skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The days when people were trained on newsgroup netiquette are long gone.

That is why it is hard to do decisions by email. Also, poor thread representation by email clients doesn't help.

Chat has the potential of being used efficiently, where arguments are stripped of their emotion and converge faster to a point without rambling. To your point, chat can be made high-bandwidth, with multi-sentence points made in a single message, or they can be a verbose rambling that consumes time and focus.

It really comes down to the professionalism of the team you're working with. Some people are a lot more cognizant about minimizing the waste of other people's time, and get to the point instantly. Others just type whatever is going through their mind—and I should point out that they are equally good at wasting time in in-person meetings.

So then it's not about the communication medium or whether people are physically present; it's about how we use each other's time.

Full disclosure: I work in the BU that makes Cisco Spark, a chat/collab tool. :)

PS: I agree with your other points about home/work context separation. We solve that by explicitely "checking in" / "checking out" of chats. There's an expectation that people are NOT always-on (except for a few rare operations chats). Notifications are adjusted accordingly, so as to not be disturbed during family time.
> There is a story of mysql as a company who had an employee who was not reachable for a few months.

How does this have anything to do with WFH? If someone is not reachable and has not communicated up front they are going to be out, then fire them. This is no different than if they just stopped showing up to an office job.

I always love the arguments that are around 'well how will I know my programmers are working'? Well, how do you know they are working when they are in the office?
Why Go and Rust are not competitors, but bloody enemies (2015)
> But how do you legalize a drug like fentanyl?

No one is doing fentanyl by choice.

People are doing fentanyl on accident because it's in the heroin they're buying on the street. This really drove it home for me: https://www.statnews.com/2016/09/29/fentanyl-heroin-photo-fa...

That being said, I still don't think we should put people in jail for using it. Fentanyl is known to kill you. So is rat poison. Buyer beware.
> Alternatively, maybe Let's Encrypt ought to Chaos Monkey this up and be down for 4 random hours every month or something on purpose.

And then gain a reputation for being unreliable?

> Or if you want to make very sure you don't turn people away, be down for 4 hours every month for any cert that has been in Let's Encrypt for more than a month or two, so you don't turn away new users. Because if you have a problem with a brief outage, the problem is in the user code, not Let's Encrypt.

Most users don't care. If it's not working reliably for them, they'll just move to something that does. Maybe there is an issue in their code that should be addressed, but I seriously doubt they'd care to have that pointed out when they're suddenly offline.

Anyone doing proper testing of their software/infrastructure should have a testing environment anyway. I'd take your proposal and modify it to: Let's Encrypt should offer testing servers which are down for well defined periods throughout the day that people can use to test their platform against.
Is this Basquiat worth $110m? Yes – his art of American violence is priceless
Exactly. The claim that Japanese grammar is very difficult seems bizarre to me because the morphology is so regular, and I don't subscribe to the idea that flexibility and omission of words makes it harder either, more that you just have to attune yourself to it. No, the elephants in the room are (a) the vocab and (b) Kanji.
I think every native English speaker in Japan has had the experience of carefully deciphering a long string of katakana in a restaurant menu, only to realize that they've just successfully translated Japanese to Italian...
The problem is the VC, stock market and the economy are becoming a giant monopoly(monopsony) engine. It's stupid to invest in competition.

VCs invest "small"(way larger than the average person can afford to start) bets on a few companies so they can dump a large amounts on the winners. Once the companies have passed the test they go to the stock market to raise even more money to further entrench their monopoly.

It used to be the market was justified because competition drove innovation and choice, but investors don't invest in competition.
The reasonable usage of that has always included "in the eyes of the law".

For example, if someone stabs you, there's no need to wait for a conviction to be upset about it. Some people may choose to get upset about things where they have less direct evidence but still believe they have sufficient evidence to come to a conclusion.
Yup. And this is because if you're a startup and you take investment from these "small investors" I can't recall the actual classification (class 3 maybe or something like that?) VC and accelerators simply won't touch you. So there's no point. And then, if you're a "small investor" and you had, say, $5,000 to kick toward a startup for speculative investing, the VCs simply say that it's not enough money and they're just not interested in your small change.
Considering what Almodovar stated, it's not (surprisingly) just a French theater owners lobbying problem.
Trump 'laptop' ban may not be extended to flights from Europe
> Taxes on the drugs themselves would probably more than cover it.

And you seriously think politicians will use this new revenue source for the treatment of addicts?

I predict they'll push another tax cut that benefits their major donors.
UN Volunteers ( http://www.unv.org/ ) has a Technology development section. ( https://www.onlinevolunteering.org/en/opportunities?f[]=fiel... ) A lot of it is web work, but there's sometimes app development.
Why can't you believe it's a coincidence?

