skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What happened to OkCupid?
I rejoined after a year in a relationship, and everything that made that site great is gone. It used to be quirky with a very human touch, and treat users with empathy and respect, in a way that hit that rare balance between weird and mainstream.

It feels like they used to have product people who really cared about relationships. Now all their blog posts are about data driven decision making, as though they replaced good human intuition with short term optimization.

I'd love to hear from people who work or have worked there, how has the culture changed over the years? Is it pressure from match.com? Or tinder fears? Or have all the good people left?

Either way, reading recent app store reviews it seems like old okc has left a big gap for people who care about substance.
In Beijing airport, as you leave immigration, there's a box with a sign saying "take a free lighter" or something to that effect. These are lighters which have presumably been confiscated at security. Seems better than chucking them given that many people in China smoke.

(The stats are really staggering: 60% of men, 7-10% of government revenue, 1 million deaths attributable per year.)
Art/music is the native language of emotive content, just as logic/mathematics is the native language of rational content. Notice the latter came much later and now we tend to forget how important the former was for communication in a human society before rational thought was codified.
Why what? Why would I have to stop using DuckDuckGo? Because I don't use Apple products. Why don't I use Apple products? Many reasons.
Backpage Seized by Federal Government
I remember hearing that if you are applying for a government job with a security clearance, then your finances and credit-worthiness is factor.
That's why the writer said that the scarcity of time is a problem partly of perception and partly of distribution.
Thanks for the downvotes, folks, it really encourages discussion!
Looks awesome and I am an SBT guy
I suspect a lot of the long hours is actually a sort of productivity blindness. I've seen some research that suggests the people who most believe they're being effective working >40hrs/wk for more than 6 week stretches are the least likely to have positive net value after 40hrs. Worse is this compounds, such that working less hours in the short term do tend to result in less productivity, until one can recover from overwork.

Sadly, I'm not sure it translates well to industries like yours, where there is just a lot of physical labor involved, and long door hours. My understanding, is that one of the problems is simply the hours in the restaurant business require chef's attention for long hours each day, coupled with the vital need that the kitchen's output is consistent.

Hopefully you're thinking of ways to not have to be present, or ways to spend money instead of time, or just simplifying the menu to be less labor intensive. My heart goes out to you though, I know some chefs, and they are a special breed.
I think the person you are responding to is alluding to humans, not corporations.
I think it dovetails nicely with the discussion of the rule requiring the cheerleaders to leave a restaurant when a player enters. It’s a very old idea that puts the onus on women to avoid improper sexual advances.
Still using a Windows Phone (Nokia 1020) as my main phone.

It's mostly the Nokia parts that I really love, like the transit app, and the fact that it's user-serviceable with minimal tools.

The app ecosystem is actually less of a problem as time goes on; now that Apple and Google ship reasonable browsers in their phones most services I want to use have good mobile web experiences. The real essentials like Pandora / Kindle / WhatsApp are available and still work.

The big pain point for me is Slack's web client, which appears to be gratuitously broken on phones.
I suspect that the (vast?) majority of people who travel that much don't check luggage regularly. The exception being people who need a lot of gear for whatever purpose they're on the road for all the time. Personally, I'm on dozens of flights a year and I only check luggage for a handful of those flights.

Anecdotally, luggage does miss connections on a fairly regular basis and if there are airline changes/international flights involved, it may take a few days to track a bag down. But I've never had a bag lost permanently and I can't remember the last time I've heard someone I know complaining about that happening. I think my parents in all their years of travel may have lost a bag permanently once.

ADDED: The statistic in the article doesn't really say what percentage of luggage is lost though. The quote is “Less than one-half percent of bags are ultimately unclaimed." So this is the case where they have the luggage but can't figure out who the owner is for whatever reason. Presumably other bags are just lost--probably most typically stolen.
uh huh, and you’re not biased at all...
Don't know why you got down voted - I had the same exact experience.
The Intricate Economics of Massive Cruise Ships Are Fascinating
Warning! 90 second infomercial for Dashlane at the end of the video. But the video itself is pretty good.
The rules against mixing cheerleaders and players is to protect the cheerleaders from being exploited by the players.
"China obviously utilizes currency" - I didn't mean to imply that China doesn't have money, obviously it does, and it functions as a social scoring system there too.

"do not keep security risk scores" - As other commenters point out, intelligence agencies use methods like cotraveller analysis and social network analysis which do seem to imply scoring all citizens. I guess they have an interpretation of the law which allows this.

You should FOIA the NSA and then we can find out for sure.

