skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> They don't even want to cure cancer

Spread this fud somewhere else, please! Yes, the "cure for cancer" will most likely come in the form of treatments that will more or less "tame" it and manage it like a chronical disease, so you will be able to live decades with it just like you could live with heart disease - and yeas, this will mean shitloads of money for pharmaceutical companies that will sell tons of expensive drugs, but they work better and better and they will keep you alive some day.

And trust me, everyone wants a cure for cancer (I mean a "real" cure, not just something that for 70% of cancers will prolong your life enough so you can still die at 70).

That's because solving the cancer problem is not only about cancer itself! It's actually a door, that once we open we'll be able to stare at the road to "the fountain of life" itself - yeah, it might take a few generations after opening the door to actually reach there, but it will be within reach. Le me explain you: cancer is one big thing, the biggest imho, that prevents advances in areas like genetic therapies and lots of areas of what we call regenerative medicine (because, to put it in simpler terms, nobody will research a therapy that will make you live longer but has 10% chances of giving you a killer cancer - that will mean that statistically, the therapy will not make you live longer). At the same time, understanding cellular regulation at the level needed to actually solve cancer is the same type of understanding needed to slow aging, regenerate organs etc.. Imagine cancer as the dragon guarding the "fountain of youth": once you kill it, sooner or later someone will figure out a way to get to it and use it's water. Everyone wants it killed! After solving cancer, with heart disease remaining the main killer in the developing world, all resources could be dedicated to "growing hearts" for example, or "repairing clogged vessels" and these problems will be solved sooner or later because, at a level, they are actually engineering problems, they don't really require that much new science to solve, just tons of data about cellular regulatory pathways and such - and we'll already have lots of it from the cancer research.

Yeah, the medical professionals or researchers like to keep their feet on the ground and not talk about such "lofty" scify-like ideas - but everybody with some understanding of science and medicine knows things are along these lines...

TL;DR "Solving cancer" is not only about cancer - it's about immor-fucking-tality! (and everyone wants this!)
Given the headline and the warning, why in the world would you link to the offending site?
It appears your past experience with them has not gone so well, but you need to meet with an attorney immediately. If you do not know someone contact the CA Bar and they can refer you to a local attorney.

>the attorney's firm has a negligible amount of equity in the company. Nobody other than the founders has any equity,

Just before saying only the founders own the company, you say the attorney's firm has some ownership in the company, so it is a little confusing, but, these are major issues to discuss with an attorney:

1. Did this attorney an/or his firm take ownership in your company? Did the attorney/Firm pay or exchange their legal services for this ownership? Did they take ownership and charge the company for their services?

2. Is the attorney seeking payment from you, personally, or the business only? Did the attorney represent you the business or both?

3. As for the comments suggesting you simply dissolve the Company, you definitely should NOT do this before talking to an attorney. For example, the articles of incorporation and by-laws generally require a meeting and approval of all owners, which in this case appears to include a law firm seeking payments either from the company or you personally.
It's good to see the code using K&R naming convention (sans the class names starting with _).

On the other hand, it's written in a C++ dialect that's incompatible with the one we are using. It also has quite a few unnecessary tie-ins into the native API and MSVC compiler specifics (#pragma endregion), so as nice of a gesture this is, it's not fit well for inclusion into other projects.
My guess is that in a good fighting game all the characters need to be reasonably different to each other but also well balanced against all the others. The balance will require a lot of play testing and tuning, so each character you add will more expensive than the last.

And there's also the more mundane possibility that a fair chunk on the money is submission costs for Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network.
Not true, people have different tastes, it is now through Crowdfunding sites, unique products can flourish finally, so people will spend their extra income whichever way they like.
Besides, Indiego, unlike Kickstarter isn't confined to US/UK only, there is a big world out there, 5/6 of world population lives outside of the said countries, more people don't just mean more money, but also that you have to provide these products/collectables/benefits to each one of them == more transportation cost
The author is misrepresenting his first quoted study: 'little or no direct effect', my emphasis. He takes this to mean 'no effect', which is a lot of screaming bullshit, as you say.

Another example of government research being very beneficial in an indirect manner is in things like mental illness research. Little is done privately outside of pharmaceutics, yet improved treatment of mental illness significantly improves the economy - workers are more productive, more people participate in the workforce (and subsequently fewer crimes), and of course there are a ton of non-economic benefits.

