skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think final figures for 2018 are out yet. For 2017:

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
I've seen them thrive in startups too. The company was incompetent, made millions. Things regularly broke (enterprise!) but the startup was backed by one of the biggest accelerators in the region, CEO hung around a lot of influential groups, media covered them a lot.

They think income is slowing down because of AI, but it's really because they make bad software and are running out of customers.

But it's a very unsexy field and there are no new competitors.
No, training modern enural networks requires a ton of data and a ton of computing power, both of which are available only to the biggest organizations.
While this may be true, it doesn’t provide a scapegoat for why I can’t buy a house in SF.
If Apple is indeed granted the patent on Swift's optional chaining (as was recently posted https://forums.swift.org/t/apple-is-indeed-patenting-swift-f... ), we wouldn't see this in future Javascript, would we?
Nice work!

Seems to freeze if you put a number too high though. Perhaps you should add a limit?
Can anyone comment on why larger resistive water heaters are being phased out?
Heat pumps are ok when its not too cold, you aren't going to be using one in an Alaskan winter though.

Are you just going to be expected to buy a heat pump water heater and rely on the resistive backup 6 months of the year? That may be preferable from an energy use point of view, but massively more expensive, to the point of pushing people back to gas.
Ah, that sounds like a really cool place to visit then.

Harsh, but cool.

Thanks for sharing so much detail!
Nitpick: DRY isn't directly a SOLID concept.

I find SPOT (Single Point Of Truth) to be more to the point than DRY, because it is explicitly about semantics and not about mere syntactic repetition.
I don't understand - why are browsers centralised?
It would be ideal if we could replace fossil fueled power plants with solar and wind, but it is not currently technically possible and as they provide different forms of services. Fossil fueled power plants generate power based on demand. Solar and wind generate power based on weather.

With current technology we really only have two distinct options. We can use solar and wind when the weather allows for it and then burn coal, gas and oil when it doesn't. The global warming impact is the combined result averaged over the year, and the energy cost is similar to the combined price.

The other option is nuclear which has the huge upfront cost and nuclear waste, but with minimal global warming.

In the future we could get more alternatives. Different form of batteries (like reverse hydro) would allow solar and wind to be separated from on-demand fossil fueled power plants, and dynamic energy market could change demand based on supply so that a lower base generation from nuclear and regular hydro would work in combination with wind and solar.
Isn't that something that could be solved by shipping it with a 50c piece of metal between the bars during shipping as a surrogate for the wheel axle? Given the list prices, seems like they could stretch to that, and it'd be more reliable than hoping the delivery man will be more gentle because he thinks it's a TV box.
I note with interest how her travelogue was rediscovered. How will this work a couple hundred years from now when people of our generation put stuff online instead of pen to paper? Will there hopefully be a local copy on their computer, assuming the SSD or HD hasn't died and later generations can read it? Or will it simply perish when the hosting bill isn't paid, or the account is inactive?

A lot of memoirs from this writer's era certainly didn't survive either, but it seems like there was a greater chance back then even considering the cost of pen, ink and paper.
>How do you get in touch with people, or how do you allow other people to get in touch with you?

Ask yourself, which people (or types of people) do you actually care about being getting in touch with you. Remember that 90%+ of people in your personal or professional will never get in touch with you. So there's no reason to go out of your way to ensure those people can find you.

For family, friends, etc, most everybody has a phone number, texting, and email. Probably the people who matter to you have your contact information. For new people, give them your phone number.

For work, a LinkedIn account is usually is sufficient. You don't even have to login on a regular basis. That gives people from your professional life a way to find you.

If you want to have a place to show projects, Github and the usual places like that are sufficient. Put your email there.

A lot of times people ask themselves, "What if somebody from the past wants to connect with me? Don't I need Facebook/Instagram/Twitter?" Honestly speaking, most people from high school, college, job 10 years ago, etc don't care if you are alive or dead. The ones that do and really want to connect with you will find a way to do so. I had a friend from high school find me on LinkedIn to get my phone number so we could catch up. Turns out we didn't have much in common anymore so that was the end of that!
Honestly I was a bit lost at what was the innovation in the article, but reading your comment I think it's just that the US (?) didn't know about that.

What you describe is how water heaters work in most households in France and Belgium, and - I assumed until now - mostly everywhere with a well developed electrical infrastructure.

Except instead on people manually setting up timers, the utility send a signal over the electrical wires when off-peak hours begin and end, and a device (owned and installed by the utility. It can be integrated into the counter like in France, or a separate Zellweger device like in Belgium) turns that into a third wire that power hungry appliances can use to turn on during off-peak hours.

