skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seriously, what the fuck is this doing on hacker news? I know the guidelines say not to comment that you flagged a story, but you need to realize that this has NOTHING to do with anything science, tech and startup. Someone who has been on HN for almost 500 days should know better. Leave this shit off of here.
Background: I started programming Java in 1996 or somewhere around there. I was a huge advocate of Java over things like C/C++ for quite a long time and I believe in early 2000 it was the best choice. I no longer believe Java is the best choice for most projects as there are saner alternatives out there including Scala, Clojure and Jruby (for the JVM) and other languages/VMs altogether if you want out of the JVM.

Bottom line: Java seems dated.

Now, to my rant.

import java.util.*;
interface Sortable<T, U extends Comparable<? super U>> extends List<T> {
void sortBy(Extractor<? super T, ? extends U> e) default Impl.sortBy;
static class Impl {
public static<T, U extends Comparable<? super U>>
void sortBy(Sortable<T, U> sortable, final Extractor<? super T, ? extends U> e) {
Collections.sort(sortable, #{T a, T b -> e.extract(a).compareTo(e.extract(b))});
}
}
}

I HATE this code. This is an example of when Java went downhill to me and started to get really, really ugly. I always thought Java was verbose, but with generics and others things it started to get ugly. That was enough for me. I knew Python and Ruby and decided to go a different way. Found Erlang and Clojure started to mature on the JVM. Bye bye Java.
Fair enough, amended
The pricing is ridiculous. In the digital age, people gets news from dozens of sources not just one or two papers like it used to be. I myself am a bit of an RSS junky and each day probably read more than 300 headlines, skim through maybe 10 to 15 articles and read maybe two or three fully. Say I limited my reading to only 10 websites, at the advertised price I would be paying $2400 per year!
I just submitted the page to HN, after seeing it in Spolsky or Atwood's twitter feed, I didn't design it. I think the curator has his contact details on that site though, if care to ask him directly.
In my experience, Al-Jazeera is remarkably neutral compared to most US news sources. They do tend to adopt a pro-Palestinian stance, but they're very professional about it.
Recommendations for improvement of review of research articles, in a British Medical Journal editorial:

http://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.d2.full
FT.com uses a similar "first few are free" scheme and while I don't think they are exactly killing it, they have stuck with it and are able to make money (last I heard they have around 125,000 online subscribers). Most interesting to me is they are going to do like WSJ.com and allow unlimited access for search engine referrals. That makes it easy for savvy readers to read whatever they want, but hard to link to. That's a bad strategy to get links/attention online.
Here's what the article said: A student who started a chapter of Global Zero at his university hasn't really thought about whether a world in which great powers have divested themselves of nuclear weapons would be more stable or less so, or whether nuclear deterrence can ever be moral.

Since when does thought equal equivocation? Thoughtless action is irresponsible no matter what motivates it. The author also faulted a student who signed up to kill for the government without wondering whether there was anything worth killing for.

The only thing I disagree with in the article is the one-sided concentration on the students who are just eager to do what they're told. What about the ones who are more thoughtful? Who are they, where do they come from, and why are they different from their Ritalin-addled robot achiever peers?
Hot damn, I had no idea bout that module.....
WikiLeaks, like the Pirate Party, is an organization in which the ideas of hackers are applied to politics. So there is a connection and related news is of interest to some hackers.

EDIT: I'd previously misread that Wikileaks was the source of the leak, but that's incorrect.
If my employer didn't provide access to the ACM online library, I would pay for the dues myself.

It would be nicer if access were free, but even at 'prox $200 / year it's a great deal.

I daresay that keeping up with the ACM papers has extended my career by at least a decade.
It's expensive, but at the same time, there'll still be plenty of people willing to pay.

