skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do you think making movies is "trivial" and not solving a "real problem"?

I don't think making movies is trivial. It has a large effect on culture and really at the end of the day, as humans, all we have that's uniquely ours is culture (for various broad definitions of the term). Think about how much Sci-Fi movies, novels, and similar ideas contributed to our drive to go to the moon - as a society, not just a country.

Snapchat affects culture, and really what's more powerful and impactful than that? It gives people an ability to tell their story in interesting ways. It gives people a platform for expression. You get a brief, unique glimpse into someone’s actual life from anywhere in the world. This ability to affect culture isn’t unique to Snapchat by any means, there are lots of things out there that affect culture in unique, interesting ways but I don’t think their effects can be understated or written off.

I think the crux of the issue is, people have a narrow definition of "solving problems". The "problem" has to be clear cut with a clear outcome otherwise it isn't a "real problem". But I don't agree with this type of thinking.

There's something Steve Jobs said in a talk that’s stuck with me ever since. Here’s the quote:
“The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values and agenda of an entire generation that is to come and Disney has a monopoly on the storyteller business. You know what? I am tired of that bullshit, I am going to be the next storyteller”.

The rest, as we all know, is history. And really, he has a point. Just look at Facebook’s effect on global culture. It’s incredible in its pervasiveness. We’ve entrusted the group of people building Facebook to drive this effect on culture at a scale we’ve never seen before. It’s a huge responsibility and they have to balance it with business interests which as you can image is very very hard.

But to write off something with such a large, global scale is incredibly short sighted. We underestimate the effects of these things on our lives greatly.

Look, I’m not a Snapchat shill by any means. I don’t even use the product that much. But I try to understand it, and part of understanding the product is understanding the impact. Put aside the nature of the product for a minute, forget that its a photo sharing app, though that is a simplification. Think about just the scale of the application. The scale is absolutely crazy and I’d venture to say that any product with that kind of scale, engagement, and usage patterns WILL have a large impact on culture. As a Software Engineer, that is incredibly exciting to me but at the same time I see it as a very unique responsibility. We need good people building these types of products who understand the full extent of the consequences of what they’re building. The alternative, is not great.

Now whether you think the people at Snapchat have these best interests at heart is a whole different topic of discussion, but I’m tired of people writing off these huge software phenomenon as “just a photo app with no value”. That’s a lazy sentiment and I’m calling you out on it buddy!
Premier communication platform for ephemeral thoughts and images that have no value even to their creators.

It makes no difference to me whether or not shapchat succeeds, just as it makes no difference to anyone whether or not you get their snapchat message.
What a fun approach. It's true that traditional neuroscience methods are too crude to give insight to brain functions and results are often over-interpreted. Neuroscientists know that however [1], and that's why attempts to simulate large circuits like the blue brain project or the simulated cat model produced nothing more than "oscillation statistics". Despite their crudeness, there are cases where circuits (like the amygdala) were causally linked to behavior by early electrophysiology .

There is hope however, as there are now optical and molecular methods that make it possible to observe , activate, and inactivate individual neurons, which allows making causal inferences[2].

1: http://compneuro.uwaterloo.ca/files/publications/eliasmith.2...

2: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150528142815.h...
I would start with using a better shell that gives you more of the context you are asking for. I would recommend zsh and using Oh My Zsh for easy setup
The criticism here is really baffling in how it blames the js ecosystem for the complexity in building large production apps..

I wouldn't find fault with a similar tutorial for "how to set up a production, at scale, rails app with only sever side rendering and zero javascript". Between hosting, cacheing, deployment, worker queues, database provisioning, etc, LOL that tut would be gigantic and that makes sense!

If people are mad that making production client side applications isn't trivially easy, well that just isn't going to happen and that isn't because the js ecosystem is screwed up.
Does it brake and accelerate? If yes, then the car is responsible for braking and accelerating and any damage done while it is braking and accelerating.

Does it turn? No, then no responsibility for turning.

If I can rely on the car to break and go, then I should be able to RELY on the car to do so. This seems like a feature that makes people complacent and will end up hurting self driving car adoption in the long run.

Look at how many people harp on the few accidents Google has been in, and they have a well trained driver in it. Tesla is just putting a 1/2 measure in place so that they can leverage their users as testers and pawning off responsibility when the users turn out to be TERRIBLE testers.
Would it be bad to mention I was born in 1997? February to be more specific.

That site and I are about the same age.
Fucking pissed me off to the max, actually. This week, they did X-Men lenses and REMOVED the face swap and picture swap features for the entire day. If I wanted to use lenses, it had to be X-Men for the whole day. What PM green-lit that shitty decision?

