skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When a company pays back interest to a bank, the interest isn't magically removed from the money supply. So the bank also has $10k more profits, with which it pays its employees more, who can then buy more widgets from the company etc.

Yes, whether this is sustainable does depend on increased economic activity. Which is why it's so important to lend for (sustainable) productivity growth or you get a bubble which creates liquidity problems when it pops.
Absolutely. There are a lot of reasons to run your own family office investment office.

"Because Vanguard charges too much" isn't one of them, IMO.
What NYT thinks devs are doing in Silicon Valley: AI and machine learning hacking in VR 3D.

Funny, the article doesn't mention any of those topics at all (except for AI - but only as a way of introducing John McCarthy). Meanwhile we do do things like "finding all occurrences of a given word or pattern of letters in a text" quite frequently. And we are utterly dependent on technologies (e.g. databases, networks) based very strongly on the bread-and-butter content of Knuth's books.

I agree, though that for most of us, chasing down "undefined is not a function" and its variants tends to rule the day.
Facebook's algorithm is blocking photos of the Yemen war
How Scammers in China Manipulate Amazon [video]
> There are also people who keep doing something completely unrewarding for years, because they like the process, or because they think they can't learn anything else. They are seen as crazy.

If they keep on doing it, then there must be some kind of reward for them, perhaps just not something that you're aware of.

I'm reminded of meditation. People nowadays take it for granted that mediation is a good thing and a worthwhile endeavor.

However, just think for a moment how useless and unnecessary it seems if you know nothing about meditation.

Zazen meditation means sitting still for hours staring at the wall.

Where's the reward in that? Why would anyone spend 10k hours doing it? They must be crazy right?

Actually, they might have a very good reason for doing Zazen and they might just know something you don't.
I personally think there are many reasons to be super careful and expect significant glitches in the economy, stock and especially bond markets, etc. in the next few years. We (US) have been on the up leg of the cycle for very long and a lot of people are used to great paper returns and a feeling of wealth that comes with it. They are also not ready for a change and few entertain "what if" scenarios -- kind of like 2006 when professionals were stretching to buy expensive houses on 2 salaries and would argue "no problem -- if one of us loses a job we will sell the house. price dropping 20%? never going to happen".

That said, I also do not see "reward shareholders" as necessarily sinister. Many companies this late in the cycle are sitting on a LOT of cash (income from operations) and do not see enough opportunities to invest in long term growth. Thus they are using it to pay dividends or buy their own stock. In fact, "reward shareholders" is exactly what the company should be doing in such case and neither of this is a sign of the problem. Problems may still happen, but I doubt about buybacks being the primary cause. My 2c.
LLVM Relicensing Effort
Very low fine considering how bad the breach was (and lack of basic security). Any idea of how much revenue this company is making?
> objective - (of a person or their judgment) not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts: historians try to be objective and impartial.

It does mean what I think it means, actually.
Skills get honed through practice. Sounds like their skills improved through putting them to use in WOW.
> You’re aware that psychedelics have been used extensively for millennia by many cultures in religious ceremonies, right?

So has animal and human sacrifice. What's your point?
Solving Sudoku :-)
Not sure how to title twitter threads. I tried posting the nyt article myself, and confirmed that it couldn't post. (It was flagged as spam in my case)

I then tried the twitter thread, and it was also flagged as spam.

This is the NYT article in question: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/yemen-children-fa...
> We were measured directly against the fund of another frenemy family.

So "keeping up with the Jones'" is something no one outgrows then... Interesting.
Yes.

