skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So sick of the ethical high-horse most employers/corporations seem to be on re: honesty, etc. when they show no such respect towards employees. They have no problem smiling in your face and calling you family, knowing that they'll downsize/ax your ass in a millisecond, should the numbers dictate.

At the start of 2012, I was working for a startup that hired 3 people into the same leadership position without knowledge of the others. (I was one of them; that was fun.) It routinely did that: hiring multiple people for the same leadership position at the same time. The CTO eventually left because he was actually a decent guy and he couldn't stand the ethical compromises the other executives expected him to make.

Promising 3 people the same leadership position at the same time... now, that is unethical.

Once you've been screwed over by a couple actually unethical people, you realize that the petty, victimless status inflations people use don't deserve any real indignation. Let's talk about the real crimes, which are usually perpetrated by powerful, established people hiding behind corporate veils. There are bigger fish to fry out there, and most of them (a) will never get caught, and (b) are enormously successful.

We proles tend to have what Filipinos call the crab mentality: we all keep each other down and stay stuck in the bucket. We heap a lot more ridicule on people who harmlessly inflate their social status with a title upgrade than on the much worse criminals who often hide behind positions of power and diminished accountability.

I'm not a liar. (See other posts about exploder vs. exploiter. I'm at least 2 sigma of exploder, to my detriment.) I have, however, concluded that most people will lie to get ahead, and that there are different forms of it and some are much more decent than others. I don't give a shit about people who move dates around slightly-- not in a world where real crimes occur on a daily basis.

With regard to the "high horse": because there are so many unethical people in business and most of them never get caught, the appearance of being ethical is paramount. Don't get me wrong: it's very bad for you if you get caught even in the minimal lies. I'm not saying it's advisable or wise for a person to play with dates-- if you get caught, you're fucked-- but I'm just saying it doesn't make me that angry if people do it and get away with it.
Mobile YouTube on iPad.
Which one?

No, seriously, I'm not sure which one you're talking about (or if you're joking). Iran has had so many revolutions (many named after colors, interestingly).

There was the one that everyone knows about (1979 - 'Islamic Revolution'), but there was also the White Revolution, the Persian Constitutional Revolution, and most recently the Green Revolution.

I have a friend who is Persian and she often jokes that 'this next one had better succeed because we're running out of colors!'
Completely off-topic... SW CT, woot!
I basically agree with you. I think return codes are simpler, and exceptions appear simpler because we're used to them. In reality they are a magical, out-of-band mechanism compared to plain old return. I contend that local and explicit is more strongly correlated with simplicity than remote and implicit.

Put another way, verbose code can be simpler if it is direct and explicit — what happens is what's on the page — just as succinct code can be more complex if it is magical or implicit — what actually happens depends on who is calling it, say.
1. In the UK, via the "milk round" of good universities, personal referrals, industrial sponsorship... Also, some universities won't take undergraduates straight from school, which forces a "year out" in industry which plays into recruitment. It was kind of fun watching the big players fighting over those new grads with 1st class degrees.

2. I think, at it's best, the process is the safety net. At it's worse, it's a substitute for talented people - but I don't think that's sustainable for long. Perhaps it's just a different talent, for working in an extremely tightly controlled way without going crazy.
Well, underpaid by what metric? If each Chinese laborer produces $100/day in profit but only gets paid $10/day, morally they're being underpaid. And the fact that so many companies are still moving operations to China is itself evidence that on average more profit is allocated to capital holders when they use Chinese labor over, say, Californian.

But even if you take liberal/market ideology at face value, they're still being underpaid. To have a free market you've got to have free people. If you agitate for more workplace protections or (god forbid) try to start an independent labor union, getting shot or sent to a prison camp in the far western provinces of China isn't out of the question. This decreases labor's bargaining power relative to what it would be in a free market, which decreases wages.
Perhaps while they're fixing this they can also revert the terrible, unusable new web inspector that launched with Safari 6.
"The result? Almost 95% of his revenue comes from this suburb."

Maybe I'm just missing something, but wouldn't that be a 1900% increase?
How do you advance to something more with no time to learn anything new? With no money to gain transferable skills? Continuously working 10+ hour days with no chance for advancement, where your employer could care less about your well being just to make enough to survive is in my opinion slavery.
I'm confused - can someone explain to me the benefit of Apple developing it's own mapping software? Apple is not full of PhD's studying problems for the sake of it, they are a collection of people creating products that push their bar higher and higher. They make commissions from digital goods being purchased on their devices. This is why I'm confused. They don't have computer science PhD's to throw at challenging problems. They could hire tons of PhDs, but Apple hasn't really done that yet, they design something pretty good, package it up nicely, and sell it.

