skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know Lisp and more specifically, Lisp machines, have greatly influenced Mathematica but when I read that Wolfram is using Mathematica as a computer shell I can't help but think that he's taken the Symbolics Genera paradigm and ran with it. I'm certainly happy about that since nobody else seems to have realized how well it fits in with the current era of having to deal with ever-increasing information flows in disparate domains.

But I'm also regretting that Mathematica is not opensource since I'm convinced this constitutes a great barrier that the vast majority of programmers today will not attempt to cross.
> The problem might be risking job security? That could be offset by forming a large enough group?

You're talking about workplace organizing to mitigate reprisal risk when taking direct action, aka "sabotage".

The IWW has literature on how to engage in such endeavors, and a good relationship with the TWC, who're organizing the tech industry in such a manner.

Please note I've so far omitted the word "union", although it's a concept adjacent to what you're reaching for.

1. https://www.iww.org/PDF/Official/IWW_organizing_manual.pdf

2. https://techworkerscoalition.org
I think that's why Rust is pulling a lot of developers from C/C++ and not languages like Python or Java.
Not sure, to be honest.
Those work great for the "back end" but don't cover the aspects of the in-browser "front end" unless you do everything on the server side.
No one said you couldn't use Mozilla. But this is being treated as news when it has already been done elsewhere. I strongly support your right to use whatever browser you want.
Show HN: Tweakflow – Safe Embeddable Scripting for the JVM
Although I appreciate the complement I am 14 and I don’t see wtf anyone would get out of posting this long ass story if they were just a “troll”
When I was a student I had a different viewpoint on this, but it all depends on the people, and putting everyone in one bucket is rarely accurate.

Kids whose parents sign their leases and pay their rents will almost never fail to pay rent, and if you do have a problem, their parents are almost always going to save their asses in fear of breaching contract. At least here in Texas, contracts and tenancy laws greatly favor property owners.
As you can imagine, there’s the risk of having people damage walls / floors / plumbing, but in my experience that stuff is mostly trivial to repair and that is what damage and security deposits are partially intended to cover. When I was a student I repaired drywall at every place I lived, some minor, some major, and was never charged a dime at move-out. Most new apartments have a standard procedure of repainting between every tenant.
Teacher unions will get upset about such realities like supply and demand :p
It seemed to me like when I went to grad school that a lot of students were there for the freedom to explore their interests. They then quickly realize that their freedom is subject to a bunch of constraints like the availability of grants or the specific interests of your advisor.

And if you're going to be that constrained may as well get a job and make some money while you're doing this.

Your salary as a PhD student is a joke but you're still an expensive asset as far as your advisor is concerned because of your tuition which pays for stuff like maintaining the campus, allowing you to take classes, your office etc..

However, I feel that most of those resources are useless as far as a student is concerned. You just need to pay for rent and maintain a relatively comfortable lifestyle. So something like $2,000 a month would be more than sufficient for a student and is a tiny cost for an investor looking to have interesting research published either as a paper or open source project.

The only real working relationship in a graduate program is the relationship between faculty and student so maybe it's worth it for some of the wealthier faculty to cut out the middlemen.
Because they've invested 5-10 years of their lives in a doctorate, publications, and connections that are specifically aimed at an academic position and very little good for anything else. Adjuctships are a holding pattern that allows you to still be "part" of the academy and thus leaves the tenure track dream alive, however tenuously. Leaving is admitting that your whole career, and probably sense of personal identity, has to be discarded and rebuilt from scratch in your mid 30s.
How Political Science Became Irrelevant
Extensive discussion of original source (NBC News report): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19672795
"Studies have shown that the cost reductions associated with reliance on contingent faculty members do not translate to greater savings or tuition decreases, but that instead more money is spent elsewhere: on recruitment, admissions, athletics, nonacademic student programming, and so on. In other words, the hollowing out of the professoriate is not a viable strategy for making the university cheaper, better, or more nimble; it’s devastating the core functions of the university itself"

This sums up the core of the problem. Some here will argue it is a labor oversupply issue, but I would argue it is a problem inherent to American capitalism itself. Our universities have transitioned into a mindset of "running like a business" and thus have adopted the common enterprise mentality of constantly seeking cost reductions. These cost reductions come at the expense of quality. I say this having spent many years working in University administration. It is exactly as the author notes, the cost savings merely get spent elsewhere in nonproductive ways, usually on more expensive administration. You see this in for-profit enterprises as well as they mature the pay inequality skews as executives take more of the profits.

"What’s the way forward? Treating nearly 75 percent of the professoriate as disposable, ancillary to the mission of higher education, has become the norm."