Apophenia.
I started a project to link charity streams to 3rd party charity fundraiser websites to allow better exposure of the cause and the fundraiser progress in real time.

I'm currently working on version 2 which returns a lot of stastical information, allows for graphs and better statistics to be shown on stream overlays and a back end console for auditing and reporting purposes.

I am currently breaking up each part and exposing them over HTTP APIs to allow future integrations and to allow the system to scale for large streaming events such as Special Effect's Gameblast.

The gaming for good initiative is ripe for new tools and services, as there are very few players in this space, to the end where I thought that I was the only one with this idea up until a few months ago.
You know who cares about these addicts, their families, who are the voting constituents of these politicians. The heroin epidemic is the worst in many traditionally republican states. I think you may find there is more bipartisan support for fixing the heroin problem than there is consensus around hot button topics like abortion.
I totally agree. My main point against Scala is the mass of features, it's like a modern C++. In the worst case you end up with a dev team in which everyone codes in his very own style.
Indeed. Go read the comments on the "My Family's Slave" article from a few days ago. A large proportion of them were supportive of slavery, or at least identified strongly with the slavers rather than their victim. Furthermore, the admins apparently disabled downvoting of comments, and detached strongly anti-slavery subthreads.

HN and the HN demographic are strongly interested in preserving/advancing a particular social order; one that is largely detrimental to most of humanity.
I'm tired of these articles. Seriously. Government has funded hi-tech through the military for the last 70 years. That's not a secret and we wouldn't have what we have now with out it. The government knows this and the large corporations who benefit from it know it.

Corporations are not willing to take on the risk to sink billions of dollars to develop a technology which may or may not pay out. Plus once it does pay out, who is to say China isn't going to steal the tech and then undercut the very thing they just developed.

He cites SpaceX as this idea of private investment, completely overlooking the fact that the government is subsidizing the whole endeavour. Please....
I can see how that's confusing. I was thinking in broader terms of the private sector with that one. Although there is American innovation happening there, it's certainly not the only place.
It actually is pretty standard. Sweden has done it in many other cases. As Wikileaks highlighted when this was made into an issue.
Or just sand/gouge the mating surfaces. The rougher they are, the more you can get away with the "wrong" adhesive.
For what it's worth, Caddy is the only server that will locally cache the staples (and manage them) automatically. In other words, Caddy sites were not affected by this OCSP downtime.
Regulating Drug Company Promotion in an Era of Unprecedented Advertisement
Why is Ecuador's consent not required if he is inside their embassy?
It seems that Let's Encrypt is back up.

I think, in the past, mods have put an extra down-weight on "X is down" stories, once 'X' is back up.

Since this discussion now has interesting stuff related to Let's Encrypt—and products which use Let's Encrypt—I hope the mods are willing to forgo the down weight, and instead just change the post title to something like "Let's Encrypt Was Down".
maybe virtual reality games of the future will be a valuable source of random numbers? also currency liquidity? I think they will be more and more useful to multiple aspects of life, and not just to the people playing them.
America: Good for innovation! except for the predatory patent lawsuits which as a small business you won't be able to afford the legal bill to defend against.
That's not what I see looking at reasonable sources. See https://www.unodc.org/documents/wdr2015/World_Drug_Report_20... for example.

The vast majority of worldwide poppy for opiates is Asia, but the US is unique in that most of the poppy source for their heroin is coming from Columbia and Mexico. It is odd. Canada, for example, gets most of it's heroin via Afghanistan.

The size of the lines in this map from the above mentioned resource is relative to the actual production source...where the poppies are, and where they end up as heroin. Note the fat lines from the south, and the thin one from the east.

http://i.imgur.com/hvYXYeQ.png
I agree with you. It's quite possible to make money doing pernicious things. It's even possible to make money legally doing pernicious things. And that's why I'm setting the bar considerably higher. Note my words: "useful problem", "reasonable price", "treats ... fairly".
The second part quite accurately describes most of the generalization techniques. Especially when it comes to deep learning.
Russ Roberts' Econtalk podcast had a stunningly good interview with Sam Quinones about the opioid epidemic.

I am fairly libertarian on many things, but this is not a simple case of prohibition run amok. Heroin/opioid addiction is close to a loss of free will, aided by screw ups from big pharma and Government healthcare policies.

Really fascinating, sad, and difficult stuff.

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/01/sam_quinones_on.htm...
Not having to deal with certificate renewal is a big deal.
I was watching the Google I/O feed and one of the Polymer guys was like, "Web Components are here, everything's great!". But, that's obviously not the case. Unless I missed something in the 2.0 for Polymer, they still use html imports. Which, will need polyfilled on everything but chrome.

