skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not convinced (yet?) that tablets are good for children. I might be a bit too old, lacking the parenting experience, but I'm skeptical because a tablet might consume too much time better spent on exploring the rest of the world and it comes with a lot of content built by people whose primary consideration wasn't to teach children, but instead to make a quick buck. It might be better than TV (arguably...), but interacting with other people, animals, more "natural" objects ranks a lot higher with me...
Ask HN: Sending a message to any Gtalk contact fails with code 503?
After Jeri Ellsworth was fired from Valve, she had said that the "flat organization" of Valve masked an informal but very real hierarchy that was made up of elites and their cliques. I realize that flat organization is not the same thing as holarchy, but it could be that they both are trading formal hierarchies for informal ones rather than dispensing with them.
Manager != leader.

Managers can = leaders, but the two are not mutually exclusive.
I was expecting the article to educate me on why holacracy is less effective than hierarchy. However the argument that "holacracy does not work because rich white men fill power vacuums" is fluff.
Benjamin, you're conflating bitcoin the protocol with bitcoin the 'currency'.

This is an all too common mistake, so please don't feel too too bad about it. Bitcoin protocol does have some interesting things to offer us and I'm sure it will be built upon in novel ways.

Bitcoin 'currency' on the other hand is a non-starter and as time goes on we will see it discarded.

I hope more people would concentrate on the protocol but about 99% of what you hear and the energy of people is set on bitcoin 'currency'.
If it was really hijacked then where are all of the calls from frantic passengers calling family members like on 9/11. I am calling BS on the hijack landing scenario. Do we really live in a word where our first thoughts are always terrorism.

I guess the government propaganda machine is really working when our only conclusion to things is it must be terrorism. More funding for the spooks!
I'll have to find this later when I have time, but there was at least one story about HR problems at Valve that came out not too long ago. The author basically said that while nobody has "official" power, a cabal of a few individuals who were particularly adept at acquiring and exercising political clout within the organization ran things and made decisions.
1. I thought Google auth and Authy were interchangeable.

2. https://library.linode.com/linode-manager-security for the dev section.
I think your read on this is a little strong. The point is that a power structure is going to emerge in an organization eventually, and a formal, out-in-the open power structure is less likely to be abused than the sort of off-the-record de facto power structure that will inevitably emerge in a "no management" type company.

Just because people have power doesn't mean they are "progressive dictators" or "oppressing people".
A little while ago I listened to the RougeLike Radio podcast about NetHack. While the people on there, mostly developers of various clones, had plenty to say about the issues with NetHack, including its code, one thing they did agree on: NetHack is a game about exceptions. What makes it fun is exactly what makes the code is damn terrible; that is, every interaction between any two or more objects is a series of if/else if statements. For example, you can dip an object into another object if it's a potion, a fountain, a sink. If you dip it into a fountain, you may summon a jinni, or the fountain might dry up. If you dip a potion into another potion, you might make a new potion; or dilute the original; or bless or curse the original. Or you might create an explosion. This is a simple example with mostly straightforward rules. Things like interactions between thrown objects and their targets are more subtle but more complex. This is why I play NetHack: because the complexity makes it fun. A simpler game like 2048 can also be fun, but it's predictable. NetHack is different every time you play it.
As far as I can tell, it's reasonably sustainable for company size of n < (something). At some point (low-mid 2 digits?), you end up with too many lines of communication.
I came to the same realization recently. I have a lot of flexibility at work to work on personal projects that relate to my job. Unfortunately work doesn't provide some of the infrastructure I need/want. So now I have a decent lab at home and a VPN connection in. Work gives me the time, I give the resources. Good balance.
Amazon Locker is almost that service (it's not drive-through). Most of the locations seem to be inside 7-11 stores, but it's just what you describe - walk in, type in or scan your code, pick up your package.
I'm just being pedantic, but the asynchronous I/O of Haskell isn't really associated with laziness, although it does have lazy I/O (which often is a bad idea.) Go essentially does all the same things (all I/O is asynchronous under the hood using epoll, kqueue, etc.) without being lazy.
Right, sharing code is always a lot more work than simply telling people what happened when you ran it.
Thanks for writing this. I agree with everything you said.

I'd also add the concern of Bitcoin lacking an inflationary mechanism. I can't see it ever becoming a currency without that. If it's lucky, it may be a transactionary vehicle before the next technology displaces it. But, like you pointed out, it doesn't have much of a utility for that purpose anyway - taking transaction fees, security and usability into account.

