skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This shortsighted brand of cynicism, writ large, is exactly what is enabling this revolving door approach to policy in this country.
> What practical problems have you, personally, run into as a result of standard library "bloat"?

Well, you don't want a graphics library in a kernel, for example. In Rust most of the feature requests for the standard library are to remove things these days, for this reason (see M:N scheduling, GC, etc.) :)
Baloney - Lets do a quick BS Detection.

"""
In fiscal year 2012, public 4-
year institutions and administrative offices received
21
percent
of their revenues from tuition and fees
"""

So What your saying is the government could foot the bill for ~20% of college education by doubling its education spending. Also this is assuming that you don't change the value equation of going to school by making it free. How much more demand would you have for those public schools if you made them free ? So lets play a quick mental game here. You make "public" schools free. That means the demand to get into those schools increases. That also means that demand at those private schools will decrease. Kids who would look at both a public and private instuition and might choose to spend marginally more on the private school will choose a public school that has an almost as good program if there is no cost associated with it. Kids who today are getting into public schools paying less and still getting a good education will be forced out by better preforming peers and will either pay _more_ to go to a private school or go without college at all. Good job you just made it so lower income students can't go to school at all. Congratulations.

Note: If your response to this is well the states would build more capacity remember that ~80% of public university funding already comes from the states so every extra student they make space for is money out of their coffers.
People tend to click first links with way higher frequency than those located below.

Additionally, when a beginner sees this page, he sees two versions - of which one is 3 and one is 2 - I think most of people will choose the "newer" ( newer = better? ) version because they don't really know about the differences between the two.

The second part of the problem is the fragmentation of tutorials on other websites - which can't be fixed by changing the download page.
what don't you get? He's making fun of the assumption you seem to make that none of the residents of the area are there due to economic reasons, and then you cite anecdotal evidence (a walk through) as evidence as such.
No some one elses site takes over Rap Genus's top spot - might actually increase Google's PPC revenue if the replacement site doesn't answer the question.
Keep in mind, the author is an Oceanographer, not an export in nuclear reactors and radiation exposure (as is abundantly clear when reading the article - at one point she suggests that control rods in the BWR class reactor are cooled with seawater - a quick read through http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_water_reactor would have caught that)

She should have probably co-written this otherwise excellent article with a subject matter expert instead of guessing.
My point is that Google is searching in vain. It's running around in circles cause it keeps coming back to ads.

Confusing? So is Google. Know anyone who works there? Ask. Many there are just as confused. And that's Google's problem.
Ok but... you could do unicode in python 2, it just wasn't ideal. The problem was, python 3 doesn't actually solve most peoples actual day to day problems.

Here are real problems with python:

* It's slow (excluding pypy)

* The C interface sucks (compared to something like Lua) and holds back language progress

* It can't handle multicore well outside of multiprocess hacks (which are sold as "the right way" -- bullshit. Sometimes threads are useful).

* Lambdas/closures are unnecessarily limited (I don't buy the whitespace/syntax argument -- look at how Boo works. You can do this just fine while keeping it pythonic).

* Explicit "self" is stupid and most people hate it. Javascript and Ruby are comparable languages, and neither of them need this while still having the exact same flexibility as python.

* (Down somewhere near the bottom:) strings should probably be unicode by default.

Python 3 doesn't solve any of the first five major problems, and the last problem can be worked around in python 2.

You've correctly identified problems with python 2, but I think you're incorrectly giving them more weight than they deserve. Most people just don't run into those issues, and don't care, and that's why python 3 is dead in the water -- because it doesn't solve the real pain points of python enough to make people want to upgrade.
" But buyers first discover their books online only about 17% of the time."

Buying merchandise online is often far more convenient and less expensive than buying merchandise in the store. But discovering products is much more convenient when you can handle it, read the first chapter, etc.

Brick-and-mortar storefronts may become outlets for marketing. Instead of making their money by generating sales, they make their money by charging book owners to have a copy on the shelves. Customers get the convenience of discovery, bookstores stay in business, and authors get their material out into the world.

Online retail is probably going to change the way we consume goods over the next decade in larger ways than it already has.
Semi-related: I recently watched this video on $20 homeless backpack care kits (http://youtu.be/Y6fkyf9UGAE), thought it was a neat idea. Figured it might be useful for those looking for simple ways to help out a bit.
Show HN: Entangled timelines, hosted or self-deployed. GPL.
You're not making a good case for your point of view here.
It seems a bit like trying to fix the pigeon problem in the city by putting out pigeon food.

The harsh reality is that the more accommodating to the homeless the city is, the more homeless there will be.

