skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I don't understand why people are so quick to dismiss SpaceX's ambitions as unrealistic.

I expect that part may be an attempt to not get their hopes up. One of the things I learned as a child was that if someone told you something that you really wanted to be true, and you believed it, then when it turned out to not be true you felt really really horrible. So instead you disbelieve it, and when it turns out to not be true you feel satisfied that you knew it wasn't true. If it turns out to be true after all, then you are surprised (in a good way) and excited because its a great thing. Of the choices, disbelieving gives a better future emotional outcome.

That said, the older version of me has come to appreciate people who are sincere even if they aren't able to deliver on their promises. Elon is pushing the edge of space travel at a rate that is much more exciting than NASA and other governments were. As a result I can cheer him on in the hopes he will be successful without becoming so invested in that success that it would crush me if it didn't come to pass. As a kid I really believed NASA when they said we'd have a lunar colony in 2001 after the lunar landing in 1969, and their inability to come close to delivering was really painful[1].

The launch of Falcon Heavy is going to be a significant milestone for SpaceX. If they can pull it off, they will have proven they can tame the complexity of adding rockets in parallel to tune their mass fraction to space. No one has done that yet. And if they can recover a second stage, and do so in a way that they can re-use its engines at least, it will demonstrate that the economics of such an effort can be managed as well.

High hopes, realistic expectations.

[1] Yes, I know that if they had kept their funding they would have made better strides, and yes I know that isn't there fault. But neither reality mitigated the impact of NASA essentially "giving up" on the moon.
One wonders how that number would change if informed that Puerto Ricans don't pay federal personal income tax?
"Expert Beginner" - this is the fate of most web developers. There's so much churn in the "technology" that by the time someone gets really good at something, it's obsolete.

Conversely, getting really good at something can be career ending when that thing dies.
Has also to do with the H1B employee lock in benefits.
> Is anyone else feeling this?

Yes, but the Western governments are moving in a similar direction. I'd rather Alibaba sponsor MariaDB than not.
A pseudonym is a kind of name, so “name” is entirely correct, if not entirely complete (though, AFAIK, it is as complete as is known to be correct, since it is only widely presumed, rather than known, that the name is a pseudonym.)
Bad for whom? If spammers actually wanted to use that as an indication of a live account, they'd need to just give up and ignore all gmail.com addresses, which would be win for ordinary users.
watch or read The Expanse.
I'm in the same boat. When I was growing up, a mini computer was huge. When I was in high school, some of my programming courses were on Digital PDP mini computers.

I remember writing BASIC programs with a Sharpie on optical mark reader cards. Debugging was a nightmare, you'd run your cards through the reader, look at the printer output and debug back at your desk by sorting through your cards. This was in the mid 80s -- the Apple ][ at home was better tech than what we had at my school.
If all the carbon came from Earth and some is burned in space then the footprint on Earth is negative I think
I think there is a big difference between the popularity of games in Europe and the US. I grew up with a C64 in the UK, and a lot of these games were considered classics here 85-90ish.
I agree with you, going by the description, about it being more like "breadth first vs. depth first."

I think the author of the article may have misunderstood the blog post he was citing; "Expert Beginner" seems to be more about self-awareness (Dunning–Kruger effect) and awareness of the big picture rather than specialization.
We love Lua and LuaJIT -- we use them extensively here.

But for running third-party code, we need to everything in our power to reduce the risk of a compromise.

Every sandbox (including V8) has bugs, and security is about risk management. With scrutiny, the low-hanging fruit is found and the risk of further bugs steadily decreases. At the end of the day, no Lua sandboxing mechanism has had anywhere near the scrutiny of V8. It's a totally unfair chicken-and-egg problem: to get scrutiny you need usage, but to get usage you need scrutiny. But, it is what it is. :/
I didn't know that'd been debunked. They should correct the article if that's true.
(This response is not to disagree with above)

My wife is not a meticulous planner. Now she is required to be. Now she runs a household, two teens, school, bills, planning, holidays, all of it.

Some programmers here have said "Well, I bring in the money, its fine for my wife to have this as a full time job".

Imagine if suddenly, instead of being a programmer, your job was now procurement and planning for a stockroom including suppliers. Like, wait, what? Imagine if this was the only job you could get now (its a thought experiment ok).

So you went from "what your day looks like as a programmer" to "what your day looks like running a warehouse, calling suppliers, negotiating deals, negotiating better deals, dealing with employees who are sick, employees who steal things, blah blah".

There are people who like that job, or are at least good at it. I would hate that job. Now imagine your new job is "running a household": making calls, dealing with mental illness (maybe thats just my family), school, school reports, children dealing with school pressure, hiring a cleaner, firing the shitty cleaner you hired, reporting the stolen jewelry to the police, hiring a new cleaner with better references, etc

Again, thats not a job that I want. I make a ton of money, I do have conversations with other people and I enjoy it. I would die in this other job. I'm not qualified and I don't have the personality for it.

