skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Most people in these kind of jobs actually believe that the job is necessary.

Really? Or do they secretly worry that it isn't?

> Especially in academic and administrative disciplines the very thought of their work not being useful will have most people very defensive and angry.

"No one gets in trouble for saying that 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall. Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true." -- PG, http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
Excellent article that I wish I had been able to read the first time I worked on a C library last year.

And speaking of Rust's dynamic linking support, what is the current status of Rust and shared object libraries? I think you can create them now if you include the Rust runtime. Is this correct?
> Afterward, she said, “I would go back to that person and he would say, ‘Oh, yeah, that should work.’ ” Each expert seemed to dwell in his own private silo, so that whenever she crossed from one discipline to another, she would run into the same wall of constricted thinking.

I do a lot of cross-protocol work, and I've seen that a lot from "domain experts".

Me: Why can't we just do X?

Them: It would violate the standards, and industry practice!

Me: how could anyone tell?

Them: Uh... they couldn't. Good idea. Let's do it.

There's a danger in letting your brain ossify. Cray used to hire young people for precisely this reason:

http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/home/tef/cray/tribute.html

> Once asked why he often hires new graduates to help him with early R&D work, he replied, "Because they don't know that what I'm asking them to do is impossible, so they try."
Meh. It doesn't even support getters and setters.
like my doctor used to like job about the differences between terrorists and the government, at least you can negotiate with the terrorists.

hopefully people are finally coming to that realization that the common quip about the government treating itself as above the law is actually true
Let me preface this by saying that when I was 19 and Hackers and Painters was just published, there was no book more subversive to the natural order of things. H&P changed my life so completely that less than a year after reading it I was standing in the YC office in Mountain View for a YC interview.

And even after subsequent rejection, deciding to change majors to CS, going back to school to seek of the advice of Olin Shivers, and actually getting a CS degree, I practically kept it by my bedside. There was nothing even close to as influential in my decision to move to Cambridge and get reinvolved with startups as soon as I graduated.

But while H&P is is great at showing people like me that you can succeed in business without an MBA, and in fact might be at an advantage, it might be too subversive in that sense as well. Later essays that weren't included in H&P tell a clearer story. Black Swan Farming and What We Look For In Founder and Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas are essays that might have affected my thinking back then.

I don't think anything could have changed my path away from startups; any book containing Why Nerds Are Unpopular and How to Make Wealth was destined to have a profound affect on my life. But while VC is somewhat demonized and stories are told about running out of money, I think there is a certain glorification of the process that
translated in my brain to "build product -> seek seed funding (YC) -> get users -> get VC", when I might have been better served by something telling me in big, bold l
etters that while all this is great, if you're just starting out, don't just make something people want, make something people want to pay you for.

I didn't learn the lesson fully (after all, everyone I knew was building facebook clones back then) until being part of my first exit at a startup where we took no money
. It was so refreshing to fund the company off customers' payments that even for my latest side project I found ways to make people want to pay me for it before I had built anything.

So while I don't think Hackers & Painters gives any wrong advice, I think that you are such a good essayist that you unintentionally glorified the traditional VC-back
ed startup process to someone as young as I was. If I'd read more about how to be a cockroach, and had someone tell me that my first company should focus on making so
mething people will pay me for immediately, maybe I would have had a better chance of success at 19 instead of in my mid-twenties.
> The sales and marketing economy is zero sum.

This is false. I'll let those more gifted than myself to make the argument:

http://www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_life_lessons_from_a...
Farage has started pushing that line a bit, but it seems to be more a way of pulling in some more hardline conservatives than a strong personal conviction
Djangoboilerplate - A Django boilerplate project for deploying to AWS
I know people in the industry. They have a terrible reputation and treat their maids horribly. They were also caught buying fake yelp reviews.
Really Scrapable Web App Is A New Way To Learn About Web Scraping
I actually am using them in a production node.js server so it better has support =)
> OTOH I really liked the idea of the minecraft world - where the cube basis is universal and malleable, and sacrificing nicer graphics for that - though the actual game doesn't grab me.

I feel like I should point out, the "idea of the minecraft world" came from Infiniminer. Notch's contribution was the part that doesn't grab you :)
> 20g fat (5g saturated), 27g carbs (14g sugar), 10g protein.

I have a slice of raw (aquaculture) salmon in my fridge that's 67% water, 19.9 grams of protein and 14% fat (so roughly 14 grams fat, 20 grams protein). 14 grams fat, 20 grams protein (and sugar!) doesn't sound great, no.

And the fish tastes great with some soy and wasabi (or fried, or steamed or...)...