I currently pay for WSJ, FT, and a bunch of magazines, and NYT will join that list when the paywall arrives. (And there are at least a couple more papers I'd pay for if they required it, to allow me to read on the iPad.)
Five IC makers join $3B 'capex club'
odd... please email details and we will update. jason@launch.is

best jcal
I'm not surprised by this. In fact prior to sitting down to look at HN I was reading 'the accidental billionaires' while (ahem) taking care of business. Of all the characters portrayed in the film (and book), Parker is the one played by the 'star'. It is him that is shown to have a lavish lifestyle of drinking and womanising. He is the protagonist to Eduardo, he is the one caught by the cops. Clearly the book and thus film is heavily slanted towards Eduardo's point of view - the others didn't contribute - so Parker probably got off the worst.

I've no idea of the level of fiction, but clearly his character must have a fair bit of it. And if it were me, I'd be making sure that level of doubt was clearly established in people's minds.
Coakham Hunt's greatest game pits bloodhounds against man
It's called a "mechanic's lien" and the scope of the liens vary from state to state and country to country.
Was Wikieaks involved here?
Trying to reproduce this now, thanks for the input!
Toothpaste's Revenge (Medicine Cabinet Madness)
What happens in the medicine cabinet stays in the medicine cabinet!
I'v stopped people mid-pitch due to the fact that they are building something exactly like Blippy, Gowalla, Signpost, Chartbeat and Thumbtack (to name a few).

They always appreciate it, and in fact I've some say "I know, but can i pitch you anyway just to get feedback?"

In those case I say "sure, but please don't tell me anything that's not obvious or public, because although I would never share what you tell me with an existing investment, I wouldn't want to have that appearance out there."
this is a 1.0 list with 300+ angels... we hope folks will give us additions.

however, keep in mind that 90% of businesses in Florida are scams (really, look it up).
"why would the author fault them for not being ambivalent toward nukes and armed conflict?"

From the article:

"A student who started a chapter of Global Zero at his university hasn't really thought about whether a world in which great powers have divested themselves of nuclear weapons would be more stable or less so, or whether nuclear deterrence can ever be moral."

http://www.globalzero.org/en/about-campaign : "Global Zero members believe that the only way to eliminate the nuclear threat — including proliferation and nuclear terrorism — is to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, secure all nuclear materials and eliminate all nuclear weapons: global zero."

This is not a criticism of a random student. This is someone who has devoted significant effort to a political campaign that they appear to have not actually thought about.

This is not particularly unusual. Find some partisan for a cause, and ask them for just a moment to suspend snark and judgment and just recite the dominant arguments of the other side, and a couple of key bits of evidence for the other side. I haven't tried this, but I rather suspect few partisans could pass this test. (But how can you have a good opinion if you don't even know the arguments the other side has?)
What OS does that thing run?
Any possibility this could be used to track health data as well as mood? I run a health website with a diet and lifestyle focus to addressing serious illness. I am increasingly looking towards tools similar to this one as a potential means to help people manage the kinds of changes that made such a big difference in my health. Stuck in a rut is not nearly as challenging as "stuck in medical hell and can't get out". In such situations, there is enormous need for an objective means to gather data and make better decisions.

Thanks and please let me know when there is more info (like screenshots) available.
Actually, I'm incorrect... I'd misread that Wikileaks was the source, but they actually aren't.
Marketing matters.

If you tell someone to hack their life by gathering statistics, that's cool and nifty.

If you tell someone that the Personal Software Process requires you to gather data on time, defects and estimates of software development, you'll get a lecture about maintaining flow and the evils of high ceremony and the SEI.
It helps a lot that for the entire history of video cards, said cards pretty much all share the same goal- rendering a 3D object.

It can be argued that all a CPU does is crunch numbers, but if you spend much time with a limited processor, you quickly realize a good CPU (or in my case MCU) needs to be very versatile and flexible.
I misread the title as 'Dungeons & Dragons used to test prison security'. Like some sort of walkthrough/role-play testing

You are in a room with 2 prison guards
The guards are armed with batons
A mase spray can has been left on the ground
There is a fold up chair in front of you ...
The problem is anyone actually considering whether they should do what they are told has probably at some point wondered whether they should be good students, and at the Rhodes Scholar level of competition it doesn't take very many semesters of not-straight-As to not be in the running anymore. Selecting for straight-As and the ideal academic is, to be fair, selecting for exactly the kind of person the author decries.

