skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem abot making a precise tax system is that then getting round it is easy. Simplicity is clearly a key point, but somehow our political processes are not very good at that alas. Corporation tax also has huge subsidies, eg allowing interest on debt as an expense should go, which would allow the rate to be cut. No deductions should be allowed on any tax...
Haven't had issues across multiple systems, even back when it first came out.
I suspect that's how it came to be chosen at my alma mater. Lots of theory-heavy professors. Was a great experience learning in Scheme, btw.
I think C makes a great second language. Use Python to teach if statements, variables, control structures etc - then later use C to teach low-level algorithms, pointers and how computers actually work.

I don't think there's any harm in learning Python first. I think they may be harm in learning C first - it's much more likely to frustrate people and potentially even put them off programming.

This is the same reason I dislike Java as a teaching language: having to tell people "don't worry about what public static void main(String[] args) means just yet" when teaching "hello world" isn't a great introduction to programming.
What startup founders and World Cup stars have in common
CIA Monitoring German for Snowden Probe Dirt
The article does mention policies of other cities in the Bay Area. For instance: "Although cities in the Valley, such as Google’s home of Mountain View, have been eager to approve the construction of new office space, they’ve refused to allow new housing construction to provide places for employees to live near their offices."
The only mistake was telling people they were doing it and being flippant about it.

Most people can't handle the truth as we see here where as you point out it is a net positive but some people are up in arms.

Most big companies are as bad or much worse but are not foolish enough to show behind the curtain for the lower masses to see.
That's ridiculous. What level of skill do you expect in an introductory program aimed at freshmen? Because that description sure seems like it should be tailored to someone completely green to programming to me.
Indeed. It's pretty silly to attack another company and then go all "aw, shucks guys" when someone questions your attack. You made this an issue by making an extraordinary claim, you should stand behind your marketing.
I strongly recommend:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32082.The_Great_Wave

If you think inflation is "normal". It may be, but rather in the sense that historical experience shows us that authorities use inflation to confiscate the economic power of the downtrodden.
If the social workers could help everyone that came to them deserving help they wouldn't be depressed in the first place.

Unfortunately, the elected officials in charge of changing the rules can get more votes by talking about other wedge issues. Worse, some of them can even get votes by peddling the myth that the poor are the ones responsible for bleeding the working class dry. This is often accompanied by a "fix" that costs more than it saves, makes life even harder for those at the bottom, and sometimes even funnels money back into the party / official's pocket (e.g. the urine test performed by a company owned by the official's wife).

It's voters that need to change, not social workers.
Moderation systems fail when they don't accept that toxicity is a human norm, pretending instead that human toxicity is an enemy to be defeated.

Why is it so wrong to criticize a bad idea? To do so bluntly?

The "effect that it had" was an honest conversation. Ultimately I find HN's policies an embarrassment and a symptom of dishonesty. Way I see it, you were brought on to make moderation more transparent, and you're doing well, but you weren't actually given powers to attack HN's main problem, which I'd define as a discomfort with disagreement.

And maybe that's a human problem. But we live in a very negative time. Outright hatred is a part of life, and tools of hatred (downvoting, shadowbanning) are hypocritically applied to shut hatred down.

But it doesn't shut it down, and it shouldn't. To say "You shouldn't feel this way" is fair game when applied as an argument between people. What you say when you banish shit is "You shouldn't exist," and that's an unsustainable mindset.

You can see the logs. You can probably see that I'm a serial offender when it comes to pissing people off here. I've got yet another account on your bad list because you think you can control discomfort.

But you don't have a modicum of transparency or honesty in your line of work, dang: there's nothing you can point to that explains why my downvoted comments are both at -4 as some minimum, but the css makes them different shades of grey.

That's really trivial shit to care about, but that's my point: you're not taking care of trivial explanation of policy. You're an improvement, but that doesn't mean you're done.
Ask HN: Laptops for programming (that aren't Apple laptops)?
I'm looking for a laptop with:

1. 1080p screen
2. 5+ hours of battery life
3. A keyboard that's nice to type on

I don't care if it's made of wood and painted with rainbows and superheroes, but for the life of me I just cannot find a straightforward laptop for programming. I don't care about gaming, I don't care about hard disk size beyond about 120GB. It just has to be "fast enough" with a nice long battery, good screen, and a keyboard that doesn't make me hate typing.

Why must it be so hard to find a site that lets me filter on resolution instead of screen size? Why do all the reviews I find online talk about the "finish" of the laptop, or the way it looks? Why can't I find any reviews from professionals?

