skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The arguments against the evils of sharing copyrighted works with your friends online. The arguments for ridiculous "life of the author plus a century" copyright terms. Disney is a huge purveyor of these bogus arguments, all while stiffing the content creators who work for them.
It does seem like "gushers" and "panners" tend to overcrowd reviews, but I was curious enough to do a quick Twitter search. About half of these results are "ok" tweets about movies/TV shows, so maybe there are enough people going to Twitter to say "whatever": https://twitter.com/search?q=watched%20was%20ok
If this is intended as a defense of Math culture, I think it falls short. He does a good job of pointing out the corresponding problems in the state of programming:

Indeed, the opposite problems are familiar to a beginning programmer when they aren’t in a group of active programmers. Why is it that people give up or don’t enjoy programming? Is it because they have a hard time getting honest help from rudely abrupt moderators on help websites like stackoverflow? Is it because often when one wants to learn the basics, they are overloaded with the entirety of the documentation and the overwhelming resources of the internet and all its inhabitants? Is it because compiler errors are nonsensically exact, but very rarely helpful? Is it because when you learn it alone, you are bombarded with contradicting messages about what you should be doing and why (and often for the wrong reasons)?

The difference is that the CS community recognizes that these are problems; every single thing he's complaining about are open problems being taken seriously and attacked from multiple directions, and there is hope for serious improvement in the coming decades. Anyone who thinks rude snobs, bad documentation, or useless compiler errors are a beneficial is rightly ridiculed as a smug weenie or accused of having an ulterior motive.

By contrast, mathematicians are defensive and complacent about their arcane, non-inclusive notation and communication: "At this point you might see all of this as my complaining, but in truth I’m saying this notational flexibility and ambiguity is a benefit." Look at the litany of problems he just presented. Consider the fact that mathematics is not the only complicated subject that requires complicated, flexible, and rigorous notation. It just isn't credible that the shitty state of mathematical notation is either necessary or unavoidable. The occasional counterexample, where someone with a good understanding of a subject presents it in full rigor without resorting to the usual obfuscation, is a hint of what could be.

If your publications cannot be read without an expert interpreter, they are defective. Hypertext has been around for decades, if you're going to invent your own ad-hoc (or even standardized!) syntax to solve a problem your readers have a right that you document the meaning of your notation.
Kitchen.ly - The Airbnb for Food
New startup kitchen.ly wants to be the Airbnb for dining.
Why should apple buy nintendo
lol I was waiting for someone to do that.
Why world-leading marketing innovation is happening in São Paulo, Brazil?
> Yes, we should. I do not think shipping unsafe defaults is ok.

Isn't it the difference between shipping a product open enough and with enough barriers torn down to get the hobbyist hooked (drug dealers) and the expert will have a script to fix all those hols anyway. And agreed, shipping with unsafe defaults is bad for the expert but very very good for the novice.

> This is why most Linux installers prompt you for the password.

The key word there is MOST.
Ah, that explains it then. I didn't realize he wasn't actually looking for jobs and was just trying to get the recruiters to stop harassing him. One of my professors had been harassed by recruiters like this, but I haven't had that happen.
The number of repetitions is a red herring. It's more a question of which business flows the code adheres to, and what's the likelihood that a change in one should also affect a change in the others. Often this is a gray distinction and it amounts to a judgement call about what type of changes and what mindset will the maintainer come in with in the future. I'd like to think that with experience I've gotten much better at this, but it's exceedingly hard to get anything besides infrequent anecdotal evidence. Working on the same code base for 5 years, every once in a while I get the joy that comes with discovering that I made a good decision years ago, beating the YAGNI odds or leaving a particularly relevant comment that saved me significant re-investigation of a difficult issue.

But how could studies on this type of long-term maintainability draw meaningful conclusions? It just seems incredibly intractable from a scientific perspective—a result of experience and thoughtful consideration outweighing formal, documented and trainable techniques.
> It doesn't seem to make sense to post about all version.

2.0.0 is kind of a big deal. It's not just any random version.

Furthermore, projects always have trouble getting people to actually use release candidates. I can't tell you the number of times I've seen a project where two or three RCs get released, issues are fixed, and when final comes out, people complain "omg there's so many bugs." They would have been fixed for final if you'd tried the RC!
The article resonates with me. Most of the kickstarter projects have a product as their deliverable, and I thought of that as the norm.

Recently, I came across a page for a large-scale hobby project[1]. As I'm a fan of that niche, and no-one has ever done it before, I wanted to see it succeed - really much. Even though I know full out that I will only ever get to watch other people play with it, it still gives me the immense satisfaction of seeing it done. It's a similar concept to the article, I think.

