skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, I think so... It's not so much the idea of the raw number of student who go to those schools, but the thought that other schools look toward them for some direction. If I recall that article from the retired teacher from Berkeley correctly, he used to help other teachers teach SICP and Scheme.

I'm going on the assumption that there is some feedback loop going on here, and that without people actually being exposed to Lisp in school, then there is probably going to be less people even aware of Lisp's existence. I wonder how many schools will drop Lisp completely now after MIT and Berkeley dropped it.

Now, if Clojure looked like Python, I bet dollars to donuts it would be the number one language in use already.
I give much more credibility to reviews that are marked "Amazon Verified Purchase". This at least weeds out bought reviews, people who received free review copies from the author, people who are supporters or detractors of the author or his ideology but haven't read the book, etc. And it's likely that someone who actually paid for the book actually read it. It would be nice if Amazon had a way of filtering out all reviews that weren't from a verified purchaser.
The problem with fossil is that it's not git. However it would indeed be nice if someone built a distributed github on top of git.
Fastest way to start with Clojure (besides the online REPL at http://tryclj.com) is to get yourself leiningen (the widely used build tool for clojure projects under: http://github.com/technomancy/leiningen) and a plugin/mode for your editor of choice, do "lein new <your project name>" and start a REPL via "lein repl" to get working.
What experiences have you had with bad programmers?
Let me try to present the other side of this argument in a way that doesn't sound crazy:

When one of your people dies, it really hurts. If you were the one in charge of guaranteeing the safety of that person, its a failure much deeper and more profound than the worst startup company failure. Most people will be willing to do anything to prevent the loss of another life on their watch. The monitoring of communications seems almost small in comparison to the lengths that many would go to.

There are practical reasons for government monitoring of communications. Bad people have existed long enough that it's safe to assume the trend will continue. [1] Listening to their communications is the best way to stop them, or at least to ensure that they can't act openly. Very few innocent people will ever know that they're being monitored, and the risks to those people are very small.

Privacy could easily considered to be a basic right of all people. But it lives in a continuum like everything else that we value. Some times it's better if the government errs on the side of caution. And most of the time, people have nothing to hide.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents
That's nonsense. There are plenty of impossible things that people want really really badly.
Given a choice, should I avoid a startup with inventory
For a long time I have been tossing various startup ideas around in my head.

At the very core I can distill them down to two types. First, an entirely only service driven site. Second, something that involves a product or inventory.

It seems that a startup that has something to sell feels a little easier on the surface. But with that comes what seems to me a ton more logistical problems. Warehouse space, shipping, receiving, inventory. Just the programming alone to support those additional aspects kicks up the daunting aspect a bit.

Then there are the completely online startups. Sites like reddit, kickstarter, etc, where there is no inventory, nothing to ship. A service is provided, and you make money off the service, advertising, or selling something the service has gained.

I have actively avoided any ideas that end up having inventory and real product. Should I throw this out the window and consider it not that big a deal?

In my earlier years I have started a few businesses, all of which had product that needed to be shipped. I remember those days, deadlines, UPS, FedEx, everything was dictated by 4PM, which was when the UPS guy came. 6PM of we were really pushing it and wanted to take the stuff to the main hub, which wasn't always feasible if it was a large order of 2000 boxes.

Any comments?
I really like only using AJAX for content that is conditional. For instance, a comment form that opens up only when a user clicks on it. If they never go to add a comment, the AJAX request is never made. Anything that is actually going to be displayed immediately on the page should be loaded as soon as possible as there are major performance gains in letting the preprocessors do their work properly.
N = 0 or P = 1 ;)
From the article: "(Some people would argue that even property as such is a governmentally-sanctioned private monopoly, in order to downplay the fact that the copyright monopoly stands in opposition to property rights, but that would not be what we mean by "property" and "monopoly" as concepts. If I own an umbrella, I control that umbrella. If I have a monopoly on umbrellas, I get to control everybody else's umbrella too, and get to call on the government to have that enforced.)"

I believe the above was meant to addresses your specific form of criticism.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again...

"imaginary property" != "real property"

importanceof("real property") > importanceof("imaginary property")

I believe my right to exist stems from my "inalienable property right" to my own body. I can move it left and right and up and down. If someone were to try to take that away from me, I'd be pretty upset and I'd do more than write my representative.

Whereas, the basic idea of copyright is to encourage sharing of ideas - it doesn't actually have a basis as an inalienable or "moral right." In order to encourage sharing ideas, societies have been allowing the encroachment of imaginary property rights (a euphemism for the independent traditions of copyright, patents, and trademaks) on tangible and even inalienable property rights (making it uncomfortable to say the least). The Internet, however, has shaken even that basic premise: the Internet is full of creativity (not just copyright infringement). Only a fool would "buy" water in the rain.

