skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hate this one-sided professionalism that we're expected to hold where we never tell the truth about ex-employers or scummy ex-business partners. If someone screws people, the world should know.

If I say, "<Venture Capitalist X> had sex with a woman not his wife", then I'm being unprofessional because I'm taking someone's private matter and exposing it to the public, quite possibly maliciously. On the other hand, that's not what we're talking about. If I say, "<Venture Capitalist X> screwed me and damaged my career", I'm helping everyone else out there make better decisions. How is that a bad thing? How is that "unprofessional"? Relevant information should be shared. (It's the embarrassing but less relevant "dirty laundry" that shouldn't be exposed.)

If companies can damage our reputations by, for example, firing us after 3 months because we refused to commit perjury to save an imperiled executive's ass, then I think we should be allowed to fight back. They don't act like they're entitled to protect our reputations, so why do we have to protect theirs?

In OP's case, he's not even naming anyone; just pointing out sub-optimal behaviors.
I was sharing a 60sqm apartment with a couple there. (13th)
To the Android fan-troll who voted this down, it is common knowledge that developing for Android is painful. If you haven't shipped a real world app on Android, links are easily found by people who have and complain like this one:

http://darkdust.net/writings/whyihateandroid

Or how about a video?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4w9hXRrU5E

You can even read through Google/Android's bug reports like this relatively famous one (3434)
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=3434
Thank you, that's exactly what I meant. I probably should improve that part of the article, and it could probably actually be removed. It was some sarcastic humor but in end, I never felt that visiting other companies.

You do feel sometimes technical isn't enough, but at Twitter you could definitely feel you had to look good. And you could also feel how current employees were proud to be part of the adventure. Proud as being part of the topnotch Silicon Valley companies.
And base64 can use the / character, so it's unsafe for POSIX filenames.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Hood_shooting
Why would you comply with foreign government agencies?
Intriguing idea, but it just shows a black screen with some controls for me.
Why do we need offices ? office-less is the new paper-less! with tools like google hangout and google glasses, it makes less and less sense everyday. Why come to the same physical space everyday and stare at the computer screens to do the work you can do from anywhere.

Offices were invented to reduce the transaction cost of communication between employees, which was true 20 years ago but not anymore. I guess we have to wait till the net generation moves in to management to be truly comfortable with the mobile workforce.
The time of long tail of work environment is upon us.
> Are you talking about government censorship?

Is government censorship really any worse than censorship by a corporation/website?

If it's a small website, then one can simply go elsewhere. After all freedom of speech doesn't include the right to an audience. Set up your own website or whatever.

But what if it's a big website, one that nearly everyone uses, such as Facebook? Sure, someone can argue: if you don't like the website don't use it and then say because you don't have to use it Facebook isn't being coercive. But with government censorship, one could say: if you don't like it leave the country and go live somewhere else. In both cases there's a counterargument: it's not as easy as that, therefore it makes more sense to regard it as coercive.

To my mind governments and large corporations are similar in that both are powerful, and neither can be relied upon to have my interests at heart. Therefore I am wary when either limits freedom of speech.
Big upvote for Edward Tufte. If you style yourself as a hardcore engineer, start with his book Visual Display of Quantitative Information. I'm away from my copy, but as I recall, John Tukey reviewed the manuscript. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tukey)
Do it. Get feedback (or compare your own work vs. other nice works you find). Improve it. Rinse & Repeat.

I'm an engineer by training. Probably about 9 years ago, I started learning Flash, Illustrator, and Photoshop. Early projects were painful and very amateurish. I kept working at it, by making diagrams for my presentations, or designing UI mockups, etc.

Nowadays, my art & design is pretty good for an engineer. But what's better is that I've gained an appreciation for good UX design and good graphics. I can tell the difference between my "good-enough" designs and the really good stuff. And that will make you a better entrepreneur, because you can then hire people who are better than you.
My learning philosophy has always been to start by just doing. After a little time spent doing, when you stop and take a look at resources and discussion about whatever it is you are trying to learn, you are much more able to use the info.
True that it's slower, but the 'one core x86'-based benchmark comparison is the one it does worst in. And I doubt a one core x86 is hardly typical of what Go code will be running on.

Here are the results on a x64 quad: http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?t...

Overall Go loses here aswell, but it does much better than in the comparison you linked, and like others have mentioned Go is still very young compared to Java.

