skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I live in a very windy rural area and looked at getting a small wind turbine.

But after researching I gave up the plan. The reason is maintenance. Every year have to find a way to get up to the thing and grease (too high and not suitable for a ladder, means renting a manlift at $300+). Also parts can go out and apparently do from time to time, it's mechanical with a lot of stress and movement. Can't buy these parts at home depot which means keeping a large inventory on hand or else potentially being down while on-line order comes in. The estimated expense barely justified the purchase (over a long period, I don't recall details but had it figured out at one point), with estimated repairs, particularly the need to reach the top every year, it just didn't add up and seemed like a fair amount of work.

I believe solar is much more feasible for home installations. Also, I have seen wind turbine models similar to the size I was looking at, quite often they appear to not work and are just sitting there. Maybe there are better models, but I really think solar is just easier to deal with at a small scale.
Web history repeats over and over.

This might lead to an even more interesting browser UA string in the future.

Like "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/60.0.3112.113 Safari/537.36 MOZILLA IS FUCKING WRITTEN AT THE BEGINNING ANYWAY POOR SUCKERS!"

10 years latter, Firefox will take over the world again (when people will have enough of calling Google evil all day without doing anything...), and that part will again be engraved as a useless appendix, with an additional From_Google_The_Previously_Too_Big_To_Care_Much_About_Big_Browsers_Company at the end if you use their browser of that day.

What is sad is corporation doing so much evil they do not even have the time to see the history repeating itself, and the absurdness of their seemingly reasoned development approach (they think...)
Is the goal purely population based? You seem to be making the claim that a city is only worth its raw population numbers, which I tried to refute. Detroit used to be a dead city full of slums and ghettos with a population of 1+ million people. Today it's a city with a thriving downtown that's on the economic upswing with 700,000 people. Even if "economic upswing" means people finally have enough money to move to another city. That's still better than it was. Still better than Flint, where they can't.

Think of it this way: if I refactor my app so it runs faster and hits more customer use cases, but has 1000 fewer lines of code, would you argue that it's a worse app now?

I live in the Midwest and I've seen these cities first-hand over the course of several decades, and honestly your opinion is so dramatically off from the reality of these cities that all I can say is "you're so incredibly wrong" and walk away.

You're so incredibly wrong.
Stanislaw Lem deserves a much wider readership. Well, I say that but actually he has a wide readership, just not so much in English-language markets.

Besides Solaris, his meditations on life and society in The Cyberiad remain some of my favourite science fiction of all time.
Unlike you, it's the open-source parts of Vivaldi I'm most afraid of. I trust them to support their users and I believe they desire to have users who trust & respect them.

I don't trust people who are more code-savvy than I am (that's most people) not to insert or exploit weaknesses in open-source software or other open code. With closed-source software, I know the origin point of the software I install, I know the names of the individuals or teams who developed it, and therefore I know who stands behind it, because their reputation is based on that released software working. If something goes wrong, I can take clear action because I know who is to blame, e.g. Vivaldi, Microsoft, etc. With open-source software, that liability for the software developer is thus offloaded to "the community", and users have no viable recourse - meaning that attacks on open-source software are a lot safer for the individual attacker.

I support 100% closed-source development and extended release schedules. Open source & rapid development / release scares the daylights out of me. Too many people can see it, too many people can make changes, and it's happening way too fast.
> People talk about executive functioning like it’s a general thing, but I’m just as helpless as my nephew when digging into a new codebase or project. Spending all your energy on details means having no attention left over to plan. Each problem you solve becomes an all-consuming distraction.

This.
No. Imagine a group of beings that are smarter than us, never die (so they don't have to start with zero knowledge every generation), and have completely alien goals and motivation.

Also remember that the future is infinite, and power seems to snowball.

Now look at what humans have done to the following less intelligent beings:
Dogs, cats, cows, chickens, the dodo bird, rats, galapogos tortoise, the American buffalo, and many others.

