skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Because if you travel in interstellar space for long enough, you are almost certain to experience problematic levels of DNA damage and get cancer.
Updated the title. Sorry
Recycling generally refers to the component materials, not reuse of the finished product. That's why the green mantra is "reduce, reuse, recycle" (in preferential order).
Checklists are cool and all. But, you shouldn't need a checklist to know that you shouldn't ship API keys.
China was happy to ban Facebook and Google. Google's market share in China plummeted from 37% to 2% over 4 years, and is still falling there.

The evidence certainly seems to suggest that China's government is willing to ban foreign tech companies for the benefit of the ruling party. Is there any evidence the Chinese government would hesitate to ban Apple if Apple undermined their authority?

I think there's a moral case for Apple refusing to serve China, but I think they would have to face the likely consequence that China would simply kick them out of the country.
> It was a enhanced clone of OpenVMS by the OpenVMS team they poached per Russinovich

I think the word "clone" is too strong. DR-DOS is a clone of MS-DOS because it attempts to implement the same APIs, with the objective that most (ideally all) software written for MS-DOS would run on DR-DOS without modification. By contrast, Windows NT doesn't implement any of the APIs of VMS, and VMS software cannot run on Windows NT without modification. Microsoft did take people and high-level ideas from VMS, but they were never trying to build a clone of OpenVMS-which would require aligning API details (as opposed to just high-level concepts)
I appreciate your position, but we simply disagree on this point. If you're interested, I'd recommend re-reading PG's "Submarine" essay. One can smell the sickly-sweet odor of PR on this headline, before even clicking through to TFA, at which point one can barely smell anything else.

After reading TFA, we may conclude that this company is developing a telemedicine product, and that they had some sort of arrangement with a nursing home on Long Island. Concluding anything else, positive or negative, based on obvious self-reportage is not "faith", it's credulousness. It would even be a mistake to fault this company for using obvious PR; every successful firm does the same.
"Coconut: Simple, elegant, Pythonic functional programming."
http://coconut-lang.org/
hi TAAndreas

you are right, the police was not very professional and it might have ended badly. Luckily it didn't. First i was scared that my ex send them to me and i was in trouble (althoug i did nothing illegal). Then i was relieved that it was about my post on HN.

Reading this made me uncomfortable, but also happy. A Stranger from the internet cared (about my life) and took action. I got 80 messages on that thread. Most of them were upliftig. But taking action is another level. Thank you for that! Faith in humanity restored.

You could have reached out to me directly. I would be happy to have a coffee with a fellow HN and "talk about it". I'd rather talk to a stranger with an open ear than a psychologist who listens because he/she gets paid for it.

If there is anything i can do for you, you can contact me at: tevlon84@gmail.com .

You did the right thing.Thank you!
Why Facebook Is Afraid of Robert Mueller
It's hard to imagine there are many folks who work in the legal world wouldn't be shocked by some of practices at colleges. Colleges shouldn't be playing the amateur legal system game, and they're doing a great job of proving why at seemingly every turn.

After a local university in my area did a review of their processes some of the recommendations were pretty shocking. Things like "the accused should be allowed to present evidence", "the accused and accuser should be allowed to have or provided representation", "the accused should be notified of appeals". It's hard to have a response that isn't a WTF.gif to things like that.
Refinement Types in Racket
This is a good article, but the author goofs here:

> “Apple says the handover is due to new regulations that cloud servers must be operated by local corporation. But this is unconvincing. China’s Cybersecurity Law, which was implemented on June 1 2017, does demand that user information and data collected in mainland China be stored within the border. But it does not require that the data center be operated by a local corporation.”

