skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What is your software development background?

I ask because it would not have once occurred to me in the past fifteen years of software development that “enforcing database constraints” in any way implies shutting everything down and stopping transactions until the cause of a violation is rooted out.

If you’re approaching it from the position of collecting raw data from sensors or something, that might make sense. But from the perspective of a webapp, allowing duplicate (or empty) usernames or failing to keep foreign key relations valid often violate basic assumptions of soundness that the application is based upon. In these cases, the right answer is to drop the data on the floor (loudly) so a developer can look at it. Inconveniencing a customer once here is infinitely better than inconveniencing them constantly due to the site being buggy or broken as a result of the invalid data, and prevents needing to migrate the data in the future which can actually be impossible to do correctly in some cases.
Moon Environments videolog
I don’t think it’s sufficient that conditions for the bottom 50% are just improving. In my opinion, humanity has the technology to provide for everyone to have access to clean food and water, modern medical care, and primary education. These should be provided without regard to the ability of the recipients to pay. Wealth inequality definitely gets in the way of this goal, as wealth that might help achieve these goals instead ends up in he hands of a few. In the US we effectively deny modern medical care to poor folks - you are required to go essentially bankrupt before Medicaid kicks in. Many people forego care so they don’t go bankrupt. The fact that more sane policies have not been implemented is a direct result of the influence of a wealthy political donor class which does not want to help pay for such a system. Inequality is inevitable, but we at least ought to move the safety net up a bit (and globally too).
> is that it really doesn't matter what the top 1% are doing so long as the bottom half are seeing improved living conditions.

Which they are not: real wages for the bottom four quintiles have been stagnant since the seventies and the 1% have captured essentially all income gains from productivity growth since then. That is the source of the discontent.

> Over a billion people have been lifted out of poverty over the last 30 years thanks to globalization

You're trying to pull a fast one here. The statistic about "a billion people have been lifted out of poverty" has been greatly overblown: it's technically true, but it turns out most of those people are in China— if you exclude China, the number looks much less impressive. And yes, China's development is impressive, but it's a non sequitur to go from "Dirt-poor Communist country becomes richer when switching to free-market capitalism" to saying that contemporary ultra-laissez-faire economics are a good thing for developed nations.

> It just spurs on class resentment which is, if history is any guide, just about the worst way to go about things possible.

"It's only class warfare when we fight back". If, as the evidence strongly hints, the rich are leveraging their capital into political power to get more and more opportunities to stack the deck and create an unfair playing field (in a positive feedback loop), then not noticing this and subsequently demonizing them is deliberately blinding oneself to the problem and the most plausible avenues of solution.
This is true. The feeling of entitlement, that their wealth was earned, and the lack of obligation to give back to the greater good, is the biggest problem with wealth growth since the 1980s. The 19th century British aristocracy might have been horrible, but at least they thought they were supposed to be building a better world, not just feathering their own nest.

_How Much is Enough_ is a very conservative British book about this, and the idea that modern Capitalism has forgotten what the point of life might be.
> WhatsApp - WhatsApp feature means some encrypted messages could be read by third party.

> Alternatives:

> Signal - Uses Signal Protocol.

Pretty sure both WhatsApp and Signal both use the Signal's crypto for encryption, and both "suffer" from the same "design defect" / "usability improvement".

That said, I still think WhatsApp only encrypts text messages E2E, and doesn't bother for videos/photos/anything else, based on how efficiently it forwards videos compares to sending them for the first time (accounting for video conversion time), so I'd still put WhatsApp in the bad list, but not for that reason.

Being owned by Facebook is enough of a good reason in itself at this point too, mind.

EDIT: Just read through the full list. This is superb. Thank you for putting this together!

EDIT AGAIN: Just read through some of the comments, Iridium in particular is what got my attention as awesome, prior to learning that it's not been updated in 5 months, which is beyond dangerous given the number of security fixes that will have come out in that timeframe. Sad times :-(
Which is exactly why a convenient alternative was desired.
Why? What kind of law, or institution, or self-regulation prevents it?
Microsoft squandered an opportunity to make an alternative mobile OS at a time when it was possible to do that. In 2010 when Windows Phone was released, the app store concept was only a few years old and many people did not have smartphones yet.

These days, I don't see how a new operating system could possibly succeed unless it had all of the popular social media apps on day one.
Thanks. Just for clarification.. did you mean https://www.fossil-scm.org ?
If you said this about Jeff Bezos and data on AWS, you'd be wrong. That's a bit apples-to-oranges, but what I mean is being an executive in a company does not entail access to customer data retained by the company.

I don't expect Facebook to be a good data steward, but they certainly could be. Not to AWS's extent (Facebook can't turn a profit without reading your unencrypted content, currently), but to a minimal extent at least...

