skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The plan was laid out clearly. The question asked of the electorate was also clear.

February 2016

The process for withdrawing from the European Union
Presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs by Command of Her Majesty

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...

2.1 The result of the referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union will
be final. The Government would have a democratic duty to give effect to the electorate’s
decision. The Prime Minister made clear to the House of Commons that “if the British people
vote to leave, there is only one way to bring that about, namely to trigger Article 50 of the
Treaties and begin the process of exit, and the British people would rightly expect that to start
straight away”.

The referendum question, June 2016 :

---

Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?

[ ] Remain a member of the European Union

[ ] Leave the European Union

---

Of the votes cast

51.9% Leave (17,410,742), 48.1% Remain (16,141,241)

Electorate 46,501,241

37.4% of the electorate voted to leave

34.7% of the electorate voted to remain
You also have to consider what side benefits libraries provide. Eg, we're likely choosing React (first time in company using React) because we're choosing React Native for our mobile apps. This is because we're a very tiny shop, with very limited developers. We simply don't have the manpower to hire or learn both Android and iOS development.

Now, we reviewed a handful of iOS/Android abstractions, and React Native seemed competent - so we're using it for our first pass. Likely, we'll use it for the web frontend too, because we're using React Native. More familiarity can be a good thing.

As I discussed internally when we were choosing frameworks, if I was just choosing a web frontend it would never be React. It's not that I think React is bad, it's just that there are a dozen frameworks similar to it that are faster. It popularized a new good idea (vdom), but it's just not best in breed imo. Yet, having the same concepts and very similar codebase between mobile apps and frontend is a pretty big deal for us.
Could We Build a Machine with Consciousness?
Catalonia was not part of the Kingdom of Aragon, it was part of the Crown of Aragon, which is different.
Kotlin due to Google's backing and being Android's first class citizen?
I'm far more familiar with Vagrant than Docker, so there may be Docker solutions for these problems. But I use Vagrant to:

- Test my software on a "fresh" Linux installation, to ensure it doesn't have any hidden dependencies

- Test my software with different filesystem layouts and (soon) different filesystems, without having to pollute my own filesystem with hundreds of test files

- Automatically install a set of global commands in the VM (such as "b" to do a complete build) and display help text as soon as a user runs "vagrant ssh", so a new developer can quickly get up to speed

It's been pretty good!
I wonder what’s your take on Crimea and Russia in this case.
I'm starting to think all those Twitter accounts I believe are bots might actually just be another part of the US demographics that I've never been exposed. I thought Sean Hannity (what a weird name to begin with) was a bot, turns out, he is an actual guy on TV.
> Vagrantfile configs are actually Ruby scripts

I took advantage of this by storing all my settings in YAML and then using the same YAML for both Vagrant and my Ansible provisioner:

Here's the Ruby Script that loads the YAML:

https://github.com/BigSense/vSense/blob/master/core/vagrante...

That I call from my Vagrant file:

https://github.com/BigSense/vSense/blob/master/core/infrastr...

That is also loaded in all my Ansible roles:

https://github.com/BigSense/vSense/blob/master/ansible/bigse...
Looking for a flat in Barcelona right now and I can tell you prices haven't moved in the slightest. Maybe that will change now, though.
Wouldn't you need infinite precision to test empirically?
> But their constitution wasn't written with modern times in mind.

1978 really wasn't that long ago. I'd call 1978 modern times!
"You need to read history to understand the situation."

That is true if we want to analyze the question of whether or not Catalan "should" be independent from Spain, a question so murky and shot through with political philosophy, theory, and pragmatics that even two sides that stipulate all the same facts can come to different conclusions.

But for what johnnyfaehell was really getting at, which is a tactical and/or strategic analysis of the effectiveness of the moves the various sides have been making, we don't really need all that, we just need an understanding of human nature, with at best some slight elaborations for the slight deviations in local conditions.

I personally have no great opinion about whether Catalan should or should not be independent. Distinctly from that, though, it is fair to observe that Spain has handled this quite badly. While there is probably no solution in which they completely smooth things over, they have certainly taken multiple moves that are very clearly the simple, intuitive things that our genetically-imposed tribal political sense tells us to take when people challenge our rule, and which work (to some degree) in a tribal context of 100-ish people [1], but which at this scale were basically guaranteed to massively inflame the situation.

