skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well a company having maximum respect for the environment would mandate a policy of maximum reuse, maximum parts harvesting, and sustainable resale channels.

On a foundation of well-built long-lasting easily-repairable product.

Only shredding the remainder of parts which could not possibly have their usefulness extended by anyone.

Especially if there was any toxicity or energy waste in the original manufacturing process.

It can be seen that the independent repairers and parts harvesters are probably performing in a more environmentally responsible way than the manufactuer. Especially from an energy balance point of view.

And on a scale that's overwhelming, the repairers need relatively stronger rights toward overcoming any imbalance in their disfavor.

A very strong manufacturer can afford to expend energy removing a vast parts resource from circulation, denying repairers a much larger multiple of available energy savings instead.

Whenever shredding has higher priority than reuse, it could be a sign of greed or other misguided management efforts taking precedence over opportunities provided by true leadership in engineering optimization. Besides having priority over the environment in any or all locations.

Who knows what other entities might also be contracting with eWaste haulers to destroy rather than resuse as many tonnes of working W7 & W8 PC's about now as a modern salvo in their maximum-waste-declaration strategy, or to further an agenda of removing all machines not having a processor with a remote management engine.

From another angle it's not unlike a nation minting and shredding its own currency for its subjects as it sees fit, to control its value relative to other established currencies, with only secondary regard for the environment if that.

Hmm, except it's mostly not their own currency they're shredding.

Which brings us to the relative environmental cost of different underlying currencies after all . . .

When you really follow the money.
I'm okay with it. I hadn't seen the last time it was posted and I found it very interesting.
The differences between Python and Haskell only affect programmers and people who employ programmers. The difference between the two parties approach to health care affects everybody in the US. It's not simply a matter of perspective.
Yeah, I meant your comment.
"if their USP leaked to the public"

That just happen, at last.

Slide deck 1 of 44: "Learn how your competitors are doing."
What kind of introduction is this?

"In India, the formula for success is drilled into children from a very young age: get good grades, go to an elite Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), move to America, and never come back."

So parents will drill this into their kids? Never come back?
N+1) Android vendors who think they know what they are doing will make customizations that utterly screw you (e.g., mucking with date/time pickers to the point that they are busted on some random set of phones).

N+2) Oh, so you want to make a buildbot that does stable builds based on known versions of tools and libraries? What a quaint notion.

[Can we just say that Activities and Intents died, or at least achieved effective bankruptcy as actual abstractions, around the time the 32nd flag modifying behavior was added? At some point you need to step back, take an honest look at what developers are actually doing and realize that things are simply not working out. All that anyone does with the UI framework is to try different things and "twist knobs" until the apps seems to work, and hope that it doesn't break much in the future.]
I do log in, follow my interests and I think the country subreddit thing is the only auto/standard one I still follow. The content and the people just aren't there for me.

But I'm happy that it's working for you.
What usually happens with their opinion pieces is that most of them are pretty uncontroversial and bland. But the ones that are silly, extreme and/or hypocritical are the ones that make it to the top precisely because they are so.

Take the example of their opinion pieces today.

Article 1: French polls show populist fever is here to stay as globalisation makes voters pick new sides

Article 2: How the opposition parties can still make a contest of this election

Two reasonable articles, which are not amongst the 10 most viewed or clicked on. What is amongst the most viewed opinion pieces then?

Article 1: Allow me to womansplain the problem with gendered language

Article 2: Serena Williams’s pregnant victory reminds us how amazing women’s bodies are. Subititle: Are women the weaker sex? I don't think so.

So the well-reasoned, sane articles are ignored, while the clickbait rubbish is well....clicked on, makes their 'most viewed' and is featured on their front page. A large part of the problem is people's tendencies to click on what you call "socially regressive" viewpoints. It's not like the people agree with them either, most of the comment section involves bashing the author. Some people are just looking for articles to get angry too.
Sounds like tough times for OmniTI. They recently announced they were canceling their Surge conference as well.

https://omniti.com/remembers/2017/every-good-surge-must-come...
So I largely agree with this analysis but what is missing is any proposed remedy.

Medicare for all certainly seems like one substantive way to address your comment. Can you do an "expectations vs reality" for that one?
http://lpi.oregonstate.edu/mic
I was referring to replacing the logic with Python, ie:

if var is not None:
...
else:
...

Or

if not var:
...

Or

if var == '':
...

Etc. Depending on what you want to achieve.

That is a lot more readable to me than:

[ -z $var ]
I'm not sure if this means what I think this means, but does this mean that we can used Direct3D 9 on WINE now with no need to translate it to something else first?
I was unsuccessful in my interviews with Google several years ago, but left the process more impressed with the company and its employees than when I started. As a candidate, they were incredibly respectful to me, even when it became clear I wasn't the right fit for the roles they needed to fill.

