skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Did you read the article? They're explicitly not* focusing on user growth:*

I also RTFA, and it's hard to understand how someone could think user growth wasn't the focus.

— "…all of its attention has gone into making the app as simple as possible to get started with…" [Hint: They did this to improve virality.]

— "All along, he adds, the company's goal has been 'getting every single smartphone user on our network and getting them to use WhatsApp.'"

Plus, they'd said as much elsewhere as well. From https://www.wired.com/2016/01/whatsapp-is-nearing-a-billion-...:

— "Continued growth, it turns out, was one of the main reasons Koum agreed to the Facebook acquisition. The deal allowed WhatsApp to concentrate on growth without worrying too much about revenue."
> You could easily represent all of the characters in the Unicode set with an encoding that says simply "assign one number, 4 bytes (or 32 bits) long, for each character in the Unicode set."

Actually you can't, at least not in a standard way. There are combinations of code points that don't have a single code point equivalent. Flag emjois are an example, but there are many letterlike versions as well. There are enough unallocated points in the 32-bit space that probably you could manage to make single-point equivalents on your own.
Around the same time that the gold standard was dropped and banks started creating money out of thin air.
Great, now rewind and re-run that history but with the Mike Marrkula, Andres Bectolsheim, and Peter Theil being taxed and 90 percent above 400k. How motivated would they have been to risk their capital knowing that 1)They have much less of it 2)What they do make will be taxed at 90 percent 3)Bonds are a safer bet. Further, in this thought experiment, assume that Perkins and Seqouia are much smaller, less successful firms with less money to invest because most wealthy individuals have made the rational choice that risk capital is not worth it.
Only matters to the Windows platform, though. EDIT: early morning brain fart on my part, js of course too. Grr.
I hoped to strike a chord with people currently using it for the same reasons I did. My post is partially self-deprecating and doesn't attack anyone specific. I'm sure there's people using the platform with no issues, and I think it's fine to criticize something for the behavior its built to induce in people.
I was also born and lived in a socialist country, not sure I get your point. If being "in the herd" means that janitors get vacation, medical leave, and don't have to work from 6am to 2am like the janitor in the article, it's an alright herd I'd say.
This is true in the telephony VRU world. Hard to say how many implement it, but I have been on projects that did.
> I wish I could just buy a decent frame from Zenni and give it to a qualified local optician who can fit a nice lens in it.

Why can't you? I know opticians who will put modern lenses into antique frames, so I have to imagine they can do it for modern frames even more readily.
How I learned Go Programming
I think you are describing a source to source translator, and an awfully fancy one at that. A translator generally would be trying to map or maintain the structural idioms in the source code, allowing for human understanding or maintenance of the translated code. But to improve the coding style by detecting latent idioms seems a bit much even for most translators.

I always considered a transpiler to be closer to a translator than to a compiler, but without the translator's concern for maintaining human-readable code. For me, the boundary between transpiler and compiler is in the runtimes.

A transpiler would be targeting the whole runtime of a target language, i.e. one with non-trivial type systems, flow control/exception handling, and memory management/GC. The transpiler maps source language runtime concepts to target language runtime concepts in a relatively straightforward fashion. A compiler targets some lower-level abstract machine language and provides its own distinct runtime system as well.

A similar boundary exists for interpreters, where a meta-interpreter does relatively high-level source-to-source conversion before delegating to a target language interpreter and its runtime. These meta-interpreters are akin to transpilers, while full blown interpreters are akin to compilers, targeting a lower level abstract machine and providing their own runtime systems.
"Rich people invest all of their money back into the economy" - if it really worked like that we wouldn't be discussing inequality.
The article interviews a few author's reactions at the end of the article which seem to indicate they either don't believe the scientific research, don't get it or don't care:

> Kes Gray, the author of the bestselling rhyming animal series Oi Frog and Friends, was unperturbed by the researchers’ findings. “Authors and illustrators have no need to panic here, as long as we keep all of the animal protagonists in all of their future stories unreservedly cuddly. Big hair, big eyes and pink twitchy noses should pretty much nail it,” he said.

Perhaps there might be a problem with these type of authors influencing large portions of the young population.
I see you have been down voted, yet no one has given an explanation as to why you are wrong. I was thinking the same thing. I would appreciate it if someone could explain to me why this line of thinking is wrong.
"May or may not be true, but definitely damaging" sounds like what these guys were publishing.

Lots of opinions are damaging to someone or someone's agenda if taken seriously by enough people.

