skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Also, manuals in XX century were great. They were often decent books by themselves, full of information and lore. Somehow, this concept was abandoned around 2000 +/- couple years

Very interesting point. I wonder why did this happen? I believe the manuals/books with backstory/guides that came with the box, added to the engagement with the game. Why did they go away? Seems like a needless regression :)

Sometimes I lament that the entire character of PC games changed as well during the same timeframe, as they become more console-ish/FPS-style, rather than adventure/puzzle/strategy/sim style. But then I remember that probably every generation romanticizes the good old days. Technology advancement explains the shift to FPS (better game engines, graphics cards, leading to more immersive worlds and movie-like narratives + multiplayer is exciting), but doesn’t explain the death of the game “manual/novel/book” :)
>4) Harvard's scoring is unintentionally hurting Asian students.

It's Harvard we are taking about, not a community college. Someone in admissions knew it was happening and let it keep happening. If you are willing to say unintentional means knew it was happening and didn't care to stop it, sure it was unintentional. The issue I have with that is if the same thing was happening but you replaced Asian with African, people would be up in arms. Such a double standard offends my sense of equality.
That's not an answer to the question above...
Presumably they can also be entered as part of a passphrase. Now that it's published it's even more likely.
Is that rethorical? It means being able to save money on every paycheck, or have enough saved (or a social safety net) that allows you to lose a job and not go bankrupt/lose assets if you spend a few months without pay. That’s by no means “being rich” in developed countries...
It still works that way too in a real vtty. Hit scroll lock to scroll through the text buffer at the terminal in a text-only session with the up and down arrows on BSD. Very handy.
Java was rarely used for that kind of things, but now it is used widely.

There's a new crop of Java databases, starting from Apache Cassandra and towards memory grids such as Apache Ignite or Apache Geode. And they benefit tremendously from access to Unsafe.

Yes it's probably 1% of code ever written in Java by line count, but with potential of being 20-50% by CPU and RAM usage. It is sine qua non, a vital piece of infrastructure.
Show HN: Illiterate, a literate programming preprocessor
How Can I Destroy the Universe?
I think library /systems/ will probably always have such an archive stack in their central repository.

However newer libraries, particularly in affluent areas, are more likely to go to a digital stack since it will be more readily searched and comprehensively indexed.
I meant kernel ABI specifically, of course.

And it's a guarantee that is, essentially, useless for any purpose other than the interaction between the base system and the kernel - i.e. not for third party software.
> The history of other regions and civilisations serve no such similar purpose and have been ignored.

Before pointing fingers at the West, does Iran take an extremely detailed view of its Persian History, that would not go well with Islamic Iran.
> blockchain is useful outside the context of cryptocurrencies because it represents a verifiable chain of custody.

That's like saying "rockets are useful because they allow to go to other galaxies faster". True enough, but going to other planets involved some technical details which current rockets do not exactly solve.

So, blockchain does represent verifyable chain of custody. But why this chain of custody is good for storing my health records (especially given that it's public)? How it can be guaranteed that there always be miners ready to carry my health info around? Who will be paying those miners and why it would be cheaper and more convenient than storing the info at regular data store? Right now miners' investments are essentially paid by hype that cryptocoins always raise. Once that stops - and it has to stop - who'll be paying it?

> Now imagine what happens if your doctor dies

It looks like you are arguing for personal data portability, but what this has to do with blockchain and it's properties? Why blockchain specifically is better here? Why not just requiring my health provider to allow me to access and regularly backup all health data they have?

> And something that blockchain could fix better than just having some federally regulated centralized medical record repository

I haven't seen any indication why it's true, could you explain why it is the case? I do not consider situation like "US federal government collapses", because in this case there would be no internet, no electricity, no working major hospitals and having up-to-date information would be not super-important because I'd be too busy trying to stay alive and fend off looters trying to steal my canned food reserve. In the normal everyday situation where we have functioning (as well or poorly as it is now) federal and local governments, why is it better?

> Blockchain allows you to maintain personal and private control of your records,

How? As far as I understand, once something is integrated into the blockchain, it is unmodifyable and accessible to all (well, maybe in encrypted form but still, keys can be stolen too) - how can I control it? Bitcoin theft proved that you can't really control your coins if somebody gets to your keys, and you can not reverse transactions once they are approved - actually, that's one of the design features. So how would I exercise such control exactly?
VR Gaming is a fad
The Oculus Rift and HTC Vive products have been released for quite some time now. Virtual Reality, as an extension of Video Gaming is not new, but it's reach to the public is. VR will hold it's place in simulation and medical research. However, in gaming, it is likely to fad out within 10 years.