"Credit ratings are heavily regulated in the United States." -
Credit ratings in the UK are notoriously opaque, if you believe a mistake has been made there is very little you can do. I don't know about the US.
The DMCA causes huge costs for search engines because of all of the bogus takedowns, which people can send without any consequences. Congress could fix that aspect of the law, but has chosen not to.
> I am a slacker, and I enjoy it very much.

I like to say I'm discovery-oriented rather than goal-oriented. Being so means I also seek to avoid being overworked because I don't know how to not prioritize discovery. I've tried joining work with pleasure but I find it doesn't lead to good things.
There's a [1] hypothesis that economic growth is mostly the result of 1) population growth, 2) energy consumption, and 3) interest rates.

Current projections estimate that population will peak at 8.7 billion in 2055. Nearly all of that growth will occur in "developing" countries. Yuval Harari makes the case in Homo Deus that the world is quickly reaching a point where the less developed areas of the world will be mostly ignored and left behind in the coming years, as the developed world has reached a sort of critical mass that it makes more sense -- economically -- to keep investing there.

As technology continues to get more and more efficient, it is quite possible we are near peak energy consumption.

Interest rates have been around 0% for quite some time.

To me, it's interesting to wonder if we live in a world that might "objectively" be getting better, but we don't see the verification with the same type of economic growth that's occurred in the past.

[1] - https://ourfiniteworld.com/2012/08/29/the-long-term-tie-betw...
TextQL: Execute SQL Against CSV or TSV
Ask HN: What human language features could be useful for the writing of code?
Currently, programming languages seem to be largely isolating[0] and invariant rather than inflected[1].

Could operands such as variable names be usefully inflected (probably agglutinatively[2] for simplicity's sake) to indicate type or other contextual constraints?

How about more extensive stacking[3] of operators (an existing example would be += that combines addition and assignment) the way some languages do verbs?

Could we use tenses[4] somehow to make parallel and concurrent programming easier?

Could articles[5] be used to do things like pass variables or instantiate objects?

Anyway, there seem to be opportunities to make programming languages more expressive by borrowing human language features rather than using ever more complex typographical conventions. What do you think?

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

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

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

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_verb_construction

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_tense

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_(grammar)
Reference links:

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

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

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

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_verb_construction

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_tense

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_(grammar)
Since it would be trivial for Goog to expose all of this functionality in their API, I consider all of this BS PR by google.

It would also be trivial for google to make a basic app for the 3rd biggest phone OS.

But since Google makes an OS and doesn’t want other OSes, any actions they have other than support are suspect.

It’s like when MS said that it was possible for PC sellers to not bundle IE. Sure it’s possible, but it was just BS because it was completely MS’ prerogative.
One of Elon Musk’s companies is working on this:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-25/elon-musk...
This pretty much nails it. Thank you.
Feds seize Backpage.com, slap charges on founder of site
‘Big Brother’ in India Requires Fingerprint Scans for Food, Phones and Finances
How many resources would it take? Especially if Microsoft partnered on it.

This doesn’t make any sense since Google used to be really supportive of new platforms and services. This was back when goog was just playing around with using lock-in to their advantage
When people talk about business growth they are typically looking for a return above and beyond inflation.

I'd also say there really isn't any such thing as a steady state for businesses not because of inflation but due to the need to keep pace with general human progress and invention in order to stay competitive in the market place.
What's the marketshare on developer machines though? And build servers? What about Docker?

It's so nice to be able to have any CI build your Android apps and Travis CI supports building iOS apps, too.
WiFi password sharing was severely criticized when Microsoft introduced it. But then Apple put in in iOS and nobody batted an eye.

There are some ideas that just need time.
I've heard the pay for NFL cheerleaders is ridiculously
low. So I wonder what the benefits of being one are.

Just because a job has low pay, limited opportunities for advancement and poor job security, doesn't mean there won't be people willing to do it.

I mean, if you've got a choice between being a shop clerk for minimum wage or being a cheerleader for 2% above minimum wage, you might choose the latter even though it's low-paid.
> If you can have static types that work for a lot of the Javascript already out there without soundness or no types at all, which one do you pick?

You restrict the allowable subset of JavaScript in your codebase further to one you know is sound. This is pretty much the same strategy that `"use strict"` has, and literally no one complains about that, so it was never really about restricting JavaScript anyway, people just like to dump on soundness as being too un-pragmatic.

Sure, sometimes you really do need to work around the type system and express something you know can't go wrong. But it's always possible to contain it to a small, 'unsafe' part of the codebase! For example, Rust proves this quite nicely.
I was just thinking about the increasingly heavy self-censorship we live under in the West after reading all of these fear mongering comments. Irony is very appropriate.
Another way to look at it is the players are worth far more to the team than the cheerleaders. Given the choice between telling TO he has to leave a restaurant, and telling a cheerleader, which do you choose?

