skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fair point. This might be a trade off for instant error reporting / ease of exception handling. I would strongly forbid any coersion of null to other values if this idea was to be implemented.
MADRaS: Multi-Agent DRiving Simulator
Interesting, I haven't heard this argument before. So what is it about null that makes it more feasible here than for example option types/tagged unions?

Also, regarding your third point, IMO the question mark syntax in for example TypeScript and C# is fine.
Why can't you just have a laptop next to your work computer to do personal stuff? For many companies, allowing access to personal email via work network is an absolute no-go as it massively increases the risk of data theft. I've worked at several financial companies in my life and they always blocked any kind of page that is designed to store files. Otherwise you get employees that upload sensitive data to some online storage because it's the "simplest" way to continue working from home.

That doesn't mean those companies don't allow personal use but it has to be from devices on another network. Nowadays with most communication happening on mobile devices that's not much of an issue.
So just wait one generation, and problem solved? ;-)
I live on a dairy. Totally not a controlled study, but the cows digestive systems can't handle grazing as well as they can handle a nutritionist-controlled diet. Their manure gets bubbly with gas when eating grass.
The title is a bit clickbait but I thought it was interesting how the artificial spatial awareness seems to match the neural patterns in rats.
It is government controlling the internet. It's the extent and who that is different. In this case, it's only forcing a fair playing field. Kinda like highways being public vs. toll instead of telling you what cars you are and are not allowed to drive. I'd like a "free" internet, but I still have to admit it's going to cost someone else's "freedom".
Happy Mother’s Day 2018
Without concrete evidence, I can have all the opinions I want. I even went so far as to caveat my opinion.
I'll preface this by saying I know next to nothing about these sorts of measurements. But if you want multiple measurements, isn't time just one variable when measuring parallax? Couldn't we potentially image it from different viewpoints--say, distant satellites relaying messages back for analysis, where time is more a function of the scale of the "imaging web?"
The todo.txt file format supports extensions, and some of the extensions include start date, due date, recurring tasks. The Simpletask todo.txt Android client supports these, and can filter by things that are past their start date, sort by due date, etc. Todo.txt also supports projects/contexts/lists/tags and Simpletask can filter by them.

i don't know which todo.txt commandline clients, if any, can do this but i bet some can (topydo maybe?). Simpletask supports Lua scripting, i dunno if this is sufficent to allow dynamic prioritization of tasks, but it might be. I don't think Simpletask supports dependencies but topydo does.

todo.txt is a file format. The nice thing about todo.txt-based tools is that the todo list is stored in a plaintext file in a relatively readable and editable format, with one line per task. This allows you to edit it using ordinary text editors, grep it, and sync it using utilities (resolving conflicts on a line-by-line basis).
The design's is one of those standard templates that 90% of new sites appear to use (my estimate). Wouldn't call that a rip off, just not very creative. But then again, hiring designers to come up with something completely new isn't cheap.
the worst thing about living overseas was not being able to find brewed coffee. everywhere you go, they'll call it an americano, but it's not American... it's garbage and it tastes like demonpiss.

also, I'm with you on the artificial creamer... what sort of terrible bastard came up with that?

that said, I really enjoy powdered coconut creamer.

(side note: nationalist fervor for coffee is also an American thing... I'm sorry, they teach it in Boy Scouts, it's just who we are)

/s :
Can you distribute a torrent file?
Well, that's kind of the thing. Everyone's willing to kill and die for their beliefs on the internet; a lot fewer will actually campaign and canvas and march and vote for their beliefs. The inconvenience of calling or mailing your politician tells them that you have passed a rock bottom threshold of willingness to act, and might conceivably have an effect on their vote totals next election.
> I'm going to gather you didn't make it past the first few paragraphs

I actually did and remain completely unconvinced despite the frame. There's another article from a few more months ago that was a lot more convincing and even wrote a positive comment reinforcing its content and pointing out how pervasive a problem loneliness can be in Japan and how the society really prevents people from making friends.

I would argue that the "point of the article" being buried in the "last third" isn't really the point, especially when the title is "Japan's Rent-a-Family Industry."

> I'm not sure how that's relevant.

To this point, my problem is that popular news focuses so much on "Japan is weird" and "Japan is exotic" that it creates and maintains an image of Japan as an ineffable other, which does a disservice to both the Japanese people and also to people who work with Japanese people and even really encourages a kind of subtle racism on both sides, where Japanese people are Japanese "because they are" -- they're just quixotic and traditional and exotic.

