skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Publish more stats on the success of YC companies, and publish stats on % of female(, black, ...) founder applications submitted, % accepted, % funded after acceptance, etc.

Sorry, but this is a terrible route to go for YC as there's a huge risk of backlash to achieve nothing good. Say, for instance, that black co-founders had received more funding but achieved poorer returns on investment. A very simple interpretation of that data (not necessarily correct, but easy to formulate interpretation) would be that blacks are less successful than whites at getting a return on investment even with odds stacked in their favor. The conclusions and the data would then be deemed "racist" and YC would have shit all over its face. It doesn't even have to be right. There just has to be published data available for there to be a debate about race/sex, etc... leading to a toxic atmosphere around YC.

The reason data like this isn't collected is because VCs are interested in being politically neutral. Data on race and gender are a political powderkeg. PG said that women who haven't been hackers can't see the world as a hacker, and we see the shitstorm it's caused. Imagine if they were tracking stats based on race or gender? They'd be called nazis.
Do we need a story submitted every time O'Reilly has a ebook sale which seems like is every other day? This is nothing but an unpaid advertisement and should be down voted off the front page.

Anyone who actually is interested in being alerted on their deals probably is on their mailing list already.
I hate apple products lately (macbook pro), well I love them but I hate you cant replace components like RAM and SSD.

I wish they improved soon. As for mac pro, I love design.
An vertically extruded triangle form factor would have been superb, like a sibling artefact from 2001.

And Apple already owns triangles http://www.theverge.com/policy/2012/6/7/3068355/Apple-design... ...
I wasn't aware of that. Thanks for the link!
Noam Chomsky: The Richest Countries Are Racing Us Towards Disaster
"The fact that college graduates aren't well-educated enough to get good jobs is an enormous problem"

That line of thinking is also a major cultural problem. A kid learning a lot in school does not in any way either magical or practical imply the world will provide a good job upon graduation.

There is a practical concern of that which can't continue forever will not continue forever. Median incomes are permanently dropping, at least in the USA, and will continue to do so for at least a couple decades best case. Go ahead, keep raising the cost of education, see where that leads you in a supply-demand scenario where the supply of money to feed the system is permanently declining but the supply of available product is permanently increasing with substantial fixed costs. That couldn't possibly lead to a collapse in that business sector in the future, could it? The only question is how to maximally profit off it by investing at this time for the future. Now that is a hard question.
He has said elsewhere, in response to questions about his choice of fonts:

This is a very funny question, why I use Comic Sans. So. All my talks use
Comic Sans, and I frequently see little remarks, “Simon Peyton Jones, great
talk about Haskell, but why did he use Comic Sans?” But nobody’s ever been
able to tell me what’s wrong with it. I think it’s a nice, legible font, I
like it. So until someone explains to me — I understand that it’s meant to be
naff, but I don't care about naff stuff, it’s meant to be able to read it. So
if you’ve got some rational reasons why I should not, then I’ll listen to them.
But just being unfashionable, I don’t care.
If you're watching the Vergecast and posting about it on HN then you're not that much of an outsider as you think you are. No one of my friends or family your age are on Twitter or Pinterest and maybe half are on Facebook. It's easy to think the whole world is into social media when you're reading about it every day, but the majority of people have no idea what any of this means or are even remotely interested in it.
> But nothing in these slides suggests that this stuff wasn't used that way.

that's true of course. but i'm afraid that the revelations of the past months have almost turned "jumping to conclusions" into a legitimate response to this kind of information.
Illegal? What law is being broken?
That's why I'm asking really - not only those two would be pretty much equivalent, there's really nothing that can be expressed with one, but not the other. I mean that's kind of like saying "would you use it if they called the binary snake instead of python3" - what's the reason apart from personal preference for the syntax?
I'd say that if you copied 10 common "small" - "utility" apps that have already been done to death and worked hard on moving them up in search rankings and whatnot you could make ~ 100$ a day.
It's not reputation that makes the media successful at programming people. It's the repetition and omnipresence of the repetition.
> If knives were the most common choice, should we consider them risks for everyone because they might commit suicide with them?

Yes.

Your argument is unclear to me. All else equal, it makes perfect sense that having a gun accessible nearby increases your suicide risk. Just as if you had a big bottle of pills nearby, or a big tower that you could just jump off of. Now, the question turns to whether or not those things should or could be regulated in some way to reduce that risk. The answer is no. Death is a side effect of those modalities. Neither pills nor a tower's main purpose is to end human life. However, for the vast majority of guns, the main purpose is to end life.

> But I'm glad to see that you agree with me that not all guns are designed to kill living things.