[edit: and most of that is not saturated fat]
You're right. I think I got ahead of myself in what I was thinking, conflating the rewrite of the C++ system into Go with the some of the other speedups I've been reading about coming from other languages/frameworks.

I'd be interested to know more from Matt about speedups or slowdowns in specific subsystems that are feature-for-feature complete (as opposed to comparisons of Go to C++ where the Go rewrite is simply doing less stuff because lots of cruft was tossed out).
I love the creativity in this, it's just wonderful. Any chance of slightly more detail about the rules? Are chests populated with treasure when you design the map or is it generated randomly during an encounter? Is there a 'goal' or is it a just explore-neverending story type game?
By the threshold of technology you mention (intersteller travel to habitable planets) you would certainly have the technology to grow and maintain an artificial womb. So you just stock the ship with self-replicating printing machines that can deploy artificial wombs, and have millions of frozen egg / sperm to populate them.

Really though, at that point, you might as well send the learning AI robots instead. Fleshy emotional meat bags with difficult to replicate reproduction are a liability.
Running Headless Selenium with Chrome
Suggestion for the "monitor" problem - code in a quake-style terminal such as yakuake or iTerm2's hotkey window. Vim and sublime work excellently here. Add a hair of transparency so that you can read your reference material "through" the console screen. And of course, tmux.

Between that and getting browser hotkeys into muscle memory, I managed to shrink my development/debug environment down from 2 19" monitors to a single 13" laptop screen. And when it's been necessary, I can happily go smaller.
On the same day the New York Times labels Djamila Bouhired a "terrorist wife" in their obituary for Jacques Verges, one of the most influential and intellectual lawyers in French history.

The medias enthusiasm to coddle up to the government and military is a dangerous development.
In this thread a man being detained for 9 hours has been compared as worse than mafia members murdering people, now apparently the look on the faces of hte officers is a serious abuse too.

This whole thread has destroyed any credibility HN had.
Inside .NET Frameworks
Its "amateur" radio, not to be stolen and taken over by encrypted taxi dispatchers or pay per view encrypted TV broadcasters. The FCC likes to separate human activities by frequency band, and gets all out of whack when people try to sneak around their intentions. In no small part because of licensing procedures and fees which are darn near zilch for ham radio and quite expensive process for some LMR and broadcasting operations.

Its also kind of vital for international communication into repressive regimes (worse than the USA in 2010s anyway). Think of a kid in Wisconsin talking to a dude in Russia during the peak of the cold war, that kind of thing. Now "everybody knows" that you can trivially embed a one time pad, but at least we're not sending character groups containing who knows what to each other. So pretty much everywhere except utterly failed states, you can get an amateur radio license and just kind of hang out on the air. Its the original techie social network, from decades before the internet.

Finally at least in theory its supposed to be one big party line for general purposes and emergency communications. So partitioning the service into little encrypted groups who intentionally would not be able to talk with each other, serves exactly what purpose given the intentional regulatory design to encourage the exact opposite goal? It would be like allowing encrypted messages on Hacker News comments, which would serve exactly what purpose, if any?
At the moment? Large enough that it realistically can't be done. Millions and millions. Millions of tons of equipment, too.

Emerging technologies (nanotech...) may be able to reduce this, but for the moment it's perfectly realistic to consider scenarios where new colonies usually regress to 18th/19th century technology for a few generations. This, of course, makes colonizing uninhabitable planets such as Mars... hard.

Mars we could probably do, it'd just be costly. An interstellar variant? Not likely.
The ICO states the following:

"When considering alternatives to cookies it is important to look at the broader privacy context. Focusing solely on cookies is missing the point."

Source (page 25): http://www.ico.org.uk/for_organisations/privacy_and_electron...

Personally I think the world would have been better served if they just put the law on browser makers and get them to provide a clear and consistent interface to whether a web site is tracking the user.
>I'm out of the status race, and people envy me for the freedom

They probably envy your newfound status.
http://static.ow.ly/docs/0%20Tilly%2085_5Xr.pdf
The whole idea is to get a functioning human civilization in another untainted place.

AI robots surely can't do that. It's not about research, it's colonization.
If I had enough money not to care anymore, I'd still write code because I feel it achieves something worthwhile. I've contributed a bunch to KDE in the past, I would just work on it "full time" (aka, whenever I wanted to).
Learn to Talk in Beggars’ Cant
So you think Go is 100 times faster and therefore better than Python for absolutely everything and everyone should use it. Did this benchmark convince you of this, did you already believe it, or do you think this benchmark is great because it help to convince others?
Starbucks, Google and the future of work
Ask HN: Know a decent Gmail library for Node?
I'm looking to authenticate users, search their inbox, and integrate those search results into an app I'm working on. Can anyone recommend a good NodeJS library for this kind of functionality?
"The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger"

I don't know what to call this fallacy, but it needs a name. In a way it's similar to saying "nature abhors a vacuum," "this evolutionary strategy aims to", "the market will.." etc. Those are all personifying emergent phenomenons. They are non person things that behave amusingly as if they have a personality. The "ruling class" is different though because it is made of of people. I don't think the author is trying to suggest thousands (or millions) or people conspired to make "the masses" waste 30 hours per week on motivational seminars, but using that language makes it sound like he is, sort of, without committing to it too much.