It’s common knowledge that the more authoritarian the country, the bigger the disconnect between the law and the truth-on-the-ground. I think it’s very likely that a party organ spoke to Apple and made it plain that “hand it over, or you’re out”. Which still has plenty of troubling implications, but criticism focused on Apple going beyond the letter of the law is disingenuous: the letter of the law is nothing in China.
I can't imagine a Mars base being useful in any meaningful way (aside from _maybe_ some sort of esoteric scientific utility) without reducing the transit time between the planets to at most a few days.
"pearl may look like a cartoon character swearing..." ><
Chronicling America: 12M+ Digitized Historic Newspapers Pages
Analysis of royalty free codecs
60% of CIOs Predict Spending on Analytics Will Increase This Year
Not irrelevant. Question for you, is this more legible:

https://twitter.com/mraleph/status/965686742614462466

I can update CSS if that helps.

UPD. Updated CSS to use non monospace fonts for the body.
I think Silicon valley's biggest contribution is innovation. All the Chinese or Indian startups I see (no matter how big their size) are generally China's answer to Uber/WhatsApp/Facebook or India's answer to Amazon.

I've yet to see one startup which is America's answer to some chinese/indian startup. I hope that day comes soon.
Ask HN: I'm not a good programmer, but I keep acing interviews
In the movie Moneyball, we learn that the Billy Beane character, when he entered baseball as a young player, was judged as a potential superstar by scouts. But he turns out to be a bad performer in the real game. He gave up other opportunities to play Major League Baseball. So those baseball scouts actually ruined his life.

I think I'm a lot like him. How can I break out of this?

I happen to be very good at a-ha problems, which show up often in interviews. I know a lot about how to optimize algorithms. I can talk learnedly about the tradeoffs between various paradigms. Interviewers are often very impressed.

The problem is, the job has nothing really to do with the above skills. It's mostly about slogging through poorly documented Java framework code, and getting some masochistic buzz from it. The desire to craft perfect code is an obstacle. Know how to do it better? Congratulations, you will be permanently dissatisfied.

And let's be clear, most of the job, even under the best of circumstances, isn't about coding. At best it's about communication and careful risk management. At worst it's cutthroat office politics in an industry that has too much money to ever treat people in a sane or humane manner.

I get depressed about this, and then those same people who judged me a potential superstar start collecting evidence to fire me.

So I'm in a job search right now. I just aced another interview. It's a company that wants to pay me way, way too much money to work on updating their legacy app. I have money woes right now but I'm considering turning it down. I am sick of being a disappointment.
The rise of cryptocurrencies degrades hard work and traditional success
I use www.com because it's the shortest to type non-https site I know of.
That’s at least what Google said publicly was the reason they left China.
It's important to distinguish between the policies of specific campus sexual-assault review boards and what was set forth in the 2011 Department of Education "Dear Colleague" letter.

There is nothing objectionable in the "Dear Colleague" letter, and it articulates sound policy for American colleges. While it is true that colleges must adhere to a "preponderance of the evidence" standard or risk falling out of Title IX compliance, a) preponderance of the evidence is the appropriate standard to use in non-criminal proceedings, including and especially civil-rights violations which are what Title IX covers; b) colleges also risk falling out of compliance of Title IX if the accused and the complainant do not have equal access to information used at the hearing, or equal time and opportunity to present their respective cases.

Whenever disciplinary investigation by a school for sexual assault becomes a "kangaroo court", it is almost assuredly a CYA move on the part of the college staff to look like they are "doing something" about campus rape without following the procedures set forth by the government. But it's not only unfair and against the law, it's in violation of Title IX and the very letter the MGTOW crowd has been whinging about.

Oh, and Betsy DeVos is an idiot for overturning this policy.
Well at least china has a internet industry- unlike Europe, more then lip service to liberalism, doesn't seem to pay too well.
> if you're shipping so much JavaScript to your site users that you need to "minify", maybe you're doing it wrong.

100% agree.
Fair enough. I thought it fit well with the parent article. I get your point about how wandering anywhere near Communism as a discussion can quickly lead to low quality argumentation.
Honestly, I'm not sure. I don't follow development that closely. It works with 1.10, possibly earlier versions.
Well they can’t in the EU because it would violate their privacy laws and be highly illegal.

