skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They're going to have a lot of issues with that policy long term. The US started doing that in the 50s and 60s only to find it raised crime rates and decreased economic productivity (these became what we know now as "the projects"). Not until Jane Jacobs came along did we begin reversing that trend, and we are still dealing with poor urban planning in the form of suburbs and luxury apartments.
It's by the same author which gives insight into his programming mindset and critical thinking ability.
This is exactly how I got out of a final project in middle school. Wiped my HDD with a Neodymium magnet right before the deadline and claimed my computer was "broken"... Of course this wasn't done for highly paranoid reasons where I needed to ensure the data was really all gone, but funny story nonetheless. People are more sympathetic when they think a computer "randomly" stopped working.
This is an amazing story of progress, technology, and hope. Do you need to make it about what it costs to you, or can that discussion maybe wait for another context?
For quickly destroying hard drives, drive big nails through the entire case in several places. Restoration is at least very manual and annoying, in many cases not worth the effort.

If you need more security, building a simple furnace isn't too hard:

http://eecue.com/c/driveslag
is he trolling or what? You want an API.. it already exists.. Stored Procs, parameterized queries or ORMs which will use parameters........
Given the Koch's involvement it's probably more about throwing a tantrum over things that threaten their other investments than "nothing".
I like the spirit behind this idea, but in practice I guess it's tricky.

"gail.com" is probably one of the most valuable typo squats, but it's also someone's name.
CVS Is Said to Agree to Buy Aetna
Making of Mini Axe
eBay for one ran on Sun - and then switched to IBM servers around 2002-03
Here's my anecdote: In 2006, while sitting at my desk playing a video on the hard disk drive of my Thinkpad T22, I held a single neodymium magnet (harvested from an old hard disk drive) about 6 inches from the left side of the unit (where the ~40GB-ish Travelstar 2.5" PATA disk was located). The video froze, Windows XP blue-screened, and the hard disk drive started emitting a ~10Khz whine. I jerked my hand away from the PC immediately when the whine started.

BIOS would no longer detect the disk on that machine, or any other I tried it on (on both USB-to-PATA and honest-to-goodness motherboard PATA controllers). The drive spun up but made a repeated ticking sound (I assume seeking back and forth looking for servo tracks).

I sent the drive to Kroll Ontrack (because, stupidly, I had billing data that wasn't backed-up on the drive). The report I received back indicated that 80% of the drive's sectors were unreadable.

As an aside: The data I was looking for was ASCII text and Kroll Ontrack was completely unhelpful in just sending me a bitstream image of the drive so I could grovel thru looking for data I needed. Being plain ASCII, their "file carving" tools didn't locate any of the data. (They sent me a "preview" of the data they'd located, and while it got lots of Microsoft Office-format files, it didn't have any ASCII text files). I offered them a 3x multiple of the rate they asked for file-level recovery to simply send me the bitstream image of the disk that they'd already made. They wouldn't do it, and wouldn't even let me pay to talk to somebody who understood what I was saying. I ended up taking a major loss on the billing data I destroyed. I'll never recommend them to anybody.

I won't ever play with neodymium magnets around spinning rust media again.
This isn't a case of young whippersnappers not knowing what a cathedral looks like. This is a case of the system getting so large that the combinatorics are no longer surmountable.

If I'm just starting on a program, and I realize that I zigged where I should have zagged, I just go through a handful of small files and make them zag. I believe Knuth did the same thing and re-wrote tex after his first attempt.

Once the system gets larger, updating every boundary and interface to something sane falls somewhere between costly and insane. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for a re-do, it's just that nobody in the private sector is going to foot that bill until we're in crisis mode, and the wizards who remember what the mistakes were aren't getting any younger...
>the diversity policy is about making sure top talent doesn't go elsewhere

From what I know that doesn't seem to be the case at all, it's about projecting a positive image of your company (The candidates skills are secondary) (Though in theory the standards should be identical)

The hiring practices should be based upon who would be the best candidate (Experience, technical skills, personality, Education)

When you simply focus on what objective skills you need as an employer, you should find "Diverse"/minority candidates in proportion to what percentage of top candidates they occupy.

This surely creates the most level playing field?
out of interest, do you also work on a reverse solution, text-to-speech? Most open source engines sadly still can't compete with commercial alternatives.
Zach Oakes, the guy who made this, is great. Obviously a tech powerhouse, but also very entertaining to watch on his youtube videos.

