skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Are you sure you're not making assumptions based on political conventional wisdom, rather than facts and observation?

I tried really hard to make sense out of that. I really did.

> What "precarious financial state"?

- "Kenya debt is rising to dangerous levels"[1]

- "Kenya holds the 3rd largest chinese debt["2]

- "Bleak 2019 for Kenyan tax payers"[3]

> rather than facts and observation?

I literally live here.

As for the 5% GDP growth you point out, surely much better than Tanzania, or Ethiopia right?.

> China wants trading partners, generally

> they know something about lifting nations out of poverty

Yup. Their economy badly needs a group of poor African countries as trading partners. definitely, nothing to do with power and global politics.

Here is china lifting nations out of poverty...

- "Like Zambia, Sri Lanka also handed over port to China to pay off debt"[4]

Yup, uplifting stuff.

> Kenya's per capita GDP has increased every year since 2002, and has nearly quadrupled in that time (from $395 to over $1500)

"Kenyans owe $1,0000 per capita" [5].

1. https://www.the-star.co.ke/news/2018/08/06/kenyas-public-deb...

2. https://www.capitalfm.co.ke/business/2018/09/kenya-holds-thi...

3. https://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/business/Bleak-2019-for-tax...

4. https://www.africanliberty.org/2018/09/10/like-zambia-sri-la...

5. https://www.the-star.co.ke/news/2018/01/08/kenyans-owe-sh100...

as bonus content, guess what security Kenya used to secure the last loan. read to find out

https://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/business/Mombasa-port-SGR-l...

If none of that can convince you, I just don't know what could. I'm exhausted at this point.
True, except the road trip case is also the case where you want more cargo capacity than is standard. A rental trailer for one week that lets my wife pack the kitchen sink actually makes sense.
One of them firebombed Dresden, sold half of Europe to the Russians and used nuclear weapons on civilians.

The other one is China.
I’m grateful for Ruby and the Rails community. Ten years ago those tools allowed me to support myself as a freelance web developer, and provided a springboard for my transition into iOS development.

Then I got a taste of the hate mail :)

It’s incredible how people will spend $5 every day on a coffee, but spend that same amount once on an app, and (some) people feel entitled to say the darndest things over email. Doubly impressive when they receive years of free updates. Add to it the real financial pain an angry one star review...

I can’t imagine the scale of emotion Matz has had to wade through, all for providing an awesome, amazing, free tool to anyone who wants it.

He’s probably not reading this, but just in case: Thank you, Matz.
What if... programming fell out of love with you?
Anti capitalist sentiment is actually pretty common here, both this site and the tech industry are well populated with liberals and leftists alike.
The Startup web guide for 2019
This thing is deceptively subtle and fiendishly addictive. Well done!
Iconic Bookstore Owner Pleads with NYC: Don't Landmark My Property
You assume that FB advertisers will stop spending money if targeting gets worse. I doubt that assumption is correct.

There's already enough noise in my profile that most of my demographic targeting is garbage.

The real value Facebook provides is tracking me across other sites. It'll pull items out of my cart at some online retailer and show me an ad on FB. I haven't figured out how to escape that.
I would argue the opposite (that self-belief is the hardest challenge in those in objectively bad circumstances), precisely because of what you phrase as '[these things] will break you down unless you're astronomically lucky.'

The manner in which they break most people down is by circumscribing ambition and self confidence.

A large part of my family goes into the hills of dirt poor mining Appalachia, so I wouldn't say I'm speaking to this from a privileged position.

When no one in your family has ever gone to college, why would you even think you could? Or have a different profession than your father? Or start a business? Or move to another town? Etc. etc.

There are certainly structural roadblocks that make things easier or harder, but I have yet to see someone succeed in something they never start. And a large reason they never start is because they don't believe they could ever succeed.

