skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's funny to read about the Microsoft developer culture now vs. when I left fifteen years ago.

MSFT was the PayPal, Google, etc. of our generation in Seattle. It spewed out startups of FYIV people in a short period of time.

At the time, it was very disruptive to hear that "ex-Microsoft engineers" were entering a market. There were a few things that seemed pretty common in the groups with which I had contact. (SQL, LAN, VC++, etc.)

1) QA as a first class function. SDETs were awesome, and they tried to staff projects with about two for each SDE. Testing tools were automated and accounted for huge amounts of code. Compatibility labs were huge. Breaking the build would be just short of a flogging offense.

2) A focus on maximizing productivity. Spend the money on the desk that can be raised or lowered. Spend the money on the newest, latest computers, and give them to anyone who asks, as many as they think they need. Locate beverages very close to everyone and subsidize outside businesses to provide food services. Give everyone a window office. It made it a lot easier to stay there from 8am to whenever. This also led to the diaspora of startups.

3) Scary-ass yelling matches in the hallways. People who had always felt they were smarter than the jocks and popular people in their youth were suddenly capable of establishing dominance by insulting other people, their intellects, and especially their work.

4) Readable code over clever code. This led to a lot of typedefs like LPCSTWCSRARSARTARSTA[1] and Hungarian notation[2]. So if you see MyMethod(lpszName); somewhere, you'll know where that came from.

People would leave after vesting (sometimes before and sometimes long after) with the idea of creating a product of their own with the good things that Microsoft taught them and without the bad things that they hated.

Very much like when we start thinking about having kids with the intention of not making the mistakes our parents did.

[1] Yes, Colemak.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_notation
The law puts it in the hands of the President, see this subthead: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6153056 ; he may of course delegate his authority, but the buck stops on the desk in the Oval Office.
I'm a bit lost for words on this case. On one hand, I can't help but feel it would have been good for Apple to get a taste of their own medicine. At the same time, I think this excessive patent protection is harming the industry...

In a perfect world, Apple would have never pursued Samsung in their frivolous extortion case, and this ban would never have reached the Obama admin. But this is a world motivated by cutthroat competition.

I'm tired of it.
It's somewhat disconcerting for Dart to merely be seen as "promising", especially given its competition.

It would take a lot of effort to do worse than JavaScript.

CoffeeScript is basically just JavaScript with a Ruby-inspired syntax.

TypeScript is only a very minimal set of improvements to JavaScript.

If it's doing things right, it should be blowing all three of those away with ease, especially given its origin. The fact that its uptake is so slow suggests that it isn't competing against them very well, which I take to be a bad sign going forward.
I've heard (from a friend working at Google) that Go is actually used a little bit inside Google. Obviously not as much as Java, or even C++ and Python. If Go survives I figure it would probably be used outside Google more than inside. After all, it's basically Java optimized for shorter time-to-first-demo, so it's best suited for small projects. Then again, programming languages rarely rise or fall based on merit; most times it's a matter of politics, hype or coincidence. The same will probably be true for Go and Dart.
I know where several startups are located. Wish I could bulk add.
If you want to turn this eternal discussion into results:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6152935
Dart is no more an attempt to replace the web with a walled garden than GWT is (which is what I work on). It is a tool, like Typescript, like CoffeeScript, like ClojureScript, like Emscripten. There's no "plan" to create a lock-in walled garden based around programming language.

Google is interested in making the experience of developing web apps better, and making web apps more performant. They have many different strategies for this: Chrome DevTools, AngularJs, Web Components and other spec improvements, Dart, Closure Compiler, GWT, etc. The company does not make money from selling the Chrome browser, and unlike Microsoft, it doesn't make money from selling an OS. The incentives are not aligned like the way they were with IE and Windows. At the end of the day, Google makes money from people using the web. The real threat is from the Web falling too far behind Native.