Neither does my wife. But its her full time job. And she has no choice. For the next 8 years at least.

It doesn't matter that your job makes more or all the money. It matters that your wife (or partner) is trapped in a dead-end job that she hates and sucks at and she cannot quit.

I am going to go and have a conversation with her about taking over some of her "duties".
Yet Another Major Russia Story Falls Apart
> I tell my son that he can use the F word whenever it makes contextual sense

To be clear, I'm talking about news articles accurately referencing and representing what they are reporting. I'm not sure how you can get more contextually appropriate than that. I'm not talking about how professional communication should use swearing because it's fun. I'm talking about how they feel the need to go out of their way to not accurately represent the name of what they are talking about or the actual words that are the cause of the news itself.

It's like people being offended if my last name is "babcock" because it has "cock" in it. At some point it switches from one party making an effort to present themselves civilly to the other party being uncivil by taking umbrage over small, inconsequential items. In this case, news agencies are apparently so worried over the latter that journalism suffers (we'll call the article in question here journalism, and leave the Scaramucci news articles out of it to prevent muddying the issue...). I think that's a real shame.
It's unrealistic because it requires a ridiculous amount of money to go there and establish a colony. The kind of money only states can spend, and probably for an endeavor like this it will require a multinational collaboration. No private company can amass that kind of money because shareholders and investors can't see the ROI in this thing.
> excised immediately

Only if the backdoor is obvious. I doubt they would introduce a backdoor that reads

`if ($PWD = "supersecretbackdoorpwd") loginAs("root");`

But a subtle buffer overrun resulting in a 0day that's only obvious to the writers - that's much more likely.

Check out the Underhanded C contest for examples of ways exploits can hide in plain sight.

EDIT: I'm not saying that's what going to happen with Alibaba & MariaDb. I'm just saying that "open source" != "free of exploits and backdoors". One of the biggest untruths about open source is that, with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
At best it's seed investment. You seed 100 projects that show promise and hope one of them is a home run. VCs do something similar, with 90% of their investments failing. The quality of token investing really depends on the due diligence done and the investment strategy pursued by the token buyer.
Boost.UI a C++ User Interface Boost library
The easiest you can do is probably to look locally.

I'm sure there are a lot of non-profit with horrible websites, architectures, communications, etc. which you can throw a few hours at and help a lot of people.
Yes I didn't mean to imply that, only that it can be challenging dealing with a resource constrained environment.

For example our deep learning clusters do not use hadoop, but use multi-process python daemons (written by me) and communicate with protocol buffers. Writing these high performance daemons myself has taught me a lot about cluster computing and some of the tradeoffs that have to be made in order to keep the GPU pipelines full.

For anyone else reading: Pyro is quite fun if you're in a limited environment and want to learn https://pythonhosted.org/Pyro4/ Also, setting up a spark https://spark.apache.org/ environment can be done on smaller machines too
Extend subclasses, mixin composes into a new class (like traits), override and plugin augment existing classes, with override replacing existing methods (which can break with every new release), and plugin fitting into a hook that remains compatible across releases.

All makes perfect sense to me. They’re standard OO techniques, the novelty was introducing them to JS developers.
Girls who code CEO?? Wow, this will surely change things at the White House...
What examples can you come up with?
> "She didn't ask for what she really wanted, so she didn't get it."

Incorrect. Read this...

"My husband waited for me to change my mind to an "easier" gift than housecleaning, something he could one-click order on Amazon. Disappointed by my unwavering desire, the day before Mother's Day he called a single service, decided they were too expensive, and vowed to clean the bathrooms himself."

The husband understood what the wife wanted, because he made a half-arsed attempt to meet her request, and then tried to get out of it. Does that sound like the actions of someone who doesn't know what his partner wants? The husband wouldn't have made such a song and dance about the gift request if he didn't know what his partner had asked for.
Improving existing software stability/security. Dive into the OpenBSD project and stay a while.

Yep. The totally unsexy answer.
For me the worst was the XML craze. Suddenly everyone was talking about XML as if it was a game changer. One major database vendor announced an XML database. New standards like XSLT and Xpath proliferated. XHTML seemed to be on the way to replace HTML... When you look at it now, each of these technologies has some use, and the "XML revolution" contributed to some useful developments, but the exaggerations on the way were egregious.

