skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Niven and Egan would be classic examples from different decades (Niven's post-1977 work, and his collaborations, not so much). I'd also point to Hannu Rajaniemi's Quantum Thief trilogy, Peter Watts (for world-building -- see below) and the cultural/linguistic side of C. J. Cherryh's Foreigner series (at least the first five or so books).

One of the less well understood (especially by non-genre reader) aspects of hard SF is that the world the story is set in can be viewed as a character/participant in the plot, or -- in this sub-field -- as a puzzle that the plot depends on; the outcome of the story simply doesn't work without the world being set up the way it is. (A lot of stuff is marketed as hard SF that doesn't fit this criterion; it just has lots of cheap throwaway references to technology. But the core of the field is about solving the puzzle that the universe has thrown in front of the protagonists.)
Architectural Principles of a DevOps Team
Practically, it's impossible to maintain one without a proportionally large team that can spend proportionally big amount of time.

As one of most obvious examples (unrelated to Mozilla or Microsoft): there are uncountably many custom Android ROMs out there, left abandoned. And most were merely cosmetic changes or even packaging (like inclusion or removal of certain pieces by default). Usually, unless luck is that there's a large social momentum and a lot of advertising among same-minded people, fork maintainer struggles for a few versions then gives up and surrenders to the upstream way of thinking. Sad but true.
Interesting! This was exactly the case on the system I used. I didn't realize Cray was the only vendor who went the no-local-storage route.
As others have noted, the 4 months of living expenses requirement can be quite excessive. I've seen similar advice in the past and can't help but recall my personal anecdote of starting a company with barely enough money for one month of expenses. What is far more vital to one's success as a solo contractor is not having savings, but having guaranteed future revenue generation – clients with signed contracts.

As the author notes, the legal business entity and business infrastructure should be set up in advance. This enables one to acquire clients and do business before putting in a two-week notice at your full time job. I no longer operate my company, but had I abided by the 4 month of living expenses rule I would have never gotten off the ground. Within 4 months I was earning slightly more than double my previous salary. Don't shackle yourself to rigid startup rules. If you have clients and believe in what you're offering, go do it.
Agree entirely. All my contracts come through recruiters, and I've never had a problem with them, once you get a good rapport going with a decent contract recruiter they'll do all the hard work for you.
Show HN: Reminder Widget: Get Your Evernote Reminders on iOS Today Widget
Frankly, I don't buy it when it's on Google, FB or MS scale. Their incentives is to maximize profits, not the user's happiness, wants or needs. Sometimes the later might help optimize the first but it's not the objective behind all the scraping.

Those improvements could be done with much less intruding anyway (be it for the sake of it or because johnny hacker is going to release those data someday).
Meet Dispatch, the app that wants to be your personal concierge
As someone who has gone through the same journey, this article strikes me as surprisingly shallow.

> The first time I got drunk, I made out with my best friend and her best friend in an RV in their backyard while doing tequila shots. I passed out, vomited, then passed out again. It was bliss.

He has not confronted the meaninglessness of a sudden break up with God. I'm speaking as someone who used to be a strict member of a religion and prayed multiple times a day.

There's really too much in the article that's wrong for me to go through. The cynic in me wants to say it was written by a wannabe author and greenlit by someone who never had to do go through that.
In this case, there are genuinly better options.

CMake, for example, is less arcane, and can also generate project files for visual studio.

I'd agree that make shouldn't really be the go-to choice for brand new projects. It's limitations can encircle new projects.
I just take what I want and pay higher tax as necessary. You still end up paying less than the average worker anyway since there are no NICs on the higher level of dividends. Other than that, I reinvest it into the business, but I can't be arsed with pensions.
In the past I've worked under Giant and Parasol. I used Giant back in 2008 when I wasn't sure if I was staying in contracting for forever. All umbrellas are much of a muchness; there's a legal limit on how much tax efficiency they can help you with, so you'll take home the same with whoever you choose. In the long term a limited company is definitely the way to go.
Congratulations! Awesome product, and I like your landing page and blurb a lot.

And I love the FAQs :)

https://support.cuvva.co/hc/en-gb/articles/202311812-Can-I-u...
> I've not read 'The Space Merchants' but I wonder how it assaults that sentence as I believe it is generally true.

I'm definitely not saying that it is not true, I'm saying that it should not be true and that 'The Space Merchants' is an excellent book around the theme of why that should not be true and how the machinery behind the curtain works.

We're not exactly unable to influence how we think and act (within limits). Corporate brands are a fairly recent invention, there is no need to give them the amount of head-space that they are taking up.
It's a skill. An artful engineering skill.
David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas and Booker nominee, is a true geek
How to apply the KISS principle to your startup
"Y U Block ads"? I have adblock on by default and I planned to spend a couple of minutes on the page just to see what it was like. I am not going to land on a random page with adblock turned off. If it bothers you so much, find a different revenue source.
in the OP's defense, it's kinda a dense read
I assume he's referring to Qt.
Lully (YC W15) Is Hiring a Lead Growth Hacker
SDLC.All You Need to Know About Kanban
I always used agents over 3.5 years and never had any problems.