Btw, there's a project for you: detailed collection of data about different products, similar to [0]PcPartPicker, but for things like laptops, or cars, or whatever.
New NYC Programming Language Meetup Group
To be honest, if you are indie developer and you don't have very aggressive IAP like Clash of Clans or Throne Rush, there is no money from people that buy apps. I've seen cool indie games like TripleTown having trouble monetizing. I bet one could make more money from Ads (although I hate ads, I hate them less than whale-catching-IAPs).

People using old devices can still click ads.
Hashcash.

/me keeps up the good fight.
who gets to choose what's in what basket? Which choices are correct, and which ones are not?
150,000 Reasons to Lock In Client Payment Upfront when Running a Business
Help me out. I love the idea of Python as a first language. But do you think there's an issue teaching a whitespace-sensitive language as a first language? When students eventually move to Java/JavaScript/C#/Swift/whatever, will this be more difficult?
I hope the roadmap for these guys includes controlled descent and landing for the rockets - otherwise they haven't got a snowballs chance against SpaceX. The aerospike dependence on aerodynamics implies it will be much less effective when running in reverse for the landing phase - better have a way around this. When you look at the breakdown of fuel cost vs vehicle cost, it's obvious that reusable rockets will win so resoundingly that everything else will probably fall by the wayside.
"This Archaeology of Errors is no place for the application programmers of old: it takes a skilled programmer with years of experience just to build simple applications on today’s web. "

I'm not sure HTML + JavaScript is any more or less easy than HyperCard + HyperTalk. I agree that nobody would design the web to be what it is right now if they had the chance to start over, but there's also something to be said for the force of Darwinism in selecting out decent technologies. And every major web technology right now is just that - decent. Not great - decent.
They have a finite budget and rules most of which, probably, they didn't write themselves.
I've always been of two minds about this. My intro course at MIT was in Scheme, a class that has since been renamed and is now taught using Python. On the one hand, it was a great course, and the FP was an awesome mindfuck (previous programming experience: TI BASIC). Though I took it all for granted at the time, it definitely set me up to think about programming better for years, and I still reread the book sometimes. The downside was that for a little bit, I couldn't really program in anything really practical, because by 2001 Scheme kinda wasn't. In other courses, I found myself crunching data with Perl that I only sort of understood, or writing C programs in situations where C probably wasn't the ideal tool, because it was the only other language I really knew. The thing where people say "once you know all the theory, you can learn a language in a couple days" isn't really true, and anyway, you probably don't have that couple of days. Point to Python.

So the question is really: can you use Python to get most of the benefit of teaching using Scheme while at the same time giving the student a practical tool for future use? I haven't taken the new Python courses, so I don't know how well the material bends to the language, but I remain skeptical of the "most of the benefit" part. Maybe I'm just a curmudgeon, but I sort of think they should keep Scheme and then just have a short (e.g. over IAP) course on practical programming techniques using Python (or whatever). Or maybe someone should rewrite SICP in Clojure? Finally, I know Scheme has continued to evolve, and I wonder if it's really still true that Racket is impractical as a day-to-day language.
Why is everyone in such a f&%king rush?
> Climate change scepticism is not a fringe view, but moderately widely held

Amongst 1) the general public, 2) scientists in general, or 3) climate scientists specifically?
EDIT: It was edw519, not tptacek: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4529609
Clang – C++1z, C++14, C++11 and C++98 Status
Swift gets updated in Xcode DP3
You are avoiding the essence of the parent's question, which is that both the 'crowdfunding' and the (currently illegal) unaccredited investment have similar risk profiles in many cases, with the same lack of reporting requirements, possibility of not returning anything, and likelihood of scams.
I applied with http://www.use-the-tree.com. It's okay with me to not have been interviewed via Skype and not receive funding.

Also the eMail from Greg (on June 5th) was nice and well written:

Hey,

Thanks a lot for applying to the Open Source Retreat. Unfortunately,
we aren't able to accept your project. We ended up with about 120
applications, and ultimately only had 2 available slots, which meant
we had to turn away a lot of projects that we would have loved to
sponsor. We'll be announcing our selectees soon; watch our Twitter
feed (https://twitter.com/stripe) for details.

We're treating the retreat as an experiment, but the strong interest
we've seen makes it likely we'll do something like it again (and we
hope you'll apply if/when we do). In any case, we expect we'll learn a
lot from this run and hopefully have lessons to share back with the
community. We've also had a number of companies express interest in
doing something similar, so hopefully other similar opportunities will
arise soon.

- gdb
What does he normally do full-time?
Sure, but a systems-oriented course is the right place to pound that into people. Not CS1.

