skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I don't see how the sugar makes them a fundamentally different kind of Type system?

They're not sugar. Their crucial feature is that they can't form an inheritance hierarchy, which doesn't work well in an algebraic type system.

> And Structural Typing is just Reflection I thought... Which again doesn't feel like an alternative Type system.

The point is that you can write (and obviously people have) a big, complex piece of software just with inheritance-based types, or just with algebraic types, or just with duck types. They all serve quite nicely. It is completely unnecessary to put them all in a single language (other than to advance compiler technology), and worse than that: putting them all together takes away their respective advantages and causes a lot of confusion.
The claim could also be compliance not to disclose under 215. eg. The 'canary' is already a lie.
You know what's more depressing when I read the Cochrane summaries about health studies...most of the medicines and treatments are no better than placebos!
http://www.apicommons.org
My not-a-lawyer read on the whole warrant canary thing is that it would never fly in front of a judge. In other words, anyone with two brain cells can see that, if there has in fact been a 215 order by the time the next report rolls around, then deliberately removing the warrant canary language is tantamount to revealing the order's existence, which is illegal. So warrant canaries, while seemingly clever, are actually pretty much worthless. You may as well just openly announce something, rather than try to be clever about it.

Therefore, I am forced to come to the Kafkaesque conclusion that Apple only included this language because they already have been subject to a Section 215 warrant. Otherwise there's no reason to put the language in there at all, since it's useless.
Lavabit wasn't a secret court, nor was the case kept closed for 15 years.
Apple has not received a warrant for customer ID XYZ

Apple has not received a warrant for customer ID ABC
The author reaches a trite conclusion uninformed by facts. The user agent string is used by at least 90+% of the Alexa 100 to improve user experience.

There is a silent evidence problem here. Successful use of the user agent string improves the user experience but goes unnoticed; failures are very apparent.

From the article:

"user agent string was a complete mess, and near useless"

vs.

https://etherpad.mozilla.org/uadetection-usecases

His conclusion is a bit like saying "I don't see why I need ABS in this car because I've never skidded since I got it."
It says that "Immense!" was a common dude expression in 1883 -- it doesn't say for what, exactly, but I presume appreciation. I like it, actually! I'm going to start using it and see if I can start a trend.

Immense!
> What's the justification? I'm genuinely curious.

If you can't talk about a violation of your Constitutional rights, you can't fight it either.
Hey,

Cool initiative — I've signed up!

As for how I got involved so early, the answer is curiosity, Google, open source, and fake-it-till-you-make-it. Just go out and build the things you want to build — not the thing you think you can build.
I've been a huge fan of LXDE ever since I went to make the clock show seconds, and it literally told me to look up man 3 strftime. THAT is how you get rid of non-serious users.
Couldn't they have shut down just the 'freemium' part of the service and keep going? Then figure out growth later on.
There was an article on here about that a few months back. The main idea is that the passcode entry limit is enforced by the OS, so Apple is able to sign and use a custom OS that doesn't enforce the limit, then brute force the passcode from there.
Slides from Today's API Commons Announcement
Diary of a Convert: from Windows to a Mac
Ugh. We've been having a lot of problems with Linkedin going down. Should be up now. I just tried it.
Just Filled it out, would also like to work on this.
Interactive Morphing Table Surface
That's a pretty hefty risk!
Exactly. I would appreciate someone explaining the difference between software developer and software engineer (and why this salary difference).
If the ECMAScript committee would just take typing ideas from TypeScript, stamp ECMAScript 6.1 on it, and approve it as standard, JavaScript could become an amazing language.
Chess stopped being interesting to me a long time ago, when I realized the only way to be a competitive player was to become a human database. If you don't devote significant effort to massive amounts of memorization there is no way you will be able to compete.

The magic of the game to me is/was in working hard to figure out how to out-think, out-strategize and even trick your opponent. And, yes, that still exists. World Chess championships are not robotic regurgitations of prior games. Some aspects of them might be, but there's plenty of hard thinking applied as well. All I am saying is that you reach a level beyond which the only way to progress is to become a database and that's simply not interesting to me. I also happen to think it is an absolute waste of time unless you happen to be particularly gifted at chess and have aspirations on the world stage.

This is the reason I don't encourage my kids to continue playing competitive chess beyond a certain stage. One of my kids was killing it in local competitions all the way up to the stage where kids started to become walking databases. I wasn't going to do that to my son. There are better things to focus on in life.

The other realization was that getting better at playing chess didn't make you better at everything else. It is a fallacy to think that because someone is amazing at chess they have superior reasoning abilities in other domains. That is rarely the case. There are early to mid-stage cognitive gains to be had from learning and playing chess. Beyond a certain point getting better at chess simply means you got better at chess and nothing else.
Scala is a fine scotch, but at a very young age. It's version 2.10.3, everything is still changing fairly rapidly. All it needs to be adopted in a more widespread manner is to improve it's approachability. Even for engineers who've been programming for years, Scala is hard to grok. The vast deviations in style don't help.

