skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a way to target digital hoarders, similar to Valve's game sales. Most buyers will never read the books and they have essentially zero marginal distribution costs, so they make money either way.

Being a digital hoarder, myself, it's still quite tempting.
Detecting a cycle is something I learned about a long time ago in a Lisp context, but haven't used. It's simple enough once you know it, but I doubt I could have come up with it on my own without thinking about it for a few days; certainly not on the fly.

When I took Comp Sci, you received some very general, broadly applicable tools. What I'd expect from my Comp Sci classmates, would be looking at such a problem for a couple of seconds, then they'd say, ok, you can do [X]. We were educated with a toolset that allowed us to do that. If you are thinking of it in terms of cycle detection being a particular specific obscure thing that you'd never have to do, let me say this. 1) If you think of it like that, and you further tell me that it would take you a couple of days, then that immediately tells me you don't have a particular, very broadly applicable toolset. 2) There are contexts where you have to do the kind of systemic thinking where cycles are something you have to account for.

There have been fields where knowledge has been lost. The British Navy figured out how to stop scurvy, then lost the ability to do so. The Japanese figured out how to stop the beri-beri deficiency disease, then failed to propagate the knowledge. I am starting to wonder if academia in the Bay Area and California can effectively compete with startups and big tech companies for Comp Sci expertise commensurate with teaching. Maybe only the very top institutions can do this?
How about an example of the results it produces on your website? Might convince more people to give this time if you can show some output, given either a known T&Cs like Apple's or if that's a legal issue, use a T&C template
I really like this article. I have read a lot of articles that bandy about terms like dark energy, the cosmological constant, and the multiverse. This was the first thing I have read that clearly explains how they link together.

However, I have a question. The article says that dark energy "presence causes the cosmos to expand ever more quickly, since, as it expands, new space forms, and the total amount of repulsive energy in the cosmos increases" But wouldn't this violate the first law of thermodynamics?
Not directly related, but I found an irc bot this guy wrote. IN BRAINFUCK.

https://github.com/SirCmpwn/bf-irc-bot
I think ASICs are still winning for bitcoin itself, but they currently have two big problems for a lot of buyers.

First, absolutely zero resale value. Once either the difficulty raises, or the value of the coin falls, to the point where you're spending more on power than you're generating in currency, your ASIC goes in the trash.

Second, the algorithm they use is baked in. So an ASIC built for bitcoin can only be used for other sha256-based currencies. With a GPU, when you realise you're not cost-effective for BTC, you can try your hand at Eth instead.
Comcast owns 30% of Hulu through NBCUniversal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulu
It's hard to do work you don't feel in anyway connected to. I'd try a technique called negative visualization. Imagine if you don't take the money and leave. What will your life look like in the next year, 5 years.

What is the worst possible scenario? Will you regret it for the rest of your life or will you be happy you made the decision. That money could potentially free you to pursue more meaningful work.

Look, everyone works a job they dislike at some point in their life. You won't always feel passionate about the things you're doing, but you need to weigh how much you may regret it otherwise. This sounds like a sure bet for 2x-5x more in straight cash within your 20's. People don't always get that.

Maybe, try to change something different in your routine of life. Shift the focus from work for 12 months to something else, like dating, a hobby, a sport.

If you seriously hate it, I mean really hate like it boils your blood to get up in the morning and think about going to work then leave. Absolutely, make your peace of mind and health the most important thing. However, this may be an opportunity for you to shift focus and coast for a bit.
A lot of people consider greater fool assets to be financially unsound, no matter what their historical performance might be.

Stocks typically provide real value in up to 3 different ways. First is paying dividends. Second is voting power. Third is liquidation preference.

Many new tech stocks provide none of those. All they provide is a hope that some fool in the future will pay more for them than you did.

As long as we're in a bubble, those greater fool stocks will keep going up. Sooner or later, the bubble will end. Some people consider it financially unwise to depend on the continued existence of a bubble for their financial positions.
Oh, mai. Where is the tldr; for this one
I don't like "the economist" however a while back they did do a piece on land value tax, maybe HN will find it more palatable coming from this journal:

https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/04/land-va...
It's just a pseudo-story, clickbait. The nerdy version of a buzzfeed article about cheese.
It doesn't matter. One big power plant is so much more efficient than a million little ICE cars that you typically end up with lower emissions and less pollution from EVs even if 100% of your electricity is from coal.

That said, China - and most of the world - is on an exponential growth curve for renewables right now. It will take a long time for the world to switch over to EVs, so we're better off starting now, regardless of the current emission profiles for electricity generation.
> Accidentally alerting the user that he's now a channel owner instead of a muted user is a trivial issue.

