skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not right. There are linguistic restrictions on gender-neutral, singular 'they'.[1] When the referent is known, it can't be used (i.e. it's not about 'patrick' and 'he' matching up, it's about 'they' not being usable with a known person).[2]

My favourite real-life example of it's usage is one in which we know that the gender is female, and we know it's singular:

"If a mother wants to use the nursing room, they can just key in the code in their pamphlet".

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/3cgbyv/limitat... gives some good discussion

[2] I can't help but feel that these restrictions are related to nondefinite contexts for "(negative polarity items)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarity_item]", like 'no-one' and 'any', where you can't say e.g.

*I ate any cake

but you can say:

I didn't eat any cake

but you can also use it in questions:

Did you eat any cake?

This seems related to usages like

If someone comes, tell them to wait

vs

*If John comes, tell them to wait.
Is _top_ university an important distinction in this context?
"now common" - the singular they was used by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen, Thackery and Shaw. Traditional grammar types might not like it but that doesn't mean it is some new usage.
Thank you for sharing. I've just gone through a very similar experience and it's about time I return to the workforce as an employee. Your reflections are insightful and I hope that I too can make the transition. Here's to finding working bliss! :-)
Try explaining that to management types. The whole problem with "Enterprise Software" is its targeted at the manager types, you tell them they are now going to able to generate 10 reports, tell them there's an app for it the would throw money at you. They don't care about the people who has to deal with the system, they don't care it takes 10 more additional steps to do something that was really easy to do, throw in a bunch of jargon and tell them its enterprise ready and cloud based, with a touch of big data. BAM! sold!
It has a web client, but that doesn't really fit with Signal's model.
Complexity tamed! With Products.CustomUserFolder.interfaces.IGSUser.interfaces.IGSAnnouncementGroup.
Businesses have experimented with "other people's data" forever. The clerk at the video store chats with customers, learns which ones are chatty, what recommendations work out, etc. This is considered to be good service. But a cloud software company does the same thing with an algorithm and a CPU and suddenly it's an outrageous violation of privacy. Suddenly we need informed consent protocols to change the signage on the store front or the font on the web page. Seems like an overreaction to me, assuming that all cloud companies are out to take zero-sum advantage of you.
Begging the question. I do not think it means what you think it means. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

(Grammar-nazi-ing aside, I completely agree with you.)
With the amount of money Zuk has he should start a non-profit drug maker that produces generic drugs at cost.
Thought I was the only one who felt this way. It quickly became so bad I lost track of what he was doing originally.
Reaktiv CSS Builder Review: Reaktiv-Ly Build Your CSS
Crowdsourced Language Understanding
Chances are at least 1% of their wealth will be put into something stable. Index funds, bonds, treasuries. Hell, cash'd be fine.
https://www.facebook.com/chanzuckerberginitiative/

"Please log in to continue."

Seriously? One might think they would prioritize raising awareness over increasing Facebook userbase.
More fun if you find out for yourself but I'll give you a hint: BBC Micro.
No, because the response is going to be "Yes you are", and we descend into a shouting match.

I don't mean literally, the words you say must be "I'm not a jerk." I mean the defense must consist of a denial that the behavior was jerkish. If that's achieved by laying out standards for jerkishness, that's fine.

The OP read to me as not even achieving that. It wasn't "we aren't jerks, because what we did wasn't jerky", it was "we're going to be jerks, tough on you, shut up".

>That seems like a fair description of how "victimhood culture" treats the rest of us.

I'm not discussing victimhood culture. I'm discussing a specific defense to a specific complaint, which I think lacks value. The specific complaint was not trying to make people feel bad, it was to make themselves feel good. The response explicitly acknowledges that they're trying to make people feel bad.
The entire premise of the Chromebook is that nothing is stored locally and you're almost exclusively using web services. That's how they're expected to work. You can't use one without knowing that your data isn't stored on that specific machine because in many cases you can't even access your data without an internet connection.

I've seen no evidence of data mining - I can't even think of a use for this data, much less a use that would be worth the risk considering their growing popularity and how well Office in schools worked out for Microsoft. I imagine just them using Gmail and Google apps is far more valuable than any fruitless advertising to people that can't spend money.
> Moses destroyed the South Bronx, not created it
It depends on what you think of as the South Bronx. In many senses, Moses did both: he created the common demarcation for the region thought of as the South Bronx (the CBE), and thereby destroyed it.

> routed his projects away from wealthy neighborhoods to destroy poor neighborhoods.

Yes, almost all of his projects had the common theme of benefiting a very precisely selected portion of the population. The Power Broker does a great job detailing Moses' biases, particularly during his parks development phase.
Even if you retain cash, it would be completely practical to demand companies submit receipts with names or ID card numbers. It'd be expensive, but not impractically so.

