skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Knuth gives higher rewards for works he believes have fewer errors. For TeX and METAFONT, he started with 1 cent for every bug found, and doubled it each year until reaching the current value of 327.68 dollars (= 0x$80.00): for example Eberhard Mattes and Oleg Bulatov (joint 7th on the list) have all their amount from a single (and the latest so far) bug found in TeX and METAFONT each (if you're wondering what the bugs were: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/154873/ — the TeX bug was a missing space in the debug output for a macro with an empty name).

Incidentally, he seems to have had this policy of giving out rewards for errors from the time he was a college student: http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html#7
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-open-letter-to-the-ma...
Wow - so many negative reviews! This must be the most controversial thing I have posted!

In general you are right that blue collar wages have not kept pace with the cost of living. This is particularly true in the SF bay area. I have often thought that the poor livability in the bay area is not sustainable. I used to live in a neighborhood with only a few engineers. Now everyone seems to be an engineer. Having said that - there are far more livable places to live!

As for college education - I do support free college education but with caveats. I am shocked by the number of people who think college needs to be expensive. For instance, you can get a degree from Berkeley by going two years to a community college and the final two years at Berkeley even today. When you don't have much money, that is a great option.

I am also here to tell you that you can have a great career with a degree from a state college. My husband and I worked our way through school and the state colleges are very flexible with working students where universities are not. With my degree I was at some of the greatest companies in the world including Apple, IBM, Xerox in their heyday. I also worked at 4 successful startups.

Even in your generation this is possible. My son got a liberal arts degree in 2008 which was the worst possible year to get a liberal arts degree. He discovered that that the curriculum from Stanford and ITT India were on line. So he studied on his own to get a college-equivalent education and worked in tech for a couple of years. Then he decided he wanted a computer science masters degree. He took the prerequisites from community colleges and applied and was accepted to graduate school. His expenses ended up being small enough that he paid half through his savings and the other half he was able to pay back within a year of graduation.

I can understand that this route is not possible in all fields such as medicine. But an interesting life is still possible.
I've wondered about standard libraries for a while now. What happens if you discover a security vulnerability in your stdlib? Presumably you'd have to bump the language version, deploy it out and beg users to upgrade. Except, users don't upgrade stuff. While if you version the standard library, every new project will get the newer version of the standard library. Sure, there's space tradeoffs, though you could offer a manual linking option. But at the very least, the amount of new projects with the vulnerability will be next to nil.

And what if the standard library just gets dated? Take Node for instance. The fs module has a whole bunch of outdated callback based functions. Sure, you can wrap them in promisify, but it sucks that we have these outdated functions stuck around forever.

There's definitely tradeoffs with package/dependency multiplication, but I don't think standard libraries are as clear cut as people make them out to be.
The natural world is filled with horrible pain and deaths. These do not add to that in quality. Maybe in quantity.
That's quite untrue, as anyone can see by looking at how we moderated this thread. Thoughtful comments on both sides of the issue are fine. Unsubstantive flamebait, and so on, is not fine. This is all just standard application of the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. The word "polite", btw, is not one we rely on.

The leap to plant-based diets is... interplanetary, but it's a great example of how people construct their image of moderators, or the community. It's always a mosaic of things the observer ran across and didn't like. Since people dislike different things, they construct different images.
Well, I would be delighted to make post but this is already at front page today :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19947068
> Once you add preemptive multitasking and memory protection, you're simply going to end up with a normal modern operating system kernel again.

You're missing the point. There is no single file operating system for desktop users (maybe VxWorks or some other embedded OS falls into that category, but those aren't really for desktops). Modern operating systems sprawl all over the disk. Memory protection and multitasking are not large features, and CS undergrads all over the world routinely implement them in less a semester.

> It's possible to run linux from a few megabytes of ram.

