skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For all its downsides and astroturfing, reddit actually does some pretty good things in that regard. Some of the best posts on there are when people go out of their way to be, you know, human towards other humans. There are subreddits out there dedicated towards exercising and eating better... the orange you-got-a-new-response seratonin-bump envelop icon appears when people give social acknowledgements towards someone's exercise progress or meal prep.

It most definitely gets co-opted... karma whoring, reposting, marketing campaigns posing as that goodwill to the kid in the children's hospital with cancer amateur picture... but that's exactly what this article is about: the forces of maximizing shareholder value find what works and wiggle their way in.

The resistant subreddits appear to be the ones that look at it as a human problem, not something needing a technical fix. That is, they create community rules around what is acceptable content and what isn't welcome, they encourage the content that furthers the subreddit's mission, they moderate away content that seems to break the rules, etc. Some communities are even organized around recognizing these things (eg r/hailcorporate)

Again, all of that can be (and does get!) co-opted for evil, but there are methods that can make groups in social media more resistant.

Problem is at the end of the day, those things don't pay the bills. Ultimately you need to find a way to align profits with good habits. Until we find that, go hit the donate link on the Guardian article. And I think Wikipedia was doing a fundraising campaign recently too.

If you're not paying for it, you're the product.
And yet WebKit came from the KDE folks deciding to do just that.
If you read up on Oxycontin, it was formulated and prescribed in a particular way that created many addicts[1]. In particular it was claimed to work for 12 hours when in some people worked for much less. Being on an opiate for pain and then having it wear off and being forced to wait in pain for sometime before taking it again, is a recipe for creating addiction. Many people also were less wary of taking the opiates when prescribed by their doctors.

I'm not sure if the opiate overdoes epidemic is a clear strike against legalization, but it is surely a cautionary tale about supporting a system of all drugs being open sale of unlimited quantities and unlimited advertising. I support some form of drug legalization but, unlike food that is controlled for content but not much else, legal drugs will need more regulation.

[1] http://www.latimes.com/projects/oxycontin-part1/
Blockchains Are Not About Decentralization
True, but everybody gets more than they had before. The employees get jobs, suppliers get paid on contracts, clients get goods and services. Everybody wins. When an owner cashed out the business isn’t wound up. When Bill Gates pulled most of his wealth out of Microsoft the employees weren’t thrown on the dole and all the businesse’s properties dynamited. His shares and those of other founded and investors were sold as a going concern to new investors. It’s called economic growth.

However there are risks with too much wealth tied up in too small a demographic group. It reduces the diversity among those investing, thus reducing the diversity of investments. This could distort economic development and leave productive opportunities unexplored. It could also lead to political capture by this monied elite.
Yes! And somehow this part is always left out when telling the tale of MS and Bill Gates. While in my opinion, it's one of the biggest reasons of the success.
Sagging, maybe. Caused by collapsing moral fortitude, maybe.

But even being on the list means it hasn't collapsed.
They will be $10 billion in few years. Afterwards they will be beyond acquision. Given they keep the same pace and hardwork. They could be more valuable than Uber period. It's because they have positioned themselves in this unique situation they are based outta SF they have good VC and good hardcore freight team. It's unique and I don't see why they can't be $100 billion company given the scope of this industry and so far they have been doing everything good that paved the way for $100 billion valuation ultimately... Perhaps in a decade but they are getting there.
This probably runs afoul of your "at least not in a satisfying way" constraint, but:

It is pretty easy (an exercise) to implement the "opposite of a Bloom filter" if you start from a summary of the complete set of events and support deletion, rather than starting from the empty set and supporting addition.

What makes everything seem hard is the (often unstated) requirement that you start from an empty set and support addition, which is roughly as hard as implementing a Bloom filter that starts from the complete set and supports deletion. Neither of the links make this requirement explicit (though, it is implicit in their "motivation" sections).
There's also an app, Stationmaster, which comes with 3D maps of all underground stations in London. Not much artistic quality though: http://www.stationmasterapp.com
I enjoyed reading Anany Levitin's Introduction to the Design and Analysis of Algorithms. Algorithms in this book are organized around problem-solving techniques - Decrease-and-Conquer, Divide-and-Conquer, Transform-and-Conquer etc - rather than application areas. I found this style very useful to develop an arsenal of techniques I can employ when I come across a new problem.

Also, for practicing programers, studying data structures is more important than algorithms. I often refer to Sally Goldman's book A Practical Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms Using Java for this.
Jesus H. Christ all they’re doing is adding a link to something else on the internet and they think that’s even remote attempting to fix the problem?? How many product managers and engineers came together to build that solution?

This is just awful. Has anyone looked at certain wikipedia pages for towns or politicians? They’re all written by PR flaks and Chamber of Commerce committees.

