skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The AP is a poor source for a typographic style guide. They are a wire service not professional typographers, and my speculation is that their conventions come from a context of typewriter manuscripts rather than properly typeset books. They eschew en dashes and use hyphens to indicate ranges (e.g. 10-20 instead of 10–20) – something no professional typographer would condone – because they are expecting someone with a typewriter to only be able to type hyphens, whereupon the choice is either one hyphen or two. So in a manuscript you get spaces around pairs of hyphens -- like so -- standing in for dashes. Their style guide is designed so that someone doing the newspaper typesetting can directly copy the typewritten manuscript over to the press without thinking about what kind of dash to use.
I wonder what it is with hacker news and the inability of people on it to understand simple dramatic exaggeration.

A more realistic estimate would be something like 40%. When I choose to, I write C or Erlang, so there is generally not much boilerplate needed in making things go. I would say 60% of my work is architectural stuff. How things should be designed, named, structured. What parts should plug into what, what functions and set of systems of POSIX to use, what makes most sense for future reading, etc.
Commodore Amiga Genlocks
> Software developers build abstractions, write tests, refactor and simplify older code, yet no such trend seems to be occurring for law. Why not?

Actually, the Common Law[1] (which the US, England, Canada, and other English-speaking countries) very much have a legal system that includes building abstractions, refactoring, and simplifying (though there are no tests). Judicial decisions are precedential and over time rules and tests are discarded or re-written to be easier to use and more applicable.

I think the parent comment is discussing legislation (which politicians enact), but the process by which judge made law develops and improves is very similar to how code evolves and improves.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law
Antsle, on-premise alternative for public cloud solutions like AWS
Don't use Facebook or any of their properties like Instagram, Whatsapp, etc. Just as important, tell others not to use Facebook (et al). Tell your children not to use Instagram and Whatsapp (they won't care about Facebook as that is 'for older people'). When someone proposes using Facebook to plan something point out that Facebook is not the right venue for such activities, use email instead. If your neighbourhood wants to start a 'Whatsapp group' tell them to use an alternative (Telegram comes to mind). If your local council wants to communicate through Facebook just tell them to quit doing so as they have no business pushing their constituents towards any commercial entity, let alone towards Facebook. Just steer anyone and everyone away from Facebook (and similar companies for that matter but Facebook is the one to kick to the curb first). Don't be a zealot and bring up this subject when there is no call for it but don't be shy to voice your opinion when it is warranted. Make sure to be able to answer questions as to why Facebook should be shunned.

Yes, you do run the risk of being seen as a Don Quichote who probably even uses Linux but so be it.
Where they are paying for peering agreements, aren't they already assured of equivalent performance regardless of any neutrality rules expiring?
The `ipfs add` command has a -r recursive flag for adding folders.
Thank you for your feedback. Could you please specify what can be improved with the images?
Never trust an annoucement about future products/features. I've got burned by Google/appengine several times..
> what the user wants rather than what they requested.

Amusing anecdote regarding this issue.

- I teach an introductory online chemistry class.
- If the students are determined enough, they can/do cheat on their quizzes.
- In one of my quizzes, I give the students a formula for a pretend material and ask them to compute its molar mass.
- If you perform the calculation, the molar mass works out to something like 108 grams / mole.
- If you try to Google the answer, Google is smart enough to know that my compound is unstable.
- Instead, Google provides the molar mass for a _related_ material (86 grams / mole)
- Each semester, I find a handful of students who dutifully tell me the answer is 86 g / mole.
With lithium-ion it's actually better for prolonging battery life to charge frequently rather than let it run down.
andy fillebrown's visualizations are so captivating, his video of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor is particularly excellent: https://youtu.be/f5vRrt0Q9Ew
> People who want to fight against the idea that these modern miracles (drugs that treat depression) are effective treatments for this debilitating, but curable disease,

The modern miracle drugs that effectively treat and cure debilitating depression are not SSRI's. Whatever benefits SSRIs have are probably a result of their influence on neurosteroids:

>> Certain antidepressant drugs such as fluoxetine and fluvoxamine, which are generally thought to affect depression by acting as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), have also been found to normalize the levels of certain neurosteroids (which are frequently deficient in depressed patients) at doses that are inactive in affecting the reuptake of serotonin. This suggests that other actions involving neurosteroids may also be at play in the effectiveness of these drugs against depression [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurosteroid#Role_in_antidepre...

Other miracle drugs are also helpful for addressing the cause. Big Pharma doesn't care about cause/effect, they just want patients on maintenance treatments.

Depressed people usually have some sort of metabolic problem, caused by thyroid problems, inadequate diet, etc. Emotional stress is usually a major factor too.