[1] Ultra-large flying quadcopter, http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1671680066/incredible-hl...
You're defeating yourself too soon.

I think you will be very surprised as to how much people don't know. The regurgitation of information isn't a byproduct of laziness; it's a direct result of two things.

1. People don't like to read.

2. There is far, far too much noise on the web, as it is.

It may have already been said, but I'll guarantee you that only a small minority ever read it.

You could talk about what it is that you know. What it is you hope to know. Not every developer takes the same road. If your intent is to eventually position yourself as a domain expert, the rest should write itself.
When you are signing a petition titled "Fire Assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Heymann", it is not to "simply let others know my attitude". You are, quite literally, petitioning to get the guy fired.
I hate to be so flippant but: Petitions are one of the most useless forms of expression I've come across.
Exactly. There are more and more scientists entering the job market every year making funding more and more competitive. I feel like it's not enough to be good anymore you have to be really good to get funding.

What can we do to change it? I love research. Having almost 10 years of experience but still earning less than if I had gone straight into industry after a masters degree wears you down though.

I think ultimately it is because scientists add little of value to society in the short term. An MD who has a comparable number of years of education can expect to earn 10X that of an equivalent scientist because they value immediately.
The Ultimate Shave
It is similar to a Monad, but not quite, because the "bind" (addCallback) mutates it inplace, and does not return a chained operation. Also because if your callback's return value is itself again a Deferred, it will flatten it out. That means it "auto-joins" on the result so if you want to actually result in some Deferred object in your callback you have to wrap it to circumvent the flattening.
Curious what were the worst pain points of C# for you?
Interesting study - Dharmesh obviously has the edge on the east Coast. Curious about how the results would look with folks out on the west coast.
Wow, the writing of this article is superb. I never quite got into the super competitiveness of gaming myself (for record breaking and etc) but the story alone has intrigued me as well as let me take a glance inside the lives of the players. I don't really know what else to say but the way the article is written was truly engaging.
I get what you're saying. I think your response captures one part -- the id, if you will -- of a pretty common refrain I've heard about this article amongst my other nerdy, SF dwelling friends.

And in that respect, you're right and certainly entitled to that opinion and entitled to express it however you'd like.

While her piece has a lot of problems, not the least of them being a tortured metaphor about gold miners, there is still certainly a kernel of truth to what she's saying. The city is growing at a boom-town pace and infrastructure is not keeping up with that growth, which affects everyone, longtime residents who make less money than young tech workers with higher salaries especially.

Where I'll emphatically disagree with you is your "solution" -- it isn't to turn every resident of San Francisco into an engineer. Much of the attraction of cities is the diversity of people who live in them, which mean ideally they are places that can support poets and programmers. San Francisco, even with its recent influx of tech workers, is not nearly the industry town that the valley proper of San Jose, Mountain View, Cupertino, and Palo Alto are. This is a good thing. This is why people choose to live here and commute there. This is why we have those buses.

This was a frustrating article to read because dealing with the massive, largely tech-fueld growth really is an issue worth exploring. But for all the problems this city has, Google buses ain't even close to the top of the list. Here are some that I think about on my walks home through the city:

* Why are there parking lots adjacent to public housing? Furthermore, why are blocks of public housing (walk up Turk from Market to Divis some time, just not at night) amongst the least dense in the city?

* How do we allow things like AirBnB to exist but not create loopholes in the housing code, which has the effect of further constricting the already tight supply of housing?

* What can the city do to encourage development in the Tenderloin to replace the far-too-many SRO's?

* The high-rises going up in SOMA are great and will hopefully provide housing for the influx of young, mostly single, tech workers. What's the city going to do about encouraging more single-family residences, say, between Van Ness/Masonic and Geary/Market?

* How does Western Addition avoid becoming the next Hayes Valley?
I cannot see the likes of Hilton etc ever coming up with this - be it production or a real story...
Why are the background colors changing drastically? Its annoying. Its fantastic otherwise! Great growth rate too.
Facebook.com's IPv6 contains face:booc
The full address is 2a03:2880:2110:df01:face:b00c::8. Enter 'host facebook.com' at a bash prompt to see for yourself.
> it seems axiomatic that sharing your algorithms, code, and data are necessary and beneficial to the scientific community.

It seems that way, but it isn't. If a cultural foolishness causes you to lose significant credibility undeservedly, it's actually more beneficial to withhold things that could damage it so that you can continue your essentially still-very-useful work.

You could spearhead the fight against said cultural foolishness, but that's time and energy spent doing something other than the work you want to do and are best at.

Someone has to, but why you? This is the Bystander Effect.
Oh. But Disney comics is the only case where no royalties are ever paid, at least according to Don in this article. I don't think he'd want us using those words as a blanket permission to pirate copyrighted works.
Yeah, and of the first dozen programs I wrote, probably someone had already written all of them, and done a far better job. That's not the point.

