skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>History told forwards is superstition: trying to show that what came after was inevitable, when in fact it was one future among an infinite number of different possible futures.

No, that's completely wrong.

For one thing, any good history book will include numerous accidents that could well have happened differently, and sent history off on an entirely different direction. I am surprised you were unaware that is how good history books are written.

As to an infinite number of possible futures, there are a far larger number one might imagine that are in fact impossible, like humans decided a thousand years ago to walk to Mars, and doing it. They are impossible because of basic realities, and history is a key way you discover and teach them. And that is important because many of these basic realities are of the greatest importance for intelligent decision making today.
that's why we need Blockchain
I'm not quite sure about this, but aren't the products you have mentioned also have the same problem as Netflix. Spotify is able to provide lots of music options, but for how long? They are being effectively strangled by music labels and competitors, which will eventually lead to a content fragmentation between music streaming services. Then people will turn back to pirating music just as fast and they have for video. I'm not sure about steam , but I'm sure that eventually the gaming industry will face the same problem, it's only a matter of time.
How is Netflix, Hulu, etc. not the same? You pay $10.99 a month and get unlimited access to an entire library of content. What device that you own can’t play Spotify music?
I miss the voice people had with blogs. Now it's gated circle jerky communities (fb/medium/Twitter for hate/etc) rather than independent thought and ideas.
>I became curious about the flat earthers and watched 2 videos to try and figure out if there was any sort of deeper meaning to their superficially ridiculous claims (spoiler: there isn't)

Whether by design or accident the flat earth nonsense has the potential effect of unmooring people from the very notion of an accepted reality; and thus habituating them to the idea that what they inherently know about the world cannot be trusted. It literally pulls the world out from under their feet.

That is, if you can get people to believe or even question that something as fundamental as the shape of the earth is a lie they've been told, then you can effectively "clean-sheet" them. They become blank-canvases upon which you can write the alternative reality of your choice. Not to mention this type of nonsense generates mistrust in the status-quo, as it raises the question among its victims: "who is this 'they' who lied to us about such fundamental and important matters?"

So, if you then claim to be against the status quo, then you have sympathizers who are now open to your message. It thus becomes much easier to write your story onto their now blank canvases and serve as their champion.
I've had some conversations where I just tap to pause and leave them in. You can hear the environment pretty decently with them in, and they don't cause discomfort. If I have anything else to worry about, I can forget to take them out for a bit, in much the same way you can forget you have sunglasses on your head. I would say that they mostly don't cause an impediment for normal activities in a functional sense, but for now, they can in the social aspect. I couldn't ride a rollercoaster or do jumping jacks in them, but I can hear the environment just fine, and they don't fall out easily, even if jogging.
> Radon/radiation poisoning would have been classified as "supernatural" by pre-1896 scientists

That is exactly my point. A lot of phenomena that were once the purview of religion are now explained by science. The reverse is never true (nothing explained by science has subsequently found a better explanation in religion)
There's a book by that title. I havn't gotten a chance to read it yet, but was told its very good.

https://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0...
Put yourself in a situation where you see the same people regularly. I show up to a weekly tennis clinic and hold season tickets to one of the local sports teams, for example.
While typing is a good way to reduce programmer errors, specially for large scale programs, it's much like autocomplete in a word processor. It's cool to have but also a bad habit to form. The quality of prgrams would improve if such aids were reduced and the programmer was expected to form good programming habits instead.
I think the reality will be that the contemporary will be the focus and the old will be glossed over.

I get that someone who loves Tarantino can't sit thru a Peckinpah movie. But imagine if Tarantino had been one of those people.
yea but how come you arent complaining that basically nothing of indian classical music, gypsy music, hungarian folk music, balkan, etc is taught. its just the white guys in europe who were good? of course not. in general, music education is insanely myopically focused on the (of course wonderful) tradition of western diatonic harmony- i guess i think your comment makes no sense if you contextualize it within a bigger musical world.
She tags the restaurant or hotel while we are there. Then a $0 check will appear with thanks from the manager on duty.
I really enjoyed a lot of the advice and thinking in this piece, but I have one nit: These biological analogies are terrible. They don't add anything to the persuasion, and actually detract significantly because they're wrong.

A) Biology is not inherently linear, at all. If I had to pick a single scaling function to identify with biology, I would pick the exponential.

B) "Biologically, we are sprinting beings, not marathon beings." is utterly untrue. We evolved as persistence hunters, we're woefully ineffective sprinters. Basically all large animals are dramatically faster than us.

Good article, but man do I hate woo bad analogies like this. It's almost as bad as the guys that talk about "Quantum" crap when I'm just looking for decent meditation help.
Can someone please label WSJ articles as "paywall" in the title?
No, you are misunderstanding what he is suggesting. He didn't say cover all of contemporary literature. He is saying spend a few years getting students hooked on contemporary literature, and then get them into say 19th century literature like with Dickens, and so on working backwards.