Then again, whose trust are they trying to earn?
I haven't read Pinker's book and he is certainly more knowledgeable than I am on the topic. What does he say about attitudes like "keeping up with the Joneses", jealousy, and similar emotions? It seems to me that most people tend toward jealousy and compare themselves to those who are better off rather than those who are worse off.

I've been under the impression that disparity, inequality in and of itself is a problem due to human nature. Does Pinker's research show otherwise?
It may be hard to imagine, but it has happened: http://articles.latimes.com/2007/jan/14/local/me-water14
I think a better approach to reducing syntactical complexity is simpler language.

In traditional basic, a for loop looks like:

for i = 1 to 100
print i
next i

The syntax here is very nearly as simple as possible. There are no parentheses, no semicolons, no braces or brackets; i is not declared ahead of time; indentation isn't important.

Every new programming language is developed with its own syntactic dressings for ever-greater levels of abstraction. More experienced programmers want to see lambdas and continuations and parallelism and design patterns and so on, and these concepts are extraordinarily difficult to teach to beginners without also introducing advanced math. We forget how difficult it is to grasp these abstractions for the first time; we eat our young.

I don't like graphical languages because they aren't a good stepping stone towards "real" programming. They are too limited, too verbose, too awkward, and too slow to build programs with.

We assume that we can't make new languages that are resistant to syntax errors. But once upon a time, we did. (Despite all its many other limitations, I don't think I ever had a single syntax error in COBOL.)
I don't see why one would need Apple to do it. A consortium would be much better and more likely.
I agree that termination isn't part of soundness. I was trying to explain how null pointer exceptions are compatible with soundness in Java.

As far as I understand it, Java covariant arrays are sound because the language is defined to throw before the unsound assignment happens. The link I had above claims as much. Maybe I have the definition wrong too?
There's a difference between someone physically constraining you so that you can't eat and from not having enough money to eat, but that doesn't mean the one is free in the latter case. Indeed, presumably one does not want to be physically stopped from eating because one wants to eat - i.e. substantively we want to be free to do things, and can only do things if society grants us the means to.

What are 'the laws of nature'?!!?
I basically agree with your first sentence. Specifically, I don't believe capitalism itself is the root problem, but rather something like a deficit in social cohesion. No sense that we're fellow humans collectively struggling towards a better society. That sense doesn't necessarily imply a communist implementation. It could mean something as simple as an ethos in which those who are better off try to help others up. I couldn't begin to address how that might come about, and I'm as wary as anyone about trying to use a State to do it. Because the State never actually turns out to be the People, except in the naive or fanciful abstract.
Every simple RPG game must have faced this problem - the rich get richer exponentially. Programmers sometimes introduce weird rules such as , the more you have the costlier it is to buy sth etc. Capitalism has a real problem. Piketty has exposed it adequately. People need to put forward solutions, to get the money flowing again. Taxation is not the only solution, in fact its impossible to get it right in today’s globalised economy.
I miss Nokia. Those were the days the biggest mobile manufacturer actually did things beneficial to users! Compare that to Apple today. No headphone jack which is probably more used every day even now than their proprietary shit port was ever used. Oh and the silly notch!
I think another reason they added refinement types in the form of literal string types and literal number types was because there are no data constructors in TS & Flow either. This is a bit of speculation on my part.

For example, in lots of strongly typed languages when you make a sum type there's a constructor.
haskell,

data Foo = Baz | Bar

or rust,
enum Foo { Baz, Bar }

Baz and Bar are data constructors, they allow you to pattern match on them and make new values. In ts an equivalent sum type has to use a string/number refinement.

type Foo = { kind: "baz" } | { kind: "bar" }

This fits closer to js semantics and still allows sum types to be written. Unfortunately the pattern matching isn't anywhere near as good, but I applaud them for adding this to the language.
Re: 1) it only applies to your primary residence. It's by no means the way top %1 in wealth maintain or create their income.
[Edit: I thought it does. But I'm not so sure anymore. Better scratch this comment]

2) I'd suggest examining double taxation. Corporations already pay taxes. It's unclear why an investor should pay additional taxes too on top of it, for the same profit.
Wow, that video is ... something.
Thanks for that data. Interesting to me is that there is that seemingly large gap between the income and wealth numbers. That is, the 32,500 number comes down to just about anyone with a full-time job in the US that pays over minimum wage, but the 770k in assets seems to be a much, much higher level.
What is wrong with Tor?? And Telegram? I don't know much about telegram but am very surprised to hear Tor described as "bad stuff." And my (admittedly amateur) understanding was that Tor Browser Bundle was a perfectly good way to run Tor (though of course not as secure as running Tor on a separate secure OS).
> People spend less as a percentage of income on food and housing

I've lived in several places in the last few years and this couldn't be further away from truth. I spend the same or more % of my income in housing than my parents did, and I get much less for it. They were able to buy a 4 bedroom flat in town working blue collar jobs, and me, with an engineering degree, probably could aspire to a 2 bedroom out of town at best.
Interesting.

