skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> they forget why the electoral college was created. To help rural America from being completely ignored while the cities with denser populations sway the votes towards their issues.

It's hard to speak with any authority about the human nature underlying politics, especially in a historical sense, as data about people's motives is non-existent, but the Electoral College is way easier to understand when you realize the elephant in the room that 18th century America was grappling with at the time.

Once you understand the sheer weight that slavery pressed down with on the entire global order, you can see what made the College necessary. Slave states simply would not willingly march into a political system in which slavery could be made illegal out of their control. They wanted a safety measure by which the will of the people could be disregarded in order to maintain the status quo.

The idea was that if the country ever really elected an anti-slave President, the College would be able to step in and set aside the election in favor of a brokered deal, the same way that these days anti-Brexiters were hoping that the government could use the rules to avoid having to actually carry it out. The slave state power brokers would work out a deal with the College electors directly if it came to that.

The College was sold to the power brokers as a way to keep their assets safe and producing, and to the rest of the country the way bald-facedly undemocratic measures are usually sold to the unsuspecting, as a way to increase democracy.

In the end, it didn't work. Lincoln won by such a landslide that a negotiated Presidency wasn't in the cards. We keep the Electoral College around to this day as a vestige of our old ways.

It's rather interesting that the states seceded immediately following Lincoln's election. His platform was anti-expansionist, not necessarily abolitionist. I suspect the tide in America simply turned towards war and there was nothing anybody could do to stop it. Much like how pre-WW1 Europe was a tinderbox ready for the first spark, mid-19th century America was just itching for a fight.
In the first page, there's a footnote that says:

> Comdb2 will be published under an open source license in 2016

which does not seem to be true.
No doubt exploiting low entry level pay and poor treatment while they gouge customers, in this case the US Army. The article mentions the product https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analyst's_Notebook so cheap labor taken to another level.
This article resembles two different ways of designing protocols. In tcp [0], information are encoded in position, e.g. the first 16 bits are for source port and the next 16 bits are for dst ports. While in, say, FIX [1], information are encoding be delimiters and position doesn't matter.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Information_eXchange
Wanted to leave the same comment and found a few here saying the same. It is surprising how such an obvious objection has not been addressed - unless they expected most of the readers to miss it, which is then very sad.

The deaths figure - 91 per day or about 33K per year - seems to be the deaths of all opioids (including heroin abuse, etc.) and not the prescription opioids, which are half that:

https://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/trends-statistics/o...

Moreover, prescription deaths are relatively stable for last 6 years (though lower before that) while heroin deaths are raising quickly.
Exactly.

NY"rulez" -_-
This seems reasonable: http://hackintoshmethod.com
"There's nothing preventing you from using it. Except (...)" - that's quite a lot of "nothing," IMNSHO, to the tune of "if we handwave away all its problems, there are no problems. Tada!"
Maybe sometimes. Seven or eight years ago, I had a badly ingrown toenail; my doctor removed the left half of it under local anesthesia, and then wrote me a prescription for 30 Vicodin tablets. (I think 3 or 4 would have been plenty; the pain was gone in 2 or 3 days.) Maybe things have changed enough that he wouldn't do that now.
Marked dupe, why?
Well yeah, the feedback loop is assumed to happen once the AI system becomes powerful enough to understand and optimize its own operation better than humans can. Basically the premise is that AI development speed is bounded by the capability of the mind working on the AI, so max(human, AI). AI intelligence grows faster than human intelligence (which has reached the limits of easy improvements and is thus arguably capped by population size, which has also stagnated), so the inflection point is assumed to happen once the second term outstrips the first.
I certainly would love to read a list of Sapir-Whorf biases included in English!
Sounds like a good idea - one of the main ways I learned programming... and still wind up doing all the time is to just copy examples and hack them into shape, understanding what's necessary, what's not and how they'll respond to different parameters via experimentation.
Is your wifi location privacy now under the threat?
Absolutely! Once the 30 days is over, I'll be writing about what I learned.

I'm also building a product to make VR dev easier at https://viewportvr.co
> How can you conjure up this example, and conclude that only sociology is ideological?

Would it be better if he had said that the Economics department seems to aspire to centrist technocracy and the Sociology department varies from left wing to far left?
Show HN: CLI written in Node.js for hackers who follow football while working
I think (on linux, at least), its better to implement this as a nss- module (/etc/nsswitch.conf). You can do things like lookup a hashtable, automatically update databases, etc without having to rewrite system config files.

