skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>A document empirically does not have authority over government

No, but people agreeing to the tenants of the document do. This would be no different in your proposal only there will be exponentially more documents (agreements) to keep track of.

> and voting is not a realistic way to keep government accountable to the people.

Voting is not the only way to keep government accountable (legal action being another -- revolution or threat of revolution being yet another, civil disobedience etc, etc.), but as far as a basic way to make sure government will reflects the governed's will, voting does a decent job. The evidence for this is that more extreme and direct action is relatively rare...at least in the West.

>An individual simply has no recourse to everyday government injustices (like taxation or prosecution for drug possession).

Taxation is an injustice? How so? I don't find it to be unjust. I get a lot of value, personally, from the taxes I pay. And drug possession? I personally don't feel that drugs should be considered contraband but many people have. Those laws are changing, however, through voting no less, as public opinion shifts.

>If you insist that government represents the people, fine, but it's still tyranny of the majority/plurality.

I live in the United States. It is a Republic. This means that while most laws flow from the majority and everyone must live under those laws the rights of minorities are protected. Thus tyranny is held in check. Also, minority and majority are fluid terms. They are not so much tied to an individual as a gross bloc, but to individual opinions held by those individuals regarding the laws, rules and regulations under consideration. The same person will find themselves in the majority on some issues and the minority in others. In short, individuals often don't find their will wholly repressed by the rules of the majority. Also, the rules tend to be slow to change and cannot be applied arbitrarily. This is opposed to a tyranny where the rule is absolute, arbitrarily applied and make no room for unassailable rights.
Seems like a weird comparison. JavaScript is obligatory and available in all common browsers. It's fairly easy to get started, and even easier to actually accomplish something with it. Not sure if Perl is as accommodating (haven't tried it though).

When all is said and done JavaScript is a very popular language. When you leave a company, having build something fairly complex - If you did your job properly, documented your code and followed common sense, the project will probably live on.

The author also speaks off everyone hating Perl. Is JavaScript really as hated? I don't get that impression at all.
I don't mean it too. I produced the most awful, unreadable, barely functional drek you can imagine for far longer than I should have as a beginner with perl. The point is, that it might not be a failing of perl and JavaScript that makes so much code written in it so ugly. Its accessibility might actually be a good thing, with this simple side effect.
You say that this blog article would be improved if he had quantified the success rate of his observations, and you say claim this would constitute "proof" of the goodness of his post. Where's your proof that quantified metrics would make the post any better, or that indeed such quantified metrics would even constitute such "proof"?

Just giving you a hard time :)
There are a number of much larger "organizations" out there that run with dispersed/non-centralized authority. Morning Star is a good example cited by HBS Review: https://archive.harvardbusiness.org/cla/web/pl/product.seam?...

BTW, if you're interested in these types of orgs... the linked article is interesting because it actually goes into some of the Pros/Cons of running your company this way. It's not written by an ideologue.
PHP is most likely not on the system they have.

I don't know about OS X but it doesn't come with any popular Linux distro and it doesn't come with Windows either. Neither does Perl.
For me, even if I hated Google --which, unlike the author of TFA-- I don't, I'd still kinda like them because it's often interesting to make the ennemy of my ennemy stronger.

I'm an "abm": "Anything But Microsoft" and I do firmly believe that the day MS produce something that doesn't suck it's going to be a vacuum cleaner. And at one point the future looked bleak: Windows at something like 97% market share and some crappy IE version was slowing down the Web -- and slowing technology as a whole (the story of MS).

I'm very happy that we know have to gigantic players: Apple and Google, giving MS quite some headaches.

The last thing I'd want would be Google or Apple to sink and see MS reign king again.

So to all the Google-haters out there (and they sure seem numerous on HN): be careful what you're asking for...

The past was bad. I don't think anyone really want to go back to that dark past.
If you're confused, you might want to read Richard Dawkins's general rebuttal to this type of twaddle: http://old.richarddawkins.net/articles/824
Nice to see, the more choices the better. I think it will be really interesting this year to see if the Steam console actually manifests itself and when/if it does, will it get any real traction? I hope it does because the more competition for Microsoft and Sony, the better off the gaming market will be.

Steam just needs to allow for trading/selling of used games, and it would be even better, but I'm sure the publishers have a lot to say about that. Hopefully the EU forces that feature on them.
When people say Linux, they usually mean more than just the kernel. Stallman insists we call this GNU/Linux since a good portion of userspace comes for the GNU project. When people say 'real linux' I believe they are referring to the full userspace that usually accompanies the Linux kernel.

