skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's very clearly not less true, even if Trump's critics like to discredit him with that (Merkel being the new leader of the free world).

The sole thing presently keeping Russia from invading Eastern Europe and taking more territory, is the US military presence in Europe. The sole thing keeping North Korea from invading South Korea and attempting to annex it, is the US. The sole thing (maybe temporarily) keeping China from officially annexing Taiwan, is the US military presence in Asia.

Not Germany, not France, not the UK, not Australia, not Canada, not New Zealand, not Japan, not the UN.

Here are your realistic alternative choices: China, expansionist dictatorship with minimum human rights; Russia, expansionist dictatorship with minimum human rights. And then for 'free world' choices: Germany, UK, France, Japan - which of those has any kind of global power today, economically or militarily? None. Germany doesn't even have its own currency, and their military capabilities can barely push beyond their own borders, not to mention they have no nuclear umbrella capability to bring the rest of the free world under.

The US is all the world has on that side of the board in terms of an actual superpower. It's going to remain that way for the forseeable future. Like it or not. I fully understand why people don't like Trump and I understand why they'd wish for a different President to be in there. Nixon mostly sucked too (despite a few significant domestic & foreign policy accomplishments). The US will, from time to time, elect bad and or mediocre leaders. And then Trump's term will be over.
It's embarrassing that it's easier to get things made in China than in the US.

I had some 5/16" paper tape manufactured for use in antique Teletype machines. I tried several US paper tape manufacturers. One quoted me $10 a roll, but made a good roll. One sent me a roll with rough edges that jammed in the machine. Most were uninterested, even for a large order. The US companies were really hard to communicate with, too. Getting emails answered was tough. Phone calls usually went to voicemail. I finally had 1000 rolls made in Fujian, China for $1/roll. They worked fine. Much better customer communication, too.

Some of the decline in US manufacturing comes from this sort of thing.
What are you on about? The author is counting rows in a database and checks how much time it takes the database to process the query. Counting rows is easily parallelisable.

So are many problems, and we still are at a point where we are creating languages and frameworks that allow us to work with the data at a higher level: e.g. theano, numpy or TensorFlow.

Speed of light is only an issue for latency-sensitive operations: e.g. if every sub-operation is non-commutative in a given transaction then it would be expected to be completed before any other sub-operation.
I don't see it man. I think this was the most democratic election in US history, where the people finally got what they really wanted - a blustering populist without a shred of actual policy experience. I mean, come on - the wall, tariffs, and now the death penalty for drug dealers? Is there any mainstream academic/intellectual on either side of the aisle that's really "running the show" here? I don't think so.
It's not just about being able to discredit candidates. An even bigger issue is using this data to manipulate voters, which is the main thing revealed about Cambridge Analytica in the story.
Why would you have your (ANY) db directly publicly accessible?
Numberphile had a recent video on car crashes here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3D7XYQExt0

In short: Since kinetic energy goes as (velocity)^2, doubling the speed will quadruple the stopping distance (MANY other factors are significant, this is a rough estimate). 3X of the speed is ~9X the stopping distance, etc.

NHTSB guidelines for 'proper' following distance are nearly never seen in LA and NYC, it's typically much shorter. If anything, L5 AVs will probably have longer gaps between AVs than what is currently on the road. Likely, the major improvement of L5 AVs will be in safety, not congestion. It turns out (I think), you can't technology your way out of a political problem. We need higher density housing, not magic carpets (effectively).
Recent comment section with very similar discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16615282
Saying "yes yes, nothing is free, I get it" doesn't explain your reasoning though.
Why did you assume that all those PHDs have the same background? What is the objective measure of how interesting your life is compared to someone else? And how do you score how different two lives are? What does it mean that it "could" give an edge?

Sure, something in your past might help you solve a problem in the future, whether that is your entire career experience or a single phrase you remember from childhood. However that's just fact and so generic that it applies to every human being on the planet, which is why these vague claims of "diverse" backgrounds being helpful are dubious at best, and that's before getting into the much worse "diverse-based-on-appearance" nonsense.
Seems more like a succinct tutorial vs a "look how easy and fast this is". There are definitely alternatives with less code.
> I don't think your definition of inequality, which basically equals popularity, is a useful one. The article is about income inequality.

My definition is perfect. High popularity -> high income -> inequality. If you bandwagon onto a popular author like J.K. Rowling, then you are further enriching her and causing inequality.

If you want to legislate away inequality for say, Twitch streamers, then pass a law that no Twitch streamer can have more than 500 views. Or authors who have sold >100,000 books can no longer sell books.
The attempts to demonize the words "social justice"

How do you feel about despotic regimes that prefix themselves "Democratic"? People have been hiding behind benign-sounding words for a very long time.
> In fact, I would wager I use Facebook more to broadcast my ego than interact with real humans

You don't say?
Office Snapshots (https://officesnapshots.com) was started ~11 years ago as a side project while I was teaching middle and high school history. It got fairly popular immediately due to early viral sharing on Twitter and Digg.