Any tools that make Clojure easier for people to get started with are welcome. Maybe he'll get bored one evening and crank out a Phoenix-like framework for Clojure :) hint hint. Maybe some Patreon love will help.
Doing the equivalent of "maybe chaining" isn't hard in c++ & quite elegant in c++17 in my view

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7690864/haskell-style-ma...
Depends on the bitrate.
SepidKhan: An alternate for Persian/Arabic braille
Yes misleading title

So whenever stuff like this pops up it's this read-between-the-lines idea that bothers me, but I am going to play along.
OK, let's say there were scientific evidence on the biological part. What do you want me to do with that information? What exactly are people hinting at that constantly emphasize that information?

If we could stop this fixed mindset nonsense we would be so much better off. The brain has incredible plasticity, lets work with that! The wander off for food and mates theory that they bring up here, how applicable is that for anyone in current society? All genders can benefit from spatial ability, so we should all practice it :)
Possibly export fees?

The article touches on the merchant advantage is reduced import costs, and pre-existing logistics network.

I wished alot of Indian ecommerce sites would ship out to North America easily... But not many of the big ones.

China subsidizes delivery of packages... And why they can hawk an item for under a dollar including shipping. (Heck in Canada, it's minimum $1.20 to send a letter to the states)
Your adversary probably isn’t the NSA, it’s commercial tracking services. Their business is tracking the general public, they don’t care about one weird person.

Unless avoiding this becomes common practice and then the whole story changes.
I think an experiment of the form no intervention vs more hugs would be ethical.
> This just mentions 'an adult' without going into detail of whether this adult has children him/herself etc, or whether the adult knows the baby, or was even the parent of the baby.

Quoting from the study paper [1]:

> Experiment 2. Infants sat upright in a high chair facing the female experimenter at a distance of 70 cm.

It doesn’t say anything more about the experimenter. All we know is that in all experiments it’s the same adult woman.

Note also that "this article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed" [2].

[1]: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2017/11/24/108...

[2]: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/11/24/108878
Ask HN: Fundamental Bitcoin Questions
With all the hype about Bitcoin, maybe we can have a real discussion about the potential and longevity of it? Thank you!

What can I do with Bitcoin that I can't do right now? I’ve never made a payment with Bitcoin, and never felt the need to. What have I been missing out on? How will my experience of buying from Amazon, or paying my bills, be different with Bitcoin in terms of convenience, speed and costs? Is that something that banks and payment processors are going to be unable to replicate?

I can send the coins somewhat anonymously (although not completely) but what practical use is that unless I’m doing something illegal? Since Bitcoin is not totally anonymous and governments are getting increasingly interested in the identities behind customer accounts at Bitcoin exchanges, is this a strength at all?

What will the effects of a downturn in world economy be? We have low interest rates, for instance, and households being in record debts in many countries. When rates increase, people face higher interest costs and start run out of savings, won’t they go to their bitcoins to get some more fiat currency?

How can Bitcoin handle a sudden rush of conversions from Bitcoin to fiat currency? Will the system be able to handle that without absolutely crashing? Could people lose their faith in the idea of getting rich simply by purchasing some bitcoins in such a situation? And then what?

The people I know don’t invest because of the technology, or because want to use bitcoins in the future; they invest because they want to make more dollars and euros. True, their reasons may not matter if there's a real reason for the value of Bitcoin. Rarely does the world reward people for irrational behavior.

Also since the price ”always goes up,” are people ever going to be able to sell, considering the price is always supposed to go higher and they fear missing out of future profits?
Exactly. Never give a be range either. The lowest number is now your estimate.
Exact same thing happened off the coast of Dorset:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navitus_Bay_wind_farm

I'm about 80% convinced that the MP behind it - Robert Syms, was in the pocket of somebody who saw a large wind farm threatening their investments in other forms of power generation. The idea that this was actually about the view is laughable.
To be clear, and not that it necessarily makes it better, but I wasn't saying "what [intoxicating substance] are you on", but "what are you on" as a British turn of speech, meaning "what are you trying to say here?" I admit it's a bit sharp, but bannable? In any case will be more careful.

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/8540/what-is-wha...
Nothing that i am actually worried about:
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2017-02-...

around 5500 in 2016.
Not a HN app, but works fine: Reeder + feedbin.me

Keeps you logged in if you want to comment/upvote. Tracks all stories that managed to main page via RSS feed.
A lot of people dislike the terseness of that style (especially the use of operators.) I'm not one of those people, but I can understand their point of view. Fortunately, Haskell also lets us write code in a way that managers can understand.

getCuteCat img = do
cropped <- findCat img
withTie <- addBowTie cropped
withSparkles <- makeEyesSparkle withTie
return (addRainbow (makeSmaller withSparkles))
Interesting info - but what does that mean in conclusion?

what proves us that the skills necessary to lead bigger teams or whole companies are so scarce that they have to be paid orders of magnitude more?