Also, the Web is far far bigger than the programming language Javascript. For the first 10+ years of the Web, people hardly even used JS except for form validation, and in general, on mobile, excessive amounts of JS lead to poor performance.

There's still a ways to go on just HTML and CSS, and I'd frankly be more concerned about fragmentation in that area rather than fixation on Javascript.

The way I see the potential of a DartVM is the same as OdinMonkey+asm.js. Dart compiles to JS, but DartVM will run it slightly faster, but it will always work on all browsers. Likewise, asm.js will work on all browsers, but will always run faster on OdinMonkey. Both Mozilla and Google have VMs that potentially bifurcate performance across browsers, but still produce outputs that can run (albeit slower)

The concerns you should have about Google misusing Dart I think should really be about Google misusing market share. It's not really Dart per se that's the issue, it's the fact that if Chrome is the dominant browser, Google can drop anything they want into it, not just Dart, but any APIs they want.
About your last point, Clojure's seqs enable code reuse. You can operate on lists, vectors, sets, maps, etc as seqs. I don't know about Interlisp, but Common Lisp does not unify these datatypes under such a common sequence abstraction.
There should be some way to track people on HN for throwing around fud like this. It's pretty easy to put out a garbage statement then move on to the next thread. Somehow, driving posters to a higher standard in what they write.
First of all, this effort and its result are fanastic!

Question: how close are sensor densities getting to present capabilities of glass in smartphones?

For example, if a 10 gigapixel (100000x100000) sensor existed that would fit behind an iDevice's lens, how much digital zoom cropping would we really be able to enjoy before we hit details that are bigger than pixels but smaller than the tiny lens can pass clearly?
If you are tired of having the same discussions over and over again:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6152935
YouTube adds Play icon to page titles so you can see which tabs are making noise
Actually, the justification for not going after banking or corporate malfeasance, according to Eric Holder, is that they're "Too Big to Jail".

I have to say, as a committed small r republican wary of executive power, this kind of crap makes me crave Teddy Roosevelt.
> (b) Damaging the test integrity which is designed to find bright kids, not just "well prepared for this one day" kids.

Either a test is important, or it is not important.

If it is not important, it is a waste of everyone's time and money, and ought to be scrapped.

If it is important, people will obviously try to game it.Therefore all tests should be resistant to gaming: the only way to do well at the test should be to actually be good at whatever the test is trying to measure. If a test doesn't have this proprty, it should also be scrapped, for the reasons you state and also because it is a waste of time and money.

I don't blame Princeton review for bad tests, I blame the people setting the tests.
As an attendee at Defcon right now I agree with you, it is a rather hostile group.

> Invites to parties being handed out to male speakers and not female speakers

My guess is this was a result of an oddball selection process rather than anti-female bias. I have never seen a party at Defcon didn't already have a huge surplus of males.

> Women stripping being used as a prize in hacker jeopardy

> Jeopardy game features the category "hot pussy"

> Objectifying content on slides

I find this whole Las Vegas scene to be gross. Most indoor places stink like cigarette smoke.

Nevertheless, let's not take Defcon and other Jeff Moss/Dark Tangent productions as representative of the "security community". There are a great many other people in security who go out of their way to be welcoming and respectful.

> Hacking devices of new users at conferences is considered completely acceptable

This is well known. One of the functions of Defcon is as an exploit/malware trading market.

> I can only conclude you don't want to be welcoming to new users.

