skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
70% of Win10 users totally happy with our big telemetry slurp, beams Microsoft
Just had a similar thing happen with me. Python wasn't the best language for the job and I had already written a prototype. Trouble was that at least one member of the team really didn't want to learn a new language so we said fuck it and decided to do it in Python. While I wish we had chosen the best tool I can see that a team member being viscerally opposed is a bad enough con to override all the pros of the language selection. It sucks but it's reality.
Your reductio-ad-absurdum assumption is that because some people don't want to have children - no one else will either. But the fact remains, there are people who genuinely want to and those who don't. It should be personal choice, not something forced upon them.
I’ve been involved on the payout side of the equation. I disagree with your position.

BB’s are complicated and can be messy. You never know what the behavior of the participant will be after the award. Someone had to fight for approval of this payout at significant career risk for themselves. If we broadly assume bad faith on the reporter or on the recipients, we’ll lose the protection that bb’s can provide and white hats will be more at risk of CFAA prosecution. We need to be more willing to make mistakes when it comes to these situations.
Sometime in the 40's and 50's, American marketing worked to convince everyone that parenthood (and especially Motherhood) are this beautiful, sanctified experience. They did everyone a disservice when they did this; such a belief was not prevalent before then. Before that, having kids was seen as a duty to continue the family line at worst, and at best a pretty intense effort that one willingly engaged, because well life is about duty and hard work.

Modern society is all about the individual, in very pervasive and insidious ways. And that's what your final point speaks about: Having kids gives us a reason to think beyond today, beyond money, beyond MY wants, MY needs, MY life, MY MY MY MY MY.

Having children is selfless, in ways that people without kids cannot comprehend. And it is not a glorious, noble sacrifice. It is painful, scary, hard work. And it's worth it, because of the person you become when you matter to someone more than just yourself.

Most of the comments I saw in the article I consider selfish, childish, and shortsighted. "I hated fatherhood and I don't like the people my kids became." Well gee, maybe those things are connected. "I resent my kids because I keep thinking about all the things I wanted to do." Speechless. Like a 4 year old screaming on the floor of WalMart because they want a piece of candy.

I was raised to think about others and about my place among them. In almost ALL the comments in the article, I see otherwise. I can't respect their position even if I understand it. They're just a bunch of adults who never learned what being adult means.
Almost no influence as related to spatial structure; I tend to view spatial structure as an information theoretic manifestation.

On the other hand, chemical engineering had a big influence on how I reason about distributed systems. That discipline is essentially about the design of complex, continuous flow, coordination-free distributed computation systems that are robustly stable in an efficient equilibrium. It maps directly to computer science but has a concept of the problem space that I think is much more refined than what you commonly see in computer science though it is never expressed in computer science terms. But it makes sense, it is chemical engineering’s One Job.
Wired, it gives me a location 3 miles away from my house.

Smartphone, it want to use GPS. That's kind of cheating, isn't it?
Really depends on the problem. If it's run-of-the-mill performance-non-critical then Python is fine. But if you need distributed fail-safe work then Erlang/Elixir is the way to go.
Generally for backend, Go is pretty good. Rust is a bit immature so would only use it in specialist cases. C and C++ is only used to call other libraries.

I found Julia to be good for general purpose workloads as well, e.g. I have a Go server that queries MongoDB and I process the return resulst in Julia, which is a great gluing language!
Solar wind must play a big part.
Perhaps a little melodramatic of a statement by the gist author. But the point is these settings are insecure by default. Exploitable by Mozilla, and perhaps by third parties.
When the Soviet Union Paid Pepsi in Warships
Kentucky to Require Literacy Tests for “Certain Populations” to Receive Medicare
Being overly generous on the severance can create more problems than it solves as employees looking to move on can milk it. It is pretty easy for a smart person to get themselves fired if they want to without totally trashing their reputation.

In my experience it is best to fire as soon as you are starting to think about it (people can’t change even if they want), but don’t be a dick. If you have been a good manager and your expectations have been clear then an employee will understand why they are being fired.

If you want to be generous be generous with the hiring bonus. This way everyone is rewarded, not just the bad performers.
Venture investors want to hear crazy ideas, not pragmatic plans. When I first pitched investors, I was talking about how we would add customers slowly at first, because that’s how enterprise SaaS works. Honesty is always a good policy. But those pitches did not go well.

I'd love to hear investors' thoughts on this one. lpolovets, are you around?
With the exception of a couple of sites, I rarely turn on javascript.

(There are a few sites where the homepage will have just show something like "turn javascript on to see this site"; I just take that as an invitation to leave the site and, if necessary, to search for an alternative.)

