skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a fairly large power difference between my eyes; my right eye is nearly perfect (maybe -0.5 or so) but my left eye is -2.75. This has been the case since 7th grade or so.

At the time, I was prescribed glasses and advised to wear them all the time. But, of course, since I didn't need them in order to function (because I had a good right eye), I didn't. Moreover, I grew up programming and spent much of my adolescence in front of a screen with uncorrected vision. I was warned that there might be problems due to this later, and ignored them, since everything seemed fine. What's more, my glasses' focal point was unquestionably long-distance and simply added fatigue to computer use that was not present without them.

I first started experiencing occasional bizarre headaches in 2010, one of which landed me in the ER because it was so bad. At the time it was treated as an atypical migraine. But things really came to a crisis point in spring and summer 2012. I started getting brief episodes of vertigo after more than ten minutes at a screen. The problem was particularly bad when going from near to far focus or vice versa; I'd get this "need for speed" effect where it felt like the world was topsy-turvy, rushing past me. It was very disturbing for a person who is deeply uncomfortable with not feeling in control. Anyway, I couldn't work, and spent the entire summer doing the one thing that seemed tolerable -- watching TV shows and movies at close range. I did a little bit of travelling and had an absolutely miserable time, compounded by the dryness of the places I visited. The economic and quality of life impact could not be overstated. I was miserable, anxious, and unproductive. I was lucky to be self-employed and somewhat flexible in how I went about working, but getting through even ten minutes of e-mail was a struggle some days.

Lots of misdiagnoses and rabbit holes along the way; migraines (of which I had no history), sinus problems, allergies, etc. I took nasal steroids, did this, did that.

An optometrist prescribed me near-distance computer glasses alongside my long-distance ones, and this did not immediately solve the problem. I struggled with such symptoms for another year or so before the problem was anything like resolved. Even so, I depend on having two pairs of glasses and switching among them scrupulously depending on what I am doing. I can get by with long-distance glasses for a little while when doing computer work, but it's ultimately too straining. The most dangerous of all is no glasses: my problems come back quite quickly if I do that.

That's what happens when you ignore computer vision issues.

Edit: I've also found that I do better with a single large monitor than two medium to large ones.
NuclearReactor.JS!

On a more (maybe?) serious note, I remember when JavaScript first came out. Well, sort of... It was mid-1990s and I think Netscape was the first to implement it.

It didn't take long before it was first used for abuse, such as spawning new windows until the target computer froze. It was just a short while before it was making cursers with tracers that followed your mouse movements.

Somewhere around this time, there were the first exploits that took advantage of JavaScript. Soon, the exploits were to JavaScript itself. At the same time, there were quite a few games being done in JavaScript.

I want to guess that it was just a few short years before the general consensus in the newsgroups was that it was a horrible, bloated, insecure bit of needless cruft that had no business being on the Internet. Many people agreed that JavaScript needed to die a slow and cruel death, and it was still so young...

Anyhow, it has cycled through these periods of love and hate, sometimes even being love-hate, but it has still kept going. People have been actively warring against JavaScript almost since day one. Well, at least since day 1,000.

Since then, it has gotten sandboxing and that helped a lot. It has been used for some truly wonderful things. It has enabled all sorts of innovation and creativity.

Don't get me wrong, I still recommend people surf with JavaScript disabled by default, but I can't really argue about the functionality and the results. JavaScript has, despite the campaigns against it, survived.

There have been untold exploits, countless press articles where it was either the problem or facilitated the problem, and is often used as an example of incompetent programmers gone amok. Yet, JavaScript persists.

I never thought it would last this long, actually. If I'd been asked to predict the demise of JavaScript, I probably would have said the year 2000. I'd have been wrong.

It is a language that seems to invoke strong emotions in the developers/tech world. You either love it or you hate it. The only other language I can think of that evokes quite so strong emotions is PHP.

It really is amazing. It really is impressive to see what people have done with the language. It was Eich, right? I wonder if he knew wht JS would become?

Also, it has been over twenty years. Why is it that people still regularly confuse Java with JavaScript? I see that mistake with remarkable frequency, though I didn't see it in this thread. How did JavaScript survive this long, if people still don't even know what it is?

Either way, I begrudgingly admit that there's a place in the world for JavaScript. I will even go so far as to say that it's a good language for some things. Well, it is now that they have kind of got the security aspects of it dialed in.

So, maybe hit is the future of programming? The future where we let any old website execute programs on our personal compute devices without any vetting, of course.

If I drank, I'd toast to NASDAQ.js.
An educated guess is something entirely different than throwing out the first thing that comes to mind in a complex situation. Evidence, not guesses is where it is at.
We've run several workshops for kids with our online Python IDE + GUI builder for web apps (https://anvil.works). So far, it's been great every time.

