skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But, no, not everyone who has used or uses those words is a proponent of IQ-based euthanasia, rape, and segregation.

But using those words leads to a culture where these things are more possible.

Ann calls Bob a retard.

i) Bob has a learning disability. Ann is either a bully, and should be condemned. Or Ann is using outmoded terminology, and she should appreciate the help she's given when people give her better information.

ii) Bob doesn't have a learning disability. Ann is a friend and they're having fun. What they do between themselves is up to them, but they're using hate speech casually, and they should at least consider the effect that use has on people who have learning disabilities.

iii) Bob doesn't have a learning disability. Ann isn't a friend, and she's using it as an insult. Ann needs to realise that her use of the term as an insult is contributing the continued abuse of people with learning disabilities. By using the word we diminish people with LD as less-than-people.

Part of the confusion is cultural difference. It's normal use in US to say "That's retarded!" and it's not at all offensive to most people. But it's really offensive to people from other countries.
I'm not claiming that this was some sort of nefarious plan.

It seems like this sort of PR effort might be even more important internally than externally. Presumably there are some portion of employees that are also emotionally invested in the "grand mission" beyond just being a job and interesting work. In that situation, releasing the "internal communication" just a freebie.
For what it's worth, I believe they took a sample of close to 600 people - 237 from Harvard, and another 332 who were less 'advantaged'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Study

Yes, they were all white males. Not a great study if they were trying to definitively answer the question for everyone in America. But to suggest the findings have no broader applicability would also be short sighted.
>You provide them with fluent async libraries, you educate them again and again why they shouldn't block on calls to remote clients, you provide sample code, and they ignore your advice because the code is too hard to read. I'm not saying that all Java developers are like this, I'm just saying that from my observations working across many enterprise companies, most are like this.

And do you think those developers are likely to adopt Scala?
I added it after reading it in another thread here the other day, would give credit if I remembered who mentioned it.
Could one of the upvoters explain what's interesting about this page?
I wondered if it was a day when companies were supposed to release research papers. I guess it's just the NH hivemind instead.
I took an interdisciplinary course in University and one of the CS professors did a whole lecture series on research in music and analysis. A lot of beat analysis, understanding rhythms and predicting popularity of songs based on the distribution of the timing between their beats. It was very cool and extremely creative.

Here's his homepage if you want to learn more http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~godfried/

Edit: Looks like he recently published a book on it too http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9781466512023
I think this also depends on the purpose and the audience of the presentation. If someone were to drift into stories of the kind described in the article (the one this thread is about) I'd get restless quickly and keep thinking "Why doesn't this person get to the point?"

I want the facts and I want them presented plainly and simply. I want to be able to go through relevant things quickly.

So, I definitely can't relate to this 'story'.
http://reason.com/archives/2013/11/10/just-say-no-to-college
You forgot Josef Mengele.

I mean, talking about Monsanto and all, that would be a more apt analogy.
SPIEGEL: In your opinion, how should intelligence services define the lines that must not be crossed?

McCain: The limit should be the potential damage to relations with that country. In other words, is it worth the collateral damage that could result in those techniques being revealed? What would be the reaction of our friends to it?

== Yikes. Only bad if you get caught.
Because it ended so well when Zimbabwe did it.
There is a c/c++ repl http://root.cern.ch/drupal/content/cling .

For java there is bean shell/groovysh which isn't quite as good.

There is a mono repl and there is linqpad for c#. Ive used linqpad and it is very usefull.

scala worksheets are also very cool.
Research at Mozilla
Research at eBay
Oddly enough, I got my first Sunday delivery today from Amazon via USPS, and I don't live in either of the referenced cities.
Change the world - SimplyInsured is hiring Engineer #1 (YC W13)
My co-founder and I probably did on the order of 10,000 pushups each in the first half year of our startup over bets like that.
LiquidVPN review
> Most of the time I need REPL-like functionalities, I need it in the heart of my application, with all its structures and state initialized and in the middle of a breakpoint. I hardly ever need to type snippets of code with zero context around them, which is what REPL's offer.

