skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm going to try to put into words something about our methods of hunting for alien life that has always bothered me, and I'm probably going to fail.

What is intelligence in the context of extraterrestrial life? I posit that we have no good model for what intelligence actually is, and that it makes no sense to assume any alien lifeform would share our goals of seeking knowledge, reproduction, preservation, or "living well". These are goals tied up very much with how life on this planet evolved. What if instead of life being on a one-dimensional axis of "intelligence", each isolated biome evolves unique properties for continued existence on its own planet, with very little overlap? What makes our "intelligence" special or even desirable, outside of furthering our own evolutionarily programmed goals? Take those very specific goals away, and intelligence becomes something without a definition.

This leads to a more fundamental question. What is life in the context of extraterrestrial life? How do we define success for an alien lifeform? Its continued existence? ...But in what form? Over what timescale? On what physical scale? How do we even know if any life we may find is alive or dead? I think these are not pointless philosophical questions, but something that should guide our efforts. How would we even recognize life if we found some? Are we even looking for life, or are we merely looking for life similar to Earth? Surely Earth-similar life would be much more rare than just life, but we seem to think "life" will exist on other planets with function similar to Earth, if not form. Why assume this? A lot of Earth's life's functioning is derived from how it evolved and how it's composed.

I think this may be part of the answer to the Fermi Paradox. Perhaps it's a faulty assumption that intelligent life would want things like we do, and perhaps it's a faulty assumption that intelligence is even a real thing, in a context outside of Earth. Perhaps it's also faulty to assume that all life will have evolutionary goals similar to Earth's.
Student Debt and Millennial Homeownership
Off topic: It annoys me to no end, the sheer hubris required, to enable 2FA with codes (e.g. Google Authenticator) you must first enable 2FA by SMS and give them your phone number. The UI won't let me multifactor with an OTP app alone, these dicks are always doing a shake down for my phone number.

This policy, and so many others, come from an attitude. And it's the attitude people are realizing they don't like, never liked, and are less inclined to overlook.
I'm sorry, I have zero sympathy to people from Berkeley complaining. Considering the amount of money that Berkeley citizens collectively have and the progressive positions that they hold I am baffled why they do not add an addition $X thousand per year tax to everyone who makes more than a federal poverty level there to make sure that all out of luck homeless people have a real roof over their head, warm meals and medical care.

Unless of course the so called progressive population does not actually care that the middle of downtown Berkeley looks like a third world country.
I write code and debug for a living and often work similarly. I even force myself to take a break every hour, deep concentration or not. Necessity makes amazing things happen. I definitely do not do more than 8 hour sessions, ever, and never without multiple breaks anymore. It works out fine, a little slower than before but that's mainly due to lack of communication and has nothing to do with hours worked.
Here is a thing about Robinhood: it does advertising in ineligible countries, apps are allowed to be downloaded, profiles must be filled in down to the last field and only then there is a message saying that you're not allowed to use the app because it's unavailable (really?) in your country. Guerilla data collection at its finest.
I've observed something a little bit like this on some long-running internal business tools, where the "GUI-first development" approach also causes problems.

Your data model ends up resembling the entry-forms and wizard-steps proposed by managers, rather than capturing the underlying ideas of the bounded-context.

Since having it look right is so important, you also get a lot of business logic which lives closer to the GUI than it should. This makes it difficult to automate things because certain rules are soft-enforced by the order and steps of the interface and JS widgets rather than by anything explicit in code.

The unhappy feedback loop continues as you get a system which can only be tested through the GUI, and it's no longer clear what parts of the app are deliberate rules versus incidental limitations.
What do boots taste like, friend?
Aye carumba the comments on this article are a cesspool.

If you don’t think the way Trump and Kim Jong Un have been interacting is a reason for concern I don’t even know what to say to you.

And the point of this isn’t to make people panic, it’s to point out how dangerous of a situation we are in and maybe get people to think about it and change course in some way.
I've read this a few times and having been through up and down periods it's clear that the most important part of this, is the following:

The best time to sell your startup is when you have many options.

It needs to be really emphasized that this is a very rare place for the vast majority of startups. That means this advice isn't generally applicable.

Which brings up the implicit question, why would you decide to sell your startup if you are clearly winning and growing at the pace that you can build a sellers market?

There are a lot of really good reasons you would, but I think all of them come down to: At some point you won't be able to be competitive in the market without the resources of a larger company. Whether that means you'll never be able get to an IPO, or you'll get out competed between now and then.

I've never read a good rundown of WHY they decided to sell, Twitch or otherwise.

