skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This was a good post.

Synthetic Biology is a big concern, and not just that people may deliberately use it to cause harm (which is definitely a concern as well).

My grandfather was an engineer during the 50's early 60's working with nuclear bomb projects. He was there when they exploded the Bikini Atolls. I never met him because he died of cancer in his mid 40's (maybe not occupational hazard but then again....). Because they had started using technology only partially figured out and not thought all the way through. Never mind that they were using it to produce horrible things.

I'd like to think we would learn, and next time will be different, but the reality is, probably not. We will likely repeat the exact mistakes of hubris and rushing. Especially with a technology less controllable by central authority than nuclear ability. I don't know about everyone else here, but I very seldom write a program that just works the first time. And there is a lesson in there somewhere. Especially when you don't get second chances.

But I'm not dumb enough to wish knowledge away either. So I suppose we will eventually adjust. If we are still here that is.
If you don't have memory or any other way to link your actual "live" with previous ones, how does the situation where "conciousness" travels between bodies and does not actually differ? What identifies a consciousness A that was in the body X and traveled now to the body Y? How is it different from consciousness B that used to be in the body P and now lives in the body Q? How can you actually link them like that if there's no difference between them, so swapping those two consciousnesses between bodies Y and Q won't make any difference?
Show HN: Leaps, pair programming over LAN
I've always stuck to my guns with goto, and will continue to do so. Any sufficiently large C codebase will have some areas where goto makes the code cleaner, less error prone, and easier to refactor (most commonly in error handling code).
You can acclimatise to it but cold shock response is a very real thing. The first minute is the most important - you're lucky to survive long enough to die of hypothermia.
By "pure SF" I mean the realm of pure imagination, unfounded in any actual emerging present circumstance. As far as I know the human race has not yet invented anything more powerful than our ability to control it, with a life both longer than ours and independent of any support from us. So worrying that such a thing might be invented and then wipe us out seems little different than worrying that something all-powerful might simply appear from some unknown place and wipe us out. Neither fear is very instructive or clarifying with regards to policy, imo.
Yes, it's a crazy idea. Paying people out of the revenue gained by advertising to them has some fairly obvious limitations.

I don't know what the deal with those Bitcoin tips is. Personally I find it weird and creepy and never cash them - it feels like a ploy to tie user identities on multiple sites together, or something like that - but I have zero evidence to support that.
> Most rich people would just take the basic income as a small tax break, but they're still getting it.

Right, I wasn't clear about this but you're correct that the idea is that technically everybody is given the same amount in one form or another.
What useful work could a manual labourer do, if you automated his job away tomorrow? It sounds harsh but not everyone can be a Javascript developer or whatever the current fashionable thing is. And what's to stop that useful thing being automated away next?
Great point! The order of titles listed here is the intended reading order:

https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS/blob/master/READM...

Also, the "Up & Going" title, Chapter 3, has descriptions about the titles and the narrative/story arc being told across them, which helps understand the intended order as well:

https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS/blob/master/up%20...
I've been trying to make some kind of casual contact with these folk for quite a while now. Beyond understandable why they wouldn't want to be easily found. Still, if anyone knows of any Parisian gigs which may have something to do with UX, let me know maybe? :) I'm totally not da police.
Wow that's a horrendous mindset to have.
I use Dvorak, but other than that, this is pretty cool.
I'm just going to say what should be obvious: One is not going to be able to engineer a dangerous plague that will wipe out the human race in one shot. One would have to do experiments, and those experiments will be noticed, because people will get sick and die.

I did get lucky and design, from first principles, a 4-fold increase in enzyme activity once, but I am not sure that is something I could repeat.
And spoken language, and writing, and masonry, and metalcasting, and cultivation, and domestication, scientific theory, logical thought, etc. A lot of things mattered a lot to get us where we are, and fundamentally changed the world when they happened (or at least changed the founders world in the short term as it spread globally).
Use a “Fake” Location to Get Cheaper Plane Tickets
What is factually wrong about that statement? He doesn't say the new technology requires huge numbers of weavers and farmers.

There's nothing about being freed for "new purposes" that means those new purposes have economic value or will necessarily uplift your standard of living. In the developing world, they are undergoing the industrial revolution now so they are going through the same process of replacing farm jobs with factory jobs. But in the developed world, unemployment and inequality are rising.
Ask HN: Thoughts on Rich Hickey's advice on becoming a better developer?
Hi HN,

Very recently I stumbled onto a comment by Rich Hickey which I've reformatted in a gist[0] (unfortunately, the source is no longer available). Honestly, Rich Hickey is one of my programming heros and I'm a big fan of his ideas about programming. However, reading the response below, I couldn't help but feel disheartened.

