skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with this line of thinking is that the problems that matter are not related to 100% implementing the spec correctly.

The problems that matter are in the design of the spec to begin with. The important part is picking the CORRECT business requirements, NOT in implementing those business requirements correctly.

And do you know what the best way is to test whether you got the spec right? You deploy and see if the feature gets traction.

The "spec" that matters is the success of the business.

And building a product, and releasing it, is the way to formally test if your feature is "correct" according to the spec that is The Market.
Often in mathematics, we look for the nontrivial solutions to questions like this.
Is that so?
A friend of mine worked too hard, his wife got fed up and divorced him. It was horrible, he had to sell of his Sun stock so that he his wife could have half. That was in the late 1990s. He has really mixed feelings about it.

I sold some of the stock I had gotten as part of the employee stock purchase plan to buy a brand new car for cash. It was the first time in my life I didn't have a car payment every month. That was in January of 1995. When I sold that car in 1999 to a used car dealer he asked what I paid for it, I told him $1.6M. That was what the stock would have been worth had I held it until 1999. Then I used the stock in a company that had acquired my startup to buy a replacement car, again for cash. When I sold that car in 2009 the equivalent value for the stock was just $280. A bargain!

The dot com days taught me the hard way why you diversify. Sure you don't get the big returns like the ones you hear about where a person invested it all in one stock that went through the roof. But you also don't lose it all when the stock goes down either.

All things in moderation, and now when I have more money in a stock than I'd like to lose I sell half and put the proceeds into something unrelated to the stock I sold.
Google Kills Gmail Quicklinks
https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2017/03/updates-in-g-suite-to-streamline-hangouts-and-gmail.html

Those of us managing multiple email accounts with Google may be disappointed to learn quick links are no more. This development makes my email management more cumbersome than ever.
License terms don't lie at the core of Libreoffice's identity...
> Why do people outside Norway keep bringing it up anyway

You've got it backwards. I only brought it up after the person I replied to finger-wagged America about how it needs to be more "ethical" in how it treats criminals; I wasn't trying to tell Norway what to do. The same type of person that tells Americans how we need to deal with firearms despite not living here or being familiar with our culture or rights.

The purpose of my example is that I believe just as it's possible to be cold and cruel to criminals that are locked up, it can be quite cruel to victims' families to give the criminal excessive creature comforts after they've violently snuffed out their familymember's life. I mean for god's sake we have to set some limit or else we might as well just turn them back out on the street again.

In addition, in most first-world western countries, many folks are detached from death and violence so that when we hear of a murder, we have a very abstract view of it. Why don't you actually watch a 10-year-old boy be stabbed to death[1], and for one minute try and imagine the fear and pain of that boy in his last moments, the heartache that will destroy his whole family, and if you're such a big fan of restorative justice, why don't you imagine this guy living next to the playground of your children's school when you let him out? Now if it's possible, try to amplify the brutality of that single murder by a factor of 77 in the case of Anders Breivik and try to justify to yourself all the creature comforts he's given.

I'm not saying we need to go back to biblical "eye for an eye" punishment, but on the same token we can't be excessively lenient on criminals who have no hope for restorative justice either.

[1]: https://forum.deathaddict.com/threads/cctv-captures-a-man-st...
> Is international law what stops Russia from annexing Alaska?

So when someone told you a loved one of yours was murdered by some private contractor or soldier, expecting some kind of reaction out of you, that would be yours? Just a shrug? That's how the world is, and that's that?
Because you can flip coins for a profit. Can't do that on kickstarter.
Perhaps digital interaction can help alleviate the negative symptoms of loneliness and social isolation. One can join any community which shares their interests and interact in real-time.

https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/IRL
https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Creative

However, I am unsure if virtualization of social interaction is beneficial in the long run.
Great resource. The one name in there I didn't recognize was '7search'; I clicked through, but it seems to have shut down within the last week, so you can probably remove that.
No, all companies are not sexist. Do you have anything to back up that extreme claim?
We might need to add your driver to the blacklist. What do you use exactly?
It's about the math of computation then, which can be carried out by any arbitrary system that we humans deem as carrying out symbol manipulation.
NASA starts work on nuclear propulsion systems to get to Mars
No, it's more likely that either breaking up Google, or heavily regulating Google into playing fair would lead to integrations that worked between services. Why be locked in, if those integrated data features could work between the best services from different companies?

We need to stop letting Google protect it's poor quality products by bundling them with their good ones.
Actually they look like rather voracious flesh-eating/bloodsucking tiny shrimps: http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/bitten-teens-dad-films-bri...
The problem is that if you force the exact ratio for every characteristic (sex, race, orientation, age, etc) for every job some people would end up being forced to do jobs they do not want to do.
>It is not an argument for a radical experiment with the free market and military force.

