skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For the love of god, turn off the auto-slide, it is completely broken and made me ragequit the browser never to look at your idea again even though I actually might find it interesting if I could tolerate the presentation.
You call out for rationality and claim that C# fixes C++'s problems? A language which requires a heavy runtime, really?
Your first points about how there are well known methods for manipulating democratic will are spot on. What truly democratic will is left in a world where politicians have power to mold the democratic will that is supposed to be controlling them?
Not so. NRE's raison d'être is to provide information to the public about train services funded by the public. There is no aspect of it's purpose that is not connected to taxpayer funding.
Kyle Gann (the author of this essay) has written some of the best English language essays on Morton Feldman.

There's another good essay by Alex Ross, music critic at the New Yorker:

http://www.therestisnoise.com/2006/06/morton_feldman_.html
> go out there and do something worthwhile and stop regaling your heroes for their ability to shut up and ship.

Reminds me of a Buddhist saying that if you meet the Buddha on the road, you should kill him. Kill being used in the sense of remain detached, not physically kill.
There is a famous saying in Japanese "七転び八起き" which means even if you fall 7 times, get up 8 times and move forward. But at the same time, the Japanese wants to do things well and organized, the citizens does not like failure, it's a country that fears shame.

Are we really that different? In the US, we seem to have this sense of superiority on this issue, but I think our tolerance of risk is paper-thin. It's superficial.

To get deeper into it, I find VC-istan to be especially hypocritical, because while it takes what seems to be a progressive attitude toward business failure, it's also a world in which, if you're not a C*O by 35 and an investor (read: rich and semi-retired) of some sort by 42, you're written off entirely as a useless human being. How, exactly, is this supposed to encourage resilience? If anything, that's the exact mentality that created the stodgy risk-aversion of these blue-chip corporations VC-istan considers itself ready to replace.

VC-istan is a postmodern corporation in which "tech companies" are disposable, because they're mere sub-projects of the meta-company. "Founders" are nominally independent project managers and investors are the real executives. What seems like a tolerant attitude toward business failure is actually the (probably beneficial, but cutthroat) willingness of this meta-company's executives (investors) to cancel projects for a variety of reasons.

Getting people to "wake up" isn't about changing one culture. The problem is that human nature is to pick leaders based on apparent success, and to ostracize failures. That works well in groups of 20 individuals that are barely surviving-- that is, our evolutionary frame-- but is not what you need in order to design or encourage a rational technological economy.
Enhance...enhance...
I was working at Lucent when they crashed from 106,000 employees to a targeted 37-35,000.

Managers boasted about laying off some of the best producers; I think the subtext was "If they're not safe, no one is".

Granted, this did kill the company (they got bought by Alcatel), and I know it killed the project I was working on when I left/was pushed out, something that was necessary for Lucent's survival (1/2 of the modern style telephone switch, what follows the 5ESS in their case).
Plain text files can probably do all this.
> is so 2005

So you have no actual quantifiable arguments and resort to this and ad hominem attacks on people that use a programming language? Not the best way to make your case.
"Open source that libraries if possible and you’ll get the feedback from the peers."

Does anyone have real experience with this (open sourcing a core piece of infrastructure and finding that others have found it, used it and provided feedback)?
The real name is not for any notion of 'security'. It's a psychological thing, to remind users to be civil to each other.

Oh, but wouln't flowers also work? Real names also remind some people in some situations that they cannot talk about certain things openly, and it could be argued to make it less civil in that case. Personally, I post under my real name a lot, and real name or handle has nothing to do with how civil I am, at least that's my (biased?) impression. Some of the worst things I said on Facebook actually :P Or on slashdot, where I have been using my real name for years. What is considered civil or not is up to each community; but the fact that you cannot post certain (perfectly legitimate, if not important) things to a public forum under your real name applies to any and all communities. Some communities may not want that stuff, but the others don't even have the option of using this for that reason, I think.

Believe it or not this actually exists on our very own HN (and discussions here do get 'wild' once in a while). And if it works for HN I don't see why it shouldn't work in other places.

Well okay, it depends on the thresholds I guess. If those are configurable, even better.

Actually, this would be very useful to users in conjunction with notifications. There have been many times when I have posted on a particular thread and then forgotten all about it, and so I miss it when somebody responds to me. This has happened annoyingly often.

Yes, that I totally understand; but doesn't "tagging" someone imply something other than a direct reply? But sure, I guess it could be useful, for example: "I want to travel to X, any suggestions", tagging a few users you remember to have mentioned to have been to X before.. if you used that as a use case, not just "increase user engagement" I would have reacted very differently I think. But maybe also allow users to block certain other users from tagging them if they overdo it.

Why (just curious)? A hosted version is to make it easy for your regular Joe Forum-master. I suspect not many of them would want to learn to manage a VPS.