I just kept going at posting to it for the next several years. Eventually I decided to stop teaching, and my wife and I moved to a new city, and decided to do something else for a career. Through the process of temping at various businesses (warehouse for a tooth whitening company, office manager at a cremation sales company), I decided that Office Snapshots should be my main pursuit.

There was still a lot of doing various projects for people to make money in the meantime while the business was growing such as web design work or hunting for working coupon codes for a friend's business.

All that said, Office Snapshots has been my sole work for the last 3 years and we recently launched a site dedicated to healthcare projects and one for educational architecture projects.
Even worse, many non-profits are exempt from the annual caps.

http://www.thenonprofittimes.com/news-articles/nonprofits-us...

"For-profit companies and many nonprofits come under a nationwide cap of 65,000 H-1B visas per year, plus 20,000 for an advanced degree exemption. Nonprofits are exempt from any cap if they are institutions of higher education; related to or affiliated with an institution of higher education; or a research organization."

I'm a lifelong Democrat (and socially and fiscally liberal) and I see this as an issue of social justice for American workers. Tech jobs are among the best paying jobs in the country, and if we're serious about income inequality then more (or very nearly all) of these jobs need to go to US citizens.

The US already has a generous immigration policy. H-1B is solely about access to cheap labor, and it should be ended immediately.
The only other realistic path to a green card for an Indian national, as far as I know, is L1 intracompany transfer (which has an identical effect on the local labor pool) or sponsorship from another American citizen, the latter of which the current administration and its supporters are attempting to limit.
I know! lol
If you go here https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications you can see all your logins. You can migrate each login, one by one, using an app like 1Password to generate new passwords that you don't have to remember.
Yes, and that's not an synchronous API.

For example, https://nodejs.org/api/crypto.html#crypto_crypto_randombytes... without the callback blocks.

You said "Just because SQLite's API is synchronous does not mean that it must block the node process." I'm saying that's not true.

A function might use threads behind the scenes, but if you're going to synchronously wait for it, you're blocking the event loop.
It still takes time and energy to package and release something to the public, even if it is assets.
Why America Is the World’s Most Uniquely Cruel Society
I log on to Facebook twice a year, to let people know that I'm still alive, and to delete older posts and tags.

My concern is that if I shut down my account completely, someone else--possibly Facebook itself--could credibly impersonate me on the platform and thus use the idea of me as a means to target my friends and acquaintances that use it more frequently.
Looking forward to more and more discoveries and theories coming up in this field. Apart from providing a satisfactory answer to the quandary of "fine-tuned Universe" problem, there has been some observed anomalies for which multiverse theory provides explanation.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_flow
Ray Dalio on populism, the phenomenon overtaking politics today [pdf]
Why does success mean being able to afford a home in one of the most expensive real estate markets in North America?

If I were to say "I'm not successful because I only make $200K and can't afford a home in Manhattan", people would laugh in my face.
Indeed, he is killing his darling before someone else can.

No interest in working there personally because I despise both PHP and working in an open office, but I don't think the Zuckerberg brand of fine social content is going away any time soon.
What’s the difference between a prototype and an MVP?
Show HN: URL Canary – Get an alert when someone finds your secrets
Zuckerberg was describing Facebook when he started. At some level, that mentality is reflected in the company and its business practices.
It wasn't necessary to correct it. There is nothing bad about celebrating differences as well as similarities. And there is great debate about why there is a gender pay gap and it's not a settled issue by any means.

I think most of you are too young to remember the ERA in the 1970s and why that failed. Women in tech are a great thing, but smart women don't have to go into tech and that's fine.
I confess my first reaction on reading this comment was "You mean the way Mastodon emerged a year ago and made Twitter completely irrelevant?"

It's possible that Facebook will be disrupted (although I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Facebook is operating at such an unprecedented scale that it's hard to apply traditional "rules of thumb" to them), and it's possible that what disrupts them will be a nonprofit competitor--but it's not going to disrupt them because it's nonprofit. Bluntly, idealism isn't sufficient; I don't see much indication that it's even necessary. Wikipedia "won" in its space against early competitors largely because of the features that its competitors perceived as its big weakness, e.g., not only can anyone read it for free, anyone can edit it for free, without even making an account.

