skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sorry but this is pretty naive. The link you proposed is for a Chess variant.
Now, in an abstract game like Chess, I may agree that using a square grid (and allowing diagonal moves) may be ok. In a wargame, though, or anything trying to "simulate" reality (e.g. a role playing game) using a square grid with diagonal moves will result in the "interesting" phenomena where moving your tank towards North-West would boost its speed by more than 40% (square root of 2=1.414...). And this would be even worse in case of favorable terrain like roads or plains.
The reason why hexagons are favored is because they can perfectly cover a plane and at the same time you move a constant distance no matter which side you are exiting.

So you should at least qualify your "overrated" statement by saying "for abstract games where speed/range of units is not considered an important feature".
Maximizing individual payoff is not necessarily contradictory to more intuitive notions of "fairness". One ignored variable is the timescale you're maximizing over. If your company spends money on other things than exec pay, you (and others) are very likely to do better in the long run, in ways that are not mathematically (or computationally) quantifiable, at least by existing theories (or resources). But just because something is not quantifiable does not mean that considering it is "irrational". Rather the opposite, you are using what computational resources you have personally (emotions and intuition) to judge this, rather than ignoring it completely.

This is why I get supremely annoyed at claims that a specific non-mathematical argument is "irrational".

(Examples of non-computable things: company spends resources on R&D and makes more long-term profit; company spends resources on higher pay for everyone else and boosts morale; reputation of company increases and you attract a wider pool of potential employees; etc.)

In more mathematical terms, greedy optimisation algorithms in the name of short-term "rationality" most often lead you to a local, not global, maximum.
I do the same thing. I have different groups of people and just talk over email threads. Works far better than G+ or FB.
I'm a little annoyed that "Work-life balance" almost always refers to "Work-family balance". Not everyone has children, or, more exactly, not having children does not mark you as "one of these guys who CAN work 14 hours". You know, I want work-life balance because I want to do things not related to my job for about 8 hours a day.
I mostly just read the updates from my Close Friends list. At some point I had to sort out my friends to acquaintances, friends, and close friends, and that has sort of fixed the glitch for me.
> And so, every few weeks it seems, we get these posts from some techie who believes that his (it's always a man) experiences with social media are universal.

Moreover, if my news feed of middle-Americans-quite-pleased-to-share-indiscriminately is any indication, Facebook is what most people need. MOST PEOPLE. This whole elitist attitude in the tech community is breeding "innovators" who don't have the first clue what the world really wants or needs.
Adap.tv, Inc.

http://adap.tv/careers/engineering

Hack Madison Ave!

Adap.tv is online ad technology platform for video. We are changing how video ad campaigns are planned, trafficked, optimized, and tracked.

Our stack:
- C++ (We wrote our own event driven web server, malloc, and more)
- Flash/ActionScript 3
- AngularJS
- iOS/Objective C
- Android/Java
- Python

We are hiring aggressively across departments and experience levels.
Yep - this is an old thing, it applies to twitter, LiveJournal or to any other social network where you pick who you read. It's more about your choices than anything else: If you don't like the content you're reading, read different people.

However ... Facebook is probably the only social network where I feel a high level of obligation to add people like Aunt Jemima, and Bill who I went to college with, years ago. It's "for" keeping in touch - i.e that's how most people use it. It's the fallback social network for contacts who don't fit into other, targeted social networks.
A month or two ago, my GF attended a lecture where everyone in the room (except her, who stood aghast in astonishment) agreed that:

- Twitter is too much freedom of speech and it should be censored.

- freedom in general is going rampant these days in our societies, and should be significantly reduced by coercion.

They literally advocated for Thought Police. We're talking about top of the line students and professors, notably in Law.

I seriously don't know what the world will look like tomorrow, but I don't like where I see it headed right now (lots of semi-isolated islands of controlled GroupThink).

BTW, if anyone is versed in French, may I recommend reading "La Zone du Dehors", a fantastic novel by Alain Damasio (a dystopian novel showcasing a glimpse of the future, and a spiritual sequel to 1984)
> I see the same Google Maps as everyone else does.

Not for much longer [1,2].

[1] http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/consumer-security/how-goo...

[2] http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2419020,00.asp
Agree to what you say. Facebook is great in some cases, like finding your old buddy from college or school. I use FB to find them, but after that I get their email ids and from then on its email communication. So for me FB is the place to find people.

But FB is not for getting news about the topics I like; because, IMHO like the OP, Facebook news feed is broken for this purpose. Yes it is broken if you like to get news and information related to your interests. The prime reason, which I have discovered over the years of using FB, is I like things which my friends do not like a lot and vice-versa. I cannot blame Facebook for this. So when they like something which I do not, I still get the news in the feed. The same thing is happening in Twitter.

