skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This talk was an interesting thought experiment by PhK of FreeBSD on how if he were tasked by some agency to sabotage open source projects and standards how he would go about doing it https://youtu.be/fwcl17Q0bpk

A talk by Robert Harper at OPLSS in 2017 is really good as well, covering the basics of programming language background https://www.cs.uoregon.edu/research/summerschool/summer17/to... "concrete syntax is where computer science meets psychology.... at the moment it's all a matter of opinion"
1280 Companies[1] — 1 IPO

Kingmakers... hardly. I remember going to a Commonwealth Club talk in January of 2013 titled: "Y Combinator:The Secret in this Incubator's Sauce". They talked about how YC exits are on par with or worse than any person trying to start a company. Sure there is tons of support when you're in the program and they really try to ensure soft landings through their relationships, but it's hardly a machine where your entrance into YC guarantees you a billion dollar valuation and great IPO.

Saying that, I still think YC is a wonderful program. It's what business school should be — starting and running a company; not talking about it. They have amazing leadership, mentorship, relationships and community in place which remove huge barriers from starting a company. I advise everyone I know who has a company idea to apply every semester.

[1] - http://yclist.com
I think they are talking about OnStar, the GM product that provides in person concierge service in additional to vehicle maintenance information and crash reporting. The connection to leasing they are trying to make is likely to say, by installing OnStar they can monitor how the user drives the car. However, the math behind leasing and payments etc is known upfront. When you return the car, they don't just say "Well you owe us an extra $10,000 because you accelerate hard."
Surprised to find an ad at the end of this article.

It also uses Google Analytics.

What was all that about spying on your users, again?
On that topic, I really liked Advanced Unix Programming by Marc Rochkind. [1] It was an early Unix programming book and covered very well how to correctly use many important Unix system calls and showed how to write some non-trivial apps including a simple DBMS, using them. IIRC I read recently that he is coming out with a new edition after many years:

http://basepath.com/aup/

[1] I got to read it because it used to be shipped for free with all HP-UX servers for some time, when I was working in an HP joint venture company.
I'd expect ceramics to survive better than steel. A lot of our archaeological artefacts from former human civilisations are ceramic.
Trillions Upon Trillions of Viruses Fall from the Sky Each Day
> One of Postgres' strengths is how easy it is to add custom types for specific use cases. I suspect that if you've got a special need for higher precision, how high will also be a more narrow use case (how wide of a type, what tradeoff to make between range and resolution). Seems to me a great custom type use case.

There's already a few cases in postgres core that'd benefit however. It's somewhat annoying to loose available clock precision when more is available. With hundreds of thousands of transactions/sec more accurate timestamps can be quite useful. IOW, having now(), clock_timestamp() either return something higher precision that can be downcast implicitly, or have higher precision variants of them, would be quite useful. The higher precision type should be used in a number of places inside postgres core.

I think once you bump up the storage size (128bit?) it's easy enough to cover both range and precision for nearly every usecase.
> but this is something altogether different than believing it is impossible to govern a society successfully in this form, for a very long period of time.

The West seems to have forgotten its own political history, which was based on the divine right of kings far longer than the current populist democratic consensus, which only has a 100-year history.

As for China——well, it's had something like 2500+ years of cycling between Imperial dynasties. China (along with India) was the world's pre-eminent economic power for the majority of that period.

The hubris of the West is that anything it does necessarily represents a permanent form of progress, rather than a single swing of the pendulum. That's not to say that societies that are more rooted in common law and popular representation aren't desirable, but blithely assuming that the 'end of history' has arrived is a bit silly.
Well, sure, but if that's your measure of worth, then what are you doing making software? Go work in finance or insurance instead - that's where the real money is.
Meadows and Forester.
It's only a tool. Look at lumberjack, does he ask how to avoid using chainsaw ? He uses chainsaw when it's convenient for him and he feels it's a right tool for the job and he uses axe or other tools when he thinks that other tools are better. Learn about other tools and maybe one of them will be a better fit in future. If something works for you then it's great, don't just jump on bandwagon saying that node.js is evil, it's a tool. I use different tools and languages and I also use node.js where it fits.
Goodness, I'd forgotten about America in the Morning. I was doing a consultant gig in San Diego in those days and it came on at 4am on KOGO. That was "going to work."
> The problem is: hardly anybody except me seems to care about them.

I'm not so sure. Being able to solve hard mathematical problems probably is a niche problem but that doesn't mean you're the only one experiencing it.

Fortunately, it's not limited locally but can easily be tackled at a global scale, i.e. by addressing potential customers around the world.

