skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In case anyone hasn't seen it, Terry Pratchett helped make a documentary, "Choosing to Die", about (and eloquently defending) assisted suicide: https://vimeo.com/105168003

I've yet to see any reports saying this was such a death, but he's been dealing with Alzheimer's for some time now. At any rate, it sounds like he died in a dignified and comfortable manner, as he deserves.
If the site goes down again, here’s the text:

It is with immeasurable sadness that we announce that author Sir Terry Pratchett has died at the age of 66.

Larry Finlay, MD at Transworld Publishers:

"I was deeply saddened to learn that Sir Terry Pratchett has died. The world has lost one of its brightest, sharpest minds.

In over 70 books, Terry enriched the planet like few before him. As all who read him know, Discworld was his vehicle to satirize this world: he did so brilliantly, with great skill, enormous humour and constant invention.

Terry faced his Alzheimer's disease (an 'embuggerance', as he called it) publicly and bravely. Over the last few years, it was his writing that sustained him. His legacy will endure for decades to come.

My sympathies go out to Terry's wife Lyn, their daughter Rhianna, to his close friend Rob Wilkins, and to all closest to him."

Terry passed away in his home, with his cat sleeping on his bed surrounded by his family on 12th March 2015. Diagnosed with PCA1 in 2007, he battled the progressive disease with his trademark determination and creativity, and continued to write. He completed his last book, a new Discworld novel, in the summer of 2014, before succumbing to the final stages of the disease.

We ask that the family are left undisturbed at this distressing time.

All enquiries: Lynsey Dalladay, Publicist ldalladay@penguinrandomhouse.co.uk T: 0208 2316793 M: 07920 712543

A Just Giving page donating to the Research Institute to the Care of Older People (RICE) has been set up in his memory: https://www.justgiving.com/Terry-Pratchett

1. Posterior cortical atrophy (PCA) is a progressive degenerative condition involving the loss and dysfunction of brain cells, particularly at the back (posterior) of the brain. alzheimers.org.uk
Kitematic license has been changed to Apache.
Apple's new MacBook cable costs as much as a Verizon Moto G [satire]
Did you stop reading immediately after the word "war" or something? I'm really shocked by the level of hivemindism on HN these days. I'm all for idealism but it really needs to be tempered with reality for any real progress to be made towards a better future with less war, more equality, etc.
Thanks Sir Terry! Your books are a comfort to me and you can just add me to the list of fans world-wide whose lives are just that bit richer for your being here. Nicely done.
It's quite a sad day. I loved his books, and he will always be one of the greatest authors to me. Glad he's no longer suffering.
Or the reality is, you don't need designers, but the hipster crowd convinced companies they do, because they needed something to do with their art degrees they'd get paid for.
I really want Linux emulation for OSX, which should be much easier. FreeBSD had very usable Linux emulation on a similar kernel.
It was a bit of a learning curve from the old layout, and I still think there's a gap between what it is and what it could one day be, but I agree that it is certainly better than 99% of enterprise software applications. QBO also serves a market where the line between consumer applications and enterprise applications is less clear.
Read http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/24/terry-pratchett... if you want to understand him.

Read http://www.lspace.org/books/pqf/ if you want a quick reminder of what we have lost.

Goodbye Terry, you will be remembered fondly.
Statistics are wildly important for both business and understanding the world around you, and without solid calculus skills you cannot truly work with statistics.

Its not something that comes up every day at work, but it is still pretty often. For example, I was on a large team developing a complicated distributed system. The performance requirements were uncertain (like 500000 clients +- 200000, sending 10 +- 30 messages per second, etc). The system itself was in early development, hadn't been tuned, and we had only rough performance numbers for it.

Given only that, I needed to purchase the correct amount of hardware for the test lab, keeping in mind that the lead time for hardware was several months. I needed both statistics and some basic calculus to build a model based on what we knew, calculating variances for each intermediate and output, and then getting 50%, 90%, 99% confidence level estimates.