CS1 should be an introduction to the nature of the discipline. I can think of many things more important and more representative of the nature of computing than the semantics of C.
Smaller block sizes are already advantageous because they propagate faster, so they have a lower risk of being orphaned. A purely rational miner should only add a transaction if its transaction fee outweighs the increased orphan risk.
This is about an introductory language. No one is saying CS students shouldn't eventually learn those concepts, but why would you want to bog down an introductory course (with non-CS students, many of which probably haven't written Hello World before) on that material?
Yes, the end goal is the same for both approaches. The reason I believe providing backwards compatability for something like email is that its probably one of the oldest and heavily used protocols people rely on today.

I believe you can think of Facebook and Twitter as "new" protocols for email. It doesn't have the "open" or "distributed" nature of email but one can say that something like Diaspora did which had a terrible time gaining traction.

I don't see how you can replace email without providing some level of interoperability. I'd love to be proved wrong though.
The Antarctic ozone hole: An update
Most Python material that I've seen that is an intro course makes limited use of changing variable [1] values , being written in a mostly-functional style (generally, preferring, at least initially, recursion to iteration to achieve that -- even though recursion is generally the wrong approach in production Python code.)

Using a modern imperative language doesn't prevent you from adding complexity a bit at a time, and -- especially initially -- getting the advantages of teaching things in a functional style.

[1] but not object fields, as objects are taught as containers of mutable state, usually late in the course.
I'm not so sure. The high-energy physics community created an ethically (but not legally) binding agreement on the date of theorist postdoc offers to prevent a useless race for ever earlier commit dates.

>In recent years, we have seen a growing number of early offers with short deadlines for high energy theory postdoctoral positions...We are worried that this practice is preventing young researchers from making a free and fair choice among their job opportunities. And, while there may be some short term advantage for the institutions which do this, we believe it will have serious negative effects in the long run....Thus, we commit to make no postdoctoral offer for the fall of a given year, whose deadline for acceptance is earlier than January 7th of that year.

http://insti.physics.sunysb.edu/itp/postdoc-agreement.html

I think all the postdoc applicants generally like this, so it does seem to be in their best interests.

It's very plausible that various private companies have a harder time than HEP professors coordinating on a pledge like this given legal restrictions and the fact that they do not have the common framework of academia. So I think this really could be a prisoner's dilemma.
That's the language of failure.

Technical debt strangles many products before they even get to market.

The status quo of software development is that management won't face the facts of what software will cost so they chronically underestimate what an efficient software development effort would cost by a factor of two or three.

Instead of laying out a realistic plan that will succeed, they embark on a hopeful plan that will certainly NOT succeed, and you end up with a 2/3 chance of failure and, if there is success, it costs a lot more than efficient development.

Screwing around leads to going in circles, not delivering a product in the next month. If software managers focused on compressing the standard deviation of the schedule they'd come very close to least cost development, because screwing up is incredibly expensive.
Talent != IQ. And I'd argue "smart" != IQ.
I believe Sony did that as well. I remember it surfacing after that major personal info breach a while ago.
You need to put up some examples of what can be done by this service. Something visitors can interact with without registering is ideal to convince them to register.
I found this a bit amusing because I do not recall ever eating food made using lettuce while in Japan, except for maybe a single salad. It's simply not a large staple crop there. That is probably why Fujitsu chose it, as opposed to a crop like rice or a type of bean. It will be interesting to see if this type of production picks up, although I do not see why it would.
> But do you think there's an issue teaching a whitespace-sensitive language as a first language?

No. Most languages are whitespace sensitive, though what whitespace differences matter varies from language to language.

> When students eventually move to Java/JavaScript/C#/Swift/whatever, will this be more difficult?

I doubt it. If anything, the indentation discipline they've learned will make their code in those languages more readable.
I can learn to adjust to systemd

But wow I cannot stand grub2, what a mess.
Actually, from your basic set of requirements, you just feature creeped your design to death.

Let me take a shot at it:

Learn enough HTML to make a GET request. Know enough PHP to receive the GET request, and then update a textfile of entries on disk. Use a second file to store the top ten clicks. Return the second text file.

Thats it. In your example, you did what is generally expected of today's current "web trends": you take a super simple use case, and demand it be highly scalable for millions of users with instant and immediate feedback. And why are we using CSS at all? Its a button and some text, no styling is needed. And why are we using a database? Do you expect millions of concurrent users? Hundreds? Your requirements didn't say that. What do you mean package/deploy/whatever to the server? Sure, there are some basic routing needs and maybe Apache, but those take minutes or less to setup. Also, right in the middle of your solution, you changed the requirement "If I want the interface to update immediately...", right there, you are adding complexity.

While at the face of it, I understand what you are trying to say, but I have to point out that you are the primary cause of the increase of complexity, not the technologies involved. I actually think deploying a simple counter website like this is easy. But as soon as you want immediate feedback? Alright, more complexity. Millions of stored records? Alright maybe some large memory cache, like Memcache (or a large array). Persistent records? Alright, fine, get a DB. Millions of concurrent users? Alright, we are going to need some more complexity to handle throttling. Thousands of requests per second? Even more complexity, maybe we have a distributed system.

