skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i had trouble falling asleep for about the first 35 years of my life. then i hit on a technique i call “scenarios.” i have various made-up fantasy settings, like an island nation surrounded by a sea of mud, and i make up stories about its inhabitants, building on whatever stories i made up last time. this seems to short-circuit the problem i had earlier, where i could not get my brain to stop racing, worrying about various real-life issues.

i have always considered my technique to be so weird and awkward that i have never discussed it with anyone. but now i see, from reading the comments here, that other people have similar techniques. who knew.
I looked up ERP software in google images. Holy poor UX, Batman! There's a great market opportunity there for something that doesn't spew out everything at once onscreen.
> Only do the things you ultimately enjoy. Why put yourself through tedious things in your adulthood. The world is a big place, I'm sure there is something you like doing.

It’s too easy to interpret that advice as doing things that are easy. Easy things don’t require effort, and people who are not inherently driven to explore or be creative point to advice like this as ways to justify spending all day watching Netflix or posting on Instagram. Those things are easy and give some level of enjoyment, but they are ultimately empty and eventually result in deeper sadness.

Hardship is not the right word but struggle is. Struggle is not pleasant but leads to deeper satisfaction, and that’s what people mean when they talk about “hardship” as a virtue.
Go-jek will win in Indonesia
I found the funfunfunction videos on functional programming [0] very useful

[0]: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0zVEGEvSaeEd9hlmCXrk5y...
I just installed Void Linux a VM.

My first impression is that it feels really snappy. I am not sure if I like the cli interface of the package manager. But I will give this one a try.

Can someone share their experiences regarding Void's stability? I am currently using openSUSE Tumbleweed on my desktop and primary laptop, and while I am mostly happy, things sometimes kind of break after installing a batch of updates.
If I may shamelessly mention the project we've been working on the last 7 years...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI

1. We started with the idea that actually social tools would let you get in, get out and get on with life. They would help you coordinate your actual social life in the real world instead of sucking up your time online. A minute spent on the app would result in hours socializing in the real world, not the other way around. Group activities would form like snowballs leading to an actual goal, not random chatting. Thus came the first part of our mission: Empowering People.

2. We also realized very soon that communities wanted to install our software themselves. The flipside of letting people actually get together on their own time, is that we can help unite their members and engage them. Universities and Buildings, for example, release their own social app to their Students and Tenants, and allow them to find one another and connect on their own time. (See https://qbix.com/communities). Thus we cane upon the second part of our mission: Uniting Communities

3. We realized there is actually no good open source alternative to Facebook, that communities can install the same way they can install Wordpress for blogs. We wanted to change the world and have developers and startups build social apps as easily as Wordpress plugins. We wanted communities to run our platform and apps even on a mesh network or router disconnected from the Internet - REAL decentralization, to be used in countries with censorship, or on a cruise or remote village to plan dinners, date, etc.

But the world has changed since blogs and we had to build and maintain literally thousands of features, from user signup to data access to payments. We recently got a security audit by an outside firm and are proud to say that they found (and since patched) only three, very hard to exploit, vulnerabilities in the entire platform. The code is at (https://github.com/Qbix/Platform). We don't have a slogan for this part of our mission yet :)

It's totally free and open source, and we will begin growing a community around it in 2018. If you want to join or find out more, contact me -- the email is greg and the domain is qbix.com

See a 7 minute video about it to understand fully the how and why:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI
Vacuuming up your data is intentional. Google Android. Don't like it? Use/build AOSP derivatives.
Pretty much all websites I make are like this. It's text, it uses minimal HTML formatting and a tiny bit of javascript if absolutely necessary (HTML has no #include directive).

There is no CSS, I just use tables. Eat me.
Lucid dreaming itself woke me up, often in the middle of the night. I had to force myself to forget to ensured I stayed asleep and got a full nights rest, and eventually I stopped remembering dreams altogether.
Here’s one recent example: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/science/earth/study-links...

And this:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/climate-change-alr...

And:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003043870...

And:
http://time.com/4024210/climate-change-migrants/

...
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/09/analysts-warn...
I explain this to myself using a simple maxim: "Any premise that can attract eyeballs will eventually appear as an article on an ad-revenue-driven website".
Every? Scanning them quickly, I count less than 20 different countries.

A better question would be “why does Wikipedia explicitly list the country of origin for anti-virus software?” (It doesn’t for word processors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_word_processors) or file archivers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_archivers), for example)

Answer is that anti-virus software sits deep into your OS, by necessity, reads all your data, and typically also tries to read all your network traffic. That makes it an ideal place for intelligence agencies to put their software, and it likely is easier for country X’s intelligence agency to coerce a company in X to help doing that.

