skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I still enjoy Nintendo's games the most by far, even at 31. They don't usually try to be edgy or contrived, or mask mediocre gameplay with ridiculous stories - they are usually light on story, and mostly about the fundamentals of player interaction.

I know many who agree with me, including plenty of friends at their 20s up to their 50s - Nintendo's legacy often shows up in their works today, whether it be in the game industry, or the music industry. Iwata had a large part in that, from the Mother series (Earthbound), Kirby series, and Smash Bros. games - I think he was also involved in my favorite game series, the Panel de Pon/Tetris Attack/Puzzle League/etc. series. It is a sad day :( .
Everybody saw the crash coming. It was clearly a bubble as the Shanghai Stock Exchange went up 250% in 12 months while every indicator (company profits, manufacturing prices, etc) were showing bad news.

https://au.finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=000001.SS&t=5y&l=on&z=l&...

Stock exchanges don't double in price year over year on bad news. That's just stupid.

I'm surprised the SSE has only fallen 30%. It still looks like it needs to lose another 30% (it's still up nearly 100% since early last year).

The only reason the entire world isn't shorting Chinese stocks is it's tricky to fight deliberate market manipulation by the Chinese government. Although I don't doubt this crash has made a few people very rich.
Science covers a large range of precision. you also have things like c or α known to much higher precision than the average engineering quantity.
Bootstrapping GCM with Amazon SQS for Server-Client Communication
As someone who loves Uber and who spends thousands of dollars a year on their app, and as someone who dislikes Hillary, I cannot be happier with Hillary's stance.

Uber will remain here and their rides will stay cheap. I am, however, very concerned about their drivers. Many of them are making huge investments purchasing new cars with the implicit (and sometimes borderline explicit, depending on the marketing rep you talk to at Uber) that they can have guaranteed work and a guaranteed wage. If über decides to cut driver wages in half and pocket the profits, drivers will be out of luck. This can be catastrophic for poor families, which will be basically be forced into wage slavery. This will have huge effects on the community as Uber gets bigger.

We can all point to how Taxi unions and their lobbyists are evil (as a colored man, it's difficult for me to get picked up by one), how awesome Uber is w/ their investments in autonomous cars, and the free markets are great...but we need real employee protections in this country.

We need real protection for drivers who are making a huge investment. This doesn't have to hurt consumers either, as über can still remain insanely profitable while maintaining lower prices.

Edit: Removed the umlauts
It's been a while but I'm pretty sure the issues here only happen in extremely contrived edge cases. Not to say they aren't big deals or to downplay them, but I don't think even that would catch them reliably. Not without extremely heavy fuzzing or something.
I love the Awl, Splitsider, Billfold et al...
But the Media Apocalypse is no Joke - The Dissolve is gone - and ViralNova is acquired for $100MM - WTF? It seems content for brainy, niche audiences will not survive due to low scale.
Unfortunately the web is finding the lowest common denominators for content consumption, and it certainly seems that those who deliver it best will survive. With 3MM uniques it seems to small to matter. Hope it does become the surviving cockroach...but it doesnt look good. Just hope the web stops becoming 'Idiocracy' for clicks.
That one was great. Terribly bleak.
It is quite saddening that there is a recent trend of hiding the complete URL from the user when the URL itself conveys much information. When the URL is hidden the user is not given the incentive to look at the URL, let alone modify it. This kind of bug should have been discovered much sooner when the user is given the opportunity to directly look at the URL and experiment with it.
That has nothing to do with Friday vs. Monday though. A major deadline can be set any day of the week and management has to be cognizant of that in deciding when to lay off. It's likely that in your case they were, but not in the way we'd hope.
> some people from IRC got me to try the Code Jam. I thought I'd use Haskell, being very familiar with it, and the experience was a most illuminating disaster. On the other hand, C++ worked out pretty well, even though I was a total cargo cult functional programming weenie at the time and had a real bad attitude about C++

Were you familiar with pure functional data structures and algorithms or at least simulating imperative ones with ST when needed? If not, I don't think you can fairly say that Haskell is bad for programming contests whereas C++ worked out pretty well.

You at least need to compare the two with an equivalent knowledge of implementing algorithms with each, not that figuring out or even approximating that equivalence would be easy .

> You'll find yourself much more aware of how much time you spend stumbling over functional code after that.

I'm well aware of when/how much I stumble over functional code since I still have vastly more experience with the imperative paradigm.

All I can do is try and keep an open mind to logical arguments and keep writing code in multiple languages and multiple paradigms to know what the best answer is for a given scenario or set of scenarios.

> how keyboard users often overlook cases where using a mouse would be more efficient

Don't see how this is relevant, but I'll bite... what cases would this be? I of course agree that gaming or navigating a 3d world is better with a mouse, but I struggle to see where programming related tasks would be better suited to using mouse.
Rob Pike tweeted about it (the Android version) recently [1]. I ported [2] the app to the web within a few hours. The port involves ~70 lines of Go, 22 lines of HTML, and 24 lines of CSS [3].