The problem isn't the computerization if cash, but the capability to record and search the information.
This is such a fantastic project.
I've always enjoyed Rob's take on things. The things he's worked on seem like "a good goal" rather than something completely unobtainable, like most SV style startups seem to those of us who are not there and don't want to kill ourselves working on one. I highly recommend his book even though it's a bit long in the tooth at this point:

http://amzn.to/1OuZPHs
That is bizarre. It's a terrific book.
Hopefully you're not the only one, as I share your reluctance to embrace it as the "go-to" model of social constructiveness. There's a lot of good that comes from people "giving back" in one form or another, be it financial, skilled labor, or just simple time and attention when possible. I think it's admirable to want to change "institutions" like education for the better - I've been an advocate for 'progress' ever since I saw some of the challenges back in my own youth - but I can't help but think of such experiments as pet projects. Those can be productive, sure, but do I believe, deep down, that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is going to have the answer to the variety of problems that plague Chicago's South Side, New Orleans, or any number of troubled communities? Sigh, might just be me.
I can’t share my recent stuff because it’s still under private development, but here’s the results of my first experiments in this method, a little rough around the edges but etc.

http://midcenturymay.nyc

The "master" type size is set to a vh unit, everything else is rem’d off that, and stepped via media query.
Indeed. Bill Gates owns a railroad in Wisconsin, for example.
Every rich guy thinks he knows what's good for the world. And why announce this together with the birth? Should the world celebrate this miraculous event that also led to our salvation?
The third one is from github as well.
Exactly, when you have that much wealth, you buy things that don't have price tags on.
Implication is competition is paramount - both level and quality of output
There hasn't been another other thing that has had as much impact in bringing me closer to my family and friends across the globe. Waste of time for you, positive life changing medium for me. Further, who know what positive impact this have had on my health? Maybe it has prevented the need for medicines in many cases.
Don't the Pennsylvania Dutch still use it? I vaguely recall there being a community out east that uses either thee or thou still with regularity.
Hacked Toymaker VTech Admits Breach Actually Hit 6.3M Children
Show HN: 10 symbol communication experience
Chill (iamchill.co) is a textless and voiceless messaging app that lets you communicate by sending icons and hashtags in a certain context where icons define the context and hashtags make the details clear.

For instance:

- #thanksgiving

- #traffic

Which would mean:

"Honey, it's Thanksgiving. The family is here already. Where are you?"

"On my way. Bad traffic"

We made a restriction of 10 symbols so that you get a quick and short answer and don't sound rude when answering in one word (#busy)
If you're not already familiar, you might be interested in the Long Now. "The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide a counterpoint to today's accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years."

http://longnow.org/
You make a good point, but see countless Dilbert cartoons about the futility of trying to persuade your boss that what he wants is stupid.
Well, I'll say that I appreciate the effort on Zuck's part, but somehow I still can't make myself like the guy :\

Oh well, I guess I don't have to like him to appreciate that kind of cash going into worthy causes.
> I think jpmattia was joking.

Guilty as charged, your honor.

> But it's fascinating how, when someone mistakenly thinks that it's a new proposed rule and tries to apply it, they frequently come up with an awkward overcorrection

I'd note that there is a great deal of verbiage about grammar rules requiring rewrite to allow singular they . For example: A foreign speaker would be well within bounds to look at the first google hit for "define are" [1] :

are1
är,ər/
2nd person singular present and 1st, 2nd, 3rd person plural present of be.

Google should note that "are" is also 3rd person singular present, consistent with 500 years of usage. But we also have to point out that singular "are" is disallowed in cases other than they, and we can't even add a gender-specific conjugation, since the neuter "it" is still not paired with "are".

Fortunately, rules in language are not subject to mathematical rigor, and people and authors and poets (and smartasses) are given free license to use language in any way that facilitates communication.
DEX has a 65K methods number limit, that's probably why they keep all the code inside the least amount of functions, resulting in that monstrosity.
It actually is in my opinion. If the top, elite research institutes show these kind of problem, then we can expect it to be very prevalent in the rest of the field as well. As in, this isn't some no name low tier school run by mediocre people.
If you have any questions for the author, he's present over in the /r/rust thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/3uwtz6/using_wayland_...
You're becoming too clouded in fuzzy ideals and missing the ugly reality that there is no virtuous public and democratic society, but the state. You say we must rely on the judgment and values of a few wealthy, but then completely ignore the whole landmine of public choice. Not that "having to rely on a few rich people" is even true.
I feel only on HN and Reddit can people find reason to criticize a guy who is giving away billions of dollars for humanity. Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees.
I used to use offlineimap. Now I use isync. Much more efficient and simple.