Maybe embargo works, to be progressively published over time, with grace period being extended by reaching goals/milestones.

In other words: use it or lose it.
"downsides"
Your post kind of reminds of two other articles along the same concept:
[1] http://ncase.me/trust/
[2] https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-to-triumph-and-cooperate-...
The propositions that are true. If a or b delete it becomes weird when both are true, because in conventional programming languages, b often isn't executed at all, since we don't care about the value of it. However, in this case you do need to execute it because you have to know if delete it reflects on a or both a and b.
The main thrust is that this seems to simply be a consequence of differing ability/circumstance, and there is no counter-example in recorded history - even our views on the "noble savage" are probably skewed by the fact that large hunter-gatherer societies with enough wealth to allow accumulation have been stamped out.

The follow-on question is: what do we do about it? Attempts to artificially "correct" inequality for the sake of correction are universally disastrous. Progressive taxation and redistribution are, I think, reasonable, as is universal basic income, and sound government has a huge role to play. But the goal should be to provide basic services and create opportunity for the bottom 50%, not wrest control of wealth from the top 1%.

The goal of actually stamping out inequality is a fool's errand.
Apple certainly puts taxes in, but Apple never agreed to FRAND terms. Qualcomm did. That's a huge difference.

When an industry group sets a standard, everyone must disclose their patents and agree to FRAND terms. If they don't, they'll work around their patents and they'll get no licensing fees. This is because everyone will be forced to use that standard. Rather than being a competitive market, it's a monopoly. As such, FRAND licensing is so important.

Apple, by contrast, doesn't force you to use their technology and is far from a monopoly. That doesn't mean that what Apple does is good or fair or just. However, I can buy an Android phone if I dislike what Apple is doing. I can't decide I'll buy a phone without Qualcomm's tech in it.

While Apple has significant market power, it doesn't have the type of market power that a monopoly gives you. If Apple has patents on a lot of iPhone things, competitors can work around it. While Apple still has power, it's much more limited.

Without the FRAND threat, once a standard had gotten traction like LTE, a company like Qualcomm could start charging $200/phone. Cell networks have invested at least $25 billion per carrier in the US into LTE networks. They have a huge installed base of LTE phone users. They can't move to a different technology even if they wanted to.

By contrast, while Apple has power, they don't have that kind of power. When the iPhone was AT&T-only, sure it helped AT&T, but Verizon countered with Android devices. Sure, some people might have left Verizon for the iPhone, but it didn't have any lasting impact on Verizon.

If Qualcomm decided to cut off Verizon from all its LTE patents and license them exclusively to AT&T, that would kill Verizon.

Apple's biggest power-move was AT&T exclusivity, and while it helped AT&T, it didn't change the dynamic of the industry. If Qualcomm did the same, it would change the industry.

That's not to say you should like Apple's exercise of power. It's to note that there's a difference between standards-essential patent licensing which is a bedrock of how we can have these industries and Apple's somewhat annoying practices which we wish they'd be nicer about.
I think it's more that authoritarianism is the natural state of human nature, and capitalist systems tend to be less authoritarian because they setup multiple competing authorities and provide a mechanism for the entry of new ones, and in the chaos that results ordinary people have space for liberty by switching allegiances between titans of industry.

"Ambition must be made to counteract ambition" - James Madison, Federalist #51.

Communism has a problem with coordination: once the economy grows complex enough that someone must decide who produces what, the central planner becomes a power structure in its own right (what is power other than the ability to control what other people do, after all?). That happened with disastrous results under both Stalinism and Maoism. If you disperse that power democratically (i.e. by majority vote, perhaps using technology to instantly tally votes for a proposal), most people only have a limited amount of time and context to evaluate each proposal, and so a charismatic strongman can easily sway the vote. (This frequently happens with California ballot propositions, for example.)

Anarcho-communism has worked on a small scale with many hunter-gatherer and small-scale agricultural societies - for example, the idea of private ownership of land was nonsensical to most Native American tribes. However, these societies tend to be conquered by ones that have attained industrialization, because the higher complexity of those economies lets them build much more effective weapons of war.
You don't have to pay anything to develop on Windows. Visual Studio Community Edition is free. Even if you want the professional edition - I don't see any reason you would - it's $499 per seat.

You also wouldn't have to buy Windows computers - you could either buy Windows + Parallels
or spend about $60 a month and get a hosted Windows desktop on AWS.