Do you really think these other corporate sponsors don't think about what's good for them and their image when they pull funding? You have to compare apples to apples. Google should be compared to other corporate sponsors of projects.
If the people that profit from the means of production live in the same society their spending is going to be taxed as well.

my whole point is you can't tax production and expect companies to stay and pay high taxes, they are going to move to somewhere with less taxes. and if that happen and we are only relying on taxing productions then we end up with nothing! how do you suggest we set it up to prevent companies from moving? and keep in mind we have a fucked up political system and corporations own congress, so your solution can't be a complicated tax regulation because there is going to be tons of loopholes in it!
Yes. The money is likely not to be spent well.
A contract won't stop him from suing you.
Are you trying to claim the United States doesn't have those?

Because it currently has 2 of those (minimum wage and a health insurance mandate) at the federal level.
But she's also not taking computer classes in her spare time, and work is approximately he same number of hours leaving approximately the same amount of spare time ... even if she were taking computer classes it would not be a reasonable comparison, because taking computer classes in the 1980s was a much more rare and advanced thing than taking them today. It'd have to be something more like quantum mechanics classes, or nanobiology classes, or, I don't even know.
So you're looking at up to four times as many chars per code point to take into account, but you still claim it's mostly the same thing. Good luck with the lobbying then, I think we're going to have to agree to disagree on this one.
Tax rates are usually progressive (I think thats the word). So you get taxed the same as everyone else up until a certain point. Only one you are already making "silly money" do you get taxed at 90%
Show HN: Make a mind map from a word document
> You can't self-study your way to becoming a lawyer or a doctor.

That's because the law doesn't allow it.
Because how can I know what to think about their arguments before I politically pigeonhole them?
Show HN: SnapCheap, websockets pictures chat
What? These are cross-platform features, defined in the ECMAScript spec. Nearly all string-processing code written in JavaScript uses them.
Human made societies are very complex systems, that is why good analyses on economics or politics must be specific, or risk saying nothing at all. I linked to a geopolitical analysis on the development of the US, and rather than judge it on its merits, you scramble for counter examples all throughout history, against some perceived ideological thesis. Just read it (or don't), and let it add to you knowledge (or not). Don't expect one strategic analysis to explain... everything.
Show HN: Simple C++ reflection with CMake
Why do tax havens exist then?
So that is indeed a problem, but a different problem from growing too much.

Perhaps letting the land lie fallow every 7 years was an awesome strategy!
One thing that bothers me about DTN is that Mr. Rogers was a believer in using real people and real-life representations of them (puppets) as a way to curb the contemporary use of cartoons to entertain children. I just can't decide whether or not DTN is something he would have approved of.
Bernie Sanders has the 3 houses part of it. Dunno about the boats or cars, but he has the houses. Why don't we ask him why he needs 3 houses?
This is the CADT development model, and has been working (sort of) for at least a decade:

https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
>I got tired of rewriting the same code over and over again, and also wanted to separate my business logic from my HTML layout.

> So I wrote a very simple tag parser that would parse through an HTML file looking for special markup tags and replace those special tags with the result of my business logic code written in C.

(emphasis my own)

I really like PHP, but I find it very interesting that Lerdorf doesn't consider PHP code itself as business logic, but more of a templating language for the web.

A lot of PHP's fundamental strengths and weaknesses make sense in that light.
Weren't they using a 10? I don't remember but it'd at least be surprising not to while they were still at MIT.
To be perfectly honest, I'm kind of 50/50 between a genuine vexation with "could care less" being semantically wrong, and a cheerful agreement that usage defines meaning. The world's inconsistent and so occasionally, in response, am I. :P
My favorite article on the subject. Unfortunately, it's down had to use the Wayback machine to find it.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120719002103/http://betabeat.c...
That's fair enough, but the wording of your statements do seem to broadly imply "if you use Facebook, you are either X, Y or Z negative stereotype" rather than "these people exist on Facebook".
Can you describe an operation (other than "count the number of UTF-16 code units") which is easier to code for UTF-16 than UTF-8?
NO. Each lookup thereafter is NOT by index. That's where the savings come from. The pointers already contain the exact block where to load the info from.
Why ponzi schemes sometime a good idea  Bitcoins and dollars story
I'm curious where you think their money is.
> My experience has been the complete opposite.

Keyword: "can".
Deeper Than Deep: David Reich’s genetics lab unveils our prehistoric past
Yes, I am sure lower quality restaurants are stealing the clientele because they do ads and are remembered.
You should check out bullet journaling. A lot of people use this for task tracking, habit forming, and life event recording, and have gotten a lot of emotional value out of the time and energy spent on these journals and what they contain.

I'm not personally good at maintaining that level of attention consistently, but I did change how I track my life based on my bullet journal research. I have a notebook where I record my meetings for the day at the top, and all my tasks. I usually end up taking notes in the sidebar, and turn them into tasks later in the week, or notes on my computer.