They are sales people though, and obviously there are bad ones. However they are providing a service to you, (and their client), often contractors that go direct are on a worse rate, get paid a lot less frequently (3 months after each month, vs weekly in some cases) and have to deal with tedious internal HR processes.

Some times after you get used to the industry you have enough contacts to go direct, but initially an agent can really help you out.
Software sometimes elevates itself to art, just like a very nicely made cabinet is both useful and a work of art.

But most of the time it is better compared with architecting malls and hospitals, bricklaying or roadworks.
This was a cause for concern in many people's minds with the .ly TLD belonging to Libya
I moved from web dev perm jobs in the west mids, down to London and started contracting around 6 years ago. It's singlehandedly the best decision I ever made, tripling my salary. And bar a few of months after I went to Asia for a year (paid for by contracting), I've never had much trouble landing a new contract.

You can easily earn over 100k if you're any good in your field.

I was thinking about writing a post about the ins and outs of the London contract market.
Good info. Does anyone have info or experience in seting up your ltd company overseas together with an overseas bank account.
Which the Bitlocker stuff already does, when you run it manually. I suspect not with devices that come pre-encrypted - Surfaces, etc.

I was going to say that the most likely thing folk have done is try to back up their key on the drive they encrypt - but last time I tried that due to not being on a network, I think the Bitlocker wizard refused to let me.
> avoid using certain words because it makes people feel
> unsafe

Which words do you think should be appropriate for a non-profit software organization which Mozilla don't think are?
Tax systems are complex. There are deliberate loopholes - a company can register for VAT, for example - and there are unintended loopholes.

Amazon, Google, Starbucks etc engage in very aggressive tax planning. They say it's all legal - they're not trying to evade tax, just avoid it. But because their schemes are so aggressive it might be illegal. We don't really know because the cases would have to go to court. Sometimes tax authorities will investigate, and will persuade a company that their aggressive tax plannin was unlawful, and then get some repayment of the missing tax. This usually means that the company avoids the court case and doesn't have to repay the total tax they avoided.

No-one expects them to pay all their tax burden. People in the UK recognise that tax planning is a useful important activity.

What we don't like is companies taking the piss.

And as to why they should pay tax: they get the benefits from society that flow from taxes - educated workforce, police, road infrastructure, healthcare, etc etc. They should pay their share.

Finally these companies will sometimes mention other taxes. So they'll talk about VAT or PAYE. But VAT is a tax the customer pays. The company collects it, but it's collected from the customer. And PAYE is (apart from the employer's contribution) a tax that the employee pays, again collected by the company. It's a scumbag move to reduce your tax payments to the minimum you can and then talk about the tax other people pay as if it's tax you pay.
How so? You can easily have error correcting codes that are human readable.
Has miniclip gone after clones that don't use the deobfuscated client source from the original?
Where do you go for your contact leads in NL? I know the London market well but find it hard to find any decent Euro contracts.
I posted an offer to HN to build their app for £100. Monetary value is obviously very little, but it's a token gesture that technically gives you freelance experience.

It was great to build my portfolio up; I'd recommend it if possible. It's much easier to land gigs with a freelance portfolio.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6382405
Is that true? It doesn't match many of the comments on HN around React, Om, Clojure etc...
If it has to work, it is engineering.

If it doesn't have to work, it is art.
Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Rules

Which includes my favorite: "Once is an accident. Twice is coincidence. Three times is an enemy action."
> For each message to be sent to or received from a worker we need to convert it to a string.

Strange, according to MDN data sent to web workers needs only be deep clone-able[1]. Is this non-standard Gecko behavior?

> aMessage: This may be any value or JavaScript object handled by the structured clone algorithm, which includes cyclical references.

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Worker/post...
"You don't get it: it's not a bug, this is art."
I read a summary of the results of a user research team checking whether end-users managed to actually set a different default browser on Windows 10.

Outside of the "power users" group, I seem to remember that not a single user succeeded.
> they aren't an organization with a history of criminal action against customers

Technically correct I guess. However: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation

Until recently, Microsoft wasn't really dealing with their users' data. This requires that you trust them. Personally I trust them just enough to use their OS (or rather, I rely on the fact that they know people watch closely what Windows does), but I definitely don't trust them to keep my data.