I'm not saying no straight-A student is a thinker, just that at some point a thinker has probably found some reason to end up not getting straight-As for a semester. Maybe not even a good reason. Just a reason.
That's exactly what a closure is.

Keep in mind that the concept of a closure has been bred in the functional programming community, where variables aren't mutable.

If you really need to reference a mutable variable in the enclosing scope, you can do in Java exactly what you can do in languages like ML/Scheme -- let the variable reference a mutable box (in Java, an object). The reference to the box (or object) is copied, not the box itself.

In fact, in Java you can go one step further and just reference the entire enclosing scope by storing the parent's "this" in a final variable.
Atari basic on a 800, then a 800XL, then GFA Basic on Atari 1040ST. There was a TI-99 in there somewhere too.

I mostly copied programs from Compute! and Byte magazine, but started writing my own things once I got the hang of it.

I liked games, but I was never really a game programmer. Most of my apps were and continue to be for businesses. I helped my dad write an app for his TRS-80, the handheld version, that calculated labor for tying rebar.

I think rails would be a great way to get started, but they abstract a lot of important pieces, that you'll eventually need to understand to be a good developer.
Nowmov - Machine Learning Software Engineer
Did you know that average person spends close to 6 hours each day watching
video? That's 25% more than they spend on all other media, combined?
Yet watching online video accounts for less than a tenth of the total -- why?
Because the current online video discovery experience is terrible. Bad as
discovery is now, it's only going to get worse; every minute, more than a day's
worth of video is uploaded to YouTube alone.

Nowmov is "Pandora for videos". Our current product intelligently programs a
list of trending videos and ones shared among your social network. We are just
getting started and are committed to change how the world discovers and watches
videos on the connected devices.

Our founders are two ex Apple employees: Thomas, who was responsible for
Apple's H.264 encoder implementation; and James, who built the video processing
systems for the iTunes Store. We are Y Combinator graduates (Winter
2010) and angel funded. Our seed round was lead by SV Angel.

You would be leading our personalization effort -- finding the needles in the
haystack, using MATH, if necessary. Think of us as a real time video genome
project on user generated content!

Here are some of the questions we need your help answering:

- what can we do to minimize the cold start problem?

- is there anything specific about video that would help?

- how can we utilize your social network activities to recommend?

You are:

- expert in the creation of machine learning/personalization systems;

- comfortable with teaching your coworkers stuff they don't know; (Don't worry we are all quick learners ;)

- familiar with if not expert in tools to scale and execute the algorithms;

- willing to put the startup as your top priority;

- unafraid of pushing your code to the live server. On a Friday afternoon.

We are:

- generous with compensation and benefits, including early-employee equity;

- flexible about work hours;

- happy to buy you whatever equipment you need to get your job done;

- working in a great office at Union Square with other awesome Y Combinator alumni.

If interested, please drop us an email at jobs@nowmov.com and say hi.
In my experience, the opposite. THe reason you "experience" it that way is that you are interpreting according to your political biases. People who have different political views than you read the same article and find in it a lack of neutrality. You think it's neutral b/c you agree with it, not b/c it is actually neutral.

