skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of my favorite DFW observations was about how on his press tour following the release of Infinite Jest, he was doing readings two or so weeks after it had released. People were coming up to him and praising him, wanting a piece of him.

He commented to.... Maybe David Lipsky I think? that it would have been nearly impossible for these fans to have read the book in its entirety, and that it made him super self-conscious that people liked the concept/marketing/fame of the book more than the writing itself.

A friend of mine once joked that he wanted to seem like someone who has read Steinbeck's East of Eden, but didn't actually want to read it.
And he's the one you hear about because of this article. My bet is a lot of folks are quietly leaving Google because the moral compass of the company is just gone.
Source?

I don't hear about rampant replication problems in chemistry/physics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
Thats why intelligent people do not work in open source and do not post elaborate, well worked out information on boards such as HN for free.

Ad.Absurdum.by Circumstance

The trouble is the organization, that is not involved in research and education, that grows with every funding round. Every good bureaucracy can grow - detached from the actual cause and reason for its existence.
A Rollable Display Device with Flexible Screen Real Estate and Gestural Input [pdf]
True, but 100+ years ago, there were practical engineering limitations on building vertically.

I don't remember the details of the history I read. It was a long time ago. I just remember that it made the point that LA sprawled from the beginning and this had to do with what made financial sense at the time. What we can do today is different from what was feasible back then.
Actually I was referring to google.
The SUSE Open Source Policy
It's bit like asking why would you use a truck when several vans can do.. and be more "horizontally scalable".

Mainframe is a really big server, and it is actually plenty elastic. You can divide it into smaller logical servers (LPARs).

The only downside is price. But I think for larger installations and certain workloads it will come out similar with a server fleet.
Sometimes you give up a Queen to get to the King :/
Which history? I'd love to know more.

I've got stories of relatives living anywhere from Hermosa Beach to Huntington Park pre-depression, so I'm inclined to believe LA certainly spread out early on, but I'd guess most of the density was along the coast and rail.
You would be surprised how many have already done so, albeit quietly.
Bezos pays the Danegeld. I'm disappointed in him. I'm also not sure what political player he's paying off...he didn't seem to need much influence with Seattle politicians lately.

Bezos is smart enough to know that the problem with Seattle homelessness has nothing to do with access to money. The city spends like water on the homeless, and we see nothing from it (which makes the spending a complete success for its intended beneficiaries, the bureaucrats in charge of the money.) We need a new policy to deal with them, and with this we won't get it.
35 here. Can confirm. I can't say my iPhone X has been worth what it cost, and I'm unlikely to replace it until it dies.
I like DFW. I just think he's a witty entertaining writer. I'm far from what I'd consider an intellectual. Love pop culture, video games and other "dumb" stuff. Thanks for the generalized insult though.
Wrongful detainee from Gitmo for 14 years is now sharing paintings on Twitter
I don't know you or Jack, but it sounds like the word you would use to describe him is as having integrity:

"Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence—that man is an indivisible entity, an integrated unit of two attributes: of matter and consciousness, and that he may permit no breach between body and mind, between action and thought, between his life and his convictions—that, like a judge impervious to public opinion, he may not sacrifice his convictions to the wishes of others, be it the whole of mankind shouting pleas or threats against him—that courage and confidence are practical necessities, that courage is the practical form of being true to existence, of being true to truth, and confidence is the practical form of being true to one’s own consciousness."
That is actually a very popular opinion, and also very poorly informed. Your reasoning is entirely anecdotal and a trivial exercise in confirmation bias.

Here's one article (among many) exploring why "Seattle's homeless population went up 44% in the last two years."[1] Spoiler: it's not because addiction and mental illness went up 44%.

[1] https://q13fox.com/2017/12/06/seattles-homeless-population-w...
It's not zero sum. One family makes more than before. The other makes the same as before. Net win. The extra money in the pocket of the first family is not coming out of the pocket of the second. It's coming out of Amazon's pocket.

The alternative is that no one gets raises. That's would be loss for a large number of families and no change for others.
As a precursor, I don't have anything necessarily against the concept of a mainframe. It's just one big shared computer, not too much different than a kube cluster etc. But if there is one thing that definitely deserves to die in the mainframe world, it is IBM's predatory tactics for vendor lock in. Mainframes running linux I can see being around for a good time.

Watch this video for a pretty cool story behind IBM and EBCDIC.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUIqtevjod4
Watch how his quitting impacts Google (especially bottom line) in no way what so ever!

