skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Totally OT rant, but here goes:

> Even then, I still used some of the FreeBSD Handbook to learn Linux, because Debian didn’t have the great Reference that it does now.

At work, we are pretty much a Windows shop, and I am often frustrated by the state of Microsoft's documentation. Some parts, say, .Net API reference, are pretty good. Reference material for SQL Server is quite good, too (and I will am very grateful for that, because I have to deal with SQL Server a lot).

But in other parts, documentation is crappy or non-existant (I am looking at you, SharePoint!)
to such a degree that sometimes I wonder if they do this on purpose to generate business for the hordes of consultants and authors to write books (although all the SharePoint books I have looked at, sucked, too - the only helpful search results tend to be the blogs of SharePoint consultants, those poor souls).

And when people tell me to stop ranting because that is just the way things are, I tell them to look at the FreeBSD Handbook. Or the OpenBSD documentation. If these projects that are largely volunteer-driven are able to supply such excellent documentation, why can't Microsoft?

Okay, enough with the ranting, let me close on a more positive note: I run my home server on FreeBSD, mostly because of ZFS, but I have come to appreciate jails and bhyve, too. I love it, because it has not given me any trouble. It was straightforward to install and set up, and once it was working the way I wanted it to, it just kept going. (I check for updates regularly, of course, but that does not take much time, and I would have to do that on any other OS, too.)
Can I ask you what your network hardware is and how customized your kernel is (i.e., are you patching the network stack at all or running some vendor-customized drivers, or is it all in mainline)?
> Freedom means that you get a choice, even if that choice is going to screw yourself later in life - for instance not buying health insurance.

America is less free than "socialist" in your example. As an American you're free not to buy health insurance. However, if you don't purchase health insurance you have to pay a tax penalty to the government for the same amount as a health insurance premium. On top of that, the $400 a month "health insurance" you are required to purchase only covers health care costs after the first $8,000 you spend out of pocket.
> But seriously the handbook is documentation gold.

Amen to that!
They're only not the same when one is in Lisp and the other isn't.

E.g. you load "infix.cl" into your Common Lisp so that you then have the #I read macro that gives you #I( f(x, y) ), then they are the same. This just denotes (f x y). It would be suboptimal for that to be any other way:

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/lang/lisp/code/syntax/infix...

Now let's think about how silly it is to try to write a let block using this syntax:

(let ((a 1) (b 2)) (+ a b))

becomes

#I( let(a(1)(b(2)), +(a, b)) )

In the ((a 1) (b 2)) part the (a 1) becomes a(1). That then then looks like a function applied to the argument b(2). Things that should be on the same level aren't.

It's like using Roman numerals instead of decimal.

(f x y) is one size fits all; perhaps not optimal for anything in particular, just for everything.
> "The way the article reads seems to imply a kernel OS."

I don't think so. Here are some instances of the word KERNAL in the article:

* ... jump table at the end of the KERNAL ROM ...

* ... The system ROM (“KERNAL”) was now 4 KB

* ... making the KERNAL and the editor merely
a device driver package.

* ... jump table in the KERNAL ROM for interfacing
with it

* ... these are the KERNAL calls used by BASIC ...

* The following eight KERNAL routines ...

* ... it calls out to these KERNAL functions ...

* ... these KERNAL calls have to parse the BASIC
arguments ...

* These 6 KERNAL calls are actually BASIC command
extensions, ...
Just to counter the statement:

> Amazon has no MOAT.

Consider the following:

- Distribution. Amazon has their own distribution system, and has deals with third-party distributors

- Data. Amazon has a lot of data on consumer buying patterns.

- Books. When selling books online, amazon is apparently a requirement for success.

These aren't the best moats, but they are something.
Hustle?
Does Donating Blood Cure Acne? – Is There a Link?
> abstract types can break merely by having a stronger type system which is able to prove strictly more things (such as whether two types are equal)

Indeed, which is why I'm not such a huge fan of overly powerful type systems.

> That makes implementing completely leak-free abstractions quite difficult.

It means the type system has to have the right amount of expressive power. Too little, and separation of concerns becomes difficult. Too much, and separation of concerns becomes difficult too!

It also means that we can't rely on types to prove everything we would like to prove about programs. This seems intuitively right, because type systems are first and foremost meant to be mechanically checkable, not to be flexible enough to express every possible software requirement.

> In your example, it is not just the existence of the union type that causes the problem, but the operation "is T", which you probably assume to be of type "forall a. (a | T) -> Bool" or something.

This is correct. But removing this `is T` operation would greatly reduce the appeal of union types in practice.

> you could trivially implement abstract types similar to Haskell's newtype wrapper as { [some private symbol]: implementation-type }.

