skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
void* is usually not a symptom of limits of static typing, but limits of the [type system] design or human brain. You can think of it as "ok, I give up. Anything can be passed here, proceed at your own risk, compiler will not save you here, errors will show up at runtime". Even the memory safe Rust does not do without such unsafe blocks. In dynamically typed languages that is everywhere, though.
I have said this before: safety benefits of static typing show up when you are working with at least data structures, not simple variables. Imagine you have an external endpoint or library call that is specified to return a single object and does exactly that. At some time after release you are the maintenance programmer responsible for implementing spec changes:

* The object returned no longer has member/property x, it is obtained by other means;
* The endpoint returns list of such objects.

How sure are you that tests in dynamic language cover these cases? My experience shows that tests very rarely get designed to anticipate data changes, because data is driving test design. Which is more likely for a test: a) to test whether object returned contains keys x, y and z; b) to check if the object returned is_list() (see appendix)?
Static typing covers such cases. Static typing is not something that magically saves oneself from shooting them in the foot, but is nevertheless a safety tool that CAN be used. It is of course a burden if one does not intend to use it and that is the core of the debate.

Fun thing: in the second case if your code manages to convert input list to a map and assign one returned object to a key that coincides with the removed property and map access looks syntactically the same as property access (a very specific set of assumptions, though), the bug can butterfly quite deep into the code before manifesting :)
Fair 'nuff. I'm more on the user side of the browser equation, so you would know.

But you do have pretty good standards compliance, last I checked.
> Why should either party get to just say, "No thanks"?

So now I'm confused. Do you support abortion or not?

I completely agree. If abortion is illegal, yeah, the man should have no say just like the woman has no say in giving birth and raising a baby.

If abortion is legal, it's the logical equivalent of a woman saying "no thanks" to the baby unilaterally. "My body, my choice" and all that.

I am not trying to be difficult, I just want to know where you're coming from.
If anything this makes -- should have made -- taking a principled stand drastically easier.

It also doesn't follow that a defense then could ever be "we won't fire..." He's not an employee nor a YC vote-carrier nor an equity holder that you seemingly can fire.
Actually me saying they're not the same would be a statement of fact.

As an American, forgive me for actually caring about my countries politics.
http://bridge.georgetown.edu/when-islamophobia-turns-violent...

http://usuncut.com/news/there-have-been-23-hate-crimes-again...

http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/10/us/brooklyn-muslim-women-attac...
OpenLazlo was a flex-alike that targeted flash and dhtml (yup, dhtml) but is no longer amongst the living. I shipped a project with it a long time ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenLaszlo
This is a false equivalence. There is such a thing as evil. There are such a thing as evil men. There are dictators that rise, and there are would-be dictators that were resisted strongly enough before hand to stop their rise in the first place.

Hillary Clinton is not a dictator. Thiel is not an employee. I do treat people differently based on their actions and who they support and you should to. Putin didn't just walk up to the Kremlin and tell them he was going to seize power, he was able to do it because people let him, then he seized the press to complete his control over the information Russians have access to.
We expect senior professors to train students. How do you train students? By getting them to do work and write papers. If they haven't published by graduation time, they can't prove they can get the job done. This is the main reason that senior people produce a lot of papers - they have a lot of students.

I've written a bunch of papers - I don't care any more about quantity. But I want each of my graduating students to have a publication or two so they can get a job. So we turn out a bunch of papers every year, and no, not every one is earth-shaking, partly because roughly every second paper is a student's first one and that's what they were capable of at the time.

It's easy to miss this kind of dynamic from the outside.
Freedom is the right to be wrong. Freedom of speech isn't fought at Michaelangelo's David; its fought at Larry Flynt's Hustler.
Just one thing: ability to return array of elements as result.
Could you elaborate on how you did this? What was your niche? How did you get in touch with the influencers? What kind of payouts were involved?

I have heard that facebook also adopted a similar strategy in the very beginning. I have no doubt that it works.
What is the downside here? I haven't seen any evidence that this type of trading is beneficial to the economy.
Citizens United basically allows corporations to compel political participation of their employees regardless of their politics.
The version deployed at orbit.libp2p.io is using orbit-db which is using redis to do pubsub right now. However, pubsub is being worked on and exists in for example go-ipfs#master right now under a feature flag. Run `ipfs pubsub --help` after build from source to try it out. It's also being worked on getting into js-ipfs.
>His resignation is not a moral issue, his public support of the marriage equality ban was economically damaging to the company.

That's funny, Mozilla is just getting worse and worse since he was forced to leave.
I'm an author. My personal mail is spd@toadstyle.org. I'm happy to help you get unblocked.
Just because it hasn't happened in these cases doesn't mean there isn't a case for it yet. It's very complex. That's why people pay lawyers.

