skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was a maturing young programmer back then. The leading alternative was Perl, which was still pretty lively but had a lot of the same complaints at the time that it does now (readability). Perl's what I was primarily using; it took me a bit to adopt PHP, but once I did, I never looked back.

Some folks were also compiling C and gluing it together with a CGI module, and a lot of others in the Microsoft world were using Frontpage and its brethren. But, the Microsoft stack only ran on Windows servers, and Windows web servers had a reputation (deserved, imo) for kinda sucking.

PHP's killer feature was mod_php. It was dead simple to integrate into any shared hosting environment, and so pretty much every shared host did. mod_php magically knew how to spit out html when reading html, and execute php when encountering php tags, so that gave us the html-mixed-with-php pattern that was wonderful at the time but considered bad practice now.

But also scope has changed a lot. At the time, people were mostly looking for hit counters, contact forms, and "guestbook" forms. For all those things, PHP excelled, so it gobbled up the market fast.
I'm not an expert in ligaturing. Everything I've read though backs up what I wrote above, that it is possible that bones in the neck are broken in suicide by hanging, but more likely that they are broken by homicidal strangulation.

This news source [1] goes over multiple academic papers that attempt to measure the likelihood of neck bone fractures in suicide versus homicide victims. On my own, I've searched and found multiple additional academic papers that, while disagreeing on the exact probabilities, all support the general conclusion that neck bone fractures are possible in a suicide but more likely in a homicide.

The implication of your comment is that, unlike me, you do know much about ligaturing, so I'd be interested in getting your expert opinion. Are neck bone fractures equally likely in suicidal hanging and homicidal strangulation?

You also write that the guards falling asleep is "worryingly common". I'm sure that's true - but what worries me most about this case is the confluence of multiple unlikely circumstances. Unfortunately the guards fell asleep, unluckily the video cameras failed, against the odds multiple bones in his neck broke while he knelt against his bed sheet, and, surprisingly, Epstein was the first suicide in 21 years at the facility.

Regarding your question about definitions - my understanding is that "suicide" is meant as a person killing themselves, and "at the MCC" means an MCC inmate who killed themselves at the MCC.

1 - https://heavy.com/news/2019/08/jeffrey-epstein-hyoid-bone-br...
Most will probably liquidate their position.
What's worse than losing your life savings, is those that made a huge profit on one coin, then traded that directly for another coin that then lost everything. The IRS considers that trade to be a liquidity event, and you owe taxes on the value difference (of the first coin) from when you bought to when you sold (even if it wasn't sold for cash). Now you could claim a loss on the second coin, but only if you sold it during the same year. If you sold it the next year, you can still claim it as a loss against future profits, but you still owe taxes on the original coin sale.

So now that you've lost everything, you still end up owing the IRS possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I don't see how it's sophistry, the author goes into great detail on the fact that MIT has long operated less as a university in the traditional sense than as a contract R&D organization. The linkage made to Epstein is that the school has long cared little for the moral implications of its research as long as it brought in revenue to MIT, so soliciting funding from morally deficient individuals was an easy extension of this ethos. You may agree or disagree with the author's argument, but I don't see it as disingenuous.
I wrote a partially finished article: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10wylnn8qHD4clDyrEIhYyP1F...

It's not even touching the techniques and approaches yet. I was too lazy.

Here a summary of my understanding:
* Relentlessly hire the best, train them and give space for them to grow and shine. This is the basis. It's not that a less quality engineer cannot grow, it's just too costly to do that at large scale.
* Build the infrastructure to support large scale engineering. The best example is the idea of "warehouse scale computer" that is the data center, embodied in systems like Borg Spanner etc.
* Relentless consistency at global scale. Example would be the Google C++ style guide. It's opinionated at its time, but is crucial to ensure a large C++ code base to grow to big size.
* Engineering oriented front line management. L6-L8 managers are mostly engineering focused. That's necessary.
* Give the super star the super star treatment. Google's engineers are rewarded as strategic asset of the company. Numerous example are made public.
Meh, give me a self-hosted or open core version and maybe I'll consider switching from taskwarrior
I was talking about the representations made in the industry PR campaign when DRM was first being rolled out, not anything in anybody's license agreement.
The e-tron is similar in weight, size, and power to the Model X and pretty much gets within 10% of its efficiency comparing WLTP ratings. I think the efficiency loss can be explained by cooling (if this article is to be believed that Audi has more complicated/expensive cooling) and aerodynamics (it has a normal SUV profile vs the coupe of the Model X).
> About four times a year, new studies come out with an ever-lower percentage of how many job seekers won’t apply to a job unless they meet precisely 100% of your listing’s overly-strict requirements. Even worse, all of the studies have a clearly highlighted gender difference between men and women: fewer women than men apply for a job with requirements they don’t meet.

