skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> income taxes are not cost-of-living adjusted

Well, this is another issue. It's incoherent, honestly, that someone can be considered both rich and poor from the federal perspective. But in the end, a COL adjustment on income tax would be equivalent to the type of subsidy in question.

- The diplomatic, covert, and military apparatus which dominates the world to the extent necessary to secure the flow of cheap oil for your car.

lel. If that was ever true, which I doubt, it isn't any more. If there was ever a point that our military paid for itself (even on the margin) in terms of cheaper oil, I'll eat my hat.

> Welfare so that unemployed people can stay in dead-end towns, instead of moving to where they are needed.

This is really the core of it. If people are really needed, economically and relatively to elsewhere, in supercities, then supercities will pay enough for them to live there. Ergo, you are overstating how much they are needed. This is exactly analogous to employers claiming there is a "shortage" of programmers, but they aren't willing to raise wages.

Besides, am I to believe that there are no unemployed people on welfare in cities? I don't know what the relative rate is. I do agree people should be incentivized to move where they are needed. We may have different views on where that is, exactly. Any kind of welfare distorts economic "need" signals, which is a big downside of it.

Imagining welfare or wealth transfers didn't exist, I'd say that the place where people are most "needed" is a place where benefits of living - COL is highest. I have no data on where that might be, but I doubt SV ranks high on the list unless you are a programmer. By that metric I would imagine that there would be a dynamic equilibrium between urbanization and countryside, as there is now.

In some ways, SV programmers defending subsidies for service workers in SV sounds like "please subsidize my $10 latte and Whole Foods bill".

> the low-density regions they enable

This is pretty creative. If cities had to grow their own food and extract their own natural resources, I think they'd have quite a problem, yes? It may be fair to say cities & countryside are codependent, but the idea that cities are one-sidedly enabling everyone else is not credible.

It is quite likely that there is a net transfer of wealth from cities to the countryside. The reason I would argue this is "fair" is because people in the cities are also the primary beneficiaries of GDP growth.

BTW, I don't live in the country, I live in a medium-sized city. I am limiting my criticisms to cities that have so poorly planned expansion, or are so crowded, that the COL is sky-high, and they want a bailout from everyone else.
In case you get caught by the paywall:
http://www.timelessinvestor.com/2017/04/27/use-index-to-shor...

Anda similar piece in the financial times:
https://www.ft.com/content/69515384-28f7-11e7-9ec8-168383da4...
Same. They used to be good about that, but lately they've been very pushy on their premium and it's probably why they are finally profitable...

Another shitty thing they do is, they often have promotions giving you a huge amount of space (10-20GB) but only for a year. They get you to fill up your Dropbox with content you depend on, and after a year, they're like "now you got a week to delete it all or pay for premium!"
> You can write a system in any language right? Python is a scripting language and lots of people use it everyday to write systems.

It's a systems language in the respect that you get full control over the resources that are used or not used, and you can reason about exactly what code runs (or check the generated output). You can write a webserver in Python, but unless you are serving a dynamic site implemented in Python, you are likely paying a steep cost for that, at least in respect to a language with much finer control such a C/C++ or Rust (or many others that are in this category).

> Also how does it compare to Go?

My understanding of Go is that it aims to fit a similar niche, if not entirely overlapping. Sort of a C/C++ with some changes to make it more modern/easier to use, some language functionality that makes concurrent programming easier, and memory management to ease the pains of manually dealing with memory. Sort of a hybrid of C and Java, where Java's VM is reduced to be very simple and embedded with every binary you create. At least that's how I understand it, not really having done much in it.

> From the perspective of other languages I know a little bit such as Ruby, Python or JS its syntax seems really bloated to me with all those specials symbols.

In many cases it's hard to compare from a dynamic language to a low-level compiled language. It's sort of like comparing a Cessna to a Fighter Jet. If you just need to get from point A to point B and time isn't too much of a factor, a Cessna is fine, and comfortable, and doesn't require much training or diligence in its use. When you need to get there fast, and you might also need to fight a battle or two, a Cessna is not sufficient, but you might make do if you bolt a few missiles and guns on it if you don't expect much of a fight. That's probably the equivalent of writing your own module or library in C/C++ and calling to it from Python.

The symbols allow for greater control and specification of the problem, and when your goal is already to make a very robust system, are something you might end up needing anyway. Imagine you are telling a friend how to go pick up your drink at Starbucks, and he's unfamiliar with the area. You can give very general directions and trust your friend is smart enough to figure it out, and in many cases they will, after taking some time to reason out the ambiguities they are presented with in the real world. Sometimes your drink comes back cold or wrong. Alternatively, you can write very detailed directions for exactly where to go, what to expect to see, and what to say. This takes time up front, but you have higher assurance that you will get your drink in a timely and correct manner. Having a shared shorthand you and your friend know might make that list of directions a bit hard to read from the outside, but it can add to accuracy and/or reduce the number of steps if it's a well defined shorthand.
It's a mistake on your part to assume my parenting style based on 4 paragraphs.
Apologies for my many disorganized thoughts here.
Consider also soliciting suggestions from mothers.

