skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's an interesting question, is there an institution or subculture in the world that is more meritocratic than Silicon Valley?

Jobs where the individual’s numbers are everything, like sales and trading.

If there isn't, then the author is wasting time attacking the one institution that comes the closest to embodying the meritocracy ideal.

The author makes the mistake of looking at Silicon Valley as a monolithic institution. There are many different aspects to life as a dev.

Having said that, coding ability isn’t >*. Things like culture fit and the ability to work with other people also factor in, unless you go the solo dev route. Also, there are still a lot of idiots getting promoted, like the people that end up populating the tales of The Daily WTF.
Go, or Ruby or ExpressJS for an API?
I'm building out an API and I would like to know your thoughts on the benefits and pitfalls of the three language options. I'm a Ruby Pro but I am considering both express and Go for my API.
I would also recommend looking at the code generated by Lex and Yacc as well as hand-written code to parse a Lisp or Scheme. That might give an idea of how to organize a hand-written parser.

Though, without reading Modern Compiler Implementation or something similar the use of shift-reduce tables in generated code might not make sense. Also, my computer science curriculum included a course where we wrote a top-down LL(1) parser which is organized very differently with a function call for parsing each rule which calls other functions for parsing sub-rules etc.

I've hand-written a few mangled char-by-char state machines as well, which served as lexers for various DSLs.
>>Voluntary

See, we clearly have different conceptions of what is and is not voluntary. Let's say you voluntarily decide to kick a glass window. It breaks, as a consequence of that action, and you are hurt. Does that mean not kicking in windows is involuntary, simply because it sets of a series of reactions?

Now, if you decide that it isn't worth it to you to do something because the consequences of an action are worse than the rewards you would gain, it doesn't mean that taking or not taking this action is involuntary, it means you're probably rational.

>>You may have noticed the vast majority of people not being savage animals? Why would this be any different without a government?

I'm not sure what you're saying here; are you disputing that there was more violence, saying that's not bad, or saying that this won't happen?

>>The word "Capitalism" has been tainted by Marxism/government propaganda, but what it actually entails is property rights combined with people making voluntary exchanges, agreements and investments. That's it.

It's actually not. Capitalism is associated with a religious calling, as in the 19th century it was common for Calvinists/some Baptists to equate hard work with being more likely to go to heaven, and more money as the proof of God's grace and favor. That's where the shift to capitalism really started, particularly as an influence on people's day-to-day lives.

>> Well, how would they enslave people? Money alone is not a problem, even if someone has shitloads of it. People can be enslaved only through coercion, through the initiation of force. You need to threaten someone with violence if he doesn't obey you. Sure, you may be able to hire an army of mercenaries to help you force people to do something, but then people can just organize against you and kill you, if necessary.
Even if you've got ten trillion dollars in your bank account, you still don't want to die, right? Your actions have consequences, and one of them might be your own personal death, so you'll want to avoid making that choice.

This would be totally valid if people didn't consistently make this choice, throughout history and today, and it's actually extremely rare for the people to rise up and successfully rebel against it. It's more likely that other powerful people want your power and attempt to take it from you, but the situation doesn't change much for normal people.

>>North Korea

Actually, the main difference is a combined lack of freedom and widespread starvation.

By the way, I don't think I have a slave-master. I pay taxes, this is true, but I get a lot out of that. Should there be tax reform? Sure. Does the existence of taxation make you automatically enslaved? I don't think so.