In the end, we got pretty close to a bullseye. On the other hand, I learned the important lesson to hide all the math from the client, lest they get awfully confused.
You are hopelessly mired by incorrect facts and perceived motivations.

Many posts above have alluded to this fact, but I'll repeat it since it may help you in the long run.

Neither of the two American wars being waged in Afghanistan and Iraq are for traditional reasons. There was no threat to the US. This has everything to do with the Military Industrial Complex, and its iron grip on American foreign policy.

The MIC requires war because that's how they sell their products. I would have expected that on a site like HN, this would be obvious. President Eisenhower prophetically warned [1] against the MIC, as he clearly saw how a positive feedback loop would form between private military contractors and US foreign policy, inciting conflict after conflict in order to keep customer demand high for their products.

Although you have obviously been thoroughly steeped in the propaganda offered by these two organizations, who could never acknowledge the truth of their actions, to any rational observer there can be no other justification. The US as a whole has everything to lose, and nothing to gain, by slaughtering defenseless civilians in an impoverished developing country.

Big defense contractors and the politicians they bribe, however, have everything to gain. And they are winning. This is one of the many failures of democracy, one that requires extreme oversight and prosecution. Sadly, we are primates, and we will succumb to our natures sooner or later.

1. http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/indust.html
Nighthawk: Debug iOS apps remotely from your browser
The Sexism of Startup Land
Its probably that VP/Directors of whatever in Europe dont make nearly as much for the same position in the US, though its a good point that the experience gives you an edge for a higher paid position like that.

I still would not believe China pays software engineers more than the US, even at a leadership position, without some stats. China as much as India has vast lower "engineering" cast based on price.

I have not yet heard of people from Argentina returning to glory after working outside, it is expected to take a dent in income, even though argentina is much richer than China/India for these purposes.
STP's books were my favorite for the last 2 decades, it's so sad to know he's gone. So long.
Bridesmaid Dresses 2015
And these companies are better off for it.
RIP. He brought so much food for thought, smiles and brutal social criticism. It is immeasurable loss for humanity. He was probably one of the greatest humanists ever to live ;(

In a hundred years we'll all be dead, but here and now, we are alive.” - Brutha, Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett.
"The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp." — Terry Pratchett
I hope "embuggerance" is accepted as an new word this year, in honour of one of the greatest English writers.
Yeah, but my point was that AdWords is a separate patent.
In honor of Sir Pratchett, let us redefine pi to be 3.12
As far as I know, chrony cannot be an authoritative time server, i.e., get the time of an atomic clock or GPS receiver and send it to other computers.

NTP needs time sources too, not just clients.
Show HN: iOS App Packager – Share Your App Without Requiring Testers to Register
Transactional Emails: 5 Best Practices to Increase Your Sales
Quick, efficient, and functional. That's what I expect of enterprise software, yes. It should have lots of options, and no useless cruft like CSS, JavaScript, etc.
“It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life.” — Terry Pratchett
It's not just for quick prototypes though, many times for me it's about marking up objects from other libraries with my own data. I'm extending them one off and not changing the base behavior in any way, this should cause no issues to anyone else using that object. Yes that can be done with inheritance in say C# so long as the base object isn't sealed, which many library classes are from MS especially, ugh.

The undefined issue seems no different to the null reference as you mentioned. I run into it constantly in C#, in fact everyone does that why they are adding the null lifting operator (?.), javascript could do the same for both undefined and null.

I may be weird but I actually like the fact that javascript has both undefined and null. It allows an extra state over just null in C# which I constantly wish I had, typically for things like data/domain objects. With undefined and null it's trivial to encoded the fact that a property is not loaded say from a db or sent from a client vs it being loaded but the value is null or sent over the network with a null value.
12.3, he’s British.
Likewise (though I'm still at that company). It's truly amazing how many tasks can be broken down into this paradigm.