I'm pretty sure there are plenty of people interested in pondering deep mathematical questions and quite a few might be willing to pay a monthly fee for having access to a community that helps them with doing so.

There are all sorts of online communities for all sorts of weird and extraordinary stuff. Why not one dedicated to solving hard mathematical problems?
I agree with the overall sentiment, that ergonomics should not come at the cost of less safety or correctness. However, two of the three examples, I would actually consider to be _unergonomic_.

Specifically, empty/null values and exceptions. For small code examples they might seem ergonomic at first glance, but from esperience with large projects in scala, java, and c++. The actually add writing code more difficult (at least if you care about handling error cases at all).

Regarding null, I think it is much more economic to work with an Option or Maybe type, with operations like `map`, `unwrap_or`, and pattern matching than checking if values are null all over the place. Not to mention that if values can be null, you have to know the details of any function you call to know if you need to worry about null values at all. See https://www.lucidchart.com/techblog/2015/08/31/the-worst-mis... for more on how terrible null is.

Likewise with exception systems, in large codebases you end up with try/catch statements all over the place, because it's hard to know if the functions you are calling will throw an exception, and even if you know they don't _now_, maybe someone will add a throw later. With explicit result types, you know if you need to handle errors or not, and that won't change unless the signature of the function changes.

As for implicit type conversion, the example in the OP is obviously bad. But I don't think it sacrifices safety to allow implicit conversions for widening integer or floating point types, such as widening u32 to u64 or f32 to f64 (but not u32 to i32, i32 to u64, etc. I think u32 to i64 would be ok, but I'm not 100% sure).
Which implies that the technique uses domain knowledge of people to make assumptions about their morphology.
The idea that the leaks were different during the Jobs era is such nonsense that's purely of the rose-colored glasses variety. The only difference is that now, once the leaks are out, every blog and their mother wants to put their spin and speculation on them to get those glorious clicks.
By the way, Facebook still leaks information.

Proof:

On Facebook, create a targeted ad, targeting people who have secret property "X"; the ad should be about a product "Y" not involving X.

Wait for people to click the ad, visiting your website, and buying the product Y. Now you know the identities of these people coupled to the fact that they have property X.

This also works for Google.
PyPI has started requiring modern, secure TLS (TLS 1.2) to download stuff. You don't need Python 3, but you do need a more recent Python or at least one compiled against a more recent libssl. Which one are you running and do you have the exact error message?
Per company, our success rate is actually much higher now than it was in the early batches for the Dropbox era.
This was not my point, from what I've understood sex work is a really high risk work. You might argue that it could be made safer, but to state that prostitution is like any other work is just a sign of you ignoring the real problems that exist in the sex industry. You can not separate the act with the environment it is done in.

I would compare sex workers to something that is way more safer, mining jobs. You only have safe mining jobs if you strive towards it, same goes for sex work.

For the record I've lived with a family with a daughter/mother in the in the sex industry of a port city, but do not base my views on those anecdotal evidence. But sure it colours it a lot.
even when you had a written contract in place? I haven't had a single issue with payments yet thanks to my contract
Building an embedded wallet for Ethereum
Add in the fact that their definition of perfect is evolving from "content people will like" to "content made by Netflix".
>UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook.

That's a great book. I've read parts of both the Unix and later Linux versions.

Edit: It also reminded me of the O'Reilly book Unix Power Tools - another classic. I had bought it early on and read almost the whole thing. Both it and the Handbook are quite thick, too.
Look at Watson from Watson & Crick to see that even doing one thing well in a field doesn’t imply doing other good work in the same field, let alone the other issues.
> Indeed -- it's become fashionable to replace tests of critical thinking with tests of rote regurgitation, since the former are "biased" towards students with wealthy or intellectual parents.

That sounds like a misunderstanding of the issue. It’s not shifting to rote memory but rather being cognizant of where the test implicitly depends on knowledge which isn’t broadly shared — e.g. how well would poor kids do on a question which used a lot of jargon related to sailing or polo? – so it’s only measuring the intended skills.

In the AP tests this has apparently meant making the tests more self-contained so you’re testing someone’s ability to reason about it rather than trivia recall. The science teachers I know (all former postdocs) this has been received positively since that’s closer to how actual science happens — nobody works without an Internet connection.

As for The Bell Curve, linking to decades-debunked pseudoscience is not a good way to start any discussion which will end well. There are less tainted sources for any valid argument.
Top Courses on GitHub
I don't understand the article's assertion in the context of this being something unique or new to Silicon Valley. Companies have always tried to keep trade secrets behind closed doors and limit what employees share about them. They wouldn't be "secrets" if they weren't limited to select individuals and had information that was ok to disclose publicly.