"All in all he's just another brick in the wall"
iPhone XS with classes.
I think the X is not for sale because the Xs is an identical phone, except for the newer A12 chip and increased water resistance by 1m. If they were to sell the X it would have to be at a lower price point, then who would buy the Xs at $1000?
This is a post about a post. Here's the discussion of the Breitbart source post with many more comments and upvotes: https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/09/12/leaked-video-googl...
That’s a good start. I’d expand it to be: 1 month, 6 month, 12 month, 24 month.
Totally unrelated to the article's content but is Refactor now part of common english?
Video: Time’s up GDPR is here – Now what?
Why are you dropping Ayn Rand quotes all over this thread? I count three quote-heavy comments already. It's bizarre and pretty spammy.
In the real world, what's going to make Python less accessible to PoC new to programming(and new programmers generally) is the arbitrary change in well-defined industry-wide terminology. Working from documentation and learning resources that employ master/slave when those terms have been memory-holed in the newest versions of the language is the sort of seemingly minor change that trips up neophytes.

I'm not totally opposed to changing master/slave. But in light of the real cost of this sort of breaking change I'd want to see some evidence of actual harm, rather than some guy(who, I feel compelled to point out, is a white man) insisting that we change it for what are, at best, totally theoretical and speculative harms.
Supersonic Aircraft Could Fly Again as Congress Targets Supersonic Ban
As a mainframer:

IBM should make the z/OS available for free experimentation! That's the biggest obstacle and reason why people do not know it. Even the long dead Solaris has more hackers on it than z/OS.

Also, millenials will also want job security and pensions, eventually. Just wait when they have kids.
Many thanks for the explanation – you've illuminated a path to a deeper understanding of art history and aesthetics, which I hope one day to possess!
You know what's overheated? Suggesting that the only way enforce human rights is through armed conflict or cold war.
Transformation from a medieval guild to evidence-based medicine was a painful journey in medice, too.

For example Semmelweis 170 years ago. He gathered data and published findings, that patient mortality is greatly reduced if doctors disinfect their hands before treating patients. Other doctors took this suggestion as offensive, rejected his ideas and attacked him for suggesting them. He had a mental breakdown and died in an asylum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
There are so many options out there today but the customer experience isn’t as good as amazon. Fact is amazon’s customer obsession is a real thing, and so they’re deservedly winning customers right now. If they ever slipped, Walmart is definitely eyeing their spot.
That's not what transducers are, though. They're a "recipe" for a function composite. I'm simplifying things, but transducers compose to form a function that then executes against each element in the collection passed in. The main difference is that no intermediary data collections are created. There's more, and it's worth reading up on them.
> to treat the groups differently, rather than bundling them together into a proposal to "solve homelessness."

I agree. Add the absence of a healthcare system to that too. Personal anecdote: a homeless man offered to wash my car for money. He seemed intelligent and nice, so I agreed. He told me the story of him becoming homeless. Both he and his wife worked and rented an OK place in OK part of SF. His wife got into a car accident and their crappy insurance couldn't handle it, the deductibles were astronomical because, as usual, some of the "independent businessmen" who "provided care" were out of network, as if the unconscious victim had any control over who touched her.

So they had to drop their income below certain level to qualify for free healthcare. Now he didn't have enough for rent and moved to under a highway bridge and was visibly embarrassed by it.
Show HN: Whoops – PHP errors for cool kids
Yes, and American tests are silly in comparison to even a regular term exam in Chinese high school.
Something like 80% of software costs are maintenance.
North Carolina's Natural Hurricane Defenses Are Disappearing
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17980665 and marked it off-topic.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17980834 and marked it off-topic.
Let's say you paid $1,000,000 for a home that would fetch $200,000 in most other parts of the country.

What would you do if someone proposed a law that you figured would half the value of your home? Eat the loss or oppose the law?

Property owners in CA are being rational. They don't like the poop, commutes and homelessness. But they aren't willing to take a half-million dollar bath on their real-estate investment.
Please do not take HN threads on generic ideological tangents, and certainly not repeatedly in a thread.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17980424 and marked it off-topic.
If the government taking things by force, or by the implied threat of force, is bad, then taxation is bad, and if you don't have any kind of taxation you don't have a government in any meaningful sense.
Genuinely interested - what makes LA a great place to live?
On Intelligence, Jeff Hawkins
I don't recall. I believe it was part of a book with short excerpts from many famous urban planning books.

I was (or had been) bedridden. I had been to San Francisco for the first time and fallen madly in love with the city and I spent $300 at the bookstore on the way home on urban planning books and other books that I felt made sense for my mad, mad scheme to get well and someday be an urban planner. (And also to keep me occupied while I recuperated.)

I'm terrible with titles anyway and this was a particularly bad time in my life.

Sorry.
It will very likely kill far fewer per mile driven than humans do. Unfortunately you're right -- it probably still will kill some. Even nonfatal accidents will be scrutinized heavily and leave a lasting impression of fear/loss of control.
The ideas aren't framed in a way that follows the standard thread of discourse
Ok, we took the word 'senior' out of the title to avoid confusion and offtopicness.
Right, they often have very little or nothing. Which puts them in the other category of people who will stand up: those who have nothing to lose.
I did Google it and I found 1.7 million refugee applications in Germany in the period 2008-2017. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_migrant_crisis#Asylum...)