Facebook, in their desire to do nothing and spend no money, wants to push the responsibility of this onto the free web?? Did they even make a donation to Wikipedia??

Facebook (and Google) are utterly incompetent, atrophied husks of corporations devoid of all creativity. They offer nothing, build nothing, and do nothing. This is so sad.

FYI here is the Oct 5th official release: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/10/news-feed-fyi-new-test-...
Counteroffers aren't always just pay. I had one unusual employee who wanted a very specific, and unorthodox, space turned into his office.

He got it, if you're curious.
What is panda?
You know what else is strangling prosperity? Normalization of taking debt. When someone "buys" something using debt, it must be paid for many times over. They usually don't end up paying that all on their own, even though they were responsible for taking the debt.

For example, when you buy an over valued house with a mortgage, say during a housing bubble, it doesn't make sense for you to try and sell it later on for less than you originally "paid" (with your fancy loan). So you are going to hold onto it, waiting for the market to go "up", so that you can sell it to yet another person who takes out yet another loan to "pay" for this overpriced house. In the mean time, either you or some renter is busting their ass to pay the interest on that unnecessary loan. It's completely ordinary for people who who decided not too take a mortgage to get stuck paying the interest for someone who locked a house into debt.

This is completely straight forward but when I try to convey how absurd it is, a lot of common sense people look at me like I'm crazy. It's considered a financially "sound investment" to buy a house and try to sell it higher. Well what if I don't want to live in a world where everyone is just playing monopoly all the time? I feel like there are much more interesting and pressing things to do with our precious human time and energy than cater to these ridiculous cycles of debt.

And lot of people who take debt because it's so "smart" couldn't come up with an original exponential function if their life depended in it.
The main point of the article seems to be that living the present is better than worrying about the future. For me it's just the opposite: I love to think about the future, being better at some sports, learning new things, working on more interesting things. I find the described "cyclical time" perception in the article quite depressing, some kind of never-ending groundhog day.
I assume if you say you’re a tinkerer that means you are someone who likes a “generalist” approach to learning.

Some things come to mind:

- Librarian
- Car Mechanic (so many different systems in a car, electrical, fuel, mechanical, sound, etc)
- Park Service or Forest Service (have to fix a lot of stuff out there on your own)

In the end, today all you can ask for is a job that pays well and doesn’t treat you like shit. Most jobs no one works the full 40 hours. Maybe just do 35 hours at your real job, and 35 hours doing whatever you want (joining the maker movement seems like a good idea).
I don't know if it's the case in other countries, but in France, most supermarket chains have their own "budget" brand which are generally quite explicit/generic in term of packaging.

Here is the label of the tin I ate yesterday for example:

https://image.ibb.co/kCxA0b/IMG_20171008_094309.jpg

no product name, just the composition of it.

Even the color are meant to associate to the composition (green -> little peas, pink/red -> bacon, white -> onions, orange -> carrots).

And a realistic photo of what to expect.
Show HN: LearnSearch, Built with Firebase's New Firestore DB and VueJS
Hey folks! I just spent the past two days building LearnSearch, a web app where you can share learning resources and upvote the ones that help you or are valuable in someway.
I asked a lot of people what they wished they knew when they started self teaching or learning something new, and the feedback was always that they wish they could tell the good resources from the ones that lead them astray, and that others were vital in letting them know about this. I wanted to make this same interaction scaleable, so I built LearnSearch!
LearnSearch is still in its early, early infancy, and I'm going to continue to build out different feeds, comments, and other cool features. I'd love for you guys to take a look and let me know what you think!

I haven't slept all night, so gonna take a quick snooze ;)
Air-Framed ‘Zippelin’ Bags Made of Old Tarps and Bike Tubes
Oh what a surprise, the guy in charge of this “idea”, Andrew Anker (tagged in press release), went to a private boarding school in Connecticut that has an endowment of $500 million.

For anyone wondering why I’m pointing this out, it’s not that I’m anti-intellectual but just a vague sense that the more prestigious one’s education the greater threat to society / less competent they seem to be.

It is a generalization, but it comes specifically from this book:

Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life https://www.amazon.com/dp/1476702721

EDIT: Anker was a board member of Pando, a site of some integrity and which chose to switch to the subscription model (good choice), so want to mention that at least. Thanks for supporting them Anker, sorry you had to go over 100% to the dark side though.
Changing Lanes
Thanks. I just want to say I did read it. It has a number of concerns that are mixed together in a way that's not entirely consistent, compelling, or even especially new.

