skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"So 2% of our economy is using 80% of our water.

This seems like a bad tradeoff [..]"

I don't think this comparison is actually terribly meaningful. Most of California industry just doesn't have much use for much water. The tradeoffs aren't so much with the next industry over (yet, or for a while) but with future years and with local ecologies.

The 80% figure alone means it's probably where we need to be looking in terms of improving efficiencies, whether it was 1% or 20% or 90% of our economy.

Certainly, we need to start actually charging appropriate amounts for water (including depletion of groundwater) so that people will find those efficiencies. But I'm not so sure that 80% number will change.
timv: the OP is warning people to avoid talking to cops. "Most cops are good" is a very common sentiment that is even inculcated in kids growing up attending public schools. This widespread common belief contributes to people speaking naively to police and thereby getting themselves in trouble. That is what I meant by dangerous. I didn't explain this in my reply to mikeash because it seemed to me that mikeash was being obtuse given the context of the OP.

Edit in reply to rosser: I agree with you there.
How We Did It: SNL – “The Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders”
Well, I like the Guayaki drinks, and anecdotally they do help moderate my appetite, so maybe I’ll try traditional mate now.
Oh but he can.

See, he's not holding himself to your standard of evidence. That would require mass mindreading, plus the ability to irrevocably demonstrate the authenticity of such.

Rather, he's backing up that statement with evidence in the reader's head, counting on most readers to reflect back on their life experience and see if his statement fits. He has faith that it will. In my case, it does: I agree. I'll even upvote him.
Doesn't being more informed about the world and the stories happening around us lead to a richer more interesting life? For instance, I randomly met someone working in racial justice down south and, because I had recently heard about all the issues around how to commemorate lynchings, we had a really interesting conversation about his work and I gained a lot of insight into that story. Does no one else value the human component of news and opinions? I find it a fun part of being a human on this earth
- A programming language with rudimentary OO

- A complete IDE

- A relational database with multi-user access and transactions

- A visual form editor

- Drag-and-droppable Components

- A debugger that lets you mutate code and even the instruction pointer, while running.

- A compiler that generates distributable EXEs in a single click

- All of this inside 2mb.

vb3.exe, released in 1993, 22 whole years ago. We're still playing catch up.
There is exactly one build system I have ever liked. It was the one they used at Google. Unfortunately it's not available outside of Google so I don't get to use it now.

However if it ever became available outside of Google then I would use it absolutely everywhere.
Thank you! What an embarrassing bout of ignorance on my part... I should have done just a little bit of research...
Delphi was a great tool! The database support was way ahead of VB, specially support of MySQL and other third party databases. I guess I always preferred C/C++ over Pascal for low-level stuff though, so even though I played around with it for quite a bit, I never became too proficient.

I hoped C++ Builder would close that gap with Delphi, but then .NET took over and the rest is (kind of) history.

What's fascinating to me is that some countries (Brazil, for one) still have a very active Delphi community, while in a lot of places it was more or less forgotten.
Sawyer: Rethink Robotics Unveils New Robot
Note: This website is an eye-friendly technical website

Not when you have all the text in Courier it isn't. It's horrible, sorry.
Travel Startups and Investor Baggage
Just for the sake of imagination, perhaps we learned from our mistakes the first time and are only now wise enough to get off our planet before something goes wrong.
Things I Learned in Years of Freelancing
Indeed! After all, who has any problems with VBX these days?
What do you mean by that?

First of all I'm not even sure this stuff is taught in college outside of a stem degree so I'm sure there are lots of people who have not encountered it.

Even for those who have studied it it's sometimes fun to walk through some light proofs, puzzle things out, refresh your memory.

It also a nice hook to get people interested in math because it one of the areas where you can use creativity to solve problems without needing many prerequisites.
I participated in the IMO around 2000. Now I work as a software engineer, but I've never lost my love of mathematics. In fact, I still consider myself a mathematician, but instead of seeking inspiration from the physical world (physics) I seek inspiration from the practice of computer programming. This approach has already yielded homotopy type theory, but I think that this is the tip of the iceberg.
I thought for a second that he was going to be able to prove infinite pixels to me, until his argument made no mention of diagonality. It makes me think of the paradox "all horses are brown"[0]. It was entertaining though.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_horses_are_the_same_color
Given the abuse and name-calling directed at another person further down in this thread posting under his real name, combined with the persistent attacks on any comment that is perceived to be in any way a criticism of Microsoft, I can't imagine why anyone would ever post under their real name around Microsoft fans.