Could you please provide some examples of guns like this? The only thing I can think of would be some sort of really heavily modified .22LR for target shooting.
I understand the problem here: don't experiment with crypto with your users' safety in the balance, claiming all the while that they're safe. The sad reality is that none if his users will ever know that there's a problem until it's too late.

Slightly off-topic, but this is one of those areas that bugs the hell out of me, and I don't know the solution. On one hand, security and cryptography people tell lawmakers and those in authority that crypto is math, anyone can do it, it's silly to try to regulate it, etc. On the other hand, these same experts tell the "anyones" of the world not to implement their own crypto, mistakes are easy to make, correct implementations are hard ...

Here's the kicker for me: If you absolutely should never release another piece of software that might have bugs that could endanger someone's life, then you'll never release another piece of software. You can become the greatest cryptographic implementor on the planet, implement to the current state of the art, and, in a couple years, still have your work completely obliterated by a new attack against a cryptosystem that you are using correctly.
Ive published a biography about a guy called Elon Musk (https://leanpub.com/theengineer). I self-published it through leanpub.com. The good thing with leanpub is that their service will automatically generate pdf/epub/mobi files from one main file so you will save time if you need to make a change.
The point of leanpub is that you can improve the book as you get feedback from your readers, so my plan is to collect feedback before the big launch at Amazon.

But don't think it's free money - it's still takes a lot of time to write it and it's still difficult to spread the word about the book.
HBO Still Doesn’t Get It: Game of Thrones Again the Most Torrented Show
"Instead of surfing the wave and adapting my idea to what a real prospect client was telling me they wanted"

FFS don't do this. There are far too many startups beached on the shores of "well, this one SRS BZNS client wanted us to change what we were doing so we did. Where'd all the rest of our clients go?"

I'm not saying "don't pivot", but "just making what they wanted" (where N(they) = 1) turns you into a poorly-paid contract developer who's also paying to host the result, not an entrepreneur.
The article advocates getting rid of all security screenings, TSA or otherwise.

We had private screening services at airports before 9/11 and people still had to arrive 1+ hours early, and still complained about the hassle of security screenings.
Ask HN: How much do CEOs know about their company's govt contracts?
For example, let's consider Apple. From a quick google search, it seems like Tim Cook doesn't hold any government security clearances.

To what degree is he familiar with the specific details of the classified government contracts Apple has taken up?
Those things are not inherently socialist, which is why you see capitalist countries embracing them. Socialism isn't a group of government policies, it's an economic system where there is not a profit motive and generally implies public or cooperative ownership. What you see in Scandinavia is not socialism, it's capitalism with welfare.
1. Why is this so heavily upvoted?
2. How do you, startup people, find the time to write a novel in the comments of this "I didn't mean it" post?
3. Would you lick dirt off Paul's shoes if he allowed you?

Go write some code instead.
You should get into midwest emo.
I don't know, but it bugs people. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6987309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6985792
If Rust had been hyped as much as Perl6 I'd call it vaporware too. It may yet turn out to be vaporware (in that it's not done), but right now I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt that they will actually deliver on their promises.
A cube created to make money is different from a cube created for bettering cubes or advancing cube making. Do you get my point? Your motivations are not high enough. What you claim is your intention is not what your actions say.
Significant in that the title is "Pinterest Passes Twitter In Popularity..." so if you decide to judge popularity by page requests then I suspect twitter may be more 'popular' than Pinterest.

This theory is backed up by http://www.alexa.com/topsites/global;0 where Twitter is 12th and Pinterest is 30th.

Of course, popularity doesn't pay the bills!
The demo looks good but look how much fiddling he had to do to get the images the way he wanted them at certain points. There are so many little quirks that you can't really solve intuitively, you end up having to brute force a solution every time.

He even dealt with a number of non-image quirks and he probably coded the editor. Like when the paragraph and header were both bolded and he had to go back and fix it.

Medium is also highly targeted to blog posts too. A lot of non-technical users somehow want the ability to edit the content on the pages of their web site that might have fairly complicated markup/css to get the desired result.
Emphasis on lower power consumption does not "kill Moore's law" or have a negative effect on computing performance. On the contrary, CPU performance has been limited by thermal output and power consumption for at least a decade and improving the power consumption will improve the performance, not the other way.

Research and development efforts have been concentrated on !/W (bang per watt) for two reasons, the other one being cooling and power supply (battery consumption) on mobile devices in particular and the other reason is being able to run at higher clocks for longer before thermal throttling kicks in.

Power consumption and thermal output are relevant for all kinds of modern computers from smartphones to servers to supercomputers. Power consumption and thermal output are related in an almost linear proportionality, twice the power consumption, twice the thermal output.

