skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wouldn't mind if PaintShop Pro made less frequent releases. None of the features I care about has changed in a significant way in the last 18 years or so. I used PSP 7 in the early oughts to do some web design work on the side; I still use PSP X8 every now and then to make transparent PNGs. As long as it gets the job done on a platform I have access to, I don't care how many platforms they don't support.
"Plate tectonics" means something a bit more specific than "convection currents with the surface of the fluid freezing". In particular, it implies 1) relatively large stable plates, 2) organized regions where crust is created/destroyed, and 3) large horizontal movement of those plates relative to each other.

Prior to ~2 billion years ago, Earth didn't have plate tectonics. You had large vertical motion (not horizontal), and creation+destruction of crust, but no organized centers where this was occurring. In other words, you didn't have large plates and what plates there were did not move long distances horizontally.

As another example, Venus has tectonic activity (it's periodically resurfaced and has volcanoes), but it doesn't have plate tectonics. You see regions of compression and extension, but no subduction zones and spreading ridges.

It's likely that what we call plate tectonics requires abundant water, at least on "rocky" planets. Hydrous phases of silicate minerals are required for the very weak faults and localized weak mantle required to have subduction. Without subduction, you don't have plate tectonics.
It’s time Migrating to Java 11: Why you should migrate to next Java now
Well, to be technical the US does have colonies and territories--the largest of which is Puerto Rico, whose residents have no vote in US elections. There are a number of other small colonies with varying degrees of independence and representation (Guam, American Samoa, and the Virgin Islands).

And of course the US almost in it's entirety owes its size and natural resources to very real "empire building" in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Admittedly the territorial expansion of the US has slowed/stopped in the past 100-200 years, but it's not hard to understand how for someone belonging to a group that lived in a given place for many, many multiples of that duration, the current situation might feel, even today, like occupation. (see: hawaii sovereignty movement, native american reservations)

I suppose the question is "when does an empire stop being an empire?" Is it the day it stops expanding? 100 years later? When nobody remembers how things were "before"? I think it's an interesting question.
Its patently obvious. No sane individual will systematically go against their economy self interest.
Author here.

I've talked to a nginx product manager and he's told me changes that are specific to one customer are unlikely to be accepted.

Also in our implementation we took some shortcuts so it may not be suitable for upstream as is anyway
As a Brazilian myself, I hate this. People are not late to work related stuff, but on a social setting this is ridiculous! I'm very punctual in everything that I do and always get to events on time. I hate the fact that being late is considered "cultural" and not a huge middle finger to other people's time.
Self-Provisioning of User Accounts in PostgreSQL via Unprivileged Anon Access
Probably because people already have their pick of those languages on the server but not on the browser client where it's even more important to get things right from a UX standpoint.

Static-typing, immutable datastructures, FP... these are things that even the Javascript ecosystem has been moving towards with React, Typescript, Redux, and more.

If you're making a language for the browser, you can offer a lot of value by rolling these into a single tool. For example, it may be much simpler for you to use Elm than to approximate Elm with your own menagerie of JS tools.
Being a democracy or not doesn't really have anything to do with being an empire, generally you have an empire when you have a state substantially composed of multiple nations. But generally with imperial democracies its only one nation that is a democracy, like in the British Empire where Britain, a democracy, ruled a huge colonial empire.

If you really squint hard you could argue that the rest of NATO are military tribute states giving soldiers to the US empire but that's a very strained interpretation. Japan is currently pretty dependent on US military protection but that doesn't seem to have turned into economic exploitation. Certainly American efforts to get Japan to open up to more US exports isn't something Japan has just rolled over on.

But the current international system does have the US at its center and colloquially people call this the American Empire, and we know what they're talking about even if it isn't really an empire.
Or how they intentionally obfuscate the unit pricing of items in the same category? One says $xx per oz, the other $xx per lb, the other $xx per kg... I've been wanting to make a userscript to fix that for a while.
If you haven't seen it, check out foobar2000 [1]. It was created by the same dude that made the original Winamp (which is now owned by Yahoo, IIRC).

[1]: https://www.foobar2000.org/
>Idk, all this hearsay and the saboteur rebranded whistleblower coming out against TSLA/SolarCity with no real substantial proof

Why is he a saboteur re-branded a whistleblower, and not a whistleblower re-branded a saboteur? Because Elon said it?

Why on earth do you think the world is out to get Tesla? Because Elon said it?
Being extremely persistent can make up for a lot of deficiencies. It's totally fine to lag behind everyone initially if you're willing to keep going long after most other people stop making progress. There's nothing wrong with being the tortoise rather than the hare.