Also, glancing at the tests where Go does really bad against Java they seem to be tests which rely much on runtime functionality, and the Java runtime/VM has had a very long time (+10 years?) in which to improve to it's current state.
The absolute number of guns may well be higher, but the percentage of Americans who own one is presumably far below what it was during colonial times, for instance. It is quite possible that the number of guns is rising but either a) new gun owners are not increasing as fast as the number of people or b) the number of gun owners is not increasing at all but existing owners are collecting more per capita than they used to. I don't know if that's the answer, but your argument that there are more guns than ever is a poor rebuttal to the grandparents argument that the percentage of Americans owning guns is going down.
The problem is this:

(1) Money invested provides returns because it's invested in some profit-generating process. Large corporations generate predictable but low returns. Small companies, if the right ones are picked, should be able to do better.

(2) Putting money in the smartest people (technologists) should be a no-brainer winning proposition.

But...

(3) Venture capitalists don't just want to give people money. They want to manage, and they want to take what they see as "the fun work".

This leads to adverse selection. The best entrepreneurs limit VC involvement (they'll raise money, but on their terms) so VC gets stuck with the middle.
Maybe we should use phrenology to measure their heads and see if they can handle the weapon first? I mean, since we're going to the realm of pseudo-science, might as well.
Poll: What is your primary desktop OS?
I'm moving away from Windows and torn between OS X and Linux. I've been using Linux for quite a few years but for the last 3 years had to use Windows because of a customer contracting work.

I understand that it all depends but curious to see where most of the HN community gets their stuff done.
Show HN: What do you think of this short End User Licensing Agreement?
Essential Macros for C Programming
I love this technique. It can catch so many errors. It's also easily extensible to slightly more complicated cases. For example, I was working on some gnarly code that was working with a bunch of times with different epochs (e.g. time since startup on the local computer, time since startup on a remote computer, and time since the UNIX epoch). Rather than try to remember what was what, or try to painfully encode it in variable names, I simply wrote a struct that contained the number of seconds and an enum indicating what epoch it used. Then any operation on a pair of times (deltas, comparisons) got factored into a function that asserted the time bases of the two times were compatible.

It's interesting how little use this seems to get in C in general.
Ask HN: Tell us one thing we should improve
Hey Guys,

Our latest site has been up for about 2 months now and we're seeing some decent growth. We'd love to know one thing that we could improve to make it better. If you don't mind, take a minute and look through. Thanks!

http://thetechblock.com
Where do these salary numbers come from?
This might be a different context than what you were asking but I try and have DigititalColor Meter open on my screen and when I come across a design or color scheme I like, I use DigitalColor Meter to help deconstruct how that design was set up. This helps break down button designs, gradients, shadows, and textures. Doing this over and over helps me understand what makes certain designs work at a pixel level.
Seems nice, but doesn't support mainstream languages e.g. C#, Java.
I can understand where you're coming from. Unfortunately, I don't think this article is the explainer you're looking for, for a lot of reasons discussed in these comments, but primarily this: he destroyed the gun.

He bought it, he built it, he fired forty rounds through it and then he found it so distasteful that he didn't want it in his life, so he destroyed it. Even after mentioning how much it might have sold for, he didn't sell it. He didn't even give it away to one of the hobbyists he met, which he would have no difficulty finding takers for.

Imagine you help someone buy and put together their first computer. Not a monster machine, but a nice solid, balanced build. Later you learn that they booted it up once, played thirty minutes of World of Warcraft, and didn't like it, so they smashed all the parts with a hammer and left it out with the trash. How does that make you feel?

To a normal person, whatever, that might be a bit of an overreaction. But an enthusiast is shocked, confused, dismayed. Why? Why did you do that? I could have taken it off your hands. I could have paid shipping.

And that's the lethal problem: The author of the article, himself, could not or did not come to an understanding of how and why it is that these hobbyists feel safe and comfortable with what they do. He didn't understand them, from the sound of it he didn't really try to, and he still doesn't.

And if he doesn't understand it himself, what can he possibly hope to teach anyone else?
The point about insurance isn't so that the driver gets a new car if they wreck it -- it's so that if they kill or injure, or damage the property of, someone else then that someone else is covered.

Driving licenses are "a seal of approval of your driving prowess" in many countries other than the United States; American drivers frequently can't drive for shit. (Sorry, but I live in the UK, with approximately half the per-capita adjusted road death/injury rate to the US, and a driving test that's notoriously hard.)

As for "not that much death and dismemberment" because of the easy availability of firearms in the US, it's noteworthy that the level in question is a couple of orders of magnitude higher than in the UK, where firearms ownership is rare and tightly licensed. I wouldn't argue for a total ban -- if nothing else, North America is full of interesting and exciting wildlife, to which many people live in close proximity -- but there's no obvious need for city dwellers to own semi-auto rifles and handguns, and requiring those who do to carry third-party insurance in case an accidental discharge ends up injuring someone is an absolute minimum.
IMHO, (1) is the not only think that counts in the end. A 'failed' (as in (1)) concept may have a second life in future works. Also, in the case of plan9 some ideas did get traction (UTF-8 for example), some didn't so it's not all bad.
Comparisons are tricky, you can compare an OS to a football team, and then yes maybe what you say is right. Or you can compare it to a work of art, then what matters is the influence the works has in shaping the future...
Well, we don't see that all the time - we see it sometimes. The only reason some people can drive with neither is because most people don't.

