skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I's not clear, but my interpretation is that they'd called him & began the meeting with "We'd like to discuss your salary; we see your compensation is at 10%"; without making it clear that they were planning to lower it. The clerk pre-empted their plan to lower it; but tactically said "I'd not take a penny more from you" to imply that he'd assumed they were about to offer him more. By this action, he's shown that he's not going to be greedy & take more even if offered, which puts the silks in an awkward situation where to correct him & say that they meant to lower it would be rude given he'd "so generously" declined the fictional offer of a pay rise.
In the last election people reporting on the KKK outnumbered the clan 10 to 1.
I fear this is just another example from the century-long tradition of politicians exploiting addiction to get their names in the news. A couple of years ago Johann Hari write a fine book on addiction and its legalities.

http://www.worldcat.org/title/chasing-the-scream-the-first-a...

The US has systematically demonized addicted persons since the end of alcohol prohibition. Demonizing them has served a few purposes.

1. promoting police employment and funding. The forerunner to the US DEA was the federal prohibition police force. Lately this has greatly expanded to include civil forfeiture.

2. separating people into us-vs-them classes. "Addicts are bad, so I'm good." This was explicitly racist back when police and pols could get away with being explicitly racist.

3. giving US pols on the world stage the self-image of righteousness.

Now that the addiction epidemic has hit, well, white working, people, the demonization doesn't work as well as it did when it hit people who don't look like red-state attorneys general and governors. So ya gotta demonize somebody? Why not big pharma? They're a juicy target.

Look. Addiction sucks. It's hard to kick. It makes people weak, silly, and vulnerable. But it doesn't make them evil.
Ripple symbol: http://www.cryptocoinsinsider.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01...

Seriously, jokes about Ripple is the only time i ever heard about "fidget spinners". They likely have nothing to do with it what-so-ever.
HN survives on pedantry.
>It probably prevented a new DirectX style dark age of the web.

DirectX was hardly a dark age, DX8 and onwards was a step ahead of GL.
Nice, do you share the code?
Once the concept is proven, once there is a real market for that, other, more efficient planes designed for bigger rockets will be built.
Oh my, this is huge!
Insurer's response to ACA reminds me of a Frank & Ernest comic, which I can't find right now, sorry:

Two USPS workers. Package label says "Do not bend, fold, mutilate." One says to the other "Doesn't say anything about crumple!"

Har har har.

---

I had high hopes for ACA. I believed the 15% medical loss ratio was the poison pill that would eventually drive insurers out of business, and therefore lead to Medicare for All. For comparison, Medicare's is under 5%, meaning 95 cents for every dollar spent goes to patient care, vs coke and prostitutes for the execs.

Silly me. There's no set of rules that can't be broken, gamed.

So now I'm for dozing it all down and rebuilding with universal coverage, single payer, using the capitation model (reward wellness vs fee for service). No more incrementalism. Just do it.

---

Aside: Mid 2000s, my team created, implemented, supported 5 regional health information exchanges (eg BHIX). It was clear then, to everyone in healthcare IT, that we were pushing cooked noodles across hot pavement. Since then, it's only gotten worse. Overhead continues to grow geometrically, due to things like ICD-10 and meaningful care, without nudging the patient care (outcomes) needle one bit.

I can't explain it.

I just read about cost disease. It seems to explain rising costs, but I don't understand the mechanism, or what to do about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease

And this book blew my mind:

"The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy"

by David Graeber

http://amzn.to/2mi169U
It's not a prescription drug. You can get up to 12mg/500mg OTC at a pharmacy.

FWIW you can also get 8mg/500mg dihydrocodone without a prescription OTC in the UK.
5 Technologies to Jumpstart Your Customer-Centric Tech Support
The problem isn't with social media, it's with the business models of Facebook, Twitter, etc. Social media is a great way to keep in touch with people. What isn't great is the constant interruptive notifications, ads all over your feed, ceaseless exposure to brands and people and posts you don't want to see because all of this stuff is known to increase "stickiness" and thus deliver a larger section of your time to advertisers.