We avoid boilerplate, so they can get text and images on the screen with their first line of code. And because what they build is a real web app, they can just send the link to their friends/parents to show them what they built.

I think that's the magic recipe for kids - short time to first result, and make sure they can show others once they've done it. (Conveniently, this also works on adults...)

I'm happy to share our workshop teaching materials if you're interested - just drop me an email.
Where human intelligence outperforms AI
Only because we live in a weird generational "reset" society, for lack of a better term. Instead of parents passing off their house/savings to their progeny, it's expected that each person must start off from zero when they come of age. We should be promoting solid wealth creation and stability, and the passing of it to future children.
Good reason to carry a fixed-blade knife (legal blade length and style of course).
Is that really true? I was under the impression when people talk about the cost of healthcare they aren't talking about the cost of insurance. Unless you're saying the taxation somehow subsidizes healthcare in addition to providing insurance?

For example, medication is more expensive in the US right?
Because the jobs may suck, and while earning $10k is much better than $0, earning $50k is not that much better than $40k.
Your courts on the other hand prohibited people from publishing a number. A number.
It’s also used to offload bits. Real computers don’t have infinite tape.
>Acting intelligent doesn't make it so just as a thespian doesn't become a real Hamlet by playing the role.

I think the idea is that a machine that can emulate a human is necessarily intelligent because it can emulate intelligence. It's supposed to be similar to the way that you can know that a machine is Turing-equivalent because it can emulate a machine which is Turing-equivalent
I’m not sure how it squares with physics. I’d recommend finding that reference.
This comes up every time that the term data science is mentioned on Hacker News, and it's frustrating that so many of the replies to you are the same ha-ha-only-serious responses that always pop up. The term is over 50 years old, and refers -- straightforwardly enough -- to the science of studying how to learn from data.[1]

To all the jokes of "data science is just statistics done by engineers" and other such things, read Breiman's "Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures." [2] It talks about how the field of statistics largely ignored "algorithmic modeling" techniques, and therefore historically those techniques have been developed outside of academic statistics, either in computer science departments or in industry.

If you look at all the big name people who are pushing forward on deep learning and machine learning -- Yann LeCunn, Andrew Ng, Geoffry Hinton -- at Facebook, Google and other places, they don't have statistics degrees, they have computer science degrees. There's a whole wave of techniques and schools of thought that developed outside of statistics. To come back now and say "data science is statistics done by engineers" as some slight against engineers is malicious, parochial and wrong, and it annoys me greatly that it comes up so often on Hacker News.

1) http://courses.csail.mit.edu/18.337/2015/docs/50YearsDataSci...

2) https://projecteuclid.org/download/pdf_1/euclid.ss/100921372...
If we have too many laws then the problem is the laws. If cops were arresting white drug users at the rate they arrest minorities, drugs would have been legal years ago.
Replace all the signs once the rebound begins, and you’ll re-befuddle everyone. Take the signs back down once that rebound hits, and repeat.
edit: Disregard this comment due to @xefer comment below.

I meant: the director of a good war documentary would be called a traitor if he/she went deeper into topics like: LBJ's lies about Gulf of Tonkin, lies exposed by the Ellsberg Pentagon Papers, kept mentioning the killing of millions of Veitnanese , Cambodia, Lao, Nixon's prevention of a LBJ peace deal to help his own election, his talk of using nuclear bombs, etc.

I never said anything about calling the audience traitors. I think you mis-understood what I was saying. From your POV, it seems hard that Burns could leave out important stuff in 18 hours.

This page has links that answer what was left out better than I can: https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/pbs-lies-vietnam/

(but view it with an adblocker)
A ticket quota is the same principle, and those are apparently the norm.
I've noticed Rust encroaching into this space lately. "They should rewrite it in Rust!" Many of those posts seem to be sincere. Hell, there are whole articles that are very sincere.

A recent(ish) favorite was one suggesting that all C should be rewritten in Rust. Granted, they suggested doing it when you did patches and doing it piece by piece, as opposed to all at once, but they were quite serious about it.

They appeared to even be serious about doing it in pieces over a period of many years. I'm not actually sure which one is worse.
Streets of Amsterdam c. 1890-1910
More like it's time to quit firefox for waterfox which has the added benefits of removing most of the unnecessary crap (signed extension, pocket, telemetry, EME, profiling, sponsored tiles, data collection) and will not drop support for legacy extensions.

https://www.waterfoxproject.org/blog/waterfox-55.0-release-d...
Back you claims with data, and don't be elitist and call Turkish institutions crap.
https://www.stlmag.com/longform/pam-hupp/
Here’s a recent example.
The A380 is high enough that the ladders (technically airstairs) available probably couldn't even reach the doors.

http://www.tips.si/pdf/Door-Sill-Heights-Passenger-Stairs-24...

