skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Energy is very abundant by E = mc^2, so what we consider "wasting energy" they may not even consider.

The average web page is bigger than the original DOOM download, about 2/3 the size of War and Peace. In an era before Gutenberg, when monks copied books my hand, I wonder if anybody mused that nobody would "waste" the equivalent of 750 pages to communicate "please log in using your email and password."
Russian economy is stagnating, but there is certainly no crisis atm. The government has also accumulated a pretty large money stash over the last decade, like 3-4 yearly budgets. So I guess we're more or less safe for the next few years.
http://www.timeshare400.com. Starts at $15/month.
The Loyc project has similar goals: http://loyc.net/
It greatly helped me to buy noise-cancellation headphones.
The newer Sony 1000mx3 are great...a bit pricey but have helped me so much in an open office environment.
I'll add The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse because it saved me from decades of pointless game playing. (Actually just read everything by Hermann Hesse).
I tend to think the mainframe shortages are the result of a culture that views mainframe "operators" and "system programmers" as nearly minimum wage unskilled jobs until someone has 40 years of experience.

But what really gets me is that tapeless mainframe backup solution abound. Though they tend to fall into two categories. The ones that require code changes in legacy applications that are using tape as hierarchical storage. And the pile of virtual tape solutions (like this one https://tributary.com/storage-director-2/) which appear as tapes on the mainframe and dump the data to alternate sources disk/AWS-S3/whatever.

I guess there is a 3rd "transparent" set of methods that basically back-up/snapshot individual volumes outside of the applications. Either way, their page could do a better job contrasting their product with existing backup solutions.
In addition to the confounding variables others have mentioned, I think the most important factor is when autopilot is enabled. If you don't (or can't) use autopilot at night, in inclement weather, or in construction zones, then you'll get into more accidents when not using autopilot -- even if it's a significantly worse driver than you are.
Yes, you've complained about it before - more than once. (At least, someone has - I don't specifically remember if it was you.)

And it's a valid point. The units are wrong for them to be compared.

And yet, it's only half of a valid point, because the only thing people are doing with that ratio is comparing it to the same ratio for other years or other countries. The number can be dimensionally wrong and still be useful to use in that way.

Why would the number be useful to use in that way? Well, it seems intuitively reasonable to say that the bigger an economy is, the more debt it can carry without the debt burden being any more of a strain. The US can carry more debt than Vanuatu can, and not because the US government is more credit-worthy. So scaling the debt by GDP makes some sense.

And, in fact, dimensional analysis can make sense of this. Let's say the GDP is $10 Trillion. Well, it's not really $10 Trillion, it's $10 Trillion/year. If the debt is $30 Trillion, then the ratio is $32 Trillion / ($10 Trillion/year), which equals 3.2 years. That's how long it would take to pay off the debt using 100% of the GDP (which of course never happens, but it's still a measure of how much of a load the debt is). So when you see them report that debt is 320% of GDP, what they're really saying is that the debt load is 3.2 years.
This. I've found a pair of 3M Peltor Optime III do a pretty good job at keeping people away while I'm working.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Peltor-Optime-Earmuffs-Headband-Bla...

North American equivalent appears to be:

https://www.amazon.com/3M-Earmuff-Protectors-Hearing-Protect...

https://www.amazon.ca/3M-Peltor-Optime-Earmuffs-H10A/dp/B000...
And by the definition of one of the two major Taiwanese political parties as well. From Wikipedia:

"The Kuomintang holds the "One China Principle" and maintains its claim that under the ROC Constitution (passed by the Kuomintang government in 1947 in Nanjing) the ROC has sovereignty over most of China (including by their interpretation both mainland China and Taiwan)...Former ROC President Ma Ying-jeou had re-asserted claims on mainland China as late as October 8, 2008."
At the very least, 15%+ inflation, currency issues.
Yes. An autonomous vehicle with lidar and maps can locate itself using any landmark, or series of landmarks it can see, it isn't limited to lane markings.
VPN Support for Heroku Private Spaces
Exactly. People used to think computers will never beat humans in chess, clinging to all sorts of romantic notions such as that inherently human understanding was required for high-level play.

And now my phone can beat the world champion.
The debt only matters when people call in their chits. Debt, similar to money, us a claim on future production. As long as people are willing to wait, and not get paid too much for waiting, everything will work out ok.

We'll see if interest rates stay low long enough.
For bytecode level transformations rather than AST level: https://github.com/llllllllll/codetransformer
As a web developer, my biggest pain point was the never-ending pressure to get a project done by tomorrow with perfect no bug code.

Another was designers designing because it's "cool" and everyone else is doing it as opposed to designing for app function and helping the user get around the app easily. Some designers love eye candy that weighs the app down with useless features that are cool once but get in the way over time.