The userspace in Android is very different from the userspace in GNU/Linux. In GNU/Linux, it is very easy to program using your preferred programming language. This isn't the case in Android, everything is very tightly wrapped up around Dalvik. Before you mention the NDK, let me say that it's only a subset of C++ (no exceptions among other things). Ubuntu on the cell phone also opens up the possibility of things like shell scripting, local webservers, etc.

What this really comes down to is programming freedom that you can find in GNU/Linux that isn't found in Android. You will now have a full fledged computer in your pocket instead of a limited device.
I don't understand your first sentence. Are you claiming that that's a security issue, or a problem somehow?
"Typesetting math: 5%" - does this really need to be done on the client side?
> From a reliable source at the company, I have been told at least one of their very popular titles will see a release for Ubuntu Linux this calendar year. I was told this in person and was a statement backed up by additional proof.

Nothing to see here.
The View Model has a dependency on a repository that is injected in via constructor injection. I don't think you understand what DI means.
Commentary on Grothendieck-Serre correspondence
Many features, not all: https://lwn.net/Articles/514901/
That seems to be at odds with this other comment in the thread:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5017160

Was this statement before the mosh repo gained the COPYING.iOS file and the iOS-related waiver from the OCB patent holder (July 20, 2012)?
Ray Kurzweil Is Building Your ‘Cybernetic Friend’
Read the post more carefully. It doesn't say you shouldn't have ideas. It say you should start with an audience and then come up with ideas for that audience. It merely shifts emphasis from the ideas to the audience.
I wasn't saying that. But that's no reason to actually make it worse.
Why such an article on such a topic start with torture is beyond me. The question we should be asking, I think, is when (the "how" is no longer relevant now is it) we start engineering humans, how we avoid the situation that has been "documented" in every post-apocalyptic sci-fi where a superior species arrives (or created) and wipes out the weaker, non-engineered humans?

I am far less concerned with philosophical question, such as whether a person engineering to be the smartest would be smart on his own right; would a person engineered to be the strongest & fastest be a successful athlete in his own right, or is it simply an unfair inter-species competition which is no different than pitting a disabled person vs. a healthy one; etc.
kobold2d is not a framework, is just cocos2d + an installer + few libraries.
I like their philosophy, and I like the C language (its a beautiful minimal thing, although there is definite room for improvement). But making software that sucks less in C is still a hard sell.
Take a look at this note:

https://github.com/keithw/mosh/blob/master/COPYING.iOS
Status symbol: what do you do to show that you're at the Polaroid store? Take a picture of the printed picture and post it on Facebook.
Yes, I wonder what language features monads as a pattern to solve certain problems are a replacement for.
I have no idea offhand if that's the full list - it's the list I come up with when I think about the question.

But that's the thing - it's a bad question. It should be asked as "what does this do?" or "how do you do this?", like:

"What does this code do: foo(1, 2, kw)?"

Or:

"How do you import all exported names from a module into your module's namespace?"

These show your code reading and code writing skills.

The original question is based on unreliable use of memory. Memory is great at slightly-fuzzy-key lookups. It is usually terrible for table scans applying a pattern filter.

Think of the challenge "Provide 5 common Unix command line utilities start with t"?

Most people who actually know 15 or so of them and regularly use 7 or so of them would have trouble providing all 5. Some will just blank for a minute (because there are just no pathways to work from), most will find 2 or 3. People who studied a Unix text book the night before would also know 2 or 3. A few might just totally blank and become affected by the fact they can't even remember something so easy that they will be unable to answer that question, and may affect their interview performance after that.

So it just is not in your interest to ask those types of questions.
"Management team" is a horrible pair of words. I suspect this was submitted as a protest of the inability to downvote submissions.

Once you start talking about "the management team", you've created a company run with an "us vs. them" mentality and that ruins the culture over time, because the people actually doing the work are a "them". It's not something that happens only at scale. I was recently at a startup infested with this mentality at under 100 people.

Management is a function. It's work that needs to be done, like administration. Drawing lines within the company is one way to end up with a horrible culture as people try to cross or control the line. Ultimately, as soon as you have a company where people succeed or fail based on their ability to control the division of labor, your culture will tend inexorably toward corporate grey goo, no matter how good your company's original intentions were.
Acer Aspire S7 ultrabook review
except that doesn't make sense use limejs when you can use cocos2d with javascript running your code natively on multiple platforms
I upgraded my Dell Latitude E6520 to 16Go while it is supposed to be limited to 8. Don't be fool by the manufacturer specifications.
@samthetechie Response to @Asher_Wolf "Dear Hacker Community – We Need To Talk." Posted on pastebin and blogger: http://pastebin.com/KbyFsbKq http://samthetechie.blogspot.com/2013/01/response-to-dear-ha...
I think the money cow WoW will be ported...
Starcraft2 I like a lot more but you cant charge monthly money from people...
Competition is always good. But I guess some people prefer the dictatorship of a monopoly.
Yes, I am. I wager:

- The founder have enough money that they never need care about it again.
- Employees are significantly happier on average than Walmart employees.