About the only thing I'm having difficulty with at the moment are TV listings: was able to see TV listings without javascript on zap2it until last week, but have not yet found an alternative. Anyone have any suggestions?
Maybe able-bodied Boomer should work longer.
Well, Meltdown proves the formerly-paranoid Javascript rejectors were actually insightful.
My thoughts on this: https://hackernoon.com/yes-python-is-slow-and-i-dont-care-13...
...which is named the Great Salt Lake, by the way.
I remember the lunches I used to have back in primary school up in Scotland; instead of having a school dinner, you used to go down to the chip shop, and their 'lunch' was a bag of chips, and you got a free potato fritter. So it was essentially a bag of chips, with a really big chip.

Frankie Boyle
I agree - Python is great and rather neutral (as soon as snake_case_naming stops causing you nausea and as soon as you stop worrying about types and the fact you can't make a class member truly private) yet it has one thing I really hate - the module/package system. Coming from C# I could never "grok" it in Python (might anybody have a link to a great intro in this subject optimized for a C# mind - I'd be more than grateful) and being unable to split a single namespace into a number of files is outrageous (especially for an ADHD person who can't stand long code files and importing every this and that manually everywhere).
Future HN Headline: On the exploitation of pdfviewer via html2pdf.
Well... where I live, the post office is opened from 9am to 12pm and from 2pm to 4pm. On Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Only in the morning for Wednesday.

I desperately try to send something since Monday. Without success.
That works until the app starts using certificate pinning.
Uh, no.

In FY2016, it ran a surplus of $23 billion. For FY2017 the surplus was $35 billion.

Stats here: https://www.ssa.gov/policy/trust-funds-summary.html
You have two of the passenger pegs, and (typically, unless you crash in a truly spectacular fashion) only one side to land on.

Your riding pegs are designed to fold so that you don't go flying when riding on the limit.

(Source: Used to ride MCs, and got through a low speed yet very expensive high side. Have also been dragging my knees and shaving the pegs at the Phillip Island GP Circuit.)
Rice's theorem is a bit more direct here: C is Turing complete, some C programs derefernce null pointers, and some don't. Therefore, the question of whether a an arbitrary C program derefernces a null pointer is in general undecidable.

But I don't think the Op was claiming it was possible to do this perfectly, just possible to write very useful tools. You will always have either flase positives or false negatives (or I suppose inputs where you just hang).

Turing completeness is the bane of static analysis, but that doesn't make it a fruitless endeavor.
Unintended side-effect of Uber, Taxis to have dynamic pricing
Trust fund is targeted to run out in 2034.

Source: https://www.ssa.gov/policy/trust-funds-summary.html
"The guy who ruined DogeCoin" is also an interesting read[1]. Things didn't turn out so well for him[2]

1. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/78xqxb/the-guy-wh...

2. https://news.bitcoin.com/ryan-kennedy-rapist/
The author of the book that makes that claim has a tendency to exaggerate. Here is some discussion of his earlier book, when it was just $200 billion he was claiming: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556
Not for cancer, no.
Kraken Goes Down for 40 Hours, Drawing Mt. Gox Comparisons
I love it, almost as wild of a read as the "gravitational pull of Pepsi aisle universe" document.

Also it's just super great how they call diet Coke a "sparkling beverage choice" a whole bunch of times instead of cola. Coke has this signage like "balance what you drink and do" in stores as if Any significant number of consumers will be able to offset their delicious corn syrup drinks with water and a bike ride instead of slumping back in a cubicle at the end of their lunch break.

I do enjoy a coke life (with stevia) and Pepsi max (more caffeine than mountain dew) from time to time so obviously I'm not immune to this marketing and will definitely keep an eye out for that new mango flavor. (whoops I just remembered my username; I've no association with the soda industry whatsoever.)
It depends on many factors. Choosing suitable tools for a project requires careful consideration.

Python is a popular language, but not the only one. So many languages exist for a reason. Of course you can always find justifications to reject a language, e.g. Python lacks compile time checking, C++ is outrageously difficult, Java code is full of boilerplates, Perl is a write-only language, PHP is just bad, etc. But all these languages are widely used for some reasons. Not only the popularity, you may also need to consider maintainability, performance, portability, libraries, licenses, etc.
Though I agree with you that bankers should face many many more personal repercussions to engaging in improper risk management, but stabilizing banks is not about bailing the rich. The financial system holds not only main street's deposits, but also future paychecks, loan re-payments, home mortgages and, well, basically anything to do with money. When that system stops working the world stops turning, so to speak.
On a certain day in 2007 Ford Motors didn't know whether they would be able to make payroll the next day, because the inter-bank money market has completely dried up. That's what bailing banks is about. Though again I agree in principal - bank shareholders, executives and board members (or partners) should've paid a much much higher personal price during all this.
I'm on a desktop with no wi-fi card and it's within a stone's throw, how the hell...
It might be because writing code is as close to magic as you can get. It does real world things, like banking and long distance communication, but it is invisible and in an arcane tongue.

