skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ironic username, given the conversation topic. ;)

While yours may be a true experience: statistics. I'm not sure a personal experience poll on an entrepreneurial technology news site is the best place for a representative sample of people with low willpower. And social psych findings have born out that are a lot of easily manipulated levers to reliably influence people's behavior in an intentional way.

To me, it's not about the people with Fort Knox reserves of willpower. Say instead I'm born into the genetic/epigenetic/life lottery with a crappy ticket, what's fair? (And if you don't agree that that's possible, try volunteering at your local homeless shelter a few times)

Is it fair that everyone else gets to leverage my vices to transfer my wealth and the profits of my work to themselves? Or is there something morally not right about that scenario?

I agree it's easy to go overboard with regulation, but just because it's possible to addict babies to cocaine in utero doesn't mean that's the society we should build.
Dirty tax dodging bastards.
I've become even more skeptical of "the government needs more money, think of the children" after learning a bit more about how the sausage is made in The Box (about containerization). Subsidies and the games that go around them create a world that incents gaming the government and regulatory capture. If you think $59 billon wouldn't attract more sharks, you're really not paying attention.
Star Citizen isn't through Kickstarter, though. At this point it's through themselves.
Afghanistan: ‘A Shocking Indictment’ by Rory Stewart
You can scale an AI's power more easily.
Nothing like respecting individual rights by bringing the wrath of the criminal justice system on anyone who dares exercise their right to self-ownership by altering their state of consciousness.

The purpose of a drug policy is not to reduce consumption rates. Consumption is not intrinsically bad. My use of the dangerous and potent drug known as theobromine (translation: I eat chocolate) is not itself the problem. A higher rate of consumption of pure and unadulterated drugs with active health and rehabilitation initiatives is preferable to lower consumption but with autistically intervening in people's self-ownership through use of the police and penal apparatus, disincentivizing health treatment as a result, bringing about organized crime and making addiction more dangerous because of tainted drugs that are peddled by unreliable black marketeers.

Paternalistic and destructive nonsense through and through.

(You did say illegal, not criminalized. Latter would be more humane in being a fine, but still unacceptable.)
FP has been "mainstream" in academia for quite a while, so an academic utilizing OOP now has the effect of being "radical". also, http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ClosuresAndObjectsAreEquivalent
If I want to spend $100,000 on ephemeral virtual items in a video game that might never actually be released, that's my problem, not the government's. I'm the one that earned the money, so I'm the one that decides how to spend it. It's totally inappropriate for the government to insert itself between two informed and consenting parties.

A paternalist government is not compatible with a free society.
"governments are at best mildly supportive of technology and at worst actively hostile."

Whether or not governments should be supportive of technology, is another complex debate with intelligent and articulate contenders on both sides of the argument.

The bigger problem for Australia is the relentless anti-intellectualism that pervades the local culture.
There is always more the government can do but there are two major government assistance programs I was not aware of till I founded a startup here. https://www.austrade.gov.au/Australian/Export/Export-Grants/... will reimburse 50% of your sales and marketing costs. So you can go spend $100k on Google Adwords and get $50k back effectively meaning you can outbid all your competitors for the same keywords. https://www.ato.gov.au/Business/Research-and-development-tax... is more well known. What is less well known is that if you make a loss in the year you make the R&D claim they will credit the offset into your bank account vs carrying the offset forward to next year. I am not sure what the equivalent of these two grants is in the US but I know Singapore is even more generous with tax holidays and 500%? of R&D spend grants.
Edit - forgot to add there are R&D consultants who will even advance you a percentage of your claim amount in advance to help with cashflow so you don't have to wait 12 months to get the money back.
About 3.4 days of US government spending.
I'm curious about this advice. Does "Ask tough questions" really make engineers feel psychologically safe?

Unfortunately for the me, the reader, I have know way of knowing whether this article is signal (distilled information from an experienced manager) or noise (somebody who isn't good at their job posting opinions because they think blogging builds their online identity).
If you crash your uninsured Harley it's no different.
Object Oriented Philosophy is even worse. ;-)
Drupal's a little strange in that every major release (Drupal 5,6,7,8) is incompatible with the previous major release, so all of the contributed modules need to be rewritten or updated.

In practice, this means that if you are going to build a Drupal site, it may take several months to a year after the official release before everything's stable enough to build out a new site.

