skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Honestly this is what gives me the most pause. I have a BA in Political Science from a liberal arts school nobody's ever heard of. Even if I could get in (which is doubtful given my academic transcript and how competitive it is), I don't think my decade of programming experience has given me nearly the theoretical foundation I'd need to do well. And I'm not going to invest the time and effort required just to graduate by the skin of my teeth.

Plus, I have a very good job already and it's not like an MSCS would help me get to the next step at all. Most of why I want one is to prove to myself I could get one. Probably the wrong reasons.
Yeah cause it's going through wild price swings due to idiosyncratic factors (Mt Gox, "Civil War", Coinbase decreasing purchasing frictions etc) which are pretty orthogonal to the stock market.

Regardless I think the wild price ride crypto has been on this past year is primarily driven by speculation (and possibly market manipulation), and as such when the recession comes and investors face a liquidity crunch they will sell their BTC.
I just finished Tolstoy's War and Peace. I think it deserves both the hype as a masterpiece and the jokes as a sprawling verbose epic. He's like Jane Goodall observing and deconstructing human beings at all social levels from the serfs and peasants to the Russian aristocracy and Napoleon himself. His characters are so real and their motives so transparent in the way he describes them, and they are this microcosm living individual lives inside the macrocosm of the French invasion of Russia. Throughout all of it are the rambling philosophical speculations of the author that are filled with brilliant insights but always seem fuzzy on making any strong points.

What I loved most about the book was how it conveys the complexity of life and the absurdity of historical analysis and the focus on "Great Men" against such complexity, which he compares to physicists trying to understand macro-phenomenon without taking into account the micro-phenomenon that add up to the macro effect. The whole books is an illustration of this through the many lives it follows in the major historical events taking place around them.
More a collection of stories, not from a single author:

- http://thedailywtf.com/

- https://clientsfromhell.net/
Because Amazons stock price is valued strongly based on future potential. For Bezos to cash out now and do philanthropy, without a very strong replacement to realize Amazons potential, shares would fall 50% effectively halving Bezos' worth.

Regarding your second question, it is actually a similar scenario to when Gates left Microsoft. Right before Gates left, Microsoft was at one of the highest peak values, $58, almost it's Market cap today if you account for inflation, and a year after Gates left the stock had plummeted to $24 a share. Many would propose that Bezos leaving would actually be more detrimental, as Microsoft at the time was not a growth stock, but a well established money printing machine, while Amazon stock is still banking on future potential.
Universities usually have plenty of student developer jobs, if you know how / when to look.
You must complete the degree in 6 years. You'll have to take at least 10 courses to get the required units. If you take one course at a time and take summers off ~ 5 years. You can also skip a semester if necessary.
what are the things that you can tweak?
See also: Best of the Web '94 Awards. Presented at the First International Conference on the World-Wide Web, Geneva, Switzerland, May 1994.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_International_Conference...

What's cool isn't how fast some of these technologies become obsolete, such as various Java applets and cgi-bin connected webcams. It's the static content that can survive until the end of time.

Like Nicolas Pioch's Web Museum. Bienvenue!

http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/
Popularity is not about facts.

When someone says "nuclear" many unthinking people with votes think "That's bad they could blow me up or polute all the things" and then shut off their brain to rational responses.

Because they have votes the politicians "Here" take action. If "Here" is Pakistan that means fewer plants in this case. If "Here" is the USA it means strained relations with Pakistan and perhaps even some public condemnation and minor sanctions.
This is poorly thought out and edited, because I have to run, but I thought it worth posting. I've been thinking more about libraries lately. I really think it is time to reinvigorate and expand them. Pretty sure I'm preaching to the converted here about the power of information; I think what some folks miss is just how incredibly valuable libraries are. No, they aren't a panacea, but they are a cheap source of immense social good.

