skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the thing about this that is most remarkable is how much better this is going to make Danielle as a founder. Being able to really focus on different and new aspects of the business (and gaining experience in those aspects), when combined with the skills she already developed at Twilio, will surely help her tremendously.
It's a race to see who can be more pedantic than the last!
It gets Damien Katz's approval so I'm learning it ASAP.

https://twitter.com/damienkatz/status/289575389641179137
I'm not familiar with @Nullable (just looking it up now), but have become quite fond of Guava's Optional<T>. It's a bit wordy, but it seems like a great example of how to make the type system work for you by finding your mistakes as early as possible,
I didn't really have to try...it just worked? I usually have the kickstand be at the end of my knees - any further and it would be close to falling off(!) but that places the keyboard in a good spot.

And sure, it's more unsteady than on a table and perhaps I look a little silly - but as far as typing speed is concerned, it's really a non issue.
Whoops, let me unpack.

1) That 'merit' is based on genetic variation was purely for the sake of illustration. Of course this is not the case in reality. Yet to boil down the problem to where we artificially limit the factors can help expose the real issue. In Equalistan, the fictitious illustration, everyone showed up at 25 with no history or connections. They immediately took a test. The genetic variation is just to show that random mutations can produce very varied outcomes. In the real world, the situation is inconceivable worse. You have genetic ability, mentorship, poetical power, network connections, wealth, random physical events, etc, that all affect outcomes.

2) Although, again, the example given was purely artificial, it is not so clear that personal 'accountability' or 'responsibility' is something that someone can help. A person with a super-charged frontal cortex will be very 'accountable' or 'responsible' with their abilities. The knock-on effects of stewardship of traits are very much the cause of other traits, whether inherited genetically or contextually (via parents or social structures). But I might be missing what you're saying here.

3) Resource distribution, you're right, is not zero-sum. In fact, on an absolute basis, there is no reason why anyone should ever write an article about injustice of outcomes given that overall standards of living are unbelievable high for people at large, and relative to past ages, although still very far form optimal. But this isn't the point of the article. Relative distribution of resources is the issue. But here 'resources' isn't necessarily physical things, it's anything limited. Power is zero sum, no matter what, and is still a resource to be distributed.

4) Yes, 'deserves' is fully-loaded, and that was the point of mentioning it. We somehow, for some bizarre reason feel that some people 'deserve' things and others do not and we should try to make sure people only have what they 'deserve'. But, you're right, this is nuts, at what point could we possible say that someone can really claim they did something independent of chance to have some moral justification to some resource, power or otherwise? Never. If you are hardworking--how can you separate that from genes plus context. If you are smart, how are you anything other than your inborn ability plus instruction. So I'm not saying some people don't deserve stuff, I'm saying this whole notion of deserving anything is ridiculous. Justification of outcomes as anything other than randomness is just what elitism is.
I believe patents work by making the description impenetrable enough to make the examiner's eyes glaze over.

So they approve the patent in self-defense, and don't notice that it's just a list of trivialities.
Ask HN: What's the Best VPN Service These Days?
So, I've been putting off moving all my network traffic for a VPN for way too long.

I was doing some googling, and it seems like there are essentially a ton of options in the space. Do any of you have a recommendation? I'd ideally like a provider that:

- Is fast (obviously).
- Offers US support.
- Doesn't log customer records.
- Bit torrent friendly.

Any suggestions?
another secret in medicine is that a lot of what patients come in for end up to be self-limiting anyhow; the patients just gets better on their own. in these cases, there may be misdiagnosis in there somewhere, but nobody would really care.
How is this Crowd Sourced infographic done? 
Hi

I would like to know the technology behind this infographic . any source to learning such visualization would be great.