I say it encourages this on both sides because there's a movement among Japanese people called nihonjin-ron, which itself is an attempt to find things "uniquely Japanese," from the length of the large intestine (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10109809) to squatting ability (http://www.e-budo.com/forum/showthread.php?20037-Western-Kne...) to an apparent inability to learn English.

These kinds of articles are often enthusiastically pulled up as "oh yes, Japan is totally unique, see this!" and only serve to make a completely artificial barrier between cultures, one that is heightened by the fact that these articles are almost always the only ones that make popular news by virtue of being "weird."
it's "web" because the recommended app only works on chromebooks
2.5 hours of subsidized web surfing... not bad!
The spectacular power of Big Lens
Wonder how many of the YIMBY's are actually YIYBY's (Yes is YOUR backyard)
The point is that option types let you explicitly state which values are nullable, but null references mean that every value is potentially null even if it doesn't make sense.
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I used to work with a smoker who tried vaping as a means to quit smoking.

Vaping quickly became a way to get his fix in between his regularly scheduled cigarettes.
I have no idea what point you are trying to make.
If we could place multiple such instruments in various orbits, it would be helpful. Alas, space science is very much underfunded.
Sounds useful, but also like a large scale social experiment :)
Unrelated to the discussion of null: Ruby the language might not coerce types, but the standard library will happily do things like multiply a string by a number, or parse a malformed date resulting in garbage.
Some government regulations are stupid, certainly. Something should probably be done about those. When you start saying that regulation as a whole is stupid--that being allowed to use cheap windows is more important than, say, keeping thalidomide out of the US--is where you lose me.
Cheap renewable energy is killing India’s coal-based power plants
I'll just leave this here: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/What_Is_Truth_0x3f_
I set my iPhone to 24/7 DND

it took a bit for my friends to get used to it. come to think of it, I haven't heard from them in a while.
Its name is Cloud MemoryStore, not Cloud Diskstore. That should set expectations right there.
"Music for Programming" podcast is pretty solid.

http://www.musicforprogramming.net
Tokyo has figured out a whole host of things, while America can't even tie its own shoes.
The Tony Hoare quote is about null _references_ which is about aliases to computer memory. (E.g. the dreaded NPE or null pointer exception.) He's not talking about _logical_ nulls such as "tri-state booleans" or "missing data".

I'm struggling to understand what you mean here. My understanding is that there is no distinction between "logical null" and a "null reference" in terms of the problem we're discussing--as soon as you introduce nulls as a placeholder for values that are not yet initialized you have to deal with the logical implications of null being a member of those types, no? It's been a while since I watched the talk, but scanning the transcript from the talk we're discussing (https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The-Bill...) the way Prof. Hoare talks about them seems to be the same in terms of their logical impact on the type system. I quote:

25:55 One of the things you want is to be able to know in a high level language is that when it is created, all of its data structure is initialised. In this case, a null reference can be used to indicate that the data is missing or not known at this time. In fact, it's the only thing that can be assigned if you have a pointer to a particular type.

...

27:40 This led me to suggest that the null value is a member of every type, and a null check is required on every use of that reference variable, and it may be perhaps a billion dollar mistake.

And another thing you wrote which I don't understand:

We need nulls in programming languages because they are useful to model real-world (lack of) information. All those other clunky techniques will reinvent the same kinds of "null" programming errors!

Isn't that exactly backwards? The entire point Prof. Hoare was trying to make is that using nulls to model the "real-world (lack of) information" causes us to have to contend with the logical problems inherent in making null a member of every type. Additionally, sum types seem to model this in a logically consistent way very well, as other commenters have noted.
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Because 16:9 ("shortscreens") was a ploy by manufacturers to sell a smaller screen for the same diagonal. Combined with much of the vertical dimension being eaten by the general pattern of window decoration + app taskbar + app toolbars + OS taskbar, and well, at least they're good for watching movies!
Get started running a serverless OLAP Pipeline on AWS
That "dogma" is closer to reality and it is the reasonable one.
I don't think you understand what literally means.

Also, anything can seem absurd if you are extremely reductionist and present it in an uncharitable fashion.