Also this does not protect you from programs that perform their own dns lookups, and ignore /etc/hosts and /etc/resolv.conf entirely!
This is one proposed experimental solution in category "deep geological repository". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

Related nice documentary where they cover the questions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film)
The GNU/Linux systems get to be in the VMs hosted by Windows? That's the other way around, man!
If you’re a European, your body requires more vegetables and grains
Did you see this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13760598
Boy Increased his Penis Size in a Year (TIME LAPSE)
Why bother changing the paper... climb into eyes and show the retina cells whatever you want...

---

Oh hey awesome! Could you see applications for e.g. sitting down with a non-technical person and having them construct working software? That was something that really interested me: the claim that non-programmers could use it.

What you say about how it reminded you of LISP is just fascinating. When I had refined my attempt to implement some HOS-like thing I eventually came up with something that I recognized (later, when I had learned LISP) as a crude subset of that.

Imagine a system that uses a stack, like Forth, but the words/functions are built out of the three primitives (Sequence, Branch, Loop) in, uh, "HOS-style". Give it S-expr syntax and squint and I see a crude proto-LISP. ;-D

(seq ...)
(branch (...) (...))
(loop ...)
I generally agree. There will be a future where even human programming skills are no longer needed, I'm sure. Hopefully I can both still live a long life and not have my timeline overlap with that future too much =).

However, until scarcity is totally eliminated, we'll be faced with the same challenge over and over again - how to bring prosperity to those whose roles in the social and economic order have been eliminated.

I have no good answers.
I think what's missed most in all of the talk about opiods lately is that there are people who need them just to function, and not for reasons of addiction.

In January of 2014 I broke my hand. Not just a fracture. I completely shattered my second metacarpal in my right hand (my dominant hand) and did extensive damage to the surrounding tendons, ligaments, and skin. The surgeon who put my hand back together said it looked like a gunshot exit wound without a corresponding entrance wound. The entire top of my hand had been flayed open. After the surgery I was given hydrocodone, enough for a week. The only reason I didn't just kill myself that week was because I had pain killers. When the dose would wear off the pain was unreal, blinding, and totally consuming. The only worse pain I've ever been in was the night I broke my hand.

Needless to say I had the prescription refilled weekly until my second surgery three months later to take out all of the pins. And again for three months after that until my third surgery to release the tendons so I could use my hand again. And for three months after that while I did thrice weekly physical therapy. I cannot emphasize enough how much I needed the pain killers just to get through life for those nine months. Even with them there were some nights I couldn't sleep because the pain in my hand was so severe. Of course, by the end of the nine months I was pretty well physically addicted, but, knowing my time was up I tapered off and haven't needed them since. For another six months I still needed frequent acetaminophen and ibuprofen to take the edge off of the throbbing in my hand.

I'm not saying at all that there isn't a problem big with opiod addiction. But recent conversations I've seen about opiods leave me with the impression that most people just don't get it. They think that either people just need to deal with pain or that some sort of non-medicine alternative is what's needed for most people on opiods. And that may be true for some. But unless you've been in the kind of pain that makes you seriously consider killing yourself I don't really think you can appreciate just how important opiod pain killers are to some people. I'm afraid we're going to lose something that helps a great deal of people all because we have this idea that addiction is somehow a moral failing and we've structured drug policies around that belief.
Okay, real talk, where do I get / buy / make one?
Same thing with the Segway. Remember that device which was going to revolutionize how we travel? Now it's for park police and airport staff and whatnot. Segway is now owned and made in China iirc.
Biases against what baseline? A language optimized to express a finite set of things?
I spoke to Mark Hannum (one of the authors of the paper) recently, it's slated for a release in either this quarter or the next.
I trust letters a lot, it's the words that worry me.
Cosmetology licensure requirements usually specify hours, not days.

Even still, cosmetology is a surprisingly complex practice which really does require a lot of hands-on training to become proficient. You should talk with a licensed cosmetologist sometime to get the ins and outs of their education.
Retail Store ‘Bubble’ Has Burst and CEOs Search for Answers
How much empathy did rural America have for those effected by the crack epidemic, really? How much does it have for those in the opioid epidemic, which somehow they own?

What does empathy look like? What makes you say rural America has it for urban America but not vice versa?
500 Startups Is Coming “Down Under” with LaunchVic Partnership
"The United States makes up only 4.6 percent of the world's population, but consumes 80 percent of its opioids -- and 99 percent of the world's hydrocodone, the opiate that is in Vicodin." [1]

I spend a lot of time listening to podcasts where addiction medicine doctors talk about the state of their industry. Their views and their guests views, are almost in complete alignment and those views are the exact opposite of the comments in this thread. I find that alarming.

If you listen to addiction medicine doctors, they will tell you:

1) There is a massive epidemic of opioid addiction. Opioids are wildly addictive and are negligently / over prescribed.

2) There is little evidence that opioids provide benefit for long term chronic pain and evidence that long-term use of opioids actually causes many problems. Getting off the opioids tends to reduce the chronic pain.