Should they be? It's a place for amateur hackers, pros, double agents, Feds, and internationals to gather in the same place for a few days with a tacit understanding of some relaxed rules. It's a once a year opportunity for many attendees but its not for everyone.
It's interesting to compare the New Yorker coverage from January (paywall, but there's a summary): http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/01/28/130128fa_fact_...
This is why: "Education in South Korea is viewed as being crucial for success and competition is, consequently, very heated and fierce."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_South_Korea
It even runs along fine on my old ZTE Blade (the DOM updates are certainly not in a hurry, but the text field remains responsive).
DIY Drones: Home for everything about amateur Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
Do health motivation videos inspire you in startups?
I am actually inclined towards Ember.js since the time I was faced with this choice. I just wanted to take the opinion of all the experienced developers here, to back my choice or change it. Thanks for easing the choice. I'll go through the Ember docs. :-)
I think the risk is that nefarious people might, for example, wait for you to copy a (legitimate) URL, then overwrite the clipboard with a slightly different URL, sending whoever follows what you just copied to somewhere else if you don't notice. Seems to me that this trick would be just as effective at doing that though.
This is wonderful! Can you link any background info on corrupt's origin/agenda?
I guess joining PRISM has its advantages.
Hey! I adore Quartz and read it daily.

Though I've done UX testing and (the non-coding side of) design for a couple companies (one YC startup, one Boost, the second being my own), I don't think I'm qualified to work as a visual designer.

Before I worked in startups, I worked in journalism-- a Detroit business magazine and at the U of Michigan newspaper. My degrees are in econ and history. Is there any chance you're hiring for other positions, writer or otherwise?

I'm really passionate about reporting on the intersection of innovation and policy, but I'll write about anything. I'd just love to be a part of your organization.
Here's my problem with this line of thinking: Dart is supposed to replace one third of the triad of core technologies web developers use: HTML, JS, and CSS. It doesn't appear that in the long term it's intended to be transcompiled to JavaScript. CoffeeScript is only intended to be an alternative that transcompiles to JS. There's no effort to build a CoffeeScript VM. (C8? CoffeeMonkey?)

Angular, Ember, etc are just frameworks. They're not likely to be as long-lived as the triad of front-end web development technologies because the creation of such a framework has a significantly lower barrier to entry and adoption. There's no W3C committee overseeing development and there will be no W3C draft or standard for any of these somewhat ephemeral frameworks.

Core web development technologies are very stable and their development, deployment, and adoption happens quite slowly; on the order of decades. If Dart does become widely adopted (and with the support of browser markers) it'll likely remain in place for a long, long time, far longer than the latest JavaScript framework or veneer language de jure.

Even if Dart does become widely adopted, Dart hasn't got a hope of truly replacing JavaScript, at least for the foreseeable future (>10 years), as both a Dart VM and a JS VM would have to coexist in all browsers for reasons of backward compatibility. Yay, browser codebase bloat!
The problem I have with this argument, is, isn't the point of every technological advance to become widespread and Standards-Essential? If we're going to disallow them, why have patents at all? For "Look-And-Feel" patents?
Mozilla Playdoh
There are at least 2 forms of hypocrisy here:

a) Big > Small : smaller companies are subject to market forces and are expected to sink or swim as deemed by their own competitive merit, but Apple gets a hand when times are tough!

This is essentially a State-assisted protection of private wealth owned by the few; Tim Cook and all the mutual funds and hedge funds that invested in AAPL can now sleep well at night knowing that the American government has a Protectionism Put Option on AAPL.

b) Free trade, patents, et al are "the American way" as long as they benefit America, but the moment a foreign competitor uses the same tools and wins, oh no no no, we can't have that.

I believe that protectionism and jingoism ("Buy American") is how the American car industry, amongst others, survived for many decades despite being uncompetitive? At least, this is the gist of what I got from reading articles here and there. Ironically, such protectionism is not (always) in Americans' interest; I believe the car industry has successfully stymied the development of metro trains and other public transport options that would have made cars supremely unnecessary? Just take the MTR in Hong Kong or the MRT in Singapore to realize what you are missing.
Looks like we have them in a separate part of the site (http://ca-high-school-ratings.findthebest.com/) I'll be the first to admit we should have these joined into one another.. I'll have to bug that PM about it
They talk about privacy, but MTAs like Postfix can already encrypt mail via TLS when moving it to another host¹. GPG gives us a better guarantee, but more user overhead, and unreadable by many recipients.

