skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I remember back when Circuit City fired all of its floor staff and replaced them with entry level (and bottom run wage) workers. Oddly, they went out of business not long after that.

You can't race to the bottom in retail, the bottom is already taken by walmart and online stores (like amazon). You can't be cheaper or more convenient, you need to offer something they don't. For bookstores that means you have to have good selection, a good environment, author signing/speaking events, and so forth.

The retail apocalypse is not being driven primarily by lack of revenue, there's plenty of meat on those bones for companies to survive on in perpetuity, and many continue to thrive. Rather it's being driven by poor business decisions. Hedge fund driven leveraged buyouts that load down retail chains with enormous levels of debt. Complicated expansion schemes designed to enrich some particular set of owners or executives at the cost of business health. And so on. B&N is just another example of how retail chains have becomes playthings for the business elite. Business fundamentals are irrelevant. The fate of the business itself or the workers are irrelevant. All that matters is how many golden eggs they can cut out of the goose's body before it dies.
It's Official: Most Americans Are Currently in Debt
That was really interesting. Thank you for the insight!
This article from BI goes into detail why. It’s basically just ripped from his Reddit AMA: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-tim-ferriss-left-silicon-...

I’ve lived in Austin for a decade and don’t really find it open minded. I mean the local Republican group on meetup.com has a private membership because they are too scared of being doxxed...

FWIW I’ve always voted Democratic but now the party is getting overwhelmed by those leaving the Republican party and diluting what was once the workers party with tiny little neoliberal solutions to every large problem.
I would love to hear more about how you did that.

How would you advise a motivated, but time-limited person who wanted to learn a language to B2?
If you need a schema, then go with an RDBMS.
>> Rather it's being driven by poor business decisions

Agreed. It's that plus a healthy dose of panic and a refusal to accept reality - that contraction of revenue is necessary to stay alive - that causes these companies to make idiotic Hail Mary decisions that never pan out.
I was out shopping 3-4 days before Christmas this year, and happened to be near a Barnes and Noble so figured I'd grab a copy of a magazine I've been wanting to read for a while.

Grabbed the magazine, wandered the aisles a bit and picked up another book then went to check out. Basically I was their marketing department's dream - walk-in traffic coming to buy something cheap and specific who made an impulse retail buy of a much higher margin item.

The checkout line was at least 50 people long and probably estimated at over an hour. Two cashiers working out of 8 or so possible registers, and as far as I could tell a singular employee on the floor itself.

I put my selections back and walked out the door. Granted it was near peak shopping season - but that was inexcusable. There were quite a lot of really pissed off looking people in that line.

So that is to say my experience lines up with the article. They entirely botched their Christmas season and it wasn't the employee's or consumer demand's fault. Just that one store bled hundreds of dollars in lost sales just from the 5 minutes I watched people walk in and immediately out after seeing the line.
It is reputed that someone wrote a Fortran compiler in TECO on a dare.
Well said.
And it got me thinking. -I wonder if this article is well known:

http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html

If not then people might enjoy a deeper dive into this kind of thing!
For anybody who's not read it - since it's pretty long I'll try and sum it up with a quote from about 2/3 of the way down:

"Lisp is executable XML with a friendlier syntax"

This bit always comes to mind when I think of lisp and "code as data / data as code".
or calibration changes cause engine to to over-heat and burn up and generally the company is held responsible for it

This happens not-too-infrequently in the car modding/tuning world --- the former, that is; to my knowledge no one has blamed the original manufacturer, much less successfully sued, after him/herself modding the ECU of a car and blowing up the engine.

Don't forget that a lot of other safety-critical components of cars (e.g. brakes, tires, etc.) have aftermarket replacements --- many of which actually perform better than stock.

If this "safety" attitude was prevalent since the beginning, we'd have cars that can only use approved fuel, no aftermarket parts would exist at all (their manufacturers being sued out of existence), and it'd be illegal to drive them on roads not approved by the manufacturer.

I will resist the urge to post that famous Benjamin Franklin quote this time.
It's pretty unlikely either Amazon or Google will face much headwind as they fulfill necessary roles. Facebook isn't necessary from what I can see (though I personally like it and use it) and contributes to known social ills.

Zuck is redirecting a lot of effort into community organizing which I think is a necessary role, though meetup already has that space and isn't really that big of a company. I think he's going to find out that it doesn't pay as well as feeding general narcissism does.
Except that tractors are more dangerous than your car/appliance/whatever.

You'd be amazed the amount of carnage running a brushhog at 1000rpm will do when it was designed at 540rpm. They will happily throw the 3-4 foot blade right though 1/2in steel up to 300-400ft in whatever direction the wind takes them.

