skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Strong social safety nets of the Scandinavian variety do reduce post-transfer poverty (less so inequality)

Granted Scandinavian countries, now more just Norway and Denmark, tend to have very low potential for poverty in general. The rate would likely be comparatively low even without the programmes. Norway and Denmark have both considerably reduced entitlements over the years to relieve the enormous stress they put on the economy.

Well before any of these programmes became so comprehensive, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden were very productive and comparatively equal.
how many days on/off for the carb cycle?
I can recall a list of things Oracle killed/lost since it bought Sun, but is there anything left of it at this point?
Machine Learning: An Applied  Econometric Approach [pdf]
"straw man" - an intentionally misrepresented proposition that is set up because it is easier to defeat than an opponent's real argument
I call FUD. Oracle acquired Sun in 2010 - that's seven years, and it wasn't until this past January and August that major project changes were made and large number of staff laid off. "Get out now" seems unnecessarily alarming. Also, this may vary from org to org, but our (sparc/solaris dev) laptop replacement was every three years.

I'll admit that the way they've handled the recent layoffs is atrocious, with most employees finding out via FedEx notification and a pre-recorded concall message. Rumors of this major cut have been circulating for months. I've lost many good friends with 10,20,30+ years in Sun/Oracle. But I think Oracle gave hardware a fair shake.

Full disclosure: I worked in a Solaris dev/sustaining group until this past week.
Dutch companies actually grow a lot of tomatoes inside the UK, in greenhouse conditions.
I'm still on the fence about the fact that having a facebook account is a bad thing.

I have seen it consuming a lot of my time in the past, and I did deactivate my account for a few months last year. I improved my life a lot, there were fewer distractions, and I generally had better self esteem. Not much was missing, except for a few conveniences I had with the account.

I have since reactivated my Facebook account, using it sparingly now. Instead, I uninstalled all IM apps from my phone, and turned off Email/slack/work notifications. I do not have the Facebook app, or the website in my bookmarks. I receive no alerts, no messages anywhere. Every week or so, I take 5-10 minutes to scroll down the News Feed (btw, doing this has the effect that I usually see much higher quality posts which Facebook thinks I've missed rather than a whole stream of memes and ads). I may or may not read the messages, and don't reply a lot. I have my email and phone number listed on my profile, so if anyone needs to really contact me, they almost always find ways to do so.

This gives me the option to use the perks at my will without being addicted and consumed by it. Visiting a city? Use the graph search to connect with friends you can visit. I can look up old photos at will if referencing anything. All this, given the fact that it's one of the only ways to connect with most of my non-tech (who rarely check their emails) friends in an asynchronous manner.

PS: This is not a comment praising Facebook. I definitely like having my privacy in my hand, out of NSA's reach. I'm just giving a reason as to why so many people might not be keen to delete their Facebook profile.
I'm actually a casual Polish consumer. While we get similar amount of sun as the Dutch do, our produce is much better in the summer than theirs.

Poland has lower yields, we have much more land than they do (lower pressure for efficiency), being a bit backwards to the Western Europe actually results in better food.

In early Spring and late Autumn, I'd always pick imported French or Spanish produce over Dutch.
When I look at the average rate of inflation from 1900 10 1970, it is 2.26% per year: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1000+1900+dollars+in+19...

And when I look at the average rate of inflation from 1970 to 2017, it is 4.01% per year: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1000+1970+dollars+in+20...

Both of them are exponential growths, but with quite different rates.
I've been buying what they call "Plum Tomatoes" and they are much better than anything else I can get here in Sweden. Technically I think they are Grape Tomatoes, as they are quite small.
The aside about Rust is a total straw man. Obviously no one with even a modicum of knowledge of programming languages would think Rust is the only memory safe language. Googling the supposed quote also turns up no results but this post.
No, but should we give it the Nobel Prize for it?
> doesn't mean it should become mainstream usage

Perhaps, but what I'm arguing is something slightly different: that the idea "literally used to only mean literally but recently it started being used to mean figuratively" is a myth.
This doesn't seem insurmountable. Three steps:

1. Introduce new methods which allow access to code points without indexing by UCS-2 code unit. An iterator over code points is the key thing. You could also have some opaque kind of index, with a method to get a list of indices for every code point in the string, and then a method to look up a code point by opaque index. The former could be expensive, as it would involve scanning the string to find where each character starts (although perhaps that could be done lazily?), but the latter should be cheap. The results of the expensive method could be cached.

