skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the most valuable CS courses I took in college was my ethics course. Our honors college was pretty wide-ranging and rigorous, but CS students who weren't in it (I think I was the only one at the time?) were mostly B.Sc. students whose schedules were crammed with (largely superfluous) CS and math courses that left very little time for stuff that's actually useful, like the humanities. And because it was being taught by a CS prof, I went into it expecting it to be awful and boring and trite. Instead it was taught by our department head (who used to be at Watson) and Tom DeMarco (the author of Peopleware) and it dug into not just ethics as considered by philosophers (it was my first introduction to Alasdair MacIntyre, one that I've since expanded on pretty extensively on my own) but the characteristics of human, and not just computer, systems that lead people to do the wrong thing. It also introduced me to the book Customers who viewed Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies by Charles Perrow, which is so critical that I think it's the closest thing to necessary reading that anyone working in any technical field should be required to read.

I've heard a lot of people pooh-poohing the notion of ethics courses, but, frankly, most of the people I've worked with would've benefited from the exposure to thinking about their and others' actions outside of the most immediately utilitarian, mine-mine-mine setting. The framework of analysis and the vocabulary of ethics create a way to ask direct questions (and effectively demand answers) from people who choose to act in one way or another. It's valuable stuff.
"e had been warned by San Mateo County and the California Coastal Commission – before and after buying the property – that he would be required to keep the public access open.

Public access to Martins Beach, and to all land seaward of the mean high tide line in California, is guaranteed in the state’s constitution and mandated within the Coastal Act of 1976."
Exactly. My gut tells me that the constitution guarantees beaches are public, but it does not guarantee the right to trespass on private property to exercise the beach right. But I have asked this question to understand if my understanding is correct.
Because continuous growth is not the sanest decision.
Absolutely. Typing is a real timesaver as it adds so much to how much an ide can help you.
> A Russian spent dollar probably gives more bang for the buck, but US military spending is still very high.

You of course didn't support that claim at all. Most US military spending goes to soldier-related costs. How do you propose to slash that given how dramatically higher the US median wage is compared to Russia? Other than of course to perhaps cut the number of US soldiers in half.

> The single-pay system can be made to work. Others make it work, and a lot cheaper

Of course it can work. It can't work with US costs what they are. You need to go tell US nurses they have to take a 1/3 pay cut, to match up with what nurses in France and Germany are making. Then you need to go tell radiologists that they have to take a 70% pay cut to match up with French radiologists. Then you have to go tell pharma they're getting a 2/3 cut. Then you have to tell average hospital workers they're getting a 20% pay cut. Then you have to close 1/3 of all hospitals. Then you have to substantially expand wait times to match eg Canada, aka rationing the care. Then you have to tell hospital admin they're getting a 50% cut in their budget. Then you have to fire 500,000 people that are employed directly or indirectly in the health insurance industry. Then you have to slash the payouts for all sorts of highway robbery prices in medtech / devices / supplies related to the healthcare industry, which will can hundreds of thousands of more employees. You have to successfully adjust all of that, lower the costs, then figure out how to create new economic growth with the cost savings to re-employ all those lost jobs, wages, taxes (all that lost income tax, which will shoot a hole in the side of social security & medicare/medicaid).

IE you have to find a trillion dollars in savings across dozens of economic segments. Which is another way of saying: a lot of people are going to lose a lot of jobs and income. It's an extraordinarily complicated and expensive problem to resolve without rattling the entire economy to its core.

Oh yeah, then you have to dramatically raise taxes on the US middle class (which pays very little in taxes vs most developed nations) to match up with what countries with single payer systems do; and explain to the middle class that they're going to be better off with socialized healthcare, and that the increased taxes will be off-set by the government healthcare vs the old private insurance approach. Then you also have to significantly raise taxes on the top 25%, which pay most of the taxes in the US.

No problem eh.
I believe that's the crux of Khosla's defense and why he is holding out. He seeks an eminent domain payment from the public -- $30 million -- to have access to Martins Beach via his property. It's unclear if this "principle" of requiring eminent domain for easements is consistent with the Coastal Act of 1976.

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Vinod-Khosla-wants-30-...
Using regex in python to scrape some data from a website works just fine for me... shrugs
Wish judges would/could find contempt of court and toss these selfish recalcitrants in jail. No release until public access is (re)secured. After all, that was the court's finding -- that public access was/is required.
Unyielding. The new 911 GT2 RS
Couldn't you solve this with privates, either via a naming convention or with symbols, as well as using getters?
Your opinion is not unpopular; it's the default and prevailing opinion in the US or any economy with access to cheap energy and without any efficiency incentives (read: scarcity or foresight).