Consider the idea that democracy is being destroyed because people are helpless addicts of social media. You can make a plausible argument that American society and democracy are going through a troubled spell. But it's a big step to say that's all or even largely the fault of social media. It's true that Facebook makes it easier to develop echo chambers that group people by political persuasion. But hey, there's emerging poll evidence that American conservatives and liberals don't even want to marry each other. [0] There are many other causes at work here like failing education systems, economic dislocation, the capturing of the the political system by moneyed interests, etc. That's not even considering real political disputes over things like health care, immigration, and crime. Plus many of the disturbing trends we see now predate social media.

Also, the article essentially dismisses fake news and trolls ("symptoms of a deeper problem"). The fact that you can't verify sources easily is not a symptom. It's a fundamental problem with the Internet today that is not all that different from the dark money problem in American politics.

Overall this article reads like a variation of Nick Carr's "The Shallows" which I read and quite enjoyed. However, I don't think the threat to our intellects is as dire as he says. In the current article it's even a little surprising to me that tech people discount the possibility that something will come along that really upsets the apple cart at Facebook and Google. These are pretty new companies after all and they were the first to get really big on the Internet. This is not the end of the story, especially if the Internet breaks up into essentially national blocks.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/upshot/are-you-married-to...
The many selves of Sylvia Plath: the poet’s early letters
IMO this is a drastic over-simplification of the issue. Legalization is one of many variables here.
Farmers are not the same thing as hunter gatherers though.
Probably not. A quick thing you can do is start using a password manager and opt-out of ads and tracking on Facebook and Google. Beyond that? Look into Michael Bazall’s (sp?) books on privacy.

Look for yourself though: https://pipl.com

There was a book a few years ago called “Brave New War”. Can’t remember the author’s name, but he basically argued that it’s now possible to run your own semi-competent intelligence agency off of simply internet data. Once this becomes more widely known, that data, combined with with a desire for vengeance, could lead to lots of blackmail, retribution, and general harassment.

The other day I found someone’s Facebook profile and he posted everything. Where his kids went to school, where his wife worked.

I kind of think society is like it was with airplanes up until the 1970’s, which was called the “golden age of hijacking”. Before that sure everyone knew technically you could hijack a plane, but no one worried about it because it hadn’t been done yet seriously or frequently. The time will come.
> that actually have safe, strong consistency

Based on what data? Even hazelcast had that same claim before they got exposed?

I've only seen 2 systems that did rigorous in-house fault-tolerant testing (foundationdb and cockroachdb) and later when "jepsen-verified", they actually backed their claim or had few modifications to uphold their claim.
Are... are you a bot?
For more on the x86 emulation and tracing tech that powers this, see:
"Framework for Instruction-level Tracing and Analysis of
Program Executions" (2006)
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/vee06/full_papers/p154-...
Apple Releases Jive
8 Charts That Show How Ethnicity Determines Your Outcome at University
I agree. The actual people paid to protect the populations are complaining to a charity that the job they are supposed to do is not done?

This as to be an Onion article!
I used to hate paperwork for interacting with bureaucracy until I looked at it as a sort of high latency RESTful API.
Writing a solid spec isn't free either. You spend 5 years on writing a spec and 1 year implementing, instead of the other way around.
When my bank calls me, they ask for my birthday, name, account number to verify my ID. I always ask them back, "how do I know you are my bank?". The caller always gets the idea. "Oh yeah, right!?!" I then tell them thanks for the call and I'll go to the branch to sort it out.
This Fascinating City Within Hong Kong Was Lawless for Decades
Matrices don't have to be "some deep mysterious thing about nature" to be important in themselves and not just beause they are well-studied. They merely need to be deep.

"Matrices" is just a word for "Linear operators over finite-dimensioned spaces". Linear stuff is important. Finite dimensional systems are imporant. And even infinite dimensional linear systems tend to have the same properties as finite dimensional ones. All of this makes matricies important in their own right.
Many people had this idea decades before Google.
In the 60" the NASA tested the idea of "Satellite balloons" [0].

Following this experimentation, engineers in France planned to create (in the sixties) a national network of telecom (atmospheric, not satellite) balloons, but it turned out it was easier to build telecom towers.

Myself I wrote a Web site in the late 90" explaining the technology (at that time) and economics of such networks. I think it was one of the earliest proposals where active platforms (Echo balloons were passive) and modern telecom (at that time) technology, where brought together. I cannot find it on the interweb anymore.

Later in the 2000" but before Loons there were several research projects on such high altitude platforms.
[1]

I filled an unsuccessful proposal for such a project inside my company in 2008.

[0] https://www.space.com/8973-1st-communication-satellite-giant...

[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/07/060717103934.h...
Do you mind sharing more about his space request?
I'm still trying to work out when they fixed this:

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62764

They got memory dumps from me, but never got back to me about it. It was incredibly poor form, I literally rebuilt systems from scratch to get them the memory dumps, and they never even told me if it helped.