In the end, you took a simple problem, and turned it into an awfully complex one. Yes, designing an application for that kind of load is complex, because it is actually a complex task. Doing all the things we want to do today is hard because there isn't some turn key solution, not because we are working with tools that are too complex.

As an unfair little poke at your solution, there are in fact turn-key solutions, like Yahoo webhosting, where you just design really high level basics and it does the rest.

Feature creep is bad. Identify it, and kill it.
Actually, if I recall correctly the only hardfork so far was accidental. It's far from clear that a deliberate hardfork would ever get community support, particularly given that some of the core developers are strongly opposed to increasing the block size and think that everyone should move to online wallet services and off-chain transactions for small payments instead.
Any business laptop should do, take a look at Thinkpad, Dell Latitude and HP models. The Lenovo T440s has a good 14 inch 1080p IPS panel.
Will Apple's iPhone 6 be made by ROBOTS?
Oh, RAM sticks are cheap, esp. for old machines. This is true. But I use a VPS, and the 128MB instances are cheap enough to be worth taking ten minutes to shut off junk services (which improves security anyway).
I found CodeIgniter to be really useful for a self-taught, spaghetti-style PHP programmer. It is the only framework that most such programmers can grasp by themselves using tutorials and docs available online. Any other framework, and they would require a lot of hand-holding.

Switching from CI to something better later is really not that hard and it's much, much easier that learning one of the modern frameworks from scratch.

I'm talking about self-taught begginers without CS degree or working-in-a-large-team experience.
There's an example API created with the service here: https://sheetlabs.com/#/services/doc/ACME/getDomain

This is linked off the front page, but could certainly be more prominent (as another commenter said)
ThinkPad T440s. Insane battery life, 1080p model exists Trackpad is a POS but that can be fixed easily.
The computing courses at my university use Haskell in the introductory programming course - apparently it works rather well as a vehicle for exploring algorithms and data structures.

The students move on to Java, C++, Perl, Prolog and others after that; not sure about Python.
Should this article make a bigger deal about the fact that they are growing food in clean rooms 60 miles from the world's worst nuclear disaster, whose cleanup is still ongoing?
http://www.caffedolcealchemia.com
> So in my opinion for a beginner Python is more future proof than Ruby

Which is more future proof: Python v2 or Python v3?

I figured that I was least likely to regret Ruby for a green-field data analysis project. So far it's been a delightful experience.
Posted the link above, don't want to spam the board. :)
on the same boat.. but have given up on using Chrome for bookmarks. It's too slow on Linux when you've more than 50 tabs.

Firefox loads under a minute with 510 tabs from various tab-groups. (I use a tab-group for each group and field of study and yes I use most tabs actually)

The search in the sidebar is so enormously useful, it helps me to find ANY bookmark made by hitting CTRL+b or middle-click (two-finger tap here). I heavily use tags, which is really making the search better, but I wish these tags could be automatically generated by an algorithm.

1. https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/flat-bookmarks-h... (this is what opens up a better sidebar)

2. https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/bookmark-rater/ (rating is really useful sometimes)

3. https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/enhanced-middle-... (I use that to open the sidebar)

4. https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/auto-sort-bookma... (autosort "heap, stack and memory" of bookmarks. I don't sort the the toolbar)

Optional:

i) https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/faviconreloader (In case you want icons for old bookmarks)

ii) https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/tabgroups-menu/ (helpful to quickly switch, rename and reorder tab-groups, because zooming-in-out sucks)

iii) https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/unloadtab/ (worried about loading >500 tabs at once? set it to load only tabs you clicked and unload tabs oder n)
Other than the scientific method, how would you propose humankind gather the information needed to make important decisions?
This reminds me of boa.js - https://github.com/Zolmeister/Boa

Python's got a great standard library with lots of common functions. Many of these functions should be standard.
While true, I don't believe many clients make it easy to do that still.
Ruby on Rails Internship
The issue is not the package manager, the issue is the repositories you're enabling. See https://iuscommunity.org/pages/TheSafeRepoInitiative.html for details.
I saw this article a few days ago which covers some good things email clients could do to help improve security around phishing:

http://www.tripwire.com/state-of-security/security-awareness...

The problem is that there is a lot of information which can help technical people figure out if something is suspicious but the email clients don't use that info to help non-technical people know if something is safe.
So we should teach the students old stuff because it's easier on the teacher? This isn't history, the tech world is changing daily with new languages and technologies being created. Sticking to one curriculum because it's easier on the teacher is ridiculous.