skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Three Scientists and their Gods: This book foreshadows the meaning and purpose of science+tech https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/214570.Three_Scientists_...

Scifi: The Three Body problem (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20518872-the-three-body-...) for its whole encompassing narrative about human future and some of it will be real (fusion instead of chemical fuel, pulse propulsion and other social consequences)

Ardor: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20931250-ardor if you ever wanted to understand ancient indian philosophy. Heavy read, not recommended for fun but more as quest

FoxTales: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/412167.Foxtales about how software was developed in the midwest free of all the fashion/hipsterism currently in vogue and building a community of users for your software

The elements of networking style: If you ever wanted to know the politics of how networking RFCs are made: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2298785.The_Elements_of_... and design choices made to build modern day internet

Unwritten Laws of Engineering: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13122143-unwritten-laws-... is an old and timeless way detailing what it means to engineer

High Performance Browser Networking: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17985198-high-performanc... if you ever wanted to know what happens inside a browser

The Computer and the Brain: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/358880.The_Computer_and_... where the master compares the machine with our brain

The Grammatical Man: If you ever wanted to know the importance of structure and constraint in everything: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/722028.Grammatical_Man
Ask HN: What are your favorite free APIs?
Hi HN -

What are your favorite, free APIs? They can be your favorite for many reasons: making you more efficient, stimulating intellectual curiosity, or simply just for being beautifully designed.

I think it'd be cool to get a list here so that we all can explore the gems our peers have found in their travels around the internet :)

Thanks, Mike
This site[1] is linked toward the bottom of the one you posted but I think it deserves special recognition just by the sheer simplicity of understanding the various systems visually in a way that the interactive applet doesn't quite get across.

There are nonprofits working on this issue in the USA.[2] Personally I'm more a fan of the push to create multi-representative districts within states than I am about RCV (basically a restricted form of IRV). But regardless, if you want to get involved, call them up first.

[1] http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

[2] http://www.fairvote.org/
Spending’s not the problem. Income just happens to correlate with having kids who aren’t disruptive and (are made to) care about education. The money itself isn’t the main reason for different school outcomes.
Hilariously ambiguous title. I assumed it meant that the UK misled people. But no, it says they themselves were misled by the US.

All I can say to that is: lolwut. If it was obvious to me that the WMD story was nonsense, surely the top minds of the United Kingdom could have figured it out.
I second Godel, Escher and Bach.
I don't agree. Super dense cities like New York might fall out of favor, but smaller cities will still be attractive. Being able to walk to wherever you want to go is very nice. In the suburbs you have to drive 10 minutes to get anywhere, which is quite annoying. Maybe that will change once self driving cars become the norm though.
As others have said, those who have tried masks haven't worked. But I wonder if normal masks have different heat signatures than real faces, which an IR array can detect. It's possible that something as simple as standard mask + heat would fool the system. Hopefully not!
> It's not actually innovation, if it doesn't work

Well it's not going to be innovation even if it does work. The technological progress of a hundred years and hundreds of billions of dollars of continuous refinement in aviation is insane. He's not going to be able to improve on a single bolt, let alone a whole frame, for a million bucks. Probably not for a billion bucks.

I mean, kudos for the guy for doing his thing and I don't mean to be hard on him but geeze. It's entrepreneurship and can-do spirit, which is great, but it's not innovation.
Neat! Oracle, being the epitome of Enterprise, is the last company I would have expected to see using Rust and containers; nice to be proven wrong :)

EDIT: typo
"Foreigners tend to view Nordic countries as "these socialist nanny states where everybody has a collectivist mindset," Partanen said. But "in fact a lot of these services really support everybody's independence.""

I pay a ton of taxes in the U.S. I don't get how Finland warrants an accusation of a collectivist mindset, while America takes and redistributes just as much money. Is it because spending on defense, instead of social services, doesn't qualify as a collectivist mindset?
Are you an American living in Mexico? Or a Mexican? Or what?
You should grow up and learn to empathize with people different than you. It's not hard, you just have to imagine why someone with a different background than you might feel different about events than you do. She's much closer to this event, anyway, so I'm sure she's got a better opinion on it than you.

And about her point of being sexualized - what if a guy had his face photoshopped onto he-man and that guy complained about being sexualized because now his face is on a shirtless strong dude. These arguments only go one way for people like this.

You really don't see the difference between a male being sexualized among a mostly male audience, and a female who wants to be treated as a professional being sexualized? It's not that hard to figure out.
The Missing Manual for Hacking Postgres
PLs arguments are very rarely falsifiable, if that's your criterion. I mean, yes, a programming language has to work in some sense, but that's a pretty low bar; C and Lisp work and have for decades, so we could just say we're done, disband the research field. The rest of PLs exists because they claim that they're building something that is in some way "better" than C or Lisp. But that's a pretty fuzzy argument, difficult to falsify. There is a small area of empirical software engineering that does try to measure things like whether certain constructs can measurably reduce bugs in real-world usage, which would be a testable hypothesis. But they've been able to establish very, very few solid things about PLs, and the vast majority of PLs doesn't look at all like that. It's more design argumentation.