[1]: https://twitter.com/rob_pike/status/619995629566058496

[2]: https://twitter.com/shurcooL/status/620084337401171968

[3]: https://twitter.com/shurcooL/status/620343011671609344
The Pros and Cons of Working from Home
Hacking Team orchestrated brazen BGP hack to hijack IPs it didn’t own
Here are EFF’s most influential cases from its first 25 years
Trakaid’s LgMonitor: Unbeatable Solution for Gas Management System
I was never trying to prove "the world believes that Haskell's is totally practical language".

My response was purely a rebuttal to:

"Haskell's perceived as an impractical language because it is one"

The "cherry picked pro-Haskell links" were picked because they link to examples of Haskell's practical uses in industry.

Should I have created a faulty rebuttal that didn't list real world counter-examples of "Haskell's perceived as an impractical language because it is one"?

I don't think I could find a link to practical uses of any language in industry that wasn't "cherry picked".
> Why is there no usable haskell SSL library?

Probably because of the broad agreement among crypto people that reinventing core crypto wheels is almost always a bad idea. On top of that, the intersection between the set of people who are qualified to write that crypto code and the set of people who know Haskell well enough to do a good job of it is probably the empty set.
15 decimal digits around is the approximate limit for a 64-bit IEEE floating-point number, which is what the built-in Calculator uses (most non-integral math done on computers uses either 32-bit of 64-bit IEEE floating-point numbers). The exponential notation is because floating-point numbers can represent absurdly large values, it just is limited on precision. So you can represent 10^31, you just can't represent 10^31 + 1.
U of Toronto OKs anti-vaccine homeopathy course
There are a number of comments saying things like, "get them to accept the check on the spot," "entice them to sign the severance agreement quickly," "make sure they sign it fast before they change their minds and get a lawyer," etc. This is bad advice.

It is true that you should get them to sign an agreement that contains, among other things, a "general release" that basically says that they promise not to sue you for any reason. It is also true that to be enforceable, you must give something of value (i.e., "legal consideration"), and the severance pay is usually the principal consideration for such an agreement.

I would be extremely cautious, however, about getting someone to sign quickly. It seems to make sense on the face of it (get them to sign away their right to sue before they contemplate getting an attorney). But there is a flip side that no one is mentioning. If you shock someone by calling them into your office and telling that they're losing their job, put a legal document in front of them that they probably won't completely understand (it's going to have a laundry-list of statutory provisions that they need to expressly waive), put a check in front of them and say "here, sign this now!" you're going to unnecessarily jeopardize the enforceability of the release. The ex-employee's lawyer will argue that it was signed under duress and without sufficient knowledge, understanding and consent to constitute a valid waiver of the right to pursue certain claims.

Also, depending on the worker's age, there might be additional complications. The Older Worker's Benefit Protection Act applies to employees over 40, and requires the terminated employee be given 21 days to consider the release and 7 days afterward to change their mind. (The 21 days increases to 45 if there are two or more employees being terminated.) Although this particular statutory requirement doesn't apply to those under 40, it underscores the notion that allowing someone to consider a severance agreement for some amount of time and have the opportunity to discuss it with their own attorney if desired are both good things when it comes to enforcing the agreement. How long you give them is a matter of balancing numerous statutory and common law considerations (both state and federal) with the goal of getting them to sign quickly, and there are avenues, regardless of age, for their attorney to attack the validity of the release if they sign it without properly understanding and consenting to its terms.

I should also point out that severance agreements should always be prepared by an attorney. There are numerous considerations that vary state-to-state; there are specific waivers that need to be contained in them; there are different rules depending on the number of employees; possible notice requirements (in which case the severance might be designated as compensation in lieu thereof); rules about timing of final payments; whether or not benefits are paid out; etc.
> Most of the start-up crowd seems to think that it's worth paying several times more rent to be physically near the big money in SanFran.

It's not an unfounded belief, imo. I've been trying to convince several of my friends to move to San Francisco, and the "it's too expensive" refrain is something I'm getting a little tired of hearing. Yes, it's expensive, but in general, the salary and other income opportunities make it worth it for a decent software engineer.

I don't know how much the cost of living is in Montana, but I'm from Alabama, and I assume it's relatively comparable, and I had a 40K/year job there. My rent was $500/mo. I'd say my monthly expenses were a little less than $1600/mo, which puts my annual expenses at around 20K. Over the last five years in SF, my annual expenses approached 60K, mostly toward rent (like you said, rent is high). Whoa. That's crazy, right? But let's stop and do the math.