And that was my point. That heroes help us dare to believe, moreso that we otherwise would.
Ask HN: A simple, minimal messaging app for2019?
How’s that prediction for the utter disruption of the finance industry going?
I think have a socialist healthcare improves the capitalist opportunities for people in those countries. Having your job tied to your health insurance means people are less likely to change jobs, thereby not giving their true optimal output to a capitalist society.

A worker who is free to offer his labour to whomever he wants knowing that his healthcare is not tied into their employment has more options and choice to them then someone who can't change jobs.

A point on your last point, people would argue that even in the US you can still access the emergency room when you have no money so no one is turned away due to lack of means.
If you are so much bothered by Android design, adjust your POV slightly: consider /system to be recovery partition (you cannot delete anything from any recovery partion of any system, so Android is no exception here) that shares data blocks with main system, created at boot in RAM. Because that it effectively is.

You don't have to resort to ADB to disable these apps for the most part; You can do it in Settings. For some apps you cannot do that in GUI - for Settings itself, for example, so the users don't shoot themselves in the foot. Unfortunately, some manufacturers abuse this and mark as undisable-able apps, that they shouldn't. Over ADB, they can't disable it, so it works for any app, including Settings.
It is based on another tool I have written, a2sketch[0]:
that uses asciitosvg (still the php-variant[1]), generates a svg and feeds that into rough.js[2] (converts svg in sketchy svg)

[0]: https://github.com/arnehilmann/a2sketch

[1]: https://github.com/dhobsd/asciitosvg

[2]: https://github.com/pshihn/rough
Theme Switcher in Nginx
What kind of profits were they showing in 2001? I'm not going to look it up, but I'm sure they were negative. There were a lot of people back then who couldn't figure out how Amazon would ever make money when they sold everything at a loss.
You can add sodium citrate to any cheese to make it stay together when melting. In fact you can melt several decent cheeses together, like gruyere and cheddar, add a gram of sodium citrate per ounce of cheese, melt, and pour it on a wax paper lined tray to make your own single slice cheese. For nacho sauce add water or beer to thin it down.
Maybe I'm just arguing semantics here but I would say that while calculations are carried out using floating points the numbers themselves are represented symbolically. For example, if you came up with an algorithm to calculate euclidean distance then you would eventually employ a square root algorithm instead of an approximation of a square root stored as a floating point number. The algorithm "sqrt(2)" is a symbolic representation of the square root of 2.
I feel that the goal behind #deletefacebook is not only to 'hurt' FB, but for the user to benefit from the deletion as well.

I don't see that much benefit in getting badly targeted ads for the user.

I tend to continue to think educating the user is the only long-term way.
Compared to the shithole I moved from it has the best food ever (perhaps after NY)
> Does Emacs have a reputation of being difficult to use?

Yes. And as it usually goes, it's an undeserved reputation caused by it being different from what most people are used to.
The problem is that there's a little more nuance than just "utility". As an example, take clothing. I don't think that anyone would argue that a single t-shirt didn't have utility. After all, I can wear it. However, I have several t-shirts from conferences or conventions that I don't ever wear. So while they have utility in theory, I'm not utilizing them in practice.
It really depends on the person, for me learning pronunciation is easy, I have the talent to be able imitate to other people's speech pretty accurately. On the other hand, I have a terrible handicap with learning grammar. It just feels like rote memorization of meaningless rules and it never sticks.

So for me personally Mandarin was like a dream come true because there's barely any grammar at all. I just have to speak the words in the correct order "you want with me eat food?" "you eat finished?" "tomorrow we together go climb mountain?".

relatively speaking. There's grammar of course and it's interesting and subtle, but it's much less than romance languages and there are basically no exceptions. The closest thing to the exception I can think of is the "ill-thought out sentence" （没想好的句子）, which is an exception to word order where you forget to say the beginning of the sentence and instead put it at the end: "go see movie? ...you tomorrow"
You don't need much power to keep a car going on the freeway. If I can extend my drive from 200 miles to 700 miles before I have to stop and recharge - well that is as far as a human can drive in a day anyway (many humans have driven farther - it wasn't safe they were just lucky).
Is that fear because of the balance of power or the consequences of losing power?