To pick a concrete example: Rich Hickey introduced transducers into Clojure a while ago, using an argument, illustrated by a number of examples, for why they're useful. Is this argument falsifiable? In principle some version of it might be, if you made "useful" more precise (useful to whom? in which contexts? how would you know?). But the kind of empirical work it would take to measure it in a non-toy setting is quite difficult, so afaik nobody's tested it, or even really formulated the question precisely enough to test it. In practice, you accept or reject the construct based on what you think of the argument, or you try to find a counterargument that makes them look like an inelegant/awkward construct, but in either case you probably aren't attempting to rigorously validate or falsify a scientific hypothesis relating to them. Basically all of PL design and evolution looks more like that than like Popperian science...
Who gets to be called a mathematician?
Probably there would be "signal decay", but one can still make sense of a text when many of the letters are missing. So the decay would have to be more than 50% for the message to be completely useless.

Also, a million years is quite a long time, I doubt there are many media one could use that one could expect to still be at least half readable in one million years time.
I don't know.There is medical perspective which focuses on deleterious mutations causing disease. This is a black-and-white perspective which sees mutations as either wholly bad or entirely unimportant. A genome without any deleterious mutations is a correct genome.

But what happens if you step back from black-and-white thinking and ask about mutations with ambiguous effects. Which is the mutation and which is the correct genome? It becomes unclear.

An alternative perspective asks: how well separated are the local minima in fitness space? Perhaps the typical separation is as large as the gaps between species. Then each species has only its own local minimum, which defines its correct genome. Or perhaps fitness space is littered with local minima, such that a single species has genetically healthy individuals in several different minima plus other individuals, perhaps not quite so healthy, nearby.
> I will admit I have not tried Face ID yet

Sounds like a solid review!
What do you call a jew who marries a chines spy? a stupid jew who thinks he is a king and wants to be president.
Variation on the pomodoro theme: Zen Programming. Coders code for the long pomodoro beat and meditate during the 5-10 minute short break.
isn't the basic problem that people are willing to swallow entire narratives from random people without being sufficiently critical? Even if the propaganda came from one of the US parties directly instead of being funded by a foreign agent, democracy fails if whoever yells the loudest most ridiculous thing wins the election.
I wrote this on another post today, but it seems like the social media are becoming arms of nation-states more than they are creating a haven of free expression that resists censorship. The hoopla about CounterPunch and similar editorial websites last year seems to confirm the suspicion that Google et al. aren't really fighting for the users.[1]

[1] http://www.mintpressnews.com/counterpunch-google-censors-blo...
It would not have been physically impossible to fake the moon landings. Physics tells us that the moon landings could have happened, but it doesn't tell us that they couldn't have been faked.

But by picking over the details of a particular example you're missing the point. Surely you don't want to say that you can reject crazy historical claims solely because the proponents of those claims make outragerous claims in other areas too. If you think the moon landings are an exception, for some reason, then let's look at other examples. E.g. Holocaust denial.
How to start C++ Programming from scratch – Get the FREE C++ Course:
I think you missed my point where i would be offended and still handle it with grace.

Oh and to shortcircuit the strawman observation, I've been in many professional situations where my latino heritage is used in a malicious and insulting way which offends me but I CHOOSE a constructive non confrontational conflict resolution that includes dialogue
> IMO, not every Web application needs to be an SPA.

Actually, it goes like this:

- not every website needs to be dynamic

- few dynamic websites need to be applications

- and very few webapplications need to be SPA

Though it would be very boring (as nearly all work that is valuable), and thus
we have proliferation of SPAs that present static text.
Five years from now when I have a problem with this I will surely remember that at a keynote in 2017 something something 12 minutes and 12 seconds.
No knock against you, just wanted to point it out since it was so shocking for me.
Does FaceID recognize children as their parents?
I welcome adding Emoji to Unicode. I also welcome adding different skin tones to Unicode. I welcome everything that invites more people to engage with, appreciate, and feel included by technology.

I welcome a world where you don't need to be at all tech-savvy to get as much out of a computer as anyone else. People can drive without being engine-savvy, and I think it is fan-fucking-fastic that computing is moving in the same way.

Technology is such an amplifier for human activity, if everyone doesn't get to play, we're doing it wrong.