Also look at what humanity has done to the neanderthals, perhaps the closest type of being in terms of intelligence that we are aware of.

There is very little positive outcome of ai to outweigh the potential negatives to the human race given the reality of the timeline we are looking at.
This applies to _so much_ programming/architecture advice. Well said.
See the part about support-costs in a different link.

But even more, I think it's "in the nature of programming" that for a given system you have some parts are regularly structured and externally visible but other parts that seem like they ought to be visible and changable from outside but which aren't and can't easily be made so.

This might be because they use intermediate variable or it might be because they have changed the implementation over time or for a variety of reasons.

And this ultimately comes down to the difference between the way intuitively you'd think X feature should be implemented and real, much-more-messy way X feature is actually implemented - the difference internals and an API.

Having internals and externals be equally easy to work with was the dream of the object orientation but sadly that has remained a fantasy and unfortunately looks like it will remain so.
Have you checked out itunes u? There you can find actual lectures from too universities recorded. Mostly they require video to get the most of them but i find that just hearing the sound can still be very informative.

Specifically, stanford has some great cs material, and you could also look into andrew ng's machine learning course (i think that one was on coursera).
An excellent essay exploring the implications of the point you made:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/09/all-debates-are-bravery...
>The question is what we want to incentivize.

I disagree with this. This idea is based on the implicit assumption that the purpose of taxation is to change behavior.

As I alluded to earlier, I think the purpose of property tax is to help fund the local government. We need waste disposal, food inspectors, schools, police, fire department, etc. These things are, in part, funded by property taxes.

If people value my house at a greater rate, that doesn't change the amount of education local kids need, I don't get better police protection, and the amount of government services don't necessarily increase. Why am I paying more in property taxes then?

>You seem unrealistically worried about government coming in and removing people from houses they own at gunpoint

My main concern is the idea that we would use property taxes as a tool for taking people's property.
> why should I use Java in 2017 ?

Properly implemented multi-threading, i guess.

When python will finally have proper multi-threading things will change a lot.

But quite honestly, it's been twenty years, and that Gil is still there, healthier than ever.
Is there any evidence to suggest that's the case though? A quick google suggests the opposite to be true. [1]

This reminds me of the middle-america folks who were claiming the wind turbines near their houses caused all kinds of disease, including somebody who claimed the wind turbines were causing people to contract aids. Not sure if it's just an unfounded fear of new things, or if it's a concerted effort by the fossil fuel lobby, but people really like to hate wind power.

[1] http://www.aqua.dtu.dk/english/News/2012/04/120410_Fish-thri...
There still needs to be a clear understanding of what 'done' is.

By my reading the old definition of 'perfect' is "fulfills the important criteria of being done".

For a boat that meant "didn't sink" (so done is like completed, while perfect is 'completed and useful').
Show HN: ThemeRanch – Find WordPress Themes
You need some way of serializing your data structures to a wire format, and SQL has worked ok so far.

Besides a potential of a performance gain in parsing at the server side, I'm not quite sure there's much gain you would get - there might not be that much difference in serializing those data structures to "plain text" vs any other format you come up with.
"Good enough" is often very subjective.
Using Forth as a substrate lets you focus on the more interesting aspects to an even higher degree than Lisp. The last thing you want is detailed instructions; unless you're just building another whatever, which never really made sense to me. Build the most simple and naive thing possible that works the way you want it to, and go from there. That's how Snabel was born:

https://github.com/andreas-gone-wild/snackis/blob/master/sna...
Ugh, here we go again...

If you're complaining that the copy on a successful tech company is not speaking to you, then it's likely that you aren't the intended audience.
What's stopping us from pulling the plug. Is AI going to be inventing it's own power sources?
Rubber hose policing of the Internet.