Drupal 8 should simplify things a lot, compared to Drupal 6/7, in that they are actively developing Drupal for developers who aren't Drupal developers. The question is whether that's enough to make Drupal a viable CMS/application platform going forward.
I dont need rare rocks and metals. Nobody does, except some specialists making certain technology.
Financial Backtesting: A Cautionary Tale
If governments didn't charge ridiculous taxes, Apple and millions of other businesses and individuals would bring back billions of assets.
R&D Tax Incentives are pretty much the only thing the Australian Government offers - http://www.business.gov.au/grants-and-assistance/innovation-...

Massacring the NBN and generally not giving a shit about technology really highlights how out of touch the Australian Government is with the general population. We are among the highest adoption rates for technology (smartphones etc.) worldwide and give a huge amount of money to US companies getting a hold of the latest tech.

Our government is ready to completely ream us once more by signing the TPP - despite the fact the US has clauses for things like "fair use" nothing of that nature exists in Australian law. We'll just adopt the shitty parts of US law and none of the (partially) redeeming parts.
So they are. Are you really equating them?
This is a subject in dire need of some non-partisan, fact-based reporting. This piece is not remotely close.

I'm not a tax lawyer, but as I understand the recent spate of "tax inversions," that is when a US company buys a foreign company and make the non-US entity the new HQ are much less of a dodge than is often reported.

My understanding is that the US company still pays the full US tax rate (which is the highest in the world) on all sales in the US. They then pay the prevailing tax rates in the countries in which they operate.

If they didn't have the foreign entity, they would have to pay the full US rate on sales they make in China, Spain, and South Africa—all of which have lower rates.

In that light, Apple isn't dodging taxes, rather they're just not additional taxes on sales that happen outside the US. There's still an argument that can be made that they should still pay the US, but I think it strikes people as less fair. So instead we get amorphous reports designed to stoke fear, uncertainty, and doubt with regard to these companies.

If nothing else, the reporting should be clear that the US wouldn't be getting all that money back, just the portion that exceeds the tax rate in the various countries they operate in.

Like I said, I'm no lawyer, or even accountant, but this piece is garbage from a logical perspective.
> Australia sucks at technology; rather than help make it suck less, you should
> leave your home and ensure that the U.S.A continues not to suck at
> technology.

Does it make me a cynic if I could only read this as a propaganda piece for The
Valley?
He's just a man, and has probably made considerable sacrifices to be at the pinnacle of CS research. Last year I saw him present a talk that was rather underwhelming (maybe I'm just dumb) - if that anecdote helps humanize him to you.
Very good work. I am extremely happy for you! I have no clue why some people expect this all to be either open source or free. I have personally invested a lot of money on building an adaptive learning tool (and two years of salary losses). We are not yet live, but when we are, I hope to have some revenue model as well.
There is a lot of junk in the various app stores (just as there is on the Internet generally) but the overall quality and quantity of incredible educational apps is growing- quickly.

When used effectively, we have seen students using iPads double their learning outcomes in a single school year. The issue is that the evaluation sustems are in their infancy- the review sites cited in the article are pretty useless because they rarely go more than skin deep.

My company, eSpark, evaluates and curates the best tablet apps for use in schools, and we apply rigorous review to make sure they work. I've been really impressed by how much the ecosystem has changed in the last few years and can't wait for more classrooms to catch up.
This is such a big deal, and I feel like we are so powerless against it.

If it was easy for governments to get the money owed, it would allow them to cash in votes for finally lowering taxes (in France especially...).

The fact that they did not succeed so far is proof that we need the system to evolve against these abuses. My only way of going in that direction is to scrutinize officials' campaigns and vote for the ones who want to tackle that problem, but that's so little it feels cowardly.
Fallen fruit over asphalt is a problem (if not removed) that this guys are creating, this is true. You can easily broke a leg or an arm if you step over an apple or a rotten nashi. You can have a bike accident also. What the woman of the photo is doing will be a problem in four years. (Although racoons will be probably happy to do the cleaning work for us).

Other problem is that this trees lose aesthetic value and health. This can sound silly, but good trees are expensive, and a mishappen tree that only have good flowers in the 50% and with stems that break or touch the soil by the load of the fruit in a narrow street will be chopped.

But if we think a little about it, to have fruit trees in suitable areas is common sense and an ancient culture of sharing that is lost now. Those trees were invaluable life-savers at war times in Europe, for example. The place for fruit trees is in a park, where you just don't care if there is some fruit around the tree, not in a narrow street.
Works really well for Somalia!
Pretty much what I was thinking. The article is dated 1997 and I am pretty sure I didn't see an autocomplete for nearly to a decade after that (tab completion, yes).

