skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Viewing privilege as something possessed by all individuals of the superficially-structurally-favored class is a dangerous, and potentially counterproductive concept. Racist, sexist, and other group-biased social structures often constrain and disadvantage individual members of the notionally "priveleged" class -- particularly those least interested in preserving the bias.

Insofar as their is real privilege, it belongs to those whose desires align with the role assigned to their class, but even that notion of privilege has some danger, because to a certain extent those desires can be shaped and constrained by the structural bias.

But, more to the point, simply asserting that any argument against the existence of privilege by those in the class asserted by those claiming to be advantaged by a structural bias is invalid because part of the concept of privilege is that those who hold it are often unaware of it is fundamentally flawed.

(Also, the use of "majority" when the intent is to refer to the structurally-favored class is problematic; apartheid South Africa is a good example of this problem in regard to discussion of racism, but its a problem with sexism, too, unless you are asserting that the female sex is the structurally-advantage group, which is inconsistent with your reference to male privilege.)
I've definitely seen "feature" startups that didn't do so well once Google finally moved, but it's been more of an issue with startups built entirely within an ecosystem & taking advantage of missing platform features e.g. Twitter.
There's something strange about this factory description/photos, and it's what's missing -- any role for automated assembly. Imagine a workforce of 2500 people, and not one robot.

That might be more a commentary on the present state of robot technology. Final assembly may not be practical to automate ... yet.
The lesson, or at least the lesson I've learned from dealing with lawyers at companies big and small, is that lawyering is a practice in making sure nothing can possibly go wrong.

In a way, lawyers are the QA team for the legal world. They know that the shit hitting the fan can potentially be very expensive, so they will go to extreme lengths to prevent any possibility of that happening. But just like you cannot rely on your QA team to prioritize features and bug fixes (because, really, who's going to click those 15 buttons in that precise order with that precise timing to trigger that bug), you cannot rely on a lawyer to determine your business plan.

Lawyers fill the role that lawyers fill. If you're an engineer, then you have to fill the engineer role.

What is that role? My father is a mechanical engineer, and he explained to me very early on just what it means to be an engineer. You see, an engineer could design a bridge that doesn't collapse and lasts for thousands of years, but that's not the engineer's job. The job of an engineer is to take the cost of materials, the budget, the expected longevity of the bridge, the project schedule, the prevailing environmental and geological conditions of the siting, etc. and balance all of these different variables against each other to arrive at a solution.

If we're programmers, then we're saying that we can write down instructions in such a way that a computer can execute them and produce some output. If we're software engineers, then we're saying that we can balance features, schedule, bug fixes, test coverage, etc. and eventually ship it!
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That's how marketing people think.

I care more about the closed nature of the platform. I want to change many things without having to root the device.

A more open platform in technical terms would be awesome. More peripherals, more software, more freedom.
Good call - thanks :)
I would be really worried about losing requests in-flight or that take a long time to run.

Is it prohibitively expensive/time consuming to get (or borrow) a bigger machine (on EC2, or in your colo, or what have you) to run MySQL on until you've figured out how to shard / scale out your application?
This sentence is a good sign that the author has no idea what he is talking about.

Solar constant is 1360 W/m². You can collect 1.3 kW (about 2 horsepowers) from 1 square meter if sun is directly overhead and conversion efficiency is 100%, no cloud, absolutely transparent atmosphere (no clouds).

Solar panels on a car can be useful, though -- to run a small fan when parked on a hot sunny day. Not much more.
I agree with your bullet points, but my take on the future is that they'll move towards an integrated TV/cable box. I imagine that the content providers are next on Apple's target list. It's an area rife for a takeover--it's stuck in the 1950's model and to me that's where Apple does great work.

Now they may use the gaming market to get there. Just as a mind-experiment, I've wondered what would happen if Apple bought Nintendo, to get a living room presence.
It doesn't matter if you have all the primitives. The problem isn't that it's hard to code; the problem is that it's very slow.
Agree 100%. I basically see all really good engineers either flying out to SF or working from home while being employed by a SF company. Mainly because of the complete lack of appreciation (in hard cash) by companies here. I myself are working for Norwegian company from Amsterdam.

Something to add as well: failure is accepted in the Valley. It's part of the way to success. In the Netherlands you will get BURNED for life. First of all, failing the company and being stuck with personal debt? The only way to get rid of it is to go into 'schuldhulpverlening' (debt helping something), which will mean you will have to live of 30 euro's a week for three years and can't get any bank loans in the first five years after it. Second, an entrepreneur that went bankrupt will have a stain on himself forever, both with banks, as well as investors.

Then there is the complete difference in how investors work between the Valley and Netherlands. When my previous employer was raising money (the company was about 10 persons in size) the only way to get money out of Dutch investors was to replace the management team, whereas they eventually raised 5M in SF. No business plan or no experienced CEO? There is the door. Seed money? There are a few funds that provide it but it's hard to get around to it.
Spot on.