The idea that this is some new Orwellian culture shift is so stupid...
You can upload 25000 mp3s to Google Music for free — no subscription and no ads. Then just ask the speaker to play them or cast from your phone.
I know. That's my point. People are complaining about decisions made by the company as if they're civil rights violations.

"I can't change the default SMS app on my phone!" This has always been the case with the iPhone since the beginning. Until Apple says that this is now a new part of the OS, pretending like that was some kind of bait and switch or deceptive business practice is completely silly.
Crazy idea: introduce a tax, per byte, on personal information, even if anonymized.
The two dozen sourceforge users left will be devastated.

I honestly won't download anything from that site anymore. If it isn't infected with their adware, I just assume it is outdated and/or comprised with malware.
Very evocative.

In Australia we have some elements of this but they're fading fast. Greek, Italian, Lebanese family owned cafes and fast food places.

These days labour costs mean that most cafes / bistros, even ones with a strong Italian theme will be staffed by newer non-European immigrants. Often no less good, but a different vibe.

Also, you'll almost never get staff older than 30 or so. The exception are highway roadhouses where the chain has out-competed the bypassed towns. So the older staff only have one choice.
Show HN: BearTax – Cryptocurrency tax calculator
BearTax (https://bear.tax) started as a solution to a problem we were facing with high volume trades, pricey tools and mismatch of withdrawals/deposits with those tools. Tried out several of them and few have refunded as their functionality was breaking.

After trying everything out there on the market, we've decided to build our own solution around the end of January 2018 and built BearTax.

"Make what people want" - Paul Graham, this is what we believed and worked for us.

We've rolled it out to individuals with modest pricing starting $0.99 and live chat available for everyone without discrimination on pricing. Our major intention was to educate users on cryptocurrency taxes, usage of exchange integrations, making them feel safe while connecting APIs as it's only read access.

Meanwhile, our business development team focused on building partnerships with CPAs to build BearTax as a go-to crypto tax suite.

That's our story and we've had more than 300 happy customers on our platform and growing exponentially. We are a bootstrapped startup having revenues enough to cover operations this year.

Signup now to calculate your cryptocurrency taxes https://bear.tax
I don't know about gevent, but stackless will work with any libraries in the same way CPython does, which makes sense given it's just a fork. Native extensions obviously won't benefit from stackless but still work with it.

Exceptions and threads don't mix well however, so using Stackless' microthreads with code that relies on exceptions will likely lead to slowdown, so there are a few things to be aware of.
Your toothbrush certainly does not need an app. But what's the game, I wonder, for the dental insurance company? I mean, _why_ do they want your data? Aggregate data on habits? The chance to shape behavior (better habits) of customers through nags, gamification, etc? Eventually rates tied to compliance? Advertising opps?
Amadeus worked not (just) because of Forman, but also the fact he had F. Murray Abraham, who elevated the fictionalization of Salieri from merely a sniveling has-been to a sardonic, somewhat unstable, social commenter on the most uncouth musical genius that world had ever seen.

"Oh, that's lovely! I didn't know you wrote that!"
"I didn't."

It's fun to read about the real historical Salieri. The movie probably did far more to rehabilitate him as a composer despite being (intentionally) inaccurate.
This was big on here last week, regarding why SQLite developers use Fossil not Git: https://sqlite.org/whynotgit.html
Anything from Armin Ronacher (the_mitsuhiko) or Raymond Hettinger, but I especially like "Thinking outside the box" [0] because it was such an eye-opener.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pZVqBFtuLk
> It's not a misconception, there are plenty of times in the past year that I've heard someone propose some change for the new edition only for the Rust devs to meet it with "that's not possible because we can't infallibly warn for it in the compiler, so there's no point discussing it".

Do you have examples for that?

Edit: I'm not doubting you, but having precedent of things that were rejected due to breakage it causes might be helpful in some current/future discussions :)

> Furthermore, just because we can imagine things that could be broken, it doesn't mean that the Rust developers interpret that as carte blanche to break things. The history of Rust development since 1.0 has been one of careful, gradual, and conservative change.

My fear is that this is currently changing. There are a couple of threads on the internals forum currently collecting ideas of what people want changed in future epochs. To me, that's a shift to a different mode of operation. From "editions allow breakage as last resort" to "editions make breakage no longer a big issue".

> It appears that you have a lot of fear about various things that you imagine might be changed (such as ref and ref mut in patterns, which is sort of head-scratching because I've never heard anyone propose removing them, and it wouldn't make sense to remove them anyway)

Here is one mention of it: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/2005#issuecomment-305...