The iOS category on that page is interesting, too, by the way: a discontinued on demand file scanner and two tools that offer “anti-theft” and “backup”, both of which ship standard with iOS.
This is surprising to me in that I don't know anyone who uses KDE.

As someone who uses Cinnamon as my day to day at home and Awesome at work, what would entice me to switch?
I think tiredness and ability to sleep quickly are less binary and more of a spectrum. My wife, for example, is often tired and can fall asleep anywhere and relatively quickly. It affects our lives a bit, but it's not life dominating. She can push through it when needed.

My son, when not on meds, is always very tired, debilitating so. It's life dominating. He can sleep 12 hours, have breakfast, and sleep a few more hours, etc. It's not just a matter of being able to sleep or wanting to sleep, he feels exhausted roughly 20 of 24 hours a day. He would not wake up in 15 mins because a timer went off.

I, on the other hand, am rarely physically tired, even when I've not got a lot of sleep.

So, it may be that you are just more on the tired end of the spectrum. If your tiredness and ability to fall asleep quickly has more than a casual negative effect on your life, it may be something to talk to your doctor about.

HTH.
Yes, they ignore it just like the US companies.
Ask HN: What online service would you like to see exist that does not?
I've done a ton of enterprise web development in the past 8 years and I would like to develop some new open source project that people would happy to use and run it as an online service.
because they can get access to audience which could take years to get on your blog
It's not really a competition for complexity within life, complexity arises naturally within life as a product of competition. Sometimes more complexity is more fit, and other times the added fragility makes the organism less fit... during the mass extinctions it was primarily the most complex organisms that died.

The purpose of life as a whole is to spread this complexity to all parts of the Universe that can support it, so as to raise the overall complexity of the system.

Another way to think about it is that life lengthens the path that energy needs to flow through in order to reach equilibrium (maximum entropy).
>Economic strength and accumulation of resources and sheer population do have a lot to do with who dominates. But maybe it takes other stuff, too.

That may be but it's got nothing to do with the article which is talking about Civilization--and games in general-- presenting monotonic, consequence free growth as the only state of being until the "A Winner Is You" screen (the dangerous myth)

Which as a side effect leads to grind-y end games where you have dominated everyone but still need to put in another hour of grind to actually finish them off or otherwise end the game (the bad game design).
You're right. I touched on this a little bit.

Your estimation skills have to be top notch. If they're not, work hourly for an agency so that they bear the risk. Use that time to hone your estimation skills. Even then, multiply your estimate by 2 and that's what you charge.

If the project is risky, lots of new stuff you've never done before, then multiply your estimate by 3 or 4.

The idea is that you cover your ass so that the "$10/hr" never happens. And of course, never take on projects with vague scope. Make sure everything is clearly defined. That's a skill too and should be honed as well.

The key though is that the "$10/hr" project will be so painful for you though, you will be sure to never repeat that mistake.
Not really true. People want to be safe and secure, but they often don't have enough money. For example: Last summer I visited Georgia and Armenia. What I saw in ordinary flats was basically screaming "I will catch fire soon" - but richer places had security taken care of just like your or my own house, even though it's not really a requirement.

If it was a requirement (theoretically it is
, but it's not enforced), most places would have no electricity at all. Same with cars: these people drive really old junk (literally) cars that are visibly (often seriously) crashed and you wouldn't be able to use them in other places, but they don't have an alternative. They'd like a nice and safe car like everyone does (and they buy them if they have enough money), but it's either this or nothing, no regulator can change that.
I started with Cinnamon, then switched to KDE. Mostly because it was more intuitive for me, 2% because I liked the new Konquii branding enough to try it that first time.

Now when people want to try "that Linux thing" I hand them Debian KDE if they are a Windows user since it is closer to Windows start menu out of the box, at least for my purposes.
"Didi and Softbank and countless others are funneling money into the key players." from the blog you linked. did you read it?
I rarely click medium.com links, or any of their associated domains, hackernoon.com, etc.

The website sucks. It's crippled without JS, and squirmy and laggy when JS is enabled. Either way, it's very heavy on the network pipe.

Medium is in business of driving traffic, which means the content is likely to be mediocre.

It's content that is looking for an audience, as my comment's sibling states. Which means that it is probably not that compelling, otherwise the audience would find it.

It's written by someone who can't be bothered to set up their own website without all of these mis-features, nor understands the importance of doing so.

And for all of these reasons, the opinion of someone who publishes on Medium is worth a lot less to me.

The same goes for businessinsider.com, wsj.com, patch.com, nymag.com and all those other shitty sites that make me regret visiting them the moment I arrive. There can't be anything relevant enough on there that I can't live without. Just a big waste of my time and network resources.