Those are the only metrics I care about.
Baron Schwartz - automated fault detection that works
Most people don't try to host their first web site on their windows box. They likely get a shared host for $3 a month somewhere. This probably has a little sample site with a few lines of PHP and some JavaScript on it.

When I started, I did not know the difference between PHP, JavaScript and HTML. I thought it was all "web markup".
In the context, 'go out' clearly meant 'go out to meals at restaurants where alcoholic beverages are the social norm.'

Yes, I'm absolutely telling you that a significant portion of the world does not have the resources to do that (even 'now and then').
> When your commandline tool needs several seconds CPU to complete the task

And mine do not. Furthermore, when you program is but one of many steps in a pipeline, but is not the bottleneck, startup time can have a very noticeable effect.

I've heard a million reasons why JVM startup times do not matter. You are telling me nothing new.
Managers and "hierarchy" aren't toxic if it's conceptual hierarchy and if management is more of a sponsorship/mentoring role, but when you have a stable hierarchy of people and begin restricting internal mobility, you're fucked. You can't be completely "flat" at 10,000 employees, but I refuse to believe that a company can't get to that point and retain a decent culture. However, you probably can't grow to that number in 4 years.

Companies lose their culture when they hire before they trust. That makes an underclass that's used for grunt work but gets no respect. Soon they hire an "HR expert" who sets up a stack-ranking system and an annual "low-performer" witch hunt and the company's culture is garbage.

I can't put a number on what is growing too fast, but you can't hire before you trust. By "trust", I mean that people should be trusted with their own working time to do good for the company. I'm not saying they should have million-dollar expense accounts.
This is interesting—as someone who is part of a "management team" at a company that has grown rapidly from startup to perhaps a post-startup stage, there is some truth to this.

There's a giant void of advice out there for folks who are making this transition. It's awkward and really challenging; like hitting puberty for your company (I like to say we've got braces right now). HN and publications focus a lot on startups. Business education and literature is heavily focused on "management" in the sense of Fortune 500 like worlds (I've been in that world as well). My sense is those two appeal to much wider, paying audiences where much smaller sets of people actually make these jumps. There's very little advice/tips/thoughts about how you steer your company as you get more customers (e.g. how to manage early customers who got more attention as you were proving your product vs. later on when the cost of that attention might be a challenge), hire a lot of employees (training, compensation models, etc.), build out teams (trade-offs of various structures, ability to repeat and scale), etc. This stuff is hard and unless you're growing at such a rate you can ignore it until much later on, you have to deal with it.

Does anyone out there have a collection of posts/tidbits/advice for others who have actually managed through these transitions? The linked post talks about trial-and-error. I'd love to read about what worked and what didn't for others.
Probably not. Though, can you think of any good server side tools that can generate prerendered mathML?

I found this coming from
https://plus.google.com/117663015413546257905/posts/An6Z8Ce3...

John Baez also mentioned the rather high computational demands of the page. There's probably some interesting opportunities for optimization, and automatically figuring out what can be done on the client and the server.
I regret that I have but one upvote to give that post, good sir.
http://twitter.com/panic/status/281208183094145024
Replace car franchise with YouTube and and factories with content creators. Now imaging that Google wants to push laws so that content creators cannot build their own video sites but instead must be licensed to sites like youtube for the simple reason that youtube was a huge and risky investment. If it sounds ridiculous for Google to do the same thing that dealers did why should the dealers be able to do it?
I have been unable to find a good web server tutorial. Everything seems to be listen, process page, done, repeat. This doesn't seem to allow multiple connections at once, especially if the process page process takes a long time.
Highway 101 and 280 on the Peninsula in the Bay Area? :-)

It was a great read, I haven't seen a lot of work that talks about the extended Prisoner's Dilemma situations.
Use monkey patching in tests, never in production.

My worry about that argument is: how do you audit your code base to make sure you really aren't relying on monkey patching in production code?

This is a concern with any abstraction technique that provides neater code by hiding some part of the behaviour, starting with simply using a programming language at a higher level than assembly.

However, in some cases, particularly more static/compiled languages, there are often tools to enforce encapsulation of various kinds. On that basis, you can systematically prove that the code you're looking at really does honour certain guarantees.

