skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I do not agree with the first statement - it supposes that men and women will, given an option and without external pressures, always choose the same thing in equal amounts.

That's not quite what I'm supposing.

I'm supposing that the choices of individual people without external pressures will always choose things unpredictably. In other words, correlation between individual choice and any particular demographic facet of a person should be pure chance.

This is how random number generators work. You want to provide as even a distribution as possible. That doesn't change the fact that, given a certain seed, the generator will always return the same "random" result.

The analogy comes back around like this: if you can reliably predict that a random number generator will return a number divisible by 3 if the input is odd, there's something weird going on even if some results are not divisible by 3. Chances are, if you look at the RNG's algorithm, you'll find something that creates that bias.

Do you care? Is that an issue? Is that a vulnerability? That's an entirely different question. As software engineers, we'd call it a business or design decision. In the wider world, we call it morality or ethics.

Edit to add: One of the consequences of this perspective is that it factors in any demographic variety, not just "men and women". If someone has a chromosomal set of XXY, then it still makes sense to consider their representation. That it's vanishingly small, such that they rarely register a blip on populations smaller than "the entire world", is part of the same analysis.
I'd be on board. Now we have to build it, and more importantly, build a community around it.
Comcast has been horribly congested in the SFBA for months.

I believe they've been looking at offloading that congestion and frankly moving Netflix is a no brainer.
The blockchain can't handle the transaction volume of currency exchanges; that just won't work.
The Germans should have sanded off the serial numbers.
Something Erlang fans rarely mention: only one generation of equipment used the OTP.

In other words, it was stillborn.
It's a skill, so you might suck. But it's possible you're just not doing the work. Be the guy who calls, hosts dinners, etc. If you DO suck, this will help with that too. :-)
Show HN: Phonegap for dummies (Android)
School start times, for one.
If you get one accountant to use it, it could equal 10-?? Clients if he pushes it to his (new) clients...

Of course, getting an accountant is probably a harder sell ;)
It's anti-climactic that all it was going to take was a compelling business case. Netflix made it easy with their peering initiative [1].

Now Comcast gets to count these bytes against their customers' quotas, and it costs them nearly nothing to deliver the traffic.

This reminds me of NNTP, but Netflix is still running their own hardware.

[1] Netflix's "Open Connect" https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect/guidelines
I self-identify with this too. I am a decent juggler, auto mechanic, wood worker, gardener/landscaper, plumber, hiker, rock climber, group organizer, sysadmin, go player, and a pretty darn good programmer.

I think generalists are the bees of human society; they help to cross-pollinate different fields. Most groups can probably benefit from a generalist or two.

But, there's a danger that people will stop taking your opinions seriously too. What's the old saying about knowing everything about nothing or nothing about everything? Flitting too much from interest to interest leaves you with no real special knowledge of any subject.
PHP's uniqid() uses time, so that's usually sufficiently indiscernible.
For the record, only one generation of equipment used Erlang/OTP. As a part of Ericsson's hardware platform, it was very short-lived.
Except for the STB interface. At least the mobile app is decent.
Bye Bye, WhatsApp: Germans Switch To Threema For Privacy Reasons
Fitbit Says It Will Stop Selling and Recall Its Force Wristband
There's a third option: Continue to use TestFlight. There's no indication that they are going away.
http://mapfight.appspot.com/in-vs-gl/india-greenland-size-co...

^ companion knowledge
Altman's recent essays have used the same phrasing/style as Paul's.. hope Paul isn't handing that off too. =P
We've developed and run a rather large erlang cluster (> 100k simultaneous users) for several years. It's pretty clear that OTP is not ready for that scale -- most of our big bugs have been in the libraries and OTP, not in our code. Couple that with the poor type safety at compile time, and a "in place update" model that doesn't actually work for "many times a day" continuous deployment, and I feel it's not lived up to the hype.
We also run PHP, C++ and Haskell stacks, each of which has had less environment-based problems.
I think you miss a major thing here: if you put vim with just it's top 100 plugins up against Sublime Text, I think it will easily lose. Why would I even use that? It's because of the long tail of thousands of plugins (your 1% usage) that I choose vim/emacs (more specifically, each power user chooses it because of the set of many of those top 100 hundred plugins + a handful of weird, obscure plugins that fit their needs perfectly.)
Interestingly, this performance drop when moving to CMOS was one of the drivers towards the development of clusters (at least for IBM - I am not very familiar with DEV technology).
Why One Executive Quit Business Travel Cold Turkey
Congrats Sam. Ace news.
I tried out uzbl a few months ago. It works very well for tiling WMs, actually. I should consider using it more often.
Congrats Sam! Thank you for the advice to continually focus, focus, focus even in the face of temptation to do more.
Very neat. What's the timeout for?
Most boxes like "Open Connect" pay to be colocated and connected that way. Netflix insists on free installation.
For multi-user machines, IO is more important than processor power.
It is not as much creating an anonymous website as it is about protecting the users (keeping their anonymity) and their content (from prying eyes).
A service can be in plain sight, but if it employs the correct (often needed - extreme) practices, it can provide its users with this level of confidence.
I happen to be a Co-Founder of such a service :-)
www.anongrid.com is an extremely secure and anonymous content sharing service. still in its infancy but you're welcome to check it out and see what I mean.
Yeah. I bet your average person can't understand compiler theory or asymptotic growth of recursive functions.

