skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll admit that it was later in the evening and has been a long week, and also that the line between being opinionated and being an opinionated jerk is sometimes thinner than it may initially seem.

However, while it's not the normal type of (technical, to the point) issue that one sees on a github project in that it deals with questions of values, intentions, and whether all product companies that FOSS projects use have an obligation to maintain similar values as those projects, it's not irrelevant. It's absolutely central to why Github hasn't responded thus far and whether they'll even pay attention to this (and arguably if they should).

But if we're lobbing attacks at one another, you don't even try to explain why it's "seriously" irrelevant. Also, the visible response I've gotten thus far from people claiming to be involved with this project has been nothing short of circlejerk. No measured consideration of what actions are being taken, no attempting to understand other people's viewpoints, nothing. Yet when I try to determine who's who and what's what, apparently that's irrelevant, even think it's always people claiming to be "involved" with dear-github who bring it up in the first place.
It's not hard to figure out how many lives are saved. Take a look at AIDS for example. 1.2M people in the US have the disease. Since AIDS is now a chronic, non-fatal illness, AIDS drugs have saved at least 1.2M lives.

And that's just one disease.
> If DRM requires a non-standard plugin, and plugins themselves become increasingly verboten

The unstated assumption here is that DRM that isn't a standard won't be built into a browser.
Interesting, didn't know.

But how about cats?
Show HN: Kixker – The social soccer news app (curated by r/soccer community)
I am a huge soccer fan, but nowadays I could rarely find the time to go from web to web to read soccer news and watch highlights.

Recently, I've found the reddit r/soccer community (~400k redditors) to be a great source for soccer news and highlights. The problem is that it's painful trying to read news and filter out game highlights on mobile devices (especially on game day).

Over the holidays, I've spent time to build the apps (Android & iOS) and this is my way to follow the latest/important soccer news.

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.talatululabs.kixker

iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id1067496083

Would love to get your feedback!
Sidekiq has a lot of attention amongst new developers, but has at least an order of magnitude less users, at least, if gem downloads are something to go by. So from my standpoint, those people deserve bugfixes, and "throw away what works just to transition to something new" isn't really a great response.

Threading vs process-based jobs is a tradeoff. Threads are not universally better.
You might be confusing democracy with anarchy: in democracy everybody has a say in anarchy no one does, bitcoin is a lot like the later and none at all like the former.
Is Github still using Resque?
Find a problem. What would you pay to have solved? Now out of that list, what do you have the skills and experience to address?
> but that gets uglier, really

is an argument. Maybe I just can't imagine how ugly it would look without "self" argument.
Thank you for explanation. At this point I almost agree with you. Well, I agree, but still can't say "oh, I love that closures boilerplate!" :)
This is another good answer to the question[0] I just posed to Steve. You're right that competition is generally good. On the other hand, it would (arguably?) be much more "Rails-y" to have a single conventional solution that works well and gets a lot of eyeballs. Neither Resque nor Sidekiq are that thing though. It has always struck me as a bit odd that Rails outsources the decision on this component, which nearly every Rails project needs. I think previously it was probably to avoid an external dependency (on Redis), but perhaps that could be reconsidered now that >5.0 has eschewed that avoidance.

Having said all that, one of the things that is most exciting to me about Elixir/Phoenix is that this sort of thing doesn't even come up, because a great and mature solution is built directly into the runtime.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10911600
if you use https://www.gyft.com/ .. you can buy gift cards to retailers and get 3% back using Bitcoin.
Fair enough, but it's a reasonable guess that any given primary email address has a paypal account associated with it. It's also not really secret, because you share that information with people to allow them to send you money.
Sometimes it's best to grow more slowly at first, build your brand, your culture, figure out your process, don't burn through mountains of cash (if you're lucky enough to have that problem) and wait for the market to come around.
Trapped below the zero bound: Consequences of crossing an economic event horizon
Thanks!

> Resque has been an example of how not to run an open source project
> for a while now. (3+ years).

Resque is the story of a gem that _everyone_ uses, yet nobody invests in. So the maintainers burn out, and burn out, and burn out. Chris, Terence, Me... trying not to do that again ;)
I rather enjoy Zandronum (http://zandronum.com/ ).

Favorite add-on campaign: Whispers of Satan (http://www.paulcorfiatis.com/wos/HTML/wos_index.htm )
As someone who's been into a CFAR workshop, I think their problem is the opposite, actually.

The article's description makes it sound complicated, but the fact is that a lot of the techniques are pretty simple when it comes down to it. And that's the problem: they're so simple that it's hard to get people to realize how useful they are. Most people will hear a description, shrug, go "makes sense I guess", and then forget all about it.

