skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am amazed as to how similar the word "sanguma" is to the Zulu word for a traditional healer (and also an area of witch burning) "sangoma". Anyone can offer some enlightenment on the linguistics?
Yeah, I wouldn't want to be one of the VCs that's named in the article.

Maybe the 'dumb vc' thinks you have what it takes to be successful as a person with the right product and that's why he/she wants to talk to you without knowing the product. If he/she reads this article you probably lost a fan.

Maybe he/she honestly just wanted to give good advice, if you think the advice sucks then you are the stupid one to meet 6 times with the VC..
I agree with this. It carries with it a bit of a sense of youthful superiority, and leads countless kids to waste away their twenties all to make someone else rich.
Why not add a simple public page to the Tarsnap website that allows the visitor to gift x dollars to the foo@example.com account? That way, bitcoiners can use bitspend.net etc. as a proxy payment provider for the time being.

Not leaking metadata on credit card statements that allows to infer that valuable data is stored at Tarsnap (and approximately how much), would be a practical increase in security: Such a leak might prompt an attacker to allocate more resources towards compromising the Tarsnap user's client computer.
A Brave New World does seem more modern than 1984 even though it was written nearly 20 years earlier. I suppose it's because international politics right now resemble the early 1932 mood more closely than the mood in 1949.

The audience A Brave New World was written for probably didn't think that their countries faced existential threats or that much could happen that would radically change the world order. Reading texts around the early responses to the Great Depression you get a sense of a great dissatisfaction with the status quo, and that advocates of both fascist and of communist policies thought their biggest threat was the obstinance of the status quo rather than revolutionary change in the "wrong" direction. The dystopia of A Brave New World seems to have come about by a gradual but unstoppable transformation.

The 1984 audience on the other hand would accept a larger domain of world-changing possibilities, but perhaps have been conditioned to war, and have acknowledged that habituation toward a perpetual state of war was a tool for autocratic government, just as much as a government unchallenged by external threats had freedom to become autocratic. Though the 1984 world has war depicted as distant and a routine part of life, it was a key part of the story, and difference between the two stories might be summed up as the difference between a peacetime dystopia and a wartime dystopia.

You can probably find both trends in our own time. The people who dream of "9/12" as a better world, see the spirit surrounding national trauma as amenable to getting their way. Then on the other end, when you hear congressmen discussing regulations on the internet, they get hysterical about the lack of deference people creating new stuff have. I suppose the congressional smugness around how everything would be okay if we didn't have disobedient progress is more an example of what radicals in the 1930s feared, but it does typify the challenges that peacetime societies face.

Anyway, that was a long way to get at the point that I agree with you that A Brave New World is a more plausible scenario than 1984 right now at least. However, what you described as appealing struck me as pretty specifically what made A Brave New World a dystopia.

Sexual attractiveness is a part of sexual attraction. Furthermore it is a source of pleasure and enjoyment for people, not just a way that they are excluded. In A Brave New World sexual relationships were very low effort—and I think that was the problem. Even if the algorithm were good enough not to just link you up with someone who is similar, but also found traits that are good complements, the unpredictable process of meeting someone who may not be perfect for you and the struggle and effort involved is pretty important.
Ask HN: Is it still good to start with ios apps development?
Hi all,
I am planning to start the development of mobile apps on various platforms. I have done various study on ios and android.

both have pros and cons. but i need HN members suggestions.

what are your choice? iOS or Android? tell me why? can i make a decent living out any of them?

PS: plz do not give diplomatic answers like "it depends on the kind of app your developing."
Gah. The very interesting question that the author asks is whether we should use the type system to help us enforce validation constraints, and in particular, security constraints -- a great idea that I've seen discussed elsewhere. But unfortunately he takes a wrong turn and assumes that this implies a subclassing relationship, where these validated string class derive from an abstract string class. This makes no sense from an OO perspective; nothing about a string class is "abstract," and it's better to favor composition over inheritance.
Can you cite any sources? I just find it implausible that anything other than petty crime would be discussed over social networks.
Reasons why Eric Weinstein's theory is unlikely to be correct
Ah okay, thanks. Another question: Why wouldn't compression take care of that? Isn't the point of compression to compact as many repeating sequences as possible?
Is the Internet of Things the future of narcissism?
> I think it's about time to start thinking about a society where employment is only available to a small fraction of people. It would be much better to have a controlled, thought out transition than to deny the possibility until we end up with mass unemployment.

The key, as I see it, is to aggressively pursue a more broad distribution of capital, and to move old age/disability safety net programs (and non-elite health insurance) away from the premise that those who will need them will be people whose income is derived largely from labor.

