skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A man was just murdered in his car while driving down a public road. This is not a concern any of us should have to deal with, but devastatingly, it is a statistical anomaly that has impacted his family's life. Should we get in to the statistical probabilities as well? Should we dig in to the physics involved?

Why not? The article did. Your emotional response is completely valid, but don't demand that everyone feel the same way that you do. Worrying about one's own safety is also a completely normal and human response to hearing this kind of news.

How about we honor his death by simply acknowledging that of all the crazy aspects of this event, the most important is the loss that everyone involved is suffering and leave it at that.

I don't think "simply acknowledging" anything is a very helpful response, but if you feel that way, go ahead.
Most developers learn by example. I've looked for resources on using vcs properly but the few that existed weren't very good. A great resource would be a showcase for a collection of great commits. It doesn't exist as far as I know unfortunately.
Will pricing be (roughly) the same as last year?
It's £4.99 or £9.99 per month. Most people probably spend significantly more than this for their iPhone contract, data and so on. Unlimited music for this price is a steal. Pony up, or put up with the ads.
Not that I disagree with you about current Windows versions, but from what I heard about Windows 8, Microsoft is trying to be more like Apple with iOS here, with the locked UEFIs, not allowing rival browsers or making them unusable on purpose (exactly like Apple did on iOS), and the "oh and noone want's to use our new GUI so we make devtools that can be used with anything else cost extra" thing.

Looks like both MS and Apple have chosen different side in war on general purpose computing than (I would imagine and hope) any "hacker" would.
And that's fine that you feel that way. It's good that you've thought this through. I'd much rather someone act this way than pretend like having children is what they want.
This is a non-starter. This fills the same niche as an electric moped at 6% or less of the cost. And people can drive electric mopeds on city streets legally today. For less than half the price someone could buy a used, low-mileage sedan (such as a Civic, Corolla, or Accent), with a trunk, seating for 5, seatbelts and airbags. And then use the other $8k to pay for gas at $5 a gallon for the next 48,000 miles. Or, they could buy 2x brand-new 150cc Honda motorcycles and use the extra money to pay for the gas (at $5 a gallon) for the next 50,000 miles for both vehicles (100k total).

Doesn't make economic sense. Doesn't make safety sense. Doesn't make logistical sense. Doesn't make practical sense. Doesn't make environmental sense.

What's the value add?
Many of us do follow the logic to its necessary conclusion. We don't assume criminals will magically disappear, we just would like law and order to be provided by the free market. See below before you dismiss it as impossible.

http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm

Edit: And I apologize for the background of that link!
I think Tycho is asking where _he_ can get bulletproof car windows from. He's not criticising the dead guy for not having bulletproof windows. And it seems to be a reasonable question if you live in Seattle :(
Clean Tech: The new resource dependencies
Is it pure egocentrism that keeps high-risk parents from adopting?

Interestingly enough, adopted children tend to resemble their birth parents much more than adopted parents in the "Big Five" personality traits, and twins raised apart from each other resemble one another to a shocking degree. Bryan Caplan's book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids discusses many of the studies that have examined these issues.

If you want a kid who is "like you," your optimal choice is probably to have biological children. The joys (and problems?) of being a parent, however, appear to be universal. Note that the first paragraph and Caplan's book are not an argument against adoption, but they are a reminder that genetics appear to have a much more powerful influence on people's personality than most Americans / Westerners wanted to believe for a very long time.
why not just perform euthanasia and focus your energy into raising the healthy child?
Why This Band Failed - Despite Tom Hanks's Love
So you can't have experience of having kids unless you have kids. This is almost along the lines of saying you don't know that getting hit by a car is bad, until you have been. I have plenty of experience with kids, my brothers and sisters have plenty. Not as much experience as a parent, clearly, but enough to know what I want.
Sounds cool and looks like it has very good documentation.

A benchmark of how it performs against the other solutions would be great!
Just win baby
Next step in the Chrome OS journey
The combination of this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4020836 and this one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4020790 might have garnered enough "flags" to be autobanned. Try emailing info@ycombinator.com and ask if they'll reinstate you. They once banned me just by accident.
By maratd's logic anything you have ever done or ever will do is completely pointless. You might as well kill yourself.
Nano. It does everything I need and nothing more.

Plus, it's already installed everywhere.
Thanks, it looks like the medical industry is trying to bury my post.
That's not entirely reasonable--what works for you is not what works for me and is probably not what works best for other sorts of tasks. Unless the tool in question is really narrow in scope, there is not single "best" solution to any particular problem.

Also, I never did understand the aversion (usually coupled with condescending comments like your "I'm not 15 any more", implying those who do configure tools to be immature) to tweaking tools. Setting my environment up is a one-time affair: I sit down for a weekend, get my computer working exactly the way I want, and I'm set.

