skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The mongol conquest was almost certainly a net negative for humanity(Baghdad recovered only in the 20th century as just one example). But the standard argument is that suddenly you had chinese culture spread to the west somewhat. Not to mention after all the killing was over, trade was more free and safe for a while. If you had the Khans permission to travel in the empire, you didn't have to worry too much about a random tribe looting your caravan. Mongols were also very tolerant of other religions as long as you submitted to their rule. Marco Polo probably wouldn't have made it to china without that region being "passified". The same argument could be used in the case of Alexander or Caesar or Napoleon. You could also say that the conquista was a good thing for the American continents, but that would depend on who you ask. This is a fairly complex topic well beyond my knowledge as a fan of history, not to mention I touched on a subject thats very sensitive to a huge portion of the population of the world. Most of us have ancestors who were conquered and few of us view it as a good thing.

In summary, humans did horrible things to each other, and we survived and endured, so now with the danger out of the way we can play these games, I don't wish to continue though. I've probably stepped on a few land mines with this comment already. The whole thread is a mine field. I wish everybody pleasant evenings with history books/podcasts.
Homomorphic encryption is one the primitives which is used for this kind of construction, but it is not sufficient per se.
I think people need to mature a bit before giving life advices.

Is he sure he will say the same thing when he will be 40 yo ?

By all means do as many hours of work per week as you want but if you want to justify it, prove (as in scientific proof) us that you are more productive than standard a 40 hours / week .
I can kind of see where the OP is coming from. My summer job out of high school was working as a roofer, where I had to get up at 5 am every morning to drive out into the small town where we were based. My boss was famously a jerk: the summer before he was hospitalized because apparently a worker "accidentally" pushed him off the roof. And the summer before that, the office workers who were employed on the managing side of the roofing company had to go up on a roofing job because my boss's crew quit on him.

I don't blame them because my boss was, all things considered, kind of a reckless asshole We didn't take breaks on 100 degree days, had 10 minute lunch breaks, and by the end of the summer all of us had fallen off a roof at least once because my boss believed that setting up the safety scaffolding was a waste of time. But goddamn we got a lot of roofs done that summer, and that actually felt great.

But I was 18 then, was in good shape from high school athletics, found the whole situation hilarious, and more importantly, I knew that in a few months, I'd be at college.

In the decade since, I've averaged at least 50 hours a week and would not be surprised if the average was closer to 60. However, the long hours I work now are not in the office. I go home and read and program on side projects/experiments/other people's Github projects, because that's the only way I can eventually figure out solutions to technical problems that not only interest me personally, but that I eventually will apply in my work. If I were to spend 20 hours a day in the office, I wouldn't get done what I do by spending a couple hours in the evening or early in the morning, studying and practicing out of my own volition.

Before my current tech work, I was a newspaper reporter. I was often at the office for 10 to 12 hours a day...some of it was because I cared about the stories and projects I was working on. But honestly, most of it was because of inefficiencies inherent to the work, i.e. waiting until close to midnight because I'm waiting for a source to call me back right before deadline. The 12-hour day then was not because of best practices...I don't think I need to convince anyone here how horribly inefficient traditional media companies are in general.

So I will never work for anyone who would raise an eyebrow if I felt that 8 hours a day in the office were enough. I work extra hours constantly because I get satisfaction out of building things well, and sometimes building things well means taking 4 hours of quiet time, spread over the weekend, to rig up a solution that saves me 50 hours of work in the next couple of weeks. If an employer can't trust me to spend my time right, then that's not an employer that would use me to our maximal mutual benefit.
The HN crowd baffles me sometimes. It seems to move between "This person is too old. They are disconnected from today's generation," and "This person is too young. They don't have the experience to share meaningful anecdotes."

At what age would this person's comments hold water? 25? 28? 30?
Ask HN: What U.S. tech/developer conferences have you enjoyed?
My employer has generously increased our professional-development budget, opening up some new possibilities for attending tech/developer conferences.

