skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree completely.

One of the big things that made me think about it like that was his stance on generic code. As in my experience it tends to lead to over-engineering, and less efficient code (as you need to account for more things).

It's takes some experience to know when the extra effort is worth the time; and it sounds like Mr. X very well slanted towards practicality ... throwing a little idealism at him where you think it's needed... AFTER you understand his reasoning... will make both him, and you better at the end of the day.
Not sure if it's been added since your comment, but there's a link to explore an interactive version on the page. It goes here: http://christopheviau.com/d3list/gallery.html
That doesn't look anything like Paul Graham.
And maybe one day the we'll actually write the numbers on our coins so they can be friendlier to visitors...
I want to have my blog on a custom domain name... How do I set up my DNS to point at your system?
This is only related to the path, if you recursively delete from the top level then it doesn't work, but if you switch CWD to a lower level directory then you can delete the files.

eg.

rm -rf C:/REALLY/LONG/PATH/
doesn't work but
cd REALLY
cd LONG
rm -rf PATH
cd ..
rm -rf LONG
cd ..
rm -rf REALLY
works (windows equivalents of course)

In past projects I've ended up rewriting most of of System.IO that dealt with paths to fix this issue. Basically all you have to do is prefix your path with \\?\ and voila it works. (Except in .NET which detects you're doing this and stops it)
I'm still playing around with ideas for users to customize their homepage more. Might give the option to show fixed posts or custom date range.
Disclaimer: I have no idea what factors are relevant for cryptographic functions.

In 1999 they had coppermine 1133 single-core @ 1.1ghz (~ 2 gflops), in 2012 we now had sandy bridge 3970 quad-core @ 3.4ghz (> 100 Gflops). So at least according to one measure the factor of increase is more like 50 than 13.
Distributed services are the future, it seems. I predict (rather boldly, so I may be wrong) that the next wave in computer technology will be the move from centralized servers to a distributed framework. I foresee the next Microsoft/Google/Facebook being a company that brings this idea to reality. (Not specifically the Silk Road bit, but the general paradigm of distributed services.)
You are not, but subjectively I move more of my code to Scala, maybe java8 will change it, probably not. It's very much a personal choice. The easiest way is simply to write some code in Scala and get a feel for it.
I prefer Scala because it's working for me, but everyone has different criteria and personal preferences. Go, clojure, Haskell might have more hype, but I tried them in the ultimate test of my productivity, and stayed with Scala. Because of my experience, not because someone convinced me in a comment or post. It's too subjective.
The longest I can find on my real-world, full operating system is also a build directory. However it's 349 characters:

/opt/local/var/macports/build/_opt_local_var_macports_sources_rsync.macports.org_release_ports_lang_v8/v8/work/v8-3.21.3/out/x64.release/.deps/opt/local/var/macports/build/_opt_local_var_macports_sources_rsync.macports.org_release_ports_lang_v8/v8/work/v8-3.21.3/out/x64.release/obj.target/v8_base.x64/src/extensions/externalize-string-extension.o.d
Whenever I try to launch a product/service, I am thinking this way:

- Which problem am I solving?
- Where people with this problem could ask for solutions
- What would they type in Google while searching for solution

In this way I find different forums, blogs, etc. From that point, when you know where your users are, you can decide will you pay for advertisements or you'll do it in some other way.
Odd, I've been making releases of my product at least twice a month for the last year, and it's been increasing steadily lately too. I always thought it was a good thing?
Live free. Don't let "them" scare you into acting out of fear.
I wasn't thinking about the short bio sentence, what I want on the top of the page is http://c.kristian.io/image/2b3X1P2y1Z3R ;)

I think it would be cool with a few variations or options.
> Because static type analysis allows you to develop more accurate code faster and with lower maintenance cost.

This statement may be true for you, but it's not for everyone.

It's a dangerous argument because it assumes that static types are going to somehow magically turn bad code into good code, or (by extension) bad coders into good ones.

Static typing is a not a solution to the problem of any deficiencies in the language, but rather the problem of people shooting themselves in the foot with it. It's admittedly a related problem, but a separate one.
or this: http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock
Yes, they can be spent forever. But when the reach the bank and get sent to the federal reserve, they can be withdrawn and replaced with newer bills. You'll be able to keep spending the old ones you have forever, but once you've spent them and they hit the Fed, they'll be removed from circulation.
Hack for Veterans at Feast Oct 12-13
Spotify: Business Through Obscurity
This is very nice looking, but I have to nitpick about the "30 second" install. It takes 30 seconds, assuming you've already installed an operating system, a webserver, PHP, and set everything up securely. For a beginner that is really non-trivial. Still better than Wordpress, though.
Juce is great especially for audio plugin developers, an alternative in this area is WDL-ol. https://github.com/olilarkin/wdl-ol
That's a very interesting observation.