I felt that it would be better if we can follow information we like rather than the people we like. This way we will be able to get the information that we want/like rather than the noise. A critical step towards this is tags and if we can follow a tag it would be better [1].

[1] Disclaimer: I have created a website to do just that. Link is https://www.scoopspot.com/ .
Great article. I have to take issue with this though:

"While Google actively tries to thwart SEO scamsters"

Google has monetised SEO and actively encourages bad SEO through SEM. You've got this strange case of Google creating shitty search results through Adwords and SEM which devalues their core product.

Looks like FB and other social platforms are suffering a similar issue. Ads are creating a frothing steam of noise which is drowning out quality content.
SEEKING WORK - San Francisco Bay Area, CA or REMOTE, TRAVEL OK

I help companies build web, mobile, and desktop apps, SDKs, and APIs. I work with node.js and Objective-C (OS X, iOS backend), but languages are just tools: in the past month I've also been doing client work in Ruby on Rails, C#/.NET, and working on my own product in Elixir (Erlang).

Looking for interesting short and long-term projects. Available in July.

http://amirmalik.net | https://github.com/ammmir | email: amir at pilvy dot com
I'm not a heavy FB user, but having lived in various places around the world, it's one of the few ways I can passively keep in touch with what my dear friends have been up to half way around the globe.

That is real value that Facebook does deliver, something I must admit despite my wide ranged mistrust and distaste for various other aspects of the service.
For sure- I hear that

it's difficult to write what I wrote without sounding like a snobby d-bag- I just hate that phrase, the language & syntax of it (usually because it is abused so often by well-intentioned grad students)

To be clear, I don't dispute the idea for one second that there are some ppl in US that no matter what they do or how hard they try it will be exceedingly difficult for them to get ahead. I also have no disagreement that aloof & sheltered (but perhaps well-meaning) say that all marginalized/overlooked people need to do is pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

I'm not sure even where you & I agree "disagree" that much, but I figure that since there are a ton of options online that are super-easy for even zero-tech savvy people to find & use to express themselves & conceal their identity this isn't that big of a crisis
This is not my blog. I came across it and seemed very accurate and unbiased. Thought I'd share here.
Erik Spiekermann, Typomaniac
I tend to have a hard time discerning whether commenting on a shared item will make my comment appear on the original thread or the "sharer"'s thread, and I usually end up not commenting even when I have something I could say.
>You say that there's a problem with centralised political power, and I agree wholeheartedly, but we certainly do have a problem because that centralised power is in every lounge room, car radio and news stand in the land. At least with communism you knew who was pulling the strings!

There is no centralised power controlling news media in the democratic developed world. I can walk out on to the street in the UK and buy publications supporting any political viewpoint with enough people interested in it to make selling such a publication viable. Hop on to the internet, and you can push whatever agenda you like, and I note that that's exactly what you and I are doing. The problem with totalitarianism is that if they decide they don't like what you're saying, you get censored. Those strings get pulled on you, immediately. See the censorship situation for social media in China for details. This conversation would be practically impossible.

If you really want to see an incumbent ruling class pulling no punches and using all the tools available to it to pull those strings as tight as possible, there are several nations out there doing that right now. My wife's family live in one.
Your friends most likely got their chicks from a hatchery that culls male chicks. It's not just factory farming that's an issue, the entire agricultural industry has serious issues.
This is a good article. A good point of view. Not everyone will and needs to agree.
I saw it in Learn Vimscript the Hard Way. I assumed it was common knowledge, since I couldn't see any other practical way to use 5j, etc, on a regular basis, but it's apparently less well-known than I thought.
An ideal Facebook would have been a directory of people and their connections. People can message each other, post text updates and pictures.

This is pretty close to how I use facebook.

The problem is Sharing. It is the most fundamental feature of Facebook, and it’s completely broken

For me, the directory itself is most fundamental. If all of my friends switched to another social network, I would immediately switch.

I'm not sure what's failed? Maybe if he fleshed out a viable alternative?

It's important not to trivialize what they've accomplished just because its core feature now seems mundane.
Typographica. Type Reviews, Books, Commentary.
If you have to update your browser to read a site, on a site that's main function is to provide someones thoughts in text form, then I'd consider the website at fault.
This is the weirdest example of pg's negative comment up-voting I have ever seen. True you are not actually nit-picking the article but the second paragraph comes close to dismisal.

A teenager built a fusion reactor FFS. I had trouble making coffee this morning.

This is the Maker top 1% - and should be celebrated, not compared poorly to other similar attempts.
I'm one of the chairs at the conference Kate mentioned (O'Reilly Fluent) so I thought I'd provide some background.

Our keynotes were entirely invite only (O'Reilly often has sponsored keynotes, we did not) and Kate was invited based on her position in the field and because she's familiar with speaking at O'Reilly events, so we knew she would be good. All keynoters were invited on these merits (so yes, being known to O'Reilly or the chairs helps, but overall stature is just as important).