[1]: Albeit in a way that many people here would probably find generally unjust. The Big Man in the Tribe basically just telling a couple of rabble-rousers to shut up, and if necessary, getting some of his supporters to rough them up a bit to remind them who is in charge, "works", but a lot of us would find that fairly distasteful, because while our genetics tell us to do that, civilization requires other tactics in order to hold together. Scaling up that Big Man's action to a region breaks in multiple ways; for instance, if Catalan perceives itself as a separate tribe, then the "rough them up a bit" phase doesn't register as an internal tribe spat with our genetically-programmed politics, but warfare between two tribes, and that prompts a radically different response.
With apologies to the author, the piece was very well-written but I didn't find any of the arguments or observations in this article comepelling :-(

> This is just a guess, but at the time he wrote Clojure, those type systems most likely were Java-style (Java, C++, C#) and Haskell

SML and OCaml pre-date some of the languages in that list, and certainly pre-date clojure.

The "positional semantics" section -- and that whole class of arguments -- never made any sense to me. All languages have hash maps, so this is about program design rather than language design. Or perhaps, at most, an argument for having nice syntactic sugar for hash maps. In any case, I'm not sure what this has to do with fundamental language design issues. The "can Haskell..." stuff has a similar smell to it. The answer is always "yes, Haskell (and everyone else) have hash maps and HOFs."

At best, it's an argument that those languages should provide a bit of extra syntax around the "everything is a map" programming style. Which, I won't disagree with :)

> In the kinds of systems Rich is talking about, any data could possibly be missing... At the limit, you would need to make everything Maybe

Which is why ML-family languages have both exceptions and algebraic data types.

The discussion of abstraction is just confusing. The author seems to define "abstraction" as "literally any list of information". And I guess it's true that pathologically bad abstractions do exist, but... what point is being made here? I don't get it.

The "screwing around in the type system syndrome" thing actually makes sense, but you can see the same thing in dynamic languages (e.g., with meta-object protocols or macros). There's something more fundamental here, and it's more about human psychology than language design.

I have to agree with keymone, though, that the really interesting thing about clojure is not its design but rather clojure.spec. Sure, you lose a lot of static guarantees, and along with them some of the maintainability/correctness that come along with statically typed languages. But perhaps recovering static checks, and tooling based on static checks, is best done on a library-by-library basis via compositional specification checkers specialized to the particular library. Rather than by a single general-purpose type theory that's rich enough for the "real problems in the messy world" type of programming. And the article kinda starts hinting at this toward the end. But I think keymone really hits the nail on the head when it comes to what you should take away from learning/working in clojure.
The only hard part about that is the municipal permitting. Home construction is not rocket science! This is a mature industry and purchase, demolition, and new construction all have predictable costs.
Don't take this the wrong way, but it sounds like you're approaching this from the perspective that Rails' way is the "correct" way when in fact almost everything about Rails' doctrine will cause you problems over the life of a project.

> We're calling them from controllers more or less as Model.get_something(args). I checked it now and we have zero occurrences of " from " in controller code. All the queries are confined inside a model.

Yeah, that's almost a best practice, except you're regarding the "model" (the terminology is 'schema' in Ecto) as primary instead of building it as a separate context or application (depending on your preferred approach to modularity within Elixir/Phoenix). For that matter, I fail to see the advantages of `Model.get` over `Model |> Repo.get(id)`.

> If we were using Rails ActiveRecord would have written all that code for us.

There's not a substantial difference between the kind of AR usage that's on the happy path and the equivalent query in Ecto.

> I know we have to split the code between what runs in the client process and what runs on the server process, but I feel there should be a vanilla GenServer that handles the most straightfoward case inside the behavior, which is no code in the client with the exception of passing the arguments to the server

You mean like an Agent[1]?

[1] https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/Agent.html
That is pretty non-standard and a pretty big red flag in my opinion. Definitely a non-starter unless you're willing to work just for the cash they're offering on the assumption that you'll end up with no equity. I'd be hesitant even then because it sounds pretty sketchy.
"You don't need outside support to declare independence" is a philosophically pleasing but politically unsound idea. It's the sort of thing that leads to martyred revolutionaries instead of redrawn boundaries on a map.
Instead of pointing out what is wrong with him, you could highlight his strengths - sales and ask him to build on that. You could tell him that it'd be beneficial for your startup if you both concentrate on each of your strengths. You - the technical aspect and your co-founder finds ways to bring in mullah.

You must have a sit down and make sure you are both on the same page with respect to the capabilities of the product. If you don't have relevant documentation for the product you've built, perhaps he can work on that. This way he would understand the product inside out and at the same time have some material when presenting to prospective clients. Going through the codebase with clients is a big nono. Alternatively, you could ask him to prepare a demo of the product that he can use when presenting to prospective clients.

Congrats on building a product and selling it without taking loans and giving away equity! Great going
In the US "the government" typically applies to either all three branches (courts, legislature, executive) or occasionally to the latter two only. The latter definition is typically only used in the case of a lawsuit involving the state. This is in contrast to parliamentary systems where the government is formed of the dominant political party or coalition in parliament, and also gets to act as the executive branch. The US almost always uses the first definition (all 3 branches are government), parliamentary systems almost always use the second (courts aren't government).