In the US, losing power means looking for a new job, or retiring with a pension. I believe the consequences of losing power are typically worse in China.
This is a great demonstration of how naive free market economics simply don't work in labor markets.

Employees typically can't "just get another job".

The obvious solution is some kind of social safety net -- maybe even UBI -- but that is a bitter pill to swallow for free market zealots (and the wealthy elites they shill for, who abhor the thought of having to relinquish some of their personal gain for the betterment of society).
No prior background except Chinese coworkers.
I think you are correct. I would say there are things that one can do to improve their odds of random opportunity and luck. A good example of that is hanging out with the right people and staying positive & motivated. In a lot of ways it is like dating. You need to be putting yourself out there. It isn't going to magically just happen. You have to make it happen.
Where did you buy groceries?
Microsoft’s Redmond campus modernization update: Demolition begins
Honestly, it's pretty rare to encounter any document that has actual artistry to it. The one I think of directly is a book about making books, though a few journals do good templates too.
Android.com shows Amazon Fire devices as examples of the wide freedom Android offers, so apparently Google disagrees with your definition of "Android".
We don't have to eat animals though. Vegans and vegetarians manage to live very healthy lives.
Fortunately I had the means to start a company. in your link, towards the end.

"Thanks to Salcedo, the entire Cali cartel hierarchy was extradited. For his service, the relocated Colombian received rewards of about $1.7 million."
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/a-daring-betrayal-...

Not sure if he gets any ongoing salary...but paying makes sense for the Feds in every way. They save resources since the boss will be jailed and collect cash in fines.
It’s not a waste.

You would learn the radicals which helps you understand a words origin among other things.
I've been vegan 20 years. Big, socially-censured changes can seem daunting, but anyone who says you can't eat well, and easily, is fooling themselves.

You either live your values, or come to terms with being part of what you don't like about the world.
Renegade BBS server inside Docker
Word doesn't support the editing tools that make me most productive so yes it's totally a preference for editing. But Word also by default does a lot of auto formatting and I just don't like chasing down the various toggles for it all.

It may have gotten better I haven't actually used Word in probably 10 years or more at this point. The fact is that I can edit my document in an editor I'm comfortable with and I can typeset it with a tool I'm comfortable with and the two steps are pretty distinct from each other and I like that explicit separation.
> only holds sway to non-Chinese.

Well, I'd say it holds sway to learners that a) know a better system, and b) learn as adults. Both factors allow them to form a better judgment than kids that don't know any better.
> but from the fact that if it is managed by the state, it will be badly managed, abused by a minority, and you end up over-paying while getting a bad service yourself the day you need it

Fact you say? Sounds like an opinion to me.
Because the author wanted to do his own, personal thing?

I get the idea behind your question, but it irks me a bit since it implies a sort of responsibility to contribute to an existing piece of software. This is a net positive of course, but the beauty of open source is the freedom to work on the things you want to work on.
Does anyone else think alexa/(services that record and retain) should be on the list of bad.
Interesting, as member of the Great White North (Toronto, Canada), the perception we have here, is that Bay Area has some of the best cuisine in USA. Still from hearsay / general perception, others would be NY City and New Orleans.

More importantly, and again talking stereotypes in the spirit of original post, the image of a young, hip silicon valley operative certainly includes the aura of foodiness
>what did they do to make their lives harder than they could have been?

The big issue for me is not following the directions for charging in the manual and battery screen for the car. The navigation has an option to find Superchargers and yet the author used Google Maps to find chargers instead. This means that they got "destination chargers" instead of Superchargers. Additionally, the car tells you not to make quick charging stops and not to wait until the battery is low to charge as it handles all that automatically. The author could have made this trip in 2 stops that would have taken a total of 40 minutes of charging if they had just used the navigation built into the car. They went out of their way to make sure the "range anxiety" lasted for as long as possible.
Almost all of the issues and frustrations that Marie ran into were new and/or unique to electric vehicle (at least initially), as she pointed out.