Interestingly enough, an A330/340 can be even higher, but only slightly (~30cm).
Employers "bully" their employees all the time to lower their salaries and work conditions under threat of unemployment. It's only fair that employees would union to balance things a little bit in the other direction.
Wow, reading through all of that (and how you put it in perspective) felt like I'm waking up from Hibernation (pun intended). Solid advices, thanks a lot!
One interesting point is the relative prevalence of different programming languages in data science vs. data engineering. Python and R are obviously dominant in data science, while Java and JVM languages are more widespread in data engineering, and that divide means that the algorithms don't always plug in well to the big data stack.
I agree, I was hoping to read about some really strange beehaviour.
> assume that the code actually worked and does something reasonable

That's almost never the case if you're in a situation where you're reading code
>I can use bricks to build a boat, if you think I can't then you don't understand floating.

Is this supposed to be sarcastic? Because it's absolutely true...
ASK HN: TechStars startup weekend right now
Can I get a little help with a market validation survey?? I will happily repay the favor anytime!
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf8URhWCUk1t1D_EQifo4VErxHGXdoixTkpd45G-kQbfA0ocw/viewform
Yes, but it doesn't seem to support all Firefox extensions and they've said they will not support WebExtensions (which is a dealbreaker from the other side since some extensions i use are WebExtensions and some new ones will only appear as WebExtensions).
Which will be greatly countered by the fact that if you make $10K more than anyone else you are going to be one of the richest people you know. That $10K extra can buy you a lot of things.

Again, judging UBI based on how things look like today is exactly where the discussion goes wrong.

UBI makes sense if you accept the idea that there are almost no jobs left for humans.

It doesn't make sense in a world where there is plenty of jobs.

In other words, it's NOT a mechanism for getting people to work it's a way to ensure that all those people who have no work still have some way to buy things and keep some economy going.
Everything that we think of as new technology is founded through ground breaking innovation. As citizens, our networks have been subsidized (through tax) for public access. If you're viewing this that innovation has affected you.

Having control handed away from the populous that paid for the infrastructure is wrong. Net neutrality maintains continued public innovation.
Yeah I agree with you that fear of the unknown shouldn’t be a reason to not try something new.

Although for many of us (myself included from time to time), it ends up being the strongest reason to resist change, especially when you happen to already be in relatively fortunate/satisfactory position.

Lol I guess that hackneyed FDR quote about “fearing fear” was a lot more poignant than I initially thought haha.
It is sad and says a lot that in our society journalists, who are responsible for delivering information to the masses, fall in he first category not the latter.
To start successful startup stop searching ideas and start looking for problems
How long does it take for the payment to go through ? What's the fee ?

For a donation transfer speed doesn't matter, but for actual purchase it's a lot more than 30 s last I've tried
That depends on where the US will be heading.

If there are plenty of jobs out there you are right it's a non-starter.

But UBI is based on the idea that there are not going to be any jobs. If you have any ohter alternatives to UBI I would love to hear them.
Vladimir Voevodsky has died
Single vision lenses are always going to be better at that one thing than anything else which tries to cater for all (or multiple) distances, at the expense of everything else.

I also agree with educating yourself to protect yourself. However, there will be many holes in your research which a good optometrist should be able to fill in. Together you can make the best choice.

One area I never see discussed, especially from the "I can find my own prescription" crowd, is binocular vision. How your eyes work together at certain distances and with certain tasks will determine not only which prescription you need but also how the spectacles are set. I'm not only talking about setting the PD and lens height (which may need to be different for your right lens compared to your left, at different at all distances). There are many more considerations such as vertex distance, pantoscopic tilt, frame choice, lens material, wrap angle etc.

Sometimes the optical centration is intentionally different from the PD to induce prism to decrease eye strain. This is not uncommon with complex prescriptions and in the older population.

And sometimes there are other solutions such as vision training. Not the woo woo Bates method, but real vision training used to fix real problems.

Good optometrists provide a lot of value. There just way too much information and most patients will be happy to just let them do what is needed.

And sometimes you just need to get off the PC for a bit.
The original book that Dan Brown plagiated (Holy Blood, Holy Grail) is so much better. I have read it few years prior to DaVinci Code and could only recomend.

https://www.amazon.com/Holy-Blood-Grail-History-Shocking/dp/...
Let me introduce you to a thing called Java!
Quick question, how do you feel about a long term contract (never ending) at 125$ per hour. Assume highly in demand skills (ML, Big Data Architecture, stream processing) with 5 years experience in NYC/SF.

Is that too low? Just right?
Perhaps.

I prefer to see it as the down votes reaffirming that I am correct.
"Just like democracy, which requires people to be informed and free of the worries of basic needs."

