skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>And here's a different, more controversial point. We used to have psychiatric disorders called hysteria and homosexuality. Now those have been reclassified out of existence.

I don't think that homosexuality is a good example to illustrate your point that ADHD might not be a "real" disorder. There's no question that there are people who are homosexual, but we no longer refer to homosexuality as a disorder because we no longer believe that it requires treatment. If ADHD were to parallel homosexuality in this regard, then there would be people who actually have ADHD, but we would stop viewing this as an abnormal variation in behavior.

Your example of hysteria is a better one to illustrate your point though. We no longer believe that hysteria is a disorder because we no longer recognize it as an actual state of being.
Smart Glass Windows
> I live on a boat that I've paid with cash, and thus own.

Man, you're living the dream. I'm in Brazil, real estate prices in the big cities are on par with US or Europe, but credit is worse (interest rates are 9-10%). I'm starting to entertain this option, which would be perfect since we have such a long coast. I also love to be in contact with nature. The price of a decent 30 feet sailboat is half the price of a 1 bedroom downtown apartment (plus, you don't have land tax), so it also makes sense financially.

Do you have any experiences to share?
I have the exact opposite reaction: a site that allows me to use my google account and not create another one will get me to sign up more readily. Adding persona support is being considered.
While that would be cool, the concept of never owning your land smacks of feudalism. It's almost like we're sharecroppers to the government. Taxes are important, however, those taxes could be collected instead by taxing the consumption of necessary resources rather than just having the piece of ground. For example, fire protection -- it could be argued that the virtue of owning land itself doesn't necessarily require fire protection. So rather than using the land as effective collateral to ensure tax payments, why not simply charge the landowner for fire protection in lieu of taxes? If they refuse to pay, their land isn't seized (as is the case now,) they merely have to assume the fire risk. Of course, getting insurance on the land (or improvements) would necessarily require fire protection, so the tax base would be minimally effected, yet not make a person subject to losing their home and land as a result of taxation.

Water and sewer is already paid for by taxes on those services. Really the big issue is with the schools, however existing income and/or sales taxes could compensate.

The problem with taxed land is that the taxable value determines the taxed amount rather than some other, more objective measure. Valuations on land and improvements are subject to external, market forces and by their nature are unfair. Imagine a family that purchased unused Napa farmland 100 years ago. Their real income has stayed the same (or declined) yet their taxes have increased with no correlation to their income. Even if the land was prime vineyard, unless they're actually making income from it, the effective output of the land didn't change from when they purchased it. So by the mere fact that they chose not to plant grapes and produce wine, they could lose their land due to an inability to pay the taxes. That then puts economic pressures on landowners that would lead them to selling out to large conglomerates.

For example, if you have prime farmland and choose not to capitalize on it, you'd have a big incentive to sell-out to a company like Monsanto, or else lose the land or go bankrupt paying the taxes. Yet if you were taxed on the land's income (and services consumed,) you'd be able to afford the taxes which would be based on output rather than potential output.

This would benefit everyone, except perhaps country property appraisal offices. As it is now, you're taxed based on potential market value and not necessarily real value. Real value can't be determined until someone actually pays money for a property -- anything before the actual purchase is just somewhat educated speculation.
The whole Palantir no sales people mantra is kind of not true. You don't sell 7 or 8 figure deals without a sales cycle/process.

Also, yes, there are some businesses where aggressive sales aren't that important. But most companies want to move up into the larger deal size at some point...at which point you definitely need a sales person. So let's cut the BS about sales people being less or more important than any other function in the company. It's so tiring.
Foursquare check-ins tell stores where to set up shop
I like the honesty. And the humility. Nice to see a public figure say, not for me.
Couldn't you goof off 20% instead?
Facebook - value themselves at $100bn, value their customers and developers as dirt. Very unclassy.
Although Einstein worked in the patent office, didn't he?

Some jobs don't matter and on top of that freedom is hard to manage, but the idea that we're all doomed sounds like something an anthropologist would imply in 400-1000 words.
Dealing With Food Allergies When Flying
Why is the overhead so great?
> I'm a mechanical engineering by schooling (what am I doing writing code?!) and it still routinely shocks me the sort of intriguing misconceptions I hear coming out of the mouths of very smart, very technical people.

That's true, and I've had similar experiences, but it doesn't argue against my saying that these engineering disciplines have many basics in common.

My only reason for posting was to argue against the idea that different engineering fields have no common base. They either do, or they're not based in science, which is the common base for all engineering fields.

As to a new project that has little in common with existing projects or established engineering fields, the obvious solution is to depend on basic science rather than nonexistent engineering projects, which would be the best approach to a project like this one.

