skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> On Stack Overflow, the most common disconnect is between these two goals:

I wonder if you could serve both these goals. What if the basic Q&A machinery was used to explicitly help solve asker's problems, but there was a mechanism to elevate a question and its answers into the site's library of long-term knowledge? The site could then do standard SEO-fu to only include the latter questions in search results, emphasise them more in search, etc. The mechanism could be something like the current close vote mechanism - if four users with sufficient rep vote to elevate, it gets elevated, plus mods can do it directly, de-elevate, etc.

You could end up with lots of "low-quality" questions and answers whose turnover is still helping people in concrete ways, but also build up a repository of knowledge.
Links clicked on within the Windows Mail app will open in Microsoft Edge
Not sure how Ireland is getting richer and richer on the back of this given there is very little tax.
It's inaccurate and misleading to call CO2 a poison in the context of climate change. Yes, it's a poison at high concentrations (as is just about everything), but the concentration required to cause climate change is way lower.
1. The whistleblower coming forward with a story, and

2. Facebook's leaky API and how Kogan was allowed to continue by lying and saying the harvesting was for academic purposes
Sounds like another case of geeks versus wonks. In Tucker’s “A Political Theory of Geeks and Wonks,” he delineates the latter with

Political wonks are fascinated by process. They love the game. They get as much satisfaction from observing as changing. They want to be players above all else. Ideals bore them. History is mere data. Intellectuals seem irrelevant. What matters to the wonk are the hard realities of the ongoing political struggle. They defer to title and rank. They thrive on meetings, small victories, administrative details, and gossip about these matters. Knowing who is who and what is what is the very pith of life.

Geeks, on the other hand:

They are no less fascinated by detail but are drawn to ideals. Observation alone bores them. They are drawn to the prospect of change. They don't want to be players as such; they question the very rules of the game and want to change them. They are happy to make a difference in the ideological infrastructure, whether big or small. They tend to work alone and totally disregard caste distinctions.

As to your frustration with Wikipedia’s political elite

The wonks are the ones who consolidate, stabilize, and entrench the status quo; the geeks are the ones who prepare revolutionary change. The wonks freeze it into place and make it work more efficiently; the geeks imagine and work toward a future that no one thought was possible. The wonks rule out drastic and extreme measures as imprudent and reckless; they geeks think these paths are the only ones worth pursing, and have confidence that the unknown future will somehow work itself out. The wonks try to bring the king around to their point of view; the geeks kill the king.

Tucker describes the conflict between the two camps.

The geeks and wonks can work together but there will always be a natural tensions between the two. The wonks think the geeks are hopeless, powerless, reckless outsiders whose heads are full of useless and unrealistic fantasies. The geeks think that the wonks are part of the system and, therefore, more than likely corrupted by it, and increasingly so.

Broadening the view, the struggle to control history is a battle between the wonks and the geeks …

According to his view, Julius Caesar represented the wonks and Brutus the geeks in Ancient Rome. In the America’s revolutionary generation, they were Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson.
Ask HN: Resources for teaching 11yr old to code?
A friend reached out to me recently asking where I would suggest he go to help teach his 11 yr old daughter who wants to learn to code (He is a lawyer, so not going to be super helpful until she has to negotiate the mediocrity of corporate compliance and license requirements).

Frankly, i'm surprised how hard I'm finding this question to answer. I think part of if it is that I don't want to get it wrong, and the other half is that I love that we're talking about a young woman who wants to get into this field, so i double want to get it right!

So my ask, what would you suggest? People with first hand experience with kids here I'd love to hear from you!
Structural engineers have one of the most stressful jobs as well. Work is incredibly precise with deadly consequences under tight deadlines with a lot of egos in the way. Massive respect to those who thrive in this profession.
Archaeologists look in places where objects have not been exposed to the elements.
GIMME VIDEO IDEAS |This Evil Bunny
Floating point's non-associativity is certainly a problem for composability and stability of neural networks, you're right. However this non-associativity is well behaved in the sense that there's an ideal arithmetic we wish to approximate and we have techniques for mitigating the discrepancy between floating point and that arithmetic.

The non-associativity of the octonions is fundamental to their structure, not something to be worked around. In particular, there's no way to consider an octonion-valued network as comprising several layers plugged in serial.
In software development you are solving new problems continually. If you weren't you could just call a library function with some parameters and be done with it.

Structural engineering is much like calling library functions with certain parameters and then making sure it all works and is safe. You know how what you are constructing differs from existing buildings and use that to decide what to do. You don't (usually) invent new ways of building things or building things that are unlike anything that was built before.Therefore such projects are well-known engineering practice, and your skill and knowledge of those practices can be tested and you can be licensed.