Praveen
Don't. They take forever as they have only so few lawyers and they're all backlogged for months. They're also not equipped for this kind of thing. Their lawyers focus more on civil suits, not criminal..
How about ditching the proprietary connectors and protocols, let people install any software they like on iOS devices if they choose, and stop abusing the patent system? I'd probably buy a MBP if they stopped being so bad for the future of open personal computing.
Here's Drew's application http://dl.dropbox.com/u/27532820/app.html.
It's a good read.
It's hard to get to the meat of your arguments because they are riddled with logical fallacies. You seem to be trying to wedge as many in as possible.

Regarding your itemized "summary":

1. You seem to forget that YOU are the one asserting the validity of YOUR comparison between HFT and bitcoins. So, the onus is on YOU to prove it. So far, you have failed. Beyond that, I simply stated that I am no bitcoin expert. But, I believe my summary of bitcoins was sufficient and relevant to draw the distinction. If it wasn't, then you should have explained how I missed the mark and why that miss is relevant to your argument.

2. Are you kidding? So the fact that there are people who have cancer but not yet died from it proves that cancer is good for you? I mean your argument here is literally: HFT exists; there are stocks that are doing well; therefore HFT cannot be harmful. Wow.

3. You introduced the straw man. Don't blame me for noticing. As for much of the rest of the stuff you wrote, I never said it.

Ditto the Mark Cuban stuff. Not sure why you invoke him or the question of understanding the market for that matter. Likewise with the 100% market efficiency comment. I never referred to any of that. How many straw men are we up to now?

You do a really good job of arguing with yourself, but you fail to address my original point. Your talk about bid/ask spreads does at least address market mechanisms, but even if we were to accept all of the great wonders that HFT does for spreads at face value, that is a far cry from rebutting my OP, as spreads are but a small part of the picture. In fact, it is so insignificant to this discussion, let's call that one a red herring.

I also noticed that you left my example in the extreme completely untouched. Wise decision.

In any event, you joke about my not offering evidence, but the irony is that much of this actually is self-evident. For instance, who do you think is sitting on the other side of the trade when HFTs profit? I won't ask you to buy my trademarked brand of common sense this time though: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/04/business/high-speed-trades...

That's an actual study, not an Amazon review from some random "day trader". BTW, it is slightly hilarious that you referred to that review as "evidence".
WebCite will stop accepting new submissions unless they can raise $50K by 2014
I don't know anything about Dustin Curtis or A/B testing. Honestly, I always just thought it was the author being an arrogant prick. Apologies to all the authors whose character I impeached. Apparently, there was more to the story.
Focusing on cost is kinda the exact opposite of what "balling" is. Sorry.
Worlds most funniest youtube video ever
"How would I know? Ask Kirsty."

Serious question here. Does YC get audited? Who verifies that the right thing is happening with your money? I'm basing this question by the way on my many many years in business in seeing what happens when the type of trust that you seem to put in Kirsty is displayed and all she does for YC. (This is not specific to her integrity since I don't know her other than what I read in the article).
they're the politest.

excepting missions involving ice hockey, which bring forth a lust which can only be quenched by blood.
Wordpress Admin & Theme
What?

CGO is pretty cool actually. It does have some irritating downsides (pkg-config for example, is used, and there's no other option to link to a specific library afaik)...

...but seriously, what are you even talking about?

All you need is a header, and a binary (library; .so or .dll). Done.

How would you even use a library that doesn't have a header?

Sounds like you've spent some time using COM objects and the . autocomplete function on them; that's just windows crazy-talk, if you want to use that kind of nonsense, go write powershell.
Anatomy of a vulnerability – cURL holed by authentication bug
The history is more complex than that. There had been at least two serious attempts at Perl 6 implementations based on Parrot when Pugs arrived, but Audrey approached implementation from a completely different direction. Instead of building bottom up, she started with the parser and tried to implement things as driven by the desire to turn the specifications into tests that parsed and then passed.

Pugs ended up succeeding in the sense that it produced that test suite, but it didn't succeed in that it relied on Audrey's presence--it never attracted a sufficient developer base to maintain it when she wasn't available.