I think there are solutions, and they can be compassionate, but simply making life easier for the homeless has long term drawbacks that are greater than the short term upsides.
I think the usual response is that the clause is not a big deal, but removing it is--they have to get their lawyers to review the changes, etc. I have seen at least one employer go ahead and make a change without consulting the attorney so I'm not suggesting this is a canned response, just one I've gotten a number of times.
What do you mean by "locking people in"? I don't have gmail or youtube account, or picassa or any of that crap, but just use their search because it is orders of magnitude more relevant than DDG for my queries. And I consider maps, scholar, patents to be part of the search.
Well, as long as your insurance carrier is willing to play ball, you can get those changed with them, and reconcile with the government when it gets its act together. Just be careful of grab backs if you're due a lower subsidy (in the other direction the system doesn't yet implement payments to insurers, as I understand it that'll work on the honor method with the insurers submitting invoices for subsidies with reconciliation to follow).
> OK, so I think "a bit tougher" is an understatement to say the least.

Sure. But the point is that a detecting corruption is a far different beast than detecting intentional collision attempts.

> If they're really worried, compare file sizes too.

This adds nearly no security.

> Then compile the code and verify that the checksum on the executable is the same as before.

Compare the whole binary! If you don't trust a SHA1 on the source, trusting a SHA1 on the binary is merely moving the goalposts around. This also requires deterministic builds - this isn't the default or necessairly easy, but it's possible and is the approach the TOR project takes at least: https://blog.torproject.org/category/tags/deterministic-buil...

Alternatively, even without deterministic builds, compare the whole source tree! The whole file must be read to compute the hash in the first place, so why not compare all those bytes?

> I just think it would be really hard to pull this off

And while I would agree with you on that point, the point I'm trying to make is simply that this has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that git attempts to detect accidental corruption -- the specifics are paramount! While SHA1 is not the weakest cryptographic hash, it is not the strongest cryptographic hash either. Git was not designed to focus on cryptographic security, and it was written by a programmer who is not a cryptographic security expert.

I would also stress that "really hard" is quite different from "impossible" (an in the general case, quite different from even "unlikely".)

(That said, sneaking in a benign-looking backdoor through standard channels sounds way easier.)
Google Trends Gets A Few Updates
I'm willing to bet that bookstores would be willing to give more prominent placement to books which aren't available at Amazon, as well as steering customers towards those books when they ask for recommendations.
So I assume you knew Obama was going to kill innocent children with an drone strike campaign larger than anything before, spy on the world, etc, and because of this you did not vote for him?
You can do that without needing it to be such an easy address - for example, you can contact me using my gmail.com address which is corin.c.cole
It is amazing that it is still possible to optimize the compression algorithm for JPEG, a file format that is already over 20 years old.
http://www.paulgraham.com/writing44.html :

> use simple, germanic words

https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm :

> The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details.

pg's essay "Writing, Briefly" mentions it in passing. So I assume that most HNer's are sorta familiar. The idea is that English words of Germanic etymology are usually simple, everyday words. E.g. "event, a lot, boring". English words of Latin etymology are usually flowery, pretentious words. E.g. "phenomenon, cornucopia, quotidian".

Latin words very abstract and hard to read. They often obscure meaning. Sometimes, they don't actually have any meaning. Sometimes, they're used as euphemisms. Germanic words are easier on the eyes and often evoke imagery of tangible objects.

I added links to my original post, because I realized that a single HN comment isn't enough to clearly explain my list.
A lot of my steam purchases are ... lets call it copyright amnesty. Even more with gog - so although I have above 300 majority of them is old stuff that I have played back in the day. My backlog is maybe 10-20 games I am interested in. But lately I confine myself to 1 game per steam sale. Top 2.
Let's rephrase my point: the existence of this knowledge base article should not be taken as a sign for ANYTHING. :)
I have had my email address available on a web page, with only minor obfuscation (escaping characters, sometimes in different encoding schemes) for over a decade. I don't get a lot of spam on that address.

I doubt there's any economic incentive for an email-harvester to solve the problem of even trivial obfuscation. These days you can buy tens of thousands of email addresses for a small amount of money. These are harvested from e-commerce and social media, and are much more likely to be real and current, and the targets more unsophisticated about clicking on ads.