In the first (more common) US-style sense, the government certainly did declare the referendum illegal.
From that CBO link...

> In this report, CBO analyzed the distribution of four types of federal taxes: individual income taxes, payroll (or social insurance) taxes, corporate income taxes, and excise taxes.

So it's not like it's including sales or property taxes or whatever else. For all intents and purposes, that's "income" tax.

And the report is from 2013. This Washington Examiner article explicitly states (with a WSJ link for source) that the disparity has dramatically widened in recent years:

> That may be the highest ever. Just two years ago, it was 84 percent, according to the Wall Street Journal.

(https://www.wsj.com/articles/top-20-of-earners-pay-84-of-inc...)

Federal income tax provides nearly half of all federal revenue. It's not the only tax that matters, but it's certainly the most important and most visible. And any reforms will have the most impact to average citizens of any tax reform.
So far it is life as usual here.

Since October 1st, 2017, more than 800 companies have moved their official address to outside of Catalunya. They tend to be larger firms. To be fair, a few have moved TO Catalunya during that same period.

Tourism bookings are down 20% on this time last year. Tourism is a significant part of the Catalan economy.

Real estate - too soo to tell. I think real estate prices probably trail events by some months.
This appears to be a system in the Smalltalk lineage but based on Node and JavaScript and currently seems only to target MacOS. It uses Self/Smalltalk's UI system and is based on ideas by Alan Kay (of Xerox PARC fame and one of the creators of Smalltalk). The web interface looks and feels similar to a web-capable Smalltalk variant called Lively Kernel[1] but in a less-mature state of development and with more of a focus on text.

1) https://lively-kernel.org/
What is consciousness, and could machines have it?
Ask HN: Document templating for automation
I’m trying to build an automatic document generation process and have multiple types of documents to automate. These documents will have standard language but also dynamic language. I’m looking for a template engine similar to the templating used in current web frameworks (e.g. React uses curly brackets to escape and execute an expression within HTML or for control flow). I’m looking for something similar so I can embed some logic in the document output. For example, if a certain variable is less than zero, a different paragraph is displayed rather than a standard paragraph. Any ideas or technologies to leverage here?
> Laravel + Bootstrap + JQuery + MySQL works pretty well then this modern stuff.

It's interesting to remember that Facebook started out as a PHP application. I imagine that Facebook's original tech stack closely resembled the stack you're recommending. And scaling that stack is what led to the creation of React. If you choose to build a rich user interface (like Facebook or Netflix) on top of that stack, you will likely find yourself creating abstractions to manage the complexity. Those abstractions will be equivalent in their utility to React, Ember, Angular, etc.

I agree that a website does not always need or benefit from a React or an Ember. Small dynamic behaviors behaviors can be implemented with less powerful tools. But, the power of your abstractions will need to scale with the complexity of your UI behavior. That's why, at a certain point, the abstractions provided by React _are_ the right choice and jQuery is not.

Regardless, the slide featured in this tweet does not comment on React working or not working well. As they say in a reply to that tweet, the application still loads React and renders React components. What they are presenting is an interesting optimization that has to do with the unique performance constraints of Netflix's UI.
Show HN: I Made a HN Reader Atom Package
I've been out of front-line web development for a while. Are Websockets supported widely enough that a developer can reasonably assume they are available and not have to worry about workarounds such as comet/long polling?
Does the onion service still serve the same advertisements their website and mobile app do?

If so, they're leaving their users-who-want-to-stay-relatively-anonymous open to attack via the advertisement vector. Members of that group would be considered high-value targets simply due to their anonymity desires.

I can't see the number of daily users being large enough that they'd lose significant profit by closing that attack vector. Hell, if there was a way to pay NYT enough to disable ads on all their services, I'd do it.
Cornerstone? Isn't recognition of nation states the cornerstone?

Art 1.2 talks of maintaining peace amongst the nation's through respect for "equal rights and self-determination of peoples". To me that puts self-determination below democratic process, reversing them would not respect equal rights.

http://www.un.org/en/sections/un-charter/chapter-i/index.htm...
If I'm not mistaken Angular 2+ also has this. It's named AOT compilation (ahead of time).