Thank you! It's amazing how many hiring managers I've worked with who aren't aware of this fact at all. It's literally your job to understand hiring, and being aware of the latest research needs to be part of that.

It's especially important since I see every other possible hiring practice on both a "must do" and "must not do" list every week, but this one is universally confirmed. If you've learned nothing else about hiring in the past 10 years, know this.
hard to have a safer bet than the JVM as your platform. not like changes like Jigsaw come around that often
I have been a happy user of PEG grammars for a while:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsing_expression_grammar

In particular this lua implementation:

http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/re.html

It let's you write stuff like this:

list <- (name s)*
name <- [a-z][a-z]*
s <- %s*

Features:

- Looks like EBNF

- Regular expressions are a subset

- Fast parser.
I think most people would agree that the Indian space program is a good thing, and despite any political, ethnic, cultural differences, etc, science is something that brings us together no matter our race, skin color, religion, etc.

That being said, it’s crazy that you insist on taking this thread on a political tangent, but I’m not surprised.

Any time there’s a discussion on India’s space program or general poverty in India, honor killings, killings over cows/beef, I see (presumably) Indian people somehow bring Pakistan into the discussion (India ranks X at Y, but Pakistan is X - 1), even though there’s no other mention of Pakistan.

Another observation from when I contracted in energy is that many Indian colleagues suspected a new hire was Pakistani and purposely excluded him and went out of their way to not share information.

The unhealthy obsession with Pakistan doesn’t make sense. I’ve seen this in so many Indians (anecdotally of course) that I wonder how it goes to this. Sure they’ve been fighting over Kashmir for half a century or something. I get that India has a lot of poverty. I suspect the Indian news media has its own share of the Fox News of the world who probably prey on the poor or uneducated and brainwash them into hating Pakistanis.

Chill out for once. Even if the rover didn’t land successfully, this is still huge progress.
I already submitted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20912460

P.S. Are you the same person who submitted this on Reddit?
One thing I find interesting about this was the description of the people likely to borrow to invest.

>Borg told City Lab that they’re usually educated, with some assets in their portfolio, but are worried about their retirement. “They earn more than $60,000 a year, and have at least an adequate handle on technology,” reports CNBC.

I think this is very understandable from my perspective. I'm relatively young, smart and have a good job. I'm tech savvy, but I'm also numerate. Because I'm numerate I can look at the house I'd like to buy - it's £3/4/5m, I earn >£100k, but probably will never earn >£300k (numbers deliberately fuzzed for privacy reasons). So I look at my situation and say "I can never get to that house that I really want". It's not a mansion, it's just a nice detatched house in a good part of town.

From that perspective I completely understand this compulsion to start betting. The step from working middle class to comfortably well off is just an unimaginable step.
I dunno about that...I've recorded some of my acoustic guitar playing, and some electronic pieces. Some mastering exists which would make the recordings sound better than a 100% unaltered digital playback?
My guess is they're doing fine as long as they invested in Bitcoin and avoided 90% of the other vaporware imitation crap floating around.
There are some pieces (eg Chopin, Lizt) that seem very simple and yet are very complex in their playability, but are beautiful. (As an average piano player, they're out of my league).

I once wrote a few bars (as a contemporary music exercise for a course I was doing) that used all 12 tones in a non repeating manner and it had all the requisite parts: motif, development and resolution, and for the task at hand and my musical ability, it was rather 'pretty'. My teacher loved it.
>> super useful for building DSLs

This is exactly the reason we do not use Scala anymore. Tired of learning new DSLs for every single problem.
Listen "Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy":

https://www.soundcloud.com/user-56712817/deep-adaptation

Or read it:

https://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf
What if we stopped talking in apocalyptic terms and started looking at ways to live on a planet which, for whatever reason, is endowed with an ever-changing climate which has given it everything from dragonflies with a 70cm wing span to blue whales to sentient self-conscious primates with a tendency to speak of terrible things which are about to come true if action is not taken right now.

Also, use common sense. It will tell you that it is a good thing to be less dependent on energy sources which are directly linked to one of the most volatile regions in the world. Alternatives exist, from nuclear in its many guises which can take care of the base load to solar and wind which can help but can not take care of the base load due to their inherent unpredictability and - in the case of solar - absence during ~50% of the day. Geothermal can be a good source in many regions. Common sense will also dictate that it is high time to seriously start looking at better ways to store energy so that those unpredictable sources can be used more efficiently while keeping the distribution networks from melting down.