All new engineering projects teach us one thing -- no matter how many advance expectations and predictions, by the time the project is operational, all of us will be educated in new principles that no one anticipated.
I see only benefits to releasing something like this proposal. Even if absolutely nothing comes of it, we all learned some interesting Physics, Musk learned what happens when you publish your unfinished proposals, others may start thinking about the problem and come up with a different solution and finally, the cynics can point out how bad the idea was to begin with. Of course the cynics won't realize that working on these ideas and in this case even publishing the work are the reason that Elon Musk runs Tesla and SpaceX and they don't.
"Jekyll" test attack sneaks through Apple App Store, wreaks havoc on iOS
You've definitely got a good point there, but I think you're being a bit unfair to the author also. SpaceXes and Teslas are by far the exception to the kind of companies SV is funding. They're probably only funded because it's Elon Musk behind them.

VC/Angel in SV has made enormous strides in working out how to reduce risk in entrepreneurship and is, to be honest, fairly incredible at selecting the companies that are going to work. YC is even better than most. The problem the author is talking about is that we (well, you) have become so good at selecting the winning companies that we're possibly throwing away the real risky bets that could be even bigger wins simply because an MVP and traction can't be found before lots of cash is on the table.

Of course, the exception to the author's point is, I believe, Planetary Resources.
Why does every government agency dealing with business have an obsession with "detailed business plans"?

The key to regulating companies is clearly to require them to write 30 pages of creative writing detached from the reality of how the business will operate a few months later.

How about a few page summary of the business with profiles of the team members, or pitch deck, without all the useless detail.
But it's still no different to any other language. An XML element has two collection members, one representing the attributes, and another representing the child nodes.

How is this different from a Java object which contains two list members called "attributes" and "children"?

How is this different from an S-Expression containing two lists?

How is this different from a json object like {"attributes":[...], "children":[...]}? Bear in mind that there is no requirement for JSON lists to be homgeneous. {"things":[1,true,"hello",3,{"addressee":"world"},[{"greeting":"Hola"},7],false]} is a perfectly valid JSON object. You don't have to define it as {"numbers":[1,3], "strings":["hello"] ...}.

It is a pretty common behaviour, that if you want a homogeneous list of things that differ, then you make abstractions until the differences disappear, e.g in an OO situation, you go up the inheritance tree until you are at the lowest common base class. In an XML situation, that common base class is "Node".

Even in a strongly typed language that requires homogeneity in lists, the only thing you know about the list members is that they can be cast to the same type, not that the members are of that type and no other, and certainly not that they all have the same name. Consider a C++ array of CFruit objects. It may have a member that is of class CBanana, one that of class CApple, and another of class COrange. If you want to do something COrange specific with the oranges, then you have to perform dynamic_cast<COrange> on any member of that list you suspect of being an orange. The same is true in a duck-typing situation.

The reason for my male & female example is that you would normally simply have a list of people. Of course, if your model contains no base that is common to both men and women, then you can't expect the machine to work that out, but if Man and Woman both inherit from Person, or if there is no Man or Woman, just Person with a member that specifies a gender, then it's trivial.
Gotta keep the people busy so they don't focus on the real issues.
I don't think the article is setting up a dichotomy at all - there is no "sales" or "engineers" there. It is more about the mismatch in communication that often happens between sales and engineering teams (and ones in bigger companies at that). Each team is trying to get the other to do what they want.
So does that mean no winter class then?
That is great to hear! Of course if ES7 takes another 10 years...
The LSE should be deeply embarassed that this person is one of their professors. His assumptions are incredibly juvenile.
Yup. If I'm paying you as an employee of my government then you can either choose to answer questions on your work so that I can evaluate it or you can find a job elsewhere. Want to take the fifth when testifying before Congress. Fine. But you can't work for the government any more.
No offense, but I think you are seriously underestimating several domains of knowledge.
This looks great. My favorite resources are those that assume prior programming knowledge and aim to get the reader up to speed quickly with the specifics of the language, not programming in general. If anything, I think I'll start studying pattern matching :)
Whether or not they could do better is separate from the question of whether it's a browser that can handle modern sites and applications. It can.
I'm as impatient as you are :) Emulating 64-bit integers is pretty slow in modern runtimes...
ECMAScript 4 had to be dropped when people realized that turning JavaScript into a JS-Java hybrid increased complexity rather than decreasing it. But the process of drafting ES4 and then disputing whether to go forward took a lot of time.