3) Patient surveys rule supreme and patients want pain-killers even if the doctor does not believe they are the solution.

Anecdotally, if you watch the A&E show "Intervention", the number of opioid and heroin cases has shot through the roof since the series started two decades ago. There has been a titanic shift in addiction. It's painful to watch some of these addicts lie to their doctor to get opioids, turn around and sell them, then use the money to get heroin because the opioids aren't strong enough anymore.

This comment thread really saddens me.

[1] http://abcnews.go.com/US/prescription-painkillers-record-num...
Blockchain needs to become technically boring
How to use new Snapchat Bitmoji widget (step-by-step guide)
Yep. My wife regularly decides to under-medicate rather than risk having to radically under-medicate later. And politicians attack the weak to appear strong, and we the weak sometimes have to cry ourselves to sleep, or die, or whatever is needed to cope.
yup. I got a digital ocean box with nginx and caching up and running in couple of hours. Added some rewrite rules to make the urls pretty. Now just need to port app codes.
Plotting R package performance metrics with Rperform
I have no knowledge of this situation, but guessing blindly I'm gonna assume that this is because Wikipedia has content that could be interpreted as mildly critical of the King of Thailand?
> There are other countries who went much further in their support for the poor, with much better outcomes.

Examples please. It's not true of Sweden or the rest of the Nordic countries and if anywhere has a more extensive system of social welfare I'm unfamiliar with it.
There's too many databases that abbreviate to CDB :P

This is interesting, but the weird thing is that I'm not sure this is all that different from e.g. hand sharding at the application level. By that I mean that ComDB2 doesn't seem to provide a real way of seamlessly sharding your data. Near the end of the paper:

> Under our design, each portion of the table has its own master (getting many of the benefits of a multi-master system) and is able to write to the portion it owns without coordinating with partitions uninvolved in the transaction.

Maybe the paper is missing some details on how queries and transactions are coordinated between masters, but it seems to imply that the application level has to handle this kind of stuff.
Interesting. I submitted this same story about a week ago and nobody cared until Ars Technica picked it up.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13863084
You really do not need to learn the command line to use Desktop Linux these days. At least for what most people do. Browsing, office, gaming (with Steam).

I would highly encourage you to learn the command line as it is considered a valuable skill on this site. You do not need to learn every obscure program. I often forget how to use quite a few Linux comamnds and just refer to Google or man.
I was assuming alternative reality. The sole reason why JS got the popularity that it did is because it was the one and only browser scripting language. If Lua was one, then it'd get the same popularity boost instead (and all the great tooling, large community etc that came with it).
> We have technical debt in software. Investing in holistically proprietary and locked down ecosystems in enterprise, where you are talking millions in software and more in labor training, you are incurring your own form of technical debt.

I understand, yet the challenge is exactly the same every time. Say, for example, you launch a brand new electric car company and need a bunch of integrated software and automation tools to help you do everything, from running the business to designing the cars, manufacturing, supply chain management, document processing, etc.

You have two choices: You can be an operating system, FOSS, free beer, free speech, pink unicorns for everyone zealot. Or you can go buy shit that works and get on with the business of getting shit done.

The difference is this: A business should only be concerned with delivering it's products and services and doing so on a timely manner while staying ahead of the competition. A business should not waste one microsecond on "technology jihad". That is not their job.

It is up to entrepreneurs who are "believers" to identify opportunities --if and where they exist-- and work hard to create solutions that appeal to the businesses who need them. It's a tall task, because success might require replacement solutions across a wide range of disciplines. This guarantees that multiple solution providers would have to engage in this "holy war" (sorry, sticking to a bad analogy at this point) in order for the car manufacturer to be able to even consider making a switch.

And then there's the other factor: Even if you could switch to an alternative universe and make it seamless within your organization it could still be a terrible business decisions. Why? Because if the vendors and suppliers you have to work with depend on communicating across company demarcation lines by using files produced by specific types of software you are almost assured a great deal of friction if you don't use the same tools. Don't believe me, call-up 100 machine shops and ask them if they accept Siemens NX or SolidWorks files and see what you learn. And both of those platforms run on Windows.

> people, on Windows, do care when Microsoft behaves against their interests and forces those decisions upon them.

Any professional is very careful about OS and software version transitions. Microsoft has had glitches here and there but they have always been nothing but rock-solid-reliable in their support of the needs of their business customers.