I don't want to argue about who is right, I just want to point out you should be more careful not to make statements basically along the lines of mistaking your biases for neutrality. You call it experience but it is actually your political judgment.
I just checked it on iphone and looks fine, I was also able to flip through the pages of the books.
It's called a "moral panic", and they happen all the time. There have been moral panics about rock music, comic books, teenage sex parties, fictitious drugs, and video games.
My experience of seeing people selected for the Rhodes scholarship in Australia was that there were two major criteria for selection:

1. You attend Sydney University.

2. You live in a residential college at Sydney University.

Folks outside those circles found it much harder to be selected. To be sure, those who were selected were exceptional scholars, sportspersons and active in University life. But such exceptional people exist all over Australia, not just in one subset of one prestigious, well-connected university.
Even this seems like oversimplifying it, because it removes all of the hedging he did prior to dropping the bomb. Removed from the context, it comes off as bitter.
I've been writing Java for a while now. I've never seen nor written code anything like that. Heavy use of generics is usually hidden away in APIs and don't usually occur in non-trivial ways in normal code.
Thanks for the link, I had not read 0380.

The proposed solution seems to be increasing syntactic complexity rather than reducing it by adding another keyword, "from" into the mix which is hardly optimal imo.

This to me indicates a systematic logical flaw of thinking of hitting a "yield" in the call stack as analagous to "return". When in fact it is the inverse and analagous to waiting for a function to return and thus more similar to a print() function call. The whole point of coroutine yielding is that it inverts the point of view of a call stack and allows the called routine to be the calling routine as well.

I still use Python for some things and have too many fond memories to ever hate it, but even if generators get cleaned up I'll probably stay w/ Lua for pipeline type projects as I've grown too used to runtime within an order of magnitude of C, better coroutines, and its more Scheme-like nature.
If I recall, a qualified dividend is taxed as a capital gain - 15% for long term (> 12 months), 35% for short term based on the length of time you held the security/shares in startup/corp/whatever. A non-qualified dividend is taxed at your base tax rate. Bear in mind that a dividend can alter your base tax rate, which affects contributions you may have made throughout the year. So, if you were in the 15% bracket and because of this payment get pushed into the 33% bracket, not only do you need to compensate for the cash received, but, the potential tax liability from your new annual base.

If you are given shares in a company after the initial date, I don't know if that resets the calendar, prorates it, etc.

In my case, as the sole shareholder of a closely held Maryland S-Corp, the IRS deemed the cash payment to be a qualified dividend from a company that was 7 months old, therefore, 35%. Overall, it took roughly 2.5 years and about $7k in accountant fees to reconstruct my bad bookkeeping and deal with the IRS, $1.5k in interest and penalties for an unpaid $2100 tax liability.

Again, if your income ever goes crazy for whatever reason, talk with an accountant.
FWIW, we've had lots of success w/ Scala @ foursquare (99% of our server code is in scala). It's been a great recruiting tool (great engineers are attracted to companies using new technologies), and we find it much much less verbose than Java would have been.
Since you asked me, yes, my two cents is if you pay for insurance out of distributed profits, you should be treated exactly the same was as a W-2 employee with no health benefits buying insurance on his own would be (I'm stating it this way because I don't know the payroll tax situation for a W-2 employee w/o benefits buying them himself).

If the benefits are provided by the S-corp to employees (i.e., to you), I don't think the question arises. The money used to buy the employees' insurance is removed from the profits, so it won't be part of distributed profits. Since tax is only on income, you won't pay taxes on insurance.
Considering the is part of an ongoing phenomenon of releasing government documents on the internet, with many implications for the future of the internet and society as a whole, I think it fits on hacker news perfectly.

As a side note, your profanity is unnecessary and only detracts from your point.
agreed, that's a significant pain point. That's also why I think using yield as "syntactic sugar" for asynchronous programming is a good looking but bad idea. It makes refactoring async code using yield even harder than it already is.
When Gadgets Talk in Their Sleep
The subtitle of AlJazeera's current feature story:

"PA offered to concede almost all of East Jerusalem, an historic concession for which Israel offered nothing in return."

East Jerusalem is not for the Palestinian Authority to give away, it was never their property [1]. This shows AlJazeera's bias in the matter. Also, when Tzipi Livni is quoted in the article, the reporter follows it with "That is the Israeli framing." -- quotes from PA spokesmen aren't followed by such comments.