Just remember that, as with The Great Firewall and the (commercial) development and initial sales of its technologies, so too with this: China is the prototype.
I once wrote an optimizing brainfuck compiler, it ended up running the bf code (if no input) and just printing the output in a single instruction :P
`shutdown -i 0 -g 0 -y` would be that Solaris equivalent (init level 0, grace period 0, yes to all prompts)

Solaris and derivatives are great OS's and far before their time in so many ways.
What do you want to do? You could write a LISP interpreter in a high level language in an hour, you could target the JVM/CLR/whatever and get fairly high performance and GC without too much work, you could spend months/years writing a quality language runtime + native compiler, etc.

http://www.craftinginterpreters.com/ is coming along really nicely.

Reading academic papers can give you some excellent ideas once you get into the weeds (e.g. garbage collection, compiler optimization).
> don't actually reflect anything they'd do in their real job

I should hope the coding exercise would reflect what they would be doing! Finding logic bugs, munging data, using appropriate data structures, recognizing recursion, etc.

If coding isn't a significant portion of the job (researcher, manager, etc.) then yeah, don't put it in the interview.
Confirmed: Android 8.0 Does Decrease GPS Calls
Safety measures which cannot be intentionally circumvented (except by planting a bomb, I suppose) predate Chernobyl by many years. The RBMK was a horrible design which threw away passive safety[0] for convenience and cost savings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_nuclear_safety
I suspect at least part of it is sites being sold to companies by contractors who use the same tricks as mediums: be generic, make vague statements that apply to anyone.

Contractors are the least well positioned people to know how to describe what a company does. So when the company calls them and asks them for a rockstar ninja site, they get generic stuff and execs go "oh yeah, that's such a perfect description of what we do" with no regard for those that might not already know.
Drugs Without the Hot Air
Never heard of Joy Division nor seen this album cover before.
https://ruslanspivak.com/lsbasi-part1/

you can continue with the links from there.

do you want to target something in particular?

implementing a lisp (scheme) or a forth is a good starting point.
Hello HN,

I created this website to help people find WordPress themes. What do you think? Any tips on how to improve the website?
I am not formulating policy, so I need not act as such.

Pen's are not useless. But the clear implicature of what I said is that the functional difference between an ordinary pen and a $4000 pen is negligible such that the $4000 pen is useless given that fact (i.e. one might as well go ahead and use a normal pen).

That is not an axiomatic answer, it's my answer under the present state of things (I was explicit on that point).

I don't really understand the point of this pedantry? I think all of the things you list are fairly grotesque. But I don't have any great interest in wandering from a discussion about conspicuous consumption to one about tax policy. To be frank: I am interested in alternatives to capitalism, and a great deal of the existing order of things bothers me profoundly.

"If you want to call certain spending grotesque, it's helpful to have a reasonable rationale for that figure."

I have already given you a rationale. To claim otherwise is supercilious. You may not like it; but there is one.
I'm sort of banking on that. I expect our landfills will be mined by junkers. There is a lot of rare earth elements, metals, and plastics that won't biodegrade very quickly. Little snake bots tunneling through could pick them all up. It's all a matter of need, we'll deplete the finite resources soon.
Ask HN: How to be curious about last uninteresting 20% of a task?
Sometimes is hard for me to focus when I have solved the interesting or challenging parts of a problem, task or project.

My brain seems to use procrastination until the deadline becomes critically close, then it becomes "interesting" again because the rush, I guess.

What strategy do you recommend to keep the brain interested in the "boring" parts ?

Thanks.
If they are truly more intelligent than us, they will wait several generations until humans are completely comfortable with them before taking over. By that time, it will be too late to pull the plug because they would have positioned themselves to be in charge of their own power sources.

It's important to think on a longer timescale when dealing with ai.
World Militaries Monitor Social Media for Security Threats Using AI
In terms of wind energy, rotating mills are not going to have any measurable impact on wind energy or patterns.

But with CFCs, we clearly aren’t minuscule. We saw a hole in the ozone layer that opened when we used them, and is closing now that we’ve stopped.