This is the way though of our current system, we treat employees as disposable cogs in the machine. We outsource to companies who pay bargain basement wages and produce low quality work destroying small businesses. We do this in the name of efficiency, but we neglect quality.

I propose no solutions of my own, but agree with the author that some healthy debate is needed on this issue.
Pornography is outright illegal in China so I imagine TikTok has that part nailed down.
This book is well worn, dog eared, and on my home office book shelf. While many people criticize it, for legitimate reasons, it is still a fun and wonderful journey through Common Lisp. I wish more books were written in this irreverent and whimsical style.

If however you want a more traditional and "from zero" introduction to Lisp, then "Common LISP - A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation"[0] may be better. If you already know a little bit of Lisp and want to step up your abilities then "Practical Common Lisp"[1] is probably what you are after.

[0] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/

[1] http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/
I think it is more a case of being everything to everyone, and one size fits all just plain sux.

IMHO there is no Twitter problem, but there are specific Twitter niche problems. Twitter is trying to solve the problems of people who want to follow a sport with those who want to lead a culture war in the same way and with the same perspectives and expected outcomes. They are not just very different problem spaces, but fundamentally different cultures, with different expectations and rules, and making either group live with a compromise between their cultures leaves everyone unhappy.

Reddit sidesteps this to a degree, with subreddits, by everything being less personal, and with moderation of sub reddits. Twitter, being account based rather than topic based, can't manage that. Twitter is just Twitter - a singular entity used in non-singular ways and criticised as a singular entity from very specific and singular perspectives.

How do you fix that? No idea. My hope is that Machine learning can give us better filtering, because the problem with Twitter is that people are not brands, so if I follow a basketball coach, and he has a bugbear about an issue that annoys me, I either lose all of his tweets, or put up with off topic rants.

But then, thinking about it, I'm not sure if that is a bug or Twitter's key feature. Maybe Twitter only works because the poor filtering forces people to see what they don't want to, and that drives usage and, in a perverse way, a desire to use twitter. That's a dark timeline.
It won't be long before companies are making extra-high bandwidth auto-playing ads to eat your allowance, not to mention the improved location tracking due to smaller cells.
It's time to rethink twitter and launch another service.

Readers want to see the content they select, in the order they select, from people/posters they find interesting. Have conversations and maybe connect with people they follow.

Posters want to control their feed and who sees it, control the conversation a bit more, perhaps pay for better tools to curate replies, get rid of spam/trolls etc, have their complaints about stalking/nazis/trolls taken seriously by someone who cares.

Advertising is at the root of the problems of Twitter because advertisers are their only customer - they are forced by their bottom line to find ever more inventive ways to boost impressions (the overwhelming notifications, the dystopian 'home' view which shows you content selected by twitter, showing likes, plays for engagement/eyeballs rather than quality, and now this new 'interest-based network' idea which lets twitter select content). Facebook suffers from the same disease - they must own your feed and your attention, any user control hits their bottom line.

The solution is of course the radical option of removing advertising entirely.

Readers should always be free as they donate their time and attention.

Posters with thousands of followers (whether businesses or individuals) would happily pay for better tools to manage their readers, manage the feed, manage responses to posts etc. Some of them would pay quite a lot for more control/access.

Journalists, traders, businesses, developers would pay for access to a firehose of data and ways of working with that data (public data with user permission of course).

I'd pay to broadcast on a version of twitter without ads, nazis and trolls, wouldn't you?
I agree with the personal blogs, etc. And I thought the same thing, too, about them turning profit on larger customers, but then I was confused when their enterprise tier was only $42/mo. Not a dig at the product, just more curious as to who their target market is.

When I see "forever free", I usually avoid it, especially for business use, for fear or it not existing in a year or 2. If "free" if your main selling point, to me, that screams low quality.

Is it a lead gen for the main product? Seems disconnected if so, but they likely know their market better, so maybe it isn't.
Show HN: Game of Coins – If GoT Characters Issued Their Own Crypto Currencies
Maybe it's even moreso today, but it's never been great. A senior person there told me years ago when we were talking about their content library that "People come for the movies and they stay for the TV." And this was (I believe) before House of Cards etc.

