skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're right, but keep in mind that VAT is really only paid on things you buy for private consumtion, e.g. not on rent, medical insurance, pension plans, mortgages, not on your office etc. In the income brackets we talk about, at most 20% of income is taxed with VAT making the effective VAT tax rate 20%x20% or about 4%.

> and yes, you're not getting your taxes worth.

Thats debatable :) The US has a live expentancy as low as Cuba, very high crime rates, very high violent crime rates, low trust in society, massive homelessness, bad schools (but good top universities), bad care for the mentally ill, horrendous working conditions, ...

As far as quality of live per GDP per capita goes, the US is among the least efficient of all industrialized countries. Just think about the fact that Cuba manages to archieve the same live expectancy as the US with 1/6 of the GDP per capita of the US!
Since you seem to be the right audience, I'll advertise it to you ;) ...especially since I'm rather a candidate to leave this country!

> You need network effects of smart people

We definitely have this, especially in the heart of Paris, and in other cities too. I've lived in Madrid and Sydney, therefore I dare giving my opinion, with the limitation that I'm not a serial entrepreneur in each of those cities.

> where creative people would want to live

Well, it's Paris, land of Macron, of Montmartre, and social mixity with black/white/arabs/traders/social-workers/low-income living together, etc. A lot of people live this mixity, fertile for ideas and leverage. The glamour is however balanced by high rental costs (=most often living far in the suburbs) and medium pays (60k€ per year is high for us, but health, unemployment, youth education and retirement are included).

> Good universities

We have plenty of excellent engineering and management schools (Centrale, X, INSA, EM Lyon, INSEAD, Les Mines, HEC), half of them free and nonetheless excellent (In France free doesn't mean students are bad, rather the opposite). We're not well versed in international rankings, so Australian unis may rank above us, but I'm persuaded it's more about tweaking the rankings than student IQ.

Given the impression you give, maybe have a business trip in Paris and interview people in coworking spaces to have alternative opinions? You may love France!
Google Scholar Blog: Classic Papers: Articles That Have Stood the Test of Time
People will buy bottled water (300 times the price of tattoo water in France) while there is perfectly good water in taps (again, in France (where water is a "food", so it follows very strict regulations - and in average (you may have places where the taste of water is not extraordinary, but it will be safe))
I don't think that's an unreasonable question. Your answer suggests that we already have the most optimal solution, which by analogy cows would be too. I assume you know cows aren't.

But like with cows, it is not inconceivable that "regular" trees are not the most effective way of making wood. They need to stay alive which means they "waste" energy doing so. While I personally don't think we can outdo trees with regular chemical compounds, I think we can at least genetically modify some already-optimized tree family in a way that require less water, sun, etc.
> If you look at the entire lifecycle of a product, plastic bags (to take an example) have a better footprint across the board than paper ones. //

Importantly we don't factor in destruction of the planet: use of non-renewable oil and pollution (and is impact on food supplies, etc.). This is where the cost seems higher with disposable plastic, a cost we are yet to pay.
> I don't know why it is like that, but perhaps a reason is that Viking culture was very revenge and honor based. But this mentality was destroying society so authorities worked hard for hundreds of years to change this mentality.

Or maybe it really sprung out of the Christian influence that came after the Viking culture, with teachings like: "Love your enemies" [Matthew 5:44 - https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+5%3A44&...]?
See you in Shenzhen next week for our next TechCrunch China event
And how many percent of this is for new development?
I use calcurse[1] for this. It handle pretty much every "calendar" files out there

[1] http://calcurse.org/
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but what in your opinion makes the menu systems in digital cameras so crappy?

I have an older Canon digital SLR, and while the rear LCD isn't as big, bright, or high res as newer cameras, and it lacks touch support, I generally find the menu system pretty nice. It's fairly information dense and has dedicated buttons for a whole host of features so that you don't have to go digging through a bunch of hamburger menus.
Fair enough I guess. I don't see much value in discussing this with a person who thinks taxation is a joke or that people buying child porn shouldn't be a concern because it can be acquired for free. Our opinions are already too far apart to find much common ground.
In the U.S., I don't think that any automated calling of 911 is legal.
Product Engineering: From Ideation to Execution, the Life Cycle of a Product
For windwos you don't need an vst for a global EQ with this: https://sourceforge.net/projects/equalizerapo/

And for measuring your room for correction: http://www.roomeqwizard.com/ (find yourself a good tutorial on this one)
Sure, it is useful. Maybe have a "string to [Char]" function in the stdlib?
Wait, Idris sounds like a much improved Haskell.

Any downsides (in the core language) besides the smaller community?