For regular sessions, a handful of people we knew would be good were invited directly into the program (perhaps 10% of the final program), a much larger number were invited to submit a proposal for review (perhaps 50% ended up being these people), and then about 40% were entirely from non-invited proposals, including several speakers who were new to speaking.

The most important thing to make it through our program committee was to get the proposal right. A good title, a good abstract and, in most (but not all) cases, having a track record in the discipline (even if you're not 'famous' for it). We did take a risk on several 'unknowns' to keep it interesting and in most cases, it played out well.

This is just how we did it, but it's not necessarily the 'best' way to do it (I don't think there is a 'best' way). Some conferences, for example, anonymize proposals, don't use proposals at all, are 100% invite only, or follow unconference formats. It's great to see a real variety and not everyone just following one approach.
Well done, looks interesting. Have provided my email through the sign up form.
We tried to figure out how to cut a planet into hexes, turns out you can't (no surprise). Footballs use pentagons.

Well, I guess you can just make equal area square map and cut that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection

Also, it's curious nobody mentioned Battle of Wesnoth. Battle of Wesnoth (together with Fantasy General and Battle Isle) is a shining example of hex-based strategic wargame.
Some screen shots would be nice to look at before I sign up.
My impression is that desktop software is/was largely written in C/C++/C#/Objective C/Objective C++ because those are the languages to which the Operating Systems of today expose their APIs. For example Win32 = C/C++, Cocoa = Objective C, Metro = C# (or I guess anything compiled to the Common Intermediate Language (CIL)???).

Now that said, most languages provide a bridging layer that allows them to call out to those "native" APIs. These are used to enable API ?wrappers?, however due to these being provided by third parties (I believe) there has been a tendency to gravitate toward the "blessed" language of the OS vendor.

One of the big advantages of Java (to me at least) was that it provided a platform independent windowing capability inbuilt within the JDK that has been maintained by Sun/Oracle/(and Apple) as new operating system revisions were released.

Note, for example, that C/C++/Objective-C/Objective-C++ programs aren't/weren't allowed in the Mac App Store (I'm not sure if this is still the case...).
(Personally I ported a Java App to Objective C++ due to this.)

But generally I agree with your point that this isn't the only reason why C was so pervasively used. However, you also need to consider that a large number of programming environments and tools were specifically developed to aid C/C++ programmers, e.g. Borland C++, Visual C++, Code Warrior, XCode. It's also worth remembering that the GNU C Compiler and Debugger were import contributions to free software back in the day.

But also consider distribution of compilers etc. I think it is pretty fair to say that a lot of programmers learnt to program using Borland Pascal/C++ because at that point the Internet was not as accessible as today and copies of these could be "obtained".

The advent of Internet has not only allowed the distribution of compilers and environments for other programming languages, it has also meant that the languages used for backend systems, i.e. web servers and web applications, is irrelevant to the user's web browser.

Anecdotally, for safety-critical system software an issue with some languages other than C is that they have not been suitable for real-time systems. I don't know much about this other than that exception handling and also garbage collection can cause issues due to their non-determinism.

I fear that you'll think that the above is a bit too much like saying "all software is 'C' because it needs to do system/library calls", however I think it's probably fairer to say "all software is 'C' because many people have really, really liked it" and "better the devil you know".
This is not about self-propagating viruses or worms, but about trojan horses in the original sense - seemingly useful but harmless modules that secretly open a backdoor to your server.
By far the best description of how facebook works I have read so far.
I can't say you couldn't have written UNIX in Algol 68, but C was very specifically developed by K&R for building the underpinnings of UNIX. They didn't just "pick" C out of a pool of available languages- C was made for UNIX.

(This is probably a gross oversimplification- please don't hang me out to dry for it- but it summarizes my understanding of the origins of C)
In my case, at least, I literally cannot hear or think as clearly when I try to multitask by taking notes. Unlike Stefan above, though, I figured this out before high school.
That has to be one of the most in-depth and informative answers in the history of StackerOverflow.

I wonder if there is a "best of" search you can do.
> It's important not to trivialize what they've accomplished just because its core feature now seems mundane.

The core feature is trivial; it has been implemented by hundreds of sites. Facebook's strength was its organic growth, which is slowing down the MySpaceification tremendously.
But if that were the case, the patent would almost certainly be invalid; the claimed invention must be inventive, i.e. having come up with something that is not obvious. What is described is coming up with the obvious solution to a problem, not coming up with an inventive solution to the problem. It's also annoying when people use soundbites from famous people as proof; they sound good and make sense on the surface but usually don't hold up to scrutiny (and I say this as someone who has a lot of time for John Carmack's advice and insights).