What I am noticing in the optimism of this relativity new technology is no different than what we thought of motion controlled gaming 10 years ago. It's something unique, it's realistic and people think it will change everything, but has motion control really made any changes? Who is still playing interactive fishing games and holding rifles in Call of Duty? Part of the reason it didn't stay was because it never actually improved playing performance. We tend to forget, hardcore gamers makeup a large audience of the whole industry. In my and many others definition, this being users who play games in their leisure. VR doesn't help gamers improve in traditional gaming, if anything it actually impairs them when playing online with keyboard and mouse wielding opponents having a more accurate edge.

I will agree, it does bring a new experience to the way we play games, but so has motion-based gaming. I don't see VR gaming as anything more significant than Wii Sports or Kinect.
Honestly I don't think web developers will ever be respected, even if every other type of developer disappears from the face of the Earth.

That's because of:

* an over-inflated sense of importance (see the comparison with the moon landing)

* aggressiveness (see the endless statements about killing the desktop, mobile, etc)

* low barrier to entry and high population numbers to entry resulting in lots of ignorance

* attention deficit (see the endless churn in frameworks, libraries, solutions)

* and poor technical craftsmanship (at the end of the day, the solutions offered have poor performance and poor platform integration). This is justified by the fact that these poor technologies are making webdevs more productive.

Not all of the above apply to back-end webdev, those devs are more relaxed. Unfortunately they're being assimilated by the front-end.
I get two cent coins in Holland all the time.
Ok, the list is distracting. I mean, experience with web dev's ecosystem is more important than the languages you can write code in. Of course a list on it's own is useless, it should be supported with actual projects (hopefully some in production).
But why can't I make religious jokes at my workplace, if my ideology requires fighting religion, and the most acceptable place for it is lunches at work?
Again, extreme cost management ahead of comon sense never makes sense.

Policies that shortcut compensation for the labor resources the company is trying to leverage can only damage the program from the outset.

Is cost cutting the _only_ thing they teach in B school anymore?
Doing "Operations" can be hard for some people to understand, and harder still to actually get right. Going "serverless" gives you the opportunity to outsource a lot of that work to someone else.

However, "serverless" also comes with a heavy price to pay in terms of debugging your code. It works perfectly (more or less), assuming you can actually write perfect code. But can anyone in this world actually write perfect code?

The bigger and more complex your code base, the more difficult it will be to debug it, and the more difficult it will be to get it to work correctly in a "serverless" environment.

For some people, going "serverless" will make a lot of sense for them. Just like some people do fine with WordPress so that all they have to do is type out their content and outsource all the hard work for publishing a web site based on that content.

But you will also pay a higher and higher monetary cost for going "serverless", as you scale up. At some point, it will no longer make sense to outsource that to someone else, and you will want to bring that in-house.

Do you understand how locks work? Or plumbing? If you need to replace or rekey the lock on your front door, can you do that yourself? Or do you outsource that to a Locksmith? If you need to replace your toilet, can you do that yourself or do you outsource that to a plumber? What if your A/C unit goes out? What if your car breaks down?

There are going to be some things that some people are good at doing, and they're good enough at doing it themselves that they don't want or need to outsource that work to someone else.

And then there are going to be some things that those same people probably are not good at doing, and those should be done by someone else -- either outsourced, or someone else in-house who works in partnership with you.
Show HN: FileTurn – Document Processing API
Hands on Bug Bounties for Penetration Testers
I’ve heard from multiple sources that the original goal of the “turbo” button was back-compat for a feature of the original 4.77Mhz PC that depended on clock-rate: using an NTSC TV as a monitor. The original PC could have been 5Mhz, but 4.77 chosen instead so that the CGA graphics adapter could use the bus clock to sync up with the NTSC signal without needing an addition clock (saved a good 25 cents on the hardware that way!). When faster PCs came out, they lost the TV display feature. But, if you really needed it, you could clock down your fancy 6Mhz PC back to 4.77 to regain TV display capability.

“TV back compat mode” is long and boring, so the button was named “turbo” in a brilliant marketing move. It became so popular that PCs added the ability to arbitrarily clock down at the touch of a button long after it made sense to do so.
> And it makes sense to do that over a public ledger.

Why? It makes much more sense to keep the data to yourself, I do not see any advantage in making it public and intermingling it with data about other people.
Intel Drives New Bus for Future Chiplets
Mormon here. Hope your friend wasn’t connected to this Baker fellow ;). Seems a little odd to me though that she needed to ask permission from anyone in the Mormon church to claim a prize. Normaly the only person you would be expected to talk to is your Bishop and that is under the circumstances of a large enough sin. You can seek guidance and counsel from the Bishop, however this is not expected.