But I see your point.

They are as emotionally advanced as computer types are intellectually advanced.
Given how hard it is for even brilliant linguists to find academic posts, I wouldn't discount the author of the grounds of his home university alone.
"I'd really love to see a richer UI with proper support for features like variable-width fonts."

Would the variable-width fonts be simply for display with plain text being edited and buffered, or do you wish to be able to have rich text formatting within the editor (e.g. italic, bold, smart quote marks &c)?

Just interested: rich text formatting has been suggested for emacs I recollect.
They already have gone away for Android. On iOS, it looks like they won't allow new apps to be created but existing apps may continue to upload new builds.
Yep. I've done a decent amount of research into why quick books is so prevalent and "accountant support/recommendations" is the main reason.
Can you tell me why Netflix is so terrible on Uverse 20Meg in San Jose?

Blurry mess.

Speedtest is always 13Meg+
I'm always reminded of an essay by, I think, pg about how school works the opposite of real life. In school you are effectively judged by your failures, and thus are encouraged to avoid failing since it will bring down your grade point average. Moreover, the impact of your successes is capped, and at a fairly low level due to grade inflation. Once you've achieved an A/4.0 there is little incentive to put in more effort.

In real-life, however, things are reversed. Being mediocre yet diligent at doing busy work in a variety of subjects, which is precisely what earning a 4.0 implies, is not terribly valuable. Instead what matters is excelling at a small number of things, perhaps even only one.

The conceit of our educational system is that the way it works encourages students to become "well rounded", but it does nothing of the sort and works stronger against doing so than towards. Students are discouraged from developing passion, discouraged from exploration, discouraged from putting forth more than the minimum amount of effort, discouraged from developing their own interests and their own points of view.
I guess that's true, maybe the problem is elsewhere.
Python Tools for Machine Learning – A beginner's guide
Nice!

This reminds me of a work I did as an undergrad which landed in a paper called "Can a Program Reverse-Engineer Itself?". The idea is to take any program/function and make it a quine so you can retrieve its original code even if it has been obfuscated. You can find the paper here: http://pablo.rauzy.name/research.html#imacc11.
All I see here is a couple of people arguing that playing dirty should be compatible with being prestigious, and to that end suggesting that pushing ethical boundaries is literally synonymous with success. And since 'we' subscribe to a certain lifestyle, 'we' need a different morality from the nearest norm. Well, playing dirty is already prestigious in a lot of circles. What more do you want?
And we haven't seen anything yet in terms of decentralized technology. Distributed apps are about to explode soon [1]. I don't know if that will "stop" mass surveillance, as I assume metadata could still be collected unless we think of ways to anonymize almost everything, too, and not just decentralize everything, but at least it should severely limit the mass collection of the content itself. And if we decide as a society that mass anonymization is what we need (in other words, how the Internet was before Facebook, Google+ and post-9/11 NSA), I think we'll have the technical ways to do it.

I believe we should be more optimistic about the future, and I think the author is right that there is a bigger underlying trend here that gives a person more freedom than one has ever had. In a way it feels like how we see the latest economic crisis and see the news about millions of people losing jobs and whatnot, but we forget that if we look at the data, we're now much "richer" than we were decades or a century ago.

It's easy to lose track of the bigger picture. But it's also true that any given country can fall from democracy into a more totalitarian state (I think UK is doing that the fastest these days), but it's not like we haven't stopped stuff like that from happening before, and it's not going to be a permanent state.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQQEdUoCtdg

https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/%5BEnglish%5D-White-Pa...
Why should I use Kraken?
Not everything has to be a conspiracy, and even if you miss a conspiracy, what's the worst that happens?
F2P Games: The Difference Between Paying and Non-Paying Players
Apple buys maker of the iOS testing platform TestFlight
It can be that progression but the RNs I've come across were more like a restricted general practitioner, so I think they just went to school (takes longer) then went into practice. They can even write certain prescriptions, but it seems like they are under the supervision of actual doctors.
You get around it by slowing down the computation
with memory latencies. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random-access_memory#Memory_wal...
E.g. say you have two customers with a balance of 100. You report the total is 100— so 100 BTC has gone missing.

