skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great Aldous Huxley! Today we open Nonforum to the general public with our Open Beta. Users can create an account with any e-mail address and immediately login to take the site for a spin.

You can share links or even just essays, and users who are logged in can then vote/rate these submissions with the Postage Stamp Rating System, where the top level is a "Doubleplus vote," the middle layer a "Plus vote" and the bottom layer a "Needs Work" or "minus vote."

Nonforum is an ambitious project starting from the bottom: With small tidbits like links and user-submitted writings we plan to start indexing and archiving larger and larger swathes of Human Experience.

More features are planned: Commenting and Discussions, Archiving of Posts, and a Feature-Rich Tagging System that will help us create an encyclopedic repo of Human Knowledge and Experience.

The end goal is to have a reference place as well as a discussion forum, where the discussions fuel the archive and the archive helps keep discussions germane and informed.

For the technically inclined, Nonforum is a Single-Page Application (SPA) that is built with Clojure and ClojureScript. The backend is Clojure using Datomic for the database operations (queries and writes), and the frontend is ClojureScript relying on Om.next for React-like UI Rendering. Essentially, there is an application state Atom (the name of atomically mutable structs in Clojure land) that holds all of the application state, and as this is updated with messages from the server, the UI is instantly re-rendered thanks to Om.next.

We'd like to give our thanks to everyone who has contributed to Clojure and ClojureScript, and the many friends and developers who have helped hone and guide the formation of this concept. Although still early on, we are eager to get your feedback.

You can send feedback to feedback<at>nonforum.com

Thrive and Stay Informed!
Small town living has its own charms, and having lived in big cities, medium-sized cities, and small towns, my preference is for places that are 50,000 people or smaller, with a city over 500,000 population no nearer than 90 minutes away.

Small towns were common 50 years ago in the rural Midwest. Farm sizes were much smaller on average then, and lots of people raised several children and made a decent living with 160 acres and some livestock. Now average farm size is somewhere north of 1000 acres, the kids move away for jobs more often than not, and the small towns are shrinking and dying. This is a loss for the country as a whole.
Nasim was a hero and she did nothing wrong.
Did you apply late? I did and that is why we are still waiting. That is understandable though.
Isn't plain piracetam (or something else, you name it if you happen to know) the best when the primary task is to increase cerebral circulation, maintain neuroplasticity and fight brain aging rather than to get stimulated or improve concentration quickly?
My disappointment that this did not actually say "The Forever Monad" is immeasurable.
Only the first estimate given there is reasonably sourced. And it's almost 40 years old. Bike safety has improved dramatically since then, so I doubt it's as bad as you suggest. [1] suggests that the number of trips made by bike increased from 1.7 billion in 2001 to 4 billion in 2009, but [2] suggests that the number of cyclist deaths was roughly constant over that range. So per-capita, cycling safety has likely improved dramatically. I couldn't find any data on the number of cyclists or number of trips by bike going back to 1979 in the 5 minutes I spent on it, but I suspect the trend is similar going back that far.

For comparison, the car number quoted on Wikipedia appears to be from 2009.

Also, you have a lot of control over your own safety on a bike. I think there are many cyclists who are an order of magnitude safer than your average cyclist.

To be clear, I don't doubt that cycling is risker than driving. I just don't find the typically quoted numbers to be accurate.

[1] http://bikeleague.org/commutingdata

[2] http://www.cyclehelmets.org/1258.html
You can do an impressive amount of diagramming with the free yED. It also has some automatic layout tools and so on. It's also cross-platform so everybody can use it. The gallery has some impressive examples in it.

https://www.yworks.com/products/yed
> You can’t retrain dogs when it comes to marijuana,” adds James Woodford, a forensic chemist who created and patented the odor of cocaine that serves as the industry standard when it comes to training dogs to sniff out the substance.

That sounds like a fun job... I wonder how he did his research?
Charters are generally free, as they have contracts with the state to provide school services. My wife teaches at a local college prep charter high school. Our daughter did both private and public school before college.

Charter schools aren't private though. Bad ones are closed, bad teachers are fired at running schools.

Quite a number of kids come from 15+ miles away to this school, driven there and back by parents daily. They come from school districts which have not been demonstrating successful outcomes, either in terms of retention, or successfully preparing kids for life after school (college, trade/vocational school, etc.)

This said, while it is a college prep school, it isn't a silver bullet. Kids parents need to be engaged and involved. They can't be helicopter parents. Most are though.

