skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that your method for teaching data structures wouldn't work in practice. I don't think many students can arrive at such data structures on their own. How many students can you expect to come up with the implementation for a dictionary who have only ever heard of and used lists and arrays?

The analogy in math would be to expect students to derive the pythagorean theorem from scratch. Not only would this be a difficult task for most newbie mathies, you would also have a significantly smaller proportion of students arriving at the formula than by conventional means. It would be much more effective and efficient for a larger demographic of learners to show them the formula, explain how it's derived, and have them then apply it over multiple examples.
Suspension bridge cables are made of smaller cables. And those smaller cables are made of yet smaller cables. For example: http://regex.info/i/JEF_042406.jpg

That's my guess.
> I would love to see some use cases of what people want to be able to do with DRM'd media that 1) can't be done with current DRM limitations and 2) is within the guidelines of what the distributor allows (or within the rights given by the user's local government).

Play it on my linux machine?

Copy it to a different medium for my own personal use?

Inspect it for security vulnerabilities?

Build and sell a device that allows you to split the video signal into multiple parts so I can watch it on multiple screens arranged into one large screen?

Buy a device that allows me to inject home automation information onto the display on which I am watching it?

Do you need more?
It's not an appealing thought to imagine that we'd start consistent space travel without first dealing with the problems of war on our own planet. This kind of policy is putting our worst collective foot forward.
Software startup roles
That is the more precise definition, and there is reason to believe the majority will be honest as reporting events are randomly distributed, and you can't possibly know who's reporting what until the reporting results are all submitted.
My definition of life: A forkbomb implemented in hardware.
Edward Albee’s Final Wish: Destroy My Unfinished Work
I wonder if one person can do all three, particularly in the context of Saas. Atleast in the start.

Would love to listen from someone who has been doing all three himself/herself. How did you manage it. Any particular use case where its possible/easier. Cases where its difficult..
WRT #1, while it certainly isn't difficult to serve libraries from your own server taking advantage of a CDN allows you to take advantage of browser caching and offloads bandwidth.

I'm not saying that CDNs should be setting tracking cookies, mind - I'm just pointing out that as a developer a CDN helps me improve the experience of my users and as a user a CDN helps you reduce my costs to provide whatever value I am to you.

Honestly, if browsers were able to quickly determine that my "reactXX-X.min.js" was the same as Facebook's I would probably just eat the occasional edge costs.
PR is a unique case. The vast majority of their deficits come from spending commitments from well before 2008.

PR's financial mismanagement parallels Chicago more than it does any state.
Sell an ebook I bought on Amazon via ebay to someone else. Gift an ebook I bought. Refund DRM’d content I bought within of 14 days after sale without significant usage.

These are all things that the law says I have the Right to do, yet DRM providers frequently violate these rights.
I recently learned lede (leode) was Old English for People. Which was interesting for me since Leute is still in use in German.
Setting up a lab capable of producing fentanyl has significant up-front costs associated with it. Running the lab and keeping it stocked with precursors is an ongoing risk. For better or worse, the golden age of american clandestine laboratories is probably past: it is far easier to import an uncontrolled, custom-synthesized fentanyl analog, although I would not recommend getting into this business.

Fentanyl isn't popular _at all_ among opioid addicts. The duration of effect is short relative to morphine-like molecules and it absolutely wrecks one's opioid tolerance. Fentanyl is popular among unscrupulous heroin dealers that try to pass off a cheap synthetic opioid as $200/gram diacetylmorphine.
Celery?
I don't think this is a well-formed question, because DRM is generally code implementing 2). That is, things DRM prevents you from doing are pretty much by definition things that are not within the guidelines of publishers.

But to treat the question charitably, here's one use case: I want to view the media on whatever devices I happen to own. That is, I want to e.g. start reading a e-book on my PC, continue on my Kindle, and then finish it on my smartwatch. Or my laser projector. Or my fishbowl. Also maybe I think the book's font is simply ugly, and I want to change it. Oh, and my Internet connection is pretty shitty, because I live in a developing nation and/or US rural area, so I'd love to be able to do all of that off-line at times[0].

That was a basic use case. To step it up, imagine I'm doing research. I want to do notes and cross-referencing, and I want to efficiently move around the text. Regular DRM-ed formats tend to make that nigh-impossible[1].

> How would that example translate to a non-DRM version while making sure that the library isn't distributing an unbounded number of licenses to customers?

It wouldn't, because DRM is by definition designed to limit you to only a very narrow way of consuming a piece of digital media. Any kind of additional flexibility will make it possible to "distribute an unbound number of licenses" for free.

Here's the fundamental conflict - as a consumer, I want to buy/rent a piece of content, as narrowly constrained as possible. In particular, I want the publisher to stop messing with the way I use it and the format I chose to consume. OTOH, publishers have exactly opposite interests - they want to have as much control over my consumption as possible, whether to make more money, to protect against copying, or both.

