skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
HN accounts aren't supposed to be used just for ideological purposes. HN is a community, and the threads are conversations. That dynamic isn't served when someone shows up only to post lengthy, prepared screeds on tendentious topics.
> Of course, compared to C#, it still benefits from a considerably larger and IMHO higher-quality ecosystem . . .

Maybe so, it's been over a decade since I've coded in Java back in the days of java servlets.

But what MS has done with C# is great. It's turned out to be an awesome language with lambda, linq, async features that's really hard to beat.

edit: Looks like java 8 has lambda now.

http://www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/tutorials/obe/ja...
I gave a link to stereotype threat earlier - http://isteve.blogspot.com/2012/10/john-list-on-virtual-none... And keep in mind, even if the studies were replicable, the studies did not even show that stereotype threat shows up in the real world, or that it causes the one standard deviation gap. What the original study showed was that on a non-meaningful test, if the professor suggests a stereotype, the gap in test scores grows bigger than one standard deviation.

I think the whole idea of stereotype threat is ridiculous. Just because of a stereotype I'm going to get dozens of questions wrong on the SAT? That just does not make any sense. (And now that we have a black president who was from Harvard Law, wouldn't we see average LSAT scores start to converge, surely there would be less of stereotype against black people in law).
I couldn't agree more, but I think you should add Clojure to the list. There's also advanced profiling tools available for the JVM platform.

For those who do use Rails the Torquebox environment is available http://torquebox.org/

TorqueBox 4's web server is powered by Undertow. Check out the performance benchmarks:
http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r9&hw=i7...

undertow edge	183,150 requests per second on the JSON benchmark
I don't use anything I don't own. I spend maybe a hundred bucks a year on a good virtual host and operate four websites off of it, along with a CloudFlare subscription for speed. I run an ownCloud server at home, everything is backed up locally and then offsite to one company I trust. If any of these entities went under I'd be out a small amount of money and some time getting setup somewhere else, but I'd be dinged, not dead.

I get extremely uncomfortable with "platforms" of all types. I've been burned so many times when the shiny new website everyone used isn't shiny and new anymore and suddenly is gone, and bang, there goes everything you made right with it.

And yeah, never used Medium. My websites don't get a ton of traffic but I don't need to be famous so, I really don't feel the need to produce content for a faceless Silicon Valley attention company.
Yeah, my intent was to convey the anecdote, not to draw a generalization.

Also, I wasn't saying they lacked awareness of the medical claims about the harms of smoking, I was saying, in my estimation, that they were not weighing that information when they picked up a cigarette (because they were drunkenly rambling about the suppression of cancer cures...).
Hardwork or Talent? Mistaken bias for inborn talent fails the bottom line
That would create problems for existing developers. Last thing I want to do is piss off my current, valuable staff who absolutely love working for me. Many have been on the job for 10+ years.
Well, BSSID, not the easily-changed ESSID (as commented below.)

Presumably some manufacturer of ultra-cheap wifi gear isn't properly setting a unique BSSID range into the units they make, and some stolen-phone operation has the same BSSID as these folks do.
I'm not aware of any one resource like that (though if you like that, you might find examine.com interesting; it's very neutral, and doesn't always hew to the beliefs of any one diet).

Here's one about saturated fat: http://examine.com/faq/is-saturated-fat-bad-for-me/

That said, paleo-ish writers like Chris Kresser do a good job of synthesizing academic papers that lead him to follow a paleo-ish diet. E.g., here's a bunch about red meat: http://chriskresser.com/the-truth-about-red-meat/
See my reply here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10948416
Relevant parody Twitter account: https://twitter.com/FalseMedium
We may not have farms, but at least we'll still have farmville.
Function declaration syntax where the return type is last is very common in functional languages. It's even allowed in C++11, because it allows one to define return types that depend on parameter types. An example taken from http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/auto,

template<class T, class U>
auto add(T t, U u) -> decltype(t + u) // return type is type of operator+(T, U)
{
return t + u;
}

It's quite a sensible approach, and hardly an impediment to understanding. A more valid concern is that Scala introduces a lot more concepts. I don't necessarily agree with it, but I think it's a potential issue, whereas a simple syntax difference that a lot of languages have is not a big deal.
DeveloperWeek AI Challenge
Pairing up with a more experienced investor is a great idea. The easiest way for an outsider to do this is to join an angel group. When I first started angel investing, I joined the Seattle Angel Conference [1], and I learned a lot from the more experienced members.

[1] http://www.seattleangelconference.com/
I'm skeptical that any other language will be nearly as easy write, operate, and maintain in production as Java.

