skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Beyond the cash, carriers reap something else from the cards: These deals remain lucrative in both good times and bad, as they are immune to economic cycles. That’s because of the addictive nature of miles, a dubious commodity that tens of millions of Americans, particularly those who fly for their jobs, will probably never quit.

“In a recession, that [bank] business will go down, but it should provide a very high cushion to the airline,” DeNardi said in an interview. “That’s the real benefit here: It speaks to downside protection for the industry better than anything else.”

So they earn money by selling miles to the CC companies who give the miles to customers who spend. So if spending goes down won't there be fewer miles to buy?

Or is the point that general spending with CCs isn't correlated with people buying airfares?
I don't buy it. There is so much amazing shit in this universe, and it's so difficult to get a proper perspective on it all. I honestly expect to enjoy life more once I hit 35, as my understanding and perspective should be much deeper, and I'll have made further progress on understanding how to live a balanced and fulfilling life (at least, in a way that works for me).

I will also likely have acquired more financial resources and additional connections with like minded folks, which should enable interesting projects and adventures.

I'm basing this largely on how the past 5 years have gone, and the understanding I have developed during that time (from age 22 to 27). I also fully reserve the right to adjust this forecast 5 years from now :)
Trolling people in an attempt to get their lawn mowed by others.
I like the overall idea here. Focus on building something quality first then worry about scaling later. Most servers can handle a decent amount of traffic. Seems like common sense to me. I guess some people can get too hung up on engineering to make their site scale before actually deploying or innovating on the product. Wonder if people have encountered this in the workplace before?
One thing I've learned being a designer is that people under estimate people's ability to figure out interfaces.

Most intial problems are around the information architecture to figure out what something does and how they can do something. The UX and UI issues are generally competitive advantages.

I concur that GNOME doesn't have much more complications compared to MacOS. Strictly from a WM and chrome perspective.

The general questions around how to use the OS are more specific to linux. And obviously it's not the perfect OS for total newbs. But it's continually getting better for average OS users. Especially as hardware support is less of an issue, which has always been issue number 1 with Linux. Things should just work and hardware is first with any OS.
I've never found the airline credit cards to be the best deal for purchases. I can get 1.5-2% cash back on some cards (even higher on certain types of purchases), but the best value is either Chase Sapphire Reserve (essentially 3% back on travel/dining, and potentially more if you redeem for miles), or SPG Amex (2.2-3%, minimum, and sometimes higher).

Airline cards are worth it for status, and for the bonus for on-airline purchases, but not for general purchases.
I assume it's the same thing as signal is for me: it's the thing with UX good enough to convince some of my friends to use it. They wouldn't use buggy xmpp, tox clients or things without many of the features like ricochet.

I like testing these tools with cryptonerd friends though.
The US Treasury Department essentially has a 1,000-page financial no-fly list
> Are you being intentionally dense?

Really? We don't speak to each other like that around here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

* Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face-to-face conversation. Avoid gratuitous negativity.

* When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.
I'm not in any of those markets but have lived and worked in Vancouver, and if I still did would likely have the same job as I do now.

$84k US but living in a part of Canada much cheaper than Vancouver. 4 days a week. No crazy corporate or startup deadlines. All open source.
For women considering Modafinil, note that it interferes with hormonal birth control.
Well, it is longreads.com.
I'm beginning to doubt the political neutrality of wiki leaks and Snowden. Do you really think the US is the only country with penetrable intelligence agencies? Why haven't KGB/FSB malwares come out?
He makes the valid point that performance for each individual user, like page load time, does matter. Just that building for an audience size you don't yet have is mostly wasted time.

Seems reasonable. I wonder, though, if PHP feels like an anchor to the average Facebook developer. I realize they architected around it, but it must have some effect on recruiting, retention, etc. I use PHP myself, and don't hate it, but the stigma is there.
Saltpack -> NaCL pack -> nacklepack -> Nickelback
Any stigma should be prioritizing tech over the business. Your business exists to turn a profit, stack be damned.
It depends on what do you interpret as ethics in any case. We fall often on the trap of those rubber abstract concepts. Dolphin can not read an ethics treatise obviously, but show lots of examples of what most people would call "ethical behaviour":

Cooperative hunting, altruism, care for the members of the group, and colective child care are normal.

Innate interest and sense of compassion for other marine mammals in distress, including humans, and a strong protection response in dangerous situations.

They have grandparents. This is particularly remarkable. Old specimens past their reproductive days are treated as expendable and die quickly in 99% of the animal species. Grandma's are instead VID (very important dolphins) in its societies, and live much longer than expected.

Mourning was also reported in some cases.
Any ADC or DAC with the Nusbio device?
I am similarly baffled by the tolerance for (even illegally obtained) drugs which apparently exist in this community. In another discussion here¹ about a similar topic I wrote the following:

> If you have “an Everest of work”, the solution is to get less work, not to take drugs. Be the person you are.