Put another way: is it proven that the pay needs to rise with the same or even any multiplier as the people you are “responsible for”? (and i even have to understand what that responsibility means - i saw too many bad managers doing bad in terms of people as well business. who takes responsibility for thousands of failed and misconducted IT projects,their exploded costs and burned out people, to speak only of my personal area of work?

Ok, maybe it’s the money you are responsible for... if you have to decide about a certain amount of money, especially in expenses, you might be prone to bribery as somebody who wants to sell your company something for a few millions could easily give you an “extra” of a few hundred thousands to buy from him and this would make uou “earn” a multitude of a months wage with just one signature.

But besides this? I see no proof that skills to handle certain management tasks are really so scarce that those who get these jobs get hundreds or some even millions a month for doing them. And they certainly don’t work hundred or thousand times more than others - that would make for extreeeeeme long days.

It might sound like bashing, but to me these questions are real, and i wanna know the answers.
It's one article out of about 100, which also ignores all of his other writing. Is this insight you think you can rely on?
Was meritocracy ever the priority? To my knowledge, at least the idyllic way this site sees it, meritocracy has never been in practice. It's merely been an ideal "strived" for, the same way a Christian may strive to live free of sin.

What likely happened: We came the realization that what we consider "merit" is highly subjective and may not even correlate with better outcomes. Once that sank in, all bets were off.
One of the things that is nice in outlook; adding a second time zone. Shows up in your calendar next to your own time slots. Would love to see that feature with more than two zones.
I was a crowdfunding supporter of the open-source, distributed, federated social network Diaspora (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network)?wpro...) but it never really got off the ground. In a chillingly tone-deaf tongue-in-cheek fashion, Zuckerberg also contributed some funds to that campaign... that was almost a decade ago, before he invested any effort in managing his public image (or maybe he genuinely meant well, I don't know).
All work is of equal cost, but not all work is of equal value. The best work is the work that utilizes each person's particular talents and abilities to their fullest potential so they can realize the most value from their work. A lot of life for people is figuring out what they're good at, or at least good enough at to be useful.

Being at the bottom of the economic ladder makes this easier, since creating value good enough for survival is the primary goal and a lot of things done well enough can do that. Often though higher talents are not used or recognized in the daily grind and the ability to create more value is not utilized. For example, I worked at a grocery store as a teenager and the store management would roll their eyes when I would come up with all sorts of ideas for things that were above my pay grade. My next job after that was doing C programming on financial software. I saw my old boss at the grocery store one day and told her about my new job. She chuckled and said she imagined I might go on to do something like that.
I always hated that scene, because it fundamentally changed the character of Mr. Scott from engineer to engineering manager. Which, he was, but that wasn't what made his character so compelling to begin with.

LaForge was a competent engineering manager. The writers tended to focus more on the character's people management skills (and, sometimes, terrible personal relationship stuff). He kept things running smoothly. He was smart. You could imagine a detailed maintenance work log for every system on the ship, and there'd be no gaps in it ever since he took the position of chief engineer.

But while Scotty cared about his staff, it was the machinery that he knew inside and out. He never needed to conjure up a hologram of the designer of the warp engines, because he knew them as well as anyone else. His maintenance logs would have gaps because he'd know which things actually needed regular attention, and which ones were just bureaucratic nonsense. He didn't just understand all of it on the technician level, but on the theoretical level too, enabling him to pull off some unlikely saves.

He actually was a miracle worker and maybe one of the best fictional representations of an engineer, and that one scene was written to make him look a little more like a bureaucrat.
Have you tried Firefox Focus?
I've never met a programmer who has a problem with learning parameterized SQL queries. But I've met plenty of old code that does, created before this sort of stuff was taught. In my experience, it's mostly the legacy code which has the greatest risks.
I'll 2nd this. I've been using them for a few years now and have been satisfied with their services.
There are countries giving citizenships already for the educated bunch. But most of this is catch22 - you have to have the smart people to attract even smarter people.
How to make iron throne phone charger
They are ugly and they are noisy hence why most people don't want them near them.
I feel like this is a blog post from 2003 or something, and the audience is PHP developers who are writing inline SQL statements.
I agree with you, but I find the whole vision to be pretty sad and fighting against what we intrinsically value as humans: deep connection.

How does this work when some people have families and don't want to live and be friends with work people? Are they ostracized? What if I have hobbies, friends from HS or college, siblings, etc. and want to spend time with them instead of increasingly with my workmates. This sounds like it's going to increase cliquey-ness, not improve culture.

There is already an old model out there that sort of already lives this way: IT or management consultants who travel every week. I did this for 10 years. You become great friends with your colleagues - until the project ends or some other break occurs. Then...nothing, unless keeping in touch on each other's birthdays on Facebook is enough for you.