It's really easy to administrate Java applications. You can connect to the JVM and examine what objects are in the heap, or request a thread dump and see what threads the application has launched and what they're doing. There are rarely any (JVM-level) correctness issues since code is safe and has a simple exception model - JVMs are rock solid and virtually never crash. There are advanced profiling tools available, and simple ones built in. It's easy to deploy applications due to Java's jar and class model. You can inspect a class and see its code as-deployed. Building Java code is simple, so there are rarely any build tooling or reproducibility issues.

Java also has excellent tools for logging and metrics emission, like Log4j / Slf4j and utilities like Metrics. These are just a few of the system-level features that are critical in large-scale deployments, and in practice these elements matter quite a lot for managing production apps. The language itself is only part of the story.

The Java language has also been improving substantially. Java 1.8 launched a lot of great features, like lambdas, functional interfaces, streams, and other modern elements that give me most of what I expect from a modern language and allow me to write clear and concise code that is statically typed, in the context of really strong IDEs. Java's portability makes it straightforward to develop an application from any platform (not just the server platform you deploy on).

IDE support is crucial and frequently overlooked. Automatic code completion, refactoring, and inspection ("show all usages of this method") are essential to working on large code bases together as a team. Java also has style enforcement and static analysis tools like FindBugs, Fortify, CheckStyle, etc. Java's open source community is extremely strong - look at all of the work happening under the Apache umbrella such as Hadoop, Spark, and Hive [1] or Google's umbrella, like Google Guava [2] or the Dataflow SDK [3]. There are excellent concurrency tools like java.util.concurrent, Guava's futures, and Akka.

I agree with meddlepal on this one. It's hard to do better than Java for the backend.

[1] https://projects-old.apache.org/indexes/language.html#Java

[2] https://code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/

[3] https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/DataflowJavaSDK
Fitbit data just undermined a woman’s rape claim
Right. Thanks for the clarification.
I'd be totally OK with all that subsidy going away if it meant we didn't have to deal with ads anymore. We'll figure it out. People would put more effort into peer-to-peer sharing networks if it weren't for the fact that ad-subsidized "free" services based on giant datacenters are so good at undercutting them.
Wait, the US effected a government change? I don't believe that has ever happened! /s
Not sure why this is being downvoted.

Even ClojureScript (which has JavaScript as a compilation target) runs on a JVM-based compiler and requires some buy-in into the greater Java ecosystem. Plus it is built around the Google Closure ecosystem which makes it largely incompatible with large parts of the modern JS ecosystem built around node (though there are ways to tap into these from CLJS but not vice versa).

Java itself is a very conservative programming language. It is getting new language features as new releases come out but it's very much not on the "bleeding edge" as language trends go. Its main target audience are big enterprises that need a reliable platform with a large market of competent developers (with qualifications available in the form of various well-established certifications).

That doesn't mean you can't do anything "cool" in Java or that there can't be any startup that starts out on Java, but it means the acceptance of non-Java JVM languages is a non-issue. That these companies already use the JVM as a platform just makes other JVM-based languages slightly more palatable.
Is Raymond Chen management? He's certainly one of the more respected Microsofters I know of.
They also can influence and downright force infrastructure updates to better serve the self driving vehicles.
It doesn't really matter who said or misunderstood what, does it? I don't mean this as a personal attack but your comment is devoid of content.
The dream of the 90's is alive and not just here in Portland!

I'm still writing Java to make money to buy music. Just like the 90's.
unpaid indefinite obligations

I'm pretty sure elder care isn't indefinite. Maybe we end it after this current generation of old people (our parents/grandparents) are no longer around.

One of the biggest social problems we'll face in the next 10 years is millions of people with dementia who can't take care of themselves just... existing. What do we do?

One fun story I've heard is a doctor gave an old woman with full blown dementia an operation to keep her alive, then she lived another 15 years just completely out of touch with the world. The family had to sell all her belongings (eating through their inheritance too), then pay even more to keep her in full time care. It makes no sense, but that's the standard set of rules. Little known fact: before medicare will pay out for extend services, they force your relatives to sell all your belongings (property, land, investments, etc) to pay for medical services before any other payments kick in.
I found this particularly disturbing:

> In June, the police came looking for a teenage girl whose parents reported her missing. The police made Lee and Saba sit outside for more than an hour while the police decided whether they should get a warrant to search the house for the girl’s phone, and presumably, the girl. When Saba asked if he could go back inside to use the bathroom, the police wouldn’t let him.
>
> “Your house is a crime scene and you two are persons of interest,” the officer said, according to Saba."

The police shouldn't be able to detain someone for over an hour without probably cause and without arresting them.
> Start-ups that deal with hardware and other physical stuff tend to fare much worse than apps and software.

I'm not sure I buy this.

