skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>the apple tax

Man how often do I hear "I don't want ads on my desktop" or "I want higher quality hardware" or "I'd pay more for a system that X" and then in the same breath someone says something ridiculous like "the apple tax".

It's like in cell phones. People bemoan how expensive iPhones are and brag about how cheap you can get an Android phone. An iPhone is $600 but you can get an Android phone for $100! Then I ask which Android phone I should get and I'm told "Samsung Galaxy S8", which is the same price as an iPhone!

I'm told Apple laptops are too expensive, so I ask which Windows laptop I should get and I'm told a Surface, a Thinkpad X1 Carbon, an XPS 13... all of which are exactly comparable in price with a Macbook.

It's almost like "the apple tax" doesn't exist and people are just mad that Apple doesn't make cheap low quality products that the person complaining would never buy anyway.
MMM is a must-read, for anyone that wants to effectively engage in the software development lifecycle, IMO. Developer, project manager, doesn't matter.
I'm confused about what's inherently oppressive about making the border more secure. Personally I oppose Trump's stupid wall because it's a useless, wasteful boondoggle, not because having a secure border is inherently bad.
I'm sure they weren't recommending you read every line and grok the whole code base of each of your dependencies.

I don't know how helpful reading source is for determining whether or not to use a dependency, but I find it very helpful to have at least a small understanding of how my dependencies work:

1. I find it useful for debugging. If a coworker or I have used a library incorrectly, understanding how the library works can help us figure out why it isn't doing what we wanted. Also, my IDE lets me do step-through debugging through dependency code as well, which can be helpful.

2. It helps with determining the capabilities of a library. If I know how a library works, then I can make reasonable guesses about what features the library has (or could easily add). I find myself thinking, "I'd like to do X, and from what I know of how library foo works, that seems like something it should be able to do." So I can go investigate that.

3. It helps with knowing the performance characteristics of the library. Just yesterday, I needed to implement some stats logic in java. I found an Apache Commons class that does exactly what I need, but by looking at the source code, I found that it uses an O(n) algorithm, which is fine for the cases they are probably targeting. In this case, I need more performance than that, and it's not hard to write this as O(log n). So I wrote my own instead. If my IDE (Intellij) didn't give me super easy access to dependency source code, this would have been more painful.
They invaded, but that's not "winning".

Plenty of people died and the US didn't really accomplish very much on the ground. Karzai has very weak control and his enemies multiply.

Vietnam could also be used - they just destroyed us with attrition and a culture that had acceptance of heavy losses.

Fancy weapons aren't a panacea - "war is politics by other means" - the people in the end are all that matter.
(Everything in this response is my interpretation of the research I've seen. Some of it is my guesswork with no evidence).

Good question. It seems that having some period of starvation that is beneficial. Overall calorie intake is less relevant. Decreased overall caloric intake may actually be bad (can't find a link for this at the moment).

Benefits appear to include decreased risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome, possible decreased cancer risk, and decreased risk of neurological disease. Also longer life expectancy in some animals, as yet unproven in humans.

Even fasting for short periods regularly appears to be beneficial [5]

Three main reasons - autophagy, ketosis and decreased inflammation.

Autophagy, a kind of intracellular recycling operation, is increased by, inter alia, starvation [1]. It seems likely that most of the benefits of fasting derive from this. Valter Longo is a key researcher into this.
Of particular interest to me is his work on fasting coupled with chemotherapy. [2]

Ketosis occurs when all your glucose and glycogen (a polymer of glucose) are used up, and you burn fat instead. Mark Mattson is a key researcher into this. Ketosis appears to have a neuroprotective action [3]

Decreased inflammation - chronic inflammation appears to be a cause of all sorts of problems, and fasting appears to decrease it.

[4] is a good general review

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831538/

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3608686/

[3] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165017308...

[4] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1550413113...

[5] http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/861319

Use sci-hub for paywalled papers.
... yet
If ETH drops by more than half his machine is still profitable; on the other hand buying it now is a bit risky if it collapses back.

ETH was 8$ in Jan now it's almost 250$.
I third it
We used it in my algorithms class in uni, I found it a bit heavy on the math side of things. For me a more code oriented book such as Skiena's The Algorithm Design Manual works better.
In some applications paper will hold out for quite some time. Only recently​ screens with a resolution comparable to paper became practical, and it will take until the 2020s until they are widely deployed outside smartphones​. And that screen technology still has problems with reading speed as compared to paper. And in terms of viewing multiple documents next to each other it might take one or two more decades for screens to catch up to paper in everyday use.

