skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OK, I'll bite.

In principle, this makes sense, but I think if we poke at it a little you may agree that there are some holes.

>A contribution defined by its payload's self-contained substance and value-add to a core mission

Let's discuss the core mission. How is this mission decided? Is there a process that includes multiple stakeholders? Who picks these stakeholders? I would presume that most open source projects are started by 1 person, or a few people who work together, but recognize that other arrangements exist. At some point either they must set these goals or expand the core group that makes such decisions. So to start with, the first person(s) setting the mission are as arbitrary as having been there when it started. Are they the best at setting goals once a project is in full swing? Perhaps, perhaps not. But, I think you can agree that at the outset, merit is defined by those who start a project or are arbitrarily close to it's start.

> It's an artifact whose value is derived from its content, and not from its provenance.

How does a project determine the "value" of a piece of content. What is the process for derivation? Is it simply the fulfillment of a feature request with accompanying tests and docs? I would suggest that for any non-trivial code, it will be difficult to determine if a pull request will do exactly what it is purported to do with no negative externalities.

What is you have competing contributions for the same feature request? How do you determine which one to choose? Let's say for example that concurrently an issue is addressed by a core contributor and a first time contributor and both arrive at equivalently good solutions. Which implementation should you choose to maintain "meritocracy"? How do you justify that decision?

You may be interested to look to the origin of the word meritocracy[1]. It was intended as satire.

[1]The Rise of the Meritocracy
https://books.google.com/books?id=QelNAQAAQBAJ
I hope you don't expect to bring the rest of the world on board with your thinking. You've got a lot of work ahead of you, if so.
Toronto and Vancouver are Canada's big insane housing markets. There are smaller tech communities in Ottawa, Waterloo, and Montreal, and those cities have normal housing markets.
>Don't believe that they will eventually make all that much money

That is a pattern I've noticed in Canada in contrast to the US in fact; We settle for "good enough" or "profitable" but not the "moonshots" or strive to be "the best".

Whether in tech, business, or even global influence, we are a "middle power" and we seem happy about it (my high school politics teacher explains that this is a result of constantly being the US's little brother). This makes me immensely unhappy, and I hope to make Canada more ambitious one day.
While I agree with this sentiment overall, what pay differential can compensate for a more general stability? It would be great if someone could get a high-paying job and not worry about being bankrupted by an unforeseen medical disaster, but that's not the case in the US.

And by the same token, almost no amount of pay (within the tech spectrum) could convince me to live in the cities in Texas where right-wing extremists are rallying outside mosques with assault rifles.
There was nothing wrong with investing in tulip bulbs in 1637 either. But investors shouldn't expect any sympathy when they get burned.
You start out with "the whole notion of 'work' is flawed." but then you admit that people have different opinions than you. So it's not "flawed" to some people.
Postion Independent Source Code
Besides the usual suspects that you run as root because of the "limitations" of the OS, like installing applications/binaries etc.: All the kinds of debugging/tinkering tools needing special permissions, such as Wireshark, attaching a debugger to a running process, tools for generating and handling raw network frames (a capability that I need surprisingly often), ...

This is what spontaneously comes to my mind. But if I reflected for some time probably more things would come to my mind.
And don't people without "nuclear" family wind up subsidizing this scheme? Not everyone has family, or if they do their family may not be capable or interested in caring for them or vice-versa.
You are not a hacker. :-(
What are you doing on HN, that's basically a link aggregator?!
It's pretty much the exact opposite of arbitrary.
Canada is one of the easiest First World countries to immigrate to.

Apply for college -> graduate and find a job -> get residence.
In my (shared) office, everyone knew each other's last 4 SSN digits, because whenever on the phone to some random customer service rep, we had to give them to "authenticate".
Dear VSCode team... now is the time for VSCode for the iPad!
People on LinkedIn who have gone to App Academy who currently or previously work at Google: https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/people/?facetCurrent...
That is, unless you're on Windows.
For those, like my, that didn't recall off the top of their heads: BLOB in MySQL can usually only hold ~64KB.

EDIT: Though I am curious why MySQL doesn't throw an error when you try to store more than 64KB in BLOB?
>>"arbitrary stereotype"

the selection criteria it's not arbitrary and is based on the factors Canada considers important. It's like saying asking for a job applicant to have a certain skillset is "discrimination based on arbitrary stereotype".
I'm saying that it is implicate in the non-compete even if not spelled out. (in some cases courts have rules a non-compete is not a valid contract even if signed because it prevents someone from earning a living)
It's most likely for efficiency and performance reason. 64-bit doubles the storage requirement of 32-bit and would have impact on database's utilization of memory, querying window size, cache, and storage.