Any time anyone writes "this new thing that makes a system less elegant but opens it up to more people is a bad new thing" -- they are doing it wrong.
Yes, the ex post facto clause should provide immunity from prosecution in such cases (IANAL). But that’s not what I was trying to say. I was saying that the President could conceivably break an existing law, not prosecute himself, and then have his successor prosecute him.
A Mysterious Virus Is Killing Africans
In Norway, you pay an annual tax on basically everything you own (update: yes, everything you own, not everything you earn that year) past the first ~$180k. I don't really care what sort of "independence" this supports for somebody, I'm not going to live somewhere that makes you rent everything from the state, after paying exorbitant taxes to "buy" it.

update: corrected the cutoff figure with new exchange rates and policy updates, seems that two parties in NO are looking to eliminate the wealth tax.

added: keep in mind purchasing power differences in Norway, where basically everything is more expensive relative to the U.S. exchange value of the kroner. 1,480,000 NOK (source of the $180k figure) will buy you about 40 sqft of suburban apartment in Norway, on average.
Do you have any more info on the restaurants per capita? Google isn't very helpful.

I ask only out of mild interest. The village closest to me has ~30 and just 1200 residents. However, it's a tourist town and there are zero franchise fast food places, or the likes.

Wait, mostly disregard this. I was looking for the wrong town and now have a bunch of information.
Not only is this yet another cheap lie.

The next war is also being sold already to US|UK|alliance citizens: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41878123
PSA: Google is your competitor in search feel free to cry
Show HN: Hetelek – Jupyter Notebooks in the cloud (on powerful GPUs)
Now take that realization and apply it to racism, homophobia/transphobia, classism, other forms of misogyny and sexism besides outright physical sexual assault, and all sorts of other problems that plague our world. Sucks, huh.
Of course that's the basic problem, but if you don't lock your door, you'd still want to know who broke into your house?
There's a bunch of stuff! https://crates.io/categories/web-programming::http-server

However, it's still very much in early days, so there's no particular consensus, other than Tokio being the async I/O component. Much less mature than Go. We'll get there!
I tried it... Over 5 years ago on Android.
From the wikipedia formula. 2 ln 2 is about 1.4.
"Ever since we were able to grow the budget large enough for Tobias to work on Webpack full time..."

This is what the open source community needs. Steal the maintainers of the top 1% of open source projects from the "free market". The projects not already sponsored by corporations that is.

Or, why not work toward pairing these maintainers w/ companies who will let them spend most of their time working on said project. Might make it easier as far as fund raising is concerned.

I bet there's a niche for this second idea. It's not always obvious to the people cutting the checks just how valuable these side projects are to the world.
There are definite immunities at play; the comment I responded to seemed to imply that there was a blanket speech immunity, and the reasoning it provided would have made it a complete blanket immunity. That’s what I was saying wasn’t the case.
The US economy is strong, and it's about to get even stronger
I just watched a documentary on the roman empire. And you know what- it was the same thing there. There leaders invented attack be foreign forces to justify there campaigns, which was basically taking a massive warmachine to pillage and enslave medieval countrys.
And it was all in the name of self-defense. To protect civilisation. To keep the life-style going.
Every roman citizen participating got his own little bribe as a soldier, or simply by feeling better then the outsiders.

This guy should be send to Den Haag. So that this idea of universal justice for once gets justice. Not just for those defeated.
And there should be something honor reducing to convicted warcriminals. Anyone related bearing the family name of a convicted warcriminal should be forced to wear a black shawl in public.
Incredible. I can't wait to see the twin grow up, become doctors, study the human brain and give a TED talk about their discovery.
Ask HN: Tamper-proof non-repudiation records in PostgreSQL and avoid blockchains?
I am developing an HIPAA compliant audit log application. I am expecting about ~4K/min of audit record insertion. And as such one of the key requirements is tamper proof. Short of using a gigantic hammer like http://bigchaindb.com/ how can I ensure tamper proof and non-repudiation using PostgreSQL.?
The overwhelming majority of my non white friends use emojis with skin tone modifiers.

This emoji business is sticky. On one hand, I agree that the current way is not sustainable - we can’t keep adding dozens of weird concepts like POO WITH CONCERNED FACE every year.

On the other hand, if you have a system whose goal is to represent humans, but certain humans feel that it can’t represent them (eg http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/18/europe/hijab-emoji-teenager/in...), then you have a problem.
Maybe the Unicode consortium made a mistake by specifying them as bright yellow, which people now associate strongly with the Simpsons, where white people are represented as bright saturated yellow.

Those who aren't as familiar with the Simpsons would probably associate yellow with Asian --- which sort of makes sense due to them originally being Japanese.