I also recommend an indexer like notmuch or mu to gain Gmail-like search and agenda capabilities.
> The first thing you need to do is realize that grammatical gender has nothing to do with actual gender or lack thereof.

And, more fully, realize that none of these four things are different axis of variation: grammatical gender, biological sex, socially-ascribed gender, personal gender identity.

Most importantly, the first two things are different kinds of things from each other and the last two things (the last two are closely related, and there is very good reason to try to align them; alignment between grammatical gender and gender identity can be important instrumentally to that goal, however, especially in contexts where there is an established expectation of alignment between socially-ascribed gender and grammatical gender, since then a divergence between gender identity and grammatical gender used communicates and reinforces the divergence between ascribed gender and gender identity.)
Mark has set some ambitious goals regarding poverty, disease, nutrition, and equality, and connectivity. I hope for all of our sake that he is successful in realigning many of the perverse short-term incentives through his and his Priscilla's generous contributions and efforts.

I wish he had spoken more about luck and balance. This is something that Bill & Melinda Gates, as well as Warren Buffet do very well. Understanding luck and balance is the key to empathy, which is also a phrase that is missing from this letter.

I also wish he had not marketed this press release as a letter to his daughter. Perhaps he has another, private letter that is actually more relevant and personal, but if I were Max, I probably wouldn't be thrilled to read this 20 years down the road.

But I'm sure he had a reason to release this letter as he did, and that he thought for a long, hard time before penning these words. Best of luck to the new father, mother, and daughter.
"Begs the question" is now commonly used in that way. This comment does not really contribute to the discussion. It feels like a "Well-actually" from Recurse Center's social rules.
That's fair, but if you notice a great deal of the letter is simply telling the child about the great achievements and dreams of the parents - if there's one thing I've learned the hard way, it's that dreams are easy to put into words and fuckin' hell on wheels to make reality. Philanthropy is a good social construct, for sure. I guess maybe I just have some inherent bias against preaching from atop the mountain of wealth inequality, a position that was obtained through a combination of luck and timing as much as any pure personal willpower and genius.
Is it possible in the US to take both names after marriage?

If so, I'm disappointed that Mark didn't choose to be Zuckerberg-Chan.
They're great! But they're great in spite of Flash's limitations, not because Flash is a great tool for animators. Adam Phillips' built-for-Flash examples are also fairly old.

A bunch of basic tooling present in other animation systems, like virtual cameras, motion blur & particle effects are missing.
Gutmann's paper talks about a time when you didn't know what drive controller was used, and so he created a set of patterns to be used for each pattern. That comes to (about) 35 different patterns.

This gets misunderstood as "you need to do 35 passes of these patterns". You don't, Gutmann recommends a couple of overwrites of random data, and a single overwrite of zeros is probably enough.
I think the parent put regional in double quotes for a reason, he/she just meant to say that it was more popular in certain part of the world than other and it's 100% right: It used to have 100 million users and was #1 in 11 countries[1]. Back in 2003 this is quite impressive!

Bashing on 'iOS users from the bay area' makes no sense, the parent also implies in his post that he is from Europe.

And as a non-iOS user, not from the bay area, I have rarely see people using WhatsApp, neither in Europe, nor in the US. The only few people I've seen using it is foreigners who want to stay in contact with relatives/friends in an country where WhatsApp is popular.

[1]http://news.microsoft.com/2003/05/12/100-million-customers-a...
Ask HN: Social Network for Geeks?
Would you be interested in an invite only social network for Geeks?

If so, would it be to find others with similar interests, to share things you've made, find news other geeks find interesting, or something else?

Are there any networks you currently use that already meet those needs?
The "Notes" app in the sidebar.
I think Zuck is still power hungry, he's just more veiled about it. Everyone with enough power (through money) wants to shape the world in their specific ideal.
> "Singular they" still normally pairs with plural forms of other words

I'd point out those "plural forms" are now "singular forms" as well, so it looks like those terms will need refining.
I have a somewhat formal process for this, which I teach to developers I'm mentoring:

First, you build a feature for the requirements you know you have, with support (possibly stubs) for the requirements you know you're going to have in the next version.

When it's time to implement the second version, you refactor as-needed to support the new requirements you have, with support for the requirements you know you're going to have in the third version.

Do the same refactoring and support approach when you implement the third version.

By the time you get to the fourth version, you'll generally find that you've already built all of the extensibility you're going to need, and you'll just be using that rather than refactoring anything.

I like this process because minimal effort is put into implementing any requirements you don't need yet, while taking into account future requirements you know about so that you don't build something that makes the future requirements very difficult to implement.
MineCraft is uses an engine that's flexible enough to accomodate this kind of use. It's both moddable and very flexible. Even if the game supports mods, you usually can't affect the geometry in a wide reaching way like you can with Minecraft.
Agreed, but it should be something you can change or opt out of if it is needed.