I'd love to hear about some "diamond in the rough" conferences you've enjoyed. I've heard enough already about the big ones, which are mostly still out of my price range. Are there any smaller (and less expensive) conferences that are enriching?

I'm particularly interested in those that deal with web development, JS, Python, and data science, but feel free to comment about any tech-related conference.
Not really, no. It's been ages since I've logged in.
Nowhere does it even define a 'card'.

A design style? Individual screens rather than a scrolling document?
This is spot on. I absolutely love the book, but I've never thought about how connected it is to the chase of user metrics and the likes. Good observation.
There are deliberate differences in chocolate composition for chocolate bars in different parts of the world for climate reasons. Take a European chocolate bar to India in the summer: it will be a gooey mess (as I discovered for myself). So the "same" bar manufactured for Indian markets (for example) has a higher melting temperature than those made for European markets. This obviously introduces taste and consistency differences.
This guy is going to read this in 10 years time and be appalled at how naive he was.

> (yes, I am passionate about lawn care)

> As long as your net contribution3 per hour is positive, what is the harm in working more?

Look, if people who have done this exact thing before tell you it doesn't work, maybe listen a bit? But I guess there is nothing quite like a lesson you learn for yourself.
Identifying good offshore Ruby and Rails vendors – A guide
Jouw Gezonde Recepten | Gezond afslanken met dit dagmenu van duizend calorieën
29 presentations you can watch online from Jim Weirich
Our method of choice is local latex installatons + git, but this certainly looks interesting. It might be a good alternative if a less tech-savy member joins the group since it looks as if it was better for teaching and assisting people.
Ultra-MMO? 6M messages per sec at 1% load
You don't have to be a certain age for your comments to matter - it's specific to the scenario you're commenting on. Someone with 30+ years in the workforce has much more knowledge to comment on it that someone with only a few years.
Little Functional Programming Lexicon
OTOH we guzzle down rotten apples like it's going out of fashion. Maybe if chocolate got you drunk...
I didn't read the article but I can speak with experience. The 60 hour work week does not work. The challenge is to try to do everything within 40. If you need more time then you're not doing it right.
Seems to me that they're going to be doing an OS/2 - if it can run Android code, that'll be all people will ever write for it, and adoption of it itself won't happen.
Google Acquires Spider.io To Help Spot And Stop Online Ad Fraud
I love the service! I've used it for several documents so far; with great success.

Thanks for opensourcing!
This is what everyone else is arguing against and what the research is invalidating.

Please cite the research, particularly research which applies to knowledge work or anything other than construction/manufacturing. I've searched for it but never found it, so I'd love to finally see something useful.
The article leaves me hanging. Long introduction, describes IO and EO, and when it's time to talk about their uses, it just handwaves "lots of exciting stuff coming in future!"

> obfuscating 'symmetric' primitives like pseudorandom functions

So how would be obfuscated and indistinguishable RNGs be useful, if they generate the same numbers? I'm sure there is something there, but the article doesn't tell :-/
Creativity: Music to my ears – Free online course from Stanford
I've been using this for my Senior Design project's docs, and so far I have had no issues.

Thanks for open sourcing!
Diplotwoops collects diplomats' deleted tweets so no error goes unpublished
I'm starting to think that lawnstarter is an experiment in content marketing rather than an actual business. At this point I've "learned" more about the founder than the business itself, but honestly, so many of these types of articles are paid for that I doubt it reflects anyone's real personality.
A Bird named the Alpine Swift may fly through the air for a period of several months without stopping... Some people's minds may work on a problem similarly.
His Earth Destruction article[1] is pretty well known indeed!

iirc I first found the site via Everything2[2], a curious place where people do writeups about pretty much everything (from short technical articles to poetry.) I stumbled upon what looked like one of those diary entries (didn't see the 'fiction' label) by some 'sam512'[3], and was confused when giant robots and aliens suddenly appeared.

