skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Strongly agree. It's taboo to criticize TeX because of who wrote it, but let's be honest: from a usability perspective it's atrocious. Cryptic error messages, code that rivals assembler for readability ... hell even the directory layout makes no sense to me, and I've been using TeX daily for over ten years. I hold Knuth in high regard as a scientist, and there's no arguing that TeX is a technical masterpiece which revolutionized the field of mathematics--but this is not the typesetting language that's going to carry us through to the next century (I hope).
>Institutionalized theft isn't an acceptable solution. Such class jealousy does not, historically, end well.

Historical precedents are not, historically, very useful.

Lots of things that worked at some point in time for some country (e.g a revolution) failed at other points in time for some other country and vice versa.

Each era has unique factors -- from technology to culture. You cannot make assumptions based on what happenned in this or that case 50 or 1000 years ago.

Plus, the notion of "institutionalized theft" is politically charged itself. Whole lotta assumptions there ("those who have lots of wealth deserve it", "they got it all by themselves", "society is better off if they don't be made to share it", etc).

How about inequality being "institutionalized theft" and redistribution being "justice"?
If youre a Prime member and a package misses it's promised delivery date you should contact customer support. SOP is to increase your prime subscription by one month.
I agree, it -shouldn't- mean that. But it oftentimes seems to serve as code for that, because outside of that I can't think of any thing you can actually measure. How does 'passion' turn into actual measurable output, if we exclude measuring how much time you spend on something?

You will also note I excluded coding outside of work (sort of); that really seems like the same metric, a measurement of how much time you're spending on coding.

That's really it; 'passion' is not a job requirement for a good developer, and it's ill-defined. If you -mean- it to be someone who is good at what they do, takes responsibility, is able to strike a balance between quick coding and quality coding, etc etc, then POST that.

When you use the word "passionate", I don't know what you mean; the only metric I can think to measure it objectively is how much time you -choose- to spend writing code.
> It's better to host it in your own home.

With the sterling reliability of the average residential ISP... For what it is worth, home runing is a viable option for many uses: I do run a server or two at home myself but important things are out in external DCs too.

> Everyone has an old computer with more storage space than you can ever afford from Dropbox

For transfers maybe, but are your really trusting an ancient box of parts long out of warranty with your long term storage?

> "Maintenance" is a bad criticism.

It isn't criticism (as it "this is bad and it is their fault because of how they've designed the product"), it is a perfectly valid concern when considering whether to run a service for yourself or pay someone else to do it for you.

> Use some stable distro and run apt-get update && apt-get upgrade once every couple of months

Remind me never to employ you as a sysadmin! There is (potentially) a lot more to it than that. what about setting up backups, monitoring those backups and testing those backups? What about connectivity: if you home connection goes down of you have a hardware failure while you are mobile who is going to fix it? If there is a fault with your physical line how long is it going to take to get people out to fix that?

You might not find those issues to be relevant to your (storage of and) access to your data, but to some people they are vitally important and need considering.

I'm actually planning to test an OwnCloud install for myself and family & friends, it looks like the feature set covers out needs quite nicely if it works well enough, but I can assure you I'm giving the above things all due consideration and I don't consider it "bad criticism" to do so (for my own data at least: friends and family will be told the service is free to use at their own risk!). I may even suggest we run an instance at work if my experiments with it go well, as we could use such a service but the nature of some of our data means that we can't trust it to 3rd party services.
> In the web you don't have pages

It can be done. For example Google docs supports headers, footers, and footnotes, but you are still free to decide whether to use the "print layout" or more webpage-like seamless layout for both editing and publishing ("publish to the web").
There should be atleast few more people interested in this!
Facebook and Zuck have waaayyyyy too bad a privacy track record to be entrusted with this imo. I deleted the app.
I want to put a hyperlink to Eq. (4.4) of http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9907164
What is the right format? How can it even in principle work?
If I click on the link:

http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9907164/Eq_4_4

what is supposed to happen?
Out of pure curiosity to see where you're coming from - when you say "I have to disagree with some of his premises, particularly where he says prototyping is difficult (or more difficult than software)", have you ever imagined, designed, and built 1) a piece of software 2) a piece of hardware?

I don't have preconceptions about what your answers will be, just curious.
Bubble trouble
Uber Preferred Pickups Concept
"Employee engagement can’t be mass produced." that was my favourite quote of the piece. In a previous place where I worked they would make little individual gifts for everyone for new year. It was usually a small thing like a cardboard statue of you, or a plush doll based on something you liked. It was really such as lovely touch, that imo it moved people on an emotional level and help retain folks much more than a lot of other things. I think it's super important, especially in a super competitive environment for talent to pay attention and invest in those little things.
Website Buys Customers New Computers To Avoid Dealing With IE7
You can turn off sms verification and use the Google Authenticator instead.
Your operating system is concurrent even if it's single threaded.