I'm not sure we're living in the same systems; in my experience, the government has trouble seizing anything at all, let alone whatever it wants for any reason. I think it's really funny that you talk about corporations being more responsible to their customers than the government because you mention that anyone taking power has a risk of being overthrown; do you think that doesn't apply to government?
Treehouse Discount
Tab Closed; Didn't Read
Finally, some honestly; yes it's frustrating, but given that the vast majority of the population aren't like you, it makes sense that they set up a society to cater to their needs, and it's pretty clear most prefer a paternalistic government simply to remove the need to think about so much stuff. Most people don't want a world where a bad decision about something they don't have the knowledge to even make correctly can kill them.
Apologies if this is imposing but do you have any links or insight regarding Japanese estate tax or real estate transfer? A family member passed away recently and was the owner of land in Tokyo. I have visited multiple times but do not speak Japanese and cannot figure out if we need to report the transfer of ownership, pay tax for the transfer, etc... The land is currently used by other family members who own the house that was built on the land.
3D Systems To Build Printing Platform For Custom Moto Phones
Hacking on Drugs?
I've read quite a few books by Oliver Sacks in which he described frantic nights of reading/writing on amphetamines.

Although I'm not into drugs myself, I'm interested to know what others have heard or experienced. Thoughts? Experiences? Stories?
MMA will get there. The modern sport of MMA is at best 20 years old this year, much less with the current rules and weight categories. It is the fastest growing sport league in the US, and I'll agree this is easy with all the others being much older and established. However, among 18-34 year-old fans, the UFC is already more popular than the NHL and NASCAR.
Geosynchronous is nowhere near 1/4 distance to the moon. This sat is temporarily going to a highly eccentric transfer orbit on its way to GEO.
I'm not doing 2PC. I'm curious what gave you that impression, and I'll clarify any documents that seem to give off that impression.

I'd like InfiniSQL to handle hard workloads as well as it can, to minimize the amount that developers need to redesign their applications.

Please go to http://www.infinisql.org/community/ and follow the project on Twitter, and sign up for the newsletter, to keep apprised of progress.

Thanks for the input!
The biggest challenge for remote workers is working with a centrally-located team. The styles of communication need to be more rigorously defined and a part of everyone's habits or else it tends to fall apart.

An excellent way to address this problem is to have a co-founder, preferably a technical one, be remote.

Given that this person is important, they will notice if they are being left out and have the weight that their complaints are heard. If no important person is remote, then these things slip far more easily.

There are several minor reasons why I'd prefer to see a senior technical person be remote. The first is that quiet time without interruptions is more likely to benefit the technical person. The second is that a non-technical co-founder has more interactions where they are likely to have legitimate reasons to be in the office.

But if it works better for you to have a technical co-founder in the office, and a non-technical co-founder who is basically a roving salesman, then go for it.
... unless the NSA has already trojaned their computer[0] or is doing an MITM attack.

[0] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/quantu...
Mmh, I'm torn. On one hand it's pretty funny and straightforward, on the other it's a bit too dismissive and aggressive for my taste.

Meh, I'll still take that over corporate newspeak, at least he doesn't sugar coat it.
66 minute launch window through 6:43PM ET. T-13 cycle must start no later than 6:30PM ET.
Nootropics - maybe
Drug grugs - no-no.
> Whether you spend $50 to mine at 3 gigahash/sec, or $50,000 to mine at 3,000 gigahash/sec

You forget to take into account that cost per GH plotted against volume is non-linear. At $50,000 investment one won't see much difference and the graph will look linear. At $500,000, though, one can design and manufacturer their own ASIC and purchase everything in high volume. Then the cost plummets like a rock. And I would argue $500k is where large scale mining starts these days, not $50k.
Here's the direct streams:

http://livestream-f.akamaihd.net/142499_129958_13c898be_1_20...

Or lower quality:
http://livestream-f.akamaihd.net/142499_129958_13c898be_1_55...
http://livestream-f.akamaihd.net/142499_129958_13c898be_1_15...
There's a live update thread on reddit. http://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/1rfc17/rspacex_falco...
>So one guy got some bad indicators that proved to be
nothing, who cares?

>Quick, stop doing CT scans!!!???

Are you really this stupid? I think you're pretending to be stupid.

Yes, bad diagnosis is kind of a big deal. Yes, new, unlicensed, untested medical devices are kind of a big deal. Thanks for your completely unrelated, probably fictional, personal anecdotes though. I'm sure someone was swayed by your emotionally charged, whatever story about something whatever, but I'm surprised, because one time I got a rental car and it told me it was out of gas but it was wrong, I went to another dealership and there was gas! Quick, stop filling up cars at the pump!