This is why we Lisp developers have networked REPLs -- I can start up a remote JVM, in communication with other services, connected to my local vim session. I can dynamically load code into it, start and stop my application, etc, all from my editor.

https://github.com/clojure/tools.nrepl
Research at NSA (gchq.gov.uk)

Derrrrrrrrrp
Why do we suddenly have all these "Research at XXX" at the same time in the front page?
Since the link doesn't seem to contain any articles, here's a different link to Intel rendering research publications: http://software.intel.com/en-us/intel-rendering-technologies

There's a lot of good stuff in there.
This is not correct.

Steve Jobs: "Apple views itself as a software company"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEeyaAUCyZs
How do you earn a gold star should always be asked.
Interesting study! The question is of course how applicable the results are...

I realize Facebook and Twitter are not around long enough to perform a similar study on their data, but I wonder if it would be possible to test just some of the findings using the data mining techniques?
A painful truth- [Deviating a bit-It is so very difficult in the mechanical world. For a moment, smart sensors offer some hope on understanding mechanics better and seem to suggest the evolution of a new breed of machines which could be truly revolutionary.]
I guess the mistake we all make is that we see hardware as chip design and other deep stuff. But look at the pioneers of hard ware design and see what they are doing. Folks like Tony fadell and Elon musk are doing the Jobsian to the existing IBM likes of respective categories(home-sensors, automobiles). Very feW hardware startups till now seem to get this point.[Its changing]
But you have to be very smart to be a good hardware engineer- I have to admit that. Lifes unfair :)
I didnt make a judgement, just pointing out a fact. That they are the most carbon efficient doesnt mean it couldnt be improved/replaced in the future however.

I just find it funny how politicians in my country try to save carbon emissions by enforcing a speed limit on highways or only let newer cars into the city areas...it just doesnt make no difference at all on a global scale.
Apple provides developers for quite a few projects like LLVM, webkit, and the like. Their OS level projects end up here: http://www.macosforge.org

They just don't have generic "research" divisions like the other companies. This is one (of many) result of Steve Jobs return - anything that wasn't product focused got canned.
The USPS currently does Sunday delivery to catch up when it falls behind. This agreement allows Amazon to drop off at postal hubs on Sunday for same-day delivery.
I think this is a joke -- job postings have been spotted in the wild demanding X years experience for languages that have existed for <X years.
Were you not inspired?
Virgin America Just Released What Might Be The Best In-Flight Safety Video Ever
I'm a lead developer who works remotely, it does work. Most of my team is remoting, but I can imagine that it'd be tricky if all the other developers worked on-site.

Since I remote, I do actually get around to some hands-on development, about half of my time currently.

I suppose the key to becoming a lead is to join a company early on. If you pick one that's open for remote working, you can nurture that culture and hire people that are good at asynchronous working. That, in turn, puts a lot of talented people in your hiring pool that otherwise weren't there, it's a competitive advantage when it comes to hiring.

We still offer relocating for everyone, some people prefer to work in an office and that's perfectly fine. At the end of the day, I just want my people to be happy and productive.
Research at Adobe
>So why is Monsanto genetically modifying plants?

To date Monsanto has genetically modified plants to create products that save money for their customers: farmers. GMOs are the fastest agricultural technology adopted in history (by acreage).
That's not NSA, that's GCHQ.

You could have linked to the organisations that have links to GCHQ. GCHQ fund lots of research.

There's the Heilbronn Institute http://www.maths.bris.ac.uk/research/heilbronn_institute/

And some bits of Bristol University specialise in cryptography http://www.bristol.ac.uk/engineering/research/research-group...

http://oxfordquantum.org/ - Oxford centre for quantum research.
Do not forget the JEEP (Just Enough Essential Parts) which can be disassembled and reassembled in less than 4 minutes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZJ9z6c2hq0
Yes it will because you have separated layout from content
> Overall, the world would be better off if Bill Gates and Microsoft did "the right thing" starting in the 80's.

