set of changes, but which we can bump more liberally. As others have mentioned here, your account gets locked into a version on its first request, and if never want to worry about API versioning at all, you can leave that version untouched essentially indefinitely.

If we realize that we made an API design mistake somewhere, we can fix it relatively easily and keep the API's design more cohesive for new users, while also leaving current users unaffected. It's also much easier to maintain for us because we only have to build a small compatibility module instead of having to maintain two (or more) completely divergent major API versions.

Anyway, I hope that helps explain some of the thinking behind this versioning scheme :)
Hopefully the same way that Bitcoin established value. Speculation that the coins will be more valuable in the future. Obviously since the coins are constantly being generated you are never going to have the coins reach values of $1000 each, but it is possible if people suspect eventually they will be worth $0.10 a piece they might try to invest now by buying them at $0.01 a piece. Hopefully after this happens and the currency starts becoming more established it will be able to maintain that value.
A more concise cheat sheet: http://dungpa.github.io/fsharp-cheatsheet/
Are you saying that they don't orbit their star because some of them gravitationally influence each other?

Or are you saying that nothing outside of our solar system can be a planet?

Either way, NASA should schedule another press release about taking celestial pedantry to a new level.
Americans Will Never Make Mars a Priority. Why Should That Stop Us?
Interesting idea. The problem with this, though, is the same problem video game economies have with similar systems - people just make extra accounts.

Ensuring a single person has a single account would be a sort of holy grail here for many things. I'd love to hear ideas of a way to make it possible without sharing private information.
And it tends to break using Space or Page Down to advance.

I really wonder if hipsters ever actually read web pages, or if they just load them, look at them and then go back to discussing the merits of their fair trade, artisanally-roasted espressos.
>solve virtually all non-military drone events

That's the same scenario I'm talking about. Overpowering the input signals is a proven, scalable defense that can be easily deployed to police forces, stadiums, national monuments across the world and for minimal cost. You simply will not be able to do that with a highly trained eagle.
How about MEGA? It's sort of like multi-key Dropbox.

Centralized, but not inherently so; you could stand up clones using its same API, and then create a discovery service mapping bucket names (users, whatever) to servers using that API.
>it has become very clear to me everyone has a different interpretation of what REST can or should be

This is very true, the term has been abused so much that it has no relation to its original meaning.

We can loosely define REST by one of its key qualities: hypermedia, that is a lot easier to say than HATEOAS. By focusing on this distinction, it rules out 99% of APIs in the wild.

On top of that, hypermedia media types and linked data are important for an API to be self-documenting, so there is a rather high bar for developers to implement.
I wonder how much of a vulnerability that really is. The SDN encapsulates everything and is supposedly IP-spoofing-secure, so in principle there's no way for anyone else in the same DC to get your traffic.

Of course, you could have a local attacker get in through other means, and then access local DC traffic within your SDN. But if you get to that point, you probably have bigger problem than terminating SSL.
I've signed up for it. Not sure what I'll do with it yet either but I have some ideas for a webservice to toy with it. Do you have an API of any kind for interacting with the service? (e.g. to see the latest transactions on my account?)
It's a cool series. Mostly review for me but I certainly passed it to my team to review. Ultimately I say that 99% of the time the correct answer is to not use raw threads and never share memory. There are much better concurrency and parallel patterns out there. Akka(.net in this case), Coroutines and Channels, Erlang Actors, Clojure's core.async, .net's async/await even. Honestly if you are reaching for threads you probably should ask yourself if some other way would be better and safer.
8 Ways to Conditional Rendering in React
Another https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/fsharp/
I don't know if there's such a thing (maybe I should write one myself, as I plan to learn F# :) ), but a cheat sheet that is a bit higher level would be useful.