And let me ask you this, do think the way literature at present is taught in elementary and secondary schools is effective in getting students involved, such that they voluntarily read high-quality works for the rest of their lives?
> What's the point of planting non-GMO corn?

Usually I would complain about the inanity of this process, but it’s whiskey. The process is the point. It’s a hedonistic venture and should be embraced as one.
I use earplugs almost every night. Earplugs don't block thumping from bass music or footsteps or slamming doors unfortunately. :-(
This is what I thought. But then I learned that lots of young professionals with some disposable income take their Instagram feed very seriously. It influences brand decisions, where to eat, where to stay, where to be seen. You would be surprised - I was - how much a post by the right someone can drive revenue.
Long workflows.
>Hansen: High fours. Impress those up-scale folks, you'll gain velocity on your arc and there's your boost.

somewhat similar appealing to google search the way to gaming instagram is by having famous people/big accounts/verified accounts comment and interact with ur account so you
1. appear in the activity for their followers
2. appear on the explore page for the potential new followers and more engagement, repeat ad nauseam

"organic growth"
Anonymous Functions and Reflection in Go
My current and my previous Samsung TVs had this built-in as well. It can search the channel guide in the cable-box, the installed apps, as well as some pay-per-view alternatives.

Works pretty damn well, actually.
> We evolved as persistence hunters

If you haven’t read about cursorial hunting, the Wikipedia article [1] is worth the time. Humans are one of like five known persistance hunters. Our ancestors (and certain Kalahari contemporaries) would literally chase their prey until they died of exhaustion.

From the perspective of the prey, it is uniquely horrifying. You outrun your predator. But every time you stop to catch your breath, before you’ve had a chance to cool down, they reappear, in the distance, on the horizon. Each time nearer. Hours or even days on end. Repeatedly until, finally, your legs or heart give out.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting
I am using that too. It was my way to use Slack before they shut down the IRC channels.
I'm a woman. A high percentage of the time, when people are looking to use me, it's for sex or "emotional labor." A very high percentage of people who expect me to care about them and their welfare have a "Giving Tree" mental model of what love looks like and they very much expect it to be a one way street.

This has mostly always been true in my life, both online and off. I'm just much more aware that I am merely being bled by people who will do absolutely nothing in return for me and who will, in fact, shit all over me if I bring up my needs and wants at all. They explicitly expect a woman to do nice things for free for them. Expecting something in return offends them in the extreme.

I'm quicker to cut people off than I used to be. It doesn't lead to the kinds of mutually beneficial relationships I desire, but I spend far less time feeling bled for my time, energy, expertise and wisdom by people who explicitly think women should give those things away for free and who saw zero problem with that abusive expectation even when I was literally homeless and going hungry. That was not their problem and how dare I suggest they should care about that.
I guess I don't get creeped out about this because this is what happens already in life - but it's implicit and unacknowledged instead of explicit and acknowledged.

This same calculus happens at all levels: trying to be part of certain groups (Stanford graduate, YCombinator graduate etc...) , join certain clubs (Founders who have raised a Series A, Forbes 30 under 30), impress certain people (Investors, Board Members) etc... to get where you want. Just change the players depending on what you want out of life.

So if making it explicit makes you feel bad, then you probably feel bad about how things work already.
I didn't mean asking for a solution, I meant, more specifically, "asking" (really demanding) that certain videos be taken down, such as with a DMCA takedown request.

Are you saying that Youtube has spent their own resources to make it easier for BigCo, beyond that legal obligation?
some poeple will just go back to p2p and there is nothing they can do.
In the first 4 months of 2018, I taught intermediate-to-advanced Python to about 2500 working engineers around the world. This was through a 30-hour series of online trainings, repeated once or twice each month.

It absolutely made me a better developer. Some comments:

* Since I don't teach beginners, some of the questions I get are really hard. As in, someone who's good enough at writing software they've been paid to do it for many years will encounter some hard problem, bang their head against a wall with it for days or weeks... and then ask me about it live during the Q&A.

* If I make some claim during class that is not accurate, the students - who, again, are all professional engineers in the work force - will eat me alive. The early classes quickly dispelled a lot of incorrect knowledge I didn't realize I had. (If I were teaching something like art or politics, maybe I could sometimes BS my way through something... but not coding.)

* Toy code sucks. I quickly figured out it is 10,000% better to have a realistic example that might actually exist in a production code base somewhere, for all sorts of reasons. This is also 10,000% harder to do well, for the instructor.