I think my favorite non-obvious aspect is how it allows you to write each component in a different language.
Actually the corollary to my point is that there can never be a true meritocracy anywhere on the planet. It's impossible for exactly the reasons you've outlined. It doesn't mean it's not worth striving, but I do agree that anyone who tells you that they've done it has simply quit trying and is rationalizing that fact.

People fuck up all the time. I would never claim that there's no issue because we already have a meritocracy. We don't. We will never have one. Like a lot of ideals it's something worth looking at by comparison, to decide how closely we want to model our actions on it.
"but they are like the Hydra"

Over simplification of the issue. We're not talking about a single organization with a single motive. We're also not talking about replacing cogs in a wheel. These are people, with skills and experience that they bring to their organization. Eliminating leadership, or even mid level leaders can cripple an organization both psychologically and in a practical sense as they loose expertise/experience/connections etc.

"the enemies US are fighting are warlords, tribal leaders, and loose terrorist groups"

This is actually a very accurate description of the ground level soldiers the US is fighting. These warlards, tribal leaders and terrorist groups are funded however by much larger nation-states and those individuals and groups with the funds to pursue their agenda.
Exactly. The designer obsession with whitespace is basically a cancer to tech products. I go out of my way to find software that was made by an enterprise vendor, ideally one that has no designers on staff. o_o
I don't see anything wrong with using it as a way of opening borders. I think, from an idealistic standpoint, borders should be completely open to everyone and people should be able to freely move from one country to another. Economics disparities between countries make that impossible, but people who can afford these passports aren't going to an economic drain on other countries.

I'm skeptical on how effective it is as a way of reducing taxes. Don't most countries tax you on residency anyways? And if you're physically in St. Kitts for 183 days a year, isn't it fair that you pay St Kitt's tax rates?
This is the second link to this video. It is completely irrelevant to HN.

This is not reddit.
So basically, these states have built a business off of the money that would otherwise be paid to governments through taxes. They're like H&R Block on a national scale. The purchasers of the passport simply reroute money they would otherwise owe, paying nothing extra and saving a great deal.

I'm skeptical of how much these individuals "contribute to the country," as Kalin says. Many of these nations, such as Bulgaria, are well known for their corruption. So in all likelihood, money from the wealthy is being diverted into the coffers of another elite.
Yeah I could totally hear it from the first couple listens - the fact that the jury made the award without even listening to the recordings, just the sheet music being played should put a big exlamation mark on the validity.

Apparently, on the stand, Pharrell even admitted that the bassline is fundamentally the same. He routinely said it took him "about an hour" to put the song together, and personally, I find that says a lot about the genesis of the song. It's one thing to use customary verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-verse-chorus-verse and put it in, say, the key of D, but some of the best wizards in the business still have to put a bit of elbow grease in to make a hit. "Blurred Lines" sounded like a kareoke version to me, straight up.

I think the Sam Smith thing was a lot less clear cut than this one, but after hearing the tweaked sound comparison, I can understand why everybody just wanted it to get solved and go away.
Realistically, I think that will be a footnote to the explosion of computers and the Internet - and not because the "winner writes history"(which is rapidly becoming moot as time goes on) but because in the grand scheme of things it's nearly inconsequential compared to developments in doing the exact opposite of killing. Your notion also ignores the fact that the reason this exists in the first place is partially the desire to eliminate collateral damage, not perpetuate more of it.
I thought this was standard practice, but maybe it's just convergent evolution.
United Airlines, for instance, made about a 3% profit in 2014. Not exactly raking in the dough.

https://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=UAL+Income+Statement&annual
No download link provided?
Genetic Test Maker 23andMe Launches Drug R&D Effort
Most time sources have other uses than serving NTP time. Those are the uses that people want to pay lots of money for. Serving NTP time isn't very lucrative.
Neither of your arguments is the problem.

