skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Source code surely is manufactured. I write it with my hands, using years of knowledge and experience, spending a lot of time on it.

Right. We not only write it with our hands, but with our brains too, as well as with the effort we put in over years to gain the skills needed to write the software in the first place. Otherwise any newbie programmer could write any of the software in the world, including complex ones.

This reminds me of that story of a senior retired engineer who was called in to diagnose a problem with some expensive, complex machine that he had worked with or operated a lot earlier (and/or maybe had invented). He walks into the room, bends down near the machine, taps it a bit, then makes an X mark with chalk near the bottom left corner. "There's your problem", he says. They open the machine, check that area, and sure enough, the fault is found and fixed. They ask him what his fee is. "$50,000", he replies. "What?", they ask. "$50,000 for making a chalk mark?". "No", he says. "$1 for making the mark. $49,999 for knowing where to make it."

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/03/06/tap/
The Elite Microsoft Hacker Team That Keeps Windows PCs Safe
Right, but those citizens are paying less than they otherwise would if the lenders were taxes on the proceeds. That discount could be considered a "gift" from the federal government to both local governments and lenders, whose taxes are lower than they would be if muni income were taxed.
I'm not convinced that unity every added much value to ubuntu it seems like they could have spent a small fraction of the money customizing gnome/cinnamon or actually shipping plasma with up to date deps and come out way ahead both for users and monetarily.
It isn't the science itself, it's the conjecture built up around its popularization.

"We have two observations of X when Y"

"So Y causes X!"

"I didn't say that."

"Hey everyone! Y causes X, probably."

Quick, get your own Z, it helps prevent Y...

It is often valuable to question how you know what you know.
To be equivalent to a wealth tax, it would need to affect all assets, not just money.
Golang for Rubyists. Part 6. Structs, Methods and Interfaces
>>My point is that you can't start a business based upon some vague hope that someday, somehow, someone will possibly choose to donate money to you. You need a reliable stream of income, and one that will keep coming long after the shine has worn off the original product and now you're slogging through complicated maintenance and upgrades

What part of that doesn't apply equally proprietary software too?
Nice idea! It reminds me of Sublime.
For many businesses, and at universities (where I work), there isn't an easy way to donate, particularly to random people.

However, it would be easy for me to spend, say £50-£100, for a support licence for software I frequently use.

I would love it if Microsoft added this to GitHub -- opt in of course.
Nasa Mars rover finds organic matter in ancient lake bed
> Charging people to use your solution after it's been developed is the stupid thing to do, IMO

I think this is the core of what I disagree with in your post. Imagine 3 scenarios:

1) I have a problem that I'd like solved and I go searching for a solution. After a while, I come across a reddit post where someone says "oh, you're trying to reticulate splines? You should buy ReticulatorPro for $50. I use it and its great!" I see that someone built it 3 years ago and I go and download the 1 month free trial, I'm happy with it and in 1 month, $50 comes out of my bank account.

2) I have a problem that I'd like solved and I go searching for a solution. After a while, I come across a reddit post where someone says "oh, you're trying to reticulate splines? Someone is trying to fundraise to build it and they seem pretty serious." I see that they've been trying for 6 months and they are 70% of the way toward their goal. So I pitch in $50, but then I'm waiting as the uncertainty of fundraising and software schedules takes its toll. 18 months later the solution is released. I am less happy.

3) I have a problem that I'd like solved and I go searching for a solution. After a while, I come across a reddit post where someone says "oh, you're trying to reticulate splines? Someone is trying to fundraise to build that." I see that someone built it 1 year ago and I go and download it for free and I am happy.

In the current world, all of these are possible. In the world you propose, option #1 is impossible. I argue that a world with Option #1 available is a better world for everyone. Why? Because in the world of option #2/#3, the only time period during which the developer can raise money is before the product has been created. That means only products with sufficiently good pre-development marketing can be successful. (note: "Get 10,000 fans who love you" isn't "easy" but at least moderately difficult.) In the world of #1, someone who isn't good at pre-development marketing but is good at building a product and using the quality of the product to do post-development marketing can succeed.

I want a world where someone can build a good product and get funding mostly on the strength of their product.

> teach people

Is a valuable but different skill from building products.
Ask HN: Django or Rails?
For anyone who has experience with both frameworks, when would you prefer one over the other? I am comfortable with Python & Flask, so I gravitate towards Django, but wanted to know if I am missing out on something. Cheers!
Let’s also not forget Einstein-Cartan theory that takes torsion into consideration and associates it with quantum spin, producing some very satisfying predictions for general cosmology and might even account for the discrepancy in galactic rotations while not causing disruption on the scales we have tested GR so far.

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/0004-637X/832/2/96...
> An open source project creates no obligation on the part of the developers.