The other important thing to learn is that you can become an expert at something. Once you have one skill under your belt you realize that it's possible to climb the ladder of expertise on almost any topic if you're able to stick with it.
There has never been a time where America wasn't segregated or in equal. I think throughout America's history we've had a long runway: the fact that the continent was open to use w/o a well organized Mexican or Indian state to stop expansion, the isolation from WW1 & WW2, the fast amount of land in this country and natural resources, the decline of Europe and relative weakness of China, etc. We've been able to take advantage of these conditions for 200+ years. The rest of the world is catching up though, we will need to really unlock the potential of people who in the past have been marginalized to continue our run as a superpower.
> Yeah, I'm sorry, but as a citizen of the UK, the US system of bail and bail bounty hunters is just nuts.

Which is somewhat ironic since the foundation of our bail system originates from UK common law and the limitations on it (e.g. the 8th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution) originate from limitations put into place after abuses of bail in the UK legal system. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excessive_Bail_Clause#Origins
Any ranking system you can suggest can and will be gamed and exploited. The problem is that Amazon is trying to rank products at all, not whatever opaque algorithm they are using to do the ranking. They need to turn off all the ranking and rating, and start actually vetting their suppliers, but that’s hard and expensive so they will never do it.
Project MAXS: Control Android and Receive Notifications Over XMPP
I'm experimenting with including formal methods on my team. We're working with concurrency in an event-sourced system and want to be reasonably certain our design is correct. We're also working on deeply embedding our specifications into our test suites to address some of the trade-offs mentioned near the end. We like to eat our cake.

I'm down with advocating more use of formal methods in industry and open source. The cost of using these tools has come down at such a rapid pace in the last decade or so compared to the rising cost of complexity our system designs are taking on. It's starting to make the trade-off attractive imho.
Americans spend too much on nearly all government provided services. Anyone who thinks that more government spending is the solution really doesn’t understand the underlying issues at all.

When it costs 5x as much to build a new subway line in NYC compared to Paris [1], spending 20% more on infrastructure isn’t going to do anything. Arguably it will make things worse, allowing the existing inefficiencies to continue.

This problem occurs in all the areas where America lags behind other first world countries. Education, healthcare, infrastructure - spending is equal or greater than comparable nations, but the returns on each dollar spent is much smaller.

People try to simplify this issue in a partisan manner to having bigger government (Democrats) vs having more free markets (Republicans), but when you look at each of these areas in greater depth you realize that it’s not that simple. There are a multitude of causes unique to America that contributes to costs being so high, as exemplified in this thread’s article. In the case of health care, elsewhere in the world there exist both free market and government provided solutions that deliver better outcomes than the American system.

For a more in depth coverage on this topic, I highly recommend:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
> How many elementary school children have perished in school fires in the last 25 years?

How much effort has society put in to ensure that they don't?
All laws based on age, ability/disability, the place someone (or their parent) was born, gender, prior criminal status, and sexuality. I'm only talking about the US, though.

I can give examples of each if you don't believe me.
Dismal? I find the resulting videos very pretty and I find it amazing that they were done mechanically, not using ray tracing.
The essential guide to scaling Webapps for newbs and non-techies
> I’m thinking in IPv6 terms here

You do realize that the utopian future you dream of will never happen!

There is too much money to be had hording and selling IPv4 addresses.
I'm not sure the Dems are focused on the poor anymore. One of Trumps main pushes was that he would represent the working class Americans who are working but still struggling. I think the GOP has been targeting the working poor away from the Dems in recent years
I noticed a billboard the other day. All it had was an edge-to-edge photograph, a raised squircle outline (iOS app icon shape of square with rounded corners), and a one word name.

It was a very simple ad, but it made me double-take, because I suddenly realized that the squircle has become such an ingrained visual term of our cultural reference frame that it's sufficient to show just that outline to communicate that this is advertising for a mobile app.
Both those books are excellent. I first read Soul of a New Machine back in the 80's when I was a spotty young apprentice Data General engineer learning how to repair Nova's and Eclipse S-series machines.
Understood. Perhaps you could make your improvements modular in some cases so that people can toggle them on, either as nginx modules, or compile flags in nginx core?
Making Practical Use of OpenSSL’s S_client
Bail isn't needed. Most people show up to court. You can go track down folks who don't if the crime is worth it.

You can pay for those people through taxes.

Currently Cash bail, and pretrial incarceration is used as a punishment and serves no other purpose.
"Immutable", eh? That would exclude wealth. But disparities of wealth are a fountainhead of unequal treatment under US bail laws.
I don't remember Lisp or linked lists being an important part of the book. Yeah, you'll deal with them a lot because it's using Scheme, but that's really not the main point.

