skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
" many startups strive to be better than that"
Better than what? Are you implying that an environment where forming close personal relationships with coworkers is a requirement is distincly "better"?

Perhaps in your case, as described in your last paragraph, you would find that to be better for you. But I don't think it is undeniably better in all cases, for all people.

Many startups are actually remote only and I don't think they would accept that they are somehow inferior for it.
> just to clarify, I was not advocating prison like barriers

Nor did I think you were, but added due to other comments I have seen in the media.

What I did not add / explain in my prior post is that one LEO salary per school (a M-F 7A-3P job) is both something that could be implemented very quickly, without the time and costs associated with reinforcing schools.
You sound like a parody of the left. "Your rights end where my feelings begin!" Is that really your stance?
Bullshit metrics
Prop 30[1] was an initiative[2] so it went directly to the people for petitioning and then voting. The legislature was kept out of the loop.

[1]http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/California_Proposition...

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_ballot_proposition#I...
"I personally hate guns. I have never owned or even fired one. I wish they didn’t exist, but they do" - Everyone should try to put at least two dozen rounds down the range. It's a great experience, and it can help you focus, make your mind faster and clearer (IPSC is simply awesome - go to an event).

I don't really care about the self defense aspect - even though it's enticing, having some of my stuff stolen is probably better than killing a person.
I'll agree that good comments don't reiterate what is plain from the code. Truly clear, self-explanatory code is a joy to read. But the process of coding usually boils away any notion of why, leaving only the brain-compiled machine that implements the how. It's the original use-case, high-level policies, implicit contracts and so on that comments should generally focus on. Especially, as the author notes, since TDD infrastructure and culture has gotten so much better at covering the "how" in recent years.

Also, sometimes the code is sufficiently brain-compiled that it's utterly inscrutable. Early in my career I wrote a fast interrupt driver for the company's main product that had become quite heavily optimized, and practically every line depended on nuances of the related hardware's functionality. This code was written in two-column code/comment form, and had more lines of comments than lines of code. This was necessary for it to be at all maintainable. In theory, a later refactoring might have simplified this state of affairs... but that opportunity never happened.
Prop 30 doesn't address the bad schools in California. We have a big union problem: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-23/new-california-taxe...

High taxes, big deficits, and bad public services - California state government achieves the trifecta of suck.
Five products that get the user experience right
What Instagram’s New Terms of Service Mean for You
Instagram released an updated version of its privacy policy and terms of service, and they include lengthy stipulations on how photographs uploaded by users may be used by Instagram and its parent company, Facebook.
It's absolutely relevant, since the purpose of the Second amendment is largely protection against governments, not critters, varmints, or even criminals.
$250,000 Cash Grants to Hire + Expand in Lower Manhattan: Take the HELM
and the resolution is great too:

"Paul has graciously let us know that he will make the intended recipient a new journal, and that we are welcome to keep this one— thanks, Paul! It will find its home either in the Oriental Institute at UChicago or the Special Collections at the Regenstein Library because, as many have noted, “It belongs in a museum!”. "

It will be simply too cool if it ends up in the Oriental Institute!
I personally have four reasons for writing comments. If a comment does not fall squarely into one of them, I try to omit it:

1) Why the code is doing what it's doing. What's the motivation? Why is a check necessary? What's the context?

2) High-level overview. 20 lines of code may speak for themselves, but a quick sentence can easily summarize it. I love well-summarized code. "Do X with the Y unless it's Z" is a really fast read. (Function names obviously provide this sort of explanation, but sometimes a name is not obviously not always sufficient.)

3) Stubs / future notes. Sometimes you need to leave something stubbed out. If you have thoughts on what they code will need to be, leave a note about it. This is easily removed later.

4) Quirks. If the code does something that is not obvious, note that. Non-obvious side-effects, bugs, etc. Don't discover something painful, then leave the next person (possibly a future you) to re-learn that same painful lesson.

Code does stuff. Comments describe the code. Comments should not re-describe what the code does, they should be about the code and the code's context itself.
This idea of retroactive taxes may have legs. Rich people can often reconfigure their future earnings in response to upcoming changes. But they can't change past income – or even better, income from years whose returns have already been filed. Perhaps the revenue-hungry states will discover that the only tax increase that can't be skillfully avoided is one on already-admitted income, say from 2009. Or to pick a real bumper year for California tax revenues, 1999.
For example, it’s feasible that a 100% tax on the price of cigarettes would save thousands of lives ever year. Why is this not attempted? Probably because the special interest group that controls tobacco sales is powerful enough to stop it.

Nothing to do with liberty, the constitution or anything...
That's what I hate most about having insight into data... the times when my intuition is wrong and there is no rational reason for what is actually happening. Human behavior can be so bizarre...
The kits didn't survive, but the parts did.

