skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That isnt far off UK national debt?? http://www.nationaldebtclock.co.uk/
The article quotes "for about a year" and the bet of 200K USD on Jan 2, profiting Feb 6 with 17.5M USD, which I understand as: if they had to do it every two months, they had to invest 1.2M USD in one year before they won 17.5M. Still not bad. Of course, the options they get wouldn't have to give them the same win every time they invest 200K though.
> Group theory originated in a very visual and geometric ways studying the symmetries of various objects

Did it? As far as I know, group theory started as method to describe the possible permutations of roots of polynomials, so it was very abstract right from the beginning.

And while there are certain geometric interpretation of some groups and the ways these groups act on objects, the "visual" part stops as soon as the groups gets more general or have more structure.
Pull Requests and Code Reviews
these smart homes bring up ethical dilemas. I worked for a company and someone got a home automation kit. It monitored comings and goings. They looked at the logs and realized the dog walker one day did a really short walk.
How do you broach this? Do you bother for an otherwise responsible walker.

I worked for a power monitoring company that put a box in your house, monitored power use for each circuit breaker. The CEO noticed that his house cleaners turned on lights in all the rooms and turned them off as they finished cleaning them.

You can learn a lot from watching a homes power, especialy if its split up circuit by circuit.
My "poor engineering" remark was a response to your original comment stating that "In the past, standards were developed through engineering and computer science."

Re: "not wanting to think or do the work": why would anyone want to think more or do extra work that is not required, except perhaps for fun? Computers were created precisely to automate and abstract away mundane tasks (such as adding padding measurements mentally). Only at Google/Facebook scales the extra bytes/CPU cycles added by setting box-sizing for all elements might perhaps make a difference. For everyone else the maintenance, time benefits of reducing the mental overhead imply on actual reduced costs, since you can ship your page/app faster.
I join the robotics club at my college. My team competes in national dancing robot competition. I help write the software to control the movements of 25 servos in humanoid robot using microcontroller (Teensy).

Coming from webdev and python background, i learn many things from it. Data types, pointer, byte shifting, serial communication. The most exhilarating part is when you have to optimize your code in every corner to fit in the small memory of the microcontroller.
And nearly all of them are now being serviced by discover financial services (DFS). Which is why I just keep dumping investment money into them. Literally, its going to be either the government tells them to write it off, or a constant 7% growth for the next decade plus.
Living in Germany, I have not seen a single household with air conditioning in my life.

Even in Italy and Spain, it’s extremely rare. As long as you don’t use plywood, it’s perfectly possible to live without ac.
I think the visual presentation would be better if a monospace font was used for the debt "odometers", so that the different loan types align and so that the student debt amount doesn't jiggle back and forth each time it's changed.
> My self-run mail server I set up before I had any sysadmin knowledge also has high reputation, isn’t on any blacklist, and successfully is rated non-spam by Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook and all others.

That is most definitely not the norm. Entire ISPs get blacklisted on a regular basis, working around that is difficult.

There are a lot of hurdles to hosting an email service, and some of them are geographic, and out of your immediate control.

If things are difficult... Why wouldn't you pay to make the hassles go away all together?
A Stall-Free Real-Time Garbage Collector for Reconfigurable Hardware (2012) [pdf]
The same thing is true with having a house. Sure, the math works out in favor of holding the debt and investing in the market. However, this logic has never sat well with me because it assumes that you can predict your situation for 30 years.

The conspiratorial part of mind suggests that finance is more invested in having people in debt than without, and the math is there to beat people over the head saying "you are not playing this game well because this math says you will lose in the end"
And exploiting security bugs is not unlawful? This is a secyrity bug in the transport mechanism of data.
My solution: Make it dis-chargeable in bankruptcy. Since it's a for profit loan--albeit at lower rates, especially compared to 20+% a year credit cards--the lender took the risk. The next time, they'll price this in and think twice before approving every loan.

The borrower that took the loan--you signed it, right, and you were 18+ years old ? --makes a calculated decision on whether to file for bankruptcy or not. It has costs for the filer, at least for 7 years, and possibly for life (some jobs will ask if you ever filed for bankruptcy).

Other than that, who cares: you are a big bank...sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. You should treat a bank like it treats you, if you can get away with it, of course.
I bought a couple of issues of GQ once, but stopped because articles were pretty much pointless and half of the magazine was advertising.
The thing is that Google maps is so old and the api is so domain specific, it doesn't need to change. The data required is just maps.google.com/v2/<z>/<x>/<y>.png

There are new things like vector tiles with multiple layers of vector data, so we will definitely see more breakage with clients using that.