- EVs have shorter range: ICEs were similar in that fuel tank capacity hasn't changed much but engine design advancements improve fuel efficiency and in turn increase range.

- Charging stations are far and few between: same with gas stations in the early days - urbanization creates more of them.

- Different levels of charging station (1.8kwh home charging, 6.6kwh public charging and 24kw+ DC fast charging, colloquially Level 1, 2 and 3 charging). This is not the same as fuel grade. But it's obvious that just like a cellphone charger, higher output charger can fill the batteries faster.

- Range meter is a guess-o-meter. This is exactly the same as your ICE's range meter. Driving style affects fuel efficiency. Heavy footers tends to empty their fuel tank quicker same with EV, they tend to run the battery out faster or range reduced faster as the faster you drive an EV and higher current the electric motor requires and the more battery voltage drops. A range at 30mph is much longer than at 80mph. I would point out that EV range is also weather dependent (temperature affects battery chemistry, rain/snow road condition affects traction and in turn affects range as well). Newer battery management systems has mitigations for temperature control etc so it's less a concern.

- You have to be mindful about your road trip planning and charging station locations. This is the same for ICEs, but since gas stations are everywhere in urban areas so it is not a concern. It sure will improve for EVs as we build out charging infrastructure. U.S. regulators were able to negotiate a deal with VW for its diesel gate settlement so VW is contributing hughly in building out charging infrastructures.

- DC Faster charger's reliability. As an early adopter of EV, I felt this pain first hand. The early 400V DC faster charger prioritize safety and hence it gets tripped up and disconnect the charging circuit a lot. But I am seeing less and less this happens in recent years, so I'd say it's only getting improved.

- Charging etiquette. I suspect this is similar as ICE. When you refilling gas and getting some snacks and run for a bathroom break, do you park your car right in front of the gas pump even though it's fully refueled? You probably shouldn't right? Same with using DC faster chargers. Don't squat the charging spot if your car is fully charged and or above 80% of charge (above 80% charge it automatically switch to a slower charging rate), let the people inline to use the charger.
FB can't track you because the app cannot be deleted, they can track you because other apps, not even other FB apps, voluntary send FB info about you. But this doesn't match the narrative that FB is bad, so the Murdoch empire will be quiet about it.
Yeah I meant that there's another layer to the symbolic representation of "sqrt(2)" than just the tree of operation, so that you can ask sensible questions about the value of the number. For instance a generator of decimal representation or a function like "given N return a fraction q/p that's within 1/2^N of the value".

And floats are really a whole other beast than fractions or naturals or real numbers. As I wrote earlier - the "+" operator isn't associative. Python snippet:

def before():
x = 0.0
x += 1.0
for i in xrange(1000):
x += 1e-17
return x

def after():
x = 0.0
for i in xrange(1000):
x += 1e-17
x += 1.0
return x

print before() == 1.0
print after() == 1.0

Will print:

True
False
I have a huge whiteboard above my bed.

On one side I have a list of things to do everyday (eat, drink, run, make bed, bathe, get dressed, call ma, be kind)
On the other side I have a list of things to do when I am feeling down (eat a piece of fruit, have some water, calisthenics, go for a run)

The middle is reserved for things I find meaningful. At the moment it is empty except for at the top it says "this is water".
Even that can be a difficult distinction. Colonies of trees, for example, have been shown to respond to damage and illness.

IIRC, trees release specific substances into their root systems in response to damage or illness in order to communicate to nearby trees. Dying trees will even give up their sugar reserves to feed younger, healthier trees.

So, while it may not be on the same level as animals, I can see an argument being made that trees respond to something resembling "pain" or "suffering".

I did a quick search and stumbled across this article[1] from the Smithsonian Magazine which corroborates some of this and expounds on it a bit. It waxes a bit... mystical, I guess? It does seem to be based on science, but the only thing it links to are books on the subject. So, you know, grain of salt. It's a place to start, though.