Let's throw out a nice round number and say my average income over those first few years in SF was ~120K and say 30% tax rate, to keep things simple. In San Francisco, 120K (income) - 60K (expenses) - 36K taxes = 24K savings. In Alabama, 40K (income) - 20K (expenses) - 12K (taxes) = 8K savings.

My expenses in Alabama were 1/3 that of SF -- the rent was almost 6 times cheaper in Alabama than my rent in SF is! But in San Francisco, my increased salary means that I'm saving three times as much in San Francisco versus Alabama. My cost of living in SF is 3x higher than my cost of living in San Francisco -- but my income is also 3x higher! And I'm not even included income from stock or freelance work. (Granted, I could get stock and freelance work elsewhere, but again, like you said, "the big money" is in SF, so roughly the same math would apply.)

All this is to say that, assuming you enjoy living in an urban environment and are responsible with your money, it IS worth paying several times more rent to be physically near the big money in SF. A dollar is a dollar anywhere in the United States. Saving 24K per year for 5 years gets you awfully close to 125K, well on your way to a nice house pretty much anywhere else in the country - Montana included. It would take you over twice that long to get to even 100K if you lived in Alabama.

Is it worth paying a high rent to enjoy the benefits of living in SF? I think so. I love SF -- the city, the culture, the weather, the working environment, and yes, the money. There are times when I wish I had a bigger house, but by and large, I'm extremely happy here.

But more to OP's point: Would I move to Montana? I agree with you. There would have to be really, really attractive incentives aside from money. Great schools, great entertainment, friends, family, and plenty of job opportunities. Solid infrastructure is a must, but my day job isn't my identity -- there are another 12-18 hours in a day that command my time and energy as well, and those needs must be met!
How Google Sparsehash achieves two bits of overhead per entry using sparsetable
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> They may have the ability to not enforce them post layoff.

That means nothing to the person being laid off. By not removing that restriction you're still putting the threat on the individual.
US Data Breach of OPM Gets Worse
This is actually one of the better guides for getting started using gpg (for the Mac): http://notes.jerzygangi.com/the-best-pgp-tutorial-for-mac-os...

What's great about this guide and approach, is that it works in any text field, including webmail.
Hms – ship all kinds of services
ProxyHam project & talk at DEF CON canceled under questionable circumstances
> I like uber but I think they f*cked themselves over and deserve every bit of scrutiny they are getting.

I guess I don't get the vitriol here. If the Uber drivers had any better alternative, wouldn't they do that instead? Isn't the worst part for workers rights that they don't have a better alternative? But I don't see how that's Uber's fault, they're clearly providing what many people feel is a useful source of money (they reportedly have over 1 million drivers).

> the u.s. appears to be in a race to the bottom, with people competing to lower their own wages.

It sounds like you're blaming Uber for a poor US job market. That seems unfair. Wouldn't it be better to point the blame at literally every other company who is not providing as good of opportunities? Why point the finger at what appears to be one of the best options for lots of people? I'm sure they could improve the situation, but I'm not sure I understand why they'd be singled out (given what I've seen they'd be one of the last I'd point at). We can lament the fact that there aren't lots of opportunities for lots of people, but I guess I just don't see how it's Uber's fault that they happen to provide one of the most compelling options.
Step zero of the Feynman algorithm is always missed:

0. Spent years dismantling every idea or concept and understanding it intimately.

This is almost always done out of sight to maintain the illusion. When people don't see the hard work, they assume you're a genius, not just working hard. I don't think there are any geniuses as such; just people with drive and enough experience and possibly good brain plasticity :)

I can get a stupid high result on an IQ test. That doesn't mean I'm a genius, just that I read up on how they work.
Good point No mention that I can find of this SO post except by Randy Olson 5 months ago: http://www.randalolson.com/2015/02/03/heres-waldo-computing-...
Web-based services make it difficult to bilk customers because there is no way to increase costs. The rate is fixed ahead of time. The service either works or it doesn't. There is no possibility of hardware problems, software rework, configuration issues, overbilling, etc. There are no contract negotiation or lowball bidding games (and subsequent cost overruns) either because services are pay as you go. Outsourcers will have to either invent new corporate IT products that are not provided as services yet or build competing services.
To clarify: that's a plugin that makes possible to receive and send SMS with your phone number on Messages.app (Mac version) like you could automatically if your phone was an iPhone, nothing else.
I believe any question that relates to your life outside work such as your marital status, your kids or how your relationship would endure a startup job can get you in trouble in the U.S. - but I am not a U.S. HR pro. However, I learned that it is safest to just focus on job related things in the U.S., while in Germany people will put things like their picture, marital status, religious affiliation, age, etc. on their resume - all of which will send a U.S. HR manager into shock :)
Simply because at that time both Google and Apple have banned Flash on their respective platforms, otherwise nothing would change.
This is why we have campaigns. We get to see the cadnidate's logic across a wide spectrum of topics.