Even when the experience is literally driving the brains behind those eyeballs to depression.

What if instead someone had created a social graph protocol and put it out there as an open thing for anyone to use? Like TCP/IP, or HTTP, or email. Perhaps we wouldn't have these problems today.

But the VC model saw an opportunity, moved in with huge amounts of money, colonized the space as fast as they could, and now work hard to pull as much cash out of it as possible. Just like a factory that dumps sludge into the river, they'll be happy to dump sludge into your eyeballs until they get pushback from consumers, regulators, or both.

Mastodon, GNU Social et. al. don't have this problem.
Two reasons I can think of, again specific to India. Desktops are typically connected to wired broadband which is way cheaper and also desktop users are usually better off than mobile only users. And only a fraction of new users are coming from desktop. Infact India is one of those countries where cinsumers leapfrogged desktops to go from no computer to smartphones.
So I could write an application in, lets say Rust, compile it to WASM and run it on Linux, macOS and Windows browsers without anything extra?
> Scaled Composites has some secret CFRP processes of construction which non Americans are not allowed to know about under ITAR regulations

Everybody knows that. We just don't want you to know we know ;-)
Mine is considerably better in that regard, for some reason: https://imgrpost.com/image/VB1i
I don't read a lot of stuff, so Amazon makes a lot more sense.

I'm just outside of the city limits, so a library card would cost me $130 / year. I don't spend much more than that on books plus Amazon ships it to me, so it's less expensive in the end.
OneLogin Breach Could Be Nasty
Perl 5 isn't a 'cool' language, because it isn't trying to rapidly change itself, instead it just works. I use it just about every day (by my own choice!) and it can be a fine language to develop in. The libraries available in CPAN contain support for pretty much any task you could think of.

Most of the horror stories that you'll hear about perl are from people who have tried to fix/maintain code that was written badly, which is no different from any other language. You can write horrific or easily-readable code in any language.

Perhaps perl has its reputation because it is often used as a quick kludge to do something that would be just too painful to do in shell script, and novice writers just cut & paste stuff from their searches online to get the job done?
Putting any kind of cap on efficiency of a middle man is asinine. The only outcome is the realization that the only way to make more profits is increase the top line number (i.e. Premiums).
I don't rent books. If they are good enough to read once I want to own the book and be able to refer back to it occasionally.
The three books I am deeply into right now are all a thousand pages and I have been reading two of them for around four months now, and just started the third. Libraries tend to get annoyed when you keep a book for over six months.
That said, I rarely visited used book stores anyways because they usually don't have the books I am looking for.
I mourn the decrease in readers in general. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/19/slightly-few...
.onion:

- free, no periodic fees for the registry entry

- natural content quality metric, if people do bother to download&run TBB or at least use some public www->onion gateway, not to mention writing down/remembering the address

- easy to self-host in a variety of conditions
"...the verifier for NaCl is likely to be an order magnitude smaller than a component in WebAssembly implementation..."

Why is this so?
As a Brazilian, I find the writing in this article disgusting. I know the BBC (edit: not BBC, The Guardian) is often seen in good light here, but this piece goes through extreme lengths to distort reality to try to save the workers' party reputation.
It's a style guide (and a static style checker), not a list of caveats. Mutable values are not a caveat. It's like referring to http://checkstyle.sourceforge.net/checks.html as a list of frightening caveats.
> Platonic trap.

i.e. is a believer in the mind & body dualism, an idea first put forth by Aristotle and Plato, and later famously championed by Descartes. Though the "quantum" variant is not as far out as the "soul" one. However neither are supported by science, but the knowledge gap regarding consciousness is still large enough that something might still hide in it.

Though Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle fell into many traps, this is probably the relevant one.
I especially remember that in the first few years of HN there was an expectation that everyone had read Paul Graham's essays and would recognize references to them.
> If I remembered it right

Serious question. No intention to insult.