More precisely I don't trust them (or any other company) when they say they won't sell my data, or spy on me, or use my data against me. Because, when you think about it, there is absolutely no way to verify that they keep their word.
It's not as fun as agar.io in my opinion. The biggest problem is the balance in this game: in agar.io big players are discouraged from attacking small players, they're too slow to catch them and the risk of splitting is not worth it. It's incredibly easy to attack a smaller ship in this game and there is no risk.

The mutual destruction in this game is an annoying mechanic in this game, yet you keep shooting at players with a similar size as there is a chance they wont react quickly enough.

It looks incredibly cool, but it needs some more balancing to be as fun as agar.io.
I don't think the net's changed that much. You can still find places to be pro racism and the like. Check out r/coontown for example. Also it was never the case such people were not criticised / shamed. Free speech works both ways you know - if you're free to say what you want then others are free to slag it off.
There's a calculator here: http://www.hl.co.uk/news/articles/budget-2015-changes-to-div...
There is a nice TED talk also on the topic:
http://www.ted.com/talks/rajiv_maheswaran_the_math_behind_ba...
Enjoyed the article, it describes most of the issues I had with ActiveRecord.
MULTITASKING IMPEDES CREATIVITY – 7/31/15
Thanks for this reference!

GCSE Statistics (UK school exams at 16 years old) teach a simpler system of process control rules, closer to Western Electric https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Electric_rules: and that is the only place I have ever come across them.

Is this in current practical use?
Being a startup news site, I'm sure some HNers can relate.
Thanks, some good pieces of insight there.
I noticed you mentioned that it took years of work to get you to being a total extrovert - How did you start out as? What things did you do?
Old Python handled strings in a really dumb way that only seemed to work for monolingual Americans and (to a lesser extent) Western Europeans.

New Python fixed that.

Problems:
1) new Python wasn't very tolerant of real-world conditions where incorrect text encoding happens once in a while.

1b) there was great resistance to fixing that because "Python now did it correctly!" and the rest of the world was just assumed to do it correctly, always.

2) not everybody who already programmed in Python really understood the need for the new (and mostly correct) way of handling strings. Also not everybody in the US really understood Unicode and encodings.

3) there was no proper update path from Old Python to New Python.

4) it was not possible (or very difficult) to write code that was both valid Old Python and valid New Python and which did the right thing in both cases.

5) at the same time the interface for libraries written in C was changed.

5a) the new way was better.

5b) a change was needed for New Pythons string handling anyway.

5c) it could still have been done in a backwards-compatible way...

5d) ... but it wasn't, since the new way was Better.

6) lots of important Python libraries are partially written in C because pure Python is so slow

7) ... so porting all the important libraries was necessary for New Python to take off while at the same time being rather annoying and difficult work.

There were other changes at the same time that were improvements but which made upgrading hard. Print was no longer a keyword with lots of special handling and corner cases but an ordinary function. You could switch newer versions of Python 2.x to the same behaviour but not the older ones. Many libraries needed to work with many different Python 2.x versions, which made it hard to support Python 3.x at the same time. You could convert all your print statements to using a function that worked like the new print function and then either use that natively (3.x and newer 2.x) or provide a compatibility function that wrapped the print statement (older 2.x). You would put this code in a module you would selectively import depending on the Python version -- or some variant of that. Not actually hard but really annoying and something that required changing many lines of some libraries.

Ad 1, things have improved a lot and there are now known ways of fixing the remaining problems (with newer 3.x versions).

Ad 2, Unicode is better understood these days.

Ad 3 and 4, things have again improved. If you skip the first few 3.x versions and the early 2.x versions then it is not too hard to write code that works on both Old and New Python.

Ad 5, I don't know if is possible to support both ABIs in a single shared library, but at least the core code that actually does the work can be shared.

PyPy might have helped as well by making ordinary Python -- the kind you would otherwise write in C -- run fast.

Edit: formatting is hard.
It's different in the sense that you know that your firend cares about you, where as for software you can't be sure if it's in your interests.
Please, do better than putting up straw men, especially the ridiculous false choice between Capitalism and dictatorship.

And please also refrain from these other logical fallacies:

- Domination proves superiority

- Being better than bad solutions proves it is a good or even best solution.

There were times that the whole world bought into a bunch of stupid things:

- creationism

- slavery

- patriarchy, sexism

- kings as gods

- gods as gods

Oh snap! Most have still bought into those things. Though in some cases (such as slavery) we've rebranded it (commoditized, capitalized labor).
If 90% of all egg-crackers are short, and you want to hire the best egg-crackers, it's very likely that 90% of your egg crackers are going to be short.
You can't convince a significant percentage of the population that smoking is unhealthy. That Global warming is a problem, an even larger percentage. A study that shows X is practically meaningless isn't going to be persuasive.