The point I'm making here is that the business world isn't a universe where people can 100% of the time support an outspoken racist, anti-semitic, Islamaphobic, misogynistic, sexual predator authoritarian who wants to put an end to American democracy.

Imagine if the CEO of Coca Cola did what Peter Thiel did. You wouldn't think he wouldn't be out on his butt?

It's a case by case basis, but saying "business therefor you can say and support whoever you want" is wrong. It's up to YC to do as they wish, I just wanted to point out that things are a little more nuanced here.
> "Is that what the protesters were reporting, that dogs were straining, dogs had their mouths open, that dogs were biting, or is this a bit or artistic license?"

You don't have to take the protesters word for it, the footage is available on YouTube. I'll dig up a link for you to see it for yourself.

EDIT: This video covers the protest, you can see the part where the dogs were used against the protesters:

http://youtu.be/VADcWANqBp8
Boolean comparison in JavaScript has a bug
[Book] Artrepreneur: A Field Guide for Creative Professionals
Actually, I think a really good case could be made that asking that was specifically an act of journalism. She asked the reasoning behind their action of using the dogs. That's better than not asking and attributing an assumed reasoning. Asking a question is what journalists do. People aren't required to like those questions.
So it would be fairer to say "Part-time Partner" is the name of a role, like "Limited Partner", that sounds like a variation of Partner but is in fact a completely different role with different duties and privileges? This sounds very likely but is hard to deduce from the blog posts.

[EDIT: To be more specific:

Here (https://blog.ycombinator.com/diversity-and-startups) you mention:

"My hope is that YC has enough leverage at this point to make it clear that [inappropriate behavior towards female founders] is unacceptable and we will not continue to work with investors who do it."

The whole post is great and speaks to the role you (meaning YC in general) feel it is important to play in supporting women, minority and more generally, 'outsider' founders. The quote illustrates you've not ruled out severing business ties to investors who make 'outsider' founders uncomfortable.

Here (http://blog.samaltman.com/trump), you are talking about Trump:

"Demagogic hate-mongers lead down terrible paths. It would be particularly embarrassing for us to fall for this[.]"

In the same piece about Trump, you reference Trump's policy regarding 'outsiders' in particular, and the famous quote, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." You also state "This would be a good time for us all—even Republicans, especially Republican politicians who previously endorsed Trump—to start speaking up."

The primary confusion is that, despite the fact "[you]’ve supported some Republicans in the past", you _aren't_ speaking up and clarifying the impact of a major Trump surrogate with a potentially misleading(?) title within YC itself.

So while some others are indicating you're engaged in pedantry, I am actually very interested in the exact role of various YC partner or partner-esque people. I think this is a case where details might matter, but so far YC has been oddly silent.

To the extent such a confusion can be averted, I'd be interested in your thoughts, but appreciate this can be quite a needle to thread.]
I'm confused, is this not a perfect example of the free market in action? Is this not exactly what conservatives suggest will (should) happen when we allow discrimination based on religious or personal views. They suggest that private individuals and organizations will refuse to work with those companies whose views they disagree with, and that in turn will force the companies to adapt or perish.

Is that not exactly what happened here? OkCupid refused to do work with Mozilla based on Mozilla's (CEO's) beliefs, and this led to action on the part of Mozilla.

I'm not sure how you can call this a liberal action when it is essentially what the right espouses as 'the way things should be'.
Machine learning is subset of statistics.
The standard text in ML, "The Elements of Statistical Learning" is authored by statistics Professors.

To be fair, I think "Machine Learning" was an academic marketing term coined by Computer Science departments. It seems that the term "Statistical Learning" was coined in response by Statistics departments. Other similar marketing buzzwords used by various factions (comp sci, stats, actuarial science, industrial engineers, etc) include "Data Science, "Predictive Analytics," "Data Mining," "Knowledge Discovery," "Knowledge Engineering," "Soft Computing," "Artificial Intelligence," "Big Data," "Deep Learning"... To be honest, it's tiresome and troubling to see academic departments invent and adopt overlapping and vacuous marketing buzzwords.
How does this not violate [1]? That is, this seems specifically anti-statistical. The best you can come up with on this is a predictive model that you then have to test on new events. In this case, that would likely mean new crashes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testing_hypotheses_suggested_b...
Why don't people see Thiel as SV's insurance ? If (atheist-god forbid) trump wins, you have an enthusiastic supporter and firm SV believer by his side (who also happens to be gay) to contain the wild beast. Would you rather have some evangelical nutjob who would put fig leaves on your porn?
Nope, I hadn't seen that. Definitely helps!
HFT Doesn't generate any value, it just siphons money to the people who do it.
Stock markets are the original Kickstarter. However with increasing trading frequency you turn something that generates value for society into a grotesque casino.
(Slight nitpick: Mozilla Corporation only has one financial shareholder, the Mozilla Foundation. It's a for-profit corporation that's a wholly owned subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. It has stakeholders it answers to, such as the board of directors, but no shareholders.)
You might be interested in OpenResty.
If you want subscribers who care about your content and engage, and not just people (or bots) who signed up for free things, then earn their subscription by sharing interesting and helpful content.
I am sincerely happy to see most of HN is taking the stance of defending Thiel--by doing it, they are simply defending the freedom to back the candidate you like, and not the one that the industry wants you to like.