This isn't an identity or socioeconomic issue. Kids families in this school range from nearly homeless through extremely wealthy. The school will be good for those who wish to engage. For those who don't and simply want a babysitting service, maybe not so good.
Acetate: stylesheets for geographic data visualization
Did you live there? There was a definite vibrancy to the network of small towns in the Midwest that is being lost, similar to the rust belt. The cultures were very different, though, so perhaps one person's "bustling" is another's unmentionable adjective.
I would be surprised if any single tutorial could cover all that. I know of courses/tutorials that are intended to cover each part of that, although I don't know if anyone's assessed them as a whole. e.g how real-world apps are made: https://www.edx.org/course/software-service-uc-berkeleyx-cs1...
In terms of consistency, time should be able to flow in either direction. But it doesn't, apparently.
GDC 2018 – WebGL and glTF
My uncle in China had a seat belt chime defeater that also doubled as a bottle opener.
We can't criminalise making mistakes, even if it is lawmakers who are making them.

I see wisdom in a general amnesty for light drug crimes if it is decriminalised; but it isn't like there is a double standard being applied here. This is how a fair legal system works - the consequences of your actions are clearly known when you act, and you face the consequences of your actions once the legal system catches up to you.
So what you are saying is that symmetric ex post facto is more important than people's freedom?
I have started using PlantUML[1] quite a bit recently in my blogging (one example[2]). I have PlantUML code in Org mode source blocks, and Org Babel then generates the svg/png of the diagram each time I update the code block.

[1]: http://plantuml.com/
[2]: https://scripter.co/org-contribution-flowchart/#flow-chart
In the main banner photo of that article, rural Kansas has better and more street lighting than some parts of Los Angeles, for whatever that's worth.
3 incidents per year at 20miles/day is higher than the statistical average. Are you biking in a way to increase the likelihood of an incident, biking in an area that is less safe than the average bike ride, or did you just have an unlucky year?
Yep.

It’s already a model, and it already works. There are no VCs, there is no exit.
To be fair, you posting this comment also contributed to expediting the eventual heat death of the universe, so.
iirc, mythical man month doesn't say that output of n > n+1 permanently; it says that you temporarily lose productivity until everyone is brought back up to speed. It becomes an effectively permanent loss if you're using the strategy "the later it is, the more people you throw at it".

But if there's no continous stream of newcomers, or rather sufficient gaps between hiring, then more man-hours does (eventually) produce more output.
Shared bicycles have some advantages over own ones:

- if you own a bike, you need a space in your apartment to keep it. Of course, if you have your own house, it is not a problem (but you have lot of other problems like no public transportation around), but in cities like Moscow or Beijing most people live in relatively small apartments and some of them rent only a single room. And usually you cannot park your bicycle outside.

- in many cities you can ride a bicycle only 7-8 months a year because it is cold in winter.

- you don't care if it gets stolen.

- you cannot get on a bus or a subway train with a bicycle. With a shared bicycle you can leave it near the station and take a new one on another station.

- a new bicycle can cost about $100-200, and a shared one can cost around $10-20 per month.
I think it’s overrated. I worked for a startup in the 90s where my team was in Sacramento, Upstate NY, Toronto and a Wisconsin.

At the time, Nextel and ICQ were good enough. That was a great team and great time.
Yes, this reminds me of the Cobra Effect from India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
Street parking IMO is a bigger danger than cars in quiet streets. They block sightlines for drivers to kids running out onto the street. I live in the middle of a quiet, single-block street. Without street parking, my kids could play out front of the house and any approaching cars would get loads of warning if they strayed onto the road. With more than 2-3 cars parked in the area, the situation changes dramatically.
Presumably one could simply work out the required degrees of freedom for eyes nose and mouth and assign each one a float and make something workable with metafont. I may put some time aside to have a play with this.
I don’t have much to add but I’d like to point out that you can see that "voluntary" -> "economically enforced" -> "mandatory" progression pattern in other areas too, not just in insurance. Look at those electronic toll tags that used to be voluntary. Then you got a “discount“ for using them. Now there are lanes you can’t use without them. Credit cards are going down this path, with the big push towards a “cashless” society.

Introduce some thing that not everyone wants, then incentivize it’s use, then punish it’s non-use.
I don't see them as the same at all. If something is made legal, it indicates that the act is OK and that the person should not _continue_ to be punished. On the other hand, people should only be prosecuted for acts that were illegal at the time they were committed - it isn't equitable to prosecute people under laws they were not subject to at the time of the action, and even on a practical level it is necessary for maintaining trust in the law.
Women addicted to opioids turn to sex work in West Virginia
> Your first sentence is a loaded, presumptive opinion that assumes age equals out-of-date without evidence.

