skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Android was not created in house by Google. The company created Android was using/emulating/whatever the technology that was popular when they created Android. They happened to check out Sun's Java 2 ME (J2ME) which Sun is pushing for small devices. At that time PDA, Windows CE, Symbian devices are popular and many are running or capable of running J2ME apps, just like running Java app on your PC today. J2ME is not just Java, but a complete SDK to build GUI apps.
the problem is that direct criticism turns into language that is insulting, or that can be interpreted as such. a lot of people do not have the social skills to participate in this strategy effectively. if you're worked in this industry for any significant length of time, i think you know the kind of person i'm referring to.

i'm sure the 37signals founders and senior executives have these skills, built up over a decade or more of banter and working together. the danger comes when you put junior employees, socially awkward employees, or perfect strangers into a room and tell them to start breaking down each others' input.
Ask HN: Getting into Video Game Development?
I've been a web programmer most of the time but have basic experience with C++, C# for non web stuffs (desktop, basic unity 2d etc). I always wanted to get into video game development and I think the time has arrived to move on from my current web dev job. Are you hiring or do you know anyone who is taking intern, jr video game developer in SF or Berkeley ? Any recommendation is highly appreciated. My email address is in my profile. Thank you.
My problem with veertu is the same as with Hyper-V: it's not crossplatform. With all its warts, VMW offered the best turnkey solution for small teams occasionally sharing VMs in offline contexts.
> even this community suffers from this strange phenomena of "group think"

There is absolutely no social cost for downvoting without commenting.

Adding costs and accountability:

- force comment box on downvotes

- deduct from karma

- flagging only

Is it important for HN's community to have a "psychologically safe" [1] at this point in time?

I can not think of a more critical time for the "STEM" crowd to have a viable forum of discussion.

Topics ranging from the expected behavior of tall steel structures subject to excessive heat (ahem), to digital rights, cryto, crypto-currency, voting systems, genetics, AI, ..., can all benefit from informed discussion and debate.

HN membership, considering the depth and range observed, is entirely capable of this.

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learn... -- remember this one, HN?
How long until computers have the same power as the human brain?
> Why is it that some languages can get away with just having 1 unicode string type with libraries to translate to other representations as needed, but not others?

Actually that's almost exactly what Rust is doing. Most of the types of strings you mentioned are added from the FFI library which is used to create bindings to other languages. They are a necessity to convert between the representations nicely.
>In sum, at least in the United States and England, most money creation stems from loans within the private sector, as opposed to what the movie and textbooks typically suggest.

I'm having trouble finding it at the moment but I remember reading a while back on the Federal Reserve's FAQ section about this. They were actually quite explicit about this, stating that if one of the big banks went under they would bail it out by printing what they needed, like they did in 2008. It is a bizarre design
> If I can't have a quiet chat with friends in public making clear I'm a gay, atheist, muslim, vegan, witch, then I'm not free.

Or, for that matter, if you're a fundamentalist Christian, Trump supporter, gay marriage opponent.
> People in the VR community drastically underplay nausea and discomfort.

You must have never tried the HTC Vive, I never had any of these problems with it. Limited amount of space as well, as long as your game doesn't move you everywhere around.
Starting a new git-based religion IRL
OK, but it is still a roll of the dice and there are costs beyond legal fees. 1:100 is _highly_ unlikely. Lawsuits are a crappy way to make money for a software company.
Pangu 9.3 jailbreak iOS 9.3 implement
I think the mentality that downvote = disagreement is widespread on any site with a karma/voting mechanism. Many subreddits themselves say right in the sidebar (and often elsewhere) that "downvote only if something is off-topic or does not contribute to discussion", but everyone still tends to use it that way.

So I think the issue is somewhat bigger than reddit or HN or even just a certain slice of users. It seems to be a fundamental problem in understanding up/down votes. Maybe psychologically we're inclined to downvote when we disagree, whether consciously or not.

I am also guilty of this even though I know better. It's hard to resist downvoting something I disagree with. It's like a natural response I have to actively work against.

Edits: grammar / clarifying wording
To be fair, Java and C# -- two languages that you would probably consider as having one unicode string type -- also effectively have two string types between `String` and `StringBuilder`. [0] Java also has `java.nio.file.Path`. [1]

[0] Java also manages to conflate synchronization into the mix with `StringBuffer`.

[1] C# (thankfully) just has static functions to manipulate strings as paths.
Because from most people's perspectives, economy is a zero-sum game. You are given money from your employer and then spend them on stuff. At no point is there an opportunity to get money from nothing, unless you're a bank and have a license to create money from nothing. And so the economy is not a zero-sum game only for the richest few who control the banks.
VR could be a great new way to enjoy a whole bunch more than "high brow" entertainment, too.