Where did you get your 5 million from?
Well, not that I think this guy's gesture (brave though it might be) will amount to anything - China is the guinea pig. If mass surveillance and mass censorship work there, you can bet it'll come here, too. They can perfect it from a distance, at very little risk if things go wrong, and spring the trap on us when it's ready.
Show HN: ChainRelay – Connect your apps to smart contracts
I disagree that it's this cut and dry. Unless you are stuffing PII into the GA cookie, there's nothing personal there and therefore it doesn't require consent -- at the least, you're not going to get in trouble for skipping it. Furthermore, even if an anonymous user did give consent, then requested a deletion, the company would be hard pressed to verify that person's identity in order to scrub the anonymous data.
A third option would be to find technical means to actively undermine and circumvent the Great Firewall of China.
How to get a job in programming languages
Automotive industries never had problems with attracting taxpayer’s money. Graduating the car from break-clutch-engine machine to airliner level of complexity vehicle is a perfect money sink.
I don't think this makes sense, while the C-level exec may have a lot more to lose measured on an absolute scale, the quality of their life will not change significantly following their resignation. However, the janitor potentially has his or her entire livelihood at stake and will likely struggle to support themselves until they manage to find another job.

For this reason, I think if the lower-level staff at your company are quitting over moral/ethical issues, you probably have much worse problems than if your highly-valued employees are leaving.

However, I'd imagine this particular employee has a lot more in common with the VP than the janitor and I don't imagine he will have any trouble finding new employment following this.
Worth nothing that 'the type of education' is only one factor, the other being the 'the type of people' that do that kind of study, and their opportunity costs afterwards.

My Grad School peers mostly got decent jobs and it's hard to convince the wife/husband to let all of that go. Most people who make good corporate warriors may not make very good entrepreneurs at all.

But of course, so many do and add to that an MBA is definitely a signal of higher levels of motivation, education etc. which are positive signals.
Building vertically costs more than running utilities an additional 100ft.

Building vertically is even less attractive when you consider CA's geological situation.
On Waste Plastics at Sea, She Finds Unique Microbial Multitudes
> But in most of America we need to get back to the point where cars are no longer a necessity

While I completely agree with you, the cultural barriers to this are petty much a non-starter in much of the country. I love not owning a car and being able to rely on mass transit where I live (Austin, TX), but Texas is so culturally opposed to anything like this.

A lot of people think that mass transit is for the poor, and the car represents independence and freedom. Go where you want, when you want (but you're gonna be bumper-to-bumper most of the way there.)

I hate that mentality, but driverless cars represent the "have your cake and eat it too" solution. It more closely aligns with the culture of driving here in the US, while also claiming numerous commercial and infrastructure benefits.
I really like two things from the author's system, but I will call out that neither of them require org-mode:

1) Being able to clone the author's blog repo and read it offline (just a bonus that it's already in org mode so no post-processing necessary). Is there a "lemme download everything by this author and read offline?" button on Medium?

2) The blog being in a public Git repository is nice for transparency.
>Self-driving cars need to be even better or people will die.

He is right - the problem with your response to this statement is that it doesn't identify the _actual_ reason behind why they need to be better, and it's a problem identified by the article in question: When a human driver swerves randomly and kills someone, we know EXACTLY who is to blame, and something can be done. If a driverless car, or even a car with "driverless technology" that also has a driver in it (like the Tesla driver mentioned in the article) hits someone and god forbid kills them, we still have no idea who is to blame for that problem, because it practically becomes a marketing argument in some cases.

Before we can be okay with driverless cars, ESPECIALLY if we don't plan on them being 100% accident free, we need to solve a lot of ethical and legal battles that don't seem to be even on the minds of the people that tout this as the future, or a necessity.
speaking from experience, even a short gap during which you do not have an official address can create tremendous hurtles to getting housing, insurance, and employment.
Of course, I'd love to spend the rest of my afternoon arguing with a libertarian on the internet! What I'm trying to say is
You want mainframe in similar situations as when you need EC2 ridiculously large instances. That is when you have workload that absolutely most run as a whole on one big single machine. Typically that means OLTP database which cannot work with some relaxed consistency model (payment settlement is often cited example of such thing).