A rule of thumb that I do think will prove to hold up: whatever replaces Facebook will be at least as difference from FB as FB was from MySpace. We're seeing that to some degree in the interest shift from FB to Instagram and SnapChat. (Of course, FB owns Instagram; another thing that's going to make them really difficult to disrupt as a corporation rather than a service is that they're big enough to throw money at potential disruptors until they sell out.) I think it's also going to be very difficult for a nonprofit to disrupt them for that reason, though, honestly; remember, even as huge as Wikipedia is, they're constantly struggling for money, and their infrastructure is way less resource-intensive than something like FB's is. Thing That Replaces FB may solve that by being fully decentralized and distributed, but it needs to be just as easy to use as FB is (and again, provide a more compelling reason to use it rather than "it's not FB").
Presumably they worked hard to get that degree.
The title isn't: dominator of the free world. It's leader of the free world. You can lead without conquering or dominating. Ideally in this use concept, the free world willingly follows. Whatever the most powerful nation in the so called free world is, that will always be the leader (even if people don't like it), particularly if there's an outsized difference in economic & military capability as is the case with the US vs everybody else.
Off-topic, but..

> refused to update or support our Windows machines past 7

What's your long term strategy?

Is there a silver bullet?
I forgot to describe what I meant by "complacent" and you helped clear that up. Thanks! While it is technically possible for such a visa worker to hop jobs, it's not easy in practice, such that they are more or less indentured servants. They also often don't have families (yet) and so can work long hours.

By the way, "!==" (or "!=") means "not the same as" for you non-coders out there.
Using Virtual Reality for Surgical Simulation Trainings
Oil is part of the composition of so many products. It's also still an essential component to moving things around the planet. So when you decide to have that burger whose ingredients were was transported using gasoline cooked by a staff who drove to work, and the bottled water whose plastic bottle was made from oil and transported with gasoline, a percentage of the money you paid for those items slides into the revenue stream of oil companies. When you have an industry which is able to shave off a percentage of the vast majority of products moved, sold, and consumed in the world you've got a huge financial advantage.
Digital ICE: The High-Tech Dust Removal Found in Film Scanners [video]
It's ridiculous to call this campaign 'anti-immigrant'. I'm very much for increasing our general skilled and unskilled immigration lottery quotas and our asylum allotment.

However, I'm very much against programs like H1B that are abused to suppress workers' salaries. Industries should not be permitted to bring in foreign workers (who are often not even citizenship track!) whenever the demand for a certain skill increases and salaries go up accordingly, all to bring salaries down to a level that's more "affordable" for those industries. It's wrong and it's anti-worker.

If the paragraph above sounds "racist" or "xenophobic" to you, I'd suggest examining the role you played in the election of Trump. It's not wrong, racist, or unethical for workers to protect their rights and their livelihood. I love diversity and immigrants, but H1B isn't designed for that, it's designed to suppress worker salaries, and also reduces employment opportunities.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16610088 Previous discussion here.

In fact, the article cited in this article was the one posted previously. It's much more thorough about what happened.
Is there a link to where I could see a recording of the Ninja, Kim Dotcom & Drake game by any chance? Or a link to a stream recording? Thanks so much! Had no idea Fortnite has become that big. It always seemed too "cartoony" for me (as compared to PUBG).
Travis Scott was the other rapper playing with them. Juju Smith-Schuster of the Pittsburgh Steelers also joined them for a while.
I guess I don't think of them as competitors. They're both social bookmarking sites but the interface and the way people use them seem very different.
For instant throw-away email addresses, try Mailinator:

http://www.mailinator.com/
The U.S. makes up a large part of facebook, but as someone living in south america, it ain't going anywhere in this continent.
Sarcasm doesn't work in short text. It just causes confusion and adds nothing, since it just relies on the reader to decided whether the utterance means its face value or opposite.
That's just repeating the SO dogma, which I think is suspect in most cases.

> Answers that just recommend a 3rd party library optimize for solving the immediate problem an answerer is having asap but they don't work very well at creating a long lasting resource and they also give answerers a hard time.

I see no problem with this. Furthermore, if you can ask a question about using a particular library, you should be able to give that library as an answer.

IMHO, any problems around "3rd party libraries" could be solved from a combination of improved culture (e.g. explain the solution with a library reference) and technical tools (e.g. tagging with library version, result/answer ranking tweaks, etc.)

> Opinion questions can get outdated very quickly and it is hard to tell if you come from a google search if the answers are still applicable.

SO could solve that problem rather than giving up. For better or worse, SO is the watering hole for programming questions. As long as dups are kept under control, competent people can find the old questions and provide new, updated answers that will converge on completeness. Also, "outdated" answers can still have value, since not everyone is using the latest stuff.

What SO needs is features for fixing the practical problems you outlined:

> They also don't work well with the site format because you cant summarize the solution into one accepted answer. Instead, you get hundreds of tiny small disconnected answers, which cant really be edited to consolidate or keep them up to date, and no room for discussions (SO comments don't work well for long discussions)

I would say some form of extra curation, answer clustering, and old answer decay would go a long way towards addressing this, and it would be a great improvement on the existing situation of digging through old forum posts or making new ones (to an audience that may or may not have good opinions).
I have a personal story from inside facebook to share. 5 years ago Facebook recruiter reached out to me and invited me to the W hotel in Chicago. I was very excited -not for the job- but for the opportunity to meet with senior Facebook managers and tell them about an evil thing Facebook does.