Everyone could see what it's like having "front row" seats at a basketball game. Or hovering above the action.

Player perspectives and other "moving camera" tricks might not work, but that's not how we currently enjoy a lot of live experiences anyway.

I'm also unbelievably excited to see what the geniuses at Disney / other major entertainment studios can accomplish. [NB I don't just think Disney will excel here, but if you don't find Disney World magical...]
Sorry yes, I forgot to put that in, anything RnD is almost exclusively C/C++
Software development is not a ponzi scheme. Employees that sabotage new employees suck.
Making yourself 10x more productive than the average by making everyone else 0.1x as productive as you is not in the best interest of the company.

Feeding a self-perpetuating circle of unethical sabotaging losers is not in the best interest of the company. It's cancer that needs to be extirpated as soon as possible and made an example of by firing them to the sound of a trumpet.

Hire people that see their job as something more than a paycheck. Hire people that care.

Hint: people that talk about their weekend, past-times, vacations, cars, etc., and change topics or moods when engaged with work related challenges, are people that are most likely checked out. Those are the people that won't care and will drown your company in their ego.
This goes back to Apple not allowing you to replace default apps. Android phones let you define the default web browser, map viewer, etc.
My favorite bit of learning with Rust strings was the WTF-8 format:
https://simonsapin.github.io/wtf-8/

Implemented:
https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/master/src/libstd/sys...
I've been eye'ing the truck sims myself (along with racing and flight) for when I get my Rift in May. Glad to hear someone mention good experience with a trunk sim!
I can actually see why some VCs would invest that way though. A startup proves that there's a massive market opportunity (think Uber's initial days), it's still not a certainty that that startup will be the eventual winner. So, I can see some VCs thinking: Now that one of the biggest risks (finding whether there's a market at all) is reduced, we can just build a better team and maybe become a much better second-mover. Or, although I am convinced that there's a massive market, I disagree with how the first-mover is trying to handle it.
It's the Alibaba stake and cash that are being discounted, as assets typically are on a public balance sheet.

AOL was worth $4.4 billion to Verizon, and was worth several billion publicly traded. Yahoo's operating business is blatantly worth more.

Simple test: show me one example in the last several decades, of a publicly traded company that was sporting a positive balance sheet, with billions in revenue, that traded with a negative market cap. You won't find a single example. It's also the same reason Yahoo didn't trade for a negative valuation prior to Alibaba becoming highly valuable: Yahoo's core business is actually worth something.
You're right, I guess "stability" is probably more accurate.

At the end of the day, it represents app(s) breaking the phone in very fundamental ways, in spite of the sandboxing iOS enforces (obviously this is a different vector in reality, but from a layman's point of view the end result is the same), in a way more severe than any Android app (which arguably have a reputation of being "less secure") has broken that OS as far as I am aware.

This stability/security was one of the reasons I've stuck with iOS for so long, but this particular issue has forced me to reevaluate my thinking somewhat, as I'm sure it will for many others.
The second part is true, I have had comments going from -4 or five to plus four or five, then tank again back to minus 4.

The problem is that when they get downvoted they don't produce any response, and if nobody is going to do anything based on what you write, why write it at all? You might as well start yelling at the walls.
Facebook/Zuckerberg have obviously been successful because this particular motto has been dissected countless times in blog posts and HN comments.

Try this search: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=fast+break
Just got mine in the mail from the kickstarter promotion. Really cool thing that they sent this to all the DK1 buyers.

First impressions are that it's certainly far more professional-looking and refined than the DK1, but that goes without saying. Clearly the QA guys have done well, the Oculus setup app is really nice and it appears they're trying to build a Steam clone of sorts.

A bit delayed finding the latest NV drivers - "Geforce Experience" is a dog that takes 10 minutes to do anything (seriously, how did this pass QA?), and the main nvidia.com site just forwards to a broken akamai link on download. Ended up having to grab it from a guru3d link.
Funny none of my stuff on Linux does.
Sometimes accounts get caught in an accidental hellban. In that case (if you've gone through the history and can't find anything obvious) you might want to email dang to let him know, or email the person to let them know. Or you could vouch for the person's posts. I think enough vouching would mean the account becomes unbanned?

(Of course, this is just my opinion. I have no idea if it's true.)
Reminds me of the Hawthorne Effect:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
Let's assume you're right, and that many poor people have no opportunity to better their situation. That doesn't change the fact that some people absolutely do have the opportunity to better their situation, but choose not to because their desire for a better future is satisfied by the fantasy of winning the lottery. The lottery acts as a drain in these cases, not only on the individuals who continue to stagnate, but to the rest of us who would benefit from those individuals contributions.