You're not going to get better if you don't get started.
The impact of $2k of new recurring revenue on a SAAS business
First, the author wasn't even saying that. And second, it really isn't that much of a stretch at all. The reason why military dictatorships like North Korea or wherever are able to exist is because they have a complete stranglehold over the media, libraries, movies, books, etc.

The publishing corporations in the US fought long and hard to make everything from libraries to recorded music to radio to VCRs to the Internet illegal, all on copyright grounds, and had they won the US wouldn't be any different than North Korea or any of the African dictatorships.
How to Build Your Own Quantum Entanglement Experiment (Part 1 of 2)
One approach could be to write about how you are using the skills you wish to demonstrate. Yet another Ruby-on-Rails tutorial-in-a-series-of-blog-posts may indeed be boring and superfluous, while you writing about how you built some particular project in Rails might not be.

You could write design descriptions of your projects. What decisions did you make, and why? What was the purpose of the project? Why did you write new code instead of using something that had already been written? Etc.
I'm not speaking in specifics, I am speaking to the general affect upon the make up of the city as a whole. The "bus" is just one small part of the overall "diary".

There have been similar such things written many times over about San Francisco over the years -- not just based on the influence of tech.
> “The proof is trivial.” This is the mathematician’s version of piping output to /dev/null.

Heh heh. Never thought about it like that. Amazing write-up, btw. As somebody who dabbled in both CS & Math, I'd say the cultures are vastly different. You can spend years, decades even, just teaching undergrad calc courses while having barely 1-2 papers to your name, and yet you'd be considered a legitimate mathematician & get paid & all that. I know scores of math professors who are in that category. With CS, if you don't have productive output in a week, you are just idling & companies will fire you. CS academia isn't a whole lot different...the paper output is a lot more, though much of it is backed by programatic machinery.

As a consequence, a standardized notation/syntax has developed out of sheer pragmatic necessity. Everybody knows what you mean when you say its a hash, or a bst, or an lfsr, or a trie or a monad ( you wish :) Well atleast some of these are standard concepts across all pgmming languages.

With math, you can labor for years in some obscure field ( heh heh a mathematician will kill for that pun!) in which less than ten people know what you mean. At a conference, Hilbert was supposed to have gotten up and asked a speaker "What do you mean by a Hilbert space?". That should tell you something. The syntax is remarkably nonstandard & even simple things like edges, nodes, edge weight, graph correspondingly become arcs, vertices, payload, network depending on where the literature originates from. When I studied a few math papers in grad school, I had a lurking suspicion the author was going out of his way to obscure his thought process & result. With CS papers, you atleast get straightforward pseudocode & you can run off to your favorite language whether php or haskell & give it a shot. There are math texts out there where you pick up one of them, you feel like a complete fool, you pick up the other, you instantly get the point, and they are both talking about the same exact thing !! artin vs dummit & foote vs herstein comes to mind...i got 1000% more out of herstein than the other two.

I agree with the author that in the absence of standard math terminology, I'm afraid programers struggling to learn advanced math just learn bits & pieces necessary to get their job done & move back to fighting their daily battles with git rebase & jira tickets.
Interesting study -- wonder if certain entrepreneurs would argue Dharmesh's because he's more focused, so they'd 'spend more money' to get his time, because he'll give them more attention?

Jason is involved in so many important projects, but not sure that makes his time "more valuable".

I'd conclude Jason has much, much more influence, power, and ability to move the needle. That said, pure substance -- I'm going with Dharmesh probably all the way.
>I'm surprised people paid for it in the first place. :)

Based on this, as a developer, I wouldn't take your opinion that you hate F2P games seriously, and I would never want to make games for the audience you belong to. TF2 is one of the best games available to play and my second favorite game ever made. Haters gonna hate.
Ha! So true.

I am currently teaching my 8yo programming, or rather in the process of building a set of teaching tools for her - right now things are very early stage, and she's busy playing VIM Adventures to familiarize herself to the keyboard and keystrokes. I'm trying to decide between Ruby and Python, which has the highly recommended Snake Wrangling For Kids going for it.
Just downloaded The Magazine app. This is the kind of stuff I love to read.

That sly Marco may have another hit on his hands.
Mailbox App - User Counter
> Generally speaking, the countries with the strongest patent rights produce many of the innovative companies.

The article suggests that the available evidence does not support this conclusion. It seems that in historical technology fairs, countries with a weak or no patent system in place performed as well as other countries, both in terms of numbers of inventions they presented, and awards they received.

