skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These articles are kind of fascinating to me. I'm in my late 40s and grew up in SF, and I'm raising my kids here. The change in SF and how it is perceived is stunning.

SF used the be the place you moved to when you were tired of the careerism of New York, Los Angeles, hell, maybe even Paris. In recent years, it has become the place people move from. I actually think some people might actually move from SF to NY because they're tired of the rat race and want to drop out of it, not because they want to join it.

As for Paris, well, nobody needs an excuse to want to move to Paris.

A couple of minor points:

"San Francisco never felt like home, a place to put down roots. Everyone I knew came from somewhere else, and no one was planning on staying around for long. Most people worked in tech, and they were too busy with their careers to have time to build real relationships with anyone else. As for housing, even with a good tech salary, I still felt like home prices in the area were way too high for me to ever contemplate buying a place of my own."

If you'd stayed, you wouldn't have felt this way forever. I have a friend who commented about this. He said that when he moved to SF, he wondered who was actually from SF. The longer he stayed, the higher the percentage of people he knew who had grown up in SF or nearby. Having kids and raising them here increases it even more.

I can't say you needed to try harder to stay, because housing is nuts here and it is very rational to decide not to bother, even if they can afford too stay. I have, ahem, seen people claim they are priced out of SF who turn their nose up at my south-of-280 neighborhood. But even there, you'd have trouble getting in for much under a mil. So at this point, yeah, I pretty much have total understanding for people who feel this way, though a small part of me still wonders if you didn't meet people outside of tech, including the people who grew up here, because you made a choice not to leave that bubble.

"Being an immigrant in France has also been a much more pleasant experience compared to the US." I've heard this. I mean this as a genuine question, since I don't know much about it, but... do you think this would be the case if you were an unskilled, low income immigrant, not from Canada or other prosperous country?
> It's literally how the world works.

So the world works perfectly in your opinion?

The good thing about blockchain is it lowers the cost bar for crazy expensive business legalize. It of course needs more work but a proper smart contract setup placed in front of a judge leaves little need for a dozen lawyers and business consultants to see the intent of the contract.

The main issue is that the current very expensive and inefficient setup benefits middle men that produce very little value. Transitioning away from that will eventually happen and that will be the reason blockchain and smart contracts explode in value and usefulness.
Or my toilet
“Make the Worst Volume Control You Can Imagine”
It's better because you just described the entire mechanism in forty-four words.
The author should probably revise the targeted advertising argument: many people I know feel they prefer targeted ads. “If I’m going to see ads I’d rather see ads for stuff I might actually want.”
This is my favorite from a library I wrote ~6 years ago:

https://github.com/ricardobeat/require-tree/blob/master/inde...

The goal is to accept a 'filter' argument that can either be a string, an array of strings, a regular expression, or a filter function. It fully uses fall-through and the multiple entry points. I find it magical, in that it turns all of those into a function so the remainder of the code doesn't have to care, and it's not any less efficient. Similar feeling to finding a use case for 'Infinity' :)

switch (type(filter)) {
case 'array' : filter = filter.join('|')
case 'string' : filter = new RegExp('^('+filter.replace('*', '.*')+')$', 'i')
case 'regexp' : filter = filter.exec.bind(filter)
case 'function' : return filter
}
I have a product idea for you. You could offer me, as an employer, a part of what they pay you as an incentive to hire your graduates. Essentially I'd be getting a discount on my employee costs for the first two years in exchange for helping your program be more attractive because you'd be able to show a higher post-graduation hire rate.

I'm still working out the ethics of this in my head though. Is this ethical or exploitive? I think the answer depends on the employer. I feel like it's good for the student, since after two years they will have had a chance to learn on the job at a discount to me, and if I've done a good job training them further, they'd be valuable enough to me to keep on board without the discount. But I worry that an unethical employer might only keep them two years and abuse them and then cut them loose when the discount runs out. So you'd have to prevent that somehow.
My phone is more powerful than my previous decade server.

If smartphones came with display ports, many more people could have a PC experience without having a PC.
It certainly seems biased towards conjoined twins.
Plagiarism, Then and Now
John Ruskin: A Prophet for Our Troubled Times
Touch friendly is mouse friendly.

It's friendly but it's not space efficient. For applications with a huge number of features, a touch UI can't handle them. Touch screens don't have right click, so you can't get context menus.

It's more than that, though. A touch screen UI for the iPhone makes zero sense on a 32" display. I'd much rather have a true multiwindow, multitasking operating system than that. Really, I wouldn't use a 32" iOS device at all. That's probably why Apple doesn't make them.
There seems to be a chronic need in the Redis community to avoid confrontation (or even be bucketed) in the same space as Kafka.

Redis Streams is probably one of the most path-breaking things that Redis is doing - and can completely change what it stands for. That's not a bad thing..but it doesn't even get a title by itself but is rather called "data structures".