Who upvotes this shit? Seems like there is a conspiracy to prevent legitimate and intelligent conversation around any medical issue by stupid, distracting comments and pointless bickering about issues that aren't even remotely related to the OP.
If you read it as Spock, you'd raise an eyebrow at the …
It seems that Go is fast, so if you expect a very high volume and want to keep the server bill low (I don't know about the developer cost comparison) it might be the way to go.

I've used Sails.js (built on top of Express.js) and can't say it's anywhere near Rails yet.

Also, Node maybe be the "wrong" tool for building APIs. By wrong I mean it's not its particular strength.
Live Mobile Congress Reveals Massive Growth in Mobile Markets
maybe a broken keyboard…

(actually my cracked phone screen will do this sometimes, the comma is right next to space on the touch screen keyboard)
Among the MMA community it used to be common knowledge that MMA was safer, concussion-wise. There were no good studies to back that up, however. Now they're starting to come by, and it seems they might be just about the same. Here's one:
http://www.cagepotato.com/myth-busting-is-mma-really-safer-t...
An Engineer’s View of the Sales Process
Over reach -- 23andMe provides no medical treatment which can be regulated. Rather they simply measure and recite a fact: your genome. That looks like a pretty clear 1st Amendment case to me. Especially if they can back it up by demonstrating that they only advertise things that are facts; for example, study by X links SNP-N to condition Z and we can tell you if you have SNP-N.
Generally disagree. People react pretty negatively to having stuff that they purchased in good faith being taken away from them. There are limits of course. State inspections (where they exist) tend to keep you from driving a vehicle that's seriously dangerous or polluting but don't require things to be up to all current standards. This seems a bigger deal in general than whether people can buy something that they don't already own given that there are alternatives--which for the majority--are perfectly satisfactory. (Not arguing for silly government regulations of course but, at the margins, I find many more things to get much more annoyed about.)
WalterBright[0] wrote the first native code C++ compiler, Zortech C++, (later called Symantec C++ and recently DigitalMars C++) and is the man behind the D programming language.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Bright
Well, 2-way Cisco servers can hold 1TB RAM each.

It scales as long as throughput increases while new nodes are added. I've done benchmarking up to 12 nodes, and it continued to scale nearly linearly. (http://www.infinisql.org/blog). I'd like to push it further, but need $$$ for bigger benchmark environments.
Time to wade through all the forum slide and astro turf of another two minute hate.

Blah blah blah, he's fat.
Blah blah blah, music thief.
Blah blah blah, copyright law.

Okay. Yeah, we get it. That's great. We get it. The fat man has a website, and it's very bad. He's a fat, ugly, stinky man. Boo hoo! Make him go away!

I'm still not clear on what it is about his website, and all the implicit data transfer it's responsible for, that's so radically different from any other website that hosts massive amounts of any data I want, shared with the world.

Flickr, for example, let's me share Terabytes of data, if I should choose to do so. Why isn't flickr villified like some genocidal dictator?
Yes, and equally great if criminals got convicted instead of awarded damages.
You have to appreciate the fortitude it took not to mention gmail once.
I do this... sometimes.

I use it (I think) to indicate not only that I had to stop and think about what word to use, but also to indicate that what I'm saying is my opinion or thoughts on the matter.

When I'm stating something factually I never do it, but when you ask if I want Pizza or Burgers, I'd say, hmmm.... Pizza sounds good :)
Trees Capture Particulate Matter From Road Exhaust
But first is true for both cases. If you want to buy something like a Porsche 959, there are only ~200 of them in the world. To get them in the US you have to go through quite the process to have the emissions stuff modified and updated. Even if every one was in the US and constantly driving, I doubt the emissions impact would be worse than a few semi's from the 1970s (and I bet there are plenty of those still on the roads).
Yep. Keyword is "transfer" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_transfer_orbit
You mean, "it is not totally obvious that probability is continuous".