1: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-whispering...
> Amid the accounts of corruption, murder, and drug smuggling, Vice News’ Keegan Hamilton wrote on Twitter, there was a brief moment of levity when lights in the courtroom went out. When the electricity returned, someone shouted “He’s gone!”, referring to Guzmán’s habit of escaping from prison. “Everybody laughed, except maybe the U.S. Marshals,” Hamilton wrote.

It's interesting how even such a serious situation as this can have these moments of laughter.
Basketball in Tibet
I used the console to set my score to 20000, and at that point the red block blinks and its movement behavior stops
working correctly.
totally agree with other two comments, tbh, nobody uses pinyin anymore after grade six, it is really just a stepping stone for kids to learn chinese before they can memorize all the common characters help them to read. As a Chinese i actually hate pinin as an adult because my name would appear in Pinin on my passport and it loses all its meaning.
UK is fine too. Even minor surgery I was scheduled in for 2 days after seeing a doctor.

We are having some trouble due to austerity cuts and freezes by the current conservative government. But in the whole it works.
iOS apps are heavily sandboxed (and given next to no process time when backgrounded).

Android apps are a bit more free, that leads to a lot of apps being good at talking to each other. But the cost is that your sandbox is less sandboxy.

Permissions are a moot point when you're talking about bundled apps because they're already going to be approved for all permissions.
I love this, while the rest of the industry is focussing on coupling admin interfaces with the front end, Ghost's focus on decoupling is a no-brainer.

Incredible work!
I should really start using RSS again, but I do remember the amount of news that you had to sort through everyday. HN does that in a fairly good fashion.
There's just to much info to handle.
Reader view is a good option, for avoiding answering on GDPR questions as well :)
I know you already know, but just posting in case it helps someone else. Be really careful about letting a squirrel get into a closed area with you, or even too close to your body. If they feel threatened (which they will once they realize they are trapped) they will f--k you up. This happened to an acquaintance of mine and he has permanent eye damage from it. They may not seem like it when they are gracefully and happily climbing trees and branches, but they are fast as hell with reflexes like lightning, and claws like knives.
Research Explains Why Pedestrians ‘Break the Rules’
One is crushing sanctions, millions of bombs, hegemony, instability, invasions, torture and government toppling. The other is China. Totalitarian lol. I get it dude, I understand you. As someone who spent a fair amount of time with westerners I know that someone telling you can't watch a movie or live without the ability to publicly insult a leader is like the worst thing ever, basically a genocide. But there really is another world out there outside of BBC and the Washington Post where people think differently than you.
Sure, but written Chinese is very different from spoken Chinese. That is the case in any language, but even more so in Chinese. Much more concise. That's the problem, really - the written language would have to change (beyond switching from characters to alphabetic writing), to be closer to spoken language.
> I meant was a phonetic system could be used in all ways contemporary spoken Mandarin is currently used without getting too tripped up by homophones.

Except phonetic writing systems are aren't even capable of representing Chinese names correctly. I think you're underestimating the extent to which homophones are prevalent in Chinese. It's not just classical texts, it's all written texts and most non-trivial spoken words, including names. The vast majority of Chinese morphemes are only a syllable long, and have up to hundreds of homophones. Unlike most European languages, Chinese names do not all come from a fixed list like "John. Mary, Jane, etc..." and are instead constructed directly from morphemes. The result is that whenever you encounter a Chinese name transliterated phonetically in any system, there is no deterministic way of converting it back into Chinese without ambiguity.
I am a multimillionaire in Indian Rupees but that doesn’t mean much in dollars or euros.

Another poster pointed out they were worth $200 million or as the article said about 147 million pounds.
If you wait until empty, but I wait until I'm at 100 miles left and fill up - this has always been within 20 miles leaving me plenty of comfort space just in case.
In pursuit of a lost childhood – A DIY story of a Hi-Fi music system
This is why I'll always run rooted Android and take back control.