Historically the concept of private fighting forces is not in any way radical.
Of course not, and nothing in my response could reasonably be understood to suggest that. Your comment is absurd.

My argument is that there's no real difference between the two: The exact same force prevent both from occurring. (And, should it occur, it would be just as terrible, of course.)

The comment I replied to was discussing how to hold people responsible, and suggesting (in my view, incorrectly) that international law is of more use against state actors than non-state actors.
>The important part is picking the CORRECT business requirements, NOT in implementing those business requirements correctly.

It's both, though. You also can't tell if you've implemented them correctly if you don't have a formal spec.
This is more or less the response Curtis Yarvin gives when his racism, which seems (if you can hack your way through his prose) virulent, is challenged. To paraphrase:

"I'm not saying black people are worse than white people. I'm saying that white people are smarter than black people, and that our society is biased against those who aren't as smart as white people. Oh, the unfairness of it all".

I have no idea who you are or of this is what you mean; you're just an abstraction to me, a nick on this site I have no association with whatsoever and will presumably soon forget about. But if you're interested (you responded to me upthread), it might be useful to you to know how this kind of logic comes across to me.
Not obtuse, but I do think you are being naive.
Because it's actually pretty difficult to withdraw $40 million worth of Ethereum, and so people that are massively successful in BTC/ETH/LTC are able to just park some of their excess in these ICOs on the off-chance one of them is a hit.
I'm kind of amazed this response is this far down. How dare these people take advantage of the poor companies /s.

If you have a market position that allows this, especially one you created for yourself, I have no grudge against you. That narrative is entirely a construction of companies...just as 'welfare queens' is to try and argue against worker protections and rights.
As an example of different hardware, there was a Russian engineer who built a couple of ternary computers in the 70s. And of course there have been analog computers.

Quantum computers would certainly not be considered "essentially equivalent".
I think I bought it at $60/share and it went down to $3 after dot com bust, wiping out Roth IRA. Oh well, that was years ago in my 20's and I'm diversified so really just a lesson (not to buy tech stocks).
pbkdf2 can be used as a computationally expensive hash... bcrypt does a few other things in terms of the output format beyond just the hash though, it contains enough information to repeat the hashing settings to verify another entry against it.

IIRC bcrypt isn't an in-the box feature in crypto, but pbkdf2 is.
Some relevant reading before you pack your bags :)

https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/2172167...

And someone asked why it is not a state yet:

https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21723149-more-6...

And an year-old article about the troubles facing PR:

https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2016/05/e...
Because you (the traveller) would order it from apple.com and get paid for the cost + courier fee.
Just because it exists historically doesn't mean that it's not a radical idea. Although, if you want historical perspective on how terrible of an idea it is, Machiavelli didn't mince words.

I repeat, then, that of all kinds of troops, auxiliaries are the most dangerous; for the prince or republic that calls them to their assistance has no control or authority whatever over them, as that remains entirely with him who sends them.
...
A prince or republic, then, should adopt any other course rather than bring auxiliaries into their state for its defence, especially when their reliance is wholly upon them; for any treaty or convention with the enemy, however hard the conditions, will be less hard to bear than the danger from auxiliaries.
...
And in truth no more favourable opportunity could be presented to an ambitious prince or republic for seizing a city or province, than to be asked to send troops there to assist in its defence. And therefore any one whose ambition so far misleads him as to call in strangers to aid in his defence, or in an attack upon others, seeks to acquire that which he will not be able to hold, and which after acquiring will be easily taken from him.
Uhm... I was responding to a conversation about software engineering not product development. The two are orthogonal.

You just described the responsibility of a product manager, and finding product-market fit. None of which requires software development. Software development may help but product management certainly doesn't require it.
Isn't that stated in the post ? That only concerned emails will have access to the paste ?
Evading duty is still a legal issue. Some countries have laws that permit you to carry some articles without duty, for personal use. This is a clear subversion of such rules.
Although that's not a good example, I agree that there are cases where you need some "inside knowledge" from the group you're targeting. By products I don't mean only software. It could be a social project, or anything else where culture is significantly important and not being intimately familiar with it could endanger the success of the project.
That's the one. If you zoom in to Street View, you can see the back side of the "Hotel Nipton".
That's not accurate at all. You took a dismissive tone with me right off the bat, and labeled my good-faith argument as a "trope", twice. Also, my "slurs" were directed at a Washington Post article, not at you. Exit the discussion if you like, but I don't think you get to plead the moral high ground on this.
Broken link (missing a colon): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session
On Managing Outrage in Silicon Valley
Dijkstra spent a lot of his research effort on ways to prove that programs are correct.

