skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: I don't care enough about anything to be great. How can I change that?
I am a generally happy person, and live a pretty good life. I read. I program a little bit for fun. I have a really great and interesting job. I am generally successful (by an average person's standards).

But, when it comes to actually doing things -- anything that would make someone awesome (creating things, putting myself out there, helping others, etc) -- I am completely lacking any impetus to do more than what is required to live a decent life.

I see people that have written really complex and useful pieces of software, or have composed brilliant works of music/art, or have built businesses that help us live modern life, or run charities that truly help people in need. People that create culture. People that inspire others. I know that based on how I live my life I will never be one of these people.

I wouldn't describe myself as lazy, necessarily (though you might!). I have just never done anything beyond the bare minimum. It has worked out reasonably well by most people's standards, but I want to do more.

I am not just looking for words here... I really need a plan of action. A list of things I can do (not just think about) that could potentially lead to doing more.
Tilt (YC W12) is hiring engineers to expand internationally
Even the Slack native app is (or at least used to be) a webview wrapped in a native container
>Having done both, the UK is way simpler, quicker and less onerous than North America.

Canada ranks 2nd in "opening a business" section of the Doing Business site, only beaten by New Zealand.
The Rise of the Gig Worker in the Sharing Economy
NSA name is National SECURITY Agency.

The agency that deals with intelligence (espionage) is the CIA, and the CIA do have their own cyber espionage systems, NSA not only is not doing their actual job, but they are being redundant.
Ah, I remember a lecture course where we classified all groups of order up to 1000.

Joy.... "Like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick."
I was interpreting the parent poster's question to mean:

1. reservation is placed.

2. Payment succeeds, but either success is not known, the process requesting payment crashes before the response, etc.

3. ???

Since we never got to telling ERP "hey, that reservation will be permanent because the payment succeeded", but the payment succeeded… what do you do? Does the reservation expire (but my potatoes!)? How do you even know that the payment succeeded, if perhaps a network connection goes dark and requires 2h to fix?
>This is one of the most uninformed titles I've read.

Well then perhaps you should read the article. Yours is a classic HN pedant response where some minor technical issue, which frequently isn't even an issue, becomes a fixation. You are taking issue with a minor ambiguity in the headline which is clarified by reading the article.

I wish people would stop these type of comments, they are the commentator's equivalent of a journalist's "gotcha" based on not letting the person being interviewed complete what they were saying and/or selectively editing.
Show HN: Puzzle Game About 0
This is a good paper on this topic: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1555372.

Another slightly older paper with similar data: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.115...
"What exactly are you trading?"

Part ownership of a company.

To say anything else is to show yourself to be completely naive.
"the "hard" work is figuring out what to build and how it should work"

That's something I like to think I'm good at. For my major project I have a 6/7 page planning document that I've been working on, and I have design mockups made. I think I know pretty well what I want to build.

I really would like to just start/try with something, but I'm worried that could end up being a "death sentence" in the future where I find out I just wasted a few months learning something that doesn't work or help me succeed.
If you wanted to have a real discussion, perhaps you shouldn't have started with the straw man that humans are the only thing influencing climate. No one seriously suggests that and, if you're interested in what the science is saying, you should know that.
I would like to ask a question, but its real. How many of you yes and no, would be willing to go to war knowing that China is making a record of every single interesting person in the United States? Would you physically be willing to go to war over that fact? They are literally profiling us and it seems like the average US citizen gives 2 shits.
Easy A/B testing at Nextdoor
Or release branches/tags.
But that cost is cheaper than repaving right?
Here's a 300w for $135: http://www.amazon.com/GalaxyhydroTM-Spectrum-Greenhouse-Flow...

Or a 1200w for $369: http://www.amazon.com/KingTM-Spectrum-360-860nm-10bands-Flow...

I actually have free electricity at my office, otherwise I'd run the numbers to see the cost savings. 5x longer lifespan ... I'd want an independent review.
> 150K is pretty much the average salary for any programmer in silicon valley, though, right?

Pretty much :)

> Autodesk also has a big presence in Montreal

Interesting. I'm very interested in the Montreal job scene because I live just across the NY/Canadian border and have wanted to relocate to Canada for a while now. Unfortunately, the salaries haven't been there for web development or game development.

> Video game skills that old apply much better to the (much better paying) embedded market.

Do you work in embedded systems? How difficult a field is it to break into? I've been thinking about shifting in that direction for my own personal sanity, if nothing else. Doing nothing but building virtual worlds and websites for a decade makes you long for the physical world. I do, at least.
When Facebook’s advertising team takes political correctness a bit too far
A Visualization of San Francisco Crime and Police Activity
Even if it is I think the relevant question here is more: does an elderly person on social security, pension, and medicaide have a greater aggregate cost to federal, state, and local governments in Berlin or in Stravadova (I'm not sure if I got that right)?