[1]: http://qntm.org/destroy

[2]: http://everything2.com/

[3]: http://everything2.com/user/sam512/writeups/March+9%252C+200...
That's very similar to CTRL+B then Q then Number. But I have about 5+ panes so I found using the arrow keys a lot easier
And intended to be a real world "Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
but is there also an integration for a Linux terminal emulator?
>Malware authors and DRM folks

Aren't those largely one and the same?
It's interesting reading these sorts of articles.

I'll just throw in my 2 cents about my experience.

A couple years ago I put in 3000 hours over the course of the year. Multiple 80 hour weeks, etc.

I was completely and absolutely burned out for about a year and a half after that. The massive amount of effort I put in really took a toll in every aspect of my life. I'd say I was about 50% as productive at work in my burn out period. Socially I was about 10% the person I was before, rarely hanging out with people and rarely wanted to do anything. Everyone on my team said essentially the same thing happened to them.

YMMV
I use the service because I haven't found a better option. I feel like I am in a position of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em"

> you will probably lose all your money(like most people do first time they try)
That is the problem.
DVD's and pretty much all optical media are terrible for backup. they degrade just siting on the shelf. and one scratch and 'poof' goes your data. I'm surprised as a medium that they have lasted this long.
[1]"Manufacturers claim that CD-R and DVD-R discs have a shelf life of 5 to 10 years before recording," note that is "before recording"
[1] http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub121/sec4.html
Absolutely right.

Just because a few driven individuals can survive Navy SEAL selection (BUD/S) doesn't mean that BUD/S is the optimal practice for everyone to have a productive, balanced, or happy life.

Some people do fine on 60 hours a week. Some people burn out on 40 hours. Some people sleep 5 hours a night. Some people delude themselves into thinking that 5 hours a night is all they need and then sleep 14 hours on Saturday.

This article is good insofar as it's one man's exploration of the question. But everyone needs to figure it out individually - there's no one-size-fits-all answer.
I think it is ok to work 60 hours+ when you are young, have only yourself to take care about and a skill set to build. As soon as you starting having a girl/boyfriend or family you are not taking care of your private life when you are working 60hours+. Then you are prioritizing work in front of your private life.

I will ask people, when you are in your death bed and thinking back about your life, how many people will wish they worked more or wished they travelled more and had more fun in life?

Done those kind of hours earlier in life and learnt by experience that if you work to much you do not have balance in your life. You have unreasonable expectation of professionalism of everyone around you and get easily annoyed by minor work misshappenings.
I think you hit the nail right on the head.

My take on it is this: You work for as much time as you need.

Different jobs, different positions, different work-styles all dictate different needs out of a typical work day. Who's to say that one is vastly superior to another. Further, who's to say that their workflow is so stupendous, that it should dictate the needs of others?
"that he forced himself to pull those hours even when there wasn't work enough to demand it, that he was working those hours without remuneration of any kind..."

I think that's the definition of workaholic
Partial application and currying in PHP
Hypercard was my first real programming exposure. Going back and looking at my stacks (which I found many years after forgetting about them) was a humbling lesson in "holy crap, I can't believe I was that terrible at programming." But it definitely did get me interested, and it was really freaking powerful for something we treated like a toy.
When someone is making statements about a global truth, such as the ability to be productive, experience is paramount. We all know you can pull off 80 hour weeks for a little bit before bad stuff happens, etc. It takes a bit of experience to learn what happens after a couple years of that.

When someone is talking about fashions or the popularity of new technologies etc, then being too old is going to make your opinion less useful as it's going to be harder for you to unlearn what you've already learned. This is generally far less of a problem and I really haven't seen much "This person is too old" on HN, but you do see it a lot on reddit as reddit attracts a very young crowd.
I give him 5 max.
The thing about people that have no life outside of work and claim to be happy is that they bring their communication and socialization needs to work all too often. Which means a lot longer meetings and a lot more small talk or playing games together etc.