You are on the Internet, not sitting in a pub with no wi-fi. Instead of writing "if I remembered it right", why not spend 2 minutes googling, to find out how AdBlock Plus actually operates?
"applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference."

https://www.ethereum.org/
Those are also poor titles. Instead of a useful title, it's just another pun.
There were mainly two types of bookstores, both adversely affected by Amazon, chains like Barnes & Noble on the one hand and independent (i.e. proprietor owned and operated). Chains could have knowledgeable staff, but most of the time they were kids working their first job. Some independents had very knowledgeable owner and staff, but many were just so-so.
It's almost as if communities have inside jokes or something.
Product Hunt is down
But it's not hard. Especially since KSP would be a restricted n-body problem (only the spacecraft are affected by gravity from multiple bodies) and the "n" in n-body is about 20 (number of massive bodies in solar system).

It's a game design decision not to include gravitation from multiple sources.
How to Turn Your Amazon Echo into a Growth Hacker
Fortune 500 companies embracing open source
This going pretty far out there in terms of imagination, but it seems possible something appearing random in our universe may not be random from another.

Yea it's crazy, but we already have theories from reputable physicists talking about stuff from other universes interacting with ours. I.E. of dark matter being the gravitational interaction of stuff from other dimensions.

So that's how it's theoretically possible randomness could sneak some free will into our universe. Far fetched, but I don't believe it's ruled out?
Ptolemaic dynasty came over 1000 years later than the mummies analyzed. 300 - 30 BC... Even then, Turkey was mostly Persia or Greece... Turks didn't exist yet.
> I think it cannot compete with Python at its current state. This has nothing to do with the language (I consider Perl to be vastly superior) but rather its ecosystem and lack of momentum.

In this specific case, these are contradictory.

Perl and Python had roughly the same amount of corporate backing (almost none) and Perl had a huge head start.

If Perl as a language would be "vastly superior", Python would have never developed its ecosystem and wouldn't have ever gathered enough momentum.
See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
JFK Centennial Celebration
Commerce is slowly zooming out - the next step will be less like a mega corp and more like a mega delivery network.

Look at the way information has evolved - first through local gazettes and slowly consolidating into international publishers and newspapers. Then the internet came and blew things up with a new protocol, as we all know.

The creation and delivery of physical products looks like it's going down a similar path. Amazon will be almost like an API for physical products. (Developers in the house, forgive me if my metaphor is off.)

Create stuff, send it it to the API and then wait for customers to ping the API for your products.

It will be an automated network of bots that pick up your products, store it (with refrigeration if need be) and then deliver it to any point around the world. The way information packets flow around the internet - this will be the way physical products flow around the world. 100% automated, end-to-end, fully democratizing product creation.

AI will determine which warehouses get the most of your products but every producer in the world will have access to the best logistics network in the world. Think of how many companies have a moat based on distribution. The promise of eCommerce will finally be fulfilled - and all of this because of driverless car tech and automated warehouses.
> most programming languages don't even give you a good way to express the invariants you are trying to maintain (except good ol' Ada).

What does Ada do that helps with this in ways C and other languages don't?
Their could be an opportunity here to launch some websites and drum up public interest against such deal being made, wait for the tickers to drop and settle off, then go long, wait for the inevitable settlement, then dump post settlement spike?

And to think of the bonds that will come from this that will be tied to tax revenue from such products that will probably decline as patients and doctors avoid using them, probably a way to get exposure to short positions on those as well.
I interviewed for a Perl gig at a biotechnology company recently. There's still people using perl out there.
Sorry, how does this Guardian article related the BBC?
I think your comment on wages is astute, and it's the same everywhere. There are Perl jobs around, but they're on legacy codebases in (parts of) organizations that are basically too dysfunctional / under-resourced / incompetent to upgrade them, and if you take the job you'll just be putting out fires and stagnating.