Concurrency is about doing things in the same time period not necessarily at the exact same time.
> I consider a more modern language that compiles to LaTeX and leverage its rendering engine for paper docs (while giving you sufficient control over the output) and also gives you a nice web output more pragmatic and a nicer way to approach the problem.

I'm currently looking for exactly such a solution. Have you found any?

Sidenote: Ideal would be a language that comes with either Word or E-Pub conversion tools (in order to migrate existing word documents over). I say E-Pub because there is a relatively nice migration path from Word to there: Get on a Mac, open the Word in Pages, export to E-Pub. Can also be used to get a sane xhtml output, since it's just a zipped folder with xhtml and some images.
Are you proposing that a car salesman might refuse to sell someone a car on the chance that the buyer could be a criminal of some sort?
I don't have any clear answers for you. I personally like the situation where I'm the only programmer in my domain at the entire organization. It gives me stability in the form of a salary, latitude because I'm the only one who knows how to translate the requirements into working code.

The stakes are small, but I get a lot of free time because prior poor business decisions are forcing them to keep a full-time guy for a workload that really could be handled by a part-time contractor. I can spend lots of time being cautious and focusing on implementation details. Also screwing around and browsing HN.

I don't get paid what a full time Rails dev should be getting paid in this job market, but the intangibles I've managed to wring out of the arrangement make it worth it.

Eventually I'd like to find/train a sales guy to line up deals and another code guy like you to help me implement them. But for now I like where I am.
I completely agree. I emailed Amazon a while back because there was an add on item I really needed but could not buy. I understand they can't ship it free. That's fine, but like you said there was literally no way for me to purchase it and pay shipping. That's insane. They should make sure there's always a way for the customer to purchase something.

I also feel the SmartPost shipping is a broken promise. SmartPost almost always turns out to be 3 day shipping. 2 days from Amazon to the post office, then 1 day from post office to me.
Re: "Java has had all of the same async capabilities for many, many years, but nobody uses them"

That's exaggeration.

Lots of Java libraries use async and concurrency. Java 7 has NIO.2 which is easy to use. There is also Netty; many projects build upon that.

I'm not here to say Java's ecosystem is richer or better; I'm just saying exaggeration is not useful.

Re: "the vast majority of the java ecosystem" I don't mean to sound dismissive, but lots of languages have code you probably don't want to use based on your preferences or needs. So? Don't use the vast majority of libraries. :) You probably don't anyway.

UPDATE: See also Akka and Clojure's concurrency for useful, popular approaches for the JVM.
Node offers parallelism through load balanced processes. See cluster.
Yeah, it may not be; I just find amenities on site, rather than pay and benefits that transfer off site, makes me uneasy. Some of my perks require remaining at work = incentive to remain at work = harder to maintain work/life balance.

I mentioned Google only because it's famous for the amenities provided at the Mountain View facility.
BoltsFramework: Open source by Parse
The free version of your game does some funky things after a round of playing.
The NIST competition was for a hash function, not a key derivation function.
I think the guys at http://substance.io are trying to solve this problem. You should take a look !
Hyperbole. Words like "awesome" and "incredible" have also lost their original meaning and power. Things can't just be "good" or "moderately enthusiastic" anymore - it sounds too weak, and doesn't cut through the noise these days.
EVidence Beta –
The Twiggy Mac Lives The Quest To Resurrect The World’s Oldest Macintosh
Ugh. That part makes me sickest of all.
It is in VC funds in the narrower sense, because their LP agreements often forbid any individual investments in startups. VCs' LPs don't want the VC partners siphoning off the best of the firm's deal flow for themselves.
Does Dave McClure wait to invest personally? I could see his investment having a similar signaling effect.
diff funds have very different policies - most top tier funds (from my experience) have a hard rule against it, given the potential signalling issues. That being said, I know at least one Tier-1 fund that lets partners invest in an existing portfolio company if and only if the firm chooses to pass on the investment in a round - take the pro-rata as it were.
Could be a more powerful ARM Cortex, rather than the insanely out-dated Atmel chips. If anyone ever makes a 5V ARM processor Atmel will be finished.

Also I'm going to rant about Arduino for a bit: Yes it's very simple and easy to get started with, but their API documentation is bad, and the IDE is objectively and irreparably awful and has not really improved since it was first released. Making things even worse they don't provide a decent way to integrate it into other IDEs because lots of the build logic is tied up in the IDE.
The Big Data Story (and Webinar) Behind Chinese New Year
Pandoc doesn't have an "include" feature, but it's easy enough to add this with a preprocessor. See http://randomdeterminism.wordpress.com/2012/06/01/how-i-stop....