Emin Gün Sirer wrote [0] an excellent survey of the Mt. Gox scandal, and a measured evaluation of the problems with Bitcoin. I loved this part:

> What Nigerian scams are to your grandfather, Bitcoin exchanges are to the 20-30 semi-tech-savvy libertarian demographic.

He ends by recommending Dogecoin because the community doesn't take itself too seriously.

> If one must pick a cryptocurrency, the lowly dogecoin, of all things, is doing everything right. It's based on economic principles that provide the right incentives for a healthy economy. The community does not take itself seriously. Most importantly, no one pretends that Doge is an investment vehicle, a slayer of Wall Street, or the next Segway. No one would be stupid enough to store their life savings in Dogecoins. And people freely share the shiba goodness by tipping others with Doge. So, young people who are excited about cryptocurrencies and want to get involved: Dogecoin is where the action is at. Much community. So wow.

I just hope the hoardes of Bitcoin speculators don't ruin it for them.

> What can I do with bitcoin that I can't with paypal or even a bank account (many let you instantly transfer money these days for no/low fees to pay friends, landlords, etc.)?

For all its faults, the cryptocurrency renaissance (based off the Bitcoin protocol) is enabling the Silk Roads to flourish. You can't run those on Paypal. You can't donate to Wikileaks with Paypal either, for that matter.

[0]: http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/03/01/what-did-not-happen...
But if you aren't in the kind of bind that a company like GitHub is in, or any company that needs to grow quite fast, you can hire and fire at your leisure, creating the team that you need.
What would be the point in stealing a 777? There are not that many of them, really, and their history is usually recorded in extensive detail. I think it's unlikely in the extreme that anybody could successfully pass off the aircraft as their own without anybody noticing any inconsistencies.
but if you want to transfer coins you have to have them first. how easy is it for the average person to get bitcoins? not very.

with coinbase you have to link a bank account. so they essentially have a blank check from you. if you trust them, great. if not...

you can wire money (bank) to bitstamp but they also want scans of verifying documents like a passport or drivers license. is the average person off the street going to jump through these hoops?

buying through localbitcoins is even more confusing.
Managers' higher pay isn't some kind of conspiracy squatting in the industry. It's the result of market forces. Those outside pressures will not evaporate simply because we do not like them.

Pay grades are telling us things we do not wish to hear:

- engineers are more replaceable than their managers

- management staff are consistently difficult to find
I wonder if the frat house culture, the opulent office, the drink up debauchery and the "holacracy" may create a delusional sense of grandiosity that permeates from the company level to the employee? Just a thought.
Why Successful Entrepreneurs And Rich People Don’t Think Like You?
Seems like a great blog rollout strategy in general - every section already has several posts (not sure if they are manually backdated or what) - you could easily spend your whole afternoon on the site, which seems great for "launch day" and way more effective than "The blog is launched! Tune in next week when our actual content starts rolling in".

Just a quick glance seems to indicate this will become a staple in my RSS list and a great complement to my current favorite non-tech blog (Grantland).
well, if your aim is to reproduce the results of the paper, then you really do need the frozen version. I would probably just add a note in the Readme that says development is ongoing and users who just want to use the code should probably clone master or some such. Hopefully, it will become common to also include automated configuration (say Ansible playbooks) with the source.
> Isn't this quite close to the idea that somewhat progressive dictators are good?

No, it's quite close to the idea that progressive power structures are good, as opposed to anarchy followed by "obviously everything will end up being progressive now that I've torn down the structure of power".
UK gov wants 'unsavoury' web content censored
The Zen of Application Test Suites
Just tried this with virtualenv and pyvenv-3.4 and they don't produce identical results.

The good thing about 3.4 is that they finally give a good virtualenv by default and we don't need to install setuptools/pip inside manually
Yes, that happens to anyone who comes from physics to neuroscience i guess. There are no laws and everyone swears by p<0.05
Well, the thing with git, is it keeps history anyway. There's no need to actually freeze the repo in time -- but the DOI can be to a URL representing (and linking to) a particular moment-in-time of the repo.

Is that what they're doing? That actually seems like a pretty good idea, if it is, I hope they are! And if they're not, it would be trivial to do.