A lot of people see a building full of books and wonder why it can't be replaced by a bank of terminals and Google. I won't get in to the relative merits of dead trees vs. electrons, and largely don't care about it. What that line of thought misses is two-fold: the librarians and the community space.

Decent librarians are hugely underrated resources. Great ones can be incredible. Maybe natural language systems will become good enough in my lifetime to handle some of the vague requests librarians routinely manage to match to the right book, but the leaps of association to related topics, the knowledge of the edge cases of information classification to navigate them well, and the general mass of knowledge they accumulate is massively useful to have on hand. And so few people take advantage of it.

Meeting spaces in this context (both formal, sign-up-for-your-group and informal) serve an important role as well. It seems[1] like they're becoming rarer as government buildings use security as an excuse to close to the public, and in calling around to private groups with spaces that previously did that sort of thing have been much more reluctant to do so when I've tried to organize things over the last several years.

To personalize this a bit, I grew up in a poor family. One thing that was heavily emphasized to me was the value of learning - I think it was reaction to missed opportunities. Who knows what would have happened, but I do know that my college essays (written referencing library books, building on interests fostered in the math and the American Lit sections) would have been very different without them, and I kinda doubt I would have gotten a free ride to a top-10 school if I had been only drawing on what public school offered.

I'd love to see more experiments with libraries. I know some are playing with becoming more "maker-space"-ey, which is a decent thing to explore. I think finding a way to offer peer-classes in whatever - learn Javascript, fancy knitting techniques - would be an interesting thing to try as well. But I'm bad at seeing opportunities like this. I wonder what people with that super power could come up with.

[1] Anecdata alert!
Ask HN: Any successes with Gollum message multiplexer from Trivago?
Just started using Gollum NxN message multiplexer from the tech team at Trivago for non-trivial ETL workflows. So far so good.

Looking for any success stories or warnings from others.

Ref: http://tech.trivago.com/2015/06/22/gollum/

What we like: Written in Go (awesome; fits with our stack nicely). Very flexible (define flows in a yaml file). Extensible (write your own plugins). Performant (ref has some stats vs. Logstash, Heka). Documentation (http://gollum.readthedocs.org/en/latest/).

Thanks!
(edit: formatting)
Just curious: would you have not purchased if PayPal wasn't available and you had to use a credit card?
Propagator Networks: Time for a Revolution [pdf]
Yup, the "CheckSpaghettiQuery" is a recipe for disaster.

I have a query here that runs on a raspberry pi running postgresql with 7 GB of data (chat logs in a postgres table, with fulltext indexing) in about 60ms.

After splitting it up far enough that the system doesn’t complain anymore, the query takes around 30 hours (I know because that’s what I started with before I merged the queries).

This is just a dumb idea in general. You can always filter the data faster in the database, and you reduce unnecessary network round-trips.
Mathematical Facts in a Physicalist Ontology (2012) [pdf]
Bezos net worth is almost entirely Amazon stock, which is a growth stock.

Gates net worth is almost entirely cash (tens of billions in cash?) and other investments (there's like a holding/investment company that's actually just Gates).
Amazon stock would plummet if Bezos just upped and left and most of his wealth is tied to the company.
"Yer da sells Avon" is definitely my favourite regional insult.
> they seem to be fobbing me off, telling me that the offer letter is binding...

Reply: Wonderful, then it shouldn't be too much trouble updating the contract accordingly. Surely Mr. Employer, you would want to make sure all the corresponding details are correct with the intended offer.
Ikea's a bit different, in that you collect the items yourself in a warehouse, and it's mostly furniture-centric. Argos is more like a small Amazon in a building; they sell all sorts of stuff.
Have you tried cutting caffeine? I've had similar symptoms and cut coffee two weeks ago after drinking > 5 cups/day for years. Not sure if it's placebo but it looks like my brain fog is gone.
I would much rather billionaire types take on large issues that governments don't want to touch, like space flight or specific diseases in foreign countries, than something already in service like libraries. Maybe I just have a bias due to having a library just up the street from where I live currently, but I have never not had access to an adequate library in my life time, and only see room for marginal diminishing returns in improving them.
I bought a book from 1850, and I could still look up all the references in a university library, or even find most of them on Google Book Search.
Certainly the handsaw needs sharpening sometimes, and the same goes for many other hand tools. And the circular saw is not nearly as bad as some tools. But when I think of lawnmowers and especially chainsaws, I have spent more time repairing, oiling, refueling, cleaning, flushing, prepping for winter storage, and diagnosing them than I have actually using them!