I've been rooting for web components for a long time now. But, I still don't think it's ready for prime time. Vue has been serving me well, and feels just like web components when writing code.
And because the private sector doesn't have anything to do with where the public sector gets it's money.
Think of it like a systems problem. You'll only find local minima/maxima with greedy algorithms.
Chatting favours subjects that only require a short span of attention. At the same time, anything of real value will take a minimum length and complexity to explain. That is why the output of chat/messaging tends to be worth little to nothing. Chat/messaging is something appreciated by demographics who do not have anything useful to say anyway. To an important extent, it is the same kind of people who have a hard time finding a job, and when they finally get one, they don't manage to keep it for long.
I see your point now. I agree that, thanks to better tooling and libraries (some of those maybe based on AI), there'll be less reinventing the wheel, and so less jobs for non-awesome programmers. I think it has already happened in games, where, due to widespread adoption of engines, there's less need for experienced C++/maths/etc folks (and, thus, less room in the job market left for non-geniuses) and instead we see jobs for lower skill "engine operators" (ex. gameplay programmers in C# for Unity).

It has not happened yet in the general/business programming field thanks to:

1. Software and automation being applicable practically everywhere (and also in part thanks to bubble money) - the field is still growing at a mad rate.

2. Business problems being less conducive to algorithms and AI. For example, try coming up with a good AI which can figure out how to handle an edge case in a supply chain app. The AI would essentially need to understand humans.
What other explanation do you have to the Tories winning by a landslide? The majority of voters like them I.e. a huge section of the UK population)

A large percentage of people under 25 don't vote.
It's sort of a stretch, but nobody knows who Satoshi is and many of the major players are American. The Bitcoin Foundation is American, the first user[1] is American, the predecessor to Bitcoin was developed by an American[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Finney_(computer_scientist...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Szabo
I am pretty much with you. To add,

1. As far as I know, it doesn't actually kill pain, people just report that they no longer are bothered by the pain, or able to ignore it and still function. Which is probably better.

2. Fairly sure its not addictive at all in the pharmaceutical sense, and quite positive it can be in the way say World of Warcraft or other entertainment can be.

3. I actually buy the "gateway theory", but only because of this.

Opposition seems to be the result of habit and years of ascribing negative virtue to recreational drug use (probably discounting alcohol cause cognitive dissonance).
I really, really, don't want to be in some kind of panopticon video conferencing situation all day long. Half of the appeal of working from home is that you get to go off in your cave and actually do some deep work for a few hours at a time, without somebody poking at you or shouting in your ear every ten minutes.

In general, it appears to me that most businesses are wildly disorganized, and don't bother to plan anything more than about four hours in advance. Thus you have all of this unrelenting communication going round and round in circles, with priorities and goals constantly in flux, and nobody knowing what the hell is going on long term.

The most productive stretch of my career, I went into the office on Monday, did staff meetings, planned out work for the rest of the week, and caught up on any office politics and other such that needed to happen, then I worked from home the rest of the week. I've never gotten so much done since, nor been happier about it.
How am I supposed to dismiss this modal window? http://i.imgur.com/atx6KsX.png
This is the document (and page) you're looking for... <waves hand>

https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/manifesto2017/Manifesto20...
> You know who cares about these addicts, their families, who are the voting constituents of these politicians.

You're making the assumption that their families have the resources to pay for their treatment. Nearly half of Americans are one pay cheque away from not being able to make ends meet. [0] [1] [2]

Here's a poverty map of America: http://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2014/01/05/poverty-map/

[0] http://www.marketwatch.com/story/half-of-americans-are-despe...

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/12/pf/americans-lack-of-savings...

[2] http://nypost.com/2016/09/27/why-even-half-the-middle-class-...
> imagine what would happen if one chimpanzee refused to participate in the group's interactions, walked away, but still demanded his share of bananas. It's not going to work.

I feel like this part of your comment could easily be overlooked, but it's a pretty astute observation of how group dynamics applies to this situation. We're wired to be tribal animals, to some extent.

Everyone knows that "culture" is an important part of a company's success. The idea of working from home profoundly affects the culture.
A good topic for a future article!
You may want to explore this with the folks at freecodecamp. I feel it aligns a lot with what they are doing. I wanted to suggest you to check their initiative to build apps for NGOs as part of the process of graduating from FCC (maybe bypass the learning part and directly contribute?) but this may be even better.
No, because when testing it out I'm forced to enter an email.

A "demo" should be just that. Save the harvesting for people that desire an investment in the site instead of using it to gather metrics.

Also, I'd posit that in general, the HN crowd, at least for the tech things, already have means of locating products.
In this case you're probably right but having most or even all of your recent comments downvoted doesn't mean much. For instance nickpsecurity could post anything at all and you can expect it to be downvoted.
Critique of YC “Hacker” Job Posting
If you want to go with MVC use this:
https://github.com/Rajeev-K/mvc-router
> http.DoGetPleaseAndThanks

I genuinely can't tell if they're joking or not.
I've been trying IF just to eat a big dinner at night since my wife loves to cook.