[1] East Jerusalem used to be part of the British Mandate, until 1948, when the UN proposed it would become a Corpus Separatum, administered by them. The Arab League turned down the offer, Jordan invaded it instead. In 1967, Israel took control of the area. At no point in time has East Jerusalem been under rule of the Palestinian Authority.
Does any of this apply if you're not distributing the cash at all? Say, I am making money in my S-Corp, but I keep all of it in the bank (minus the expenses) and instead live off my savings. The plan is to save enough to expand the business, but for now the money is just sitting there, doing nothing.
Anyone here who digs Qwiki's approach to presenting info? I tried it a little bit, found it mind-dumbing, and promptly went back to wikipedia. Anyone found it good for kids maybe?
I don't know how it is for S-corps with passthrough, but for LLCs opting for passthrough taxation results in exactly what you describe: you owe taxes even though the profits were not distributed to you because the company decided to reinvest. Search for "allocated profits", "distributed profits", and "phantom income". You owe taxes on allocated profits, not distributed profits.

Opting to be taxed as a coporation (or C-corp) avoids all these problems (at the expense of "double taxation").
Accessing Cassandra 0.7.0 from Perl
Teaser Site for Toshiba Tablet Takes Swing at Apple's iPad
You mean code that was interesting to write, and not just another fucking web template?
If you already are running a startup from your dorm, the main reason to stay in college is to meet women. Honestly, there is no easier venue, and the chance to have a captive audience of thousands of women looking for a boyfriend will never happen again in your life. You should be one of the most ballin' dudes at Bentley.

NYC is the second easiest place in the USA to meet women. It's not as easy as when you're in college. But it's about 100x better than Silicon Valley.

Relationships might seem unimportant when compared to your potential bazillion dollar website, but even the most autistic geeky weirdos want companions - see all of livejournal as evidence. I did startups in SV/SF for 10 years and could count the number of women I worked with on 2 hands. If you're working 12 hours a day, when are you going to meet the other women who aren't working at startups? At the bar, after work. But, you could go to any bar and there would be no women there, either. You end up condemning yourself to a life of near chastity hoping your startup sells so you can maybe attract a mate based on your bank account. That probably won't even work, there are loads of rich dudes in SF/SV who can't get a date.

The NYC startup scene is OK but kind of stupid.
There is a lot of dumb money. For example, GroupMe got $10M for a product that took 24 hours to build and has already been built by a dozen other companies over the years. The guys working on it are basically drunks and stoners and guys who follow jam bands around. (Check their twitter history, I'm not just being snide.) I actually think they are cool dudes but I'm just using them as an example that the bar for funding in NYC is way lower compared to SV. The nouveau startup wunderkinds in SF/SV are now all straight-laced type-a achievers who went to Philips Andover, Yale, Stanford, MIT, etc.

(This is actually really weird, cuz it's the opposite of the previous bubble where SV/SF was a bunch of bipolar freaks and dropouts with purple dreadlocks, and you needed to go to Choate and Princeton and wear a suit to get a job in NYC)

I spent about 2 years in NYC hanging out with startups and came to the conclusion that most of them are just "playing startup." The startups that make the most sense there are startups that target the NYC market first, like Gilt and Foursquare and media/blog empire things like Gawker, Tumblr, and DailyBeast. GroupMe works well in NYC, too, as the main activity is to go out at night and you can use it to sync up. So if your plan is to service the NYC market first and then see how it spreads from there, it's not a bad place to be and it should be trivial for you to get funding $$$.
I'd like to get a hold of you with some different ideas for that app, or possibly a different app altogether. Do you have an email I could send ideas to?
I wonder what effect the fear of HIV's existence has had on reducing the number of accidental pregnancies and what effect that has had on slowing world population growth.
Put up a teaser page with some information that will pique curiosity so that you can start collecting emails. Then you will have good number of users ready to test the product by the time you are ready to launch the initial version.
What? I can't hear you, my glasses are off