Take TAPs (Trigger-Action Plans) that are mentioned in the article. They're basically pretty much what it sounds like: plans of the form "when [trigger], then [action]". "When I see stairs, I'll take them (rather than using the elevator)". Not something that'd sound very revolutionary. But if you dig into the psychological literature, when people are instructed to set goals and use TAPs (the psych literature calls them "implementation intentions") to plan out how exactly they'll achieve those goals, people get better success rates than people who don't. (if you want a reference, google e.g. [1])

There's a bunch stuff about what makes for a good TAP and how you should use them to get the best results, but even if you include all of that, it's still not very complicated. The guidelines are stuff like "make your trigger a concrete specific thing such as 'when I see the stairs', not vague ones such as 'before dinner'". Not rocket surgery.

So here we have a simple, straightforward technique that has research support behind it - and getting people to use it is hard. It just doesn't sound exciting enough, or obviously useful enough. Heck, I too often just forget that I could use TAPs for something.

Most of their techniques are kinda like this. Simple, useful, and not terribly exciting by themselves.

So - I don't know if this is their explicit motivation for having a three-day workshop, but I think that this is a big part of the reason why the format works - instead of trying to make the individual techniques exciting, they instead throw everything and the kitchen sink at you within a short time period. Rather than relying on any single one of them making you go "wow", they rely on the sheer amount of them to make you go "wow" - and then, hopefully, actually adopt at least some of them. As well as to internalize the mode of thought that lets you come up with your own.

It seems to work okay.

[1] Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta‐analysis of effects and processes. Advances in experimental social psychology, 38, 69-119.
Geez.

The comment I responded to said anyone who has problems with GitHub always has a local copy of the repo. I'm participating in a discussion about the problems with GitHub in the abstract. I'm not trying to change the minds of the Python community, and I'm not even complaining about their choice. Nothing I wrote past the opening sentence was specific to this particular decision or community, and I have no dog in the fight either way. That was the entire point of prefacing my comment with that disclaimer.

Why has the level of discussion on HN turned to such a nasty one lately?

> their end-user in this model is [...] the core developer who is going to have a (hopefully) easier time reviewing changes

The point is, anyone who decides to go the GitHub-only route is going to have a worse time reviewing changes of those who choose to stay away from GitHub for similar reasons for choosing to stay away from something like Facebook—because those contributors either won't embark on making those changes to begin with, or will be unable to send them in after the fact.
Somewhat related, drinking methanol (wood alcohol) can make you blind or kill you. More information in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol#Toxicity

Layman translation: Methanol is transformed into Formate, that is another substance. Formate mess with the functions of the mitochondria, that are the parts of the cells that use the oxygen. So each cell dies like it would die if you can't breath oxygen.

(I suppose that the neurons are more sensible, and the visual problems are easier to spot, so one of the first symptoms of Methanol poisoning is blindness.)
Well, the beauty is that you only have to do it once. Nobody that receives a cover letter from you is likely to see another one you ever send out, so it's okay if they have some of the same content.

I personally keep each cover letter I write in a Google doc. When I have to whip up a new one I just go back and find some useful bits that apply to the position I'm interested in. That gets the ball rolling enough that the last 15% is easy to get through.

I only have so many skills I want to highlight in a cover letter, so having 10-15 sentences already laying around to cherry pick from gets me 80% of the way there on new letters.
It seems like only allowing a zero-dollar invoice after two parties have conducted another non-zero legitimate transaction might be a solution.
Numbers that fool the Fermat test are called Carmichael numbers, and little is known about them other than that they are extremely rare. There are 255 Carmichael numbers below 100,000,000. The smallest few are 561, 1105, 1729, 2465, 2821, and 6601. In testing primality of very large numbers chosen at random, the chance of stumbling upon a value that fools the Fermat test is less than the chance that cosmic radiation will cause the computer to make an error in carrying out a ``correct'' algorithm. Considering an algorithm to be inadequate for the first reason but not for the second illustrates the difference between mathematics and engineering. -- SICP

https://github.com/ikr/sicp/blob/master/exercises/chapter_1/...
Newer Rails has ActiveJob: https://github.com/rails/rails/tree/master/activejob
I mistook this for being about John Carmack on first pass, and was both extremely excited and extremely confused.

Having corrected this, I am still moderately excited and slightly confused.
I only use it to transfer money between myself and friends. The most time I've ever had to wait to get money from venmo to bank is 24 hours.

the longest I've had to wait from Paypal is 24 DAYS
In all the years of gaming and "internet"-ing since then, there is something intangible about the experience BBS systems and these types of games provided that hasn't been achieved since. I know some of it must be simply rosy-goggled nostalgia, but I can't shake the feeling that there is something material that made the BBS experience awesome that didn't quite translate over to the "internet" as we know it today. I remember that BSSs used to have "picnics" and stuff where everyone met up in real life (I couldn't go because I was too young, but I still appreciated the sense of community that grew around those.)