(But weekends are a problem since I don't have work to distract and tend to have 4 big meals with the family...)
I thought the whole deal with startup investing was: Invest in a few dozen companies and hope you get one hit so big it makes up for all the others, which you expect to all go down in flames.

That can work if you have millions to spend and the time, connections, and access to pal around with dozens of founders, looking for the good eggs. For a "small investor" who has a small fraction of a middle-class paycheck to spend and access only to the web, it would just be the most boring form of gambling ever invented.

Who "expected" a crowd of small investors for this, exactly?
Honestly I thought there would be some marginally ethical VCs that would team up with similar salespeople to scale up this type of investing.

I'm a little surprised this void hasn't been filled.
The funniest part is how much this discussion sounds like the Java vs. Perl on web programming from decades ago.

In the end it is just politics. What will make a framework or language succeed is how influential its sponsors are (e.g.: IBM -> Fortran & Cobol, ATT -> C, MS -> Basic & C#, Sun -> Java, Google -> Python, MS & ATT -> C++, Apple -> ObjectiveC). The ideological arguments are just decoration, fancy wrapping and cosmetics to convince people to buy the thing.

If language "quality" alone was enough to win adepts, both Smalltalk and Lisp would be among the top 10 most used.

Kotlin might be better than Java, in the same sense a Dvorak keyboard might be better than a qwerty. But it doesn't seem better enough to force old Java dogs to care for new tricks.

Edit: typos.
The idea that shares are worth $0 because there are no plans for an exit is ridiculous.
That's interesting. I wonder whether some artists are already exploiting this by creating tracks with names such as "a random song" and "some music"?
I feel like there's a very simple explanation the article either ignores or doesn't see: Kids were allowed to bring them to school for a while (till they became a distraction)...that's really all you need for a neat toy to become a sensation.
7 New Business Ideas Whose Time Has Come and Gone
There's also a massive support group for alcoholics. I'd bet that if you discover someone stopped drinking because they were/are a alcoholic you wouldnt bat a eye. If you found out they were addicted to heroin you would have a very different view of them.
Magenta = Music and Art Generation with Machine Intelligence
Awesome update.

By the way, any update on how are they planning to make money? It is still true that they don't plan to make money at all?
I found it to be quite the opposite. The title is simple and matter of fact, not clickbait, but the actual article is genuinely hilarious.
Even as a married guy, apart from my wife the people I speak most to are the people at my office. I'd go nuts if I worked solely from home.

Are you also in the 30-something friend-slump? My parents (late 60s) have a more active social life than me.
I want to feel like the HN crowd are reading this wrong. That it's about things like going after market power of FB/Goog rather than suppressing speech. But then you remember that it's Mrs. May's Manifesto.
"making the world a better place by selling $service" is usually hypocrisy rather than a matter of methodology.

Same goes for making a service cheaper at the expense of the workers and the list goes on...
"A terminator is required, multiple terminators (ie, redundancy) are not."

Food for thought and discussion, rather than a "correction": Terminators are not required in a language. See the concatenative languages like Forth or Factor, in which

z = func1(x, y);
func2(1 + 2 + 3, z);

comes out looking like

1 2 + 3 + x y func1 func2

And, indeed, many people find this a fairly confusing programming style. (For instance, note how the second expression has no "z" variable in it.) Functions tend to become difficult-to-differentiate streams of tokens with few breaks in them. You'll also note that by token count the concatenative approach is smaller (21 non-whitespace tokens in the first if I'm counting this correctly, 9 tokens in the second); that is normal, not a fluke. By using the stack to hold things almost all variable assignments and their usages end up going away. However, despite being a programming paradigm that nearly as old as imperative programming, it has not taken the world by storm.
Not only that, the ones that are can be quite scammy.

Highlights from this startup raising money:

-Advertised with TV commercials by former Seinfeld actor

-$160k in assets, raising $50million at >$200million valuation

-CEO was formerly barred from leading companies by the SEC due to security fraud

-The management team has a few more planned IPOs in the biomed
and aeronautical industries, and has a graveyard of past businesses that got investor money and went bankrupt.

http://www.businessinsider.com/yayyo-ipo-ads-tv-ramy-el-batr...
Show HN: Live Stream to YouTube from your $5 RPi with Docker Image
Humans are executed data. The blueprint of life has never been more like computer code. Ben Horrowitz believes where data touches biology is where there's ton of profit waiting. Pick a SENS initiative and see where you can attack it with software. Human Longevity Inc is using machine learning I think to figure out what genes actually cause what pathologies.

It would be interesting to point at the genes for the heritability of IQ for giggles. We are all data, the meat is what matters. The life you save may be your own.