skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1) Not precisely. Suppose the "patent troll" in your example was a company that had some absurd, dubious patents and made a sizable chunk of their revenue from them, but was not a non-practicing entity, and actually produced other products that people generally liked. Beyond that, that they could prove that they licensed a lot of their patents--both valid and dubious--pretty reasonably. (In other words, assume things are more complex than "Everything Gawker Media produces is clearly indefensible.")

2) You can always use analogies from other industries, but you can also make a case that in the United States the press is something of a special case. It's the only private industry specifically given constitutional protection in the Bill of Rights. It's certainly worth asking--and potentially litigating--whether Gawker violated both Thiel's and Hogan's right to privacy, but we give the press more latitude than we do other industries for a reason.

3) In the example as you outlined it, where a "patent troll only extorts money from small startups," I wouldn't feel the same despite disagreeing with Thiel's actions in this case.

The difference, beyond what I've suggested above in (1) and (2), is one of precedence. People are focusing, understandably, on the specifics of this particular case. But we don't know wat other cases Thiel is funding against Gawker; we don't know what the merits are. And that's the whole thing: a billionaire unhappy with the way a media outlet has covered him doesn't need to find winnable libel and defamation suits against that outlet; he just needs to find ones good enough to get to trial and cost tens of millions of dollars to defend. If Thiel funded a half-dozen losing cases against Gawker, he might still bankrupt them.

And, again: precedent. What if instead of Peter Thiel this was Donald Trump? Hillary Clinton? George Soros? David Koch? What if the ultimate reason for the vendetta was because they brought out embarrassing secrets that were in the public interest?

While I understand why everyone is focusing on the "Gawker? Couldn't happen to a more deserving company, ha ha ha" aspect of all this, free speech cases don't always revolve around noble defenders with noble goals. As wary as I am of slippery slope arguments (use one once and you'll use them everywhere), "hey, this couldn't possibly happen to someone who's less of a jerk than Nick Denton" seems uncomfortably close to magic thinking.
They also don't own the networks they operate on.
Should be straight-forward. I know, famous last words for people starting on projects. Yet, a web server is straight-forward piece of software if you're not trying to make a production system with widespread adoption. For a static web server, heres what it does:

1. Parse a HTTP request into simple, internal form.

2. Convert the identifier into location in memory with the page.

3. Convert data at that location into outgoing packets.

4. Run those through I/O.

One clever, embedded system I saw pre-encoded the HTML pages as TCP packets in memory to just send them directly. The HW will obviously need TCP/IP stack. There's plenty examples in academic literature. Whole thing is a pipeline with part manipulating memory, in/out HTTP processing, in/out TCP processing, in/out IP processing, in/out Ethernet, a memory subsystem for accessing RAM, and some cache thrown in there likely.

That's as far as I got when I thought about it. Looks quite doable given everything up to TCP in that stack has been done already. The rest seems straight-forward. Could probably even implement it in a static way amendable to fixed, pre-allocations of memory or on-chip resources.
The US Government Still Uses Floppy Disks to Manage Its Nuclear Operations
Untrusting an intermediate CA on OS X
Ah, yes, a kit with sensors and servos and things like that is very useful indeed. I'd just put the Arduino away and keep the rest :P
Nice, really, but if it's not open-source, I have zero interest.
There already is a free and better solution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy

Sorry for the redundant comments, but it's important for people to hear this. More people die from MRSA than AIDS in the US, and the FDA is structurally against adaptive therapies.
> The real question is how can you make money from this.

Apparently you can set up a homework helper service for graduates like Fanyi Translation [1] [2]

> If it wasn't good for survival, it wouldn't happen.

There are all kinds of things that happen in evolution that don't survive. Happening isn't evidence that something is good for survival

[1] https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-CN&tl=en&...

[2] http://archive.is/XNZD1
All of that, for that simple demo...
This viewpoint genuinely baffles me. You can only manage what you measure, and the process of monitoring a metric isn't the same thing as caring about the metric. I monitor free disk space on all my servers, but it doesn't mean I care primarily about buying more disks. In fact I don't care because I've monitored it and have determined we're okay there. However, as a result of data, if my servers were regularly running out of disk space, then I should start caring.

If these reports determined that there was no evidence of something to be fixed (either the statistics were consistent with the statistics of qualified potential employees, or there were a good reason for them not to be consistent), I would expect GitHub not to care. And yes, if they continued to care about shifting the numbers further past that point, then you could accuse them of caring only about skin color when it's unjustified. But why should a technical company not measure metrics and gather data?
Hurray: API are not copyrightable
Why Google's victory in a copyright fight with Oracle is a big deal
That is pretty funny because decades ago we used to remotely compromise university HP 9000 systems, create new privileged accounts, and apply the latest patch sets to the system to close up any security issues. I would assume that is a pretty common practice, you don't want someone else messing with your system. I would bet the investigation didn't go far enough.
The React ecosystem for developing non-trivial apps is not at all easy and rather complex. Both for new developers and experienced web folks to relearn "the React way".
It's not useless, it's a nice, basic tool that's clearly a hit with users.