Similarly, the US saw a massive economic growth from its early days all the way to WWII

The US is an incredibly wealthy landscape, in terms of mineral wealth, agricultural wealth, and temperate weather. Throw in a massive population increase, successful wars of conquest, and a productive temperate climate, and the author is pushing shit uphill with a pointed stick if he's trying to make the argument against publicly-funded R&D this way.
Same here.. We had logo and a sheet of commands to help us draw shapes. I got into trouble because within 5 minutes I'd binned the paper and was writing my name. I was amazed by the keyboard and the interaction. I was making "Something" happen and I could see it. Straight away. Really got me hooked. Never looked back, I do programming for career / hobby. Just so happy really I had access to that sort of thing as from what I read, it isn't that common!
It seems to be the download of their product (same URL as referred to on the download button, but as a <meta> refresh, 5 seconds). Highly unusual to trigger the download immediately, but at first glance seems to be innocuous.

https://www.virustotal.com/en/url/62ffa4af2b77fb35edfcce944a...

(click on downloaded file analysis, two hits are refering to a generic executable compression “PAK_GENERIC.009”)
This StackOverflow answer, "Numbers everyone should know", seems relevant here: http://serverfault.com/a/238534
> I thought that links duplication can't happen in HN.

It happens every day. Even identical titles and links.

> How can someone steal my karma?

By definition (spiritual, practical), if it's karma, it's not yours. You don't possess karma, karma possesses you.
You can't abandon them if you want to have fast code.

It is possible to write code in a portable fashion, accepting utf-8 as a standard string encoding, but this will then require converting to/from utf-16 for virtually every Windows API call that takes in a string variable. Not hard to do (MultiByteToWideChar), but there's a non-negligible performance penalty.
No, because you don't have to use the flexibility. Pyramid comes with defaults. You can blissfully just use what comes out of the box, or you can, relatively easily, use something else. There is no cost to the programmer who simply wants to ignorantly use the default tool set.
Issue 8788 - Every day around 9 AM Brussels time, huge drop in GAE performance
It's not only the ability to administer a single system, but high-performance systems/clusters. This is also a very different skill set than just knowing how to setup and run a single system. All of the sudden you have to worry about how systems interact, how to maintain them, and how to get the most performance out of the cluster that you can. All while balancing heat, power, and cost. These get real hairy real fast.
> My guess is that we'd still end up with legions of unemployed people that happen to be mediocre-to-awful at programming.

Probably true. For all the hype around the job market today, generally speaking only talented developers find employment.

The rest tend to end up in other fields or unemployed. I can only imagine what the market will look like when the talent pool expands.
The 30 Day Challenge
> Is it worth to learn Java nowadays?

Yes. Not because it's the pinnacle of computer languages (hardly!), but just because it's ubiquitous. You would have a hard time functioning as a modern CS professional and never encounter Java.

Asking about Java is like asking, "Should I be familiar with the Windows OS?" The argument isn't that Windows is the pinnacle of sophistication, the argument is that it's everywhere.
I don't know why he bothered. This sort of post is the Macalope's turf.
What's the matter with this "Let's teach everyone to code" thing? Why code and not, say, medicine? Is there such a lack of engineers?
Definitely a comment worthy of down votes.
> I truly want to become another Steve Jobs.

Well, you're off to a good start. You've linked to a site that requires a signup just to visit -- it's a walled garden, just like Apple itself.
Do they have a standard ABI or FFI for interaction with C? If so, they probably designed the assumption of a conservative GC into it. You can always make an incompatible change, but it's a pain.
Pretty much all Japanese payment processors support payment at convenience store.

http://www.gmo-pg.com/ and http://www.paygent.co.jp/ are two examples.
As others are saying, there is a lot of innovation going on. However, I propose that the "digital economy" is quite different from anything we are used to.

The productivity gains are not necessarily such that they contribute to growth -- at least, not they way we are used to measure it.

It seems that two of the big effects of the Internet is removing rentiers and middlemen, and lowering costs across the board, the first because, well, connecting people, the second because of multiplicative efficiency increases.

This enables smaller organizations to capture a bigger part of a smaller pie. This is most visible in strictly informational sectors, such as free software, music and publishing, but I don't think it's constrained to that but rather the effect of adding "intelligence". The end game of a company like AirBnB for instance, is to replace (all) hotels, for a fraction of the turnover (but higher profit margin). The same could be true of self driving cars -- we believe it will let us make do with fewer cars, because they are easier to share. Indeed, Google is perhaps the foremost example, incessantly cutting away at the advertising sector (along with related industries), filling the same purpose but better and an order of magnitude cheaper.

This is not growth, but degrowth. The thing is, it is still good and valuable -- it's just that it's not reflected in GDP.

I would say that this has been going on for a few decades, which is why we've seen the rise of the financial sector, which seems, to me, to be a kind of "manufactured growth" -- all of our politics and policies expect, indeed, demands growth in order to work. So when it slows, or rather changes it's nature if you will, we invent fake growth.

In summary, I agree with some of the "pessimists" in the article, but I'm optimistic and hopeful about it. I think we can really live abundant.
They do speak foreign languages, but not English.
Don't you think, the representatives and their supporters need to justify their use of violence first? If not, then I can also end this discussion by killing you without justification.