This is practically a deal killer for me and Hillary. I think that W2 employment is a dying model. Piecemeal 1099 work empowers every participant to have clear and direct economic benefit and takes the power away from corporations to exploit labor with manipulation about how incapable they are to function independently. They rob the individual of identity, forcing membership in the ranks of the company as a sense of self.

Instead I think work will be distributed, scalable, and coordinated with great software. I think that work will happen based on real-time pricing and presence. I think that means having skills and a good reputation means you can always work when you want as much or as little as you want as long as you actually produce.

I hope that said great software isn't owned and operated by a for-profit institution, but instead is a community-driven, decentralized tool. I think this would pave the way for as close as possible 'frictionless' marketplace where the value of things and people's time are based on the value they bring, not based on slick sales tactics or lobbied regulations.

I seriously believe that government needs to empower and support independent work, or face a slow, 'Snow Crash' style extinction when mesh coordination brings about digital voting, etc.

I get a sense that Hillary will in many ways enforce the status quo and that simply isn't the kind of leadership that we need as we approach 2020 and all that comes along with it.
Are you exercising? I can't emphasize enough what a difference exercise makes. Try going for a run or at least work up a sweat somehow - I've found it's been an incredible support to my emotional well being.
Tangentially, if you like Stross you may also like Peter Watts, who also has a backlist of work available online: http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts.htm

Watts' "Rifters" trilogy is there in its entirety. Also "Blindsight", which is fascinating. His latest book is "Echopraxia", a sequel to Blindsight, which isn't there, but you could always consider buying it if you like his other stuff!

Amusingly, as vampires are/were in fashion, both Stross and Watts have written books featuring nonstandard imaginative interpretations of vampires. Strossian vampires are explainable in the context of Laundry-universe magic, and enjoy investment banking [1], and Scrum practices. Wattsian vampires are resurrected from the dead by human genetic engineering, and have an unfortunate flaw (well, unfortunate for them, fortunate for the humans who enslave them) - "the Crucifix glitch" - that cause them to go into seizures when they see right angles [2][3].

[1] novel: "The Rhesus Chart" ;
[2] http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts/VampireDomestication.pdf ;
[3] novel: "Blindsight" .
Functional testing in an environment of Flask micro-services
I think cloud here means products like Freshbooks, basecamp, salesforce, etc. Big companies were previously outsourcing dev + support to these to Indian companies (and were bloated, also bad software, constant dev cycles fixing things) but are now turning towards these "0-programmer required" cloud apps. Which is essentially causing this decline.
Developing a body of knowledge in a given language takes a lot of time, and comes at a huge cost (quasi-isolation from the rest of the world of science).

It's been done before (Germany during the Third Reich, Russia during the Cold War), but even though the scientists involved did some really good work, they couldn't do as much as they could have in cooperation with the rest of the world (a lot of work done abroad was duplicated).

There's a reason science has always been so international - it just makes the research process a lot quicker and more effective. And a common language helps enormously. In the Middle Ages (and for quite some time after) the lingua franca of science was Latin. That changed around the 18th-19th century, when a lot of work started being done in local languages (Mendel wrote his findings up in German, Darwin in English, Pasteur presumably in French, etc.) This meant that to stay on top of your field as a scientist you had to understand all the important languages (English, French, German, some Italian and Russian). After WWII, English became the new Latin so to speak, and we had a predominant language again.

So to sum up, if you are prepared to risk scientific isolation, go ahead and do your own thing in your own language - if a nation state is set on doing something like this, it will manage at an academic level. But in today's globalised world, I doubt whether any commercial/industrial players would be able or even willing to pull it off.
Belgian PM about Greece Negotiations: “Agreement”
> And, of course, it's true that you do also have to manage the same concurrency issues as with any mutability.

No, it's not. I'm talking about within a single method, which inherently means belonging to a single thread.

> But, it's actually worse than that because it goes beyond creation of parallel constructs: it also includes working to actively suppress the built-in language constructs.

Again, some language constructs are just bad. E.g. I believe Gosling has said he wishes he never put checked exceptions in Java.

> You need to set a property? Then, set it. Don't construct a completely new object with a builder, just to update the zip code. In a multithreaded environment? Sorry, you need to understand concurrency issues. No amount of dumbing down objects is going to make up for your lack of understanding there.

On the contrary, more restrictive models really are easier to understand.
Just curious to know how this could have been done better. Those who believe the design of 2008-09 Airbnb was not up to mark, mind explaining this to a guy with little UX design understanding.
OK I agree that it's more logical from a GC point of view. But why would you end up with a gigantic string? Are you not doing something wrong then?

Anyway, I have moderately sized strings and am trying to analyze parts of them. And I don't want to make copies for the sake of analysis. This has to be quite common as well.