The world is filled with people that are uninformed (or would disagree with your definition of "informed", even). I don't think you'd be able to find any large group of people that would make this work to a sufficient degree if we go off your premise about them being "informed".
Doubt they'd prefer any of those. None of those are open source, every single one is a GUI app (which has a history of limiting access to the plumbing that can be provided), and some of those don't even run on Linux.
New evidence would push life back to at least 3.95B years ago
I totally buy that Norway has many strengths, and like I said, I was really impressed with the entrepreneurs I met there.

I think the problem with cultivating a tech ecosystem in many first-world cities is the lack of capital channeled through sophisticated investors who can deploy it in tech.

That's one factor behind Silicon Valley's continued gravity for international entrepreneurs -- they keep running into the funding gaps in their homelands. Sadly, the Trump administration seems to be making it harder for international talent and international capital to meet in the US.

I lived in Europe for many years, and saw a lot of capital that just wanted a safe real estate bet.

> Most of our billionaires are self made. In fact we have more billionaires per capita than the US and more social mobility.

Sure. But Norway is a country with enormous oil reserves, like the Gulf Emirates. That's basically luck. The question is: How can you build an economy with less/zero dependence on arbitrary allocations of natural resources, especially given that the price of energy is trending toward zero?
Banks saying your mortgage or credit cards or student loan is in default before the city is recovered enough for you to earn if a paycheck again.
Well the article on DF also says "While overall considered part of the radical right, its policies on most economic issues would rather place the party in the centre to centre-left."

We try to squeeze too much meaning into the 1-dimensional "left-right" that it really doesn't mean anything at all.
I mean given where you would expect the shadows of floating blocks to be when illuminated from your headlights.
Fighting is an extremely social behavior, particularly in the context of adolescent males. It represents a high degree of concern for honor, status, reputation, justice, the in-group, etc - high enough to risk physical harm. Someone (like me) who has never been in a fight is far less social, less engaged, more apathetic about peers and their emotional lives, than someone who will throw down when they feel it’s appropriate. In this case, that lack of concern for social status is positive, but stil.

Fighting is not isolation taken to an extreme, it’s the opposite.
That was killed by a principled stand not by market forces, the record labels wanted DRM, consumer did not give a shit, a few companies made a principled stand to say no...

Apple introduced a large legal online music store with DRM. Apple got huge. Huge enough that record labels got scared and needed to break Apple's position. They turned to Amazon to start a competing music store, but had a problem: they needed to have the music from Amazon play on devices from Apple, or else people wouldn't shop at Amazon's music store. Since Apple probably wouldn't license Apple's DRM (since, after all, it would be for someone to break Apple's market position), the only option left was DRM-free. And lo and behold, Amazon became the first big music store with major-label music available DRM-free. And once there was one DRM-free store, it became hard to argue, from a market perspective, that there should be any that weren't. So Apple's ended up DRM-free too!

Market forces. Not people taking stands on principle.

That said, even if you want to claim it should be market forces that dictate DRM, then let the market decide by not ham fisting it into a Standard for HTML5.

The fact that you keep claiming EME is DRM tells me that you either don't actually know how EME works or what it does, or that you are willfully lying about it. Which is it, please?

I love all the DRM supporters (which you clearly are despite your claims to not be)

And here we are, back at the assertion that anyone who differs from your position by even a tiny amount must actually be 100% your enemy in every way. This is the kind of thinking that the twentieth century taught us to be very careful around, because it tends to lead to lots and lots and lots of dead bodies, all of them people who were "guilty" of being insufficiently perfectly compliant with the stated ideal.
For how long though? This will become normalized after some time.
> I think it's vastly more likely that this will do little more than sharply increase the demand for people that actually have the bodies that other individuals were being photoshopped to have.

And that's good. There's only a limited number of them. Either they'll get paid so high only few will afford them, or they'll just run out of time to do the photo shots for everyone.

Then the studios will have to use "less ideal" people. That's encouragement and incentives.
I had a similar experience. I got severe migraines all throughout my childhood. When I was studying my masters I couldn't handle all the reading so I went to the optometrist, who sent me to a binocular vision specialist who prescribed a vertical prism on my right eye, which points slightly down at rest. I had been correcting for this manually for 20 years which is what had caused the migraines, since independent vertical movement is super strenuous on the eyes. Haven't had a migraine since!
yea right.

Fed up with sky-high cloud service provider bills? Microsoft is too...
Hence why I said skills and not taste.
Maybe give Gnus a try anyway. It might not be that slow on good hardware. Or just run it coupled with a Dovecot server.

I really like Notmuch's interface. I think limitations are perhaps not that hard to patch on Elisp unless you have a complicated setup.

I'm trying to implement a DSL to coordinate tag <-> maildir sync on top of a few macros.