We should not be allowing, condoning, or financially supporting, any unneeded encroachment on tangible rights, so IMHO we should dismantle copyright as we know it. What's more: copying itself has social value that should not simply be dismissed.

This whole conflict is about preserving the front-loaded pricing (CDs and DVDs that can sit on a store shelf) that the biggest music and movie publishers only became accustomed to this century, after the phonograph. (OK, the printing press was around a little longer before that, but scribes couldn't help read the book they were copying...) As awkward as it is for these biggest "creators" (distributors) to return to a gratuity system (beg? never!), this change only affects the biggest publishers and employers, not creators generally.

The moral argument for copyright is an illusion: it's a confusion of the right to privacy with the right to have monopoly control over distribution. I support the former but not the latter.

For independant artists and creators, the Internet is the best opportunity ever to realize their vision, to distribute it directly, and to capitalize on it directly... But the tip only comes after the meal.

I believe the long-term implications of this conflict were explored further by Cory Doctorow in the following:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbYXBJOFgeI

Do you also disagree with him?
I am interested in this too. Sadly, I don't have an answer for this.
Not the strongest argument but I'm sympathetic to the direction here.

I think the line of argument would clearer if writer were to argue that rights to physical property have evolved out of traditional practices in English Common Law while right to intellectual property are the result of distinct "monopoly grants" that have happened at one time or another - and that specifically "intellectual property" would better be referred to as "intellectual monopoly" to indicate this distinction.

Another useful argument is that physical objects generally have the inherent property that only a certain number of people can enjoy them - at least at one time. The "objects" of "intellectual property" don't have that quality and the owner and the state together instead must act to artificially impose that property on the "objects".
Just to note, Github Wiki is git repo, so it you want to backup the data, branch, etc, you can push pull and everything else with any Github Wiki.

Github issues aren't however.
Seeing Software Complexity
I'm loving how the trend now seems to have apps using Dropbox to store my data. Hopefully the next step will be to use a standard self-hosting API (that does not seem to exist yet) for those who are happy to pay for software but want to keep our own data.
This is the real problem with drones. America is the richest country in the world. Therefore, it's in our interest to make war as expensive as possible, since we are well positioned to win a costly war. On the other hand, drones are cheap and getting cheaper. It's suicidal for us to invest our resources in lowering the cost of entry to war, and yet we do so blithely. When we are attacked by cheap $100,000 or $10,000 drones, who will we blame for not keeping the cost of a cruise missile up in the millions besides ourselves?
So "page weight" isn't the issue then, contradicting the title. It's the pipeline depth of the page.
> Well, I have to insist that math does not prove a statement true.

Be careful to define your terms. Most people, including mathematicians, will insist that Euclid's prime theorem proves that there are an infinity of primes -- that the assertion is "true".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclids_theorem

But it will always be possible to redefine "true" arbitrarily to reject any such claims, which partly explains philosophy's low standing among intellectual disciplines.

> It is never possible to prove a claim anyway.

You've shifted ground in your wording, and contradicted the idea of a mathematical proof. There really are mathematical proofs.

In general science, your claim is correct -- a theory cannot be proven true, only false. But in mathematics, proofs exist.
If you're looking to poke around and try out Gitlab, it's very nice... but it has a few unsightly snags to install that will turn away 90% of people who just want to try it out... (including how to guides have the usual open-source vapidly miss obvious steps, requires a specific build of Ruby, etc), the latest version of Gitlab doesn't support certain versions of Ruby, and some required libraries are awaiting updating.

The best angle to go with is to download an appliance VPS with Gitlab already installed and fool around with upgrading it from there..
Agree on all, and thanks for the continued insight. While it's clearly institutional policy rather than law, I'm a little concerned that the ASF appears to claim copyright ownership of all of their projects' code, but doesn't actually have this ownership. My worry would be that as a result they wouldn't have legal standing to enforce license restrictions. I've written a question to the Apache project list that I'm part of asking for clarification about our specific case.
Google Application Security 0x0A List Hall of Fame
I think Workflowy has an amazing approach to this problem (hierarchical, collapsable tree) and I simply wish they added date functionality.

Right now, I can't use it for TODO, and use it only for brainstorming. For TODO, I now use getflow.com
This is an old, well-known issue. It just rarely occurs.
I should also clarify that I mean that for what I'm doing at wellposed, the individuals representing wellposed in a sales conversation essentially need to be the core engineers at wellposed.
I'm curious - what part of the world has single digit kbps links to the internet?