Here's a question - do you anticipate competing with Kafka? There are a lot of us that are cheering Redis on for this...but it seems there is internal reluctance.

It's like the long standing "Redis is not memcached" statement - even WordPress has a "choose Redis or memcached for object caching" option.
Which mountain was it?
> At least $2.5B of that is on the table for any company that wants to build and office for 25,000 people in LIC.

Right. Leaving $500MM in cold hard taxpayer dollars to build a building for the richest guy in the world so he could promptly compete with local businesses. Which, to be clear, was not something a lot of those taxpayers were happy about.
Real-time collision detection (Real-Time Collision Detection (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive 3-D Technology) https://www.amazon.com/dp/1558607323/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_bR...) also deserves a spot on this list.
Hey, Kshitij from Rockset here.

With Rockset you can avoid ETL when it comes to extracting and manipulating the data. Also, the main value here is that you can join this data with other data sets that are in JSON, CSV, XLS or Parquet formats using SQL to help in analysis.
Cue cries of corporations becoming more powerful than governments.

That is a legitimate reason for concern. US corporations have ravaged entire countries in the past. Four of the largest US tech corporations taking coordinated action to punish a part of the US judicial system is something to be concerned about. If you're concerned about corporate lobbying, you should be at least as concerned about that. Probably more.
Which is actually a good thing, because the constant delay meant we could not obtain an injunction nor sure if EAD would exist. Also some of the recent changes by USCIS means that time to get H4+EAD is now around 12 months. Effectively as good as killing EAD.

Courts have forced them to publish the rule on which we can then obtain an injunction.
Blockchain is a fractional reserve system which can be used as a payment layer. That's it. The whole point of blockchain tech is to create hype and incentivise collaboration towards a shared financially beneficial goal.

Saying that blockchain has no use cases is like saying that money has no use cases. It incentivizes, it corrupts, it buys loyalties, it buys positive news coverage - These are the most important use cases of all and blockchain is great at that. Potential value is real value, even speculative value is real value.

People should not diregard the benefits of Blockchain any more than they should disregard the benefits of VC money. They're both mechanisms of mass collaborative incentivization and corruption.

The only way to beat corruption is by democratizing it so that anyone can do it.
I'm pretty comfortable with Ruby and have been programming in it for over 5 years now. But for any new project from now on I'd try to use a Typed Functional language - Reason/OCaml, Haskell etc.

I used to argue strongly against types and functional programming, but that was before I actually knew the paradigm at all. I wonder if you have tried building anything non-trivial in a Typed Functional language, or even a different paradigm like logic programming. If you have and are not convinced, that'd be a great discussion to have. If you haven't, then based on my own experience, I think you might shift your opinions after spending a year or so with it.
Probably moreso now than ever with the synchronized ideation from Internet news and social media.
I'm conflicted. Swift's switch is powerful, but it's also complex, and even after using it for years, I still have to occasionally look up the syntax for some variant. Other HLLs have other ways of accomplishing these tasks that work just as well.

The whole language feels like they crammed every possible feature into every other feature, as a cartesian product of syntax, rather than as Lisp or Tcl or Forth does, with simple syntax that's flexible so everything naturally works everywhere. Someone even made an http://fuckingifcaseletsyntax.com for Swift, so I don't think I'm alone here.

You can really see the C legacy by the name and overall structure. I still miss the simplicity and flexibility of COND, and :keywords. It's nice that Swift can identify unhandled enum cases, I guess, but I can't say that's ever been a problem I've run into.

Most of the examples here I would prefer to write as a dictionary literal (more declarative), or possibly a method on the enum (easy in Swift). It's only single-dispatch, but it's still much better than burying functionality inside single-use, untestable switch statements in the middle of a func. If something is useful enough to justify writing 8 or 10 lines of code to handle a set of cases, then I guarantee I'm going to want to evaluate it in the debugger next week.

The older I get, the less Turing-complete code I want to write. Code is a liability. Constant tables are pure value. Switch, then, is the worst: it takes something which looks very much like a constant table, and forces it to be code.
A powerful move would be for Apple to continue renting the space, but close the store and place posters in the windows explaining exactly why they've left, and why things needs to change. Might light a fire under local politicians.
It depends which toolset the 2 year old is currently using.
Use F# with a TypeProvider. Of course, I imagine it would take some work learning F# but once you learn it the sky is the limit in what you can do with this data.
The Death of Local News Is Making Us Dumber and More Divided
The mixing in of reader abuse is really off putting. "do you really not understand?" etc. I know, I know, it's been discussed a thousand times, but still.
>In return graduates pay us 15% of their income for 2 years if they are earning over $40,000.