Do you think Elixir will help him solve a problem that is interesting to him?

Kids would probably be most immediately motivated by a language that allows them to execute interesting effects right away. Declarations, definitions, and tautological wiring are all probably the least interesting things.

I don't know if "spoiling" a budding programmer is really a thing. However, I suspect it may be easier to go up the ladder of abstraction than down. For example, after using a primitive line-oriented version of BASIC as a kid for a while, I wanted more structured constructs, and could understand how those structures worked in terms of conditional jumps etc.

I accidentally introduced my son to PICO-8 (which uses Lua). I was evaluating alternatives, he noticed the icon for it and asked about it, and that was that. He hasn't done much programming with it; he's more interested in drawing and making music. Then again, he's only six years old. I think the specialized screens for editing graphics and music make it easier for him to just not think about programming at all, in a way that wouldn't be true if he had to draw graphics with LINE(x1,y1,x2,y2) etc. In short, probably don't use PICO-8.

My start with primitive BASIC dialects is probably biasing me, but if there were a fake assembly language with a simplified interface for interacting with the environment (sound, graphics, text input), that sounds like it would be ideal. You don't even need to understand block structures to start with this sort of thing.
Abusing generative adversarial networks to make 8-bit pixel art
Here is a draft of a comment I plan to submit to the FCC regarding this notice:

The draft seeks comment on the analysis in Paragraph 27. This analysis purports to show that broadband Internet service is an information service because it provides users the "capability for generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information via telecommunications." The argument given is that broadband Internet service allows users to do all these things. However, this is not the same as providing the capability to do these things. To see why, consider that providing users Internet services over dialup phone lines also allows users to do all these things; but the phone lines themselves are telecommunications services, not information services. Why? Because providing the user dialup Internet, by itself, does not provide them the capability to do all these things. That capability is provided by the endpoints: the users' computers, and the computers hosting the Internet services that the users connect to.

Exactly the same is true of broadband Internet services provided by ISPs: by themselves, they do not provide users the capability to do all these things. They only provide connections between computers at the endpoints that provide those capabilities. It is the services provided by the Internet hosts that users connect to that are "information services". The broadband Internet services that allow users to connect to those hosts are telecommunications services, and should be regulated as such.

ISPs object to analyses like the one above because they claim that they also provide the actual information services--in other words, they also provide Internet hosts that function as email servers, web servers, etc. But it is obvious that those services are separate from the broadband connection services provided by those same ISPs, because users can make use of the latter without making use of the former at all. I am such a user: I use the broadband Internet connection provided by my ISP, but I do not use any of the information services they provide; I do not use their email, their web hosting, etc. I use other Internet hosts provided by other companies for those services. The fact that ISPs offer information services as well as telecommunications services does not make their telecommunications services into information services; an ISP's choice of business model cannot change the nature of a particular service it provides. Broadband Internet connections are obviously a telecommunications service, and should be regulated as such, regardless of what other services ISPs would like to bundle with them. The FCC should continue to regulate broadband Internet service as a telecommunications service.
What I learned after 8 weeks as a YouTuber
Sounds like a good move. Malls are dying. The last enclosed mall opened in the US was in 2006. (Yes, there are some megamall projects underway, such as American Dream Meadowlands, but they're in trouble.)

See "deadmalls.com".
I'll answer the "what's-it-for" question first: basically, a systems language (as loosely distinguished from a scripting language, or languages with a runtime) is, to me, a language that lets me take control of the bare metal. With Go, for example, I can't control directly whether a value lives on the stack or the heap. With Python, I can't get assurances that variable access in loops won't have a layer of indirection that may hurt performance. With Java, I don't necessarily control the layout of structures in memory, which may be important for things like managing memory pages. A systems language lets me manipulate memory and machine state directly.

With all the power that a systems language gives, comes great risk. To err is human, and most system languages do not prevent humans from erring in ways that can cause significant undefined effects. The usual suspect is, of course, memory safety, but this can also mean things like losing sight of an algorithm because you're carrying too much intellectual overhead when doing the aforementioned memory or system state manipulation. Computer science has lots of very well-studied approaches to solving particular parts of problems, but there's a gap between those approaches and the expressiveness of systems languages to implement them in a way that is fault-free, or doesn't make things like Hoare analysis too difficult to manage.