Any chances for Haskell to get some of the same things?
As an American living and working in France, this sounds like a scenario where France would love to have the results and benefits of a startup boom, but they don't want to take the necessary steps to enable it. Having a bunch of free money or easy visas are actually not what will cause a boom. France is notorious for never-ending paperwork and administration, and it's true. It's like trying to swim in molasses. You can do it. No one is "stopping" you. But eventually you just get too tired and give up, and go to the cafe and enjoy life. But hey, yeah let's make France attractive to startups and catch some of those taxes and world attention. But we don't want to change anything about our culture or regulations, so we can give give out a bunch of money, right? That will get people to flock here, make billion euro companies, and we'll reap the benefits. That's what it seems like to me.
That's just incorrect, take the famous marxist Adam Smith:

"When the regulation, therefore, is in support of the workman, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters."

https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/faculty/jstiglitz/sites/jstigl...
I'd guess external IO (memory and PCIe) might be a problem. How are you going to route all those wires out from the socket?

Secondly, there's probably some economic argument as well. Too few customers willing to pay for a humongous MCM, and with the attendant wiring complexity requiring more layers for the motherboard, it might be cheaper to go to more sockets instead?
Thank you. This needed to be said.
When I was freelancing, I was specialized in fixing businesses/projects that got stuck due to tech debt and non-communicating teams, using a bottom-up approach.

The hardest part is changing the mentality of the team, but within a month or 3 you usually ignite the spark that gets everything back on track. Getting to the first tiny win that changes the status quo requires a lot of hard work, but once that's rolling, it's only a matter of making yourself redundant.

One caveat: the bottom-up approach works best when people introduce you as the helping-hand dev. Some people had a hard time understanding the exorbitant paycheck, when all you do is sit with the developers, not even being a PM? (TBH I've been an ad-interim PM in most of these projects for a few weeks, and it usually helps - lead by example etc).

TL;DR: businesses/teams do get stuck, and a consultant who knows what he's doing and doesn't care for titles can turn around things.

EDIT: The one thing that's lacking in this article, is the social aspect. If you are only fixing code, you are just fixing the symptoms, not the causes.
>But iterating over the characters is a very useful feature. It's used in all string algorithms that I can remember in the time it takes to write this comment.

And you still do that with atomic strings -- you just either add a helper method like charAt(i) that gives you access to each character (or, rather, each rune), or you have some way to turn a string of length N into a list of N strings of length one.
I started using emacs for email back in my uni days. I used Dovecot to run an IMAP server locally which would get my mail when it could. This made it very quick in emacs because it wouldn't have to wait for any remote server.

But, unfortunately, I had to go back to Thunderbird. With the exception of free software mailing lists, people simply do not know how to use email. Bottom quoting is the default. We can thank Microsoft for that one, I think. I can't understand why anyone thought it was a good idea to attach the previous message to the bottom. Most people just accept this as the way email is and never question how unbelievably stupid it is.

Then you've got all the HTML shit that people put in there. And the fact that many clients are simply broken and don't write the headers correctly which breaks threading. This is often confounded by broken servers which garble the headers a second time.

It's amazing that something as simple as mutt or gnus (emacs) has everything you need: threaded messaging and convenient composition. Inline quoting is surely the only sane way to do quoting. Why would you assume the person you reply to has deleted their own message? My message to you is right there in the same thread in my client. Don't send it back to me. But do make it clear which parts of it you are addressing (inline quoting). You had to laugh when Google reinvented threaded messaging in the 2000s and advertised it as some groundbreaking new thing.

So I gave up. I use a client that can deal with the stupid shit that other clients spit out. I also bottom quote now. Why? Because if you do inline quoting, MS Outhouse web client thinks that everything after the beginning of the quotation is a copy of the previous message and folds the whole thing, meaning your recipients get back what looks like an empty message. Really.
Amazon is among several companies interested in buying Slack for over $9B
The elephant in the room here — and this is no judgement — is that the contractor isn't worrying about creating more technical debt or something that will fall down in a year's time. It's YAGNI taken to an extreme. As easy it is as a contractor (as I can attest) to make fun of previous implementation spacemen who came before you, they often had the laudable goal of creating something that would be easier and cheaper to work with moving forward. I've also been at - more than once - given managerial control of a large codebase driven exclusively by the need to deliver deliver deliver and had to explain to the company why development has become so much slower since they started.
TBH, I'm starting to think people that work in big companies need this the most. Outlook's filtering configuration is fairly limited compared to what you can do with a well setup procmail system.
The Matrix Voice seems the most affordable... for makers that is :-)
Makes me wonder about the link between alleged prediction plane in humans, self perception, perception of others and communication
> Haskell is good for compilers and parsers.