Similarly, given the choice between telling Gal Gadot she has to leave a restaurant, and telling a male extra from the set of Wonder Woman, which do you choose?
The web engine on Windows phone is (was) terrible though compared to Webkit/Blink.
> Contrary to previous understandings, posts with negative, even vitriolic, criticism of [China], its leaders, and its policies are not more likely to be censored. Instead, we show that the censorship program is aimed at curtailing collective action by silencing comments that represent, reinforce, or spur social mobilization, regardless of content.

https://gking.harvard.edu/publications/how-censorship-china-...
(this is only a very quick and dirty exposition.)

Humans, like every other organism on this Earth, have been shaped by evolution, which has instilled a set of adaptations into them.

Like most other species, there is a competition for mates, reproduction opportunities and resources within the sexes. So, along the ages, humans have acquired a set of adaptations that "maximize" wealth, status, (whether they still work in the current environment as opposed to the ones in which these adaptations evolved is another question). So, in essence, humans who tended to work more, tended to obtain more resources/wealth thereby becoming more attractive reproductive prospects. You also get more opportunities to help fellow tribe members, improving your status within your community etc. In other words, a highly competitive arms race has emerged.

However, only in recent times, intellectual work has become more common, where the size of the input is not proportional to the quality of the output.

There is another dimension to this. Many humans today work in corporate environments where there is an intense competition for advancing in a rigid hierarchical structure. These advances are strongly correlated with income growth, and power and control over many work-related issues, which is strongly related to status. In these environments, it is often difficult to actually measure the output quality and quantity of each human, partly because there is little incentive to do that, partly because people doing the measurement are not the most technically knowledgeable in the field, but mostly because they are humans themselves and thus have their own interests (namely improving their reproductive prospects themselves, so they need to forge allegiances that stabilize their positions etc). Promoting the most capable worker is sometimes outside their interests. So in this environment, many other cues are used to evaluate the worth of employees, many completely unrelated to their capabilities and work. So, marketing oneself becomes an important aspect in this economy.

One clear way to signal to others that you are very dedicated to the company and an important employee is to spend more time at the office than the others. Busyness is a signal of importance/status and value to the company. Of course, people actually interested in performing high quality intellectual work will know that time spent on a task is only one (minor) factor ...
Consumers' personal information are at risk in the hands of multinational corporates. That's why i'm working on a blockchain concierge services project called PREEVE to help consumers pay without giving out their identity or personal info. If you want to join me on this mission DM here or via telegram @sammydeeknight for a chat.
Can you give some examples? I had worked on many games and a licensed engine had been always evaluated. Some went with one, some did not for technical and economical reasons. Never seen people just outright declining it because it's "heresy".
Steam (sales and usage data) in 2017
Why learn a completely new framework for an OS with 1% marketshare?
>Do you have any papers around the sinus headaches?

It is understudied, the first link discusses it a bit. A lot of celiacs report it but last I looked for papers I couldn't find any that weren't GI related.
What is the energy source for this- is it running off a diesel generator?

lettuce is the ultimate waste of resources. if you're running your grow lights on generators, spend it on something better than lettuce.
It doesn't say it does on the spec and doesn't have a PSID printed on the label in the photo which are two strong indicators that it doesn't support it.
According to the linked article, they have a list of public phone numbers. I guess they can cycle through fresh ones every few days.

Of course, if they simply provision a list of phone numbers and then give them up and get new ones, the new holders of the numbers won't be happy....
Neighborhood Watch?
Way before Napoleon, during the Zhou Dynasty of China, Confucius was already teaching his minister-aspiring students about the role of music in governing, owing to it being a device to actualize harmonious behavior among the vassals and the people as practiced for a thousand years then and codified in the lost Book of Harmony.

https://ctext.org/liji/yue-ji/ens
https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=30475

I sometimes wonder too- but then i meet the language lawyers, talking with the drm-legal team about, undefined behaviour in todays society- and suddenly.

Or if you sit with actual lawyers, and all they talk about is how you could get away with a crime, in a theoretical sense of course, if you used that trapdoor and lousy wording, and you realize, that is just exactly what you talked about the other day, with the database team over lunch.

You are right though, that the word hacker-culture does not capture it- its a mindset bend on edge cases, always looking for ways to circumvent.
Could an Electric Car Have a Manual Gearbox and Clutch?
A lot of services that use SMS for new account verification also block numbers from non-mobile providers, even ones that haven't been used before. I tried using a Twilio number as a Google-Voice-like service where it would forward texts to my actual number, but many services refused to accept the Twilio number.
Show HN: Strictured Programming [pdf]
That is not true, it is perfectly happy to compile files that have a .C and .H extension as modern C++ :).
In general, that's the sane argument against feature bloat.