One that really comes to mind is bad SCRUM project management. The longer projects will always get spaghetti code when badly managed that will be a bear to maintain. It's not too bad for smaller projects but longer project the manager needs to be a master to divide the project into manageable parts that will deliver good code.
re. stagnation:

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/secular-stagnat...
I think the people who downplay this question forget that many technologies we take for granted today would be considered impossible by older understandings of physics.
Don't remember the exact title or author, but it was the first book I read about logic, proof, and fallacies. It allowed me to separate the gems from the garbage in most of the other books I see mentioned here.
there’s nothing to decide. Google is a public company solely dedicated to increasing shareholder value.

There’s no room for moral arguments here. Google will comply with China’s demands or risk losing access to the market.

If we don’t like that system someone needs to come up with an economic system that doesn’t incentivize blind greed
I remember the national being a huge issue in the 80s (and probably before). This send like important and scary reporting but I'm not sure how this time is different from all the other alarm bells over the past 40+ years.

Is this a case of people calling wolf or is this a real crisis just decades in the making?
The only civilizations we have known definitely show that contact involving a great technological difference is usually a disaster for the less advanced people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#It_is_dangerous_...
Not sure why that comment's been voted down. Ultimately it's a question - voting down a question... Anyway, I'm not convinced surveilling the high profile people is going to alert you to the people who are off the radar, ie lone wolves. There might be an association between some, but not all. Again, (I think some people struggled to read this in the previous comment), I'm not pro-mass-surveillance, I'm just not convinced that what should be a better situation would be a better situation, ie maybe an unfortunately necessary evil.
For them, a 30km/h crawler with overattentive collision avoidance system may well be useful. This is not much different to how public transport drivers have to drive.

I expect them facing same issues like trams and trolleybuses - terribly bad experience in traffic.

You only see risky people aggressively trying to overtake and scratching their paint, while leaving the driver no opportunity to move an inch.
Can we please stop calling FRBs mysterious signals when we already have name for them. It's not something new it's FRB. They set out to find FRBs and they found FRBs.
Right perspective. You did the right thing even when it was financially painful. Props to you.
California Bill on Police Militarization Reaches Governor’s Desk
Once upon a time, there was a student who went to a middling poor school in a middling-poor school district. The highest math class he took before graduating was algebra. He proceeded to test out of geometry and trig, getting dumped into calc his first semester in college.

He did not do well.
It is not a competition. The US did all those things (and more). It is bad, in many cases worse than China. But China is also bad and in many other cases did much worse than the US.

In my non-american opinion, tech companies doing business in China are bad for the world. The fact that the US thinks it has the moral high ground doesn’t enter into it (incidentally China also considers itself morally superior).

(Appologise for brevity and potential errors, I am typing this on a phone).
Open plan offices. They're fantastic for managers / saving space, but just awful for trying to focus.

I recently read a good medium article[1] about why they are a terrible idea.

[1]: https://m.signalvnoise.com/the-open-plan-office-is-a-terribl...
As most clients only appreciate things when they see them; a better enviroment to mock up applications which look and feel like the real thing but take less time than actually implementing the real thing. I used many tools meant for that but usually the endclient (internal or external) says ‘yes thats great’ or ‘come back when its done’, which are basically the same remark in reality. In the first case when you deliver, they feed back things 80% of which could have been caught when you showed the mockup/clickthrough but they really thought at that time ‘yeah looks ok, but come back when its done’.

Besides just spending far too much time on actually doing a chunk of the actual work (which might not yet be commissioned for), I have not found effective ways of fixing this issue.
I don't know why the downvotes since it's an interesting tidbit of info... but looking at the Wikipedia page, it's not that you are legally required to do all of your processing using the IBM hex format in your floating point calculations, it's just that when you submit your data set to the FDA the file format they specify uses the IBM hex floating point format as the data type for one of the fields. So you can convert at submission time (and, indeed, it looks like the FDA even provides code to help you convert if the data isn't coming from a mainframe with native support for the format).

And the other examples under Special Uses... like the GRIB data, I have toyed with reading weather model data and I just write Go code that reads the files and does conversions as necessary on x86 without having to involve a mainframe. (Although that said, I have an odd fascination with mainframes despite never using them professionally, and maintain a system using the Hercules emulator and the MVS 3.8 operating system, which was the last freely-available version of what became today's z/OS.)
Converting all my C code to c++ for inline Perl, or not.
Convert Word Documents to Image File Formats Online in Seconds
Hey, you know what would fix the drunk driving problem?

Autonomous cars.
This is an alarmist article that ignores lots of important details and vastly oversimplifies things.

