skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very cool. First thing I did was to search for "it was the best of times, it was the blurst of times".

However, I notice that the site routinely locks up my Chrome browser. What client-side processing is it doing that causes everything to freeze?
OS compatibility layers never work well. I expect this to fail within a couple of years max. It'll be used to convince people to do a quick one-time port of their iOS apps over. Microsoft won't be able to keep it with Apple's API changes so it will always be behind and crappy.
Social Media for Content Creators
It was less than a year ago, also running our own mail server.
That were just examples.

While this is often considered to be one of JavaScript's weaknesses, the prototypal inheritance model is in fact more powerful than the class based model. It is, for example, fairly trivial to build a class based model on top of a prototypal model, while the other way around is a far more difficult task.

> The capabilities of the Smalltalk environments are simply on a different plane.

Please explain. Maybe use the following examples: FirefoxOS and Squeak
ordinal numbers come to mind
Are you allowed to listen to music at work (with headphones)?
I joined a new office since January. Work isn't very exciting but it pays alright although not great pay. However, when I used my headphones to listen to music, the boss said he doesn't like it. So, I don't listen to music at office. However, I sometimes wish if I had some music. On top of that, my office doesn't have any eating area, no kitchen, no fridge, no microwave. No talks besides ones related to work. If something was discussed before, no discussion on same thing again because boss thinks it's waste of time. I got yelled at couple of times because there were some bugs. I'm not sure if I'm over reacting or the office isn't good. We are just 3 in office including boss.
They've taken proven over and over again for the past 30 years that they never follow through on anything that involves cross platform compatibility so I'd take it with a healthy dose of skepticism. It just fundamentally isn't in their culture and they have a lot of old-timers there.
The other side of that bottle will be much more busy due to all the compulsory requirments: ingredients, etc.
It's also been done in actual reality. For example, one of Sweden's largest supermarket chain is the consumer co-operative Coop [1]. Their own line of budget private-label products had a very minimal "no-brand" design, though in 1979 they started using the name "Blåvitt", referring to the blue-white colors of the minimal design. I found a picture [2] of some of their products (coffee, detergent, tooth paste, tea, soap, bread, etc).

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kooperativa_F%C3%B6rbundet

[2]: https://fredrikedin.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/blavitt.jpg
I think flow is the more the state achieved, whereas mindfulness is learning to notice when flow is not achieved, or is achieved for the wrong thing.

For example, I can be in flow while coding, but if things get too frustrating I may drop out of flow. Mindfulness for me is noticing quickly that I am frustrated. If I don't, I may end up in flow while reading Hacker News; being mindful helps me recognize that state rather than getting caught in it until noprocrast boots me.
I personally found looking at the visual design of the passport covers to be much more interesting than the 'power ranking'.

It would be interesting to know what each passport image depicts or represents. I really like Sweden's passport cover. Maybe it's partly because the passport image isn't centred that makes it a bit less stuffy and official.

Others I liked: UK, Malta, Mauritius - all old-fashioned but still quite nice. In fact, all of the passports look old-fashioned with their historic emblems (although El Salvador has an outline of the country, rather than an emblem). The Swiss one is the only one that looks modern in this regard.
Sure, but the way that historically the 5% has grown to 50%+ has involved a bunch of people willfully breaking laws. They can't just be static standards. Society changes, and for the laws to reflect that there has to be some wiggle room. If we just say "any time that 90% or more of society agrees on a law right now, it will be that way forever," we will stagnate.
FWIW Rust is intended to be more than a systems language, but is designed as a systems language first (but other use cases are all taken into consideration)
Germany has VERY strict laws on what can go in beer - which means its all high quality but rather bland when compared to Belgium which has much more variety.
http://gawker.com/on-smarm-1476594977
> What is smarm, exactly? Smarm is a kind of performance—an assumption of the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance. Smarm is concerned with appropriateness and with tone. Smarm disapproves.
I don't know why this is downvoted. This is exactly right. See you in 2-3 years when everyone has forgotten about their latest desperate attempt.
Couldn't agree more. I am an Indian and when I first came to US, my biggest surprise was that jobs would advertise 'health insurance' as a benefit. I never understood it till I had to obtain medical care.