The productivity benefits (and, at least for me, they are significant), are not one-time: they scale with however much work I do. The difference, of course, is that the benefits are less obvious than the time spent to get them. The only reason I'm well aware of them is that I've used both a nicely customized system and (for school) a horribly inflexible Mac OS system at the same time. Throughout the year, the difference between the two became more and more annoying until I was just gave up and did most of my work at home.

So really, the cost to customizing a system is O(1); the benefits are O(n). Unless the constants are very high (e.g. modifying the kernel for my own use would just take too long) or you don't plan on using a tool too much, optimizing it makes sense.

Coincidentally, while I've never seen anyone customizing a hammer (it's a rather simple tool which, chance are, you don't use that much or for too many different things), people do customize things like tool boxes for a very good reason: they're moderately complex and having everything organized the way you like makes you much more productive.

Additionally, I find another benefit to modifying my tools myself: it's much easier to remember my additions than even equivalent features that come standard with the system. I have added a whole bunch of useful commands to Emacs that save me quite a bit of work, and I did not have to spend any time remembering the new key sequences because I was the one who came up with them in the first place. Even if those features existed and were on by default, it would probably have been easier to set my own key commands for them.

In short: while it's fair to expect software to "just work", it is not fair to expect it to work optimally or even well for every case and every person. And customizing your own tools (which is one of the things I think it takes to be a "power user", rather than sheer quantity of use) really can make you more productive, even taking in the time needed to actually customize them.
The problem with saying your a pragmatic X is X becomes meaningless, your just pragmatic 98% of the time. It's only the 'meaningless' edge cases where you revert to whatever X is. See: How the 'communist party' deals with the Chinese economy.

PS: For a US example compare how law enforcement deals with impoverished areas vs wealthy areas in the same state.
Good article with some good points. But it did get me thinking, is Perl getting ready to be in a prime position to become the next Cobol? Probability will go up considerably if Perl 6 never comes out to shake up the ecosystem, but even if it does come, what's to say that there won't be Perl 5 applications running into the next century?

Combine its shorthand and with the fact that it's already getting hard to find Perl people, and we could see some dedicated Perl warriors doing very, very well in the coming years.
You misunderstand the word compromise in this context. It's not a negative. Compromise is:

> a position where everybody is genuinely happy.

It's not about splitting 50/50. People equate meeting someone half way with splitting things 50/50. That's far from it.

So, what you say is true. It's what I was saying, just with more words. =)

Now, please don't come back and be one of those people that argue semantics. I meant what I said, I said what I meant, and there was just some confusion. Hopefully, it's clearer now.
JRuby 1.7 Preview 1 Released
Yeah, last figure I heard was $4 million a month, with only one somewhat successful game under their belt (and they bought the company that made it).

This is why any company that doesn't already have a serious track record and money coming in from previous projects shouldn't jump straight to an MMO.
This thing that can only cry learns to: talk, walk, read, express themselves, formulate opinions, ride a bike, conquer fears, grow etc. They do this all the while looking at you as a hero with nothing but complete and selfless love for you. All your minor faults are irrelevant to them. You are their everything.

Yes, it's genetic conditioning, but I have been on this planet 37 years and have never experienced emotion on any scale anywhere approaching what fatherhood has given me. Here's another secret - it's completely different the second time around too!

I'm struggling here to find an argument that would help illustrate this to a non-parent and I am failing. I'll leave it at this:

I would give up everything I'll ever do from now until death - my entire existence - in exchange for my children's without more than a 30 second thought. That is what parenthood does to you.

It's fucking great.
I went through the same thing. When link shorteners were all the rage, I wasn't the earliest adopter, but I re-submitted a few posts, once a piece, using a bit.ly link, to track links across properties, all shortened, together.

I purposely did this, but didn't realize that HN would view this as some sort of link scamming behavior to manipulate the system and they banned an account I had for 6+ months. I disputed, after a fellow HN user notified me (I was slow banned). I appealed to PG, who explained the situation. The account was never recovered.

The point is, you'll get a chance to plead your case. But, it seems they don't haphazardly ban.

Good Luck.
<sigh>

People regularly complain about this. If you do a search you'll find all the advice you need about what to do when banned.

However ...

HN is popular, and attracts many, many trolls. A great way of dealing with trolls is the hellban, wherein posts and comments are visible to the submitter, but not to anyone else. The troll then doesn't try to circumvent the ban, because they don't know it's there, and everyone else gets a comparatively clean site.

This process is, to the best or my knowledge, at least partly automated. There are (probably several) algorithms to detect troll-like behavior, and it's likely that sometimes the bans are automatic. But because they are algorithms, and because this kind of stuff is hard, there is the occasional false positive.