A few megs of ram and a directory in /etc filled with startup stuff and config files. Clearly you don't appreciate it, but there was something really nice about being in the root directory and seeing only command.com and config.sys. The entire rest of the machine was yours to setup however you liked. The things most people hated about DOS really had more to do with the 16 bit address space and segmented architecture.
Imagine your candidate studied at best schools, worked at best companies, contributed to some popular open source projects, now you lucked out and for some reason she ended up interviewing for your team. You examine the CV, and decide "it's Fizz Buzz time!". Now what kind of reaction would you expect from the candidate, whose CV is screaming "I worked super hard to be able to handle the most difficult tasks with enormous responsibility, often life or death situations", and now she needs to "get down to the basics" or no job in your team :DDD What do you think will she tell to her network when they ask her why didn't she end up working for you?
> but the reality is that over 3/4 of Americans have access to knowledge that people in any other century would have sold their souls for

Some people. Your average medieval serf didn't care for all that in his pocket: he couldn't read and he'd get the whip if he stood around doing nothing, so he would very much not have sold his soul for something that had no value for him.

It's similar today. For you, it's a great asset, but most (and, I assume, everybody some of the time) don't use it that way. For most people, it is indeed 24/7 cat videos.
Also, I have my doubts about the importance of carrying it around with you. It's the knowledge and the access that counts (if you're into knowledge), not the "and I can do it while standing outside anywhere in the city". The access would be virtually the same if you had to go to a public library instead of getting your phone out of your pocket.
Campaign to collect data on social media bias raises free speech, privacy alarms
Swallowtail Summer
International Editions differ often in the problems at the ends of the chapters in order to protect US and other western markets. Differences in the problems means it discourages students from buying things that may lead to incorrect answers to assigned problem sets.

As for things just being flat out wrong, I can only imagine this discourages US/western students from buying International Editions to save money.
Not gonna lie, I have pissed some people off with this approach myself even when it was handled properly. Diplomacy and collaboration should be used first. Maybe even let someone else take the win. Use the get shit done approach as a last resort.
I used to play a lot, and hit 1900 (USCF) before I ran out of time to keep playing competitively. So I'm not a pro by any means, but I might know enough to help you get started.

The best way to increase your rating is to find a good chess coach. Otherwise, off the top of my head, my suggestions would be (in order of importance):

1. Learn an opening really well. Ideally, find one opening for white that doesn't generally have many weird transpositions, e.g. the London system. Also, find a couple of solid defenses for black in response to 1. e4 and 1. d4, e.g. the French and the Slav defenses.

2. Study the most basic endgames -- queen + king vs king, rook + king vs king, etc. I'd suggest [0] as a resource.

3. Practice a lot of tactics. You can do this through books (I'm partial to [1] for beginners and [2] when you reach 1600 or so) or through online services like lichess.org.

4. You can probably hit 1500-1600 fairly easily with 1-3. At this point I'd start learning the basics of strategy/positional play, e.g. static vs dynamic advantages. I think [3] is a pretty good resource for this.

5. Study some of the more advanced endgames in [0].

6. Start looking at some more complex openings and go a bit deeper into positional play. IMO the most important thing in the long run is just to find an opening and style of play that you really like.

Hope that helps!

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Endgame-Challenge-John-Hall/dp/188067...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Combination-Challenge-Lou-Hays/dp/188...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Sharpen-Your-Tactics-Sacrifices-Combi...
[3] https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Positional-Evaluation-Dan-He...
Or perhaps we have different ideas of what "reasonable" assumptions about costs will be in ten years.

I expect nuclear to show little or no cost decline in that time. And I expect renewables to have shown large continued declines. I expect solar to have fallen by a factor of 2. Given that sort of decline, even low efficiency seasonal storage could beat nuclear.

High latitude regions -- what latitude are you talking about? 95% of the world's population is below 50 N/S. For the few in true polar regions, I suggest solar + moderate temperature geothermal could be a good combination. Geothermal would be used in the winter, when a very low temperature heat sink is available.

In a solar dominated future, I expect those high latitude regions to eventually lose most of their energy-intensive industry. They will not be able to compete with industries at lower latitude with better access to cheaper solar power. Having expensive nuclear available there will not save them from this.
I think we are talking about South Korean government, not North Korea...
The problem with rants is it stings and it divides.

When it comes to constructive criticism, I think Amber did a good job with her criticism but can do better at the constructive front. Her problem statement was spot on and I agree that the direction she proposed is a good one.

