skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If the wars had gone differently, Greek historians would have recorded a glorious defeat of the northern barbarians by the Greeks. Alexander won, and so the story features "awarding a generalship."

I'm not making the case for either narratives. I'm making the case that both narratives are fictions, a symbolic language narrating a one-damned-thing-after-another truth. I don't think Alexander/Macedonia was "really" Greek or not Greek. I also think this meant different things at different times. Modern nationalism is a very dominant paradigm in our times. It is new though. Even though it's hard to imagine it, "nationality" was not a dominant paradigm either for personal identity or politics throughout most of history. Alexander didn't seem to give much of a damn about nationality.
Now read about the cheerleading that CNN and every other major US news outlet did in the run up to the Iraq war.
Well stated. I do not see how prosecuting individuals can be a bad thing. There _must_ be a critical point of individual prosecutions becoming commonplace enough before engineers being forced to play dirty say "Fuck you motherfucker" and report such behaviour to HR or to higher ups etc.
The bigger China grows the more important IP and patents will become thus making it like all the rest. India will be the next giant to be exploited.
I have a really hard time believing this 70%

I appreciate that we all live in a bit of an echo chamber since we choose our friends, but I don't know anyone who is not okay with the "two names" solution

What more could anyone else want? That they call themselves Skopje? We are the only ones to clal them that while E V E R Y O N E else just calls them "Macedonia" and wonders "what the hell is wrong with you greeks".
It's worth noting that ETOPS only applies to 2-engine aircraft; a 4-engine aircraft can travel outside the ETOPS-permitted areas as long as it has enough fuel.
Reverse Polish Notation, Lambdas, and Currying in Python
This sounds like very actionable advice. Thanks for sharing the info, it's very helpful.
RxSwift: Benefits and Use Cases
Building the Universal Menu of Tomorrow? UI & AI
My 30 dollar dress shoes have lasted 15 years, since I rarely wear casual dress shoes.
They're a hypothetical future product like Google Glasses, but much better.
Statist nonsense! As expected from the socialists at the FT....

China is a Ponzi society, completely hopeless.
True, I'm not talking about UI/UX test, but tests that test that your application is "correct" and does the right thing. For such tests, you need to start out a beta or just wait for user feedback or also be great in product design and thinking like the average user. Adding help popups, and good documentations.
Kerouac's "On the Road" and "Big Sur" nicely book-end the ebullience of youth and the disillusion/dissolution of middle-age.
Politicians and businessmen have profited from war since the Industrial Revolution, but the point that GP is trying to make is that beforehand, the "ruling class" (i.e. aristocracy, not rich business/politics tycoons) was directly involved in warfare and suffered human and economic loss from it.
Personally, it's Lands' End's all weather mocs [1]. It should be noted I'm absolutely hopeless when it comes to fashion, I can only vouch for their functionality and comfort. Another commentor also mentioned Adidas Sambas as being a good standard [2].

[1] https://www.landsend.com/products/mens-all-weather-moc-shoes...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17337829
Proprietary Software Is Often Malware
On Mac you need to explicitly enable the feature that allows one to install unsigned programs, which I think is a really healthy feature for the average user.

It will also warn you that you are installing unsigned software in scary language.
Living in NYC on a $106k Salary
Memoro: A Detailed Heap Profiler
I think one of the biggest changes has been the visual deemphasis on individual identity in modern social media over forums, even on HN. Forums that allowed user large user avatars, flair, and the rest made it possible to easily visually identify back-and-forth between people, as opposed to reddit which deemphasizes usernames. This basically means that it’s harder to identify users across threads, and harder to “get to know people”. You may or may not have read my comments before, but you don’t instinctively make the connection between my past behavior and my present behavior unless you go look at my comment history or unless I’m one of the HN super-posters who gets mentioned by name.
So far the free market has failed spectacularly at addressing global warming.
> numerous good ideas that could have saved substantial money got ignored.

I see a lot of that, too, and have in the past two and a half decades. It took me a while to catch on to the difference between what got worked on and what didn't: the things that are measurable are the things that get worked on. In fact, the things that are most trivially measurable are always the things that get the most love. I think that some of the really big, really successful places like Amazon and Google have managed to get past this and actually put some effort into "speculative" projects, but most organizations spend all their time on the lowest hanging fruit, no matter how rotten it actually is.
I think this is what Eric Schmidt’s life must be like.
These people exist across verticals. And many wind up very successful b/c at the end of the day people are afraid of not being cool enough. To wit: AOL's 'digital prophet', Shingy.
Bats Help Preserve Old Books
The idea that private enterprise is more efficient than government is a myth. Waste scales with any organization.

It's similar to how Florida seems more messed up than other states, but it's only because of the state's public information laws. There's probably a term for the bias where something seems more prevalent only because information on it is more accessible.