And don't forget that IE6 was Microsoft's latest and greatest for a long time, with little prospect of an upgrade. When IE progress was frozen with huge market share, the prospect of updating JS seemed like a pipe dream.
Why is everything beautiful after Steve Jobs? It's idiotic. Elegant, whatever, but beautiful?
The Real Neuroscience of Creativity
Ask HN: TechStars startup needs help from hackers - please take a 2 min survey
1215? What's wrong with Euclid?
I can pretty much guarantee the author doesn't know what sales people actually do. Assumptions lacking experience makes this article a waste of time. I'd suggest he tries to figure out how hard it is to get someone to actually talk on the phone, much less make a large purchase, and he would change his tone.

What engineers generally don't understand is how hard it is to get people interested, qualify out prospects who are a waste of time, make your stuff a top priority, and most importantly build trust. Engineers only see a very small part of sales. Unfortunately what they see is the gaps in the product, and the customer's requirements that may not match theirs. Most people hate sales, keep that in mind when you consider how hard of a job it is. With biases like this, it is a miracle a sales team can deliver.
What would be interesting is if issue trackers allowed users to pay actual money for features. Many times I find myself saying "I care strongly enough about ____ that I'm willing to pay ____ but it's not worth my time to read the codebase of ____ and fix it myself"
Love it. Balanced utilizing github for public discussions is an absolutely amazing approach to running a company. I have to imagine that validating their features before even building them does wonders for their development schedule.
Hacks to boost your audience numbers
How to make money selling a free product.
Yeah, I don't want to worry about motivation; the proposal itself is prima facie unserious. Perhaps Musk was just tired of being asked about it all the time. Perhaps he has a nefarious motive. Ultimately, I don't know or care.
Yes Lines-ruby is similar to scrolls with richer data types and support for ActiveRecord and Rack loggers out of the box. It also provides the parser to extract the data back.
The cost of the hyperloop is equivalent to the sum of every single VC investment (including life sciences, cleantech etc. not just software) made in the last quarter.

There's nowhere near enough money in the VC world to justify the kind of investment it would require. As it happens the biggest VC rounds in recent history have gone to transportation companies like Fisker and Better Place, but even those are in the hundreds of millions rather than the billions something like Hyperloop would require.
could you please send me your status report? thanks!
Looks like someone needs a V8.
JSC should build cleanly on its own (e.g. no dependencies on anything on top of it.) It's possible some of the build scripts have developed a bizarro dependency on other portions of the repo, but we'd happily take patches to fix those issues.

As far as APIs, JSC has provided a completely API and ABI stable C API for 7-ish years, and there's an ObjC API built on top of that now. Unfortunately the nature of C APIs for interacting with language runtimes makes it somewhat clunky and hard to use perfectly - C++ makes this easier as you can make types with constructors and destructors to make a lot of the otherwise manual work (ref()/deref(), etc) entirely automatic. Unfortunately C++ makes it easy to make an API that has a stable interface, but still isn't ABI stable.
I think people forget that Minecraft was literally just a side project for Notch while he had a "real" job.

It was his fun thing to do when he was bored.

As a programmer, he's clearly capable, but I think he serves better as a director than someone who is trying to tackle an entire game by themselves.
Yeah there are plenty of JS libraries for large numbers, but all of them are a bit of a hack. They are not as fast as native compiler/interpreter support, and there is no obvious way to integrate the logic into other native functions such as JSON.parse and JSON.stringify. So you have to create your own JSON parser which is not as fast like I did: https://github.com/datalanche/json-bignum
Teleborder (YC S13) Uses SaaS To Cut Through Immigration Red Tape
http://picturesofpeoplescanningmstags.tumblr.com/

(which I made in a fit of apparent prescience last year.)
No, I do think he's right. They might be honestly curious about the details of living on a boat, but in the end not really that interested in pursuing it for themselves. Many think of it as something they might really like to try out for a year or two... tops. others, likely see the appeal but realize that it's not a realistic option for them (spouses, children, pets, etc.). If everyone wanted to live on a boat too, there is no way your costs would stay the same (slip costs would go through the roof).
Concluding Part of Building a Hacker News clone in Django
If you have money and resources, sure perhaps the sales cycle in Enterprise is dead. The part I think is missing from this article is that rarely are systems this simple. Most Enterprise level systems require some sort of "integration" where there are several moving parts. A good salesmen is able to pitch why your product, or company can perform this. Perhaps Atlassian has enough momentum now to not need a salesforce, but what about smaller companies that are trying to get customers? How do you convince them to buy a product that is still in development? Your article speaks to features specifically-- I've seen first hand a good sales person can portray a positive story that makes users gloss over missing "must-haves" and trust your team can deliver these as part of a project.
It's really refreshing to get such fair retrospection on himself from such a pillar of indie game dev.
That's ridiculous. You shouldn't need millions to just trade bitcoins. Some of those requirements are arbitrary and needless hurdles like being "professionally qualified". And then some are just track people that use bitcoin and what they are doing with it.