--

[0] - Related, it's kind of ridiculous to have to stream a book from the Internet all the time. DRM does encourage some pretty shitty engineering decisions.

[1] - Consider just how much economic damage is being done to society by using DRM to make media usable for lowest common denominator of consumers, while making it much more difficult to use in a specialized way for interesting or important work. It's a huge waste, to take a general-purpose computer and use its power to restrict its own functions.
But it deters the USA from invading Russia or China
Double-check Bitcoin addresses when pasting (Bitcoin TX Generator malware)
I am thinking about it as well, and my take is developing stock trading systems, so when I walk away from my job, I'll stil have it as a hobby, not to mention the financial rewards...
I think your second truth is closer to the real one.

There's a lot of capital floating around out there. Most of it is actually foreign, either OPEC sovereign wealth funds (like how Saudi Arabia put $3.5B into Uber) or wealthy Chinese businessmen. All that capital is seeking a productive return: it has to go do something, if it sits in a bank account it'll just shrink because of inflation. Right now, tech is basically the only sector of the economy that has noticeable growth. Hence, anything vaguely connected to tech gets plenty of funding, regardless of how ill-considered the idea is.

The fundraising climate has tightened fairly significantly since 2015 - that's why all these companies are going out of business. But around 2012-2013, the way you got funded was you went out, painted a picture of how everyone in the world would be using your technology-enabled product, and asked lots of people for money. There were so many people with money to invest that you'd be bound to find somebody.
Sorry but your $800bn figure is bullshit. I'd highly recommend reading The Three Trillion Dollar War: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Trillion_Dollar_Wa...

Even moderate estimates put it at about $5 Trillion, the most conservative at $3 trillion, with the high end (reality) at $8+.

One huge cost people completely ignore is the cost of health care for the vets we bring back who suffer from a huge number of physical and mental issues. It's also one we'll be paying for the next 40-50 years.
Same for people from the Dutch city of Utrecht, never call them Utrechtenaar. As there were a few huge "sodomy scandals" in Utrecht the regular form of Utrechtenaar became a synonym for homosexual. That's why they prefer to be called Utrechters.

Sorry, no English source:
http://m.dichtbij.nl/utrecht-en-leidsche-rijn/artikel/387814...
> You seem to think that opioids are an effective treatment for long term pain

Because it can be. In many cases of severe persistent pain, they are the only effective treatment. There are many situations where literally nothing else works save for anesthetic infusions.

> and is now addicted to opioids

Those patients and doctors are making the determination that addiction is better than the alternative. Why is anyones business if that is what they decide? Frankly being addicted to a prescription painkiller is not any different from addiction to ADHD medication, a benzodiazepine (which are far worse in terms of addiction, withdrawal, and consequence), or an anti-depressant.

> People with long term pain need rapid access to a specialist pain management clinic.

Sure. But do you expect a patient to come back every 6 hours for another lidocaine injection? What do you think they do in pain management clinics? If you think the side effects of an opiate are bad wait until you see people on heavy gabapentin or benzodiazepenes as 'alternatives', who, btw are getting practically no relief from their pain at all but are heavily medicated.
Right! I suspect our intuitive definition of life includes a biological substrate. If I were somehow able to to engineer a new species of viable biological organism, possibly even not using any existing DNA building blocks, I think most people would consider the result "alive". When really I just created a new program for molecular machinery to run.
One particularly cool aspect of the letter: you can see a late stage in the evolution away from the letter thorn (Þþ) in English. In the transcription in the article it's transcribed as 'y', and at this point it was no longer in general use but as an abbreviation for the word "the" it hung on for a while as a highly stylised thorn (which does kind of look like a 'y') and a superscript 'e'. If you view the image in a separate window you can see it most clearly in the last line ("ye prises") and also two lines up from that ("ye others").

You might have heard about the general phenomenon (it's the reason people going for an old-timey look prefix stuff with "Ye Olde") but it's cool to see it "in the wild", so to speak.
I don't think this is relevant, though. It really doesn't matter that the process reaches every configuration given enough time; the post is about the limiting behaviour. Take roulette for example. If played long enough it will pass through every configuration with 100% certainty; yet its limit is -∞ dollars.
Productivity Tools for Startups on a Budget
I think that as initial capital requirements go down the only ideas that seek out VC investment are those that less validated. The VCs agree to invest in these "moonshots" that need to bleed for a few years maybe because there is a belief that increased difficulty means greater reward. (Like a video game)

The risk may actually not be that high due to the liquidation preferences and the inflated prices and hype may actually be promoted by the VCs themselves so they can offload at high prices. The most important factor for this pump and dump is the founders personality.