Things like:

* how do I read a text file

* how do I write a text file

* how do I download a file using HTTP

* ...
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13707529 and marked it off-topic.
Is anyone familiar with any of these books? I'm particularly interested in the FPGA book but can't find many reviews of it (most say that it's shallow, but don't go into whether the content that's there is good).
IIRC, that is a serious hypothesis for how life began on earth, seeded from elsewhere (maybe not Mars).

But certainly someone here knows more than I do about it ...
La La Land Parody
Thanks for the reassurance that side projects and being the top of the class aren't particularly important. I definitely get a little worried when there I've got the 20-year-old classmates that have spent the last six months building some crazy thing, or have two internships and are launching a startup or whatever, so it's a relief to hear that being interested in the field and having ideas about it is enough.
Inflation will be handled in by simply increasing the amount of coins given to users. For example if there is a target of 3% inflation YoY then then amount of coins given will be based on that target inflation level. Figuring out the exact numbers will be decided in the future once the service has gained mainstream adoption.
https basic auth, I assume you mean.

For http basic auth, you may as well just "secure" the resource by hosting it at http://my-username-and-password.example.com or http://example.com/username/password/resource
Having used both Rackspace and Mailgun and had a great experience with both I'm sad that it's come to this.

Good luck to Mailgun! DFTBA
My apologies. I must misinterpreted your reply.

If I read them in a different mindset then i can take them as a complement to what I said. That knowing how to analyze application performance and concepts like recursion are more important than rote memory. And that interviews should focus on things that can't be ""look up" then read a one paragraph blurb for 3 seconds". I can fully agree to that.

Once again, I am sorry I misread your reply and dumped a wall of text on you.
My proposition is out of the box but maybe get a chance to VSCode?
It's also exciting, isn't it? That every generation is likely to experience some unique achievement?
This is really cool. Nice to see the Dat protocol[0] getting more uses and implementations.

[0] https://datproject.org/
The landing burn is generally a single engine. The only time they have done three engine landing burns is for very tight margin GTO launches (and even then, it's not three engines all the way to the ground, the two outboard engines shut down about halfway through the landing burn).

In cases where they are using three engines during the landing burn, losing one would be catastrophic. You'd lose a third of the thrust you were counting on, and the remaining thrust would be highly asymmetric. The other outboard engine can't gimbal far enough to keep the thrust vector through the center of mass of the rocket.
Thanks! I'm definitely guilty of falling into that trap so far. I haven't wanted to show up and feel like I don't have anything interesting to say or like I can't make any kind of good impression, but your advice to just ask what I should do to go forward in the area I'm interested in totally makes sense.
Microsoft launching Skype Lite for low connectivity areas
An excellent, incredibly beautiful film, beyond the topical plot point.
The conflict here is that humans are animals, and animals evolved to use the minimum amount of energy possible to satisfy their needs. Yes you can learn the reward of willfully working hard, but I'm not sure whether everyone, or even most people, will make that transition.
Is your Google account secure? Connected apps and how to find them
> So with that in mind, how the heck can these countries even consider rolling out a new "basic income" program?

Unconditional income programs (whether they meet basic needs or not) are conceived of as replacing some or all existing means-tested benefit programs, and reducing or eliminating the adverse employment effects of minimum wage laws (without eliminating the income-floor effects of those same laws).

They can be budget neutral by either being cost neutral (redirecting funds from the displaced programs) or by being tied to specific new funding sources. (Given that one of the long-term goals is to address long-term concentration of economic gains in capital rather than labor, capital-specific income or ad valorem taxation is the natural place to look for dedicated new revenue streams.)
Yea, the extra account issue is something that I have thought a lot about. My initial plan is to slowly increase the requirements for information. In the very near future I will be making email verification a requirement. After that I will be adding required phone verification as an extra step. Eventually once the service grows large enough I will be forced to start requiring private information to ensure that people are unable to game the system by creating multiple accounts.
Can someone explain to me why we don't replicate some of these key platforms like the Hubble and James Webb ST?