Edit: I'm just going to point out that even this comment has been downvoted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9230140

I'm not sure what you guys think this kind of nasty behavior benefits you or your favorite company, or why you believe people don't notice and aren't going to do something about it.
For the sake of imagination:

Some outsider aliens didn't do the destroying, it was a civil war. There's nobody to come back to wipe us out, we are the genociders.
Computer algebra systems can symbolicly solve quadratics precisly (think Mathematica).
Interesting licensing choice. So if I download and compile it myself am I still bound to the 30-trial? As my understanding of the MIT license would suggest, no if I compile it myself I'm free to do as I please.
All of the products you listed just help with design. None of them let you add functionality using drag and drop.
I can't help noticing the absence of any genetic data from the Republic in the figure accompanying the article, though. This seems like a wasted opportunity, a foolish limitation when you look at how gene pools seem to correlate so poorly with political borders.
Can we agree that it's an assertion in advance of facts?
If you want to support your favorite music artists, send them money directly. That's basically the only way you can ensure a reasonable portion goes into their pocket.

Services like Spotify don't support independent, awesome musicians that you love enough to give them even a bad living. If someone creates art that touches you and improves your life, figure out a way to support them in a way that actually makes a difference.
Probably until the end of the year at least.
Hardly. The author of the article enumerated the benefits that could reasonably be expected to accrue to the public on the basis of empirical research. Most of the nay-saying comments in this thread are total BS.
The good cop:bad cop ratio is utterly orthogonal to whether or not it's a terrible idea to talk to them without a lawyer present. They still have to do their jobs, and if you say something in the course of speaking with them that furthers their investigation, directly or indirectly, they're kinda obligated to pursue it.

Even if they're the nicest person you've ever met.
> there isn't much money in the consumption of music

Depends how you consume it. I had to pay nearly £100 to see the Stones live. Online of course you can download it for nothing.
I'm a third year maths student at the moment and having a bit of an existential career choice crisis. I don't know if academia is for me, because I don't think it is worth it unless you are top tier, and having done an internship at a big bank neither does finance, mainly due to the stress. What kind of resources or subject areas do you think are valuable to study while I will have time? How lucrative is the industry in its current state and how good current employment opportunities are?
Most professional developers will view this as a shameful and classless move on your part.
"Last updated April 22, 1996."
> points not on those lines form an uncountable set

What do you mean? A countable set of lines cuts the screen into a nonsensical "set of regions", you can't do it.

The infinite pixel scanline is the set of all finite paths (it's all *terminating binary strings), not the set of all infinite paths. Since the set of cutlines is dense, you can actually name all regions, so the only sensible way to assign pixels is to assign a pixel to every line, not to the space between lines (since there is no nonzero space between lines)
It's a bold concept that I'll keep an eye on, and which deserves to succeed. Even if it turns out to have problems, this is good economics research you're doing here.
My ride in the sci-fi car of the future
We read it so long ago, that we forgot about it.
You may also find "z-expressions" interesting. http://chrisdone.com/z/
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc#t=1279

If the prosecutor wants to push it, almost any interaction with the police can be made to seem incriminating.
Thanks for that link. I always assumed that the music subscription services charged more than what the average consumer pays for music in a year.

It appears that the artists aren't getting paid enough because there are not enough subscribers. And there are not enough subscribers because the price is too high for the average music consumer. So lowering the price $5/month might actually drastically increase the artist pay.
You missed the other cues in the article.
During the Bronze Age, bronze weapons and armor were rarer. It cost more to mine and work bronze, and it cost more to buy a panoply. Therefore the distribution of those possessing the top-of-the-line violence capacity was concentrated in a narrow martial elite.

The Iron Age broadened the number of people who could afford a panoply, because iron was easier to mine and cheaper to work (once they figured out how). The distribution of those with the ability to use force was a substantially broader elite, less concentrated than during the Bronze Age.

When the ability to wield lethal violence becomes cheaper and available to a wider number of people, it's being "democratized." Samuel Colt's 1873 Single Action Army revolver is a more recent example of the democratization of violence capacity—“God made Men, but Samuel Colt made them all equal.” A similar argument can be made about the widespread availability of the cheap AK-47 following WWII.
Screens may be terrible for you, and now we know why
I'm wondering... can't you map all infinite binary strings to all positive integers? If the rightmost digit is the 1s column, the next rightmost digit is the 2s column, and so on, you're just enumerating all possible positive integers. And each time you double (or quadruple) your pixels, you add one (or two) digits in front, getting bigger and bigger integers. But this always stays in the set of integers, which is countable. Am I missing something here? To me, this bijection makes it clear that you'll get a countable number of pixels with a countable number of doublings.
As I understand it, VB 1.0 was effectively QB 8.0, as the last shipment of QB was the QB PDS 7.1. How much did the VB 1.0 codebase borrow from the existing QB implementations? Were they entirely independent projects?
I prefer it over Chocolately, however Scoop is mainly aimed at developer tools on the command line. Scoop is more a replacement for Cygwin.