> explain in plain English

doesn't generally mean 'download a deck of cards' from Stanford.
An increase in interest rates ~2% could trigger a large number of junk corporate bond defaults, according to the latest McKinsey analysis

The trigger for interest rates rising by that much in a short period of time is not apparent and/or explored in the article, and frankly I don't see one, but that would be the real worry, and would probably have a large, negative effect on junk government bonds as well

https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-cor...
Beyond the filter bubble, I've noticed that a lot media spends most of their time in personal attacks, and very little time discussing the substance of any issue. Even when the discussion actually contains any substance, authors cannot refrain from poisoning the well. It isn't Person A believes ..., and Person B points to research ..., it is Left-wing ideologue idiot Person A believes crazy idea ...and well-respected patriot Person B point to research ... Both left and right partisan authors are using this style.

I raise this point in a discussion about filter bubbles since I'm suspect the two aspects are self-reinforcing.
What will you do when your neighbouring town is stricken by communicable diseases?
Not right away, but wasn’t there a 2 year waiting period exactly for that?
Apple has done this multiple times because loan rates were/are cheaper than paying taxes to repatriate cash.
No, most software development jobs are 9-5 with (usually unpaid) overtime only done on an exceptional circumstances. It's been years since I worked more than 40 hours a week.
Basically -- anything that you'd use SQL for. SQL is probably the most widely-used logic programming language.
One issue is it takes time for an innovation to become widely adopted; a criterium for this list (e.g. git is young, but the idea of distributed version control is old).
Apparently Stage 1 - 7 were classical ciphers, followed by brute-forcing the 56-bit DES, and factoring RSA-155 though distributed computing.

> Compaq provided access to one of their benchmarking computers with four 667 MHz Alphas and 8 GB of primary memory.

This was massive computational power for a workstation in 2000! It's always impressive to see the progress of Moore's Law, even although single-core performance has peaked long ago.
The rate of progress increased exponentially, peaking somewhere in the 60's-70's. The singularity is over.
I think what's missing from this is "Show HN". I don't think anybody is suggesting it be used in place of NGINX or H2O - not yet.
WkWebView is used a lot in apps to present content that isn't immediately obviously web content, rather it is just using HTML/CSS as a presentation layer. One example is the activity feed in Instagram - I only know this because once upon a time the page lost CSS on a reload and I got to see it in all its link-blue-bordered glory.

The Safari controller is for when you're linking out to an external web site and want the user to behave the way they would in a normal browsing session.
I cannot remember the number at this point, but there was one specific release recently that did seem to make a significant improvement for me on MacOS.

I used to have heavy pages hang here and there and really burn some CPU (Facebook, etc) and sometimes even freeze without loading completely. Now on the same machine, the latest Firefox works just fine and avoids those states completely.

It's still a long way from perfect, but I once thought Firefox unusable on MacOS and went back to Chrome, but now that I've tried the latest FF releases, I'm happy enough with the performance that I'm staying with FF this time around

The only remaining sites with poor performance are Google products, and I blame Google for that and am trying to slowly remove myself from all of their products.
Git quick statistics
> Wow, now this is deep!

It certainly doesn't help that GitHub renders tabs as 8 spaces wide instead of something more sane.
>>Here's one of Bernie Sanders' economic advisers explaining it

Let me stop you right there.
Thanks for sharing! That was really interesting! From your other comments it looks like you live in China? What has the reception been so far?

I didn't realize the point system so subjective until I watched that clip you shared. How do they decide who becomes an "Information Collector?" Those positions will surely be highly coveted because they come with a massive amount of power and influence over their neighbors' lives. What concerns me about the payment system is that it seems like a fast-track to massive inequality - wealth, social, and justice. If someone can simply pay to erase their "bad" behavior then there's functionally one set of "rules" for those who can afford not to follow them and another set of rules that are actually enforced, in life changing ways, for everyone else.
Do people write about failed divided businesses?
IMO it sits at quite a higher level of programming. You use logic programming to explore ~infinite program states; all that in extremely concise (near fully declarative of course) ways.

In Bratko's prolog book you quickly get to do graph processing, some algorithms are 4 clauses and almost word for word what you have in mind. It's mind boggling to me.