I don't think it's merely a solution in search of a problem because we seem to spend an enourmous amount of political energy on the topic in the way we don't on 'who gets to own a Ferrari'. Ferrari owners pay the exorbitant insurance fees for the privilege. You're a firearms enthusiast who would like to own a .303 British? More power to you. Pay up.
Anyone has experience with Duplicity?
http://duplicity.nongnu.org/
I hate open plan. Hell I hate open door policies. My door is closed till noon and closed again at 5:30 sharp. If you need to collaborate pick up the phone!
Firstly, please read the commenting guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html particularly: Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation. and When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.

Secondly, the supposed contradiction you identified is not a contradiction at all, the first quote was talking about most gun owners the second about a minority of the entire population (who, the poster was arguing, makeup the majority of gun owners). Perhaps your reply would have benefited from you taking a few seconds to allow your masculinity to recover before you started hammering the keyboard in anger.

Thirdly, 30 seconds on google scholar will find you plenty of articles about the links between masculinity and gun ownership.

http://gas.sagepub.com/content/26/2/216.short

Stroud, Angela. "Good Guys With Guns Hegemonic Masculinity and Concealed Handguns." Gender & Society 26.2 (2012): 216-238.

In most states in the U.S. it is legal to carry a concealed handgun in public, but little is known about why people want to do this. While the existing literature argues that guns symbolize masculinity, most research on the actual use of guns has focused on marginalized men. The issue of concealed handguns is interesting because they must remain concealed and because relatively privileged men are most likely to have a license to carry one. Using in-depth interviews with 20 men, this article explores how they draw on discourses of masculinity to explain their use of concealed handguns. These men claim that they are motivated by a desire to protect their wives and children, to compensate for lost strength as they age, and to defend themselves against people and places they perceive as dangerous, especially those involving racial/ethnic minority men. These findings suggest that part of the appeal of carrying a concealed firearm is that it allows men to identify with hegemonic masculinity through fantasies of violence and self-defense.
Lets be honest though, if every presenter included a 2 minute video it would make the process faster, not slower.

100 presentations x 2 minutes is a little over 3 hours. That's not that bad. I'd imagine reading and debating a 2 page questionnaire would take longer.
You mean like Thomas Jefferson? Yeah, he was pretty uppity.
The US citizenry is better armed than most nations. We collect tanks, APCs, and most other former military vehicles. I know people who own .50 cal rifles, grenade launchers, various automatic rifles, etc. violence here is more rare than you'd think, but armaments far more common.
I hadn't heard of MailTester before; I have used the telnet/25 and RCPT TO: technique manually several times.
what's wrong with The man from earth? It's by the same authors as star trek. Seems like it was engaging intellectually to describe that unique idea of immortality
"Knowledge workers of the past who have had money and power work in quiet campus colleges or oasis of calm like London's Lincoln's Inn or Temple."

The average Oxford JCR isn't that calm, and both the Inns of Court support people who are performing in the open shout mosh pit that was the Georgian courtroom.

I take your well-made point, but somehow we need to balance calm reflection with connection.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell_v._City_of_Oakland

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton#Assassination_by_C...

And for you fans of enterprise solutions:

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

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

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

~

Your moral reasoning needs practice, kid.
I was using "children" rhetorically here, including gang violence and adult suicides basically. Anyway, this isn't the place for the conversation.
How exactly would Mike Bloomberg “fucking destroy” the taxi industry?
Jefferson was gleeful at the thought of armed revolution? Do tell.
"Boo hoo, Steve Jobs was a big meany!"
> 3) I get your whole in-the-future-we-store-ASTs argument, but that's certainly not the case today. Today we store text, and I don't see that changing. Could there also be a diff, perhaps even another mode that, counter to just dealing with structure, deals with formatting? ie, find the ranges that contribute nothing to the AST and then diff those textually.

Agree. I think it's likely code will be stored as text, but parsed into ASTs easily. Consider Go standard library has a full language parser built right in, so to get an AST from a .go text source file is about 3 lines of code.

Because you can get the code back from AST easily (while maintaining spacing), it really doesn't matter what you save. You can use tools to edit the text form or AST form without any duplication.
Read up on Dieter Rams and Bauhaus for some foundational lessons on aesthetics and design. (Go to some museum exhibitions if you can in your area.) Look into Jeff Veen and his work on HotWired in the 90's.

Hoefler & Frere-Jones have some great blurbs on typography. IDEO and Frog Design have written good stuff. Tufte, as mentioned,is great for information architecture.