And the routing is response JSON also had a stable layout. It's not hard to continue to support these api because the type of data they send doesn't change. Google also versions, and accounts and charges for the api usage.

I wish there was more standardization for calendar data but many calendars, including Google, like to mess with the the underlying data and functionality, and there is not ground truth like xyz to really ground them =)
Could be a pun on Electron, though.
David Esterly is the world's best woodcarver
That’s exactly what today’s cloud technologies bring to any small business. You don’t have to invest $Y to know if you can increase profits by x%. You can invest $Y/10 (even less in some cases) to figure out if this works.

If you zoom out and think about it for a second what most technology is doing today is making a small guy look big
Great article, love his writing style as well.
Also Wired... Not much to see (most things echoed from the internet) and a lots and lots of advertising.
I was with you up until the second “paragraph.” Just because something doesn’t depend on security through obscurity doesn’t mean it can’t be closed source
This is not terribly surprising, but it’s nice to see some experimental confirmation.

Here’s my question: Many will use this data to make themselves feel better (“See, I told you they were all idiots.”) How can this data be used to actually help the problem? Are there techniques that can be applied to help folks who lack high cognitive abilities to see and understand that they’re being manipulated?
The xslst "approach" + Javascript/json = graphql.
None, because the concept of men's magazines feels quite dated in 2018.

Health and relationships do not depend that much on your gender, generally HN finds great articles weekly regarding those topics.

Fashion does not need regular news but a strong base, many books communities are very good to improve on that matter (same for fitness by the way).
Man, I love how totally valid and normal thought is now labeled as "controversial". You gotta flag wrong-thinkers from the getgo right? Can't let anyone have any wrong ideas.
> why not consider an action as dramatic as forgiving all student debt?

What about folks who couldn't afford college because they actually had to work to make money? The ones who were busting their ass 60 hours/week while their better off (and less financially responsible) peers partied on cheap government money in college? If you don't think there is already a huge amount of resentment in a sizable minority of the "working underclass" on this point you are mistaken.

As one of those guys who had to forego college in favor of starting a career I'd be absolutely livid. A relatively spoon-feed population gets yet another handout? The below market rate debt that you could only get due to taxpayer guarantee wasn't enough? That's what the optics will look like to the vast majority of the country. Most of the country will never have the privilege that a kid with a 4 year college degree already has had in their life - debt or not.

Talk about creating winners and losers. Reading comments like this on HN (and other places with similar demographics) makes me realize how utterly socially disconnected as a society we are. It's downright scary at this point.
>Just because a tool exists doesn't mean you have to use it.

Most developers don't just grab their tools based on what they want to play with at the moment. Actual software engineering today involves working with other people and their code. Code reviews, integrations, maintenance, enhancements, technology overhauls, system decommissioning, working with vendors.

The fact that this simple reality didn't even cross your mind tells me everything I need to know about your opinions on tooling.
Isn’t this blaming the victim in a way? How is it their fault that they are susceptible to “fake news”. They didn’t chose to be born dumb.

Additionally, does it even matter? Intelligent people have their own blind spots and biases. The biggest being that because they are smart they must be right.

I think the only rational thing to do is to take a skeptical view of any information presented and not internalize it too much. It really irks me when I read something from a “reputable” news source and the only source is “officials familiar with the matter”. I know people are lapping that garbage up, regardless of how smart they are.
You aren't wrong, but I am not sure where you are going with this?
I was a low-information student, first to go to college in family. Once I decided to go however, the entire equation was what college could I afford and the living costs. Loans never felt like an option. Because of that, I basically was forced to choose a state school and live off campus in cheap housing.
Plus side is I came out with no debt, drawback is I didn't have much fun.
I guess that biases my thinking, but student debt forgiveness seems ridiculous for most all of the people I know who went deep in debt for a non-economically practical degree.
We have this system in the UK, you pay 9% on everything above 21k, and the debt is written off after 25(?) years. It’s a stealth tax on the poor/low middle earners. Anyone who can afford to not take out the loans ends up with a 9% pay rise. Anyone who can afford to pay them back early (high earning graduates) end up saving. Then you end up with the majority of people who will end up paying back many many times the debt over in interest.

A fairer option for all would be a flat graduate tax where all graduates pay x% of their earnings over a threshol.
The really gross thing here is the insane moral hazard that universities represent in this feedback loop.

Universities, particularly through the media, exercise strong influence over public discourse about education spending. They also benefit massively from that spending. Canceling student debt without penalizing that feedback loop likely accomplishes nothing or a negative.