I've blacklisted them in my hosts file, and haven't looked back.
it is in "50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship" a bit after the "Three rules for controlling your dreams".

Edit: Search for the sentence "In this posture, you must hold a heavy key which you will keep suspended, delicately pressed between the extremities of the thumb and forefinger of your left hand." and look at the google book result, you can read the page 36.
Thst only explains why they would syndicate to Medium, not host there.
I get e-mails ever once in a while asking if I'd like to write for a medium blog. I always ask how much they're paying and never get a reply.

I'm fine for writing in a spot I can get exposure, but you better pay me. Medium does pay a subset of their writers. I know when they started The Nib, they paid political cartoonists like Matt Bors. So they paid a small group to get others to contribute. They're pretty much the new Huffington Post.
> At the time, the practice was not only widely reported, but praised by major news outlets as evidence of the innovative and forward-thinking nature of the campaign.

I keep seeing this, but never linked to an article. Is it even true? Are we shooting down bad reporting with worse reporting?
i3 is fun :P
> Recently, apart from CS and genetics, we are stagnant.

That seems a pretty weird argument to make. "Apart from all the people with black hair, nobody has black hair" These two fields alone are wide ranging enough that they can touch almost everything on earth. Furthermore, fields like material science have progressed an incredible amount due to widespread availability of computing power. So have agriculture, logistics, manufacturing, mining, medicine and education. We may yet destroy ourselves before we attain utopia, but it won't be because our technology is too stagnant.
Any official word from Medium? I want to know what their excuse will be.
Ask HN: Engineer manager? What is your management style?
Would love to hear other managers' philosophy for managing engineers.
No :-). For what its worth, Google never worked that way either, it used Page Rank initially to sort results by social importance. I would guess that the last keyword based engine of any merit was AltaVista. AV had the issue of returning all pages with your words but it had no notion of sorting them (at least initially, you can read their patent as well)

These days its fairly easy to code up an n-gram index and host it on a moderate server. If you have a corpus of documents you can see how well it works. The simplest corpus is to just down load all of Wikipedia. Last time I checked it fit on a 2 TB disk drive.

You could also use the Common Crawl database and index it as you would like, or talk to the Internet Archive project for some sort of collaborative project. However I will warn you that of the people who have done this experiment (and it was a new hire task at both Blekko and Google where I worked) folks quickly discovered it wasn't very useful.
I would consider “black magic” to be something that works reliably due to some specific and idiosyncratic property of the environment that it operates within. Basically, something that is exceptionally tightly coupled. I think the novel FPGA solutions that genetic algorithms can create fall into this category; they often didn’t work on different boards, or even when the same board was plugged into a different power supply because the solution was overfit.

“A Story About Magic” is black magic in action. http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html

“The Story of Mel” is not black magic even though no one else understood his program. http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
Way back in 1978, Demillo, Lipton and Dobkin published a note in the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (SE-4(1):73- 75 · February 1978) called "Even databases that lie can be compromised" The basic idea was to look at the idea of giving slightly wrong answers to median type queries in order to protect results for individuals. They showed that, even when the query system deliberately lied, it was possible to compromise the data base. I am surprised that this note is not listed in the bibliography of the differential privacy article.
Maybe they should try upping the difficulty level.

I usually play at Prince or lower because my civilization does much falling at higher levels.
Nothing. They will change nothing.

The illusion that "no-one is in control" of blockchain applications is going to meet the brick wall of regulatory reality pretty hard.
Medium offers the potential for an audience who will read your work. It’s dead simple to use. The “claps” economy at least offers a glimmer of hope you could be compensated for your work. And, for a lot of folks, it can offer a sense of community. And honestly, hosting your own blog, while cheap, is often an annoyance to maintain.
North American pre-Columbian societies were all Stone Age and most were pre-literate. One of the most advanced, the Mayans, collapsed hundreds of years before Columbus. The most advanced Aztecs worked with metals but hadn't discovered the wheel (beyond toys) or bronze. No doubt the collapse from European contact resulted in tragic loss of life, loss of culture and loss of local knowledge of medicine and agriculture, but on net it actually ushered a wave of dramatic technological advancement among indigenous tribes-- particularly adoption of the horse and horse-riding, which the Spanish tried to make illegal. The tribes in North America that adopted the horse (and later, firearms) rapidly conquered the tribes that did not, until they were ultimately displaced in turn by European settlers.
I've always been amazed how quickly people can fall asleep on trains in Japan.
a purely keyword search would not very useful. BTW semantic search engines can do exact keyword matches enclosing your query using double quotes e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q="keyword+search+engine".
I think its a good take.