It'd be interesting to see if perhaps it's better for the feds if they're in rural towns but not the states.

In Albany, NY where I'm from I used to live right near a major hospital and college Albany Medical Center. And there were helicopters flying to it three or four times a day. I'm sure some of those helicopter rides out to taxi those requiring medical assistance are being borne by tax payers. It's a pretty complex question to wrap your head around when there are so many variables. Does an elderly person living in NYC produce a small drag on the economy because they're not contributing as much as the average young professional and increase the cost of rent for those people?
I was listening to the Senate hearing on Wednesday where they were asking the FBI director questions about this issue. They were talking about how they need to include the tech community in the conversation about how to best solve the problem of making sure the govt can access encrypted messages, etc. when they're conducting an investigation.

Senator McCain started asking questions about how it was possible to maintain citizens' privacy, but at the same time be able to access private data. Then he made it clear what his feelings were on the subject. Basically, his argument boiled down to "But, ISIS!".

"Is ISIS trying to kill Americans?", he asked the FBI director. The director said "yes". Then he said that b/c of ISIS, the govt has to be able to access keys so they can read encrypted data.
If you read this in a different context you could be supporting the exact opposite view. Both sides are concerned with abusers and protecting customers but they have opposite views about who the customers and abusers are.
From your reference, I think this supports the other meaning:

> The verb "monopolise" refers to the process by which a company gains the ability to raise prices or exclude competitors.

As I see it, without that ability to exclude, it's not a monopoly.

In a market without lock-in, or lock-out depending on your PoV, I can start selling widgets at any time and will do so whenever your profit margin gets too sweet. You're competing against me even if I'm not actively selling yet.
For some reason I feel Redmine + Gitolite is the best for everything, except for code-review that is.
After the sum and division.
Black-box testing as a first move is often a good move, IMO — but it's important to accept that at some point you're going to stop hitting so many edge-cases in the implementation that ought be tested. Some of those edge-cases should probably be tested with black-box tests, and some should probably be tested with unit tests.

One has to consider the performance cost of black-box tests, though. It will almost always be higher than that of unit tests, simply because more code will get run per test (this is especially true of network stuff, as even going through the loopback device is comparatively insanely expensive). That said, in some cases, it may well still be the right choice.
Others have already mentioned one failure mechanism that causes transistor degradation over time: electromigration. Other important aging mechanisms are negative-bias temperature instability (NBTI) and hot carrier injection (HCI). I've seem papers claim the dual of NBTI - PBTI - is now an issue in the newest process nodes.

This seems to be a nice overview of aging effects: http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/processors/transisto....
Retail Analytics Service Provider
If you absolutely must build a website on this, you can serve the bootstrap HTML page out of S3 and use the JSON to populate it, single page app style.
I don't think this is a good enough business model to explain so many tools popping up. Firstly, it's hard and expensive to make a tool good enough to become popular. But more importantly (and increasingly), it's extremely hard and very risky to build a community to a critical mass where it can sustain itself, precisely because there are so many tools competing for attention. I think tools pop up despite this difficulty and risk, because people have real itches they're scratching.

Introspectively, despite having many frustrations with my tools, and periodically coming up with ideas for tools that seem at the time like they might improve upon things, I know that my gut sense is not, "wow, I could just code this up, get a community going, and make tons of consulting cash!", but rather, "ugh that seems super hard and likely to result in many hours of unpaid labor, I'll just work around these issues and get back to work".
You're right, it's not. More attack surface area.

Sure, you could in theory have a highly distributed system with multiple keys, but then you can't use it day to day for monitoring communications, which is the whole purpose of the backdoor.

The government may be able to keep the nuclear codes safe in such a fashion, but it wouldn't if ten different government agencies wanted to use them on a daily basis.
Awesome if you are using only "up" and "down" ...
This is exactly true. You gotta balance freshness, quality, and uncertainty.
My guess is she means they don't need authorization to install it if it is a web app, where as a desktop app may need company sign off to install software.
Are you comfortable with proving math statements? If not, How to Think About Analysis by Lara Alcock is an amazing intro to Analysis. http://www.amazon.com/Think-About-Analysis-Lara-Alcock/dp/01...
Wikipedia is a horrible way to learn math. At most it works as a way to get initial pointers for literature. In most specialized fields, don't expect wikipedia to provide any understanding of mathematics beyond a summary of formulas without much explanation of what they are.
The theorem the SA article is talking about - CFSG, the Classification of Finite Simple Groups - is somewhat special in that respect. Lots of things in math fall out of fashion and get forgotten, often whole subfields. CFSG is different because the theorem itself is so basic and important that it's not likely to be forgotten in any foreseeable future. But its proof is so long and complicated that it's not even clear that there's one person who understands all of it, and the heap of details is not organised well enough for someone to just study it from books/articles without the help of people who lived through proving it back in the 70ies.