Usually, the utility guarantees a minimum amount of off-peak hours per day, with min/max times that are convenient enough (you will never have two hours of off-peak at 9am, then one hour at 2pm and then five hours from 4pm to 9pm, is going to be between 10pm and 8am in any case).

Water heaters will rarely be turned on during the day in this configuration. It doesn't work that well will storage heaters though.
"I was haunted by the possibility that the thing had no answer at all, and by the even more dismaying thought that the damn thing was simple and I just couldn’t see it. Am I stupid to keep trying or stupid to not be done yet? Either way …"

This resonates so much with me. This is the biggest gulf between doing very hard assigned problems and original research.

Just knowing that a problem is 'at your level' really helps me with solving it. Any failure becomes a temporary setback, rather than an indication that maybe I won't be able to solve this.

I've tried to meta-game myself on this, simply by assuming the solution is achievable. It gets ever harder the longer a problem goes unsolved though. Simply because it takes more effort to ignore the 'evidence' suggesting the problem is hard.
I’ve lived my whole life breaking this advice. No ill effects yet!
I'm on real-time electricity pricing (https://hourlypricing.comed.com/live-prices/) and have been thinking about this for a while.

I have a gas-powered main water heater, and my idea involved installing a second electrically heated tank to use as a feed/preheater to the main water heater and would only kick on when the real-time price was near zero or, as it happens in the summer sometimes, slightly negative which indicates a load-shedding situation.

At the end the cost of installing this all meant the ROI was really long. But I like this concept.
> It's OK to repeat the same 3 lines of code

… 2–3 times. Not ok to repeat them 1000 times.
Are there other frameworks that run on OpenResty? I like the idea very much and I like Lua, but I don't like this class/ORM thing.
This isn’t just a “newsroom” problem - there are lots of areas where “the IT guy” is seen as just that and nothing more. We get typecast in many companies.

In my experience, knowledge of the field you’re working in is a huge deal. I worked for an LTL trucking company for seven years. Anyone can write SQL, but it takes specialized and specific knowledge to build appropriate metrics and to know what data exist to support them. I’m in healthcare now, and have worked for companies serving medical research, patient care, and prescription drug pricing/insurance. The knowledge I bring to the table allows me to see things my peers who don’t share my specific history simply don’t - and, importantly, their knowledge and unique histories allow them to do the same. We’re stronger because of our diverse professional backgrounds.

In short, I think it’s important to cultivate cross-role knowledge sharing and responsibilities. It’s good for the company now, and it’s good for the employees’ careers in the long term.
Goto in JavaScript via Babel
even for PWA. you still need to test your app. on several devices.
This is a sorta standard rejoiner.. but other humans should have to account/take responsibility for their decisions, and part of that process is that other humans should judge individuals as individuals which almost by definition machine learned classifiers cannot. ML is great for dealing with massproduced artefacts, or standardised processes, but it's just not the right tool for reasoning over domains that are not full of approximately similar things. That the Chinese government (and Google, and Facebook) think that humans are in that category speaks volumes about them.
Whether it seems like a trick or not depends on your background.
Samsung already make laptops.
https://github.com/eligrey/FileSaver.js/issues

Doesn't seem to be working well. A few people I know got burned trying to use it and expecting universal functionality across all browsers.
I don't think the article says it is difficult. I think it more laments the fact that it is a bit of a lost art and that some people are afraid of its safety (as comments to this article can confirm). If more people took the time to give it a shot, more people would get hooked on it and do more of it. I swear that sauerkraut is like a gateway drug.

The ethics stuff in the article comes off a bit strong to me though. My ferments are a bit like a pet. Heck, many people name their sourdough cultures!
> Imagine that the requirements are that your program does A, B, C, D and E, in that order.

I find that every year I write software, the less my software looks like "do step A, then B, then ...". It's always becoming more functional and declarative. I'm not sure there's any function in my entire program that has to do 5 high-level calls in order like that.

Without hearing what A/B/C/D/E actually are, this sounds almost straw-man-ish, or perhaps architecture-astronaut-ish.
I'm really curious : could you try to make the case here? I'd be very interested in this perspective.
Part of thinks thinks well, yeah, incompetence exists everywhere, but another part is wondering if this sort of thing isn't done intentionally to distract attention away from the actual operation and foster a false sense of security. If you are my enemy, it is to my advantage if you believe I am incompetent.
> A heat pump (a compressor and some fans) can be switched on or off just as fast as a heating element,

This is not true, and the article specifically addresses this. A heating element can be switched on and off roughly five orders of magnitude faster (100 000× faster) than a heat pump.
In your view - are "open societies" as an idea naive or the means of achieving them employed naive? You might very well be right, but imagine desiring a more open world, what would be the correct course to achieve it?