Fortunately sharpening is often pretty easy, and it's quite a useful skill considering how many things can be sharpened. Kitchen knives, lawn mowers, axes, hatches, scissors, pruners, shaving blades, chainsaws, shears...
DoJ requests 1.3M IP addresses of visitors to anti-Trump protest site
Libraries are an excellent place to put some money. They provide learning opportunities, but many also provide resume and job search training, community meeting places, free internet access, and I think is one of the few "neutral" places in American society. Neutral in that there are few, if any politics involved, and it's an equal opportunity benefit to a community that most people can get behind. Even if they don't use the library, few I think would speak against.
Well, there's now Chrome headless which is slowly edging out PhantomJS for such use cases.
How Jason Fried Runs Basecamp Using Basecamp
Does the research and collaboration intensive nature of a doctorate really lend itself to online/distance education?
Mine's at 291,600 as of a 200-mile trip last night.

Runs like a top!

FYI Chevy trucks sell all the time in my area for good (high) prices with 200k+ miles on them. People don't seem to doubt they'll keep running.

I think many modern engine styles can achieve that, but lack of maintenance does a lot of damage, and most people aren't very good at maintenance. (Me included!)
Startup plans world’s largest data center in Norway
His company hosts a large part of the biggest library ever existed: Internet.
I'm currently in the program with a BS in Industrial Engineering. I highlighted the CS side of my job in my application, and had done a lot of learning on my own time between my BS and application. So it's definitely possible if you're interested.
I wonder if they were able to negotiate a better deal on these things because people don't go to the movies as often anymore..?
Hey, thanks for your reply. Would you say that this low bar means that for an actually good contractor, there's a lot of opportunity for word-of-mouth references, repeat business relationships, or high hourly rates?
Still seeing lots of "No results" screens here for queries that definitely should have results, though every so often it works OK.
MIT's new AI can keep streaming video from buffering
Ask HN: Best practice to stay healthy?
What you eat/What you do to keep yourself healthy?
Ask HN: Tools to stop people dying due to mudslides?
These mudslides in Sierra Leone are terrible: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/aug/15/sierra-leone-mudslide-flooding-freetown-national-emergency

I was wondering whether we might be able to help address this problem with technology. At the most basic I would imagine you would need data on angle of slope, soil type, precipitation, and land use. With that you might be able to generate a map of the most at risk areas, and can then target those areas with mitigation measures, whether that's hard engineering where possible, or even something as simple as sending out text messages when dangerous amounts of rain are forecast, kind of like a tsunami warning. Surely we can do better than letting hundreds of people die like this?

I found an interesting reference here: https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1325/pdf/Sections/Section1.pdf

30000 dead in Venezuela in 1999. Terrifying.
Yeah I somewhat understand the phrase "snapshots are not backups". But what really constitutes a "backup" ? Because I argue snapshots are backups. I snapshot a dataset. And use ZFS send/recv to a remote ZFS server of the dataset snapshot. Is that not a backup? I argue it is. If the original dataset is completely trashed I simply send/recv again the remote snapshot of that dataset back to the primary server. Plus you can update with incremental send/recv as well. I simply don't need tapes. I suppose for archival purposes one might want a tape copy somewhere. But even tapes are problematic. They degrade, get chewed up, etc. There are fewer variables with digital data for me personally.
I used it recently while preparing for interviews. I really liked it, especially their challenges which pair a small lesson with a coding problem. If you work your way through the different "tracks" it's a great way to focus on a particular area.