The article also describes some instances where patents clearly inhibited innovation - for example in the US in 1916, aircraft production halted due to patent disputes between Wright and Curtiss.
In Amazon, Wall Street worships a disruptive god
Not to get too meta, but you did both. Consider this:

For all the people arguing this is glorifying breaking the law, it's worth keeping in mind all the people that stood up against raising the speed limit to 65 in the southern US states, or requiring seat belts in cars, or any number of laws that were considered "immutable" and carried severe penalties.

Yes, these actions are against current laws, but at citizens of the world we have a responsibility to stand up and make our voices heard if we ever hope to change anything. Many people will go to jail and pay big fines in the near future, but that is the way it has always been to influence great change.

---

That extra oomph that's missing is you equating the apartheid and segregation laws (and their egregious nature) to copyright law. While I agree with your underlying point, the solution isn't to blow things out of proportion and compare them to some heinous human rights laws. It's a short hop from there to Nazis, a la Godwin's Law.

edited for clarity
3D camera using WebGL
Does this algorithm actually make things more readable? Or does it just make them look nicer. Not that there's anything wrong with that but sometimes the two goals clash, like with the text in this article.

And is it me or is the use of a series of single characters rather than a length of actual text a really weird choice?
Tons.

I've also used JavaScript to automate Adobe's products, extend Cheetah 3d, build web apps in node.js, and develop games in Unity 3d. JavaScript is far from perfect, but it's a nice language.

Note that jQuery is great for fixing problems in the DOM APi, but it doesn't fix JavaScript (which has its own problems but no more than any other useful language). Much of jQuery is obsolete in modern browsers — events are handled fairly well in most browsers, and QuerySelectorAll replaces jQuery for most lookups. I don't like jQuery's iterators, but writing better ones is quite easy.

PHP's problems are with its libraries (themselves far more horrible than the DOM API) and also the language itself. I do find PHP useful but its problems far outnumber JavaScript's.
I have to be careful about tendonitis flare ups in my wrist from my musician days. That makes languages like Java and C# literally more painful than languages like ruby that require less typing.
I think it's a fair point. The time spent documenting and releasing code could be spent on producing and finishing another manuscript to add to your CV. If you're not behaving like this, them probably some one else is maybe? Job search and tenure committees demand more and more publications the higher the institution.

Science shouldn't be like this but I think it's zero sum.
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Save the money. Why buy a laptop that's only OK when you can Save 2000 and then spend a good amount on abetter laptop and still have 700 left over.
Great, will do (I wish [Y] sent email notifications when you receive comment replies, might have seen this sooner)
I might not understand the complaint here. I don't get paid royalties on the software I write either, because my employer owns the copyright to my work. That licensing arrangement suits both of us because I would like to collect a salary without assuming the risk that my work won't be profitable. It's not an exploitive relationship.
Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow
Nice! I just had a conversation with a friend about what new game he should play. Perhaps a nice extension of your platform is to get social media buzz ratings for games.
if you must buy save and get a system76 linux laptop. There you go, linux and supporting a good company. Pricesn't aren't bad.
Try to scroll with your mouse wheel. It still sucks. It's only good with a touchpad.
Sometimes I wonder about these issues, and as the commenter below points out, the silence on these issues is deafening. I'm reminded of when YouTube launched, and they allows copyrighted content to a point [0], this helped drive page views. I'm not saying this is what airbnb is doing, I guess I'm wondering if this is a overall strategy for start-ups. This is one of the key elements that allows them to grow quickly.

I guess talk is cheap, journalists can write something, but when someone sues, then you have to pay attention. Why would you direct your energy to journalists with out an agenda. Just to get pulled into the discussion and side track you from growing the company. Looks like the EU is really taking off for them anyways, maybe NY and CA are not hot topics around the company?

[0] http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/03/21/youtube-founders-knew...
Interesting take. Personally, I would go them for different reasons.
Don't frame it like that. It's dishonest.

Corporations withholding royalties from artists is obviously bad. But it's entirely consistent to condemn such abuse while still supporting the idea that artists ought to be repaid for their work.
Five things you can do to make HTML5 perform better
Ask HN: How do I spread the word of my project?
I finished a small tool and I'd like to present it to the broader developer community. Some may find it useful, and if not, I'd appreciate at least some feedback.

I submitted a Show HN story, it got lost without a single comment. I have a blog which nobody reads, a Twitter account which nobody follows. What other options do I have?
When it comes to pharmaceuticals, one has to remember that the vast majority of the costs involved are with the late stage trials that society mandates. That medicine is properly tested is not a bad thing, but there may be other ways to finance such tests without having to resort to monopolies.
Pro File-Sharing Professors ‘Hunted Down’ by the Copyright Lobby
5 Payday Loan Myths We Have All Heard