You also have bidirectional reasoning, you don't have to write a function A => B and then another one for B => A. It's even more telling with multivariate functions. I knew a guy who needed something similar for a large application. He needed a way to reason backward with incomplete parameters.
I'm sure Elm is lovely, but how is it useful without a browser to deliver it, a browser to provide it a document to manipulate, and a browser to display its changes to that document?

It's those things that are complex; the client-side programming language (if present) is just one of many, many high-complexity parts in a browser.
This is why science drives me mad sometimes, the premise of so many different theories in Longevity "based on science" having been rooted in "science" derived from this women, who may turn out to be this woman's daughter, mind blowing. And I can hear it now "Well technically the science itself was correct..."
no, killing someone is what happens when you absolutely should have asked for permission. you don't get forgiveness for that.
"Logic programming" is a misnomer. It's really a kind of parallel reality database query language.

It's not used much because relational databases and SQL won in the end.

(I guess back in the day people imagined computers as knowledge graphs and logical predicates on them, not tabular data and joins.)
I had severe acne for many years. I tried a lot of different things, but I discovered that I had a personal trigger - if I ate a lot of carbs and fats together combined with irregularity of my bowel movements, I would break out. So I basically cut out sugar and took steps to make myself as regular as possible. Acne completely disappeared. I didn't really lose weight (I was never fat) and I didn't really get too much healthier since I still eat a lot of "non-sugary" junk food.

But even now, around the holidays when there is lots of candy and unhealthy food, if I eat too much sugar and don't have regular bowel movements, the acne comes back like it was never gone. It's crazy, but I'm approaching middle age and this is still a thing.

And this isn't something that applies to other acne sufferers I've met, either. This is my trigger, they have theirs.
It's fair to separate the issues of borrowing and stock-buybacks ... specifically because the borrowing has to be based on the credit worthiness of the company, and the stock-buybacks are a separate thing entirely.

Using debt instead of equity is a rational thing for companies to do if debt is really cheap.

The 'higher stock price' as a result of the buybacks is effectively an adjustment of the equilibrium to that fact: the company is taking advantage of cheap sources of financing.

If the company is doing sneaky things like hiding problems, or if the lenders are failing to do due diligence .... then yes, this can be a problem.

Or of companies are over-leveraging - again a potential problem.

But tapping into cheap debt, even combined with stock-buybacks - this could definitely be characterized as an intelligent kind of financial engineering, I don't think that it should be in and of itself viewed as suspicious or negative.

It's just the CFO doing their job, mostly.

Also ... stocks are quite expensive right now by most measures, so I'm not sure how much buybacks make sense in that context at this moment.
The problem with his analogy is that it make the difference between browsers out to be the difference between a bird and a squirrel when at best it's more like the difference between a falcon and a eagle.

If we really want diversity on the internet we should probably still be using Gopher and other internet clients.
How to be a freelance UI/UX designer from a developing country
> I think that is the least charitable interpretation of him performing that gesture.

He's posing with two virulent white supremacists. If you lie down with dogs, you might not get fleas but everyone will certainly think you have.
Sony May Have Just Accidentally Revealed the Playercounts of Every PS4 Game
> do developers still refer to their job as "IT" in some places?

Yes, we do. In fact, some of our employers insist on labeling us as IT Developers specifically. I imagine that in a decade or two we'll update our titles to something like AI Developers.

You might ask, which employers? Think of the biggest, oldest, slow-moving private- and public-sector organizations that you can think of. While they might have certain divisions that are innovative, most of them are trapped in the past.

And these groups employ A LOT of individuals. More and more new developers are coming on board every day. This means that the number of IT developers could actually be growing...if that term isn't killed off first.
Jax, I’m sorry but this is just fundamentally incorrect. The economy is not a zero sum game. Clearly there is annual economic growth, and that growth compounded over many years has lead to orders of magnitude growth in the size of the US/World economy.