What is interesting is that many people were aware of the shortcomings of the new technology from the very beginning. For example, many noted that XML is too verbose for both machine-to-machine communication as well as editing by humans. It's interesting to note the same phenomena in each technology cycle.
I had one of those! With a bit of modification, you could even hook up a PS/2 keyboard
I love Vue and React. It's the UI layer where things don't match up, however. There are plenty of examples of UI frameworks, some which sit atop React/Vue, that on the surface look to have everything ExtJS offers. Ext had hidden strength behind the scenes though. The Ext.util.Observable pattern for event handling; the Ext.data package for binding component data to server-side back-ends using Ajax, REST and SOAP proxies; under appreciated features such as keyboard navigation and state management with options to persist to cookies and local storage. At the time it felt bloated and the learning curve was crazy, but looking back on it in an age where heavy client-side JS apps reign supreme, it actually doesn't look all that bad.
>It's not however required for merely putting forward the argument as a possible explanation, or for judging whether the argument is rational or not.

This is the difference between you and me. Before putting an argument forward I would evaluate it or at least calculate it a little bit!

>It seems that your concerns are more tied to a priori axioms and emotional resistance than actual methodological issues in the questions.

Why would you say that? The only thing i wanted was a little bit evidence and calculation! And it is funny in your nonsense world I am the emotional one here!
Except Tokyo, Vienna, Montreal, Germany. Almost like we could apply their policies in SV.
Homelessness induced by mental health challenges. I know this isn't exactly what you were asking, but this is an area in which creating engineering solutions can go a long way. As suggested - think geographically local. Improvements in the way our society handles these issues, proven to work on a local scale, can be adapted and replicated globally.
Let's also not forget that road wear's relationship with weight is greater than linear, which is to say that doubling the weight will more than double the wear. Your average cyclist is going to be 10x smaller than a normal 4 door car.
Thats a pretty shallow interpretation of history.

To the degree that they did trade peacefully (free enterprise), they flourished - thus the lesson of Thanksgiving. Not to mention they were fleeing religious persecution themselves in North America. Of course establishing private property in a new land was not without friction and abuse. However, the killing of Indians by the Union army were direct actions of Government - not the enlightenment principles of capitalism, free trade & movement, as expounded by the likes of Mises and Adam Smith.

and it was financed by European royalty in South America. How did that go?

The truth is there weren't many options. But I would attribute abuses by violent governments to government, not private enterprise.
Writing a CSS-In-JS Library from Scratch
I liked ExtJS 3.4 Never migrated to any newer version as it would require rewrite of our app which would negate any benefit for a long time. I instead dropped old browser compatibility cruft from ExtJS 3 and moved styling to sass/CSS3. Gutted all network access code too in favor of modern alternatives.

It worked fine. ExtJS 4 was overengineered and less performant and sencha cmd was crap.

I like the basic architecture and easy extensibility. Nothing "modern" compares if your goal is to have a basic app and be able to simply include another js file at the end to extend/override anything, even if you've not anticipated it in the basic app.

Nevertheless I'll never use it again for anything new. Its (ExtJS 3) basic architecture (component tree separate from DOM) is easily replicable in the modern browser (for the amount of money they're asking for a license) and that's all I really care for. I don't care for their widgets.

When web components will be supported universally, there will be no need for separate component tree, and for me that will be it for ExtJS's architecture.
Thanks for your interest. I've added a couple of screenshots to the readme. I usually run ozette in a terminal filling one monitor, with 2-3 files open. It works fine with more, but you just can't see much of their contents; still, seeing the edges of the other files in a stack behind the active tab somehow helps my sense of spatial navigation.

It's funny how life works. There is nothing especially sophisticated about this bit of code, it has many little bugs I've never bothered to fix, and I'd design it completely differently if I started now. Still, though: after thirty-plus years writing code, I've gotten more actual use out of this little tool than anything else I've ever written. Judging by the ratio of hours spent writing it to hours spent using it, nothing else even comes close, not within an order of magnitude.
One strategy that I adopt is to think of industries that are highly manual labor and dream of ways to fix that. I forget the name of the company, but there's a startup in the Bay Area that builds drones for farmers. Right now, farmers wake up early in the morning and drive through small sections of their fields and spot check things to decide what needs water or fertilizer or what-have-you. They have to spot check, because some of these farms are so large that it would take a prohibitively long time to check everything. As a result, a small patch of plants that might need more water might get some water, but the nearby plants that are already well-watered might get too much water. With these drones, the farmer can wake up, hit a button on their computer, go make coffee, and by the time their coffee is ready, the drones have uploaded photos of every square foot of the farm onto their computer. Software can analyze it to see what needs watering and fertilizing, what's ready for picking or for planting, etc.

That's the kind of thing that gets me excited about the future of technology. How could we automate or ease the jobs of farmers? How can we automate going to the DMV? How can we streamline flu shots? Can we write software that can organize resistance to Ebola outbreaks or malaria? Is there some software that can get the people of Flint access to clean water -- or can we write software that will prevent a Flint-like crisis from happening again? Can we identify bots that might be trying to affect our political processes? What about making sure kids in schools are well fed, since we know that hungry kids perform worse in schools? Can we solve that somehow?