Rich Hickey says - You don't level up by switching games all the time, but by sticking with one long enough to gain advanced skills. And, you need to be careful to recognize the actual game involved. Programming mastery has little to do with languages, paradigms, platforms, building blocks, open source, conferences etc.

Quite seriously, this is more or less opposite of what I've lived by in my career till now. As a backend engineer I can't help not getting excited by React or not spending a month learning OCaml or building side-projects tangential to my 9-5 line of work. The worst part is, that till now I always felt that it is a sure fire way to level up as a developer.

The confusing part is that Peter Norvig, another great programmer has quite the opposite to say[1] (although one can argue that overall they mean the same) - Learn at least a half dozen programming languages. Include one language that emphasizes class abstractions (like Java or C++), one that emphasizes functional abstraction (like Lisp or ML or Haskell), one that supports declarative specifications (like Prolog or C++ templates), and one that emphasizes parallelism (like Clojure or Go).

At this point, I'm really confused and I spent better part of the day mulling over whether I should go through the lectures of a recent Coursera course that I'm doing or should I dive deeper in my current stack e.g. Python / Django.

What are your thoughts? Is there one school of thought that you agree to?

[0] - https://gist.github.com/prakhar1989/1b0a2c9849b2e1e912fb
[1] - http://norvig.com/21-days.html
I know the OP didn't name and shame, I'm referring to the comments here asking for them to do so - this comment thread is about whether or not that should be done.

I don't know what "power dynamic" means, but feel free to provide a clear definition for it. If you've actually got some set of abstract principles you are willing to use across the board, I'd love to hear them.

From my vantage point, I don't see much of a problem here. Offering investment is a beneficial act. So is offering romantic or sexual options. It's hard to see why offering both together suddenly becomes a bad thing - worst case the recipient can decline and is exactly as well off as before.
Free speech zones, excessive pursuit of whistle blowers, proposed restrictions on cryptography, extensive use of national security letters, resisting FOIA requests, defending NSA programs, killing US citizens in secret.

I'm flabbergasted you believe my fears of government overreach and suppression of dissent is not well grounded.
Pygments for me has been easy to get working on my blog but extremely difficult and so far impossible for me to customize. My blog is Ruby based and so first of all I don't quite understand how a python program can be added as a ruby gem. Second, I really don't understand how to create my own lexer. Do I edit the Ruby gem? Do I need to create my own gem? If I edit the gem locally I may be able to do something but how do those edits get to Heroku? The task is much more complicated than I have the knowledge for.
What is the benefit of a real name policy in the first place? Isn't it still fairly easy to create fake accounts using generic names?
Playtech buys Yoyo Games for $21.7m
That site has as much credibility as Brian Williams. I'll take a drubbing for this but her story has zero proof and is completely one-sided.
From the outside, the blogging culture for "digital nomads" already seems like hopeless, sell-out garbage. Frequent low-content posts that have the same promising-but-never-delivering feel as "long copy" marketing, blog-format where something more like a privately-editable Wiki or simple traditional informational site (do people still do those?) would be far more helpful (but, crucially, may have worse SEO to drive traffic to their "funnel"! [vomit]),

"Sign up for our newsletter!" pop-ups.

"Learn how I make money to travel using credit card affiliate links (spoiler alert: it's by writing articles about how I make money from credit card affiliate links)".

"Buy my awful book! Here's a crappy CG render of what it might look like if I had even bothered to on-demand print it!"

It's like all those "growth hacking" marketing sites that started popping up a few years ago. Or Mister Money Mustache, for that matter ("how I live free and cheap and don't even have a job! Spoiler alert: it's by already being kind of rich so I avoid most of the expenses and risk that poor people have, and in fact I work three part time jobs, one of which is this website, so that was simply a lie. Click my affiliate links!") I haven't read Timothy Ferriss, but I see him referenced all the time in relation to these sorts of things. Is he responsible for this explosion of cynical, manipulative, garbage websites that now infest the Internet, or is someone else to blame? The whole thing feels like Amway.

To sum up: speaking as someone on the outside of all this, I'm not sure throwing a few start-ups in to the mix could make the digital nomads' public online presence much scummier[1].

[1] NOT saying even a substantial fraction of people living this life are scummy, mind you!

[EDIT] Tim Ferris -> Timothy Ferriss
Not OP, but I agree with the point you question, and my rationale for so doing is that I've yet to see a compelling argument that a self-improving system is other than the software version of a perpetual-motion machine. Those seemed plausible enough, too, when thermodynamics was as ill-understood as information dynamics is now.
It's hard to get worked up about the concerns raised in this article simply because I view where I'm driving essentially as public information (as almost all of my commute is on public property)

But the start and end points are critical information. Google now knows where you live and who/where you visit. That's pretty private information and I think most people would like a good assurance that Google won't abuse this knowledge.