① https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8868035
Seattle. At my last 3 jobs, I made $135k, then $110k, then $90k, in that order, as both my skills and the profile/prestige of the products increased.
1) FB uses a lot of languages other than Hack
2) Hack is fairly reasonable language even has pipe operator :)
3) While it is prevailing sentiment that PHP sux I think PHP 7 is fairly reasonable language
Maybe along those lines you could have a clean up satellite with a nuclear reactor and high powered laser to gradually vapourize the junk?
I can't believe the PDF fulltext search works. Must be a rare alignment of bugs across search engine, PDF parser, database, and website.
That works to motivate some employees, assuming their comp is relative to your business success. Facebook has been able to do that for some time, but there's probably a plateau or two in their future.
Just identify those workers as male. Problem solved.
How about a third agency that focuses on securing our digital infrastructure?
I don't understand. I read about half of the article and it doesn't explain how that works.

I mean money has to come from somewhere, I assume the tens of millions of credit card holders. But credit card holders do their usual spending, and in fact save between 1% and 3% on their monthly bills instead of paying more.

Unless.

- They increase their air travel frequency.

- They get addicted to collecting airline miles, because it gives them the feeling of free air travel.

- And as a result they increase their average spending (so no longer the 'usual' spending), and buy useless stuff, just so they can collect more and more miles.

Is that the real story or something more/different?
It's something like that (I'm not being coy, I just haven't run the numbers). It comes out to $200K/year on ~$15K of operating expenses.

More people should run niche sites! A vanilla Flickr reboot, for example, is a livelihood waiting to happen.
Yes, I have just imported my LJ to Dreamwidth, and I am not alone: there has been a spike in the number of Dreamwidth accounts.
Even ignoring the innumerable flaws PHP (yes including 7) has as a language, its standard library is among the worst standard libraries of any language.
FizzBuzz in Haskell by Embedding a Domain-Specific Language (2014) [pdf]
Heh, I just bought a ticket from SLC -> CHI for around a $100. AA had a nice little add(?) showing it would cost me $0 (minus tax and other fees) if I got their card. I was just thinking how crazy that was.

I've personally never found the use for a credit card from a specific airline to be useful for a casual traveler. I generally like to shop around for the cheapest price between all available carriers. There is no incentive for me to stick with a single carrier to get those miles simply because I can't afford to travel that much.

I also don't have those credit cards from walmart, Khols or <insert business name here> though. When I first came to USA, someone told me having multiple cc can lower your credit score and credit score is life. So I am still scared of credit cards.
Switch from vb to lxc/docker and you get great GPU driver support, even CUDA.
I liked the article and agree with its premise. But as a side question, why do developers use so many parenthetical expressions?

Those ideas (like this one, which happens to add nothing) are often either throwaway statements (like this one) or are by themselves complete thoughts that should be a separate sentence. (I see this so often in posts written by devs.)
It ticked me off that their CC version of a useful-looking GNU Make book is distributed as a bunch of individual chapter PDFs, a.k.a. royal hassle to download and combine by hand.

So I banged out a quick 40-ish line CLI utility to scrape such things. https://github.com/paultopia/scrape-ebook
The business isn't your concern if you don't work there yet.

i.e. it's not bad to avoid working somewhere because they use PHP. That's not 'prioritising tech over business', it's just choosing to avoid toxic crap technology.
Ok but please don't do things like using nested array searches with bad runtime when you can use hashmaps instead. I hate seeing code or using programs that are extremely unoptimized.
We switched to lxc for vagrant, it is a amazing both for GPU support, speed of startup, and low memory usage. Would never go back to running full VMs via VB or VMware.

You could wait years for some 3D support in VB, or you could just side step the problem and go with lxc.
'Mowgli girl' was not raised by monkeys
It's good to allow people to take risks that only affect them, but even then we have to make sure they are properly informed of the risk. When so much of tech is spread on hype, people aren't aware how much of risk they're signing on for.

The example that frustrates me most is self driving cars. Tesla's marketing department got ahead of the rest of the org, and you end up with people doing this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnZHRupjl5E. Or you see excited people comparing number of crashes per self-driving mile to number of crashes per human driven mile and thinking that's an apples-to-apples number to compare, and thinking that therefore their risk has decreased.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for self driving cars and personal autonomy, but something has to balance all the PR and marketing bullshit around every product. How many misleading half truths and flat out lies have you seen in in advertisements lately? Or in the news? Science journalism isn't exactly renowned for accuracy.
This sounds true to me, but it would take a very uncommon executive to put it into practice. MBA types won't do a thing without quantitative data behind it and attempts to measure real productivity in creative fields usually turn into meaningless self-fulfilling prophecies. I wonder what it would take to break the dogma of the 40-hour week?
I care because it usually goes like this:
Product manager > "Niche sass app {x} will never need to support more than 10-20 users"

Two weeks after launch > "We have 10k users and counting, why didn't you architect this for scale?"