Well as I said, I only speak for myself... of course there are more people who would like to have a forum than there are people willing to set up a server, so it's not really a criticism of your idea, just one of the reasons why I personally wouldn't be super hot for it. Take all of that in that spirit and good luck, okay?
Tangentially relevant: This is a textbook case of bad design. I cannot even read the article. http://imgur.com/jsMg0fG.jpg
Here is an almost too obvious idea... which I'm confident my fellow HNers will debunk in minutes!

Why doesn't Google allow, indeed encourage, a pre-publication process? As I see it, this registration would allow me to "predict" that my 5000-word essay, which can't be found anywhere on the Internet right now, will appear on example.com/article within a day. Almost beyond any reasonable doubt that should bring lots of credibility to my allowed site(s) and accurately destroy the credibility of unscrupulous sites that simply copy and paste. By the way, this could also apply to works placed in the public domain [1], and copyrighted material that will not (or should not) appear freely on the web, as is the case with the OP's book.

A refined API would speed up the process and allow authors to attach copyright restrictions to the resource in question. Needless to say, this process could be extended to other search engines, but it's safe to say right now that if Google alone allowed something like this it could rectify many problems in SEO.

I guess pre-registering heavy data such as images or video may not be reasonable yet, but plain text (even excluding HTML and CSS) could be a great beginning.

Thoughts?

[1] Even if a work is placed in the public domain, it would be reasonable to give the author's original version due prominence in the search results.
Also, "the CLR generics team" has built a lot of Haskell. The Microsoft Research program in Cambridge has been developing the GHC for years. The F# project led to a number of improvements in the CLR. F# really started as "Haskell for .NET" according to Don Syme.
> Signatures?

Glad to hear there will be an option to turn off, but it wasn't in your slidedeck so it wasn't an "Ofcourse" [sic] when @PavlovsCat made his comment.

> Real names

@PavlovsCat highlights several areas where user 'security' trumps psychological civility reminders. Personally, I won't use systems that require real names for this reason alone. If someone wants to use their real name, good for them. But systems that require it aren't for me.

> "flameware control"

Sounds like some other systems I know that get in the way of actual conversation (e.g., I'm trying to respond to individual posts individually, and manage to do so too quickly). If the controls aren't too aggressive, I can see the benefit, but if they're too aggressive I feel like I'm being punished for being able to touch type, and subsequently avoid those forums. (I haven't hit any such limits in HN, so if they're here, they're a good gauge for not too aggressive.)

> "tagging"

I happen to be a big fan of tagging. Although some systems do limit to existing tags, which I'm not a big fan of.

> hosted versus source

As an end user, I use both. When I'm setting up a system, open always gets preference over closed. There are several packages that have hosted service as their primary offering, but if you read through their FAQs they still have their source opened on bitbucket, github, or an accessible self-hosted system. Such dual-offerings provide the ease of hosted, with the myriad of benefits that come from open sourcing the code.
Of course.

A good example that many people are familiar with is parsing data. Compare these two approaches. You could write functions that manipulate the input and build up an output or you could create a structure that represents a grammar for the data you are parsing (perhaps by using a parser combinator library).

In the first approach, the only feasible way of reasoning about the program is operationally; when it gets to here, this function is called, causing ... . In the second approach, you can reason about the program by considering the grammar that you created. You don't need to know exactly how the parsing happens in order to understand a grammar. I argue that this is because the grammar has been given a meaning.

Parsing makes a good toy example, but this same technique of finding ways of giving meaning to components is applicable to software in the real world.
Reminds me of all those UX guys who look at designs and try to think it through logically and make arguments from their own authority instead of from data. I remember articles linked here where the designer said users will study all the options on the page before picking one, lol. Pinterest layouts do well in user studies and do well in helping people find something interesting to engage without before ditching your site. Because that's what most people do. Quick scan of site, don't read anything entirely, nothing interesting, go somewhere else. Meanwhile, when implementing Pinterest layouts and user testing them, we've gotten feedback that these thing little knowledge or story or interest bites or whatever are actually making people feel smarter. It's mentally rewarding to users to have these little useless mind snacks scattered across the page that they quickly skim and feel accomplished about. Sure it doesn't make sense to some clueless designer who tries to make up rules for everything and doesn't do user studies and tries to argue from authority, but that's the way it is.
Ruby 1.9 doesn't implement ISO 8601 properly
I have a habit of bringing up this page every time I hear someone talk about Python whitespace. I'm not sure if you've read this, but here it is anyway.

http://www.secnetix.de/olli/Python/block_indentation.hawk

Summary: Python's whitespace usage is nothing like Make's.
If you want a better java look at c#, its statically typed with minor type inference but it has some support for dynamic types(http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd264736.aspx).