Even a "public" company only shares so much with the general public. Much less than even the smallest government.
Wikipedia's math content is, in a way, unique. I can read and comprehend almost any scientific topic there except math. And, it's not like I am not capable of understanding. I am a highly abstract thinker, and have an intuitive understanding of many higher-mathematical concepts. I'm pretty decent at functional programming (hopefully that's not too much of a non sequitur).

Here's how this usually goes: I see a mathematical term in some article (for example, eigenvalue). Go to Wikipedia to learn what it means. Find five more terms that I don't understand. Look those up. Eyes glaze over while scanning pages full of formulas that I also don't understand. Pretty soon I forget what I was trying to understand, and I give up.

(The one exception, oddly enough, was set theory. For some reason that clicked. The axioms of the ZFC made perfect sense to me, and the symbolic representation, their conclusions, etc., just felt right. But I doubt that I could truly learn even that subject using just Wikipedia.)

Wikipedia is great as a reference, but when it comes to a subject so intensely technical as mathematics, the articles require too much context. They are a great reference to someone well-versed in the specific field of math the articles address, but are otherwise incomprehensible. This is not a criticism of Wikipedia. It's just the nature of the subject.
The World Cup has tens of thousands of fake Chinese fans as the main victims
Spotter can be "installed" as a webapp with standalone mode in your phone. I say "installed" because it's actually a bookmark in your screen that doesn't take up any storage, but works almost as a native app :)

To install spotter this way:
1) Go to https://spotter.live
2) On your mobile browser tap the Share Button (bottom bar with Safari iOS, top-right corner with Android Chrome)
3) Tap OK

Done! :D

if you.like_it:
Enjoy and be nice to each other! xP

if not:
please tell me what you think about it. I can take it (=
Market timing and some thoughts on self-driving car
OF coarse doctors are always going to err on the side of caution, part of the reason for the super bugs in the first place have been given as the over prescription of antibiotics. Not just over prescription in that antibiotics are not needed also the over prescription of duration.

I think the whole feel better approach will help antibiotics resistance not necessarily the patient.

Will be interesting to see the risk of "reinfection vs risk of over prescription" graph.

Horizontal gene transfer thing is what I found really interesting

Found the journal entry if anyone cares : https://www.bmj.com/content/358/bmj.j3418

Article about journal entry : https://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/27/health/antibiotics-course...
Yes I understand how ipfs works. But I mean, now we don't have the ability to print an URL that is not dependent on a domain name ipfs or any other. That's why DNS would require an alternative for true persistent and decentralized identifiers that are human readable.
Yeah but I guess what is remarkable is the trajectory from 1990 to 2018
It's not really a problem for compiled languages, like C, as they provide enough context for static speculation. But the architecture itself has to be well suited for statically speculated general purpose applications, which Itanium wasn't.

Today even Russia have managed to produce a VLIW architecture and a good enough compiler [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbrus-8S
Makes you wonder, right?

Of course, there are (still) pathological cases where a single line of code will abort because it runs out of time.

> cat too-complex.swift
let a:[Int] = [1] + [2] + [3] + [4] + [5] + [6] + [7]

For me, this aborts after about a minute and a half:

> time swiftc too-complex.swift
too-complex.swift:1:49: error: expression was too complex to be solved in reasonable time; consider breaking up the expression into distinct sub-expressions
let a:[Int] = [1] + [2] + [3] + [4] + [5] + [6] + [7]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^~~~~

real	1m35.094s
user	1m16.698s
sys	0m5.141s

That appears to be some sort of exponential in type inference. Other similar ones have been fixed.

The ternary expressions mentioned elsewhere also appear to be problematic, and in general, there's little time bombs all over just waiting to go off.

The rate I mentioned earlier was taken from a CocoaHeads talk by someone who built a caching mechanism for Carthage, because their Swift framework(s) of around 20KLOC were taking ages to compile.

So it's a real-world example, not something made up.
I think they're referring to basket options. TL; DR It's a non-story for all but financial engineering geeks.

"Deutsche Bank and Barclays used the options structure to open accounts for their clients in their own names, creating the illusion that they owned the assets. But in fact, the hedge funds exercised complete control over the assets, executed all the trades and raked in all of the trading profits, according to the report.

The hedge funds exercised the options soon after the one-year mark and claimed that the trading profits were eligible for the 20 percent (previously 15 percent) tax rate that applies to long-term capital gains on assets held for at least a year. The report contends that those options were actually short-term trades that should have been taxed at the ordinary income rate of 39 percent, which would otherwise apply to investors in hedge funds engaged in daily trading" [1].

Market makers are taxed differently from other investors. Certain market makers tried to "rent" their low-tax status to hedge funds. All this resulted from a weird 1999 law trying to fix a loophole in some other arcane law [2].