Both Haskell's `newtype` and your proposal are poor replacements for actual abstract types.
I only know the solution for orthographic. But it seems like perspective would be too easy, just make any shape with many square sides, and put the cameras close to the sides.
> I would argue it’s the GNU tools that are not 100% compatible. The BSD tools are very much the same as they always have been in Unix of old.

Of course, that's the point: the GNU tools undergo relatively active development and grow better while the BSD tools don't.
...'Charles Mackay, whose 'Extraordinary Popular Delusions' and 'the Madness of Crowds' of 1841 have had huge and undeserved success'.

Another example of books which get it all completely wrong yet become what people believe and 'how history happened'...
Worth considering that Netflix is both a compeititor and customer of Amazon.
I think Qubes' approach should be the default. There is no valid reason for so many permissions by default. The current default for example on Debian is crazy! Any user can read the home directory of any other user by default! If somebody whould have told me that before knowing it, I would have considered it a bad joke. I can't fathom why it's not changed.

However, Qubes can't protect against malicious hardware. I see no way around it, we must have hardware with completely open sources.
That's a ridiculous price to pay for ketamine. Though I'm hoping that cost includes a doctor's supervision and stuff?

$6000 would buy me enough Special K for several life times ...
> none of them want an agency like Europol getting involved, because then they would reduce their co-operation with it,

Well, now see it from the point of view of the other side. How will Belgium now see their future cooperation with europol? You are not wrong, but it is a stance which causes supranational organisations to whither until nothing is left.
Social hacking is still hacking.
Ask HN: Any Companies using crowdsourcing platforms?
Hi friends,

Previously, I worked for a crowdsourcing company that offloads routine data work for businesses.I am now applying some of those learnings into my product.Our goal is to lower the barrier to software engineering using crowdsourcing.I am doing a user study on teams both technical and non-technical teams to understand how they use freelancing platforms like Gigster, Toptal and more to augment their limited resources. What are your pain points?
Even more than that, the structure of these networks imply that targeting influencers may be ineffective. There's an interview [0] with Duncan Watts discussing this.

[0] Is the Tipping Point Toast? https://www.fastcompany.com/641124/tipping-point-toast
I always hear in my head the voice from old Maxis games like SC2K that says, “reticulating splines”
No, that's the first documented case of a bug being a literal insect. There were bugs in programs before, and they were called as such even then.
Also if people redeem these miles, wouldn't it bankrupt the airline or at least significantly affect its profitability?
So regardless of the facts here, you're on the bandwagon of "guilt by association." That is, "we caught you being friends with communists so we're going to take your job away"?
No. You can't put the law "in context" while outright ignoring case law. Courts have consistently found 1101 and 1102 to offer broad protection. I'm not a lawyer, nor want to do the research. AIUI from learned legal commentary, the broadness has not been tested for exactly this sort of issue, but that doesn't make it slam-dunk unprotected either.

You're claiming to put something "in context," but rather than clarify you're obscuring. This type of fake-smart comment is what makes me hate hacker news.
> I imagine self driving trucks will be priced with the cost savings over decades of driverless service in mind.

That's certainly not what I would expect to happen in the long run in a competitive market.

For example -- in the early days of computing, I would believe you if you told me that computers had a high premium, reflecting the work savings computers offered. But these days computers are certainly not priced to reflect their cost savings. They're priced to reflect supply and demand.

Indeed, computers (or, say, cars) have become so ubiquitous that to talk about their marginal cost savings relative to the alternative is kind of meaningless. Imagine a world where self-driving cars are in the same category. I think it's coming, and soon.
React Component Component
Bezos dream of shifting all heavy industry and mining to the asteroids would be so beneficial to humanity and the planet, that whatever short term pain (short as in timescale of decades) to either current incumbents business performance or consumer choice should be balanced against this promise.
Because one is native, while the other is not. I don’t think I’m splitting hairs, except in allowing a distinction between native vs native UI. Words have meaning. If a JS VM is being used on a platform for which JS is not a platform-native language and runs in a VM, it’s pretty much clear that’s not native. Calling it native—much less truly native—is making a false claim at worst, or muddying clarity of language and terminology at best. Perhaps creators of JS app technologies should stop claiming to be native, and none of us would ever have to go investigating the latest framework/library to find out if they mean what the rest of us mean when we say native.
I really hope Costco steps up and saves itself from Amazon.
The best antidote to an anecdote is one from the opposite angle. At least it starts me thinking who I should believe (if anyone) and why.
"Once this is done, they can entrench themselves and raise prices"

If that strategy really worked in the long run, you would see countless examples of it. So called "price dumping" can actually be illegal, but it rarely needs to be enforced.
You're completely wrong. So are most people in the comment section.

Research papers should NOT release code. Ever.

Researchers don't care, and should not care about your setup, your IDE, your OS, your dependencies, your processor architecture etc. None of that matters, unless it's the central point of the paper. You literally ask researchers to write coding tutorials or something. It's simply comedic.