"Unless their goal is simply revenge"

As they've implied in The Godfather, taking things personally is bad for business. Companies that make money do whatever is necessary to keep the flow going. Revenge is a detour to this process so unless they're trying to stifle competition or the like, destroying someone isn't worth it.

Revenge is bad for business.
Well the end-machines that most people sat at were still technically 'terminal's. That is, after all, where the name came from, is it not? :P
Android has blundered along releasing phones with 4 hour battery life and jittery screens.

If that's the reason, then I suspect Apple have waited too long. Android phones (and the OS itself) has gone on a long, long way in the last year or two. It has a coherent UI and great performance now.
An additional upside for them is, it sets an example. If MegaCorp gains a reputation for being revenge-driven life ruiners, then future contractors will know the stakes are serious, and they'll be less likely to violate their contracts.

Not that I consider that strategy cost-effective in general. For one thing, it's bad PR. (Unless you're some kind of wizard that can spin it like, "we're principled and don't let bullies walk all over us. That's why we hold people to their promises")
Definitely true, and this benefits us all. But its not the "once per generation" type of innovation that he was talking about.
> Apple envisions a future in which you can seamlessly move between mobile, web (iCloud), and desktop/laptop experiences and you get the same high quality experience.

I believe that's more the vision of Canonical than the vision of Apple, but I like the trend.
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It used to be I bought Apple products at a premium price to be ahead of the curve in technology. For instance, Retina Screens on Phones, Thunderbolt ports, lightweight quad core notebooks. Now I find myself waiting for Apple to play catch up and release NFC on an iPhone, or HASWELL MACBOOK PROS/Retina (that I can't believe we don't have yet). The Macbook Pros used to be the first of popular laptops to use the latest processors. Now what am I paying the premium price for again?
Isn't this also horribly insecure? Unless it's encrypted (ha. ha.) anybody can intercept the email and get access to your account.
>Does it make sense to have to learn Haskell and a Haskell framework just to understand Clojure?

No, but it makes sense to learn haskell to understand functional programming, which is what you asked. Clojure's emphasis on purity is essentially useless without a type system to go with it. The type system is what separates the pure functions from the impure ones.
Multiple inheritance in JavaScript
I think this opens them up to new experimentation at the top of the market. The 5C becomes the everyday model that suits the average consumer. The 5S will become the experimental super phone. Following on from this I would not be at all surprised to see a larger screen phone join the 5S as a high end lower volume model for those who can afford/want it.
They will also be less likely to attract future contractors.
I can tell you with a modest $10K fee.
Back of the envelop calculation :

A m² of solar panel receive about 1 kW (during the day). Efficiency of solar panel are around 10-20%, so basically you get about 150 W/m².

Given than EV have motors with power in the range of 50 to 80kW. It is at least an order of magnitude bigger that what you could get from your solar panel.

So a solar panel on the roof would be rather negligible.

You will never ever power a car from mounted solar panel only. An electric bicycle with a 5m² roof maybe.
Sadly the answer to this question is iOS development for many people.
I like this point:

Judges in non-related sectors determine whether an early-stage gaming studio is ‘better’ than a boot-strapped big data startup.

It's certainly true that watching back to back pitches of very different companies, even in the same general sector, makes me wonder how on earth the judges are supposed to pick a 'winner'. However, it's pretty educational at the end of the day -- numbers matter, perhaps more so than the idea itself? -- any startup can be distilled down into a bunch of metrics and compared against another. It's that ephemeral 'potential' that makes the difference in terms of winning competitions, I think; I also wonder if a startup built purely to win a specific competition would look very different from one built because the founders had deep expertise and genuine passion for a specific problem or area?
Yes, that's the entire point, it shields you from all liability. If you perjure yourself, you're still personally liable, but for things such as money owed by the business, you're not personally liable unless if you personally guarantee something (i.e. a company credit card that you guarantee with your social).
My Most Interesting Interview Problem
I am not sure it is true that comp.lang.lisp barely tolerates newbies. I have posted there on several occasions and when I say something wrong, I am politely corrected. I have seen a lot of less experienced programmers come there, ask an obviously beginner question, and get helpful answers. Reading through the past few days of posts, I can see a few beginner questions which all received helpful answers.

The problem in comp.lang.lisp is the number of trolls -- in other words, the universal problem on Usenet. People come in trying to prove that some other language is superior, or asking questions like "If Lisp is so great why is nobody using it?"
Meanwhile, Toyota claim that hybrid cars are at a "tipping point" in EU sales: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4984ab8e-196d-11e3-afc2-00144feab7...