Maybe on Kickstarter, et al. I do, because most of the people trying to do hardware there are hobbyists who have never actually shipped a product and so have highly unrealistic expectations. My baseline for a hardware Kickstarter is "Take the Bill of Materials and Multiply by 3--if that isn't retail price they're in big trouble."

Hardware startups take quite a bit more money to get running. However, once they do, you tend to have a very strong customer base and a less assailable position. They have hardware after all--3 guys and a dog can't just clone them.
So your point is ... the same or not?
Most problems already have some sort of solution for them. When you make a claim that your solution is better than the existing solution you often provide a better UX in some respects. For this you have to make design decisions some of which don't have an accepted standard. This is where you are pushing the boundaries.

On the other hand, UI style and UX naturally improves over time. Compare Windows 95 and Windows 7. There are certainly style and UX changes in the latter that are superior. A lot of people may not like Window's Ribbon interface but I think it was definitely an interesting new design, one which I think will in the long term prove to be better than plain drop down menus.

So I guess I am making the claim that if you are really invested in your product you probably have ideas on how it could be improved and a lot of those ideas are uncertain but deserve time to be attempted.
I think you know what I meant. I don't, literally, think they belonged to me.
> I think it is our place to expand life through the universe.

Not sure if it's our "place" but for damn sure it's a good goal, getting life off the Earth and becoming sustainable in space massively reduces the risk of humans going extinct.

The solar system is rich in resources we are going to need at some point.
The liabilities side of US corporations balance sheet makes the cash holdings far less significant than they appear. When one imagines a "hoard", we don't assume the fire breathing dragon also has bills that match the equivalent of that hoard or beyond.

The expected EU tax payments for companies like Apple take another large bite out of how much of that cash is really their own.

The word "hoard" is correct ("a supply or accumulation that is hidden or carefully guarded for preservation, future use, etc.") but suggesting that this money can just be unleashed upon investors or the general population in the form of capex or wage increases is silly.
Without ads we would have developed alternative revenue streams or different styles of architecture which don't place all of the costs and power in the lap of centralised organisations. Ads have crippled innovation on the Internet, not promoted it.
You haven't heard of and?
Small anecdote on the parking requirement - in the LA suburb I live in one of the local coffee shops has a large 'seating' area which is nearly devoid of actual seating. Asking the staff why they didn't install more chairs and tables, they said they were not allowed to have more tables than parking spaces, and their location only had a few parking spaces.

So when I walk there I have no place to sit because - well, why would anyone not drive and park to get their latte fix?
You're aware the cops are allowed to phone in their own anonymous tips, right? Stay safe out there.
That's a good point. For some reason the only thing I was thinking about was cloudfront/elb.
To continue his analogy with RSS, When Google killed reader, they did provide an option to export all your feeds. Several RSS clients came out, but RSS itself was under attack by Twitter, Facebook and co., and it never regained steam.

Ten years from now, unless you believe weblogs are going to die, I don't think you should be too worried about having Medium disappear and take all your writing with it. What incentive would they possibly have to not have an export option to let users take their content away?

As it stands now, they offer the best writing / reading experience on the web and while I'm all for competition and innovation, I'd be satisfied with their product even if it does not change for the next 10 years.
Micro benchmarking libraries for C++
I think that says more about you and the content you choose to read than it does about the content on Medium. I've read some great posts there with no egotism involved.
>the biggest cohort of US demographics - the millennials - is just getting started

As a millennial, this is hilarious to me. I hope your startup doesn't depend on millennials consuming ANYTHING. The best you can MAYBE achieve is having people disable their adblocker.
> "On the other hand, safety is the absolute least concern."

In that case, you may be interested to know Rust permits unsafe code:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/unsafe.html
Just because an agreement is consensual does not mean that there is no power differential. One party will almost always have some greater leverage over another. When the power differential is too great for consent to lead to a mutually-beneficial arrangement, regulation may be required.
I suspect it's a taxation thing.

Better to give back the money as capital gains than as dividends.
in the Ruby world people end up consuming more RAM when using the C based ruby (MRI) because in order to achieve concurrency they must scale with processes and that consumes an absorbent amount of RAM. With JRuby you can scale concurrency with native threads that have minimal memory overhead.
Netflix is making a cyberpunk detective series
Henrik Joreteg has a related talk[1] and post[2] on the evolution of web apps that are worth checking out.

[1]: https://speakerdeck.com/henrikjoreteg/the-evolution-of-the-w...

[2]: https://joreteg.com/blog/viability-of-js-frameworks-on-mobil...
There is a school of economics, sometimes called the "freshwater school" (from the Chicago School and Milton Friedman) which claims you can't run out of demand. This is a classic position. But productivity is now so good that we can run out of demand. Classically, countries ran out of land, labor, capital, or management before they ran out of demand. There were occasional recessions, but that wasn't a permanent condition. That's over in the US. Plenty of land outside NY and SF, lots of workers (some might need retraining, but it's not like the real labor shortage of WWII), oceans of capital, and lots of experienced managers. But nothing to do with it, because the demand isn't there.