Unfortunately the EULA gives them free reign to do what they like with this data and they can choose to give it to others who may also do nasty things with it.
I'm surprised "Lone Hill" would even register. "Hill" is a perfectly ordinary European name, and "Lone" can be short for "Magdelone", or "Lonetta" or a lot of other things. It's nothing like "Sitting Bull" or "Kicking Bird" or "Crazy Horse".
Clickable links -

https://gist.github.com/prakhar1989/1b0a2c9849b2e1e912fb

http://norvig.com/21-days.html
In this context it's worth noting that Waze is available in Europe too. And contrary to the US, in Europe you generally have an expectation of privacy even in public and on public property.

Of course you can give that privacy up voluntarily, but I don't think being tracked on your daily commute would sit well with most people over here.
I would rather sit on my ass and feel worthless than do something inefficiently or something not needed and feel worthless.

Never mind I don't usually feel worthless even when sitting on my ass because I find something to do.
I don't think any of my clients know my age, nor they care. My best clients are those that I haven't met in person, and simply happened by random chance. They like my work and like that I'm good at it, they don't ask many personal questions and I'm ok with it. Now, if you do "consulting" and you are hired to come into a team and fix stuff, that might be a different story (will a 40yo dev take advice from someone half their age? I might find it a bit hard in that scenario and age might come into play).

Edit: Getting clients is hard, but I've had luck with HN's monthly "Who's hiring" and people seeking freelancer)
Building a road isn't busywork; when it's done, there's a road where no road was before.
Visual Regression Testing for Angular Applications
Can you provide a link to the comment in footnote one, "many people believe that fishing is what allowed us to develop the brains that we have now" ? I hadn't heard this before.
I don't have a good answer for why this doesn't happen. However, the fact of the matter is that the wealthy, on the whole, don't naturally redistribute their wealth very effectively.
The Great Bank Robbery: The Carbanak APT
We've gotten to the point that even admitting the existence of possible negative consequences of current economic trends is "leftist."

It's so very ironically Soviet. Collectivized farming is boosting crop yields! What? There are people starving? How would that be possible, because collectivized farming is boosting crop yields!
Much applause for this post which is by far the most sensible article I have seen coming from Silicon Valley.
Awesome feedback. We are on the same page, and I will try to be the cool solution between AirBnB, Hotel, Hostel and other co-living space.

Thank you.
A block might be 8KB, but the actual update you're making to the block might be much smaller.

All major databases will only deal in the 8KB increments (or whatever their block size is, whether larger or smaller, but never as small as originally claimed) though. They don't write less. Indeed, it's worth noting that most (every single major one) database systems actually write to a sequential transaction log (which they do not have to checkpoint every n-bytes), and only on commit do they actually then make a strategy for changing those source pages and extents, unrolling it from the log and checkpointing it, which by default includes coalescing and combining strategies. The idea that databases are randomly writing small bits of data all over the place is simply wrong, but is the entire foundation of almost every comment in this thread.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa337560%28v=sql...

As one example. Oracle, pgsql, mysql, and others do the exact same thing.

They aren't randomly changing an int here and a bool there.

I worked on a financial system where we wrote just absurd amounts of data a day. We ran it on a FusionIO SLC device (with a mirror backup), and churned the data essentially around the clock. After three years the FusionIO little lifespan hadn't even moved.

tldr; people grossly overestimate the "magical" nature of databases.
They are easy from an 'intelligence required' perspective. They are difficult from a logistics perspective.
Brill, it's still quite fast on my work repo, and much more useful to me. :)
OT: as someone trying to learn my way around Erlang's OTP framework, I'd be interested in a walkthrough of an OTP based system compared to this.
Would you like to give the vote to something that can be mass produced and qualifies as intelligent?
How is the assumption that "ending of human life would not be so easy" any better than the opposite? If they're equally valid, then its rather fair to take the opposite view because it is more cautious.
OK, I don't know what belorn had in mind when he asked his question. But I know what I have in mind, and it has nothing to do with disqualifying concerns about sexual harassment and everything to do with the fact that I don't drink alcohol and really don't understand drinking culture.