I have a Twitter stream of hundreds of developers from different backgrounds and it was like 99% pro-Hillary--by defending Trump you would get spanked. Something was really wrong there, and this conversation we are having proves it.

And I can't help but wonder if Thiel did this just so this conversation would spark. It simply is brilliant.
Can you name a politician at the national level with an executive position or foreign-policy-related legislative position who doesn't advocate war crimes?
By all means. You can email me if you wish.
I'm not calling the protester's words into question, I'm asking whether he's attributing those words to the protesters, or those are his words. That's what I meant by "sloppy", as the wording makes it somewhat ambiguous when going by this article alone. IMO it's either sloppy, or overstepping the bounds of what I consider good journalism. I would prefer it be sloppy rather than the alternative, but as I say, it's hard to tell for me.

That link would be appreciated.
Why do people trade against HFT (particularly, HFT market makers) if they just siphon money out?
I'm not understanding what exactly you want.

If you're saying Sam should come out and say he disagrees with Thiel, he's already said he finds Trump repugnant. Are you saying that in addition to this, he also has to say, "I now draw attention to the fact that by opposing Trump, I am hereby disagreeing with my partner who supports him"? Why? And could it possibly also be because YC has other people in it, and disavowing a partner of YC by himself would be acting irresponsibly toward his partners?

If you're saying YC as an institution should disavow Thiel's actions, is every company expected to choose a political stance, then disavow any partners who act against it? For that matter, it's disingenuous of you to point to an individual's tweets denouncing Trump, then to the fact that his organization hasn't done the same, and call it a lack of moral courage.

It's also disingenuous to suggest, as you do in your tweets where you warn women and Muslims against joining YC, that because one of their partners donated to Trump and spoke at his convention, YC as an institution is now somehow poisoned with the views typical of a Trump supporter. Presumably Thiel was added as a partner for the simple reason that he is a valuable source of advice for startups. He can still be one as a keynote speaker for Trump. Besides, most people who endorse candidates, even people who act as keynote speakers, don't agree completely with their candidate, which further weakens your argument.

Finally, I sometimes read your tweets, and I noticed you tweeted https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/787756601281085440 to Paul Graham's wife. Your usual sense of humor becomes weirdly aggressive when you write about YC, like you really want to pick a fight. What's your problem with them?
>When a CEO's freedom of speech damages their company economically, what are shareholders supposed to do?

A fair question, but Mozilla has no shareholders. It is a non-profit[0][1].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation
> to their human management practices.

You (perhaps unconsciously) did not address the full assertion which precisely refers to human management practices where the two atomic operations (so to speak) are hiring (append) and firing (remove).

To settle according to what ethical framework corporations must abide when they do business with other entities is a vast topic that goes well beyond the particular scope of this HN thread. In case I was not clear, by politically neutral agents I am referring to the fashion by which corporations consume and exchange human capital within a defined social body. This is not the same as saying that a company is apolitical; since they do that all the time (through lobbying on single-issue bills etc.).

>If corporations are expected to be truly "politically neutral agents", then IBM providing services to the Nazis was nothing wrong

As I said, this is off-topic. Though I am a bit amused by how you justify your own authoritarianism (motivated by your morals) by pointing to Trump's supposed. Do you also think that it was unethical for journalists to let Trump participate to the debate? After all, it provides a platform for his rancid, heinous, dangerous, seditious, genocidal ideas for millions of Americans to hear. Or that hunting down and firing the three (let's be generous and say four) software engineers that support Trump at company X is a necessary condition to prevent <literally_genocide> or <literally_Hitler> taking power.