The problem is no-one knows how to use the parts unless they are assembled into kits.

The whole maker movement solves this by making kits, therefore raising the bedrock abstraction for knowledge way too high.

The better solution would be to teach people how to use the parts, which is my problem.
I once wrote a very simple recipe for a delicious tomato soup - here it is copy pasted:

worlds fastest tomato soup

canned and diced tomatoes

spray cream (with sugar added, ideally)

some italian spices mix.

pour the diced tomatoes with the juice included into a microwave safe jar and put
cream on it (cover about half or three fourths of the surface with
a 1cm thick layer), stir it with a spoon, and make sure it is all well mixed with the tomatoes. add spices. put it in the
microwave at approx. 700W for 5 minutes (dont cover the jar).
enjoy.
Is that really quicker than reading
return array(foo, foo->encodeHTML())?
Prism, Internet of things, and Koa Labs startup space in Boston
>I live in a country with gun control laws. Despite what you may think, this is not a totalitarial oppressive regime.

That may be so, but things change. If it becomes a "totalitarial" oppressive regime your options will be more limited than mine.
Well, this morning was spent shredding powder in the mountains. This afternoon I am coding. Why wouldn't everyone demand to live where they want? Revolt and make these companies wake up & realize that remote workers produce equal or better than those who are local. There is 0 benefit for local devs and I have been doing this for 5+ years. Sure, a recent college grad might be worth to have local, but folks with legitimate experience and who contribute, who cares any more?

As for salary? I demand Bay Area pay wherever I live. I also demand to watch my daughter grow up and not suffer through any more BS commutes on 85/101.
I would have loved to see this beautifully written, touching story without mentioning any form or idea of God.
All those fantastic public K12 schools in red states are made possible with federal education spending that is made possible by California (and to a lesser extent other blue states like New York and Massachussetts).

California receives back less than $1.00 in federal spending for every dollar its citizens pay in taxes, while the smaller states receive back in federal spending significantly more than $1.00 for every dollar their citizens pay in federal taxes. In effect, California's largesse subsidizes the rest of the nation. If California received back in federal spending its fair share of the federal taxes its citizens paid, it would have a multi-billion dollar surplus each year.
Doing Game Gravity Right
If there’s a game that comes close to this depth, I’ve yet to see it.

You may want to check out http://www.eveonline.com .
Comments are useful when they provide information that is not in the code (e.g. rationale for the choice of an algorithm, source of a regular expression that parses an URL). Your example HTML encoding function can be coded as:

def clean(foo)
return [foo, foo.apply_html_encoding]
end

The encoding logic should be contained in apply_html_encoding. The point is that most of the functions/methods that are 65 lines long are badly coded.
Thanks! Don't worry about us stealing your steam, this is mostly a side/revenue-project for us.
Came across an article proposing this: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/breakingnews/os-or...

To which one of the first comments is "How are we going to pay for these SROs in Elemtary Schools now?"

My suggestion would be fewer police activities in other nations.
"hey I make the decisions not you"

uhh, isn't that the way it should be?
Sorry, but TFA has it all wrong. This is about values, not ratios. The question at hand is whether you think these deaths are acceptable given our values as a society.

To put it in nerd-speak, the intolerance for any given death is a function V with multiple inputs. (I find this extremely distasteful but bear with me.) For cars and smoking, the output of that function scales quite slowly; we're mostly OK with those because we like cars and if you smoke it's your funeral. Note that we already spend a lot of money on automotive safety, so arguably we still want to bring those numbers down. For instance, look at recent safety-oriented recalls from various manufacturers. Likewise, we spend money to reduce teen smoking, et al. So even then those don't really wash as an example of hypocrisy around the value of human life.

For the murder of multiple people via gratuitously overpowered firearms, you might argue V scales linearly, perhaps even quadratically. Maybe V takes a time-delta which scales V even faster with smaller deltas; Aurora is still fresh in many people's minds, as are numerous other incidents.

For multiple children under the age of 8 gunned down by a madman with a high-capacity assault rifle, V might scale factorially. We as a society try to place a very high value on the lives and well-being of children.

In other words, you're going to have to do a hell of a lot better than simply comparing inputs to V, and a small input to V for some category of deaths is not in itself a justification to ignore it. The author has committed the fallacy of looking at morality and society primarily or even solely through the lens of statistics.

The author's laziness is also ironic, all things considered. The UK and Australia are other western industrialized nations quite similar to ours, in a great many respects. They've experienced some success in reducing gun violence since the '90s, when they banned private handgun ownership. The irony is that the author's blindness here is a far better example of magical thinking about how regulation might or might not work in the US.
I'll give you one of two things: lego if you're under 12, tools if you're over 12. And good tools, no crap. And I'd rather give a select number of people something good than a lot of people something crappy. I'm also 100% anti-social in that I do not send out Christmas cards.
I know that when Obama originally threatened the progressive taxation, there was a contingent (I don't really know how large) of people whose incomes were 'on the bubble', or had incomes of between (let's say) $250-$255k who would have netted more bring home money by grossing less.