Also, I had the best experience while doing technical screens on HackerRank, every other platform had issues of one sort or another.
Much of the appeal of software and the internet is that they can change quickly. We would also like them to never change.
>"This is perhaps the cheapest Computer Science masters in the United States from a premier school."

Actually, there are funded ones! Princeton and Cornell both have 2 year thesis-based M.S.E CS programs which are fully funded + stipend. I'm starting Princeton's in the fall. These are small programs though, I believe there's 12 of us incoming.
Baltimore Community Leaders React Negatively to Under Armour's $5.5 Bn New City
There is an active and well moderated subreddit for anybody interested in this degree, /r/osuonlinecs. Several current and former students have been talking about the GaTech program so I linked this discussion in our slack channel.

The degree is good in the sense that every alumnus I've talked to has found employment as a full time dev. It also does a good job of quickly washing out those who are trying it on and aren't ready and/or interested.
The part about compiling from source seems dubious and not backed by any data. Modules being dynamically loaded. They should not affect performance when not loaded. As for memory, I also doubt there will be any difference.

When compiling from source, you don't get automatic security updates from your distribution and you may break integration with the other parts of the distribution.
Scott Adams' blog is also great: http://blog.dilbert.com/
> next time just spill the remaining

Get plants! Take the responsibility to water them. You will have another reason to walk around the office!
If you're concerned about military spending, your best course of action is voting against politicians that want to increase defense spending. Lower taxes on the wealthy doesn't keep the government from spending on defense, it just runs up a deficit that is then used as an excuse to cut non-defense spending (research, infrastructure, food for the impoverished, etc.).
Just a curiosity question: why COBOL? Since it's not mainstream anymore, this makes the process of finding a job way more complicated. As a person who has never programmed in it I'm simply curious what makes it worth all the extra trouble?
The problem you'll run in to is that you'll be charged full tuition despite not using nearly the amount of services. I looked at one (I believe in Illinois but I don't recall) that was over $60k for the degree, all online, with minimal access to your professors, and no rights to the physical campus.
Visit a library in a low-income area (where people need them the most) and see the kinds of computers people use to hunt for jobs, do their homework, etc. I've been to a library that was running windows 2000 on TWO ancient Dells with with CRT monitors in 2015. And the two computers they had were being used by adults and students. There is so much to be gained from improving libraries.
Ask HN: Potentially Moving to SF / SV with a Family
Hi folks,

I could use some advice. A few weeks ago, I did the Triplebyte quiz on a whim, later did their interview, and now I'm talking to companies in Silicon Valley / San Francisco about potentially interviewing with them. If you're unfamiliar with Triplebyte, they do their own candidate vetting, with the promise that if you pass their process, you can go directly to a final interview at their client companies (typically early- to mid-stage startups, many YC graduates) who are located almost entirely in California or NYC. (Triplebyte has been great, by the way, and I highly advise trying them out if you're looking for a new position.[1])

I currently live in Ohio with my wife and infant daughter. She has a fairly low income job (non-profit), and if we moved to California, she would be a stay-at-home mom. We own a three bedroom house here. I make roughly $85K as a full stack developer for a startup here for whom I've worked for a few years.

I'm going to be at the point soon where I need to pick the companies with whom I'll interview. The expenses of living in a SF / SV suburb are scaring me. Renting seems in the $3K+ range for a two bedroom (which would be the minimum since we have a daughter... may try for another child later). By comparison, my mortgage is ~$850 / mo.

We're relatively frugal and ideally want to get to a point where we can be financially independent, so savings rate is important. We would also want to find a decent school district for when my daughter starts school. Also, we would be moving away from my wife's family, which would require her to fly up fairly frequently so our daughter could see her grandparents.