When that process is controlled by software all it takes is flipping the wrong high order bit in the PTO controller. On a manual tractor it's very clear when the PTO lever is in 1000rpm vs 540rpm(and usually on a separate lever from engagement) vs an opaque software stack.
Is this official? If not, it seems likely that Valve will make you change the name.
First the pinterest cancer, now this.
Overlap Add, Overlap Save Visual Explanation
> To that end, how things are actually implemented takes a trip to assembly.

Don't confuse “defined” with “implemented”. This is the entire point to having an axiomatic semantics!

> My point was that you don't typically see c constructs explained in terms of other c constructs.

Languages can't be entirely defined in terms of themselves. At some point you need to drop down to something else. If most of Lisp is defined in terms of other Lisp constructs, that is perfectly fine, but, for my purposes, i.e., proving things about programs, there are two mutually exclusive possibilities:

(0) The semantics of Lisp is the semantics of its primitive forms, and derived forms are just Lisp's standard library.

(1) So-called “derived” forms have an abstract semantics of their own right, and their implementation in terms of so-called “primitive” forms is, well, an implementation detail.

So, my answer to “most of Lisp is defined in terms of Lisp itself” is “that's cute, but how mathematically elegant is the part of Lisp that is not defined in terms of itself?”
I would say the idea is higher chance of survival on a small island nation (inaccessible except by sea or air), in a remote location, with clean air, land and water, that is not a major military target, that is also a first-world country with a cultural background and language not too dissimilar from the U.S.
This makes me wonder why physical retail stores don't follow Apple's approach by developing an app so shoppers can self-check out.
What is your point? I have a relative that lost his arm to a combine. There was no lawsuit, he did not seek damages. Farmers are well aware of how dangerous this equipment is.
New humans replace those eliminated in accidents (immortality doesn’t).

New humans allow for changes in DNA to fit a changing environment (immortality doesn’t - hey, you get my drift)

Thinking of the people’s throughout history who shrunk to be smaller due to poor nutrition or unstable food source let’s the human race adapt pretty well to a whole host of issues. Immortality (unless it’s accompanied by some pretty impressive technology from the future) doesn’t.
++ For DoV. Wrote a bit of my dissertation there, but also just sat there listening and chatting with interesting peoples
Profit margins?

You dissipate the heat into the faraday cage. There's been a patent for this: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5901040
Washing machines can malfunction and cause fires, hypothetically.

Not just hypothetically: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12610218

Mind you, those were unmodified so the maker does take the blame; but if the cause is known, modifications can make them safer too.
Beerware License
I understand people can contribute with their eyes open; that's fine. People volunteer bug reports (for e.g.) to paid software all the time, open source or not. My criticism was actually of Google soliciting those contributions in the first place.

"Open source" is just a useful fiction in this case: what would a fork of AMP even do? It does however make the project corporately palatable to others that might want to implement it (i.e. Microsoft/Bing), plus it attracts unpaid contributions to fix the work of Google's highly paid engineers ("Building the future web, together."). The former might be necessary but the latter is extremely problematic IMO.

Google could have set up AMP as an independent W3C group (for e.g.) at arms length from its competitive interests, but it didn't, and recent AMP product announcements show us why.
Chargehound Is Hiring a Solutions Engineer in Oakland
Set Image Quality While Exporting Project Data to JPEG and Enhanced Loading MPP
For any company that can, increasing cash flow is a great way to proceed assuming you don't muck around with the balance sheet.

Unfortunately, I don't see a way for BN to really do that, the sun set on their business a long, long time ago. Sure they could morph into some kind of WeWork/Starbucks thing, but its not like that's an open playing field begging for competition either.
I like lisp and prefix notation in general, but I definitely still prefer reading large mathematical expressions in infix. Its really just a matter of preference.
A single study will almost never be actionable, but a series of studies, accompanied by systematic reviews, could be the basis of such recommendations.
There's merit in competiton itself. This product does something that both Anki and Memrise do. That's a unique feature, is it not?
I will miss Barnes and Noble.

I would pay a monthly membership fee just to keep my local store open. Kinda like a gym membership, but I would actually go in, and enjoy just the wifi, books, clean bathroom, and pleasant staff.

I do think it's time to break up the monopolies. What do we have to loose at this point?

I don't even need to list the companies. We all know them. Plus--three three companies will put so many of you tech workers out of business--eventually.
A burrito is just a strong monad in the symmetric monoidal category of food, what’s the promise?
So the bigger question, if this trend continues and B&N goes the way of Borders ... what happens to all your Nook purchases?

I only have 2 or 3, but I feel like I need to figure out how to rip the DRM off and export all my highlights/notes sooner rather than later.
A quarter of B&N now devoted to toys. They also earn more in their cafe than they probably do selling books.
they are distribution, just like the agencies. Only Google drives distribution costs down
The legwork on usability is what makes code into software. That GUI matters.
I've never tried growing them but apparently pulses are a good 'green manure' in that the plants absorb beneficial nutrients that can be composted to improve soil quality.