By the way random facts, but we prefer calling ourselves and being called members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS Church) instead of Mormons. Mormon was the name of an ancient American prophet-historian who abridged records of other prophets into a book of scripture which would later be called The Book of Mormon. We by no means worship Mormon, but instead Christ that’s why we prefer the other name.
I recommend the Designer Notes podcast episode [1] where Sid Meier (yes, that Sid Meier) explains how this game was designed. And if you are interested, listen all of the four episodes where he is interviewed.

[1] https://www.idlethumbs.net/designernotes/episodes/sid-meier-...
Can you even buy a joystick these days?
> Very interesting point. I wonder why did this happen? I believe the manuals/books with backstory/guides that came with the box, added to the engagement with the game. Why did they go away? Seems like a needless regression :)

I remember it happened around the time of the CD-ROM and the digitization of manuals as PDF files simply dropped on the disc. Then, economy.
Mods didn't. Users flagged it.
That's a lot of what ifs. Growing up in the US I remember always feeling afraid. Afraid of getting pulled over. Afraid what people would think because I smoked pot. Afraid of not getting good grades. Afraid of not negotiating a high salary. Afraid of not making enough money. Afraid I wouldn't find a partner. And that fear kept me working hard, paying taxes and helped ensure I put the value of money above even family. No matter what the government, people who live in constant fear will always be easily controlled.
Microsoft promises no more unexpected update reboots
> (better game engines, graphics cards, leading to more immersive worlds and movie-like narratives + multiplayer is exciting)

I strongly disagree that better game engines, graphic cards led to more immersive worlds and movie-like narratives. It's like saying Marvel movies are more immersive and have better narratives than pre-fx movies.
You are wrong, I did a lot of research, but you obviously did so much more that it would be easy for you to answer my questions. Hopefully, one day your busy schedule would allow you to do it. It is a pity for now it only allowed to post a content-free comment.
"The ease of spreading information is also ease of spreading misinformation, and objection to censorship means there's no way to control spread of misinformation."

Censorship is non-consensual filtering of information (the mediator censors without consent of producer and consumer of information).

This does not mean we can't control the spread of disinformation at all: by investing in education, and educating people about the importance of verification in general or formal verification in specific where possible, society could invest in infrastructure that helps in weeding out false information without twisting the consumers hand willy-nilly.

As an example: without any need for censorship, if someone claims to give a proof for a theorem that supposedly follows from set.mm I can consent to censorship by voluntarily using MetaMath to verify it without even trying to understand the proof myself, and then discover that the proof is false, without some intermediary of information needing to censor anything for me.

This is kind of the underlying theme behind the "blockchain craze", educating people the surprising applicability of logic/mathematics to the real world, even if it is very hard to design and prove the security of such systems, and to interpret the assumptions of such designs with desirable properties as being the requirements of infrastructure we need to build in order to enjoy such a decentralized commons.
I was thinking about this the other day.

Would a good solution for /really/ long term storage be a kind of WORM ROM based on fuses that could be burned to 'program' a given area? (I think some EPROM might be this, but I'm talking about more storage density than even current top end flash drives.) Obviously you'd only want to use this for the LONG term storage, but if it's cheep enough I could see it being useful in the same use cases that existing optical media were and even in roles like backup / audit logs.
The machine-readable line gets substituted letters (ü --> ue). The "normal page" doesn't.

Gave me a tense moment in China, when a border agent questioned the difference between the name on my ticket and the name in the passport.

Of course, to Germans both forms are interchangeable, but I'd compare a Chinese letter sign by sign, too.

He finally accepted it when I showed him that the machine-readable line was identically spelled.
Please can you elaborate more about the legal aspects? I've scanned a lot of Chinese-language material (especially bilingual English/Chinese and dialects) and found some new Unicode characters that way.

I'm reluctant to share it online because I'm scared about copyright.
#metoo in China (Chinese language)
Modern software engineering is a cult.
If anti-semitism existed, how could that relationship have been professional? You can't have it both ways.

Either the relationship is professional, meaning that the associated -ism didn't exist, or that relationship was not as professional as you were imagining it. People do not arbitrarily turn off their prejudices when they enter a workplace.

> I work with several religious people (varying religions) who think I deserve to burn in hell for all eternity for various reasons, which is quite a severe level of hatred if you think about it. Yet it doesn't impact the professional relationship.

This only works because said religious people are too underpowered for the concreteness of their beliefs to be practical, so they don't really believe it on a significant level, and it doesn't make any difference. That relationship was certainly not professional when Christianity was at its power peak. Modern Christianity is very, very contradictory, has become so to survive, it's not really a good example.

What I am saying is, if there is a significant negative belief in someone's address, that relationship cannot be professional. If a manager thinks women are below him, there is no way he can be professional in his interactions with them, it just doesn't work.
Didn't Genius do something like this? I remember seeing random political articles with annotations from pundits a while back.
One doesn't need to save the world. But not making it worse through ads and ubiquitous tracking would be nice.