But it can never be that simple, can it? We got to grow! monetize! have another fundraising round! justify it all with increasingly complex features of progressively marginal utility that further dilute the core funcionality that made it so popular in the first place.

Imagine if HN were to succumb to this disease, it would be a travesty.
I've been on the fence for quite a while, but a couple of weeks ago I finally bit the bullet and taught myself webpack, ES6, React, CSS modules, Redux, and everything else that comes along with these tools.
It definitely felt like relearning my job (coming from working with Grunt, Backbone and jQuery) and it took a lot of time and effort to really get to understand everything (still learning many new things each day), but man was it worth it. I enjoy working with these tools very, very much and I am able to build apps significantly faster than I could before.
Would be nice to compare productivity with others. Just purchased the full version.
Our tests are pretty useful, they check things like "when you ask the API to submit a pickup, it gets assigned to a driver", and so on. Especially in JavaScript where anything can take any value they've been extremely helpful.
It's odd for Blank to continually be tooting this horn when his ideas on "The Lean Startup" are part of the problem. You can't walk into a business not knowing how the business is going to work. That's not something TBD. Sure, some "startups" manage to make it through, but if we're talking about ponzi schemes here...
Unfortunately the repo says:

> DISCLAIMER: This project is no longer actively maintained and probably broken
I seriously doubt that's true. Chances are high that you've already interacted with a trans person and not even known about it. The point people are making is that that fundamental thing that you can't change is actually biologically based, but it's a brain thing, not dependent on genitalia or chromosomes.
5 out of 31? And I'd say only 3 are noticeably slower, and only 1 seems to be "much" slower (at 0.38ms). But given that just about everything benchmarked seems to be sub-0.05ms, I'm left thinking that gaining noticeable and much-increased performance is highly dependent on operations, and a high-precision timer. Humans aren't going to notice a difference between an operation lasting 0.04ms vs 0.02ms. Unless a ton of operations add up to something noticeable, of course.

After looking into it further, morphdom appears to be a solid alternative to virtual DOMs. Seems worth having around for that reason alone, especially if it were to improve with time, or become used by other tools.
> People absolutely can be wrong about their own subjective experiences: that's a big component to why religion exists.

No, they can be wrong in their explanations of the cause of their subjective experiences, but they cannot be wrong about the experience. People who feel the presence of the Holy Spirit really do feel something. It's just that what they feel is most likely not caused by the Holy Spirit.

> we do people a disservice by agreeing with their self-deception.

And we do ourselves a disservice by dismissing spiritual experiences as mere delusion. See:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/n9y/is_spirituality_irrational/

particularly the resulting discussion.
But function is not something to be assessed in isolation. The context is important too, as "the Java API" is not expression for expression's sake and has little intrinsic value. Google argued that they brought a system built originally for desktops and servers (the domain of JavaSE) to smartphones. Whether that's "transformative" is up to a jury.
> paying off initial investors

Here comes Charles Ponzi ...
react-cli is pretty good
JavaME had existed for years. There were a few very good apps (Google Maps was great, as was the Facebook app). Given that even the cheapest phones included it I can't imagine Sun was making any money off it.
> Because the percentage of black GitHubbers in management positions is far below e.g. the percentage of e.g. black people with CS degrees in the US

Where's the data for this? Often people talk about these things as assumptions, but I've never seen credible data. Can you share a source?

Furthermore, even the comparison that you mentioned is not accurate. It should start from a funnel like: "the number of qualified black applicants to GitHub with CS degrees", or something along those lines. GitHub can't hire people that don't apply.
In throwing away three commits to fix a typo you also throw away 10 commits that show how the parameters in a function declaration changed over time. You may need that information. And you're choosing to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Companies want to be in a possition where if a talented candidate is african american, female, gay, transgender, ect. that they wouldn't turn down the offer simply because they didn't feel comfortable working there/there is another company that is more diverse that makes this kind of person more comfortable there.

The talent war is so competitive that companies are doing everything they can to keep up, including diversity blog posts.
This is irrelevant. There was a ridiculous notion going around a while back that if Oracle lost then the GPL would become unenforceable.

The GPL does not depend on copyrightable APIs, and says nothing about what Oracle is trying to argue. Linking to a library and merely using an API are two different things. The GPL depends on the former and says the latter is neither here nor there.
> How do you know that the docker image was created with the right set of software?

Define "the right set". If I ask someone to prepare something I might use

docker export/diff

in part of the review process.