In the dynamic/interpreted languages, this can be harder, because with so much being done at run-time and so much flexibility, almost everything comes down to trust. That makes it more difficult to move from informal/convenient to formal/rigorous code as a project evolves.

Often, that may be a price worth paying. In return we can get early prototypes up and running more quickly than we could with a heavier "engineering" language. But we shouldn't underestimate the long-term implications of that trade-off.
Precisely like that!
I don't like adding that parameter at all. When someone else comes across your method, will they know whether #publish! is meant to have a changeable time in real use? You don't want test-specific functionality leaking into real code.
NSLogger – a flexible logging tool for OS X and iOS
Have a "honeypot". Just carry an empty (or with unimportant things) on your back pocket as always and a small money-clip on your front one. If someone gets it - no problem. It's better than "surprising" the thief on the spot because things can get worse from there.
I'm a consultant as well. I never take stock or equity as payment; cash only. Look at it this way: if the company's so cash-poor that they can't afford to pay for work, what are the odds their stock/equity will ever be worth anything?
Working for the Long Term
It shifts nothing the way I read it. You can't separate idea from audience.
PHP is available on OS X

computer-4:~ justin$ php -v
PHP 5.3.15 with Suhosin-Patch (cli) (built: Aug 24 2012 17:45:44)
Copyright (c) 1997-2012 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.3.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2012 Zend Technologies
I'm not sure where you're getting #4 from. While dhh might actually believe Ruby programmers are the best, this post does not say or even imply that.

He's saying that sometimes a design pattern isn't universal to every language. You need to shape your thinking to the language you're using.

In general, I'd say that's a good thing to keep in mind (disregarding anything specific about DI from that post).
This isn’t concatenative except in the trivial sense of “stack-based”. Concatenative languages are functional languages with compositional semantics, which often happen to be most efficiently implemented as stack machines. Concatenative languages are interesting because they’re a combinator calculus like SKI[1] but with simpler semantics and useful algebraic properties.

Only allowing two-argument functions doesn’t cut it, and you need some means of returning multiple values as well. You also need a means of abstraction (e.g., Clojure fns) and combinators for application, abstraction, and stack manipulation. A full implementation of an interpreter for a concatenative DSL would be rather longer than this—though still probably in the realm of 100 lines.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKI_combinator_calculus
I feel like they show lack of discrimination, with almost everything being up-voted and not much variation in content.
The APIs are exactly the same. One is explicit, reading its signature is enough to understand what it does, the other one is implicit, requiring reading the method body. The implicit version readability mass increases fast as it makes further transitive calls, which are now all required reading. The explicit version mass is always constant: the signature.
In 2005 I was getting parts lists printed out on a dot matrix printer and sent via fax machine.

We asked for the spreadsheet file. We got a Microsoft Works .WKS file.

People in this industry are not always computer literate. (A manger had a parallel port printer. He was unable to connect it to his computer, despite there being only one connector the cable could fit it, and only one way round that connector could fit. Other managers wanted drawing documents on computers rather than paper so they could add changes. Try explaining why you can't scan a paper drawing and turn it into an auto-CAD file (when you don't own autocad) and why a gif file just isn't the same.)

They've spent a lot of money on their software. Something like Sage Line 100 (or similar.) So, if you can write something to interface with that list of weird accounting software you're pretty good.
It depends on whether the work is concave or convex. Concave means that the difference between excellence and mediocrity is smaller than that between mediocrity and failure. It applies to commodity work where the best performers might be 1.2-1.4 times as effective as average ones. There's no such thing as a "10x factory worker". Convex work is where the difference between excellence and mediocrity is huge, but mediocrity and failure aren't far apart.

If you're doing concave work, command-and-control works. Reduce defects in your factory process, fire the slackers, reduce risk. If you're doing convex work, then you need the Valve/Github approach because traditional management will drive excellence away.

Wal-Mart excels in a commodity domain. Valve and Github are in software, and software is convex.

More on concave vs. convex: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/11/12/the-end-of-ma...
I agree with almost all of your points, but there is one minor item to correct:

There should be no encounters with orcs until, possibly, the battle of the 5 armies.

"Orc" and "goblin" are just different names for the same creature. In the book the word "goblin" is the only one used, except for one passage in "Riddles in the Dark", where "orcs of the mountains" are equated with "big" goblins.
I've seen a lot of silly Ruby / Java / Scala code to buy this line of argument.
"my phones usually last quite a long time without the screen turned on."

It's important to remember that this isn't just because the display is off - it's also because the device is in a low power state. Try having an app running with the screen turned off - it also doesn't last too long.

It's be interesting to see what % of the battery usage is due to JUST the screen. If anyone has any stats, please post!