In a sense, this is the "ownership society" that Republicans liked to talk about around the first term of the second Bush Administration, but the actual policies that they pushed (which rewarded current holders of capital and increased the burden on current laborers) were pretty much the exact opposite of what is needed to get there.
I read that the upper cap is a mere $67,500 per annum. An income level above this amount, say double, does not double your happiness.
> The book was first published in 1987 and apparently has not been very influential.

You think that's bad? Brooks first published The Mythical Man-Month in 1975 and I don't think those lessons have ever sunk in, either.
Is it common for employers to restrict the use of headphones in an open workspace? I imagine that some bosses might feel that headphones "dampen the synergy," or whatever language they use.
What's to stop someone from forking Chain World onto another USB stick? In fact, adding that ability plus some sort of unpredictable way to reconcile the subsequent divergent timelines when two USB sticks met in the wild would make a far more interesting design IMO.
Not just about auditory stimuli, it's also visual "noise".
Neat, love new approaches to old problems. At first sight I thought it would be an awesome implementation of an idea I had (and probably tons of other people before and after :) a few years ago to find cheating among C programming assignments: convert programs to PostScript "drawings": ifs, fors and certain other functions gave rise to different "movements" of the cursor, eventually drawing paths for different expressions. Since it didn't take into account variable names, malloc-calloc-free order or any other extraneous thing, it could pinpoint cheating with a relatively good accuracy (and indeed, we caught 3 cheaters among ~90 submissions, and one of them would have been pretty hard to spot without the tool.) If anyone's interested, it was created with lex and basically parsed the expressions I was interested. I think I wrote about it once in my blog, but I'm not sure if I ever published the code (it was hacky as hell!)
It's easy to sympathize with the OP.

It would be better to quote some actual data on VC
returns, So, recently we have seen:

(1) As in Fred Wilson's post of

Feb 21, 2013

Venture Capital Returns

at his

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/02/venture-capital-returns.html

over the past 10 years, early stage US venture
capital on average has had return on investment
(ROI) less than the S&P 500.

(2) As in remarks on venture capital at the Web site
of Peter Theil's The Founders Fund, at

http://www.foundersfund.com/the-future

where click on "Read More" in a tiny image near the
bottom of the page, with

'Founders Fund:'

'What Happened to the Future?'

By Bruce Gibney

in section "VC's Long Nightmare", see:

"Along the way, VC has ceased to be the funder of
the future, and instead has become a funder of
features, widgets, irrelevances. In large part, it
also ceased making money, as the bottom half of
venture produced flat to negative return for the
past decade."

Wow! Negative return for a decade!

It would be good for the VCs to 'up their game'.
IIRC you can say "I want users to pay $5 for this" and have Coinbase figure out how many BTC that is.
> really the only way that you could say that it isn't ritualized murder is if you want to nitpick about "when the government does it, that means it is not murder".

Well, the real definition distinction is that when it is legal it isn't murder, and I think that that distinction is more than just semantic, as I think it ties into some substantive differences in the social forces at work.

That's not to say that there aren't also areas of substantive similarity between that form of ritualized killing and others including ritualized murder.
AFAIK salaries are rather low there, but cost of living is quite expensive.
http://arresteddevelopment.wikia.com/wiki/Larry_Middleman
Sure. I was just using one example of sanitization: defense against Bobby Tables.
The VC was seventy-five minutes late to the meeting. She refused to see him even though he was in the office and her calendar was clear. Later that week she raised money from someone else. He kept emailing her saying his partners were going to kill him, please take the meeting with me.She never took the meeting, and she never called him back.

Good for her. If he's 75 minutes late the very first meeting, that signals you're not a priority and could suffer in the future when you most need it.

I don't care how "big" you are....if you want people to respect you, respect their time.
It's not untraceable, I can see his name under the article title.
I thought the real reason was that if you have a candidate that is, say, Black, and you tell him that you didn't hire him because you "felt that he didn't have enough knowledge of Ruby", he would be able to sue you if he found out you hired someone who supposedly has the same level of knowledge of ruby as him.
Despite being from 2009 - I just received the same email. Unbelievable.
> Other people have to try real hard. Want to have a nightclub lifestyle - become a bouncer/dancer.

That's not the same "nightclub lifestyle" as a nightclub patron.
Don't just sit there. Really.
Interesting science fiction will not be available at the cinema in the forseeable future. The reason is that it doesn't pay at the box office. If you wonder why so few big action movies have an engaging sci-fi script, then the answer is: Because studios can get away with having bad scripts.

For more on the topic, I recommend:
http://redlettermedia.com/half-in-the-bag-star-trek-into-dar...
Water wet, sky blue, Pope Catholic, Bear excrement in forested areas

Knowledge workers of the past who have had money and power work in quiet campus colleges or oasis of calm like Londons Lincoln's Inn or Temple.

