skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If journals ever demand code that reviewers can read (as they should IMO; who knows whether hard to read garbage is actually doing what they claim it is in the methods section, and the call for reproducibility in science is getting stronger), then academics might be forced to learn to code. And then they might want to use a programming language that's more conducive to readable code.

I don't think MATLAB toolboxes are a huge obstacle. Maybe something like the Aerospace Toolbox is useful for people in aerospace. But for people in my field (neuroscience), people end up writing their own code for their various applications anyway, because the MATLAB toolboxes are too slow or too inflexible for their use cases. The source of inertia is that everyone uses MATLAB, so they end up writing the code in MATLAB. While it takes time to overcome an established userbase, I think it will happen eventually if the alternatives have substantial technical advantages, as I believe Julia does. It only takes a handful of technically skilled people to reproduce the majority of the code in common use, and if there are good reasons for those people to write that code in Julia and for others to use that Julia code, then Julia will eventually take over.
Eric Scott Raymond, a very bright and often abrasive person.

Wrote Cathedral and the Bazaar, and was responsible for a lot of the realpolitik and branding that got Open Source to where it is today.

Had varying amounts of a hand in gpsd, ncurses, reposturgeon, and various other tools people actually use.

The big problem is that his worldview is exceptionally conservative culture war while at the same time being fairly social liberal. If something isn't productive to expanding Western Civilization (by his definition), for whatever reason, it must go. This includes Islam, this includes a lot of SJW theory, this includes homosexuals (not out of malice, but because they by definition can't make more population), and so forth.

He's quite interesting to read, and he makes very interesting points--unfortunately, if you have a visceral reaction to his politics it is quite hard to bear him.

He also has an annoying habit of claiming expertise and skills that aren't quite there, such as forensic critique of a police shooting.

"Interesting insufferable intellectual independent" would be my classification of him.
So the jury was 6/12=50% white, 3/12=25% Latino, 2/12=17% Black and 1/12=8% Asian.

The US racial demographics are White: 64%, Hispanic: 16%, Black: 12%, Asian: 5% [1]

Looks like Blacks and Latinos were overrepresented on that jury.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...
I don't disagree with the point "that won't work". I just don't think what he proposes will work either.
If your not interested in a sensible justice system, I guess it is irrelevant.
I don't think a competent employer would make that leap in logic.

And I'm not sure about families of killers getting death threats. In America, we have a pretty solid understanding of individuals, and individual's actions. Society generally just wants to move beyond the incident and somehow better ourselves. I'm not sure where you're getting that idea.
Inventions can be made through state grants (a lot of innovation is already funded by state grants like NIH). Who told you rich people finance innovation?

A society that demonizes its poorest is a doomed one.
How to teach programming to computer illiterate people?
I was wondering if there are any materials or ideas on how to teach programming to computer illiterate people. The idea is to introduce them to the market.

- Where do I start explaining things?
- What language to teach?
- Are there good books/articles on "programming pedagogy"?
- What else should I be asking?

Thanks!
Show HN: Demo of Wiki and Forum coded in C under 80k
I posted this on a different thread. I think it is tax avoidance.

One way to look at this is that Zuckerberg just robbed the treasury of $45B. Part of that would have come in through capital gains taxes and the rest through the estate tax.

What they do with that money is up to them, not the state. It's a pretty sweeping end run around the taxation system.

Maybe we'll get lucky and he'll use the money to good end like Gates is doing. And maybe not.

This is a heck of a tax code we've got, it's trickle down on a grand scale.

reply
> I really dislike the idea that programming languages have "commands"

I guess you would really hate tcl, then. Everything is a command.
I'll upload the source code tomorrow...

Edit: Its also running on my 4mb flash openwrt router, and has NO dependencies
2. Raising the barrier of entry will disincentivize most people from doing it.

I've had close friends try to show me crappy recordings of live music shows on their mobile phone. No thank you, next time send an invite so I can see it live.

3. Audience interaction is probably a lot more difficult when every numbskull with a smartphone is simultaneously trying to record the show.

Short story, enjoy the damn show and stop trying to rebroadcast crap quality copies of the real thing.

I recently had the privilege of seeing Bill Burr live at a crappy little venue. The show was even better than I imagined, with tons of new material.

10/10 I'd pony up the cash to see him next time he's in town.
I use this too. I open and close terminals a lot so I created a special tag for tasks that I want to "prompt myself about" and these are printed concisely at the top of every new interactive shell.

I need to take the time to try the newest web interface tools and check out the json output. My major issues with taskwarrior have been with having native clients on other platforms. Taskwarrior is lightning fast on my desktop and laptop... It's speed and ease of use are why I love using it. But the quality of the various third party sync, web UI, and native app integration opportunities has left me let down.

