skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Imagine you're running a consulting company. A client approaches you with a project.

Like all software projects, there are big error bars on all time estimates; it could take X hours or 0.5X hours or 2X hours, even without scope changes. With scope changes, all bets are off. The deal you strike with the client makes this clear - you estimate X hours, but you can bill them anything from 0.5X hours to 2X hours.

If you assign one competent engineer to the project, they'll bill X hours.

If you assign two competent engineers to the project, they'll each bill 0.55X hours for a total of 1.1X hours billed (the extra 0.1X is due to communications overhead)

But if you assign one competent engineer and one incompetent engineer, the competent engineer will bill 0.8X hours completing the project and the incompetent engineer will bill 0.8X hours - for a total of 1.6X hours billed.

In other words, if a project has one competent engineer, adding a competent engineer adds 0.1X to revenue but adding an incompetent engineer adds 0.6X to revenue.

How do you suppose these incentives work out in practice?
There are many examples of girls being actively refused entry in to technology classes[1] based on their gender. When the education system itself is prejudiced against women it's unreasonable to suggest women aren't getting tech jobs because they're unwilling to put in the effort - they can't because they're blocked from doing so.

[1] A recent example http://jezebel.com/girl-fights-library-s-boys-only-robotics-...
Since these are requests that google take down links from it's index, it is much more probable that someone somewhere has a page where they have a link to localhost with the anchor text matching the title of a movie.
puerto rico isn't part of the united states now?
The problem is not that people don't want new developments near their homes. People are always going to want things that benefit them.

The problem is the legal situation where a lot of people and organizations that stand to gain from stopping development can veto it.

In other words: We don't need better people, we need better laws.
The abandonment side doesn't really make a whole lot of sense.

There's plenty of train lines in the US that are kept on the books/maintained, yet don't see any regular service. Some brush cutting, an inspection train once a year, and that's about it.

There's also plenty which are entirely abandoned and overgrown in practice, yet are still kept on the books, which means the train company retains the right of way and can resume service at any time it wants even though a train hasn't run on it in at all in 30 years and it currently looks like a forest.

Training for emergency detours makes some sense, although unless the line is long you don't really need all that many people trained to be prepared for that. You can have a few people qualified and they can just get on/off the train (riding back and forth) in the section the normal engineers aren't qualified for. And if it's once a decade or longer planned work, it's going to be cheaper to qualify the workforce right before it rather than have to keep them all up to date all the time. (I'm also sure that not all of these lines are worthwhile detours)
http://web.stanford.edu/~dmgordon/articles/doi/10.1038-natur...
take that, Elon
That does not work out. The total numbers of Bitcoins that will ever be mined is finite but miners will have to pay their electricity bills forever (or at least until Bitcoin ceases to exist). The only way that miners could cover their costs would be that the price of Bitcoins goes to infinity which is of course a bad thing. And a Bitcoin is mined only once but can be transacted an unbounded number of times. The costs occur at every transaction because transactions require the Bitcoin network and therefore you have to pay for transactions. I completely understand and support your desire to have a system that does not allow a minority to get rich without doing much work but Bitcoin won't be this system.
Plus you know they're legit, WB's robot says so. That's like what, at least a green skull and crossbones?

Why aren't they submitting DMCAs to the places actually hosting the files?
Click-baity headline. Yes, he's 78. Yes, he's starting a hedge fund. But he worked at Renaissance (the gold standard of hedge funds) from 2003 - 2010, and was preparing to start it for the 4 years the non-compete was in place.
I guess he is south German? That would also explain why he is calling Berlin "north Germany". While geographically, Berlin is more north than south, it has nothing to do with the cultural region we call north Germany.

Btw, if anyone is interested, here is a map of what people call the region they are living in: http://www.atlas-alltagssprache.de/wp-content/uploads/2012/0...
They don't face it in contemporary America, but they did face it when they started immigrating to the US many years ago. Given that you don't discern any anti-Irish sentiment I might argue that they did a fine job of "unbending themselves"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Irish_sentiment

I'm not suggesting that "unbending yourself" is the only way to do things, just that it does seem as though it's possible. Maybe not easy, maybe not quick, but to suggest that "it can't be done" would be disingenuous.
Two commits touching the same file, represented by the identifier at the end of the rebase's commit line. If you look at each file as a column, you can see which commits would clash.
Right, this is what I meant to say. Arguing with "feminism" is a bit like arguing with "politics" or "ethics" or "philosophy" given how disparate the different strains of it really are. I suppose most people who are arguing against feminism have a specific kind in mind but it doesn't do any good to the reader if you don't explain.
The government of almost every country is -almost always- incompetent and inefficient. Why would I want to give them my money for "security" when I could assure myself that security much more effectively?
Shopify vs. WooCommerce – Which One Holds the Crown?
> This would only be true if the library stored all of its books on disk.