As in, every single one I worked with that stayed in work that much without being burned out or tired did that.
AWS ELB – Perfect Forward Secrecy and Other Security Enhancements
You keep popping up on these threads making wild claims like this. You're like an evolution denier, you keep pushing this weird agenda, but I just don't understand why.

People keep giving you the research and yet somehow you don't read it and then claim there is none.

It is simple to find research about manual work showing 40 hours per week is optimal. It is simple to find research showing that for knowledge workers the optimal is even less.

Last time you you were trying to claim 40-60 hours was an 'optimal' working time for manual labour and linked research yourself which showed that it wasn't.

Why is the concept so antithetical to your world view that you can't accepted it?

There is a huge body of research proving directly the opposite of what you claim, that working long hours leads to an ever increasing drop in overall productivity and leads to more and more mistakes (even deaths). From the 1800s to today, many companies and institutions have researched this and 40 hours keeps being the result. And even less for knowledge workers!

Here's an example of people giving yummy primary research before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7089557
Can someone put up instructions for making it?
Ahah! So it's your fault! Nah, I'm only kidding. I love AC2.
I think in this case it's actually relevant to mention age, because I'm more and more inclined to believe that while 60+ hours can be a good thing to do in your twenties, especially if your digital life is your social life, but that it rarely ever is a smart thing to do after you're thirty.

Young coders don't have that much experience yet and will often have to rely on their brawn rather than their wit which could perhaps make the 60+ hours thing a solid strategic choice.

As I've grown older I've found that I can deliver much more value with much less effort by being well rested and taking a step back to see what's actually the important thing to do.

Whether I'm doing so because I've become wiser or because I've become less effective in those long hours is a different question altogether of course.
absolutely. this is why DDG is the default search on my browser. It's site-specific search for all the sites I actually care about rules into one easy command line interface. It's also replaced the desktop calculator thanks to wolfram alpha integration.

seriously, I don't know how I would function without !python, !pypi, !w, !gmap, and !hn
I'm hardly a pro at using bootstrap, but we have been dealing with a few of these things, and I can tell you how we've handled some of these questions:

* How do I add icons without peppering span.glyphicon.glyphicon-X's all over my markup?

This one's fairly simple--you still need to add a class to the span, but you can extend the glyphicon.glyphicon-X bit into a particular icon and call it a day:

.foo-icon {
&:extend(.glyphicon);
&:extend(.glyphicon-foo);
}

* How should I organize/maintain all of my LESS files as my stylesheets scale?

I'm not sure there is a "right" way, but I'd suggest keeping like things together. You're going to end up with a number of rules that are either dependent upon each other, or at least similar in goal, and they can live near each other. In theory, future refactorings will be easier that way.

* Are there any optimizations I can consider when I'm only using a bit of Bootstrap's functionality?

http://getbootstrap.com/customize/

^ Do that :)

Good luck. If you find answers to the rest of those questions, pass them to me!!
The problem about 60+ hour work weeks is that it's nothing but utter cheating by employers.

It means they are too cheap to pay you what you are really worth (you are being paid for 40 hours of work, but work over 50% more thus severely constricting your 'hourly' rate) and too cheap to hire enough people to do the job (i.e. 2 people need to do the work that 3 people are supposed to do).
Nothing more, nothing less.
Just tried to add a project and some of my thoughts

- you might want to mention more clearly that current posting projects is free

- Do you need to ask for address details just to post a project? I can understand when it comes to billing, but it initially put me off just to post a free project.

