skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The thing to understand about nature is that it is made up of complex systems that have evolved into finely balanced equilibria. Our reductionist science only works well in linear systems where variables are cleanly separable, which complex systems by definition are not. Thus tinkering with nature under the assumption that it is a linear system is likely to have lots of unintended consequences. That is why science's track record in promoting health is so abysmal, and our agriculture is completely unsustainable.

The only way to really evolve a complex system is to make a lot of small gradual changes, constantly course correcting as you go.
I've been using this exact analogy the other way around about hiring in IT. First screening is usually some HR drone scanning your resume/cv for buzzwords.

HR: So, I see on your resume you have been building houses for a decade. This is a good foundation for the work we are doing.
Applicant carpenter: Yes, all sorts of houses. Done both interiors and prep for concrete pouring. Fiddled a little bit with wiring on a job where the electrician needed some help.
HR: Uhu. Yes. What vendor did you use for your tools?
AC: Pardon?
HR: Well, we have secured a really good deal on tools from Stanley. Are you familiar with their hammers?
AC: (puzzled) uhn, sure. I'm not too sure what I used on my last site. For me a hammer is a hammer. It has to be a really crappy tool not to do it's work.
HR: Thank you for coming in. I think you should expect a call from us sometime next week. (marks the checkbox, Not familiar with tools)

Coding is usually based around learning the solution we are employing. It's a very boring problem if the solution is known beforehand. It's now knowing the tools that make you effective, it's being able to learn them that is valuable about a knowledge worker.
Ask HN: What VPN service do you use?
Hi everyone,

I think the moment has arrived, I will start to use a VPN from now on, bit first I will have to decide which VPN provider I should use and I thought I could get some help from someone with experience.

What service do you use ? What do you recommend ? Considering privacy, pricing and speed ?

From a quick search I came across https://www.tunnelbear.com/ and https://www.expressvpn.com/ and they both seem nice options, although a little bit pricey.
Anecdata: the well-developed legal field is the prime reason why my corporate attorney always pushes his clients to incorporate in Delaware. He and his firm know what to expect throughout the process, and can offer much more reliable advice than when you incorporate elsewhere or in your home state (even California).

Delaware residents certainly have a favorable tax situation, with zero sales tax and very low property taxes, but that's mostly because they get tons of income from the franchise taxes applied to corporations registering there.

And if you're a first-time founder getting your first Delaware franchise tax bill, you're not going to consider the process favorable by any means.
I don't know if this is helpful for you, but I map <c-p> to run the open buffer in Vim in the buffer's filetype's interpreter (or compile and run, etc.). For GNU APL, this is:

nnoremap <buffer> <C-P> :write !cat - <(echo ")OFF") \| apl --script<CR>

It took some time to figure that out, but combined with https://github.com/ngn/vim-apl, it is not too bad of an editing experience.
After 12 rejections, Apple accepts app that tracks US drone strikes
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> What other modern programming language is so bad that a linter is most recommended for safety sake?

Python, for one.
You know you can already get things for free at current stores.

It's called shoplifting and it's REALLY EASY.

The truth is in Western Society most people don't do this.

And after an initial novelty factor (which I'm sure Amazon will account for), people won't bother any more than they shoplift now.

P.S. Nor will they shoot Amazon Prime AIr drones out of the sky like other HN threads fret.
The nuance of calling people names is lost on the author. Bad code can be written by great coders. It happens to the best of us. No need to insult people to improve code.
> Since the decommissioning of the Concorde, our fastest commercial means of transportation has actually been getting slower, not faster.

Our means of travel have also gotten vastly more efficient.

Prioritizing progress in average efficiency over speed of a showpiece that is used for a very small share of actual travel isn't the end of progress, and it is very much change in the world of atoms, not bits.
That would be pointless because a docker container is explicitly everything but the kernel. Just run the unikernel as a vm.
The astonishing power of probe response packets
Harvard Dives into Data Science
PreScheme, Nim... Very powerful. Compiled to C for performance.
NativeScript Supports Angular 4
Could this be a tactic to chose the trial location and avoid Texas ?
I'm a bit skeptical that the human sex drive is going to automatically adjust itself downwards at the same rate as the death rate suddenly plunging, even with modern contraception.
I'm not really on wifi good enough to reply extensively, but I pushed an update to the post explaining this better. If you carry out the read explicitly, you can still get the anomaly in much the same way. I should've done so from the beginning, but I tried to simplify the argument and went too far.
If the paper gets traction and the model specification is indeed not robust, the first thing you'll see in a few months is something like "paper xyz: comment" driving holes in the methodology getting even more traction. Empirical microeconomics is fairly open about methodology flaws and critiques.