I used it to get started with CS as a programmer who didn't study CS in college. I thought it was pretty good. It assumes the reader is intelligent. A lot of books and tutorials do way too much hand-holding for my taste.

It's an intro book. If you've already done CS in college I don't expect you'd find it very insightful.
This was god damn depressing
Of course it is, American popular culture loves cynicism, especially about America.

Why would you hate America because of the president in office? America is so much more than the President or the party in power. America is the underlying institutional design, the system of checks and balances, the Constitution, the accepted transfer of power.

Cynics don't seem to appreciate any of these things, their respect for America resting entirely on a myopic view of who occupies the Oval Office.

That's the problem.
Brazilians love to pretend they "relaxed" but they're the most uptight people. If you don't follow their cultural rules to a T they get all weird and upset.
Obviously some situations are complicated or don't lend themselves to doing so in a timely manner, but my healthcare/insurance provider (UWHealth and Quartz) has a priceline and online message center for immediate quotes without insurance. I use it even though I have insurance, especially before appointments where I anticipate what tests the doctor is going to order. They're usually reasonable, at least by American standards. Surgery has been more difficult to pin numbers down for because of the facilities.
> It is quite possible -- overwhelmingly probable, one might guess -- that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology.

-- Noam Chomsky
Personal anecdote: Someone in my high school class nearly failed a course after she picked up a particularly engaging series.

It was interesting to hear her talk about how her parents punished her by prohibiting her from reading for the month.
Here's the question at the heart of this- Which do you feel to be a greater problem in our society; Imprisoning people unjustly, or allowing criminals back into the street to commit more crimes?

My answer is "both". Bail reform advocates typically say they want people to be kept out of jail before their trial, for free, if they pose no flight risk or danger to the community (ie, violent criminal past) and want people kept in jail if they pose a flight risk or a danger to the community. There is not a perfect solution, but we can do much better.

TL;dr- not all crimes are the same, not all criminals are the same, and we both agree the system is broken. The difference seems to be that you're not actually advocating for any specific solution, just pointing out that bad people have done bad things.
It is some new level of tackiness to post an article about yourself that was written by your company's PR team and has no useful content in it that isn't just a shallow ad for you and your company.
>Source? Athenian direct democracy was only for males, legally sanctioned slaves and allowed for a simple majority to ostracize people

That's irrelevant to the discussion though, as that was simply the norm then across regimes, not a special characteristic of Athenian direct democracy.

Not to mention that the US representative democracy was only for males until the 1920s, had slaves until 1865 and segregation until the 1970s. And that's 2.5 millennia later than that pesky Athenian direct democracy.
Is balancing needs really the best, though?

Balancing everyone's needs tends to result in something that doesn't make anyone really happy.

This leads to a least common denominator result (you can have any color you want, as long as it's black) which is objectively worse in aggregate than "optimize for some, and let someone else optimize for the others".
>I cant tell if Elon sent his reddit marketing team to bombard HN too.

Oh, they're here, no doubt about it.

It's going to be 10 times funnier than the iamverysmart crowd here who told us we didn't like Theranos because it was run by a woman.
CallPage lets you call your website visitors
Maybe you're right. What life experience(s) would help lead me to seeing it the other way?
I don't know if it was true in 1835 that "The laws of which I speak are English" but today the situation is utterly different in the two countries.

The UK has no concept of "cash bail", either you may go free, or you are a danger or flight risk and so you're held in jail by the state on its dime to avoid that.

The court can set fairly broad rules for bail, it just doesn't [this used to say "can't" but see the example below which proves that they actually can] ask for cash, e.g. "You must give us your passports and other travel documents so that you can't fly" or "You mustn't go near Jimmy who says you assaulted him" or even "You must go see the police once per week between now and your court date". If you break any of the rules, then you may stop qualifying for bail and get sent to prison until trial.
Why This 48-Year-Old Woman Is Building Ghana's Biggest Solar Farm
Every time I play around with the idea of decentralized/p2p networks in my head or discuss it with friends, one of the questions that always comes up is:

* If a company or product can't lock the user, their data, and their friends in their platform, how are they supposed to make money, learn, train their models, etc?

Could we somehow create a common framework that is responsible of normalising and anonymising the user's data and providing them either for public consumption or to exchange them in return of a company hosting their full (encrypted) data or providing add-on services for them that require cpu cycles?

I understand that it would hard to agree upon the normalisation and anonymisation rules and maybe limiting in some cases but I don't think that it would be out of the realm of possibilities.
Yep... thanks, wrote that too quickly, I'll update
China threw massive subsidies at solar, and they readily admit there was a great deal of waste and graft, but now that the dust has settled China is the industry leader.
I don't think linuxftw was necessarily saying that government intervention is inappropriate.