Worse, it absolves one from exploring the most interesting part of this argument. If There is a literal conspiracy, who? how? details, please. If it's a metaphor for some sort of emergent phenomenon, explore that. What are the forces at work that make this happen. Is it the proliferation of zero (or small) sum games like litigation or advertising? Is it about opaque performance in modern snowflake jobs? This is the most interesting part of the discussion and "The ruling class has" just absolves the writer of addressing it.
...and regular corn does too. Is this news?
Zipcar - Office Tour [slideshow]
How and why learn web development
> Eggs. Milk. Protein powder. Even cheese.

Am I wrong, or is "one of these things, not like the other"?

What is "protein powder" (made from)? To me it seems like the odd one out? (I'm not saying you shouldn't eat protein powder, but -- it is made from something, right -- most likely(?) powdered egg whites?)
> why do you provide implementations for calloc and strdup instead of letting them be set as well.

For me personally it's because I never use calloc religiously. I implement calloc so that I can forward those allocators to my dependencies (like curl). I guess you have a point there.

With regards to strdup: My version changes the interface in that it's allowed to pass NULL through it in my own code. I know I did not do that in the blog post because I did not want to start a discussion about that API change :-)
Chance to Win Free Copies of Xcode 4 Cookbook by Packt Publishing
Readers would be pleased to know that we have teamed up with Packt Publishing to organize a Giveaway of a brand new book Xcode 4 Cookbook.
Well, pointless busywork was a staple of my high school and under days of math. Once I got to college, I had a professor for Calculus I that said our grade was the four tests + the final or just the final - whichever grade was higher. Having taken Cal in high school, I just showed up for the final and got a B+ (I reversed the damn derivatives of ln/e).

That was the best math class I never took. To be fair, my discipline wasn't anything scientific so needing math wasn't in my college curriculum (switched from business to psychology then to art and advertising). I took another class, Discrete Math, from the same teacher my senior year as an elective and absolutely loved it. I never skipped a day.

He was a great teacher, and the way his class was set up for grading and not really giving a shit about homework was perfect. If I were to ever teach math later, his format would be how I would do it.
Web Services: Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)
Quick Study: Neuroscience: Crosswords don’t make you clever
Did he used to be a freelancer?
Figuring out new tools and codebases is a skill one tends to acquire very quickly in that line of work.
While I think the overly negative comments are overblown, the source (imo) is that there is definitely a group of people that think Notch is the best thing since sliced bread, and the truth is that he had a somewhat meritorious technical accomplishment that went onto be a commercial success, and they cant stand it.
Get to Know the Possible Feature Locations
American Cattle Are Sick
Just how do you propose eating without working? Someone has to work so she or others can eat.
Having something like REPL available makes, IME, learning a new language much easier - and this is a sort of hodge-podge way to get something similar for HTML/CSS, so I can see why it might be an advantage.

Less so for when you're at a stage where you can do large projects - because you're not redoing things as often, but when it's just short snippets where you want to drill multiple variations to try out ideas and to get the stuff wired into your head, it seems to be advantageous to have that sort of dialogue with the computer.
Object Oriented Programming in Go
Part of the problem is that it's really hard to quantify the social value of failure. So, a lot of people opt to take the easy path and do more busy work. At least, then they may show that their busy work had some productivity and output.

I see this all too often in software development. Instead of people chasing wildly challenging ideas, they choose to re-write things over and over. How many programming languages do we really need? How many ORMs and MVC frameworks? How many template engines? Do we really need to port all of those libraries to yet another platform?

It seems its socially more acceptable to chase the incremental improvements (or illusory improvements) than to chase those things that have high risk of failure.

Let's say you're a musician. Would you rather spend your life working on a entirely new genre of music that ends up never catching on? Or, would you rather pursue the path of getting signed to a major label by churning out rehashes of previous hits? At least the second path gives some opportunity to pay the bills while still doing something that resembles what you love.

As a society we need a better way of 'paying' people to explore, experiment and invent. We need better ways to capture the multitudes of failures and re-incorporate them. I think this used to be the realm of the academic, but it seems that the academic institution has now become just a hand of the corporate machine.
Only problem with those waffles, is that if you eat 100% of your "daily"* protein needs, you eat too much sodium.