Plausibly, in this case, you.

I haven't bothered to read the enormous block of text you submitted. Have a look at it - do you really want people to read it? If so, try harder to make it readable. However, the advice that's always given is simply to email pg and ask if this is a mistake. If so, it will be reversed promptly. If not, he might explain what you've done to provoke it. When I've been banned he has responded promptly every time. I have, however, explicitly followed the advice to be found on the web about how to get responses from busy people.

So my suggestion is simply that you email pg. That's what the advice has been every time I've seen this complaint.
I thought implicit deref of references was coming in 5.16 or 5.18, at least in cases where it was unambiguous?
This IS useful!
Ask HN:I started(&sold) FounderMatchup, now looking for my next big opportunity.
I just finished freshmen year of college. I had co-founded FounderMatchup which ran successful events in Boston and NYC to help entrepreneurs find co-founders. We got acquired a few days ago.
I am either looking to start something interesting with a great team or join a growing early stage startup.
A fellow hackernews friend described me as "bold and ambitious, and when you want something you go after it. You're pretty much made for marketing or founding."
What are your thoughts folks? Any interesting opportunities for me or some you know of? I live in Boston but open to SF as well.
My email is smit at smitpatel dot com.
One could very easily argue that the USER ought to be empowered to take control of the UI. I'll use MS Excel as an example of a tool that I've used with regularity since it came to market. MS thought they knew better and utterly destroyed the UI with the introduction of Office 2007. As anyone who was a power user prior to that version and you are very likely to get a nearly unanimous thumbs-down on the changes. The ribbon interface, as well as other choices MS made, took a power user and made him/her feel like a total idiot. Could you learn it? Sure. Could you find the commands you needed? Of course. And, for a period of days and weeks your productivity went down to nearly zero. Here is a case of a company thinking it knew better and pushing forward changes that actually destroyed productivity in a massive way.

That sort of thing led me to thinking that users ought to be empowered to completely customize their UI. Keep the mainstream on the new shiny thing, but enable a setting that allows me to use a text editor to completely redo all of your choices. Create a marketplace for the sharing of these config files under source control too. A mechanical engineer will have different needs than an executive assistant, not in complexity but rather in context and workflow.
thanks, I was super confused. all I figured was that 'One hundred twenty five thousand one hundred' has 44 characters with spaces, and was about to start ascii conversion of the string. you saved me.
Are we talking about the same Gnome 3? Mine has a thin toolbar for the clock, and all the other UI is hidden unless you mouse over the top left corner. It works extremely well on the comparatively small MacBook Pro 13", to the point that I'm now seeking the best linux distro to offer as close to vanilla Gnome 3 experience as possible.
That's correct. In fact, at the moment Einhorn only supports TCP sockets. (That being said, I might be mistaken, but I think that Unicorn can also bind TCP sockets.)
I do agree with you that people flame out because their lives evolve around kids and they lose touch with each other. It can't really be underestimated the amount of energy required to stop that from happening. You always see on TV that marriage takes work but I doubt many people understand what that actually means until they're in it. Little things can creep up on you. Your spouse may feel neglected and you won't even know it until it's gotten to be a serious problem. You might think you're being the perfect parents because you dote on your kids and meanwhile your spouse is lonely and unhappy. You might not even be aware that you're being selfish. Children tend to consume every ounce of energy that the parents have, especially in the early years. That doesn't leave a lot of time or energy left for each other. It really takes a constant effort and work to keep the marriage healthy.
It's funny -- I think this is where some of the conflict lies. With git, you can do a bunch of commits with crappy comments and then, when you are ready to publicize it (push, whatever), you can use rebase to pretty up your commit history. In other words, I take the analogy of "crappy commits" to "crappy code" a step further: the commit history is another document that is to be presented to other developers; make it helpful!
Cloud Computing: Too Risky for Mission Critical?
The Productivity Conundrum
Ha.. Mercury? Really? You are right, mercury is poison. But...
there are too many people who have had spectacular results with colloidal silver, including myself, who would disagree with your post. Hospitals still use it in the eyes of newborns today to combat infections. Did you know that arsenic is not poison in the body if it is in organic form?
That doesn't really make sense. Cognitive dissonance may cause a smoker to rationalize their habit even though they have also been a non-smoker. In fact you could argue that cognitive dissonance is more likely to affect a parent than a smoker, as parents don't have the alternative option of quitting.

You could argue that non-parents may also be under the influence, but having formerly been a non-parent doesn't necessarily mean you're not rationalizing your choice to make you feel better about it.
It becomes dangerous if you have changes in your working tree. You truly lose those changes with a "git reset --hard HEAD" or the forced checkout.
Storm [1] and Spark [2] are two other distributed stream processing libraries in this family. Lots of good work being done in this area; batch-processing a la Hadoop is simply unnecessary for a lot of incredibly useful algorithms.