Are green-thumbs up to the task of preserving these heirloom varieties via their vegie patch!?
Because it takes more than just an app. Plus, that app isn't that easy.
That's true. I don't want to criticize Guile or Lisp implementations in general, which have a number of features that Lua can't easily emulate (a numeric tower, true continuations, probably a whole lot more I'm not aware of), but I think Guile and Lua have very similar uses as embedded scripting languages (small, and with fast incremental compilation). Chances are if you using guile you may have considered Lua.

As for use-cases for Fnl, I would say it's more applicable for places where one would use Lua or Guile, rather than something like SBCL or any really fast, compiled Lisp.

Lua makes a pretty good dynamic language target, though, because of the many great implementations and small language spec.
> You can't race to the bottom in retail, the bottom is already taken by walmart and online stores (like amazon). You can't be cheaper or more convenient, you need to offer something they don't. For bookstores that means you have to have good selection, a good environment, author signing/speaking events, and so forth.

I made the effort to visit a B&N earlier this month because I was looking for good translations of texts from Ancient Greece (Homer, Herodotus). I wanted the ability to compare different books to determine what I would actually enjoy reading, as opposed to trusting online reviews. There were two options for each. Herodotus sort of makes sense, but Homer ought to have several translations. It’s considered a masterpiece, after all.

This was probably the final visit to a chain bookstore for me. I will still pop into mom and pop shops on occasion just to browse, but I no longer believe that I can find the things I want in a megastore.
I went through a round of interviews as the interviewer and assigned take-home work. The problems were hard, fun hard, but would take time to solve. I had a number of people balk. They said they were too busy.

I realized in that moment what an asshole I was being for assuming somebody would be able to dedicate free time over a week to solving some problem just to prove to me they could, just for the potential of getting hired, and no other benefit.

Now, the way some people articulated (or yelled) their objections lead me to believe they wouldn't be a good culture fit. Others though opted for a lighter touch, "lets just talk through how we'd solve this" and I came away understanding how they think through problems. It was an attempt at saving the interviews. This stuff is hard, on both sides. That was a long time ago, I've since read way more horror (and success stories).

Please don't give people take home projects. I sure as fuck won't do them. I'm busy with hard problems I actually find rewarding.
It's not a dumb discussion at all. Callback hells and managing threads synchronously/asynchronously as desired are a big deal.
MicroEmacs, a free text editor from the 1980s, uses a double-linked list of lines. It is fast and memory compact, after all, it worked on a 64K DOS machine.

https://github.com/DigitalMars/med
Federal Judge Says Embedding a Tweet Can Be Copyright Infringement
Show HN: Bookmarklet to view full size photos from Google Images
They’ve been chasing cost reduction for many years, reducing investment in total and in that specific case I’d bet they have considerable worries about shoplifting.
What I’ve Learned from My Quest for Loose Change
Google removes View Image button from search results
I wonder why we have to resort to terms like monadic, immutable, orthagonal, etc, in our field so often. I feel weird and elitist using these terms when more common ones suffice and are understood by my customers.
Historically, it has been important to have a diversity of opinion on an independent board with delegated policy making authority. These traditions are enforced as dragonwriter pointed out by the confirmation process.

Unfortunately the modern GOP was a party with a narrow, declining constituency that was reinvigorated by a tidal wave of money, much more so than the Democratic Party, which is a big tent party with many different constituencies.

Personally, I don’t think that a guy like Pat is fit for public service, whatever his beliefs. He’s too obviously close to past employers.
This is probably the raisin d'être of homoiconicity but it's more specific a concept than that. It's a conceptual property on the grammar of the language: there need to be control characters/words in the grammar like spaces and parentheses so that the parser can correctly generate nested lists, or trees matching the intended AST, even when it doesn't necessarily have full information about what the languages set of operative keyword are. Basically the parser has to support adding new, user defined operators.

And then in addition to being able to parse user defined operators, then you have to have a decently organized, simple system for applying AST transformations and modifying tree objects. And there again homoconicity in the grammar can be useful if it makes it easy to textually serialize and set object attributes.
> winning Silver at the Hispanic American level

I can't read the page and I don't follow the math Olympics. What is a "Silver at the Hispanic American level"?
I'm not asserting anything. A 35mm Kodachrome transparency, like other 35mm transparencies on films of comparable ISO rating, contains an equivalent of approximately 140 megapixels of data in its 24 mm x 36 mm image.

Citation: Langford, Michael (2000). Basic Photography (7th Ed.). Oxford: Focal Press. p. 99.