(I've never fished before, just some remarks)
If by me you mean low-income renters.. then probably #10, where the bona fide for-profit developer explicitly opposes affordable housing fees. You offer no support for your assertion that BMR requirements of any kind are unprofitable.
I don't fish, but:

Presumably it's enjoyable to sit in nature, far from distractions, with a variable reward that something happens every hour or so, and occasionally the thing that happens warrants a photo and something you can tell your friends about? A bit like watching cricket, actually.
Emerging service marketplace industry: How to meet the demands of millennials?
Verge [XVG]’s popularity index growing at an exponential rate
for the last few weeks I've been working from a kitchen counter in a small studio apt. it's about the perfect height for a standup desk, within 5 paces of a toilet and the refrigerator. I've managed to set it up with a 2nd monitor & I'm really impressed with the "flow" I've found. in a week or so, I'll move on to the next spot... let's hope it can be as successfully productive.
12 to 6 sounds great. Would prefer 9 till 3.
Do you have eco-drive feature?
The key point of the comment I replied to is that "scientific/technological progress" has only been incremental, not leaps of creativity.

I can't speak to the factual accuracy, and it can be difficult to separate revolutionary from evolutionary, since even the greatest of leaps have antecedents and stood on the shoulders of giants (e.g. Newton)... but with such a huge population, a large proportion educated, there would be many extremely smart people capable of great work. But the only such Chinese people I know of are not in China (one famous e.g. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao). So, maybe, as you say, there's a brain-drain.

And maybe I just don't hear about the ones in China (and maybe the very best work on sensitive commercial and government/military projects - e.g. CPU designers).
Do credit unions have the capital to service the lending needs of national/international-scale companies?

(genuine question, I have no idea how banking works)
But why bother using all that energy? And It will be a huge amount to get light years down to hours.

What threat would we be to them?
Thanks for your oponion, you'r right. I changed readme to be more legible and helpful.
"Incels" are a self-identified group that don't represent all sexually frustrated men, and "What are you going to do about it?" can have answers besides "root them out and fire them".
> My understanding is that around half of the world's greenhouse gas comes from livestock

That's not right. The highest number I've been able to find for the whole of agriculture is 24% of world greenhouse gas emissions.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...

About 25% of that is methane from livestock (http://old.grida.no/graphicslib/detail/greenhouse-gas-emissi...)

So livestock is about 6% of total greenhouse gas emissions.
So we can summarize saying it's customers freedom against ISP freedom.
IMHO it should be more integrated with tasks, and tasks should be much more powerful. Some examples:

- Here in Italy I can donate blood every 3 months. So I want to set a task "Now you can donate blood" on say June 1st and set it to repeat itself 3 months after the day I actually donate blood and in the meantime being shown on top of calendar in a special "to-do" section. And if I donate blood on June 5th, the next donation should be automatically set on September 5th. I achieve this with an external app that syncs to tasks, but being it integrated in calender would be wonderful.

- A task can have more dates to be set. An example is taxes: from April 1st I can review the documentation the governament send me, from May 1st I can submit the correct documents and at May 31st I must have submited the documents. Of course during this period the task should always be visibile on my calendar.

Thing is I have the feeling that todo lists, calendars, tasks and time-tracking should ALL be integrated in the same software. And as far as I know this software is emacs' org-mode... one day I will learn it.
I did exactly the same.

Further anecdata - several non-nerds in my life have decided to use facebook less, and several have also started using Signal instead of WhatsApp.

I’d say it’s a small but significant number of people, I don’t expect it to hurt Facebook much unless it becomes a trend - if cultural trendsetters if different groups do the same, it could do some serious damage. (See also: Elon).
So how come this is specific to founders of companies?

And I am not conviced having side projects as a fronted developer makes you a better developer unless you push yourself really hard.

What is more likely to make you better developer in any job is working with people who have a lot of experience and are willing to share it. So not necessarily a hobby, or you have to spend a lot of time yourself to discover and think about a lot of concepts, at which point is not really a hobby, more like college.

And i would argue also about hiking being a hobby, i never go hiking, but i love walking around the city like a maniac, is that a hoby? oh well maybe, but i’d say it would be more correct to say that you need to relax and gain strength for next working day, how exactly to do it you have to findout for yourself cos not everyone is the same...
China has a patent system. I don't know about copyright, but that's less significant for tech progress (and trademarks not at all).

I would guess foreign owned patents would not fare well, because it's not in China's interest (USA did the same thing some time ago), but that reasoning doesn't apply to domestically owned patents.