> How do you know that there wasn't anything else added to it?

docker diff

> Copying the final image means you're just copying an opaque binary blob. You can't do the work yourself to build an image, and get the same docker image.

So what?

Why exactly do you think "copying an opaque binary blob" is bad?

Don't you ever copy files on your hard disk?

Have you ever used `dd` to copy a filesystem as a binary blob to a disk or a USB key?

Did you know "git" copies "opaque binary blobs" around? Do you really prefer RCS because the version control is stored in plain text files?

What exactly is your complaint here?

My position is simple, but apparently radical: I recommend interactive development of systems because it is better, and I define better as faster and more secure. "Reproducible" simply is not a goal.

> For me, it's not about ease of use. It's about security and trust.

You should rethink your position.

Nix packages from sources you don't trust aren't more secure than docker images (even if you use nix.useChroot=true), which, barring bugs in docker and Linux, at least get virtual memory, disk, and networking.

Nix packages built by yourself are harder to write than docker tags you build yourself.
So you're saying my subliminal messaging was too obvious? ;)
It's hard to overstate how much easier the Twilio API has made it for developers to interact with SMS and phones.

When I first built StoryWorth, it only worked over email because I thought voice recording would be too complex (both to use and to implement).

However, users kept asking for it so I finally bit the bullet... and it was way easier than I expected. Using the Twilio API, I had voice recordings over the phone working within days.

The team is also super friendly. Less than a month after our launch, someone reached out to me and they wrote about our company on their blog:

https://www.twilio.com/blog/2013/05/old-stories-new-tech-sto...

Really glad to see their continued success!
>The total number of terrorists is very low. 9/11 was a major operation and was not something they could ramp up.

There is enormous support for terrorism and they have a lot of recruits. If they found something that worked, and nothing changed to make it stop working, you can bet they'd double down.

>PS: Hospitals are dangerous even for healthy people. Much like how trench warfare lead to the 1918 pandemic which killed between 50 and 100 million. Simply being around those with a compromised immune system represents a risk.

I'm aware, and yes, there's a tradeoff between the benefit of the hospital vs the risk of picking up something even worse. Point taken. But if you have a gunshot wound, you should probably go to a hospital. It would be a severe error of logic to say, "most gunshot deaths are in a hospital, so if I have a gunshot wound, I should stay away from a hospital" -- because that figure is an artifact of dumping a disproportionate fraction of living victims there.

It's likewise wrong to say, "cities are safe, look how the crime rate is the same as the suburbs" -- there is much more risk, they just work harder to control it.
I really appreciate your reasonable and measured tone but I'll need some time to digest your comment. It's a brain-full :)
> You make it clear in your first sentence that you don't think there's anything wrong with the university system, and that the institution is an innocent victim here. On the other hand, I think there's plenty wrong with the system.

American students already know by their college years that cheating has immediate negative consequences

Why should the college need to hold the hand of foreign students who haven't been taught this by their home countries?

New country, new laws, new culture. It's to be expected
$200B valuation with only $50MM in revenue... You must like bubbles, 'cause that's how you get bubbles.
Only 7MB! Good job! Product looks awesome. If it works well for the next 10 days I'm definitely buying it :)
I don't necessarily think Snapchat is useless but I can't for the life of me understand why they need $1.8B or how they could ever efficiently use it considering how technologically simple the app is.
> I hate that neither N900 nor Jolla can just have mainline boring Debian with normal boring updates

The N900 can. Shameless plug: https://github.com/dderby/debian900/
It's like a law of nature... your organisation grows, its culture becomes braindead.

There should be more Basecamps around. I don't know what their equality policy is, but they sure have very little tolerance to bullshit - and don't mind letting you know!
Yes,

In fact, it's even worse than that. You can become one kind of "C wizard" just by writing a bunch of programs since a lot of programming is fairly clear once someone understands function calls and for-loops.

But understand compiler construction at a reasonable level requires some specific set of skills that don't come from just messing around.
So, what's involved in packaging them? I'm thinking along the lines of me coming up with a custom circuit that I print onto silicon, package into a chip, and put that sucker on a PCB. I figured the packaging would take similarly, specialized equipment given it's so tiny. Is it built into FIB equipment? Extra? How easy is it to use?

I always see articles on the ebeams and FIB showing how they work. Nothing on packaging.
I prefer https://github.com/abingham/emacs-ycmd – the engine is also used by the corresponding vim plugin. Gives completion and "jump to".

Rtags is a also nice alternative. Both packages work as daemons outside emacs that read your compile commands.
Eclipse CDT (Juno) does it even better. Just hover a mouse over any function call and you can see the body of that function in a scrollable tooltip. You don't need to jump back and forth - you simply follow the code logic and see what the called function does in a tooltip window. This is a huge productivity boost for me and I haven't seen any other IDE doing it.