Many large tech companies are having to retrofit their systems to deal with the privacy laws of the EU.

Germany also is in a league of its own in terms of its privacy laws.

Either way I don’t think much of it matters because I think the intelligence community probably has ways even around the privacy laws.
> So even if the "experiment" would have stopped right then and there and they would have switched to pure capitalism, what kind of development would you have expected?

I would expect something more like 350 million strong Norway, not 140 million strong Honduras that is the result of a century of communist experiment.

I am often reminded that Eastern Europe was always poor. Guess what? So were Norway at the time of divergence. Moreover, poverty and corruption is a direct result of communism that can't be ignored.
Show HN: GTD meets Pomodoro productivity workflows for Alfred
> Anthropogenic climate change is a factual reality.

Are the apocalyptic prophecies surrounding anthropogenic climate change also factual realities or pure speculation?
As a side note, doesn't anyone else find ironic that the edge technology car with autopilot is sent in space with the "driver" having both hands (glued) on the steering wheel?
It's a fine fix but many companies don't pay for that so you're out $200+ a month in a large city. It also gets complicated if you take the home office deduction
Hi! Until quite recently most scientists I know agreed that we did not have conclusive evidence that climate change was directly harming polar bear populations. However, a recent study provided the first empirical evidence of that happening [0]. I hope you read and maybe change your mind about it!

[0] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6375/568
I don't think you can avoid JavaScript even with WASM - and WASM in it's current form is, for some languages, a worse compilation target than JavaScript.
Chrome 64 now trims messy links when you share them
Yes, but google still has other business in china (android, selling ads to Chinese customers). They sacrificed their web search business, but not everything else.
> Then they did it right, I am most probably not going to donate to FreeBSD foundation first time in 5 years.

You must not care much about FreeBSD if a code of conduct saying don't be a asshole is what drove you to stop donating.

Also I'm skeptical you ever donated, you were spreading misinformation in you previous post about FreeBSD and now your mad they wrote a CoC that say things like don't threaten violence or stalk people.
The next generation of wireless technology is ready for take-off
it's called a wife where I live (/s), but like any good manager she'll take care of 100% your resources
That's just a "type system by obscurity". Extending it to provide the same sort safety, you'd need specific function for all combinations of types: sum_two_integers(), sum_integer_and_float() etc... Which would be both extremely ugly and a terrible waste of memory.
Show HN: Active Circles invite friends with snaps
Hi, my name is Rushi and I launched Active Circles.
The idea behind Active Circles is simple to gather a crowd and use the FOMO effect to pull it off.

So why did I build this? I have a whole article on it on medium: https://medium.com/@rush86999/what-facebook-and-gambling-hav...

long version short: I think social networks are becoming too unhealthy for everyone due to their effects on the reward system of our brains. I am a family doctor and I see that in young adults and how it's ruining our social fabric.

here's what I came up with in response

Planning for a new party, need friends for a quick yoga session. How about going for a run? Active Circles allows you to give a shout out to your close friends all at the same time. Have you ever noticed that sometimes that’s not enough? A picture may be worth a thousand words but more than that it creates a great story to tell and a great FOMO effect. Sometimes enough to give someone an extra little nudge to get up and get going to come over to whatever you are doing.

This is the premise for Active Circles. A simple FOMO effect to invite friends over and create huge crowds! If more common friends are present at the same place then stronger the FOMO effect.

What can I do with it?

Anything that needs gathering a crowd- a huge party, yoga session, play a sport, cheer for an event.

You can show off your snaps to friends' friends, even your school or workplace as long as you have an authenticated email address.