And, please... stop following the talking points of political organisations which have taken up the climate banner to further their own goals. Stop the McCarthy-like hunt for anyone who dares to voice a differing opinion. Stop all that polarising nonsense and maybe, just maybe the world will be better off in the end.
The judgments need to happen now. Holding our judgments is how people wound up being the one holding the bag. Everyone in their right mind knew that people investing into vaporware in the worst case or a speculative bubble in the best case were going to get burned on average.
3Blue1Brow has a nice video on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sD0NjbwqlYw
The Ethiopean government shut down the internet for an extended period a couple of months ago, just before "surviving" a coup attempt that probably wasn't a real coup attempt. The Chief of the Army and a regional Attorney General were killed. Mass detentions are ongoing, and the leader of the opposition NAMA party and dozens of party members were arrested.

On that same day, news reports emerge that Ethiopia is going to plant 200 million trees in one day. Lo and behold, only a few days later, they nearly doubled that. Amazing!

Or maybe the 350 million trees planted in Ethiopia in a day is just bullshit propaganda to distract from what would appear to be a collapse in Ethiopian democracy.
Doesn't nonce mean "number used once"? Seems like you would have to use the same number every time, no?
Citing a post in this same discussion: warming by 5 degrees will cause all phytoplankton to die off and as a result we'll run out of oxygen. So no, that's not enough.

Even if it would be, how would you feed these people? How would their underground cave get power for light etc in a CO2-negative world?

AFAIK, the 'biosphere 2' experiment and the experiences with the space stations demonstrated humanity is not capable of surviving long term without mother earth. There are plenty of unknown unknowns.
Good PR--sure. $100M worth of PR? I don't think so.
Isolating Literary Style with Raymond Queneau
What dang said. But I see a lot of similarities to jet skis when they were more widespread. About the only people who wanted them around—outside of some fairly specific settings where they were either needed or loud powerboats were already widely accepted—were other jet skiers. I saw more than one deliberate confrontation with a ranger at a state or local park.
Ah yes, the Ratner effect [1]. See also the Osbourne effect [2] and the Elop effect (which did Nokia no good) [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop#%22Burning_Platfo...
Manjaro is taking the next step
[I was fantastically rude the first time I wrote this reply. Sorry. I've edited it to be much less rude, but I might have missed some.]

> Are neck bone fractures equally likely in suicidal hanging and homicidal strangulation?

It's not a question I'd ask. We don't need to know which is more likely. We only need to know that it's perfectly possible and normal to break bones in the neck from ligaturing.

> Regarding your question about definitions - my understanding is that "suicide" is meant as a person killing themselves,

This is wrong.

Hypothetical Bob takes an overdose of pills, but does not intend to die. He calls an ambo. The ambo doesn't get there in time, and Bob dies. Bob took an action that ended his life: did Bob die by suicide?

> and "at the MCC" means an MCC inmate who killed themselves at the MCC.

Is it where the death happens, or where the action that causes death happens? If someone takes an overdose of medication and is then transferred to hospital does that count as a death at MCC or a death at the hospital?

The point I'm trying, and failing, is that suicide is very common, especially among prisoners, especially among those facing trial for sex crimes. You've present four items that you think are unusual, especially when combined. But these are not in anyway unusual. They're very common.

The thing that stands out is the "no suicide here for X years" which is clearly nonsense. I can't be bothered to trawl through Manhattan laws and stats to try to understand it, but if people wanted to they might want to look at who rules a death as suicide, why they might chose not to do so, what definition of suicide they're using (especially around mental state and intent), what burden of proof they're using (beyond all reasonable doubt or balance or probabilities), and where the deaths occur and whether that makes any difference to the stats.
Perhaps not incidentally there's no double bank holiday weekend over Easter. I had lectures on a Bank Holiday Monday which in England generally means everything is shut.

I don't know how much longer this Christian stranglehold will have on England.
I'm kind of surprised to see the Koch's invoked as true evil that upstanding people accept money from rather than, say, Saudi royalty. There are many examples of direct murders that universities, corporations, and governments glibly partner with... But maybe I'm not up-to-date on the Koch's.

The details and the timeline of the donor disqualification in the New Yorker article sounded odd to me-- in particular, that it juxtaposed conjecture and unsupported claims with emails to make it sound like the request for anonymity was a workaround for MIT policy yet it didn't actually introduce any factual support for that conclusion.

In particular, when was he disqualified (e.g. before or after things being discussed) and how was this communicated in the institution? These were obvious and surprising omissions in the article. For Joi's sake I hope Lessig's belief on this point is based on more than just the writing smelling suspicious. Regardless, the absence of clarity on details like this is why investigations are superior to lynch mobs.
Turns out,...not so much.
getting university professors into an arms race with the salaries of the private markets would entirely shift the character of public education.