It seems like the major limitation for discovery is getting enough observation time for whatever certain point in the sky that scientists are researching.

Why don't we launch a second copy of James Webb?
Cat ownership not linked to mental health problems, study says
The Top 3 Recruiting Mistakes Startups Are Making, and How to Avoid Them
Video encoding/decoding is definitely a niche for which the FX series had great value when it came out, so I agree with you on that. However, for gaming and most "typical desktop software", having higher single-core performance is much more important than having more cores, and the FX series was a huge letdown there. Then you factor in the extra energy you're using, and all of a sudden there are very few cases in which it makes sense to buy an AMD CPU over an Intel one.

(They're much cheaper now, so it might make a lot more sense to buy one today, but I'm sticking with my Intel CPU until AMD can prove themselves.)
> The money saved eliminating all these programs (and their nontrivial overhead) can be used to give everyone a modest basic income.

This isn't really the case. Basic income is not about cost savings.

The programs you mention are wealth transfers, so the overhead is in fact trivial. They take money from person A, and give it to person B. There are checks in place to make sure person B qualifies, which accounts for the overhead. For retirement transfer (social security), you check each persons age--not too hard in America.

All those programs would have to be colossally, amazingly inefficient for basic income to be more efficient at redistributing wealth. Out of it's over $1 trillion budget, estimates of administrative overhead are around 1%. Even for more complex programs like foodstamps, overhead is likely low and under 10% [1].

Basic income is about wealth re-distribution, not efficiency. It applies a huge tax increase to the top 10-20% of society, and gives that money to the bottom 80-90%. It's that simple.

So the question everyone should ask is: should we have a policy of taking money from the top 10%, and giving it to the bottom 90%?

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-blumenthal/food-stamp-my... (not the most reliable source, but best I could find quickly)
Thank you, that seems like great advice. A few of his better known papers are definitely over my head currently, although I'm familiar with the basic concepts at least; but luckily he has some other work that is at least somewhat accessible for where I'm at. I'll keep working through his stuff and come armed with some questions, and as you point out, I can definitely use the practice in being able to read papers well and stay abreast of things.
It's been a long time since I laughed out loud at an HN comment! Well played. Thank you for that.
syzkaller strikes again!
Better off Enceladus. A ship that size probably would be built in space.
An API is on my todo list. There are three main things I am looking to add in the near future:

An exchange to allow people to trade their coins for normal currency
An API to allow businesses to easily hook Swift Demand into their platform
Added verification requirements (This one depends on the rate of growth)
> Basic income would solve that problem too, by replacing the state pension programs.

This doesn't actually fit very well with the conceptual basis of UBI as a replacement for means-tested benefit programs, as defined-benefit pensions are not means-tested benefits.

Though its true that a number (though not all) UBI proponents have either explicitly called for replacing existing Social Security-style retirement programs, or implicitly suggested that by including the existing cost of those programs as funds available for UBI.
>Hopefully the same way that Bitcoin established value.

Bitcoins value fluctuates so fast that no one really knows how much something real costs in bitcoin on any given day.

As a result, even though Bitcoins are surprisingly valuable, as a currency it has very low velocity. Bitcoin is closer to gold, real estate or shares than it is to dollars. It makes an ok place[1] to park your value in the hopes that it'll beat inflation, but much like gold and houses it's extremely difficult to directly buy something with it.

You need to find a way to make your project a high velocity currency. I don't know how to do that though. Good luck :)

[1] Your mileage may vary. I personally wouldn't invest in bitcoin because it's too volatile for me to be bothered tracking it, but some have done so with success.
I've seen this app: https://www.trackreddit.com/
Is the difference that your app covers Hacker News as well?

FYI, the verification email is not a link.
I thought tech people liked hard problems ;)

Please, by all means use whatever technical measures you want at the border. My criticism was of hn commenters armchair quarterbacking, as thought the ability to bypass these checks (at great effort) makes it ok that you have no expectation of privacy.