Coloured emoji don't make much sense to me either --- they are text like any other, and should thus be represented with the same colour as the text.
Effective tax rate in finland is around 50%

https://tradingeconomics.com/finland/personal-income-tax-rat...
and seems to come from a income tax rate that is similar to the US 25-31% but also includes retierment / social monies around 18+3%, so ends up effectively being 50-51. Also capitol gains is taxed at 30% for anything over 30k euros.

I found this info with one google request, first 2 answers.

So the tax rate is OOM 2x the US.

So it's not anywhere near as much money % wise.

But yes we allocate it differently.
The non-adults who are set off by (potentially anything) and then escalate to public forums to demonize others instead of themselves reacting with empathy or resilience then say what adults act like. Funny.
Practical Node.js book on GitHub
I thank you for your clear and helpful amplifying remarks, delivered without snark or otherwise unhelpful edge. I must confess that over time here on HN, I have become aware that many posters seem to consider only a very small section of the economy (and indeed, a very small part of technology) when making general statements, and I do find myself erring on the side of assuming people have not considered the ninety-something percent of jobs that do not involve making web pages and web apps. Mea culpa.
Why would blue be any more neutral than yellow?
Oh, you shun any product of science then?
Is this your first time on HN? People will complain about anything and everything. They'll incessantly dismiss anything that they think they could have done better in a weekend.

There's this whole FUD around Javascript in general. If you didn't know better, you'd think there were client-side tools in other ecosystems where you didn't have to learn or credentialize in anything to build a full-featured client.
Nest – A progressive Node.js web framework
So you'd rather they have access to nothing than access to a portion of the Internet? That's a pretty cut off your nose to spite your face argument.

This is free access to a huge trove of information.
The hardest part might be noticing in the first place that your FaceID model has drifted away from only your face.
What does nodejs community think about this framework?
If what happens to your income past the first $100k is a major concern for you, you are very much in the minority in the US, as the median family income in the US is about $60k[1], and most Americans have less than $1k in savings.[2]

Sure, rich people have little to gain by having a great social safety net, as they can just rely on their own money for all of that. But for the vast majority of Americans, it matters.

Also, for those who are complaining that the US has such high taxes, you should know that the US itself used to tax income of over 90%.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...

[2] - https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/13/how-much-americans-at-have-i...
Most scientists now reject the idea that the first Americans came by land
I think people might agree with you more if you wrote this in a tone that is even slightly condescending. If your approach to responding to people who disagree with you is trying to shame them for their behavior and shut them out then nobody will ever want to hear out your argument or consider it.
Two examples of the holistic view:

- Finland is adopting a more holistic education system than compartmentalised subjects http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39889523

- (Not Finland but really cool) retirement home with a co-located pre-school benefits both the elderly and the young kids https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/01/the-pr... :

> Another resident with advanced Alzheimer’s whose speech was incomprehensible garble was able to speak in complete, fluid, and appropriate sentences the moment she was wheeled into the baby room. “You could immediately see that she had accessed some part of her brain that had raised several kids,” Hoover says.
found the self-taught programmer :)

No offense intended; I'm self-taught as well and can appreciate the sentiment immensely. But damn do I wish I made a few different decisions during high school. I'm ~1 year into my web development career and I'm concerned about what happens when I get bored of building APIs and web apps -- I seem to have a talent for picking up new skills pretty quickly, but I'm afraid my lack of formal math and algorithms training is going to limit the career trajectory of self-taught programmers like me. That's without considering the ramifications of an irrelevant college degree.
> If one can read the thoughts of the other so easily, in my book it is the same person.

I can also read your thoughts. Are we the same person? The only difference is you need to put them in text, and she does it via electrical impulses.

Their thoughts are not integrated into a single entity, but rather they are able to communicate via a channel you don't posses. As evidence, when they need to share thoughts it takes them extra time, to me that means communication, not single entity.

Another way to put it: They can distinguish their own thoughts from those of their sister.

> am resident in Neurology

Then you should know that even a regular brain is really multiple independent "thinkers" that are wired to give the illusion of a single entity. Disrupt that wiring and the different "minds" will do their own thing, separately from the others (alien hand syndrome for example).

And I know that that sounds like an argument against what I'm saying.

It's basically the question of consciousness: Who is the "I" that is speaking. That alien hand has no consciousness. These conjoined sisters have two, because each can perceive itself as distinct.
I use Beeminder to keep myself accountable. Learning a language and taking 2 courses currently.
Maybe the guy is homosexual. Maybe his boyfriend will get pissed off now that the other homosexual men in the audience may react to him differently. Who knows

You even say that "a male being sexualized in a mostly male audience" is ok. HOW IS THAT OK? You literally can't make judgements about what is OK or not, because you can't empathize with each person in each scenario who "knows it better than you" and if someone gets upset because reasons

The point is even if everyone tries to act their best, you have no idea what will set her off, or the next person. And you are supporting a society where this behavior is OK. That is wrong.