skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> that requires you to surrender some of your most precious human rights in order to access it

I'm genuinely curious, which human rights? I created an account, don't really use it... and don't feel like I've had any human rights taken away.
First time I've ever agreed with Stallman.
Lots of rationalizations for why you don't keep in touch. Lets admit that geography, convenience, jobs get in the way as often as anything. It takes little time investment to write a thoughtful note to an old friend, facebook or not. It doesn't have to be family vs friends, we can make time for both.
I don't get what you mean, because your desktop is just an X11 app, which you can remote by just running gnome-session or whatever your favorite desktop is. I do this all the time.
You're right, that was my plan actually, but I got sidetracked by the cygwin beast, sorry.

I timed the fib(36) function from within a clojurescript repl inside a clojure jvm repl, and it returned in 86 seconds.

Then I timed the generated js function in a Chrome console with a not-so-minor modification so it would compile, it returned in 13 seconds. The modification in question was inlining the generated cljs.core.truth_(predicate) javascript function.

The orders of magnitude don't lie though - for what it's worth, a recursive fibonacci implementation in plain java returns in about 125ms (and depending on jvm warm-up, an array-backed computation is a merry jog of 50 to 300µs, but that's completely off-topic)

I have yet to setup gambit and clone the clojure-scheme project. I'm really curious though, I like these 800ms that the author advertises.
I have a love-hate/hypocritical relationship with Facebook, but one that prevents me from not using it. Even if I want to not use it, I have to because:

1) I have a product that users want to use with Facebook, so I need to use FB APIs etc and understand how it works for real users

2) I have a product that can benefit from viral-ness on Facebook

I wonder how many other developers share such ambivalence about being forced to use a tool that you might otherwise abandon.
I'm not so sure it's possible to tell whether you are an angel or VC company at such an early stage. It's like asking if I would risk my life to save someone else's. I know what I'd like to think I would do but will never know the true answer unless I'm placed in that situation.
You would be surprised (or shocked, or perhaps just sadly resigned) to how often people "sweep things under the rug" in academic biology. Do your results conflict with some keystone experiment performed 10 years ago by famous people? Too bad for you, something must be wrong with your experiment.

Even better, my personal favorite is the "well, we think this is a real result...but we don't want to be the people to question the status quo. Ignore it".

:(
Nope. If you head to my site, and try to use it without Javascript it'll work for simple browsing but not for content creation.

It's a decision I made early on not to support a vanishing minority of users who have javascript off by choice or by force.
Do they have to offer any incentives aside from the simplicity of filling out forms once?

leaky.com gives real-time data as you change your policy. If you want to compare a $250 and $500 deductible, you can see how that affects every insurance provider at once (instead of changing it on all 5 sites individually and manually comparing). That alone is worth going through leaky instead of the supplier directly.
Privacy and free speech.
I can't even imagine why you'd blame old media when AOL, Gawker, Business Insider, Mashable, The Verge etc show them over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again that the key to success in the internet age is SEO spam and cheap writing / rewriting.
I think I know what Stallman is getting at. I've been thinking about how resistance movements work. In general, they use the power of personal connections to resist the power of a government. Facebook amplified the effect of this kind of power for the Arab Spring by augmenting those kinds of connections.

What if those governments had preexisting intelligence about the social graph? In World War II, Germans used paper punch cards to collate information about the so called "undesirable" residents of France and other occupied countries, and rounded most of them up in a matter of days. Just having most of the social graph in digital form would be devastating intelligence to be used by an oppressive government.

I hope the engineers at Facebook have put together a "self destruct button" for Mark Zuckerburg, and that he would have the courage to use it if the government turned oppressive. In all likelihood, this did not/will not happen, however.
I also do this quite often.

Network security admins allow only a port 22 binary connection to an inner enclave of protected machines, protected by firewall. I need to admin those machines, sometimes with gui apps. ssh -X to the rescue.
> > Women get equal pay for the same experience in the same job.

> That goes against a whole lot of sociological research

No it doesn't.

Here's a report that the Department of Labor commissioned

http://www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20...

TL;DR: women and men with the same experience and the same job get the same salary. Women, though (a) opt out of the labor force to have and raise kids, and (b) opt out of high paying jobs that are dangerous or require insane time commitments.

Feel free to respond with any actual statistics you may have.

> One third of all women are killed by an intimate partner.

One third.

ONE THIRD??!?

Let's see what the CDC has to say:

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/lcod.htm

1,219,784 women died in the US in 2009.

3,673 died of homicide.

That means that 0.28% of women were killed by ANYONE.

...yet you claim that 33% of women are killed by their intimate partners.
> Not feeling sorry for you.