I am a neophyte using Rust, but it has me excited because it closes that gap in a really elegant way. I just published a libnss plugin that queries Azure Active Directory for user information[1]. Without going into too much detail, it's a set of functions that takes pointers to memory, and stuffs them full of data that it gets from an OAuth2-protected REST endpoint. That's a looooot of "range" in terms of function, and the surface area for bugs in a language like C is huge. On the other hand, doing FFI in runtime-based languages is usually very hard and can be relatively slow, which matters in something as basic as user information retrieval. Rust made writing it extraordinarily easy. I have to "speak C" on one end, but I can handle HTTP calls with the ease and low-risk usually only found in languages like Python. At the same time, if there is a bug that effects memory, I can trust the compiler will catch it, which frees me up to think about structure, maintainability, extensibility, &c.

[1] https://github.com/outlook/libnss-aad
SiriusXM buys connected car accessory maker Automatic for over $100M
The killer feature of Typescript is being able to model data. Most serious bugs I see in JS applications are because somebody serializes something from JSON, passes it around, and somebody somewhere makes incorrect assumptions about the data. Being able to type my models, Redux state, config objects, etc is a huge boost to developer productivity and maintainability.
There are two reasons I won't use GDrive anymore.

- If it starts up and your GDrive folder is empty, it deletes everything from the online version.

- There is no history like Dropbox, so once you fuck up and delete everything there is no easy way to get it back.
You have indeed hit upon a good point.

I am reading many of the comments here with a lot amusement. Perfect marriages between the clueless and the patronizing. So many efforts have come and gone: (i)hey you 3rd world person here take this money build a proper toilet, (ii) hey Indian govt here's some aid for toilet for your people, (iii) hey my brother we built these toilets for you, now use them, (iv) govt gave us money to built them so we did it for you... and on and on in so many variations.

There is a strong urge to believe in the narrative: oh the poor souls if only they had access to the toilets that they have yearned for things would be all right. Lets build them for them, lets raise money etc. Yes its true for many people, but it is also very untrue for many.

Just as the a one size cancer cure is silly notion (because cancer is not a single thing) there is no such easy one dimensional cure here either. There is a lot of understanding that needs to take place before this is solved.

Some people break open toilets constructed for free, by the govt or a charity, in their house and sell of the bricks. Why ? because they think a toilet in the house makes it impure and dirty. No worries about that tied cow that shits with gay abandon inside that very house, that is clean holy godmother. Heck the current govt is getting social security cards for cows (I am not kidding). Some will fight tooth and nail for their habit of defecating in the open. They don't see a problem with that. Disease ? what disease, that's just bad karma.

Political parties play into this as well. Right now one party is big into "swachchh(clean) Bharat". A move sorely needed and something I strongly support. But when this same party was not in power, they were big into propaganda: toilets are a 'foreign influence', a 'theft of tradition'. Open defecation has been how it has been done and god almighty in the name of tradition and patriotism that's how it would be. Break free from your toilets if you are a patriot ... etc etc. resist rule by the Italian.
A very simple product launch checklist
"Systems language" usually refers to lower-level programming. For example: an OS kernel or its drivers where you're poking at hardware and need control over memory layout, a library to be called from many other languages that thus needs to avoid a large runtime and garbage collector, or high-performance infrastructure like web servers or game engines. Generally things you've had to use C or C++ for, in the past.

Go is sometimes called a systems language, but in a much narrower sense than Rust. For example, it is garbage collected and has a runtime, so it's not great at being FFI'd into. It seems to be quite useful for distributed applications.

Rust, on the other hand, is closer to C++ in that it has no real runtime and no GC. On top of that, it brings compile-time memory safety and lots of other modern features to systems programming. One of its biggest applications is making Firefox safer and faster as part of the Quantum project (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum).

Part of why Rust is more symbol-heavy than Python or Javascript is it has to express things in more detail, giving you the control required to do systems programming. So it's not necessarily a direct competitor to JS, since it can work in areas JS simply can't.

In some ways, though, that can make it more productive- static typing is like compiler-enforced documentation and tests, making it easier to keep track of a large codebase.
This is Bruce Schneier, btw. So not some random blogger.
Tips on How to Write a Great Request for Proposal (RFP)
> Translated into a more common "AWS opex cost",

Weird tangent, but there are methods to classify AWS spend as CapEx; while your typical startup isn't going to bother with it, companies spending in the 8 figure and up range annually on AWS annually do tend to go down that path.
Highly unpopular opinion, but Wikileaks is seeming more like an anti-western operation funded by Russia. The more they leak the more their bias is showing.
Here's another info chart, The Doggo Kingdom

https://i.redd.it/5e7bja88gckx.jpg
Boring good paid work is not slavery
That is why I used sys.hexversion. Since there are 3 paths, has real bytes, fake str bytes, and no bytes.
It's odd. On the one side, so many of these kind of things feel cringeworthy and weird.