No power or influence - and work in chicken farms.

There is an advantage - for companies willing to put in the effort to make a sane work environment, to grow and support honesty and team support - well it's like being give. A free extra lap on the business marathon.
Steve Ballmer's surprise introductions throughout history
I believe it is very difficult to get works done in an open plan office. That seems too distraction prone. Noise cancellation headphones can get useful only if accompanied by an extended hood to guard vision to the screen. So that the programmer does not get distracted by any human movement nearby.
Excellent post, thanks for writing it. The viewpoint of a French developer probably resonates with anyone from Europe.

> You’ll see an immense amazing positive atmosphere everywhere, people working day time for a normal job and coding on evenings in coffee places, trying to work on their latest idea. They might even raise a few millions dollars on it, really.

I completely appreciate this - it's an amazing cultural difference.
Working with the FBI folks at the TSC (Terrorist Screening Center), being dumb and incompetent doesn't even begin to describe what I saw. The FBI is the most backwards agency technologically -- the leadership is mostly composed of people who actively oppose innovation. At any other government agency, you can host user created applications that consolidate workflows and make peoples' lives much easier. Some even have teams that are dedicated to creating these one-off solutions that don't fit into a general commercial/OSS workflow program. The FBI, however, doesn't allow programming of any sort outside of the scope of their contracts, which mean that a regular analyst is storing data in an excel spreadsheet and trying to pass it around as a database.

I say actively oppose innovation, because I've seen people told to get in line and shut up when speaking out about how to make processes better. This attitude mostly comes from a culture of "special agents" who are their own cool kid club. Imagine a bunch of movie-stereotypical dumb jocks. Now imagine them in front of a computer. FBI.

The most egregious of technological sins I witnessed was when we told the FBI that if they appended a row id to the scattered data they were sending us, that it would literally save on the order of 10 million dollars a year in people not having to manually input things, but being able to parse the data out. Their engineers came back and told us that it was not technologically possible. I said that not knowing their systems, what languages they were using to program the database, or even the database structure itself, give me one hour in the code and I will make it happen. Let's just say that didn't go over well.
Thank you for this. I derived great pleasure reading it.
Considering that rifles are used to kill fewer people in the United States than knives, fists, hammers, or bats, Mother Jones' attempt at scaring people about those who build their own guns rings a little hallow. But I get it, AK-47s look scary and so we should all be outraged.

https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/...
The original novel by Phillip K. Dick is a very worthwhile read as well.
To be fair, you don't know how many rounds he fired before the pic was taken.
Movies a pretty horrible places to get philosophy across: Dry diatribes and overmuch dialog at times. E. G. the man from earth, etc
Deduplication is a form of compression, yes. Most forms of compression are "local" however -- looking to match data against bits from within the past few MB -- so they won't detect duplicated data spread across entire archives.
I don't think that whether it's humour or not is relevant. Just as it makes no difference if a derogatory caricature of a jew is a "cartoon" or if The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a "work of literature".
Joel Spolsky has written extensively about peopleware:

"Ever wonder why everybody at Microsoft gets their own office, with walls and a door that shuts? It's in there. Why do managers give so much leeway to their teams to get things done? That's in there too. Why are there so many jelled SWAT teams at Microsoft that are remarkably productive? Mainly because Bill Gates has built a company full of managers who read Peopleware."

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/navlinks/fog0000000262.html

It does make you wonder what the future of facebook, with the world's largest open plan office, versus microsoft, which is now viewed as everyone's version of techno-corpor-bureaucratic hell. Are office plans destiny? TBD.
Anyone who has worked in enough office environments for a while will recognize that the "best" environment is a flexible one. Sometimes it's working in the open, sometimes a quiet office with the door closed, sometimes at home or a coffee shop.

When I took a mgmt role as VP/Engnring at a firm a few years ago, the first thing I did was assess and address morale, which was not good. One of the obvious things was that the staff didn't like the militaristic-layout of desks, being on display to others in the organization who had cozy and private retreats to use.

The CEO freaked out when I told him we were moving to the opposite side of the office floor (we had a full floor in a standard big-city downtown office building). When we moved over, we had our choice of cubes, open areas (not desks, but full-on tables) and quiet corners. Product management hated it because they "had to walk over to see what was going on". It didn't take a lot to figure out the source of frustration with the office environment for the engineering team. After that, I was able to take on the frustrations of the product management group since they could no longer easily impact the engineering team.

As it turned out, the engineering team didn't mind working in any combination of those situations, as long as they could kind of pick-and-choose over time. And, wouldn't you know it, productivity went up -- considerably.
Agreed. This is politically charged linkbait.
If everyone had a 2 minute intro to their talk...