I love autocompletes from both a user and developer viewpoint (they stop my users entering crap, and it's significantly easier for them as well).
Didn't you hear? Coal is the future, get digging.
The key point is that as an Australian programmer living relatively close to Sydney in an area less than a decade old, I can only get 5mbps (that's megabits) internet at the best of times, this means I am almost entirely unable to work remotely and getting access to the latest software and libraries requires hours of downloading. I can't host my own test servers because my upload speeds are in the tens of Kbps and all Australian hosting providers are prohibitively expensive. It makes it very difficult to get anything productive done away from the office, where even then I have 15-20mbps peak in the middle of North Sydney.
The benefit of NBN wouldn't be for employees, it would be for potential customers. I've heard so many times from so many people "I'd love to use X but my internet is dodgy/stops working when it rains/is slow between 5 and bed time"

Where X is any number of internet reliant service
> When you're a programmer, what is the difference to your work between 10 and 100mbps, really?

There's a pretty long list actually. If you've got 10 people in a office sharing a 10mbit pipe then the internet is straight up prohibitively slow. On top of that, if your users are on slow internet then they are less likely to interact with whatever you are building, especially if it involves rich media interaction like uploading photos/videos (and upload speeds are even slower here). Then there are workflow collaboration tools like teleconferencing, dispatching of large files over networks that can take hours. It makes it harder to work remotely and adds a fairly large extra cost for small tech businesses to absorb in getting decent internet set up. And this is all going to get worse as the rest of the world speeds past us and starts creating content for gigabit internet while we are sitting here trying to get by on our promised 25megabits.
Sounds like a lot of these apps are simple games to give kids practice recognizing letters and how groups of letters work together. But I'm not sure why that's a problem--as the article says, kids have been learning to read this way since the Stone Age.

And if parents are downloading the apps, do they really need expert guidance on what age or developmental stage they're suited for? Can't they just say, "oh, we were singing the ABC song with Johnny today--let's download a couple of alphabet games and see how he likes them?"
I'd prefer if he just give his address, but in Dan's defence he does offer some pretty clear hints in his profile page: "Email is my full name @ gmail." https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=luu

His email address is also given prominently on his linked resume: https://github.com/danluu/tex-resume
(periods are optional in Gmail addresses)
With the risk of being viewed as a Turnbull apologist, re: NBN I think he's just trying his best to work with the cards he's been dealt (i.e. compromise).

It is unfortunate that the NBN was one of the key points of the campaign, we all know how it's turning out... It will probably ended up costing about the same, yet without the advantages FTTH brings.

I do hope NBN will come to my area soon (within the next 24 months?), I live about 30 mins away from the CBD, but 4G connection is patchy and I only managed to get 2.5 Mbps on `Broadband`.
Anyone care to justify the downvotes?

Or maybe better any downvoters care to justify Apple's behaviour?
I wish this article suggested ways for these apps to improve. Sure, run studies, list your curriculum, whatever, but if it's so stone-aged to just regurgitate the "correct" answer, what do modern education leaders recommend?
I'm not sure about that. A person can theoretically be scaled by adding another person to their cause, and there are a lot of people around. If the first brain in a box is simulated by a supercomputer that has only three others like it in existence, it's going to be much more difficult to scale it.

Of course, just adding another person doesn't necessarily make things go faster (mythical man-month and all that). But then again, just adding more hardware isn't going to necessarily make a brain in a box more powerful, either.
Can you explain? Did Somalia rework their tax code or something?
> have an incredibly fine tuned and skillful marketing department bent on psychological manipulation.

This.

This is not specific to games industry. In fact they are rather late bloomers and amateurish. This is consumerism. This is production driven economy (in which goods are produced and post facto demand is manufactured). This is inevitable in any market with unequal ownership of resources (that is any market system were it's possible to profit or "get ahead", i.e. all of them).

All advertising is this. Almost all marketing is this. It only varies in it's sophistication and subtleness.

I can not fathom why people watch commercials, don't ad block, read advertising based periodicals, go to shopping centers, etc. Why people willingly participate in being psychologically manipulated into beliefs, decisions, and actions.
> what is the difference to your work between 10 and 100mbps, really?

From personal experience as an Australian freelance developer who works mostly remotely, the difference is screencasts and video calls where the other party's screen is fuzzy and sometimes unreadable, with frequent call (or at least video) dropouts/stuttering, vs crystal clear clarity and no dropouts/stuttering.

It's also useful if you are dealing with clients that have medium-large datasets (> 1GB) for you to use. It's the difference between a few minutes transfer or a few hours. I've had cases where the client was local and it was faster for me to catch public transport in to the city and back to pick up a USB with the data rather than transfer it online. That's the lucky case when the client was local - good luck if they're based overseas.