Whether you forgive student debt or not, universities keep their huge gains that they've pumped into infrastructure, administrators, and influence.
Plucking Hairs and Jumping Down the Turtles: Why Did I Learn Rust?
I can’t say it’s the most effective or most moral way to spend a trillion dollars. I can say it’s much more moral and effective than spending a trillion dollars on waging useless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s much more moral and effective than giving trillions to the very wealthy in the form of tax cuts.

Higher education is a public good. It used to be the case that tuition was around 1/3 the cost of running a university. Now it’s north of 50%. It’s not good for society to have some many people in a lot of debt in their 20s. The so called greatest generation in American history, at least partly, got their greatness from free higher education.

Maybe this isn’t the best option but something needs to be done because the current system isn’t sustainable.
>I keep hearing coworkers trash a particular open source project/framework with no understanding of what kind of problems it solves.

Also I often think:

I keep hearing coworkers adopt particular open source project/framework with no understanding of what kind of problems it solves.
No one (absolutely no one) should be trusting a human being to be 100% infallible when it comes to security. That's what I'd propose, without even going into the topic of the fallibility of software.

If you're interested in the topic, there are many good papers and studies on how we can't even trust ourselves when it comes to basic things like memory and honesty (with ourselves).
> html, css, and jQuery work just about exactly the same as they did a decade ago, nothing stops you from using tools you already understand.

A decade ago, the requirements for supporting all/most clients (devices) were radically different. Different requirements mean different solutions and perhaps new tools must be used.
This is the productivity problem that julia aims to solve. The idea is to stay in one language that everyone on the team can work productively in, while still producing hi performance code.
> Part of the argument was the government owns 90% of outstanding student loan debt. Don't know how true this figure is but that's their claim.

At least according to http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/18/pf/college/navient-sallie-ma..., by borrower count, roughly 50% are federally backed and 50% are private.

However, even for the federal loans where taxpayers are the lender[1], there's still a choice whether to retire the debt or leave the debt as-is and fund something else (like tuition for future students).

[1]: More on federal loan funding, ie, which government entities are actually the lenders: https://www.loan.com/student-loans/where-does-funding-for-fe...
Presumably by calling parseInt('010') which used to detect zero leading strings as octal.
Alphabet has announced a cybersecurity business unit called Chronicle
The scariest WSJ headline the week prior to when volatility started was the following: "New account creation hits all time high at E-Trade, TD Ameritrade, etc".

The stock market engine has been hot for 5 - 6 years now and we just threw a can of nitro into the engine by way of massive tax cuts and deregulation. And then pundits and our President brag about how awesome this ride is as if managed growth is somehow anti-American. The retail investor masses heard that message and have arrived. The masses that don't know the difference between an income statement and balance sheet or how a market cap relates to the stock price. Historically they have been a catalyst of instability and trade solely based on the chart and trends.

So volatility seemed obvious two weeks ago. But when an obvious thought arises regarding the market two quotes always come to mind:

"Far more money has been lost anticipating the correction than in the correction itself". P. Lynch

"The first person you must not fool is yourself and you are the easiest person to fool". R. Feynman
No, other poor decisions were made. Yes, it rewards people who took out tens of thousands of dollars in loans to prolong adolescence at college when others didn't make that decision or enjoy that experience. You seem to think people with debt are the only ones at a loss here.
But but... what about $rich_schooling when they declare bankruptcy? Those doctors are screwing us all over!

Which, the above happened in the late 70's and early 80, as bankruptcy protections were whittled away for everyone, because of a small percentage of bad actors.

The doctor issue seemed simple: a judge has to approve the bankruptcy. And they can make a determination that it was happening to ignore scholastic debt and cancel the doctor's license. But I guess the "applies to every american" was much more profitable.
Reminds of Plato's thought that Socrates was like a doctor being judged by a jury of children. His conclusion was to turn against democracy to a vision of a polity ruled by enlightened 'philosopher kings'. So what are the implications for democracy in the Internet age?
It doesn't on our side of the pond.
There is a difference between web design and web application development. If you are a designer making brochure sites for small business, you don't need the modern frameworks and toolkits, and you are over-engineering it if you use them.

This is true, but the fundamental argument Frank makes in this article is just as applicable to web applications, if not more so.

We are now building significant software that happens to be written in JavaScript and to run in a browser. We call the results web applications, but it’s still just software. The basic principles of building software well are still the same: using modular design to decompose a large system into more manageable parts, separation of concerns, choosing the right data structures and algorithms, being systematic about covering different cases... These are all as relevant to developing front-end web applications as any other non-trivial software.

None of those things implies a need for overcomplicated tooling. None of those things implies a need for dependency trees with an unmanageable level of complexity. None of these things requires a combination of trial-and-error coding and rapid deployment. You can build large, complex, robust, useful web applications perfectly well without those things.