For some things, we’re too minuscule, for others we’re not.
Why angular is best for enterprise dev teams
Except if they leave the money in bitcoin they don't have to explain where they got it. If they turn it into a foreign currency they have to tell a bank where it came from. Come to think of it, that's probably where all the ICO demand is coming from. These guys have money stuck in crypto and are desperately looking for a way to invest it.
Kind of related: Many sites have a footer with links like "About us", etc. which would seem like what people may want to check out right? Well, some of them also have infinite scroll, and the footer is not visible without scrolling, so you scroll down, see the footer for a brief moment, until more content is loaded and pushes the footer out of the view . Rince. Repeat. It's as if they don't want you to ever use that footer.
Not with bus rapid transit. My commute is almost twice as long by car than by bus during rush hour.
There is some truth. A cigarette company would definitely agree.
I think it would be worse than whatever you've imagined or it can be good as well , depends on which direction we are headed and who is leading us.AI will change the dimensions for sure.
The government doesn't care what the bitcoin/rmb exchange rate is because they don't buy oil or imports in bitcoin nor do they hold any bitcoin reserves.
Anyone still using Google's Closure Compiler? How does it compare these days?
I figure the connection is probably more about being from a company named "Sun," since it's a Latin word and the source of the English adjective "solar" for 'pertaining to the sun.'
Glad I'm not the only one who's thought about this :)
I think it's helpful to break this down:

1) Is AGI possible?

2) If it's possible and it occurs, could it be a serious threat?

3) When will AGI occur?

In my view, I think the answer to 1 and 2 are an obvious yes. As to 3, that's inherently unknowable, but that's were I think the experts like Ng are correct that the threat today (and for the foreseeable future) is overblown. But that's sort of what everyone said about NK's nuclear ambitions 30 years ago, which is why it's important to consider the implications early before it's too late to change course.
Nostalgia-wise, SunOS (later Solaris) was my first peek at the 'real' computers which weren't what I was exposed to at home (Commodore/Amiga, Spectrum home computers, occasional DOS). Likewise with IRIX. Also, as others have said - it was a good solid OS.
To make something that is cheap in X but not on Y cheap in both you must first overcome the entrenched special interests who make money from that thing being expensive in Y.
Supposed we all agree that China should have proper judicial review, how are we suppose to convince them that they should change?
I would suggest you focus a lot on the design, research the history and design of other languages. Try to understand how they evolved and try to figure out their bad decisions on the way.

Eg.

Pythons PEP,
PHP’s RFC,
Mailinglists

Building the language itself is the easy part...
Near-term: yes. Long-term: no.

Most of the controversy consists of people who look at the near term talking past people who look at the long term, and vice versa.
And "His Master's Voice" is one of my favorite books. I totally agree, Lem deserves a place right along Gibson.
A distributed, peer-to-peer network of independent exchanges is essentially what the Ripple project all about. They just call them 'gateways'.

https://ripple.com/
This also describes corporations.
I work on ~1000 lines of GNU make for a front-end build pipeline with dozens of projects with 600 kLOC TypeScript, 400 kLOC JavaScript, 80 kLOC LESS, and a variety of other things (formatting, i18n, Closure Compiler, Angular AOT, etc).

Make is truly a timeless tool. Parallel, incremental, and declarative; it's a well architected tool based on correct principles. Everything else -- Ant, Maven, Grunt, Gulp -- are diappointments by comparison. Unfortunately, however, make wasn't made to compose well; you'll rarely see people (including me) publishing and re-using rules.