Pretty shitty really. I found a nasty issue, and all I wanted was to know if they were going to fix it. Hell, I didn't even want credit - just knowing it was fixed would have been great.
> start using a password manager

isn't that a point of failure too? why not just use different passwords for every site and make a longest-allowed password?
> And lot of people who take debt because it's so "smart" couldn't come up with an original exponential function if their life depended in it.

What does this even mean?
Kembalinya “The Godfather” Duduk Di Kursi Pelatih Bayern Munich
You're looking for trouble... But after thinking I have to second that.
See, now that is TWICE as informative as the entire article. I never knew that.
I just posted a link to blogpost
they are still more powerful than chromes, because mozilla made sure most of the popular extentions can get ported and surprisingly many do get ported.
Much of math's foundation isn't from the west. Even our numerals aren't from the west. They came from India by way of Arabia.

Also, I'd probably pick a different source if I were expecting deep commentary about science or math. That's not intended as a slight, it's just about the target audience.
The Equifax Aftermath – We Need More Hacking
I love the old "metal" look and feel. It's retro-tastic! :)
One shouldn't give notice then negotiate. One should say 'I am considering giving notice', then negotiate.
> but the whole point of CONSUMERIST technology is to make life easier after all.

FTFY
The magic version is "Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSB", which provides a whole bunch of toggles not available in the regular version.

Despite saying IOT in the name it's really intended for POS systems.
Jared Diamond's "The World Before Yesterday" touches on this wrt to the people of Papua New Guinea.

These are people who basically lived in hunter-gatherer style until very recently, and have recently started to adopt the "modern" lifestyle. According to him, they do not regret it.

Also, the "happy savage" meme has been around for literally centuries, and it's generally been propagated by rich, educated non-savages.
> Rosenstein, Pearlman and most of the tech insiders questioning today’s attention economy are in their 30s, members of the last generation that can remember a world in which telephones were plugged into walls.

Umm. Yoohoo! We're still here, you remember us, those who created the hardware and the computing concepts you all use now? Well maybe not me personally but I was there using and developing computing hardware and software starting in 1970. I remember when telephones were plugged in to wall too!

And we've been questioning the direction that it's all going in since before Rosenstein, etc., were in kindergarten.
Insomniac has two studios, one in Burbank, another is in Raleigh. It also does multiple projects at once in the Burbank so no, they are not delivering two console games a year. In fact, since 1996 they've done it only in 4 years (with the second game being a R&C game, which is more of a game design than a programming project) just as many years as they have not released a single game. Each of their big games is 2 years+, just like any other AAA studio. They start pre-production on the next project in the middle of the current one, just like any other AAA studio. 6-8 months in the console games nowadays is either a port (porting a game from one platform to another) or some horrible shovelware you find in the happy meals. In 6th generation a AAA game could be 12-18 months and if you worked really hard you could do something like Rogue Leader in 9. But 6 months is something from the 8 bit era, before Insomniac's times.
Awesome, I hadn't heard of TTD. It's great to see reverse-debugging get serious attention

rr sounds fantastic... unfortunately, I can't use it because AMD CPUs aren't supported (they simply don't have adequate performance counters; it's not rr's fault). With the exception of Ryzen, but even there, the performance counters apparently aren't entirely reliable (meaning sometimes the debugger will go haywire)
Why not use a bunlder? Webpack, Rollup, Browserify...

You'd want to load it dynamically over the network? That sounds like a very bad plan (tying your app uptime to the one of the NPM servers).
More entitlement culture in the software development community
I mean that a lot of people don't understand how to write down an exponential function intuitively. A lot of people can write down the formula for compounding interest, but don't understand what it means or how to come up with it from scratch.

People rely on math that they vaguely understand to govern their financial and economic relationships.
I'm going to make a prediction. If you are correct with the analogy of comparing FB to modern cigarettes (and I am inclined to believe you've hit the nail in the head here), then FB is going to find a way to make money off of two more categories of people.

1: Those who do not use FB, and who make every effort not to be under their influence; and more importantly..

2: Those who do use FB and want to limit their exposure, along with the damage that have endured.

If there is a way to turn the second group into a lucrative business case, FB will make sure they have a piece. After all - throughout the history of the human race, few things have been more profitable than selling both the poison and the cure.[ß]

ß: Incidentally, we have already seen this, perhaps by accident, with the very same tobacco industry you made the comparison to. Tobacco industry sells addictive nicotine products. The pharmaceutical industry sells what they can to make money off of that addiction. Both industries are required to manage their wealth responsibly... and via an intermediary or three, own decent chunks of each other. The more money they individually leech off of their customers, the bigger the second bite is.
Nice idea! Seeing that you mention the technology stack, is the product open source? Also, what's the privacy policy (for example for the email addresses collected)?