Usually, good tools are simple and do one job well. The tools that have stood the test of time in my web programming toolbox — things like jQuery, Lodash, SASS, Babel, Browserify, Mocha and React — almost invariably fall into that category. I find much less benefit in tools that require more than a few seconds to set up, depend on anything not obviously related, introduce any non-trivial boilerplate that I’m not almost always going to need, or introduce any sort of non-standard changes to source files that aren’t all but guaranteed to work in the long term.

Of course there are no absolute rules here, but it has been my experience that heavyweight frameworks, scaffolding generators, build process and the like often trade off short-term convenience against stability and longevity (and often, worse, understanding what is really happening). Like the current emphasis on continuous/rapid everything, that isn’t necessarily a good trade to make if you’re interested in building larger, more complicated, longer-lived software, as we increasingly are in front-end web development.
> If Amazon is shipping things cheaper, it's because they are using it as a loss leader. You don't really think it costs them $0 to ship things, do you?

No, I'm specifically talking about actual dollars paid to UPS. I run (ran) a small business, and we shipped about a pallet or two (overall) a week. Amazon's leaked UPS rates a few years back were about 30% of our already heavily discounted (from what a retail customer would pay) rates. Where did the $0 shipping comment come from?

You also can commit to a spend with Fedex/UPS of relatively small amounts (4 figures/mo) and get an immediate and painless 25-40% off immediately.

Like I said there is a lot of margin there, at least in certain segments of the business. I'm just not sure how much or where exactly the costs are (there may be very legitimate reasons why serving Amazon costs less than half of serving me) to know if there is a retail cost play.
Interesting - shows up monospace and perfectly alligned on my screen (Chrome, Win10)
Sweden has that system. The loans are also very low-interest (for a while the interest on my loan was lower than the interest on my basic savings account) [edit: just checked, the interest for 2018 is 0.13%. my savings account is 0.20%]

Sweden also has free tuition, and small living stipends for all (in my time it basically covered rent and nothing else), so your student debt is only for living expenses. I had classmates who took on no student debt by working all summer and living frugally.
You also don't pay income tax on debt interest you saved yourself from accruing.
Obscure security linked to stock volatility plummets 80% after hours, sparking worries of bigger market effect

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/05/xiv-exchange-traded-security...
World of Warcraft got colorblind mode in patch 6.1 (around feb 2015) [1]. Before that, one needed to achieve this via addons (with varying effect).

[1] https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/news/17964863
That wasn't a big problem before 1998. There are many disincentives to bankruptcy which is why people who are not broke or those with prospects to earn aren't lining up to do it.

If a college actually prepares a student for the job market they would be insane to do this; if it doesn't they may have no recourse.

Very few forms of debt are excluded from bankruptcy. IMO it's far from humane to make college, of all things, in that category. Should those who pay huge $$$ for American degrees and then can't get jobs be forced to pay the bloated costs despite having to go back to a retail job where they can barely survive? The original act takes a civil liberty, which most people enjoy, from a vulnerable group. Young people just starting out who may have made a huge investment that didn't pan out... being unable to declare bankruptcy prevents such young people from getting back on sound financial ground for potentially decades. It's embarrassing that the Clintons haven't taken more heat for this, arguably nothing but an act of crony capitalism.
Sounds like you're going to be first to do that.
Expecting people to honor their debts isn't finger wagging.
No, this is just plain stupid. You (wherever student debt is so common) must prioritize early school education about personal finance and loan consequences.
I imagine federalizing municipal pension obligations would be a better idea.

It would have to follow some sort of extremely firm commitment to overfund future pensions though (future residents getting a rebate from previous taxpayers is way less hazardous than future residents getting taxed for current services).
Chicago is so ridiculously cheap compared to the rest of the very small group of "large american cities with big functional public transit networks." Never thought I'd really consider moving back home, but that's definitely something I didn't appreciate growing up.

Given the lack of geographic constraints, it's amazing how expensive the DC area is. In % terms since 2000 it looks like only SF has exceeded it out of the big cities. NYC had a lower increase, and Seattle is only just now getting to a similar level. I hate looking for housing here.
Just remember, Skepticism isn't rejecting information, it is withholding your acceptance/distension until you have more data.

Rejecting information outright is cynicism.
I'm quite happy with a squeezebox server running on a linux computer, and music streamed to a Squeezebox Radio. Sadly these cannot be bought anymore, but there is a chromecast plugin that works with squeezebox server - I can then stream to a chromecast audioplug + powered speaker (edifier 1280T). Unfortunately the edifier does not have USB for chromecast power, but the sound is pretty decent. I've also streamed to a sony SRS-X 77 with a bit less success, there are occasional wifi dropouts.