I truly enjoyed them bringing me out for the weekend before my interview so that I wasn't rushed and to give me an opportunity to see the area. I also enjoyed the interview process itself (well, right up until the point one of my interviewers introduced me to some math I had no chance of solving). One of my interviewers even stayed in touch with me after the process, checking in occasionally and helping me make some new contacts.

Today, when I interview people, I keep my Google experience in mind and try to provide candidates a similar impression of my firm.
My point is that you see a large impact between the parties while others might see a low impact between the parties. That is a difference of perspective.
How do I convert a Date to a different time zone? You don’t – because a Date doesn’t have a time zone.

There's something about this, and the way we think about dates, which makes it very hard for some people to understand. Some people get it immediately, others never will. Not wanting to sound superior (I think the Date object seems almost designed to foster this confusion), but I've lost count of the number of times I've spent a long time explaining this, and then at the end of it all the person still says something like, "OK, well we'll just use this GMT Date then."
The Intercept while not perfect, has a pro-privacy, pro-people stance and does great reporting about serious issues largely ignored by mainstream outlets, like drone strikes.
Wall Street's Hot New Financial Product: Your Rent Check. (2014)
Xoogler here:

If you want to work for Google, my advice is to try again when you get a chance. IMHO, getting an offer is about 50% the luck of the draw as to what questions you get, and what interviewer you get. If you were close this time, you might get an offer next time.

If it makes you feel any better, people who I knew were smarter and better coders than me got declined, yet somehow I got hired.

BTW, I thought so little of the HR process that I refused to participate while I was there. I did not do interview training, and never did any interviews or committees in my time there.
As I said, I think the focus for the points of this discussion is the effect. No doubt everybody acts logically, I didn't suggest that everybody in those companies just lost their mind. This goes long the same lines as "For evil to triumph, all that is required is for good men to respond rationally to incentives." (so here it is the loss of ever more "market" in the "market economy" that we get as an effect, and it's questionable we get it back in economies of scale, judging by the popularity of Dilbert cartoons).
How does MS have a monopoly on desktops? I have three desktops in my house, and no microsoft software running on any of them.

Markets don't devolve into "monopolies" very often. In Microsofts case, it had an operating system that provided massive economies of scale to customers. You could run it on any compatible PC and be guaranteed to be able run hundreds of leading applications. Most businesses are significantly more productive with 100% windows than 50% windows and 50% other platforms. The only reason Apple Mac OS is in corporate America is because of it's special advantages in specific uses. It's always been too expensive to equip everyone with a Mac, esp. your lowest paid order entry/support types.

Most markets don't grow economies of scale for their customers in that manner. The advantage of having all of your sales people drive Fords instead of a mix of cars is a minor one from a fleet purchase perspective. And the same advantage can be had with a fleet purchase agreement with virtually any competitor.
Better than my interview experience.

Sailed through the phone interview, went in person for the day long interview. Most were no problem except for one that took longer than it should have. And then...

Nothing. Radio silence. No emails. No answered emails. I had ceased to exist.

After that colossal waste of time, I decided to only work remote.
It's illegal? Or it doesn't meet the minimum qualifications for the tax benefit, because those are quite different.

https://www.healthcare.gov/private-plan-exceptions-outside-o...

As to costs, those vary widely by state. This recent article in the NYTimes was a fairly good overview of how policy decisions can affect the premiums: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/21/health/how-gop-in-2-state...
My biggest beef with Android is the frequency with which stuff gets stuffed in a Bundle and sent off elsewhere. Which means the typing isn't "you don't have to worry about getting this wrong, the compiler will help you" but rather "yet another thing you can get wrong that will explode at runtime."
In regards to why previous administrations made no motion on this - my guess is that it's state level politics. While prioritizing by yearly salary definitely makes sense, it means H1-B will be occupied by tech hubs with high cost of living: SF/NYC. I'd be interested to see the distribution between states of the $50k h1b jobs and how many are in states/districts which would benefit from the way it is now.
What exactly is a fact? There's no easy answer to that question, particularly with natural rather than formal languages. 'Facts' and statements depend on context. The meaning of a natural language statement usually is derived from these layers building on each other:

- syntax (the structure of a sentence)

- semantics (the isolated meaning of a sentence)

- pragmatics (the meaning of a sentence in context)

Anaphora (references to previous sentences or concepts) can be particularly nasty in this context.