Disclaimer: I'm a Scoop contributor.
You just won the thread. Congratulations.
I came here to say "Not the llamas!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8aWBcPVPMo
>A countable set of lines cuts the screen into a nonsensical "set of regions", you can't do it.

No, it (the set of lines in question) cuts the screen into a set of points (not regions) -- all the points without a coordinate of the form k/2^n.
Chromium is the open-source version of Google Chrome.
Oh, I forgot about that. Probably at least by UIUC if not a little higher actually.
> Another member of the research team, a biological anthropologist, hypothesizes that somehow, only a few men accumulated lots of wealth and power, leaving nothing for others.

This line cracked me up.

Yes, "somehow" indeed. Quite a mystery we have on our hands here!
Please don't divert my comment. His argument was wrong, it doesn't matter who he's mocking.
Yup, but you left out the part where it is traveling at relativistic velocities and thus also causes the gases in the atmosphere to go thermonuclear on impact from kinetic energy alone. So a "hypervelocity critical mass" might be a thing.
When you become a cop (and I use that word loosely to mean anyone who is empowered by the broad law enforcement system) everyone else becomes a potential criminal.
... uh GitHub Pull Requests are not a place for jokes that's why.
And PHP is the logical choice for the role of QuickBASIC in this analogy.
Data Retention Law Passes the Oz Senate: Which VPN Service Do I Recommend Now?
Do you mean the guy that made fun of the company for open-sourcing their product by posting a PR that completely replaces it with another tool?

He was being incredibly disrespectful and he got called out for it. If he wasn't being such a prick in the first place, maybe people wouldn't call him one.
> at which point I woke up immediately.

Could the whole thing have been a dream?

Even if you remember waking up before it happened, that doesn't mean that it was not a dream. You can have a dream within a dream, or have two consecutive dreams that make you feel like you dreamed within a dream.
MSBuild is used to build C++ projects, too :)
On one hand, reductionists say that qualia (qualitative propeties of experience) is reducible to physical states. On the other hand, some (anti-reductionists) say, qualia is irreducible. How to settle this dispute?

Only theories from the object level domain (say, neurophysiology, vision, human experience) can settle this. When theories from the object level domain do not exist or when we have not understood enough about the phenomena, people engage is all philosophical disputes. Which philsophical theory one should choose? Pick your thought experiment:)

The same thing you see in moral philosophy: tons of thought experiments.
The Windows Driver Frameworks are on GitHub
Ugg! Graphics and GPU compute were split by choice because OpenGL programming is an esoteric art, the only thing that can fix these is simplification - something I don't trust Khronos with because of my miserable experience with OpenCL when compared to CUDA.
I agree with this. But at least with Twitter, you're the one actively filtering and curating your news feed, as opposed to exclusively reading The New York Times every morning and having the content curated for you.
I like your line of thinking, but gold seems like a really poor point of comparison. I tried to find inflation adjusted prices over time for things such as energy and steel and had difficulty. There's lots of easy data on oil but anything else is tricky. Hrm..
They do, actually - all of the Polymer-based ones (the first three) let you drop full web components onto the page and wire up bindings. It very much is analogous to Visual Basic + COM.
The Matcha (Green tea powder) boom of NYC
Yep, that's why you meant "due to the higher cost of forging bronze weapons".
Back in the mid 90s, in my early- mid twenties, I built a software business on vb. Clients included financial services, government, and others. I even had a customer who connected my cv software to custom hardware. It was such a good product (I'm talking about vb). There definitely was snobbery compared to vc++, especially around the fact that it compiled into pcode. And the fact that I couldn't do my own dll's / ocx/ vbx. But the versatility and utility was amazing and I was able to create a nice bit of side income. If was my second business but my first software eating the world one. Wanted to use this opportunity to say thanks to you guys for such an awesome product!
There's a really good book by David Foster Wallace called Everything and More: A Compact a history of Infinity that traces the origin of the concept and the numerous difficulties the idea faced before becoming more or less accepted as it is today. Highly recommended if you like reading or math.

Interstingly, Wallace takes a similar attitude towards those not keen on the details of the Math. There are large swaths where he basically says, "skip this if it makes your head hurt, you won't be missing any of the story."

@refrigerator, some of us come from all kinds of different backgrounds and didn't study this in school and wouldn't know anything at all about it if not for books like the one I mentioned above. Who knows? Perhaps Butterick has sparked an interest in some typographer who's never thought about the concept.
Don't Be a Jerk: The Open Source Software License
> If he wasn't being such a prick in the first place, maybe people wouldn't call him one.

There we go. Posted straight from Redmond, no less.