I'm betting it's going to take over the world in a few years, especially as it expands it foothold in the Big Data space.
Gen Y here. OP nailed it. I live in Sydney Australia and its exactly how I feel.
I don't think there's actually a difference in the two titles themselves, but rather in the kind of company which uses each title.

A software developer at a small startup is likely doing similar work to a software engineer at a large corporation, but the software engineer gets the BigCorp bonus.
> I don't have any data, but nothing will continue "going up forever"...

Take a look at historical production per hour over the past few decades or centuries. It's been going up "forever".

What we have seen in the physical world is that the people who reap the wages of this productivity has been shifting to the holders of capital (physical capital, land, finance, etc). In software, there's very little need for physical capital (factories) and land - "holders of capital" really means "holders of human capital"; i.e. intellectual capital. I do believe productivity will continue to increase, and since programmers own their own minds (human capital), they will see the wages.
True, but the government would at least have to go to a judge to get such an order, which is not guaranteed to be granted. We can hope...
Thanks man! I'll try to follow your advice,and hopefully make it as far as you have!
I tried Debian Gnome 3 in wheezy.

I decided "right, this is the new user-friendly desktop. Let's see how I go."

I literally couldn't find anything to click on to make it work. Literally nothing. The only button I could find was how to switch it off.

'I recommend this Dusk Till Dawn quote to desktop designers: "Are you such a loser, you can't tell when you've won?".'
List of practical joke topics
>What's the justification

It's along the lines of - if we're monitoring a service to catch terrorists or prevent terror attacks, it's counterproductive to alert the terrorists they're being monitored.
Furthermore - if the people trust us enough to allow us to monitor these services (which is supposed to follow from there being laws enabling us to monitor these services [a]) then you must also trust us not to abuse the information we gain or to use it in any way that does not serve the interest of national security, so non-terrorists using the service aren't harmed by not knowing they're being monitored.
Read "Why Men Earn More" by Warren Farrell to understand the reasons why this is.
Programmer Astrology
That happens in all sports that have a world championship.

There is often a difference between World Champion and World Number One.
Interactive lessons and projects to learn Foundation
When the dirty laundry eventually gets aired, the official reasons are usually nonsensical assertions that allowing the public to know what our government is doing is somehow helping terrorists avoid detection and capture.

I think many of the people who came up with this stuff know that a lot of it is questionably legal at best. The justification of these gag orders is therefore to hide the prevalence of the questionable behavior, allowing those responsible to continue what they're doing for as long as possible.
How'd fighting for the constitution work out for Qwest?
> Personally, I think there are a lot of people deeply invested in Javascript who fear anything that even remotely, one day in the super future, may threaten their skill set.

Pretty much, I think a large swathe of people who jumped on the Angular JS platform are quite fond of just that -- jumping on the latest technology. They've evangelized for it, knocked on peoples' doors Saturday mornings, wanted to tell them about the great new wonderful framework that will save the world. And now the fear is not that Angular JS will go way. It won't. It will be there sitting on Github accepting pull requests, forks will appear and so on. They fear that there will be something else, newer out there and they will be stuck with 2012 technology. They will be hipsters who are still drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon while all other cooler hipsters are drinking Tecate already.
Why did Apple agree to do such a thing? Were they legally compelled to do so, or did they up and decide that it was a good idea?
> They hoped that at the very least, they would be able to refund their customers' money and allow them to download their data.

I wish more web services gave the option of hooking into my own personal AWS S3 buckets or DropBox account (with append-only permissions). This would totally eliminate any concerns over data retention and possession. Double-bonus points for open formats. I want to (unambiguously) control the underlying data!

I don't know if EverPix had this option or not... it's just a frustration for me that keeps me from using (most) web applications.
I'll answer this directly before going home.

The problem is that departments are too underfunded to maintain a large presence (the beat cop chilling on your street in your neighborhoods substation), and the construction of cities (especially suburbs) is such that they cruise around in cop cars most of the day, except when they're actually engaged in an incident.

That means that, to the normal person, the sudden appearance of a cop is that of an alien "other"--and I would suspect a similar sense of detachment from their side of the fence.

This also means that when they get involved, they have to use standardized practices, which over time snowball into the impersonal human-crushing machinery we have today.

While it might work for society at large, for the percentage of folks who get caught in the gears it can be pretty terrible--especially because the cops (by which I also include prosecuting attorneys, judges, and the other apparatchik of the judicial and executive branch) have no reason to be lenient or reasonable. They simply dispense the law, as written.