Crypto ICOs eliminate much of this potential as whilst in the VC model the investor needs to be thinking pump-and-dump. In crypto, every buyer must be thinking this. Ironically due to the hype in cryptocurrencies the hype may be so widespread that this does indeed happen despite it being able to completely upset the funding model. (That large capital requires impressing specific keyholders)
“If I had more money,” Wilson said, “I would put it into lethality, not bureaucracy.”

What a terrifying quotation
> without first dealing with the problems of war on our own planet

Problems of food & water security. Problems of air pollution. Problems of equality. Problems of disease. Problems of enough toys at Christmas. You could always insert a new problem on Earth - of strictly subjective seriousness - to use to prevent that leap. Conceptually it's the: eventually you have to launch, problem. There will never be a shortage of serious problems to solve on this planet.
All Time 100: Strength Training Books
I second that, it might exist, but its not easy to find.
Your own citation disputes your opinion and claim.

> This is just untrue.

Oh are you saying this from your own research or clinical experience? Do you work directly with persistent pain patients? Are you an anesthesiologist? Or are you just Doctor Google?
In the Netherlands, it's a legal requirement that businesses must accommodate any employee requests for reduced hours, at proportionally reduced pay.

The average person in the Netherlands works 25 hours a week, yet they still have a higher GDP per capita. Not per hour, just overall. They work less, yet generate more.
While the idea is very cool, it seems to have most of the drawbacks of traditional regexes (i.e. the little Syntax quirks that eventually one has to learn), with none of the benefits (regex are everywhere including text editors, not just a python thing). It does make them more readable I guess, but I'd like to hear other HNers' opinions.

I think for beginners a better approach would be using something like RegexBuddy (https://www.regexbuddy.com not affiliated, just found it super useful when I started writing regexes).
Thanks! I'll read about this today :)
Against charisma
Show HN: DIY bzero
Twitter, no.
Not an API, but perhaps a good basis for one: https://github.com/secynic/ipwhois
I've never work with virtual hosts. Nice to have something to read about today, thanks!
Interesting, how does this compare to PyParsing[1]? It seems that pyparsing does a lot of this already. Not that you shouldn't write your own, mind you!

Some improvements could be to use operators to reduce some boilerplate, like using * instead of Times(), i.e `(X() * 3) * 5`

1. http://pyparsing.wikispaces.com/
Exactly, going both ways.
That's like arguing that restaurants are extending credit because they charge you at the end of the meal. The "keep it open and then you forget to pay" type tabs are very different than having a long running tab at a bar, which is not super common and is what I thought we were talking about. One is much closer to credit than another. Regardless, neither are significantly meaningful in the larger credit market.
I did not. I started with Python 2 around 2009 (coming from a C and Perl background) and was surprised how backward string formatting is, and how unicode is messed up.

Then I started with Python 3 and was relieved to find named .format() parameters and bytes (vs. str). This is just an example - Python 3 is a very positive evolution.

(and yes, I read the arguments of the other (mistaken :)) group who advocates Python 2)
Cool work!
Many died being poisoned by ineptly made bootleg liquor.
Surprisingly it's really worth doing (if possible in your case): https://medium.com/personal-finance-series-by-richard-reis/t...
A generic communication API (this might exist). When I want to communicate with my customer, it handles how they receive the message - whether that's SMS, Email, IM, slack, etc.
> it makes individuals less autonomous

Really, I think the problem is not so much the decreasing autonomy of the individual, but rather the increasing concentration of power. In a modern society, you are already massively dependent on other people, in a normal day you get into contact with the direct result of the work of thousands of people (as in: not just people who had the idea to bake a bread, but actually people who contributed to the specific bread that you are eating now), and I think that's perfectly fine. What is problematic is if a small group of individuals/companies get a massive amount of centralized control over a large part of the population.
The modern at alternative is:

systemd-run --user --on-calendar=23:20 notify-send Example

Or relative with --on-active=60. And you automatically get the normal systemd tooling, e.g. systemctl list-timers.
For Augur, how it works is reporters are randomly handed events to report on. Meaning you can't buy REP and then choose to report on a specific event in order to further your financial interest.

Further even if you did that and by random chance are selected to report on your sporting event, you have to hope that majority of other reporters who were also chosen do the same thing you do (keeping in mind you don't know who they are), so if you still choose to report a lie you further risk losing a portion of the REP that you previously bought.

The only practical way to game the system is to have a majority of all REP holders collude and they would in truth control the outcome of all events. However it would be a waste of their money to do so, because the value of REP is derived from trading fees, and their trading fees would be non-existent because no one would use Augur if the reporting wasn't reliable, so the value of their REP holdings would plummet.

It's just like a 51% attack on Bitcoin, it's physically possible but you're financially incentivized against it.
The 20 years might not but the never making money while still getting massively funded would fit with the rest. $590M over 11 rounds. Maybe the 20 years is an intensifier rather than an extenuation.

