skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting quote:

> While U.S. retailers took in more than $4 trillion in revenues according to the most recent U.S. Census, wholesalers brought in $7.2 trillion selling everything from Bunsen burners to toner cartridges. Even better for Amazon: Of America’s 35,000 distributors, almost all are regional, family-run companies pulling in annual revenues of $50 million or less, and only 160 have more than $1 billion in sales annually.

Very interesting in the context of this article from yesterday, about U.S. businesses being shut down faster than they are created: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7703721.

How many people will be made obsolete by Amazon's movements into this sector, how many middle-American cities will see money flow away, etc? Not criticizing Amazon, of course, seems like a market that's ripe for disruption. Just food for thought.
Doesn't that section use lambda for anonymous functions? http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-12.html...

The OP is complaining about lambda functions in Python.
Does Google let teachers share assignments? That would help, a library of assignments could be built and improved.
The most interesting part of SpaceX's plan is that even if the subsequent launches are riskier than the first, it will still be worth doing for the customers, as the average launch price will be much cheaper. Launch costs have come to dominate satellite non-recurring expenditures, so it will would be worth building a couple of extra satellites for every constellation, and knowing that some may be lost on launch.

Some buyers who are risk averse may opt to only use first-launch rockets, while others who are cost sensitive will buy rockets on their last legs. This could revolutionize the entire launch market, and enable many more low-cost satellites to be launched.
I think well-structured and designed landing pages are too infrequent, so I like the OP on that alone...and being an optimist, I'm always a little excited when I hear of a new paradigm, or an iteration of it...because that means that there is a (slightly) new way of thinking about and doing things...maybe even better than my own. Either way, I like that the opportunity exists (even if I never get around to thoroughly investigate it).

And I know a lot of this is promo-copy, but this kind of stuck out to me:

> Focus on the right areas without fear of constant conflicts, code reviews and lengthy onboarding processes.

Again, I'm not experienced in the flow-paradigm...but I just have to guess that the need for code reviews is not because traditional code is not visual enough. In fact, I'd argue quite the opposite... a visual diagram offers some great big-picture benefits, but at the loss of granularity...if anything, I'd think a flow-based paradigm would require as much code review as before, but perhaps with a different mindset.

I also think the background image for "Drag, Drop, Connect, Build" is...not inspiring to me. I mean, it's useful in some respects for overview of dependencies, maybe...but dragging-dropping and interpretation of visual symbols is not always more efficient than pure textual concepts. In fact, I'd argue that it can be even less efficient. How easy is it to examine the underlying abstractions behind connecting one pipe from one icon to another?
...and 4Chan starts pumping 5 stars into the votes in 4... 3... 2...
It seemed broken that this comment was at the bottom, so I upvoted it.
On writing a code formatter for PHP
Because they didn't have 50% of their users trying to view 6 mbit/s video streams.

EDIT: Just wanted to clarify that 50% is a number I pulled out of my ass. The general point is that the percentage of users who stream video online on a regular basis is increasing more quickly than the economics/logistics allow the ISPs to perform network upgrades.
I post all kinds of controversial things on Twitter. I _never_ receive as much pure hatred as when I talk about my preference for a viral license.
I like the early Google employee example - of course, let's cherry pick the best-of-the-best, and just assume everyone in the sample is of that caliber.

I am fine with citizenship or automatic green cards for accepted Harvard students. That's a pretty prestigious designation and very hard to obtain. Harvard does not give out slots lightly. However, there are a lot of degree granting institutions in the US with lower standards, such that I don't think all universities should have that privilege.

I have worked with dozens of H1B employees. It's really stupid to ask - since they are here working - but it occasionally is discussed whether they would consider going home. I think the answer is usually - maybe - when I'm ready to retire.

The opportunities here are still "on average" better - and it's not just "the economy" - infrastructure, rule of law, space-to-people ratio, etc.
I also wonder about the use of hydrogen and how this impacted reusability. From what I've read hydrogen causes things like metal embrittlement, which is why SpaceX is completely avoiding it despite the higher specific impulse it yields.
The requirement for the item to be unopened is void if the item is defective.
Neal Stephenson envisioned it first - and yes, sweet lord I'm excited!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse
> using std::tie, your have to know the order in which the argument are returned

How is this any different than needing to know the order in which the arguments are passes? (Which I happen think is a problem that needs solved.)
After Huge Alibaba Payday, a Test for Yahoo Executives
> Given that sometimes the only way to tell that an Ikea item is defective is to open it and try to put it together ("Hey, these holes don't line up, and that board is warped..."), a requirement to be unopened an unused would be ludicrous.