Google has a very attainable goal (or cause) for it's mapping project (at least that's what it seems from the outside) - the creation of self driving cars. Regardless of their initial motivation, looking back in ten years it will seem like Google wanted self driving cars, and Google created awesome mapping to provide the infrastructure for their cars.

Apple isn't going to create 'Apple cars' that drive around and take pictures of everything, will they?

How much is their to gain in them creating their own mapping software, what is their motivation for doing it?
What a refreshingly even-handed perspective. And you even talk about semantics instead of syntax.

Go isn't particularly elegant in my opinion, either, at least not compared to a lot of languages. But it's pretty good for getting stuff done, and handles a lot of common problems in a way that is direct and simple. I can perceive that utilitarianism as a form of elegance.
Why don't they just start charging for it? Personally, I'd much rather run software that costs money but is high quality than software that is free but riddled with adware.
HBO Go on Roku gets Dolby Surround Sound
Neji. Python Online Classroom.
> Transnistria is not listed, even though it has de facto sovereignty.

if by 'de facto sovereignty' you mean not being recognized by any country aka their passports being worthless. a database should not make political statements. if they earn recognition, they'll be listed. there are dozens of separatist territories in the world who claim sovereignty. if Transnistria were to be listed as a country - why not Karabakh? not to mention autonomous regions like Iraqi Kurdistan.
The only issue I have with this is that, AFAIK, the city is offering you this information for free. I can understand if you were paying a licensing fee to have access to the location data, you'd want to cover that fee. But wrapping up a stream of data someone else produces and curates doesn't justify a recurring fee to me.
Thanks for clarifying the strict superset part, I'm not actually a mathematician.

To clarify my convention comment; it is only convention that mathematicians have decided that any given set of properties are useful or interesting to be used pervasively and alternate number systems are not. To any person who is asking why .9 repeating is 1 those reasons are entirely outside the scope of their knowledge and so entirely unrelated to the question; is it not true that the answer is "based on the axioms of which this number line is created due to complex reasons that you can't possibly know at this stage, this is effectively decided to be true as an axiom".

If one of these alternate number lines was in common use and reals were only uncommonly used then I'm pretty sure there would be tons of people saying "why is .99.. NOT equal to 1 in ($reals-replacement)" and all the people who have been taught it would sigh condescendingly because they believe it is just an intuitively obvious feature of numbers and not simply an axiom of the number line they are choosing to use. I'm interested in whether you disagree with that sentiment.

Re: your proof, trivially could be refused based on the other number line not being closed over division, then there would simply be no such number Z=(X+Y)/2 for X=.999.. and and Y=1. Then the proof where be like those silly ones where someone uses a /0 and arrives at a contradiction. Actually it seems that reals themselves already are not closed over division since x/0 doesn't result in a real.
Joel Spolsky on exceptions : http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2003/10/13.html
This is a very good question. I work at a large Canadian hospital in research environment. I see inefficiencies every day, tons of them, I'm seeing new startup opportunities every week.

For example there are lots of problems that could benefit from applications of Machine Learning and modern statistical learning theory, but people working on the problems don't have enough Math/CS background and not sure who to turn to; the quality of data analysis in Nursing/Psychiatry/Paliative care/etc areas is much inferior to, say, quality of data analysis people do in physics or finance; the widely used software (e.g. SPSS, Excel) is mostly crap and things could get done much faster and less error prone if appropriate technologies were developed. I could probably go on forever...
No matter who gets elected in November, by 2015 guaranteed-issue health insurance is going to be the norm...

I realize it's a bit off-topic, but what factors lead you to believe this will happen by the third year of the next president's term?
I don't think the work to be done to keep the data fresh is that much, since they're basically scraping publicly available data. Plus, as nice as the interface is, Google has already done this with Now, and presumably it'll be coming to the iPhone soon.
The Real World: A Four Month Retrospective
Weibo Reports: Workers at Apple Supplier Foxconn’s Taiyuan Factory Rioting
I'm sorry you feel that way but there's nothing wrong about me wanting to share my learnings and others' learnings with the world via email.
A little off-topic, but: how does Montreal have 19 different transit agencies!?
Every time I've set out to spend a good 20 minutes "code reading" random projects, I've learnt something. It might not be something big or even something positive, but I've always picked up something.. and strongly recommend it to anyone I tutor.
The Chinese have it bad, but American factory workers don't have it all that much better. You're still dealing with a lot of easily-replaceable people who have little or no leverage to push back at unreasonable demands.

That's a recipe for unhappiness no matter where you live.
The issue is that people get fired and sometimes even humiliated over minor deceptions (like "playing" with dates) while companies routinely protect managers who do much worse things that actually hurt people-- things like promising good reviews and writing bad ones, abusing process for retaliatory or deceptive purposes, and hiring multiple people for the same leadership role at the same time. "Rules are for the proles" is what seems to be the corporate attitude in at least 75% of companies.