Also, by the way, you see pretty much the same type of thing in a ton of fMRI neuroscience, medical and psychology studies (even the ones you'll later see on NPR or ted talks). You shouldn't ever believe any one empirical result in basically anything except maybe CERN particle physics type work.
Wanna Learn PHP in a fun way Why not learn it now
My current belief is that morality is indirectly related to the progress of technology, by being directly related to the stability and wealth of the society. Basically, when most people aren't afraid of going hungry or getting invaded by their neighbours, they suddenly have time to discuss issues like homosexuality and generally relax the social norms that in the past were necessary for survival (by maintaining group cohesion).
Mercedes Lackey writes a lot about writer's block on Quora. Her position is that there's no such thing as writer's block, what people do is write themselves into a corner and their subconscious won't let them proceed with the story because every available path is silly or stupid.

The cure is to go back to the drawing board and figure out where you screwed the story up. The way forward could be as simple as introducing another character or as difficult as re-outlining the current story arc.
None of the above are new technologies (last decade(s) or so) developments -- except those that concern computers (which is in accordance to what the parent said).
Democratization of Computer-Aided Engineering
Rustls[1] is a work in progress to build a TLSv1.3 Server in 100% safe Rust. Uses Ring for crypto.

It could use more contributors/eyes/auditors. It works out of the box on Windows currently.

[1] https://github.com/ctz/rustls
>- that government has changed from thinking that progress can be achieved via planning, into thinking that it's more just there to watch random forces & statistics evolve the world. This change in mindset away from planning for innovation has made it impossible to achieve grandiose mission like the Apollo space missions. As a result if there is going to be a government role in getting innovation started, people have to philosophically believe again that it’s possible to plan.

It's pretty bloody ironic to hear Peter Thiel say we need state planning.
Mainly because Sam's already had receipt checking at the exit, so it's nothing outside of their normal operating process.
Stop calling it "Machine Learning" and "Neural Networks" if you don't want the attention. Do we refer to code or computers as "Machines?". That kind of language is just begging for skynet references.

Any sort of elaborate processing network could be called "Neural" or maybe even a fancy linked-list . Something more reasonable like a learning network would keep the sensationalism down. Im sure we can come up with better names...
> Is it possible to do that? Or is the problem that docker inherits the host kernel

Since containers are "merely" sandboxed processes there is no "host"† to speak of and no "inheritance": it's just exactly the current kernel that exec() a process in a highly segregated environment (from mount points to network stack). So obviously that's not possible.

† as opposed to "guest" in VM parlance
A No-Rub solution was not an option? I can just take em out, store them in No-Rub solution overnight and repeat that for a month before they start to deteriorate.
Go to faster/lower power semiconductors and you don't need to scale in terms of size. Faster clock speed can mean fewer parts and you can go 3d if you get power down.
> Uber are betting on their customers becoming vocal opponents of the regulation and lobbying their government to change the law in order to allow Uber back without the rules, and for other governments to become fearful of enforcing their regulations in case they anger Uber's customers too.

And I suppose that certain markets are really going to be the driver of the customer's rallying cry. I have seen posts from different locales (typically major US cities) where people have said that hailing a cab is almost impossible. You call dispatch, and one might show up within the next hour. The cab driver could have stopped to pick up another fare while on the way to you.

Then there are places like my locale where Uber is present, but there isn't a need for it. My city is markedly not walkable. The surrounding neighborhoods are not walk/bike friendly. I used to live 20 minutes away from my office via bike, but I wouldn't dare attempt to ride a bike in from that house. No bike lanes, no sidewalks, so few grassy shoulders for when traffic gets up to 50 mph. The only feasibly way to bike to the city was to take an additional 15 minutes by cutting through neighborhoods. Public transportation is a joke. There aren't a ton of people here, and everyone has cars for the above reason - even if it's a late 80s junker with 300k miles. Calling a cab is not a gamble here. It just shows up.

In the other areas I first mentioned, I think Uber really did disrupt the cab industry in those markets. Cab companies had to give up their monopoly to compete with a mostly unregulated ride-sharing service.It was either fix your issues or lose to Uber. I don't think Uber has the worldwide (or even US nationwide) support to rely on it's customers. It's possible that some hubs will have champions for their cause, but I don't think Uber has that vocal customer base that it needs.
the airport counter sells you a ticket, you give the ticket to the driver. no further payment is necessary.
I used to work at a large insurance company as an actuary, and although it's dying out, there's still APL code modeling insurance products in use. One of my jobs was to add the new years' assumptions into arrays.
A global transport model would be nice. But it should not rely on a single operator. Instead it should be based on a standard (like HTTP, etc) such that all taxi companies are independent and able to live up to national standards.
>Our means of travel have also gotten vastly more efficient.

