skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Generally familiar with his work (and before it was featured on HN a few days back), though I've not read it closely.
> Since when were politicians even comparable to programs?

Since people learned the power of the metaphor.

> Do we "elect" a init system

For some distros? Sure. By its nature, Linux, GNU and the open source software that goes into the ecosystem allows people to create new distributions, or choose one of the many that exist. This choice is, in some small way, like a vote. If systemd was really that bad, enough people would work around it to make it's adoption much more problematic.

If you want more than that, some distributions literally vote on features like this, and have voted specifically on systemd[1].

> I cannot even begin to describe how silly your comment is. ... I'm hoping I was just trolled by an HN-flavored Markov Chain.

That doesn't seem very constructive.

1: https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00294.html
The popup makes it practically unreadable on mobile
Isn't LuaJIT now unmaintained?
You really need to check out Elm.

It's an ML-like language with built in functional reactive framework similar to React, but built to work naturally with the language rather than requiring the FFI binding you'd need if you use Purescript.
Bucky Fuller was big on measuring shapes relative to triangular / tetrahedral coordinates. “Synergetics coordinates”.

See e.g. http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/s09/p6300.html#966...

The advantage of measuring area relative to a unit simplex is that it gets rid of a factor of n! in the denominator which would pop up if you measured the area of a simplex relative to a square grid. Likewise it simplifies the formulae for area/volume of the n–sphere.

An equilateral triangle grid in 2-dimensions, and its dual the hexagonal grid, have much to recommend them. They’re often more efficient, e.g. it would be noticeably better (less isotropic, more efficient) to represent images using hexagonally shaped pixels than square pixels. Perhaps most importantly, they broaden thinking beyond the square-grid culture we’re immersed in in every aspect of our society (textiles, city planning, construction, carpentry, cartography, visual art, written documents, analytic geometry, ...) and just take for granted. It’s quite literally a way to “think outside the box”.

The downside is that it’s not a priori obvious exactly which way to generalize the equilateral triangle grid beyond two dimensions, whereas for a square grid there’s a natural choice. We can base our coordinates on just a single simplex, but this doesn’t necessarily make measuring or relating arbitrary shapes any easier.

The symmetry system of the tetrahedron has one type of 2-fold and two types of 3-fold axes of symmetry, and regular tetrahedra alone don’t tile space in a regular way. The FCC and BCC lattices, based on the symmetry of the cube/octahedron have 2-fold, 3-fold, and 4-fold axes of symmetry (this is the symmetry system of a tiling of space using mixed octahedra and tetrahedra). The dodecahedron/icosahedron have 2-fold, 3-fold, and 5-fold axes of symmetry, don’t tile space, and don’t generalize beyond the 4th dimensional case.
You're right. Although Musk did make the point that the Raptor and the Merlin are essentially the same size. The scale is the same.
I think there's plenty of modern pixel/block art that's awesome, http://www.nuklearpower.com/2001/03/05/episode-002-why-is-he... as an early example.

But we should appreciate modern pixel artwork as a cool retro-themed anachronism, not an actual representation of what displays rendered in the past. The idea that a pixel is only a 2D square gets in the way of that -- ideally, people could understand that it refers to both a point sample as well as a box-filtered rendering of that sample, and those two senses imply different ways to view a set of pixels.
I want to know who or what will decide what to put in the preview. Will content creators have any control over this? If previews are strictly algorithmic, will there be recourse in case a certain preview misrepresents or spoils the content?
If your goal is to find a "salaried job", you should really put 100% of your effort into it. "not the right fit" or "insufficient amount of experience" is just a roundabout way to say you didn't pass the interview.

Think about this: EVERYONE gets their first job when they have 0 experience. So next time when someone says you don't have enough experience take it as meaning "your skills are not enough". This is not something you can just hope it will fix itself while you're doing doordash work. If you really want to get the job, be good at it by studying. From my experience it is extremely rare to reject an obviously competent candidate for ANY reason.
It's not like car safety. There's an enemy. The enemy is not random.

Patch and release only works against inept opponents, and there are more non-inept opponents. It won't work against opponents who can develop or buy their own exploits. Patch and release gives the illusion of working because it stops vast numbers of inept attacks from clowns who just want to send spam emails.

Someone in military base security once said that you have to avoid tying up too much of your resources chasing kids throwing rocks at the perimeter fence. The real threat is the janitor who has access to the spare parts stores. Patch and release, and pattern-matching virus scanners, are chasing kids throwing rocks.
Its so bad that some wealthy municipalities spend a significant fraction of their budgets lobbying or fighting development in court. The government of South Pasadena, for example, a town of about 25,000, spends millions of dollars a year in legal fees to block the 710 freeway expansion. This expansion would break a huge bottleneck in the area and LA county went as far as coming up with an underground freeway plan costing a billion dollars a mile (paid for by the state and TARP!) but even that was shot down. I think they finally gave up after decades of court battles and all of the houses bought along the planned expansion are being sold by the state.