Github's UI still makes it easy to see what happened after (or before) that point (including the 'latest' version), but if you're citing software used as a tool for research results, it makes sense to be able to cite the actual software that really was used, not it's hypothetical future evolution.
wouldn't it be more effective to use your target keywords as the words list and create dozens or hundreds of slightly relevant pages vs. 148k?

am i wrong in thinking that might actually move SERPs?
Also, can you expand on what you are digging at with your "kinda ad hominem-y" line? The technology arm of Obama's campaign was generally viewed in a very positive light, as far as I remember. And not the same thing as the brains behind the Obamacare debacle. So I'm not sure what the dig is. Is it because she is a recruiter rather than an engineer? Still not sure how that would disqualify her opinion in this case.
Things You Should Know About The Future
You can transfer cash to someone else cost free, tax free, and paperwork free if you don't mind breaking the law. If you transfer money by other means (e.g. the bank, bonds, etc) there are perks that make up for the additional cost generally. If nothing else, simplicity.

You really think it can't be devalued by the government?

Its value changed when China implemented laws regulating it (and even when there was speculation of it).

If the NSA threw its resources at mining, it could become rich and then dump for cheap, thus crashing it.

The FBI already showed that they can seize some, and they managed to seize such a significant portion that it could be devalued that way.

What you should be saying is "It's not backed by a central authority we have to trust". A third party as powerful as the government can still do significant damage to it.
Actually, if you look at the situation, it was the very nature of having a Founder involved. If there were no Founders or other powerful people, then that wife's all edged bullshit never would have taken off.

Holacracy is not Bullshit.
Confirming already held opinions or large audiences is usually very profitable.
Now you are never going to satisfy everyone with your choice of the contenders :) If you allow C libraries it would interesting to see where Judy falls in that spectrum, it has quite a reputation for being fast, although the code itself is quite impenetrable.
This is fucking stupid, given we have almost literally no information about what has happened at Github, nor the extent to which any events were due to an absence of hierarchy.

I really wish people would dial back on the gloating promotion of their own pet theories and maybe wait until a little bit more information is available before jumping to conclusions.
Is that a trick question? I don't know how or why you would try to do that.
But I think the point the article is trying to make is that people who are good at politics will end up with power whether you officially have a flat structure or not. So then management needs to be used as a way to keep the whole thing in check. I'm not sure how best to do it, but I think it's a good point.
That's not remotely what the author offers as a solution. What she's saying is that "rule of law" is actually kind of a good idea.
Right, but the point is that each sensor works for Apple. Pays the MFI fee, the app pays the 30% fee and no other solution is permitted.

Apple gets your health data, the manufacturer gets nothing, developers get nothing. Apple once again sits as the unflappable middleman taking a cut of everyone's money.
>Until 9/11, there was never a plot that involved intentionally hijacking an airliner with the intent of using it as a weapon and killing everyone on board.

Fedex Flight 705 (7 April 1994), before 9/11. Pilot tried to kill other pilots so he could crash plane into FedEx hub and destroy it and employees. Was subdued, barely, by a pilot with cracked skull that then managed to land the plane.

Egypt Air 990 (31 October 1999), before 9/11. Pilot deliberately killed everyone on board, thought it wasn't a weapon.
In other words, holacracy as a concept is incompatible with a startup's typical ownership structure?
> People who need to save $200 on a tablet where we live very likely do not need said tablet at all. In the end we just often buy inferior products (in design, functionality and longevity) in order to be able to purchase a larger total number of unnecessary items. We absurdly feel we've put our money to better use if we spent it on more things, most of which we cannot put to good use anyway.

This statement seems totally divorced from my reality.

I live in the US, albeit one of the poorer states. I do, however, make nearly twice the median household income. My mortgage consumes approximately one-quarter of my after-tax income.

But $200 is definitely a significant amount of money to me. Nearly all my money is spent on necessities - by which I mean food, electricity, medical, propane, gas, household and car repairs, etc. I am left over with a few hundred dollars a month in "spending" money, of which I prefer to save at least half. I am definitely not spending that in an endeavor to comfort myself with a bunch of junk.

But it would take some serious consideration and a really, really good reason for me to spend an extra $200 on a product. There must be some extra use case extremely important to me to justify spending an extra $200 - just better design or some bonus functionality is not sufficient. That said, I do take longevity into account - I am typing this on a nearly 8 year old Dell laptop - because I try to look at the total cost, and buying a replacement factors into that.

In my experience, people either do what I do, or just give up altogether and buy cheap because that's all they can afford and its Good Enough.