However, to separate the standard library from the core is probably even more dramatic than the Python 2 to 3 migration. Is that what the community can afford at the moment? What's needed to make the transition? What's the opportunity costs? i.e. what other developments we can do for a bigger impact? What are the pros and cons?
What happens to the PTO at the rollover date?
Or if an employee accrues more PTO time than the employer will pay.
I'm not being caustic here im just wondering what happens to those funds?
Of course “everyone” is never true. But for example in The Netherlands, 4.5 weeks of paid leave is the bare minimum (like even if you flip burgers you get at least that). If you’re e sick, you get paid leave for multiple months and after that, still 70% is paid. Your health endurance is not held hostage by your employer; for a small monthly fee (< $50 if you have a low income job) you’re pretty much ensured health issues won’t ruin you financially.

Every country has their own Stockholm Syndromes where they think they’ve got it made, while actually other places are doing a lot better. I think employment and benefits are one of these for the US.
Jsonpath – a query language for JSON in Postgres [pdf]
From netmarketshare.com:

- XP market share: 3.57%

- Vista market share: 0.23%

- Mac OS 10.10 market share: 0.51%

(10.10 went out of support the same year as Vista)
Thanks for the feedback. Looks like there aren't any gaping holes in the approach. So, I'm off to build something. I'll keep you posted
I don't think you need smart buses to be able to add/remove capacity to a route as it fills.

the data collection/aggregation/analysis sound like the fast part of getting a bus to a route, even if it's bus drivers calling in to report a busy route. the slow part would be getting the bus to the route
Did you mean to say that about North Korea, not South Korea?
I’ve been working with go a lot lately and they seem really focused on not letting this happen. Every single thing in the language and standard library seem completely focused on minimalism and compiler time. The standard lib is unlikely to change all that much and people are not picking the language for a bunch of convenience features.

Third party package problems will be an issue at some point but that’s more due to them be so focused on minimalism they don’t have clear guidance on setting up and maintaining packages.
This article is about low skilled workers. I've worked the same job in the US and the EU, I earned MORE than double in the US. Also lower taxes.

And holiday you can negotiate up front to get as many as you would in Europe.
Seems like there might be some other confounding factors here:

- A language that is simply less active or whose users feel less ability to have a say in the language's development is going to be both less social and less dramatic, but also carries a high chance that existing users are only there for legacy reasons and are always considering moving to another language better suited for their purposes.

- A language run by a corporation is less "social," and has the drama play out in business negotiations, closed-door committee meetings, and lawsuits instead of on blogs and public mailing lists and (in this case) closed-door meetings with an expectation of public reporting.

I'm not aware of any drama in the ASP community, but that probably also had something to do with many users having picked Python for their next project instead of ASP. I'm aware of some drama in the Clojure community, the conclusion of which seems to have been that Clojure is their corporate sponsor's language and if it doesn't work for you you should find something else.
The right hand is your weapon hand. So by offering it, you are stating that you do not intend to fight.
Apple's rumored to profit several hundred dollars per iPhone sold, between the $1.70/hr not-employees, massive tax evasion, and dishonesty with hardware issues there's not much left to respect them for. Privacy, with the caveat that you're not the product except for Google paying $9 billion to make you their product.
Have you used the new unreleased version yet?
And the web fixed these issues, one by one, on one end by being simplified by generations and generations of technologists, and on the other end by adding actual real world uses like making shopping easy.

Most importantly, it did not have a full blown competitor that everyone was already using that it had to contend with.

The past is a foreign country. Web of the ‘90s has almost no likeness to the web we have today. Had it stayed like that, we’d still be faxing things around.
I clicked on this link think "uh oh standard ill informed rant post"

However brown has solid good points.

The brilliant selling point of python is the massive standard lib. If the quality of the libraries fall, then python's use as a tool drops dramatically.

One of Node's massive failures is that is has no standard lib.
Subs keep their air at significantly lower oxygen concentrations for fire safety reasons which may contribute to the stress. I had a teacher tell stories about sailors putting bags over whatever emitted the oxygen and then breathing it directly.
> Plenty of languages have succeeded without their creators handling every little detail, from C to JavaScript to PHP to Java.

Sure, if your definition of success is being used by as many people as possible, but there are other (more) important criteria for asserting the quality of a language.

When you have a vision for your project, you might be afraid that other people are going to ruin it, because they don't understand, or they don't have good taste, etc.
Have you seen the same enterprise users try a Linux distro? I can assure you that the reaction is not better...
Grid gap is a killer feature for dynamic layout. It allows you to place items in a container and have them wrap dynamically when there's not enough space in the container, _with consistent spacing between the wrapped lines_.