Some software development is like that too but most is not, you are creating new designs all the time because your software is for new purposes, not to replace something existing with perhaps a slightly improved version. It's hard to license anybody in "inventing new things".
No doubt! It seems antiquated and repetitive
Industrialization has many positive aspects. Its byproducts may lead to some deaths, but they also lead to saved or longer lives for many. There is a decent chance that the positives outweigh the negatives.

Measles...it's hard to make a case that the benefits of getting measles outweigh anything.
Would you care to elaborate?

The mind consists of atoms and molecules. All of the physics relevant to chemistry is known [0].

[0] 10.1021/cr200042e
> how much of it would still be alive if they had used tin solder?

Tin ages poorly?
Code from what dictionary? I am pretty sure you are the racist antisemite.
That seems like a very uncharitable interpretation, I went through many pages of google results for that term and couldn't find anything in regards to anti-Semitic connotations.

Perhaps we should assume that friendly_chap is telling the truth when he says he's referring to the bankers, and not the jews?
Abandoned Factories as Tourist Attractions
Hash tables for me were not just a data structure, I had some form of love for this way of organizing data. Can't forget the articles in the Dr. Dobb's issues about the new hashing schema, or how the new processors caches + access locality could change the game and so forth. But at this point, in 2018, I believe that hash tables should be rarely used.

Take Redis for instance. I used an hash table to start. Very early in the project I discovered that people were going to use it to store large amounts of data and rehashing times were a too big price to pay, so let's switch to an incremental rehashing schema, with all the complexity. Then there was to implement some form of iteration (see the Redis *SCAN family of commands). So let's fight against the complexity of an incrementally rehashing hash table in the context of a stateless cursor iterator. and so forth.

Basically a decent implementation of hash tables end being slower and more complex to handle than a good radix tree implementation (not to implement, radix trees when full featured are a nightmare to get right, if you have a stateful iterator). So once you implement a good radix tree (check for instance the "rax.c" file inside Redis source code, or simply https://github.com/antirez/rax), you start to see that, hey! you have all the advantages of an hash table, but it's faster, the key space is sorted, you can iterate it in many ways, and the memory usage is much smaller.

So I'm not sure at this point, other than "the simplest dictionary data structure I can implement just recalling from memory", if there are great applications for in-memory hash tables as data structures. They are perhaps starting to be more interesting for disk applications.

For all my new projects I imagine myself just copying rax.[ch] and use it, unless there is some very odd reason why an hash table will be preferable.
12 interactions? Or 12 lengthy interviews?

Steve Bannon has more incentive than anyone to contest the books accuracy and he’s basically confirmed it.
What do you mean with you don't have much choice with Qt? Its view-model architecture lets you basically use any source of data you like in the backend.
Request HN:  a thing I'd like – recent posts for a user
There are mechanisms to follow people on HN, externally provided, and there are ways to get informed when someone posts a reply to one's submissions or comments, also externally provided.

Here's a thing I find myself doing: I see an insightful comment from someone, and I click on their profile, click on their recent submissions and comments, click on the ones that have happening in the last week or so, and see if they were similarly insightful on other, recent occasions.

I've recently written an external script that does something similar from a command line, but I was wondering if anyone else has a script or tool already, and if so, is it generally available.

And if not, would anyone like to write and provide one?

Thank you.
The sibling comment is good enough and gets the point across. But I want to elaborate because I've ended up in basically the same place as the GP.

I know you've written about SO not being a good place for opinion-based questions before, and perhaps in theory you are correct, but I (at least) am not satisfied with the implementation, and tend to link that at some level to a flaw in the theory.

What I mean: some of SO's most [in]famous questions are opinion questions where the askers are requesting advice from "expert" answerers to help them navigate a new topic. They're not just infamous because they may be controversial and "hard to moderate". They're famous primarily because the way in which the question was asked drove many users (hundreds even thousands of upvotes with millions of views) to the site and helped a lot of people through their journey working on a new technology or in a new problem domain.

SO said "nahwp, we don't want questions without clear cut answers". Not necessarily SO's fault, but nonetheless their problem: the community took that as, "err on the side of annoying pedantic asshole and close, downvote, and otherwise ostracize any user asking any question that might not be a good fit for the site under the new regime".

In my experience, it feels like people are trying to find a way justify being annoying instead of find a way to provide meaningful advice. I've asked questions that, if you took 30 seconds to think about instead of a quick search for a marginally related title (which I already did in the 4 hours prior to asking my question) and immediate vote to close as duplicate, or an almost bot-like flag as "too broad" based on word choice heuristics, are not bad questions, and often after hours of flagging and arguing with the original users who are stubborn because they don't want to be wrong (especially publicly) I can make my case. But by that point it's too late and too many times I've had to do that to fend off users trying to do good for the site over helping me with a problem. And I'm not even asking opinion questions...