Judging from the wording of tormeh's comment, and if the regulations and customs are similar where s/he is located to those here in Sweden, unopened and unused was meant to refer to cases where you actually CAN return stuff no questions asked, such as when shopping through mail order or online (sometimes stores give you this opportunity anyway, but it's not something that's required by law or ubiquitous). It's not a given that you can always buy something, try it out and then return it if it's not explicitly stated.

If you're returning something because it was obviously defective when you bought it, then naturally it doesn't matter if you've opened the box.
I disagree with all the opposition that I can muster. America needs to get its head out of its own ass, abandon police state fascism, and suck the brains out of the rest of the world by offering principled people the priceless treasures of liberty and self-determination.

The one qualification for immigration should be this: will the country be better with this person in it? Does the person have a net positive value to society?

Thanks to technological progress, that is not a difficult bar to pass. The problem is entirely with American politicians that use immigration as a wedge issue. They blame immigration for any weaknesses in the economy, when in reality, they are the ones sucking value out of the economy, pocketing some, and burning the rest on a pyre.

People who come to your town wanting to work for their living are not your enemy. They are the ones multiplying your trade opportunities and business potential. No one is taking your job. Those jobs belong to the company. If you want to own a job, you have to own your own business. And if you can't do that, it is the people setting up tollbooths and roadblocks between you and business ownership that are ultimately at fault. Look hard at them. They are not immigrants.
But we already have such a slow lane. And it already made the internet less free and less useful.

It's the upload bandwidth.

Weak upload effectively killed peer to peer. File sharing is slower than it could be, and e-mail, chat, blogs… are all in the "Cloud". Very convenient, but also dangerous (insert random EFF or FSF argument here —they all apply).

With a worthy upload bandwidth, all these things could use a server at home, with many advantages for choice, control, privacy… You could argue it's impractical for a lambda user (and it is), but that's not the problem. If someone try to sell a simple server with a fantastic UX that host e-mail, blog, vlog, social network, and distributed encrypted backup, all out of the box, it would still suck because of the damn bandwidth —and firewalls in some cases. So, this business model is dead in the water, which is why it is still so dammed difficult to install one's own mail server.

You want net neutrality? Start with a neutral bandwidth. Stop treating users like consumers, and they may stop acting like ones. With any luck, it should kill YouTube, Blogger, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Skype… except the users will still do what these "services" offer.
> A lot of people are homeless. Every year I visit it’s increasing. Maybe I am using the wrong streets. I am surprised there’s no startup to fix this.

Do we really think startups are the silver bullet to solve all of the world's problems?
Strikes me folks here are really complaining about a broken cable market, made up of local monopolies.

I googled the American cable market a bit, and some of what was described - the cable majors carving up the country so as not to compete, or aggressively blocking new competitors - that stuff sounds like anti-competitive practice.

Writing from a country with a functioning cable market, when I hear 'ISP will charge for X', I think 'Well I will change ISP then'. If you can't do that, I think net neutrality is the least of your problems.
Was QoS ever under my control? I can manage things up to my router, but not upstream from it. (IANAS, I Am Not A Sysadmim)
A clear and light interface CSS for Trello
Sounds like heap analytics to me

https://heapanalytics.com/
Do people ever go to poor areas to enjoy themselves? Wouldn't that be some form of poverty tourism? I don't see any reason to lash out at the comment you're replying to. Saying "these are fun areas in SF (or any city)" is not a political comment. For all you know the commenter you replied to volunteers in shelters, and donates to charities that aid the homeless.
Right. This is the kind of thing you'd basically get for free if you just used PuSH instead of reinventing the world.

Anyway, good luck. My efforts in this space have failed and you're still plugging away, so...
I am elderly enough to remember IRIS Explorer on SGI Workstations way back in the 1990's, when having a 2Gb hard drive was just about unimaginable.

Here is a quickly Googled screenshot:

http://wwwasdoc.web.cern.ch/wwwasdoc/lhcpp/irisexplorer.gif

IRIS Explorer was awesome, but hardware was not really up to the job in those days. There was also a rich market in GIS and other applications that did what you needed so there was no way you were going to roll your own with IRIS Explorer.

However, the scope and ambition to do stuff with it was incredible. It was far beyond the flat (as in non-3D) internet we have ended up with.

IRIS Explorer was 'flow programming'. You did not have to use it to overlay a vegetation map over a terrain map to render it in 3D and step through the seasons, with widgets to control al aspects of the show, you could use it to render something lame if you wanted to.

Despite the awesome-ness of IRIS Explorer it failed in the marketplace. This was not because of hardware or that there weren't milliions of code modules to casually wire up. For me, trying to do things with it, the problem was because of the 'black boxes'. Sure they had pretty controls on them and you could pump your data in and out of them with a few mouse clicks. However, at some stage you had to go inside those black boxes and work out what was going on. A box could have '2 + 2 = 4' inside it but there was all kinds of toolkit code to take the inputs and set the outputs. A couple of lines of code would do, but those black boxes had a lot of cruft with them. All very off-putting. So, if 'flow programming' with flowhub is to get anywhere, there needs to be an easy gradient between the 'as per the video' way it works and the reality, i.e. inside the black boxes.
>Currently they have no serious competitors

Prime video. Hulu.