Unfortunately all of this stems from a lack of a definition of what a task actually is. At some level we could have a standard like CalDAV. But CalDAV embeds the tasks in other junk, and a separate TaskDAV is not likely as long as the tasks as calendar item paradigm solves 80% of people's task related needs.
Depends, what is your definition of "worked". Mercantalism was actually successful in many ways.
Isn't he still a signifigant shareholder?
lol if it took them 8 months to fork bootstap a little bit their developers must be as talented as the writers
Aspose.Newsletter December 2015: Special Holidays Offers on Aspose.Total and More
I've given some thought to having no internet at home. I cut the cord on cable TV several years ago.
He had a point about the iPhone though - iPhone sales rose quite a bit after it got subsidized pricing which was way lesser than the original price of $500 subsidized that Ballmer was objecting to.
You'll be surprised by the background of many computer security people. It's a varied field consisting of people with all kinds of backgrounds.
Any plans to toss it on GitHub?
Wait a second. Mark did not steal his money. It is his money. Hence, he does what he likes with it. If you believe the estate tax department should have his money, let them set up a Facebook project. What is stopping them from creating similar value? Are they really waiting until someone else does it, to leech from him?
I bought Hack n Slash because it was supposed to be some hackable, easily moddable adventure game, but it was terrible. To my knowledge, no one really modded it either. The in-game condition statement crystals were way more confusing than any if or for statement. Kind of left a bad taste in my mouth. Their latest games haven't been very good IMHO. Hope they don't destroy Psychonauts.
Wat?

What's the point of going to a live show if you're just going to watch/listen to it from a device.

Live a little, enjoy the moment. Put down your phone, the twittersphere will go on without you. Or stay home and make more room for those of us that show up for the performance rather than the social cred (ie bragging rights) of going to a show.
Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10664998
Rome? It's the Roman times, alright, but it's by Lucian who was an Assyrian / Greek author (the Mark Twain of his day).

(He was born in the area of the so-called "hellenistic kingdoms", where Greek culture had been established for several centuries after Alexander).
There's no way to know; only time will tell. He either genuinely wants to maximize his charitable contribution to the world, or he just wants to avoid capital gains and estate taxes, and the smart choice of action (that which he has taken) is the same in either case.
Give me the stats on where lethal force is used on an unarmed citizen and a wrongful death/manslaughter conviction is levied against an officer.
I don't see that happening ever. It's not just that computers are the core of their business identity/culture, but there is too much cross culture of hardware ideas for them to want to ditch it. They're free to try some new widget idea in a MacBook then refine it if it works before adding it to the phone or scrap it if it's flawed without having millions of iPhone users get upset about it. Most of the other handset makers don't have this to test with.
You believe the government had no hand in the success Facebook has had?
Man, is anyone else seriously bummed out by how cynically everyone is viewing this announcement?

There's a rich guy who founded an organization, ostensibly with the hopes of doing something good with all that money that he owns. Maybe the organization doesn't go anywhere, or maybe he winds up paying less in taxes. Can't we all hope for the other side of the coin -- that he does wind up doing good for the world? Why not wait and see?
I definitely need a tooling ecosystem, so I'll be waiting for good integration between IDEs and LLVM for Swift. Maybe Atom or VSCode will get there soon. For libraries, when I really need something, I'll wrap it myself using C FFI. It is very easy to pass C structs by value or reference between Julia and C. Go is not bad either and does a lot of static checking for me. Swift sounds like for value types it should be easy. Java is super painful with the marshalling back and forth.
Nope, exceptions get their own subclass. Babies would be baby-humans, the mentally ill would be - well you get the idea. These classes are actually a predictable reality given an accurate definition of "human being", a component of the whole. Imagine a dependency graph, with the edge cases as leaf nodes. So the definition of human isn't related to a single entity, or the averaging of the qualities of the entire population - it is related to the attributes that give rise to the entire structure - seed values. Again, this has nothing to do with time, so "give rise to" is more like a logical conclusion than a sequence of events.
Causality is something that you prove in repeatable experiments. Where are the repeatable experiments backing your claim?
> Mark did not steal his money

If theft is defined solely by law, then you are correct.

> creating similar value

Facebook does not create value, it merely captures it. I suspect you subscribe to a simplistic economic ideology that does not even recognize the existence of a create vs capture distinction.
It seems that this time around fig is taking unaccredited investments, which is interesting.

Double Fine is hit and miss, but at least they are trying to be original, and they have a good reputation in a pretty shady industry. I'll support them.
Doesn't this make the code more difficult to work with, sine these characters require uncommon sequences of keystrokes?