It is rarely a good idea to crackdown on individuals because they hold a set of beliefs that does not fit your schema for "Good and honourable things to believe in". Especially during an election period where plurality is a necessary condition for democracy to work.
Yes, I beleive too often abuse is described in the language of violence, which either ubjustly narrows the definition abuse or expands the definition of violence in ways that illicit confusion or resistance.
Alternatively you can partner with a community and build a product for them on revenue share.
Statistics as a field typically concerns itself with fitting models to data by determining the distribution of the process that the data was generated from. Machine learning follows a different approach. Read Breiman's "Two Cultures."

http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.ss/1009213726
For SEO, what tools were you using to assess changes you needed to make?
Of Peter Thiel, Donald Trump and Silicon Valley
Dangerous idiots: how the liberal media elite failed working-class Americans
> This false dichotomy of "Thiel is making a political statement and expressing his beliefs, he shouldn't be punished/bullied/ruined/etc for it, less we start moving down the slope of totalitarianism" is intellectually dishonest.

It's not a false dichotomy, for two reasons. First is it's not a dichotomy - you need two things for it, and you have here just one claim - that Thiel should not be ruined for expressing support for Trump. Also, it is not false - it is completely true, he should not, otherwise we are on the way to totalitarian unity of opinion, where dissent is not tolerated.

> Peter Thiel is an influential person.

So is it ok to support people you don't like, but only if you are not influential? Once a person is influential, and their opinions actually does matter, they must agree with you or it is beyond the acceptable normal? It looks like for you only acceptable opposition is a weak and inefficient one. Having strong and influential opposition is something you are not willing to tolerate, but powerless and useless dissent is completely OK. It's a step away from not tolerating any dissent at all, but very small and largely meaningless step.

> When Thiel made this contribution he crossed the line of neutrality, moving from expressing his speech into an action.

Thiel does not owe anybody any obligation to be neutral, and of course he is not. Of course he did it in support of Trump, and it's completely normal. "Speech" does not mean only literally producing acoustical vibration with your mouth, it is a much broader term and has been for centuries. It means a multitude of actions done in support of political point or candidate you prefer, including donating money to the causes you prefer. His expression of his political opinion is not some fault you can tolerate, but only if he hides it well and it doesn't matter. It's a basic right any person of a democratic country is entitled to, and it is a right that millions of persons exercise proudly every day. Thiel is one of them, and there's absolutely nothing exceptional in what he did or is doing.

The only difference is that he is doing it in support of the cause you oppose. That may be unpleasant for you - as is a row of millionaires and billionaires routinely supporting the causes I hate is for me - but it's in no way abnormal or unheard of or beyond what is normally done in US politics.

> but to pretend that it is not an action is incorrect.

Of course it's an action. Nobody ever claimed otherwise, including me. What I said is claiming his action somehow is exceptional is completely false, and trying to get him and everybody he associates with ostracized for the fact he did it betrays intolerance to opposing opinions which can develop into a full blown totalitarian mindset if left unchecked.

> We should definitely criticize those who perform actions we deem harmful,

Criticizing him and demanding his peers to ostracize him is different.
You are referring to the academic microcosm, but the OP said that scientists act so because "the wider public" voted for them to do so. It's true that the insiders of the academic bubble are living the tragedy of their commons.
> I am confident that Peter joining will be great for YC.
Losing grounds. Which is one reason YouTube would not be worried by a similar lawsuit.
I'm not giving Trump a pass. I'm giving Trump supporters a pass, because I believe it's possible to support a candidate without supporting every position they espouse. (In fact, with Trump's many contradictory statements, this is guaranteed for any of his supporters!)

If one of your employees advocates for genocide, go ahead and fire them. If one of your employees supports a candidate who advocates for genocide -- well, it might call into question their judgment, but maybe they like the rest of the platform and think that the call for genocide is mere hyperbole.
Posted my image board on 4chan. Got my userbase.
It would suffice for me to see any public reluctance on the part of Paul Graham or Sam Altman to continue to associate professionally with Thiel so long as he is playing this role in American politics.

I don't demand that Altman and Graham know exactly what to do about this. I don't demand that they "fire" Thiel (they can't, as Thiel isn't an employee). I don't even demand that they strike him from the roster of Partners to the Regional Partner of YC. I understand that this stuff is complicated and that there's more going on behind the scenes of these relationships than we know.

Unfortunately, both Altman and Graham are being supportive of Thiel, despite the fact that he donated $1.25MM to Trump's campaign just days ago.
From liberal beacon to a prop for Trump: what has happened to WikiLeaks?
Meet Fancy Bear, the Russian Group Hacking the US Election
Political views are one aspect of a person, but they do not define that person. Thiel himself understands this. When he was a law school classmate with Alex Karp (now CEO of Palantir), they constantly argued bitterly over politics, because Karp held an extremely liberal point of view. They were also very good friends and have clearly maintained a very good business relationship.

I personally despise Trump, but I agree with Sam -- other people's political views don't really matter to me. Hopefully after this election ends, everyone can calm down and keep things in context. Business and politics are separate.