Neither python nor ruby have any special support for pure functions, I suppose you could use some sort of decorator marking pure functions which one of those python subset compilers(or pypy) could use for performance optimization but I'm not aware of anything like this happening right now.

Also I don't think ruby supports list comprehensions it supports oo styled higher order functions, c# without the special syntax does the same thing. You may argue this is just a syntax but list comprehensions are just syntax that , you can rewrite them with nested for loops and appends(yields in the case of generator expressions)

I think in many although not all ways ruby is more of a smalltalk(but more practical).

Python doesn't exactly have an exact idealogical parent, although it has ABC as a historical parent(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_%28programming_language%29).
Python outside of core imperative freeform do your own thing, want to write a oo based solution sure, want to write large imperative functions, go ahead, want to use modules to organize those go ahead. Want to use named function arguments or kwargs or objects or dictionary args go ahead. You can choose to use itertools, or your own yielding functions, or generator expressions sure.
I don't get the last part...

in python a class is written as

class InPython:
def aMethod(self):
pass

but... what I'm missing? I can't follow the reasoning...

regarding the C extensions... I didn't really needed to write one, but from http://docs.python.org/3/extending/extending.html#a-simple-e... I see

static PyObject *
spam_system(PyObject *self, PyObject *args)
...

so I assume also on C level the python objects are mapped on some structs in OO fashion...

I honestly have no idea on how is (or if it has some meaning) to extend python in rpython on pypy, but in this case I assume there are some objects involved :D
THanks for your response, yeh I can imagine the variable fee would be a nightmare. I think it's the upgrade and downgrade facility which is most complicated in PayPal, no easy way of doing it.
You seriously would turn down a good job or other opportunity if the only downside was having to write in a whitespace-sensitive language?

Most of the good developers I know have their preferences for sure, but can be productive in all sorts of languages.
> Hmm, I found some of the criticism unfair. E.g. the example with "baz = foo->bar(3);". Yes, "bar" could be a number of things here, but that's why variable naming conventions help.

Then why must variables have static types?
A Famous Angel Explains The Four Biggest Mistakes Startups Make
> and if you remove spam, what's the use of nofollow?

For the period in between when spam is posted and when you remove it, during which there is an extremely high chance Google has already indexed it.
You are committing something like the "perfect candidate fallacy".

For a bank, making your future more predictable would likely just result in a different rate on the loan (either higher or lower, but they are interested in writing any loan that they think they can price sufficiently well).

For the job, the candidates with better measurements would likely get promoted faster, but over time, the companies with more meaningful measurements would (should?) be more profitable, and there would probably still be interesting work for people with lesser "stats". If a measurement is leading to higher profitability, there is at least one argument that it is fair.

Even for something like healthcare it shouldn't be that scary, if we (as a society) don't want predicted costs to factor into the availability of health care, then we shouldn't pretend to operate under an insurance scheme.

None of that is to say I have any desire to live in a transparent society.
Thanks for posting this. It always puzzled me when I was in college; what was the usefulness of flow charts. Instructors seemed unnaturally fixated on them. Now that I am an instructor, I occasionally find them useful on the whiteboard, but that's about it.
I'm not familiar enough with YAML to see the problem at a glance but parsing the snippet with an online parser [1] suggests that unless you put quotation marks around "NO" it gets parsed into a boolean False. Looks precarious, especially since not requiring strings to be quoted is kind of a selling point of YAML.

[1] https://yaml-online-parser.appspot.com/
Wonderful! My favorite was the 1-month rise/fall in revenue (scary), followed by the context. So true!

Questions re the pricing tier slides: (a) did you experiment with the prices & number of tiers? It would be interesting to hear your experience with that. (b) The lowest tier had the highest churn and demands ... but they were 25% of revenue ... which is too big to ignore, no?
Disruptive lighting is coming..
LED efficiencies have dramatically improved recently. 100-200 lumens/watt is common and improvements are still coming (reference, a typical 100 watt tungsten bulb produces about 1600 lumens (~16 lumens/watt)).

This project uses 32 LEDs, each of which can produce ~250 lumens, emitting 8000 lumens in total, and it only draws 88 watts! (current lighting solutions used in the field yield 8000 lumens and take 1000 watts! - an order of magnitude less power).

On top of that, the lights can be more-afordable and this project can be arduino-controlled, wi-fi enabled, and it's _open-sourced_(!). Pretty awesome!

Work like this could significantly lower costs/barriers to high-quality film-making and photography in various cases.

Production films, for instance, typically hire union electricians to deal with the electrical demands of lighting. The logistics of making sure you have circuits to handle the load and safety can be a pain. Carrying around heavy lighting is a pain, etc. Also purchasing these large lights is expensive.

It will be interesting to see how quickly/widely adoption takes place.. and I wonder about other effects it will have in other areas..
I've gone through this dilemma as a solo founder and experimented with both (existing & new market). I ended up choosing an existing market. Some thoughts:

Make sure that the market you're going into is growing and not shrinking. In a growing market, there will always be new customers.