Hardly vastly. At best within an order of magnitude better, but not even close to that.
Thank you. If that's the case and he's completely normal without any racism and hatred between his episodes I was wrong and I apologize.
Flexible Glass Made for Tiny Medical Devices
That's a nice thought, but tampered taximeters 100% do exist, it's not a hypothetical. On the other hand, Uber faking or altering a receipt is hypothetical.

Update: Also, if Uber is found to be cheating at some point there is a record of every ride so you can bet they will be forced to make everyone whole. Good luck getting a settlement on your random taxi ride.
Why is this little construction crane not being used in other cities?

This is what is the oddest piece of the story to me. There are lots of cities where these buildings are built. Mid-size cities. If the cost of the tower crane is so much more than this one, then the cost of transport should be minimal.
I'd be paying a corruption tax, instead of an actual absurd amount of taxes. The horror.

I'm being facetious but seriously. A world in which people believe that a supermarket scale has to be regulated by federal government or else - is a weird world.

Life as we know it would NOT break down just because government doesnt dabble in one tiny stupid little thing.
Like I said, you're yet to explain what "async-to-async" actually means in this context. I say this, because I don't think you actually understand what Google means when you write that they're using a synchronous model of development. What they're doing is, quoting from the article, "shifting the burden of managing asynchronous events away from the programmer to the operating system or the thread library". The programs themselves are still asynchronous, it's just that the programmer doesn't have to care.

So if you're going to claim that using a synchronous programming model over an asynchronous runtime wastes a lot of energy, you're going to have to (1) explain very well the differences between that model and the one you're proposing and (2) explain how your model wastes less energy.

You're also going to have to support the rather extraordinary claim that "[s]olar and wind to electrivity are net energy negative". That myth was already false back in the late 90s, it's quite absurd nowadays. The Energy Payback time of a current solar panel is just a couple of years, depending on how sunny the place you put it is.
Normally, asserts are only compiled into debug versions
of the code, and removed for release versions.

I know a lot of languages default to this, and it always seemed like a bad decision to me. The performance benefits of most checks are trivial compared to the major downside of not testing the exact code you release.

Several times I've had to track down bugs that have been very difficult to find, as they were 'fixed' by side effects of assert statements and hence didn't show up in debug builds.

If a check really can't be performed in the release version for performance reasons, just separate it out into a unit test.
>In example 1 though it's just called silly. What's wrong with that one?

It's arguably a point about style. The original code saved the effort of typing "assert()" twice but the granularity of exactly which condition failed the assertion is lost. E.g., a MSVC error will show granularity of line# but not the subexpression[1].

So there's a benefit of improved error reporting if the programmer wraps each conditional with its own assert().

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=c%2B%2B+assert+error&source=...
TensorFlow as a Distributed Virtual Machine
Do you think this could have something to do with ingrained interests that have subverted disruptive technological progress? I have a feeling that there have been at least a few cases of this preventing the public from enjoying the benefits of "future living" that the 60's envisioned.
So more apartments is nicer to you than some grass and trees?
To which one could say that's not how science works. You don't sweep bad science under the rug, you publish the research to the contrary.

From a scientific perspective it is the wrong approach.

From a social perspective, It's like burning books you don't agree with.

Neither works for more than a short time.
>Not sure I'd consider stuff like the vast majority of human knowledge sitting in my pocket to be less useful than the dishwasher because it has fewer moving parts or most people can afford to fly to be less of an achievement than the megarich can fly 50% faster.

Not sure anybody told you to consider that.

What they did ask you to consider is that technological progress, outside of the digital realm, has been slowed down.
Wearing a mask to conceal your identity in public is a crime in most places and also a felony in some. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-mask_laws#United_States
Well that was unexpected [1]. I can kinda see what he means, but I'm not sure I'd use the same simile.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ozt2d8t8hIU
Tesla Model 3 Production Lower, Price Higher (A Lot): Morgan Stanley Analyst
From personal experience defending such suits, the bar is effectively so low to be imperceptibly higher than ground level. In the rare case it would be relevant, it's just as expensive or moreso to make that claim as defend the underlying case.

In this case, based on just reading the article alone, it would be a very hard claim to make against Acushnet. Even if the patents could be invalidated, until they are they have the presumption of enforceability.
For some reason daily contacts dried out very fast for me. Often they would be uncomfortable in 8-10 hours. I didn't have this problem with bi-weeklies.
The past and ongoing research lets us understand in more details the processes that make humans have the maximum age. Unless you believe ~124 is a hard limit mandated by God himself (which, BTW., is something that the Bible says explicitly), that research is crucial to eventually overcoming the limit. Is there anything you believe that makes life extention a problem that's impossible to solve? Because if not, it's always a matter of throwing more resources at it.
Learn to be resilient.

Pick up an artistic or handcraft technique.

Make friends.

Comedy, music, drama, or something other performing art.