The idea also seemed like a big hit in #rust-lang at the time. People were quite gleeful that `ref` could go away at some point.

I'm happy it's no longer on the table, but having to fight for the ability to destructure into mutable and immutable felt wrong.

Same thing with the modules redesign. Having to fight that hard for your existing workflows and use-cases not to be broken through multiple RFCs felt wrong as well.

Having some constructs auto-convert their final result value seems certain at this point.

> but I think such fears are unwarranted. I've been observing the Rust developers at work longer than almost anyone, and I've ended up with a degree of trust in their sense of taste that rivals that of any other project that I've seen. The people behind the language today are the same ones who have been behind the language for years now, so if you happen to like where their influence has led the project so far, I think it's reasonable to trust that they won't abruptly leap off the rails. :)

I've been following Rust since 0.10 or so, so I've been there quite a while as well. I was there for the uint wars, the battle of match ergonomics, and of course the big module rework skirmish.

I'm sure nobody is acting out of malice, my fears are more that with a certain community size, it is easy to be drowned out if you have different needs or opinions.
Fun fact: the Sicilian mafia's annual revenue is comparable to that of Amazon. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/22/the-women-who-...
Good point. If it was the only evidence and didn’t connect with anything else it would not be substantial proof. I would think it could add to a story but not be definitive proof? You are describing the defense against the screenshot which could be backed up by “expert” testimony. Here is something I found on e-mails being edited in outlook even: https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1135234-can-i-protect... (questionable source)
Fossil also has version control for issues. That didn't become very popular in other applications. We're now thinking about having issues function like Google Docs. You only get linear history but you gain real-time collaboration.
The main trap to avoid is intermingling of the client code with the server code. This almost always leads to very tightly coupling of server/client code with all the pain that brings.
Alibaba Founder, Jack Ma: Both Sides Would Lose a U.S.-China Trade War
What are the tradeoffs on modern hardware using 128bit storage? I've been interested in wider types in general and have abused UUIDs for this purpose.
> The attitude was the same towards the Navy.

Can you give any specifics to support this? From my reading of the writings of the founders, I see them talking about the dangers of a standing army all over the place, but I never see them talking about similar dangers of a navy.

> Your rationalization was well after the fact

No, it was the reason given at the time. The reason it wasn't done first thing when the Constitution was adopted is that navies cost money and the early Federal government didn't have a lot of it, so they only agreed to finance a navy when the losses to American merchant shipping became large enough to make it a worthwhile expense.
As for the training - I believe being onsite is crucial, so this is not something easily achievable remotely.
No update/acknowledgement on their twitter: https://twitter.com/sfnet_ops
I’d bet it’s nearly nowhere. It doesn’t have the driver support of Linux.
Backward compatibility and overloading
I grew up in the High Desert of California (around Apple Valley, Victorville, Hesperia, Barstow). I can't count how many times I was driving alone down the desert highways at night, not a single other car on the road, and Art Bell was the only thing on the radio. And he'd be interviewing people or talking about UFOs, aliens, ghosts, government conspiracies, or whatever else he thought would be great to spook people with at the time.

He made those lonely, dark night road trips into amazing experiences. No matter how rational you are, his show really could creep you out when you were driving alone at night on a long stretch of road. And not in a bad way. It felt like watching a really scary movie, one that cut kinda close to reality. And I like to think that's exactly what he was going for. His show was amazing.

George Noory is great too, but I've since moved from the desert and don't take long night road trips anymore.
I was going to address this comment until I read the last two words, which just shut down intelligent discussion.
I think you are talking about a different sourceforge. The business has changed hands multiple times.
Again, not a technical problem. If you think people shouldn't concentrate on what somebody did then they were young, Google has nothing to do with it. We can witness in US politics both how people are forgiven for being prominent KKK members and for drowning a woman while driving drunk and then fleeing the scene - and these people not just not become pariahs - they become an important politicians with millions voting for them. On the other hand, we witness high school shenanigans dug up and dissected, decades after, on TV and mass media. All these happened before Google even existed. We as society are capable both of forgiveness and of extreme un-forgiveness, if we want to. We can choose either, or do both, depending on our preferences. In either case, Google has nothing to it.
The Secret to Better Social Media? Fewer Friends
Link to discussion from 3 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16806114 (600 comments)
Since git is decentralized, moving elsewhere is a single command:

git remote set-url origin <url>

Numerous alternatives exist:

* https://notabug.org/

* https://bitbucket.org/

* https://gitlab.com/

* https://allura.apache.org/

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_source_code_host...

While GitHub is a massive repository, developers can change the origin with ease if necessary.