They were saying that the nature of government intervention is to distort the underlying economics.

It is therefore unsurprising when businesses grow up around these temporary distortions rather than long term business models.

It's the "price" we pay for whatever upsides there are to the subsidy.
My co-worker. He is a fantastic database guy. Super willing to share. I lucked out.
Bail is NOT broken. Working as intended. Will not fix.

It's profitable.
It works against the poor.
It works in favor of the rich.

The only way the world could be a better place would be to bring back "for profit" prisons. Vacant cells mean lower profit, decreased shareholder value and lower executive bonuses. Thus increasing incentive to incarcerate more people. A working bail system would work against that profitability -- except for incarcerating poor people.

I think I'm going to be sick now.
I would say the latter. People have escaped their upbringing, culture, and socioeconomic position. I’m not saying it’s easy, but it’s not immutable either.

But I’ve never seen a woman become a man or a white person become a POC. So that’s pretty immutable.

I’ll take examples from either category though.
> The reality is the hardest most complex stuff is literally solved and produced by an elite few. All of which could be taught or learnt but no one gives a shit.

The elite few don't really want anyone joining them, so nobody does. Look at the state of academia and look at lack of training in jobs. Nobody wants anyone to be elite, so people don't bother, there's no benefit in it. Your problem is that you think you're important, that you think the most useful contribution from a person is what they do personally, but all that does is just advance, you, personally.

The thing is, the elite are often much more worried about being elite than about what they're actually doing. Once you see that, you know the incentive is corrupt. It's a status thing for them. And how dare anyone challenge their status. That's really all this is. It's hardly about the advancement of technology, because if it was, those people would be out there teaching, or trying to address the informational overload, and not looking smug. It's elitist because it's utterly disregarding most of human experience and presenting yours as superior, and your entire argument will ultimately derive from that view and pretty much everything you say after that could be really anything as long as it supports your idea that you're superior. That's why elitism is bad, it's destructive to conception of reality.

I know plenty of people who don't look at things as magic but who also don't consider themselves as some "wizards". Maybe you should try getting off your high horse and talking to people some and figuring out what it is that they are doing all day and you'll understand how silly everything you're saying here is. But as with everything else, it's easier to sit on top than to try to understand.

Snobbery is all this is, and likely unearned, can't say the association between perceiving yourself as elite and actually being so is very good at all.
Well, Grain is as well so is that really an issue?
See also: https://www.scribd.com/document/385100943/Letter-Washington-...
SolarCity, not Tesla.
I wish we didn't overpay compared to other first world countries, but although that is very annoying it is probably sustainable. Furthermore, we have several examples of other first world countries paying much less, using systems ranging from full socialized medicine (the UK) to almost fully private systems with some government regulation (Switzerland), so that fixing this is not a matter of figuring out something that works. It is a matter of getting enough people to agree on the same fix.

What worries me more is how the costs keep going up, and that's when measured as a percentage of GDP, so you can't just hand wave it away as part of everything going up over time due to inflation.

That's not sustainable.

Worse, the same thing is happening in other first world countries, with the costs going up at similar rates as they are here, so unlike the overspending problem this is not just a matter of getting the will to adopt one of the known solutions.

There's a great interactive view of the data at the OECD health spending page: https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm

Uncheck the "latest data available" box, and that will enable the year range sliders. Set them to 1970-2017 and the graph will show the growth over time for several countries. Mouse over the lines on the graph and it will give you number.
Could another parameter be how it crumples in a crash?
I don't want my AI supercar to transform into inescapable cage on impact.
>Why are we blaming the employees when these kind of things come from high pressure management.

Hypocrisy, pure and simple.

Go read how HackerNews reacted to the Wells Fargo scandal.
Are age and gender still required to be called out? I believe in gender equality and do not find it extraordinary when a woman does something. I expect all people to be able to accomplish great things regardless of their age or gender.
I've seen this argument that if outcomes of public services( like education) is not upto par then the problem is that there wasn't enough funding for these programs and solution is to increase funding.

is this argument is fundamentally unfalsifiable?

Is it possible to do estimations like we do for software projects. Improving education by x% will cost y$ or are there way too many moving variable to any sort of estimations.
Draw Milan

What does it mean? Is he drawing the entire city?!

Jeez, here I am, writing "do laundry" in my list :(
Then I support this intervention. This idea that there is some "pure" form of undisturbed economics that is practiced outside the framework of achieving some larger social objective is also an absurd myth.