The real problem is a system, where it only takes three mutually self-assured groupthinkers, under stress, who have never seen a dead man, woman or child, to push a button and kill.

It might seem like unhappy accidents, but under these circumstances they are inevitable, and whoever set this system up should be judged and found guilty.

(The next level is that these systems grow this ugly exactly because there is no specific person responsible for that. The guilt is spread out thinly such that no one's moral sense is triggered. Exactly how the machinery of concentration camps worked, everyone is doing their job and at the end of the machine, people die).

I believe that only solution to this is to have a personal moral code, and if your higher ups are ordering you to do something that you know isn't right, fk the orders. But the army know this, and attracts losers that can be brainwashed so that belonging to army becomes their only way of life. Saying no to order then means being expelled from whole your life. So they rather press the button and kill twenty mothers in Afgnanistan.
Do you have a recommendation for a good statistics textbook, for someone who is mathematically literate, but doesn't know almost any statistics?
I took Gilbert Strang's Mathematical Methods for Engineers course at MIT. Can't seem to find the link for it, but I would recommend the online version for anyone who wants to learn linear algebra.
Terry Practchett Dead
What a frustratingly simplistic retort.
Samsung vs. Apple Pay: What Is the Difference
Sry it's there now. Refresh
These guys are awesome, smart and innovative.
A Startup Marketing ROI Framework
Excellent! Much better than what I made for personal use, and it's great that you open sourced it. I'll set it up on my local web server and start using it.
What three books have you read that shape how you run/plan to run your company?
These programs might sound unsavory and unfair at the moment, but they just help highlight the archaic nature of nationality and citizenship. The wealthy have always been able to cross borders more easily, now the rules are just being clarified and systematized.
We all knew this day would come, but it doesn't make it any easier.

Pterry created some of my favourite characters in the literary world. Nany Ogg, the witch who's keen on drink and singing (The wizards staff has a knob on the end), The Igors and Igorinas, Conina the barbarian hairdresser, DEATH, Nobby Nobbs, the luggage, ... .

RIP Sir Terry, you have enriched my life greatly.
One decent bet about this market is that it will become a true ride sharing(UBERpool And liftLine are working on that) market. That market have pretty decent network effect(because you need that shared trips will be as optimal as possible for all users, and people will be quite sensitive to longer AND more expensive trips, and it could also help if you met fun people,etc). Some also say that many ,even with self driving cars might use shared transport. Hard to tell.
The responses would be a pretty boring "because I love what I do and I want to keep doing it".
What's interesting about this tack is that it would go against the anti-corporate anti-big food movements which have steadily grown since the mid seventies and had taken root vigorously in the recession and expressed itself with people cooking at home more, cooking from scratch more. A belief that the closer to the source the healthier the food.

But this is an attempt to figure out how to feed a growing world cheaply (pocket-wise and ecology-wise) which small local organic farming would have trouble achieving, presumably.
> What does binary size have to do with quality?

I think grandparent meant that binary size is related to code size. The number of bugs being related to the number of lines of code, you could infer that a bigger binary means more lines of code which means more bugs. In my experience, this tends to be true. Of course this makes the big assumption that the binaries have been compiled with similar compilers using similar optimizations and are both stripped.
As someone who is saddened to see the relatively low acceptance of Dart, I hope to more efforts like Strong mode take off.

More and more mission critical software is being written in javascript, affecting the livelihood of ordinary people. I think there is a significant audience that can benefit from a less dynamic, more static javascript.
I think Lyft is making a major tactical mistake by using surge-pricing, and in my experience, in many cases at rates that are higher than those of Uber. While this may ensure that their drivers make a comparable amount to Uber drivers, its at precisely the times that Uber is surge-pricing at 1.7x+ that people are most-likely to look at alternate options. Indeed I've witnessed many instances of friends doing just that- checking Lyft and realizing that the cost is actually higher than Uber's and just using Uber or (gasp) an honest-to-God cab. If Lyft truly wants to land-grab from Uber, that is the most opportune time to do so.