Then again in a lot of office applications that is irrelevant, meaning paper is of little use to them.
+1 for Parsing techniques. Excellent book.
I also emphatically suggest D.Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming". Super dense, not like a sit down and read from cover to cover, but really good set to have around.
Congratulations ISRO!
Apprenticeship Patterns - A great book more focused on being an good software engineer and less on software specific details. Online for free at
http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1234000001813/index.ht...
I like how BBS over modem and telnet on an ancient machine loads faster than like 50% of websites.
I'll build it, if you run it.
The whole point of the economy is to allocate our scarce resources in the way that maximises the benefit to society.

Automation is a way of reducing costs; it is a way of making our scarce resources go farther.

On the micro level, it is a Kaldor-Hicks improvement [0]. This means that there are winners (all of society because goods are cheaper) and losers (people who have lost their jobs) - but, overall, there is a net gain. We can tax some portion of this net gain (e.g, with income tax, or corporation tax if you are really worried about foreigners) and compensate the losers (with training so they can be employed in a different industry).

In many ways, the "arguments" people have against automation are similar to those against immigration, and are befallen by the same fallacies. The difference is that we don't have to give robots health care. We already have a nice case study on rapid automation (and how the sky didn't fall in) - just look at the Luddites.

My main concern with current levels of automation is that, with patents and network effects, we are creating a new generation of monopolies (Google, Facebook, Uber, AirBnB) with very little oversight.

[0] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Kaldor–Hicks_efficiency
The most important footnote in this article:

"Returns vary significantly by school and major."
Amazon reportedly working on proper Android ‘Ice’ smartphones with Google’s apps
That's obviously nonsense. Killing 1M people is worse than killing 1.
i see in my native language (hebrew) it's not.
No and thats precisely what is worrying. Those massive switches in the past have come with all manner of social unrest, revolutions, war and changes to the basic fabric of daily life.

We are just now seeing the impact of the introduction of computers into the workforce and that is causing all manner of issues, but the response to that so far is the best case scenario when compared to say the industrial revolutions 300 years of massive change.
This is why I love C++ and C even though you cant find the source you can read the headers.
I don't think there's an "every", because not every programmer can read every language and there isn't even a common union of languages that you can universally expect.

In that regard Donald Knuth's work in the fictional assembler MIX for TAOCP is worth reading - it's at one remove from any real system. Knuth's TeX source is also quite unique.
As far as I know, at least in the US, the central bank is not involved in bank runs. That's the job of the FDIC, which doesn't print new money, it keeps a reserve from funds levied upon private banks. All of which could certainly exists in a Bitcoin world.
> Overweight people are overweight because they eat when they don't need to

That's a massive over-simplification, but by the same token, okay? We've now established that over-accumulation of wealth is comparable to an eating / mental disorder? Has anyone looked into treating this disorder?
A picture is better than 1000 words. But, which words? or for programming, which code?

Most visual programming efforts focus on representing algorithm logic with diagrams. But I think the difficulty to understand most complex programs (from my own experience) lies in the complexity of data structures, not the code logic. Reasoning about the algorithm is like reading a story, it is kinda intuitive; but for a large data structure (say a big struct with more than 20 fields), it's very hard to keep all those in your memory, you always have to go to its definition to refresh your memory, very frustrating. One of my tricks for reading a large open source project is to first find all the key data structures, draw them and the relationships on paper, then reading the code becomes easier and more pleasant. So maybe if a visual programming UI displays data structures with a visual format always on screen, it can help boost coding productivity.
When it comes to terror, there is no middle ground. If you are against terror in the Britain and the US then you are against terror in Israel.

> "hundreds of civilians, politicians, policemen, and scientists"

Please cite your sources. The British had appointed the head of the Palestinians a terrorist who was responsible for the deaths of 73 Jewish students in Hebron in 1929 including 10 Americans. It was this man who became "The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem" who later spent WW II as a guest of Hitler's in Berlin. This man who was appointed by the British wanted Hitler to bring "The Final Solution" to the Middle East.

It was Israel which bombed the Iraqi Nuclear Reactor which made Operation Desert Storm far easier than it would have been if Iraq would have had nuclear weapons. Israel is committed to fighting terror and not letting terrorists get away with terror. See Steven Spielberg's movie, "Munich" about how the Palestinian terrorists that killed 11 Israeli athletes in the 1972 Munich Olympics were tracked down and killed. Or see how once prevalent airplane hijackings were stopped by the Israeli "Raid on Entebbe" which itself was featured in 3 different movies.

There has to be zero tolerance for terror. The Palestinians, instead of combatting terror embrace it. They honor terrorists and they pay them and their families over $300 million per year of US and British taxpayer money.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/un-chief-pulls-support-for-pale...