Know your means, live within them.
The first part of the 2nd Ave subway line to 96th St in NYC was completed a couple of months ago. The cost of the extension was prohibitively expensive because of unions. Europe is able to build subways with much less cost per mile than NYC.
I second this. There are plenty of times I'll be looking at code I wrote a few months ago and swear it was written by someone else. The same goes for more elegant code. Not everyone writes amazing code all the time.
> Cheap, safe, non-polluting, no maintenance car?

We've made tremendous progress in that direction since 1960. What's your point?

> A world where you could walk to the things you need because they're close?

That's not a technology problem; much of the developed world is like that and more of the world is getting to be like it with progressive urbanization. The US made a deliberate social choice to focus on auto-centric development that inhibits that a bit in the US, but that's a social problem, not a technical one.
if every transaction on my bank account cheated me out of 2 cents, that would amount to a low single digit sum. Yes, I'd probably be cool with that.

Do you guys realize that the armageddon you are trying to paint isnt all that armageddon-y?

I mean, fraud isn't cool. But if you want to scare me, you may at least try to scare me. Losing 5 dollars in a year to "fraud" sounds more enticing than losing 70% of my income to - taxes which are totally not theft because the law says so - theft.
It's not snarky, I agree with you actually. :)

But seriously... In general, "strategic thinking" for junior people is basically understanding your role in the team, the team's long term strategy, the team's collaborations with other parts of the company, and stuff like that.
The difference between vaccines and climate change is that we have hard evidence on vaccines. You can create a hypothesis and do a randomized double blind experiment. The results are conclusive.

Climate Science is a bunch of computer models are not testable. When they're run and compared to what actually happened they're always off. e.g. Name a single climate science model that predicted "the pause" starting in '98?

Climate Scientists don't release their model's code. They don't release the exact data that went into their model. Shit, isn't that one of the complaints about Wansink? That he isn't sharing his data?

I'm not saying climate change isn't real, I'm saying that the level of certainty that climate scientists proclaim is problematic. I'm saying that labeling dissenters as deniers (reminiscent of holocaust deniers) is beyond the pale. I'm saying that fossil fuels have done more to advance the human condition than anything else in history of mankind.
PureEarth Wallpapers – The best aerial photos
Looks like the site is hugged to death :-(

My only experience with APL-like languages was playing with K for a few months. It's amazing, no other language can do so much in a few characters. Here's a list of hundreds of snippets: http://code.kx.com/wiki/Qidioms

To give a taste of K style, I'll try to explain one of those snippets here. The problem statement is to merge three arrays x, y, z under control of another array g. Don't worry, it will make sense in a moment. These are the definitions of x, y, z and g, followed by one line of code solving the problem, and the result:

x:"abcd"
y:"123456789"
z:"zz"
g:"101121211010101"
(x,y,z)[<<g]
"1a23z4z56b7c8d9"

First of all, (x,y,z) is just the concatenation of three arrays, and [] is the familiar array indexing operator. The twist is that [] can also accept an array of indices, so e.g. "ab"[0 1 1 0] returns "abba".

But the really clever bit is <<g. A single invocation of < returns the sorting permutation of an array, i.e. an array of indices x such that g[x] is sorted. After two invocations of < you get the sorting permutation of the sorting permutation. In other words, the inverse of the sorting permutation. In other words, the permutation that turns sorted g into regular g. In other words, exactly the permutation that you need to mesh x, y and z together!

By any reasonable programmer's standard, that's way too much cleverness. But if you want a lot of functionality in a few characters, that's the price to pay, and K programmers seem happy to pay it. It's also really fast, because you're combining optimized bulk operations, and dropping down to individual elements only in special cases.
I'm not well versed in other countries' laws but you are right of course. My comment was intended to be seen in this direction: For small companies (let's say up to a few employees) almost all relevant risks of liability for the founder exist equally in both unlimited and limited liability companies. There are very few cases were the shield of a limited liability company is beneficial. An insurance is ofter a cheaper way of getting that. Also, a significant customer with a competent lawyer will ensure that all contracts with a small just-started business will include a personal liability clause.

That supermarket down the street? Almost surely run by a fully liable merchant. That consulting office next door? A fully liable partnership. This two-person software company? Both owner fully liable. It's a common choice and often better suited than it might sound at first.
April 1 is four days away, please get the date right.
I almost feel guilty.

I remember hearing about starfighters.io sometime back and putting on my ever-growing tab of "Visit on freetime", but now it's--in all likelihood--gone forever.
Amazon Connect – Customer Contact Center in the Cloud
My experience is that Uber was roughly ~20% cheaper overall.

The good outcome is that the taxi companies ramped up, got out a decent app (with most of the features from the Uber app) and we got discussion and even law changes about how Taxis operate (though not necessarily all for the better).