I closed Snapchat and didn't use it for the entire day. I'm boycotting the X-Men movie out of protest.
They also may not have taken the case because it was an interlocutory appeal, and the Supreme Court has a strong bias toward taking appeals of final judgements and avoiding interlocutory appeals unless, in addition to a good reason to take the case, there's also a good reason not to let it go to final judgement before taking it.

It's still possible that the Supreme Court could take this case and Oracle might go back to losing on copyrightability rendering fair use moot.
Using floppy disks and old hardware and software doesn't sound like a problem if it still runs and does what it's supposed to do. I'm skeptical that building a modern system would really save money since the temptation for feature creep is too great.
Relevant story: As a kid, one of my friends would frequently get strep throat. So his mom would give him amoxicillin until he appeared better... and then save the rest of the bottle for the next time he'd (invariably) get strep throat.

And that's how antibiotic resistance happens.
Thanks. Quite apart from 'Java' having been open sourced, Schwartz also got up and told everyone this was all OK. Oracle really did face an uphill battle with that since it's nigh on impossible to take back.
> If anyone can pick their gender, what makes someone masculine and what feminine?

I don't think this really follows. There are still traditionally masculine and feminine traits, this is unchanged by people self-identifying as a gender other than the one they were born with.
I was referring to the latter, though the former is bad as well :)
Scph7502.bin Download – DllYes.com
> It's certainly not impossible to write a 3D game in Go and get 60 fps with high reliability...

But it's hard to write a 3D game in Go and get 60 fps with certainty.
I see what you're saying, but respectfully I disagree. The importance of parsers and run-time systems in compilers really depends on the language you are compiling. There's a big spectrum there.

For runtime systems, on one hand you have languages where they are very important, such as runtime garbage collectors in Lisp, Java, and similar languages, Prolog's runtime logic backtracking, runtime exception support for C++ but no garbage collection, down to languages like C with no garbage collection and minimal runtime. Forth is certainly on the lower end of the compiler runtime implementation spectrum.

For parsing, there's a similar spectrum. There's languages with hideously complicated grammars, like C++, less complex ones like Lisp, and probably again on the simplest end of the spectrum is Forth.

So the requirement of needing to learn to write complex parsers and runtime systems is dependant on the language. I'd certainly classify a C compiler author as a "wizard" even though they wouldn't have to write a garbage collector for their C compiler, and a Lisp compiler author as a "wizard" even though their parser is much less difficult to create than a C++ language parser.

Of course, it's not like wizard is an exact term or anything. If you're saying a "compiler wizard" should be able to understand how to implement any language, then of course you need to have in-depth knowledge of parsers and run-time systems. Me personally, I'd say if you can write a compiler for any language you're somewhere on the compiler magician spectrum. Maybe not full wizard, but at least a compiler warlock or enchanter or something (this is getting silly now, I don't really want to argue about the semantics of the term wizard applied to compilers).
Yes, it will go back to the federal circuit because they interpret anything that once, ever, had patent claims in the complaint as arising under the patent laws of the united states.

I wish Gunn v. Minton had been more expansive.
Researchers ask whether LIGO discovered both dark matter and gravitational waves
Data is not necessarily information. If three commits to fix a typoe make you happy, so be it. I don't need and I do not want this kind of history and information.
On demand vets
Install and test Varnish Cache in five steps
The USSC hasn't ruled on copyrightability (they still might in this case, and it's anyone's guess how they would.)
There already is a method, decades old: bacteriophages [1] in phage therapy [2]. Put them with bacteria that have resistance and they'll evolve along with them. It's cheap and will always be effective.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteriophage
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy
Open source is just a blanket term for a variety of different licenses with different limitations. Earlier court decisions didn't see the GPL license invalidating API copyrights. I guess a poor analogy is that you can use linux code all day long but the Linux trademark is not yours. Nor does Linus personally give you immunity from patents that code might infringe on.
Out of curiosity, do we know if he is still being payed for this?
That isn't a useful metric without details, as it probably includes such sundries as licensing, maintenance agreements, and salaries. A brand-new suite of Oracle enterprise systems would probably be as unfavorable a cost profile.
that was a figure of speech dude. If we're talking about languages you ought to spot these
That only indicates startups being more prudent and reducing their burn rate.
The United States has a unique history with race relations, and we still haven't figured this stuff out. I think part of it is geopolitical, and related to the histories of various ethnic groups in America, which is very different from the histories both in Europe and in South America. If it were in fact the case that nobody cared what color your skin was in America, nobody would care about consciously ending that caring, either.