Also, what would be the mechanisms you would employ if you were a person with lots of money and desiring to shape the world into a better place? One approach is the one taken by Bill Gates, where he focuses on technological and social ones, but steers away from the political issues. But lots and lots of evil from this world stems from political reasons. Surely there should be a way to improve that, besides just focusing on the technical and hoping the politics would sort itself out.
It's hilarious that so many people are pointing out that this argument against abstraction would not be convincing if the author had used good concrete function names.
Why Is It So Hard to Detect Keyup Events on Linux?
Living in a Fictional Story Created by Social Media Is Making Us Delusional
The Library of Congress also decided to archive Tyler's blog, Marginal Revolution [0].

Tyler has interesting views, and some of them are rather unconventional. E.g., he thinks that religion is good predictor of economic growth (citing Mormons as an example). Although Mormonism might be a good predictor of economic growth, I disagree that we should have more Mormons or religious groups. He said it in a podcast with Erik Torenberg [1].

My startup has been awarded his grant called Emergent Ventures [2] and have met and talked to him in that context. Super interesting person and has a surprisingly great network in Silicon Valley, although he is based in the East Coast. For example next week, he's interviewing Sam Altman [3].

0: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/01/li...

1: https://www.breaker.audio/venture-stories/e/40444931

2: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/12/se...

3: https://conversationswithtyler.com/event/sam-altman/
Thanks for checking it out! I am wondering how big is the number you are putting in? If the number is really high, it's probably causing a stack overflow. I would limit the size, but each browser has its own recursion limits so that would be quite a pain. In retrospect, I probably should not have used a recursive algorithm for this task :).
Not sure I'd hang my hat on Snopes as the arbiter of truth. Soros himself admits in the 60 minutes interview in having a role in the property confiscation. However, IMO his actions at that time are morally justifiable given he was a 14 year old boy attempting to survive in a historically unique context.

However, WRT this speech at Davos, I suspect his problem isn't with mass surveillance as much as it is with China performing the mass surveillance. Soros is an ideologue and I'm sure he'd be just fine with the technology being used to support his political agendas.
I guarantee more cyclists break the law than delivery drivers. Would you suggest I immediately pull my truck in front of every cyclist I see blow through a stop sign?
Not as much as it'll hurt the crowd living in locations that are likely to be totally wiped off the map in the event that we fail to mitigate the issue which is still likely.

But independent of this, I'm pro wealth-redistribution at any rate so really I see the solution to the paycheck to paycheck problem in terms of that. Massive investment in switching to green energy should also help by creating good jobs, as well.

The largest bulk of excess emissions doesn't appear to come from individual habits so much as structural industrial practices - things like producing things far overseas and shipping them by oil tanker, electricity production still being heavily reliant on coal, commutes being effectively mandated for many workers as their work doesn't pay them enough to live close to their job - or their job being doable remotely but corporate policy preventing workers from taking advantage of that (to both the benefit of their free time and health as well as the environment). So it seems unfair that working people should be punished for something they have limited power over.
In the UK, and I guess there are similarities elsewhere, food dates come in two forms.

"Best before" is product quality information. "Use by" is product safety information. If a product says "best before mm/yyyy" you can use the product after that. There'll be a gradual deterioration in quality. But it may well be safe for years after the date (depending how it's stored and whether the packaging stays in shape).

"Use by" means you risk illness if you eat it after the date. Obviously there's a bit of a safety margin built in, and some people are at much higher risk of illness than others.
why no one proposes as feature a header to make javascript strict with the newest standard and deprecate and drop compatibility from previous versions in the newer ones?

Or even just complete support for asmjs with interop and program in completely other languages, especially since the person who wrote this seems to want to program in languages with different semantics...
Google's search AI connects Java question with suicide
Jacques Ellul makes very similar points in his work La Technique (The Technological Society). He traces how technology and power interplay from the invention of the pocket watch and steam engine, all the way to computers. It's one of the best works I've come across in this space and a must read for Technology critics and advocates alike. I wish it would be (even) more widely read here[1] than it is but finding it in languages others than English or French might prove a challenge. His follow up work "Propaganda The Formation of Mens Attitudes" is also phenomenal. These 2 books are among the best books I discovered in 2018 (if not in the last decade).

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Jacques%20Ellul&sort=byPopular...
This isn't even abstraction, it's just encapsulation of code into functions.

If you're fundamentally against that, I pity anyone that has to attempt to read and understand anything any bigger than a toy example.
Is it even a useful feature?

Will it lead to many JS bugs simply disappearing and applications getting more stable or will it just obfuscate bugs in the long run?
It was stupid on my part, but I remember being surprised in an undergrad Physics I lab when our inclined plane motion experiment matched predicted results so accurately.

I went to a decent high school with science labs, but most knowledge seemed so abstract. How often do you do accurate chemistry in everyday life?