Pandoc does provide a way to link to section headings, but it doesn't yet have a generic system for autogenerating numbers and producing references to these, like LaTeX's \label{} and \ref{}. It does, however, have a system for creating running example lists: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/README.html#numbered-exampl.... This can be used for numbering equations and referring back to them, but it is considerably less flexible than LaTeX.

Pandoc has extensive support for automatic citations using CSL stylesheets: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/README.html#citations. BibTeX and BibLaTeX files can be used as the database, or YAML citations can be included in the markdown document itself.

LaTeX formulas can be embedded in markdown. They can even use macros defined in the document. Formulas can be converted to MathML or native Word equation objects, depending on the output format.

Pandoc can also be extended using "filters" that operate directly on the parsed AST. Here's an example of a filter that finds tikz diagrams and converts them to embedded images that can be displayed on the web:
https://github.com/jgm/pandocfilters/blob/master/examples/ti....
Wow, this is awesome! Excellent work on this. Going to give it a spin over the weekend.
No, because selling guns out of your trunk is a crime more often than not. This is a poor analogy.
> Wealth is built by extracting that wealth from a shared economy.

This is wrong. First wealth is not extracted from people...it is created from a voluntary exchange. Think about why people handed over money to the "wealthy" in the first place. It was in exchange for a good or service that made that person wealthy where wealth is defined by being better off than they were before. Money is just a unit of exchange that we use to move wealth around. Following this logic the wealthy have already paid their dues so to speak by making other people more wealthy.

Again they do not EXTRACT wealth, they GENERATE wealth for their customers. People with a ton of money should be applauded for delivering so much wealth to society not vilified as if they stole it from them.
Recap: This Month in Data Science
Incredible new first-person view of Felix Baumgartner's space jump
I recently gave Tmobile a try and they've made me regret it immensely. Every single customer-facing part of their web services (activation, account management, etc) is riddled with pants-on-fire bugs, and their phone support is terrible.

When I tried to activate my new account online, I got to a form for payment that was demanding I fill out fields that didn't exist on the page. This is insane from a major carrier. I then had to call in to activate, and after having me on hold for half an hour, they made me verify with one of those things where they want to know a nearby intersection from where you lived six years ago - which of course I couldn't answer. I hung up on that guy, called again, and they let me verify my card through my bank. And now that I had an account, I tried checking out their account management site, and it was so broken as to be nigh unusable. And then I found out like the OP that a noticeable amount of sites are broken or just plain unreachable on their network.

I now understand why they can offer such a great-sounding plan for $30/month.
A system that takes ideas from http://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/ would be most welcome.
"No. The output might be beautiful, but the language is most certainly not. Awful to debug."

Absolutely agree but, as far as I'm aware, this "more modern alternative" does not exist.
That said, saying (concurrent) Node is faster than (nonconcurrent) Language X is several distinct levels of stupid.

If you introduce blocking into an application then to the user it slower, but in terms of computation it could still be faster by some magnitude.

It's like having C block on a network call while having in-browser Javascript concurrently move past it and declaring Javascript faster.
It's not about transferring value - it's about substituting currency-equivalent value. What's the substitution going on in a mining pool? (And don't say electricity for coin, electricity is not valued similarly to a currency. Similarly 'claim on mining output'.)
Apple: "Don't send us your ideas"
Lots of businesses fit, but only ones with cash to take or political points to score will be targeted.
I cancelled my Prime membership early this month after being 4 years as a prime member. I took advantage of the 4 year($39/year) offer for Students. Am not eligible any more now. I looked through my orders over last 4 years and its only in the last year, I have really used the Prime to its best.

I was still thinking about getting back Prime for $79 as I enjoyed Alpha house and as a member of Amazon Preview, I have a bit of knowledge about their future productions. But a $40 increase would be too much for me at least. Might consider in Summer again based on how my 6 months without prime will go.
Quick tangent for those saying they pay for Prime but have never used the Prime Instant Video part --

Seeing as you're here on HN, you might be interested in one of Amazon's two original TV series, "Betas". It's a comedy about a social mobile app startup going through a YC-like incubator, followed by a demo day, attempting to raise funds from VCs and angels, while spurning buyout attempts from a caricature of Zuckerberg and avoiding hit-pieces in Valleyswag.
The reactions of investors after Demo Day don't change our opinions much. We've just spent the last 3 months working closely with these companies.
Fair point, we haven't heard of a similar thing happening in the US. However, I'm not convinced we would have heard about it happening.

Consider, this is a _US invention_: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary
I did, and would recommend it to others. The final product is just so much nicer looking than I feel the reader subconsciously finds one to be a more appealing candidate.