So it's really a question of when, not if. Opportunities to sell will come in waves over time so how do you know which one you should take because it's possible to overshoot and then the whole thing goes bust (Digg, Foursquare etc...).

What I'd be interested in is the Founders guide to selling your company when it has relatively few options. That's the more common case, and one that where I think the opportunities there are missed by most founders. I never read stories about that, I've only read "we were on track to a billion in revenue and sold."
You seem to assume that this service is expensive. I'm really not sure why anyone would think that, other than some notion that Larry Page is a comic book villain who hates the poor. It appears to be cheaper than any other commuting option for most people (~55 cents/mile).

Public transit, at least here in the SF Bay Area, is horribly mismanaged. Google does not have the power to force the 37 independent squabbling agencies here to work together, to force BART to kick obvious criminal activity out of their stations, or to fire anyone when new train stations fall behind schedule fifteen times in a row. Companies that provide good services should not be punished for not being magically omnipotent.
For one, the very presence of a useless feature, enabled or disabled, increase the chance of vulnerabilities. It also introduces more uncertainty. If I turn it off, is it really off? Is there a bug that misreads user preferences? Far worse, when a feature is for advertising and monetization, conflict of interest are introduced. The fact that they're quietly turning it on for some users is already a huge breach of trust.
How so?

The client, a major Japanese software distributor who was going to be selling copies of the software to end users, wanted a way to let the user decide how they wanted to trade off ripping speed with disk usage.

That was a perfectly reasonable thing for the client to want, given his extensive knowledge of the hardware characteristics of the computers that were in widespread use among his potential customers, and his knowledge of Japanese usage patterns.

What I gave him did that.

So how exactly is he a moron for (1) asking for a reasonable feature, and (2) being happy that he received that feature?
I encourage you to read the reviews on the Waze app. "User keeps sending me lewd messages and can still see my trips even though I blocked him" "the system automatically deactivated my account and I couldn't contact anyone".

Sure it's early days and these hiccups will be reduced. But they'll never completely go away and you need human support to resolve these situations. Better filters and software intelligence will help, but they won't be trained enough or effective for a long time.
Stairway to the Burn Unit
Yep, I don't get why "the safety aspects of this are shocking". Shocking?
I loved the input magazines. I’ll have to dig out my old ones ! I think we only had them in the uk though?
Sadly, Datomic lacks two of (arguably) very important features in this space:

1. It seems to not be optimized for speed (but it's difficult to say since the license forbids publishing benchmarks).

2. It's not open source.
probably cos of word "Lite" in their name.
I had set up ElasticSearch for logging events and was thinking about using it to store metrics as well. It seemed like it ticked all the boxes and would work pretty well when I was messing around with it.

I ended up leaving that job and set up something specifically for metrics from scratch. I didn't compare 1 to 1, but this was much faster to query and had much lower requirements (disk space, memory, etc).

Both use-cases are using it as a time-series database, and there's no reason ElasticSearch couldn't work for both of those use-cases for many people. When using two different backends (one for events and another for metrics) I meant drawing a line when creating/logging data and two ways to query...which sucks for training. You also would have to maintain/archive two different data stores.
Yes! A thousand times yes!

I'd also be okay starting at a 1-9 if people are against the idea of working less hours per day.

Now this would only work if everything adapted. Schools, shops, banks, would all need to shift their hours.

Finally we could enjoy daylight. Imagine spending time outside in the sun with your kids and wife during the day!! Everyday!

Imagine not being too tired after your hard day of work to spend quality time with your family, hangout with friends, so household chores, work on that hobby project of yours, exercise!

I don't think its feasible without a King or dictator forcing this change though. I hope we did, the idea of working on the hours that the sun is out is old, everyone works indoors now.

Also, its difficult to gage the health and mental health impact of how little less sunshine we now consume compared to days past when we were outside a lot more during daylight times.
Graph with reasons it moved forward or backward -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock#Changing_settin...

Stupid -

"There have been heightened tensions between the U.S. and North Korea over the past few months, which Bronson said did influence the changing of the time."

NK sends nukes kills at best millions probably hundreds or 10 of thousands if really lucky.

We anillate them with small nukes or boring conventional weapons.

World goes fuck and really tightens up nuclear weapons making us further away from "Dooooooms day"
I recently went to see A Perfect Circle who have instituted a no phones policy. It seemed to work pretty well, even without these phone lockers. I saw a handful of people escorted out by security.