In retrospect it all felt very vapid and superficial - just people trying desperately to make connections to get them by, but not much "built to last."
So redefining words so your argument makes sense isn't a valid tactic. From a dictionary:

xen·o·pho·bi·a
ˌzenəˈfōbēə,ˌzēnəˈfōbēə/Submit
noun
intense or irrational dislike or fear of people from other countries.

Nimby
ˈnimbē/Submit
noun
a person who objects to the siting of something perceived as unpleasant or potentially dangerous in their own neighborhood, such as a landfill or hazardous waste facility, especially while raising no such objections to similar developments elsewhere.
Soy Fields Forever
No, this is all wrong. By the time you apply your equal tests, it's already way too late. The societal damage has been done, and you're going to confirm inequalities that already exist. You shouldn't hire someone just for being a minority, but as a human being you should care if one group is inexplicably doing worse at some task, and work to figure out why and correct it. I assume you know that there are no biological differences between races that are significant in the workplace, and nearly zero significant different differences between sexes. Despite this, it is trivial to find extreme inequalities in the workplace that can't be explained at all by biology. You despise "artificial equality", but this is artificial inequality. It is deeply immoral to not care about this. It is totally reasonable to be opposed to diversity quotas and affirmative action and such as a solution, although there are good arguments in favor, but it is not reasonable to say "let's never even ask questions about it so we won't have to think about it".

In this particular case, we find that men and women perform differently on a mental task, but there's no obvious reason to expect a difference. If we never asked the question, women would be underrepresented in jobs that require this task, and would disproportionately fail at equally applied tests. This is unfair, especially if the inequality is caused by differences in their upbringing. The solution is not to hire women despite their worse performance, but to apply training to correct the inequality, and then continue to hire the best. Again, if we never asked the question, we would perpetually have an inequitable and inefficient system, even if all employers treated candidates exactly equally. In the longer term, the goal should be to figure out the root cause of this inequality and fix it, so we don't need to do this extra training.
Well put.

Having worked with plenty of software developed by the priesthood in the era of the cathedral might I observe that it was mostly fractally terrible. For every UNIX there were so many terrible pieces of software, and UNIX itself is pretty fractally horrible. (See “The UNIX hater’s handbook” for thorough criticism of UNIX as it was when when Raymond published his book.)
> IoT Enterprise and LTSB are for embedded systems, they lack many of desktop applications and features (like Cortana) found in "regular" Windows.

I view that as an advantage. That's why I use LTSB whenever I set up a Windows desktop for anyone at work.
Yes, tested and working for 10+ years now. Also works well if usage is capped/throttled after a certain amount and you wish to 'reset' the connection. Try not to abuse this on a shared network obviously, but if you have a legitimate need it's very simple.
But if you already have null then the method could return null, empty optional or optional with value.
Good links, thanks!
The irony is that European universities are one of the reasons we are stuck with the journal publishing model. I have spoken with tenured professors about this, and in general European universities are more concerned with the name of the journal publishing company that publishes the articles a professor has published for things like hiring and granting tenure. The attitude at European schools seems to be that there is a group of companies responsible for maintaining high-quality journals, and that publishing in journals not operated by the incumbents is questionable. As a result, researchers have trouble pursuing alternative publishing models e.g. running journals over the Internet without the likes of Springer/Elsevier/etc.

(My own experience is that American schools are too fixated on the names of the journals, but less concerned with the company that publishes the journal. So it would still be pretty tough to break the current model, although not as difficult as it would be with Europe.)
I would much rather have the certainty that I get working high quality products with no hassle and solid return policies, than save a few percent extra on price.
If Amazon turns into Walmart, or eBay, they have lost.
> Being in politics is supposed to mean being a public servant.

That's what the powerful tell the naive. Politics is about power and money.
Now I really want to take that course. 15 hours is a low investment for something like this.
"Honey, why are your hundred grams of oatmeal taking up 5 bowls?"

"I'm not sure! It must be exceptionally light."
If this turns every CVS into a uniform, inexpensive office/urgent care/etc., particularly with telemedicine, I'll be happy -- the "minute clinic" stuff already provides cheaper and more convenient access to care, but CVS+Aetna+some kind of EHR could do something amazing.
Hands-on with the PocketBeagle: a $25 Linux computer with lots of I/O pins
WeWork is a strange company. They lease office space, but have somehow hyped that into a much larger valuation than other companies which lease office space.
Love binds people in ways raw power does not, but its yoke is light.
It was definitely never achieved, but at least people gave a shit about it. Thats no longer the case, and it's not in the mainstream monoculture that people seem to be convinced is somehow anti-establishment.
No. You need to cast it into the fires of Mordor. Or something similar.
100k is low even for engineers in the bay
Best HN comment I've ever read.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11465978
It's about 4 years old.