There was a sort of "liminal" phase of the internet that I've never seen anyone even mention in these types of articles, as well: the "Freenet" era ( http://cfn.tangledhelix.com/history.html ). It was sort of halfway between local BBS and WWW. I wonder if the emergence of the Physical Web or the like might bring about a resurgence of some of this "local"-ness the web lost as it outgrew its origins.
I've been looking for something similar for C++ for a while now, after getting fed up with yet another prototype like

bool OpenFile( const std::string& path, File& f, std::string& err )

or similar, you get the point. At the moment I'm using a class like llvm's ErroOr<T> [1] and I'm loving it so far. The aformentioned function would be written as

ErrorOr<File> OpenFile( const std::string& path )

and contain an std::error_code if opening failed, or else a File instance.

[1] http://www.llvm.org/docs/doxygen/html/classllvm_1_1ErrorOr.h...
Official news from YC will show up on the blog. Announcements about and from our organization. We also put launches of new YC companies on the blog.

We won't be breaking any news on The Macro. The Macro's content is not meant to be time sensitive at all and we want it to incorporate lots of voices from the YC / startup universe.

Sam's post could have been put on The Macro, but I think he just wanted to get the ideas out there quickly since we're just starting a new batch and everyone has goal setting on their minds right now.
I've been writing C on and off for 27 years or so and I still enjoyed this book from the list on your stackoverflow link:

21st Century C - Ben Klemens
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1449327141/?tag=stackoverfl08-20

You asked about "Modern C" and that caught my eye. Most instructional resources on C focus on facts about C without putting them into perspective as to which C era they belong to. "21st Century C" takes an explicitly modern perspective, is opinionated as to which aspects of C you can postpone or ignore, and provides updates for people (like me) who have mostly been familiar with K&R or C89. I found it a really fun read and would definitely recommend it as #1 for your question about "Modern C".

As to if you should learn C, I am super opinionated but I think C still has a lot of value, even for someone who doesn't describe themselves as "full-stack". The reasons are obvious: the kernel is written in C, libc is written in C, the webserver serving your web application is almost definitely written in C, but if it isn't, the compiler that compiles the language it is written in is almost definitely written in C (hats off to Golang for getting off their C compiler). Despite its flaws, I love C.
Urban Death Project Aims to Rebuild Our Soil by Composting Corpses
I have low vision. This makes me different from many people as I learned to navigate the world in a different way. My mental models are different, my perception is different. I am a different human being.

I would swap my eyes for good ones in a second. Shut up and take my money!!!
Of course LORD, but anyone here played Usurper? That sure was a dark game as a little kid!
Think there is a difference between defective and broken.

I under clocked a CPU for a while and that worked, but that does not mean I wanted to buy a slower CPU. I can see an adult choosing to stay deaf. But, not curing a deaf child is a far more tricky question.
In my opinion, Resque so far failed because like a lot of OSS projects (and unlike Sidekiq), it isn't built on sustainable economical grounds - from the maintainer POV.

Bringing outside "funding" can work for a while (see JRuby), but when the funding stops, it only underlines that the financial engine should really be carefully "designed" at the core of the OSS project, for things to be maintainable on the very long run. Otherwise history is bound to repeat itself.

Large projects can enjoy a large pool of contributors, sometimes with less risks of burn-out (often seen on small OSS projects around me at least), each contributing marginally, with a few paid core members (either directly or indirectly via by-products of a well paid activity), but for smaller projects like Resque, it's more likely a single individual full-time, paid by the project.

Again Sidekiq is really a great inspiration here for me (disclaimer: I plan to launch a "pro" offering for an OSS project I manage at http://kiba-etl.org/, and maintained another open-source for a while before which ultimately went to the cesspit).
Why should my taxes subsidize the open source toolkits of closed source projects? Unless you're talking about taxing only software startups, I don't want them getting a handout.
The viability of this service is inversely proportional to income equality.
While probably a biased blog, folks might find it interesting to read Julian Seward's (valgrind's maintainer) thoughts after experimenting with drmemory;

https://blog.mozilla.org/jseward/2015/10/05/dr-memory-a-memo...
Yes, but it makes containers pretty heavyweight. XML config files and so on.
In a world where "Color" received $41M in VC funding, I'd argue that solving worthless non-problems has no bearing on cashing out.

In a world where people like Dixon advocate having ideas that "look stupid"[1], it's no surprise that even the ones who don't want to cash out but genuinely want to build something useful follow the stupid path.