Read it again. It's referring to older stagnant people, not all older people. The longer someone has been stagnant, the more out of date their skills become.
I like a great deal that one of the considerations the authors make is adapting to prior knowledge. (3.1) describes what they looked for in detail. In their summary, "None provide personalization based on prior coding experience or learner goals, other than rudimentary age-based differentiation." Its hard to overstate the importance of prior knowledge. Prior knowledge has some of the highest effect sizes in educational research. In other words, what you already know going into it is going to determine how much you learn. It's rare for other factors to have the same impact on the results as prior knowledge. And yet, even given decades of learning science research, its pretty rare to see much of any attempt in Western learning to account for prior knowledge. It would be a refreshing change of pace to see some of these coding tutorials work in preemptive assessment to figure out where to focus the learner before getting into the "how" of it.

Disclaimer: I'm working on sagefy.org
I don't understand the logic behind commodity food economics. Why is there so much excess wheat sitting around waiting for prices to jump? Surely that will go bad eventually. How much food will get wasted because of volatile markets?

When I think of wheat, it's not just bread either. Breweries are a fast-growing industry that are springing up everywhere. I've seen so many of them become major boons to cities as they occupy formerly unused warehouse or industrial spaces. Maybe they could work out a cooperative deal with brewers to sell excess to them at lower costs to keep driving up demand for craft beer by making production more affordable. The real upside in all this, if wheat becomes cheaper maybe the places around me will make something other than ridiculously bitter IPAs.
Not only bikepaths but also parking lots for them.
Having worked on financial code that is brittle and subject to far less minutiae than the multitude of IRS code, I can be very sympathetic on the complexity involved. It is hard to handle all of the complexity in a generic maintainable manner. I once ran into a 56-page printed function to calculate the margin required for a portfolio at a prime broker. Was it poorly written? Yes. Was it also representative of the complexity of the problem? Yes. Not an excuse for poor design, though.
Home – 406 Window Company Billings, Montana
But larger users can also afford more RAM.
I adore Ruby, but I think that's fair.

Twitter's failwhale-heavy Ruby experience is a good example. Ruby and especially Rails are good examples of trading hardware for programmer convenience. This is absolutely great when you're banging out an in-house app for 100 people, and there's no problem spending $1 per user-month on hardware. But Twitter's revenue is only $0.60 per user-month, and they need to spend on things besides severs. There is a reason that they needed to switch away from Ruby to a much more complicated architecture: https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...

I also saw some people go the other direction. They had a Java app for serving a high-volume website. But the developers had a rewrite itch, and the execs were afraid they couldn't get acquired without a more hip technology stack. They even hired a fancy consulting firm to help, but when the first version was ready to go it was incredibly slow. Like two orders of magnitude slower to render a page. The rendering times were considered normal in Rails-land, but were a real problem at volume. So they spent another 6 weeks putting in a lot of caching while the ops people ordered a bunch more hardware.
I was convinced it was singular when they had a big mainframe sitting there to play He. Today I strongly believe it's simply a brand.
Well... that’s what I’d do. What would you?
AutoRobot: macro-creation and automation application, inspired by AutoHotkey
That's still a civil case in New Zealand. It's copyright infringement, you don't go to jail - you get sued and bankrupted. The fact he was making money from it doesn't change the court, he just gets sued for more (in this case, it would have been everything he owned).
Why is that so? If people in a city move from their house to the downtown or to the nearest subway station, they will return the bicycle on their way back.
“Launch is scheduled at 4:05 a.m. local time on May 5, and the southward trajectory could offer a predawn light show for early risers in Los Angeles and San Diego.”

If you are not blocked by clouds, you should be able to see it looking westward over the LA basin - it passes over the Channel Islands, roughly headed south.

It may not even be visible around the Vandenberg launch pad due to persistent low clouds at that time of day.

More: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7095
Probably the same way he feels about earthquakes.
The smartphone sales slowdown is real
A Canadian sole proprietorship is about as simple as it gets, since you can file taxes on your T1 and business income just passes through to you. Stripe can also transfer USD straight to a USD account at a Canadian bank.

Any kind of corporation (US or Canadian) is much more effort, both from legal and accounting perspectives. It's worth it if you need legal protections a corporation gives you or care for some of the tax advantages. But it comes at the cost of extra effort in managing the complexities if a corporation.
I've lived in Kansas 28 years and have never seen one. Avoid a trailer park and you'll be fine.
Huh, I didn't know that. Thanks for sharing. Sad :(

I don't mean to disrespect public school teachers. Or to be sexist. Teachers should be respected, and well paid. Regardless of gender. Because it's an investment in the future. Nations with uneducated populations tend not to fare so well.
Not sure I see anything shameful here. More like clever.

I’m reminded of that guy[1] who earned tons of airline miles by taking advantage of an ill-thought-out pudding promotion.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Phillips_(entrepreneur...
Would someone explain to me why this is true (or not).
I'd argue the correct thing to do is wipe all criminal records clean of drug related convictions, and do all the good things in your comment.
The increasing concentration of farm land ownership in the hands of fewer, larger farmers is the result of declining property taxes on land:

http://www.masongaffney.org/publications/D1Rising_Inequality...