Since clock frequencies stopped going up some ten years ago, we've had a 5x to 10x increase in single core performance (in addition to multi cores) thanks to increase in power and thermal efficiency and smaller transistors. Concentrating on power consumption keeps Moore's law alive rather than kills it.
The survey is missing sets of answers for users who rejected or moved away from python because they were turned off by the disconnect between core devs and the community when python 3 got released.
It is true a team ideally is made up of experts in different areas.

It is true having technical skills can make it easier to hire developers, get customers (only one way to make this easier), and appreciate the technical side.

If a 'developer looks down on you' why does this not make them an 'ideal candidate'?

And what is the value of an ideal candidate? Is finding one even possible? Isn't 'the ideal' hard to reach in anything? My ideal life is to make millions while making the word a better place, have a six pack, lots of interesting friends, write rap, write a novel, have an uberman sleep cycle and not go crazy, and have many beautiful and intelligent woman.

Isn't 'ideal' more of a standard then an actual possibility? If so, isn't not the end of the world if this developer is not ideal? Don't you only need a talented developer who will do the work that is asked of him?

And what is 'business or talent ' not 'convincing enough' for? (hiring the developer, creating a business etc..)

It'd be great to fully understand your point of view.
Big Data Is Dumb If You Are Smart
I'm a bit confused about your example with the bakery. That's clearly NOT caused by the placebo effect. Maybe you meant something else?
My Most Used Sublime Text Themes, And A New One
> So, let's tolerate each other.

Yes, yes, many words, lots of rationality. The problem is that the cause is irrational. I do NOT like the fact that you are wearing an always-on recording device pointed in my direction. That's it. I don't like it. Just as I don't like people farting, burping and chewing with their mouths open.

Moreover, and that's the root of this whole "asshole" angle of the Glass use, I am hardly alone. In the unlikely event that you weren't aware of this before, now you are. Just read through the rest of comments here. Now you know that a lot of people feel the exact same way. And yet you insist on wearing it. You choose to act in spite. Do tell me how it makes you look to others and what they will in fact be tempted to call you. And then let's talk about tolerance and understanding.
What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2014
Why It's Nearly Impossible to Castrate a Hippo
I have never understood how rarely attacks occur. I think of the places I visit in London, and the volume of people, and I conclude that there is simply no shortage of opportunity to create casualties of at least 3 figures.

So my question becomes, do the supposed large swathes of angry terrorists not want to damage it in traditional terrorist attacks, or are they being prevented from doing so by the security services, surveillance and border controls etc.

I genuinely believe that some attacks are being foiled though whether it's 1 a year or 1000 a year is extremely unclear.
Same to you. Happy new year.
true, but as we've come to see, a big proportion of the spying efforts of the NSA are being directed towards information gathering, for various other reasons than threat assessment. e.g. i don't think many people would have believed the NSA to be spying on US allies, or being involved in industrial espionage.
Well, since we're discussing opinions here, it is of my opinion that it is your reading comprehension that's lacking. But you shouldn't take it as a personal failure, it happens to everyone from time to time.

When there is an ongoing discussion about an object then one is fully capable of referring to that object without literally naming that object each and every time it is mentioned.

My way: I am holding a stapler. The object in my hand is red. I use it to excess, wasting staples. The boss wants to restrict everyone's usage of staplers because of my waste. I don't think the boss should restrict your usage of an object because of my inefficient usage of the same object.

Your way: I am holding a stapler. The stapler in my hand is red. I use the stapler to excess, wasting staples. The boss wants to restrict everyone's usage of staplers because of my waste. I don't think the boss should restrict your usage of a stapler because of my inefficient usage of a stapler.

That's a stupid way to construct a discussion. But if it makes you happy.

If you take my statement and remove it from the context of the discussion then sure, you are quite correct. But it is not correct to quote that statement as to somehow proving your point by removing it from the context of the discussion.

I did not fail in using a rhetorical flourish to make an argument. I used a simple statement to prove my point that you apparently either failed to follow or attempted to use as a "gotcha!" moment. I'm leaning towards you thinking you had an excellent gotcha moment but alas, I think you protest too much.

By the way, your expanding my statement to include nuclear weapons to totally blow the discussion out of proportion and out of reality was the joke of my office yesterday. Many people thank you for the chuckles you provided.
The problem is that capitalism, as any other paperclip maximizer, will not stop working just because of one country decision. Minimal income will increase cost of labour because nobody would want to do shitty job.
This will make local products more costly and less competitive, and most of the labour will be outsourced. Most of the export will be natural resources.

Switzerland owns huge chunk of world's banking system and due to direct democracy has minimal corruption, so it could afford minimal income by exploitation of other countries. How to make it work for Ethiopia without Earth's unite government and worldwide wealth redistribution system?
"You know all those things you like having in a smartphone? You could do without them, you know."