So, if solar is cheap and efficient we're going to need to do a little better at selling it. I don't see real numbers, just the unsubstantiated claim. Plus, I see the claim of a breakthrough on solar cell efficiency every couple of months on HN, which leads me to believe we're still waiting for one.
This is great. i wish a lot more things were like this. ie by example. it's also good for jogging one's memory on details.
So a demo video or a mockup image is art. That sounds reasonable, videos and images are already widely accepted as artistic canvases.
Gave you some love on my blog post on
Hey I gave you some love on my latest blog post: http://blog.xcopy.co/

Feel free to share it or shout it from the rooftops :) Thanks,

Hussein shtia CEO at Xcopy
Why I jump out of bed every morning: www.xcopy.co What keeps me up at night: blog.xcopy.co
Yeah, sure, but also the bookie will give you crappy odds on that bet! :)
I can't use similar loopholes.

Imagine an English person running an English business (eg, a tea shop with a single store and no online presence) in England. They want to advertise to people so they contact Google's English ad division and buy ads to be shown in England. They pay using English money, from their English bank account to Google's English bank account.

Somehow this doesn't count for English tax, somehow it's Irish tax.
I agree that there is a place for both styles in the world. Unfortunately when it comes to rust most of the tutorial seem to be in this style, and I thought at least the "advanced" guide would be more "sensible". I enjoyed Learn You a Haskell, but that was an introductory text. If I am reading an "advanced" text on a systems programming language I probably expect it to be a little more formal.

>In regards to sounding childish, I find that in general to be an unusual criticism. Perhaps there are people who speak this way as adults simply because that is who they are?

First off, maybe it wasn't the best word for me to use. However, the second statement is a tautology; of course if they are childish then that is "who they are": childish people. The term to me doesn't denote an interest in "childish" things, like the CS Lewis quotation seems to say. Rather it denotes "not fully emotionally developed" which is usually a judgement placed on their current behaviour. You can read all the fairy tale books you like, I don't care. But if you start exhibiting the negative behaviours typical of children - selfishness, irresponsibility, etc - then yes, you are a bad person and deserve to be called out for it. (I'm not suggesting this at all about the author - this is now a separate discussion.)
Are you sure about that? There is a statutory notice period of one or two weeks depending on how long your employment has been, but this appears to be trumped by contractual agreements:

https://www.gov.uk/handing-in-your-notice-resigning-leaving-...
It's true that http and html are completely obsolete, the proof of that is how smartphone apps perform so much better than their web counterpart.

Honestly, I think there is a need to have solid p2p libraries, so to be able to use a DHT, NAT punchthrough or upnp more easily. P2P is immensely hard and has a lot of implications as much as it has usages. Isn't there a p2p filesystem already ? I'm sure you could distribute public data in a decentralized manner.

I don't know if libtorrent does it well, but since there are security issues implementing software that sends data packets directly, it would be greatly welcomed.

Also I don't believe diaspora went far enough in the decentralization method. There should be no server at all.
Python 2.7 supports string.format and Python 3 supports % formatting.

The only actual difference in that example is that print became a function in Python 3, requiring some additional parentheses. (Something that can be mechanically translated without much hassle.)
Journalism is treason in Germany
I think that's not true. They do not consider their privacy nor understand the consequences.
The correct answer is: true.

(Logical operators.)
Do you work with the Sport-Reference.com sites?

if so, would you mind if I asked you a somewhat technical question?

Is there some sort of advanced query function?

-------------------------------

Here's kind of what I'd like to be able to do

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/no-team-can-beat-the-dra...

the first chart in there sort of fits a line from draft position to career AV (7 paragraphs in)

I'm curious if you can hold for certain factors and move that line around

specifically I'm curious if the line changes if you adjust for winning percentage of the player's college team

ie if you did a curve players from schools w/ winning percentages >.750, .750 - .500, .500 - .250, .250 - 0, would that produce 4 noticeably different curves?

------------------------------------

it appears that all the data necessary to do that is contained between NFL-reference and CFB-reference

the way I would think to do that is to scrape the data off the site and put it into an excel sheet to work with

is that the best way to do that?

or is there a function within the site that I can work with such that I don't have to scrape the data?

-------------------------

thanks, sorry if this sort of question was outside the bounds of this message board
Yes, it is slow. Immutability is allowing you to write elegant concurrent algorithms at the expense of speed and memory. Imagine you are forced to never change an array of numbers for an algorithm computing matrices, rather creating new matrices for each step and specifying numbers only during initialization. But hey, you can cache them and keep track of every single copy without any confusion now! Now imagine a non-concurrent language like JavaScript - what exactly are you going to get by using immutable structures except for the feeling you are going with the times?

Reference counting and caching are probably the only areas where immutability can help for most programs.

Immutability is in fashion nowadays due to functional programming being in fashion despite the inability to ever achieve "pure" functional programming in reality - I/O is by default "dirty" (I really hate these charged words in computing), no amount of flatmapping (i.e. monads) is going to help with that.