* We all have certain mental models and even beliefs that have been "installed" in our thinking from our previous coding experiences. A big part of my job is to quickly figure out what lens you're using to view coding reality (e.g. maybe you're a Java expat, and tend to think in terms of its type system); pace that reality so I don't lose you; and gently drag you into a very unfamiliar way of thinking, using the different metaphors required to reason about the new language/technology. Oh, I have to do it for 150 people from two dozen different countries all at the same time.

* Biggest surprise: what's been more useful than anything in helping me become better as a trainer: studying psychology and hypnosis. (Lots of subtle hints in how this applies in the previous item.)
Get a list of decision makers professionally researched for you
Check the banks - they all are likely to have mainframes somewhere.
Several months ago I switched from MacOS to Fedora.

Two things I really missed from MacOS that I thought didn't have a good alternative in Linux were Colloquy and Sequel Pro.

The Lounge via Docker Container and https://applicationize.me/ :

docker run --detach \
--name thelounge \
--publish 9100:9000 \
--volume ~/.config/thelounge:/home/lounge/data \
--env THELOUNGE_HOME=/home/lounge/data \
--restart always \
-u "$(id -u $USER):$(id -g $USER)" \
thelounge/lounge:latest

solved my IRC itch, and it works even better than Colloquy.

Still haven't found anything that comes close to Sequel Pro, though.
> ... of course that faded, to make place for Twitter and Facebook

Twitter was always useless for me for having a conversation. It's just shouting short phrase into the void hoping someone will shout some other short phrase back. It's roughly equivalent of ICQ status message. Little text you could attach to information whether you are online or not. Technically you could have conversation through that but it is more like passive-aggressive shouting match in a large room full of other people than actual conversation. Twitter is exactly that for me and I refuse to participate.

And Facebook forces you to have one exposed identity and glues it to your face and your mom. So it's useless for conversation purposes because you won't dare to say there anything ever. I still have an account if only to see what my family and friends are doing with their lives and using messenger because nobody installs even skype anymore.

Pretty much old conversation systems from my point of view faded away into their most limiting and stupid parts.

Bye bye ICQ or your local equivalent of that experience.

And forums got digg treatment. In the old days you could say whatever you thought and you only risked that some people will mute you or you get kicked out of that forum right away. Now everything is gamified, you get downvoted, you are loosing karma, your post fades away for everybody, gets buried. And it hurts much. To much to risk expressing any opinion you might think is controversial. Because cost is loosing points you learned to care about, loosing standing on a platform, the only platform. There's no second HN, no second reddit.

Instead of providing personalized tools for muting trolls and their feeders forums transformed into gamified, mob-policed states that keep everybody in check with self-censorship. The only people that break through that are straight up racist, sexist trolls that don't care about anything and anybody. People with most extreme views. And then everybody else can say: "See? That's why we can't have nice things. That's what we have downvoting for."

Modern internet is different. It's better in many aspects. Youtube is modern marvel for hands-on learning. But freedom of expression definitely suffered.
Damn near every bank in Canada uses cobol on zOS and DB2. I'd suggest searching job postings at all major banks. Likely you'd need to move to Toronto though because that's where the bank HQs are. Also check out a company called CGI... they have a few Cobol/mainframe positions open right now:

https://cgi.njoyn.com/CGI/xweb/xweb.asp?page=joblisting&CLID...

Also, check out the Cobol cowboys:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-banks-cobol-idUSKBN17...
As usual, much of what Niklaus Wirth writes is over my head. But I agree with him that using the equal sign for assignment is an unfortunate choice. I remember being confused by it in my first programming class ages ago. I thought foo = 10 was a test and not an assignment, and, when the assignment was the first occurrence of foo, I remember being confused about how you could test whether it equaled 10 if it had yet to be defined. I got over the problem soon enough, but I'm sure I wasn't the first person to have it.

Wirth points out that Algol used := for assignment. That is also what Smalltalk uses, which leaves = for testing equality (and == for testing object identity). Of course, after using the equals sign for assignment for so long, I often stumbled when I was in Pharo.
> doesn't have searchable history nor separated users and channels (there might be a setting for this that I haven't found yet).

Yes it does: https://thelounge.chat/docs/server/users.html
FBG – Lightweight C Linux framebuffer graphics with parallelism
I feel as if you have a bit of a tone against these authors.

Would you rather the software not exist at all?
> Sounds like you should have reported that rental instead of taking it out on all vacation rentals.

Care to show me what you interpreted as me 'taking it out on all vacation rentals?'

> I still don't want to ban hotels. I give the hotel a scathing review, sometimes complain to them directly, and then I move on.

Cool? I understand that you think that I want to ban vacation rentals, but perhaps you should reread my post before responding with assumptions and non-sequiturs.

Airbnbs are generally unregulated and hosts, more often than not, try to hide their business from landlords, neighbors and their local government.
What would you like to know? Just FYI I set it up because people I talked asked if there was a way to be notified.
Thanks (I'm not a parent). In those cases, yes, that pricing would make sense.