I meant a subconscious obligation, not a legal one. When somebody gives you a gift, it puts pressure on you (subconscious and social) to reciprocate. You see it all the time with youtube streamers, who frequently cater their content to their subscribers wishes to keep them happy. And to clarify, the streamers don't do this because their users are unhappy or protesting. They do it because they feel a sense of obligation to give their subscribers what they want because the subscribers were generous enough to give the streamer money.

For whatever reason, this phenomenon is completely lacking in the open source community. Instead, the opposite seems to occur. OSS developers are actively hostile toward their users, both vocally and how they react to criticism that their software isn't user friendly or respectful of their user's time. Anybody who has spent hours trying to set up a piece of OSS and then made the mistake of asking the developer for help can attest to this.
Around here on the American continent I don't think the choice was available. Native cultures were destroyed much before most of the colonizers got here, because the continent was experience a downcycle, and because of diseases that came with the first Europeans.
I mistyped, I wanted to say, that you can create your own blueprints by studying a machine. But when your invention is patented this implementation is protected. But in software it is not about the implementation (because that's already protected via copyright) it is about the idea behind the implementation. Which even prohibits different implementations.
I fully agree. Recently, they also released radically improved mobile apps (finally!).
Redhat owns Centos if I recall correctly. Prior to that centos was just a rebuild of all the open source parts of redhats software.
Well, I'll read this, but my first thought was of American football. And my first response thereupon was, "blind allegiance".

Sounds snarky. But it is applicable, on so many levels.

(And yeah, it is a bit snarky. I'm not very keen on the U.S., right now -- even though I'm part of it.)
We're talking about biological evolution here. There's no design process, except by chance and fitness. Even some traits that might be better for an animal may not make it -- there's a whole chance and probably thing there.

There is a paper where some researchers look at biological processes vs computer software. Biological processes seem to have a lot of repetition between systems:

http://www.pnas.org/content/107/20/9186.full
I see nothing substantive in the post you linked to. Can you clarify why you think it “paints a quite different picture”?
The other fact most people don't know is that the first agriculture appeared not in the middle east or even Africa but in New Guinea. People we write off as "savages" invented the cultivation of plants for food.
GitHub was a bad solution for FLOSS projects already, it just became so much clearer now.
or this: http://mega65.org/
>Graph theory, all the time.

Seconded. Having at least a working knowledge of graph theory is essential for anyone, even CRUD app developers. You don't need to know how to implement a DFS blindfolded with one eye closed. But you do need to be able to recognize when you are facing a graph problem and what libraries to apply. The alternative you end up with is some really nasty O(n^2) or even O(n!) type code.
Ask HN: What useful scripts do you use to automate your startup or work?
Generally I have always hated the argument that anyone opposed to anything needs to have a better solution before their opinion is valid and will be taken into account.

Sometimes it's clear how a particular solution is negative but beyond that we don't have the breath or depth of knowledge to suggest the alternative or it is not our job to spend the time to come up with one. Yet we may have enough experience in a particular aspect of it to know about a significant downside of the choice.

It always just seems like a way of dismissing valid criticism by someone who supports the choice and not addressing the criticism.

Edit: grammar & spelling
It's a french invention.
the "private entity entitled to their decisions" argument is facing an interesting 1st ammendment challenge based on a 1946 court case Marsh v. Alabama

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama

It may not hold up after all, i.e. facebook censoring users because they are a private entity, they may be forced to provide some avenue for people to do so in the future. Its interesting to me because it goes against everything I use to believed in, but at the same time these entities are being used to promote a dark globalist agenda.
That isn't how tax deductions work. Even very tax efficient giving will not save you $1.00 of taxes when you give $1.00!
This comes off as rather dismissive. Xiphmont simultaneously claims that Jarek's work is useless ("the performance claims just don't hold up") and that Google needs a defensive patent on it.

As someone on encode.ru pointed out, "if Google genuinely wanted this as a defensive patent, then the right approach is to work with Jarek and pay for him to file a patent on ANS itself blocking as many of the spin-off patents as possible." They didn't even talk to him before patenting his work.
Carried interest is a misapplication of the idea of labor. Of course it's fine that they're taxed less than people who put up only money - but I disagree with the entire idea of capital taxation being less.

Capital investment is discouraged, but it's not as if it's going to stop due to this discouragement. What are people going to do with their money, NOT invest it? Found their own companies instead? Acquire capital assets and lease them? It's not as if you can work _instead_ of capital gains, cap gains income is passive.