The problem its hard when not social media to get visibility.

Its easy to start a blog (wordpress/blogger/tumblr etc.. ), its harder to get people to go to it and periodically check it out. RSS aggregators/ google reader was a good way to do this, but they've fallen out of favor. There is a ghost town of abandoned blogs on the internet presumably because they didn't get the reads/ interaction.

Its almost like you need to announce your new blogpost on twitter/ fb..

But I think there are solutions.

I saw this open source groupware on hn a while back and am starting to get in installed for an art non-profit. There are probably others, but I'm going install and see how it goes:

https://www.agorakit.org/en/
Which distro should you use for KDE?
Maybe it could be different now? Or maybe it's not a solo effort? If multiple companies leveraged their traction (read: user base) maybe it could work.

God knows we need something. It's not safe "outside."
I think it mostly has a special “canary in the coal mine” status.

For a lot of people pornography has no clear definition and is decided on a “I know it when I see it” basis. And it gets worse when it comes to an AI flagging it or a service’s staff reviewing content from another country.

This means it’s the perfect ground to train a banning content process, because it can be fuzzy, can fail a bunch, and a good chunk of people won’t be willing to openly defend their possession of “porn” (even if it’s a false positive for instance).

Otherwise I genuinely think we should recalibrate our vision of porn, its place in our societies and how we relate to it. I have the feeling it’s one of the subject that we dragged our feet the most to revise, when the world has been changing leaps and bounds compared to two or three gneerations ago.
There are many fallacies in your ideas. What do you do about programming errors you cannot identify? And what about programming errors that your process and your language causes? Can you identify those too? Of course not. Once you understand that things you introduce into a language can both help with some problems and cause other problems we can move to ideas on how to identify and classify those things. And of course we cannot do that with math proofs.

Programming language design is all about interactions with humans and there is no place for so much ignorance of humans as your comment expresses. And don't get me wrong, you can come up with an arbitrary approach to language design that doesn't involve humans, but it can work for humans only by chance.
I long for the return of a platform-less Internet, where the only real "platforms" are primarily HTTP and email...
The article and this thread is simply amazing to me! I had no idea that were so many who are doing this. I've always had a fascination for clocks of all kinds. Building your own mechanical watch from scratch seems like it would be one of the ultimate achievements for a hobbyist.

And here I am trying to decide whether I should build shelves in the garage myself, pay someone else to build them, or buy shelves at Home Depot. Downright embarrassing to mention in a thread like this.
A blanket statement like 'Medium is bad' does not have enough nuance. Medium is for profit centralized service. You are trading freedom for convenience and access to an audience. It is for you to decide if this tradeoff is profitable.

For me, having Medium as the sole repository of my content does not seem like the right tradeoff. Maintaining a static site with a CDN costs less than 5$ a month. Having complete control over the content is far more valuable than the audience that Medium brings. Mirroring posts to Medium can still allow me to reach that audience.
Happy Medium user here for several years. Even have been paid >$5 USD for work hosted there. Yes, I have skin in the game, and yes I'm positioning myself as a semi-advocate.

Today's better lesson: LibraPay is too cheap to fork over money for effective legit marketing, so they're going the GoldiBlox route and trying to pick a fight to make themselves look good and get press. I mean they can totally respond to this post with a list of how much they've spent in hard currency to market their brand versus the traffic they've gotten from throwing mud at Medium...
A website that was initially written in VB6 on the back end (I know) had transitioned to C# for new development. So new functionality would be written in C#, but all the old stuff had to still work. On a page built with the new framework, the bulk of the page was going to be C#, but the "chrome" around it- the header, footer, page nav- needed to be generated with the old VB code. It turned out to be nearly impossible to begin in VB6 and call out to C# to generate the page contents, so the solution was to

1. Generate the page chrome
2. Post that HTML into the database
3. Call the new framework
4. Pull the page chrome out of the database
5. Render the page

The worst piece of the VB6 code I ever had the misfortune of working on was an implementation of a questionnaire, which would guide you through several pages of questions and keep track of what the state of the questionnaire was. A particular sequence of actions could crash it consistently, but the code was so incredibly stateful that it was impossible to work out what was going on. To add insult to injury, it didn't happen when debugging, and the VB6 debugger left a lot to be desired anyway.
Package manager sounds like a worse version of ~~Nice~~ Nix, but distro's choice of services is neat.

Edit stupid autocorrect. Also further research indicates xbps is way more traditional. Sigh...
The Limits of Corporate Activism
City of San Diego is suing the Experian credit agency for 2013 securitybreach