Does this apply to all bitcoin companies like it said, or just exchanges?
Pattern matching, immutability, option types, combinators, traits are not advanced features in Scala. They are fundamental concepts. To be productive in Scala, write in Scala. Otherwise, you will needlessly waste a huge chunk of your life, including having to go back and clean up your messes.
So funny! I came in here to post the same thing.

Same here. Earlier in my career I had that same sort of "we don't need no stinkin' sales-people" mindset, but once I started a startup and really started focusing on what it takes to sell something, I started to see things a bit differently. I've gained a new-found appreciation for the value of good sales-people, and I've always learned a lot about why bad sales-people are so damned annoying.

FWIW, for anybody coming from an engineering background, who is interested in learning sales, I'm a big fan of the book Mastering The Complex Sale by Jeff Thull. His approach is based on NOT doing the stereotypical "bad salesperson" stuff and actually having intense focus on delivering real value to customers.
My company creates Facebook apps and have multiple FB accounts for testing purposes. They're not going to kick him off FB for having two accounts, come on.
I know there are web services for working with mail like Context.io. Barring calling that, they probably get the data through IMAP or some other way to talk to Google, which likely has a NodeJS library.

Auth could then be treated separately as oauth/openid does it. I know I've requested permission for looking up the user profile including their gmail user ID before with that.

Honestly, though, most people who do anything significant with GMail end up writing a browser extension to get more access than you could ever get with APIs.
He made a game, by himself, that was awesome and genre busting and fun to play even when it was in the "alpha" stage. Millions of people played that version of the game and millions of people loved it. Just because it wasn't perfect doesn't diminish that achievement.
Diigo, A Tool For Highlighting And Adding Sticky, Gets A Facelift
>Furthermore, the stock market isn’t influenced by value today like it was thirty years ago.

This simply isn't true. It was nearly 30 years ago that Warren Buffett published his article "The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville" arguing that the market didn't accurately value many companies, and that anyone could become rich by taking the time to find market inefficiencies. And in the article he described the approach he had already been using for nearly three decades. There have always been discrepancies between stock prices and companies' true values.
It is not wrong. To make matters worse you'd need to look at the history books to better appreciate what indeed actually is "groundbreaking tech" and how it evolves. Science and technology is nudged along with micro breakthroughs. The history books are full of what appear to be big breakthroughs but when you look past the surface you'll discover how they really happen. Your experience of VC firms appears to be very limited, I'm guessing though you were top in your class (probably two years ago), and now think when you say something, it automatically becomes "the word".
What Palantir is doing (at least in the way they talk about it publicly) seems to be more about the mentality than anything else. If you consider that everyone in the company who touches the customer is responsible for selling then you can change the culture of how you sell.

For example, I see customer support as the most important aspect of sales now for SaaS companies. It is likely to be the first, and one of the most common, touch points for any customer. So getting the customer support team to realize they are selling too is crucial to success.
Mlog: Comfortable lightweight C++ logging library
Meditation and Longevity
The problem with documenting internals is that it becomes a contract. Developers then start relying on those documented behaviors, and it later becomes much more difficult to change them.

It's bad enough as is with developers relying on undocumented behavior, see the troubles Wine (and Microsoft as well) with applications that touch Windows internals.
Just to add, you can do this in an even simpler form and cater it toward your child's age. For example, instead of drawing a detailed maze like that, you can build a dungeon with blocks. It doesn't have to be big. Put some toys inside it to represent monsters, treasure, traps, etc. If your kids are 2-4, you can even skip the dice too. Put a puzzle of some sort before the final boss, like you have to play a series of tones on a toy flute to unlock the door, or pick a colored key, or say a magic word ("please"), etc. For child-friendly play, the monsters can be scary at first and then become your friend. Everyone can live happily ever after at the end (spiders and monsters too).
Can I write a book in a weekend? Almost.
Where do people get this weird idea that typing "make" creates some sort of magic that makes the software faster or more stable or somehow better than having someone else type "make"?
FightMe - An app that can make you popular
Forgive me if I'm just being ignorant on the matter (I'm not super familiar with Bitcoin), but wasn't one of the founding principles of Bitcoin the idea that it wasn't/wouldn't be regulated?
> transportation infrastructure is a very low-risk investment.

That's a good one. Building out a technology that has never been proven in a lab, let alone at production scale, in an industry where 2x cost overruns are inevitable and 10x not uncommon, that is dominated by government spending and not private capital for infrastructure, you consider the hyperloop a low-risk investment.

It might work, despite the skepticism, but there is no sense in which it can be considered low-risk.