Just off the top of my head, rural Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.
i achieve most of this with Boto + iPython.
Nice. I'm wrapping a text-based todo/note taker now. I think there's still a lot of people who use these.
History of Gun Control
I started using org-mode for text-based notes/todos recently, even though I wasn't an Emacs user.[1] Org-mode has its own website, and more well-documented features than most programs I use! ( http://orgmode.org/ , manual http://orgmode.org/manual/ )

[1] It's an Emacs mode. I'm using it happily without knowing much Emacs.
Well, wants are not constrained by physics or mathematics either. So this is a throwaway comment.
Cardboard bicycles
They mitigate that by discarding without looking several of the cards, so it's not a completely even distribution of outcomes. E.g., it's possible that 4 of the '6's won't come out at all that time through the deck.
The question is in this day and age why can't we find another Ramanujan ? Have we somehow destroyed the ecosystem in which such a mind could exist and have a capacity for deep thoughts. Was he so special that someone like him could exist once every millennia. How many Ramanujans died before they could meet their Prof Hardy. Just wondering..
I knew Dr. Crandall personally. This is sad news. It's especially sad to see people, approximately "peers" if that term still has meaning, who are younger than you, who have passed on.

Crandall was 64 and outlived Steve Jobs (whom we both knew), who passed away at 56. I'm 67 and have outlived Crandall. It's not remotely an occasion for rejoicing.

Don't worry, boys and girls, you will eventually find yourselves in the same bittersweet position, with an overall probability of 0.5.
The article states that the lighter page was opt-in. Thus a bias towards people for whom the heavy page was unusable is not surprising.
Are you sure about this? Reading wikipedia suggests only 90mg or higher unit dosage falls under Schedule II narcotic. You may not be guilty after all :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codeine#North_America
I work for a fairly large 20,000+ mostly non IT consulting firm that has a solid reputation for getting things done. Most programmers make on the lower end of ~60-110k and code quality tends to sit just above terrible. However, what works for us is simply focusing on solving problems not meeting specks which is the antithesis of the factory model.

Granted, if they knew who to higher and what problems they needed to solve they would get by at 1/3 of our what we charge. But, most people and organisations are unbelievably incompetent.

PS: As to immigration a lot of the work done by immigrants would simply disappear without immigrant labor because it's just not worth minimum wage and or could just as easily be done outside the country. However, when it comes to the upper ends of the work force we are far better off with them than without. Don't forget Sergey Brin was born in Russia and I don't think we would be better off without Google.
Why on earth is this framed as a "war against machines"? That's just plain wrong. The machines serve people. If there's a war, it's between people and other people.
I like to remind people in that camp that I have the right to hide nothing. I may very well have "nothing to hide" but I also have the right to hide that.
The Vivid Schemer.
The Little Schemer is a book teaching you to think recursively. The way to use it is to read a question, think about the question, and come up with an answer.<p>The Vivid Schemer turns the Q&As in black and white into a live conversation on the screen, which can guide you to think in the right path.
Simple Organizer Pro
Simple Organizer PRO is a powerful productivity app that simplifies the way you take notes, create and organize your daily tasks and manage all your personal events on your Android device and syncs seamlessly with Google Calendar.
The founders of snapchat should be pretty happy right now -- they have an idea worth stealing. And to push your apple vs IBM analogy farther, it seems that they could potentially still win, by building a product that is far and away better for a certain segment of the market (i.e. as apple did).

To address the deeper philosophical claim -- are big companies morally obligated in some sense, to not encroach on ideas currently dominated by some startup, I think not. The whole crux of your argument is that there's some well ordering on the timestamp of ideas, and whoever is earlier in the well ordering has some moral claim to executing the idea. As far as I can see, there's no a priori reason why this should be so, and there are lots of utilitarian reasons why this ought not be so. Just because someone came up with the idea does not mean they are the best agent to execute the idea. I might be a brilliant military tactician, but I might lack the charisma or fortitude to lead an army. In the same way, I might be a brilliant social based startup, but my same product under the influence of the most complete social graph might be tons better.

I am not saying facebook poke is better than snapchat. I don't use either, but I do think competition is healthy. Now what would be problematic is if startups did -- as your article asserts -- stop having original ideas just because they were afraid big companies would clone them. In that case, the government should probably seriously consider penalizing companies like facebook for scooping up the idea, if not by making them disable the app completely, but by making them retroactively purchase or pay a large sum to snapchat. I don't have any data to discern whether a "chill" effect is happening, but I would guess an answer in the negative.
Hopefully it means that they thoroughly thought this through before planning the maintenance, and through their due diligence, they concluded that customers shouldn't see any problems, and thus decided to go forward.

Just shows people aren't perfect. Haven't we all been there?

(I do agree though that it does feel like a slap in the face to say: "Hey there shouldn't be any problems! Never mind, we were wrong...")
I hope more software comes out that use Dropbox for storage. I want an Instagram for Dropbox, a music locker with a player for Dropbox, a Skitch for Dropbox, an Xmarks bookmark sync for Dropbox.