What if graduates don't get (or decide not to pursue) a coding job, and instead return to their original or similar field? Do they still need to pay part of their unrelated jobs salary to you?
I'm pretty sure that some criminals will use such devices in the future.

I'm also pretty sure that criminal use is going to be rare.

There doesn't seem to be a very large overlap between willingness to commit violent crime and the technical competency to turn off-the-shelf consumer products into weapons. Why do terrorists stab people with knives when they could make explosives from household materials instead? They're clearly violent and unafraid of death. My interpretation: they lack the necessary knowledge to make explosives, aren't capable of self-learning either, and settle for a vastly inferior but readily available knife. Even organized crime seems to use explosives rather rarely, and even then diverted/stolen commercial ones more often than DIY.
Yes, I'm inclined to agree. Seems like this is the only way to instil awareness in people what the tradeoffs are.
Yes but Gogs is self-hosted whereas Gitlab offers hosting solutions.
This argument is obvious nonsense.

There was no outcry to prevent Amazon from using general programs that were open to all applicants, the problem was with the special extras they negotiated.

There's no reason to think that Amazon would have been facing opposition if they'd just announced a new project in LIC and applied for the normal programs.

They didn't do that.
I've often considered myself a bit of a paranoid freak with my resistance to running apps on my mobile devices. However, this really makes the point of mobile devices questionable for me if I don't really do anything with them because of the fear of not knowing what they really do. While that's all a bit hyperbolic, I'm kind of glad I just don't trust anything. I have a few apps that I use, but I can't really vouch that they are not doing things I don't know about. If it were not for maps, decent web browsing, and a small number of other slightly more useful than just convenient apps, I'd be willing to go back to a feature phone. One I can take the battery out of if I felt the need.
I mean, I would like if they said use a public cryptographic ledger as the no path with another split. But yea pretty much. Unless you are making money, you don't need a block chain, a public cryptographic ledger will do ya just fine.
I've recently been thinking about a blockchain use case that I have not seen mentioned: security.

It seems like log obfuscation is a common tactic used to cover tracks after a break in. Thus it seems like a blockchain could be used in a logging system so that a falsified log would trigger an alert.
Our Twisted DNA
Hey, Kshitij from Rockset here.

You are correct that Rockset is doing text extraction for PDF but the main value here is that you can join this data with other data sets that are in JSON, CSV, XLS or Parquet formats using SQL without doing any ETL.
> Do you want your car company maximizing revenue by not allowing you to buy anything but new parts of their manufacture installed by their techs?

DRM for machinery is absolutely already a thing.

What about shifting open source licenses so that duplicating an open source API in a proprietary product, or using a product that does so, is a violation of the license agreement?
Yep but I went for the simplest case that answers the question.
So what if people communicate with each other? That's the point of the internet and has been forever. That's like blaming telephones for outrage.

What does Q have to do with outrage? Is Q responsible for Smollet and the race baiting by CNN and the rest of the media? Is Q responsible for the russia fearmongering?

Are you really blaming small fringe youtube channels for the current state of affairs? Most people get brainwashed into hysteria by CNN, MSBNC, Foxnews, NYTimes, etc, not fringe youtube channels.

Conspiracy has been on youtube and the internet forever. It's nothing new and it is fringe.

What's new is that the entire media apparatus has decided to shift blame onto social media for the problems they caused. The extremism isn't on youtube, it's on CNN, MSBNC, NYTimes, WashingtonPost, Huffpo, Buzzfeed, TheVerge and all the rest of the media.

They are the ones spreading conspiracies. They are the ones spread lies. They are the ones spreading hate. They are the ones claiming one side are nazis and the other side are commies. They are the ones lying about trump being a putin slave just like 8 years ago some in the media painted obama as a foreign born muslim.

The only ones blaming "Q" are propagandists working for the media or politically affiliated groups. 99% of americans haven't even heard of Q. But 99% of americans have heard the hate-filled divisive propaganda from CNN, MSBNC, NYTimes, WashingtonPost, etc.

Blaming social media for the current outrage is like blaming mortgage borrowers, rather than the multinational banks for the financial crisis. It's absurd.

Also, don't you think it's a bit odd that outrage has increased since youtube, google, facebook, etc shifted their algorithm to favor CNN, MSBNC, NYTimes, WashingtonPost, etc. I wonder why.

And most importantly, much of the outrage is coming from the left, not the fringe Q crowd. You know the people consuming CNN, MSBNC, NYTimes, WashingtonPost, etc. But we can blame "Q" or "4chan" or "russia" or any of the other nonsense the people pretending to be journalists love to spout.
Did you ever read Flatland? Spoiler alert...

The thing about Flatland is the twist at the end, when Square asks Sphere about even higher dimensions (than three) and Sphere is unwilling to consider them.