Film has vastly more resolution than even high-end DSLRs. This isn't shocking or surprising if you know anything about the space.
This happens in a lot of places. The shopping experience may be nice but the actual payment experience is atrocious. Honestly if I have to wait more than 10 minutes to pay for something, I just don't buy anything, or purchase online instead. Even if there are long queues, there are many ways you could improve the experience - for example get an automatic ticket to get "in line" in the system, and get called when it's your turn - at the same time you can continue looking at more items instead of wasting your time in line.
Yes I believe that is one pillar of the argument. The other is whether or not companies are using reparability (or lack thereof) to increase revenue or protect channels.
I agree with michael
"This is in stark contrast to the trend of lumping both sick time and time off into a single limited “PTO” bucket. Having an unlimited budget of time off means you don’t have to worry about “banking” time in case you get sick.
Those policies are fucked-up. It's Enron-style accounting, a way for a company to say, "we offer 15 days off" while lying through its fucking teeth. Counting sick days against vacation is evil. By effectively forcing people to come into work when ill and making the whole office sick, they're fucking with my health (and everyone's, most of all the people who are already sick and deserve rest).

Whoever came up with that "innovation" deserves to be sold into Roose Bolton's captivity."

Guess what I'm doing right now? I'm at work...I have a fever, apparently, but I REFUSE to leave because I'm not going to lose yet more vacation. I already lose about half of my vacation because I have a chronic condition.

Needless to say, there's never been a post I agree with more.
To even try? To try to exercise and not drink sodas is extremely frustrating? Living a healthy lifestyle is about simple choices like going to the gym or adding broccoli to your meal and avoiding junk food.
Sadly I agree. I had a lot of issues casting from VLC on mac OS.
Go would totally be a viable option. Cross compilation for the win.
The Jim Roskind C/C++ Grammar
The phrase "nothing to lose" comes to mind about the fearless.
> You never considered things might have been lost in translation

I did. Lots of people here are ESL, and there is that persistent strain of tone-deafness you can see from ESL folks. (Many learn better; some hide behind it.) Then I went and looked at your posting history, because I am invested in this place and I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. I determined, for myself, that your behavior did not merit it. But that you also weren't dumb. Which is why I responded to your post in the first place--like I said, I've been that righteous, raging internet prick, too, and it basically only hurt myself. So you could call it my good deed for the day.

Right now you are, however, making me play "dumb or dishonest?"; you keep (and my inclination is to "dishonestly", if I'm being frank) conflating your opinions with your behavior, as if that I am saying you are being a jerk because I disagree with you, rather than because I think you are being a jerk. The deeper you huddle in your excuses, the harder it is to find the fortitude to own your behavior, to walk it back, and to stop.

---

I didn't realize that the Unfairness of the Situation was your "main point"; it mostly seemed that I Am A Misunderstood Genius Who Everyone Is Keeping Down was your main point. But sure, I guess it's unfair that I've invested more time in the community and surpassed a (fairly low; I've had a few comments reach the 80-100 point range and you often see 500+-point submissions!) barrier that mostly serves to keep voting rings from downvote-bombing stuff. Maybe if you didn't needlessly antagonize people in so many comments, you would too surmount it?

I also didn't realize "you're being a jerk and should stop" was so arrogant, but...well. I was honest with you, and I gave you some pretty constructive criticism about how to not be so upset by being downvoted (namely, just...don't be a jerk!). You've chosen not to listen to that criticism and instead try to legislate about how wrong it is. I think you're probably messing up by doing so; frankly, the lessons I learned from reforming my own online behavior made me a much better person to be around offline, too, which is a nontrivial part of why I said anything in the first place because seeing people piss down their own legs makes me a little uncomfortable. I don't intend to respond to you further now, though, as you have proven that assuming good faith of you is a waste of time.
The point is I don't think allowing the modification of software in what is essentially a factory on wheels is a safe thing to do.

When we bought our '81 Ford there was a ton of bodge jobs and half-assed repairs(that helped us talk down the price) that I could easily verify by visual inspection. I knew because I could see them that they weren't inherently dangerous. Software doesn't have the same analogy in this space.
whats a better term here?
You really don't have to be obscenely wealthy to have that kind of money invested into a hobby over time, just a decade or three into a white collar career (or decent paying trade) is plenty.
Um, the problem here is Javascript. Don't use a cesspool of a language and you don't have such banal conversations.
I think he got NZ citizenship as a "the world has gone to nuclear hell/the proletariat are uprising" backup plan, but never intended to move their full time.
How much code did the preprocessor strip out?
I wonder if Google's AMP team is truly drowning in the Kool aid or if they actually know what's going on, but keep quiet for job security reasons.
But the rest of the year, the stores are empty. Which validated the company's decision: why have a bunch of full time employees, when what it really needs is part time and flexible employees to handle holiday surges (probably caused by waiting for Amazon shipping to not be an option).
Earlier discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16386774
Alzheimer's Disease Completely Removed in Mice by Deleting One Enzyme