For example, few people realize that one of the largest owners of US Treasuries and US government sponsored enterprise (i.e., Fannie, Freddie, and Ginnie Mac, or collectively the GSEs) debt holdings is... the US government itself, via the Federal Reserve. As of yesterday, the Fed owns and is earning interest income on $2.3 trillion of treasuries and $1.9 trillion of GSE debt.[a]

In other words, the US federal government and GSE-guaranteed borrowers owe $4.2 trillion to... the US federal government itself.

Among other things, this means the US treasury is currently paying annual interest on $2.3 trillion of US treasuries to the Fed, and at the end of the year the Fed hands over all that earned interest to the US treasury, in perfectly circular fashion.

This startling fact is just one of many -- many! -- important details about modern monetary systems that are generally poorly understood by the public and which are utterly ignored by this article. Don't waste time reading it.

[a] https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h41/current/h41.htm#...
Write lexers and parsers for data formats, JSON and EDN are two good starting points.

write a forth or lisp lexer, parser and interpreter.

then write a small language that compiles to a target, like js, make sure your language is close in semantics to the target language to avoid headaches.
Making websites efficient again
Interestingly, the biggest eye-opener of reading the 4HWW is the part when Ferriss defines the word muse. I used to only think that it was a dichotomy of 1) boring 9-5 selling out your soul for the rest of your life, or 2) VC-backed startup scaling like mad and ending in a 7+ figure acquisition, but never considered the option in between: lifestyle businesses that are "automated", so you can actually do other things with your life.
That's basically my job now.

Absolute technical freedom with absolute responsibility.

It's made me very cautious about adopting any 'new'/'shiny' technology, I'm sticking to things that already have mass market adoption and a proven track record because I simply don't have the time to disappear down rabbit holes.

I keep a scratch list of "this looks interesting, check back in a year" and sometimes even then it goes back on the "check back in a year" list.
Any tips for the death and despair in the interim as 'something better' comes online?
For those of us who do drive it would be great to get that commute time back.
Consider having a /humans.txt and a founders@ email address that isn't advertised.
The Borg have become lazy indeed.
Probably the greatest amount of growth I've had in my lifelong programming journey was during the years when I was working on making my own scripting language. I think the skills I learned have shaped how I approach other programming project. Think debugging is hard? Try debugging why your script interpreter isn't running a given script correctly.
I'm partially with you because I agree that college in the US is too expensive because the costs are in many ways unrestrained. I think your proposal would lead to more radical change than you think though. We wouldn't end up with "the system we have now but cheaper."

You'd have a lot fewer people going to college. And the people missing out would be poorer and browner.

Now, maybe that would be OK. But a lot of people wouldn't see it that way.
What a wonderful article. I think that there are two sides to this coin: the nature of the debt and the nature of the repayment. Even the smallest and most well mannered debt is a problem if there is no path to repayment. And even large, nasty debt is ok as long as the people borrowing have done their homework and have a solid plan to repay. So this article did a great job of profiling the debt but it didn’t go into enough detail about the borrowers. If interest rates have been so low, and the borrowers have been somewhat lucid, even this large debt can be paid off without any crisis?
The best you can do while preserving purchasing power is to diversify across asset classes with a big weighting to US equities.
Humans suck at these classification tasks things too, though, if you set your expectations high. Is it a cat or a bag, or a weird shadow? Doesn't matter, I ran it over before I could figure it out and react. Or maybe it turned out to be a boulder? Now I'm one of 35,000 traffic fatalities this year in this country.

Computer vision has been improving rapidly in the last 10 years, I think it's too soon to rule out the viability of a camera-based solution entirely. Though I do hope improved lidar technology can improve on humans.
Really appreciate the feedback - this is useful

> Seeing a list of people associated with a product is kind of useful, but I specifically want to know what their role was / what they did, vs. just a generic quote

Yeah this is one of the changes that's on my todo list. The data is there for most people but you have to dig-in. I'll hopefully fix this soon.

> I like the idea of having versions under a larger high-level product (like Mac → Apple Macintosh 128K) but this doesn't seem to be expressed in the navigation anywhere

The reason that there currently isn't a breadcrumb is because things can be versions of more than one thing. Unfortunately I don't have an example on the top of my head. Not sure how to form navigation based on that yet.

> Right now I have to click through 8 different tabs to see if there's possibly content which is usually pretty sparse

Yeah this is another known problem. I'll experiment with your suggestion.

> Not crazy about the quotes as the lead-in for the product pages. It feels like it should be a succinct summary of what the product was. Information like release date, size of team

This is up to creator of the entry. I only chose quotes since it's a product description by the creator and it's easier to find and less generic

> I tried to edit an article to see how the data's being captured but didn't want to create an account — are you familiar with Wikidata, RDF, Linked Data, etc...?

I have versioning integrated but I did not expose it to the UI yet, until this changes or somehow a community forms I don't see myself removing the signup requirement anytime soon.

> but could you gather data from there / cross-reference to infer who worked on what products?