Additionally SPF gives us a way to check if the sender address has been forged. GPG signing is more robust, but again, more user overhead.

Not to mention, I already have S/MIME support in my mail application and can get GPG support via a plug-in, but I use neither, because few recipients can handle it.

So what is new with Mailpile? What is it supposed to change?

In my opinion, if the goal is to make email more secure, we should look into ensuring that all MTAs is setup to support TLS and use it when delivering mail to other hosts (AFAIK Exim4 only announces STARTTLS when connecting to its submission port).

Getting SPF records setup would also be a plus.

This would go a long way in making email more secure, and only requires action from administrators of mail domains.

¹ http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html#smtp_tls_security_lev...
This really should say right up front that you should not compare it across browsers because it's serving significantly different code to the different browsers.
Dart is a solution for building and maintaining complex web apps. Googles JS web apps has 100's of engineers working on it spanning millions LOC. Google doesn't think it's possible to develop at this scale with vanilla JS which is why they've invested a ton of effort in developing the Closure Compiler/Library and GWT (i.e. what their big JS Web Apps use). The problems with the previous strategies is that they add boilerplate, artefacts and complexity on top of JS that slows down their build times to the point where some devs have to wait 24mins to see a live/edit reload cycle. Dart was built from the ground-up to manage complexity and to provide a consistent development experience with the goal of providing the fastest edit/reload dev cycles possible. As it's also built with the input of the VM engineers who helped create StrongTalk, Hotspot JVM, V8 VMs they are able to add features that enable a high-performance VM implementation and enable features like 'Snapshots' to provide instant start up times.

Google will never drop support for their 2 crown jewels, Chrome or Android. When Dart gets into Chrome and some of their big internet properties start to depend on it, you can pretty much guarantee that they'll never drop support for it. One of the mandates Google has is to improve the web, make it faster and make it possible for everyone to build richer more interactive web experiences so more people use and spend more time on the Internet. More time on the Internet means more time on Google, so developing and investing in technologies like Dart indirectly benefits them. It's also why any investments on improving the Internet remain supported, free and Open Source e.g WebP/M, SPDY, Chromium/Blink, V8, Closure Library, GWT, mod_pagespeed, Polymer and now Dart.

People like to confuse Google's dropping of support for their products where everything they create is fair game and can be dropped at anytime, what's not looked at, is how the product to relates to their entire ecosystem, whether it adds value and is in a growing technology/market.
I've got an M17x r3. It has 4 slots for RAM. Alienware gets badmouthed quite a bit, and it really isn't deserved. My M17x is built like a tank and it has an excellent keyboard. The components are also pretty easy to access for upgrades. I suspect many are put off by the way the machine looks, but if you disable the tacky lighting it looks like any other black laptop.

It's a great computer, but there are two major drawbacks. The first is battery life. With the dGPU enabled, it gets about 65 minutes. Any machine with such a powerful GPU is going to be about the same. It's more like 2-3 hours using the iGPU. The second downside is the extreme weight. The device itself weighs about ten pounds, and it's accompanied by the largest AC adapter I've ever seen. The adapter itself probably weights at least 3-4 lbs.

Other than that, it's amazing.
The PR problems come with success and size. It's impossible for any large organization, no matter how "non-evil" to avoid criticism and conspiracies. Google has done better than most in still maintaining good will, but obviously PRISM isn't helping, and Microsoft and Apple communities are both pushing the privacy angle. (If you really think these concerns are totally organically driven, I encourage you to look at complaints about 'google tracking you' before/after Android was launched, or follow the trail of Microsoft shell organizations and their whisper campaigns)

Google commands tremendous marketshare with Chrome now, and so people are going to be hyper-sensitive about anything it does. But I would read PPK on Blink for example (http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2013/04/blink.html) to see how Google is treating the Web.