Basically I'm trying to figure out if I'm crazy for even considering this, and if there is a way to make it work. Triplebyte has said I'm probably mid- to senior-level and could expect around $130k - $150k.

What are your thoughts?

1. Triplebyte referral link: https://triplebyte.com/iv/afyYdFu/cp ($1500 for both if you get a job through them.)
Well, Bezos already invests in space flight, so there's no much point in suggesting that.

The article also claims that libraries are getting defunded, so you may not have your library up the street for much longer.
Left-brain mode after coding all day is certainly a thing.

I thought it would go away once I got into management, but the truth is I solve those problems with the same analysis, so even though I'm problem solving people, I'm still a horrible conversationalist right as I leave work.
I should have articulated my original post in this manner and not what I wrote. Thanks for the clarification.
So would I, but I believe as he states it would be a monumental task across multiple disciplines and would that effort be worth it for probably a very small audience of nerds? :)
Modern approaches to managing legacy code
Pure advert. No actual tech content
So put another way if every country (~200) planted this many trees it would capture about half a percent of the carbon we release each year.

That really puts into perspective how much carbon is trapped in fossil fuel reserves for me. Put another way a few companies can dig so much carbon out of the ground the that they could outdo 195 countries each planting a billion trees by 200 fold.
Receiving webhooks through k8s sidecar container
> Separating out payroll vs income taxes -- in other words recognizing the different tax rates for "earned" vs. "unearned" income -- is not entirely irrelevant, because dollar for dollar your capital gains taxes will be spent more on defense than welfare, but it's still no where near 50% of your capital gains taxes being spent on defense.

So that's not entirely how income vs payroll taxes work.

If you get a paycheck, out comes taxes for social security and Medicare. There is an annual limit on how much of your income is taxed for social security, whereas there is no limit for Medicare, and there's a bump in the Medicare rate after a very high dollar amount (near $250k/year if I recall). For our argument, none of the above is refundable (if you pay too much social security tax because of multiple W2 employers, the extra tax gets applied to your federal income liability).

For income tax, lots of people pay through their paycheck, although if you're below a certain yearly income threshold, federal income tax is not withheld (you even get a refundable tax credit for working if you're poor enough). Also, as you mentioned, capital gains taxes also are federal income tax revenue. So, income tax is not unearned income alone.
I actually built something like this for myself when I was learning javascript. It's buggy, but for the most part it works. http://okpeet.com/breaktimer/ if anyone wants to take a look.
It looks like digital TV dishes meant for marine purposes would work.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15011636
I regretted using bubblesort as an example because the O(n^2) performance is not relevant to my point. Let's consider a Knuth-Fisher-Yates shuffle instead. Pretty easy to describe by mutating an array, and I don't think it's wrong or pigheaded to implement it that way or that I'm just being too stubborn to see how great it is to implement it in a Haskell way.
Thanks for this, I have been looking for a good introduction to Quantum Computing. I haven't actually read it yet, but this looks promising.
There you go. You donate a billion in stock, and it ends up being a complete tax free transfer from stock into cash. Tax avoidance 101 guys
A lot of people here are saying take breaks and go for walks. I've felt what you described and something that I have just recently started doing that has helped 1000x over is meditation.

Check out the Calm app[1]. Its helped for me because I had no idea where to start. I have no affiliation with them and am sure there are alternatives out there, this just happened to be the first I had tried. I've just started using it the past few weeks and use it at least a couple of times during the work day, and I try and take a walk at least once a day during work as well. Its really helped with everything you listed above.

[1] https://www.calm.com/
Cargo VPN – totally new private and secure vpn proxy
I joined the program in Fall 2016, and I am half way now. So far, i can say that the program is very useful for workers who are looking for a part-time degree, or for people who can't afford the on-campus program. However, the knowledge you gain and experience you get can't be compared to the on-campus program.
we pull data from public archives and run our own algorithm then return the top talked scores to users.