“We are increasing our sales in hybrid a lot,” said Toyota Europe President Didier Leroy. “In western Europe 27 to 30 per cent of our sales will be hybrids this year. In the EU it will be 25 per cent.”

Obviously that's less than half of new car sales, and the total fleet will remain mostly petrol+diesel for the next decade, but hybrids and EVs will start to win on economy grounds for commuters fairly soon. Don't forget that in the UK we're paying £1.40 / litre, which is about $10/USgal ( https://www.google.co.uk/#q=1.4+%C2%A3%2Fliter+in+%24%2Fgall... )
Apple stock has been up 4/7 times the day after the announcement of an iPhone.
It's funny, but Blizzard's been playing this game for years with their two-factor auth, particularly the part where people's accounts without two-factor would get compromised and the thief would then turn on the two-factor auth, thus making it that much more difficult to recover the account.

Blizzard's been doing this for longer than Google has, maybe Google could learn something.
My question is if there are explorations of where "the aesthetic value of having one's code be math-like" is explored at a more objective level. Aesthetics are nice, but they do little to explore the ultimate goal of getting things done.

I confess I really like the exploration in SICP of the value and place of imperative programming versus declarative programming. I do think there is a space for both, but I worry at the gymnastics we go through to never mix our metaphor away from "equation like" and over to "directions like."
Windows 95 problem? Did Apple make an overhyped system that was a steaming, crashing, pile? You remember: "Start me up! ... You'd make a grown man cry----y!"

I guess 95 sold, but man it was awful. I switched to Linux about 6 months earlier. The real innovation for MS was earlier in NT, but MS wasn't pushing that to consumers. Comparing iOS to Win95 just seems like a totally off comparison.

Maybe comparing iOS to XBox would be a better comparison from a tech standpoint, but I'm not sure MS made so much money from XBox. XBox grew quite a bit at first, but now seems stalled on dubious increments. That seems a better parallel for iOS to me.
This article doesn't really answer the question it poses. Unless there is some huge security flaw that cannot be fixed, this marks the beginning of mainstream fingerprint recognition. Other companies will quickly follow suit. Yes, fingerprint technology has been around for a while, but it's always been either an optional accessory or used in a niche case where heightened security was required. Apple's use of fingerprint as ID is new and groundbreaking in this context.

There; I've said more of substance than the author said in his whole article.
To be honest, I lost faith in maker culture and open hardware in general around the time MakerBot went closed hardware - not because of MakerBot themselves, but because of the way their critics were treated.

MakerBot themselves base their designs heavily on both the open hardware RepRap and open designs by other commercial manufacturers, and their head honch Bre Pettis was a big proponent of open hardware and maker culture - even publicly humiliating newbies to the community on his blog for failing to the files associated with their designs, insinuating that they were somehow undermining the maker community. [1] (In reality, they were trying to but couldn't figure out how because they used their PCB house's free proprietary software which couldn't export - we're talking a tiny hobby operation here.)

Then he went against the very principles he publicly shamed others for failing to follow and turned MakerBot's hardware and software proprietary in order to make more money.[2][3] All the people who politely but firmly criticised him for failing to live up to the same standards he held were accused of using "language similar to that we usually hear from people who blow things up" and "fundamentalism" by another maker[4]. This was linked supportively by one of the most prominent companies, Adafruit.[5] Anyone who suggested that comparing other members of the community to terrorists was incredibly inflammatory itself, or linked Bre Pettis' own views on others who took open hardware closed, was labelled a "troll" and had their comments deleted. People who correctly figured out that MakerBot was taking their hardware closed based on Bre's non-denial denial[6] were called liars and accused of spreading rumours. Remember, Bre's own public humiliation of newbies with much less power than him didn't get this kind of criticism.

So yeah. I'm basically done with open hardware and the maker community. It looks like a way of suckering people into doing big businesses' work for them and then labelling them terrorists when they ask said businesses to uphold their end of the bargain. I guess it's profitable for some though.[7]

[1] http://www.makerbot.com/blog/2010/03/25/open-source-ethics-a...

[2] http://www.hoektronics.com/2012/09/21/makerbot-and-open-sour...

[3] http://openalia.wordpress.com/2012/09/22/the-definitive-make...

[4] http://www.tigoe.net/blog/category/open-innovation/408/

[5] http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2012/09/21/in-defense-of-open-s...

[6] http://www.makerbot.com/blog/2012/09/20/fixing-misinformatio...

[7] http://allthingsd.com/20130619/makerbot-sells-to-stratasys-f...
Agree that the purpose of the 5C is to keep margins up rather than grow market share.