If universities had to play by the cutthroat logic of the market as a consequence research or teaching that is not profit oriented would have to die out, or tuitions rise to levels that put immense pressure on individuals and the public purse.

This is a dystopian scenario where academic freedom, basic research, and the non-commercial nature of research is completely lost. This is not something we should be going for, instead we should appeal to highly trained researchers to maybe think about the public good that is at stake here. People like Bengio show that it is possible. A future where essential AI research is commodified is a nightmare scenario.
NIMBY has evolved into this catchphrase that means people who don’t want what I want.
It's easy to transfer to transition to the manager ladder by becoming a TLM (Tech Lead Manager) once you are L5 or higher.
There is also a command line application: https://support.1password.com/command-line-getting-started/
My comment is a bit of an oversimplification.

During the oil embargo in the 1970s, US record manufacturers started to cut a lot of corners to keep their costs under control. Then when the price of oil fell, quality didn't come back very quickly.

Japanese and European imports were generally of very high quality virgin vinyl during that time and the quality in the US varied from label to label. The big labels were turning out a lot of very low quality records.
> the flight was to a science-related event in California and included other scientists who were also booked by the same literary agent.

That literary agent being John Brockman, who seems to be in as deep as anyone - he pitched "science-related events" to his writers by saying Epstein would be bringing girls!

https://newrepublic.com/article/154826/jeffrey-epsteins-inte...
This amounts to “sometimes the ends justify the means, also, oops, mea culpa!” My respect for Lessig diminished significantly after reading this.
Unrealistic desires are not an excuse for betting, they're the exact reason not to bet. The road to the mansion is paved with the crippling debt of the less fortunate. Assuming you'll be the winner of a speculative bubble is not the numerate decision.
i stopped reading when he classifies epstein as a "type 3" person. i think it's quite bold, especially without any evidence whatsoever, to claim that epstein's money came from non-criminal activities. and this is coming from a "top" law expert. epstein's previously upcoming trial would have sorted through some of this, but it isn't clear at all that his money wasn't funded directly by his own criminal activities or indirectly by others' criminal activities. in fact, it's one of the biggest open questions: where did epstein get his money from?

also, his type 1 examples are laughable. tom hanks makes movies. taylor swift makes music, and vindictive music at that. what is it about those professions that is "doing good"? they aren't about doing bad, but they're just jobs.

the people really doing good in this world don't make any money at all.

all this epstein stuff and the avalanches caused by his actions and associations is just giving us a peek into how the world really works: a bunch of people who don't know what they're doing who think they do are running things in complete, total self and those like their self interest. nobody really cares about anyone else, and people prop up their decisions in the context of institutions with an inability to step outside and ask "what am i really doing here"?
It’s driven more by a holistic understanding of the ecosystem as a whole than by any sort of naturalistic fallacy, at least on the producer side. Modern pesticides are creating resistant weeds, such that now farmers who rely on chemistry to control the competitor organisms are finding weeds that are resistant to glyphosate and gluphosinate in their fields.
We are a scala shop as well, but more and more things are being built in Kotlin. I love scala but the lack of a future is downhearting.
You can become a millionaire before you retire is you save $100 dollars every month and ask your bank is there is any program that can give you 10-12 percent increament of your savings. Try it.
Never invest in something you don't understand.

Words to live by.
Scala seems to be chugging along.

Twitter still uses it heavily.

I recently watched a few Scala Days 2019 videos:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOHg8YCiyMVRRxb3mJT_0Mg

It seems to have a healthy community. 3.0 comes out next year.

If you want a functional gateway drug, Scala appears to be the answer:

https://typelevel.org/cats/
Most of the company are working on Todoist, and we have a big update coming in October. For the past two years, we have worked on an initiative called Todoist Foundations, which is redoing and rethinking some of the design and tech debt we had (e.g., the web app has been rewritten to use React and Redux).

I understand the frustration, but it was critical for us to spend time on improving the core.
CDs are just... awful. Nice booklets? You mean small booklets with tiny pictures and even tinier text. And they come in what I consider one of the most horrible containers of all time: the ugly and easily-broken jewel case.

Like vinyl, CDs can be scratched, but they sure don't degrade gracefully: the nice pops of vinyl becomes jarring skips on a CD up to the point where the CD just becomes unplayable.

Nowadays I have all my music on my computer, as files on the drive or from a stream. But when it comes to wanting something physical, something I can hold and look at (from the cover and extra material that comes with an LP to the wonderful spinning of a record as the sound emerges), vinyl easily wins.

But maybe I'm weird, because even in the mid '90s as a teenager I thought vinyl looked cool and was fun and fascinating to interact with. I hated CDs and their cases so much I even converted all my CDs to minidisc! Happily I kept them around until I ripped them to FLAC files.