>most of the same questions are going through Netflix executives' heads.

Conjecture. Contrary to populist belief, not every corporation is a soulless, amoral entity. Netflix has yet to demonstrate in even the smallest way that they are for anything but complete neutrality.
OK, fine. The number is a sham.

Were provisions for a particular level of broadband penetration and performance included in the 1996 Telecom Act? If so, was the inclusion of these provisions tied in any way to the more provider-friendly regulatory posture granted as a result of the Act?

Assuming the answer to first question is yes, were those provisions met? If not, was it because they were just unrealistic, or was it because of some other reason?

What I think: yes, yes, no and a little of both.

What I don't think: doubling down on deregulation at this point - which is what this fast-lane stuff seems like to me - will be a long-term benefit for consumers, which (as a consumer) is what I currently care most about.

To answer your questions:

- Of course infrastructure providers enabling a boom industry should profit from their efforts. I also expect the provider to upgrade their infrastructure out of these profits, not go around with their hand out trying to get everyone else to pay for it every upgrade cycle.

- I don't understand how this supports your argument. Isn't a part of the argument that they are not upgrading infrastructure fast enough?

- re: 70's style regulation... Did you say handwaving?

I'm not really disagreeing with you that companies should profit. However they want to try and do that is also fine, they basically have the right to try and earn profit however they want. But it's got to be OK to decide no, this method you're trying is unseemly and we're not going to permit it. That's what I think is happening here w/ Comcast, and I'd prefer if regulation was not changed (or established or whatever the appropriate term is) such that it's not only OK, but a big green light for _every_ provider to start running around doing the same thing.
But you only get one apparent life. Bummer.
Tesla Could Be The Next Big Tech Company
I'd love to support a more ethical ISP, but as a practical matter, internet is already expensive and spending more for the same or less isn't really a workable option. Downgrading my connection is also not a great option; if I'm forced to choose between a fast expensive connection and a cheap slow connection, then yeah; it's great that Net Neutrality is a thing, but now I'm stuck in the shitty situation I was trying to prevent anyways.
Tangential thought:

It really seems to me that only companies with the "California tech startup mentality" (whether they're in Cali or not) can actually do anything today. I'm starting to refer to the rest of the economy as the "legacy economy," "legacy industry," etc.

I understand some of the reasons: bottom-up engineer-led engineering teams, lean operations, little or no bureaucracy compared to large older institutions, etc. But there seems to be something else too, some kind of difficult to quantify attitude or mentality. I get it, but I find it hard to describe except to say it's about believing in the future, believing that things are actually possible. Everyone else everywhere else seems to be looking backward and thinking of all the reasons things can't be done.

Like this, for example. "Here, we're NASA, and here's why it can't be done." The NASA of the 50s and the 60s is rolling in its grave!

Legacy economy indeed. Disrupt everything. Ditch it all and start over.
What a stupid argument. This is a great example of how statistics can appear to support any random premise, no matter how obviously wrong it is.

So why don't we take basic protective measures to mitigate safety risks? Um, we do. Drivers wear seat belts, pedestrians cross at crosswalks, and cyclists wear helmets.

Of course if OP had phrased the question this way, it would be clear that he has no point. Instead, just to be pedantic he phrases it: "why don't we wear helmets all the time"? Such bullshit is what you're taught to look out for in your freshman rhetoric class.

Please, please wear a helmet when you ride a bike. OP himself admits that if you're in a serious accident a helmet will save your life. That's where the argument should have ended.
480p is DVD quality
`xargs` also has a `-P` flag which will instruct it to spread work over multiple processes. Given that you already have `-n1`, adding a `-P 0` will have it automatically spread out over all your CPUs.
"and the meddling of the military"

"The Air Force put some tough requirements on it, such as the requirement for enough cross-range capability when landing to be able to launch into a polar orbit from Vandenberg, deploy a satellite, and land back one orbit later."

That's not what I remember at the time this was happening, nor was it e.g. the story in a good study published in Science. Sure, the DoD/intelligence community wouldn't have minded such a capability, but NASA insisted on it to make the shuttle more attractive to them and to help justify the monopoly NASA obtained on these sorts of launches.