Disk? Who said anything about disk? The calculation assumes that a single sub-atomic particle can store an entire work. Not only that, but that a sub-atomic particle can generate a different work every Planck time, and store them all.

That's really the point: our imaginations are much bigger than the universe we live in.

> the algorithm it uses to generate the books, which is described here:

Sorry, I don't see the description? All I see is:

"I found a successful formula combining modular arithmetic and bit-shifting operations, and the result is the library you see today."

It doesn't actually say what the formula is.

> Any digital archive, like JSTOR for example, exists as a mass of zeroes and ones, and only enters a form intelligible to the human eye once an article is loaded from its reserve.

How is my model any different?

> the library was more capacious than the universe.

Borges was writing fiction so he was free to ignore the laws of physics. But libraryofbabel.info actually exists, so it is not.
Earlier this week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9921557
I belong to the static typing camp...

REST, static/dynamic typing... all decisions like this are a cost trade-off.

There aren't really two 'camps', there are just comfortable positions on a scale, places where people are acclimatised to the trade-offs by their experience.
I asked this before and I hope it helps https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8128400
> So now the exchange tag wont just load an image but load more JS tags to render the ad.

Not to mention that more and more this javascript is spent calculating whether an ad is being viewed are not and phoning that data back home. Ad providers do this in different ways and it's not uncommon to see them send down a full jQuery build with their ad.
MobileFusion: 3D scanning using mobile phones
Your attitude is disappointing and short-sighted. It reminds me of a discussion I had some time ago where someone was saying "Moore's law ensures we don't have to worry about optimization."

But Moore's law isn't a law of nature, it's a consequence of human behavior. Moore's law is true because hardware designers are focused on optimization! It just wouldn't be true if everyone agreed not to focus on optimization.

And here you are saying "If we all focussed on tech problems, we wouldn't have to worry about social problems." But social problems don't fix themselves. Social equality is not a law of nature. Someone has to work on it.

In effect, you are trying to argue something that contradicts one of the assumptions you've used in your argument.
This is such a non-issue. All you have to do is look at how successful RESTful APIs have been this decade. It's easy to consume, which is really the number one priority if you actually want anyone to use your API. Anyone who has built an API will tell you that REST gets you 80% of the way, and if you need some transactional business logic the world will not end if you add a few non-REST custom endpoints.
I was expecting to see an alternate suggestion for communication via client-side browser based JS apps.
>anyone with the resources to buy and manage their own servers

Eh, I think the bar is a lot higher than that, especially if you have to meet external compliance standards with yearly audits, or have to have good disaster recovery with multiple datacenters. Those kind of things get very expensive if you are under a certain scale.
Marine biologist explores this in the sci-fi Blindsight, suggesting that self-awareness is an evolutionary hiccup that in the long-run wastes resources that could be spent towards building a better species. See: ants, for example.
> REST has its limitations, but it has one nice advantage: it uses a very well-understood, totally ubiquitous, firewall-piercing protocol.

REST is a protocol-independent architectural style. (And, even if you mean the kind of RPC over HTTP that is often misnamed REST, then using "a very well-understood, totally ubiquitous, firewall-piercing protocol" -- i.e., HTTP -- isn't really an advantage over the main things it is an alternative to, e.g., XML-RPC and SOAP-over-HTTP, which use the same "very well-understood, totally ubiquitous, firewall-piercing protocol.")
Jewish folks and South Asian folks overcame discrimination from Americans by killing them? Are you from Earth-2?

Read Steven Dutch's essay "The world's most toxic value system" [1] before you recommend violence as a solution to any group's problems. It's a comfortably direct approach, but it backfires. It creates a class of violent people who will push others down, so the group as a whole stays down.

[1] http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/pseudosc/toxicval.htm
Show HN: I just released my first self-published book
+1 for Backbone. It is very well documented
I frequently wonder why json-rpc isn't more of a thing. I've always rather loved it.
As a contrast to @mikeash's experience, I'd love to use contacts, but can't really wear them. My astigmatism is ... epic. Astigmatism with soft contacts means toric lenses, which have a few annoying "quirks". First, they never quite fully correct most astigmatism because the corrections are quantized in a way that makes it difficult to get a bang-on correction. Second, they lose acuity if the wearer's head is tilted. Both of these flaws relate to how toric lenses work: they're weighted to maintain their orientation. They're only in correct position when your head is straight up-and-down. Tilt your head a bit and they start to float off line. The worse your astigmatism, the more annoying these deviations become. As such, when I'm in for an eye exam no one recommends soft lenses for me anymore.