Always assume you underestimated the scope of the project.
The opposite. Lenders like to see that you can obtain credit, use it a little and make payments on time.
As I understand it, they are also removing raw public keys and OpenPGP keys, keeping only X.509 certificates.
This site would not render until JavaScript was enabled.

EDIT:

It seems that NoScript plugin has stopped Firefox from rendering this page where no script is embedded/referred. Probably NoScript blocked XSLT in Firefox.
Without 3d support, basically no-one can use virtualbox, so is the dilemma whether to kill the project or not?

(This is a serious question--what can possibly be more important to average virtualbox users than having a working desktop environment? Virtualbox has always occupied the desktop virtualization niche, so I'm trying to figure out what has changed...)
Katie Bouman: How to take a picture of a black hole (2016) [video]
The banks pay the airlines for miles cardholders earn.
Gynecologists hate her
maybe it really doesn't make sense to travel 80 miles a day to get to work? just saying, at some point it becomes a poor societal and personal tradeoff. where do you think the line is?

to some extend the 80 mile commute is being subsidized (roads, artificially lower gas prices, cost of congestion, pollution, sufficient space for parking at dense destinations, etc)

I'm not saying there aren't tradeoffs, but you can't really assert that as a group we just have to accommodate 80 mile daily commutes for everyone and solve backwards from that.
Plenty of people (in my experience, mostly older people) use smartphones without even knowing what an app is. Between the inbuilt browser, camera, email, IM and phone functions, a massive amount of functionality is covered off for a heap of people.
I'm not sure what source you derive from about the particularity of "sitting still". You imply that not being distracted from the given task? Or the physicality of sitting still has the benefit? (The two can be distinguished easily---if the latter is the case, "sitting still without doing anything, and just daydreaming wildly" would also have benefit.) Or you mean meditation? That's a different activity at all.

In the ADHD case, it seems about the way of processing stimuli. They (or at least my kid) need a sort of synchronization stimulus (or, outside distrubance, in the way that disturbance suppresses the divergence of hypersensitive systems) to keep his mind on rail. If no such stream of stimuli is provided, he must create one by his own. I try to make him find and build his own toolset to work with. (One of the activities, for example, is tapping along metronome while doing other tasks.)

[Edit] I see your comment in other thread that you refer to Zen meditation. I've learned meditation and I agree on its benefits, but it can't be applied to the current discussion of school setting---"sitting still listening lectures" and "sitting still meditating" are very different activities. The latter would certainly develop the ability of the former, but I'm dubious about just forcing the former.
I use Virtualbox daily without ever using a desktop environment in the VM. It's very useful in headless form for development machines when working locally.
I'd place it in the hands of habit. We're used to dealing with strange keyboard symbols (like %@*# - and having them mean something). Personally I find that I use dashes far more than any human should while writing (but like others) I do engage in a bit of parenthetical shenanigans as well.
Libc++ String Layouts
I think you may be projecting your own experience growing up on a nation as a whole.

Yes, Fairlight and some other groups were Swedish. Yes, a strong middle class meant that a lot of kids had access to ABC80s, C64s, Amiga 500s, IBM PCs, Macintoshes growing up. BBSes were popular in certain groups of the population. People grew up with this and started companies. A lot of existing companies were open to new things. That does not mean that "hacking is a part of Swedish culture".

> an unfriendly climate most of the year encourages indoor activities

Anecdotally, I seem to recall a lot of sledge riding, snowball throwing and various other winter activities from my youth.
Everything has flaws but PHP is a reasonable choice for many problems. Python pip is crap compared to composer for example. While my favorite language is Elixir I mostly do Node and Python at work can't say experience is significantly better with either of them compared to PHP 7.
The first article that appeared in my feed after reading this one: The Emerging Trump Doctrine: Don’t Follow Doctrine.

This article made me think of this line from Does irrationality fuel innovation? "A lot of important truths come from v. irrational ppl."

You guys are smarter than I am. Any correlation? Is there any hope that his irrationality might just be what the world needed? Crazy like a fox? Didn't he gain most of his support from people's desire to shake things up? People didn't necessarily like him. They had an overwhelming desire that maybe a force from the outside traditional government could bring a change.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/04/08/us/politics/trump-doct...
Not sure what you mean. Employers would prefer to give no information about previous employees, specifically "to cover their arse from lawsuits". They confirm employment dates as a courtesy because it can be difficult to get a job without confirmation of previous employment.