It was really great to have only the concert's lighting without the distraction of a sea of screens. Many people even pulled out their lighters for one song, when at other shows I've often seen them defaulting to waving their phones instead.
stocks give you ownership in productive companies. those companies on average go up in value and produce profits which they throw off as dividends (or re-invest to increase their market-cap).

so one difference then is that stocks have a justification for their returns given the variance you experience.
I can attest to how great InfluxDB is. Have used it in a few applications that rely on time based data and I am constantly blown away by how fast the query times are.
Diplomats have that right.
I've sat in on some conference calls for a standards org in healthcare. The reason these specifications are so shitty to implement became clear as day for me. There was not a single technical person on the call. To be honest the majority barely sounded computer literate.
Couldn't agree more! What a horrible idea! The night sky is sacred
*her
stocks without them re-invest the profits and that re-investing increases the share price.
> You'd be destroying a culture of independence in the US punishing car drivers so much, and I don't think it would be nearly worth it.

Is it really independence if you can't cover the costs you impose? Sounds an awful lot like the "oppression" felt by angsty teenagers without jobs when they're told they have to empty a dishwasher.

> I greatly appreciate being able to just go where I want without having to be beholden to public transit schedules and share the space with a bunch of strangers, and have my own temperature controls etc.

I'm sure you do. I'd greatly appreciate being able to fly private, for all of the same reasons, but unfortunately I can't afford it. If you want it, you should pay the cost to get it. And that cost is gonna be about $6/gallon in extra taxes.

> The "cost" cars have to society and how "subsidized" they are is ridiculously overblown around here. [...]

Still not enough. As long as cities, states, and the federal government are taking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the general fund to build and maintain roads, you aren't even close to covering your costs. And that would be before congestion charges, carbon taxes, appropriately priced bridge tolls, etc.

What is overblown is the independence and financial responsibility of the average person who merely pays their bills for actions that are heavily subsidized.
Funny, I remember setting up a mitm proxy on a Raspberry Pi for Tinder when I was designing an interactive display of my tinder likes and dislikes. Even used the content-length trick to bypass installing a custom root cert on my phone to decrypt swipe status. Didn't think about the security implications about it at the time but in hindsight it was terrible security practice.
Yep. The caveat is that we are currently adding methane at a faster rate than it is lost through this process, which obviously means methane concentrations are increasing right now, and early signs are that this may accelerate. Sigh.
Going the other direction is fairly easy, if you retain control over the original page, you can help people/search engines find the new page via the following:

* Meta refresh tags: `<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http://example.com/" />`

* HTTP Status codes `301` and `302`

* Canonical link tags: `<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/"/>`
First sentence of the article: In software engineering, continuous integration (CI) is the practice of merging all developer working copies to a shared mainline several times a day.

Guy didn't do that. His project blew up. He failed the basic premise of CI, and his project blew up. I'm not sure how much more clear it can be: his project failed because he didn't do continuous integration. He _did_ use version, as did everyone else in the company. But he didn't do continuous integration. And his project blew up. Ergo, the statement that caused you to immediately stop reading: "The post describes how a 6 months project failed because it didn't implement the principles of Continuous Integration."
Yeah I know (thanks for the link). I mean using a clock as the way to communicate how likely nuclear war is happens to be a terrible way of communicating to a public that knows clocks only, and naturally, move forward. Having seen a clock and reading this news, it would be reasonable for children to expect us to reach nuclear war very soon, which is not at all accurate.
I think in this case a slippery slope counterargument is not obviously wrong. According to the UN, a person's correspondance is sacred and each and every one has a universal right not to have the privacy of their correspondance breached.

Why are we now debating the privacy of encrypted correspondance from a baseline of no privacy for unencrypted correspondance?

What says we will not continue to accept more and more, as long as it is only a small step from status quo?
> My goodness, all those people who went to concerts before cell phones must have been so hardcore, taking risks like that.

I get the point you're trying to make, but to me this just reads like gatekeeping.

Cell phones are useful and they can make people safer. In a world with cell phones not having timely access to one is riskier. In a world without cell phones it's a moot point.

The more interesting issue -- which others in this thread are discussing -- is whether the benefits of having a cell phone outweigh the harms people can cause with them, and whether policy can help strike an appropriate balance.
It sounds like you don't have experience with redux and how it is used, which makes me surprised that you have such a strong opinion about it.

Redux makes available state that is required globally, like the contents of your todo list or other properties that must persist as you navigate a web app. Components will store their own state for their specific requirements.

I suggest reading up on redux use cases to find out more before dismissing it entirely.
There are certainly a lot of resources out there to learn digital marketing, SEO, PPC, and paid social. While there's a lot of great information out there, there's a lot of misinformation out there, as well.