Apparently, in 2014 patent owners won about 80% of their cases BUT the damages granted are "maddeningly" low. The article isn't clear if that's also true for domestically owned patents. http://maxhamfirm.com/patent-litigation-china/

One mechanism is that it's harder to prove damages under Chinese Law, though people say it's changing. Though none of the cases are about real technological progress, more design/trademark like designs (I guess it's the same in the west though too) https://www.limegreenipnews.com/2018/03/calculating-larger-p...
Google Duplex and the Struggle of the Moth
Hi Johnson

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I am glad on reading even just looking at the headline. haha
The Turing Test is irrelevant, the "dystopian" stuff is mostly irrelevant, the ethics are highly relevant. It is simply unethical for a computer to converse with a human while misleading them into believing they are talking to a human. There are a zillion reasons why this is so, if none of them seem obvious then I'd suggest investing some time to take an ethics course.
probably easier to get animals to eat kelp than to get humans to stop eating animals.
Surely revision means more Facebook use! Assuming procrastination remains at historical levels.
You need to throw when and b is a method.

Solution to the problem is already there: Kotlin, TypeScript, Rust, Crystal, Swift, Haskell just to name few.

We just need to push the industry toward better and safer languages. We keep building an abstractions on top of unsafe languages and then we are suprised that it suck.
1. That would only affect a small portion of the global market
2. You'd have verification problems, same as with a lot of things now claimed to be organic/free range/etc but aren't really in the sense people expect
The problem isn't the idea of "net neutrality". The problem is special interest groups and lobbyists, but those are the same problems we've always had. Nothing's changed.

Admittedly, it could get worse, but the need for "drawing the line" (in this case, deciding what gets regulated) has to be done somewhere, and it seems most of us here think it's a good idea to draw it at what would likely be a critical bottleneck. Perhaps the regulations themselves aren't needed but the high likelihood that they might be made law might encourage ISPs to stay on the friendlier side, so promoting net neutrality is still good.
Torturing fish for fun seems distinctly suspect to me as well.
This is a very american centric perspective due to decades of propaganda by libertarians who want to set up an artificial divide between government and people. See 'Democracy in Chains' by Nancy Maclean.

The government is you in a democracy, it's there to protect your and everyone else's interests, that what democracy and rule of law means. It's what guarantees a somewhat civilized society. It is not this simplistic 'majority can do what they want' illiteracy spread by market fundamentalists.

Markets have existed for thousands of years, it did not lead to any civilization then and cannot now. Discrimination, segregation, slavery, plunder and exploitation are the result of uncontrolled capitalism and free markets, not democracy and 'popular will'. Anyone who knows history and human greed understands this instinctively.

It appears some people become rich and increasingly alienated from people, society and government and begin to believe they don't need government. This is the kind of hubris that leads to tyranny and quasi feudalism, which is of course what they want.
Ask HN: Who's using private blockchain?
Ah yes, that's the problem the country is having right now. Too many people are getting too dependent on facebook that it's becoming a playground for fake news and propaganda campaigns[0].

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-07/how-rodri...
Could you ask a more general question please?

Oh, what the heck, I'll give you a general answer, you may get some benefit from it.

San Francisco, i.e. The City (NOT Frisco), never changes once you're in a neighborhood, everyone is different, some people are friendly, some not, just like any large city.

The time I spent there was fantastic, walking to the store, great neighborhood restaurants, friendly shop owners, amazing art and always interesting graffiti.

The Castro is still fun to walk through if you're not a homophobe and one of the best kept secret hard to find restaurants is there, Orphan Andy's, real comfort food 24 hours a day.

The public transportation is totally adequate and one can get around town without too many transfers.

Despite the hills, it's a very walk-able town, I walked all over the place, it was nice seeing all the different neighborhoods on foot.

Like any location, you get out of it what you put in.

I hear it's way expensive to live there now, even my sister who lived there for 40 years sold her Bernal Heights house and moved North to Santa Rosa.
Does anyone have a third party confirmation of that DAU number? I’ve heard informally that this may be inflated.
A need to run Debian system without systemd.
This has nothing to do with functional vs imperative programming, of course functional programs also want to encode the absence of things.

The billion dollar mistake is about not being able to say that a type (specifically a reference/pointer) does not include NULL/nil/whatever as an element.