Edit: so does Vue if you're using vueify (https://github.com/vuejs/vue/issues/4272).
Do you think my parents didn't do that and still do (I'm in my 50's)? Respect is not the same as uncritically accepting authority decisions.
I'm under the impression the only way an independence vote could be legal is if the Spanish Constitution was changed to allow that. The current constitution declares Spain "indivisible", with no more specific details. That would seem to pretty clearly exclude any possibility of a part of Spain legally separating from Spain. The UK's legal system is a little slipperier. UK doesn't have a hard and fast Constitution. If Parliament allows something, it's basically legal (less hard checks on legislative power than your typical constitution).
Private individual ownership has never been absolute for anyone, except for those despots and monarchs with a large and loyal military. There have always been ways for a large group of people to strip an intransigent and selfish person of his property, and some of those ways don't involve murdering him in a public and humiliating way. If nothing else, a series of successful civil suits can force the transfer of real property to the plaintiffs.

Eminent domain is one establishment-sanctioned way in the US, wherein the owner is forced to sell to the government. The purpose is supposedly to enable construction of public infrastructure such that private owners cannot obstruct for personal profit, but the controversial Kelo v. New London case involved the use of eminent domain to transfer property from one private party to another.

If your style of ownership is a clear burden on the surrounding community, they will eventually strip you of your property. But the bar is set rather low, even for the minorities in a racist community. As long as you pay your property taxes, obey the most literal interpretation of the law, and don't allow the property to look too bad from the curb, people will generally leave you alone.

So the duty of the landlord is to not be such an enormous ass that the community notices it, and comes after them. It isn't difficult, let some people can't even manage that.
I can't blame anyone for skepticism because the press has taken leave of their senses and begun blaming Russia for everything from Black Lives Matter to the Standing Rock protests to the Catalonian Independent Movement, as though there were no local grievances involved in any of these matters until the Russians stepped in. And the stories about Russians swaying the US election with $100K in Facebook ads just seem completely beyond belief given the mind-melting amount of money spent on the election.
It's not true, they haven't declared independence. This is a resolution proposal, which means it's not a law and it has no legal value (I mean, not even from the point of view of a pro-independence judge/lawyer). It's a proposal asking the Catalan government to declare independence.

But it's fulfilling its purpose, which is to escalate things in a political sense while maintaining the status-quo in the legal realm: it's a provocation to the Spanish government, seeking an over-reaction from the Spanish government, with the aim to maintain the moral victory over Spain in the matter of independence.
I see I have been down voted.

As someone born in Barcelona, with dual Spanish/British nationality, all I can say with certainty is that I’m deeply saddened to lose not one, but possibly now two connections to my European neighbours.
“What if ...” doesn’t pass YAGNI.
Show HN: Manipulist Color Palette, find and try your color scheme on the fly
It seems like the author was using Vagrant to set up their base Docker machine.

So yes, the author could have run everything on Docker locally, but this was to setup those Docker clusters (Kubernetes and OpenShift).

I did the same thing when experimenting with DC/OS. Running a small cluster on my developer box with 32GB of ram was cheap. Running the same cluster on DigitalOcean gets very expensive:

http://penguindreams.org/blog/installing-mesosphere-dcos-on-...
How are you planning to do hardware isolation?
That sounds great to me too!
I guess the point is that given that the spanish government considered the referendum illegal, people not in favor of independence would probably not have wanted to caution it by participating. Clearly in these conditions the results can't be trusted.

It's more like "90% of the people who thought the referendum was legitimate are in favor of independence". There's obviously a big selection bias.

As for the question of whether the referendum was legitimate or not, the problem in my opinion is how can you consider a referendum democratic if only a tiny portion of the country's population gets to take the decision? Catalunia becoming independent would have consequences throughout the country, shouldn't everybody get to vote?

And if not, where do you draw the line? Paris and its region generate about 1/6th of the total GDP of France, what if Parisians decided to declare independence? What about the Lega Nord in Italy? And let's not even talk about the historical economic divide between eastern/western Germany or the variations of GDP between states in the USA.

What if all the rich people in Japan decided to all move to an inhabited island and declare independence with 100% of the vote? Would that be legitimate?
This is incorrect. Onion domain addresses already provide the same level of confidence as a DV certificate, because they are a public key of the server you are connecting to. There would be no additional value in issuing a DV certificate for an .onion domain.
The only thugs I saw were the police beating people up
I believe whats special in the Valley that I have not seen anywhere is the sheer concentration of startups, investors and qualified people and the willingness for them to share.
Sharing comes in many formats in the valley of knowledge, their own startup, contacts and advise.
The last two are the hardest to find elsewhere at the scale that you see in SV, I havent found it in Asia I havent found it in Europe... this for me is the competitive advantage of being in the Valley
The UK public has historically been one of the most eurosceptic countries in europe and certainly the most eurosceptic in the EU. When given an actual chance to vote on the issue amazingly the British public followed through... who could possibly have seen that coming?

The farce is that people who should've known that were somehow shocked by it.