I agree with your overall point, but no need to be so rude here.
I am very loathe to trust this article because a) there are 8 reasons mentioned. If you're trying to change your design, you want the top 2 or 3 that give you the most bang for your buck.

and b) because the author doesn't say where s/he got this data from. Was it a diary study? Interviews? Observational studies? Introspection?

Without knowing how hte data was generated, I don't see why it should be trusted (yes, it may be valid, but would you spend the next 8 hours "fixing" your site based on someone's quickly written article?)
Because, clearly, your wants indicate what's important for civilization?

Yes, there's a lot wrong with Facebook, but you do realize that you act exactly like those kids in camp - if people don't enjoy what you do, or have the same preferences you do, there's something messed up about them.

Maybe most people don't want private space, I don't know. It's certainly a good idea to point out what the privacy implications of FB are, but you should be prepared to hear that people simply don't care.

(Me? I think privacy will inevitably die, or at least become a radically different concept. I might be wrong, and I'm open to debate. I won't treat the outcome of that debate as a sign for civilization either way ;)
In my experience it does. "Hire people smart than you" is a management ethos, which translates to delegate the hell out of a task.

But software development specially in small teams doesn't work that way. Many a times, junior programmers require direction and even help in completing their tasks. So it comes down to two problems (three, third one later)

1. Either you give someone sub-standard work to maintain that you be able to help them. This will lead to demotivation eventually

2. You accept you are not in position to help them. This generally leads to friction and a bad boss will try to hide incompetence by architecture discussions, meetings etc

Smartness is subjective. Which leads to the third problem. How can you assess skills of someone better than you? You can only go as far as grilling a candidate to your own competence. So a B, C player will only be hiring other B, C players and that will soon degenerate the organization.
The Problem with Wikidata
having been in a camp I can definitely say that I didn't enjoy it and I was rejected based on that

If you didn't like camp, you probably weren't very fun to be around at camp. If kids from camp ostracized you at school six months later saying "Oh, he didn't have fun at camp so he's uncool" then there is something up, but I can't blame kids for not wanting to hang out with someone who is NOT enjoying themselves. Someone who is NOT having fun, is not fun to be with.
IANAL but it seems to be that the layout of a particular existing building is factual information and therefore cannot be copyrighted, just like the location of streets cannot be copyrighted.

I guess it's slightly more hairy because architecture is considered to be artistic as well as functional, whereas street layouts are generally only considered to be functional, but I still think that would stand.
Yeah, because Gizmodo and Engadget and TechCrunch and BetaKit and ZDNet and Slashdot all sound so much more professional than Hizook.

My eyes rolled so hard they fell out of my head.
>You must have had fallen out of touch for a reason, hadn't you?

This is exactly what made me realize it was OK for me to drop Facebook.

I was unreasonably worried that I would again lose touch with these people who were my friends back in college. We fell out of contact after graduation, and then rediscovered on Facebook years later. These were folks with whom I didn't have a whole lot in common at all - maybe I might have lived on the same dorm floor with them, or maybe we were study pals in data structures class, or something else similarly un-meaningful.

Then there were the people I actually cared about and made efforts to keep up friendships. I looked through my phone contact list, and realized not only did I have telephone numbers and email addresses for every last one of them, but I had made use of it often. Facebook was not how I communicated with the people that matter anyway.
> there's something wrong with people liking camp because they're supposed to like camp

It is very easy as an outside observer to decide that someone must like something you dislike because they feel they are "supposed" to.

Kind of like sushi. If you're grossed out by it, you've probably watched people eating it and having fun while saying to yourself "well, they only like it because they're supposed to...it's trendy right now, that's all".
The same applies for good movie soundtracks - the ones that fit so naturally that you don't notice them consciously but they impact you anyway.
Wanting to know his opinion doesn't make him the High Judge.

I'm curious because slthough I'm critical of Google for various reasons, I think it's hard to make a case against the value that Google search has brought to the world.

In the particular thread about Facebook RMS is pretty absolute in his boycott. I wondered whether he'd be more nuanced with Google.
If you don't smoke, that doesn't prevent other people from smoking. If you're not on FB, that does prevent other people from messaging/whatever you on FB.
keyword 'sensor'. I watched the video and was impressed by the display but I had to keep reminding myself they are just talking about the touch sensor.
Great point...I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I'm from LA but I moved to a village in europe with just over 1000 people. I see the same people every day, and everyone talks about each other's business. I've thought a bit about how FB is sort of trying to recreate this, and the ways in which it's failed.