Flying is the most energy- and carbon-intensive mode per passenger-mile. Which as alluded above, is not a meaningful economic factor, yet. (Unfortunately by the time it becomes meaningful enough to be profitable, it might be too late to transition to anything else because the capital won't be there.)

RE highway vs. train - If you can imagine a continuous stream of cars on a highway, why wouldn't you be able to also imagine a continuous stream of trains on a track? A mile of track filled with train cars can hold more people than a mile of highway, easily. And it has one centralized power plant with a much higher efficiency factor (because it's a larger engine and because it uses better fuel for the purpose). It also has far less total wind resistance, since the train has only one front face and one rear face. And if it's high-speed rail, well, it moves faster than cars. But again, efficiency is not currently a meaningful factor.

Traveling the last few miles from the train stop is very much a solved problem. Even if you drive, that beats making the whole journey by car in my book. But those wishing to minimize it can always move closer in near the stop... thereby concentrating land-use in cities again and maybe letting the scourge of suburbia die off like it needs to... in a paroxysm of mold-infested particle-board.
Why not just make all patents illegal? Then just let companies mitigate the risks of IP infringement through the purchase of insurance. The insurer could offer various policies some that compensate for all losses due to infringment and/or also going after perpetrators, etc. This seems like a more optimal solution to me than the current lot of legislation and trolling, I think it would maximize rate of innovation while also allowing companies to invest and have safeguards against IP theft.
Reminds also when there were these water shortages and you could not even shame these types into cutting back.

Simple solution, set fine to a percentage of income or wealth. Require that penalty to be under the three strikes and you are out. So we hit you with 0.0025% of your wealth at three strikes and keep moving the decimal to the right until you play ball.
The time has come. We need to tie fees/fines to income.

There's a bill in California that, in all honestly, I don't know what's exactly in the bill. But it's trying to tie fines to income.

Now--besides my laziness, I have felt the sting of fees/fines since I was a young man.

It will be a miracle if it passes.

We need it badly. This is not the America I saluted to.
>simply send back the coins to clear your name

Earnest question: if someone sent you coins, wasn't it presumably in exchange for something? If so, doesn't that complicate the idea of simply sending them back (without incurring a loss)?
Hopefully they didn't do the same thing Dubai did and not install a sewer system (Dubai has since corrected that, but not before it impacted beach hotel business).
yep me too, no problem.
Hyperloop is a joke. Japan's maglev is a reality. Japan is building a maglev line from Tokyo to Nagoya. The first 42km section is running right now. 500km/hour. 600km/hour in tests. Train sets have been delivered. Stations are under construction. Tunnels are being bored. Opening 2027.
Yeah, it's not fine.

I meant it in a different way (and was being somewhat sarcastic): that in a lot of cases, office flirting (even among equal peers) can seem OK if the woman likes the guy, and creepy if they don't (e.g. he is awkward, nerdy, out of shape, etc). In essence, a comment on how "jocks" get away with more of that kind of stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxuUkYiaUc8
one could make that argument, and should. If it serves the common good, and there are other opportunities to own land (and of course their are), than we should dissallow it as a society. Getting some theoretical tax dollars and giving my son or daughter an opportunity to feel sand in their tows and waves on their chest and salt in their mouth, etc, are for more worthy than some tax dollars. We should not create a society where only the wealthy get to enjoy common properties and delights of the earth.
I agree to some extent, and I'm worried about the war on general purpose computing too, but in the case of the Pi it's mitigated by the fact that the hardware starts at $5. That's a fraction of the cost of, say, a PC in the '90s.
The takeaway isn't that he could make more money from marketing directly to developers, but that sites like StackOverflow give him direct access to developers right at the _very_ moment their pain point is at maximum velocity.

Someone searching for "IP API" on StackOverflow and having his site rank in the top result(s) is the same as searching for "dresses" on Google, but without having to pay for search placement and getting 100% targeted traffic.
I hope they converge towards the middle and stay there until ARM takes over completely (which it will, within the next decade or so). I'm waiting for Threadripper and for AMD to address Linux-related problems with Ryzen (GCC crashes, general stability, etc), but we did build a couple of boxes with Ryzen at work to benchmark and optimize software for, and they hold their own against Intel performance wise, in spite of narrower SIMD.
Pretty cool man, use your site all the time for ASN lookups, although I find your carrier information wildly conflicts with digital element's DB.
>Failure to comply could lead to fines that start at 5 million euros and range up to 50 million euros, or about $57 million.