The cases where the cops aren't bad news bears? Those, I suggest, are the exception rather then the rule--modern policing is quite reactionary in nature.
GoReq: A Simple, Sane HTTP Request Library for Go
I think that's true. But I think it's much shorter at least in SF. Something on the order of 15 days to a month.
To play devil's advocate for a bit, let's assume an America where the government never abuses its power and there are no criminals other than two terrorist cells, one in New York and one in DC, and neither of those cells knows how to make bombs because America has education and nobody else does.

Both of these cells go to the public library and check out books on bombmaking and other mischief. They also ask the librarian, "Hey, have you had any requests for records under the PATRIOT ACT?" If they ever hear a "yes", no matter whether it's them or not, that cell shuts down and moves to another city, and the other cell continues its plot.

Leaking even the one bit of knowledge of whether there was a request for anyone would make the investigation harder, and would allow the terrorists to escape and plot the destruction of our freedom elsewhere.

Now, in the real America, the value of that one bit to an evildoer, when applied to an organization Apple's size, as opposed to the value of that one bit to measure PATRIOT ACT activity as part of government accountability, is a good question to ask.
They are required to sell wholesale to companies provided end user products. It seems the intent is to set the wholesale price for profitability.

Gouging end users by controlling their air supply is one business model. The city is preferring a model where the wholesaler makes a profit at the transport layer and competes in a market at the retail layer. Sounds good for the citizens to me and profitable for company.
How is the tennis points system arbitrary? Each tournament has set points depending on ranking of the tournament, each placing in the tournament has a set number of points. The points won are carried for 1 year.

Rankings are seen to be pretty accurate when you look at who gets through each Grand Slam round.
As a Dart learner, thank you. Dart IDE is great. It has some rough edges, it is new, but I like that the IDE is developed along the language and the VM. It make a difference.
The feedback we have gotten in the 7 years that we have been running our warrant canary:

http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt

has been similar ... however I am certainly much, much more confident now that apple is running one ...
Semi-relatedly, one of my greatest criticisms of all that stimulus spending of the last several years was how incredibly unimaginatively it was allocated. I've seen figures which indicate gigabit fiber could be rolled out nationally to 95%+ of homes and businesses for $400 billion if gov't paid it all, or $100 billion if done in a private/public partnership. Another figure I've read is that if the U.S. heavy duty truck fleet were converted to run on CNG, we could reduce our oil usage by 20%.

Those would both have been transformational accomplishments, and the $950B or so spent in total could have probably done it all thrice over. Bitterly disappointing.
Prediction:

The real test of our generation is going to be whether or not we succeed in bringing government back down to more manageable local levels, a sort of backlash against federalism.

The majority of issues we have could and should be solved locally, for proper values of "locally". The technology we have today could then be used to federate these communities on larger issues without giving over autonomy.
Same age bracket, same sentiment in my peer group.
Even in Alberta where health-care and other social nets exist, and un-(or under)-employment is rare, much is the same.
We've seen ads for cars and suits and fertilizer for so long that we're immune to any of it. Our parents lived in such a radically different time in terms of the economy, technology, societal norms, that we can't relate to each other, even though we'd like to.
We "young folk" share a collective skepticism, so we advertise products and services to each other when we find something that works or makes sense to us. We don't care about crashing markets and fiscal cliffs because we don't have years of retirement savings.
We don't buy newspapers or watch the evening news; News is received through twitter, facebook, or real conversations, if and when there is any news.
It's not that we don't want to pay for things. We just don't want what you're selling, or the format it comes in, or the commitments that come with it.
I was intrigued by your statements and looked up some information on them. "Forcing them to buy hybrid seeds" appears to be a baseless statement. Apparently "Order 81" by Paul Bremer institutes certain patent laws regarding plant seeds, however as noted in a clarification in the following article "The law does not prohibit Iraqi farmers from using or saving 'traditional' seeds." (http://www.grain.org/article/entries/150-iraq-s-new-patent-l...)
You can read the actual language of Order 81 at http://www.iraqcoalition.org/regulations/20040426_CPAORD_81_..., which was linked as a citation in the grain.org article.

I can't find anything relating to "forbidding people to sell traditional food on the market" either.
JavaScript x86 emulator on github
New frameworks might make our work easier, but companies don't typically respond by employing fewer developers. Instead, they ask for bigger and larger projects.

As for people actually learning to code, I don't actually think there's much risk of increased supply. The majority of people simply cannot think in the logical manner programming requires. They might learn a couple bits here and there, but they'll never be employed as engineers. (I've seen this myself with people who've taken months of classes—ask them to compute a program and they're still incapable.)