The interesting relationship isn't between the price of the 5C and the 5S, it's between the price of the 4S and 5C. It seems to be targeting people who would have bought a 4S, not people who wouldn't have bought an iPhone at all.
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Emails are (almost) free to send, and the payout (identity theft) is generally worth thousands, so all it takes is one or two clicks to make it worth the investment.
When Multicore Makes Sense for Mobile Apps
Pwning the Chromebook
This website is in the top 5 list of the worst website designs I have ever seen.
I wonder how much the real issues here are with startup culture rather than the IT/CS/Programming community/profession
What exactly are there problems with? I am behind a strict corporate network and all I needed to do was download the Zookeeper JAR and write a couple of deployment scripts. Even though the environment variables for the startup scripts are lacking they cover nearly everything you can want.

Zookeeper has legitimate issues and from experience most of which stems from the documentation being so verbose that it takes a lot of fine tuning to get right. But if you put it on its own hardware, or at the very least, the write-ahead log on its own partition, you should be good go.
That's certainty true. I can tell you as an OSS dev that that are simply not enough eyeballs for all bugs to be shallow.

However you don't have even the possibility with closed-source products. That means you must instead rely on the process used to create the software. So something by MS might actually be pretty trustworthy from a "security issues not accidentally introduced" standpoint at this point after years of improvement on secure coding practices.

But they still operate by a profit motive, and there's still the possibility of deliberate introduction of security issues when it suits business purposes or for legal compliance.

Unfortunately there's no great way to tell that an OSS project from RANDOM_DEV is well-coded without looking at the code and it may be that a well-intentioned but junior dev introduces a relative swath of security bugs by accident.

I don't know where the cutoff is either. It may depend more on your threat model than anything else.
Not really, no. The earth is warming, ice receded this summer at record levels; because of that record recession, the normal winter bounceback is higher than normal.
What's it like to have your app go viral?
Maintenance Developer (because they think "Junior" has a negative connotation).
Yes, it's amazing how much Android has lagged, releasing best-in-class phones like the HTC Once and Sony Xperia Z1 that have no match in the iOS world (and that cost the same as Apple's 'low-end' 5C). As well as inexpensive mid-range products like the Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 making modern well-made smartphones and tablets accessible to all. Not to mention the open ecosytem and OS that all kinds of companies are innovating on in all sorts of ways a single company could never dream of, both hardware and software.

Summarizing the Android market by looking at the low-end devices shows a complete lack of understanding of the Android market and the smartphone market as a whole.
The whole size_type <-> size_t malarkey is thanks to STL's gremlins, but that's beyond the point. Every compiler nowadays will emit a warning about comparing/assigning signed and unsigned integers (that can be promoted to an error if need be), as someone's comment already mentioned, which should be enough (not that the C++ warnings are always obvious or easy to parse mentally).
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We are actually more than worried too, because we _know_ we're losing plenty of requests daily so trying to cut down the losses temporarily while we figure out a more long-term solution.

For the rest, this thread might give you some more info on the issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6348903
I think you're being silly. And I don't think that's what downvotes are for (not that I have a say in the matter, because I don't have the button). Explaining why the comic is relevant would be like explaining the joke itself. That hardly every works.

Would you downvote a comment with just a link to a paper about the technology being discussed in the article?
The story of Doozer is a classic example of how not to steward an open source project.

It was released by two Heroku engineers who promptly completely abandoned it. By completely I mean did not respond to any communication whatsoever for a year or so, despite a very active community that had sprung up around the project in terms of users and forks. I don't begrudge them their lives (or whatever drew them away), but there were people/companies willing and able to take over maintenance, but not even that happened. It probably would have taken just a few hours to hand over maintainership. Instead, just radio silence.

Eventually there was some movement and the most active group of fork maintainers were given commit access, but by that time any enthusiasm over Doozer was long dead and gone.
Playing the devil's advocate here: if contractors self-select themselves out of being hired because they're not sure they can get the job done, then all the better! The remaining applicant pool will be stronger on average.
Thanks! Yes, I see a trend of modern programming languages towards LISP features. Also visual environments are having a resurgence, now that computers are powerful enough to support "Intellisense"-like autodiscovery and suggestions without grinding the system. I expect future user interfaces to allow users to modify ASTs, and fool them into thinking that they're looking at blogs and wikis. :-)
For a company that doesn't have a market presence or a product yet? If this was Bell Atlantic rebranding as Verizon or similar, $50k does seem quite cheap. I doubt many (any?) startups have paid $50k to come up with a company name since the money is just better spent elsewhere as your name as no meaning yet.
It's a nice step in the evolutionary cycle of iOS, but not innovation...
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"... she did say the company is experimenting with hardware-based tokens as well as a Motorola-created system that authenticates users by having them touch a device to something embedded, or held, in their own clothing. 'A hacker can't steal that from you,' she said."

Something embedded in their clothes? Users have to wear the same jacket or dress every day? Anyone, not just a "hacker" can steal your jacket if you take it off. If it relies on something physical, it's easier for anyone to steal. You still need a password/passphrase.