If you want to experience true free market health care, you must go to India. Whenever I visit India, I make sure to get my teeth cleaning done. Person in my home town has a choice to get teeth cleaning done from 500 INR (7$) to 3500 INR (55$). On the low end, you get a clinic which is not in the hip part of the town, equipment is not the latest and greatest and the waiting room will be non air conditioned. On the higher end, the clinic will be fully air conditioned, serve you tea/coffee and will use the latest equipment. On my last trip, a real dentist (not a hygienist) performed my teeth cleaning and they took my teeth x-ray using those new machines where you stand up and the machine takes 360 degree scan. After the cleaning, the doctor took me to her office and reviewed the x-ray with me and then gave me a CD with all the x-ray images so that I can use them with my next doctor in case I decide to go somewhere else.
The comments from those in India are interesting. Here in Thailand it is similar. Prices for standard procedures are published and you get an estimate in advance if it is a complex procedure. This is true for private hospitals. It is also true for public hospitals that offer "special clinic hours" which is when foreigners must go since they are not covered by the national health insurance scheme. To top it off, quality of care is better here than what I experienced in the U.S. at a fraction of the price. It drives me nuts to be reminded of the U.S. health care mess.
Just wondering: How does this compare with the GNU Make users manual? Does it cover roughly the same ground or is it more or less deeper?
You could, I've uploaded stuff from some bands home burned demo discs before. I probably don't have access to any of that stuff anywhere now.
We know right where a bunch of aliens are: the bottom of the ocean. Incredibly, it's so hard to go there that it's considered a joke to suggest it, whereas with space it seems if it weren't for the problem of the sheer distances involved, we could really do it and just go anywhere.
sundays are slow is why. and it's got hacker's spirit
They don't have a good reputation, do they. But, it depends on how much engineering resource Microsoft dedicate (and of course, how quickly Apple evolve their APIs/applications make use of them).
Suppose your passport only granted you access to 4 countries.

Mine gets me to Russia, Canada, the U.S. and China.

Yours gets you to Grenada, Malta, Maldives and Saint Kitts and Nevis (ignoring the EU for a moment).

Which one is "more powerful"? Obviously mine is since I get to enjoy most of the landmass of the Northern Hemisphere while yours gets you access to a handful of minor island nations.
It's amazing to me that someone of Norvig's stature still finds time and joy in tackling "common" CS questions and not just writing his own code, but going the extra mile by doing it in a presentation format (ipython notebook) that's designed to be reader and replication-friendly...nevermind creating a fleshed out narrative of the process.

A list of his notebooks here: http://norvig.com/ipython/

His explanation of the Cheryl's birthday brain teaser, which was posted here last week: http://nbviewer.ipython.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/Cheryl.ip...

edit: One of my favorite bits: Norvig even takes time to describe his thought process behind what most people would consider the most basic object-oriented design: how to construct a simple Point class, and then explains how that will affect his design and implementation of subsequent functions and routines: http://nbviewer.ipython.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/TSPv3.ipy...
Like it or not, human relationships and trust are related to distance, geographical and cultural. Broadly speaking, family > neighborhood > city > state > country > continent > rest of the world. So yes, as an individual you are "stuck" with whatever citizenship you are born into just like you are stuck with whatever parents you are born from.

If you think that a country giving privileges to its own citizens compared to foreigners is morally equivalent to a caste system, you might as well claim the same about parents caring more about their own children than other people's children. Good luck with that.
Life on HIV treatment – a personal perspective
It might change for me in the future, but at this point in my life commuting seems really inefficient and annoying. It's not just the time lost while in your car (I listen to music anyway) but the stress of having to basically exist in two places.