Better late than never.
Dynamic typing has nothing to do with compilation speed. Furthermore, static typing is not orthogonal to dynamic; rather static type system is just another utility language on top of the actual language which helps to prove the correctness of the program. Such type systems can event be optional, see e.g. Clojure or Erlang.
Research at HP
I am not remotely interested or educated in the topic of charity in the third world, I just don't see the connection between Microsoft's history and the assessment of the foundation, but this article is clearly written with a certain agenda in mind and by the end becomes plainly ridiculous:

He and Gates are products of an economic system that has produced monopolies and redistributed wealth upwards for 30 years. Parallels may be drawn between the inequalities of today and the Victorian era, when health provision for the poor depended on the largesse of the rich.

There sure is plenty of inequality in the world, but the conditions in Africa are as they are primarily because the geographical conditions are one of the harshest on earth and because the huge amount of people that now has to try to survive in those conditions. In many places the West can not exploit anything because there is nothing to exploit, the natural resources are very scarce, the people have literally nothing and in best case have barely enough energy to survive. I doubt the authors know much about what they are writing about.

One needs to consider, that willing to do something in the real world, you can often either compromise or do nothing or do much less. From what I understand the Gates Foundation does this to engage American pharmaceutical companies in the whole project, without which they could do little.
I'm well aware of that, but the UI is nowhere near as convenient and targeted sharing doesn't play as central a role. "Circles" was the major differentiating feature when G+ launched.
Yep. In vim (make sure to have plugins that come with go in misc/vim/ directory installed):

:Drop fmt

to remove package "fmt" from imports, and

:Import fmt

to put it back.
Thank you for saying this.

Taiwan has never been part of the PRC. Before its current democratic system, it was a one-party state run by the KMT. Before that, it was under Japanese rule from the 1890s until WWII. Taiwan hasn't been governed by a China government since the Qing Dynasty. That particular country is long gone and is about as connected to the modern day PRC as Hungary is to the Hapsburg Empire.

It's not reunification if the two weren't previously unified.
And yes, REPL is still helpful even if the compilation is fast; amusingly most languages that have REPL features fast compilation (at least those not based on JVM). The benefit of REPL is that it preserves state which one can experiment on, and sometimes that state can be cumbersome/take long to acquire.
I'm a climate corp. employee who's happy to answer questions. I'd prefer to remain anonymous, but would generally be cool with answering questions.

Edit: I'll be back around tomorrow to answer questions.
Amazon deforestation could mean droughts for western US
From a hacker news reader perspective, can anyone shed light on how this hit front page at all?
Not being under patent protection makes glyphosate (originally patented for Roundup) even more present everywhere.
My university uses [Mediasite](http://www.sonicfoundry.com/mediasite) to record our lectures. It does a pretty good job of syncing slides to video, though it is Silverlight-based.

The only real problem is that it seems to detect slides based on delta with previous slide instead of getting information from the actual presentation. This means that if you switch to the lecturer's camera (which allows the lecturer to display text written on paper on a big screen) or write on the slide then it counts as a new slide.
Have you worked on an entire team that worked remote? Or been a remote worker on an otherwise co-located team?

Just from personal experience, I've found a huge difference between the two.
Be aware - some algorithms described in publications on research.microsoft.com can be patented by microsoft (and this fact not referred in publication itself, google patent search can be useful for this).
MongoDB guys call a "database migration" something like "adding a column to a table". They'll tell you it's an incredibly complex and time consuming thing to so, AND THAT"S WHY YOU NEED MONGO!

Of course out here in the real world, an "alter table" statement takes no time at all even on a large table, and can be done while the system is running.