If I see a bridge, I don't need to be an engineer to gauge if it is likely to support my weight. But if the bridge is invisible, I probably want significant assurance that no one is pulling a fast one here, so to speak.
The one thing I have learnt is it is never too early to fire. The only exception is if you haven’t been clear with your expectations.

The one counterintuitive piece of advice is don’t overpay (I made this mistake in version 1 of my company). Pay above the average the employee could earn elsewhere, but not too much over.

You want to pay enough that no one leaves to get a pay rise, but not so much that they can’t get a similar salary elsewhere. A smart unhappy employee that feels they can’t leave can cause a lot of damage in ways that are hard to identify and fix.

Edit. I think I was unclear about what I meant by average pay - it is not the average for the job title, but the average the employee could earn in the industry. These two numbers are close most of the time, but with high performers they will be significantly different.
I struggle with this problem with my small team of programmers.

The biggest problem is the unstated motivations at play around ego and ambition. People want to be influential. They want to use the latest technology. They want to be the ones to make important decisions around architecture and style. They have their personalities deeply bound up in the technologies they use, so technical merits and technical problems quickly translate into personal emotions around things - insecurity, defensiveness, secretive behavior, - all of which is unstated and manifests in passive ways.

Our problem is sort of the opposite though. We chose Python as the "backbone" language - the glue that holds other things together. However the team is small and inexperienced and mostly only know Python. So they persist in using Python for every other task as well. Unless I make it a hard requirement not to, they will pick it up and use it for performance sensitive things, things that have significant structural complexity where Python's type system weaknesses really hamper it.

So we have problems where we have a design meeting and we say "We need an X. X should do Y and Z". We all agree. Then I come back a few days later and team member A announces he implemented X "in his spare time". So we now have an X. Written in Python, which is not the optimal language I would have chosen. Only team member A understands it, so everybody else is a step behind and didn't have any input. Team member A made all architectural decisions for it. X is well written, seems to work and now that we have it, it is hard to argue time is well invested in writing it in a more optimal language.

What do I do? "Have a chat" with team member A (ie: discipline them?)? Praise them for taking on an important task? Do we rewrite this component? If I do all these things am I being heavy handed and causing untold harm to the team morale? But what are the consequences if I don't intervene - can we actually end up with good cohesive design if every team member is just steering the whole team in whatever random direction they happen to want?
If the search engine is unhappy, they will pay less money to be the default.
If Google is paying what Yahoo was, it's $300 million a year for the default search option on Firefox. Google pays Apple billions to stay the default on the iPhone as well.
Are there any other blockchain use cases at scale more than that of RippleNet?
Import several files into one, then import it elsewhere.
> being unable to split a single namespace into a number of files is outrageous

The usual solution to that is an __init__.py that pulls in the names from its subpackages. I'm sure you'll be able to find an example of that in basically any large open-source Python project.
Hmm, dubious claim here with the "Smart Gateway"

>> “The Smart Gateway can learn the availability of the connection to the cloud. After a successful transmission, it will follow that network next time. Otherwise, it will try another one,” says Zhang.

Considering,

>> Video cameras were spaced every 500 meters along the entire structure.

And,

>> Yang and his team developed the so-called Smart Gateway to receive data continuously from local sensors and then transmit it to a cloud server using whatever signal was available at the moment. That could include fiber, Ethernet, 2G, 3G, 4G, Wi-Fi, or Zigbee.

I'd be interested to see how their network holds up when streaming video to a gateway via Zigbee or video to the cloud over 2G (or even 3G). Considering the system is supposed to go into "continuous stream" mode during a natural disaster or other emergency, I'd guess this is also when the network would collapse. Oof.
Extortion is always wrong.
network.websocket.enabled=false

This isn't even in my about:config anymore. I'm pretty sure it was at some point. Did they remove the option to disable it for some reason?
eBay, PayPal, and Amazon are useless without JavaScript, just off the top of my head.
Brave new world is not comparable to 1984, quite simply, because ... one is about lack of empathy, the other lack of information.
A Stack Story
Getting shit done and pleasing clients can be seen as "greatness."

I write a shitload of PHP/jquery - and no one reviews my code. If it's done fast and works as expected my bosses don't care... and they'll listen to me over the front-end dev who wants to use React/Ruby.

Now I don't 'hate' any language and will try new things, but my point is that the definition of greatness can be completely different between companies, especially when the company isn't a tech company.
Curious about how it's worked for you. Why did you pick Bulgaria? How serious have you found language and cultural barriers to be? As an American (my assumption), how hard was it to open a bank account? Etc. Tnx.
Thermal loss. The molecules in a gas have certain kinetic energy distribution. Highest energy H and He atoms reach escape velocity in the upper part of the atmosphere.