Meanwhile, the school district cuts millions from its budget every few years (from five schools), road and other infrastructure maintenance is years behind at best (roads are crumbling and El Nino took it up another level), and the emergency services have turned to donations to meet their stagnant budgets.
Peter Thiel and Acts of Kindness
I wanted to ask Hacker News about things that Mr. Thiel did that are philanthropic and/or kind. I read a lot of seemingly misinformation on the internet related to Mr. Thiel, some of the articles call him a Nazi, for example. I wanted to know more about the truth (instead of the information present in the media), because I've looked up to Mr. Thiel for a number of years now and I wanted to hear from people who actually know Mr. Thiel.. instead of journalists.
What's the largest team YC has accepted?
node.js insists on its own mainloop. python is agnostic. efl already integrates with node's libuv usage and glib mainloop. really gtk requires a glib mainloop. you make glib integrate/sit on top of something elses and efl did the same thing.
Keep those ratings up or your supplies are cut off.

Anime reference: "Starship Operators".
For whatever reason, Apple seems to be struggling across the board when it comes to software engineering. They are slow to execute new features and when they do they are often buggy. With each release cycle they fall farther and farther behind their competition. I'm having a hard time thinking of any Apple applications that are better than their competition. I don't know if they're having trouble attracting top talent or if there's something off in their culture but they need to fix it. Swift is a good foundation to build on but it won't be enough on its own.

They're lucky Microsoft has been asleep at the wheel for the last few years or actively shooting itself in the foot (Windows 8). But MS seems to be getting its act together lately.
Its a silly attitude to deny development. There is plenty of room for more people, on the planet, in LA.Just get organized.I live in Venice but friends in Hollywood I see maybe 4 times a year because driving is numbing. Robocars are gonna improve things greatly.That said, LA is full of itself.You will pay through the nose for property that shouldvbe torn down, yet you are not allowed to. I am a Euro transplant and I have travelled the U.S.for the past dozen years and there is hardly a bad spot anymore.You get great food, culture, people many many places. Madison WI, Bozeman, Raleigh, Detroit even, even Texas. Lot of people are stuck in LA molasses.
Want an Apple Watch? For some Aetna customers, it’ll soon be covered
Oauth popups is a good example of how to give consent. They are opt in and usually say exactly to whom you share information and what kind of information they will get.
Unless you are doing Java, I would even take issue with the argument that dynamic typing is faster to develop. It's taken as obvious fact but I don't think we should just take that as face value. Getting as-you-type feedback, intellisense, and simple documentation (methods, parameters, types) is hugely productive. As well as the ability to break things and know you've caught all the breaks.

I would say that a very fast edit-run cycle is an advantage of dynamic languages -- especially if you can edit code live without restarting the application -- but that's not always the norm.
Maybe the initial write is faster, but any refactoring strongly favors static type systems in the speed department. Even an extremely well tested dynamic code base will have a significant disadvantage for refactoring because the tools can't catch all the small details and you'll have to iterate over and over again until tests pass.
Why has no one made a more developer friendly way of doing this that does not need to include breakpoints in code? What if I don't know what I should be looking at when I am profiling?

XCode has a really nice memory profiler that shows where the memory was allotted inline.
I tried to do the same thing but bought a cheap <$100 mono laser. I pretty much never print, maybe a page a month, if that.

It's only a year old and now it won't suck up the paper properly. I have to literally stick my hands into it and feed the paper in page-by-page.

The thing has successfully printed less than 20 pages and it's already not working.

It's 2016 and Samsung can't make a rubber roller that works. And I don't want to buy another just to have the same thing happen.
IEEE sets new Ethernet standard that brings 5X the speed without cable changes
Or, to put it another way: If the CIA had set out to slander the poor, unappreciated Syrian public servants who kidnap and murder gay people, their sinister propaganda operative wouldn't have pulled "Amina's" picture off of Google Images. He wouldn't have gotten her "hometown pictures" from his own vacation photos on his public Facebook.

McMaster is too stupid to be a government agent. You are seriously underestimating your enemy if you think the US intelligence system is that dim.
The standard defense of JavaScript is no different than the standard defense of PHP. There are good arguments but that is still the camp you're in.
Does that mean Karabiner and Seil are now combined?

I mapped my Caps Lock to escape, but I just realized that it's not by Karabiner, and I need Seil from the same author to do it.
I don't see that as inconsistent. The term is 'advertiser friendly'. Plenty of advertisers are happy to be associated with popular artists because their popularity gives the advertiser cover. Equally, they might not want to be associated with a small-time true crime channel.
Do you secretly have a Japanese nickname that goes something like Sama-sama?
I would much, much rather use a modern, statically typed language than a dynamic language. This includes languages like Swift, Scala, Kotlin etc and specifically excludes Java.