Remember that Europe and I think South America managed to relatively-peacefully get rid of slavery in the early- to mid-1800s (in those countries that had slavery at all). The US had an extremely fractious war about it, because half the country's economy did not work unless you exploited people's lives for free, and that part of the country morally justified it to themselves by saying that some races were more like animals than humans.
I'm going to go out on a limb here, and say antibiotics overuse in third world countries is a big part of the problem, and the hardest one to fix.

This is purely from anecdotes, but I've heard from several friends who were exchange students from Pakistan/China/India that we have such a ridiculous system here, that back home they can just buy random antibiotics from the pharmacy whenever they catch a cold.
I've worked on:

* Liver transplant protocols

* Military VR for PTSD therapy

* Early R&D for self driving cars

* Long range point to point wifi systems being used in Africa

* VR motion capture studio used in the most of the Marvel movies

* Built several prototype zero net energy homes

* Built several solar concentration array in Haiti with a team after the earthquakes

* Tidal energy generation prototypes

The list goes on.
No. He's a paid consultant to Oracle and Microsoft (see: http://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-to-google-which-blogge...) and his employers get their money's worth.
Most federal systems that are anywhere over ten years old (and that's most of them) are complete mysteries to the people who both use and maintain them.

A long time ago, I was responsible for such a system. I didn't ask for the job; I simply was the smartest person in the room for too long.

I vividly remember one day we had a problem with folks in a remote location entering things and those things getting mangled and/or lost on the way to the system-of-record.

For one system, with maybe five thousand users and perhaps a few gigabytes of traffic a month, I was on a call with 30 people spanning most of the Earth. I learned that there were at least a dozen separate systems at that location between the person entering the data and the data being sent to HQ. Each system was old. Each system had a separate vendor which claimed to be the only vendor to understand that system (Sometimes this was true. Many times they were just bluffing.)

And -- and this was the kicker -- for each of our dozens of locations, each location manager, because of their friendship with politicians, made their own decisions about how machines were configured and which programs were installed. They were complaining to us because things were bad, but they did not feel like they answered to us.

I was responsible for fixing it.

At the end of that call, I was reminded of Arthur C. Clarke's quip: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

But I doubt I thought of it in the way he meant it.
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11773650
It will return to the federal circuit.
The patent issues were not even appealed to the federal circuit the first time.

"Because this action included patent claims, we have jurisdiction pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1295(a)(1)"

...

"The jury found no patent infringement, and the patent claims
are not at issue in this appeal. "

See Oracle America v. Google, Inc. (http://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/content/oracle-america-inc-v-go...)

The federal circuit will, in turn, pretend to apply ninth circuit law.
That wasn't how I meant it to come off, and apologies if it came out that way. I'm not suggesting that we don't acknowledge the problem. I'm more suggesting that the problem is completely elsewhere, so locally addressing it does harm, rather than good.

I have bipolar which causes ADD-like symptoms. When I try to address these problems with requests like "Please don't install three TVs in my peripheral vision", I'm often ignored, laughed at, or my problems are completely minimized (eg, "My cousin was given an ADD misdiagnosis at 2, so clearly that's the case with you", "Grow a thicker skin.", "Get used to it."). How can we expect to address gender issues if we can't even discuss mental health issues?

The problem doesn't start and end in employment, so treating it as a problem within employment and implementing "fixes" on top of employment/employment culture will only make things more complex and exclusionary (particularly for the fringe). As with security, adding a layer of complexity can often have incredibly undesired results, while making the implementers (HR) feel good and secure with their "fix".

It would be nice as a culture to address things from the problem sources, not just the symptoms. Any time I try to have similar serious discussions at workplaces, nobody wants to talk about the root. It's incredibly frustrating, particularly since protecting the fringe is something I'm personally vested in.
It's awkward that all these statistics seem to focus on the output of system without any regard to the input. There's a passing comment about "improve recruiting" but there's no details presented as to who is actually applying.

The hiring process/system is very complicated an difficult to reason about in an objective manner, mostly because it's humans dealing with humans, compounding our human-y traits, non-objectiveness being a hallmark.

I don't see how I'm supposed to take seriously an initiative at attempting to uncover/rectify biases of a system with only the output taken into account. It just seems silly.
I would argue that the stickiness is derived from enterprise. If you get Twilio in as a core dependency on a legacy application that check is never ever gonna stop coming in the mail.
I was not suggesting that all C programmers switch to Common Lisp (though I don't think that would be a bad thing). I was just citing that as an existence proof that it is possible to introduce a new language into the software development mix without abandoning all of the legacy code written in C.

> And all that to gain what?

The ability to write future software with less effort (and that is more reliable and secure) than past software.

> equal-ish to C.

Equal-ish is good enough given the big win in security, reliability and development effort.
I thought about modifying it to include Asian saturation, but I was thinking more so about Facebook services, of which Viber is not one but an underdog
>Oracle were never going to get away with that crap argument. To say that had Google copied all the APIs and created a compatible JVM that would have constituted fair use is laughable frankly.