I'll also note that I fundamentally disagree with your statement. Everyone has an opportunity to create their own success. Obviously not everyone has the same kinds of opportunities or the same number of opportunities. Those of us with enough time to comment on Hacker News probably have dozens of opportunities PER DAY to create our own success, whereas a poor black kid from Baltimore may only have one, and it may require him to wake up at 4am to go to work or stay up till midnight to educate himself. But those opportunities still exist, even if you're poor.
Scientists successfully create a quantum ‘Fredkin gate’
I do the same on HN (self-censor, constantly) and have come to peace with it. I don't submit over 80% of the HN posts I write, and I immediately delete anything that gets one down vote. Furthermore, if I do post something that gets a down vote, I update my "don't post" probabilities to match, meaning I post even less.

I'd encourage you to try and not feel bad about the situation. It's not your job to provide insight or knowledge to others, or even just plain old participation. If you don't like the response you get, just keep doing what you're doing: don't post. It's their loss.

P.s. If this comment gets down-voted, which my filters tell me is "highly likely", I'll just leave this P.s. comment instead of doing a full delete like I usually do. Hopefully you'll have read it by then. :)
OK. You don't think the author supports slavery either. I'm not sure why we're even discussing this!

The author wrote specifically they believe slavery is a bad thing in their AMA here: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4bxf6f/im_curtis_yarv...
Theranos Results Could Throw Off Medical Decisions, Study Finds
Can you imagine a remote "open office" workspace where you can mute the background chatter when you actually want to work?

Or sit next to whoever you want so you can bother them when they're not obviously busy?
A Side-By-side Comparison of Django and Moya
>"I increasingly find that the best companies/organizations are simply those groups that now how to argue well."

While I agree with this point, I think it is only one piece of the puzzle. In order to have productive "arguments" it is important to also make sure you provide an environment conducive to it. That means finding ways to eliminate concerns one might have with "arguing against a boss or executive's point" due to fear of risking their job, or simply being steamrolled due to rank. Cultures that place a strong emphasis on building consensus can also breed situations where people don't speak against someone because they are playing things politically and need that person's support for their own pet project and don't want to risk giving up that capital just to voice a contrarian opinion.

Beyond that, it also takes the right temperament of people in the room. I've worked with some people that I can only classify as "overly-sensitive." They are very passive-aggressive people, and read into any random negative thing they hear as a personal attack against them. There's simply no effective way to have a constructive debate with people like that in my experience.

But I do agree that this sort of "bare it all" dialogue is critical to moving things forward. The real question I have is how to transform an organization or team to that state in as painless a way as possible.
Alternate sources:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/29/business/study-of-theranos...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2016/03/28/therano...
To be honest, it _was_ a long picture.
My theory is that it's because it's to convenient.

A solution could be to move it to next to the flag button, maybe? And also making it a bit more difficult to do, like requiring the user to input a reason.
The truth has value in itself.
I don't think Andy was completely wrong, or right, in his thinking that if biotech copied tech, they would be more successful. He was naive, and didn't really understand the underlying structural reasons for the inability to translate the tech sector to the biotech sector.

I went from academia to industry to learn how to do what Andy said: make biotech copy tech. In many ways, I was extremely successful: I built Exacycle, which took Google's style of warehouse computing and made it available to a number of biology researchers. The scientists who were successful with it basically had to drop a lot of the preconceived notions about how to solve problems- they were accustomed to spending a huge amount of time setting up their simulations or drug docking (months or years of prep work before running sims for a year). Exacycle converted this to a rapid cycle where they could test an idea in a day on 600+Kcores/sec, make a few tweaks, and run again. This greatly sped up the productivity of scientists.

Ultimately, these ideas weren't well received in biotech until we published a bombshell paper on GPCRs that spoke to them in their language. Even then, it wasn't a product that I think any biotech would want to buy (this is the part where Andy was spot-on). I think Google/Verily paid attention to what we had to say and hopefully, they'll be able to succeed in ways that biotech does not.

At this point, though, I think the nail is in the coffin for rational drug design as a multibillion dollar investment for pharma. It's just not productive enough. Instead, I think pharma needs to solve the inverse problem: for every drug that is already approved for something, what diseases can it impact (the RDD problem is "for a given disease, find a drug that modulates the disease").
Choice implies choosing from a number of options. What are the alternatives you're thinking of?
Anyone off the street could pick up an iPhone and do something productive in a couple of minutes. Everyone who bought a first generation iPhone was pretty impressed with the product itself; it took me at least a week before I really wished I could install more software on it. And even so, it was still really useful.

Compare this to the Oculus Rift, the average person doesn't even have a machine they can plug it into. I mean, who even has a desktop computer anymore? Everyone I know has a laptop.

The product is clearly aimed at serious gamers who have the money to sink into serious gaming rigs. The iPhone-of-VR it certainly is not.
Actually, you could in theory craft save-data that softlocks the game when the save-data names are displayed. If the game isn't programmed to wipe bad save data you'd be in trouble.