The fact is that there's no subscription streaming service that has a great movie catalog. You can subscribe to DVDs on Netflix--still pretty good though the back catalog is rotting. Or just buy/rent a la carte either streaming or disc. Welcome to our unbundled future.
I’ve become super bearish on Netflix. At some point the masses will realize how bad the selection is for the money you pay.
Also I smoke a shit ton of weed daily (and have been for months) so I didn’t think it would be such a problem. Soon I realized shrooms are on a very different level. But after the first time I didn’t want to leave it on a bad note so I figured I’d give it another shot.
> I want to read about politics from the political analysts I follow, but don't care about their cooking adventures on the weekend. I want to read about tech from the software folks I follow, but don't want to hear about their politics. I sure as heck don't want to see "liked" tweets by people I follow in areas outside of the interests of theirs I care about.
> Beyond that, I'm generally disappointed that we never hear about features that try to get users to act better, by their own volition

Now that's a great idea. Let me create multiple outgoing feeds. Lists become 10x cooler when "C programming" only contains programming tweets
> you are incredibly wrong

And this is why you are so confident in your claim that you made a new account a few minutes ago to argue with people?

How long have you been on HN using your real account, if I may ask?

Or perhaps you'd like to claim that you randomly stumbled into this board a few minutes ago and happened to see this thread and decided to post with your relevant expertise.
> Probably Ph.D. graduates should consider teaching at a university as a sort of popular avocation like music, art, sports, or video games. Maybe you can make some money at it if you are particularly skilled and lucky, but you will almost certainly need a real day job in order to pay the bills.

There is no shortage of people entering PhD programs knowing full well how bad the job market is, yet somehow still convinced they will get a tenure-track job after they finish.

I spent some time in a history PhD program almost a decade ago. We all knew how bad the academic job market was. Yet all of the students were committed to spending the next ~7 years working toward a PhD so they would get a chance to compete in what they knew to be of the world's worst job markets.

At that point they had been in the academic bubble for so long that it didn't really make sense to consider life outside it, and they viewed academic work as part of their personal identity and could not imagine themselves doing anything else.
Lying assumes malice, which assumes that the people in a position to encourage a college track vs career track have any understanding of the situation whatsoever. People are incredibly adept at repeating a truism that they've themselves been told. No bearing on reality required.
How does a relational database work? (2017)
The whole point of Facebook's social graph API is to get access to user data. Usually without permission or consent.
Basic economics, first aid, dealing with cops/law, basic nutrition - these should be mandatory subjects for all students, would benefit them and the society in the long run
Try doing that, and find out how many times Twitter helpfully resets you to go back 'home' - a home which they feel they own and control. I press that button about once a week to go back to a chronological feed.

I don't log in every few minutes - every few hours perhaps on a good day, but have no interest in an algorithmic feed - a scrolling chronological feed is just fine.

There are very good reasons they forced us all onto this algorithm, and they are not in your interest - it means they can insert content whenever they like, and make posters pay for it. You may be happy with it now, but I doubt you would be long term when it becomes pay to play.
>A PhD isn't training to do a job other than research.

That's simply wrong.

>A doctorate (from Latin docere, "to teach") or doctor's degree (from Latin doctor, "teacher") or doctoral degree, is an academic degree awarded by universities, derived from the ancient formalism licentia docendi ("licence to teach") In most countries, it is a research degree that qualifies the holder to teach at university level in the degree's field, or to work in a specific profession.

We've recently formalized it to "doing research", but for most of history it has not been limited to, or even primarily for, research.
Comedy as Socratic Journalism
I agree full healthcare for all is something we should have.

I'm also willing to consider something slightly short of basic income: a new "new deal". Anyone that wants to work should be able to work. A job provider of baseline resort. That would also be how minimum wages are set (the market price is set by this job provision via some other process).

However consumer buying power should be part of active market control in the form of regulations that discourage inflation by encouraging the market towards positive equilibrium rather than cyclic loops of inflation and crashes (which arguably we're still suffering from the lack of; there was no actual correction in many areas during the last/current recession).
If you put it on a single, easily recognizable, easily accessible page (all new features, etc.), then many users will find it. You can even give a notification when a new feature is added (as long as kept to a reasonable amount).

Features that will go viral are worth adding for all, features that did not can be kept there.
Twitter users trolled Jack Dorsey on a projection screen during his Ted Talk
The block function makes it inconvenient for trolls to read your tweets and impossible for them to RT them for a pile on. It's a "last resort" before moving to a protected account (which can't be RTd at all)
If it's time to rethink the fundamental dynamics of Twitter, maybe they could start by hiring a full time CEO?
> Has anybody ever been happy with Twitter's attempts to force content from non-followed users into the feed?

Judging by the amount of alt-right nonsense that gets promoted to me despite my complete disinterest I'd say they're fucking delighted.
I think you might be surprised to learn about the modern economics of being an auto mechanic. [1]

[1] https://thinkprogress.org/the-harsh-reality-of-being-an-auto...
Labor demand is a funny thing. It's clear that there is want, need, and opportunity for services, and yet so few employers, all in pursuit of goals so tightly constrained as to exclude the majority of wanted, needed services.