A secondary problem is that Lyft has far too few drivers (at least in DC) to realistically compete, which probably further compounds the aforementioned problem of constant surge-pricing. IMO to compete with Uber they should use this money to get more drivers on the road in major markets and do away with surge-pricing for some time until they have reached a higher market saturation.
Well, this is very hypothetical. I go by "you aren't gonna need it" and "do the simplest thing that could possibly work." Maybe I'll have to change a bunch of stuff when someone suddenly comes up with a split-screen requirement. I probably will have to change a bunch of stuff anyway. As long as the code isn't impossible to understand and change, I would in most cases prefer to add split-screen support once I know for sure I need it.
Show HN: Apple Watch Weekly
Yes. 4-5x a week. Le Creuset pots, Swiss knives, gas stove. Over 1x a week.
The Rise of the Prototype Engineer
That's a good point, my own studies have been biased towards the analytical side of mathematics, but I can definitely see how calculus could be less useful in other fields, e.g. I don't remember ever needing to do an integral when learning algorithms. And the opinions of my professors are of course biased as well, since they've spent their entire careers on analysis.
"Musicians will have to think twice before creating any new songs that evoke the feel of the music that inspired them in their youth."

That wasn't the issue of the case and the EFF is being shitty by pretending that it is - the "recording" is what evokes the feel / vibe, but the case was about the composition. There's a big, big difference. That's why, in the courtroom, the jury was NOT allowed to listen to the recordings back-to-back. They were only allowed to listen to the SHEET MUSIC played on a piano.

So, what they concluded is that the music was infringing - not that "Oh dear it sounds too funky!" or "Gee we better rule against the Gaye family to make sure nobody ever sounds like Jimi Hendrix again." If imitating a style was actual copyright infringement I could rattle off a list so long that your eyes would roll into the back of your head - but that ain't what the case was about, and the EFF's take on it is pure shill bullshit.

You want a decent discussion of the case? Go read over at Complete Music Update. Chris was surprised at the verdict, but at least tracked the case properly:

http://www.completemusicupdate.com/article/gaye-family-win-b...
‘Goodbye,’ Mort said, and was surprised to find a lump in
his throat. ‘It’s such an unpleasant word, isn’t it?’

QUITE SO. Death grinned because, as has so often been
remarked, he didn’t have much option. But possibly he
meant it, this time.

I PREFER AU REVOIR, he said.

So, goodbye, Sir Terry; or at least let's hope it's just au revoir.
This book is great and designed for exactly this type of audience: http://www.stat.cmu.edu/~larry/all-of-statistics/
RIP, Sir.
This is the way to go and well worded.

One comment, politics will be at every company you work at, especially the larger ones. Even those who swear they don't have any, so you have to accept there will always be some but find the ones you can live with and learn to navigate what remains. Good companies do their best to control and eliminate bad politics but some will always exist. I am one who doesn't do well with politics around product or deceit, so I'd be out the door with you if I saw what you are saying.

You can learn how to screen companies, to some degree, during the interview process. It takes a little time and practice to figure out how and it is also a lot about you personally and what you can accept or not.
Do you know how to echo text in ASCII or UTF-8?
> "text" or
> echo "text"
For me both come out with weird character encoding
That's so much faster than I thought... HOPED for. I'm a big fan of his writing style. Clever and funny. He'll be missed. RIP, Sir.
This. Like unethical research, unetically selling 0days to various gov/3letter agencies etc. etc.
If he were working directly for Google or another bigco doing the same work, he'd be making more in the neighborhood of 200k/year, if not more. Someone skilled enough to do this work is worth considerably more than $7k/month.
This hits hard. Pratchett has been a constant in my life ever since I picked up my first Discworld book at 13. I'll be reading "Guards, Guards!" tonight in memory of him while eating a hot meat pie of questionable origin.