I'm currently in Taiwan and have a 100mbps connection - the difference in doing these things vs doing it in Australia on a 10mbps connection is night and day.

Killing the FTTH NBN was an incredibly short sighted decision.
FYI non-Australians, I give you (former) PM of Australia, Tony Abbott:

July 17, 2015 - "For the foreseeable future coal is the foundation of prosperity"

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/17/for-tony-...

That just about sums up the amount of vision in Australian politics.
> In an age where the state of the art broadband to the home in the U.S.A. is 10 gigabits, Australia is currently building (it claims) a National Broadband Network at great expense that promises a blistering 12 to 100 megabits per second at the top end

I know it mentioned "state of the art", but the vast majority of Americans would be lucky to get 100 megabits without breaking the bank every month. Many (most?) don't even have the option of such speeds.
Actually it has. Somalia improved by almost all metrics during the period in which it did not have a state.

http://www.peterleeson.com/Better_Off_Stateless.pdf
> Celebrate effort, not just results. This is a common parenting tip but it’s applicable to team members of all ages.

What if the reverse advice (acknowledge only results, not mere effort) were given to parents and teachers instead? Then perhaps the next generation wouldn't need their managers to celebrate effort in addition to results. Edit: And why is this desirable? Because the market itself only rewards results, not effort.
Auto Delete Old Applications Deployed on Apache Marathon
Am I wrong in thinking there's a fat chance that the US govt. is funneling money to tech startups? I doubt there are grants for this stuff in Silicon Valley.

Maybe some sort of trickle down effect from the money that goes into Amazon, intel, MS & IBM.

Not sure every home in the US is getting the claimed 10gig internet pipes neither.
Dear Every Other IDE That Costs Money, Whether Costs Are Implicit (os license bundling, for example) Or Explicit (not naming names),

Please be free and open source.

Sincerely,

Anyone that has ever paid money for anything ever.
Yes, that's where things are going. The vast majority of websites out there never really needed 18-wheeler CMSs to move a small box. The vast majority of web dev shops cannot afford a full-time fully qualified ops/server admin employee. Conclusion: serverless architectures are the obvious answers for most websites and web apps. For the two or three must-be-done-in-server processes, services like AWS Lambda will do (or APIs from vendors). Turn Drupal into a PAAS with an API that any front-end CMS can use. I've already tested this hypothesis with a few small/medium sized clients (size measured in traffic and user base). It works. I had to put together a simple CMS (backbone+bootsrap) but it would be nice to see a popular CMS with themes + plugins going into this direction.
I wonder how i is that South Park did a great episode[0] on this subject of addiction to freemium games, and neither the post nor anyone in over 100 episodes mentioned this. Is South Park completely passé?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemium_Isn%27t_Free
Everyone in my family except me works for the government, and most of my friends do as well (I was born and raised in DC). Lots of them (the friends) are contractors who work from home, smoking weed all day, literally working 30 minutes per nine hours of billable time. I have friends who were hired (and paid six-figures) but not even given any work for their first year and a half. Everyone constantly talks about how easy their jobs are. My sister works in a Diblert-esque office where nobody actually knows what their role is or what specifically they are supposed to be doing. My brother got his job through nepotism.

Government lives in an alternate reality without the pressures and incentives of free market competition. Ninety-nine percent of its revenues come, at the end of the day, from people robbed at gunpoint (try not paying your taxes and then refusing to go to be locked in a cage). It doesn't operate at all similarly to how small businesses operate. And no, I don't have a better idea.

My point is that I'm all for people paying less tax because I think there's a decent probability that that's literally more beneficial than paying more. The government is like a fat pig. Giving it more food doesn't help. Giving it less (to a point) forces it to operate more efficiently.
Yup, that is the only difference between the USA and Somalia.
It's strange to me that anyone believes humans are rational and that logic can be applied to their behavior. Esp in the face of innumerable studies showing that we are exceptionally irrational. It simply is not logical.
That is a tough question. I would just stick with the popular known ones out there: smali, apktool, dex2jar, jeb, jad.
I think the original poster is trying to say that 99% of people aren't builders and don't even get to the point of geeky frustration - and I have to say I agree.

I'm an AR developer and it's been disheartening over the past 12 months to see how little people actually want to do anything other than "like" things. Even posting comments seems to be a big leap for most people.
I can't downvote, but I believe the HN sentiment is that you should contribute to the conversation or not post at all. Your post is pretty much a "+1" in a code review (not helpful).