It's a power relationship. They can lie and get away with it because they have the gold (cf. "golden rule" as "those with the gold make the rules") but you are screwed if you get caught in even a small one. It's important to know how the game works and what risks you're taking, and my strategy is not to lie. But I don't believe that people who pursue other strategies and cheat harmlessly at an unfair game are awful or unethical people.
This is a very apropos recommendation. I love the way Haskell makes you think like this. Even better I love how you can continue to apply that kind of thinking to programming in any other language.
While data mining on this scale is only barely science fiction, I don't see it progressing it this far for a number of reasons:

1. Users. Once Facebook users learn that their public data will be used for these purposes, people will en masse make their profiles private. Not everyone will understand what is going on, but everyone with enough Facebook friends will figure out from their friends to make their profiles private.

2. The public. Public outrage is a powerful thing. Data-sharing on such an unprecedented scale would almost certainly trigger public outcry and/or boycott. People have an alternative to Facebook: G+. A boycott would not be such a big tragedy for people. Plus, you don't want your website to be known as the one that can get people fired.

3. Government. This is related to number 2. If enough people get mad, then Congress may pass laws to stop Narrative Data and similar companies from producing personal data mining products.
>You said this is a lean, lightweight browser, but it's 8MB! I laugh at your silly lies!

>Take it easy, sport. Phoenix has many files that override those in Mozilla, but it also has a new set of files. These files render a ton of files in Mozilla unnecessary, but we haven't yet stopped packaging the old files. It also still contains the modern theme and all the composer UI. In short, we haven't done any work yet to minimize the size, but we expect to be able to hit 6MB with a little work.

Things have changed quite a bit.
Old Google-powered Maps on iOS 5.0 made to mostly work on iOS 6.0
Open source is not the same gratis, so there is non reason to suspect it would be lowest cost for any non-appliance product.

But open source has a free market of maintenance industry, instead of a monopoly, which pushes prices down in general.
Out of curiousity, have people done this study about tech workplaces, particularly in the Bay Area?

If it's incredibly trivial to prove, I'd be surprised if it hadn't. (I'd be equally surprised if it had been attempted and shown no age discrimination--it'd push against my priors, but I'd try to keep an open mind.)

In reality, I suspect it's much harder than you suggest to prove, and even harder to litigate on.
As I understand it, it is about severity. I think "panic" and "error" are meant to handle situations where there is no obvious, correct answer, like with array indexing. A nil pointer is another gimme example. Some languages have unchecked exceptions — maybe conceptualize it somewhat like that. panics() are for disasters, for serious program errors.

By contrast, a network timeout is not a disaster. It's not "normal" or desired behavior but it's well within widely-known modes of behavior.

Composition is nice-to-have but in general you ought to be able to write Go as if everything that does not return errors will succeed under the vast majority of circumstances, or where failure is inevitable.

Recover is, among other things, a failsafe of sorts for cases when code you do not control (e.g. a library) panics. It might be catastrophic failure for the library, but it may not be for your code, and you need an escape hatch.

...I am not an expert, either, but I've spent a fair amount of time on the Go mailing lists. I feel like I'm actually repeating something I've read, but Effective Go doesn't talk much about this. (It does say that library functions should avoid panic.)
The article suggests he was killed over a land dispute. Which, really, exemplifies the point of the Canadian-governed cities: mediating property disputes in first-world legal systems, not anarchic violence.
It's ok to question his background and credentials on science, however the formula he uses - basically substituting science by economical growth is consistent with what I know about Sollow growth model, which tends to no growth unless an external variable called technical progress is introduced.

I am also worried by the growing disregard of science, but IMHO it is less worrysome that the actual slowing down in technical progress.

I wouldn't call web 2.0 startup, social networks and the likes "progress". We are just focusing more about ourselves instead of exploiting our environment more.

We think we are doing things, but we're not actually building new physical stuff - only barely improving.

The drug innovation example is spot on.
That isn't really phrased as a salary, is it? It sounds like a signing bonus. Which - well, I've never worked around Cupertino. Is $85k really a typical signing bonus?
The tz database that this is sourced for is one of the most impressive compilations of information that I have ever seen. Timezones seem like they should be simple, but the reality is very impressive: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Tz_map_wo...
Because it's hard and people could die. I think that scares most of us off.
Another similar project: https://github.com/podio/valideer. The (rough) equivalent schema for the example above can be expressed as {"a": ["?integer"], "b": AnyOf("number", "string")}.
Leapfrog over the NYTimes paywall
That is a bit backwards. The Kindle Fire is much lesser hardware than iPad. iPad is inexpensive at wholesale BoM because Apple has amazing supply chain in hardware. Amazon has efficoency in logistics but not in components.