One Password, Hackpad, O'Reilly Media, and now this todo.txt are all doing the right thing and may they be successful for a thousand years. There is no reason I should have to pay Evernote, Apple, Amazon or Google any cloud storage money when I already use Dropbox, and there's no reason why I should have to deal with ads on "free" services either.
In addition to the developing world, page weight is a big concern for those of us with limited data plans. When a single log post weighs in at 2-3 MB (which is common), the day's allotment of a 200MB/mo plan disappears really fast.
I often end up only reading the HN comments while on the bus since I don't want to play Russian roulette with the article size.

(of course, this is unrelated to YouTube, but to the general sentiment of the article)
So far as I am concerned, if people haven't at least tried out hiring remote, they have no room to complain about shortages.

Even if you want someone who speaks english as a first language, you're still closing the door on at least 90% of the population that could contain someone who would work for you and do a great job.
Tangentially related, this reminded me of the color hue test - http://www.xrite.com/custom_page.aspx?pageid=77&lang=pt
I think they were talking about just a small opt-in % of Youtube traffic, and that that percentage had a higher average latency than the rest of Youtube (vs shifting Youtube's entire traffic average).
I think it may be possible to phrase a claim for this.

for any almostZero, it is possible to find an integer m1, so that the m1.2.pi + pi/2 is greater than 1/almostZero and therefore for which sin(m1.2.pi+pi/2) =1; 1/(m1.2.pi + pi/2) will be smaller than 1/almostZero. It is also possible to find an integer m2, so that m2.pi+pi is greater than 1/almostZero and therefore for which sin(m2.pi+pi) =0; 1/(m2.pi+pi) will be smaller than 1/almostZero.
The claim: find me an almostZero for it is not possible to find such m1,m2.

This could be a possibility, but I haven't written the program yet ;-)
Devolution of Friendship: Full Essay (Pts I & II)
I'm here until Paul Graham offers me a YC slot just to get me to shut up.
> To sum up, despite claims to the contrary that are often covered by the lay press, the best-considered view among medical practitioners with clinical experience is that the placebo response has no ethical clinical application.

Of course I agree with this view, but when interpreted in its widest sense, it argues against the legitimacy of religion. It also occurs to me that few will notice the connection.

On a more practical level, it argues against most psychological treatments, which research shows cannot reliably be distinguished from a placebo effect. Few will notice this connection either.
Why the Massive Wealth of the 1% Could Ruin the Economy
Exactly. To expand on this point, I love the redundancy built into Git.

I had a clone of my personal fork of my department's github repository at home. I read this and thought "that's interesting, I wonder if I could still work on it from home if I want to." I saw with "git config -l" that I had my github repository and my university's github repository, but not my university's mirror of the repository. I did a "git add remote", logged in to my university's VPN, "git fetch", and was up and running with my latest changes from Friday.

If that didn't make any sense, well, the gist of it is that the outage wouldn't affect development work in the slightest, thanks to the fact that every repository is a) content addressable, so you have consistency between servers and b) self-contained, so you have a complete copy everywhere. Hit me up for more info if you're curious; I recently upgraded us from CVS to Git for this redundancy advantage, among others.
"McCarthyism"... Thank's Joseph McCarthy, for giving us a word for it.
I think kmfrk is implying his place of employment doesn't use git.
>That's not a controlled study

Just wondering, how could you get rid of the placebo effect in the placebo experiment?
Fundamentalist Functional Programming
If you do sell a physical product, consider Fulfillment by Amazon. They rent warehouse space by the cubic foot and handle picking, packing, and shipping for you.

http://www.amazonservices.com/content/fulfillment-by-amazon....

People are scared of physical products they're hard. You have to deal with design, manufacturing, logistics, etc. That may make it easier for you if the competition is scared away.
Math and science use exactly the same method of reducing their claims to their basic claims and backing those with a failed search for counterexamples. Consequently, all untruth is invariably always the result of the untruth hidden in the basic claims. The untruth in the basic claims obviously exists but it is sheer impossible to pinpoint precisely where exactly it is.
> Ironically, the best-educated economists are often the most resistant to this idea, as the standard models of economic growth implicitly assume that economic growth benefits all residents of a country.

Because economics is not a science, its a religion devoted to making sure that those who have money and power keep it and get more.

The idea that there is a set of high-skill jobs which are immune to technological unemployment is false. It will just take a little while longer for those jobs to be replaced by artificial intelligence.

The concept of superstars v. the rest is mainly just a weak argument attempting to cover for the tendency of monopolies to form in any economy. Technology just amplifies this fundamental characteristic of our 'economic' system.

Technology directly opposes our 'economic' system because technology is the application of science to solving problems (i.e. information and resource _sharing_) whereas economics is about using proprietary information and resources to your advantage.