I appreciated the Thoreau references in the article. Perhaps moving into my office isn't the best simplifying solution, but it's a nice parable for improving daily routine.
Yeah, that's just what the German beer market needs: more genericism, less diversity. Sure.
These are also quite well-known in Germany: http://i.imgur.com/baRUVan.jpg (5.0 is the percentage of alcohol)
The Great thing about the Flame Warriors is it captures trolling, XKD 386'ing, and many other reasons people write for effect. It captures the idea that people write for sport and that the simplest form is little but gamesmanship.

This is why gamification can work to reduce bad behavior. It encourages people to write within community standards and provides incentives for the community to discuss, publicise and enforce standards. Without gamification, flaming and banning are about the limits of the arsenal against bad behavior.
Hey DanAnderson,

I'm the programmer of libraryofbabel.info - thanks for letting me know about this. Which pages is it happening on?
Where I work we have music playing within the workplace through speakers, we're also free to use headphones if we wish. I don't see why you wouldn't be allowed to be honest - that seems a little unfair!
Anyone else get the feeling that .net is being groomed to be the "runtime" of the internet (I'll stop short of calling it "OS" as that would seem presumptuous :-)? To the extent where you could run any .net supported language on any OS as well as your browser (C#/F#/VB/Managed C++/etc). Granted the browser version would need to be well sand-boxed but penetrating the Javascript market would be huge. I'm predicting Edge will eventually explore this path.
Climate change: the big myths that need to be exploded
It takes one to be in those shoes to see how despicable and humiliating the process of getting a visa is.

If you were told you should tell your friends to vote better next time just so they can see you, I'd love to know how that would make you feel.
Okay, so there's sort of a spectrum, with true puzzles (like "How many golf balls would fit inside a jumbo jet") on one side, and true work sample tests (like "Work with us to address a programming challenge typical of what we do") on the other side.

True puzzles do not provide very much useful information, as they are often based on a trick, and don't actually overlap a lot with what we do. Even algorithmic puzzles are pretty dumb.

But problem solving, O(n), and composing algorithms is very important to what we do. So what I'm looking for when I ask you to write a function so solve X is:

- Can you understand a problem and critically think about it?

- Can you handle super-basic logic to work out a solution?

- Do you at least vaguely understand performance concerns, i.e. can you identify whether a given input is problematic, or talk about possible ways to improve it?
And it's possible Apple will open source it - although if they do I imagine it will be more work to integrate with a foreign runtime (if indeed that is what MS has done) than to use Apple's own.
I disagree. Each of jgrahamc's articles he posted was useful and interesting in its own right, and would well qualify as a quality hacker news post. And if he wants to plug his book on his own blog, I'm OK with that.

However, I do think just posting the Amazon link to the book page on here is little more questionable, and might border on just blatant advertising (Unless jgrahamc has moreto add than just "Buy my book"?).
This was not rare in college. One school had a 364/24 library and students took over a study correl with their books and a few belongings. Others lived in closets or cars. I think the janitors knew but did not care. I did this a few times myself when there were gaps between residences and I run out of placed to crash.
I think it is a perversion of computer science that we think ourselves as users of languages, instead of creators of languages. Especially because it is not hard to create a language these days -- we know much more and have better tools than people 30 years ago. Many of the problems that we consider uber-complicated could be relatively easily solved by creating appropriate problem-specific languages: consider web programming, data mining, etc.
AT&T Fires President Over Racist Text
It's interesting that most of the countries with observed post-peak-car figures are relatively advanced countries, but most of which have had very good public mass-transit for a very long time. Yet the downturn didn't really occur until around 1994.

It's important to realize that this peak has occurred not just after the construction of mass-transit systems, but after the widespread availability of the internet has allowed for telecommuting.