Depending on the task at hand chunk parsing could be a good first take at finding relevant phrases from unstructured textual data. There are numerous libraries to accomplish that, for English and other Indo-European languages at least.
Archived copy:

https://archive.fo/bxUaX
Exciting times in database land! It certainly seems like the good systems are converging on very similar storage architectures. This design is so similar to how Kafka and Kudu work internally.

As the raw storage seems pretty optimal now, I suspect next we'll see a comeback of indices for more precise queries to get another jump in performance.
Most 'monopolies' that exist today are artificial - This is because they are only monopolies to the extent that they are able to:

1. Keep buying up advertising to make sure that any potential competitor cannot afford eyeballs.

2. Keep hiring up as much technical talent as possible to make sure that any potential competitor doesn't get access to that talent in order to build a competing product.

3. Keep subsidising the cost of their own services (at a loss to themselves) in order to make the market non-viable for any potential competitor.

It's a scorched-earth approach.
Any company that has the money can create an artificial monopoly for themselves by engaging in any of the three activities above.

However, those activities are increasingly expensive because they drive up advertising costs and engineer salaries.

If companies keep doing this, eventually, they'll make the market non-viable even for themselves.
Reproducing Go binaries byte by byte
Banksy:

"You owe the companies nothing. You especially don't owe them any courtesy. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs."

"...any advertisement in public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours, it belongs to you... its yours to take, rearrange and re use. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head."

Banksy is to "attentional integrity" what Stallman is to software freedom: radical-sounding, heretical to big business, and very very right.
If it actually crucial, they can pay enough to guaranteee they get the visa.
Simple solution: order the applicants by decreasing order of salary, and take the top 65K. Problem solved.
Reference material, fine. "Windows Drivers for Beginners", probably a bad sign, something that I confirmed in the first 5-10 minutes of working with the contractor in question.

[I've been writing software for a living since the late 1970s, working on products that you've almost certainly heard of and some you've probably used, and I've got enough perspective and experience to be a pretty good judge of someone's level of expertise]
It would be better if you just used the obvious historical precedent - Standard Oil integrated with rail services by negotiating discounts that provided an insurmountable barrier to entry for smaller competitive. It was restraining trade, and while prices may have benefited consumers in the short run, the lack of competition would have been a negative over the long run.
Honestly, all I expect if this type of h1b abuse is reduced is that the visa cap won't be 3x oversubscribed on the first day. The total cap is less than 100,000, so it's a very small part of the overall labor force and even a big change in h1b policies isn't going to have a major change on the rest of the market.
They also have a top-notch sporting section with live coverage(if you're not American- they mostly cover soccer, tennis and F1), their mobile/ipad app is one of the best out there and their long reads essentially make them a nice weekend reading magazine. Plus they have a few nice podcasts too. They are probably worth the 5 pounds.
They would never know who "your" bank is. Reading a few paragraphs near the top of the privacy policy could have cleared up the initial misunderstanding about the nature of the service and also any FUD about how the data is used.
as if used phones market doesn't exists
Monkey just isn't a good term to fight over. There are plenty of respectable people arguing that monkey means simian, not just non-hominoid simian (as you take from it). Either which way, fighting over where the taxonomical set ends is likely a waste of breath.

But yeah, a CGI gorilla for a site called bonobo. Le sigh.
shocking news indeed, seems like you need researchers and studies about everything nowadays, otherwise you're called names
Sort of. For example, the NSA developed a way to hotpatch an ethernet adapter's firmware to respond to incoming packets that operate out of band with normal IP packets. Meaning it's a way to communicate with a target computer that's completely undetectable by standard tools. Using such an exploit against a computer isn't typically a risk, because the target you're exploiting isn't sophisticated enough to catch the exploit. And even if they were, and they send their computer to a foreign intelligence agency for extensive analysis, that typically wouldn't confer an advantage to that agency. They were already developing their own exploits to use against us, and there are only so many unique techniques.

The way to protect against this is probably to have constant security audits. But these are expensive, so the situation is that there will always be exploitable computers and software, especially when a nation-state adversary is doing the exploitation.

The solution is what it's always been: Political control. We have terrifying weapons, and what keeps them at bay is aligning the incentives of our politicians so that the calculus of employing them is more costly than keeping them unused. (Unfortunately this may not be possible with cyberweapons, because unlike real weapons, there is no death and destruction as a side effect.)
There is an energy deficit creating workable electronics from raw materials, but that can be covered by a large flow of retail currency through an efficient sales and supply chain.

There is an energy surplus remaining after small profits have been extracted from many repurposed waste materials, especially workable electronics. Not much retail currency available, only wholesale but at least it's surplus.

However the "market" is balanced to the extreme disadvantage of the reuse/resale operators, and it looks like Koebler has been reporting things from that type of source:

Right-to-Repair
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/there-are-now-11-...