"Palestinian Media Watch, which first brought attention to the naming of the women’s center, recently quoted a local village leader saying that “the center will focus especially on the history of the struggle of Martyr Dalal Mughrabi and on presenting it to the youth groups, and…constitutes the beginning of the launch of enrichment activities regarding the history of the Palestinian struggle.”

In addition to the women’s center in Burqa, the PA has named a number of events and facilities in honor of Mughrabi and the other terrorists who died during the massacre in a firefight with Israeli security forces, with the ruling Fatah party repeatedly hailing them as “martyrs.”

There will never be a Palestinian State until the Palestinians elect leadership that denounce terror instead of embracing it.
Gee I wonder if that contributed at all.
Wow, I did not expect a reply from Alan Kay himself! Thank you for taking the time to write a thoughtful reply.

I think of friendly competition as means to improve myself. It's not required, but it can be fun.

Unrelated to the above, I'd like to take this opportunity to ask you the following question: what would you like to see all software engineers start doing?
this guy has a blog that recommends a lot of great books
http://www.catonmat.net/blog/top-100-books-part-one/
It's not a pain, can be 1 click if you're on the same device (with log of websites you used). https://github.com/sakurity/securelogin#7-how-do-i-change-ma...
Harder if on a fresh device, but totally doable for anyone
The IBM PC came with Basic in ROM as well as the ability to load and save programs to tape. It was also available with color graphics.

...Of course most were sold with monochrome graphics and the clones cut out the built in Basic because it was IBM's code, as well as the tape routines, because floppies were so prevalent.
Good point. I hate DRM but I couldn't articulate why I didn't have much issue with this. It's a rental, you don't own it. I bought a book that was DRM and I can't read it. It was Barnes and Noble and they cancelled the app and I don't remember the logon to the site or even exists still.

Netflix is protecting it's service. I am not a dogmatic absoltist, they are renting the content and you are leasing the service from them. If you really want a copy I would just full screen it and screen cap it with quicktime. There are probably easier ways. Point is, with Netflix you are unlikely to do it because for $9 (or whatever it costs) the value prop is higher than the opportunity cost of piracy.
Yes Quake II which I expect to be similar is a major influence on anything I do.
If you asked me, PHP has had "serverless" for 20 years (just plop your "serverless" script on any cpanel host, maybe even more than one and put a load balancer in front of them).

For serverless NodeJS, zeit now might be worth considering as an alternative to AWS's lambda.

I would say Laravel doesn't beat NodeJS for SPA at all, because with Nuxt+Vuejs or Next+React, you can write your templates once and render with both the server on first arrival and with the client on subsequent arrivals. Then that setup can defer business logic to any one or more JSON backends (Laravel, nodejs, golang, etc.).
A couple of observations:

1) The discrepancy starts at an early age. When I was in college, there were very few women in my CS classes, and nearly all of them were international students. This SMBC comes to mind more than anything else: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=1883

2) Looking at my own employer, I noticed some interesting things. First off, we're a mid-size B2B telecom with a very corporate culture, which is antithetical to the "tech bro" startups that are often discussed on HN. Different departments have strikingly different gender ratios. Only sales and technology are really male dominated, and even then they're not exclusively male. All departments outside of sales and technology are either gender-diverse or female-dominated. In sales: our sales operations and client experience teams are diverse, and we have a few female executives. In technology, our business intelligence/data warehousing people and our business analysts are all women, the QA lead is female, and we have a couple of female software engineers and a female IT tech. I am the only woman in the network engineering department, though. We're still above the curve compared to SV tech bro startups, though, and I have never once felt discriminated against for my gender.
sox is kinda nice. Read a lot of it ages ago but I would like to revisit it know with my marginally improved math skills.
Cute little tool, definitley one of the nicest designed Zone lookup tools I've seen.
Russia can probably manipulate Ethereum easily as well.
Why the highly coveted visa that changed my life is now reviled in America
This is a feature, not a bug. The idea is to continue to devalue the Pro version of Windows so that business has to pay for the more expensive Enterprise to get rid of all the crapware via LTSB or just being able to use a version that will respect the 'disable store' GPO setting. Worse, there's no upgrade path from OEM Pro to Enterprise Volume. So you're paying for Windows twice, once via the OEM Pro license you'll never use and another by buying Enterprise.

This product is a another way to devalue the old SKUs by introducing yet another premium priced product.

Cant reply below so adding my comment here:

That path doesn't exist for volume. There is no OEM to Volume path and guess what every business uses: Volume.

> Dell and Lenovo and HP have standard agreements to put Home on every PC, youre not paying for an individual OEM license.