But it's not if you accidentally make someone an owner instead of muting them.

> EDIT: Also, there's work on getting modern irc server features added to the protocol, which could possibly standardize those additional modes. https://ircv3.net/

Yeah, the IRCv3 Working Group is doing great work
Hanlons Razor seems apropos here.

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Also, DNS does weird things sometimes.
Its a little scary how easy it is to eat too much sugar.
Is MIR being treated as part of the language definition? Most languages would treat such a thing as an implementation detail, so defining the constraints in that fashion seems like it still looks like it may tie you to the reference implementation.
"but in the mean time I just really don't like being here"

That's the key takeaway here, IMHO. If you aren't in a situation where you absolutely need the money, there's nothing wrong with prioritizing your own happiness and wellbeing. People regularly take pay cuts and give up options for a better quality of life.
How would you do that in such a way as to prevent a Twitter army from piling on someone? Or at least make it so they don't feel they're being bombarded?
Her joining Dropbox was discussed 4 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7565546

That was a very realpolitik like hire.
Riddle me this:

How can you tell the difference between the government asking Comcast to block a certain site for a few days, and Comcast's normal level of service?

Without more evidence, you can't.
We really just need better public education

That's great but it's a slow cultural change. Well-educated countries can still fall into extremism, which is driven by emotional and atavistic factors as well as economic and political ones, and can't simply be dispelled with doses of Rationality (tm). Arguably, the failure of rational utilitarianism to engage with this aspect of humanity and to simply dismiss everything that can't be quantified as irrationality exacerbates the growth of toxicity.

On a more practical level, the US is a country where part of the population rejects the theory of evolution on religious grounds, historical narratives are intensely contested, and political life is objectively and increasingly polarized. Educational change happens over generational timescales, and if it were as simple as making it available all our social ills would have been dispelled long ago.

Of course education and critical thinking skills are essential for a healthy social body, but when I see people saying 'we just need better education' I feel like I'm on a bus that's headed towards a cliff edge and well-meaning people are suggesting that the solution to this is better driving lessons.
meh hate all these handouts based solutions, devalues the effort of the developers.

If I do something I'd rather get paid or not at all and I've chosen that, rather than cap out looking for tips.
This nightmare scenario has natural stable states, I think. At some point, it will cease to be profitable to propagandize at machines, no? We should work to construct a society that negatively incentivizes bot proliferation, but it can't be a purely financial incentive. Free speech must not have a price tag, or else "stop, thief" may become impossible to shout.
People aren't desperately throwing themselves to buy them for their full price it seems, because Packt is always there with humble programming books of any sort.
> However, if you create consequences or a cost to commenting you'd eliminate toxic comments and trolling at the cost of less participation and an echo chamber (though, you could argue that not all participation is equal and you're mainly removing poor participants).

Twitter actually does this but only for some types of accounts. Every see the "see more" button under replies? That's where people of low quality go. Twitter has a sort of rating for figuring out if someone is of low quality or not and they usually get hidden. Even their likes and retweets get hidden.

Hasn't to help overall on Twitter though I have noticed I get less assholes replying to me.
This problem is easy to solve: give users the tools to do their own filtering. But services like to pretend that it's a hard problem because they don't want to actually cede that control to their users. The whole point of controlling the communication networks is to control what and how people say and hear.
Stack Overflow site utilizes this really well. You get more privileges the more trusted you are.
We tend to think we’re more in control of our behavior than we actually are. That is, our brains are operating from habit a large amount of the time, and the idea of the CEO brain consciously deciding our every action is largely an illusion.

This is why emergency exit doors must open outwards. People have died in fires in theaters trying to push on doors that said “Pull”. The crash bar on an emergency exit door is what’s known in design as an affordance.

When you present people with a door handle that affords “pulling”, they will pull even if the sign says “push”.

Now consider the fact that the primary affordance of social media is the “reaction”. Is it a surprise that content that garners a reaction will trend towards the outrageous?

If proactivity is the road to a more fulfilled, more civilly minded life and society, maybe we need to think of our affordances. Because we’ve made it awfully easy to be reactive, and awfully cumbersome to be proactive.

Edit:
The comments below correctly point out an error; what I should have said was that there’s a danger in putting a “pull” handle on an emergency door that pushed outward, because of the confusing affordance.
Libraries aren't the same as native support as the latter case influences all uses of concurrency in a language while the former only affects things that use that library and may be incompatible with other concurrency libraries.
I see billboards and the busses that shuttle people between the different ASU campuses going on about their effectiveness all the time.

#1 school for this metric.

In the Top 10 for some other metric.