I live in a not-super-well connected suburb mass-transit wise, but my whole area has Fios. Because of that I've basically worked from home for the last 5-6 years. My most recent job even has a corporate policy favoring telecommuting because it lets them keep facility costs low. We have to come in 2-3 days a week for face-to-face meetings and other coordinating activities, but they offer robust remote access solutions, BYOD, etc. and make it very welcoming and easy to telecommute.

I've recently become surprised at how many of my neighbors work for places with similar policies.
Would love to see more stories like this. For example, how did Koreans come to dominate the black haircare industry?

Also wish the nail industry was healthier for these women to work in. It still seems to be a place where a lot of newly landed Asian immigrants find work and I wonder about the long-term health effects of working with those fumes. I knew a manicurist who suffered miscarriage after miscarriage -- surely the toxicity of the nail shop she owned may have had something to do with it. I have also heard, from someone who works at Sephora's corporate office, that nail polish is so flammable it is not allowed to be shipped by air. Harsh chems.
By the way - also a fan of the Simpsons. I'd be lying if I said that scene wasn't a partial inspiration for the site.
Reminds me of the movie "Repo Man." Harry Dean Stanton says "let's go get a drink." They go into a quick mart and they find six packs of white cans labeled "Drink" and that's it.
Also; starköl[1] (strong beer)

[1]: http://cdn.beeradvocate.com/im/beers/22068.jpg
it would sound like as if there could be office environments for you where you would feel better. are you coding? how long have you been in this (or a similar) position?

I would start to ask myself what I'm getting from the job (besides the money) and why I joined in the first place. maybe make a weighed pro's and con's list and see how I score.

does that help?
But it's not ad-free, the ads[1] just blend in better.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs
See "Reinheitsgebot" on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinheitsgebot
Samsung Debuts Apple-Like Design Video for Galaxy S6 Edge
You pretty much nailed it.

Just a small nitpick. I don't think lack of phosphates is going to be a bottleneck in our lifetimes. There's plenty of lower grade sources available. If nothing else, just recycling our excrement.

All this doesn't mean our lives need to be less happy. We will need to do with less, unless major technological breakthroughs are on their way.
Swiss passport cover is lovely. Looks like a medical card.
That sounds like a really unpleasant work environment. I don't think you're overreacting.
To be fair, the same can be said of Uber and Airbnb, both of which are largely praised on HN in the same way.
Better Risk Model for Angels. WDYT?
That sounds like a toxic environment and my advice would be to move on.
I misread his post and thought he was being sarcastic.
Mind you, Thoreau would probably abandon the office-drone life altogether...
I read a couple of essays from googliers who did this. Google provides nearly all your needs in office- free food, recreation, laundry- save a many hour sleep spot. And people work and hang out 12, 15 hours then. So why pay high rent only to sleep and put up with terrible commute traffic. In the open office environment of new techs finding sleep spots is harder. But many sleep in their vehicles in a climate rarely freezing or roasting.
BTW, while I am sure you are talking about developed countries, India is another country that still uses the polygraph test.
Swiss graphic design is very well known all over the world (at least by Graphic Designers). Words often used to descrbe it are: modern, clean, minimal, unfussy, neutral, rational. (People who dislike the style might also sometimes describe it as cold or even bland.)
This Week in Science: Predicting Cancer, Modifying Blood Types, and More
I've read both of these comments, and I really struggle to see how both of the following can be true:

1. As a hiring manager, knowing your previous salary will not impact my decision on your value.
2. As a hiring manager, I insist on knowing your previous salary. If you do not want to discuss it, you must not trust us.
No, it seems to be Italian (with French and English to support).

http://www.quora.com/What-does-the-inside-of-todays-Vatican-...
And yet, if alien civilizations are using a method of communicating other than radio, it won't matter how much resources and funding we devote to SETI (often assumed to be the same as radio astronomy).
Ask HN: Help me start using test-driven design and development “in anger”
I've been programming a long time, so I'm not a novice and writing code from a blank screen, making it work, and deploying it in the real world. But I was around before things like "testing frameworks" and "Unit Testing Libraries." As a result I really don't know how to get started, "properly," with TDD.