Because, let's face it, for any startup with VC money plans, the primary goal is not building a good product, but convincing VCs they're building a good product. The appearance of a good product is more important than the reality of a good product.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/the-secret-is-to-have-a-stupi...
They are as far as I know, though they've been on a fork for a while, due to https://github.com/resque/resque/issues/552

One employee has mentioned that they're willing to work on it: https://github.com/resque/resque/issues/1372#issuecomment-17...
It's really hard on a track pad. I lasted 3 second on 10 attempts.
Ethan Kurzweil at Bessemer and Puneet Agarwal at True both have done NPMs seed and A rounds:
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/npm#/entity. I've never met Puneet but I know Ethan has a thesis regarding platforms/developer driven projects.
I guess this is it: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2013/09/teach-dont-tell/ ?
I find it somehow hard to believe that it was universally believed to be personal right only by recent activists, as many state constitutions explicitly treat it as personal right[1].

If people writing those constitutions didn't believe such personal right exists and is important, why would they write so?

There are known examples of prominent lawyers supporting such understanding in 19th century. [2]

It is also hard to believe if you read historical reviews about various gun laws in 19th century [3], where while the public carry of guns was often restricted, nobody doubted the right of people to actually own them, and nobody referred to "collective right" as the reason.

I can appreciate the difference in approaches, but the claim that "individual rights" approach did not exist until recently - and not as a crazy idea in minds of a small bunch of "activists", but as widely recognized and adopted concept - seems to contradict all evidence.
NRA was founded in 1871, not exactly "a few decades ago", but "individual rights" interpretation existed and was widely accepted way before that.

[1] http://www.davekopel.com/2A/LawRev/19thcentury.htm#N_191_
[2] http://www.davekopel.com/2A/LawRev/19thcentury.htm#St. George Tucker
[2] http://fabiusmaximus.com/2013/01/24/guns-wild-west-48208/
cannabinoids have a ridiculously high therapeutic index

Some cannabinoids have a high therapeutic index. Some of the THC analogues being used as "fake weed" are quite toxic.

Also, there is a huge market for cannabinoid-like drugs. If you have chronic pain, would you want to be stoned all day? Or take a drug that provides pain relief, but doesn't alter your mood?
Well, your definition of bad C++ devs may differ from mine or Google's. Or it might not, but for all I know, you might require knowledge of arcana that I don't care about, even when I happen to know it.

To me success includes being able to find (not frequently replace - I like working with the same people for many years - but find new ones in order to grow) developers that can contribute to the code base, and some of the best ones I know can't be bothered to learn much of C++. Go figure. Maybe you and I legitimately disagree because we work on different things, and maybe one of us is wrong.
I'm confused. There are a lot of things I might associate things like "behavioral economics" with, but New Age wouldn't have been what I'd have expected. Where do you get that from?
Boston's Great Molasses Flood – 21 People Killed
I've always believed that some of this "playing house" is fueled by the fact that a lot of startup founders are young and lack years of direct experience with the various problems industries face (I say this as a 28 year old).

Of course a bunch of twenty somethings gravitate repeatedly to social apps; one of the core focuses of their lives to that point, whether they know it or not, is to learn how to be a social creature.

As you get older and more experienced, you start to unearth the "real" problems in the world oftentimes in some niche you could have never predicted you'd be involved in your younger years.

I could be completely wrong, just something I've always pondered when seeing so many of these ridiculous startups that keep churning out of VC land.
The appearance of a startup is more important than the reality of that startup period. The fact is that most people aren't capable of an objective critical analysis of the options before them, so they just go with whichever thing invokes more of their positive biases. People are simply incapable of differentiating substance from non-substance, or objective value from non-value. It's all about the signals that they pick up from your appearance and presentation (including your representation by third parties, like friends or press outlets).

You can be a massive chunk of crap that only works 10-20% of the time and still get 90% market penetration based solely on the robustness of your marketing/image management teams. The key, therefore, is to look substantive and important, even if you're not, and trip the correct biases in your target audience.

This acts against good founders and good products, because they usually spend a lot of time thinking about how to fix something and improve their product instead of worrying about their PR.
Yup, this is exactly it. The only reason I was able to do all the open source work I did was because of my job at Jumpstart Labs, and once that ended, well...

That said, as you mentioned, this is pretty much the default state for the large, large part of open source projects. Something's got to give somewhere, eventually.
For the isocpp guidelines to be truly safe on a C++ module similar work is required, really. Without the C-interface boilerplate, but plenty of old-C++ idioms will probably be incompatible with isocpp and you need to carefully work at abstraction boundaries.

Less work, but nontrivial and of a similar kind.
When to Prototype
Finland’s basic income plan could change everything
Sure, but they'd lose $10M+ to do it.
They probably assume that VPNs to known .edu IP spaces can't be dropped without harming remote research
> What makes this unprecedented, imho, is that so many died.

No one died from this trial.
Some applications are not designed to be portable to 32-bits targets, regardless of memory usage... (whether or not this is a bad thing is another story, but at a point where such non-trivial application exist and has to be checked this is just a fact you can't retroactively bypass)