Even the small California state school I went to goes on and on about the things they're good at...Environmental stuff and getting grads into the Peace Corp.
> Multiverse is not as mysterious as "god did it" (a.k.a magic), it's a very specific hypothesis.

If you can test the existence of another “universe”, it's really the same universe.

Plus, even if you have a model of a multiverse in which the component universes have variation on particular axes, you can still ask why you have such a well-constructed set of parameters such that varying them will allow life somewhere on the multiverse. Multiverse is not only a non-terrible hypothesis, it's one that doesn't do anything but kick the problem it is meant to explain one step further down the road without transforming it's general shape.
That's a solid idea. A couple of people have suggested it. I'm working on one right now to put up on the site. Thanks for the suggestion!
It's less about goals of the technical project, and more about goals of the organization. Rust the language is written by people, The Rust Team, most of whom I'd imagine are volunteers. In order to guarantee the life of the project, its important for potential contributors to not only feel comfortable using the language and writing code, but also feel comfortable in discussing the future potential features and use cases for the language.

It is important for projects, now, to state their goals upfront and be clear, especially when you could have 1000s of contributors from all over the world. This is something that's new for software projects, but as open source becomes larger and more diverse its becoming more necessary. The alternative has been a community based loosely around some invisible set of rules that alienates or drives away potential contributors or sparks some drama that ends up on the top of Reddit/HN/etc.

Lifetime checks will stop working if the project gets abandoned over political issues.
Reputation will mean different things to different people.
>That’s all fine, but who pays? It’s true that large-scale urban redevelopment projects can be very expensive. However, engaging with private capital has proven to be a viable strategy both in and outside of the UK.

>Few years ago, when I was serving as an elected official in Moscow, I was the only outspoken YIMBY in my district. Once at the public hearings I was even accused of being bribed by the developer — just because I supported a private park project!

So this is just a play to privatize public land? I like walkable areas and I really like areas that anyone can walk in. Who cares how walkable a space is when your ability to actually walk there is subject to the whims of a private individual?
> .../Reddit/... promote a regression towards the mean understanding... viral content reflects and amplifies the "average user's" sentiment and values

Comparing the experience in a niche subreddit, vs. a default subreddit, it's clear that the real problem is allowing causals in. If people have to go out of their way to participate, you wind up with only the ones who care to do so. And they have, in their reputation, something they don't want to lose.

But if people are allowed to participate by default, you get the enormous masses of people who, collectively, by virtue of their shifting roster, are immune to moderation. And you get people who set out that morning to share as many opinions as possible, instead of the people who set out to participate in that community exclusively.
A b-tree or a binary tree? A b-tree doesn't even sound believable, unless there's other info you're not telling us.
As it turns out, invading "third world" countries, overthrowing their existing institutions, and installing "proper" systems designed in "first world" countries has been tried. It was, broadly speaking, the foreign policy of Europe toward poor countries during roughly the period 1600 to 1950. It was called "colonialism", and it caused the problems we see there today, as well as much worse problems (up to and including the extermination of entire populations) while it was going on.

I do not think that attempting to re-establish colonialism, as you propose, would be a good use of our technology, skills, or knowledge. However, Peter Thiel and the current government of Honduras seem to disagree.
Thankyou. I already take extra D3 and K2. I had never heard of metformin.

I have had really bad luck finding a doctor that will discuss natural solutions. A nurse friend was suggesting I find a functional medicine doctor or lab scientist.
The human brain is a fantastic computer. Most people are geniuses, constantly crunching stochastic phenomenal trajectories, and navigating ever-changing real and virtual terrains. The problem isn't how smart we are, but on what we focus.
Its all just fluff. Might have something to do with Mozilla being left-leaning.
Skin color has nothing to do with non-lexical lifetimes.

They will say that they value diversity of thoughts that may come when you have people with various backgrounds, but it is much more primitive in practice, always boiling down to companies acquiring people with certain skin color or gender just for the sake of it.

There are well-known but taboo reasons behind the lack of so-called diversity in tech and other highly intellectually demanding areas. And as long as uncomfortable truth cannot come out in the overly sensitive cultural climate of today, initiatives and policies in this direction will remain misguided.
"Toxic statements = statements from a different political orientation"

Wrong. Saying so is dangerously minimizing the problem.
I was deliberately vague, because this is an individual thing. I was never dismissing nutrition science...

I swear some people just downvote without even trying to understand what I'm trying to convey... then again, maybe I could have explained a little better.
Ask HN: High-signal sources for learning Python?
I have an interview for a Python developer position in a few days. I'm fairly confident about the algorithmic part, and have a generally wide knowledge of other relevant CS/programming areas, but I'd like to brush up on my Python.