- You ask for a budget but i'm looking for someone for ongoing work, perhaps make this optional? I had to enter £0 to proceed

- the text boxes aren't resizable (FF mac) so its hard to re-read what you've just entered

Good luck and looking forward to some responses to my listing
(Disclaimer: I don't know how good any of these are)

* PyCon

* Cloud Slam

* Strata

* O'Reilly Fluent Conference

* JSConf
tried it once, but did not like it, since everybody is on twitter anyway
Tesla’s most disruptive product may not be its cars
Not surprised how shady their MO is. LinkedIn is literally the most useless site I've ever registered to. It's just a giant circlejerk that serves no real purpose be it work networking or sharing well written industry articles.
My mother's trick was to put the pre-soaked beans in a steam-cooker, add hot water, cook for 5 minutes, drain off the water, then cook the beans with fresh water. It does seem to remove a lot of the gas, not sure why though.
Jim Fixx (two Xs) had a family history of heart disease. He lived 9 years past his father's age -- James died at 52, his father had a fatal heart attack at 43.

A long history of smoking likely didn't help much either.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Fixx#Death
I don't think the price is worth it. A serious burnout is nothing to be solved by 'hitting the reset button every now then'. Burn out may include depression and that's something you really don't want to have I guess.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnout_(psychology)
TangoMatter Port 3D Modeling makes your SmartPhone an Epic 3D Camera (video)
Agreed.

At least they got the SD card, though.
After missing out on WhatsApp, what does Google do next?
I'm not so sure. There are a lot of people out there that _really_ dislike Java.
You'll just get a different kind of competition. If some states choose to suck, people who want good internet may move to different states, and the sucky states will suck even more.
Sequioia was Whatsapp's lone investor, this is an insane deal for them.
Really? That's something I haven't heard of from a technical person in a very long while (if ever). LinkedIn's public image from the last 2 years:

* 2012 hack. 6.5M unsalted SHA1 password hashes leaked [1]

* 2013 Acquires Pulse, forces existing users to create a LinkedIn account. Users are pissed [2]

* 2013 LinkedIn Intro. In case you missed it, it was an iOS app that changed your mail settings to proxy your incoming mail through linkedin's servers in order to inject a frame with business-card-like CTAs. In the meantime, this naturally gave them instant access to all your emails. Massive privacy implications.

* 2013 LinkedIn Intro, 3 days after release. Jordan Wright shows a CSS-based phishing attack: security implications as well [3]

My personal experience with LinkedIn:

* My profile info is available to premium users without my consent

* Premium users can spam me without my consent.

* "Who viewed your profile" feature. Unbelievable.

* Constant contact requests from random people. I can't turn their
email notifications off entirely (introductions are mandatory). EDIT: I was mistaken - <sarcasm>the process is very straightforward [5]</sarcasm>

* They seem to be in the business of intentionally misleading people (2011) [4]

So, personally I'm the furthest you can get from being a fan and I can't imagine what you were a fan of. They're top ranking on my shit list.

[1] http://blog.linkedin.com/2012/06/06/linkedin-member-password...

[2] http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2306932/linkedin-in...

[3] http://jordan-wright.github.io/blog/2013/10/26/phishing-with...

[4] http://www.michielgaasterland.com/online-reputation/try-link...

[5] http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-disable-all-of-linkedi...
Is it just me, or are others finding HN has problems?
Recently I've been getting this message:

We're having some trouble serving your request. If
we're down, @HNStatus might have more information:

...

It's sporadic, but it feels like it's getting more common. Is anyone else having this problem?
Strong type checking in Python?
For half a second there, I thought you said "almost, but not quite, completely unlike a regular PC" and almost laughed out loud.
Thanks I'll investigate them. I had the same issue, everything I'm finding is for printing photos onto various objects.
They are showing off work (to Android users) to generate interest in their own products, to hopefully help sell those down the line. Which is exactly what they should be doing.

The major issue preventing adoption is not anything about drivers. That's silly. People buy phones with the relevant drivers included. Purchases drive adoption. The major issue is they aren't selling a lot of phones. Giving top priority to people who want to put arbitrary OSes on arbitrary hardware is not going to build viable business. Jolla should focus on selling their phones. They will need to do that successfully in order for us to possibly see anything new or useful come out of Sailfish, let alone make any progress against the boring, limiting "iPhone and Android forever" status quo.