Now I am not saying that MongoDB has no uses at all; but I am saying that the people around it don't really have much of a clue about databases in general and aren't in any sort of a position to be choosing technologies.
How about you make things that are illegal - legal. Then you don't need to inspect anything. And for those things that are truly horrible - like sex slavery - stop fighting the symptom. Shipping companies are not the root cause of sex slavery. There is a demand for such things. Eliminate the demand and there will be no sex slaves.
They're primarily a seed company. Most of the products they have in the pipeline are based on generating resistances to various crop diseases/insects. They try to do this in a variety of ways. GMOs are relatively more expensive then breeding, so that generally tends to be the method of last resort when they can't find a natural resistance to breed in.

The scientists I also talked to mentioned a 30% overall reduction in herbicide used with round up ready plants. That could definitely be propaganda, and if anyone has any hard facts I can ask anonymously at our weekly meeting and hopefully get answers from our executive team.
To be fair - he was comparing Monsanto's technology to Mendel/Einstein, not himself. I think GMO crops can fairly be described as revolutionary tech.
I wonder what would happen if a city's homeless population suddenly became ultra fit?
Link to actual project site : http://www.osvehicle.com
It's only mentioned at the end, but this article is an excerpt from a book as well: http://www.amazon.com/Ninety-Percent-Everything-Shipping-Inv...
I started using Kotlin on the weekend and I have been pretty happy with it. The only issues I have with it so far is that I would like to use a package name with more than two identifiers (eg. com.android.scripting, instead of just com.android), and there isn't a succinct way of declaring multidimensional arrays. I resort to doing something like

val arr: Array<Array<Tile>> = Array<Array<Tile>>(height, { x ->
Array<Tile>(width, { y -> Tile(x, y, Terrain.GRASS) })
})

Now I'm looking at writing my array in Java instead and making good use of Kotlin's interoperability with Java. :)
There's been some great reporting recently on this at Grist:
GMOs and Insecticides: http://grist.org/food/in-the-insecticide-wars-gmos-have-so-f...
GMOs and Herbicides: http://grist.org/food/roundup-ready-aim-spray-how-gm-crops-l...
What's the logic here? If you're cross platform, most people are most likely not going to be using your app on more than one platform, so there's little to be gained from a "consistent experience across platforms" angle. It's rare that the same person or team is doing both iOS and Android development, and the languages and layout methods are different anyway, so there's little to be gained on the development side in terms of reuse. Maybe it makes sense if you only have one "mobile PM" who handles both, but this seems shortsighted considering how quickly the platforms change and, especially on Android, how many devices and carrier customized builds you need to test on.

I suppose it makes sense from a branding perspective, but any designer worth their weight should be able to come up with a distinctive branded experience that doesn't revamp the entire, default, builtin experience on the device.
SD cards found somewhere?
This is fatshaming. Thin privilege is getting free subway rides. thisisthinprivilege.tumblr.com (couldn't resist)
For the love of everything fluffy, don't run that command if you don't know what you're doing!
You're right, the instructions are a lot and not trivial but are very useful for the Docker team and hackers that may want to modify the procedure.
We are planning to release pre-built binaries and kernel soon though.
I quite like this comment. But it appears we are in the minority. :)
When the first line of your article contains an Amazon referral link to buy the book and make you a quick buck, how is anybody expected to take your subsequent glowing praise of the book's contents seriously? Ending the post with a quick disclaimer doesn't mitigate this loss of credibility.
From the article:

> The Amazon contract will be a much-needed financial boost to the Postal Service, which continues to bleed red ink as more Americans eschew "snail mail" in favor of email, instant messaging and social networks. The agency, which said it expects to lose around $6 billion this year, has been closing locations and has proposed ceasing Saturday delivery of many items to cut costs.

But the USPS is, operationally speaking, profitable; it makes about $400M in operating profit per year. So where does the $6B loss come from? It turns out that the overwhelming chunk of USPS expenses are due to a 2006 Congressional mandate that forces the agency to prepay for 75 years of benefits.