Well… To me, it is obvious.
> the TSA has never caught an actual terrorist. The FDA has stopped potentially harmful and/or ineffective drugs from coming to market

Bingo. Mistakes happen, but different government agencies, different companies, different individuals do have varying degrees of success or failure.
How Russell's Paradox Changed Set Theory
That is not my argument. I'm saying why am I not allowed to import a vehicle from a country with standards that are at least equivalent, if not more stringent than our own? I'm talking about a new vehicle on sale in a 1st world country. I could even buy the same vehicle in Mexico, drive it across the border, and drive it here legally if I was a Mexican citizen on vacation.

* Well, technically I could import it for "display purposes", but it could not be registered for road use.
Seems like there's a lot of pointless and distracting comments on this story. Thanks for your contribution.
What makes me uncomfortable is:

1. the claim that dogfooding would be helpful for feedback and improvement, followed by

2. listing only superficially positive feedback.

Given this memo, I don't think I would feel comfortable giving negative feedback, which then negates one of the major points of the memo.
Actually, I was accusing you of understating the strength of Cox's theorem.
Only if said advertiser is also my butler, cleaning my windows and waiting on me hand and foot.

This is a terrible analogy.
?

You may, or may not be aware, that the very vast majority of physicians practicing in the US today have never sworn an oath, let alone the Hippocratic Oath (which amongst other things, forbids surgery)?

As an EMS provider, my anecdotal evidence in the Pacific Northwest has providers overwhelmingly in support of "Death With Dignity" legislation.
It looks like the countdown overlay is polling every 1 second but is off from the backing timer - some displayed "seconds" last more than a second while the next lasts much less.
That's just.. ugh. Trying too hard.

Yahoo Mail looks like GMail and it pretty much works the same. Same goes for the new Outlook. So theres no motivation to switch when I have all my stuff at Google already.
Not to sound like a 50's handyman. (http://www.familyhandyman.com/doors/repair/fix-sagging-or-st...) However, replacing / rehanging doors and windows and doors is generally a fast and easy thing to do and more or less required as wood flows and settles in an older home. Really what your talking about has more to do with a generally mild climate enabling a lack of maintenance vs. any kind of earthquake damage.

PS: I stayed at a a 100 year old farm house made by complete Amateurs and built on over time where some of the floors and trim sloped more than 5 degrees which is vary noticeable to the naked eye. Yet it had decent insulation, every door opened freely and most windows opened just fine. It took a few people a few weekends to get it there, but vary little cash. A respectable carpenter can do the same thing for you for about 10k every 15-20 years. Again though the difference without cold winters there is far less incentive to actually deal with such things.

Edit: The science behind it is even fairly interesting, but basically wood reacts to the forces on it over time so the less symmetric the home the more extreme the warping can get. Which again hurts Japan with there love of unusual shaped wooden homes.
You're right of course, although I would argue that the difference between 1/11 the distance to the moon (geostationary orbit) and 1/4 the distance to the moon are not off by an order of magnitude, compared to LEO or other lower orbits.
Seriously, I did a double take when I read that.
Presumably they can't check their internal mail via Gmail, but can via either Outlook or their own corporate webmail interface.
The issue isn't them saying "you have a higher likelyhood of disease." The problem the FDA has is 23andMe saying "you have the gene variation XYZ." If you take your 23andMe results to a doctor, the doctor should at best order a REAL FDA approved diagnostic test to see if you really do have variation XYZ because 23andMe hasn't proven that their test is accurate.
>"If you like libertarianism so much, why not just move to Somalia?"