Suppose there just isn't enough interest in the younger generation of mathematicians to study the proof, even if the old guard are able to organize it better before they retire. Then we may reach a situation in which CFSG will still be used as a proved theorem and not a conjecture - because it's so powerful and important in many fields of math - but its proof will be lost to collective memory. I'm not sure, but I think that state of affairs might be without precedent.

(Here's a quote from Gian-Carlo Rota's _Indiscrete Thoughts_ on forgotten and rediscovered math:

"The history of mathematics is replete with injustice. There is a tendency
to exhibit toward the past a forgetful, oversimplifying, hero-worshiping
attitude that we have come to identify with mass behavior. Great
advances in science are pinned on a few extraordinary white-maned
individuals. [...]

One consequence of this sociological law is that whenever a
forgotten branch of mathematics comes back into fashion after a period
of neglect only the main outlines of the theory are remembered, those
you would find in the works of the Great Men. The bulk of the theory
is likely to be rediscovered from scratch by smart young
mathematicians who have realized that their future careers depend on publishing
research papers rather than on rummaging through dusty old journals.

In all mathematics, it would be hard to find a more blatant instance
of this regrettable state of affairs than the theory of symmetric
functions. Each generation rediscovers them and presents them in the latest
jargon. Today it is if-theory, yesterday it was categories and functors,
and the day before, group representations. Behind these and several
other attractive theories stands one immutable source: the ordinary,
crude definition of the symmetric functions and the identities they
satisfy.")
a private browsing window worked for me.
They do.

That's why our boxen have power-on self tests.
Nice. Always wanted to play.
I feel that I'm a proponent of microservices that has only ever worked on monolithic apps.

> I cannot think of the "monolithic" variation they depicted as a "service-oriented architecture" of any kind.

I think you're on the right track here. Note that the article uses "monolithic application", not "monolithic services"; it really is the lack of services.

> unless "services" is synonymous with "API" and for my part that is too general a definition to be of much use

I agree that that is too general. To me, a microservice would of course expose an API, but whereas a monolithic application exposes the entire application (or, perhaps, the entire API for everything your company does…), a microservice is exposing a small facet of the overall application, and is only responsible for that facet.

I probably agree with you that "services" is probably what most of us are after; I think the "micro" may just be an attempt to re-emphasize that it shouldn't be one huge thing, and that perhaps you should split services off sooner, rather than later, as it only ever gets harder.

Then again, I've never worked with in a microservices-oriented architecture.
I'm on the exact same visa. It took a month from getting to Berlin to getting the visa in my hands. I hired a lady for 800 Euro to help me do all the paperwork, forms etc as it's all in German and I had no friends/family to help me through the translation process. Having done it, I think you could get away with doing it yourself - most speak at least a little bit of English. The paperwork is not really that intensive, but you can often only book appointments 1 month out at the Ausländerbehörde (where they will do your interview & process your visa application).

I'm not 100% certain if it's the same process for US (I'm Australian), but roughly I needed:
- Registered address in Berlin (It's supposed to be a rental lease, but I had my airbnb host write a letter saying this was my address in Berlin).
- Bank statement of savings
- 3 references from clients saying that I was being paid X amount each month
- Portfolio of work (web designer)
You have a wooden head.
Calif. attacks send warning that Internet lines are 'basically unsecured'
Discipline. Decide what you want to do or work towards and do an hour of it every day. You'd be surprised how far that can get you.
I was trying this API gateway out, unfortunately there is no way to delete the API created..
"I'art pour I'art" should be "l'art pour l'art".

I'm only nitpicking because I recently started compiling a list of interesting quotes and intend to save this one :)
Unlikely? Hard to say.

And yes, the J-20 closely resembles the F-35. There's no doubt about that.

But in any case, I do think that it could be a productive scenario for the US military :)
> When I asked Mazviita Chirimuuta why philosophers were so crazy about color, she smiled, as if she sensed my question had an implied criticism of philosophy’s penchant for chewing more than it bit off, to paraphrase what a wit once said of Henry James.

Too pretentious for my blood.
> What era are you from, again?

Uh, the one following hordes of brain-dead Java developers hand-coding getters and setters?

> Also, those "brain dead" Java developers still write code that smoke your dog slow Python code regardless of how meticulously you hand crafted your code.

And is delivered 2 years later, requires 5 times more people and costs 10 time more to develop. And Python can be plenty fast if you use the right libraries.

> So yeah, I would be bitter too.

What do I have to be bitter about? I get paid well to write Python, C and Go on bespoke and interesting back-end systems and don't have to attend daily stand-ups with brain-dead Java developers and Oracle DBAs and listen to them duke it out over who's fault it is queries are running slow. No thanks.
I don't know that the exact opposite metric would be useful but I agree their metric doesn't sound useful either.
There are a few things I don't quite understand here.