I don't have answers to any of those questions. They are what I call "Epic Problems," and I think about them all the time. Unfortunately, the solutions are several orders of magnitude more involved than a standard CRUD app.

One thing to do is pick an Epic Problem, then work in an Agile mindset to tackle it. That's what Planet Labs did when it came to satellites. They have hundreds of shoebox-sized satellites in space, putting them up there at a tiny, tiny fraction of the cost of what it takes to put a traditional satellite in orbit.

What else could you do that with?
My argument would be either use them now where the surgeons can still use the tech to benefit them or be forced to by malpractice insurance later where you can't reap as many benefits.
When a scientist wants to make progress in some field, the scientist first educates herself on the state of the art, and then does novel research that pushes the frontier.

When you have a discussion on facebook/reddit/HN about your favorite political issue, you just post your gut feeling and what you heard on TV instead of educating yourself on the issue, learning what the foremost experts are currently debating and what arguments are already refuted.

Super shitty example fix: Facebook Clippy "It sounds like you're having a discussion about abortion - are you aware that the smartest people on this topic are not actually discussing X, but rather have moved on to Y?"

Side problem:

When we DO make some bump of progress, only a few people benefit (the people reading the thread, at best), and everyone else does not. A million parallel discussions rehash the issue until after a decade, "culture" incrementally improves. How can my facebook discussion, in which I made a good point, prevent that same discussion from ever happening again?
Anyone have a good estimate the total amount of money spent in the name of education in the U.S. in the last 50 years? I'd be interested to see the total pre-k through university graduate school, including both public (local, state, federal) and private.
How my adsense page ctr was reduced in one week
> I didn't notice a single typo

JavaScript is spelled incorrect all over the place.

Awesome feature and post!
This is actually old news. Here's one from 2012 : http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/NHnLRi9Gn5LQFX1Z2CnG0N/IBM-e...
I have a question about the cow path problem. The blog postulates that, when choosing an appropriate approach/framework/technology/tool, I should lay out the options and choose the best one, taking into account the longterm cost of adopting something new?

What if I'm not competent at most of the options? I can spend a few days evaluating each one and getting a beginner's idea of what it can do, but evaluating the long-term costs of more than 2 or 3 choices seems like it would take an inordinate amount of time.

Say my team has expertise in our own areas but we need to add a thing in some new domain we have no experience in, for example web development. We're going to need to build our thing on some sort of framework, but, for the sake of argument, we're not familiar with any of them. How do we choose the right one without spending months in analysis paralysis but also not simply following the cow path?
That's besides the point. Even if every single employee at Alibaba is well-intentioned (which is close enough to reality to be considered the case), in the end the government of the PRC has the capability to coerce the company to exert influence in a direction we almost certainly wouldn't like. The only question is whether the PRC would consider the trade offs worth it.
Styled-jsx v2
Make a website that brings transparency to your local political candidates and votes. In many places it's very difficult to find any real information on what we're voting on and the props themselves are ambiguous or confusing. And the candidates themselves also often have no online presence and no real scrutiny as to whether they're full of shit.
You sound new to this, so I recommend you make it someone else's problem. As in, sell, trade, or give them to someone who specializes in acquiring outdated hardware, whether it's a repurposing shop, a recycler, a charity, etc.
That's solved in every industrialized country besides America. It's an issue of political will. I think it's a great thing to work on, and desperately needed in the US, but it's not a question of how to implement it but rather the political change to implement it.

Edit: it's not even, strictly speaking, nation-wide. Idaho for example, does a great job on this. California had most of its mental health facilities shut down during the 1960's when Reagan was Governor to save costs.
Lenovo seems to get caught with a backdoor every 6 months or so lately. Although I do think that has tainted its brand, I think it's still pretty far off from "destroying the brand".
Show HN: ARKit Playground – Make ARKit Experiences in JS from Your Browser
Great product announcement post! I especially liked the Q&A section's reasons for not choosing alternatives.

Is the lack of maturity also the reason for not choosing something like vm2 for NodeJS https://github.com/patriksimek/vm2
A long term way that doesn't bankrupt you first? I doubt it, but I don't know your financial situation.

Plenty of exchanges will offer you shorts if you're that confident, though. BitFinex and Kraken come to mind.
There are probably jobs where there's someone watching a split-screen display showing the webcam images of all their subordinates.

(IoT idea: Desktop USB activated food reward dispenser. Boss-controlled.)

(Just checked. It's available. Pavlov Treat Dispenser $69.95 [1])

[1] http://pavlovdogmonitor.com/treat-dispenser/pavlov-treat-dis...)
Use m.facebook.com. The mobile site has "Reply" buttons next to the comment text fields.
They do pay other taxes though. And they're missing many benefits that they'd get if they were a proper state.