Not saying this is the case for SMW, but there are certain cartridge games where this can happen naturally.
Another account of mine was hellbanned for triggering some automated response based on voting patterns - which were very suspicious, but had a legitimate reason (specifically I downvoted comments that were of topic, which was most if not all the comments in that thread).
Unfortunately, Java should be considered open source with a huge asterisk after it and a long explanation due to the legal ministrations of Oracle.
Well I think the reference you're citing is more about the length of the film - 3 hours and 45 minutes - moreso than the fact that it's in Technicolor. A closer parallel would be comparing Gone With the Wind to a Michael Bay Transformers film, in that almost 3 hours of cinema is typically hard on the viewer, and moreso when there are tons of visual explosions and loud sounds that wear down on an audience.

I love THX theater sound. SDDS. All of them. However, those tools can be very much abused by certain practitioners, and that's not the tech's fault. Basically I think that improvements are welcomed but gimmicks never last. Is VR a new gimmick in the grand context of entertainment? We're about to find out it seems.
Well capitalism is defined as: "an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state."

I don't see how this tragic event is a pure form of anything except tragedy.
I would assume that they don't tire, have as many safety issues, and don't mind the weather. Plus they don't go on strike. Throw in as automation improves then efficiency will go up and this will make moving goods even cheaper regardless of source. The more we can move people out of physically dangerous situations the better. That crane operator sitting in the air conditioned office certainly sees a benefit. Eventually the cargo will get loaded on robotic trucks, trains, and the like, and its trip across the country will be similar. Akin to changing the whole distribution process across the world into a large scale warehouse.
Big Corp doesn't care when it comes to potentially getting $10 billion dollars, that's for damn sure.

How many people here would just go "oh nah, it's OK... go ahead, we don't want any money. Do your thing Google!".
Thanks for editing out your suggestion for me to "read a high-school physics textbook." The earth is the frame of reference when considering free body diagrams of objects moving around on its surface for all practical purposes. Neither the treadmill nor the person using the treadmill moves with respect to the earth and therefore no bodily acceleration is experienced by the user. In the virtual world, however, the user does move and bodily acceleration is expected. Therefore, a treadmill cannot alleviate the problems caused by acceleration mismatching.
The Seas Will Save Us: How Ocean Farmers Are Starting an Economic Revolution
> What matters a few karma points

Aren't there effects of downvotes like rate limiting and post position?
I wouldn't conflate the "run anywhere" aspect with OS-level package management.

How operating systems handle updates is unrelated to Java, and affects other applications on the system as well. Think about other "run anywhere" technology like Flash, PDF (Adobe Reader), Microsoft Office, Browsers -- they also don't have a great security story and need constant updates. Adobe and Sun decided to ship their software with "Update Managers". Everybody loved them (not), but at least they fulfilled their purpose. 10 years later, Google added background updates with binary patching to Chrome on Windows and Mac OS (not needed on Linux). They decided to just install updates without the user's consent, because that will at least keep them safe. Google can get away with it because everybody expects them to know what they're doing. But I certainly don't want downloading code at runtime to become the norm.

That's why distributing updates for third-party apps should be an operating system feature, as it is in all popular Linux distributions. Microsoft and Apple, please feel free to copy.
Chamath wasn't in charge of the food. I'm sure he told the relevant person within the company and I'm pretty certain that problem didn't last very long.
I think research md is the field to be in. Md/phd. Plenty of jobs always in demand.
Isn't Dart for browsers? And it looks like WebAssembly might overtake Dart there. Maybe that would work for Chrome Web Apps on Android, I haven't tried.

For native apps, I think it's still mainly Java, tho JetBrains is promoting Kotlin as an alternative.
I couldn't find this memo. I'm interested in reading it.

I did find a WSJ article with a quote from a Google engineer:

"We have been over a bunch of these [alternatives to Java] and think they all suck," the Google email continued, according to the transcript, adding, "We conclude that we need to negotiate a license for Java." [0]

[0]http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240531119035202045764826...
To make sure they support it, and to make sure they keep supporting it. Compliance today does not buy you a free pass tomorrow.
Process registry in Elixir: A practical example
The problem is that we should distribute the load over multiple servers https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/1 Right now the lonely repository server has over 200k context switches per second.
Do all DK1 owners get them? I have a DK1 but haven't heard anything about getting one from this release.
What you said is of course correct, but what I'm saying is that while the concept of a down vote button is useful, people end up using it in the fashion I described because of its convenience.

Maybe merging them isn't the best idea, but changing it to mimic the flag button (i.e. moving it and requiring a reason to be specified before submission) would probably fix this issue, I'd wager.