So have fun and let me know how I can make it better! (Only Available in North America for now)

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/active-circles/id1348466506?...
No. It is still being actively developed:
https://github.com/elm-lang/core/commits/master / https://github.com/elm-lang/elm-compiler/commits/master

But it's been 14 months since the latest full release.
Found my current job through HN's "Who is Hiring" threads.
Croissant distribution model
Launch HN is only for YC startups. You may want to do a Show HN instead.
Apologies, i fat-fingered a 1 onto the end. Thanks for the correction, team!
Non-paywall version: http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/opinion/columns/4405830-com...
One thing I think every Silicon Valley startup and investor should be afraid of is the incredible rate and depth of adoption of new technologies in China.

I came across two examples recently. First, in China e-books have taken over paper books, not just in volume, but in publishers' minds [1]. Second, payment systems like AliPay are becoming the dominant in just a few years, completely circumventing credit cards [2].

Now, neither of these are technological breakthroughs in themselves. The Kindle has been around for over 10 years, and Apple Pay and its precursors are not news, either. However, neither of those technologies has had the impact on their respective markets that the creators hoped for. Paper books are still frequently cheaper than their Kindle versions, and there have hardly been any noteworthy straight-to-Kindle publications. Likewise, Apple Pay, which is only a replacement for your physical card, but still a transaction mostly owned by Visa/MasterCard, and not Apple, is still far from a dominant purchase mechanism, even in the Bay Area. All in all, the pace of adoption of disruptive technologies in the US is pretty poor.

So, as an entrepreneur, I'd be much more worried not about inventing the cool new tech before China, but actually getting people hooked on it.

[1] https://www.economist.com/news/business/21731860-tencents-ch...
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/age-of-social-credit/
> I suspect we're the first to attempt to codify rude behavior.

Many private groups have rules on good and bad behavior. There's simply nothing new about it.
Imagine it's 8pm and you try to work 9-5. You get an email or slack message, you just quickly glance at it and it sounds like there's a tiny fire somewhere in the system that you know how to fix/respond to. It's very easy to sit down on the computer since it's literally a few feet away and get sucked into an 30-90min debacle multiple times per week.
I use the same computer for games/internet time and work so that definitely doesn't help. I just don't have room to set up another desktop since my home office has a nice desk, monitor, chair already.
datomic has both soft delete (retraction) and hard delete (excision).
> “Retina-X Studios is committed to protecting the privacy of its users...”

That's rich. The 'users' in this case are not necessarily the people with this appalling software installed on their device.
Not all heroes wear capes.
he couldn't read his own Perl programs less than a year after writing them

A year? I often lost a half day trying to understand Perl I’d written less than a week before. I’m not exaggerating.

I’m not sure what that says about me as a programmer but I’m terrified to find out.
Citibank New Jobs
What an incoherent rant. The author jumps from being angry at the people who took huge risks, invested in a new technology, and succeeded (oh, and they are evil males!), and then immediately switches to talking about scammers, like it's the same people.
Ok. If there's anything we can do to help, let us know at hn@ycombinator.com.
MonteCrypto: The Bitcoin Enigma
And when A calls something in B? For this example, let's bump the major rev.

B is expecting C = 2.0.0. A is expecting C = 1.0.0. A makes a call to B, which it passes to C. Does A know that B now expects to be called differently, since C is also significantly different now? According to the above requirements, no version of the deps exist that could allow the app to execute correctly, even though it will technically build fine.

The way to resolve this would be to say A requires C < 2.0.0, and simply fail to build until someone fixes A. But you probably won't even know about this conflict until someone tests the app with a specific feature of A that conflicts with C >= 2.0.0, the build fails, someone figures out the conflict, and updates the requirements.

But you can only know this, and add this requirement, once you have found the conflict. Thus code in the present, even with dependency requirements, may be indeterminate in the future. (Unless you walk back through all calls in the code to find calls between multiple dependencies that eventually land on conflicts... but I don't think that is possible in Turing-complete languages)

If you pinned the version in each function call in each part of the code, you could have the compiler or interpreter walk back through dependent code, identify mismatches, retrieve a compatible dependency, and continue execution. Or at the very least throw warnings all over the place when code is running using dependencies it wasn't written for.
Why A.I. Researchers at Google Got Desks Next to the Boss
Flash has always been better for media and games than JavaScript. WASM fills that niche.
Eh, I think both extremes are sub-optimal.