Something the DoD didn't like at all, and was partly freed from after the Challenger disaster. Which also prompted a closer look at the safety of Vandenberg launches and the canceling of them.
Homelessness in SF is a lot more complicated than that. With a mild climate, political sympathy (and associated city services), and lots of tourists to panhandle... SF is something of a destination for the homeless who can manage it.
Making the web fun again, one year later
If you make the worker a citizen, you can be absolutely certain that a citizen can fill the role, both now and ten years in the future.

Otherwise, you are finding a different person to fill the role in ten years, and that person will be competing with someone in a foreign country that has 10 more years of experience.
>Solving homelessness is not an economic problem

Of course it is. If housing were not so expensive, there would be no "homeless" population.
Here is another YC startup that is doing the same for hardware components: http://octopart.com/about
There's Much More To Haiti Than An Earthquake
^^ this. also sam altman did a good post on AI http://blog.samaltman.com/ai
The Return of Upcoming.org by Andy Baio
The other part that virtually no one talks about is how this would be regulated. Are we going to have "internet inspectors" from the FCC doing periodic surprise checks of every ISP? Will ISPs be required to have a neutrality license with full historical audit logs?

This reminds me of when the TSA took over airport screening after 9/11, over the belief that only a government agency could screen passengers securely. The net effect was longer lines, more expensive travel, less rights for flyers (ie either you get a body scan or a pat-down, and no more liquids on flights), and in general less happy travelers.
I still remember the first time I started to grok recursive definitions in a functional language. At the time it was Scheme and I remember going through all the effort to track the various bits of state and operation as they "reboot" and begin again in each recursive call.

It made me think that recursion, no matter how short the code looked, was terrible.

Now I realize that recursion, thought about properly, requires so much less mental overhead. All those lines of code that vanished were really whole concepts and ideas which could vanish as well.

Of late, my style has been refined by working with theorem provers which make the ultimate connection. Recursion is absolutely nothing more than mathematical induction. Each recursive call is just you invoking the inductive hypothesis.

What that connection really drives home is that when writing a recursive definition you need to do so very few things. First, you need to make sure your definition has a good foundation—you must list all of the conditions where it terminates and ensure that they truly found and support the algorithm/proof. Then you must write the inductive engine that will burn away whatever inputs you receive down to the foundation you just made.

The release is in noticing that those inductive engines can be primed on the very tiniest actions—and those tiny actions are all you, the implementer, are responsible for.

When writing your inductive step consider only the things that are novel about this case. If I'm working with an input list and inducting on `cons` then all I must do is consider what happens to the head and tail of the list. Everything else will be handled by the turning of the inductive engine.

Now a good algorithm just feels like someone walked me into a room with a gigantic domino structure. I walk around it slowly and determine the ends and then just flick the single domino which will churn away inevitably the rest of the algorithm.
> I can not, for the life of me, tell what this is from the website.

This makes me feel a little better. I couldn't tell what this is, either.

I scrolled all the way down and eventually found a FAQ link that helps: http://flowhub.io/documentation/flowhub-faq/

May be worth putting that somewhere more prominent.
The difference between id and name is significant. The article makes it feel as if it's all the same.

I don't use such ids, but I use such names.

The default name of an input type=submit button is, in fact, "submit".
It seems messier than politics in a democracy of 300MM people or 70MM...
Those aren't for VR though, right?
> I could have been spending my smarts on something, anything, useful like medical research

Whenever our short lives are maintained to be the end-goal we will only reach meaninglessness or delusion. Despite the likelihood of inviting downvotes, I must say that an investment in eternal wealth is the way to go. I'm referring to coming to faith in God. [Matthew 11:28]
Dear Agile Friends: Please Stop It With The Pointless Bickering
Cities in India Have Dirtiest Air
It doesn't dissuade from your point at all, but as a geologist in the oil industry, it's rare to see a geologist in upper management.

(One big exception: Tony Hayward, who's was also one of the few energy-industry CEOs to have a STEM PhD. (CEO of BP during the Macando/Deepwater Horizon blowout.) Other exceptions are mostly very small, exploration-only companies.)

The truth is, though, that the oil industry hires very few geologists in proportion to the number of engineers. (This is true even if you disregard the entire "downstream" refining and marketing half and just stick to exploration and production.)

The most common job function for most oil and gas companies is building or maintaining physical infrastructure of some sort. (e.g. wells, production facilites, pipelines, refineries, etc) Therefore, oil companies hire mostly engineers, and most oil company CEOs are engineers. (Once again proving your point.)
Well, everything has to be shipped there, so Ikea probably has a cost and speed advantage b/c of the flat-pack designs. Shipping has to be a much smaller % of total costs compared to pre-assembled furniture.
If you use these much, mscdirect.com is strong competition for mcmaster-carr, because they often have better prices and their shipping is very fast--although the site can only be used in internet explorer at times. These are all US-centric, because there are great sites in Europe that operate in the same space and will also be competition for Amazon.