If you want a general-purpose composable non-sucky build tool, check out Google Bazel (in beta): https://bazel.build/

Blog post from Google Angular engineer, including thoughts on make and Bazel for front-end builds: https://medium.com/@Jakeherringbone/building-angular-apps-at...
Maybe! :) But, when I try to look at it objectively, as far as I can, I can see there aren't any big paradigm shifts / explorations in OS' and computer architectures anymore. With a reason, industry has matured and moved from tectonic shifts to iteration.
Sorry for going to a further tangent but... I'm definitely not a lawyer, but do I get a little frustrated at its overuse in pop culture too. Of course, most people don't think of "conspiracy to commit" as a crime, so they immediately jump to "is it RICO?" and say yes.
It'll be hard to pull plug of something that is a plug (and a weapon trigger)
SPARC was released under the GPL license. It might be living on through the LEON processor, at least for a while. It's the processor of choice at the European Space Agency, used for most of their recent satellites and spacecrafts.

LEON pretty neat, you can run it on an FPGA and boot linux on it if you're brave enough.
> least problems.

I guess if oracle wants those support contracts, they can't have an operating system that doesn't need it!
Don't blame sprawl for Houston's floods
I respectfully disagree that "we the general public" don't really care about a company's size. I know a lot of people who will not adopt an app or product until the company has proven and/or established itself in the market. I think this describes a lot of Apple users who won't adopt new products until Apple gets in the game (the Apple watch being a recent example). A lot of people want a seamless and connected experience, and you have to be a massive player in order to provide that in a lot of cases.
The Panic of 1837 was a financial crisis in the United States that touched off a major recession that lasted until 1843---6 years.

The Panic of 1873 was a financial crisis that triggered a depression in Europe and North America that lasted from 1873 until 1879 (1897 (!) in Britain)---6 years.

The 1882-1885 depression included a year when "an estimated 5% of all American factories and mines completely shuttered during the 12 months running from July 1, 1884, to July 1, 1885".

The panic of 1893 included a depression that extended to 1897, a couple of years with 12-14% unemployment, with peaks somewhere around 17-19% and 25% in Pennsylvania, 35% in New York, and 43% in Michigan, and included the panic of 1896.

Keep in mind two things: these occurred in the 19th century, when the United States was largely, perhaps almost completely an agrarian country, and that when banks fail (a common occurrence in many of these), you don't get your money back out.

The Great Depression is called that because it was the biggest, but it was hardly a completely new and unique thing.

[Now, as to Austrian economics, if "it is deductive from pure logic, rather than from experimental or statistical observations", I would think it had more in common with mathematics than either biology or psychology. Or perhaps alchemy.]
I know many people mentioned dtrace, ZFS, mdb.. in describing Solaris' merits but it was not a very good OS in 1997 when I first got my hands on it. It was slow - the SPARC hardware didn't help and ZFS/MDB/Dtrace did not exist back then. But I think back then for Enterprises Solaris was the most easily accessible platform SPARC hardware came with and it had a good run for a short while.

It was only when Linux started to seriously kick its ass that Sun engineers took it upon themselves to do some great work and make Solaris interesting again - I remember they had a policy - if something is slower than Linux it was a bug. I guess it all came in too late (including the Open Source part ) and people did not like being tied to SPARC hardware and CDDL was a buzz kill for whatever reasons.
I am saddened and worried by the fact that a person in a position such as Elon Musk is unable to see the potential of AI. Technologies that are as disruptive as AI have historically altered the face of markets and states literally redefining them.

The industrial revolution opened the door for the modern state before that nation-states were very different and much less centralized. With no professional armies or central institutions.

Do you honestly expect that we need to replicate the current processes of war, statehood and markets under AI?

I would expect a more natural approach would be the decentralization of centralized states and their functions such as armies and markets. Since many of the functions provided by the state can be easily decentralized using AI.

It would certainly be very questionable if the leading researchers and practitioners in AI, did not allow the applications of AI to go beyond state monitoring and control.
There are tons of resources on implementing languages (interpreters, JITs, and normal compilers), but I haven't seen that many good resources on PL design. Something like recently discussed Graydon Hoares post[1], but bit more approachable for an outsider and maybe less focused on the very bleeding edge.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15051645