I wouldn't even consider dealing with a big JS codebase without either Flow or Typescript now.
Yeah, because fuck adoption. It only counts if it has your DNA, right?
The False Premise of the Shareholder Value Debate
I do retract my complaint about comparing politicians to programs. In its place, I complain about the process of electing a President being different from voting on an init system.

The most important point here is that distributions vote on which init system they elect. We are not all electing one init system to rule them all, across Linux. Distributions are nation-states of varying size that follow similar but sometimes incompatible rules, all derived from the same core tenets and program. So we're electing governors from the same political parties, more or less.

I think telling people to suck it up and just accept systemd as their one true init system is just silly. Regardless about how you feel about Clinton, there are always reasons to use something else.

If you need a barebones system, or something for experimentation, or something that is hardened at the price of flexibility, that is an applicable choice, and one you can make from the comfort of your own home. You can't fork the US or an individual state in the same way you can download a different distro to your Raspberry Pi.

And I could go on and on. But you're right; I suppose I could, in the end, begin to describe how silly that comment was. Even if the explanation ended up being really unwieldy and not my best writing. It might not have been wholly constructive either, but we're generally all here to have a good time.

My point is, it's a silly, leaky metaphor. And telling people to suck it up and use an actually useful tool in the comments for a distribution that's written as an elitist hobby project is similarly silly. These people aren't picketing your Debian or Arch systemd parties. They're just doing their own dang thing.
Hmm .. Mountain View is an interesting example. The area near whishman park has no grocery stores or restaurants. I ran into an old timer in an Uber recently and he mentioned people did some of this zoning on purpose .. I.e. the need for a car to survive. As a young person, it seems weird that I bike home from work, and then take uber to get groceries. But yeah .. things are messed up in zoning big time.
What they are actually doing is making progress is fulfilling the plan to colonize Mars. Everything they've done since the founding of the company has been toward that goal. This presentation was just to fill the public in on more details of the near future of achieving that. I think celebrating their progress so far is also celebrating their attitude and ambition toward the future they are projecting. It's definitely not empty talk if the previous goals they've set in their plan have been successful. That's a good indicator that the goals they set for the future is something they really are working toward achieving.
Pasadena will tax Netflix, Hulu
And...you can actually choose.

Not only does your vote count, when it comes down to it, yours is the only vote that counts.
I can't take my eyes off of that "3D low-poly" racetrack thingy. So pretty.

I wonder how far someone could get with that artstyle in general, I haven't seen it that often. There was that RTS game that used it, forgot the name..
So you know it's wrong, but you keep doing it?

Aren't you doing exactly the same thing as the industrialists who slandered the Luddites? You're reducing the real welfare of thousands of workers and their families to "oh, they're scared of technology, just ignore the silly primitives."
And this is where the supply side of the equation comes into play. Many people can build the road and there shouldn't be any differentiation in how it is built (assuming they have common engineering standards). Thus, the supply is almost perfectly competitive causing low wages.

However, there are infinite ways a developer can make something. 1 developer can make design a system that can save/make their company millions that most other developers would miss. The supply side of developers is more like a monopolistically competitive market. Thus, they can extract some of those savings/profits in wages.
Hi Sam — seems like 'Science' was removed as a category in RFS. Can you comment on this?
asm.js is exactly that!
An article from the recording world, with a similar perspective:

http://tapeop.com/columns/end-rant/115/
Thats precisely why HN is not reddit.
There's also a quite-active, and largely effective, moderation effort by @dang and ... I forget the other mod, scbc or something like that.

I've been making comparative studies of a few communities (HN, Reddit, G+, Imzy, Ello), and it's interesting to see how various ones work. In particular, there's a tremendous culture against the types of even indirect personal attacks at HN which fly in spades elsewhere. I saw @dang inveighing against a comment which began with "<sigh>", on the grounds that that is the equivalent of an internet eyeroll.

On G+, discussion quality depends very much on the host and how they manage a particular thread. I've got problems with Google itself, but the platform can support quite good discussions. Overall participation has always been small (6-12 million users posting publicly per month, a value I'd had a hand in determining), but in corners, that's still a good crowd. The best circumstance is to cultivate a small group ~30-100 members or so, set firm expectations for participation, moderate aggressively (that is, promptly), though fairly and starting with social nudges. There's a balance between topic drift and derailment.

Reddit varies hugely by subreddit, the good ones are exceptionally good. The site as a whole has some faults that leak through even to the good subs though.

Ello has a very small (~10k or so daily, ~200k or so monthly visits) userbase, but it strikes me as quite well behaved for the most part, something I've commented on specifically to the site's admins.