It can be somewhat oppressive to live in a place where everyone knows your business, even if they're all nice people. I think the difference boils down to walls and boundaries. I have a porch in front of my house where only friends will likely drop by, if I'm sitting out there. Unlike with FB, random people I barely know would be uncomfortable suddenly showing up on my porch and standing there without saying anything interesting. I have a yard in back where my girlfriend and I can be alone. If the phone rings at a bad time, or someone knocks while we're out back, we don't feel compelled to get up and answer it, or even to find out who it was; whereas with FB, we would feel bad ignoring someone completely, since they'd know we had a record of the contact. Conversely, if we're out in public and waiting in line at the bakery while the people in front of us are having a super-long 20 minute chat with the baker, we wait patiently because it would be obscenely impolite to interrupt; but we don't eavesdrop or intrude on the conversation, as we could with FB. If I'm cornered by someone in town I don't really want to talk to, I can talk for a few minutes and then leave; comfortably knowing they won't see live status updates of where I'm walking.

Maybe a better way to say it is that small towns, for all their gossip, have a decorum and a sense of human dignity that facebook simply hasn't developed, and maybe never will.
Show HN: Web Service that fixes typos, DNS checks + validates email addresses.
I built this web-service for my own usage, so it will stay around. You are more than welcome to use it if you think it will be handy. I hope that some of you may find it useful.

If there is continued and heavy usage of the service, I may come up with a premium offering or something. Let me know if you'd like that. I will quite possibly open-source it at some point too.
... If you use facebook you don't have unique ideas or are less likey to found the next great startup? Get over yourself.
Spam.

http://google-latlong.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/help-improve-bl...
Most of that seems to be aimed at ChromeOS - which is predictable.

I'm more interested in what he thinks of Google as a service.
If it's a decentralized system and it uses a free and open protocol, there could be many different clients. I am sure many of them would be very easy to use, and as far as cognitive load goes, Facebook's many capricious and poorly considered UI sea changes over the years have created countless cases of "oh shit how do I do that now?"
What it's like to be billionaire? - "All it does is make things easier"
I'd avoid making it "easy". Easy being defined as "usable by easily confused programmers who don't understand it or the trade offs."
they've had some great exits (Backtype for one) and are in on some great companies like Twilio, Fitocracy, Sendgrid, Wildfire, and TaskRabbit.

Honestly, 10 have already exited, and they have at least half a dozen impressive companies in the pipe.

Are these companies AirBnB or Dropbox? Probably not, though Twilio is legit.
This is a cool concept that is formalized in the "Dining Cryptographers" paper: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dining_cryptographers_problem . You can use this basic idea to create a completely anonymous broadcast channel.
If you're going to specify that you might as well just paint a detailed background. You'll get much better and cleaner results that way.

We've still got a long way until this type of technology is ready for games (the rendering has to take only a fraction of the frame time or there's no execution time for the game itself), and frankly it may never be viable for real-time gameplay, though for visualizations and simulations it is promising.
fwiw, I thought the same when I began work on Rust, but I have since gotten quite used to the shorter keywords. At this point, I can't believe the keywords in other languages are so pointlessly long.

But the truth is that whatever the surface syntax is, one quickly gets used to it. What's more important are the core concepts at work.
There is surely something to be said for making it a little easier for people in the world's largest single-nation economy to give you money.
Activists Fight Cybersecurity Bill
I actually started using Facebook primarily to keep in touch with people from summer camp.
This is good to hear. At least if we get rejected we'll know that the goalpost is still in the same general location, even if the competition makes it harder to reach.

How do you weigh references when reviewing an application?

Has there ever been an application that was accepted on the basis of a clever stunt or some other cunning?
He wasn't talking about those camps though. He was talking about American summer camp.
When people use the open web they censor themselves.

Also, on facebook people engage in bullshittery, while on the open, sites such as this people at least might learn/teach a thing or two.
Mad science, abstract data types, and objects
This is a really confusing post.

Nobody cares that you don't like Facebook because nobody is forcing you to use Facebook. I'm at a loss as to how you can consider it "oppressive" and "authoritarian." Did some thugs from FB come around signing people up at gunpoint?

I don't even see what you're trying to achieve, really. You just want other people to stop using Facebook because you don't like it?
Lisp is so powerful that problems which are technical issues in other programming languages are social issues in Lisp.

Here's my take on it: Social issues will swamp the technical power of any language.

Corollary: Virtuous cycles in the social dimension will augment the technical power of any language by an order of magnitude.

The over-arching principle: A programming language community is as much a social artifact as it is a technical one. You have to get both sides right to succeed.
> A different bunch of volunteers were asked to roll the die just once

Was anyone else surprised to see "bunch"? Why did they use that, when "group" would be a much better word?
Thats not really the point, I think.
> Without looking anything up, design a three-column layout where all columns have equal height even when their contents are unequal.

Like this?