So is not pushing negative externalities inherent to web apps to customers just because it makes web devs more productive.

Today's web is a monster.
I fail to see the relevance of Iran's example although drawing moral equivalence with a country which has often been decried to belong to "axis of evil" seems counter productive
Audio from the 1999 Shoot Down of F-117 “Vega 31” Over Serbia Is Chilling
The simple feature of reducing settlements from days into seconds is by itself a great use-case. However, there is a lot of structural incentives against it. If you're a big bank and make nice transaction fees because your clients trust you to make a secure, legal, and successful transaction, you probably don't want blockchain, because it's a threat to your business model. That's certainly one of the major reasons it's taking so long to be accepted by mainstream banks.

But long term, banks will need to accept faster transaction times. Blockchain or not, it's ridiculous you need to wait days to transfer money when you can send email in milliseconds.

Rather than accept Bitcoin, it's far more likely big-banks will get together and form their own crypto coin, which will enable faster transfers, but keep them in control. They'll get regulations passed that will make Bitcoin and most other crypto currencies illegal or legally risky, whereas their system will be blessed by regulators.

Under this scenario (I think the likeliest), the existing power hegemony stays this same, crypto-currency's idealistic roots become viewed as naive and antiquated, and consumers get slightly faster transfers through their same old banks with marginally lower transaction fees.
Everything comes with a price attached. Free means different thing to different people.
Has iMessage been made to work on hackintosh or is it still locked to Apple hardware?
I don't think it exists, but really it takes you less than 2 hours of code to figure out what to do, if you're already in C++ or Python. These Frameworks expose C++ and Python API
Why is SAT so ridiculously easy that thousands have perfect score?
yeah an the quest focuses on activate energy from Hoover Dam :)
The problem is industries such as the financial sector are extremely resistant to change. Banks are still using COBOL! They are so slow to adapt, it could take a decade or more for blockchain technology to be integrate.
Ideally let's also have various colleges create new versions of the source instructions and collectively create a better modern set to use as bootstrapping (and feed this back as the foundation for future education as well).
Why publish on Medium when they could publish somewhere more crypto-friendly such as Steemit? Or even make their own blog? Is a Chrome Browser extension really how you want to be managing your money?
Wow. Had no idea that Sid Meier was connected to this game. His Railroad Tycoon (esp RT2) is one of the greatest "business simulations" of all time!
If you're a Web developer and homeless it is by choice, and choice alone.
Khjj
Thanks for the reference! I got curious and looked it up. Turns out the term is 'segwit'.

But more to the point, turns out some cryptocurrency implementations move the transaction database to a segwit system because of the scalability problem.

Huh.
I see many of non-trivial java projects using UnSafe. At this point, why not make UnSafe a feature and let programmers use memory outside the purview of Garbage Collector ?
They deserve that drop. A lot of them were scams and a lot of them were well intentioned but badly executed. That happens with startups in the same way though: many (most?) funded startups go bust. In ICOs this is just far more public record as you can follow their demise publicly. If startups would do that in the same way, no one would be so surprised or shouting scam as much. A lot of startups I did competitor analysis on or who we talked with for acquisition or merger had nothing to do with blockchain but also got millions on vague promises and never delivered while burning through the millions. Some of them actually being obvious scams (easy to point out which ones if you are in my industry). Why would that be different for blockchain projects? Are there statistics to show fiat vc funded startups failures vs ico failures? Kickstarter etc failures vs ico failures? XXX scams vs ico scams?
No doubt about this.

One issue that messes up the HR response.

Stronger staff when discriminated against sometimes can / do leave. They thankfully just don't put up with the crap, and HR that's not on their game can miss the signs of this.

If you have good or even what you consider OK people leaving FIND OUT WHY AS A TOP PRIORITY! HR is way too reactive. I'm serious people DO NOT leave for no reason.

HR also deals with the BS claims. And these can suck up insane time and HR can get a totally warped / fight mode approach to these issues. Even if there are not a ton of these, they can suck up more then their fair share of time, so HR can develop a pretty strong bias I think.

My own suggestions.

1) Leadership from top, behave the way you want staff to.

2) Pay attention to strong / even just what you consider ok workers leaving - this is wildly under-weighted as a warning signal around discrimination.

2) Be much more open to letting people try to do things. If they can, great. If they can't, they and you learn something. A fair bit of legit unfair treatment claims come from folks not getting a chance to do something.

4) I'm also a fan of trying to get the BS cases out of HR or into a different HR area so HR leadership and parts of rest of HR don't warp so bad. It seriously takes on total BS case dragging out for a few years to absolutely warp people. It's all they talk about (ie, 20 real issues - resolved in various way, 1 BS issue that drags out - all people talk about).