Last I heard, the IRS charged the market makers for the investors' short-term gains [3], and did so retroactively.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/senate-repor...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-07-03/the-irs-c...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/09/business/dealbook/irs-cra...
Obama broke the record for most whistleblowers tried under the Espionage Act, and Trump is on pace to beat that record. So if that issue matters to you, voting Republican or Democrat has the same effect as not voting. Same thing if you are opposed to the wars. Real pragmatic choice.
All courses on Udemy are up for grabs at 90% off
I don’t really understand how Europe has struggled so much. Is it due to a lack of investors? Brain drain or some comparative lack of talent (I doubt it)? Regulations (also doubt it)? Cultural differences? Difficult domestic market?
That sounds like the real lesson here: have separate accounts for separate sites.

I haven't used Stripe for years, so I'm not sure: is that totally kosher? And if you enter the same business/tax/ID details for two different accounts, will there be any problems?

It'd be great to hear from someone about Stripe about this, as I know a lot of Stripe people hang around HN.
Right and since Jefferson and others had large estates of the only viable slaves they would dramatically increase the value of each slave on the plantation because there was no longer any outside source.
> The percentage of volume on your account that has been disputed (you are currently 44.82%)

Holy. ANY payment process will drop you after something like this. A botched purchase of another company doesn't relieve you of any of the obligations they had made.
From what I can tell, just looking at some of the folks the site has raised money for, I see a lot of anti-jewish memes and other nazi related content.

Yeah, sorry buddy. No one wants your site to survive. Maybe try not spreading hate speech. kthxbye
Same for OOP, example from 1988:

"Building a backtracking facility in smalltalk without kernel support"[1]

Languages like Snobol, Prolog, and Icon were designed with backtracking facilities from the outset and these facilities are deeply intertwined with the implementation. Retrofitting a backtracking facility in a language that wasn't designed for it has never been achieved. We report on an experiment to retrofit Smalltalk with a backtracking facility. The facility is provided through a small number of primitives written in the language (no modifications to the kernel were made). The ability to do this is a direct result of the power provided by the objectification of contexts.

There's tons of other examples, for example various distributed objects mechanisms, my own Higher Order Messaging [2] the way Gemstone creates queries from procedural selection code etc.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=62084.62094

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_order_message
Yes, good points about the debugging issues.

Thanks for the encouragement and links. Will check them out.
I wasn't aware there was anything below the chocolate-like surface, so I understood you to be saying the same thing as grandparent.
Show HN APIs that connect buyers and suppliers across the Travel Industry.
The Bhagavad Gita translated by Jack Hawley
Yes, random mutations. Random mutations that cause cancer kill an organism and random mutations that make them more attractive to mates make them more likely to pass that mutations to offspring, who pass it to their offspring, and so on. This is all basic evolutionary theory...
The UK had a big case where the question asked was why they didn't spot the doctor with the unusually large number of patients who died unexpectedly, when a cursory examination of his approach to their medical records might have uncovered evidence that many of those deaths weren't natural.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Shipman
See other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17338445
Decent camera is way underestimated when talking about Leica film camera, it's like saying Tesla is a decent car. I don't think more companies will reintroduce film cameras though.
Same. I used to buy into this when I was so afraid of "breaking rules" but this is before I realized it was often just parroted advice from dated guidance. I've recently switched to using a lot more standard monochrome styles for websites and find them to be more accessible and clear.

There is also a reason some of the largest news pubs do it too.

https://www.nytimes.com #000 #333
https://www.washingtonpost.com #2a2a2a
Thank you for calling out the no true scot's man fallacy.
I worked for a high-risk merchant, and a 44% chargeback rate is utterly insane. IIRC, internal alarms would go off and the processors would be breathing down our necks if the chargeback rate started to approach 2%.
Nitpicking: it's "Μακεδονία" (without "ς") in nominative.
I don't think it's a bad thing. I think it's an important thing, and I think it will be effective for preventing bad behaviour. If it seems otherwise, I'm sorry for being unclear.

But.. I am fuming at what a case like this exposes. We have no real way of holding corporations accountable as corporations. If an individual "sole trader" (or even just a small company) did this, they would almost certainly pay with the loss of their entire business. In this case, shareholders are barely affected. I'm angry (hence the ranting) about this, not at the prosecutor. I'm also don't have a solution.
You'll need to click through to the parent comments for this to properly make sense, but this is the most relevant
bit of a subthread I think you may find interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16368271
It's worth noting also that the benefit of doing this is to avoid the difficult-to-reason-about, goto-like behavior that exception throwing and catching necessitates. I have yet to experience a team which handles that very well at all; it usually turns into a mess.
VOOKI – Web Application Vulnerability Scanner
There are several differences though. First, DF has a lot less sponsorship spots than your average influencer who basically posts ads 24/7. Second, the stuff which is usually advertised on tech blogs is mostly about work related products which also usually cost less than one of those fancy vacations. DF also has more readers that most of the influencers that are considered successful.