<table><tr><td><td><td>
When I'm on FB, and Joe X sends me a friend request, it goes in my email. Since I'm on FB, the implicit assumption is that I got the request. If I think Joe is nice enough, but not really my friend, I'm suddenly forced to (a) accept a friend who's not my friend, and imply I like him more than I do, (b) reject the request and make him think I don't like him, or (c) lie and say I don't get facebook emails.

In reality, I would have far more options; there's a long gradient of subtle ways to let him know to what extent he's my friend or not. Most of all, I would have the option to defer making any kind of statement, assuming he's not a nutcase who asked me "so are we really friends?" And that deferral -- plausible deniability -- is the first thing FB takes away. That's what I call the freedom to be left alone.
I notice that some of you are testing "example.cmo" etc. I will fix this asap so it corrects that.

This site was made for personal use so it won't go away and you're more than welcome to use it in your applications. If there is heavy use of it, or there is interest, then I may introduce pricing options.

Let me know if you're using it. I'm not sure how useful it will be to people so I'd be interested to know how you use it.
I find Lisp a bit unsettling because when you look at the code it's like you're looking at pure abstraction... there is a lack of semantic/symbolic content to latch on to and feel 'anchored.' Gives you the feeling that if you use Lisp, you'll have to be thinking hard the whole time you're using it.
That's actually an excellent point. Uber personal success would completely remove the desire to make a move for money.

Isn't that what acquihiring is about though? Purchase the talent that wont make the move for money.
http://www.scribd.com/facebook/d/78445521-Role-of-Social-Net...

This looks like it could be the paper in question.
I deleted my facebook account because I determined that what it cost me to host my data there (and to consume their services) was more than I was willing to spend - and that this cost was creeping up over time without giving me the opportunity to decline.

The currency in this case is the information that I'm providing them, either explicitly through postings and 'Like's on external sites, or implicitly by their plumbing of my social graph.

I would actually feel much better if facebook were a paid service, since then they would have an incentive to maintain me as a customer.

I'd rather that a third party with whom I've already established a financial relationship (Apple, Amazon, UPS or Fedex, etc) could provide an authentication token that could be used as a universal login.
Good question. This is why a more transparent indoor mapping process could breed innovation (a standard format) and better curation (allowing users to find and fix incorrect floor plans, a la OpenStreetMap or Wikipedia).
Kind of my point, sadly.
What it's doing is setting ground control points that can be passed to a tool like gdal_translate[1]. That three-point alignment deal is setting three pairs of points made up of a lat,lng on the world, and an x,y on the image. Most world map projections cause distortion that can't be compensated for with just pan, scale, and rotate. The GCP jazz can.

But I'm in agreement, their UI to set the GCPs is terrible. :-P

[1] http://www.gdal.org/gdal_translate.html
Then you are an angel company, for now.
I've not encountered a "code culture" that "measures how much you self-perceive to know about code." I've encountered management cultures like that, but if you have a bunch of developers working together, people deeply know the wizards from the blowhards.
I find this very interesting. Really, there is a larger principle here: that in today's world, languages become popular, in part, by encouraging social connectedness, e.g., forums for solving problems, interoperability between different codebases, etc. The author's point, then, is that, perversely, one way to encourage social connectedness, is to be almost-but-not-quite powerful enough that one person can do everything alone.

I find a couple of misconceptions, though. The most glaring is the lack of distinction between conceiving an idea, and implementing it. This is best exemplified by the following:

> In a world where teams of talented academics were needed to write Haskell, one man, Dr. Tarver wrote Qi all by his lonesome.

Teams of talented academics, building on the work of others going back decades, were required to design Haskell. Once that design was done, anyone could copy it. Sure, Tarver implemented Qi all by himself, and the fact that he could is significant. But let's not talk as if Qi is based entirely on ideas that he made up himself without considering the work of others.
What does it mean for [[attributes]] to affect C++ language semantics?
Work environment definitely matters. If the environment isn't any good, then the pay had better be great.

Ultimately, if you had an interesting product, a great environment and offered extremely competitive salaries then you would most likely end up with interest from more people in the "A" range.
Do you really see many talented programmers submitting to the process you're suggesting?

Interviewing is a two-way street. While you're trying to figure out my coding skills, I'm trying to figure out if I'm interested in what your company does and if I'd like to work with the people there. Personally if I knew I'll have to spend an hour of my time on interview challenges just for the chance to get some face-time with an engineer, you'd never even see my resume.
How Apple, Microsoft & Wikipedia Fight Google's "Best-Loved Service"
How? I'll just create a password manager entry for the site, just like any other site. If I'm asked random silly required questions, I'll lie if I don't think it benefits me in some way or is truly required.

Most users at this point (not desiring external auth) would just give up unless they saw a huge need for the service.