In this instance, is the effort required to maintain a layout option really that much more? I don't know the answer, it's a genuine question.

Also, was there no benefit? I didn't even realize the feature existed because I searched for it before it was introduced and moved to Firefox.

I know nothing about the history of this feature in Chrome, but from 10000 feet, this looks like a heavy handed move to remove a feature instead of making it optional, especially in the times of large + tall touchscreens.

Disclaimer: I don't know what I'm talking about, there may be, and probably are some good reasons for these.
> paved with good intentions.

lol you're giving xi jingping the dictator too much credit. it's a means to monitor and silence his critics, and to prevent protests/uprisings.

this is just cultural revolution 2.0. from hitler 2.0.
That makes no sense. Someone in the middle of the meal obviously gets to finish their meal no matter who walks in the door. That's besides the point of asking anybody to leave which is ridiculous in the first place. People should be able to eat in the same restaurant without busybodies micro managing their lives.
sounds like:
https://prism-break.org/en/
Weird Stuff Warehouse is closing this weekend
I can confirm this. I worked for a major game publisher at the time, and MSFT threw significant money at us to port iOS/Android titles to Windows Phone. I think their gamble was once our - and the hundreds of other developers' - titles were on their platform, users would migrate to it. We'd then hopefully see promising numbers and decide to update the titles on our own accord, keeping them in sync with iOS/Android.

Unfortunately for MSFT, that didn't happen. Aside from their hefty payment to get the 1.0 out, after that there was zero incentive to update as often as iOS/Android (platforms that actually brought in revenue) so after the initial release the titles stagnated.

They did offer payment for additional point updates, but these were separate contracts that would take months to sign-off (MSFT moved VERY slow), and in the fast-moving mobile world, the WP port gathered dust.

Xbox Live support which sounded like a great idea at the time and edge over the other platforms, turned out to be a nightmare. Rather than come up with a mobile-specific review policy, we had to go through the same approval process as Xbox console publishers do to get the titles signed off, and this took many weeks or months of tedious back and forth with their review team who didn't 'get' mobile. Titles would occasionally get rejected for reasons irrelevant to mobile, and then take weeks to be resolved.

Ultimately, the few Windows users we did have (IIRC our metrics showed a few thousand DAU on our major titles vs. iOS/Android in the low millions) became frustrated because Windows Phone versions lagged significantly behind iOS/Android releases (which were in sync) and had less features.
"Developing features of your product without a commensurate push to grow your user base can set your startup on an inertialess path. This is what I learned when I was my previous company’s ramp up phase. We developed new features thinking each feature would cause the inflection point we were looking for. ‘Ticketing will be a game changer,’ or ‘this new mobile app will allow us to sell at a higher price point.’ Each time we barely pushed the needle when it came to growth. We dreamt silver bullets, but we were only pushing out what amounted to paper bullets.

It turns out paper bullets are expensive. Features cost money in the form of engineering hours. We invested all of our seed funding in developing a great product. In doing so, our feature list expanded, but our actual revenue growth never changed in a meaningful way to support that development.

Eventually we stopped making new features all together. We had no choice; we couldn’t meet payroll to continue all of this development. We were in what I call a startup tarpit. The startup tarpit is the land of inertia. We had a good enough product but not enough marketing resources to get out of our stagnation. We raised money to build a great product and when we ran out of money we had nothing to show for it; making it nearly impossible to raise additional money."
I think the EU is very aware that in the reality we live in, search engines are how people find stuff, not by looking through or searching directly on sites.

Thus, this is one of those times where the lawmakers actually looked at technology, and understood how it was used.

Also, making search engines responsible creates a far smaller surface area of contact than having every site that contains the content.
Both my father and my sister are coeliac, and find a lot of packaged gluten free foods (biscuits, breads, cakes, etc) have more sugar than the normal versions to compensate for frankly generally tasting worse...

Fresh food is fine, but in general people deciding to go gluten free because it's trendy and "healthy", without having done a proper elimination trial or having coeliac disease, aren't actually making a good choice.
Talent shortage in AI is a myth: reply to Cedric Villani
To be honest, when Peters horses stampeded with him, the audience happily went along even with the most unreasonable idea. People like him where and are rare, and the games delivered under the name bullfrog where so legendary - (even though half of them he wasnt involved at all), its was allmost impossible to live up to that avalanch of a reputation that had developed around him.

Its a sad thing that the people looking for something to hate- aka the web happend to him. I liked him visionary, and even if only half the vision survived, the games where always excellent.