Companies borrow money in order to invest in their own growth. Borrowing allows increased growth rate and in turn increased spending which has follow-on effects downstream (this is called the money multiple).

I very much enjoyed taking the intro Micro and Macroeconomics classes as part of my Econ degree. There are probably even great courses online for free now. I’d highly recommend it.
Does anyone else has good tips on how to find competitors? I am doing this right now and I am struggling
To be honest, a change of habits tends to work best. I used to think I needed a mouse to be productive, until I made the effort to learn more keyboard shortcuts for my editor. I used to think that I needed a couple of large monitors to get everything up, but realistically I was only looking at one window at a time so I went to full-screening applications into their own workspace. Basically, the less stuff you can get away with carting around, the happier you will be.

The other thing: get hardware warrenties that will overnight you new parts, or get hardware that can be trivially rebought and restored to from your backups. Things go wrong, and you can’t stockpile spares, so common hardware is good hardware.
I could just as easily describe the net result as companies using debt instead of investment to finance operations. A practice that is far older than publically-traded stocks, and absolutely common.

The wisdom of privately buying stock with debt stems from a consideration of the risks involved. But a company is going to shoulder its risk of operations, no matter how you turn it.

I also don't get your criticism of Apple's practice: It's well understood that it happened for tax considerations, and surely them holding billions of dollars in cash cannot, in anyway, be worse than not having billions of dollars in cash? In any case, the current tax "amnesty" seems to be in the process of resolving that particular accounting nightmare of yours.
>“Here at Google, sometimes we just throw stuff together,” Dr. Norvig said, during a meeting of the Google Trips team, in Mountain View, Calif. “But other times, if you’re serving billions of users, it’s important to do that efficiently. A 10-per-cent improvement in efficiency can work out to billions of dollars, and in order to get that last level of efficiency, you have to understand what’s going on all the way down.”

I'm interested in this low level systems opimization. What type of jobs hire for this work? What areas in graduate school should one focus in? Is this type of skill set still employable?
Why is legalization better than decriminalization? If legal drugs are anything like Juuls, widespread availability and removal of social stigma will just cause use to explode and you have 10x as many addicts as you did before.
I was thinking about this a lot lately.

Since I started my business I was trying to reach out to nonprofits to offer my skills, however not one of those that I contacted was interested (although my main skill is robotics).

I think the best way to help us to financially support environmental NGOs (I'm currently looking at joining 1% for the planet).

I'd be very interested to hear about other ideas people have!
a pack of lawyers has been dispatched to your address...
There's an interesting phenomenon here in the UK where a lot of the quality journalism on the right is behind a paywall, whereas a lot of the quality journalism on the left is ad-funded and freely available. I can see that being a potential amplifier of 'filter bubbles'.
I can't find any mention of "devil welcomes him to breakfast" other than that article and quotes from that article.
ABSU Notice to Graduands on 26th Convocation Ceremony – See Details
Oh my god, I was just considering building exactly the same thing for my project. Thanks a lot :)
Having worked in customer service for many years, I've used LiveAgent's chat products at multiple companies and was not impressed with the actual software itself.
How to Communicate Effectively with Remote Teammates
Ask HN: What are good christmas presents for a 3 year old?
A real instrument, a pop-up book, a lego, ... ?
U.S. Student Loan Debt Sets Record, Doubling Since Recession
That's from the 80s or 90s then
Rust port of Google's SwissTable hash map
Looks like it gets worse down the list, so I don't think the IT folk will complain too much.

edit: Yes, whether you feel "Civil engineering" is worse than "Hazmat engineering" is a subjective matter.
It was a silly concept that has been scrapped, IIRC.
This reminds of the kind of metaprogramming found in languages like www.terralang.org
Current schoolnews
Why China's electric car industry is leaving Detroit, Japan, Germany in the dust
Major hedge funds are scrambling to prevent financial wipeout
Dihydrogen monoxide
I second! This book was excellent. Actually, I've read all his books but one, and they are all great.
Funny, The NeXT Book by Bruce Webster referred to Knuth as the "Obi Wan of Computer Science".