When it comes to actual design, I recommend starting with scrap paper and a fat marker. The bigger marker prevents one from getting too detail oriented -- particularly helpful when designing for mobile.
http://dribbble.com/

from an engineer to another, I remember reading an article about how a company doesn't use a designer for their site because enough tools already exist. Dribbble was their favorite
According to the CDC[1], there were 613 deaths caused by unintended firearm injury in 2007. Are they wrong?

[1]: http://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/leadcaus10.html
This is a small penis defense. No VC will come out and say it is about them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_penis_rule

Calling someone dumb is unprofessional only if the person is not. Otherwise is just impolite. And if we wasted time negotiating with the VC fund he has some opportunity costs.
A large aspect of design that separates great professional designers from amateurs is very hard to teach. It can be described as training your eye and developing your taste. This simply comes from repetition and practise. Ira Glass articulates this well describing the creative process — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbC4gqZGPSY

Another aspect of design is the mindset and mentality required when looking to solve a problem. Something I feel often gets overlooked in the software world, where culture is generally engineer focused. IDEO pitch this in as 'design thinking'. While I'm not so keen on the term they do a good job of communicating the importance of certain mental traits that designers possess that are key to the design process.

Sketch. Considering a user flow/feature or user story? Sketch out 50 ideas, explore and exhaust all possible scenarios, no matter how achievable, obvious or silly. Get it down on paper. I often think that getting the idea down on paper allows my mind to forget on it and move on to another potential solution. Try to not let your technical expertise constrain this exploration, that'll come later as you whittle your ideas down.

Personally, if I have the time I quite like to produce hi-fidelity sketches. It may seem frivolous when a quick sharpie sketch will do, but as I spend time sketching I find the thinking time valuable and often find myself with another piece of paper jotting down notes/ideas etc.

Learn to draw — I believe designers should sketch and draw. There are so many lessons to be learnt that translate to what we do when designing interfaces. It provides a foundation in understand proportion, lighting, white space, suspense etc. It's also an exercise in discipline and training your brain to accurately produce the image in your minds eye.
And possibly change their choice from day to day depending on task. Could be expensive?
There's this course, not sure what it's like yet as I decided to learn javascript in depth first before I move on to design:

http://hackdesign.org/
As others have said, this depends on your definition of paranoia. If you're paranoid right here and right now, you can always go to your local 7-11/Walgreens/etc and get a prepaid credit card to pay for this.
Actually, the higher-energy cartridges like .303 Brit and .30-06 are used even more rarely in crime than other rifle cartridges. Intermediate cartridges, which came into military favor following the second world war, allow the user to carry more ammunition per unit of weight, and to manage the recoil of the rifle more easily. It's also easier to manufacture an autoloading rifle to reliably fire a cartridge like 5.56 or 7.62x39 than one like .303 British.
Looking for Startup Partners Group
Announce the Looking for Startup Partners group on Linkedin. Open to anyone that is hungry and needs partners.
Well there is a huge difference. As a Software Engineer you want to work in San Francisco because it's where your job happens.

In Paris, nothing happens on that level. If you do want to come to Paris it's because of the amazing food, lifestyle, public transportation system, and certainly not because of the amazing startups we should have.
My thoughts on this article are roughly equivalent to my thoughts on my hypothetical Vanity Fair piece, which I think I made clear. Since your questions don't seem to relate to that hypothetical, I don't have much to add.
flesh eating bacteria, not virus.
hysterix has already covered the bias well, there there's inconvenient facts such as:

Driving or owning an automobile is not an enumerated Constitutional right.

Owning an automobile is not a highly regulated activity. An analogous comparison would be legal concealed carry .... which is highly regulated outside of Vermont, Alaska, Wyoming, and Arizona.

"The only reason...." In addition to the above is that there are a very large number of gun owners in this country, possibly a majority of the nation's households, and we vote. Politicians aren't in thrall to the manufacturers organization, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), they're scared of the gunowners organization, the National Rifle Association, which even at 5 million members is only a fraction of gun owners and serious voting gun owners.

Every year Obama has been in office Americans have bought 10 million new guns (we have good numbers on that due to taxes and regulation). Think about that....
I have released several projects under conventional multi-page licenses, covering everything from not suing "licensees of data providers" and force majeure (that may or may not be different from the acts of God). This time around I have a simpler project and I want to try a simpler plain-spoken EULA that boils down to this:

1. This is an "as is" software

that may break
in which case you won't go after the developer

2. You won't do objectionable things with the software

Have anyone tried this?

There's just such a stark difference between, say, a BSD license and a license that comes with a typical Windows/Mac software. But since BSD clearly works, so why not try and keep things simple?

EDIT -> added "that boils down to this"