If everyone starts including a 2 minute intro, then it won't make you stand out anymore, and you'll need to take a different tack.

The reason I sent Chad that video was to demonstrate passion. Doing what everyone else does doesn't accomplish that.

I recommend taking this as an illustrative example, not a step-by-step guide.
I have a pair of Bose Quiet Comfort 15's, supposedly one of the best noise canceling headphones you can buy. While it eliminates alot of the noise, noise still gets in.
I've been places that claim exactly that. But if that were really true, then a much more effective way to do that would be to include engineers in the design meetings, the customer feedback sessions, and strategy discussions. In most open plans I've seen, the engineers sit together. That doesn't sound like exposing them to the rest of the business.

But I think we're probably in violent agreement here. I like team rooms. Small team including product people, engineers, qa, even support and sales sometimes, in one enclosed space. Much less random noise, and a more focused vibe. Either that or 100% remote with a single shared team chat room.
Google's Eric Schmidt: "Don't Be Evil" was Stupid
I've worked in every possible configuration, and I've watched teams work in every possible configuration.

I don't like open-plan, but it tentatively appears to be most effective for organizations as a whole. Some initial conclusions:

- We'd be wise to distinguish what we'd all like to have as an office from what actually functions best in a larger system. It is erroneous to think that simply because you like something means it's always the best policy for everybody. Sometimes local non-optimizations need to be made to optimize the system as a whole.

- Open-plan environments are nowhere near being a determining factor in team performance, but they can be an important add-on. So sure, if your company is too cheap for offices, treat teams like slaves, and just wants to cram as many people possible into the smallest space? Then that's going to suck. But that's going to suck anyway. I'd just be really careful about confusing "stuff I think is cool" from "stuff that works the best for everybody concerned" I'd also be careful about over-generalizing. A big hunk of this is team, project, company, technology, and building specific.

- As long as you're adapting, you could end up with any kind of office space. But just as an informed guess, co-located open plan is where I'd start, then adapt from there.

- The worse thing you can do is start with a pre-conceived notion of what works and didn't and then try to force reality to conform to it.
In the span of 4 years, I went from a cube farm, to an office, to taking almost a year off and being by myself at home, to an entirely open-plan. It took a couple of weeks to get used to but I really like the open-plan. I enjoyed being by myself at home alone tremendously and didn't miss the social interaction at all, since I IM with most of my friends anyway, but I have to say I do like the open-plan now. My team is very social, I very much like everyone on the team, and I get to interact with my teammates a lot more, and if I need some solitude I can move to a smaller room (we're all laptop-based).

We do respect each other's space though, so most times it gets as quiet as a library, and even though my teammate is just on the other side of the table from me, he will IM me instead of just looking past the monitor and talk to me. It's usually quiet, but closer to lunch or near the end of the day, we play StarCraft 2, start chattering a bit more, and it's generally a bit looser.

For the most part, we don't work remotely, but the VP of Engineering insists that if one of us is even possibly sick, to stay at home and not infect others.

It's definitely a different set of "rules", but I really do enjoy it.
Yeah, it'd be awesome if everyone knew about this so we could really drive that rifle number up and make it competitive with other kinds of guns. Think of how many people could be brandishing their own unmarked AK-47 instead of having to resort to killing people with bats! So barbaric!
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2012/01/10/tech-terr...

http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/27/world/rivers-social-media-terr...
I was working on a very similar project myself recently [1], heavily inspired by ydiff. Unfortunately, I didn't implement the tree diff algorithm entirely correctly, and it's been on hiatus for over a year :(.

The one interesting addition my project had was merging. The neat trick was that we reused the same tree diff algorithm to find conflicts :P. With a bit of work, we would have some very neat features, including the ability to resolve certain conflicts which physically overlap.

[1]: http://jelv.is/cow
Someone working as a semi sr. developer is earning $ 1K so in two months you can afford it. And this is a long term investment.

In the worst case many people can join together to share the same company.
> The enlightened know that the stress reduction of never having money problems is far better than living a life of maximum comfort/extravagance.

Sound advice. Even though my income has happily grown over the past year, I’m trying to keep my value perception of money as close as possible to where it was when I was a poor student, to maintain my sanity as much as anything else.
Yes much of what made star trek interesting was how every week it would present some interesting cultural challenge. They were always stumbling into odd parallel societies, often rational but different in an interesting way, and more often than not they would escape a difficult situation by applying moral principles (e.g. the prime directive).

I'd love to see more of this adapted to challenge the modern mainstream. Why can't we have an openly gay muslim chinese captain and his southern white baptist communications officer all journey to some previously unexplored world of H1B immigrants who modeled their society based on the works of Ann Rand?
Not exactly. In the book and the movie, it is 100% likely.

Original short story by Dick: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Minority_Report