Can you give me some _high-impact_ sources for learning Python? My idea of these sources is that they would approach (to some point) a trivia-list as their signal-to-noise ratio increases. I'm not looking for long-winded think-pieces about design patterns, reports about personal experience, or such, or rather large technical references, but something that had been pre-processed by a human, prioritized, etc.
Kudos to you for creating and sharing this.

I've toyed around with ideas related to your project. Such as: What if... you had a Lisp that instead of being based around the classic linked list, was based around the Lua table instead?

I've briefly tried to come up with formulations for how the code itself should be represented as a series of nested tables.

And perhaps have a series of nested tables for all variables in the runtime as well (including local ones), though Lua sort of does this now.

All that would increase ease the introspection, creation of macros, and other fun stuff. I hadn't started deciding on a syntax or anything either.
Modern Romance Dos and Don’ts
> Amazon's phone might have flopped, but they've eaten the Android tablet market

That is very country specific, I hardly see any Kindle that isn't a plain e-book reader around here.

What I see on my train travels is people using iPads or Windows 10 tablets with detachable keyboards.

Anecdote data, take it as you wish.
(shared-nothing = copy-everything != blazingly fast)?

also:

(multi-threading + shared-nothing) = much less complexity = more correctness
Joel Spolsky, CEO of Stack Overflow, using data for decision making
I quit reddit for good on Saturday. There are two major problems with it:

- Downvoting creates echo chambers,

- No accountability for moderators.

I think the downvoting should be removed completely. Downvoting is basically giving people the power of a mini-censor and the people love it.

Subreddits can be completely censored by moderators and there's no way to know this is happening. Maybe reddit can develop a way to judge the behaviour of the moderators. Like showing what posts they removed, for example.

I've been part of plenty of internet communities that don't become like this. Even completely public forums and IRC channels. I guess HN isn't as bad as reddit because we have an above-average intelligence crowd, but there are some opinions I am careful not to mention here as well.
>Google is the weapon used by all the groups involved.

This also shows that Google is a power-deficient gate-keeper, because they are buckling under pressure over search results.

Somewhat OT: Wikipedia has a list of Swedish Jews[0], but Helle Klein, for instance, is not on that list. She does have a Wikipedia article and it clearly has her on a different list of Jews.[2] In fact, Wikipedia has a list of lists of lists of Jews.[3] Wikipedia probably gets zero flak over this fact, because there is zero neo-nazi rhetoric surrounding the lists.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Swedish_Jews

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Sweden

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helle_Klein

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_Jews
GDXM (Global Digital Exchanges Monitor) Has Officially Launched
some of my favorite parts of The Recognitions are the ones that make fun of that book

>There was, finally, very little need to know anything at all, except how to “deal with people.” College, the author implied, meant simply years wasted on Latin verbs and calculus. Vergil, and Harvard, were cited regularly with an uncomfortable, if off-hand, reverence for their unnecessary existences...In these pages, he was assured that whatever his work, knowledge of it was infinitely less important that knowing how to “deal with people.” This was what brought a price in the market place; and what else could anyone possibly want?
I think there is value in traking the intake to your system, but is of course a chore. I used myfitnesspal for a year and its great to have a data driven approach, but is also exahusting.

Also traking your physical activity could be done with several combinations of devices and apps.

But also, very important, is to track your mood and overall feeling and wellness (or lack of). Again several apps are out there, but a old good pen and paper diary goes a long way.

Then, is a matter of correlate, and review back to when you were feeling better and try to replicate and optimize.

Of course this is nothing new, Tim Ferris and several other authors had dedicated a lot of ink to the subject of traking and self-improvement.

The other way to do it is hear your body, and do what you know it works. It's a lot more relaxed, but prone to biases.

This is not to say that any condition can be treated with lifestyle adjustments. I don't know about your condition and I am not giving any medical advice. But for sure I will try to see if any specific diet helps me to feel better if I were in your situation
> It's the people who are toxic.

I half-agree with this. The internet doesn't make a genuinely kind and empathetic person into a troll. But I think it does amplify certain bad little impulses that are latent in pretty much everybody -- the temptation of quick and cutting putdowns, mob and tribal mentality, lobbing rhetorical bombs then ignoring the consequences...

There is a qualitative difference between a back-and-forth on Twitter (or even HN) and a back-and-forth in real life. There's way more trust in good faith in the latter.
Flare 1.0 Free/Libre Action Roleplaying Engine
I don't think moderation should be done by algorithm, as soon as you give the task back to humans you're much more capable of shades of gray and thoughtful, real moderation. Humans have been moderating public spaces for thousands of years, we're more than up to the task if a little bit of care is put into the implementation.