That leaves modern rigid gas permeable (RGP) lenses. I don't mind the feel of wearing these, and the vision is excellent. They don't need weighting for correct orientation, which eliminates the aforementioned limitations of soft lenses. The visual acuity for my correction is in all ways superior to soft lenses I've tried. The central vision nearly rivals good glasses, and the sharp peripheral vision blows glasses out of the water. But even with the newest, most permeable lens materials my eyes can't really ramp up to tolerating them for a full day's wear. And there's the rub, since RGPs require a ramp up to acclimate to wearing them, they aren't really amenable to just popping them in "weekend warrior" style.

I haven't taken the LASIK plunge yet, but the above might illuminate why it's an appealing option for some people.
You're not supposed to eval the strings, that way leads to xss. Since you're supposed to parse it no matter what, there's no difference between JSON and any other format.
Rather than politics, I think the primary motivation is predictability and control over costs and the ability to link costs to the company's financial performance. A ranking process that buckets employees into performance categories allows you to determine the company-wide increase in salaries and the bonus pool first and work backwards to arrive at each employee's raise/bonus. And since bonuses are usually timed with the end of the fiscal year, that increase (or lack thereof) can be based entirely on the numbers they deliver to investors.

Also, by forcing a relative appraisal of each employees performance, you force managers to view employees with a more critical eye. If I were to simply have to answer, "did X do a good job on this project?", my answer would almost always be yes, absent any incentive to say no. But there are members of my team who deliver significantly better than others, so the calibration process forces me to find a way to put them above the team members who perform at a lower level. Getting rid of performance reviews would, from what I've seen, create a culture of "don't screw up" rather than one of taking risks and trying to do as well as possible.

As a manager who both received an annual performance review and delivered 10 of them in the past week (our FY15 ends 7/31), I hate the process more than most people. But I think this discussion is ignoring the advantages just because we all hate the process. We run the risk of creating a whole new process that we hate just as much as the old process. Because it all boils down to finding an impartial way to evaluate performance and, unless you can crack that nut, your process isn't going to work. Top performers will move on and you'll be left with only under-performers. And that's because humans naturally evaluate their circumstances relatively rather than absolutely, once you get beyond the basics (i.e. can I pay rent and bills). Someone making $100k/yr is going to feel underpaid if someone they feel they're better than makes more. Just because the current system for ranking is flawed doesn't mean that there doesn't mean that ranking isn't necessary.
This is really, really, cool technology. Would love to learn what's going on behind the scenes!
Ironically, you can only refuse to provide your name if you have a "reasonable belief" that doing so could incriminate you!

-----

Justice Kennedy wrote, "While we recognize petitioner's strong belief that he should not have to disclose his identity, the Fifth Amendment does not override the Nevada Legislature's judgment to the contrary absent a reasonable belief that the disclosure would tend to incriminate him."
>I think this is somehow similar to how indigenous people wondered how the white man could possibly think of owning
>forests, rivers, and land. They considered Earth unownable, not belonging to anyone but rather people belonging to the
>Earth.

A) North America has no indigenous people.
B) The people who did live here when the Europeans arrived did have ownership and private property. Sometimes owned by families and sometimes by tribes. And anyone who has even a basic high school education should be aware of the fact that there were Native American nations who controlled and owned territory and would exclude other nations from land use, hunting rights, fishing, etc.
How Much Money You Lose Without Social Commerce? [Infographic]
Harmful to whom? You don't like REST. That's cool. REST has actually been very useful.
The function n -> n + 1 maps every even number into an odd, and it has an inverse (obviously n -> n - 1). Thus, the two sets have the same cardinality.
It's effectively a government intelligence contractor. You can charge a lot to help the government bend its way around privacy laws.
Invited to the U.S., Foreign Workers Find a Nightmare
My advice would be to fire the guy. It would make your timekeeper boss happy, and it would make some other company very happy to be able to hire a brilliant employee. A win-win situation.
Now? The "considered harmful" essay is probably one of the most important early contributions to the field of computer science.
I agree with the other comments in this thread that Palantir isn't really sensibly called a startup, given its ability to scale and its current size. But isn't 1-2 years worth of salary a pretty typical funding round?
I found this headline odd: "Bloated, human readable format that demands extra compression"

Is human readability a main reason for using JSON or is it a beneficial side effect?