Single character Greek variables don't seem better than single character ASCII for readability.
I don't understand. This is how the tax code works. If you give the money away to charity the Government doesn't take income tax on it. That is a law that was passed. The whole point is to get people to give money to charities because that's a good thing.
your argument is seriously that state revenue services should stop collecting taxes and do a startup instead..?
Elm's reactive model is best suited to UI's in my opinion. There's no good way to limit the data coming at you in a push-only model, so if you can't keep up with the incoming data flow bad things happen. On the UI this case usually isnt encountered, but on the server one needs mechanisms to deal with this
Excited to see the code. C isn't known for being great for writing high level applications like this, so I'm really curious what the source looks like. Especially since it has no dependencies!
Microsoft now employs 118,584 people with many of them working in research laboratories. Had Gates pursued academia he could have at best accomplished a fraction of what he has.
>two men of color make it to the jury, and I am one of them. The other is Latino.

Perhaps you need to read this again
Better a 5% chance it does good than a 100% chance it's squandered on bureaucracy and inefficient solutions to problems other tax dollars went to creating.
I think whatever good deed a person do, people like author, will be able to turn it upside down and make it look like a crime. That's just the way they like to see the world.
How about we collectively make it socially acceptable to punch people who hold up their phone blocking the view in the back of the head.

Just because you can doesn't mean you should...
There were two men of color, one black and one latino. All the other people of color were women.
That is one truly crazy argument.

You seem to be suggesting there should be no taxes. After all, "it's your money" Quite how government then functions is beyond me, but I'm sure there's some libertarian argument I'm missing here.

I am sure you will disagree though, seeing as you think taxes are "leeching" people's money. I suppose on ethical grounds you don't take advantage of any government services of any kind.
I don't think a sizeable portion of the population that has access to the internet will ever choose to go back.

TV and Internet are very different animals. How many school projects nowadays require kids to go home, turn on their TV and research a topic on HGTV?
Perhaps the author's city's racial composition is very different from that of US's national average, hence his implicit complaint.

Since the author wrote anonymously (and understandably so), there's no way for us to know either way.
Here it is.
http://twitter.github.io/labella.js/with_text.html
> Why not wait and see?

In other headlines[1], Chick-fil-A switches to antibiotic-free chicken!! Yay, good feelings for Chick-fil-A!! (Fine print - still serving chicken chock full of antibiotics through 2019.)

Instead of honoring people and corporations today for ostensibly, possibly, maybe doing something good in the distant future, let's hold the adoration until the time that they actually do it.

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/11/health/chick-fil-a-chicken-ant...
Time-lapse of the disassembly of an entire U-2 plane
Sure, you woke up and didn't kill yourself. As did most every human being that has ever existed, because humans don't do that outside of very strange circumstances that are out of their control.
That's kind of the point, though: there haven't been any 'good deeds'. Two things have happened so far. One is that an entrepreneur has formed an LLC. The other is he has invited charities to begin sucking up. Both of these things happen all the time. If anything, the fact that anyone has paid him any attention is a sign of optimism, because he certainly hasn't actually done anything with this plan yet.
I translated a piano score from Haydn using Alda a while back:

https://github.com/mwhuang2/Haydn

Nice to see new features being added. I might do some more pieces in the future.
The thing is, I think people are starting to see through Mark to his real motivations. The "baby announcement" was clearly written by a PR firm. It just doesn't feel genuine.

I want to believe but this does really look like a PR move / "power fund".

Here is what genuine sounds like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wug9n5Atk8c

Seriously, after watching that (jump to 3:30 to skip the Stanford rah rah stuff). It is hard to believe that Gates is not all-in on making the world better with this foundation.
Lessons from the Core Engine Architecture of Bungie's "Destiny"
If it were are tax avoidance scheme, Mr.Zukerberg would have been well served if it was all kept silent from public. For all his flaws, Mr.Zukerberg seems to be a guy who cares, and he will have my benefit of doubt until proven other wise. The vitriolic reaction to his announcement is uncalled for.
Four factors:

0. Intelligence is hard to "measure;" and even informally, there are mostly inferred attribute from a subject's performance filtered through the viewer's (fallible/biased) perception.

1. There's many domains of intelligence:

- critical thinking (i.e., lawyers)
- fact memory
- abstract thinking
- spatial
- problem solving
- social
- political
- emotional

... and far too many others to list.

2. Biases - upbringing, environment, experiences and so on tend to influence a person's preferences and beliefs, and they may be expressing what it is their social group expects or how they view themselves.

3. I'm sure there is at least one belief each of us clings to that others find wacky. Sometimes person don't pick up that a certain view is social unacceptable. Examples:

- The guy in Starbucks with backpack supporting "the missile men of gaza"... de-facto endorsement of terrorism.
- I happen to be vegetarian (not driving around with "meat is murder" and slaughterhouse shame pictures)... a lot of people are offended by that and heap on certain biases.
- People struggling to survive, yet don't support unions, basic income or higher taxes on large trusts and estates, and are still libertarian "completely unregulated market" types.
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg
> The letter is a significant addition to the literature of comparative American victimhood: “Can we truly empower everyone — women, children, underrepresented minorities, immigrants and the unconnected?”