I guess we can split the difference and agree on Jedi. :-)
The US does have a television network called PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) which is a non-profit organization although it is only partially government funded (they generally ask for donations from viewers about once a year). The quality of the reporting is usually pretty good, but news is only a subset of their programming, so it doesn't compare to something like the 24-hour cable news channels.
Async React Using React Router and Suspense
Xerox was a monopoly, but not a software monopoly. They didn't use the innovations of PARC to further their monopoly.

Physics had a time of rapid innovation.
Offensive? Someone who is older than twelve is suggesting that UK, France and Germany stop "playing nice" with Muslims. And they weren't called a shill, read it again, read what is actually written. As far as I'm concerned, it would have been more charitable than to assume they're older than 12 and really mean what they wrote. I mean, where do you from there, right? A shill can quit their job at least.

As a German, the idea that we should put a whole religion in camps so beyond the pale, I think it's mainly bad for public discourse that this discussion was flagged. People should have their comments dissected until the cows come home, instead of not really having to own up to their words. This coy short flashing of this unwashed, ugly underbelly, that's the problem, that people who say A don't have to say B is the problem. They should have to sleep in the beds they declare fit for others.

It's pretty rich to bring up being offended, or radicalization for that matter, while people happily normalize putting a whole religion in concentration camps.
So what you’re saying is that you, and the authors of the article, failed the Untellectual Turing Test then?

Because that’s verifiably nonsense if you actually talked to anyone liberal. Most liberal policy even stems from empathetic roots!

I totally understand—-and often agree with—-conservative (in the political sense) values. In fact, when you get down to it they are not very complex and different.

The disagreement is generally in how to best promote & empower those values. Not about them. Very vigorous disagreement.

There will, of course, be some values each side fundamentally disagrees on. That’s ok, it’s expected.
A primer on PySpark for data science
Not about BAT,cryptocurrency. It's all about usable privacy. Makes it easy for me to quarantine Google services, social media, from each other. Privacy as the killer feature is what makes it killer
"I was sitting in Steve's office when Lynn Takahashi, Steve's assistant, announced Knuth's arrival. Steve bounced out of his chair, bounded over to the door and extended a welcoming hand.

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Professor Knuth," Steve said. "I've read all of your books."

"You're full of shit," Knuth responded.

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...
That is so cool! He really liked the question!
Logitech MX Ergo. It's a trackball.

* Doesn't need to move on your desk.

* Wireless, so if you want to have it away from your pc (standing desk for instance) that's no problem

* trackball, and two angle to position it: no more pain in my arm
IT: Garbage truck operators

Developers: Garbage truck service/maintenance department

Devops: Mechanic's apprentice who sometimes has to fill in for garbage truck drivers who no-show.

Contractor: Mobile service tech gets called in to weld up stuff when it's broken beyond what the in-house team can handle.

CS: Guys who plan the garbage trucks' route.

Not everything is "engineering".

Edit: You people take yourselves too seriously.
Some people just scan the content, I actually read the full article!
Agreed. You can change it by appending `?ts=2' at the end, such as:

https://gist.github.com/realmonster/93090d4ef0b40c1b88d62f88...
Take a swim at your Linux terminal with asciiquarium
I had always found it fascinating/suspicious that she outlived the next closest long-lifers by so much. Beginning at age 105, there's a 50/50 chance you'll make it to your next birthday (1). So Jeanne was a super outlier in this model, a 2^17 outlier (1:131,072)

1 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2...
The Visa Requirements for Every Country
That's really funny. One man recreating Vanguard's business single highhandedly and doing triple duty with tax planning and philanthropic services and doing it for less money than Vanguard can do just the index funds. Thank goodness the knowledge to handle each and every one of those services, at an expert level, is interchangeable.