This has worked really well, physically writing my tasks and time restrictions, and has lasted far longer than any to-do app I've used.

Experimenting without guilt is an important component to this - you will probably evolve your process to serve your needs, and what you think you need or want now may not be true later.
Can you elaborate? I didn't say that you should use UTF-8 (that's just what I prefer personally), but my point was that you should never make any assumption about a Unicode string without consulting the corresponding Unicode tables and essentially have to treat strings as "opaque sequence of something" anyways. May as well be a byte sequence.

Regarding your last point, I'm totally with you (if I understood you correctly). Of course applications should support multiple input/output encodings, but as a programmer you have to decide on some internal representation.

That being said, I really don't see how processing UTF-8 is significantly more complex than processing, say, UTF-16. In both cases you need to handle continuation units for the extraction of Unicode code points.
When it comes to money, I would prefer if I could skip negotiating and probably need overall to work on my negotiating skills. I also happily work for less for remote positions so you got me down to a tee on those.
And Stories, what was he thinking?
I read the article, and then I wondered what kind of publication could publish something so pointless. Then I noticed the URL and perused their headlines.
Ha, that's funny. I had almost forgotten about the SunOS-vs-Solaris wars. Everybody wanted to hang onto SunOS as long as possible. Seems ironic that (many) people feel this way about Solaris now.
It happens every time. They can't dispute the facts I illustrated above. They just down vote without any refuting. It's hard to argue the grams of silver in pre 1965 quarters is not 6.25, it's hard to argue the current price of those 6.25 grams of silver, and it is, I suppose, theoretical you can show me bread or milk that costs more then 3.xx dollars. But those are the national averages.

So I just assume it's Wall Street vampires down voting or those who hear the word constitution and down vote because clearly that makes me wrong or insane.
Ask HN: Tips for getting used to working in a bigger company
I recently started working in a software development company as a junior java developer.

It's my first job in such a company and I wanted to ask: Do you have any tips for getting accustomed to working in a company in contrast to small university projects?

Thanks for the help.
it's already happened; trump, al-right, etc.. there used to be all these middle class jobs that kept everyone occupied, now without that we have lots of anger and automatic weapons.
I've encountered this with human agents too, especially when cancelling an account or declining an upsell. The most effective humans are good at making you think you're cancelling the account, before they even get to “connect you with our account cancellation specialist”.
One would hope that we could draw the appropriate logarithmic taxation curve to constrain risky investment without eliminating it outright. I personally do not see a massive problem with curtailing some of the power/amount of money flowing around in some of these entities; but don't see it as an all or nothing as you suggest.

I'd note however that my original point was to emphasize the smallness of most of the initial investments. One does not need to be a billion dollar entity to have enough diversification in high risk investments to make it a worthwhile component of your portfolio.

(I'd also defend America's ingenuity prior to the advent of VC; we were a pioneer in the sciences and technology long before venture capital was a thing. This is an entirely separate discussion about the viability of various forms of tech. growth stimulus that I'm neither qualified nor desirous to have, but I mention it to suggest that if we've found success in other systems before, there may be reason to experiment further when we observe a clearly deleterious trend in the current state.)
I think if I remember correctly one of their main cost was paying a service like twilio (or something like that) to verify phone numbers of users when they registered to use whatsapp. Anybody has an idea if they are still outsourcing that verification part to a third party or doing in-house at Facebook?
> "if you're using C++ as a better C you're doing it wrong"

As far as correctness and safety goes, this is still true. It's difficult to scale systems-level programming to large teams. C++ gives the opportunity for more explicit semantics and more aggressive compile-time checks. C can scale well and can be used safely, but you need to do a lot more through convention (always call xyz_Create and xyz_Destroy in pairs!) and through runtime checks (calls to assert, unit testing).

D, Rust, OCaml, and a few other projects are interesting in this space since they provide some of the same benefits as C++ with respect to correctness and safety. Some are plausibly better in theory, though I'm not aware of huge, say, Rust projects that approach the size of huge C++ ones.
GDPR will change that. Fines of up to 4% of global gross should make them adhere.
Lewis' completion of that line of tweets says it's in the couple hundred kT range, but still a staged TN device.
The whole point was that was not like any other company or individual.
> the pay for "janitorial work" has simply decreased.

Author's point is not about decrease in pay but about the social changes that came about as a result of prioritizing the outsourcing of non-core-competency work to contractors, which increased competition and had the effect of reducing effective pay.

In other words, income inequality has increased as contract work has increased, and the reason why is because a large part of social mobility is due to networking and connections, which are far stronger at companies which prefer in-sourcing compared to companies which prefer out-sourcing, since out-sourcing naturally creates an "us vs. them" dynamic at companies which is difficult to overcome.