Expect FWD.us and similar outfits to be showered with cash.
Hephaestus has robot servants in The Iliad. And self-driving cars. (kind of)
No more bummed out than by the negativity from the peanut gallery about internet.org.
Juries are composed of 12 people. Saying there are discrepancies between the jury pool and the US of less than 8 percentage points is somewhat silly -- making even the smallest change would not reduce the size of those errors.
The answer is that the government needs to run it in the same way they run the roads and the sewerage, as a tax funded service.
Of course, it's been just a couple of days, what did you expect him to achieve?
First, shootings that happened over four years ago are recent?

Second, in at least one case, the weapons were stolen from a parent--so, really, that is kinda a dishonest data point if you're trying to argue for legal acquisition of firearms.

Third, funny how a good chunk of the shooters here were all veterans.

Fourth, and most distressingly: this sort of article really fearmongers about people who have mental illness. In fact, it tends to inch in the direction of saying "Hey, if you see a shrink, for whatever reason, you should be required to forfeit your right to bear arms".

This last point is the worst, least of all because it's pretty trivial to abuse.
Sequoia's Moritz: Looking for Women to Be Partners
I am not sure how you would read that from my comment. But to answer your question, no they are still technically human.

But also I do not feel inclined or obligated to afford a terrorist a courtesy of understanding their motivation or point of view or grow my mindfulness. Murder is evil, terrorists are evil - is there more to understand in anyway other than purely academic?

One is naive to believe understanding the human condition of a murderer by getting to know their family or understanding them pre-radicalized will bring change or make an impact or stop the next one. No offense but in my opinion this is philosophical gibberish.
Trompe (a water-powered gas compressor)
> Man, is anyone else seriously bummed out by how cynically everyone is viewing this announcement?

He's making a big deal to get a lot of publicity out of it. With that alone it's not being done just out of the goodness of his heart.
This guy seems like a terrible, terrible juror. Bragging about violating the rules, annoyed because the judge is called "your honor", implying that a jury with 6/12 people white is somehow a sign of massive racial bias?

What is supposed to be redeeming about this article? I'm not reading it all unless there's something somebody says is worth reading.

EDIT: It gets more readable in the jury section, but I still don't get what if anything this guy is trying to say, other than simply "it's like The Breakfast Club".
204Bae: Make your own 2048 with pictures of your bae
How to add a data science search engine to your blog: solution
> Facebook does not create value, it merely captures it.

That is not up to any of us to decide. In the meanwhile, the world population has voted with its feet on exactly that subject.

Technology is a meritocracy. Seriously, nobody cares about the ideological manifest of the one or the other communist party. It is technology that runs the world and not any unproductive, imbecile political opinion. Furthermore, technology overrules politics. Time after time, with new technology we bring the political idiots to their knees, and we shall keep doing so.
Just because he was an idiot while in college doesn't mean he can't change and do something good.
Greenspun would read the worst into whatever Zuckerberg did here, as seen by him starting the post criticizing the timing of Zuckerberg's marriage.

Why not assume the best? Zuckerberg said he planned to give away 99% of his wealth to help other people. That's a good thing. Why criticize him now? If he ends up not doing it, criticize him then. If all he was doing was trying to avoid some estate taxes, he could have done that without any announcement at all, certainly drawing less scrutiny.

Scrutiny is important here, because the IRS could disallow the application of the LLC estate planning loophole here just by saying so. The 40% discount for non-management shares is an accounting judgement, not a law, and not one the IRS need accept if it believes the sole purpose is to evade taxes.
Clear your iPhone RAM quickly
Knowing Epson, the catch is probably along the lines of "requires consumable cartridges that cost as much as the machine itself".

I'm only half-joking.
He's created one of the largest and most pervasive surveillance systems on Earth--this is where the fortune comes from.
I wonder if it has no buffer overflows either. ;-)

C is definitely not known for easy and safe string processing, so I'm quite curious to see how it accomplishes that.
Wait so this article is basically him saying that the system worked?

That's the impression that I got. Even disregarding his early learnings towards high-school level leftist protest and mistrust of the government, doesn't his careful consideration of the case show the reasons why we use a jury system? Even if the 'mob' e.g. the other jurors decide that a person is guilty, one or two reasonable arguments can decide otherwise.

It seems to me that everything worked out as it should. I wouldn't feel bad if I was the author. (oh and he'll be back in court, serving a case in most states only gives you a 3-5 year reprieve from jury duty)
Has there ever been a multi-billionaire/millionaire that did the same thing?
The point is that you can justify lower taxes if you have private donations to charities instead of state funding.