Some small public APIs are backed by large enough implementations that it pays off to be able to test implementation details. Sure, it might be "poorly factored" code that should have a bigger API and smaller guts, but that's not always an something you can change. Also, writing tests for internal behavior before refactoring can give you a good blueprint for how the refactored code should behave--being able to read the tests to specify unclear behavior is, while far from enjoyable in some cases, better than nothing.

You're right that there are some pretty silly test suites that break encapsulation for a coverage number without actually testing anything useful, though.

I don't think an absolute "all tests must behave thus" rule (e.g. coverage requirements, "only test public functionality", "refactor the instant something isn't easily testable") is useful. Explain the benefits of each path, and make sure the decision of what compromise to make--and in any project more than a one-developer hobby, you will have to compromise here eventually--is in the hands of people with the experience and common sense to make the right one.
I agree. Using less antagonistic language and providing more context would both be great.
Amish IT pro runs PCs on a platform of tradition
Check out OWASP cheatsheets and guides:

https://www.owasp.org/
Why? 16 million isn’t much, maybe 10 to 20 gigabyte if compressed.

I’ve seen IRC bouncers that have more messages stored for a single user (270 million, in fact).
Yeah so much great high quality software coming out of China. Many of these apps aren’t even a national security risk!
"The public disclosure will likely anger Microsoft, once again."
What has Microsoft done to retaliate in, if any, previous disclosures?
The criticism is fair given the timeframe, but it equally useful to point out for the readers coming here today how the language has evolved since that time.
Sure, I think I can explain some of what people might see in it. Obviously its strengths/weaknesses will depend on what language you compare it to, the article mentioned Java so I'll use that.

1) Value types - in Java if you want an array of objects of a non-primitive type, each one will be individually heap allocated (with some extra per-object overhead) and stored as an array of pointers (may change in Java 10). Go allows objects to be linear in memory with no overhead.

2) Slices everywhere - in Go slices are the default list representation. This allows any API that takes a list of objects to be passed a range of a bigger list, without copying/allocating.

3) Low-latency garbage collector - I believe Go has one of the lowest latency garbage collectors in common use (sub-1ms pauses). I realize Java has several options, but I think Go's is lower latency than all but some commercial/exotic ones like Zing. This is not saying the GC is better all around, just on latency. It's also relatively easy to minimize allocations in Go due to value types.

4) Low-overhead concurrency - lightweight tasks with no blocking/non-blocking dichotomy in APIs. But threads can scale up a lot, so this might not be a big benefit depending on the application.

5) Interior pointers - you can lay out structures linearly, and still use interior pointers. Also, you can use them as interfaces without allocating any 'boxed' objects.

There's probably more, but these are the things that come to mind right now. Looking back on this list, all of them are performance related. So if an application isn't performance sensitive in any of these ways I guess it would be understandable that someone might not see much in it, compared to a language with a higher learning curve but a lot of conveniences like Kotlin. Things like capitalization don't seem that big an issue though... maybe because Go is a simple language the tooling is already pretty good, and you can easily rename to upper/lower case in an IDE like GoLand.

For people unfamiliar with Go and want to see something more than hello world, I think an interesting project to look at is https://github.com/fogleman/pt. It's not enormous but not trivial either and makes use of interfaces, goroutines etc. The author's other projects are great too.
They way I read it is that the changing habitat will hurt the polar bear (now click here to see polar bear starving because it can't find food due to ice melting).

The data does not YET bear(no pun intended) this out and alluding to a viral video is a sympathy play and not anything backed in reality but rather speculation and prognostication.

So by its very nature its propaganda since it's using misleading information to put forward a point of view as absolute truth.

Misleading tactics will always hurt your argument in the long run.