> belong in the same category as flat earth era, anti-vaxxers and now, apparently, "raw water" fans/advocates.

Where do you belong? Are you a tireless advocate for the status quo?
Those 2 services are a lot better than Facebook newsfeed, which is basically a pile of garbage!
I agree, computer students should learn C++ and write at least one exam using it, and if it is only to get acquainted with all the possible pitfalls. Extra points for the exam code if it passes Coverity, Valgrind and ASan/UBSan checks and input fuzzing.
I agree the article is incredibly long (him establishing his credentials is almost an article onto itself), but I assure you that the article is not just about him. :-)

One of the other commenters gave a succinct bulleted overview. I recommend you check it out, if you're interested in what the article was actually about.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16092602
8 hours of sleep every night

Tai Chi

Less social media, more in-person interaction
Click bait title. You can say the same about sums and multiplication, they are at the basis of most trillion dollar technologies :P
It could have been flagged multiple times (flags are additive). Even articles that have hundreds of upvotes can be killed by flagging if enough people flag them.
Library also available in Java[0] and to an extent in Golang[1], though the latter is incomplete.

S2 is fantastic for geofencing. Arbitrary regions can be covered by a set of S2 cells of varying level. A point (lat/lon) can be converted to a S2 cell of the smallest level (around a cm^2 of area on the sphere). Checking to see if one S2 cell is contained in another amounts to searching an integer range, since all children of a given S2 cell have IDs that fall within a fixed ranged. See also [2]

[0] https://github.com/google/s2-geometry-library-java

[1] https://github.com/golang/geo

[2] http://blog.christianperone.com/2015/08/googles-s2-geometry-...
I agree with you but then I believe that with the recent developments in video streaming (becoming mainstream) it would then be totally reasonable for ISP's to start charging a lot more for packages that give you the data to stream that much video.

It just seems like underlying the whole NN debate is the very large uptake in the average user's data usage over the last 10 years that is just sort of ignored when it comes to how do such upgrades get paid for and before such upgrades take place, who or what gets slowed down in the case of congestion?
If the caps apply equally to any and all data, I really have no problem with them, and neither should you.

We're just asking for a content-agnostic utility. Not "as much as you can eat". Consider if electricity was "unlimited". "Unlimited" is part of what got us into this mess in the first place. Delivering lots of data to each of many subscribers is just not that easy and cheap. At least with explicit caps companies can compete by offering higher caps. Instead of mysterious limitations on "unlimited".
> these markets exist because people buy these products.

Indeed. But when a poorly educated population with few alternatives ia actively marketed to[1], then perhaps the outcome is more a reflection of corporate exploitation than a reflection of informed consumer choices.

[1] http://www.lapoliticaeslapolitica.com/2013/03/in-mexico-coca...
None of these things are equivalent, so I’m not sure what you are trying to demonstrate with the hyperbolic whataboutisms.
Did they give you a formal semantics for the language in which you implemented algorithms? Or did you merely “prove” things about informal descriptions of algorithms?
_Evidence_:
> when was the last time you saw something that actually had to be explained come up in a televised debate?

_Question_:
> what do you think can be done to take back US society and make it a little closer to what our seemingly more critically-thinking predecessors had lived through?

_Logic_:
An individual can only critically think about or evaluate things that are presented to them.

_Issue_:
If something is glossed over, for whatever reason (be it too difficult to understand), it has not been [and likely will never be] presented for evaluation unless ____(Reason #1).

The issue doesn't end with the lack of presentation -- instead it ends with the consensus that it's OK or necessary to gloss over things because ______(Reason #2).
> I don't want to be a bummer, but video streaming might stress the hell out of the internet infrastructure. At some point, transmitting video online, on a large scale, at a good resolution, at peak hours, is going to be expensive.

This is really frustrating, since Netflix is usually not served over the internet, but directly from the ISP's head end. Netflix usage largely has no major impact on the world wide internet.

https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

https://gizmodo.com/this-box-can-hold-an-entire-netflix-1592...

ISPs don't even have to serve you internet access for Netflix videos. Netflix already hand delivers the data to your town and then pays cash to Verizon and Comcast to serve their already-on-local-network videos to you. That's all on top of the money you are already paying the ISPs to receive that exact same traffic.

All ISPs really do for Netflix is take traffic from a private local field office to your home. Frustratingly, they are often too cheap and lazy to even manage that.
Thanks for the shout out. Glad to see that post is aging well. Happy to answer questions about it if they come up.
> it's like we blame markets for our own lack of personal responsibility and consciousness.