I mean, the 'more money' argument certainly applies once you've crossed the bubble threshold, but if you're making $251,000, if the additional tax is only 1%, that translates to $2,510, which takes your gross to under the $249,999 you could have made and been exempted from the increased tax.

For the self-employed, who have more control over their direct income, it might be more beneficial to take a slight pay cut and come home with more until you're able to give yourself a significant enough raise for it to not matter.

Edit: I've been corrected by others who are more savvy on taxes than myself. I admittedly am not in the >250k tax bracket, but regardless, there is a contingent of people who are also wrong, and are working their taxes in the way I described.
Yep... I think it's like 75 cents on the dollar (which I wrote a bit earlier). Pobre California.
Surely the scale of a single active shooter matches something like using a fire extinguisher vs. "fighting a fire".

As for "effective and safe", so you'd think, and so did I (who started shooting in 1st grade in 1967 (sic)), but civilians with little or no training have demonstrated an amazing ability to responsibly use firearms in self-defense.

Police in general are not useful comparisons. They're required by their jobs to go in harm's way and frequently use their service handguns. The NYPD is a particularly poor example, they are run by people who don't understand guns and equip their men with ones that are particularly hard to shoot accurately---as you sort of note they prefer this vs. negligent discharges---and we learned after the recent debacle that their training, initial and continuing, is really subpar. And there are much better ways to avoid negligent discharges, the NYPD is the outlier here.

That's also why I suggested the option of M4 carbines. Long guns are a LOT easier to shoot correctly, skill with them doesn't seem to degrade like it's said to do with most people with handguns, with good choices of ammo they're more effective and less dangerous than handguns, etc.
Thank you, you just won me $20.
aren't a lot of people who have jail-broken iOs devices, already by definition people who want paid apps for free?

I'm an Android guy myself so I might be wrong here (and your app is an example of non pirate usage for jail-breaking), but I often hear young relatives talking about jail-breaking their iPhones to save those $1-2 on apps, which to be honest, is pretty shitty behavior IMHO (yeah, I lecture them, they look at me like a crazy old person)
Not I. Paul Buchheit is sharing a deeply personal account of what is most important to him and why. If that includes some form or idea of God, why should he leave it out?
Thank you for sharing this.

Words really can't express how this article made me feel... but it's rare for something I've read on HN to cause me to take a step back and reflect on what's important in life.
Drop me an email please (or put yours in your profile).
I didn't say anything about taking away guns.

I simply said it's very clear there is a problem and something needs to be done about it.
Sure. On the flip side, since no one has a gun at home, people are not afraid to rob or invade your house. A ban isn't the answer either.
Would you care about AOL if AOL companies didn't tell you to?
I played a bit of elite Back In The Day (speccy, got to Deadly). I always assumed that Eve online was pretty much exactly what the blogger described. Spaceships, freedom, trading.

Is there something I'm missing?
Then you don't understand. One needn't believe in anything metaphysical to appreciate the power of a concept.
>This is absolutely not true. There are plenty of places with standing armies (i.e. pretty much all eligible males have guns in their homes) and don't have anything remotely like the gun murder rate of the US.

You're confusing standing armies and militias/reserves. A standing army is a group of people who are in the army as an occupation.

You are right that the prevalence of gun ownership isn't the whole story. Certainly part of it is cultural. But for now, in this time and in the current state of the US, these incidents really are the price we pay for freedom.
I've recently read Clean Code by Robert Martin and now totally agree with the OP; everyone should go and read it, though it's full of annoying Java, it does apply equally to proper languages.
In your efforts to RE the GPU, have you uncovered any hope of getting faster I/O? I'd love to use all that GPU power, but the applications I have in mind require I/O to match (at the very least, solid 150 mbits/s USB2.0 and 25mbits/s Ethernet).
My wife and I are considering going on a staycation (and vacations in future years) as a Christmas gift to our children instead of buying more cheap toys to fill a house that already has too many. (Our children are 4, 2.5, and 1 years old.)
This thread has made me think less of Hacker News. All of it. The hate posts were pretty petty, but the fawning is pretty gross as well.

We wonder why there's so much ageism. It's because age obsessions stem from this "cool list" narcissistic nonsense. But this is a prejudice all of us will face, because we're all (well, almost all, and with luck) going to be old some day.

The sign of maturity is to see something like this, neither be impressed nor upset/resentful, and just move on. Some magazine made a list somewhere. There were names on it. Don't remember most of 'em. Not news, not interesting, #toobusygettingshitdone, et cetera.