While true, the same applies to any other language in the ML family.
When you base a theme on a terrible subsystem (Wordpress) then it can never be anything but 'crap' (to quote your question)

The wordpress community ethos seems to be "let's hack it to make it work", spending to much time trying to accomplish something instead of thinking if they should be doing it in the first place.
It doesn't look Marxist to me, and I don't see how you get long-term sustained competition in an unregulated market.

Maybe it worked before the invention of the corporation. You'd buy from an individual human. Fraud would mostly be obvious, and you could get a mob to beat the person if they were into fraud. Unlike corporations, which can merge into MegaCorp and then dictate prices, humans can't actually merge into MegaMan.
Look, everyone knows that concepts have no intentionality. It was a figure of speech.
I think "Borgen" is far more realistic when it comes to politics, the "shadow play" and intricacies
if you do inline quoting, MS Outhouse web client thinks that everything after the beginning of the quotation is a copy of the previous message and folds the whole thing, meaning your recipients get back what looks like an empty message. Really.

Gah; that explains it. Occasionally I get a reply saying "you just sent me a blank email", while the text of my email is quoted right there in the email they've just sent me!
I love reading about the War of 1812. I think it is easily the most avoidable of all U.S. wars.

The U.S. declared war on Great Britain as negotiations to roll back impressment and trade restrictions were finally progressing. Then, after some impressive U.S. victories repelling British invasions (following some impressive British victories), none of the original grievances were addressed in the treaty.
This is all very nice, but the fact that the article doesn't even _mention_ images or attachments shows how divorced it is from the reality of most people's email experience.

I happily used emacs as my mail-reader from 1989 to about 2009 (first RMAIL mode, then VM). The increasing importance of non-text formats made it cumbersome, and I somewhat reluctantly switched to GMail. It's hard to imagine switching back now.
Dependent types can help a lot when writing both of those actually. Idris' documentation contains an example interpreter that uses dependent typing (outside of theorem proving) heavily[1]. Compilers are a place where formal verification is likely worth it in some parts, particularly when writing optimization passes.

I think one of the biggest advantages of dependent typing is that it lets you implement a lot of things that other languages need to add as ad-hoc language features. A good example (if you're familiar with Haskell) is typeclasses. These can be done entirely at the value level in Idris, and IIRC interfaces are just syntactic sugar over this implementation. Other examples are generics that depend on values instead of types (without resorting to tedious things like type-level integers) and cleaner replacements for a lot of macro functionality.

[1]: http://docs.idris-lang.org/en/latest/tutorial/interp.html
Polyolefins are used to make stuff like plastic bags and are heavily researched due to their substantial and very negative impact on the environment. So that this stone paper stuff is sold as a more environmentally friendly alternative to paper is just a big hoax. Our oceans are already littered with plastics and aquatic wildlife is heavily impacted. Plastics made out of olefin polymers can survive a whole century - i.e., this "water-free" tech might dump a century worth of plastic paper into our oceans. Nice! :-(

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0141391010...
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079670010...
asf....

http://www.plasticgarbageproject.org/en/plastic-garbage/prob...
http://www.onegreenplanet.org/environment/how-plastic-is-har...
etc....
I'm speculating wildly, but it's not like demand is totally inelastic for launches. If you can make launches a lot cheaper, then it's not totally inconceivable that they might make it up in additional volume. Also, if Musk's goal is Mars, then the best thing for that is the healthiest possible space program, which requires the most economic launches.
The war was almost certainly unwinnable without French loans, arms, and naval support, but the bulk of the fighting was done by the Continentals.
North America is also Canada
And the next post: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/06/how-we-counter-terroris...
The core is based on a different type theory. It is very unlikely that the part of GHC called "Haskell core" will make such a massive change.

In general the Idris type inference is not nearly as good as Haskells. I don't mean this in the "dependent type inference is undecidable" sense, but instead just generally.

Idris is also strict instead of lazy like Haskell. This is good or bad depending on who you ask. Very unlikely for it to change in Haskell though.

Many of the other issues are the issues with every small language. Community size and libraries.
Hard Questions: How We Counter Terrorism
Richard Stallman (RMS) uses emacs for email as well.

I can't imagine it. Too much valuable information comes in the form of rich emails for me to even try.
Malaysian TV Celebrity abused while undercover as homeless person
the only images i find are either from spammy adverts or tracking pixels. Normal people don't put images in emails.

As for attachments, you can open them in their native programs just fine.
I had a similar case a year ago where about two days of work resulted in a pull request that changed only one word: https://github.com/docker/distribution/pull/1578
Why would this matter? You can get an IETF RFC drafted on pretty much everything. Dan Harkins even got Dragonfly an RFC: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7664.
You mean grapheme clusters? Swift is the only language I know that uses that by default, and you still wouldn't want to store strings as a list of grapheme clusters.
Honestly this seems like the best we could hope for, not just from Facebook, but from any company. It seems honest and forthcoming. The conversations we're starting will be going for decades. This page clearly recognizes this.