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/jawbone#/entity
A dead-easy scraper API
I find autopoiesis ("self-constructing, self-maintaining, energy-transducing autocatalytic entities") to be the most satisfying definition of Life. But I find it weird that they would throw that term out there without citing Humberto Maturana or Francisco Varela, who came up with the concept.

They wrote mostly long essays in obscure philosopher's jargon, but one day decided to go ahead and explain everything very simply; they wrote The Tree of Knowledge, which summarizes their philosophy in the style of a children's book. Very worth reading if you're into these kinds of questions. I found a PDF here:

https://www.cybertech.swiss/research/references/Maturana1988...
"Oh, we could totally synthesize meth and make tons of money, but it would be so good we'd get caught immediately." Talk is cheap. POC or GTFO.
That's cool (Idris seems to have an infinitely pluggable back end), but it's not the same thing. You can code in a higher-level language, but you can't inspect another program's guarantees and you can't safely use them within your own system.
Maybe something that could easily be interpreted as social mockery and making fun of people = crossing the line.

It's not a fair treatment for someone who has made an enormous contribution for startups and is already paying a big price for past mistakes. It can also harm/dilute the cause women are rightfully fighting for.
WHY I CHOSE MANCHESTER UNITED AND SNUBBED CHELSEA – LUKAKU OPEN UP
It's not funding that's the scarce resource, it's user attention.

When thousands of startups with terrible ideas get funded, it floods the market with tons of new products that users don't get any value from. Eventually they get category fatigue and just start blocking out trying anything new. Even if you've got something innovative that you can build yourself, people still need to try it for it to catch on. That's easier when there are few other products vying for attention and users are actively looking for something new.

Fortunately, I think the last mania ended around 2015. Trump has sucked all of the oxygen out of the collective zeitgeist since mid-2016, so hopefully by 2018 people will be sick of being angry at their leaders and looking for small, concrete ways to improve their lives.
Ask HN: How a lonely developer can make non-developer friends?
Hi,

I'm a 32 years old french software developer.
I like spending time learning new languages and frameworks. I also like reading, watching videos and play video games.

When moving to my new flat, I realized that I have no friends except 1 or 2 former colleagues.

Question :
How can a lonely developer make "non-virtual" friends from various horizons (architects, cookers, etc.) ?
I wish I could have large circle of friends.
Best,
Pierre
Yes, the second law of thermodynamics is a statistical law. It is physically possible that all the particles in an ideal gas container will be moving east all at the same time, for example (it doesn't break any law of mechanics), or that a temperature fluctuation will spontaneously appear in a material in thermal equilibrium. It's just that the probability for such spontaneous entropy decreases happening is astronomically small.
Eh, it sounds like the teacher is just trying to get their class excited about the chemistry. Come for the very pure drugs, stay for the molecular orbital theory and the love of the lab.
Historically, the research needed for moonshot projects has increased the quality of life for everyone.

Think of all the improvements to mundane parts of lives that we can attribute to satellites. Improvements in weather prediction increasing crop yields. Improvements in geolocation with GPS inproving search and rescue efforts. Improvements in fabrication technology making all consumer products cheaper. The list goes on and on.

I just wish that the kind of funding that would go to a space corps was instead directed at NASA for fundamental research.
> Conceptually it's the: eventually you have to launch, problem.

Why do you have to launch?

If we can't solve our serious problems on Earth, what do we expect to gain by going into space?
Can you tell me more about how you would've integrated the API? I think I could've helped out.
> Caffeine is in the same family as meth

If by family you mean CNS stimulant with an amino group, then yes, I guess? They are very different structurally and pharmacologically.

A synthesis of methamphetamine would not look very much at all like an alkaloid extraction, except, possibly, for the final workup and isolation of the salt.
An API that had close to real time feed of all closed captioning for news sites and those who were speaking.
It's applying a heuristic that triggers a false positive in many cases. Most ad blocking rulesets do tend to include very basic rules like that. I don't know how many ads they actually still catch but if it's a significant number then it's probably a justified one.
> You're assuming the alternative to lending at interest is nothing rather than something.

No, I'm arguing with what you proposed, which is this:

> > People would still lend money to their friends and family. Stores would extend credit to customers because they want to make sales.

which is not in anyway a meaningful alternative to the actual credit market.

> Notice that the first two are the only ones that are actually good for anything.

Except that the first two only exist because of the third.

> But you don't actually need any lenders for that. If all you want is to create new money and give it to people, the government can create money by fiat and just hand it out to all citizens, or pay for government with it in lieu of taxing people. It's the same thing, there is just no interest.

It's the same thing, there is just no incentive whatsoever for the behavior to happen, so it reality it's not at all the same thing. This would cause massive devaluation of currency.