This is a bit offtopic, but how about "because it was terrible before the collapse of their government, and still is terrible?"
I thoroughly enjoyed watching their first mission where their programmers made changes while the craft was sitting outside of the ISS because the position markers weren't being spotted as they expected. They do have an amazing ability to change on the fly, not what you expect from a space program except in SciFi
The Beastie Boys Did Not Sue GoldieBlox
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/404067161175379968
When I read the original article I found myself wondering if I have just worked in a corporate environment too long to find the memo odd. I don't find it unreasonable at all to use the mail portal of choice for the company. When I'm on my own time I use the standards I prefer, but while I'm on company time if they want me to use outlook or yahoo mail or anything else it doesn't seem crazy to just use that and hope it works well.

It also seemed weird to me that it was a plea to the company to change over, rather than just a roll out/move over.
Agreed, this sounds like a great opportunity to capture people that want to sell privately.
Meh.. if not even their own employees want to use it..
Using Vim as Your Password Manager
Depends on your needs. If you need to get something up and running quickly, I would recommend you stick with Ruby.

If you can afford some extra time to learn a new framework then both Go or Express/Node.js are great options that would enhance your skill set.

Node.js and Go are both growing quickly in popularity. They're much faster on the execution side than Ruby and provide additional optimization opportunities via the ability to query more than one external resource simultaneously and combine the results into your API's response.

If you do decide to go with Node.js or Go, Node.js is currently the more popular of the two. You're more likely to be able to land a job or freelancing gig with Node.js skills today, whereas you're more able to contribute something meaningful to the Go ecosystem by getting into it now.

Personally I prefer coding in Go, but most of my client's request Node.js.
People don't realize how easy it is to see the secret API's behind their mobile apps. There's no obvious view-source on my phone and a lot of devs lack a full picture of how all the pieces fit together.
This is actually a stats 101 issue. Imagine that most tests only had 5% false positive rate, then if you took 20 tests then chances are at least one of those is going to give you a false positive.
Google created a dummy G+ account for my Youtube user recently. I had hard time reverting that, and just found a way to unlink Youtube from that G+ page. When I try to delete that G+ page, it warns me that it would nuke my corresponding Google Talk service (which I don't want to lose). This is very annoying. Is there a clean way to revert all this G+ nonsense without disturbing other services?
Show HN: upDrum, a new social news aggregator
I'd choose Dropbox, AWS, Paypal, and Facebook over all of those Google alternatives. But that's not because I believe they are "trustworthy", nor is it because I believe Google has already "fooled" us. Rather, it's because of the economics of the situation.

None of those products are Google's core competency. They're almost all imitation products that are extremely late to the game and that, consequently, have a relatively high chance of failure. On the flip side, AWS, Dropbox, Paypal, and Facebook are all high-revenue market leaders with practically no chance of failing any time soon and owners who can't be enticed to sell out. If you were to replace these products with newer, riskier, less-profitable alternatives from smaller companies, I'd have picked the Google option every time.

Stability, profitability, and market dominance are the primary reasons I trust products to last, not company track record. If Dropbox made a search engine, Amazon made a webmail service, or Facebook made a mobile OS, would you trust any of them to outlast their Google counterparts?
For similar reasons (built-in MIDI interfacing) the Atari STs had a huge uptake in music production that has lasted well beyond their lifespan as general-purpose computers, and even into recent years. Music arrangements haven't gotten more complicated over time, so for many artists, there's just no need to replace setups using 30+ year old gear.
Two massive problems with this plan.

Next to no artists own the rights to their music. So, there will be no significant catalog on this service unless people falsely claim to be the rights holder (as they do on Grooveshark) and upload the content under DMCA, then start collecting fraudulent checks for the material.

But the main problem is, the kinds of people who will install garbage on their computer in order to get free music are already getting it through Pirate Bay, etc. If I care enough about getting it "legally" through this service, wouldn't I have a problem ripping off the other companies whose sites I browse that depend on the ad revenue I'm now depriving them of? "Hey music lovers - make sure your favorite artists get some hard earned money from their music by taking it away from all those writers, game makers and other people whose products you use!"
Phase change (liquid to gas) removes a lot more heat.

It's not being evaporated into the atmosphere, it is undoubtedly being recondensed to liquid state and recirculated.