I somehow feel like with such ridiculous sums it makes more financial sense to just pull any kind of forum/social media/etc out of Germany.
You're correct. They sell a product.
I had read that too. It's clear that the beaches are public. But I would not trust a government employee. It's unclear to me that the Constitution guarantees my right to cross anybody's private property to access the public beach. Why can't people go through other properties doors, climb fences, etc. to enjoy the right to use a public beach? Why is this path considered public property, when it is clearly private? I think this is the issue.
Right, but currently what is lawful is also the most conductive for human flourishing. Hence, it should be enforced, not changed.
You still have induced drag from low pressure areas unless you design your cars so they're more box-like (i.e., the front of one car matches up with the rear of another, without any bonnet/hood/etc. or similar).
> Further, the $165 billion wouldn't accomplish anything in terms of infrastructure, or healthcare, or anything else.

That's an absurd statement to make. Total spending on highway and street construction in the US is around $90 billion annually: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TLHWYCONS . You are honestly arguing that adding an additional ~185% of what we spend on roads today wouldn't accomplish anything?
So if I did the same for people to do that in your house you would be ok too?

If not, what's the difference?
"court order"
Discussed 1-2 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14669516
After working with MUMPS for some time, getting to use Node.js has been a religious experience for me. I feel as if an incredible weight has been lifted off my shoulders.
Well, this is a cultural connection, and it probably could have gone either way

(Not denying it is the case, still, it's very curious it ended up that way)
If we are of the opinion that everything should be private, then why not privatize Central Park?!

What could go wrong if some poor kids will never get to see the beach? It makes it even more of an incentive to work hard, am I right? /sarcasm

The truth is that the bigger the disparities between rich and poor the more violent the environment gets. So, let those poor kids access to the beach and you'll be able to enjoy your wealth.
The purpose of sanctions in a situation like this is to compel the recipient of those sanctions to do the court's bidding. They should just ratchet the sanctions up until he does what has been ordered. If ten thousand dollars won't do it, make it a hundred. If that doesn't do it, multiply it by ten again. Eventually he'll either comply or no longer have any assets. Either way, the problem will be solved.
Countries already consider use of a mixer as a possible indication of money laundering, they don't need to strictly outlaw it.

When someone tries to cash out coins that came predominantly through mixers, the authorities could hold it up and ask the individual to explain. And if they don't have an explanation, the authorities can keep the money. Sure, this sort of enforcement isn't happening yet but it can and it's simple and practical. And I'd be more surprised if it doesn't happen.

Last year I closed a bank account with $11,000 in it, and just for fun I asked for the money as cash. That took a long time, the bank manager got involved and I had to sign a document stating the source of the money. Which is funny because they sure didn't ask when I deposited it. That's the world we live in, and that's where bitcoin is going.
..that OP's house is not public land?
Yes, Docker is great but learning it can definitely require more than 20 minutes. A `curl ipinfo.io` is still simpler.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14676851 and marked it off-topic.
I read from this

> I built the API in a few hours, posted the answer, and forgot about it — until a few months later I got an email saying my server usage was off the charts. I’d been getting millions of requests per day.

that they basically just set it up as a side-project and answered a couple questions on SO about it only to be confronted with its explosive growth after a few months.

One could then interpret the author in that situation as thinking "don't need marketing, who's gonna use this little thing I made anyway. [a couple months later] Oh shit, this blew up and I didn't even need to spend anything on marketing it besides plugging it on Stackoverflow occasionally".
Clojure in 10 big ideas
The difference is that I don't have a legal obligation to let people into my house.
The constitution does not guarantee access to OP's house, but it does for the beach. The courts have not ordered toomuchtodo to give the public access to his house.
> I addressed your abuse argument directly in my edit, which you saw, so this comment was probably the definition of bad faith writing.

How I read HN is none of your business but just FYI I opened the tab when your comment was in its original un-edited state and when I hit reply your edit wasn't there yet.

Talk about bad faith.
sure, if i blocked public access illegally
In addition to the many good replies:

One thing I like to point out whenever this comes up is that you should aim for a hybrid solution. Don't use a queue to store state, use it to coordinate. Databases are great at dealing with transactional state, queues are good at sequentially handing out data in order.

For example: Say we're generating reports. First you create a table "report_tasks", each row representing a report to be generated. Let each task have a status field and a description of what's to be done or whatever. You can use foreign keys here. Then create the rows, and for each row, publish a queue message with the ID of your row. The queue consumer then needs to read the town by its ID, do the necessary processing and update the status. You can of course also do things like avoid duplicate processing by looking at the status field.