Besides, how is the argument that Google effectively didn't copy enough at all consistent with the fair use factor regarding the amount of expression copied?
For the lazy (saves some searching on the page and two clicks), the direct link to the full text:

http://www.cell.com/cancer-cell/fulltext/S1535-6108(02)00133...

I'll bookmark both those papers - and I rarely bookmark anything (instead relying on Google and the eternal onslaught of ever newer links and issues).

That paper is real fun to read, an excerpt:

> How would we begin? First, we would secure funds to obtain a large supply of identical functioning radios in order to dissect and compare them to the one that is broken. We would eventually find how to open the radios and will find objects of various shape, color, and size (Figure 2). We would describe and classify them into families according to their appearance. We would describe a family of square metal objects, a family of round brightly colored objects with two legs, round-shaped objects with three legs and so on. Because the objects would vary in color, we would investigate whether changing the colors affects the radio's performance. Although changing the colors would have only attenuating effects (the music is still playing but a trained ear of some can discern some distortion) this approach will produce many publications and result in a lively debate.

If you need a real good laugh, do read it now, it gets even more funny after the quoted paragraph! It's almost as good as that (much shorter) paper on PubMed where they examined the sterility of farts in operating rooms (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1121900/).
The marketplace of ideas just, rightly, rejected your elaborate but essentially baseless claim that anti-discrimination victimizes everyone who is not in the group being "de-victimized".

It would be comical if it wasn't so sad.
You can now use lambdas as generic type references http://benjiweber.co.uk/blog/2015/08/04/lambda-type-referenc...
A public library started our company
I don't see why it would necessarily get messy. Remember that appellate court does not accept new facts. The judges reviewing the case will do so based entirely on the facts found during the trial case and make a ruling. The only thing they would need to rule on is whether a particular fact was weighted properly by the jury. Remember, jury members are not expected to be experts of law; that's the judge's realm. So it's possible for them to misapply the law, and this process is a way to correct that.

I can certainly see an argument here that certain facts, such as commercial use, were not properly considered by the jury. Commercial use is typically a very large factor in fair use, and should receive a correspondingly heavy weighting.

Also, remember that this would merely permit a retrial. It would not be an immediate ruling for Oracle, as one normally thinks of appeal decisions. It would be a big reset button on the whole process.
"There are no Black/African-American GitHubbers in management positions, which is unacceptable."

It is only unacceptable if people with the skills to be in management positions didn't get a promotion because of a non-relevant personal attribute.

Otherwise, it is acceptable and in the best long term interests of the company.

I acknowledge that America has equality of opportunity problems. There are strong and just historical reasons why the government has carried the torch on this issue. However, I think its time to let the market work. Companies that place talent above non-relevant personal attributes are at a competitive advantage as they are drawing from a larger talent pool. Letting that market run on a long enough time line means that companies who discriminate will grow weaker, as well they should.

Github has come out and said "we're going to make sure that we meet target quotas for people of X, Y and Z non-relevant personal attributes." I think that's bad business and not the equality we need to be going for.

If you have the skill set, drive and integrity to be a strong contributor to a team, I want to work with you and make wealth with you. If you don't, I don't want to work with you - go get educated, build skills and try again or if I'm wrong about you, prove it by out competing me. This is equality of opportunity and of ideas. What Github is doing isn't, nor does it get us closer to what the idea of America promises us all.

I think that providing the resources to build skills to those whose parents didn't or couldn't provide them is a great idea.

I think shaking up our education system (because the numbers show that investing doesn't produce better results) is a great idea.

I want to be fellow citizens with educated, driven people who are so in part because society ensured it'd happen.

Lets not go too far or go in the wrong direction.
Brooke Greenberg – The Syndrome X
More's to the point. Let's say I apply for a job early in my career and a hiring manager doesn't give it to me.

Then later in life I'm a billionaire and I want revenge. It becomes known publicly that I want to destroy him and his company so very badly, that I will fund any lawsuit against him or them. I fund lawsuit after lawsuit until the company is destroyed and he is bankrupted and ruined, his family and life in shambles.

Is that okay?
I think your analysis of Intel's problem is spot on. But FPGAs have something like (IIRC) 4% of the density of custom-designed ASICs. Can Intel's superior process create FPGAs at such small scales to overcome this rather large disadvantage?

Agree about the terrible tooling. 'Twas always thus, unfortunately, even when I was doing PLDs back in 1991.
> I'm not blaming react,

No, React is particularly bad here. RactiveJS for example can be used in a minute: http://www.ractivejs.org/60-second-setup