I've seen potential sources, however both the quality and quantity of data is lacking. After I fix the UI issues that you've mentioned, I may do more work on this area again one day. As for Linkedin and similar sources like Crunchbase, even if there weren't any issues related to data scraping; they still wouldn't be good enough to use. At best you just get a person's employment history and not what they actually worked on.

The UI, especially for mobile, is a mess. Thanks for helping me fix it.
So the fact that the US did not consider Native Americans citizens made their killing somewhat justifiable?

It seems to me you’re making a strong case for GPs point about how perceived US moral superiority influences one's arguments. It doesn't matter whether the US (the oppressor!) considered them citizens. It matters that they were people.

Disturbing how in the light of NSA revelations many people here were more concerned that they were spying on americans rather than the fact that they were spying on people.
And if there are no landmarks, such as you're on a highway or rural area, not in a city?
"Projectional Editing" is coming to my mind, in case you are looking for more input on the topic.
Related : Rewriting bash scripts to windows batch scripts because they can't get cygwin installed on that one client machine. Ughh!
SE has mostly 6s internals, IIRC.
I was under the understanding that they asked for either Page or Pichai.

And Google basically responded with "it's either our legal team or nothing".
dang is one of the mods. This comment is the equivalent of telling the cop who pulled you over for speeding that if you were speeding then he must have been too when he pulled you over.
Thanks, I really appreciate that.
This is one of my biggest complaints about the job.

Unfortunately, standing desks, under-desk cycles, and I would guess (though have not tried) treadmill desks, are not complete solutions.

I am certainly not as focussed while I'm using my under-desk cycle than I am when I am sitting still in a chair. It's great for certain types of dev work, but not great for when I need to learn something new or tackle a really critical situation. I wish this work was more physical, but alas, it's just not.
There's no contraction in Russia, that's true. But the risk there is the heavy reliance on oil (not a reliable economic basis) and on imports from China. Russia gave up a lot of the internal production capacity in the past.
This isn’t about national debt but global debt. The US national debt at present is not much of an issue because the dollar is strong and interest rates are still quite low. The risk is for less economically strong countries who are susceptible to changing foreign interest rates / exchange ratios.
YMMV, it worked fine for me.
Bowler doesn't have much to do with 2to3, except that they have the same library underneath.

lib2to3, despite the name, is a fairly generic refactoring library.
The inevitable Schema vs Code mismatch that creeps in.

I've yet to see a belts and braces solution that works when introducing it on an existing database (rather than from the start with something like Flyaway).

I mostly like SQL but I kind of wish someone would do a clean slate design of a relational data store and unfuck the last 40 odd years of cruft.

I work in an environment where our data is eminently relational and generally mapping to a relational db type structure is quite simple but actually dealing with the minutiae of the various RDBMS's is just painful.
You need to consider that you're sending a message over millions of light years. You'd need a a power output comparable to a star to be visible across that distance if you didn't focus your message (because, obviously, stars themselves do it!)
It was hard for me to gauge what percentage of total debt that is, so a quick search indicates that by end of year 2018 the US government debt is going to be 21.4 trillion.

Roughly 20% of US government debt is held by itself.
I see no intention from governments of ever paying off that debt. All I see, worldwide and US is more and more spending. At one point in the future we won't be able to pay for it anymore. So, what happens if everyone finds out they're not getting their money back? i hope we never find out.

30% of US debt is owned by intergovernmental agencies: like Social security/medicare/military retirement funds - so that might go down the tubes.

The other 70% of US debt is public debt, of which almost half is owned by foreign governments and investors.

https://www.thebalance.com/who-owns-the-u-s-national-debt-33...
>Even if you reject that premise, what you call “unnaturally restricted growth” is being applied to a truly massive city. What would unrestricted growth look like exactly? After all was said and done, would it still be such a desirable place to live?

Unrestricted growth would look like... the present day. LA has grown unrestricted in many ways. New land is continually cleared for houses. New highways are routinely built. The only thing which is restricted is growth that puts people closer together. LA residents have no qualms with supporting economic policies that ultimately fund housing construction in the outskirts of Riverside and San Fernando. LA residents benefit materially from this growth, via increased property values and cheaper services as new residents lend slack to the labor market.

You want to protect the environment of southern California? Limit new employment. Enact urban growth boundaries. Stop subsidizing fire insurance. People will stop moving there -- I guarantee it. But LA residents don't want that. They want to continue to benefit from growth without having to meet any of the people whose high rents ultimately subsidize their utility bills.

>can’t get water, is subject to deveststing earthquakes,

Water is just a pricing issue. The price of water will never rise too high for residential use. Desalination might triple the cost -- which is still cheaper than a heating bill in Minnesota. Earthquakes are a non-issue. Humans have built cities in earthquake zones for millenia. That includes Rome, Toyko, Mexico City and Calcutta.