An example might be the invention of bloom filters[1]. I would argue that if you were looking for a way to check for membership in a set in the time before the bloom filter's invention, it would not have been obvious to devise a structure which can give false positives but no false negatives through the use of multiple hashing functions and a bit array. It is of course obvious to us now, knowing the answer, but at the time it would not have been. this is what the patent system is about; encouraging people to invest time, effort and money into inventive solutions to problems by giving them a way to protect their investment for a limited period of time. Somehow this all becomes evil when a large company is doing it, but you'll all be outraged when a startup comes up with something inventive and have their ideas "stolen" by big companies when they didn't seek to protect themselves.

[1] I'm not saying this is a shining example of a patented technology; I have no idea whether it has ever been patented or not. However it is a good example of an inventive solution and one which most people would not regard as obvious and be able to come up with through routine trial and error.
It's interesting, what PG would say. I would expect YCombinator to have many non-mainstream startups, but I don't know.
"They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

-- Carl Sagan
Indian checkpost for Facebook, Google?
It would take too much time to do it yourself, and if you're no security expert you will miss vulnerabilities anyway. This project is a better answer: http://nodesecurity.io/
Maria.js: The real MVC. The Smalltalk MVC.
I feel that you are missing his point.

There is a trend towards emotional populist content on social networks. It's interesting to you because it's your friends and it feels personal.

However in a broader context its creating a society that is inward looking (walled garden of your friends) and concerned with re-enforcing social norms (the like button).

How does this activity improve us as a society? Where is the creativity and freedom?
Afaik my's last' name is equivalent to

my.name['last']

How does the ' operator decide between need for 's and not?

Where is the GitHub page? :-)
What did you learn :-)
Who are you ?

Nice one
Your fault. It is possible to do both.
Apparently, it has been introduced in 7.3, which is pretty recent.
Yeah I had the same reaction last September when I saw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4496578. But my git history shows I disabled it again a day later. Maybe enabling it just in normal mode will make it stick this time.
Resources For Learning Git
> And so, every few weeks it seems, we get these posts from some techie who believes that his (it's always a man) experiences with social media are universal.

On the other hand, technical people are like rats. They're the first to pile on to fresh meat (there was even a prominent website by this name...), and they're the first to flee when the place is burning down.
>I don't want to have to make a decision every time I want to share a link to something interesting about what subset of friends I'm sharing it to. I don't want to be pressured to create circles of friends for different things.

And this is why I'm not on facebook

Sure, I'm cool with family baby photos, and "oh, my kid did X, y or Z, I'm so proud" you know, that's what I expect out of a family list. that's all well and good.

But if I have to wade through a gazillion "likes" and a bunch of half-baked emotionally-charged political rants to get at those things?

Nope. I'm logging off. Seriously, do you know how many messages I get a day that I actually have to deal with? It's a large number. It's not at all unusual for me to send 30 emails before I take my morning shower.

That's the thing about email. We've worked out an etiquette. Nobody is going to email me a link to a funny cat video; or email me an emotionally charged political rant. that's rude, and I'll tell family that is rude if they start doing that to me.

In fact, that's the thing I like about facebook the most; it is such a great platform for emotionally charged political rants and cute cat pictures that my family has moved all that stuff to facebook and off of email. I mean, I'm missing all the baby pictures now, but that's a price I can pay.
Legalize corruption and it goes off from ranks.
Rather than switching between rnu and nu, I simply have `set rnu` and absolute line number in my status line.
Diamond's secret agents in India.
Please - more about the steps and missteps is like water to dying men in a desert.
The burden of proof is on you. I'd like for you to demonstrate that claim 1 is indeed novel and so forth and not been presented in every sci-fie movie on Earth. And while you're at it, please provide some git repo for us mortals to enlighten us on what we've been all missing since the rise of AI.

If concept 3 is non-obvious to you then you have no right on claiming ignorance on patent law from our part.
I don't know if they always are. My older nephew spoke 'for' his slightly younger brother a huge amount, which I think probably either exacerbated or masked the younger ones language delays. (I wasn't involved in any of the diagnosis/therapy process so this is just my opinion).
Glad to know you like it! will send out a follow up email soon.
Removing garbage collection from the Rust language
:D

It doesn't care basically if it's encountering a dict ({}), an object, or a function/method.

If it's not a function then it's either a dict OR another object instance. it it's a function it applies it! Glas treats everything as potential functions or procedures (no arguments)
math sin: x
could be _anything_ really :)

Use '$' sign if you wish to refer to function's object explicitly like this:

a function name # could be application?
$ a function name # definitely function object to be referred!
Actually yes people do wish they took college more seriously and worked harder in their 20s.
> This blog post reads like like a fool arguing that the rules of chess are stupid.

No one is being forced to play chess.