In other words, Congress believes that a hypothetical 30-year-old USPS employee's benefit costs need to be fully covered at current levels for 75 years, when the employee would then be 105. Likewise, a retiring 60-year-old USPS employee's pension benefits need to be fully covered for 75 years out -- when the retiree would then be 135 years old.

So, if USPS wants to hire, say, a new mail carrier whose benefits are worth (say) $20,000/year, they must immediately pay $1.5M into the fund (it's actually higher than that because there is a discount factor applied to account for interest and rising health care costs). Imagine if your startup or small business were held to the same requirements, and any reasonable person can see this is insanity.

Here's a WaPo article covering the problem in more detail:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2013/02/0...
I'm from the Philippines and we are changing the world remotely.

I started as a trainee for Junior Software Engineer level working with a startup in Silicon Valley.

The best thing about it is that in just 3 months, I was able to learn HTML and CSS, Bootstrap, jQuery/JqueryUI, PHP, MySQL, OOP in PHP, MVC using CodeIgniter, Ajax, Ruby on Rails, Setting up Linux Server from Scractch, SVN, Git, Agile Project Management and a lot more. My mentor is really good teacher and at the same time "to struggle is to learn".

After two years, we have 9 more team members, an office. We have built our own LMS to train more people remotely. We have bootcamps running in MV and Seattle. We also have consulting projects. We are working with other entreprenuers and helping them with their startups.

Gmail, ASANA, Skype and screen sharing tools make the world flat for us. Gives us the feeling that we are working in one place.

The best advise that I could give to others will be 3 things:

1. Have focus and Love your work. If you don't love what you are doing remotely, chances are you will not focus.
2. Company is about the people not the revenue. This is very critical in a remote setup, you must value your teammates as if they are your family.
3. "What Gets Measured Gets Managed" - Peter Drucker. We have daily reports, we measure hours spent and assigned story points to each task.
> If you're in Europe in February 2014, come along to the Go Devroom at FOSDEM 2014.

Ok, so now I really have to attend next year's FOSDEM.
> Eliminate the demand

And how exactly do you propose to do that?
Thank you very much for a very comprehensive review. I guess you're right, 'knowledge management tool' and 'collaboration tool' are pretty much overused. To your point on the target market- could you offer some additional insight after reading the following:
So our platform is more of a library where you could "shelf" the experiences and things of interest that are relevant to you and your group in one place where you can easily find them again later. The things that you could capture would include; pictures from trips, an interesting article, a chapter from a book, lists of movies, things to do, places to go, products you'd like to buy, presentations from events, audio files from events, research, etc. It's like your own customized local library.
What is a y-combinator? (2008)
Learn it just for the fun of it!
Whelp, I predict he will come to regret is decision. Either that or this is just a PR farce and it wasn't really about climate idealism to being with.

Any company based around 'owning' biological progeny into subsequent generations on the basis of parents' genetics is too offensive and bile inducing to have a good side...

If the company is successful I sure can't imagine this turning out any other way than Monsanto holding farmers hostage over the climate and weather just like they do now over seeds.
This whole idea is pretty weird. Not surprising it comes from Russia. It is very reminiscent of the idea promoted both by the Nazis and communists that citizens should be fit for the state.
Previous HN discussion on this article can be found here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6347848
Working for the post office has to be probably the best job in the USA right now - your retirement is already funded before you are even hired, thanks to congress trying to put the post office out of business.

They are not "bleeding red ink" they are just being gouged and forced to fund things even the largest corporations do not do.
> Neither Java, C#, C++ nor C have one (and together, these four languages probably make up for 95% of programming languages).

C# ==> http://www.mono-project.com/CsharpRepl

C++ ==> http://root.cern.ch/drupal/content/cint

C ==> http://www.softintegration.com/demos/chstandard/interactiveC...

Java ==> http://www.javarepl.com/console.html

People, please pay attention in compiler design classes and don't mix languages with implementations.