When customer A logs in you give them one root and show them their balance (and B has a balance of 0). When customer B logs in— oops balances just update— you show them a new root, and in that one B has a balance of 100.

So you need to pin the commitments strongly enough so that the prover can't swap them out at will.
This is absolutely fantastic news for YC, their startups and the community as a whole.

pg was a huge influence on me - I've read all of his essays, watched his talks and studied his comments on HN. I've learned so much about startups and making cool things from him and am now in SF hacking away at a startup solely thanks to the inspiration "How to Make Wealth" gave me.

sama, if you'll take a piece of advice from a lowly HN commenter, please be the same to the next generation of founder/hackers. Don't just be really good at accelerating startups. Teach, inspire, and care. You're inheriting a legacy, now build one of your own.

I've never met you in person but from what I've heard, you're just as capable of this as pg was in your own way. Godspeed.
>I'm convinced there's a fundamental change happening in the way work gets done. It's becoming normal to start a startup.

I'm hoping this will be the topic of PG's next essay.
I completely agree. That level of foresight is crucial to actually moving towards those goals.
It would be awesome for technology focused entrepreneurial focused people did get into the presidency and politics. Maybe guys like Sam one day or Jim Greer of Kongregate: http://www.kongregate.com/forums/1-kongregate/topics/383925-...
No - I've done a number of FP projects, but certainly spent less time with it than imperative languages. Here are some FP projects I've done --

* Compiler for a scheme-like language in Haskell
* simple webapp in Haskell using Yesod
* small 2d game in Clojure
* racket-based little language that compiles to openscad
* lots of academic programming-languages projects in Racket
(garbage collector, type checker, prolog, etc)
Even without technological advances, the US public school system has been able to teach false history (and other subjects including science) for decades. Sure it can be checked and a minority of students may be angry for being lied to but this has yet to stop the system. It's true that information is hardly it's primary purpose, that being babysitting, but the perception that school is for learning lends it much credibility.

The other major problem is that we are now forced to choose between privacy and innovation. Want to use any cloud based service or any service that operates on remote data? You give up any right to privacy regardless of any corporate policy. Want to be secure and private? Put up with slow tor, no remote services, and no cell phone. If enough people chose the latter, it might make a dent in companies' bottom line to possibly get them to use their clout to influence policy towards privacy. It's unlikely that will happen, and even if it does, until corporate data can be protected from surveillance without a warrant, even that is moot.
How large of a scraping project are we talking about in terms of throughput?
If you rely on precious metals as money, they make a perfectly good medium of exchange. Unfortunately, the money supply will still change.

Imposing a fixed amount of money on the world does not somehow imply that there is a fixed supply of money. This was a central problem in European economies for thousands of years.

You hate the central banks. Great. What's your solution? Chaining your economy to precious metals or a computer algorithm is an unpleasant alternative.

(An interesting historical option: rather than precious metals, Chinese accounts were historically backed by the productive capacity of the land. i.e. capital was defined in terms of rice. This had its own ugly side-effects. Still, it was, in many ways, less ugly than relying on precious metals, since money supply was at least somewhat correlated with economic activity)
It just catalogs existing youtube public content right? Why would MPAA have a problem, if they have, they would have DMCA'd the original video

looks like its in github https://github.com/sdelarquier/couchtube
We have advanced weaponry, but we don't spend life at the point of a gun. Decisions have been made to apply technology in this way and to allow technology to be applied in this way.

We're not surrendering to some sort of technological determinism, but to government contractors, Congressmen, judges, the unitary Executive, and a short list of private companies and individuals.

The government always had the ability to monitor all of our phone metadata, they just weren't allowed to. That we can't get back to that state is a failure of national character, not an advance in technology.
What do (Chinese) bank share prices tell us about growth?
How many kids like this are there, really. I keep reading these articles but I'm not sure how representative they are. I live in a town with a demographic that should be 100% trapped in upper-class white-ville angst but I don't actually meet very many parents or kids like this.

Maybe it's Oregon, my in laws in the Bay Area are more prone to this kind of behavior.
Ultimately you can also generalize this. Specifically, there is a tug of war between the company and its users. By and large, the company interests may be served by exploiting as much user data as possible. The user usually sees this a bad. They want the company to be useful but without having to give up and privacy (or other negatives.) The user perspective only impacts the companies interests when enough negatives accumulate to create a negative reputation that stifles growth, but almost all users, ceteris paribus, would prefer the company to be less invasive. So these outrage-fests directed at LinkedIn, Facebook, Path, etc. serve to push back against companies and create the demarcation line between acceptable and unacceptable tactics.
Verizon doesn't care what customers want. Cellular is a cartel if ever there was one.
Isn't that a pyramid scheme? To have any nxt, you need to buy it from someone else.
I'm not inhibiting any progress by pointing out the fallacy of "more jobs = less inequality". That, by the way, is a classic example of syllogistic reasoning. We need more women to get CS jobs to increase equality, and i'm suggesting we don't need to focus on just getting them CS jobs, so I must be advocating women should have less equality.