Edit: 32 bits worth of games played means about 4 billion games. 4 billion X 4 bytes for 32-bit = 16GB just for the 32-bit ID's. 64-bit ID's would need 32GB for the 4 billion games. I guess memory and storage weren't that cheap back then.
The 100 best solutions to reverse climate change, ranked
No. You might say the facts speak clearly that Uber was mismanaged or even toxic --- I would lean towards agreeing with you, though my epistemic certitude is no doubt lower than yours.

LOTS of people disagree with us. So it's a stretch to say the assertion is self-evident.

But unless you know something we don't, you are nowhere close to calling Kalanick "sociopathic". Hence the question.

We should all try to be more careful about how we talk about people.
This is similar to what happened to me. I've attempted to contact their "support" via email but nobody's replied in over a month.
I wish to subscribe to a newsletter in which you annotate, line by line, speeches by politicians and other popular figures.
Come on Canada. You're making me and all Canadians look bad.
> That's not the exact opposite experience, that's just stupid.

Please don't be rude in comments here.
> It would be great if someone could get a high-paying job and not worry about being bankrupted by an unforeseen medical disaster, but that's not the case in the US.

I agree with this sentiment but if you have a high-paying tech job then you probably get insurance which won't bankrupt you in the case of a medical disaster. It's the ~90% of the rest of the population who has to worry.
Three people from my bootcamp cohort ended up at Google. They had math/science background, but not CS. I know other people from my bootcamp who got to Google after year or two of working at other companies. It happens.
Sleep monitor maker Hello does layoffs, seeking a buyer of assets
Toward level 5 autonomous checkout
Similarly: if you live in WA but have a non-compete agreement with your employer who is headquartered in CA, is that enforceable anywhere?
I thought so because the evolution of the waveform looked exactly like this:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e3/FracFT_R...
(from the wikipedia page on a fractional fourier transform)
"Most foreigners or people with diverse minority backgrounds have a difficult time adapting to very social environments. They would rather stay strictly professional and confined to their work."

Maybe rephrase this sentence, this reads like anyone not like you cannot do creative work. It sounds extremely racist and other 'ists.
The flip side (based on my observations as a white male who actively engages in social justice) is that many women and minorities are so utterly sick and tired of harassment and obliviousness from white men that they simply have no patience for the engagement anymore. I can't say I blame them. I tire of the fight too - and I know it's my privilege that allows me to retreat when I'm tired of it.

I really appreciate those who can stay active and upbeat when trying to educate the privileged, but I understand those who can't. I don't think I could.
Control systems are so ridiculously insecure given what they do. I was lucky enough to attend a DHS control systems security summit at INL way back in 2006 (or 2007 I can't remember). They had a huge lab full of various PLCs, etc, and a bunch of surprisingly smart folks working on pen-testing them. But still, it's a decade later and we don't seem to have made much progress.
It would be better if they supported the OpenSSH PKI format.
>Who among us is writing code today worried about how it will be used in 2052?

This decade I knowingly wrote code that will break in 2036 [1]. My supervisor was against investing the time to do it future-proof (he will be retired by 2036), and I have good reason to believe the code will still be around by that time. I don't think I'm the only programmer in that position.

[1] Library specific variant of the y2038 problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
I'm an App Academy grad. I don't work at Google myself, but I know a few who do.

App Academy is indeed extremely selective, with an acceptance rate less than 3%.

The salaries shown are all self-reported (App Academy isn't releasing this), so there is likely some sample bias for sure.

And you doubt that a/A grads work at Google or similar companies? See for yourself: https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/people/?facetCurrent...
Note that Coinbase sent an email out some weeks ago telling customers to switch to Google/Microsoft Authenticator instead of relying on Authy and SMS: https://blog.coinbase.com/how-to-increase-your-coinbase-acco...
> Competition. If we take lobbying out of the picture, and therefore prevent ISPs from drafting legislation to suppress competition, it would allow for small, local ISPs to spring up.

You are assuming capital needed to set up an ISP is non-prevantably low. This can only be the case if the state, county or city owns the last mile and allows any business to rent it.

> A lot of customers will pay more to get decent service. (Otherwise, McDonald's would have driven sit-down restaurants out of business entirely.) If you're running a local ISP, whose business is based on providing good service, screwing over your customers would seriously hurt your business.

Your restaurant comparison doesn't work, because you don't have McDonalds customers or TGIF customers, you have people who eat at both at varying frequencies.

And as for your second point, I said screwing over you end-user for a reason. If it's more profitable to undercut prices to get the cheapest users, while selling data and deals to other market actors based on your users data, ISPs will compete for that instead of speeds, privacy concerns and other. And your choice becomes between varyingly shitty deals.

The "market" can't then make a choice until:

1) Someone wants to start an ISP with users as primary customer.

2) It being more profitable.