Now, I know for a fact that the feeds to influence buying decisions for smaller, cheaper stuff, such as cosmetics. It is not a long stretch to think that it also works for vacations. However, from what I heard, the brands that are most successful in selling out their stock are in the category of affordable luxury.
Very bad advice- you should either finish the entire course or not take antibiotics at all, otherwise you're gonna help the superbugs along.
I either haven't gotten the point or have to assume there isn't one. Isn't that normal error handling? The incoming error path is usually even done with exception handling in normal languages, so you don't have to worry about it. the pattern `if not <assertion>: raise Exception` should be everything one needs. And for that this whole stuff is really fancy and long, especially if one considers that most people (sadly) don't even check assertions between function calls, if they are not forced to by bug reports.
Your analogy only holds true if it is difficult to use a spreadsheet for adding and subtracting numbers. That's clearly false. Spreadsheets were the very first "killer apps" of computers for the precise reason that they are easy to use.

So many people use spreadsheets today. What are the non-spreadsheet budgeting or expense tracking apps that are highly used?
Do these other countries continue to enjoy WTO Developing Nation Status, which enables a lot of the unfair advantages China enjoys as pointed out by the grandparent comment?

https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/devel_e/dev_special_dif...

Pointing out the historic cheating of now first world countries is fair if questionably relevant, pointing out Donald Trump's raising of tariffs as hypocrisy (I assume) is down right silly, especially in the context of this conversation.
>This is propaganda. China is mostly an uneducated factory nation who will be crushed by automation

LOL.

First, that's the same argument they were making back in the day for Japan (the "uneducated factory nation", the "copy cats", the "cheap knockoffs" etc). Funny how that turned out.

Second, labor costs are not the relevant factor, so automation wont matter much to bring factory jobs back. It's all about the supply chain:

http://www.businessinsider.com/you-simply-must-read-this-art...

https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2012/01/23/apple-and...

Not to mention that Chinese factories can and will also invest in automation.

Third, "uneducated factory nation"? Where does one get that information from, the John Birch Society Bulletin?

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/18/china-great-...

http://bruegel.org/2017/08/china-is-the-worlds-new-science-a...

Oh, and as sibling says: "the latest PISA findings from 2015 would have China scoring higher than the US on math (10th vs. 25th) and science (6th vs. 40th), but slightly lower than the US on reading (27th vs. 24th)."

It's easy to make fun of previously underdeveloped nations that started from an uneducated and less advance point 30 and 60 years ago, but the problem is that they can catch up (like Japan and South Korea, an insignificant economic wasteland after WWII, did). Especially if their rivals are on the decline themselves. Rome didn't last forever.
It's been a very predictable trajectory. I recall reading in the mid 90s, as a high school student an op-ed that anticipated China's GDP to exceed America's sometime in the early 2020s. They're right on course to do that.
Engineers must have the ability to whistleblow to an independent regulator outside of their organization.
> they would almost certainly pay with the loss of their entire business

As the Takata example shows (and Enron and Arthur Andersen), a big enough fine will wipe out a business.
You'd think they'd get the hint from the perennial popularity of Chuck Taylors and Doc Martens...
quick & dirty - PG tunning: https://pgtune.leopard.in.ua
‘Environmental disaster’: BIS warns on cryptocurrencies
John* Kidd :)
I know this article is more about tech companies, but China is winning everywhere. They have started a very ambitious OBOR to connect Europe, Africa and Asia. The Chinese investments in Europe is just mind boggling [0] and the infrastructure projects by the Chinese Govt are spread across the whole Asia, Africa and Europe.

Unlike the USA which offers support and aid by offering money to other countries, the Chinese loan tons of money to build infrastructure and it is so much that the small countries will not be able to pay and literally submit to the Chinese. [1]

[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-china-business-in-eu...
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/12/world/asia/sri-lanka-chin...
Solo dev and 100ks of users? Wow.

What is your tech stack? What is your code-deploy process?
> And if you enter the same business/tax/ID details for two different accounts, will there be any problems?

I have no experience acquiring companies, but my first instincts are I would acquire a given company into a separate owned LLC, to firewall the rest of my assets from unknown snakes in the grass. If I'm doing that, plugging those LLC's details into Stripe seems like a non-issue.
Pulumi: Get Code to the Cloud. Faster. Together
There is an exception for community interests and lawful requirements, so it makes sense.
How we watch soccer now
Apple’s iOS 12 securely and automatically shares emergency location with 911