Apple wins in profits because it keeps more per unit (including the App Store cut), even at then same retail price for competitors with the same BoM. Like Coke does.
This has happened before. RegisterFly went under. Another registrar (I think it was godaddy) took over their customers under the auspices of icann.
Cython, not CPython. I took it as a given that it will run "pure" CPython-compatible code. I meant that the ability to JIT down Cython code (without the C translation step) would be a strong hook to get some people interested. There have been steps toward this in PyPy, and I expect it will happen in Numba sooner or later.

This would actually be even more compelling that I initially thought, since you pointed out that mypy run in stock CPython (I overlooked that and assumed it would have separate interpreter). All hypothetical, of course -- where's the github link?
Have you looked into Yahoo PlaceFinder? My understanding is that they don't have a similar restriction on use, although I don't know if they're better than Apple's geocoder.
And posted: http://flightfox.com/contest/29010

Let's see how this goes.
I disagree with a number of points in this article.

Businesses have been built on reading code. We (Architexa) are one such example, but there are lots more companies trying to help you browse/understand code. One of the older companies in this area is SciTools, which makes the 'Understand' product.

Beyond the above trivial point. The problem with books is that they are often designed to start from only one place (the first chapter). Blogs overcome this by letting you start reading at any post. If there really is a tool that is needed, it is a tool that helps you pick a way to start reading code. It is NOT to give you the one annointed way to read code (from where the writer started writing the code). You sometimes care about the code from the start to finish, or MUCH more likely you would want to read the code in a manner that aligns to your tasks - perhaps by seeing how the code responds to some event (by looking at the event hook), or seeing how the code uses a library or subsystem like the filesystem (by finding dependencies to the appropriate library).

Code reading/understanding is a big problem. And I am biased, but there is a lot of work that needs to be done here.

By the way, I would love your thoughts on what we are doing. Please check the video on our homepage (http://www.architexa.com/) and let me know either here or via e-mail what you think.
If this succeeds I suspect criminals will just resort to sneaker-net and carrier pigeons.
The last time the Friedmanites tried to impose neoliberal economic doctrine in Latin America it resulted in wide-scale repression and murder [1]. It is tragic, yet not surprising, that it's happening again.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_War#The_Disappeared_held_...
It's a good thing the weight of responsibility is lowered onto our shoulders slowly. You're complaining about bike maintenance, but owning a home is way worse (something is always broken). And when you get married, your spouse is likely also working ... it's quite a shock when one of you has to stay home with the kids. My advice to any newly graduated (and newly earning) workers is to save everything you can. And if you get married, live off one income while saving the other.

Have fun ... life can be rewarding without spending a dime!
Chinese families' worldly goods in Huang Qinqjun's pictures
With all due respect you are pulling a lot of numbers out of thin air. There are only 10 people that they can hire... really? While a totally respectable position, the hire they are talking about (which I guess is the first of the so called 10) was a GIS analyst - again no disrespect but not exactly what I would consider a 1 in 10 in the world kind of profile. Certainly someone who has skill but lets come back down to earth a bit.
I've always disliked this current trend on how people values the quality of software by speed and "responsiveness", disregarding all other features.
The mega services aren't really used for legit hosting, they are used for "Linux ISO hosting".
Ok, I accept your second point. Regarding the first... If there was an unskilled labour that, by itself could produce $100/day profit for a majority of people, then you wouldn't have any $10/day labourers. This $100/day profit is only possible with the value added by the skilled labour. It is like this everywhere. For example, the artist who made the facebook logo only got paid in the hundreds of dollars yet the facebook logo produces much more than 10x that in profit. Yet, without the value that the facebook product adds to the logo, it would have been worthless. You wouldn't argue that the artist is underpaid.
IPhone 5 Unboxing And Comparison [Pictures]
I respectfully disagree. You almost never cast the error. Two approaches are common in the go community.

1. Error constants. These you can use == or a switch statement to do control flow with.

2. Custom Error Types. These you typically use a type switch which uses reflection to do dispatch off. In this case you might also then cast it if you need specific data off of the error but most of the time you don't need any more than the string the error() method returns.

Both of these cases use errors in the way go intends them to be used. For control flow at the location where it makes the most sense.
Kickstarter has plausibly deniability and hiding behind an undefined disclosure of what the creator and backer are due is unacceptable. I spent 99 buck on something the 17 months later dont have and the creator has ceased communications with the backers. Prosecution needs to be discussed to get our money back with interest in failure to fulfill the terms of our contract when i gave him the money.