In my 20+ years of digital marketing (I was trying to get rankings on Altavista back in 1996), I've learned that the best way to learn digital marketing is by actually practicing it and doing it. You can certainly learn the basics, and this springboard curriculum is a good start. I hope they can keep with the updates, though, as even the "best practices" are constantly changing. The ways you optimized a website 5 years ago are different now, and some techniques are considered spam.

Start with the basics, learn what you can, and then learn by actually putting what you learned into practice. Create your own website. Create your own blog. You'll learn more that way.
I think this misses the point that we are using our dollars inefficiently.

Between race and socio-economic status, the later has a stronger correlation to health and so it should be used as the main indicator directing where/how to spend those healthcare dollars.

When it comes to people's health, these dollars need to be blind, or we are needlessly throwing some number of lives away each year.
Lime mortar/plaster cures by absorption of CO2, from air: http://www.britishlime.org/education/lime_cycle.php
Sounds like you're in a bubble. There's reasonable people on both sides of this debate, even if some of them are wrong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HNnVcp6NYA
> Normally people, at least in cities, rarely hitchhike or take up hitchhikers.

Hitchhiking is also illegal in most states.
im surprised that there is no mention of Poon Lim:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poon_Lim
Survived 133 days in the ocean
'unverified bit'... is not a thing.

Comedians tell jokes, they aren't news organizations that need to do fact checking.

And even if they did hold to that standard, what a crazy bad example to pick. He was correct. So you think he got 'caught' telling a joke that had true facts that hadn't been verified yet?
When it gets down to it - talking trade balances here - once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here - once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel - once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity - y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else

music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery

-- Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (1992)
This was exactly the motivation behind a project I wrote called react-redux-controller [1]. It has made for great separation of concerns between state management (Redux), display logic (React), and implementation of processes (the controller functions). It's completely possible to segment portions of the app such that slices of those three aspects are colocated and then composed as needed.

I don't necessarily recommend using this project specifically, as I don't devote any time to maintaining it. There's a whole next-generation of how I think it should work that I haven't gotten around to persuing. But I mention it to back the overall approach. It makes UI refactors extremely easy, as components are generally not responsible for any dependencies of their descendant subtree, with the exception of some parent-child interactions.

I haven't tried it, but I think Freactal [2] also seems to allow for this sort of separation of concerns.

[1] https://github.com/artsy/react-redux-controller

[2] https://github.com/FormidableLabs/freactal
As a former HK resident, a lot of it is because of how impractical it is for most people to own and operate a private car.

Returning to the US, it's car-culture and lackluster public transport was jarring.
If you have to offer a compromise agreement (the legal term for what your suggesting) when people leave the company has major problems.

Forcing companies to publish the number of such agreements made might make an interesting metric to use when evaluating companies.
Looks like I never verified my email, so I didn't get any of the distribution. Too bad!
The reason I would consider Google to legitimately compete with them are the following.

1. If they have issues with their system they will create a competitor to it internally.

2. They have the money to subsidize just like uber and lyft.

3. They are the company that could either perform a deal with Elon for his data or buy Tesla out.

4. Since no "contractor" that is employed by uber or lyft have any loyalty torward another it will just drive down prices even more. I'm not sure Uber could survive that or even lyft.
Stories like this are the reason that I think that the following headline format is rightly banned from HN in the future:

"Scientists <verb>."

Nobody cares that "scientists" did something. We care about the science of what they did, sure. But this is a built-in appeal to authority that seems completely anti-hacker to me.
the risk you take for those returns means the price won't fully match the expectation. but you can mitigate that risk via diversification.
Other assets are tied to real phenomena.

With stocks, for example, I can make a prediction about a company's future performance, buy or short accordingly, and expect that if I am correct I will profit.

I may be wrong about my prediction, but if I am correct then I've got far better than chance odds of also being correct about the future price of the asset.

Without making any further predictions about the state of the world I can equally easily imagine the price of Bitcoin in 5 years being $100 or $100,000. Neither price feels "wrong" the way it would if, say, Google's stock price rose or dropped by an order of magnitude without the company changing anything.
I found a couple of mirrors of the video. They have the same title, but they have slightly different content, so I'm not sure which was the one that was linked.

https://youtu.be/8dVbO9BJa80

https://youtu.be/46RDiwfknu4
What part of the article was sensational? It was mostly background and direct quotes.
Nailing 13 signal and slot mistakes with clazy 1.3