Farming is heavily dependent on labor and capital rather than land. Rural land is worth very little relative to urban land.

A broken tax system which assigns low taxes on land relative to taxes on capital and labor has resulted in higher land prices, increased the concentration of farm land ownership in the hands of fewer individuals, while shifting jobs and investment towards coastal cities where land values are highest.
Once upon a time, it took 90% of the US population to produce enough food to feed 100% of the US population.

Today, it takes 2% of the US population to produce enough food to feed 100% of the US population - freeing the other 88% to pursue other, more lofty goals, such as "Instagram Model" or "Net Influencer".

Picking berries or being a "net influencer"? Where is our time really more well-spent?
Earth's magnetic field is not about to reverse, study finds
If it's like corn in Iowa, yes, many just hold it and hope for the price to go up. It seems unreasonable, but commodity prices are just that low; selling at the wrong time can be worse for your bottom line than doing nothing. Especially since many farmers go into debt to pay for the initial costs of planting, fertilizing, ...

You tend to see a lot more corn in storage (occasionally this is just huge piles of corn covered with a tarp!) right after harvest time, precisely because that's when the prices are the lowest. There's a surprisingly big market for huge containers that are designed to store crops for long periods of time.
"So, an advertising company that used to have a motto about not being evil, but abandoned it, built a web browser."

Realistically that wasn't going to end any other way :)
Pretty sure nipples suppose to be nibbles in the code
I like the weather here I KS. I won’t live anywhere that does not get a continuous hard freeze to kill off all those things that bite.
> Let’s say you figure out how to run a company with 100M customers with only five employees.

That's not how it works. I'm pretty sure you and I could write a Snapchat clone in a weekend. This doesn't imply we'll ever reach 100M users.
Only the user-base, and slicker UA/UX.

If the people you want to chat to are happy moving, you’re all good. I’m in this position and haven’t had any problems.
I can't help but think this must be useful for something other than cheating, but I can't think of anything off-hand.
The obvious answer to this is: change the law.

Do whatever is necessary to enable the bureaucracy to remove all drug related charges from a persons record.
Code all long term business logic in magnetic core memory running on hardened valves with dixie tube displays.
Yeah, but spoofing GPS is possible. The black box insurance gadgets typically wire directly into a car, so it'll be harder send fake data from that pipeline, but totally possible.

The benefit would come from smoothing extremes. Lie about speeds over 80, reduce big accelerations and hard breaking. Lieing about total miles could also work, but I think that could be done by just unplugging the box, or only sending it power and not data.
For me, weather is a big issue - I’ve spent 4 years in Champaign-Urbana in Illinois, and I got sick of winter the first year I was there (two weeks where the high was -15 F, and the low was even lower than -30 F).

If the weather were better, I would seriously consider it, but I tired of suffering through that cold real fast.
One thing that most peeps from the East/West coast don't realize about Detroit is how big it is, compared to it's population size.

The city limits of Detroit proper encompass about 143 square miles.

While it's not that large of a city compared to others, you can fit the cities of San Francisco (46.7 sq miles), Boston (89.6 sq miles), and Manhattan (22.8 sq miles) within Detroit city limits.

While you process that, the 2017 population of Detroit is about 672,000 people, compared to the 3.12 million people who live in SF(860k), Boston (618k), and Manhattan (1.64M)

While it's growing for sure, if you get off the highway you'll see really fast that Detroit is still a ghost town.

There are entire neighborhoods/subdivisions with streets lined with houses except all of those houses have been abandoned. For DECADES. It's like the Walking Dead minus the zombies.

I'm psyched for Detroit (I grew up in the Detroit suburbs) and am rooting hard for it's recovery. With that said... the city of Detroit has lost 61% of it's population since it's peak in the 1950s.

61 PERCENT! While I remain optimistic, I'm also realistic. I'm psyched that Detroit is on an upswing, but there's a long way up to go.
“In the article” - literally. Not in the headline likely written by an editor.
I wish Microsoft could make a new edx course in their series covering TLA+. Those lectures are gonna be more helpful with exercises one can get his/her hands dirty.
Pandoc ultimately either has to move the html through another markup format such as laTeX or uses a plugin that attempts to convert html4 to pdf code.

This uses a full browser rendering engine that supports modern html5/css3/js by ultimately running a headless browser.

I suspect pandoc is still a great approach for a lot of cases. Running a headless browser isn't cheap, especially at scale. If your output is a simple book or an invoice, pandoc is probably the way to go. If you want to pdf websites or dump an html file with charts into a pdf, use this.