Honestly, the Web has been driven forward tremendously in the last few years with HTML5, CSS3, WebRTC, etc but Javascript hasn't budged much, although performance has increased, the warts of the language have not been fixed, and TC39 is taking too long. That's why you're seeing everyone create languages that compile down to JS.

My biggest concerns are that if the problems of the Web platform aren't fixed, especially for mobile, a whole generation of people will be raised on native apps, and the most amazing platform for distribution of federated, transparent information in human history will lose.

Simply put, the Web is more important than Javascript.
Actually I did give a thought to Node.js/express and more pleasantly, the recent one called Mean.io. Mean.io is especially appealing to newcomers like me because it hides significant complexity in linking up stuff on the node.js platform. However, the only thing which puts me off is the instability/novelty of node and consequent unsuitability for production environments.
Django OTOH has been battle hardened, and there is help available if I hit a wall. Not at all to say that the node community is not helpful. It's vibrant and helpful but there are simply too many gotchas yet to be resolved, and more importantly, discovered and I do not want to be the one doing these discoveries, midway through my startup. :-)

Regarding ROR, I'd say I have never even seen the language or the framework. Since I have done previous work in NLP/ML I was inclined to learn python so that I can utilize the huge spectrum of Python based ML/NLP libraries, which I believe Ruby lacks.
> but I'm really turned off by this model of 'pay us in advance for developing a product that hasn't been market tested or validated

Um, you mean software consulting?

This model is beautiful. It's a bunch of email privacy advocates hiring a couple of skilled guys for a year to write the open source software we all wish existed.

Seems fair to me. I'm not so entitled as to demand someone altruistically create this for me.

And I explicitly _don't_ want them to make a business of it, because that changes the incentives completely.
This is a desktop mail client. It is also a web-mail you can run on a server somewhere if you so choose. It depends on how it is deployed.

Contrasting Mailpile with other tools, one difference is that the basic design is that of a search engine, not a tool for reading mail from folders. Most current desktop mail clients are built on top of a bad paradigm, in my opinion.

Another exciting thing about this model, is that since the UI is a website (of sorts), we can leverage the collective experience and creativity of the web design community. That is a much, much larger pool of talent than UI designers who know C++ or Objective C, or whatever.

Finally, making the app a web server means you get an API to interact with your e-mail almost for free.
If you know people at some organization which could become the sponsor of such a project, please let them know that there are interested developers out there!
When You Account For Pensions, The Boston Globe Sold For Negative $40 Million
>> All of this is academic because it assumes the AI would design a new smarter AI

I think this is a very reasonable assumption. It would be very difficult to just flat-out write a human-level AI, but it might be a little less difficult to start with a somewhat dumb AI with an ability to improve itself.
Why aren't the copy/cut/paste events be sufficient for this? There's no need to trigger a programmatic copy event in this context, since you're just modifying the default behavior of copy.
Thank you. I'm tired of getting the "thank you but we don't stream to your country" due to licensing concerns every time I want to watch Netflix or Hulu in France. (Yes I have bypassed this message with VPN).
JavaScript was originally as "open" as Dart. It was developed by Netscape and was only supported by their browser. It quickly became popular so Microsoft had to write their own implementation to stay competitive. Only after that JavaScript was standardized.
South Korean 15-year-olds rank No. 2 in the world in reading

Unmentioned is that written Korean was designed by an accomplished linguist (around 1500), making it very easy to learn. This in contrast to English, a bewildering mashup of incompatible spelling & phonetic rules made up by happenstance.
I understand. Thx!
Funny, it didn't make any news when I quit my job and started working on several non-money-making tech projects.
Comonads tend to well represent a notion of computing where you're isolating a particular section of your data in relation to its context. Compare this to monads which are often thought to layer computational context atop pure values.
And Gruber yesterday posted a link indicating that Apple's punishment of recent e-book trial was result of Amazon's good relation with Obama administration http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/08/02/amazon. I wonder what will he say now.