Classical mechanics, on the other hand, is most of life. Everything moves. And it felt pretty magical that suddenly I had math that could predict the future.
While I like the humour a lot...

I don't think Java is what is was about 8-15 years ago. I did a little at university in the late 90s, and have started working with it professionally just in the last three years. AFAICT the enterprise OO nightmare is over, and it's much more like working with python - pick some components and libraries that implement the details of what you need then build your business logic. With lambdas, streams, futures etc, it becomes quite straightforward and powerful.
> There are no neutral organizations.

That's only fair to say, therefore you must not mind me quoting some facts highlighted by "the other side":

"From the viewpoint of security of supply, so far wind power in Germany has replaced conventional power plant output of no more than 150MW. For comparison: In terms of the stability of the electricity grid in Germany, a power plant capacity of about 77,000 to 82,000 MW is required at the time of the annual peak load, which can occur usually on a late afternoon on a day in the period from November to February and is not known in advance"

https://docs.wind-watch.org/VGB-Windstudie-2017-Teil-1-EN.pd...

Your source just doesn't really deal with base load at all, even though that's the giant pink cigar-smoking elephant in the room. It can't be taken serious. It's starting with a premise ("Energiewende" is necessary) and works its way backwards, carefully avoiding to deal with the real issues. It's implying significant technological breakthroughs coming out of left field. It's all supposed to happen with taxpayer/consumer money, thrown around like candy. There's profiteering everywhere, lots of PR and lobbying, lots of moral grandstanding. In that environment, I can almost guarantee you, the money will be in the wrong hands. It won't be there when the real opportunities appear.
My father works in the heating world. He installed a large efficient storage water heater in the house which would basically warm the water in one go at 5am and provide it to the house all day.

What I don't understand from the article is why this is being controlled by the grid? The US is a market system, can't I buy a smart immersion heater which can then react to real time pricing information? So I warm my water up at times when the grid are paying people to use electricity?

That places the incentives correctly:

a) The entity making the investment in a new heater also gets the financial benefits thereof.

b) What's to stop your electricity supplier making your water 5% hotter every year to boost their revenues?
I was trying to work out their attitude to heat pumps too. Its almost "they're too efficient, lets use something that uses more electricity" ?!

I don't share your concerns with calling it a battery though, it stores energy. Combined with a peltier it could generate electricity with that energy.

If it eases marketing, and gets this into peoples homes, I'm all for it.
ConvNet implemented in Minecraft
Agreed. It says free, but it does cost my name and email. It's going to have to answer these questions by the pop up before I fill it in.
The original emoji: Why the Scream is still an icon for today
> It bothers me that PWAs are a thing too.

I think you accidentally replied to the wrong comment. It sounds like you're responding to lettergram's comment, which also complains that PWAs bother him: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19011910

Versus the parent comment from reichardt, which speaks favorably of PWAs.
We re not talking about Apollo-level investments
You clipped out the qualifying phrase, “as far as the article is concerned”, dumping a few extra MW of electricity for 30 mins or a few hours. I don’t see a need presented in the article to rapidly switch a heating element on and off a few 1000 times a second.
The 40 hours week? I thought some countries were already trying 32 hours weeks.
What freedom of information? China chose "restrict access to information" as the method of control, the US chose "deluge people with so much misinformation they can just choose whatever truth suits them". Don't make the mistake of thinking one is better, or more free.
When Trump and Soros sound the same, they're probably right.
>- "better performance, better battery use" - this is not true at all. What makes you think so?

How is that even remotely controversial? With native you run direct native code, in C/C++/Obj-C/Swift/etc and optimized native UI libraries. With a PWA you run a browser engine, a DOM rendering pipeline, and on top of it you run Javascript, and on top you run one today's frameworks. Guess what uses less battery? Ever did a comparison of native vs Electron apps on the desktop, where it's easy to compare?

(To preempt a facile counter-argument: yes, a native app can be coded very silly, do busy wait or whatever, and eat all the cpu/battery/memory. We're interested about baselines and what happens "everything else being equal").

>- "better integration, better look and feel" - it depends a lot on available web standards, which are constantly improving.

Doesn't matter how much they improve, they will always not be 1:1 with the access to the smartphone OS's SDK libs a native app has.

Nor would be the exact same look/feel as the platform (which native gives you), ever compare to someone's ad-hoc UI or re-implementation of the native L&F.

>You forgot about disadvantages: Developers need to develop several versions of their app

That's a disadvantage of the developer, not the user. Why would I as a user care? So that I can get more worse apps more easily?

Besides, WPA still need testing -- especially if they use the "available web standards, which are constantly improving".

>Authors have to pay fees for having their product in various "stores"

Still good in my book. Puts a somewhat higher barrier for crap.