"Today a usual technique is to make a program and then to test it. But: program testing can be a very effective way to show the presence of bugs, but it is hopelessly inadequate for showing their absence. The only effective way to raise the confidence level of a program significantly is to give a convincing proof of its correctness."

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd03xx/EWD340.PDF
What's bad about rent-seeking behavior? If anything, that is where the business starts (as opposed to a job: meaning, something which has a value for which it can be sold. you can sell a business but can't sell your job). A business is an unfair advantage which creates rent, and thus has a value. Say Facebook has an advantage of network effect, so any new social network can't overtake it because it is a catch-22: you need to have many people already in to get any people in. That is an unfair advantage (Facebook founders could have been a lot more stupid and your product may be actually a lot better, but it doesn't matter), and it creates rent, and is worth billions. No business can create value or profit without having that. Business is rent on capital, either invested or created.
That doesn't seem typical to me... I've used public transit for years, in both the Seattle area and Massachusetts, and it's rare for anyone to strike up a spontaneous conversation, with me or anyone else. Whenever someone did, they usually seemed a little... odd. Maybe one time out of five it would be an interesting conversation, and that only happened every few months of riding the bus every weekday.

The main thing I learned from this is, if I started conversations with random people on the bus, I'd be that odd person who makes people uncomfortable. I wish it didn't work that way.
This, exactly. Crypto Inception, as the piece puts it.
To read Noam Chomsky, one wonders if that's his position, as he defends communist autocratic regimes far more than capitalist democracies like the USA. Part of his shtick is to criticize his home country the most. But compare his treatment of eg US in Vietnam vs Cambodian genocide. Or the amount of criticism he levels at the USA's activities abroad vs the same amount of the KGB.

In the Israel-Palestine situation he criticizes Democratic Israel far more than, say the Kingdom of Jordan. He criticizes Likud more than the PLO, and writes about the USA's imperialism in supporting a democratic state in the Middle East, while ignoring that during the 50s and 60s the KGB trained the PLO as part of explicit support to undermine Western-backed countries.

I correspond with Chomsky from time to time, and I think he is set in his ways. But I hardly think he would say our democracy has a good track record. You're thinking of Michio Kaku :)
Or... consider that perhaps career choice or job choice in a location and/or company is a byproduct of percieved ability to adapt to that community's social norms. Google switzerland doesn't have these problems but it is well known that Silicon Valley is rot with the "brogrammer" culture. I wouldn't want to work there either knowing that's what you have to deal with. Maybe things are better now but it seems a divergence from the previous bro-culture at mountain view is uncomfortable for a number of people there.
The millionaire engineers who get paid gobs of money and barely work
That's why a strongly advocate for using Ricardian contracts over smart contracts in most cases. R contracts can contain standard legal prose while delegating specific clauses or portions to embedded smart contracts (embedded by hash or bytecode).
A lot probably. The US population seems to be totally unaware of what their military is really doing.

The whole thing is obfuscated in a web of foreign governments, three-letter agencies, contractors and tech giants, endless acronyms and euphemisms (e.g. 'disposition matrix', 'extraordinary rendition', 'enhanced interrogation techniques', 'collateral damage'), and as others in this thread have said, a lot of it is about creating distance from culpability. Barack Obama was a remarkably adept and slick PR guy, possessing the perfect confluence of personal attributes to make Americans not care about whatever their government was doing. But now Trump is letting the cat out of the bag! It's a dangerous course of events but maybe has more opportunity for creating lasting change if people unite against him.

Can I suggest this news network?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Real_News

They have a Youtube channel with all their videos up. The name pre-dates the "real" vs. "fake news" thing. It's a rare example of American journalists speaking candidly about the US war & arms industry. They have other content too, along the lines of Democracy Now but with less focus on social justice issues, but I know that the CEO / editor Paul Jay believes that US war profiteering is presently the main existential threat to humankind:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAEF0iToJ5Y&t=747s
This article is dated Apr 2016. "Oracles" seem to be the way now to inject external data. Oraclize[1] can apparently be provably kept trustable. Anyone with deeper knowledge of this?

[1] http://www.oraclize.it/
Creating DSL with Kotlin: Introducing a TLSLibrary
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14943146
Because entropy. The natural state of the world is chaos.
How, exactly, can you pay money to not be lonely? If it were that simple, this would be much less of a problem.
> You can imagine why this market exists in Italy: the hotels in every city are geared toward tourists (thus, lots of $$$) but Italians have such a beautiful (and geographically small) country, and they needed a way to do local tourism at affordable prices. I imagine the fact that you needed to call the owners (and speak Italian to them) acted as a barrier against tourists.