But people claiming each other is giving strawman arguments is an infinite loop. So let me just address your point about gender diversity. Is it useful in general? Sure. Will it help you understand an algorithm's efficiency? Probably not.

There's a lot of different kinds of diversity we could be pushing for, like political, religious, economic, cultural, and racial diversity, but nobody's pushing for them. I suspect it's less that tech workers are inherently more sensitive to the needs of women, and more likely that lonely male nerds want women to gawk at in the workplace. This could be why none of them are actually discussing the issues that cause inequality and seemingly just want to get them to work in nearby cubicles. But that might be a big leap.

To elaborate on the misogynist comment, i'm saying getting more women into tech jobs won't make for a better working/living condition - they're still subject to the same problems that prevented them from going into the job in the first place. Example, when men started allowing women into the workplace (in general) in greater numbers. They allowed them in, sure, but still treated them like shit - and still do, for reasons other than simply access to the job. So pushing women into more tech jobs without working on the more important issues (inequality) just subjects them to more abuse, for example the misogynist kind.
Goldman Sachs takes on Bitcoin
If you had asked me I might've said this was impossible.
Quora digest links hold login info.
The Wolves of the Web
Christine: The World's Most Modular PC Design
You described rules being violated or systems performing poorly. You didn't describe people being harmed.
NuttX-6.33 et all Released (100th release)
Just tried it out with my synth, worked well. Good work :)
First-class support for embedding wins a pledge from me. I wish you the best.
> We have advanced weaponry, but we don't spend life at the point of a gun.

That's kind of the point though. After the Cold War we gave the military every capability needed to oppress us 1000x over without too much fretting about police states, trusting that the government would not force us to live at the point of a gun. We didn't simply forbid the military from having missiles, which is the proposed equivalent here.

> The government always had the ability to monitor all of our phone metadata, they just weren't allowed to.

Sure they were, ever since Smith v. Maryland, and for all the years before Katz v. United States. Any prohibitions on what government could look at regarding business records or on the wire were imposed by Congress, not by the Constitution.
> Look at SublimeText, it's got 1% of the features of Vim, yet it's converting Vim users left and right, by its sheer usability.

I just looked it up, $70 is way out of my pay range. I'll convert when I have a full-time job.

> We as developers in the Open Source community should be ashamed people are still using Vim to write LaTeX in Bash running on terminal emulators.

Yes, you should be ashamed.
> my only relationship with Stripe is paying them substantial money to charge credit cards, and I'm... not a Bitcoin fan, to put it mildly.

Those are two very strange statements to put beside each other, Patrick. It makes it seem as if you genuinely believe that processing digital payments is something that should cost society a significant amount of money.
Congrats Sam! You've recently shown your ability to be a thought leader with your writing, and I couldn't be more excited for this opportunity to show your mettle as an executer as well. Here's to a bright future for YC!
Most Ruby implementations have some kind of inline cache - they remember at each call site what object you normally see there, and what method you're normally calling. Could you get that data out and use it to report the correct method at each call site?
I was at Balisage this summer, a markup conference (XML). The opening talk was on semantics. The summary basically read, what the hell does this word even mean anyway.

(paper - http://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vol10/html/Usdin01/Balis...)
Putting aside legal issues, you don't have any moral problems doing volumes of scraping content that is not yours?
Its memory requirement of 128KB is a compromise
between computation-hardness for the prover and verification efficiency for the verifier.
You don't want verification of a proof-of-work to take a lot of resources, since every client has to perform it.
The Man who is really trying to Make a Difference
> I wouldn't be surprised by this. Go's concurrency pattern is fantastic

Only for those not versed in java.util.concurrent, TPL, PPL, TBB, Cilk Plus.
Reach Into Your Heart Dig Into Your Pockets – Let's save Africa
Localytics Predicts Huge App Marketing Opportunities
Tested 1m times under load with no degradation (someone kindly sent me a copy of the paper). They talk about the process here: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2014/02/19/343.6173....
Thanks, I get it now. Hadn't thought of that.

Of course, if many people were connected at the same time, this would quickly become perilous gymnastics for the exchange.
When it really matters- Nothing makes you use the GC... You can use a your own pool (or in tip sync.Pool) or mmap and your own allocator...

I used to do a lot of C#/C++/Java and after two years of Go... I don't miss generics. Go has been a great C++ replacement for me...