When you take that into account, the salary would need to be at a real premium to make it worthwhile, and the premium just isn't there.
The Falcon 9 first stage releases stage 2 at around 6-10 times the height and 10x the speed.

That said, remember that the difficulty of elevating yourself above a given height is much worse the lower you are. Using a plane-drop means skipping the very worst parts of the launch. The air is so much thinner.

There's other advantages though. Launch windows get much easier, as the plane can fly in any direction, and stay at a given heading a bit longer.
Show HN: Ethereum BlockChain Explorer and Search
80-hour weeks: The struggles of being a startup founder
Space penthouses.
> ...that require knowing previous posts to understand

Also known as "culture". It's part of what keeps communities alive, and I don't think it's bad in and of itself.
Use system random generator in crypto
In over their heads: U.S. Forces are dangerously unprepared for enemy drones
Can you say more about it?
I've always had a terrible memory, both short-term and long-term. But this has been an advantage, in a way: I could never memorize material and bluff my way through. Instead, to remember it, I had to understand it. I think this helps partly because you can always work it out from first principles (and just remembering there's some tricky bit somewhere around here), partly the familiarity required for understanding helps embed it, but mostly that I've distilled it to a very simple model in my mind, that I've related to other systems I already know. The meta-model becomes the more interesting thing.

It's hard work to uncover this model, often requiring chasing up foundations, to see what's really going up. And of course, sometimes you end up with the wrong model (or a limited one). Unfortunately, most subjects don't seem to be taught in terms of understanding - but I've had some rare lecturers and textbooks that are so clear, you can work out what they'll say next, and solve example problems the first time you see them.

I've always thought this understanding-oriented approach is a strong long-term strategy, as I age. Although it means some subjects are too hard for me - like human languages, history, geography, biology, medicine... and enterprise application development (but I'm good at libraries).
Modern Perl pretty much has feature parity with python. Don't listen to the "perl bigots".
Data Exploitation
There was a recent StartUp (the podcast) episode about slap bracelets: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/you-have-to-invent-something...
MechJeb doesn't do proper roll, pitch, gravity turn launches either. It does a pre-programmed ascent profile.

In reality all the control of a space launch takes place in the first seconds when the vehicle is subsonic. After that it's just pointing to the direction of travel because any angle of attack in the atmosphere would cause excess aerodynamic stress.

That's why launch controllers say "nominal" that often. There's nothing that can be done, just hoping that the vehicle stays within the planned bounds.

All the accumulated errors from atmospheric conditions and other randomness are corrected by the second stage burn once outside the atmosphere.
Ask HN: Personal Development Articles from Hacker News
Is there interest for a weekly newsletter containing just the Personal Development articles found on the HN front-page?

I've made a tiny letter for this purpose:
http://tinyletter.com/personaldevelopmenthacker

First issue is here:
http://tinyletter.com/personaldevelopmenthacker/letters/personal-development-hacker-1

Back story: for over 10 years now I've been reading HN with a certain pattern: I ignore over 90% of the tech / startup / silicon valley stuff and mostly focus on the personal development articles (learning, focus, productivity, health) and also lifestyle business articles (indie hackers, solo founders)

Every week I'll dig up the best links and comments on:

- productivity, personal development & inspiration

- small/lifestyle businesses / one man shows

- side projects

- some articles on family life or parenting

- occasional tech articles when they relate to the above

I'll do my best to avoid:

- political news

- bitcoin, uber, tesla or other tech giant news

- latest js frameworks, most tech links

- startup / VC oriented pieces

To my knowledge there's no place to read just those articles and I know it would save me lots of time digging thorough HN. I'd like to know if this is something the community is wants, so I'm open to all feedback
And now it isn't. Announcements like these are almost always silly.
Reverse engineering a Nintendo Switch cartridge
NaCl verifier in practice is much simpler than WASM compiler leading to a significantly reduced attack surface.
56 yo here. Since a year on a learning spree: Docker Swarm, CI/CD, React, RN after a life of C/PHP/Python and -later on -C-level management. Not aware that I'm slower these days, but slightly harder to focus, so using a headset.
yes, but the API you'll code against is limited
Yes, that's the goal
Interesting that Google makes that mistake in 2017.
Hacking UK Trident: A Growing Threat
Our government has capped APRs for credit cards. Then, banks added fees, reduced services. Then govt capped fees.