Here is the background story:

I am Kurdish from Iran. And Iran has many provinces. one of them is called Kurdistan. In Facebook profile section for Hometown you could pick all of the Iranian provinces except Kurdistan.

And at first I thought it was a bug. For years and years we submitted bug reports and collected petitions for Facebook they never responded why the Kurdistan province cannot be picked while other provinces could be picked.

Till one day, An internal document -guidance- leaked out of Facebook. That explained it all ! One of the pages was talking about Kurdistan. In which they had explained any reference to Kurdistan is considered terrorism. That was on the request of Turkish government.

In "Turkey", the word Kurdistan is forbidden. and many people in Turkey been prisoned for speaking Kurdish.
however in "Iran" we officially have a province called "Kurdistan Province). and Iranian government recognizes the name Kurdistan for my homeland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provinces_of_Iran

But Facebook decided to enforce the Turkish government racist rule on other countries that have Kurdistan (Iran, Iraq, Syria...)

Also in that leaked guidance memo. Kurdistan flag was considered illegal. And hundreds of Kurdish pages and accounts got banned for having Kurdistan flag.

While Kurdish flag is illegal in Turkey. Kurdish flag is officially recognized in the Constitution of Iraq for Kurdistan regional government.

So when they invited me to W Hotel to recruit me. I was like yes finally I can meet the people in person. Because as a Kurd I have no importance and they will never respond to me but a software engineer I am pretty attractive on the market.

So I asked the question from one of the managers. And told them my story this for years and years I send them emails and nobody got back to me and we made petitions about this so-called bug.

He said these things are decided by higher management.

I told him how often do you show this disagreement to higher managers or Mark Zuckerburg's policies if you have a different opinion.
He responded if I disagree with them I wouldn't work there.

I left the W Hotel in Chicago 5 years ago refusing to proceed with a job on FB. I knew Facebook is on the wrong path. And today I see that prediction coming true.

Even today when Turkey committed a massacre in Kurdish city of Afrin, Facebook blocked many voices inside the city who were showing massacres by Turkish government.

10 years ago FB came after kurds and you said not my problem. Today they are coming after all of us
Value is relative. That is how you justify charging open source $0, a bootstrapped business $15, and a multi-billion dollar corporation $5000. The larger the product/more revenue a product brings in the more value your service offers them.
Why Kubernetes Operators are a game changer
This is off-topic, but these footers that read “Made with [emoji heart] in [random place]” are such an irritating startup meme.

It makes particularly little sense for Magic Leap: they’ve got a billion dollars in VC funding, and their product is supposedly “made with heart” like an artisanal Brooklyn cupcake?
I'm a little uncomfortable with how quickly you decided to label these thoughts racist/xenophobic; but I'd like to better understand where that comes from.

Lynn's stating that he hasn't seen any clear examples of where diversity led to innovation; and while your scenario makes sense, you're not providing 1) an actual example that demonstrates why he's incorrect, 2) any observation that a diverse group will generally produce that innovation.
Also, a) they never really, truly delete your profile (mine, which I deleted in 2013, is still present in some form) and b) one or more shadow profiles will probably pop up, at least giving the impression that you are still on FB.
Instagram Report 2018
Evidence of Delayed Aging Among a National Sample of Americans
> For the genuinely well meaning and self motivated learners, I agree we should try hard to be sympathetic and respectful.

I agree with this, but I think part of this is fighting the instinct to sarcasm or hostility even when people are looking for the easy way.

Whenever people start employing public hostility, the people who are deterred the most are the least confident and most well-intentioned people. If you're asking someone else to do your work for you, you presumably don't care much about their time and frustration. But if you're cautious and respectful and already worried about wasting people's time with dumb questions, then seeing someone who's annoyed and likely to snap at you is a huge deterrent.

"What's the ticket number" may not be a productive question, but I still winced at that answer - I can't imagine that a Slack where people are that hostile is one where people feel comfortable asking potentially 'dumb' questions and getting support. Better to stay silent, or say "that's something you can do as well as me", or politely say "their ticket queue actually has a great search feature". Calling out unjustified questions is hopefully less alienating, because it at least shows why you're annoyed, and that you wouldn't do the same to a question that's novice-level, but not rude. And if these questions are too common to handle politely, that's its own serious issue at the company.
basic necessities of life, healthcare, and no worry with emergency destroying you completely
Guns, Drones, and Augmented Reality: Army Seeks Infantry Revolution