I didn't even read the list and have no idea who's on it, so I have no opinion of the selection, but the fact that people care is appalling.
Excluding Mexico is a huge disservice because Mexico actually has stricter gun laws than the US. Mexico's gun murder rate is over 3 times greater than that in the US.

I feel this is instructive because with all of the guns already in private hands in the US if they were banned outright today you'd end up with an enormous and uncontrollable black market. The same type of black market that exists in Mexico.

Even in the US now, the vast majority of gun crimes are committed with illegally obtained guns. Something on the order of greater than 90%.
TL;DR: "I voted in favor of taxes on people making more than $250,000 per year because I thought it wouldn't include me."
You don't need a thick skin
Exactly. All I said is that I don't know if there are any fixes to the problem that wouldn't cause potentially worse problems. That's why I mention iatrogenics: unintended side effects of a cure that are more damaging than leaving a disease alone.
I don't mind people getting it for free -- if I actually cared about making money from it, I wouldn't have gone about it the way I did -- but it's just interesting to me how people who are willing to spend money actually value it.
Neat idea. Here's another I've been stewing on for a while: give every wifi point a wall/chatroom that's only writable (and maybe, only readable) by people using the same public (behind-NAT) IP address.

One problem with SSIDs for messaging is how their display is often truncated. (iOS's wifi screens are a bad offender here.)
Another great tool in this vein of "process, but not too much" is https://sprint.ly/
I disagree. If God was integral to his experience, why should he self-censor that? I'd much rather read a truthful account of his experiences than a white-washed one.

Thanks for sharing, Paul.
"I'm not convinced that VC-istan has any real edge over the rest of the business world. It's just better at marketing itself."

It's going to be funny when everyone starts figuring that out!
Sorry - that's a pretty silly argument. Countries that formed through some form of peaceful negotiated settlement exist, but most formed either through conquest, revolution, or through an imposed partition. I don't have numbers on this, but running through examples in my head, especially for the developed countries I'm familiar with, I can only think of a handful.

I'm not sure what you have in mind when you say "founded by violence"...

Australia was at least as wicked with their aboriginal populations - and has a vastly lower level of gun violence.

The Netherlands was birthed in a revolution lasting 8 decades, and also has negligible gun violence.
Ask HN: Selling Wordpress plugins
Just curious how many of you sell Wordpress plugins, and where you sell yours. Bonus points if you list the name of your plugin, and/or what sort of revenue it brings you
So... your argument is that tightening gun control would lead to more wars?
haha... I should have also clarified that I did not think you thought that. But your comment made me think of my own comment and it seemed fitting to acknowledge it. And agreed about the on-site LEO. I think both are worthy. Particularly if a school has multiple entry points and/or is large. One LEO may not be enough if entry is through an unsecured door across campus.
You're making the mistake that thinking they'll lower their income to avoid an increase in income tax means they'll make less money for the year. If the accountant says that because of the oddities of the tax code it's possible to exit the year with more money after taxes by lowering their income, you better believe they'll do it. But don't necessarily think they'll make less money overall, it's just that their reported income will be lower.

Why do you think all those CEO's are so nice to accept a $1 yearly salary and take stock instead?

So, in the end the guy still gets enough money to make him happy and tax revenue goes down.

The other popular option is to just move, which some countries in Europe are now experiencing.
What I meant is, aren't you limiting yourself to an audience who already chose to go out of their way to save a couple of bucks? they may not represent "ordinary" people and how they value apps.
Your sociological insight is spot-on (few people are born into VC connections) but your delivery sucks. Hate the game, not the player.
Looking to change healthcare? Python / Django hacker needed.
I often want to Command-F various stacks of papers and things in my apartment.
We're very bad at managing money. The only solution is to give us more money, while we hold your children's education hostage.
I have the same experiences. We wrote http://hyves.nl/hybrid which works wonderfully on iOS. But didnt really deliver the HTML promise on Android. Maybe because of the browser which was not as good as the safari a year ago. And maybe also because of slower phones.

However the same code did run on iOS blackberry and Android. However the experience was sub-native on most devices. And we really needed to do a lot of tweaking and work to get the native look and feel on iOS.

So if you want to be the best, no matter the costs, go native. Otherwise Sencha is not a bad choice to make. It really depends on your requirements.
It's not bad... it's just much more light-weight (essentially). So, the bigger the project, the more you're going to feel Backbone strain relative to AngularJS. However, for small projects, you probably don't need such big guns... but if you can afford shipping AngularJS to the clients anyway, why not?

You can see the different styles for yourself for a very basic web application (and try to extrapolate what it would look like for large ones): http://addyosmani.github.com/todomvc/
What an amazingly insightful post. Thank you for sharing.
I really love the honesty of this piece. I also feel that the message about being thankful and forgiving is very important. Life is too short to hold on to anger, and too wonderful to wait to embrace its gifts.