This is an alien concept to many people and economic policy makers. See the parent article. They report on a capital glut, but are puzzled that it exists. The Fed keeps pumping capital into the economy in hopes it will fuel growth. But pumping capital into a capital glut doesn't do much.

Look at Japan since 1989. Japan hit this about two decades before the US did. They never really figured out what to do about it. That's discouraging, because if Japan had a solution, we'd have a success to look at.

So nobody really knows what to do about a capital glut and a demand shortage.
I've seen security issues introduced by dynamic linking too, so I don't think this is so cut-and-dry. The huge number of package updates needed when a core library has a security vulnerability is a big downside, but having programs that actually work is the upside.

Have you looked at what steam does to eliminate any system libraries from accidentally getting linked in and breaking games? This is an example of the downsides of dynamic linking.
Rocks and sticks are simpler than computers. By your logic, we should still be using rocks and sticks.

Learning is a necessary part of getting efficient with complex tools.
The money for a cashier to make a livable wage doesn't have to come from increasing the costs of all goods. The point of the article was essentially that companies have more money than they know what do with. If they paid their employees more, not only would it be better for the employees, it would be better for the company as more money in the hands of the poor will drive up demand for goods.
Google's Android Generates $31B Revenue, Oracle Says
GPS is definitely more power hungry and easily blocked, but when you get a solid signal it's far more accurate than WiFi positioning. GPS will pretty reliably nail down your location to within 2m or so, while WiFi positioning is probably an order of magnitude worse. The main use for WiFi positioning (besides devices that simply don't have GPS capability at all) is for indoor location, because GPS signals tend to penetrate buildings poorly.
> Medium is on its way to becoming the consensus platform for writing on the web

Jesus, I hope not. I have better ways to burn my phone battery. The Medium version of this post contains 388kb of javascript and 312kb of CSS. Medium's engineering is terrible.
Repel overlapping text labels in ggplot2
>The best way to achieve public awareness is through paid for mass communication.

Justify that this is of value to the people.
Firefox and Chrome are application platforms, like your OS. It doesn't make sense to count them. They don't only run youtube, unlike VLC which is only a media player. Otherwise VLC counts as 20 GB (or whatever) for the OS as well.
Are you seriously equating electro-magnetic radiation at a frequency high enough to be de-ionizing with the compression of fluids?

The difference here is that we know how both of these things work.
Phylogenetic analyses suggests fairy tales are much older than thought
Microsoft’s insane Android alarm app wants you to make faces at 6AM
I've used OneNote for years, but I definitely agree with the parent that it could be better. Here's a brief summary:

Good stuff:

1) Search is fairly fast and comprehensive

2) Supports lots of content types easily with paste, including images and other Office app content

3) Shortcuts for Table manipulation, todo checkbox items, and other icons are really helpful. I wish every editor had these.

4) Handwriting is well supported.

Bad stuff:

1) The organizational structure is overly complex and confusing as it has three categories of structure: Notebooks (top pulldown), Sections (tabs on top), and Pages (tabs on right). This makes it hard to know which to use and it's visually overwhelming.

Wikipedia is a good example of something better as its structure is much more uniform: everything is a page and all navigation uses links.

2) Synchronizing is very slow compared to google docs. This makes it fine for simple scenarios where people edit alone and share after it's mostly written, but makes it hard to work together on a document (no multiple cursors on the page)

My guess is (1) and (2) are an artifact of Notebooks being files instead of "in the cloud". This likely forces the organizational structure OneNote has, and slows down synchronizing because it's harder to sync at the file level rather than the text-run level.

3) Shared freeform content like this gets out of date fast. This should be built into the product so we can see which pages are important to the organization. Most people don't delete pages ever, so some way of showing which pages matter and which should be disregarded would be very helpful.
That doesn't say that the top 10 accounts for 45% but that it should account for 45%. That's a big difference.

The problem is that the US tax system is so complex that once you reach a certain level of wealth, it pays for you to have someone find those loopholes. Warren Buffet famously decried that he pays lower taxes than his secretary, for example:
http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/04/news/economy/buffett-secreta...

Swiss roads have no potholes, there are no homeless, they have universal healthcare and a free university system. I've lived there and I paid less in taxes, and one big difference is that the wealthy pony up their fair share.
Oh, interesting. That's certainly what the SV elite need, isn't it? Yet another closed social network for them to preach their wise and monied thought leadership down upon us lowly commoners. cloudbro social all the way.