We might be looking at another glitch, I don't know, but I don't really care, they'll do the right thing. Not saying this because I love MS. It's just a matter of historical fact. Thinking back over 36 years, I can't remember the last time MS boned anyone. I can remember multiple times where both Apple and various Linux issues did.
Make a demo site, put in your portfolio, get a freelancing gig, do a few, put in your resume, apply for entry positions.
Now just add the section about uploading it to your GitHub so all new servers get setup with a simple git clone, and any new changes can be propogated around with push/pull.
on a tangent, I was just reading
https://medium.com/@dominikus/the-end-of-interactive-visuali...

in short (over simplified, my take): interactive visualizations are dead because nobody interacts with them.

wondering if this holds here as well.

Can't find the reference anymore, but there were also papers in educational sciences that interactive books usually don't increase comprehension of kids (they just play with them instead of depen their understanding).

edit: sorry didn't want to sound too critical. The work is awesome (upvote), was just thinking out loud.
Let's say we got to a point where every single individual has a bachelors or higher? What would that change? What about if everyone got a Masters or higher?

You think this will change anything? I doubt it, there would just be an increase in the job requirements due to credential inflation.
Product Hunt + Unsplash = HuntSplash
Maintain CV in markdown, and host static site on GitHub Page
I'm 23 years old living in a major city in the midwest, grew up a in a middle-small town (120k population) a few hours away. Everyone I grew up with is either selling heroin or taking it, or both.

The fact that I'm a software developer (making a living legally) and not taking and/or selling heroin is an anomaly.
> It's like a comical game of chicken because in less than a decade all of this software is going to be in a web browser anyway.

Will it, though? On the surface it stands to reason, but I distinctly recall seeing this exact argument a lot back in mid-00s already, during all the initial RoR craze. And yet, here we are.
The section you're referring to is the work underway to increase write performance, which is currently bounded by the master node's ability to process bplogs (an internal structure used to detect write-write conflicts).

re: 'the application level has to handle [sharding]', the table partitioning described in this section is merely a conceptual model 'assigning' masters to what are presumably non-overlapping row ranges in order to increase write throughput (writes/reads will be processed via that specific master). The behaviour of the system still resembles a single node database, this is alluded to intermittently throughout.

(also CRDB is the preferred acronym for CockroachDB haha, source: interning there)
California teacher shortage worsens, especially in cities
I love how precise and detailed this article is written. If only more documentation were like this.

It was always my assumption that grammar is the most important thing to learn about a language. Vocabulary accumulates almost automatically over time, with practise (and a dictionary). Interesting to see how that holds in this case.
daily mail is banned in .th, not wiki.
I have to ask, have you tried cannabis for your nerve pain?
Feral has really put a good effort to get alot of AAA games on Linux. XCOM, Mad Max and Shadows of Mordor I have played alot of on Linux. XCOM 2 and Deus Ex is next.

Virtual GPU support in KVM is something I am looking forward to maintain Win7 on a future Ryzen system.
I learned Japanese very much the same way I learn programming languages and found it to be very easy to learn spoken Japanese.

As far as languages go, Japanese is structured a lot like a programming language. If you learn five or six "bunpo" or grammar rules, you can go a very long ways. Then, to improve, just add rules to your mastery.

When I first learn any programming language I start with basics: variable binding/assignment, types, conditionals, looping, etc. Japanese fits very nicely into the same learning method.

Does a language have if/then? is it 'if (<expression>) { expression }'? Or 'if <expression> then <expression> end if'? Is there an 'unless' form? What about 'else'?

For Japanese, it's <expression> naraba <expression>. That's it. Unless? <expression> nakeriba <expression>.

How about while? <expression> nagara <expression>

For people who can learn the gist of a programming language in a week, you could learn the gist of Japanese in a week or two. That doesn't mean you would be fluent. You'd still need to learn thousands of vocabulary words. But the basic mechanics can be mastered in days or weeks. More mechanics can be layered as needed.
This kind of response to reported problems is why Linux has been hovering at 1% desktop user share for over a decade now. It was exactly the same back when I was first installing Mandrake in 2002, and it seems like nothing has changed in that regard, even though the DEs etc look very different nowadays.
Time of day and whatever else has been posted.
I could be misremembering this, but haven't head-mounted displays of one sort or another been used in industrial settings for something like 20 years? I don't remember when it was, but I seem to recall something with monochrome (and lower-resolution) displays like this being used in things like airplane repair[1].

[1] After a little searching, I may be remembering reading about the 1996 Boeing conference: https://www.media.mit.edu/wearables/lizzy/timeline.html, or it could be any of the other late-90s systems listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_head-mounted_display that got press at the time.

Edit: Looking at another page, I may actually be remembering something from computer magazines back while I was in college or shortly after - the Private Eye from Reflection Technology (1989) (https://glassdevelopment.wordpress.com/2014/04/17/hmd-histor...) - which would fit, because that plus the Twiddler chorded keyboard became part of the MIT Wearable Computer stuff and I remember wanting one of those keyboards.....