Capital gains taxes in the US have been higher in the past, and at several points, were higher than wage taxes are now. Things worked out fine.
"It seems you and GP are confusing VR and AR"
I'm doing no such thing. I don't know where in my comment you got such an impression. If you bothered to read it you'll see I mention that I own a VR rig. I certainly know the difference. Also I would have agreed with your comment about VR being nowhere ready 2 years ago. While it's not quite ready for mass market primetime it's definitely at a stage where the average Joe can get a lot of mileage out of it (unlike AR which is mostly hype at the moment). I would say it's currently at the stage that PCs where at in the mid 80's. BTW you don't need a 'big fat gaming rig' and a dedicated graphics card - I don't know where you are but here in the US you can get the Oculus Go which is a standalone unit for less than $200. It's not the full VR experience but its good enough that I would consider buying it over a gaming console or even a tablet. I think you should have more experience with VR before you make grandiose statements knocking it publicly. As for AR I haven't really had a lot of opportunity to try it out (except for Glass). It may well overtake VR at some point but at the moment most AR projects are at the concept stage or just hype.
If you’re anything like me, you’re better off skipping the java and .net shops.

Have you tried Python?
I am well aware I can do that. But I don't have enough money to ensure that there is enough donation to ensure that there is enough support for those working on the projects to focus on it full time. The systems-level change of allowing developers to use copyright to require people to pay for their work comes much closer to ensuring that.

> "did you even bother looking?"

Also, when someone is building a product for money, it incentivizes them to proactively look for feedback on the quality of their product and to value the feedback of frustrated users. When someone is building a product without a business goal focused on pleasing someone else, they are far more likely to be either passive in waiting for people to report things on mailing lists or to be actively annoyed with the reports and to occasionally express that frustration in a way that belittles users.
> This sounds whiny

Are you an OSS developer by chance?

> its hard to get people to pay for things that they can have for free full stop.

The Apple third party app ecosystem proves you wrong. Users are willing to pay for good software, even if there are free alternatives available.
It would depend on how this evolved in the water mammals researchers have found this in. Maybe some land mammals do the same thing, we just have preformed this type of experiment on them yet.

If it does appear in humans, it'd probably be best to study those with extreme insomnia or people who claim to have very short sleep patterns (<2 hours a night) or maybe those who are narcoleptic (the other end of that scale).
"You can't complain until you provide something better" is one of the oldest bullshit arguments in the book.

If I go to a doctor with an ailment, or the Agora with a public grievance, the notion of admitting and communicating that there's a problem is an essential step. Identifying etiologies, goals, and solutions ("getting there from here") are also necessary, but independent steps that need not be initiated or accomplished by the same people.

Sorry, but I'm tired of this very tired trope.

A key problem is that infrastructure, information, and information exchanges play poorly with markets and market-oriented institutions: for-profit corporations.

If markets are your problem, marketing-it-harder -- selling the company to a larger and more abusive monopolist -- will probably mean you'll be having a bad day.
This is very sound advice.

The interface of the library is intended to help the user of the library, not the developer of the library.

The simplest interface is the best for the user, who does not want to know anything about the implementation details.

In the ideal case, the developer and the api designer will be different persons who are not in good terms to each other. The more the developer hates the api designer, the better.
Noted that the example they use from Rui Costa et al. 2017 (a great paper btw recommended reading) is not any kind of machine learning result, it is a fitting of data from previous experiments showing pre- and post-synaptic changes during short term LTP experiments. So i 'm not sure what the authors are rambling on about here.
Lyrebird – an AI driven service that can clone any human's voice
I expect they are paid 2x more than trained statisticians unfortunately. Happily though, they didn’t try to solve this problem with Judea Pearl-style causal inference hype.

A better approach to this would probably be treating the data as panel data and either doing monthwise hierarchical Bayesian regressions, and testing if the coefficients pooled over time are significantly non-zero, or else using a sort of distributed lag model or instrumental variables model on the monthwise simple regressions. In these cases, it’s better to roll up lagged features of the exogenous time series to serve as constructed covariates in the lag model, than to rely on differencing and time series tests which are like a landmine of interpretation issues.

Checking causality in models like this is very tricky, so a lot of care has to be taken, and you should expect work to proceed slowly and require a lot of posterior checks.
I personally think it’s fair to be catiously optimisitic at best. I for one don’t have the solution but I don’t feel like all the sudden I need to trust Microsoft.

That being said I like the direction they are going in but I’m sure people liked the direction they were going in before thier change of heart towards open source too.
> It is waaaay more efficient for these to be fixed by an engineer working not in their spare time, but as their full-time job.

You miss the possibility of simply offering to pay a developer with the relevant expertise to fix one of these bugs for you.

I can tell you from experience that there are FLOSS developers out there with sufficient expertise and professionalism to do this.
Why does "in case of anomaly or ambiguity, slow the fuck down, gather more data and reassess" never seem to be part of the functional logic with these things?
Reduce the problem to something simpler. If it's a project for someone else I'll do my best to change his mind about his problem.
Regeneratively cooling nozzles (i.e., circulating liquid or gaseous propellant in embedded cooling channels) is standard fare for liquid rocket engines. GP used graphite because it was a student project. Probably not what would be done for a real launch vehicle.