In case of "daily" needs, I think protein is a bit of an odd one out -- if you work out hard, you need a lot more* protein than the "average" don't ever move at all person. I'm not even sure where the US daily values are from/what they relate to. If they truly are average, I suspect they are wildly wrong for anyone that actually exercise their bodies in a healthy way.
People here at HN don't just know how use a search engine ... they write search engines.
I remember being contracted out for IT support to a government agency whose sole purpose was representing workers in government agencies. The entirety of its existence astonished me, and as you can imagine, absolutely nothing was accomplished in the 3 weeks I was around. One employee spent most of her time procuring special furniture and equipment for a self-perceived disability (she was perfectly capable), others whiled the day away in "meetings" and water cooler discussions. They could not, however, be bothered to observe that the reason their office server was not functioning was due to its power cord not being plugged in. I wish I was making this up.
I agree .. but I also think that technological change is exacerbating old stresses in the system.
I thought it was a great and edifying book, but towards the end he did the same thing as in this article. He went off preaching half baked ideas about morality like a hippy.

His list of bullshit jobs here is so slippery it undermines his basic point. If private equity and all the corporate lawyers vanished there would be serious ramifications. Nothing capital intensive would get done, unless you instituted fiat capital allocation, but we know that doesn't work. And what's not bullshit about modern doctoring and nursing? 90% of the time they're treating lifestyle ailments for which the treatments don't actually do very much. What's not bullshit about being a teacher of tenth graders who can barely read?
Return of the Stock UIKit
https://medium.com/design-ux/310c439876fd
Sorry, I guess my sarcasm wasn't apparent. Of course it's not the same.
Totally agree with Zeteo's assessment - only thing I would add is that people shouldn't assume someone else'e job is 'bullshit' simply because they can't directly see or appreciate the value it creates.

For example: in the case of corporate leadership, it is easy and appealing to suggest they aren't creating any direct value... i.e. fire the leadership and 'widgets' will still get made. The problem with this thinking is that the output from some individuals only shows up in the medium to long term... take away great leadership from a company and they will make the numbers for the next few quarters, but in a year they will be out-maneuvered and out-performed by the competition. In today's economy it's not about how many widgets you make, it's about making the right widget in the first place... figuring that out is a lot harder than actually making the thing in the end.

The value some jobs create is more difficult to view directly, but is no less valuable in terms of delivering things people want, that they are willing to pay for - i.e. creating wealth. Investors understand this very well, which is why they are willing to pay huge sums to top leadership.

As a final thought, if you really want to 'reap the benefits' or our more productive society, you can work 15 hours starting today. The tradeoff is that you'll need to move to the middle of Colorado, buy a small plot of land, build your own house and purchase a straight edge razor. If you want to enjoy the vast benefits (however small) that our progressive society enjoys, then you also need to live within that system and work in some way to push things forward... however incrementally.
See Outreach links from the Racket Community here:

http://www.racket-lang.org/learning.html

One of the relevant features of Racket is that so many fundamental decisions are based upon teaching and learning programming.
When you're trying to argue that strict and unconditional equality is good for people, and your only supporting argument includes the Medici family as a positive example, you're doing it wrong.
Erlang is slow
I figured the same, but then I realized the use. Even if your input key is unique, it does not mean that every bit is uniformly distributed. For example a counter has zero upper bits with high propability. By ensuring that the mapping is uniform you can take any number of bits from the result (say the first 16 bits for a hash table with 65536 entires) and retain uniformity.
Wow. Interesting take on things. I may have to think about this a bit.
One of the best things I did for myself was buying a 24" display, super nice Filco keyboard, and a good mouse. Pair all this with a table that is adjustable and a nice chair.
I haven't used them (yet, I'm planning on it) but Bugsense is free for OS.

http://www.bugsense.com/pricing
Choosing a payment provider for your Europe-based SaaS startup
Sharing an email address is not the same as sharing email, is it? At least your reply just confused me more. :)
Except Uber is livery cars, and these have been around for ages. People regularly take them to the airport. The only difference is Uber handles the booking and billing via app instead of over the phone.

NYC cabs are well regulated and work just fine, they all accept credit cards and will take the route you ask for. If I feel like paying more for a more plush ride, fine, I can use a livery but otherwise $25 to LaGuardia is a good deal.
> All that has resulted in is a security arms race which doesn't benefit anyone.

On the contrary, if we lack low level predators on a short feedback/evolution cycle, then the high level ones operating on a longer cycle will be more effective when the threat environment changes abruptly.