Of course, it doesn't really matter if they control all the distribution anyway. They can just make "buying" a non-option, which I believe Disney has tried for certain titles already.
Human rights are a very politically controversial topic, so let's instead reverse our focus and address this via Dawkins's concept of memetics. Looking at a piece of well-designed popular consumer entertainment content, we can see that its main reason of being is to spread out as if it were an epidemic, infecting people's minds and getting them to pass it around.

Continuing with the epidemiological metaphor, there are several possible vectors for the content to spread, and the prevalence of each depends on the particular circumstances of specific hosts or communities of hosts. For example, if the vector of "Alice advising Bob to consume it on subscription service X" is effective in a particular community (and this effectiveness obviously depends on several different parameters), then piracy wouldn't be an issue there. But if all such legal vectors are ineffective in that community, while the content is still very potent in its memetic properties, then it will still spread out, in one of several forms of alternative less legal vectors.

To paraphrase John Gilmore's famous quote about the internet, society treats inconvenient content providers as if they weren't there and routes around them, creating alternative distribution methods.
Other stab:
https://iso.500px.com/500px-getty-images-new-partnership/

The GettyImages licensing change involve some legal and backend changes.

Jaj VCG.....
Rent it. Usually $4 on Amazon or Google or Vudu.
didn’t skip out on a class called Military Science as an undergrad at UCLA

I see a lot of Military leadership or Military strategy ideas referenced around the startup world as valuable lessons. Yet actual Military members or Veterans, outside of some "hiring veterans" efforts, aren't held in particularly high regard in the valley.

Why the Delta?
> Some a$#h@!& is gonna come in and whine about something

This is very true just like in our society (good or bad intention it may be).
Nice article Ken Wheeler by the way.

How much time do you normally spend writing OSS?
True, forgot about that. Yeah that would’ve been preferable.
The beauty of Kafka and Kafkaesque stories like this is that they're so genuinely rooted in reality that they're essentially a form of magical realism.
Tried Twitter. It's terrible and awful. I mean, there are some wonderful people there, but it boggles the mind why they choose to use platform that limits them to short grunts and which they have to share with so much awfulness.

Tried Reddit. It has some good content but omg so much noise. So. Much. Noise.

Tried Facebook. Nice platform to see pictures of cute animals. And an occasional meme. And keep up-to-date with latest developments among who went where and ate what, whose kid/dog/cat done what, and other things like that. Never try to discuss something serious there, it's hopeless. Some thematic communities have good content, but the only way to find them is by luck. Oh, and of course it will track you to the end of your days now that you sold your soul to it.

Tried HN. That one works ok so far, a lot of smart people here. Content is mostly limited to specific domain, but that's OK.

Still, all those new things didn't make an impact on my life like the old internet things did. Maybe it's me that is different now.

I won't say internet is worse now than it was then. But it's different. Some for the better (working search! Wikipedia! free university courses!), some for the worse.

P.S. I got on the internet when Windows was sold on floppy disks :) I actually used gopher.
Netflix actually had a feature on the original Xbox that allowed you to create a group with your friends and watch videos together. Unfortunately, they removed this feature a while ago.
Then fuck it, I will pay for some cheap streaming services and pirate the rest.. And pirating content is not going to end ever. If anything it has become easier to do. And lately easier to do than use the legitimate streaming service. I've actually was trying to watch a movie through a paid service this weekend and basically said "fuck it" watched it on a copyright infringing service within 45 seconds.

I honestly no longer care about copyright or piracy. I simply will do whatever is easiest. The greed of the entertainment industry has made me not give a shit.
The binary tree is one of the core data structures used in search. To apply at google and not be able to perform the basic search algorithms on that data structure is a huge red flag. Binary tree is to search what an array is to the programming language, would you hire a programmer that could not use array indexes?
Sure, and it's possible OP really is saving money by renting their hardware instead of owning. I don't know the details of their needs or of their costs or what cloud provider they are moving to or what deal they cut with that provider.

I'm just saying, there's currently a huge push to rent your essential services from service providers such as amazon, and from what I've seen, it's pretty easy to "move to the cloud" and then find that your total cost goes up pretty dramatically vs. owning hardware.

I mean, yea, "cloud" does make sense sometimes. But... it is sold as being cheaper, and quite often it is not.

Even if the rates look good up front, you've got the same problem that you have when leasing commercial realestate from professionals; they are professionals, which means that when it comes time to renew the lease, the rate will go up to match what renting something similar would cost from a competitor, plus slightly less than whatever they think it will cost you to move. If you can't switch cloud providers and your cloud provider knows it, you can count on your negotiated rates going up next contract renewal.