3) That someone having enough capital to do so.
I'm sure one could make the argument that if it wasn't the US, it was Great Britain's influence as well. Canada was always second-rate compared to England and they never let us forget it. It's ingrained into the psyche of all Canadians in some way.

Also a century of political monotony didn't help.
Developer Spotlight: Brian Mullis
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14539226 and marked it off-topic.
We've banned this account for trolling. Please don't create accounts to break the HN guidelines with.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14539226 and marked it off-topic.
Regarding the point I was speaking to: it's undoubtedly true that some of those hacks were initially worthwhile. Keeping them going until the year 2000 was, by that same standard of cost effectiveness, pretty definitely a visible failure.
PyCon Canada is coming to Montreal this year, and Montreal has the second largest Python user group in the world (IIRC). So these communities aren't necessarily short on tech.
> We really shouldn't use anthropomorphization of a company to justify inhumanity in us

And yet... what is the purpose of branding, but to 'humanize' a service or product produced group of people who are gathered for the purpose of profit?
There's a difference between buying tulip bulbs and having the price collapse and buying bitcoin and never even receiving the bitcoin.
I don't know but I've been using this technique for a year or two now with great success. The Google authenticator just stores its secrets in the salute db every app gets.
I think Charlie Lee picked a good day to quit as director of engineering:

https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/charlie-lee-ends-his-coinbas...
This is less about the investment and more about the broker. If bitcoin takes a dive or the blockchain forks and users lose their investment, that's investing in a crash. When the broker absconds with the money, that's breaking the law. Users should have every reason to be confident Coinbase is reliable.
If you have to rely on model serialization schemes you have a problem because they express the model in terms of low level operations.

You probably want to do experiments with multiple model variants, or teak your model and fine tune from deployed weights. To do that you need a way to recreate it from layer-level objects instead of the add/reshape operations Tensorflow and its kin store internally.
I didn't argue they're likely to boost their salaries, or that they receive self gratification from doing so, so I'm not sure how to answer your question.
This is how it's been for over 100 years.

The neat thing about international tech workers however, might be that you can get skills without needing to transfer your education over in Canada and still have transferrable value and skills. Not to mention being self taught is good enough to find a way into Canada.
The salary differences are more than 31% though- you can see differences of 100% to 150% at the junior level (without adding in the exchange rate, which adds another 30% on top).
This is relevant. There are lots of real-life errors that come out of these errors and the worse mistakes people make trying to work around control flow (goto fail?).

I desperately want a 'break break' command. Not a label break, which is painful to work with, but an instruction to break the current loop and the outer loop.
$200k is not very hard at the big tech companies, who employ a LOT of engineers in the bay area.

I'm less than 2 years out of college, and I'm set to make ~$210k at google in 2017. Up from ~$170 when I started. I know a few who are making a more than me because they negotiated their stock units well. To be fair, GOOG doing well the past two years has helped me a lot. It would be $186k at grant price.

I haven't even gotten promoted yet.

These figures are before taxes, of course.
MySQL's silent data truncation is such a nuisance. It's off by default in 5.7, and can be disabled in earlier versions by adding STRICT_ALL_TABLES/STRICT_TRANS_TABLES to sql_mode [1].

I inherited a system where, among other things, the entire response body from a payment gateway callback is saved into a text field using utf8 character set, despite the fact that most of the supported payment gateways send data in iso-8859-x (and indicate the used charset inside the body itself, how's that for a chicken-and-egg problem). Of course when the data gets truncated due to not actually being utf8, nobody notices. Fun times.

[1]: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/sql-mode.html#sql-mo...
Technoethical T400s launch
The US surgeon general has a really nice, fucking long, document about tobacco.

Everything in it is evidenced by as much research as they can get.

https://www.surgeongeneral.gov/library/reports/50-years-of-p...

I agree that it's a bad idea to take nicotine in any form unless you need to, but it seems that nicotine is one of the less harmful parts of tobacco.

For chewing tobacco it's probably not the nicotine that's causing cancer, but all the other stuff.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14539362 and marked it off-topic.
> used electrics seem to have a significant price premium suggesting people think replacing older battery packs is probably a good long term deal.

Maybe. Depends on how you interpret the numbers. The electric Focus seems to command a premium of ~20% over the SE for a comparable used car near me, but the MSRP is >50% over the SE new. So you could see that as used buyers believing that the electric is worth 20% more than the comparable used IC, or you could see that as buyers believing that the a value of an electric drops much more rapidly than the value of an IC. Maybe after a couple more years these lines cross and the IC commands a premium. I honestly don't know.
Hot snot gets icky with time, rather use a conformal coating; they're available in spray-form as well (e.g. CRC Urethan or Plastik 70). That being said FR4 is a really tough material and it's quite difficult to pry SMD parts off.
Wait, wtf? You're advocating for occupational licensing in tech?
Check Out Freesist.com on Product Hunt. Upvote. It'll Help Us:-)
> being bankrupted by an unforeseen medical disaster

For maybe most of the U.S. population, this is a risk, but most tech companies have health plans that cover this.