Using raw flexbox you'd have to resort to hacks with negative margins on the container (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30887071/margin-top-only...), which often affects layout of the container in unpredictable ways, making it less than ideal for building reusable layout abstractions.

A popular alternative is to resort to screen size media queries to set margins, but screen size doesn't always match whatever container you have to render content in, so you end up with very brittle layouts that need all their media queries adjusted when you move containers around and add elements that constrain the dimensions of the container like sidebars (or even worse, collapsible sidebars that change width dynamically).
Ah, you're talking about flagged comments. I was talking about the overall thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19945514. I assumed that's what the GP was asking about.
I was never permanent crew on a surface ship, but that story certainly sounds familiar. For added fun, though, submarine crews are divorced from circadian rhythms: a submarine "day" is 18 hours long rather than 24.
> I've wondered about standard libraries for a while now. What happens if you discover a security vulnerability in your stdlib?

That depends on what you are writing.

For an application that is deployed stand-alone, you'll likely fat-package it with python and all the libraries. In case of a security issue, you create a new version of your application that bundles the fixed python.

For an application that is deployed on the system python (more typical on Linux), it's the system admin's task to update the system python.
The idea of "distros" for python is interesting, and to a certain extent has already happened: just look at Anaconda.

I've been using built-in environment isolation tools such as virtualenv for ages but have recently switched over to using miniconda for all things python. Among other things it has amazing support across all three major OS's, and I happen to be dealing with all three at any given time. Whether one uses miniconda, pipenv, virtualenv, or anything else like it, as far as I am concerned the days of ever using the system python are over. I will always create my own personal "distro" on the fly with full control over the python version and every add-on package.
1. Review your mistakes after each game - lichess.org (which is the best online chess platform by far) has an option to look at your sub-optimal moves at the end of a game and find a better move than the one you made originally.

2. Obligatory shoutout to ChessNetwork who has a great youtube channel - the guy is just a pleasure to listen to and his beginner series, which teach important general concepts, will be really useful if you've plateaued around 1000.
Aren't conservatism and minimalism pulling in opposite directions here?

Amber wants to remove asyncio from the standard library. That's minimalism but not conservatism.
Can you give detail in salary trajectory ?
Linus Torvalds has been known to, yes! He even took a little break to deal with it.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-takes-a-break-f...
Go 101 – Online Book
Amazing how no one is answering your question.

“The Secrets of the Russian Chess Masters: Fundamentals of the Game”
https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Russian-Chess-Masters-Fundame...

Don’t let the title deter you; hitting a wall is almost always about fundamentals, which at 1000 points is a heady topic. Great series. Graduate to Jeremy Silman’s books.
Just graduated from medical school. Started out with 0 gray hairs. Now I have salt and pepper hair on the sides. Not worth it.
Wow, I've had a really opposite experience with CPAN modules. I've overwhelmingly found them to not respect encapsulation (messing with all sorts of global state, not mentioning that they're doing it, and failing to clean up after themselves or even provide the tools to clean up well), be massively inconsistent in their APIs, have messy and hard-to-parse documentation (still better than Python's conventions here, though), and have some really silly hierarchy-related decisions, most of which I suspect stem from inter-maintainer politics and infighting, of which I've observed a large amount.

Sure, I've found some gems on CPAN, but, having worked on both Perl, Python, and Java at reasonable scale for awhile, I cannot understand all the praise CPAN gets. It's the worst-quality scripting language package ecosystem out there. Even NPM does a better job, and some things about NPM are awful. CPAN might have been the first/only/best package manager for a get-shit-done scripting language at some point, but not any more.

Separately, I agree about modules which extend language functionality (e.g. class systems, async programming, runtime typing) specifically. Perl does pretty well in that area. While many of those language-extension modules really don't play well with any other metaprogramming tools being installed in the project, I don't imagine that any alternatives in other languages do, either. My main beef above is with "simple" (read: not pervasive semantics changes) modules like IPC utilities, HTTP clients, or loggers that don't know how to stay in their lanes.
You may dislike it, but calling it a "dark abyss" is pushing it. Probably 95% of people in tech get a paycheck due to non-free software.

And yes, Googlers & co., that includes you, even if the small lib you released is Open Source, the magic sauce powering Page Rank, Analytics, AdWords and such isn't.