The cost per OEM license of windows was reported to be $40-$80 depending on edition. That is baked into the cost of the computer you buy from them. You're not getting it for 'free' the same way you aren't getting leather seats for free because you bought the LT model of a car. You're paying for that too.
Yes to Code Complete. I read the first edition at a time I wasn't sure if I'd pursue a career in computer programming. I hadn't used a computer for nearly a month making that decision. After reading and re-reading that book during that time, I pursued programming with a passion. That book struck all the right chords with me.
I have a pretty negative opinion on ESR these days. I could find technical arguments about many aspects of his good pieces of writing, and much of his writing is not good. His abilities as a coder are not generally remarkable, either. But mostly I don't think he's a good person. I would probably not say "Don't read ESR", but I think it has to be "Read ESR* "

*but be aware that he's a polarizing figure and opinions of his merits differ

(and if you happen to have a differing opinion, please use the reply button instead of the downvote button)
Well they were because they were small. They fought for it until they got big, then closed the door behind them.
I've looked closely after standards in auth area and left very disappointed. They are painfully slow. FIDO is founded on 2013, and they never tried to get rid of passwords, but only sell overpriced plastic sticks. I doubt webauthn will be less bureaucratic
Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming - Peter Van Roy
Thanks for contructive answer. Got it. I was just curious. I am lurking here for long time and it seems to me, that the ratio of technical posts is really declining over last few months so I was wondering about the guidelines.
Why Aren’t American Teenagers Working Anymore?
Bot turns Trump tweets into White House statements
For this particular situation, I too would recommend Apache 2.0 over MIT. In other words, please do claim that you won't sue over patents, and that you won't be sued over patents.
Not sure what kind of argument that is. If something overfits it will have less error, does that make it better? It may mean it would generalize a lot less when run on more data. Whether or not something is meaningful depends on what you take the meaning to be.
I'm a Junior in college and I initially thought college wasn't worth it by the numbers. I was going here because.. well... I had no idea what to do. I've now come around.

College is absolutely useless unless you find every possible way to waste every other student's money on things you want to do. The education you'll get is going to be sub-par (unless you're going to a big-5), the professors are short tempered and provide poor service, and you're going to have to learn a hole bunch of things you honestly don't give a crap about.

At my college you need to take Calculus 2 to be able to take Linear Algebra..... If you follow the standard course layout you'll probably be taking Lin on your Senior year. This is after 2 courses in discrete math where you apply Lin!

It's a joke. It's a fares. We all know it's BS. But it's worth it if you take advantage of every single service.

1. Use your college email to get software
2. Use your college email to get hardware (starving artist discount)
3. Take advantage of internal funding to do research you want to do.
4. Start clubs in your subject area. (My college provides $700/semester for each club!)
5. Talk to, and get to know, all of your good profs
6. Talk to, and get to know, researchers
7. Take advantage of student discounts (Amazon Prime, etc).
8. Your school will likely give you a laptop discount
9. Find the IT gift shop (trash room). Free hardware!
10. Find a job on campus if you otherwise have nothing to do.

So far, in my 2 full years of school, I've presented research findings at an international conference, funded my own research from an internal grant solicitation, obtained piles and piles of cheap software and hardware, I'm attempting to upgrade my Thinkpad to one of the new x260/x270s via a school program, and my next project is to start a Retro-Computer Club at NJIT.

I'm starting this club because I don't have $700/semester to spend on old hardware nor do I have the space to store old hardware in my shoebox apartment. You know who does? My school! Hopefully by my senior year I'll have created a mini-museum for the rest of the students. I'll have to brush off my old OS kernel I started and re-read my copy of Operating Systems Implementation and Design.

Unfortunately not every student can do all of these things. With my school's tuition being 20k/year I'm easily milking 5 to 10k/year back out of the university. If everyone did this then the money pot would run dry.

If you're not going to use everything you're paying for, you're getting ripped off. Classes aren't worth 5k/year, let alone whatever you're being charged.
And original MIT video lectures (for HP employees) are must watch. The mood/feel they have, impossible to receive from the book alone.
Coarser processes have their benefits, especially when they've matured for a while. When you're building a large chip you start really thinking about yield. Coarser and more mature processes give better yield.

I would assume that maximum yield would be achieved by very accurate machinery making coarse chips, like using 14nm lithography to make 22nm chips, but this is rarely done in practice, I think.
I would assume that any book about the internals of a database would be suitable. MySQL is plenty real enough to be educational to learn about its internals, yea verily, even its quirks, and to learn a lot about how other databases work. Even the "NoSQL" databases will use many of the same primitives.

An equivalent substitution for another database would be fine; anyone have any suggestions? Then again, such a substitution is really solving a non-problem.
I think you posted to the wrong article.