Example 1. Everyone thinks the Earth is flat, but I don't think so. Since everyone's senses indicate that it is flat and my idea is not self-evident, it is me who must provide sensual evidence. E.g. by showing that the horizon is limited and ships go under.

Example 2. Many people think the god exists, but senses do not provide any common (objective) perception. More than that, if you show them that by behaving badly you don't get mysteriously evaporated, it's now their job to prove how and why the god exists.

In other words, me and other people see a lot of evidence that some people kill other people, but we do not see a solid reason why some have a right to do so, while others do not. Then someone comes and says "it is democracy". Very well, but it is very far from being satisfactory answer and it has even more moral questions. E.g. how sudden increase of 50% audience by 1 person reverts their morality? Or what happens if older voters died and new were born? What are the "borders" within which you can use democracy, but outside - it's another jurisdiction? All of this stuff is 100% imaginary and outside of realm of sensual evidence. So it's your job to prove that these imaginary concepts have any ground. Quarks are imaginary, we cannot feel them directly or indirectly. So it's up to physicists to prove to anyone else that this imaginary model is useful at organizing all their real sensual knowledge in a coherent manner. And if they derive from quark theory that they can kill people - they have to prove it first.
doubtful, 87 days is my longest. Pretty sure i'm not the highest either.
TraceMyCode - online exception tracker
"TraceMyCode" (http://tracemycode.net) is simple and clean online exception tracker.
This service is interesting for developers. It collects exception data from applications and notifies if new bug appears. It's very simple and absolutely free.
> Perhaps all the "low hanging fruit" had been picked and future progress will be much harder.

Yes, it will be, but "much harder" doesn't have to mean that it will "take more time". Most problems in medicine are starting to look like engineering problems, though at the nano-scale. This is bad, because you can't just "pick fruits", ie. make serendipitous discoveries that have great impact, but it's also good, because in an "engineering field", once you get past a certain point, let's call it the "transistor point", things can start moving very fast result-wise. Unfortunately medicine is very much somewhere at the "steam-engine point", maybe even below it, in a grey zone of slow progress and we don't really know how much this "grey zone" will last. Maybe it's just waiting for the physicists and chemists to come up with cool nanothech, maybe not...
That would be it. To be fair though I have more success with ? than #.
Humanity's Deep Future
If I see examples in Coffeescript, I'm not sure if you can also write it in Javascript, or if the whole thing is in Coffeescript or what.
The Tale of Timothy Dexter
Torta paradiso, ricette dolci
In the realm of government-imposed law? Yes. There is also lynching, but it generally does not occur.

Outside the government people use peaceful dispute resolution organizations, reputation systems, rating agencies and insurance companies.
First Solar’s new world record for solar cell efficiency and why it’s important
> So, this model might work if you have a Rails[1] app that doesn't use up a lot of memory.

I can confirm that. In my previous company, we had a lot of H12 (request timeout) on heroku. We thought this should be our codebase fault, without being able to isolate why some usually fast requests were sometime so long to complete. As a workaround, we decided to temporary switch to unicorn to add more concurrency to our dynos.

H12 went down, but we were flooded by R14 (memory exceeded).

Even with two workers, it was too much. Granted, our app was eating too much memory and we were refactoring it to split it into several distinct apps.

We also had the problem that heroku router seemed to send requests to dyno while master unicorn process was starting (and thus, could not process it yet), which was a major problem since we used hirefire, which keep starting new dynos(and thus, new unicorn masters).
> the murder of tens of thousands innocent children

Citation needed

> relatively tiny consequences of their actions

So we can send you to jail for 30 years? It would only be a minor inconvenience if we did so?
Do you have an example of a job opening where they're offering 60k for a MIT programmer? I can give you a bunch where they offer substantially more (all $100k+ with just an undergrad degree):

https://www.google.com/about/jobs/search/#t=sq&q=j&j...

http://careers.microsoft.com/careers/en/us/grad-software-job...

https://www.dropbox.com/jobs
I loved the sample chapter mate............looking forward for the book
It's about the rigidity of the structure given. A framework is supposed to give me the tools and structure I need to do what I brought the framework in to do. On a web framework, that is to pipe I/O over the web, give me access to web-layer stuff like the request object, and provide a few other simple structural niceties like MVC (which itself is quite flexible in Pyramid (optionally, of course)). I don't want it constraining me to the point where the world breaks if I decide the default ORM or template is not making the cut.

As for all the things you've mentioned, it's perfectly plausible to have those things occur in Sinatra/Flask/Pyramid/whatever. The structures they provide are sufficient to hook up the kind of things you've mentioned. It's only that smaller communities have fewer pre-packaged solutions. In most cases, if you're building a new, serious platform, you'll want to use something that you can believe in technically, even if initially you'll have to contribute some of those modules yourself. You must be willing to invest in things you believe in, or they will die.
An Autopsy of a Dead Social Network
Hey, it's only illegal at night!