What this solves is introspection/queriability. Queues are for the most part opaque (although Kafka at least keeps the queue around even after processing). This allows you to know exactly what work is pending and what has been completed, and do things like periodically retry the tasks or even preemptively cancel them. With RabbitMQ alone this is much more difficult, since you can't look into the queue without republishing the contents. The best you can do is to funnel ACKed messages into another queue, but you can't see what's pending.
I see the author is posting the same thing every 20 days or so, so here is the 0 marketing...
If they are valid, and he shots and kills an intruder, would that be trespassing and he fearing for his life be a valid legal defense?
Some years ago, in Los Altos Hills, a new landowner built a fence across a horse trail easement. The mayor and police chief went to the site and cut the fence open. It can be done.
This actually has a name:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
> Suggesting dynamic languages are "slow, unstable, drains your battery, is constantly offline, or has major security flaws" is throwing shade with no basis in reality.

What I suggested, if you go back and read my initial comment, was that static type systems give you a higher chance of improving performance, efficiency, and quality. I never said dynamic languages guarantee those issues, or that static languages guarantee the absence of those issues.

And there's plenty of basis in reality.

> It doesn't exist

It does exist.

> requires significantly less effort and is more naturally suitable to implement in a dynamic language

Maybe since dynamic languages are popular. I'm not convinced that dynamic typing made this easier, or if it just so happens that most people know dynamically-typed languages.

But that's beside the point completely.

The point was pretty simple (I thought...): Quality is visible to the end user, and all other things being equal, a static type system has a higher chance of resulting in quality software.

Now in the real world, of course, all other things aren't equal (otherwise everyone would just use statically typed languages). But choosing a dynamically typed language for those other reasons (your developers are more familiar with it, it has more libraries that you need) should be a conscious choice made knowing full well that you are opening your self up to a class of errors that you could have automatically avoided. If that trade-off is worth it to you (it is worth it to many) so be it. But the trade-off is still there, and when it does cause quality issues, users will notice.

I'm not saying using a dynamic language is a mistake and I'm not saying using a dynamic language guarantees the quality of the result will be lower (nor am I saying a static language guarantees the quality will be higher, although I believe it helps a lot), so arguing against those points is falling on deaf ears.
The way that the US is spending money (e.g. building a 1.5tn fighter jet that can hardly fight and a 35bn aircraft carrier that can't launch) I would actually start getting worried about adversaries with just a tenth of the US budget.

To put it differently, if the Swiss, population 8M, can figure out how to transport 1.8x the amount of rail passengers
compared to the entire US (no, not by capita, in absolute numbers [1]), it could also happen that a smaller budget military outmaneuvers US army, navy and marines. That being said, conventional armies made for symmetric warfare seem just about as useless now as at the height of the cold war. But not even the security of the nuclear arsenal seems a high priority in US politics today.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_us...
Is it? Even 2% interest on a billion dollars is $20M/yr.
Take a bolt cutter and unlock it yourself, and throw the thing at any of his minions who come out and complain. It seems we've entered a period of lawlessness if one is rich and powerful enough and it's time to push back.
So I went and read the piece on whether mathematics is invented or discovered, and found it to be surprisingly shallow. Hope this isn't an indication of his other work (which I'm much less qualified to evaluate).
It can't really be treated as "evidence". Maybe it's "probable cause" for looking into something -- but that's different in a couple of important ways:

* One needs real and credible evidence to carry through with depriving another person of any liberty or property.

* Probable cause never trumps or adds to evidence -- if you investigate and find nothing, that's it.

One of the most confusing and unfortunate memes of the past year is this "believe women" stuff, because it confuses strong suspicion with proof. If these cases show us anything, it's that there is plenty of real and credible evidence -- no need to go on intuition or suspicion.
So have multiple classes in trains! Heck, look at what some of the high-speed trains in Italy have as their top product (https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8810/17082308250_62443948ff_z...). Admittedly only 10 per train, but still. And that's on top of three lower classes!
The only interesting question here is: why isn't he (Khosla) in jail?
Since we're already in meta-mode...

FWIW, I disagree with virtually everything you've written on this thread, but haven't downvoted you once.

Even for those who realize votes are about as valuable as a warm bucket of spit, it can submarine comments into oblivion, ensuring that fewer people see dissenting ideas. I don't care about votes, but I do take time to comment to engage in discussion.

Downvoting over disagreement is silly, counter-productive, discourages free expression, and encourages group-think.

This is true, even if a decade old pg post endorsed downvoting as a means of disagreement.
Are you dense? It's not private property, that's the whole point!
I believe the point is that they are paying the fine, and just can keep on paying it.
Except that the probability of some aspect of your self business running afoul of a fine goes way up as your net worth goes up.
I don't see your hope for AMD or your prediction about ARM happening.

I think it's much more likely that Intel will continue to produce backward compatible x86 chips and start producing a variant that eschews backwards compatibility in favor of performance by dropping legacy x86 features either gradually or entirely.