And for the elasticity part, mainframes are where the whole virtualization and hypervisors started. Although, or maybe because, purchasing and operating an mainframe is significant investment in terms of both capex and opex (it is somewhat telling that IBM's specification sheets for mainframes read somewhat like flyers for new cars, about half of the thing is about available financing methods :)).
TimescaleDB surpasses 1M downloads and launches 1.0 for time-series data
Thank god this piece was so short that it only wasted mere seconds of my time. If author has any semblance of a point to make, it’s well hidden.
Even if Z/OS was available for free, wouldn't hardware be a huge problem? IBM zSeries are pretty unique under the hood.
FTA :

> The child will be the customer.

Maybe he could just start giving a proper salary to his work force (the one who's moving the boxes around) ?
Just for the record, I didn't say they're not worth $15/hr. Maybe they're worth $20/hr. They're worth whatever value they bring to the business + retention bonus since hiring new people also costs money -- and I think in the case of whole foods that number is high, but without studying their business I don't know what that number is. To throw out $15/hr arbitrarily doesn't help anyone; it might be less than they're worth.
It's mostly because you said "all of north Africa" that I wrote this response; being from Morocco, this was surprising.
best comment of them all, I agree, there is no skills shortage of mainframe programmers!
My conversation with a Nigerian Facebook friend
This is the part that drives me crazy - America HAD electric railroads all over the place. Or at least Illinois (my homestate) did. You can look up 'Illinois InterUrban' and see maps of rails connecting every rural city.

Many of the carriages were used as scrap metal for WWII, and once cars took off the demand wasn't there to rehabilitate them. But it would be so much cheaper to build out than even just replacing the signals in NYC would be. All the right of ways are still there, many of them turned into bike trails (which is great, but I'd rather have a $5 ride to the next town over)

The carriages back in the day were pretty slow, maybe 20mph, so I get why cars won, but rebuilding this infrastructure with modern equipment would be a really nice situation, and if gas was 10$/gal we would probably see the demand, but as long as gas is cheap we lack the ability to plan ahead...
It's good to think these things thru. Nicely done.

There are two holes with respect to our current system of voting.

#1 It's not immediately obvious, but the order which voters sign-in is preserved, as is the order the ballots are cast. So it's trivial to identify each voter's ballot.

One variant of this idea is some kind of ballot marking device. Mark or print the ballot, tabulate it separately. This can have value for accessibility reasons. But doesn't add anything to the current processes.

#2 Your idea is generally known as the voter verified paper audit trail (VVPAT). Research and experience has shown that voters mostly do not review their ballots before casting.

Further, there's no reason to believe what you cast is what was recorded. In fact, one of the times I observed a random "audit" of the VVPAT, when administrators encountered a problem (cheap thermal printer shredded the output), they just put the memory card in a new device and reprinted the VVPAT. So the only thing being verified was that the printer worked.

A variant of the VVPAT is to give voters some kind of receipt. Then later they could verify that their vote was cast and counted correctly. But just having a receipt allows someone to verify how you voted, destroying the secret ballot.

There are proposals for using some kind of crypto to obfuscate the actual votes, but still allow one to see their votes were counted. Suspending disbelief for a second, the reason these systems don't work for our elections is because of information leakage. All the crypto based systems rely on some kind of hash collision, to hide your ballot in the herd of ballots. Unfortunately, with our small precincts and complicated ballots, collisions are rare. So even after hashing your ballot would be uniquely identifiable. To make such systems feasible, we'd have to increase the herd (bigger precincts), or simplify the ballots (perhaps splitting federal, state, local races on to their own ballots).
Something mysterious is happening at a solar observatory in New Mexico
Perhaps you mean “moral judgement”, or something like that, or I've missed something, because this is exactly a judgement.
End of Tenancy Cleaning London – EOT Cleaners
Sounds preferable in both cases to me What is the non tech solution for automobiles, better designed cities?
Fidelity Investments has a software engineer training program for fresh college graduates that lasts a few months and is supposed to prepare them to work at Fidelity. The training program is split into different tracks, one of which is a mainframe track [1].

[1] https://www.cs.uri.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/...
This is the dark side of demanding that tech companies implement feel-good censorship here in the US (removing "hate")...we've opened the door to relative standards and the filtering to back them up.

Sorry but you were all told you would hit this slippery slope...its fine when the SPLC is having tech companies filter out "undesirable" content but now you have PRC turning the same levers. You all demanded this door be opened when you freaked out about "hate"....now it can't be closed.

What will be left of Google and the other techs when everyone has taken their turn filtering out the content that "offends" them?
I donate much more than 1.2% of my net worth to charity, and every 2 weeks to boot. Somehow I also manage to do it without publicizing it on dozens of media outlets every time or blowing tens of millions on a disgustingly wasteful luxury lifestyle. But where's my army of loser internet sycophants?
Careful; China has been ramping up the brain drain. Google & the USA do not have a monopoly on brain power. Besides, how is Google offering China anything it doesn't have? From my perspective, operating in China is merely defending forced losses, such as companies that use Google cloud and want to operate in China.