You almost certainly want to use a better font than Computer Modern, but that's easy.
What Amazon needs to do is arrange for weekly shipments. I love prime, but I pre-order a lot of stuff, and often I'll have a week where I receive shipments three or four days in a row; One impulse buy I bought right then, two things I placed orders for months ago and months apart from each other, that just happen to come out at the same time.

Imagine if I could have them consolidate those shipments; Get a weekly shipment for most items, or get it via normal prime when it's something I really need fast.
A lot of this is just confusion of necessary and sufficient conditions. Assuming that X, Y, and Z are necessary, it doesn't mean they are sufficient. (Although in #1 they might not even be arguing they are necessary.)
That's why there's a difference between choosing a job and choosing a career. You choose a job because it's a job and you are working for money. You choose a career because it's something you want to do with your life. People should focus more on what career they want and less on the job, but I understand that sometimes money gets in the way of career and focuses people on the job instead.
That is common to all systems that involve publication. It's no more a disadvantage than saying something before a crowd out in public. You can disavow saying it all you like, but someone is probably going to remember what really happened regardless.

At least if you say it while wearing a mask of pseudonymity or anonymity, you can shed the identity itself and grow another. And if you choose to defame homosexuals, people could look to see if you were wearing your corporate CEO hat or your religious zealot hat at the time--or even note that you do, in fact, consider them to be separate hats--before boycotting any chicken sandwich restaurants.

People do erect cubicle walls within their own psyche. Hardly anyone has a monolithic personality that is presented for all possible occasions. Many of the people who do have engaged in a lifelong pursuit of introspective remodeling to get there, as with a Buddhist monk who has trained himself to show equal respect to a homeless drunk as he shows to sober heads of state. Most everybody else would prefer to keep several different personas on file, to be used at need, including the persona that we show to no one at all.

The Facebook strategy to date is only serving the universal public persona. And that's really only suitable when no one on it actually knows anyone else. The instant any two pepole have an actual personal connection, the invasion of their privacy begins.
I've had the opposite experience - 30+ minute hold wait times every time, clueless and indifferent service personnel, incredibly annoying verification procedures.
Money laundering is not unethical. It wasn't even illegal in the US until 1986. At the time the law was passed we were promised it would only be used against organized crime that couldn't be stopped any other way.
I use Amazon EC2 and I can assure its not a feasible solution due to the bandwidth it will consume.
I think the issue here is that you could use a stolen card to buy Starbucks cards and sell them to this guy for btc. This guy is then going to swallow the loss when the fraud is detected. Credit card thief gets away with bitcoin.
Video only would be really tough for them to match Netflix on price or content in near future IMO.
Lovely piece. Really. I know from my own personal experience that the time in my life where I most successful by the society surrounding me standard I was also the most unhappy. Sure, financial wealth helps you in certain areas in life and alleviates some worries, but in the long run others can creep in instead and you don't end up happier. It's that mix of being appreciative of other people from all walks of life and finding gratitude for what you have that I think can help you be happier. My thoughts anyway. Great piece.
PlayFramework (which I can't recommend enough) makes async and continuations super easy in Java.

http://www.playframework.com/documentation/1.2.7/asynchronou...

Play also dramatically improves Java's general... cruftiness.
They have done a decent job of making the add-ons good enough that I would stick with it if they raised it to $10 a month. When it was originally just $79 for 2-day shipping, and the free shipping threshold was $25 otherwise, it felt like much more of a splurge.
Parent might have made some good point, but this whole "PHP sucks" attitude is pretty juvenile. How can we have constructive discussion about some software if the knee jerk reaction this community has is "lol PHP, so shit"?

I'll take open source code over proprietary crap any day of the week.
It's an "informercial" from a company which core business is providing nodejs commercial tools and consulting, what did you expect them to say about NodeJS ?
I use akka for much if not all of my heavy lifting on the JVM. Admittedly, it's a little awkward sometimes, but if you make the right tasks non blocking (run it in a future), you would be surprised at the performance increase you can net.
Markdown Tables Generator
We're small enough that we can enforce things easily on our side. We can't control what founders say to investors. But experienced investors wouldn't believe a YC partner had agreed to invest without being able to confirm it.
Oh, them!

Strange, there seem to be relatively few studios like that which didn't either get merged into something larger or fade away completely.

Superior Software is another example.

Mind you, if what these developers is saying is true, then they would do with improving one or two things.
Yeah, there is an establishment north of Houston that is a very common stop on the way from Houston to Dallas. They pay pretty high above market, and from what I can tell, it seems to work. Kinda sad that, by definition, everyone can't do that, although I do wonder if the above market pay just lets you find those who are stuck working retail but are willing to value the job.
Awesome! I'm going to try it out now.
I'm guessing it's the latter, and as this was put out by Marketing Land, it was a poll of their readers. I don't necessarily associate MS with marketing, but they probably mean Bing as a marketing channel.