Whackamole.

Is this a legit analogy? If so, is either side wrong? How would you handle it, if you were King?

My only notion for healthcare is to change the incentives. Reward wellness vs treat disease.
Creator of China's Great Firewall Uses VPN to Dodge Blocks
No.

Different western societies attribute quite different values to having knowledge VS having formal education VS becoming wealthy. Even more so throughout history.
BigData and ML Toolset and Library Weekly Roundup – June 1, 2017
Why not make Chrome a JVM like runtime engine for Electron apps?
Well, once you start believing that mathematical objects (or any other concepts) exist in some abstract sense (rather than are some kind of emergent property of our bodies, minds and social interactions) it's an easy path to get to ridiculous conclusions. (Cf. a very naturalistic vision of science itself by Ludwick Fleck.)

Sure, we don't understand consciousness yet (or maybe we never will). Still, it doesn't mean that it is good to fall into some plausible, and comforting, mental trap. Vide Feynman's "I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong".
Why I Am Killing a Startup That Has Over 100,000 Customers
I fail to see when/why this would be required, other than cases where a user forgets the password and doesn't have a back up..
At first I was thinking "this isn't a big deal, Atari Jaguar CD did this back in 1995 on way less hardware," but then​ I realised it was a hackathon project and now I'm really impressed at how far they got in that short frame of time!
Scientists make contributions and they work supported by the previous contributions. So the argument "X were the first" doesn't have to do anything to science, but only to populism in politics.
Indeed. And the thing I linked to (the odin) does allow you to do CRISPR in your living room for $150, as I said in my original comment.
Dark A.I. – A Cybersecurity Time Bomb?
"Speeding up" would only happen when you turn nudging on, it wouldn't continuously keep getting faster.

But the algorithm described by the author has a bigger problem: It wouldn't actually sync the fireflies!

If EVERYONE nudged their clocks forward, then an out-of-sync firefly would be nudged the same as an in-sync firefly, and synchronization wouldn't increase over time!

Your rule avoids this problem:

> If you see a neighbour nearby flash, when you are not flashing, nudge your clock forward by a bit.

If you look in "show clocks" mode, it looks like this is exactly what is implemented.
Writing Excel add-ins in D (without GC if you want)
This artist turns bananas into stunning 3D sculptures
Apple Releases: “App Development with Swift”
It is very different from country to country how they do stuff. When they where in China they heavily subsidized rides, paying drives more than the entire fare, sometimes.
EU Piracy Filter Proposals Being Sabotaged Says MEP Julia Reda
obligatory http://www.mongodb-is-web-scale.com/
Update: The guy who was investigating Teori Zavascki's death was murdered yesterday.
This is a rather simplistic analysis of why poor people often vote republican in the USA.

Ironically, I just visited Gothenburg in "socialist Sweden", and it was the most racially/poverty segregated city I have ever been to in the modern world.
One of Crispr’s Creators Faces Her Fears
My mistake. My fingers were not wired to my brain before coffee.
Why You Should Do Customer Interviews Even If You Are the CFO
It's worth pointing out that Mozilla can only continue to put pressure on Google and fight for the open web if people continue to use Firefox and support them. Consider switching to Firefox even if you prefer Chrome. Report websites that don't support FF. We are all better off for the existence of Mozilla, and strong viable competition to Chrome and IE.
Pentagon leak: 28GB intelligence data was freely exposed on Amazon server
Perl is still the only language I've seen that has a dedicated syntax for regular expressions. Every other language requires you to write your regexes as strings, which puts you squarely in backslash hell.

(I'm sure there must be other languages with dedicated regex syntax, but I'm not aware of any.)