The flip side is well paid professionals that come to work every day to work relentlessly to exploit weaknesses in peoples personal responsibility and consciousness.
Cache Control Immutable – A Year Later
A shame this comment was voted down. It is a pertinent question.
Payroll and general ledger. It’s hard to fathom how many billions of dollars are spent on payroll.
The Banana As We Know It Is Dying Again
There seems to be an increasing number of non-academic articles, essays and books that are expressing the idea that the Serotonin hypothesis of depression is flawed. It seems like the drug industry just picked up this idea in the 70s and has been running with it (to the bank) ever since

Anecdotally, I have come to believe that SSRIs have a temporary mood-altering effect, possibly combined with a placebo effect that wears off over time - as your body adapts to the induced serotonin imbalance. The only answer from the medical profession? Increase the dose.

I saw this with my own mother. She went from being a mildly depressed retired housewife to suicidal within the space of 12 months. She started on low-dose SSRIs which seemed to work for a while before she regressed. Each time she started to feel depressed again she would be prescribed with an increased dosage. This pattern repeated until she was taking the maximum 'allowed' dosage, by this point she was delusional, paranoid and suffered terrifying, persecution-style hallucinations - perhaps not surprising seeing how much her brain chemistry must have been out of whack.

Sadly, I'm making these observations with hindsight, she took her own life in 2015. I wish I could share this article with my dad, if I knew it wouldn't break his heart. Both she and my father couldn't share with their children how gravely ill she was until it was too late. They both trusted their doctors implicitly. What they weren't prepared for was the fact that the theory that formed the basis of her treatment was, it seems, no more than guesswork supported only by publication bias, wishful thinking and greed.

Ironically, one of my first web development jobs, way back in 2000, was at a 'medical communications company' where I created an intranet site for GSK (IIRC) for use by their salespeople to shore up the claims of the effectiveness of Seroxat/Paxil and counter negative studies. So, I guess that makes me complicit in all this too.
I'm not surprised at all. I bring it up because it's an example of a blatant net neutrality violation that many people agree is acceptable. Same goes for IP ingress filtering.
The government isn't in the video hosting business. I do have a right to equal access to the services the government does provide.
Years of strict exercise, diet, meditation, breathing techniques, various forms of therapy, and numerous self-help books did not cure my anxiety and depression. 2 weeks after starting a low-dose (10mg / day) of Lexapro made me feel better than I had in 10 years.

Don't be afraid of medication if other techniques fail. My life was ostensibly fine, with a good job, friends, and family. I had a chemical issue, which is solved to this day with Lexapro. I consider it a drug that saved my life.
From what I understand (very roughly) with ZFS or BTRFS at least it takes one flipped bit in the particular block of memory which has just been successfully checksummed and 'approved' by the filesystem as valid for a write operation. Those are quite a few hoops to jump through so let's not head towards melodrama just yet.
That "processor" has been out for at least ten years.
It doesn't take the contradicting interests in to account. People in IT should really stop to pretend that they are the only smart people that know how to run a business.

A cfo can easily understand the benefits of an organizational capability to continuously improve a core business asset. But he also understands the difference between capex and opex and needs to take decisions in order to achieve the strategic goals of the company. This strategy can or can not define software development (for a specific goal) as a core in house capability that gets an investment. This relates also heavily with the defined core business etc. Without understanding the long term strategy of a company, it does not make a lot of sense to come up with generic advice.

The ceo and the management board do generally (almost intuitively) understand which activities will generate competitive advantage. If they are not in the silicon valley hype, this can mean that they can make a deliberate choice to invest in other things than software teams. Is it really that unthinkable that other things than software can bring value to a company? Do all companies need to act like Google or Facebook?

>>for greater responsiveness and a higher benefits realization ratio, “product-mode” is a more effective way of working than projects.

This is a sweeping statement. This could definitely lead to higher benefits and lower responsibility for the consulting company. That is almost for sure. But that doesn't mean that a short living project organization is a bad idea by default. The choice needs a much more substantial argument like the probability of a positive realization result (depending on the complexity and uniqueness of the software) versus risk if it does not get realized etc. If it can't be bought of the shelf, it can be outsourced or developed entirely in house by long term perm employees...

>>it may feel unsound to those who are used to approving big change programs with detailed roadmap...

If a project can be predicted by a high enough level of certainty, I would say that there is nothing wrong with a detailed roadmap. Also here, a false dichotomy.
They have got some adoption. Android security model is somewhat capability security based.

However it is used in an insufficiently fine grained way. It does highlight some ways that it may not work if used for desktop, programs would just ask for large-grained capabilities (can I access all your pictures/files etc) and you get back to ambient style authority.