Financial incentive is not always a bad thing, especially when there's no real greed, just pursuit of excellent business opportunity instead.

Plus financial incentive is not always driven by the desire for financial gains, sometimes more so the prevention of financial losses. From the poor soul who's desperate for his gear to be fixed cheap by the neighborhood hobbyist who only needs an online factory repair manual, to the corporation that invested heavily in tonnes[0] of top-dollar goods truly having 2x or 3x workable lifetimes, they would both benefit by participating in a smaller purchase-to-resale differential that would naturally exist if the secondary market was allowed to thrive with encouragement.

Cornering the consumers into a pure retail-to-scrap scenario (with a support lifetime limit for backup) does appear to be more of a major institutional policy effort disadvantageous to consumers, compared with the Right-to-Repair operators who appear dedicated to removing as much gear as possible from the retail-to-scrap cycle and preventing future resources from being tied up within it. Consumers would theoretically benefit the stronger the right to repair.

Even when there is not much financial benefit either way, at least the environment might suffer less.

I agree, it must be a big deal.

[0] Metric
Storing things in the URL only got you so far (Internet Explorer would eventually complain about the request string being too long), so ASP.Net or whatever would bundle the entire stateful object into a hidden form, which would be submitted with POST via Javascript when the link was clicked.
Sorry to hear you were one of those receiving that dump work. I saw it happen to one of the most talented developers I've worked with at a prior gig a few years back. A few of us made a pact to never dump our work on "V___" and try to lighten his workload. Hopefully, this will improve people's situations.
Im mostly experienced with the Lua Reference handling, so beware.

Usually there is one global hash-table, and a local hash table. Everything (every function, every object, every string is stored once, depending on the calling situation.
So passing a reference to a object is passing the reference to that one global object, until you change it, or make a local copy of it.
That sounds really strange and in a way is it. It also means, that your list of objects, will not contain duplicates. It means no useless work is done to copy data.

The model involved borrows basically from the concept of lazy loading and flat copys. Do work only when needed.
Super difficult to explain to new users without CS background.
I don't know why previous administrations showed no interest in this - did they not understand what was happening or were their capitalist values comfortable in allowing it ?

I don't think it was capitalist values that led to wage dumping, but rather wilful ignorance. Until now, the consensus of the global elites was that open borders are good, and that those who called for controlling immigration were evil in some way. Although I am extremely disturbed by the rise of populist right-wing movements, I am also convinced they have tapped into popular resentment of open borders philosophies that transcends simplistic labelling.

Bernie Sanders is an obvious example of a politician from the Western Left who opposed open borders, but an even more interesting example is the "xenophobic" violence in South Africa.

In the 1990s, for various reasons, South Africa ended up with de facto open borders. People flowed in from the rest of Africa and the Indian subcontinent. The economic collapse of Zimbabwe led to an even bigger inflow of foreigners. Refugees from other African countries often made a bee-line for SA. Employers often hired easily-exploited foreigners in preference to locals, and foreign businessmen were able to out-compete locals by using family members as very low paid labour, and undercutting small businesses run by South Africans in the impoverished townships, and in small towns by doing things like living in their shops. This in a country with extremely high unemployment.

Things came to a head in early 2008 when the first round of "xenophobic violence" erupted, and, since then, there have been sporadic outbreaks. Although the violence is often horrific, and obviously worthy of condemnation, the South African elites have been unwilling to address its causes, instead using words like "xenophobia" and generally deploring those who oppose open borders. These same elites benefited from the cheap labour, and dont bear the costs of uncontrolled immigration.

Although the violence in South Africa, and the rise of racist and bigoted rhetoric in the West is deeply disturbing, and worthy of condemnation, it is wilful blindness to the underlying causes that has lead to such extreme outcomes.
Impartiality and objectivity are key principles of any press agency

Should be key principles of any press agency. If you're old enough to remember TASS in Soviet times (TASS still exists and is still under Russian state control and still portrays the world in a way very favourable to Russia) you'll know what I mean here, or just look at KCNA (the North Korean press agency) for a current example. I'd go so far as to suspect any state-controlled press agency of bias in one way or another.
I believe so too, from the repo:

> Runs Direct3D 9 applications on Windows or Linux (/w Wine) over Vulkan.
I had a similar end result from Facebook, I assume I did not pass but never heard back from my recruiter.
Everyone except the supplier is worse off. Remember, a 50% discount on 3x price increase is still a huge price increase.

Further it's all short vs long term pricing. In the short term a company will setup lower prices to kill of competitors, the when there is no competition they raise prices significantly to have a long term war chest. So, on a day to day basis they might be the cheapest option, but their average price over decades is more than their short lived competition.