Rakudo isn't anywhere near complete now, almost seven years later, and I believe Pugs passes no more than 30% of Rakudo's test suite.

It might be fair to say that the goalposts have moved in the intervening time, however.
Sounds like a list of C# benefits. In 2004.
JSDB is the name of a javascript cross-platform environment based on SpiderMonkey, that exists since 2005 and is still active.

http://jsdb.org/
> most languages' compilers aren't that fast

All mainstream languages compile in about that ballpark, if not faster.

I've always found it odd that one of the driving design principles of Go was "fast compilation". It's always struck me as odd and short-sighted, obviously motivated by the Go authors' history with C++. If only they had spent some more time studying other languages, they would have realized that compilation times are really not a concern in languages these days, and they might also have designed Go with more modern features in mind, such as exceptions and generics.
There is abundant prior art on this one.

E.g., one casualty of the dot-com bubble was Streamline, an online grocery delivery company. They called their version of the invention Don't Run Out. Fast Company raved about it in this article dated July 31, 1998:

What happens when customers depend on you - and you deliver?
They decide to depend on you even more. One of Streamline's most
popular services is called Don't Run Out. Families identify
their must-have items - milk, toilet paper, diapers, pet food -
and authorize the company to replenish their stock of each item
automatically. Today almost every Streamline household uses
Don't Run Out. The average household has standing orders for
more than 10 items. "It's extraordinary," says [Gina] Wilcox. "The
consumer makes a purchase decision once, and we fill the order
throughout the year. It redefines brand loyalty. It redefines
marketing."

http://www.fastcompany.com/34524/streamline-delivers-goods
C# doesn't build native binaries on all platforms out of the box.
These posts make me feel like Go is some oddball quirky person we all know and we all feel like we have talk about how great he/she is at some drunken party. I mean, we all love Go and all ...
I don't think that's the case. "yield from" is apparently for generators, which allows yielding from "subgenerators" (i.e. a generator can invoke another generator which is part of its stream).

But you can already the equivalent with Python coroutines (and Lua), using the trampolining technique in Beazley's material (and PEP 342).

Python coroutines aren't any less powerful than Lua coroutines. If you still believe they are I would be very interested in an example.
Agreed. In terms of compilation times, Scala feels as slow in compilation times as C++ did in the early 2000's. Kotlin and Ceylon are showing that it's possible to be a modern JVM language and still compile fast. Hopefully, Scala can learn from them.
Do you believe this based on anything in particular?
That's http://cdnjs.com/
FWIW, Chrome implements this out of the box. Changing zoom on one tab will automatically update for all current and future tabs of the same domain.
Same thing happened to me, but I'm in the US.
A lot of hackers hang out at Red Rock Coffee in Mountain View (2nd floor) and use it as an informal office. I've heard stories that some VCs get deals done at Buck's in Woodside over breakfast and I've seen VCs getting drinks at the Madera at the Rosewood Sand Hill.
Ask HN: Does the Seattle Freeze hinder spontaneous networking?
From the blogs I've read, including PG, Silicon Valley's biggest pros is the spontaneous networking and idea sharing. You can eat down at a restaurant and hear and idea float across and all of a sudden have a new start-up partner.

Does the Seattle Freeze hinder this in any way?
Humans are the only real evidence we have of how a technological society develops. Evolution produced us, and evolution arises from the physical laws of the universe. Why should we believe it would operate differently elsewhere in the universe?

No planet will have infinite resources, so it's logical that life will develop through continuous competition for territory and materials--just like it did here.

Looking back at Earth's history, it's not like we are the only violent forms of life we know of. Quite the opposite.
Git now fully supported and integrated into Team Foundation Service
> 600px? Are you using a 1024x768 monitor from 2000?