Anyone who thinks they have the one true answer to any of those bullet points is full of hubris.
It is subjective to some extent, but I do find that those who don't wrap their code at 80 characters aren't really particular in terms of wrapping their code at all. So most lines may be between 70 to 130 characters, but there may be the occasional line that's a bit longer.

Plus, it also depends on the tools one uses to review code. Github, for instance, will present a horizontal scroll bar for the unified diff view if there are lines that are too long. Using that scroll bar is not something I appreciate having to do when reviewing code.
Oh wow, I didn't know that. Reminds me of the Aborigines who looked for shapes and figures in the empty space between the stars as opposed to our own ancients who'd rather 'connect the dots'.
I switched to mutt after I was unable to view images with emacs (gnus) as it did not bother (or failed) to un-base64 them before either trying to display them in-line nor when saving the image.
True, but good luck working without an operational calendar system.
Physicists just smashed a record to achieve quantum entanglement in space
Turns out, the purpose of diarrhoea is way more complicated than we thought
Ugh, no thanks.

I already use enough arcane tools on a daily basis due to my work. For mundane stuff like reading and sending mail, I'd rather take a break and use tools that even my tech illiterate father could effectively use.

It's really detoxicating to become a normie from time to time.

Disclaimer: Used to read mail with emacs back in the day. Tried mutt for a while.
The general approach is to display the text/plain version of any incoming mails, but if you absolutely need to view the HTML then you'll pipe out to lynx, w3m, or links to view it.
The common solution is to pipe these HTML messages through a command line browser, see https://debian-administration.org/article/75/Reading_HTML_em... for instance. You still have to open the pictures manually if you want to see them.
The Norse myths were from a millennium ago, no one has believed in them for almost a thousand years.

I can't quite see why Norse mythology wouldn't have had a direct impact on Norwegian culture that continues today. I don't know much about Norway but here in the UK we have laws that were passed 500 years ago that are still in use and that were strongly influenced by the church when they were enacted. You don't have to believe in something directly for it to influence your culture.
I'd not heard of that, thanks for sharing.
Good list. And other basics:

* support for mono tracks

* sys-ex for everything, not just Push 2

* VST 3

* a completely open API, not just the selected highlights that are available now
> sold their office building

Short-term realisable profit and improvement to their cash position, at the expense of future cashflow.

It can sometimes make sense if the business's return on capital is much higher than that of real estate, or the business is at risk of having to downsize.
Four trends that will shape web design in 2018
Cool, DWARF improvements are definitely welcome. Even if these ones are just for Windows. ;)

Go's debugging story, for things using cgo, has been a bit of a rude shock (to me). As of yesterday's toolchain updates (Gogland, Delve), single stepping on Linux is now working reliably (eg not randomly hanging).

It still needs to be improved so instructions execute in the order they're written (eg more disabling of compiler optimisations when debugging), but that's less important than fixing the "ugh, it's just hung again!" bug was.

Hopefully OSX debugging gets to a similar (working ok) state soon too. :)
Mutt in Debian comes with the NeoMutt patchset by default. This is really convenient as I make heavy use of the NNTP feature that NeoMutt adds.
This came up in the recent thread about switching to mutt :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14567074

That was also where I did shameful self-promotion of my own console-based mail client with lua scripting:

https://github.com/lumail/lumail
SHA3 is a hash function, not a KDF.
You have an implicit assumption that the competitor was previously charging close to cost. They have an incentive to cut prices too after Space-X enters. The old monopoly price is different to the price where Space-X wins the contract.
Images are opened like any image on your system: by using an image viewer.

For non-text formats, I only deal with HTML. For them, I pipe the mail through a terminal-based browser before reading it. All of this is done automatically, literally a one-line configuration in the proper file, a thing that is explained at length in most mutt guides.
Cat vs. Snake real fight to death
I have also been using an emacs (spacemacs) + org + mu4e setup for 6 months or so. Unfortunately, everything seems to be really buggy and break at random moments. Also, there isn't a really good iOS integration story.

So, I am slowly retracting and going back to vim, Mail.app, Things (and mutt every now and then ;)).
Nice idea. A bit simplistic in its current form, though.

One thing that would be really nice would be some kind of discussion thread for each topic. What does the customer really need? If there are ten interested customers, do they want the same thing? Which alternatives were considered? Which tradeoffs would be acceptable?

Also, IMHO, it would be cool if the site could handle the mundane details of hosting and billing. But I guess that there are probably other sites that do that kind of thing already?
SSL/HTTPS via CDN – an accident waiting to happen