(I guess what I'm saying is, if you like Functional Programming, try Prolog. Logical Paradigm is even more useful than Functional Paradigm.)
To me it seems more like two wildly different forms of PTSD. For the former group (those who prefer static typing), unmaintainable and poorly documented spaghetti code has been the most identifiable source of pain in their career while for the latter, it has been long iteration times due to bureaucratic nightmares caused by compiler and management.

Like early childhood experiences, each programmer I've discussed the subject with seems to have their own unique professional experience that has molded their opinions. It's less a religion and more a coping mechanism for bad experiences.
Flagged posts still appear in https://hckrnews.com/
Taming Time Series Data
Will Blockchain Technology Startups Transform the Internet of Things?
With blockchain, like a database, if you put garbage in you get garbage out. There's no good way to tie physical world assets to blockchain because you can't fingerprint these things like you can with digital assets.
I've found that when there's something that I can SHOW him, some cause/effect, simple explanations stick. For example, how keystrokes make matching letters and numbers appear on screen, how we can find a picture of a truck and print it out, or a model of his BRIO railroad and make it on the 3D printer.

On the other hand, when the cause/effect is behind the scenes, not tangible, simple explanations end up leading him down a (funny) road of misunderstandings. I was trying to explain to him the idea of place values when reading numbers, which is surprisingly hard to explain short of memorizing numbers. He came up with some great questions, all of which indicated he was on a totally different page.
> a thousand residential units—two hundred and fifty of which will be affordable. The neighborhood will also gain 100,000 square feet of light manufacturing and industrial space, ground floor retail, a cultural center, a 600-seat middle school, and a one-acre park.

Those things sound like a much better addition to the area than one Amazon.
YouTube itself refuses to agree to free licensing agreements with content creators. It forces them into a non-free agreement, or nothing. This is done, in no small part, to deter competition.

The term is 4H, "You agree not to solicit, for commercial purposes, any users of the Service with respect to their Content.".

That would include licensing requests. Commercial purpose does not mean e.g. only for pay. It has a broad definition that would almost certainly include a peer to peer company reaching out to content creators to try to host their content, even for free. Once again, that is their exclusively for anti-competitive purposes as I doubt even users that just want to share their content with no expectation over remuneration would opt in to having any and all proposals preemptively killed off.
This sounds great! I'm no expert but it seems that the postgres documentation disagrees about the process for enabling the extension -- "The module must be loaded by adding pg_stat_statements to shared_preload_libraries in postgresql.conf, because it requires additional shared memory. This means that a server restart is needed to add or remove the module."[1]

What I was really looking for was a ballpark estimate or guideline of what additional resources a server would need to run this extension.

[1]https://www.postgresql.org/docs/11/pgstatstatements.html
Polluted by Money
Firefox optionally syncs a configurable list of things between installations. It uses firefox sync. All of this is opt in and encrypted so that mozilla can't read it.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/firefox-sync-privacy/
> Then check again, as OpenJDK has a much better ARM support nowadays.

I just checked, and it by default ships with Zero in interpreter mode, with Azul's AArch32 work still being pre beta and not even fully integrated into master yet.

> In any case, the beauty of standard Java is that the OpenJDK is not the only option available for targeting ARM, there are other vendors offering Java compliant solutions.

I'm not going to pay for a solution for a $5 chip.
Shame on her like those people "intolerant of intolerance".
Node isn't even a JavaScript engine.
I believe you are saying "blockchain" here when what you are meaning is "cryptocurrency" such as Bitcoin.
Machine Learning 101: Supervised, Unsupervised, Reinforcement, and Beyond
> I can pretty much guarantee that as long as everybody does cross-development, the platform won't be all that stable.

Even if that's technically true, there's no reason there can't be ARM workstations. There aren't many because they're still generally slower, but there's no fundamental reason (that I know of) why an ARM workstation can't work just as well as an x86 workstation in almost every case.
That sounds like a very convoluted way to ask for what is in essence a discount.
Unsurprisingly, catalogues raisonnes are a hotbed of legal activity and controversy. Many scholars will now not offer opinions on the authenticity of a work for fear of getting sued:

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/20/arts/design/art-scholars-...

And works with supposedly excellent provenance still end up being repudiated by authentication committees:

https://www.antiquestradegazette.com/news/2011/double-denied...

Due to the misaligned incentives in the art authentication world, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that a blockchain would be a good way of tracking records in the artworld, particularly if artists register works directly on it.
One thing I want to add regarding "Cookie Autodelete" that tripped me up, unlike it's predecessor it does not default at the start to deleting everything, so you may end up running it for a year thinking it's clearing everything and than realize you have a multi-megabyte list full of tracking cookies.
> much of the outrage is coming from the left

I'm not sure how you can say that when most of the actual murders (shooting up church congregations; shooting up synagogues; shooting up festivals; driving cars into protestors; etc etc) is coming from the right.

You don't get much more outraged than trying to kill someone.