But then some things like this seem to go just that bit further and the effort and feeling behind them makes it all just wonderful and fun again.

Either way it's quite fascinating just how quickly new languages or dialects appear and spread.

Slight addition to the other things in this thread so far: I've really loved the description of "snip snap doggos, not woof bork doggos" to describe scorpions.
I agree, but on the face of it it does seem to make sense: there's no shortage of articles now about the "retail implosion", and lots of stores really are closing: Macy's, Sears/Kmart, etc. If a mall's anchor stores close, that can mean the death of the mall because other tenants will pull out (their leases usually allow this in the case of anchor store closure).

Personally, if I were a hedge fund manager, I'd be really careful with this and pick carefully which malls (or rather, the companies that own them) I think are going to fail. The newer, trendy "lifestyle centers" seem to be doing just fine mostly, and even the places like Macy's are still hanging on in some places, just not in others. Macy's isn't going out of business any time soon, but they are downsizing a lot, which means certain locations just aren't viable any more. Even regular malls are still doing OK in many places, but that segment of the market is shrinking.
He's actually asked me about my work many times. I think I'm going to go the lego mindstorm route. Any particular "package" you recommend?
Do we have any numbers on what it means that they run only when the power is cheap?

Does that mean they can operate in 4hr windows? Or do they run have to run the furnace for a minimum period? A large quantity of steel takes a large amount of energy to melt.
This is probably easier for most people to read:

http://www.timelessinvestor.com/2017/04/27/use-index-to-shor...

From the article:

> When Mr. Yip cast a critical eye on regional malls’ debt in 2015, the CMBX 6 index was trading near its full value, implying a very low probability of defaults.

> Mr. Yip visited malls in Connecticut, Louisiana and elsewhere while on work trips and vacations, sometime taking his family along with him.

> He would walk three times around each shopping center, studying its mix of stores and chatting with store owners, workers and shoppers.

> He noticed some malls seemed poorly maintained and outdated, with a high concentration of mom-and-pop shops that, he figured, probably weren’t paying much in rent. Locally owned stores such as these have less staying power than stores that are part of national retail chains.

The above might be one of the better descriptions of what it can be like to be a hedge fund manager. Just like Steve Carrell's team in "The Big Short" going out to Florida and Vegas to talk to house owners and see empty subdivisions for themselves, the real world job of managing money is alot less sexy than I think alot of people believe it to be.

It's a lot of work going down avenues that end up as dead ends only to find a single potential winning idea after 6 months of work.

This guy's team had to get the hypothesis, and then do the leg work, think things that don't scale, and then even though they think they are right, you still need to find out a way to short shopping malls.

Before today, I've never heard of the Markit index CMBX 6, I'm pretty sure they spent alot of their time just finding the correct vehicle to short shopping malls with and even with this it's not a great one to one match for their thesis, but its as good as they could get.

As heard at one poker tournament that was filled with mostly hedge fund employee's. "So many good shorts, so few reliable ways to short them."
>We propose to return jurisdiction over Internet service providers’ privacy practices to the
FTC, with its decades of experience and expertise in this area.157
We seek comment on this proposal.

Somehow I feel that their "decades of experience and expertise" is not the kind appropriate for dealing with privacy on the modern internet.
So you perform commits after uploading. How are you going to convince your collaborators to do it too.
> Flossing is nearly useless (the studies that led to ADA recommendations turned out to be deeply flawed and inconclusive).

Since we're going into a high level of detail, I want to point out that "nearly useless" implies that we've concluded no correlation. We actually just don't have a conclusion, so "we don't know" is much more accurate. I got your point, but let's make sure to stay on the right side of rigor.

Retirement: feel free to substitute "retirement" with "time period at end of life that usually correlates with less ability to draw income." The advice is still sound whether or not you choose to retire at 65. There are exceptions, but if you're that rich, then you're a tiny exceptional minority of the potential audience of the advice.

Array length checks: as long as indexing into arrays is a thing, it's going to remain good advice the vast majority of the time. Thankfully most modern languages realized that it's better if the language does the low level bounds checking for you, but high level bounds checking is still very much a thing.

What counts as "obvious" is like what counts as a "heap" of sand. The exact line is subjective, but there's a point where pretty much everyone is in agreement. Defining what's "obvious" in the gray middle area is hard, but defining what's "obvious" or "not obvious" on the extremes tends to be far easier.
Military spending in 2016