By making one small decision, you created two problems.

1. You actively choose to diminish the value to practical real users of the site by setting a long term vision of becoming some bastion of objective knowledge. We have those; they're encyclopedias.

2. You unintentionally validated the pedantic/authoritarian desire for and abuse of power that has deterred many of your original users.

Honestly most people can handle snarky comments and opinionated edged answers. Everyone (users of SO) has a tiny (and sometimes large) "programmer ego" inside of them. On SO you could responsibly exercise it. Not anymore. What I can't handle is nonsensical authoritarian and meaningless abuse of questions because they don't immediately and explicitly adhere to some SO agenda. The former can be mildly annoying at times but tolerable and hell even fun on occasion, the latter is frustrating and infuriating and something I cannot tolerate.

Sorry that really turned into a rant, didn't it?
Stored XSS on Facebook
The half dozen times that I've corrected blatantly incorrect answers my posts have been deleted for some inane pedantic reason or another - while leaving the wrong answer intact. I'm done with StackOverflow. It's not worth the hassle. The answer quality has decreased exponentially over the years to the point when googling for the solution to a problem I will click on only non-SO links.
I don't know how on here to read a flagged comment, so I don't know the context in which this was used, but I thought "usury" was a quite common term. There are usury laws in states against high-interest loans. I think we should be mindful against creating slurs where they don't exists, as the word itself is just a word that refers to something very real. Again, I don't know how to see the context.
I can show you a brick. Can you show me a mind?
It means it's material in the same way a computer chip is material, or your spleen is material, and there's nothing "special" happening that can't, in principle, be explained by the same physical laws that govern everything else.
It's interesting to compare Stack Overflow to Quora, which was similarly great a few years ago and is now almost worthless, but in a different way. Stack Overflow suffers from militant moderators who close and delete reasonable submissions and answers due to draconian rules. Quora, meanwhile, has been taken over by spammers and idiots, and has lost any sense of trustworthiness. Just today I visited a discussion on Quora about WordPress plugins [1]. The top answer is an advertisement, the second gives an answer but offers no justification (and is also an advertisement), the third is probably an advertisement, and the fourth is again an answer without any justification. Repeat ad absurdum.

It's weird that both sites' communities have made it difficult for old users to take part, but in completely different ways.

[1] https://www.quora.com/Which-is-the-best-WordPress-plugin-to-...
Laymen’s Guide to Bitcoin – The Accouting Glutton – Medium
It’s not quite as bad if you use .NET Core (which is what I’m currently using for a number of things in an integration stack). I just have to run “dotnet lambda deploy-function” with a template set up.

I started with Golang, however, and found the “out of the box” deployment process pretty painful which is part of why I switched to .NET Core.
Running from what exactly? He doesn't say anything here, except that people like you push propaganda and that the majority of Americans are in debt.
The Cards Fall: The Truth About the SAT and ACT
This is as far as you can get with square based grids. :) We call it "top down isometric".
Wonderful and indeed a very practical idea. I would use it!
Do you say that because you have coded those programs using SIMD and rustc nightly, and seen that using SIMD eliminates the performance difference ?
Honestly, a lot of people's opinions on HN just seem like people getting more experienced with programming and not needing SO like they used to.

How many times is "I rarely even go there anymore" going to be part of someone's criticism? I barely go there, too. You should see the questions I used to ask though. I was a beginner.

Also, each time I learn a new language, I'm back on SO. Lately it's been Rust. I'm googling questions like how to concat strings and convert a byte array to base10 all over again.

I have no doubt that SO has problems. But I wonder how much of the piling on I see in comments is just people who aren't serviced by it as much as they used to be, and then backsplaining it with "because it sucks."

Also, a lot of the criticism I read here is extremely petty. People who got way too absorbed by SO and then blamed SO for their own kinda toxic behavior.
Yes... and maybe discussions shouldn't be immediately disrupted and censored as soon as someone accuses another as being anti-semite.
No it never breaks down. Milton Friedman commented some 30 years back to the typical "we should have higher tariffs on steel, because its unfair that the japanese are subsidizing their exports".

His response? "Well that benefits the American consumer tremendously... we are sending them pieces of paper(dollar) and we are getting hard goods in return at a significant discount". If you think in in the absolute terms, wouldn't you want to trade a silly paper for steeel/cars/whatever?

Also, where does the Chinese go with these dollars? Definitely not the Chinese store, they take Yuan. How about Japan? Nope, they take Yen. So...who takes dollars? At some point they have to come back and spend it either directly(investing/purchasing american goods) or indirectly(trading dollars -> random currency) which then leads the other party holding dollars to go out and buy American goods.
> Glass doesn't decay on a human time scale.