I've always been taught that breaking things down as small as possible is good - easier to estimate, easier to understand, easier to track.

You don't want to give a developer a week long task - that turns into two weeks, for instance. There just isn't the visibility.

I'd agree, there's a huge issue of none of the work feeling important, and an issue of Developers having no real power in the process (other than to unilaterally dictate how long we thought things would cost, strangely enough).

But is it a result of subdividing tasks too small? I'm not sure; it's an interesting concept to explore.
""What stops the parties from ignoring the messages I send, thus recovering my secret by simply pretending I died?" They would have to control enough of the network and know who you are and how you are interfacing with the network to stop you."

OK, but if the assumption is that out of the n parties in the network no more than k parties are malicious, why not just use a k+1 out of n secret sharing scheme? You broadcast a signed message once per month, and if the message does not arrive for some number of months the parties all broadcast their shares and recover the secret.

At best, the role of "proof of work" systems here is in combating sybil attacks, which is only relevant if you want to remove the requirement that I know the people I am issuing shares to. If that is truly advantageous, the system might look like this: first, I broadcast a public key for some non-malleable encryption scheme. Each party willing to participate will then use that key to encrypt a randomly generated ID string that they keep secret. Once I have received the IDs, I broadcast a random string, and each party will use their chosen ID and the random string as a "starting point" in a proof-of-work scheme. The output of the proof of work is then used as the seed to generate a keypair for a symmetric cipher (using an appropriate key derivation function). The parties encrypt the proof-of-work outputs and send the ciphertext to me; I check the proofs and generate the keys locally. Then I encrypt each party's share using the party's symmetric key and send the encrypted share. Then I proceed as before, sending a periodic message.

I suspect, though, that such a construction is overkill; also I have not really evaluated the security of it.

"I think big computational networks with incentives unlock some interesting doors"

Maybe so, but right now I see a solution in search of a problem.

"If you can assume that the computational majority"

Why should I need to assume anything about the computational resources about the participants? We can have threshold secret sharing with unconditional security, and we only need to trust one of the parties for the switch to be secure regardless of the computing power of the rest of the parties.
Although that "out-of-fashion" shirt is made from engineered meta-material and the trendy ones just have nice patterns. Seriously, did you even try C#5+VS2012+ReSharper? Add TPL, Rx and XAML to the mix for desktop or ASP.NET MVC WebAPI + SignalR for web.
No, because Tor is a tool for anonymizing Web traffic, and it's not against the law to use the Web anonymously. It is against the law, by definition, to participate in a black market.
Gov. Arnold did it better :)
The truth is all the good stuff you mentioned / believed in is not important or even irrelevant in a lot of contexts. Try to learn from him on judgement within a context, instead of sticking to whatever fancy things/rules you learn from a textbook or the internet.
I think the conciseness can improve readability. Consider these examples:

List<String> list = getListofStrings();
List<String> capitalized = new ArrayList<String>();
for(String st : list)
if(Character.isUpperCase(st.charAt(0)))
capitalized.add(st);

Or...

val list = getListOfStrings
val capitalized = list.filter(_.head.isUpper)

Grokking two lines will take less time than grokking six lines.
Maybe they are dealing with a few gig of CSV time series?
In what language are you rewriting the backend?
It seems more like a cautionary tale. Sometimes when you are in the thick of it you can be wearing blinders.
Man, don't let people discourage you.

I guess the thing that you should realize though is that this isn't a degree in computer programming, or IT - it's a more or less a mathematics degree. As the saying goes, "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."

If you want to get ready for serious computer science, I'd recommend a few things which are what I think I got out of my undergraduate degree:

1. A solid understanding of algorithms and data-structures. To this end, topcoder.com/tc is invaluable and some serious study will quickly bring you up to speed. CLRS (Introduction to Algorithms) is a great resource, as is train.usaco.org.

2. A basic understanding of theoretical computer science. To that end, I found this a really useful book: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321455363

3. Basic understanding of networking and operating systems. Not sure the best route here, there must be online courses. Not too many great self-study books in this area, unfortunately. So find some online courses.

4. A decent math background: linear algebra, calculus, combinatorics, and probability. For self study:

Calculus: Stewart's Calculus is great.

Linear Algebra: I've yet to meet a linear algebra text I liked, so not sure here.

Probability: A First Course in Probability is an outstanding textbook.

Other: Concrete Mathematics by Knuth is an incredible book, very VERY hard and took me a long time to get through, but packed with useful and interesting information. I'd recommend it after the rest of these.