Tangentially, it's really abrasive and generally unnecessary to start a comment by calling someone a liar. You can disagree with me here, and that's totally fine. To call me a liar for holding a different opinion than you makes you seem really petty. Arguing about the reason companies will disclose employment history doesn't seem to be the time to break out this sort of accusation.
ScrapySharp, free C# scraping library
It wasn't generic at the time and also it's a scheduled drug so it's illegal to import into the US unless the receiver is registered with the DEA.
Yes. But how do banks make money? Surely they're not paying airlines for miles and distributing the miles free-of-charge to their card holders out of the goodness of their hearts. What are they getting in return? Either what I said above or something more/different (annual fees is another possibility?).
Does it not make sense to evaluate the offering in total?

Also, rewards cards usually try to optimize perceived value vs actual value. So miles, for example might have perceived value of 4% but only cost the bank 2%. Cash reward is 1:1.
You could do this pretty easily. All orbits at the same altitude eventually intersect, and high LEO orbits take decades or more to decay. Moreover, at orbital velocities, even tiny fragments can destroy a satellite.

So if you fill an altitude range with enough orbiting shrapnel, you can ruin the party for everyone. The movie 'Gravity' has some breathtaking visuals of how such a runaway event would look.
I've literally been waffling back and forth between UUID and BigInt for the last week. The reason for this is I need to handle eventually distributed systems. Do I need UUIDs? Maybe not, but after much debt, I've decided that the storage requirements of such an index in memory is worth the ability to move from Postgres to Postgresql-xl.
Because Indians are smart enough to realize that it's better to fund those slippers using an uber-successful space program than to tax people or asking the reserve to print more currency.
Here in Australia, US-style cashback cards basically don't exist - there have been a handful of banks that have tried things like a 2% cashback on debit cards for using Visa PayWave, a few cards which have introductory (e.g. first three months) cashback deals, and of course you can use Amex points to pay off your Amex debt, but usually at worse rates than you can exchange to airline miles. But nothing like US-style permanent cashback deals.

Of course, over here we have far lower interchange rates than the US, and courtesy of new Reserve Bank regulations, interchange rates will drop even further on Visa and MasterCard purchases later this year, which I suspect makes it rather harder to do a cashback offer profitably.
On Twitter and Tumblr you can make extra accounts to participate in discussions you're interested in, and select people to follow based on that, so the feed system is okay for talking about things other than yourself if the feeds don't include everyone you know by default.

Tumblr has some pretty good discussion about movies and books.

Twitter not so good for discussion because off the length limit, but there's plenty of people posting concise observations and jokes rather than posting about themselves.

On both systems, people can reply to content from strangers, and there's lots of conflict arising from that.

I do think Tumblr would be improved by making it easier to have discussions that don't go to all your followers by default, for example like on Twitter where if you tag people at the start of your tweet, it doesn't go into the main feed for your followers who aren't tagged.

Or you can go all the way to partitioning a system into topics, as with Reddit. I wouldn't call that a social network though, you don't just casually start a conversation with people you've chosen to connect with, you start a conversation with a subreddit.
Couldn't agree with this article more.

I built the biggest social network to come out of India from 2006-2009. It was like Twitter but over text messaging. At it's peak it had 50M+ users and sent 1B+ text messages in a day.

When I started, the app was on a single machine. I didn't know a lot about databases and scaling. Didn't even know what database indexes are and what are their benefits.

Just built the basic product over a weekend and launched. Timeline after that whenever the web server exhausted all the JVM threads trying to serve requests:

1. 1 month - 20k users - learnt about indexes and created indexes.

2. 3 months - 500k users - Realized MyISAM is a bad fit for mutable tables. Converted the tables to InnoDB. Increased number of JVM threads to tomcat

3. 9 months - 5M users - Realized that the default MySQL config is for a desktop and allocates just 64MB RAM to the database. Setup the mysql configs. 2 application servers now.

4. 18 months - 15M users - Tuned MySQL even more. Optimized JDBC connector to cache MySQL prepared statements.

5. 36 months - 45M users - Split database by having different tables on different machines.

I had no idea or previous experience about any of these issues. However I always had enough notice to fix issues. Worked really hard, learnt along the way and was always able to find a way to scale the service.

I know of absolutely no service which failed because it couldn't scale. First focus on building what people love. If people love your product, they will put up with the growing pains (e.g. Twitter used to be down a lot!).

Because of my previous experience, I can now build and launch a highly scalable service at launch. However the reason I do this is that it is faster for me to do it - not because I am building it for scale.

Launch as soon as you can. Iterate as fast as you can. Time is the only currency you have which can't be earned and only spent. Spend it wisely.

Edited: formatting
Ok what can you write it in that you can't scale to 10K users by just adding web servers? The hard to scale part is storage layer but even crappy options like RDS will happily support 10K users.
Interchange fees charged per-transaction by Visa/MC/Amex.