The implied conclusion is, if market forces are biased towards out-sourcing, then the government should incentivize in-sourcing as a means of combatting inequality.
Reagan didn't get rid of all of the tax shelters. But the idea that tax havens (i.e. tax shelters) are relatively crummy investments remains.

The reason Apple, etc., invest a lot of their cash overseas is not because those are better investments, but because the US corporate taxes are so much higher those foreign investments become more attractive.

Level the taxes, and the money will be reinvested back in the US.
It says that she has no paid vacation, so thats a chunk less spare time. My guess is that commuting to Apple's offices will be a large chunk as well. I doubt she can afford to stay in the same area as the high paid tech workers.
Forecasting crowd dynamics through coarse-grained data analysis
> Financially, I have nothing to show

Was this because individual projects or endeavors were not successful, or the companies you invested time in were not?

Also, the results of the last 10 years can help determine the approach of the next 10. Until you are too old or sick to move, there is always time for R&R.

(Disclaimer: I'm approaching 50 and always feel behind)
No, it is just that demand for janitors and engineers have shifted.

You need fewer janitors now because modern chemicals allow cleaning same space quicker (and probably tools also changed a bit, while maybe in the U.S. in 1980s, modern ones have already been in place).

You need more engineers. And they impact work more because development and marketing (which also became a branch of engineering, see: growth hackers) is more important now than production.

You can always train enough janitors, not so easy with engineers.

Same thing about nearly all low-skilled workers. They are easy to train and their supply is nearly infinite, demand isn't, and demand for high-skilled is high plus they make so much profit you can actually afford paying them a ton of money, which wasn't possible back in 1980s.

It is that proverbial bifurcation of workforce. Outsourcing has nothing to do with it. It is just technological change. There is no way out of it (at least no way which won't cripple economic growth - which is already not so good).
...which control at least one plant in Canada (though recently it was replaced with an emulation.)

And apparently they solved the 16-bit data problem, but maybe not the 32-bit date problem.

"A current generation DCC system resides at L3 MAPPS' main Montreal, Canada facility and is used to provide support to all participating COG members until 2035."

http://mapps.l3t.com/candu-plant-control-systems.html
I have two versions

* Simple text file. My terminal pops up every hour or so and asks me write whatever I want to. what I type goes into a simple text file that I review at the end of the day. Its pretty effective way to know where my time is going.

* I have a physical journal that I write the tasks I'd like to get done & cross out whatever was done (may be add some notes or leftover things to do). In scrum world, this would be your backlog.

Its being doing great for the past year or so. YMMV
Correct you are. And yet it's depressing how many people do not get that. Or understand money.
Show HN: Instant package name checking, supports NPM and Pypi
My nieces are 2 and 4 so I get to read the books and surprisingly often the books are awfully written with zero educational value. So the authors' sentiments don't really surprise me; if you don't bother with the quality of your craft, why should you bother with the scientific underpinnings of teaching/learning.
OS delegated one pass GC.
It's funny, I looked at the diagram and went "that's not a transistor". Then the actual words from the team involved called it a diode, and talked about it as a junction.

So...it isn't a transistor at all.
I meant something very specific: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/24/the-holiday-is-over-amazon-w...

(The era of Amazon posting things from Jersey to UK and other destinations for similar reasons ended ages ago)

I was also restricting myself to the question of sales taxes; tax evasion/avoidance among the internet tech monoliths is a wider question.
That sounds like Sydney and Melbourne nowadays
Considering they used atom twice, I'm pretty sure they meant molecule.
Here are some advantages animal characters can have:

They provide enough psychological distance to allow dangerous situations or bad things to happen.

They allow stereotypes more easily without creating human prejudice.

So as the article supports, human characters may provide more immediate context, but animal characters probably allow more complex/difficult situations to be explored.
> “Images tell a much better story than text,” he says. “And videos tell a much better story than images.

Seems like the evidence of WhatsApp itself, not to mention my own experience, is directly contradictory to this.

A video is rarely preferable to an image, and an image is rarely preferable to a bit of text.
See also Open Adventure:

https://gitlab.com/esr/open-adventure

“This code is a forward-port of the Crowther/Woods Adventure 2.5 from
1995, last version in the main line of Colossal Cave Adventure
development written by the original authors. The authors have given
permission and encouragement for this release, it obsolesces all
the 350-point versions and previous 2.x (430-point) ports.”
I always wonder if programmers have a different experience on Facebook than other folks. I deactivated my account this year and a lot of it was because I could identify the patterns of content that I was being fed by the algorithms and didn't care for it. On top of that after I had the same political conversation with the same person for about the 5th time I just decided it wasn't worth the time anymore.

Do nonprogrammers not pick up on those patterns?