Most machine learning and CS research revolves around Methods, Architectures, Processes and other abstract approaches to solving a problem. Their algorithms are always reproducible with any implementation you like.

Sure, the training data should be supplied, because in AI/learning it's part of the algorithm, but even if sometimes they aren't, you can try and reproduce the relative changes with another similar database. If their point is that one training method works better than another, the result still should be reproducible with similar datasets.

I get where you're coming from, after all most people on this site are programmers, but research is not about publishing code that works, it's about publishing ideas that work.
Why on earth would you do that? Yes, he's the head of the agency that breaks the law in your country, but you've got one of those too. There is 0 chance of extradition actually happening.
Can we prove posession of AES-256 key without showing it?
i never tried native script so i can't tell you for sure, but i hear that it produces code that works 100% on ios and android, whereas with React Native, it is platform dependent so you still need to modify code here and there to make it work. i'm not sure about performance though, i get mixed signals about it.
sad, sad story. do you work in the soap opera industry? your comment inspired me to do 100 burpees. Having done them, i negated your weak rationalization.
> There are, of course, two very different reasons why people wear glasses

Actually, three. Probably more. I wear glasses for astigmatism.
"Dictionary compression" can be any scheme in which coded symbols in the compressed data are references to some body of accompanying data where their replacements are found.
I've tried supporting the little guy with my online purchaces, and been ripped off several times, whereas Amazon has always put things right.

Do we really want to go back to the wild-west days of online retail?
Some people do: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/shortcuts/2016/jan/17/th...
If this is wget, my bicycle is a car.

This isn't "Wget in 50 lines of C code", just `wget --help` page is 192 lines.
You're ignoring the part of it that's difficult. Like saying that not being addicted to a drug or poker machines is effortless because the action of not picking up the needle or not pulling the handle is almost effortless.
Well, arch doesn't get used much in the server, and for good reasons.
You ever seen that Swole Bezos picture? He's that doughy, slightly nerdy guy who transformed himself into a hard assed cutthroat. This is Amazon.

Bezos obviously has an incredible nose for business, but he's mainly shown that he's not incompetent and just by being that he's run circles around others.

I've had too many bad experiences with Amazon that it tells me that his genius businessman mythology doesn't extend to the details. Went searching for a new smartphone recently. Was seconds away from spending $300 for what seemed like a new device only to see review after review from people who had been shipped poorly refurbished phones (shipped by Amazon) that would break a few months later.

There's too much stuff like that. That's their own damn site, an Apple product, and it shows that people are getting regularly ripped off and they are powerless to stop it (or won't). I see that and I see them getting into groceries and healthcare and it scares me. How can they possibly keep quality up?

There's too much mythology there, too much obvious greed, and not enough care that they appear to be building the world's greatest monopoly and we're patting them on the back.
It appears to me that there is a very peculiar vacuum of knowledge surrounding eyesight and glasses among the public, and what must surely be willful ignorance amongst opticians.
Interesting isn't it? Chinese people didn't just bootstrap themselves either. They got help. I mean, does anyone actually think that the Chinese populace asked for Communism and built up their tyrannical government from within? No way.

So who helped them start all this and why? Yale admits that they were complicit in helping Mao Tse Tung come to power in an article entitled "Yale Group Spurs Maos Emergence" - http://digital.library.yale.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collectio...

Without even looking at individual players, you can see what's going on. The USA has empowered China by buying everything they've made over the past 60 years. You'd think based on our values, a country like the US would have a big problem doing business with China. But nope! Everything's fine, just don't let any controlled-media mouthpiece talk about it though.

There are many, many, many open and obvious details which outline an invisible hand at work here. If you look deeper, you'll also find the involvement of such shady characters as a certain well-known family of international banksters who loan money to start wars and people who start wars to be able to sell their drugs to people. Long story short: I think that China is the prototype for a new world-wide government that is going to take over after the big-bad USA (my homeland) is wiped out either economically or physically. The stage is being set right now and there is no time in history that we've looked worse than we do right now. I'm pretty sure we deserve whatever we get though because we've let our tax dollars be used for some pretty nasty business.

Regardless of who anyone thinks the players are, we all know that the culture of corruption is real. This is the absolute height of corruption and it is definitely possible if not probable.
Check your settings, save mad loot
I have a little different take on the whole Amazon is too big argument. My family has owned small businesses for over 40 years. My dad and I have a vastly different opinion of Amazon. My dad is constantly frustrated by them, because its "cutting into our business". We simply can't compete on price on some items, and people choose not to buy products from us when they can just purchase them and have them shipped home.