2. Wait N years for the new methods to be widely adopted.

3. Shift the internal representation of strings to UTF-8. Anyone using the new methods will see similar, or better, performance. Anyone using the old methods will see a drop in performance. Implementations could even dynamically choose between representations based on usage patterns. The fact that each web page is its own little JS universe should make that fairly practical.
Turkey, perhaps, seeing how they are the biggest producer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apricot#/media/File:2012aprico...
I wonder if this is really a step down from the templatized and scripted answers that real humans have been providing over email or chat for a long time. Customer service has, in general, been terrible across many companies and business domains. If companies are prioritizing cost over service quality, as they have been doing all along (except for a few), such articles alone won't help.
Or maybe start with
Michael Woodiwiss: "Gangster Capitalism: The United States and the Globalization of Organized Crime" for a depressing look at the bleak history of corporate criminal behaviour...

https://www.amazon.com/Gangster-Capitalism-United-Globalizat...
Indeed!

I didn't know Plan 9 was behind UTF-8. :)

We've come a long, long way since the 90s and even the 00s.
It's shocking and gratifying how well emojis work online. A great motivator for Unicode support, too. :)
Unfortunately it seems that the majority of C++ code out there is like that. It could be said that C++ makes it far easier than C to introduce unnecessary abstraction and indirection, without realising the true costs.

I've noticed that using a lower-level language, where abstractions have to be built explicitly, tends to cause one to rethink the problem and often come up with an even simpler and more efficient solution, by approaching it from another direction which using a higher-level language may not even allow.

An example of this I encountered several years ago was with several coworkers who were trying with utmost effort to optimise a piece of code which the profiler had indicated was taking a substantial amount of time --- and a lot of it consisted of memory allocation and copying. They tried lots of "classic" tricks like unrolling, inlining, even reorganising the layout of several classes in an attempt to be more cache-friendly. I looked at the algorithm and realised rather quickly that the code in question was not necessary at all; some trivial modifications to code elsewhere which was using it and deleting that code completely resulted in 30x faster performance and 1/10 memory usage. Due to their background, my coworkers were stuck in the mindset that it was necessary to perform all that convoluted processing, and neglected to see the bigger picture.
Yeah, when I see that so often it makes me think I am loosing my mind.

Wait, maybe that's a good thing: "loose" (v): to free from restraint, to make less rigid, tight, or strict. (M-W)

Here's an odd one for you. Many of my younger friends say "on accident" instead of "by accident", e.g. "He didn't mean to do that. It was on accident."

It bugs me to no end; it just seems wrong.

But it's surprisingly logical: after all, we say "on purpose", so why not "on accident" for the opposite?

I don't think I will start saying or writing it that way, though!
Can't say I'm surprised at the downvotes here from the free-marketeers of HN but you can't deny that there were massive public spending cuts under Reagan, along with subsidies for private interests, which is basically what the negative value of tau represents.
until your script needs to launch/spawn another app/script/command/program.
Hi Colin. This isn't an optimisation though, it's a guarantee. Member function calls are resolved statically at compile-time. Replacing indirect calls off a function pointer with direct calls (devirtualization) is an optimisation that applies to both languages equally and requires whole-program / link-time optimization.
So now I should zero out my unused space to prevent indefinite jail time? Seems like a flawed system.
These 150.000 birds are getting much better care from this single farmer than when they were spread over 10.000 households like they were 100 years ago.
I think it does none of it in a way that's easy to use.
Sprint vs. T-Mobile International Data
Calling modern farmers most competent , intelligent, sustainable is an interesting point of view. Agreed it's very hard to blame the farmers because few would survive not scaling out in the current system. Farming tech is far from sustainable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topsoil#Erosion

And vertical farming, hydroponics is cool tech and RGB LED's are cool to increase size, weight etc for increased profits. None of that has a positive influence on sustainability.

There a new phenomenon btw called Herenboeren, http://www.herenboeren.nl/, basically crowdfunding, for farmers. This is getting quite some attention. This at least gives me the impression that there's a bigger part of our country starting to see otherwise.
Nit: That 52.9% number isn’t quite right because you get to deduct your CA income tax against your federal income tax. So in practice even if you made a billion dollars in California, you’d pay $133M to the state then get federally taxed 39.6% on the remaining $867M, giving you an effective tax rate of about 47%.
Indeed. I realize the guy I answered to was probably just trolling, but it was very effective. To suggest that Rasmus should get academic praise for PHP is highly insulting.
> In fairness, I'm selective with the candidates I decide to interview, from usually large pools.

I agree with your thoughts on interviewing, but the "real-time coding" session in my mind isn't part of the interview, it's part of the pre-interview screening process that you gloss over here.