Imzy, the "kinder, gentler Reddit" has largely proven not to be. For reasons not entirely suprising when you combine an on-tap, ad libitum anonymity access, lacking leadership, overtaxed / AWOL moderation, exceptionally ill-conceived notifications, threading, and response mechanisms, and a community drawn from SRS and similar beds of vitriol. It's not the issues advocated for, but the methods of advocacy, including ample amounts of friendly fire and hypocrisy, which generate problems.

I watched a trainwreck explode simply trying to discuss anonymity itself: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/qdxyzy2x4lbaq_4rx81nnw
I agree, maybe it's also cultural but saying how great everyone was at each retro just dampers the intended effect.
Have a look at the end of the video presentation when they open the cabin and look out on Mars. Two of 'people' in the shot are not wearing any sort of helmet or suit and appear to be humanoid robots.
Pretty much. This is where I am right now. I get off work and stop doing web development to practice data structures and algorithms because that's what intviewers want. They don't care about the actual web development experience and the questions I've been asked in all my recent interviews reflect this.

I can't wait to be done interviewing so I can go back to working on fun side projects after work.
One of the first questions I would ask is what is an indirect assertion of a patent in this situation? If you get shaken down by a patent troll for a patent related to React stuff, would that be considered an indirect assertion? After all, you're making a statement there that React is violating some patent. While I can agree with patent severance clauses, this one just feels full of real ugliness that would drive a lawyer crazy.
Some tips I've found for finding/actuating a good marketer;

1) Dig into exact contributions to campaigns for past roles. Ask for the logic around decisions. Often marketers talk about their campaigns results but really they were a body in a room with little input. Dig for detail and motivations to decisions and you will find out who is who.

2) Look for initiative. Many marketeers repeat what is always done optimising here and there. Especially for dynamic businesses i'd look for people that see the world independently of their enviroment, have the initiative to shift how things are done. This is someone that will deliver results vs turn wheels for the sake of it.

3) Look for someone that has experience working big and small companies. The big brands will train comms, project management and procedure. Small brands should give the 'getting it done' skills, generalist experience and show they can get technical/dirty hands. Larger brand experience can look impressive but often the work is more project management for agencies and doesnt suit hand on. Likewise if you're business is big enough to run agencies if someone has always been hands on they can be weak project managers and communicate needs ineffectively.

4) Find someone that can analyse data vs report it. There's a big difference in the 2 and the former is surprisingly rare.

5) Avoid anyone that shows narcissistic tendency or is generally 'me' focused. This personality tends to be bad comms people (especially with social) as they see the world from their POV, not the customers.

6) Give marketers product input. They should have their finger on the customer pulse and valuable views on what sell/motivates users. Dont let tech side shut out marketing.

7) Don't go cheap. I often see startups advertising low paid roles a couple years experience, while they pay for experienced developers. Half the price sounds great but they will bring a fraction of the value.

8) Make sure they have a budget. This goes well with the above point. Generally I'd say a 10-20x marketing salary would be a good rule of what you should be looking to spend if bringing a permanent marketing role in.

9) Sales and marketing are not the same thing. Know what you need. They dont often come all-in-one.

10) While not an absolute I usually check linkedin contacts to skill endorsements ratio. Typically this ratio is higher for the people I know are good marketers. I wouldn't make my decision by this but is seems one of those soft indicators.

11) When you interview give a 10min exercise before to discuss and cover up real-time actual skills. E.g. show them some relevant to role campaign materials (e.g. landing pages/EDM's) and ask them how they would improve. Ask them what they would do with $50k. Typically I add in some spelling/grammar mistakes to also look for attention to detail as it tends to be a 'you have it or you dont' skill (like initiative) and not something you can train up.

...hope that's useful...not a rant :)
I really like the idea of static linking.

Then I think about how I'd patch the next inevitable openssl bug.

Then I don't like it as much.
You're making his point for him.

His point is that cars used to be built assuming there would never be an accident. They were very comfortable until you crashed into something, and then everyone died. Today cars are built defensively, so that when the unforeseen happens, you are still protected.

That's the idea. Building in defenses that protect you against unknown bugs and exploits.
Could you elaborate on the further problems you're alluding to here?
I believe his answer in the QA was that you would launch an empty rocket first, and once that rocket is fueled, a 2nd rocket with passengers would launch and transfer to the fueled rocket, and then the new passenger-empty rocket would be in orbit to be fueled for the next trip.
"The argument [for building a civilization on Mars] that I actually find most compelling is that it would be an incredible adventure. I think it would be the most inspiring thing that I can possibly imagine. And life needs to be more than just solving problems every day. You need to wakeup and be excited about the future, and be inspired, and want to live." -- Elon Musk

(1 hour 31 minutes)
Evolutionarily, yes
Phoenix?