Now this isn't a poor us, feel bad for us statement. Like I said my opinion of them is vastly different. I want them around. I need them around. They make logistics for us a 1000 times easier. In 3 clicks I can get items ordered that we need and not have to worry about it. (Need a new storage rack? BAM! Be here on Tuesday? We need a new printer ribbon? Phone camera + Amazon app = I have the exact one I need to replace.)

I hear retailers largely complain about them, because they are taking away business that they have come to rely on. That's not Amazon's fault; that's the business' fault. This is no different than the Walmart's, Barnes and Nobles (remember when there were small bookstores?), etc. of the world. Amazon is different, because it's threatening them too. Amazon is making people realize that they need to be constantly searching for new products and new sources of revenue, but the truth is that they should have been doing this all along. Literally every time I walk into the store, I talk to the manager and ask, "What are we doing to move forward?" Amazon isn't what should be scaring people, it should be the fact that they've been asleep at the wheel not realizing they are driving of the road.

My point is that competing directly with Amazon is stupid, but so is competing with any other large dominant company. They don't have a monopoly on anything, it's just that their presence is more widely felt by a larger number of people at the same time.
Yep they did the same to me... If they don't like your argument they just flag it as offensive. Admins are obviously on the side of oppression since I was prevented from posting for the last few hours and they threatened to ban me.
It's like... Employee discusses theory and gets fired to silence the unwanted opinion. Then we discuss whether it should have happened or not - and we're at the point now of suppressing any opinions that strongly disagree with the firing. So not only aren't you allowed to support an idea - but you're not allowed to defend anyone who has supported it. This is why this discussion always comes back to free speech! Why can't we defend each other's rights to free speech? After participating in this thread it is clearer than ever.
Take a quick look at how many of those ICO tokens are built on top of Ethereum: https://coinmarketcap.com/tokens/

Most of those are connected to some kind of dApp project.
>because every startup is unsustainable at the beginning. every startup wants to beat its competition and emerge as the sole winner. every startup wants to raise prices and make more money.

With the idea that they will eventually become sustainable. And let's not pretend that manu (most?) startups are a massive cash sink-hole run by people who don't really know what they're doing. Regardless, if your startup's plan is to start cheap, grow their user base until they have a network effect, and then raise their prices significantly _and_ the product they offer can be easily replicated... then yes, that startup should probably not exist.
That seems like a very ambitious project, is there any company behind this? Otherwise I'm not sure it will work over the long term. Even React Native with Facebook (and Microsoft) behind it and years of development, it still feels like a beta product and many features are still missing. I wish an independent project could do better than that but it's unlikely.
Thanks for the advice and vote of confidence in MySQL JSON support. I don't anticipate reaching that kind of scale, but it's great to hear about large, successful, production deployments. These days I try to stick with a very stable back-end stack and innovate more on the front-end.
Client doesn't mean everything. In applications like these, there shouldn't be even a single binary blob without code for it.

To their credit, they said they will, but this[1] has been on their website since a very long time.

[1]:https://telegram.org/faq#q-why-not-open-source-everything
It's UPC. I've got a business connection, technically, but it's not excessively expensive and the SLA is worth it.
> Lisp programs are lists of Lisp lists

That's actually not true either. Here is a Lisp program:

(defun true () t)

It's a list of four elements, only one of which is a list. (You actually could define a language where all programs were lists of lists, and you could even make it Turing-complete. But it would be completely unusable because it would consist of nothing but parentheses!)

Now, obviously I know you know this. And equally obviously I know that what you meant was different from what you actually said. But that's only because I already knew what you were trying to say. If you're trying to communicate with someone who doesn't already know what you're trying to say (and isn't that the whole point of communication?) then you have to actually say what you mean or you will fail.
Hypocrisy is also not a fallacy. It is not even a weak indicator of flawed reasoning.
Even a small amount of time spent perusing Bitcoin fora reveals an endemic belief that if one doesn't sell, one has incurred no loss. Any conversations discussing a realized loss will quickly surface the "weak hands" meme wherein the loser simply didn't have sufficient will or presence of mind to keep HODLing and selling their Bitcoins served to benefit the better investors who were able to buy them at a discount.

Perhaps the author is simply playing to the zeitgeist?
The façade is coming down. It took less than expected to prove the thesis that an open society would ever only be tolerated when everybody already agreed with each other.
Apple dictates that all new apps must fully support the iPhone X screen
maybe if your 'app' is entropy in the universe.
What I like about languages with REPLs is that I can just copy-paste stuff and then muck about at various points of execution to get an idea of how things work, or prod at the different parts.
It’s just the title that’s a bit simplified. First paragraph already says:

“This tutorial is meant as an introduction to libdill socket library. We are going to develop a simple version of wget utility, that can be used to download webpages from the net.”
I don't think the question is that simple.

Does "increased life expectancy" mean more healthy, productive life or does it mean more time at the end in a hospital or nursing home? That would make a big difference, or so it seems to me.