One other thing no other tool does (AFAIK) is that you can get a "call hierarchy" for a function or any variable and it's laid out as a tree and you can expand each node to trace the calls. This makes understanding the code and refactoring faster by an order of magnitude.

I have avoided Eclipse for years because of cpu/memory usage, but ever since I got a computer with Intel i7 CPU and 16GB of RAM, I have completely switched to Eclipse because it makes me so much more productive than any other environment I tried.
Number 1 Virtual Reality Number 2 Experience
Sadly, your examples seem to suggest the opposite. The condensing of phrases makes the language more opaque and difficult to learn. So to a versed English speaker, the dropped implied words are easy to fill in; for someone learning, it's requires significant processing.
We're talking about sexual objectification of women specifically, not some kind of generic "objectification". So I don't think most of what you're saying is really relevant to the topic

Generic objectification is the underlying mechanism, and the specific referent in my comments. My whole point is that the underlying mechanism is morally neutral. (Objectification as formulated by feminist scholars is largely pseudoscience, and requires the addition of an arbitrary gender direction to make ideological sense.)

regard the sexual objectification of women as inevitable

Did you honestly think I was taking the position that the sexual objectification of women is inevitable? You are the one primarily using the words "sexual" and "inevitable." Please provide a quote where I say something to this effect. It would seem you are engaging in a tactic of tacking on adjectives to what another is saying. (Nice strawman fallacy.) This analogy works well: Objectification is certainly avoidable, in much the same way that hitting a pedestrian is. Willfully objectifying someone is harmful and morally objectionable in much the same way that purposely hitting a pedestrian is. In much the same way, objectification can happen incidentally in contexts that are badly engineered. The correct approach is to change the environment in ways that minimize the possibility of incidents. Likewise, automatically ascribing a moral position in such cases makes as little sense as automatically assuming a moral stance on the part of someone in an auto accident. More information is needed beyond the mere incident to be able to say anything about morality. (Thought about in this way, the various formulations of avoidance of certain topics in the workplace makes eminent sense.)

The addition of a the moral stance seems particularly useful in terms of the use of such accusations as a power grab. The purpose is to enable vilification of people based on subjective standards. Really, the equivalent of "You're either for us or against us" should raise hackles in any humanist and liberal worthy of the name. It was unconvincing to me when George W. Bush used it as a silencing tactic to his opponents, and it hasn't developed any more substance since.
It isn't just a "huge photo app with no value", it is a well funded business that encourages trivial ephemeral communication so that is can gain access to your personal information and serve you ads.

Snapchat isn't an accident, it is a well engineered platform built by intelligent people. However it caters to the lowest form of communication that I can think of.

If Snapchat is having an effect on global culture, then god help us. The business itself may have a monetary value, based on its user base. Its product and its effect on communication is toxic, and should be viewed as the junk food of online communication.
How do you evaluate whether your process is good or bad without looking at the outcome it produces? While I grant that even the best/fairest processes can fail on individual cases, if your aggregate result is poor, what other conclusion can you draw except that your process is broken?

To take your example, if the scenario was that no qualified person from a given group applied, you can look at your process and ask what prevented them from doing so. Maybe there's a perception that your organization is hostile to that group, and you can do something to address that perception. Maybe your job postings are only going up in places that target a specific type. Maybe your 3rd-party recruiters are biased. Whatever the reason is, if the broader population of qualified candidates includes groups that aren't applying to your organization, that's pointing to a process problem you can try to fix (which I very much think of as accepting responsibility for my own actions).
Can you substantiate this?
"a sort of low-effort stream of consciousness between friends."

That's exactly the draw for many people, and why it's so sticky. It's about as close to a genuine in-person conversation as you can get. I don't think of it as low quality, just low reach. I speak more colloquially around my friends than I do my employer, and I like Snapchat because it similarly allows me to communicate "at ease".
That got me curious and I think you might be onto something:

Google employs 19,000 people in Mountain View currently

The Twin Towers in NYC each held 25,000 people on a daily basis.

Two buildings in NYC could accommodate the populations of two tech giants that sprawl across entire south bay towns. So several of NYC's average sized and planned skyscrapers could do a fine job. And there is room every direction away from Midtown Manhattan to replicate new robust building clusters.
Snapchat is useful, but so is paper. Billions of people use paper every single day.
> The software development process starts with the definition of the problem and its desired answer.

That's precisely where the metaphor breaks down. For a physical theory, we don't have a desired answer.

The desired answer that motion in the universe is made of circles does not somehow turn ellipses into a set of epicycles.
That's one way of looking at it. But using a medium where people expect short, frequent updates rather than a 10,000 word article has its advantages.