Earth's magnetic field protects it from solar winds so Earth is not losing significant amount of any heavier atoms or molecules.
I believe that this is the idea behind reversible computing, which I would assume would require superconducting circuits needing energy only to drive inputs, and the CPU would expend negligible heat.
Respect the users: let them tell you what they want, when they want, and how they want.

To expand on this a bit, the past several years advertisers and attention brokers have focused on the difference between stated preferences and observed behavior, optimizing for the latter. Unfortunately it seems optimizing for observed behavior amplifies the worst of our base instincts, so even if it improves the bottom line in the short term, we are degrading our civilization in the process.

It's possible a similar discrepancy between behavior and intention exists in UI telemetry. Ask people what they want when at their best, don't optimize for measurements of them at their worst.
Well written, thanks for posting. This is my sentiment exactly.
Multi String Search
> we promise to unsift what we've already sifted through.

The government is not Uber's competition, and actually has interest in them existing as they can collect taxes from them. It's not appropriate to view it through an "adversarial" lens.
Exactly. This is why Internet access is a public utility. No municipality wants 50 lines going pole to pole. I was curious about the idea of Internet as a public utility, so I did some research. I wanted to know what made people declare electricity, water, natural gas, etc to be regulated public utilities instead of just a free market setup. After reading some beautiful quotes from people opposing the establishment of such things (including many quotes from people certain that no reasonable person could ever want, much less need, a telephone in their own home when they could walk to a local store (because businesses were the only ones with legitimate need) and use theirs), I found that it comes down to one single question:

Does the benefit gained by society by having the service be ubiquitous amount to something greater than the damage done by the elimination of competition? If the answer is yes, then it should be made a public utility. I don't know how anyone could honestly argue that the private oligopoly setup we have now is so valuable to preserve that it provides more value to society than would ubiquitous Internet access. Just the fact that we could actually write laws on the assumption that people have Internet access would provide such tremendous benefit and enable us to get rid of some much duplicated junk as to be monumental.
Aesthetics really matter in the early stage. Spend time and/or money early on nailing a cool logo and beautiful slide template. It really matters. Even copying other beautiful stuff is fine.
For getting our first 3/10/100 clients, the fact that we looked and sounded totally pro meant a lot. We seemed like a larger more innovative company because of it.

Great advice all round but the above really spoke to me. Most advice talks about failing fast, getting to market asap etc. It's just as important to make sure what you DO ship / put out there is polished.
My strategy, write/prototype everything in Python until you have a performance problem. Then choose Cython, Golang, or Kotlin, etc for systems or modules that require it.
I think he's just pointing out the irony of someone purporting to aid the security-conscious having an expired cert on his own site. Unless this is really some meta-level social commentary on how people will trust a complete stranger's website despite an invalid cert because he seems like a nice guy.
> Someone had to fight for approval of this payout at significant career risk for themselves.

I think that, in this case, it is more likely that someone was told, or felt it to be the case, that their career or options were at risk unless they could come up with some sort of cover so that Uber could claim it did not have to disclose the leak.

There is a simple test for whether someone is seeking a bug bonus, or to extort you: if someone says he has a way to get your data and would you care to know how, its a BB case, but if they say they have your data, give us some money to say we deleted all copies of it, that's extortion.
E.g. I have file aaa.py, bbb.py and ccc.py (placed in the same directory but I don't mind adding a line of code to declare their relationship explicitly). What I want is not only to be able to import them all at once in ddd.py but to access everything from aaa and bbb in ccc, everything from bbb and ccc in aaa and everything from aaa and ccc in bbb [almost] seamlessly.
It sounds like the problem is you're spending your time on adversarial websites. Give JS to a skillful developer who shares your goals, and they'll use it to make the website better.
Not just one coin, but I'm interested generally in blockchain as social media, I'd really like to see alternatives to fb, twitter, yt, business models with more fairness and also less centralization. Things I'm looking into right now are http://ong.social http://d.tube http://steemit.com
Maybe you have never had to maintain a program written in Javascript or Python ;)

In my experience, if you have a language with a compilation-like step, e.g., assembly language, then you automatically have a massive advantage over a language without, e.g., Javascript or Python.

The advantage over languages such as Javascript only grows wider if you opt for a language with a comparatively sophisticated and thorough static type system, e.g., C89.

Now, suppose the Javascript code has 100% test coverage, and the C89 code has 0%. But so what? I was assuming that already. In my experience, the C89 code is still easier to work with.
I know this sounds judgmental, but I would challenge your perception of these "best" programmers. In my experience, truly great programmers only have preferences when it comes to languages.

If I have someone voicing very strong preferences or go as far as claiming to "hate" a language as inoffensive as Python, I mentally add them to the "probably middle of the road programmers, needs ego management".