[1] https://github.com/nathanmarz/storm
[2] http://www.spark-project.org/
Google blog post is here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/next-step-in-chrome-o...
> the hilariously false core of libertarianism. They're a class of abstract thinkers stuck in an imperfect world where their theories will always be unapologetically shattered by complex and unpredictable realities.

Also, most of these hardcore libertarians seem to be, basically, robots. They are people from a biologic standpoint, but lacking humanity. If you're asking yourself right now "what the hell does he mean", you're likely one of them, or pretty close. There's no point in clarifying it, it's like describing the color red to a blind person.

The article does confirm the stereotypical image of the libertarian-as-a-robot.
That's exactly my point. I understand why this is not right for stackoverflow; that is for technical question and answer. But isn't this kind of question exactly the point of programmers stackexchange? How to overcome analysis paralysis is not relevant to programmers? Insanity.
Google announces next Chromebooks and a Chromebox (desktop replacement)
I'm not chromatic - but I don't think that's the point he's trying to make.

It's not that the the ability to upgrade the interpreter, and several hundred dependencies, and have several tens of thousands of lines of production work easily is good (although it would be tough to argue that it's bad :-)

It's what being able to do that successfully says about the reliability of the perl ecosystem as a whole.

The investment the perl community has made over the last ten years in building the best testing infrastructure of any language (seriously - it's damn excellent), and fostering a community that's values stuff working has paid off in spades.

My experiences match chromatic's in that it just fracking works.
Responses to "Intelligent Design" Criticisms of Biological Evolution
Not true. From the AGPL:

> Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, you have permission to link or combine any covered work with a work licensed under version 3 of the GNU General Public License into a single combined work, and to convey the resulting work. The terms of this License will continue to apply to the part which is the covered work, but the work with which it is combined will remain governed by version 3 of the GNU General Public License.
Coming up next in this article series:

Why I am avoiding articles with headlines that end in "and you should, too" and why you should, too.
I don't understand what the site does? And I don't intend of finding out when you want these permissions to my Twitter account:

This application will be able to:
Read Tweets from your timeline.
See who you follow, and follow new people.
Update your profile.
Post Tweets for you.
>except on matters of the military (which cannot work if it was subjected to market forces)

Why? This is a huge subject and text to dump on you, so sorry about this:

http://mises.org/etexts/defensemyth.pdf
More iomportantly the article uses drones, plural? I thought it was only one drone?
To some extent it's already true. There's a lot of Perl in the financial sector. That community is paying a lot more than the average for Perl dev's already :-)
That's the arms race - on the road the more massive vehicle in a collision wins.

So if you care about your dear little children you have to buy the M1 Abrahams tank. A mere $4.3M for the peace of mind of knowing your little ones are protected in a collision with an Escalade.

(ps the 120mm cannon is also useful against Volvos)
They would need empathy to do that, or at least a basic understanding of human nature. That's pretty unlikely, given that they seem to lack the hardware for that.

> Someone who has known him for more than a decade said, “He’s very cerebral, and I’m not sure how much value he places on the more intimate human emotions. I’ve never seen him express them. It’s certainly not the most developed aspect of his personality.” The friend added, “There are some irreconcilable elements that remain unreconciled in him”—a reference to Thiel’s being both Christian and gay, two facts that get no mention in his public utterances and are barely acknowledged in his private conversations. Though he is known for his competitiveness, he has an equally pronounced aversion to conflict. As chief executive of PayPal, which counted its users with a “world domination index,” Thiel avoided the personal friction that comes with managing people by delegating those responsibilities. Similarly, he hired from a small pool of like-minded friends, because “figuring out how well people work together would have been really difficult.”

> Thiel liked to quote Margaret Thatcher: “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women.”
Your point being what, that there's a speculative boom in petroleum prices?

It's a finite resource with a growing demand. Seems like my argument requires less in the way of elaborate justification.

I don't expect to convince you of anything. So: write it down. In 2012 you thought $4 gas was going to stop getting more expensive. In 2014 when it hits $5, you'll probably think similarly. At $10, maybe you're change your mind. And if you've written it down you'll hopefully avoid this kind of mistake in the future.

People like you have been predicting cheaper gas right around the corner since 2003. They haven't been right yet.
Live Post-Mortem with John Allspaw, Mike Rembetsy, and David Zwieback
absolutely! Best programmers are self-taught. Even CS graduates have to continue teaching themselves to be decent programmers.
Workers of the world, level up
No surprise. It was grossly hyped and over valued. It's marketable price is being determined by the markets.