EDIT: Actually there is an incentive; when the algorithm is applied on behalf of many naive users. So maybe the built-in algorithm in WordPress is actually more targetable than something you make up yourself. This isn't crypto; it's just obfuscation, so being original may help.
Sounds about right. The author mentions using K&R style function declarations as a way of shaving bytes in his writeup, too.
Based on my experience the bigger issue than money (though the two are related) could be too many shot-calling stakeholders. I'm sure HealthCare.gov had a much bigger budget than the Kentucky site but it also probably had far more people interested in putting their little "stamp" on it (absolutely regardless of how invisible that stamp is to people in the wider outside world who are just using the site) because the site was clearly going to be a "big deal". These little pet "stamps" often manifest themselves in conflicting requirements, power struggles that result in important technical decisions being altered haphazardly through the life of the project and dozens of other unfortunate ways.

The situation where you have a bunch of people trying to make a name for themselves within a project perceived to be very important without one strong decision maker keeping everyone in line is my number 1 "project smell" for detecting likely failure of a big project, and I'd be surprised if this wasn't a factor in the failure of the HealthCare.gov site.
I agree that there are multiple complex causes of homelessness and that we need to address those issues. I have been thinking about this for a while and I have talked with a lot of social workers and activists to learn the details of the issue, yet, I am not the best person to work on actively solving those main causes. So, with this first campaign, I am trying to reach the people who are passionate about fixing this problem by directly designing/executing campaigns or by donating.
I believe that the people who have been working on this for years will be the ones that will come up with the most sustainable solutions. I will try my best to help them reach potential donators through this website.
This blogpost is so silly.

Agg is more like a meta library for constructing drawing APIs. Using it directly is quite painful. It even comes with Agg2D which is a simplified API.

Another easy to use C++ drawing API is Qt's QPainter.

It all comes down to how you design the API. C++ doesn't force you to come up with Agg if you really want something like QPainter. I expect the C++-translation of Cairo to be equally simple. We're talking about translating cairo_foo(ctx, params); to ctx.foo(params); and adding automatic memory management.

API design is hard. If you have it in you to design a good C API, you could probably do the same in C++.
Ghost in the Room
It sounds like he didn't optimize the algorithm per se; he optimized the implementation of the algorithm for the particular processor. Still very impressive.
Major congratulations to him! What an achievement!

I wonder though: in these situations if he were to refuse the acquisition would Apple just steal his idea (NOT implementation) and bake it into the iPhone regardless? I think Microsoft did something like this, no? Any thoughts?
I went through and reformatted the code, after expanding all of the macros that contained unbalanced parens: http://eigenstate.org/cable3-formatted.c

I still haven't puzzled out exactly what all the variables are, but I think that this makes the structure much clearer.
You know what? I really can't get behind the idea that MS is somehow the stirling example of engineering prowess and discipline. This is the organisation who fails their way through every other operating system. One of the poster children for missing the boat on the internet, tablets, operating systems, cloud services, and more.

I also reject this idea that Google's got a lock on every smart person ever. That they don't have any politics or wasted effort. That they're the snowflake they think they are. This kind of thinking is pathetically misguided, and a huge part of their marketing. Google is not perfect. They are staggeringly weak in the face of real competition (witness Facebook vs. G+ and Apple vs. Android).

Your argument is a replay of the prevailing attitude in the mid nineties regarding operating systems (from the same company, surprise!). And then some college student named Torvalds pushed out the most influential operating system ever, and did it for free, with the help of the world.

Nobody and nothing is invincible, and people who say that a situation is unassailable are always, categorically wrong, given enough time.
Since most of my changes to the notes happen on one device (my laptop), I have never had any conflicts. Using nvALT on different computers sharing the same notes folder through Dropbox does have some problems which the nvALT website recognizes as well.
This is great for all iPhone users, and a much better outcome than had a company like Facebook or Snapchat acquired them.
I recall a time at a community meeting I advocated finding a way of providing a facility that could house and treat the addicted and mentally ill, I was accused of wanting to "sweep the homeless under the rug and forget about them." I knew it was a difficult problem I just didn't realize that the problem wasn't the homeless, the problem has roots in our collective understanding of what is a 'better' versus 'not better' quality of life.

I have always held that it is one of the main purposes of government to maximize the quality of life for the governed. Whether they are rich, poor, sane, or insane. What I always find challenging is when someone chooses to define 'better' in a way that I cannot comprehend.

I strongly recommend that anyone who wants to help here start by looking at what we had, in terms of laws and institutions, which gave the state the ability to hold someone and treat their illness, and restrict their movements, and why those institutions were abolished and laws changed.

As a community we changed our position from it is 'better' to house these people and give them treatment, to it is 'better' that they live without constraints and someone trying to provide help they don't want.