I wonder what the thinking was behind that law.

Edit: On second viewing, that's a highly suspect site. For example, for the UK it has 'Divorces are Outlawed'. For a start, they're actually not - that's the whole thing about the creation of the CofE, but more to the point, the 'Source' for the law is listed in its totality as "BBC 17 Nov. 1999", as if that would help us verify it.
honest question: my job is programming in python. I never had python 3 installed on a machine, being it personal, a server or a computer at work. I never felt the need to. any time I wonder why I'm not using it, I go back to the "what's new" page and I remember why. I mean, the biggest change is print not being a statement anymore? Improved UTF8 is neat, and being Italian I work with not ASCII chars all the day, but even in large projects this comes down to a couple of encodings. I mean, multi-line lambdas, optional static decorators, those would justify a jump in version and backwork incompatibility, but map returning an iterator and not a list? Meh, this is good for python 2.actual_version + 1.
I completely disagree with lutusp. It depends. I cannot give you an unequivocal yes-no answer.

You don't learn a language for the sake of learning a language. You learn a language in order to accomplish something. So what is that "something" that you want to accomplish?

If you want to build a web app, you don't learn Java, you learn Python or Ruby (and use one of the web frameworks). If you want to build the front-end of a website, learn Javascript, HTML, and CSS. If you want to build an iPhone/Mac app, you learn Objective-C. If you want to build an Android app, learn Java. If you want to work with machine learning, consider learning Java or Python or C++, depending on what libraries you use. If you want to build Windows apps, learn C# or Python or Java. Etc. Etc.

EDIT (reply to below):

I learned Java in school (the language and most of the essentials of the standard library). I have never touched it again. If you ask me to build a real-world product (i.e not just implement an algorithm or something) in Java today, I would not be able to do anything until I teach myself the necessary libraries. Not to mention that precisely because I never built any large projects in Java, my understanding of Java is very weak. If you're going to learn a language, you might as well learn the language that lies on the path to building something useful.

Most employers are going to hire you based on what you're capable of building, not what languages you know. (I think the exception would be "big" companies who are not technically focused).
Probably hardware acceleration

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/04/07/a-closer-look-...
Is that what you took from this article?
See my post here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5291205

The Skullgirls team is highly respected in the fighting game community. They not only are catering to their niche, they are the only company in the USA who is catering to their niche.

Just because their budget is small doesn't mean that they're a non-serious company, or part of a crowdfunding fad. They are the real deal to fighting game players, especially those who specialize in "Hyper-fighters". (MvC, BlazBlue, and Skullgirls)
Thanks, configured this but I was hoping something else. Turns out this is akin to creating a new FF profile user, which doesn't really resolve the Google Chrome auth issue directly, but nonetheless another dirty workaround for Google's horrible multiple account management.
I'm totally not in memory optimization, but I suppose an app memory size is directly proportional to its required gems' size ? Or is it in the contrary quite insignificant in runtime memory ?
Umbraco Meets YouTrack: From Bug Tracking Chaos to Issue Management
Not if the life advice is any good. It's like your maternal figure always told you, "If your friends were jumping off a bridge, would YOU?" (paraphrased)
I thought Smalltalk was dead and its good ideas transplanted in other languages. My question to anyone talking to me about a "resurrected" version is: what does it still have that other Smalltalk-inspired languages don't? what does it have over (J)Ruby for example? what can I do in it better than in Scala?
You have now the official definition of snake oil, but in my experience what it often means is a knee jerk reaction against something that fall out of common acceptance, and then too often becomes mere insult.

Witness here how certain posters seem determined to trash the product. No matter what the defenders say, they simply must come back with something, and they will keep going until the defenders simply give up. Notice each attempt subtly shifting the goal posts each time the defending argument is put.

Do I want to post examples? Absolutely no. All that will do is end up the same way. No matter what I say, there will be endless comebacks until people get annoyed with the whole thing ending up in a similar cycle. I'll leave it as one of those things a read can decide for themselves.

So be careful, the use of the term snake oil can tell you as much about the person using the term as it can the target.
of course.. he'll beat me in 26 days :)
If John Gruber makes an objective claim like, you can bet he has some real information. He may be an Apple shill, but he is a very well informed shill who values his reputation for providing accurate inside information. He isn't a WebObjects programmer, but dollars to doughnuts that info comes from someone who is.
What do Python frameworks like Django need to do to start taking market share from Rails?
Update: A little clarification. I got to this page by clicking on a Google Adwords ad for Helpsmith. The crazy thing is--when using Chrome I was not even prompted about whether or not I wanted to download--it just started saving to disk. When using IE or Firefox I was prompted and was able to decline.

I'm sure this file is indeed innocuous. However, it seems like a pretty slimeball move on their part.