I think expecting the user to be an intelligent judge of what capabilities a program needs, is not realistic. I think something like agoric auction of capabilities might force programs to provide useful features to get access to data, might work. I'm exploring it anyway.
34C3 – Taxation (How the Double Irish Dutch Sandwich Works)
It's good to hear that Lenovo treats you better than Dell treated me. Is this their policy in general or do you have to buy a megabuck enterprise service contract (i.e. the one bonestamp2 identified as not competitive)?
To be honest, this guys approach to creating a myth around himself seems much more compelling and unique to me. As is the (post mortem) Vivian Maier story.
I don't see any real point in including zero rating under net neutrality, for several reasons.

1. The usual argument is that if an ISP can zero rate service X, that makes it harder for competitors of X to compete, and so we need to ban zero rating to encourage competition.

This argument fails because a last mile ISP like Comcast can easily side step any internet neutrality rules in offering X by making a deal with the X provider to serve the service from Comcast's own servers. Then it is not being provided over internet and so is out of scope for net neutrality.

They could even go farther, and not even use IP at all to deliver it from Comcast to the home. They run IP on top of lower level protocols, and they could use one of those lower level protocols to deliver to an app running on the set top box, which could then serve on the LAN using normal IP protocols (which would be out of scope for net neutrality because they are just running on a LAN in this case).

If we want to stop this for competition reasons, we'll need to use antitrust, not net neutrality. Antitrust cannot be evaded by simply changing the protocols.

2. We accept zero rating in every other or nearly every other common carrier service. In telecommunications. for example, I've never seen any objections to zero rated telephone service, whether paid for by the phone company (such as free calls to government offices), or paid for by the company called (commercial toll free numbers). In transportation, we don't get our feathers ruffled when a bus or cab company offers free rides (possibly paid for by a sponsor). What is different about internet?

Generalizing this, in general we allow nearly every provider of goods and services to give you MORE than you have paid for. As long as they deliver the service that you paid for, if they want to give you a gift of more service to promote a particular offering of their own, or to promote (possibly for pay) some sponsor, we allow it. Regulation is concerned with making sure they don't under deliver, not preventing over delivery.

It is hard to make a case to the typical consumer that there is something fundamentally different between, say, Safeway giving a discount on Pepsi, and an ISP giving a discount on bandwidth used for Spotify.

3. Suppose I'm a company selling something that uses a lot of bandwidth, such as a game that requires a large download. I'd like to pay major ISPs to zero rate it. If I cannot directly do that, but the ISP sells prepaid bandwidth cards that you use by entering a code from the card, I could simply buy prepaid bandwidth this way, and when someone buys my game I could give them a bandwidth code for their ISP to cover the costs of the download. Are we going to ban prepaid bandwidth to stop this?

If we want to get net neutrality back, and have it STAY back instead of just flipping every time we change which party is in control we need to keep it to just involving things ON the network. That's basically throttling, blocking, and paid prioritization. Billing is OFF the network. I think it should be reasonably possible to get bipartisan support for those.
The problem with your perspective is it's wrong. I don't mean to be mean to you, but it just isn't correct. The difference isn't culture, it's simply access to capital.

Here's an enlightening video[0], a 12-minute video about the representation of black families in media. It touches on the myth of black fathers not being involved with their kids, which is a good example of false attitudes that lead people to blame "culture" rather than systemic inequalities.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q21XGV2z7hw
It's worth noting that WebAssembly should go nicely with capability systems. Mark S. Miller started a thread on the mailing lists recently about making sure it stays that way.
This is very unhelpful advice, as we are talking about a massively influential platform and the advice is ‘dont let it influence you.’

Our society has more dependencies than node.js, and the incentives in facebook’s world are skewed toward big payoffs for bad actors who will benefit at the expense of all others.

I’d classify this comment as fitting a very common paradigm called ‘If I were the god this would be my simple solution, so let us dispense with further discussion of the matter.’
> Can't we just educate people about things and use some self control to tackle these kind of issues

How has that been working out so far?
That's how I've often described it before. Feeling like shit when your life is terrible is normal. Feeling like shit when your life is awesome is not.

The problem is that the pill often works regardless of why you feel like shit.
The Hackers EDC bag
Netflix is already paying for a lot of infrastructure, local CDN boxes, to the point where ISPs only have to stick the fiber in - but they are unwilling, out of allegiance to their cable business or because they realize that if people start to use their 50 Mbit internet, it will become painfully obvious how oversubscribed, underdeveloped and underinvested their infrastructure is.

The ISPs are not keeping up their part of the bargain.