It doesn't oxidize.

I bet if you find any in the environment (excluding freshly broken glass on the street and that sort of thing) you'll find something where the sharpness of the edge has abraded away. If you're on a beach or near a creek, you'll possibly find something that looks dull and round and more like a pebble.
“making money” always means profit. Losing horrendous amounts doesn’t “create” money, it burns it.

And its not growing rapdlit, and nor was its $100M in revenues built in a year.
Code

Initial commit: https://hg.nginx.org/nginx/rev/2713b2dbf5bb

Additional features: https://hg.nginx.org/nginx/rev/c693daca57f7 and https://hg.nginx.org/nginx/rev/c2a0a838c40f
I don't have the cultural context, so help me grasp why would this word be anti-Semitic, as far as I know it has a perfectly legit meaning.
This is really cool. I wrote something similar with Python (it was slow ha) as an exercise to learn Redis a few years back. I used Gremlin/Groovy as an inspiration for the query lang, not Cypher as this project does. https://github.com/emehrkay/rgp
"Tin whiskers" is the term to google. Makes for an especially visceral image search.

There are many mitigation strategies, but lead was a miracle cure, and it will take substantial time and effort to approach its efficacy, especially on the multi-decade timescale. My guess is that companies won't bother. Reliability beyond planned lifetime impacts their bottom line negatively, if at all.
It would be interesting how elevated lead levels affected the history of the 20th/21st century. (Not just crime statistics - but effects on elites / world leaders).
I have the exact opposite experience. In my experience the quality of answers has been improving significantly recently.
Do you have to set up a company in Portugal? You maybe better of be registered as a contractor in Ireland.
Probably not, but it's three times the work. Do you want to spend effort in maintaining or developing?
The way to get more feedback is to reduce the load of the individual in community moderation.

Try going to a tag... lets say Java. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/java Now, on each post on that page read it, edit it if it needs editing (this includes things like "i am trying to use a path..." - fix all the grammar (the post I'm looking at is tagged java, c#, android, .net and google maps - https://stackoverflow.com/q/49349444 ). Give a comment if additional clarification is needed.

Then go back to the tag page and see how many more there are. Repeat.

To help the most people possible, and help the people who are answering questions know which are the posts that they can help the most - vote on the questions. Up and down.

If you know it is a good question that you can decode - fix it first. People casting close votes don't see that you're trying to answer - they see an unclear post. Whats more, an unclear question (that might be clear to you) isn't clear to everyone else. You've spent a minute or so decoding it - contribute that time back to community by fixing the post. Don't leave it in a comment - fix the question before writing an answer.

Consider that if a post is getting close votes there and down votes even with the fix, it might not be a good question for Stack Overflow. Not all good questions are good questions for a particular site. One doesn't ask coding questions on Hacker News even though it may be a good question.

That a post is too easy to down vote - by percentage, down votes are a small, small fraction of the total votes cast. Up votes are 8x more common than down votes.

Improved questions many still not be a good fit for Stack Overflow. A recommendation question or opinion poll, or something that is "how do you design Amazon" is still a poor fit, even if it has been improved.

Close votes expire as it is. If its good enough, it will not get any more and there's no issue.

Down votes are a signal to people answering questions that this isn't a good question. Look at a page with 50 questions on it. Decide which one you're going to spend time on - that is likely based partly on which questions have gotten up votes.

Rewritten questions don't necessarily mean that the question is good now.

In the past, when I've down voted and left a comment I've gotten a dozen angry pings from comments from the person and sometimes half a dozen down votes on my other posts (that then got removed for serial voting). I decided not to leave comments any more at that point. I'm not there to argue with a person about if their question is good or not.

The person asking the question has all the time in the world to perfect it before posting. They can see the preview and how it will look. They can run it through a grammar checker. They can notice even things like the red squiggles under misspelled words on any modern browser.

There is no reason why they can't post a good question the first time - or at least one that shows that they have put in at least as much time as they're expecting of the person answering.
Well that's what CI/CD is for. It's not any different than building and pushing a new docker image.
> ..., not to mention wasting enormous amounts of hardware and electricity.

I wonder how legitimate this concern is from an environmental angle. On one hand a lot of code in the world probably has much worse performance ratios than than the one described in the article -- using python is sufficient to cause an order of performance loss. On the other hand data centers are using more renewable energy sources and reducing their carbon output.

Is this only a wasted money problem? How worth while is it to write "green code"? Back of the envelope calculations on how much developer comfort costs would be interesting.
Here's a book that's given many software practitioners inspiration:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Timeless_Way_of_Building