That makes no sense. Of course Italians stay in hotels, and there are one-star hotels for those traveling on a budget, and hostels for young people, same as in any country. B&Bs were introduced later, as an even cheaper option. In Italy they are literally called "bed and breakfast", in English, because they are not a local invention: they were borrowed from the impoverished and benighted country known as the UK.

The agriturismi were not invented as a way to keep tourists out: you may notice that they have "tourism" right in the name. Quite the opposite: owners of small farms were seeking a new revenue stream, and took advantage of the fact that the Italian countryside is quite attractive in its own right. Think hills with small farms, villages, churches and castles, not miles and miles of corn. The idea was to visit the countryside itself, not to take a fifty miles detour to visit a city because the hotels are too expensive.
Very comprehensive in detailing practical options for each step. Thank you!
Yeah...then again a lot of brilliant software engineers get to a point in their career where they realize how hard they've been working. Then they start to focus on other parts of their life with ample time and money they never had before. It's not a terrible thing by any means.

Some people willfully choose to turn their focus towards their personal lives, raising their kids, etc while still being paid a lot of money in a cushy job where they are respected.
That's about meaningless a statement as they come. How do you mean?
It's interesting to look back on things like this with the lens of history.

Tcl has arguably been as successful as Guile, but neither has exhibited longevity; both have been in decline for many years. Emacs has switched to Guile (maybe?), and Guile has gotten a major overhaul this decade (lots of smart people with a lot of experience like Scheme, so not a big surprise), but the other "high profile" projects using it are really not very high profile at all (Guix, Gnucash, GDB, all pretty niche projects with limited user bases).

Tcl got a lot of effort put into it by pretty big companies for a while, and it's actually a pretty good language, IMHO. It has significant limits, sure, but so did Guile for a long time. And real software has been built with both.

It almost feels like a personal vendetta rather than any significant technical reason, even though it's written as though, "Obviously, we should choose the technically superior extension language that, by the way, does not yet exist in a fully usable form."

Was there a licensing beef with Tcl, as well, or is it purely that RMS just really wanted everything to use Scheme?
I had a little contact with the language. The article nails the biggest problem with TCL:

"One actual technical problem that Tcl faces is the concept that all values must be representable as a string. This is more or less ok for things like lists, hash tables or numbers, but is problematic when the user wishes to represent a value that simply isn’t a string."
Bookstores are not libraries.
Brogrammer' Culture Is Driving Women Out of STEM Jobs
Is it? Has he been proven right in this case?
One reason CEOs are paid so much is to offset the risk involved in accepting the position. If a CEO performs poorly, that's often the end of their career, so the high compensation makes that gamble more acceptable.
I find this hard to believe given what I know about Apple's corporate culture. If your characterization of his employment is true, I don't believe it's common.

I think the closest that might come to this is Bob Mansfield. He returned after his retirement shortly after Scott Forstall left and eventually gave up his executive role, but even then he continued to work on "special projects", which turned out to be the Apple Watch [1] and now the Apple Car [2].

[1] https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/disruptions-apple-...

[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-taps-bob-mansfield-to-ove...
That is a gross understatement. Vast majority of ICOs are deliberate scams, not just they aren't building a business, they have no idea how to do it, have no relevant skills, and whole 'idea' is lunatic and would be laughed off by even a beginner angel investor if pitched to him. In many cases, an idea is also technically unworkable due to scaling limits of blockchains used. It is just that: a scam. Not a bubble as in: 1990s tech bubble, or subprime mortgage bubble. There, you got something which didn't follow the profit curve you predicted. Here, you get nothing for your money.
This. So much. As a developer, I personally feel sick thinking about all the greed associated with cryptocurrency right now. I was an early adopter of both Bitcoin and Ethereum, but I only mined a bit or purchased enough to build little side projects for fun.

Now I have non-technical friends and coworkers who are suddenly millionaires (literally, a friend bragged to me about having a few hundred BTC. He since quit his job) because they decided to dump their life savings into this stuff knowing nothing about it. It frustrates me to no end when I have family members ask, why didn't you buy or mine more? Why aren't you a millionaire? You were so into this stuff, weren't you?

Yeah, I was. As a developer, not as a speculator. It's not just about the markets. But all of the exciting tech constantly gets drowned out by the noise of people going on about lucrative investments and comparing coins to gold. I'm so sick of the hype. I'm disappointed at the lack of millions I could have made (maybe, if I were a serious "hodlr"), but I do actually see value in the tech so it's extremely frustrating...

Distributed ledgers and consensus algorithms are neat. Greed isn't.
I'm curious if you could elaborate on this more. What other probably techniques would you recommend knowing?