One thing to keep in mind about spike nozzle cooling is that you get compression shocks from the aerospike flowfield that strike the centerbody. These shock impingements drive up local heat transfer rates. As the flowfield changes with increasing altitude (decreasing ambient pressure), the impingement locations move. So when you size your cooling capacity, you have to account for this which tends to make the spike "overcooled" as compared to what you'd have to design for with the bell. This tends to correlate with increased pressure losses from the associated high coolant flow rates, causing a system-level mass hit and detracting from the nozzle Isp efficiency benefit. Take a look at XRS-2200 test video to watch the spike ramps ice over hard after engine shutdown. While not unique to that engine, the magnitude of that effect has a lot to do with how heavily cooled the ramps were.
When what you’re after is very high resolution, film still scales better than digital; the largest (somewhat common) film format is 8x10».

A sheet of slow (fine grain) film at this size can capture detail way beyond what any digital sensor I know of - surely it can be scanned with the equivalent of multi-gigapixel resolution - and if one were to develop such a monster sensor, it would have a hard time competing with the film in all but a few edge cases. (Most notably the ability to transmit imagery to the ground immediately, provided the necessary bandwidth is available.)
Gina Häußge is the only one making reasonable money on Patron for a software project, last I checked. I exchanged several emails with her about this very topic. Despite her success in fund raising, even she was concerned about the long-term viability of this sort of funding.

I also am the author of an active Open-Source project. I accept donations but they have never amounted to much.
=?iso-8859-8-i?Q? Handling Non-UTF-8 Hebrew Email
Thoughts?

It depends. In my own business I decided open source 'customers' are more trouble than they are worth so I do very little.

Just the fact that people are willing to pay for my software is a strong validation that I'm doing something useful and on the right course.
>The entire economy of the world is a time bomb since it is predicated on exponential growth continuing indefinitely into the future.

Adding zeros is not that hard. Munis have actual tax bases and actual obligations and those seem out of step in some situations. That muni debt will be mispriced because of tax incentives seems obvious.

Municipalities are in the same spot that Greece or Italy is in. They have debt in a currency they do not issue. They cannot devalue or inflate that debt away. Therefore they have to manage their debt as a corporation or state would, but they are much smaller and less flexible. Bad buy.
notion.so is perfect for me, like a more complete Workflowy.
They just released an android app, and a better free plan.
Until someone actually do it, and better. Good luck monetize your proprietary alternative then!
> I do believe for instance that the earth surface is spherical (…) I have not personally traveled around the world in a boat or launched satellites.

Eratosthenes needed neither[1]. With a pair of sticks and friend far away, you can replicate the experiment and conclude for yourself.

[1]: https://youtu.be/0JHEqBLG650
I wish more of the world would take New Zealand's stance. Software patents are banned in that country. The US/EU should really go a similar route.
Haha, what is this...

So, I have no interest in football, but a quick search for top clubs -> Everton FC players reveals around half of them are foreign.

So what does this have to do with the country? A rich club can afford the best players from all over the world, plus the best training... and that's it...
If you are looking outside pure software shops (FANGs and startups, etc...) getting a .NET or Java certification can be useful. I think they are a bit ridiculous, but they help get past clueless HR types and open up the convo to other parts of your resume.
I don't know about Apple maps, but Mapbox's address geocoding is pretty useless for smaller countries, e.g. in Eastern Europe, while Google can provide excellent geocoding for addresses there too. It's a shame they will switch to this very expensive pricing, making it useless for smaller sites which can't afford it.
I think it would be useful if there was a patent type for "free for anyone to use", something like the MIT License in open source. This would make it easier for patent officers to discover and reject applications conflicting with prior free to use patents and offload the burden of keeping track of this from the inventor to the patent office.
Keep. It has no ads and you can access it from phone or laptop. It's not open source though.
Sublime or VS code, as markdown in Dropbox for constant backup and easy roll-back for up to a week or something. I had used Ulysses on the Mac but an iCloud sync bug caused me to lose 8 hours of notes from customer meetings so that was the end of that. VS code has a lot of nice markdown plugins and I also use the “highlight” plugin for arbitrary colour based on regex for custom things like tags I include.
Trunk Notes on an iPad. Self-hosted iOS wiki that supports markdown. My major wish is that it had support for mathematical notation.

You might check out TiddlyWiki. Open source, and will run almost anywhere.
Lots of pictures, disclaimers, and coverage of every last optional feature your vehicle may or may not have been equipped with.
>Everyone complaining about MS buying GitHub needs to offer a better solution

MS not buying GitHub?