I'm not sure where you guys get off calling another commenter "a prick" over and over again, along with other insults, for a joke pull request, given there is a long history of people (including pretty notably respectable people) creating them. I even listed some in another comment you guys can keep downvoting (because apparently my comments are worse than personally attacking other commenters): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9229987
If anybody is curious I am a Nath.
Yes - it's too bad they keep the fun stuff for the end. I've been rediscovering the fun of number theory via Project Euler.
Certain types of knowledge cannot be encoded effectively.

What I mean by an encoding that's effective is one that translates my subjective experience of the idea or the thing so that you can "imagine" or "visualize" the thing by the mere act of decoding my encoding.

Experiencing the thing directly does not count as an encoding in this case.

Defining the precise meaning of "encoding" is left as an exercise to the reader.

So if you've never experienced seeing red, you can't "imagine it" by just reading or hearing about it.

If you've never experienced reading a Chinese sentence and "understanding it" effortlessly, you won't really know what it feels like exactly; you can only approximate the feeling by comparing with your own native language.
There's an interesting interview with Alan Cooper about the subject up on Channel 9 (and a lot of other stuff, Alan pulls no punches :).

I did find it odd that "Ruby" (what became VB) was suppose to be the "shell for windows " and allow user to "design their os". Maybe I misunderstood that part because it sounds like a recipe for disaster :)

http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/VisualStudioDocumentary/The-...

I give great kudos to Alan Cooper, his book "The Inmates are running the asylum" was a paradigm shift for me. Once you've read it you have a little Alan inside your head for the rest of your life, telling you how stupid, impolite and lazy most software is. It's annoying but highly effective.

Really recommend it for anyone who hasn't read it. He's a bit rabid in his aversion to developers designing, but if you can look past that it contains many gems
If the pixels are laid out in a grid then each has a coordinate (x, y), where x and y are integers. Then we form a bijection (x, y) <-> x/y and we see that there are as many pixels as rational numbers. We know that the set of rational numbers is countably infinite, so the number of pixels is countably infinite.
> Bigger, more muscular bodies require more fuel, so bigger men starve to death more frequently than smaller men during bad years, which all the data we have on pre-political peoples suggest were not infrequent.

Take a group of ten males. Restrict their access to food such that eventually a few of them will die. What are some characteristics that the surviving males will share? One of them is not "they are physically weaker than the dead males".
>If I have the resources to make an iron sword and you don’t, I can cut your bronze spearhead like butter

Bronze isn't particularly worse than iron, when it comes to making weapons. Its primary drawback is its scarcity, compared to iron.
I'm afraid I have no idea on that, sorry! Our team was just involved in VB before it became VB: we did the visual forms editor, VBX interface, and stuff like that. Microsoft then took it in-house and added Basic to it and updated a lot of other things. This article tells about that and may have some insights about the Basic code used:

http://www.forestmoon.com/birthofvb/birthofvb.html
All that you said is true, but I think it's orthogonal to what I was wondering about -- actually, it just raised more questions for me.

The common legal advice is "do not talk to cop", which presumably because on average, you will actually get into trouble with it. So in a sense, the question was "Why would LEO cause you trouble for those technicality if you're innocent?". I mean, let's say the first innocent guy who got into the false statement trap actually just cooperate, got himself proven innocent, and the investigator let him go from the technicality, and then that's ... it, right? But I don't think that's what the story normally is (is it?). There seems to be too many stories of people getting into trouble for technicality/ trap, while committing no crime originally.

There are several explanations I can think of for the behaviour (in which LEO follow up on trap when investigating innocence), most of them are quite unsettling. Notably, if criminal are getting good to the point that investigation can't truly tell without unreasonable doubt that a criminal has committed a crime, and so has to resort to trap to convict them (which leads using trap in any case they can), then well, isn't that just mean investigation are not effective as well?

I know what we should do to (try to) protect ourselves from the current situation, I was just wondering how we get here.

TL;DR: Law trap by itself is not good, however it's a necessity. But shouldn't it be used as last resort against criminal? Why does the population has to worry about trap as SOP of criminal investigator?
I don't like Facebook but I have an account because my mom and wife do too. So I choose not to connect my account with anything. Am I an unacceptable weirdo?
> Here is an idea: everyone should vote in a completely myopic way based on what is immediately good for them today.

If Vancouver had a referendum to get rid of bike lanes and ban bikes from streets entirely, I doubt you would be saying the same thing. There are far more drivers than cyclists. I guess in that case all the drivers should vote to get rid of bike lanes and ban cyclists?
I had only thought about this for Twitter before, but it would be nice if a trustworthy third party could act as a mediator between some of these APIs to give developers the ability to request less information or for users to restrict/filter what personal data is given away. That would help with this github all-or-nothing problem.