I always assumed (rightly? wrongly?) that the reason for using JSON was that it uses Javascript's native object format and therefore much easier to serialize/deserialize and debug at the browser level.
> if it were removed and all residential areas jump up to market price

Nit pick: If all these units came out on the open market, it would mean a substantial lowering of the market price.

It would also mean that a lot more people could live in SF, both because more people would share existing apartments, and because many of the apartments now empty would be rented out.
Pretty much at a point where I immediately disregard "considered harmful" posts. Majority of the time its hyperbole and clickbait.
Yes, I mentioned all this in the other paragraphs.

Ad networks have a lot of work put into the backend systems but the frontend stuff that runs in the browser has been ignored for a long time. Even Google still uses things like Document.Write for putting more tags on the page, something that was obsolete about 6 years ago.
(edit: just read geofft's post instead)

I think parent is referring to the fact that the author of the article seems to feel as if her experiences as an autistic person are invalidated by the dominant feminist narrative in tech, and that she is supposed to apologize for her experiences:

...if they tried walking around in my shoes for once.

There’s a noticeable empathy vacuum in the room, and for once it’s not coming from the direction of the sperglord.
I stopped drinking the REST cool aid years ago, for pretty much the same reasons.

It's not that HTTP APIs aren't useful - of course they are - it's the religious adherence to REST doctrine that is harmful. I take the author's point to basically be, "do the simplest thing that makes sense for your use case, don't worry about how RESTful it is", which I totally agree with.
Yes, it’s true that only 20 – 23% of tech workers are women. But less than twenty percent of high school students who choose to the AP Computer Science test are women.

Perhaps women choose not to study computer science because they feel it'd be overly difficult to get in to an industry made up of 80% men. What if the fact there are relatively few women tech workers is the reason few women study it, and not the reverse as you're inferring.
I've only watched the pilot of Sherlock and found it so-so. Is the rest comparable?

I got sucked into Elementary a bit (Lucy Liu is very good, didn't expect that), but decided after half a season, it's not that great to justify the investment of time.
Can articles with the words "considered harmful" in the title (or the article itself for that matter) be banned? It's almost always a low effort way to get votes by taking a popular technology and finding some flaws to write an article on.
Yes, "over unity" means that it's a perpetual mobile machine that breaks the first law of thermodynamics.

This article mix the Casimir effect (that is weird but real) and some hand waving and a prototype that is not verified by a serious independent review, and then proclaims that it breaks the first law of thermodynamics.

Nothing to see, until they have a peer review article and some independent verification of the device.
Is that ICQ? ;)
Just publish to full-disclosure. Done and done.
I don't do soylent or clones, so I don't talk from experience.

From what I've read, farting is a problem for most people when changing diets and suddenly adding much more fiber than they were used to before. It lasts for a while and then allegedly stops.

People who start weightlifting and change their diets completely also often complain about farting, even if they are not taking any supplements. Check the weightlifting forums for other tragic experiences.
Perhaps they were referring to the respective diasporas who succeeded by investing in their own education. The groups cited tend to be high academic achievers or at least put great emphasis on academics so much so that American born sometimes avoid some school districts with high achieving groups for being over competitive.
Not true. While you should indeed not eval the string, once you have properly parsed it, you get a structured collection of objects and arrays that is very regular JavaScript structures. XML cannot offer the same, you get some much more abstract representation can easily be "wrong" if you don't follow the format as you extend it with more values, objects and arrays.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping

Facebook does not like their pages to be scraped. So I was a bit surprised by you title.

But actually you are using the Graph API as intended to collect posts. Nothing wrong with that, but nothing unusual either.
Probably much less. The organization is very flat and for the first several years they offered only 3 salary options close to 100K (something like 80, 100, 120) since they were still offering equity. Last I heard this system is still in place. So let's just say the typical overhead is around 150K and multiply that by 1500 employees (NYTimes/Wikipedia, 2015) and that gives us around $225 million.
According to news reports, the Mirabel terminal demolition began in November 2014: http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/mirabel-airports-...
I haven't read the article yet, and while I prefer to work with JSON most of the time XML is much more human readable. And working in publishing we have a lot of XML floating around.
see from the outset that they will have to work twice as hard to be only equally respected in the industry

'citation needed'

When I work with females who do the work, and don't turn into weird drama queens, they get equivalent respect and reward as the guys.

People sometimes get afraid that a female will not be normal at work, and instead reveal herself as some kind of angry, complaining, entitled SJW who believes she is entitled to unearned respect or accolades. (To be fair, guys can show this too, but usually they are shut down faster and harder, because they don't have the "but I'm a girl" card.)
3 Ways to Create an Excellent Workspace for Programmers