Why do you think they call it "newspaper column" and not "newspaper spread"? It's because the best way to read is in a narrow column (1/3 ... 1/2 the width of the screen). Otherwise the eyes need to move horizontally too much and risk losing position.
Curiosity Mars Rover Takes Historic Drill Sample
Ooh, nice; I've seen this before too but forgot all about it. @ksokhan, maybe think of linking up the CDN URL's from cdnjs.com to your site? Your site definitely offers more as far as discoverability.
The most disturbing point on VPN services is that they all claim "we don't hold data on users and will not log/provide logs to law enforcement", but when they are confronted with the question "what do you do when law enforcement knocks with child pornography or lolicon accusations?" (lolicon is comic depiction of child porn. some places forbid it, like Germany, others allow it).

I haven't found a service yet that said "Nothing". The point is not that I want child porn, but rather: It's child porn today, and tomorrow it's "Criticizing the bankster regime" or anything other political.
Humans and buffalo. Humans and passenger pigeons. Humans and mastodons. Humans and elephants. Humans and tigers. Humans and smallpox. Humans and dodos. Etc.
I don't have a dog in this fight. This is the first I've seen of this patent, and I've only just barely glanced at claim 1. I'm not here to argue the merits, which could easily take hours and pages.

What I have a problem with (and what happens so depressingly often) is people saying "OMG they got a patent for {what the abstract says}! I can think of so much prior art, the examiner must be brain dead!"

Now, various examiners do work all along the quality spectrum. But it is almost never that simple, and this ignorant, arrogant shit has got to go.
I think one of the biggest issues with JS is its lack of an intuitively obvious inheritance scheme. Until you get a full grasp of prototypes, you're not going to really know what the all the objects are. Couple this with a lack of namespacing and you can have a lot of trouble structuring large programs effectively.
It is working here in Brazil as well. Not usual.
According to the thread on the FreeBSD forums linked here somewhere below, the difference in motherboards is just a difference in report on Linux vs BSD.

Other than that, on x86, they seem to compare a PAE-enabled linux kernel to a FreeBSD kernel without PAE. And different versions of Xorg, for some reason. And, yeah, Unity vs KDE.

While most of it shouldn't matter (my money is on "Unity vs KDE makes all other differences negligible"), it's like they didn't even try to give the illusion they were doing things seriously.
I've become aware of Go just a few months go, but I already like it so much that I'm planning to make my next/current project in it, after using C++ exclusively the last 8+ years.

It has a lot of good things going for it, as a modern language should, but IMO that only makes it a viable alternative.

What really pushes it over onto the "I wanna use it" side is how easy and natural it makes concurrent programming. See e.g. vimeo.com/53221560
Really? Because if I want a quick response, I normally get better luck with a messenger.
Oven knobs, fine. But there are so many things that can't be machine printed; they require the assembly of components made of very different materials.

Take "sporting goods" mentioned in the article. Tennis racquet: supposing you could print a frame that was strong enough (dubious) with an acceptable grip feel (very dubious), you can't print the strings. They need to be assembled into the frame. Baseball, baseball mitt, basketball, etc.

Somebody here mentioned you can't print headphones, anything electromechanical. I'll add, anything with a circuit board in it, anything with an LCD or OLED screen on it; anything with a motor in it; anything with a heating element (coffee maker, hot pad). Anything with springs or hinged or rotating parts (many toys).
This part is true. It's a spammy site, and annoying.

The criticism of the benchmarks, though, is out of line. All benchmarks suck. Why? Because benchmaking is hard. It takes a ton of patience, a ton of diligence, and a ton of hardware. It's easy to sit back typing on the one laptop you use, running one OS, and whine about someone's inability to be an expert across dozens of environment.

Yet we all want benchmarks, as evidenced by this post. If you guys really think Phoronix benchmarks can be improved (and obviously they can), I'd appreciate it if you'd get off your MBP's and post some.
I don't really know anything about this story, but do you have any guesses as to why they did go after him?
Unrelated: I like the fact this person used Github as a "blog". I've been looking for some good blogging software & host for a while, but Github might just fit my needs :)
Yubikey is an option.
> but I could see things like revisions fitting in comfortably with the existing paradigm.