Asking programmers to code tough problems on the phone or whiteboard is a good test of certain personality traits, but not a good test of programming skills. On the other hand, there are problems so simple that a decent programmer should consider them to be typing rather than coding, and I think they make perfectly decent initial screening tasks. FizzBuzz is the obvious example here, but I think it's too popular to be useful. I periodically hear from devs who say they get so nervous in interview situations that they can't program at all, but no type of screening is going to be perfect.

And I much prefer this kind of objective screening process to more subjective ones, which tend tend to devolve into "let's choose people with backgrounds similar to mine".
Say goodbye to Juicero, the maker of the $400 juicer
Just like that Van Gogh dude who just started seriously drawing at 25.

Way behind he was.

And don't get me started on that slouch Cezanne . What with becoming a master in his 60s and all that.
Good point, updated. It would be further impacted by AMT and the standard deduction thresh-hold, but that's a good estimate I think.
The problem with counting leaks is it counts memory you need until the very end of your program. There is no point calling free as you are exiting anyway, and I have seen programs where freeing everything took .5 seconds as the program was closing.
At this rate Oracle is going to be the next Yahoo.
My experience has been the opposite of yours. Freeing is always a good idea so you can use tools like valgrind to find memory bugs without needing to sort through all the false positives. Your short-lived program today can become a service tomorrow. c++is worth it just for RAII
I think we can agree "when you give poor people money to spend, they don't end up spending more money" is an extraordinary claim. And so should need an extraordinary amount of evidence to back it up. Can you point me in the right direction to some more information about how this could possibly be true?
And for 1970 to 1980 it's 7.82% per year: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1000+1970+dollars+in+19...

As I said, there was a surge around 1970, so yes, if you take a period that includes that surge, it will probably have a higher rate than one that does not.
I think it's called self-deprecating humour. I don't know too much about this guy, but these quotes endear him to somebody like me who is learning as much JavaScript as I need to do the things I want to do, but didn't necessarily come from a CS background. He seems like he's questioning what is pragmatic by using a bit of hyperbole.
If I was innocent, and legitimately forgot my password, and faced an indefinite time locked away, I would probably actually consider that as an option. Now that act itself could be an act of contempt, but then again you could always use the excuse that someone else did it to you. Or you could pick a sufficiently damaging fight with another inmate or guard.
Maybe he is referring to the fact that the Soviet bloc also gave you a job and a flat to live in.
Russia's position is "Nk is sonovabitch, but it trolls US, let's support it"
Container-diff: diff your Docker containers
There's significant daylight between

- someone should receive an award

- someone has had a large impact

- someone should go to prison

Countering the first with the third isn't very constructive, particularly as you note "I realize the guy I answered to was probably just trolling." It just further degrades the conversation.
No. Oracle is mainly B2B, and executives love Oracle solutions.
Agreed. Oracle does kill products and end teams, but no more so than other large acquireres. Hell, it is NOTHING compared to Yahoo! or HP. HP is the absolute kings of ruining products and teams long term, while Yahoo! has killed more acquired products than any other company I can think of. Oracle has good benefits, takes pretty good care of their employees, but they'er old school so people don't get to work at home and have to drive to Redwood City every day. Not the worst, but not the best either.
> There are enough unallocated points in the 32-bit space that probably you could manage to make single-point equivalents on your own.

Unicode doesn't prevent you from drowning letters in many combining marks (e.g. an accent, an umlaut, and an overhead tilde), or doing this with letters where they make no sense and for which no font will have useful positioning information (e.g. over a copyright sign). There's over 1700 combining marks in Unicode, which gives you way over 2^32 ways to use the combining marks with the letter a, let alone the rest of the letters in Unicode.
"'Mono' means 'one', and 'rail' means 'rail'", and to paraphrase Zaphod Beeblebrox, "Count the rails kid." ;)
> Member functions are _not_ function pointers that reside inside the struct.

...as long as they're not virtual functions, this is correct. Add a virtual table and this is less correct (but the optimizer may still make it correct if it can prove the types match).
> I find it hard to believe someone loving live animals would put them in such a place.

I read the parent post as a statement on production and media representation. I didn't see any claim about farmers loving animals. I'm sure many do, but your argument is addressing something different.

I love animals. I eat meat. I want humane treatment of animals when they are bred for consumption. I know this is frequently not the case. But this is a different cause than what parent post addresses (aside from the 'decades old' bit about photos, which I am not qualified to address as someone outside the Netherlands).
Companies that manufacture and sell industrial equipment shy away from any third-party modifications or additions to their units.

First off, it will invalidate the warranty and cause many headaches for service personnel. Customers depend on that warranty and service network and many times it's part of the purchase contract.