So, with that established: Why do people make critical business decisions in bars?
First off in many areas cops are limited the top seed allowed in a chase after all it’s hard to outrun a police radio. Second, a cop car / ambulance / fire truck with siren’s covered in flashing lights and with a siren blaring is far more conspicuous than a normal car which aids safety. Finally, top speeds are in part based around the lowest common denominator so a tired person with moderately reduced reflexes can still generally drive safely.
The federal government has a terrible record of trying and succeeding in ruining people they perceive as a threat to the status quo, including people like MLK Jr., a Senate confirmed target of the FBI. These tactics continue today, they are currently being directed towards investigative journalists and whistle blowers. The threats are so great as to create a very real chill among conventional journalists to keep on approved topics and messages.
The Netherlands has a criminal copyright infringement statute, and it appears to include --- in the criminal law part --- vicarious infringement.
Postgres LATERAL join
The best kind of change: transcending instead of attacking
I've personally worked with zero female, American developers in 10 years of professional programming (I've primarily worked for smaller companies and startups). I don't think much will change unless programming is pushed as a possible career path for young girls early on. In fact, now that I think about it, I've only worked alongside one female American developer total (academically and professionally) and she changed majors after a few weeks in her first year.
TLDR;'thought experiment', feh, if this was actual tested result would be much more interesting.
The Free Market has been faced with this problem countless times, and each time the answer has been "the service sector". First we moved from agriculture to industry until agriculture, previously humanity's main occupation, became a small part of the economy. Now we move from manufacturing to services. It's not even a new phenomenon. It's been going on for a couple of decades now.
How would a virus immediately lethal to 100% of it's hosts ever survive long enough to be selected for?

There is a natural limit on selection like this. A lab doesn't have the limit because it's product is not constrained by natural selection.
Can someone with more details on his involvement provide more information? I'm confused as to what exactly this guy did for Mega.
I am puzzled by this. There is also this first order decrease in cost of living that technology drives, that really is the 'rising tide that lifts all boats', in effect, a 'natural' progressive redistribution[0]. It would be hard to argue that inequality increased between, say, 1700 and 1900 because of the increase in technology.

[0] This 'natural' redistribution tends to be counteracted by authorities that debase the money system. Currently we have an explicit anti-deflationist policy on the grounds that lowering prices are believed to inherently have a socially destabilizing effect. Monetary policy tends to be regressive redistribution, because the primary executors of these policies are connected to banks, and the secondary effects are to create upward market indexes that beat inflation (but are eventually corrected downward, hurting middle-class 'slow movers' like pension funds and disproportionately helping upper-class 'fast moving' investment classes).
>But new technology frees their labor for new purposes and uplifts the standard of living for everyone in society.

I hear this a lot in discussions about technology (and about free trade) but it contains a fallacy: just because a group is collectively better off it does not mean that all persons in that group are better off. It's quite possible for a society to become wealthier at the same time that many members of that society become poorer. Indeed, there are large parts of the U.S. for which this has been true for the last 30 years.

That doesn't mean that we should retard technological progress, but it's disingenuous to paper over the real suffering it causes real persons by talking only about society collectively.
The hard part is not in knowing how to construct the actual bomb. The hard part is enriching the requisite quantity of a fissile material.

That's why the US and Israel went after Iran's enrichment facilities with Stuxnet.
I personally started low, competing on price and earning 2 dollars an hour, if that, after all fees and all hours that came into building something. This is because at a time I also had to learn a lot. However, I still did my best with each project, communicated nicely and now am working with one client only who supplies me with constant stream of work at hourly rate that none of these job sites ever offer.

The lesson is, do good job, be nice and eventually you will find your way out. As everywhere in life, best opportunities are usually not readily accessible.

Also, I don't hide my age or that I'm a student. I have a proven track record and that's all that matters.
The recent flood of generic science-cheerleading pieces such as this one strike me as intellectually lazy.

Science is a good thing? No shit. Of course it is.

The level of polarization being applied in recent discourse on some of these topics is disturbing.

This article in particular is a prime example. Several topics are listed, each cast as black and white, and subsequently lumped together under the same banner. If you have any reservations regarding any of the topics listed, no matter how nuanced, you clearly must be anti-science.

Moreover, this intolerance doesn't seem to discourage the ignorant from continuing to argue their uninformed opinions. On the contrary, it only inflames them.

The few people who do have nuanced, well-researched opinions on these hot-button topics are then shouted down and discouraged from participating. Why risk career suicide or otherwise waste time arguing something when it's completely fruitless anyways.

If I had to ascribe a dynamic to the phenomenon, it might look something like this:

1. Hot-button issue arises wherein the majority of the science agrees with one position, but very specific legitimate issues persist.

2. The uninformed latch on to the issue as a whole, and completely fail argue in any sort of reasonable, nuanced manner.

3. The media, usually spurred on by robust corporate messaging strategies, decide to utterly destroy these people (rightfully so).

4. The general public joins in to fight on behalf of Science™, because the Neil deGrasse Tyson memes on Facebook really spoke to them at some basal level.

5. The uninformed become even more inflamed, and the crazies start coming out of the woodwork.

6. Any semblance of civil or reasoned discourse is completely gone at this point. All that's left is a self-perpetuating cycle that fosters an environment completely hostile to anyone wanting to raise legitimate concerns, but it at least generates heaps of ad revenue.

A cynic might say the last point is by design, though I prefer to think it's simply a dynamic inherent to modern, public forms of communication.