Where do I start? What tutorial should I work through?

For the purposes I would guess the language I'd have to start with would be Python.

Help?
This is really exciting. I think it can be better when companies like Microsoft demonstrate tight top-to-bottom integration.

But it's also hard to forget previous behavior when they used that same integration to screw people over. Let's hope they follow a more benign path this time.
This appears to be a false statement. In fact, viewing the top contributions, only one of the top twenty is a republican:

http://maplight.org/us-congress/interest/L1400

Source Please.
So many assumptions and guesswork embedded in your statement!
I'd second this advice. Also, did you notice any warning signs during your initial interview? If not, you should consider incorporating some questions that'll feel out the office culture.
Would you say the same for WINE or ReactOS? Or Pages, OpenOffice and Google Docs 'copying' the docx format? Samba and SMB?

It's more about compatibility with an existing ecosystem than copying.
> vastly increase passenger miles

Ok, this might break the "peak car" but I'm fine with increasing passenger miles as long as passenger-CO2 and passenger-congestion go down. A self-driving minibus that you can call like a taxi but share with other passengers is my equivalent of the flying car :-)
Excellent point! And "Renat brännvin" [1] ("pure booze"), with the distinction of having product ID 1 (one) at the state-owned alcohol monopoly.

[1]: http://www.systembolaget.se/ImageVaultFiles/id_9735/cf_4500/...
These are often used as part of required policy for the US federal government in certain types of security clearances. They seem to be used more as a psychological influence on the person undergoing the clearance than actually working to detect their deception, so I agree with that point in the article.

Case in point, Snowden would have most likely had to undergo at least one of these polygraph tests for the cleared work he did and that didn't exactly prevent anything. Plus, people that are pathological liars can essentially convince themselves that something is the truth which these tests would rarely, if ever, pick up on as deception.
So, basically, "OK Soda"?
I once had to take a polygraph to be considered for a security clearance. For various reason I didn't want it - I didn't want to join the group of social misfits I knew who worked on classified projects, I didn't want project security telling me where I could go on vacation and with whom I could associate (no foreigners), plus I had a few ethical objections. But at the time I liked my job (lots of great unclassified tech work), wanted to keep it, and needed to go along with my bosses' desires to get me cleared.

The polygraph was administered by a strange guy from a three letter agency. I did the sphincter squeeze for every question. He said the test showed I was being deceptive. I thought that was the end of it and hoped my boss would leave me alone about it. But they called me back to do another one. This time I didn't do the sphincter squeeze. He said the test showed I was being deceptive. I don't know. I think the test just showed I didn't want to get a clearance.
You don't seem to be overreacting. That's a small, intense, pressure cooker type environment with a lot of control going on.

If it were me, I would be looking elsewhere.
> Additionally, holding an EU passport allows one to work, study, etc. in any EU country, rather than simply visit it.

I don't think you even need a passport, just a proof of nationality (e.g. a national ID card from your country of origin, that's usually free or much cheaper than a passport)
Roomer travel – hotel rooms “hack”
But how ? What is the appropriate response to be given when a recruiter presses you for this information and mention that they cannot move forward without it being given.

I am earning at least 30 % lower than median pay (based on glassdoor information), more like 11 percentile in my category. I try to quote a figure that is 20 % higher than what i get in case the recruiter presses me but i really do not know what is the right way.
We often use coronary CTA to rule out coronary disease in low risk chest pain, but I can't say I would recommend it as a routine test due to the radiation and the dye load. We know that the fatty streak begins in childhood and it must be true that there is a lot of clinically undetected coronary disease. When it comes to sudden cardiac death for a young man, I'd also be concerned about electrical abnormalities such as the Brugada syndrome / channelopathies / accessory pathway syndromes. Drug use is another important factor in general, not that I would think it to be relevant here.

May the family of the deceased find peace.