When a person says they would rather sleep on a bench than be given drugs that make them feel "bad" and be forced to live with other people who are similarly afflicted, which is better? Homelessness or being institutionalized? Why?
What is a folding method?
Isn't this article guilty of the same sins it is lambasting others for ie: speculation based on guessing? It's just taking the other side of the argument. I don't see any actual measure of radiation here it's just another model. Can't they just go out in the ocean and monitor the actual levels? Seems like that would settle things.
What if the response is "No comment." as per corporate policy? I think a lot of people would interpret that answer to simply mean "no", but it doesn't necessarily mean anything regarding Jack(ie).
> would the costs not rise if attending college became free?

It depends. Prices could go up as a result of cronyism and corruption. Or prices could go down if the deciders decide to cut it.

Or if education were democratically managed, resources could be allocated according to the population's preferences.

Who knows what would happen in real life?
I applaud efforts like these for at least doing something to address the problem, even if it doesn't turn out to be the most effective use of capital in the end as some suggest here.

That said, I think some of the best projects fighting homelessness are supportive housing projects that help people get an apartment and provide additional services for medical/psychiatric treatments, food stamps, etc. [1]

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supportive_housing
Anyone who doubts the essence of the "round up gun owners" narrative (disarm us, of course) which became an imperative after Sandy Hook, post election, but not Aurora, Colorado, pre-election, hasn't been paying attention.

And your point is a very good one: smashing enough trust in the government that a lot of conservatives have, e.g. ones like me who grew up watching The F.B.I. starring Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., is a critical step in fixing things. I'd say it won't take much, based on the one House vote so far, which didn't break along any conventional lines (party, region, etc.)
I like this one as a counter:

“The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.”

-- Bertrand Russell
I gotta flag this, and it's not because I disagree with it.

Reading the title, the answer is obviously "zero". Government could by fiat decide that college education is anything it decides it to be. No money required at all.

But then the author comes up with this 62 billion number, which isn't the cost to make college tuition-free, it's the current private cost of tuition, which is a completely different animal. Hell, it might require an infinite amount of money to pay the tuition on everyone in the country for the next four years -- demand simply outstrips supply. So the article doesn't answer the question.

Finally, the author seems to think this is all just basic math, which I find odd after having screwed the pooch so badly thus far.

It's just a mess of a piece: linkbait headline, confusion of issues, poorly supported thesis, and rambling ending. I don't see it contributing to an interesting discussion on HN, and I wouldn't want to see HN full of articles like this.
Ah, thanks for the explanation. Looks like the author did a deep, deep dive in the C language specs!
Does anybody know a good way to export Evernote notes to a usable format (not HTML, ideally?)

I really want to move from Evernote to Google Drive, which serves 90% of my uses with a much, much better cloud service and interoperability. Unfortunately, most of my Evernote notes are mixed formatted text and images and I can't find a sane way to export them.

Ironically, even exporting to a .doc would work, since Google and many others are forced to offer MSOffice import capabilities.
Good for him! The app is a bit of technical marvel. I love playing with it, and now that Apple has it, hopefully the UX will improve a bit in whatever way they decide to implement the core tech. Wins all around!
Kernel hacking's a bit of a corner case, wouldn't you agree?

C's standard library doesn't seem to encumber Linux much: They just eschew it or implement it.

C++'s language semantics are a much bigger problem, last I heard Kernel devs generally didn't like the idea of implementing the supporting cruft behind exception handling, for example.
Go out and talk to some social workers, figure out what tech could actually help with. This is just silly.
Abuse of the rules, if done well, is a time-honored IOCCC tradition.
"... they should have had at least one killer feature"

Or if Python 3 had included reliable (and updated) package and environment managers; and/or a default GUI framework (QT maybe) - out of the box.

The fragmentation between Python 2 and Python 3 is killing the language. Not to mention the community. Python needs a united front.
"The radioactive rods in the Fukushima power plant are usually cooled by seawater [CORRECTION: they are usually cooled by freshwater. As a last ditch emergency effort at Fukushima seawater was used as a coolant.]."

She corrects herself just fine, but nice job on reading the article.
Exactly, higher education costs in the US are FREAKING RIDICULOUS.
I know it's anecdotal, this idea does not seem far-fetched to me at all.

I buy about a hundred books a year, and while I used to buy a lot of them from amazon, I know that I discovered at most 2-3 a year through it.
Now I never buy books on Amazon any more, because I'd rather give my money to the bookstores that I love (and provide me a valuable service) than to yet another internet monopoly.

Bookstores (well, the ones that do their job anyway) tend to select the books they will put on display and write reviews to help you discover good new things to read. On the other hand Amazon seems to be very bad at this, only ever giving irrelevant or useless suggestions (i.e. books on the same topic that the one i just bought, all the other books from the same author - as if I couldn't find them by myself - and that kind of useless "recommendations")