5. Read Snow Crash and watch Hackers.

Also, keep writing lots of code. Daily practice is the secret to everything.
Raise retirement to 70, go single-payer and name the price of all things medical, and put a little resistance on SSD claims and then there's no problem. That's because these "liabilities' are actually discretionary, unlike actual bonds.
Not necessarily want, but I've come across it just by installing a node project into my home folder on XP, something along the lines of:

C:\Documents and Settings\____._______.________\project\node_modules\package\src\tests\somelib\helpers\test123\file.html

What made this troublesome for me is that my networked profile refused to sync while the file was there (and couldn't be removed without renaming each layer to single character folders. Additionally the profile sync failure copied back files I had deleted confusing the heck out of me :)
> "There are a lot of rabid anti-Microsoft developers on HN"

Intellectual laziness test: Have you spent some time considering that maybe there is a good reason for that? Or are you just simplistically dismissing it out of hand as uninformed hatred?
It's just marketing...how many people do you know that keep a single Benjamin laying around much less 10+? The fact is that most of what everyone uses as money is "inside money" that banks conjure up and charge interest on in perpetuity.

The world quickly devolves when the ROC on this benchmark goes flat and the social world heads for chaos when it goes negative.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/TCMDO
You characterized it as egalitarianism, which could be characterized as 50:50 distribution. In any case I think you should quantify your "demands", or else how can they ever be satisfied? It is not obvious to me why it is unfair if for example a woman is a nurse instead of a PHP developer? Should she begrudge her fate? Why not vice versa (PHP devs who would rather be nurses)?
Name one example, please.

Said example must include:

* open source implementation released to the public

* author did not directly do anything obviously illegal, or profit by anyone else doing it

* overwhelming force under colour of law
Considering there are an increasing number of designed-to-be-likable languages that compile to JS, it's about as close to objectively better as you can get.
This is pretty cool, I'd be happy with a service that mummified it to storage I control, since I've had pages that I've pointed to at archive.org vanish after the current robots.txt was changed.
Free trials are for the birds.

Particularly when software is work-related, the amount of time it takes to evaluate something is usually far more than the product costs. For instance, I'd expect to spend more than an hour writing and promoting my serious post, and if I valued my time at (a very low) $50 an hour, the time costs more than the product does.

(The perverse thing about enterprise software sales is that the same thing is true about $50,000 software purchases)

Anyhow, I can say that 95% of the time I sign up for a 30-day free trial, 30 days go by and I never get around to evaluating the product because time is more dear to me than money.
That was a long-winded, meandering way to say

1. Transaction scripts in place of 100% human arbitrage. Reasonable feature.

2. hand-wavy name coin reputation thingy. This idea makes no sense.

3. Being federated would be 'neat', despite the example project being abandoned and largely non-functional. Or you could just use Freenet instead of Tor?
Estimate Mobile App Downloads
I like this point. I read an facinating article about men being both at the top and bottom of society a year or so ago. I wish I could remember what it was called I would link it to you.
Are you claiming to have an objective yardstick for comparing the goodness of languages? (Don't answer that.)

If not, please remember that different languages are just that -- different, not necessarily better or worse. Personal attitudes towards the differences between languages are totally normal. Bearing this in mind will help the conversation proceed in a more civil manner.
It does not work that way. The finite Easy Oil is the proverbial tip of the iceberg. The price point just trends upwards after the relatively easy material is successfully mined/drilled -- there is plenty more, it is just harder and harder to get to.

There is a small amount of oil that can be pumped at less than $10 per barrel. There is a moderate amount of oil that can be pumped at $20 per barrel, and that will disappear in the foreseeable future. At $50 per barrel, there is a lot of fossil fuel material. At $100 per barrel, there is vastly more. At $200 per barrel, we do not know because no one will care until the 23rd century, but the problem will probably be the environmental damage, not the availability.
On your point 1), I'm obligated to point out that over the last 20 years, inflation has been very low by historical standards. We were only above 4% (historical average) for a couple years in the late 90s and from about 2006-2008, if I recall correctly.
There's this super stealthy startup right now that's trying to solve this: http://apiweb.io

Keep it on the dl.
I'd argue that Wikileaks doesn't want it released solely on his death but more like 'Assange's assassination or 10 years, whichever comes first', so it does get released eventually.

And I'm surprised no one sees a use-case in recent events: if I were DPR, I'd be happy if usable time-lock crypto existed so I could, say, lock a wallet of 100k btc for 10 years, and give it to a friend as a backup; I don't have to worry about the friend deciding that they'd like to retire to Patagonia, but if I'm 'shot resisting arrest', at least I left my friend a fortune. Or, even if he hands a time-locked wallet over to the FBI, he's delayed them spending it for 10 years and given the Bitcoin economy that much more time to grow and be able to absorb a sudden infusion of 1% of the money supply.