Put simply, CS is hard. That's why, despite the general awesomeness of our careers, so few people major in it. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/04/students-majoring-i...)
The cause of the hunger is the simple problem of too many mouths to feed. The cause of too many mouths to feed is that infant mortality drops precipitously with the introduction of modern medicine, while family planning is a foreign concept or worse, actively demonized by the very missionaries who bring the aforementioned modern medicine.
I'm unconvinced that supporting other mail applications is a better bet than supporting Lavar. Regardless of his product claims, he's in a position to fight an important political battle for the rights of all of us. That's why I support him, because politics are the battleground here, not technology.
Warrants are quite a quaint notion in an era of parallel construction and Room 641As. To talk of warrants today is like talking of rope in the house of a hanged man.
Since about 2004 I think? Anything before that, I think it was an AOL email address. If they can access it, they can have it.
""KDE4 is probably the best desktop on Linux right now"
I strongly dissagree."
I strongly disagree with you. KDE is not perfect but at least gives freedom to customize it a lot, and without need to swing in config files.
epic rant, well-written and enough truth that it rings
Sorry, I must have been living in an alternate universe where every person in SV is not a total genius at the age of 20.
I look at that chart and just laugh. Why in the Hell would anyone buy a new car these days!?
I always thought the idea was that the LTV is in getting a lot of users and you do that by making as good an impression as possible on your first users. Even if you are spend several times what your initial users bring in supporting them, if that creates enough traction to get a lot of users down the line you come out ahead.
Question for dpg. I heard that as a founder you get access to a mailing list read by every other YC founder.

Out of curiosity, how many founders read it nowadays? Most of them? YC's funded 440 companies, so there've been around ~1k founders. I was just wondering how many of them still use it.

It's quite cool to see the alumni network growing so large.
Anyone know about, or interested in starting, something like this in NYC?
Its natural human behavior, that the wealthy middle class people have only few children and invest in their education, while the poor have lots of children, in the hope two of them survive long enough to feed their parents, once they retire.

The only solution to this problem is fighting poverty, and educating women.
> Google's overbearing intention is obvious.

Please.

> That's what causes the friction: resentment that a pretty flawed language is being pushed.

"flawed language" you mean [] + [] doesn't equal '' ?

Oh look it throws a "TypeError: Object #<JSArray> has no method '$add'", yes please bring more such flawed languages around Google, I love them!
This is one of the reasons that our warrant canary[1] is distributed to all of our storage arrays, some of which are in foreign countries (Switzerland and Hong Kong, namely).

Then the question changes, and becomes: "can the US government compel a swiss national to make false statements".

From 2006 to 2010 we simply had the canary on our web page, hosted in the US - but from 2010 onward we had it there, as well as in the /tmp directory on customer filesystems.

[1] http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt
I think that's on you and your group. Being realistic and setting goals, then going to your support group and being accountable for hitting those is really important. You feel guilty when you show up empty handed, meanwhile everyone else is showing progress. It keeps you motivated.
Great in theory, but I just don't see this happening with the telcos (AT&T and TWC) controlling the entire broadband footprint in SoCal. It's called collusion, look it up.

These two telcos (the worst in the world most likely) base their entire business and offerings on providing high-speed internet of yesteryear. AT&T UVerse service is a step up from traditional ADSL with speeds up to 25Mbps (I get 19Mbps regularly and live about 2 miles from the CO). Telco execs have been quoted as saying "consumer just don't need higher speeds." And most probably do not, the niche consumers (probably the HNers) would love 1Gbps speeds for reasons unknown (perhaps to host their own in-house EC2/S3!) but the niche consumers are the 1% and telcos don't care about us.

The biggest problem with this concept of Gigabit internet in Los Angeles is who will pay the bill, which will most certainly exceed the estimate.

AT&T already has plenty of fiber running to the pole with copper to the household. There are tens of thousands of old buildings in LA that make it impossible or extremely difficult to run fiber to the home. Not to mention, a ton of landlords will simply not care to tear up their infrastructure even if it costs them nothing. There is a VERY serious disease people in LA have which is "We just don't care."

Additionally, the "free" access of 2Mbps - 5Mbps is redundant since these are quite frankly ancient speeds regardless of their price economics. So with that said, if you do a simple analysis of how many customers would actually pay for high-speed (>100Mbps) access vs. the "free hoarders" it would be dismal. And would never cover the costs of the roll out.

Finally, EVEN if the economics made sense, the telcos would simply fight it, create problems for potential bidders, collude enough to force bidders out and continue their shitty business.
Action minded people
I tend to be extremely "action minded" What I mean is that I am willing to make large life altering decisions VERY quickly. I feel like people think I am crazy as a result.

It's difficult to get on the same page with other people because they're always like "I can't believe you actually did that."

Any thoughts on this? Is it bad, good? Or just needs to be refined? Thank you.
I like "austere". It sounds much more elegant but is actually much dirtier.