There's a difference between limiting and requiring approval for a dangerous but often useful activity and outlawing it entirely.
Power Ship Arrives in Ghana to Help End Blackouts
Nightmares Pyrex Ft. Exstendo Prod. Detrakz
Do you think they're intentionally blacklisting the +, or are they just writing sloppy validation/regexes that aren't up to the spec?
The CEO Paying Everyone $70,000 Is Full of Shit
That would leave him with $450 million left over.

Four hundred. And fifty. Million.
Awesome. Now we need a satire of e NYT that doesn't involve Hayden Christensen.
> To me, his mistake was in attempting to provide government-proof email without taking the time to build the expertise required to do so.

It is very hard to find someone who knows what he does not know. Much more capable people than Levinson have been bitten by that particular failure.

> There (are) experts trying to deliver the same systems, but securely; they get drowned out because their UX isn't as smooth as that of Lavabit's --- which took full advantage of the UX benefits of total insecurity to get more users.

Agreed. Conclusion: user experience counts. What I wonder is why those experts in crypto can't get their act together and deliver a user experience that's at least good enough not to get in the way of acceptance. Wherever there is a conflict between 'good crypto' and 'user experience' the crypto wins out in one product and the user experience wins out in another. Users overwhelmingly choose the packages with the good user experience and the bad crypto.

This may not be fixable in the case of conflicts but for many of the issues they may in fact be simply a matter of attention to detail, after all if the effort can be expended to make good crypto then a similar effort should go into the user experience since in the eyes of the users both are important. Delivering great crypto in an impractical package is a non-contribution.

That is going to be an uphill battle if the past is anything to go by.
China Set to Open First Military Outpost in Africa
Similar (I think) techniques were once used by Skype[1]. I wonder how much they've changed in the past few years.

1. https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-europe-06/bh-eu-06...
Let's not get caught up in definitions. I called it snark because it was sarcastically dismissive. We can use a different term if you prefer.

Snark varies mostly by commenter, not by topic, which implies that people do it for personal reasons (e.g. how they're feeling, or habit) and also that it's off-topic, even when the point you're trying to make is not, as with your comment above. It has two bad consequences for HN: it degrades the channel by adding noise, and it acidifies the culture, making it hostile to new work and new ideas. Those are the things we care about.

Many HN users, including me, have gone through the process of figuring this out in our own case and learning to mostly edit the snark (or bile, or dimissiveness) out of our comments. Perhaps you would be willing to do this if you realized what HN is trying to optimize for, which is curiosity—not any of the things you've listed here. I wouldn't want to participate in those either.

Once one realizes that snark is optimizing for a personal discharge at the expense of the community and quality of the site, it becomes fair to edit it out of one's comments, for the same reason one doesn't litter.
Samsung Launches Optimized Web Browser for Gear VR
One difference is that billionaires (at least the Buffett / Gates crowd) seem to put a lot more of their donations toward projects in foreign countries than the government would. Since the vast majority of people living in bad situations in the world are not Americans, I think it's very plausible that they're doing more good with the money than we would get from taxing it.
>I've given my technical criticism. LuaJIT + it's ffi module by themselves do a better job than this poor excuse for software

The "LuaJIT + it's ffi module by themselves do a better job" part is the opinion/criticism (even without specifics given). And it would be OK and not lead to down-votes by itself. The "poor excuse for software" that follows it, though, would.

>What arguments can you make besides saying I'm a big doo doo head?

A lot of them.

First of all, LuaJIT is not statically typed. Terra is.

Second, it's not meant to be used instead of Lua/LuaJIT but instead of C. For people not wanting to mess with C, Terra can be used as a high level alternative.

Third, yes, there are others in that space. But by that logic, we should stop designing new languages, because there's something else in any niche anyway.

You seem hellbent of comparing it to using Lua. I don't care for Lua, but I wouldn't mind a new high level C/C++ like language. The fact that it's written in Lua is an irrelevant implementation detail (though it does help it get a good interoperability story with Lua. But even for someone NOT caring for Lua, a high level statically typed language such as Terra can be very interesting.

Especially people who don't give a dead rats arse about ffi and going through the the trouble of extensions in C just to consume them in Lua. With Terra they can still do that IF they want, but they can just write in its own language and get C performance.

Then there's the whole language features and design thing, that Terra does differently to Lua and C and C++, and which might fit some better than others. You haven't made one argument against that.

That you prefer Lua, or that you can do the same things with Lua+ffi are not technical arguments. One could do the same thing in assembler or C too, so?

>I do think the creator(s) of the language are idiots.

That just reflects badly on you though.