As it is, he's basically in an all-or-nothing position.
I'm currently slowly cleaning up the mess created by older developers because they were inexperienced in mobile development and under the startup pressure gun. I'm understanding what their situation was and they are not bad developers. Old != Great. All of these heuristics just help you save energy in evaluating people, you need to evaluate people properly in the first place.
best plan is generate new bills in a different denomination. Hmm these new $20s look kinda like the $100s but not as good, well, yeah they're only worth 1/5 as much whaddya expect?

This eliminates confusion over someone holding a real new $100 and a fake new $100 and wondering which is which.
... the hope is that it will be like a gym membership - you count on some people never to use your service.

I think that any consultant who has been in the game for many years has worked out a recurring monthly "relationship" with some customers for exactly that reason. The difference is that (a) those consultant deals have a minimum of x hours per month (where x >= 10), and (b) there's a dollar amount per hour that you bill for time over that base. As a result, you the consultant have a strong bias towards helping that customer ASAP. But it has to be at least a decent amount of money per month - say $1000 at a minimum - for you to put aside other projects 2-5x per month to help this customer. $50 though just doesn't cut it - am I going to stop working on this major project with a deadline three days away so I can earn $50 one time? No. I have 50 unread emails and they represent $5000 this month - am I going to ignore those right at this moment and answer the one that's worth $50? No. With your recurring consulting client though, you would do that - not only are you getting $1000 per month from them, but there's the potential every month to make much, much more if we go over x hours.

"But, Scott - I don't actually have any of those customers doing that with me right now."

Maybe not, but everything has an opportunity cost. All it takes is you not answering a $50 email in what the customer thinks is an appropriate amount of time and bam - bad reputation. Or all it takes is 2-3 customers in a row who ask for things that can't be completed in an hour or who don't like the advice/help you've given them and bam - bad rep. Or all it takes is one customer asking a problem that you don't know the answer to and you also have a major project deadline looming and so you "miss" the question (wrong answer, bad advice, forget to answer, etc) and bam - bad rep. Just not worth $50 to me.
Any thoughts on vega? http://trifacta.github.io/vega/
Don't confuse "release" with "build". That's one every ~3-4 months. Why would that be a red flag?
> I've always wondered about this argument. Haven't modern Java IDEs more or less automated away the boilerplate?

They may automate some of the typing of boilerplate, but that just means the language you are entering isn't the same language you are reading, which is another problem.

The boilerplate is still there, and its still in the way.

> Sure, you have a little more code to look at. But frankly, sometimes this can improve readability vis-a-vis excessively concise and overloaded syntax.

IME, its more often the case that the boilerplate that Java requires makes code hard to read than that the conciseness that Scala permits (but generally does not require) makes it hard to read. And, since the concise options in Scala are generally options, a programmer who is aware of a case where being maximally concise impedes clarity can opt for a more explicit expression, whereas the Java-required boilerplate isn't optional, so even if the programmer is aware of it getting in the way of readability, they can't eliminate it.
I don't have time to get into this in detail, but it runs as thus:

- I'm not giving money or support to proprietary vendors. I am, however, contributing by filing bugs and maybe hanging out on the mailing list for the open source system.

OR

- I am contributing money and maybe code to the open source vendor, in addition to above.

OR

- Even a comment about how your service is built on F/OSS system can significantly improve its standing in the world, if your service is well known.

Therefore, even though I have a proprietary licensed piece of software (due to lack of visible business model for xyz), I can provide significant help to the tools backing me up.
Windows through Server 2008 ran on Itanium, so they've been fine with non-x86 at least up until that point.
I am sure you read about the early-access scandal at Reuters [0], which the quants found especially spooky as they (by definition) weren't first. So releasing high-value financial information this way is my first idea for a use case.
Clarification: it seems Reuters intentionally sold the info to high value customers early. But this is an even better reason for the information source to release their info this way.

[0] http://qz.com/92786/more-evidence-that-data-thomson-reuters-...
The Biggest Problem with Google Glass
It looks like he hasn't responded to anyone else re: DRM, why would he talk to me? The point is he's only communicating about this through proxies and needs to explain himself.
Yep. I fully expect forums like that to become a dominant mode of communication in the near and medium-term future. All it really needs is for someone to make for it a slick and easy to use interface. If I was in a position at the moment to found a startup, this would absolutely be the field I would found it in.
I think WinRT is evidence enough that Microsoft can build NT for other architectures if need be. I'm sure it wasn't as simple as typing "make" to get an ARM version of Windows, but it certainly didn't take them very long to do it either.
Developing things with the language has never been the problem.

Coming back and maintaining them a year later is a different story.