People like choice. You don't have to compete feature to feature with your competitors. Stand out somehow. Identify how you truly differentiate and make sure that everybody knows this.

The good thing about an existing market is that people are already looking for what you're selling. All you have to do is be there, be different and be findable. The bad thing is that the competitors are mature and it takes a lot more effort to actually compete.
How do I “think in AngularJS” if I have a jQuery background?
I understood "tagging" more in a sense of "tag, you're it". Like some bloggers do, "I got tagged by Person A to answer these questions", I'm pretty sure I've seen that before. Maybe I got it wrong, but I thought was like what you just did, @mentions :P

As for tagging with words (and maybe even more than just one taxonomy), of course, it's the best. Tag first, tag lots, and find uses for the tags later I say :D
From the article:

> Run a search on Pinterest it gives you totally irrelevant search relevant.

> If Pinterest needs to move forward then their search factor needs to improve else its just another bookmarking website with a different theme.

Uhm, what?
LED efficiencies have dramatically improved recently. 100-200 lumens/watt is common and improvements are still coming (reference, a typical 100 watt tungsten bulb produces about 1600 lumens (~16 lumens/watt)).

This project uses 32 LEDs, each of which can produce ~250 lumens, emitting 8000 lumens in total, and it only draws 88 watts! (current lighting solutions used in the field yield 8000 lumens and take 1000 watts! - an order of magnitude less power).

On top of that, the lights can be more-afordable and this project can be arduino-controlled, wi-fi enabled, and it's _open-sourced_(!). Pretty awesome!

Work like this could significantly lower costs/barriers to high-quality film-making and photography in various cases.

Production films, for instance, typically hire union electricians to deal with the electrical demands of lighting. The logistics of making sure you have circuits to handle the load and safety can be a pain. Carrying around heavy lighting is a pain, etc. Also purchasing these large lights is expensive.

It will be interesting to see how quickly/widely adoption takes place.. and I wonder about other effects it will have in other areas..
Most people just miss the common C++ idioms that solve many of the exception issues in very elegant ways (and give a lot of benefits at the same time).

... and the remaining people realise that use of exceptions in C++,

1. almost always creates a trade-off in performance for strong-exception safety guarantees

2. requires special and strong control of side effects throughout the code base, even when there is minimal benefit

3. increases compile times and resource pressure

4. encourages less knowledgeable developers to inappropriately throw exceptions or make poor attempts to recover from them

5. contain some of the least portable platform semantics and handling.

C++ exceptions contain far greater costs and consequences than many programmers realise. For anything other than testing frameworks, it is debatable that they are worth any benefit at all compared to the alternatives.
So I've read, congratulations! It's just that these things always remind me to a Simpsons episode:

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

Hence my whining. I hope I'm very wrong.
Will SurfaceFlinger Replace Compiz In Ubuntu 14.04?
Thanks for the question.

I will bring this up with all PyLadies - but for my part, yes! We don't have a global charter, so I will seek clarification on this and express my opinion.

The wording that I have tried to use is "primarily woman-identified" or "not primarily male-identified". If you have better wording suggestions, please share!
"I don't disagree that overpenetration should be a concern for a lot of people."

Ok.

"It isn't for me, so I like the AR15 for home defense. I've got a cabin that is even more remote, and comes replete with occasional threats from various wildlife, and I like it there too -- but that is with the knowledge that the nearest human being should be no closer than 50 acres away."

Most victims of mass shootings aren't afforded that luxury.

"Regarding the ammo, for a small caliber weapon, and the accuracy of the average person who shoots, your odds of stopping an assailant with 10 rounds is pretty good, at about 85.1%. If there are multiple assailants though, 10 rounds doesn't provide particularly great odds - at 35%. 12 rounds gets you 50% odds against 2 assailants."

Exactly why mass shooters prefer high capacity weapons.

"Further, according to the Supreme Court, bans on arms "in common use" are effectively unconstitutional, and banning down to a 7 round capacity limit is a violation of that decision."

Free negros were also unconstitutional at one point. The constitution means nothing to me.

"I forgot to mention also that banning high capacity magazines is an extra-special futile endeavor since I can make them with a 3D printer."

People print counterfeit money too but we put measures in place to minimize it.

Lastly, fully-automatic firearms are heavily regulated in comparison to semi-automatic firearms and have only accounted for 2 homicides in the last 80 years. On the other hand, semi-automatic firearms have accounted for more than 3/4ths of mass shootings, of which 88 people died and 151 were injured in 2012 alone:

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-m...
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/12/17/1171047/-There-are-...
What did you use to measure and export your revenue so you could make the chart used in the presentation?
China is sponsoring cyber-espionage