First, why bother cleaning up the spam? IIUC it has always been the case that miners are allowed to choose which transactions they do and don't include in a block. The idea is that as the block solving reward diminishes, there will be a market for transaction fees. If you set the fee high enough, many people trying to make a block will add it to their list. If the fee is not high enough, then nobody will add it to the list and it will take a long time (possibly forever) to clear. Ignoring tiny transactions that have very small transaction fees seems like a completely reasonable thing to do to me... Is there a downside to this?

This leads me to another question. If a transaction never gets processed, can the original person get their money back? I suppose they can double spend and the transaction that gets processed first wins, but that seems like a risky proposition. It's been a while since I looked at the protocol, but I can't recall anything about cancelling transactions (and I don't know how that would work...). So if nobody decided to add your transaction to a block, do you effectively lose that money? That seems like an unacceptable situation, so I have to imagine that there is some work around that I haven't imagined yet...

Finally, if there is some way to cancel a transaction, then I suppose this can lead to a DOS attack by sending out lots of transactions and then cancelling them right away. While nobody needs to add a transaction to a block, I can't understand a way for the protocol to work unless the transactions are propogated to every miner so that they can at least choose what to add to their blocks. Is there anything in the protocol to limit the effect of someone simply flooding the network with worthless transactions? (Given the current problem, I'm guessing no...)
Paving rate varies but can be quite high. The one mile grid though is quite prevalent.
The desktop application for Slack is basically the same thing as having a dedicated browser window anyway, except probably even heavier-weight, at least in the OS X version. IIRC they use the same JS-on-the-desktop toolkit as Atom, so it's not a desktop application so much as it is a "desktop application". It eats ~400MB(!!!!) of RAM on my laptop at all times and I'm sure the only reason it isn't painfully unresponsive is because modern machines have enormous amounts of processing power. Totally unreasonable for what it does.

Even at that, it's still not as rough on system resources as a browser tab with Asana loaded and left open for a couple days, and all of Google's "applications" are hogs of course. Web Apps: the way of the future! [gag, gag, vomit]
Your point was that LEDs don't break even. My point is that there's a threshold at which they would.

If you only ever grew one tomato then you probably could buy a cheap plane ticket to deliver it, for less than the lights. So you'd be right, the LEDs would use more energy (cost to make, ship, and use) vs the delivery charges for the sun-grown (free energy) tomato from farther away - even if shipped expensively.

But if you grew millions of tomatoes from the same LEDs then you'd be wrong - now buying the grow lights is much more efficient than shipping in sun-grown tomatoes from even a few kilometers away.

How many tomatoes are you going to grow?
1) React does not make simple apps overly complex. It might feel like more work if you are more used to jQuery. If you are used to React instead, it really won't have a huge negative impact on a small app.
2) React will scale. It will be a much better vehicle for future development (as you admit, it is more suited for more complex cases than jQuery).

I was not making a judgement on the value of the approach, although I personally believe that this paradigm shift has a huge positive impact and is applicable in lots of cases. If I can choose between lots of computation intertwined with state mutation and a declarative approach where the mutation happens on the smallest scale, up the call stack, I will always choose the latter (of course, unless you have to mutate to gain performance).
(Sigh) It seems I have to spell it out.

> The Mount Pinatubo eruption emitted 42 million tonnes of CO2 (Gerlach et al 1996). Compare this to human emissions in 1991: 23 billion tonnes of CO2 (CDIAC). The strongest eruption over the last half-century amounted to 0.2% of human CO2 emissions in that year. [1]

In other words, for volcanic eruptions to match human CO2 output, we need ~500 Mount Pinatubo's every year (or roughly two of them every day). Like watching volcanoes?

[1] https://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=50

Edit: on second thought, if we have anywhere near that many volcanoes, most of us will be too busy starving to death to contribute anything meaningful to the anthropogenic global warming (which would be no more), so maybe one Mount Pinatubo every week or so would be enough to match human emission.
Scaleform is a barely-maintained Flash implementation.
For all the hype I hear about dvorak and other alternate keyboard layouts, I've never met anyone who could type significantly faster on it than I could on qwerty. This isn't objective in any way but from experience I can't say its any 'better'. As for ergonomics and other peripheral effects, I can't comment as I haven't looked into them.
Yes, but consider the "accumulation phase" (pre-retirement) vs. the "distribution phase" (retirement). At some point, you need to sell part of your portfolio to to pay your bills []. Check out "sequence of returns risks".

Or buy annuities, setup a bond ladder, or hold dividend stocks, but these have their own, related issues.

Early in the accumulation phase, however, I completely agree with you -- you're making the central argument for a long-term buy-and-hold strategy.