But then why call it frighteningly ambitious or ambitious at all?
It seems to me that a centralized blogging platform[1], that did its own analytics on the people browsing each blog, but also had enough information about each blogger's identity (perhaps through API access to their Facebooks, Twitters, G+s &c) to determine their likely audience, would be able to do very good with ad sales and placement, perhaps much better than Facebook itself (because if you're looking at Bob's wall, you aren't in a buying mood, but if you're looking at Bob's review of something on his blog, you are.)

The only problem with this is putting ads on what people think of as "their" blog. People want to be able to run their own ads on "their" blogs; even if they're hosted with some other service, they want to be the ones making money off people seeing their own content on their own pages.

I think Tumblr might be closest to a solution here (though even they haven't grasped it yet): once you can get people to read the blogs you host through a centralized interface (their "dashboard", effectively an RSS reader), you can display ads beside/between/around those posts that you think are relevant to those posts--and because the viewer never ends up going to the blogger's site itself, the blogger doesn't feel slighted by the ads + lack of revenue. They're not showing up on their site, after all.

[1] You can debate the other pros and cons of centralized/decentralized blogging--there are many--but "makes enough money for the people doing the centralizing to offer blog-hosting as a free service, and blog consumption with a streamlined and enjoyable UX" is definitely one of the pros of centralization.
Its been moved to github - https://github.com/Frege/frege

Can anyone explain the interest of this to someone unfamiliar?
Except for the goroutine and channel, and the type system, and the package system.
> EFF maintains a list of attorneys, called the Cooperating Attorneys list, who have told us that they are passionate about the same things we're passionate about, and who have indicated that they have some of the same areas of expertise. If we can't help you, but feel that your case is something our cooperating attorneys may be able to assist with, we'll offer to refer you to one of them.
Are you referring to the rather astonishing suggestion in the headline, or the use of this technology in general?

I think I know the answer but it still makes a big difference.
From my experience in Seattle, the "Seattle Freeze" might exist in general social situations... but it definitely doesn't seem to in tech/start up circles.

Get to a couple meet ups and you'll love it.
Introducing a new Java framework for web development: Micro
Micro, for short: (μ) or Mu, is a modular Model View Controller framework (MVC Pull) for web development, and it was designed with simplicity in mind. Compared with other Java web frameworks, Micro doesn't force you to use the Java language for creating dynamic content, nor does it pigment your code with Java syntactic metadata or anything like that. With Micro you can start developing your web application right away even if the only content your site has is plain text or Markdown documents; you don't need Java for that. Micro uses Java under the hood, providing you the support that is specific to the web development: localization, template languages, scripting support for more advanced use, and a modular way to extend your dynamic content with controllers written in Java or using scripting, such as: Beanshell, server side Javascript(Rhino), JRuby and more.
Micro is distributed under the Apache 2 license and it is available as a Github repository: https://github.com/florinpatrascu/micro

Documentation: http://micro-docs.simplegames.ca, a Micro web application using Markdown for formatting the content; work in progress and available as an open source project too.

While still in beta, we believe you will find Micro interesting to work with and you are more than welcome to try it out and send us your feedback.

Thank you!
I think email is the ultimate form of bad skeumorphism. It was designed to mimic postal mail. Email addresses, no permissions, no true id checks, no punishment for abuse. Many of the now used features like spam folders, filters, encryption, receipts were just tacked on (poorly). And because it's a "worldwide standard" that no one controls it's impossible for someone with a vision to try and change email.

I say abandon "fixing email" and come up with a new solution altogether. Start with a clean slate. Form a coop or nonprofit foundation that will control the standard for 5-10 years until everything's ironed out, then release the source code so people and providers can use it to replace email and people don't have to depend on one group of people. At this point I'm willing to try anything, as I'm sick of email, I HATE it with every fiber of my being. Spam and delayed newsletter bombing is taking up hours of my time each week.