I agree with your point that more software = more surface area, but your examples of alternatives aren't very viable for most people, in my opinion.
I voted you up due to sentiment, and I don't mean to sound like a grumpy member of the Cabal of Crypto Criticizers, but what's the point in Nadim developing the application if he won't respond well to honest peer review and wakes up every day and decides to fuck around with the basic structure of the application, and not only that, but makes fatal flaws when doing so?

I'm all for learning and experimentation, but not when some dude from Syria is literally Tweeting you and saying, "Hey, thanks!", which is the point of the article. I think end-point spying is probably bad enough at this point that we really don't need a broken protocol too. I don't really see the point in constantly changing out crypto primitives like he does, and it has introduced major security vulnerabilities in the past. He should find something, stick with it and then get it audited and reviewed, and then I think less people would bitch.

I support the goal of making crypto more usable.
I don't mind the print statement/function thing but I am bothered by the pain when dealing with byte strings. I use Python to talk to hardware that doesn't speak unicode, the contortions I have to go through to get byte strings to behave correctly on py3 are frustrating. I have no problem with the default string being unicode, but why can't byte strings be implemented like the unicode strings were done on py2.x?
Why, ...
Because absolute egalitarianism is dogma. Evidence of anything is just evidence of the capitalist patriarchs running everything.
In the long run, we're all dead.

The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

There is an unlimited supply of wrong theories; if yours isn't working, pick a new one.
He has to capitulate because he's 18, ignorant of the relevant laws, and likely has no money to be thrown away on litigation. He definitely has shallower pockets than the RIAA. In the civil arena in the U.S., that's an automatic loss.

Since operating in good faith is apparently untenable, there is no particular reason for anyone to operate in good faith with respect to the RIAA. Thus copyright piracy proliferates.

I'm sure that there are plenty of software writers that would be happy to help the RIAA connect their members with potential new fans and paying customers over the Internet. It's a crying shame that the RIAA consistently turns them away by acting like total dicks.

While I also disagree that it's illegal, I do concur with the decision to fold. If you don't have a big gun behind you to back you up, like the EFF or ACLU, you lose against the RIAA. Even if you "win" in court by the judges' decisions, you already lost time, money, and reputation by the time you get there, with no way of ever getting that back.

The only way to win is not to play.
For Mercurial, this is the biggest problem with Python 3:

http://bugs.python.org/issue3982

They got rid of format for ordinary strings, and since we have to use bytestrings for handling hg's binary format, converting back and forth with .decode and .encode just to get the formatting is a lot of work.

The Python devs have actually acknowledged this use case and apologised to hg. Kinda weird, considering how Python itself is hosted with hg. :-/
World's First Crowdfunded Company? (1602)
Show HN: Six Unconventional Github Projects
Bullshit. I was there in 2002 looking at Perl 6 and we expected it to replace Perl 5 within a couple of years.
I totally get what you're saying, I'm just saying for the vast majority of people who mostly live in a browser, "switching" into a browser doesn't have much meaning because they're already there, this just works a little better for them.

There exist a couple remote desktop apps, rdesktop rdp vnc whatever. And I have a perfectly good virtualization compatible server in the basement, so in the unlikely even she needed a "real" desktop, its not hard to remotely access.

The biggest problem with chromebooks is the good ones are "always" sold out and the bad ones have weird issues like the video drivers are not compatible with normal codecs so do whatever you want as long as its not youtube / netflix / prime video / whatever. And that is a problem. If you're sold out of the good stuff, you don't need to buy advertising.
I don't think your two examples are contradictory. It is silly to try to regulate export of strong crypto, and it is difficult to get crypto right.
Talking with Americans that have lived in China, it sounds like the problem isn't the govt, but culture. Like the anti-spitting campaign during the Olympics, the Chinese govt need similar strong tactics to get its citizens to care about the environment. I don't know how successful the anti-spitting campaign worked out, but the West's current love affair with the environment didn't happen over night either.
Emulation Camp: Yet Another Retrogaming Resource
Make sure to read Charles Stross' Common Misconception about Publishing, that does a great job of explaining the industry.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-m...
2013 was an incredibly embarrassing year for the technology industry. And no, I don't think the positive accomplishments of this year were, on the whole, special in comparison to those in other years. At least, we won't know if any were until a long time from now.

My point is that it wasn't a lost year. Done right, technology is about hard work, year after year, and getting rich slowly. The fact that a few jackasses made public embarrassments of themselves is mostly irrelevant to the people doing that work.

Moreover, the embarrassingness of the Valley's 2013 is a great thing for humanity in the long run, because it might move the technical focus outside of the Valley and the VC-funded world, and back into places that are more hospitable to Real Technology.
Should that matter for Moore's Law as it was defined, for number of transistors on a die? I thought that smaller transistors required less current to operate, so the incentives for lowering power consumption and upping transistor count are aligned.