Secondly, a lot of equipment is validated and approved by the customer before installation. For example, any piece of kitchen equipment that goes into a McDonald's has been validated and tested in their corporate kitchens before it's even allowed to approach an actual store. Modifications and retrofits are, again, not allowed without their permission. So unless you have a business relationship with McDonald's beforehand, you won't get the time of day from them.

Thirdly, there's no profit motive in it for the manufacturer. I've worked on systems where IoT subsystems can help with predictive maintenance (thereby minimizing emergency service calls and expensive downtime), but the cost of that system typically isn't passed on to the final customer price.
> COND is basically unreadable in any Lisp, you'd very rarely see people use it today. In CL you'd have more readable options like IF, WHEN and UNLESS.

I wouldn't say "very rarely"; COND is still used for multi-way conditionals. Virtually everyone I know would write:

(cond ((minusp x) 'negative)
((plusp x) 'positive)
(t 'zero))

Rather than:

(if (minusp x)
'negative
(if (plusp x)
'positive
'zero))

IF, WHEN, and UNLESS are generally preferred where they fit nowadays, but I wouldn't call writing them with COND "basically unreadable", either, ie:

(cond (pred then)
(t else))
(cond (pred then))
(cond ((not pred) then))

Compared to:

(if pred then else)
(when pred then)
(unless pred then)
Quality has a price. If you buy the cheapest tomatoes you get the lowest grade, if you're prepared to spend more you get better quality and more taste.

The Germans are extremely interesting in this respect deriding the lowest quality Dutch vegetables with all kinds of name-calling ('waterbombs') but at the same time they keep buying them because they are cheap.

If you want quality you will simply have to be prepared to pay for it, this goes for many more things than just vegetables.
I can't tell about your cuisine or what you produce, but what is in your supermarkets is very disappointing.
Mediterranean vegetables that taste good are unfortunately luxury products in the UK. You can get good tomatoes, you just have to pay 2-3x as much. It's because the mediterranean diet is a middle class thing, so supermarkets segment the market, because people will pay. Whereas in France, Italy, Spain etc that food culture goes across all classes.
True story: the Cambridge Maths Society, The Archimedeans, had a journal called Eureka (of course). It happily published interesting but not important bits of mathematics. One student wrote a proof of an impossible sequence for any width board. It's even impossible if you have perfect knowledge of the sequence. All you need is to drop Ss and Zs in an irrational order.

I think this got published in 1990, but I can find little evidence even if the journal's existence online.
Whoops. Bad example, I guess.
I never buy any vegetables from the Netherlands, just flowers. They're looking good but completely lack taste. They're also grown by heavily relying on fertilizers. I prefer to buy my veggies from Southern Europe when not available locally.
I had similar thoughts while reading the piece. Especially the statement that he "is still the best programmer at his company". One wonders if that is something he said about himself or if it is something the other coders said. Without further context, it feels pretty strange.
My friend lives in Barcelona. I live in Belgium. Tomatoes are just _AMAZING_ there in comparison.

Actually, most vegetables seem to be a lot better in Spain. And I tend to go for the best quality organic veggies I can actually buy in Belgium.
> > At 33, he released MySQL, the most popular open-source database in the world ...

Ugh. Flat out bullshit. SQLite (and others) would like to have a word...
NL is not a country it is a machine that exists by the grace of the countless engineers and construction workers that keep on adding to our water management systems. But we're not just facing danger from the sea side, the rivers are quite capable of flooding the country as well.
> ever going to be an encoding that replaces UTF-8? Or have we hit on some sort of permanent local maxima

Our programming languages, type systems and compilers, are still extremely poor at specifying the properties of types, and at permitting variant implementations which preserve them. We're still struggling with basics, like memory layout for locality (eg, arrays of structures of arrays). And many languages still can't manage multiple dispatch.

As we slowly become less crippled, it eventually becomes straightforward to use alternate representations and encodings. For instance, UTF strings with inline descriptive bitmasks is already a thing, as is substring-local encoding.

So it seems we needn't be trapped in a local maxima, at least long-term. And that perhaps the future will eventually be more heterogeneous. Perhaps like integers and floats, there's both diversity collapse (big endian dies, ieee 754), and heterogeneity (integer packing, SIMD).
Read about the Korean War and how his grandfather managed to get China and Russia to help. This situation also reminds me of the Cuban Missile Crisis under Kennedy - perhaps the only short term viable option if you want a real embargo.
Thanks for describing the post contents as "wildly inaccurate." I guess the problem with explaining anything is you have to decide which abstractions are good enough for the concept you are trying to get across
Can you explain why the "never" was even "wrong"? That seems totally fine to me, and I don't understand why you would think otherwise.
Valgrind does not force the user to read mem leak reports along errors. Actually IIRC, by default you don't get detailed leak reports.