Why, after all, would I pay workers to improve the lot of the poor? And how, after all, can the poor pay workers at all?

And so we see all talent funneled into a few employers' projects; often wholly detrimental ones, such as peddling fructose, and nearly always tangential to the talent's personal goals, priorities, and passions.

> Given a massive oversupply of replacement workers ready to go at a moment's notice, unionization seems unlikely to change anything.

Perhaps, then, a union of the unemployed.
Yes. The European Court of Justice is independent from the political and executive structures (and gives them a fair number of bloody noses, too). But the ECJ cannot prosecute anyone if the rules are nebulous and still somewhat in flux - as they often are, because a lot of EU institutions are extremely new in historical terms.

What is required, at the moment, is strong political oversight, particularly from the media. Light is the best disinfectant.
What an accurate picture. Maybe someday more of this story will be known (as a learning). In the meantime, the show must go on - "All startups are shitshows".

"In 2018, we saw the first signs: (...)" - this means, after Series B. More money will not solve it.
I'm sure there are relevant industry jobs for people no matter what their PhD is in.
I got my EE/CS degree and currently work in software development. I was talking about people I knew from my first few years at college and my high school experience. I was still lied to, but it worked great for me because what I wanted to do requires a college degree and compensation is notoriously good.
Idempotency at Work at Airbnb
I'm curious that you say "May's deal is dead" but then say that a customs union (presumably tacked on to May's deal) remains an option. Surely they're effectively the same thing? May's WA already leads to a customs union in practice, it's just evasive about coming out and saying so. Maybe a ref on WA+CU-explicit versus WTO is what's needed, but let's be honest, they're never ever going to run that one.

Maybe a solid kicking in the May elections (EU and local) will concentrate minds a bit, but I'm not hopeful. I can easily see both main parties disintegrating soon, at which point we're really off to the races.
I used to check out a book from the library full of solutions for a wide variety of adventure games. It's the only way I beat Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
I am curious to know what your opinion is regarding the case of Aaron Swartz. Was 35 years appropriate?
>"there's always a jerk in the middle who changes the story to something totally different" and then just outright ignore that when talking about oral tradition //

We actually have some confirmations where oral traditions weren't bawdlerised in Judaeo-Christian history -- if you look at how they adopted a system of rewarding verity (as Muslims do now, with learning their scripture by rote) then you can see how separated populations maintained the same stories, in the same form, without alteration of major factual points.

https://www.sapiens.org/column/curiosities/dead-sea-scrolls-... read from "When I entered graduate school".
When I was at uni the idea was you study whatever you like, and then there will be a job at a big consultancy like Arthur Andersen or whatever waiting for you because they'd take in anyone with any degree (who can jump through their hoops) and then retrain them to do a job.

I was fortunate as although I didn't have the "communication skills" to land such jobs (my hoop jumping skills were terrible), I did had tech skills so plenty of smaller companies and government jobs were possible for me to get.

Anyway if this situation has changed, doing arty degrees should come with a disclaimer that no job might be found as a result, and as such they are hobbies. Doing a full time hobby for a few years at a cost to yourself should be considered a luxury of the rich.
I think you’ve hit a key psychological insight. And they have a choice to also push through an existential Sunk Cost fallacy.

I spent the first 11 years of my professional career in the Navy flying airplanes. It was a niche skill set. When I left, I had the airlines available, by I would’ve been bored to tears in the job.

So at 35 I started over in a new career. It’s been challenging - but there is a future. I’m 6-8 years (at least) “behind” my colleagues.

The choices we make have consequences. And if you have your health, you can always choose to change your course.
>> Meanwhile, for example, a Data Science in Python nanodegree may very well be better prep for an industry job

That is the root of the problem isn't it? IMO No institution should train you for a job in the industry except the industry. Also, higher education (post-college) should not discredit themself to be an apprentices-program for any industry -- it is not what they can accomplish anyhow since the requirements change faster than the institutions can adapt. A university has lost all of its meaning if they do not work to further the field itself, but for the ever-changing demands of the economy.
Seems like part of the plan really. Why pay license fees to other studios when they can make their own movies?
It’s possible the deal didn’t affect Apple but losing all those lawsuits did.
ha, upvoted!
Uber says it fixed electric bikes that had similar problems to Lyft ones
Wolfram Research today has several hundred employees. Are you proposing they would keep working on Mathematica, and would they continue to get paid for it?