> And by the same token, almost no amount of pay (within the tech spectrum) could convince me to live in the cities in Texas where right-wing extremists are rallying outside mosques with [semi-automatic] rifles.

I don't think it's representative of most of Texas or the rest of the country. I get that you're using rhetoric, but there is also anti-Muslim violence in Canada, Australia, UK, Germany, etc.
How This Boston Startup's 'Group FaceTime' App Became a Social Media Hit
> Quick googling says income tax has doubled in 2017.
reply

This is not true, and was likely posted by a conservative hardliners.

Canada uses an after-price sales tax like the USA, but in higher quantities - it will vary between 5% and 13% depending on province. Also, all provinces are currently implementing a carbon pricing system, so some provinces will have an additional sales tax on carbon intensive goods like gasoline. Unlike VAT, they're above the printed cost of the time, not included. These have been quite stable for a long time.

Also, Canada has income tax. Like the Americans, we run on a graduated income tax system, where you pay no tax at all on the first $11,000ish dollars you earn, and then in each tax bracket you pay increasing percentages on the money that falls within that bracket. There has been modest increases in the highest tax brackets to pay for a cut in the second-lowest bracket. Also some "boutique" exemptions have been closed or reduced recently.

In every case, there are taxes paid separately to both the federal government and provincial governments.

The biggest rising expense here on Ontario is not taxes, but "hydro" which is what Canadians call electricity (so much of it is generated by hydroelectric dams and power companies market themselves as hydro companies because of it). Ontario has had a history of mismanaging electrical bills, and that process has come to a head and so energy prices have skyrocketed recently.

While our taxes are normally somewhat higher than Americans, it hasn't been really a huge problem historically. Only now it's starting to come to a head with cost of living as the crazy housing market has driven mortgages through the roof and the hydro crisis have come together to create a cost-of-living problem in the Toronto area.

Finally, we have municipal property taxes (comparable to British council taxes). These are priced based on the value of your real-estate property. These are generally stable, as councils are very price-sensitive and are hesitant to raise them outside of a crisis.
>The usage of Cultural Marxism on the internet appears to this reader to completely divorced from academic concerns.

[citation needed]

>I note that the author of your linked piece claims to be: "Fighting to save Western civilization one-hundred forty characters at a time." which implies to me a certain political agenda.

No one is claiming that the contrary is true, and the fact that he has an agenda does not dispute the facts he has presented (unlike SPLC's opinion-based piece).
The last sentence here isn't self-consistent.
How to Port Your Mobile App to Another Platform
Broadband speeds have soared under net neutrality rules, cable lobby says
I mean...maybe? I know of few American companies that aren't going to find away to get rid of you if you're out of work for an extended period of time because of a serious illness or accident. Labor rights are pretty poorly enforced in the US, and when they are, it's often dependent on you being able to mount and survive a costly legal challenge. People tell themselves they'll be ok, but it seems more like a gamble/survivorship bias to me.
Air pollution more harmful to children in cars than outside, warns top scientist
Your site appears to be down, the connection is timing out for me
Did he quit or did they come to a "mutual understanding?"

And I suppose he picked a good time seeing as he finally got LTC into Coinbase right before the segwit pump.
But the manufacturer doesn't have to disclose that information if there's no regulation compelling them to, or they can downright lie if nobody's there watching them. Or just put random shit in there that hasn't been tested for safety.

http://www.webmd.com/smoking-cessation/news/20150218/e-cigar...

>The results of one FDA review of 18 different e-cigarette cartridges found toxic and carcinogenic chemicals in some but not others. All but one of the cartridges labeled “no nicotine” did, in fact, contain nicotine. The authors suggest that “quality control processes used to manufacture these products are inconsistent or non-existent.”

> Flavorings: Goniewicz says hundreds of flavors exist, including cherry, cheesecake, cinnamon, and tobacco. Many of those flavoring chemicals, he says, are also used to flavor food.

>“These are the big unknowns,” he says. “When we eat them, they are safe, but we don’t know what’s going on when we inhale them.”
With immigration you will definitively focus on highly educated people, people who have skills needed in the respective industries and who are likely to fit in well culturally.

How would you regulate immigration?
Across Russia, Protesters Heed Navalny’s Anti-Kremlin Rallying Cry
> Why should a country not be permitted to prohibit you entry if you don't add value to said country? That's what sovereignty is all about.

The problem is that capital flows more or less freely but labor does not.
They very easily are. And cost per square foot is higher in London, so you're in a smaller place.