You can get a hosted build server via Visual Studio Online - unlimited private git repos, 5 users free (each additional user $5). 240 build minutes free per month or $40 per hosted build agent with unlimited minutes.

If you really have no need for Windows machines, just use AWS Workspaces and you can get a 4 vcpu 16GB Hosted Windows workstation for $70 a month.
Teslas are actually advanced. Cadillac (to me) has a far worse reputation than BMW & in my mind their cars look worse. No idea about the reliability.
Hehe sometimes people have similar ideas at similar times. When I was researching if something like Glyph already exists I found this: https://github.com/mateogianolio/issuance

You can check it out.. I think it's partly what you described.
OK, I would have done it too. This is a 0.01 on a 1-10 scale. Messages over the years, at 2am or 1pm can be taken out of context and so on and here you have one of the richest people on earth. Of course he could've said "my assistants wrote it" but un-sending does not do much bad to the receiver.
It turns out that some problems are solvable by a massively parallelized optimization process based on independent decision making, advertising, pricing, and money.

Success stories include food production, household goods, and many kinds of media.

Failures include addictive drugs, gambling, global warming, and healthcare.

As a civilization we’re crushing it on problems solvable by capitalism. The solution to other problems is not new ways of measuring things to make them fungible (sounds like Wuffie). The solution is other forms of collective action and decision making, like functional governments and NGOs.
Can you show an example of how to use R to read tabular data on stdin (e.g. in a UNIX pipe line) and perform SQL queries?
Communism was a historic aberration. Trying to make an economy without market is stupid, as you throw away a valuable tool known since prehistoric times. Markets are not the problem, but they are not enough.
Does limiting government limit the powers of the wealthy? It would limit one channel for them to exercise their power, but other channels like corporate control would exist.
A Hard Transparency Choice: What Is WikiLeaks?
Capitalism isn’t very good at the initial bootstrap, start from zero and you have to take stop gap jobs that exhaust you while long term having a chance to build skills for a future job could have far better outcomes for everyone economically.
Top 1% of earning, not necessarily top 1% of wealth.

I remember checking my moderately above average European income on a site that showed this. I think I was in or close to the top 1% of earners. But not being on the property ladder I think I was closer to top 6% by wealth. (It was a while ago so my numbers may be a bit out, but I hope you get the idea).
Amazon cancels 'Mozart in the Jungle' after four seasons
At 88, doctor pursues a long-ignored treatment for strokes, heart attacks
PostgreSQL Begins Adding LLVM JIT Support For Faster Performance
If one thinks that their ideas on alternative therapies are worth investigating, I would strongly urge them to connect with a scientist that shares similar views, and apply for funding through the NIH. There is a significant amount of funding for complementary and alternative medicine. It's not well known that such funding exists, so I try and let others know about it.

I have been tangentially involved with pain researchers that teamed up with chiropractors to study some of their maneuvers in a rigorous manner.
Nope. "SUV"s are more expensive, less efficient (and look worse imo). They have demand for model 3. A fat one will be next.
> It would be trivial to store data in the browser's local storage and hijack a "real" HTTP POST with this data. The front-end logic would need to be obfuscated far enough to deter anyone from trying to step through the Javascript to find it.

Hmm, I think I’ll write a library to do something like this, I just need a cool clever name for it.
Yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16770818
Income/wealth inequality always happens and probably always will, but it doesn't NEED to be so big and become bigger and bigger as it's doing since Reagan started the movement to tax the rich less and less.
> The system itself is broken, and the people who run it have forgotten the lesson of history that people with no stake in a system eventually turn to violence when threatened with starvation.

The people who run it are aware that they can, with impunity, make others starve when necessary (see multiple famines in the European history). Such potential power is extremely exciting for some.
> is that it really doesn't matter what the top 1% are doing so long as the bottom half are seeing improved living conditions.

That line of thought will lead you to run in with the ultimate wealth distribution tools the bullet, the bomb and the rifle

I know this is true because I'm decently middle class and want the fuckers to burn myself right now, I can't imagine what people truly being fucked by these monsters feel
1) That's inaccurate. From my own direct experience, it applies to any investment property.
2) You're making an argument to not tax dividends, not capital gains.
We should clarify if we are talking about top 1% of earnings, or top 1% of wealth. The housing boom in the UK in the last 15 years has made wealth very related to age.
Google doesn't collect a paid license fee for Google Apps on Android, but they have fairly significant nonmonetary agreements, essentially barring the OEMs from using Google's competitors, making Google's products the default, dictating where Google Apps must be placed on the home screen, etc.

Some of the larger OEMs might be able to negotiate revenue sharing agreements from Play purchases, but inside the Google Apps is definitely where Google makes its money, on app sales and ad targeting based on data collected by Google hoovering up everyone's mobile data and location.