It's difficult for me to even fathom having the attitude that "if you can't spend $200 more, you don't need it." I would argue that I do "need" a tablet (as far as anyone does) - I travel frequently and it would be very nice to have, and even when I am at work I walk around a lot. But I'm not looking at an iPad and cost is the main consideration there. For me it's down the a Kindle Fire (cheap, OK for consumption, call this a probably) or Surface Pro (expensive, but would be much more useful for my use cases, but not very likely because of cost.)
Call Centers, the Cloud, and your Business
that sounds about right. I wasn't thinking about it from the technical end. I was just speculating the business angle.
Your argument is fallacious. You've cherry picked a single line from her argument and misrepresented it.

Her argument is against holacracy, not against management. What I got out of the article is that when you have a system with no conventional management structure you end up filling the vacuum with people who take advantage of it. In this case some of the people at GitHub who have been accused of harassment would have been dealt with earlier if there was a better management structure in place.
As an Englishman (from the south-east to boot) who married a Glaswegian I can relate to this. I was held personally responsible for most of the ills befalling Scotland and my protestations that I had been on poll tax demos etc fell on deaf ears.

But that attitude did change and I put it down to the creation of the Scottish parliament. From about 2000 it started to become the focus of the most of the real political arguments, or at least that's how it seemed to me, and the anti-English thing became much less specific. More of a "we don't like the English except for the ones we've met" kind of thing.

As an aside, it's also the reason why I believe that the Scottish parliament may have killed the chance of independence. It seems to have taken some of the sting out of the, very real, ruled from London mentality. At least for issues that actually affected people day to day.
Doge 2048
It sounds like you have a very language-centric view of the world. In practice, deployment is everything. (Why do people write code in Objective C? Because iPhone.)

Having a solid implementation for your target platform is very good reason to pick a language.
Car metaphors don't always match well with the situations they try to illustrate. Obviously if you had the chance to be offered either one of these two cars, you'd probably try them out and pick the one you feel the most comfortable with, but also which would best fit your needs. If all other factors have been weighted, and it boils down to the number of cup holders, would you stop there short of making a choice, because of the apparent superficiality of the argument? The author expressed his interest in both languages, and brought other arguments than just the js one.
Gchat has been down for me for over an hour.
I don't ever remember a google service being out for that long.
why is it a nonstarter as a currency? is it because it can't scale if widely adopted? or because it's difficult to keep secure? any other reasons?
JS101 – Slides To Get Started With JavaScript Language
> Whenever a well defined group of people is absent from (or underrepresented in) a source of power, discrimination is taking place, period.

You are correct, but only if the term 'discrimation' includes 'discrimination based on skill levels.' If not, then you are assuming that power-relevant skill is distributed evenly, which is baldly false in many real-wrld situations.
"When you allow a power vacuum to emerge someone will fill
it, and it’s usually the people who have traditionally
held power (rich white men)."

Why? If there is a power vacuum, exactly what forces support rich white men filling those roles? Why can't woman or person of a different race fill the role?

Near as I can tell, the only thing I can see that supports this likelihood is base rates. A greater percentage of the participants in a tech holocracy are likely to be white men (because they are well represented in tech), so when you have 70-80 white male marbles in a bag of 100 marbles, the probably of picking a white male marble is 70-80%. Is there some other force other than simple statistics that increases the probability of a white man taking over power in excess of their representation in the population in question?
Is the market saying that? There were higher starting salaries coming out of my CS undergrad than my management masters. That was 5 years ago, and I don't think things have shifted away from engineers since.

Look at the acquihire prices engineers are getting these days...
There is no trying out on Outline. You must buy is ($40). Outline is relatively new, editing was recently added. As such, it is limited, and somehow buggy.

Hopefully the release of OneNote free of charge will not stop Outline on its tracks.
> My suspicion is that this is a particularly USAian myopia, which does not bode well for the NSA.

I am telling you literally like it is. Whether or not you want the Fourth Amendment to apply outside of the U.S. (keeping in mind that amendment is the only part of U.S. constitutional law restricting electronic surveillance by the U.S. government anywhere in the world), the fact is that legally speaking it doesn't. I'm not telling you how the world should be here, I'm telling you how it actually is.

This is not specific to the U.S. though. Does Germany have constitutional laws forbidding them to collect intelligence from networks in France?
I actually liked the puck mouse DEC bundled with their DECStations and VAXStations.

http://arvutimuuseum.ut.ee/images/decstation_3100_mouse.jpg
The majority of hijackings have the original pilot at the controls under duress. In 9/11, it was unusual that the hijackers had done flight training and piloted the planes. That was because the pilots wouldn't have done what those hijackers wanted.
Startup lures clients with its journalism (Priceonomics YC W12)
Both of those points can be seen as good arguments against bitcoin by many. Myself for instance, I don't consider facilitating tax evasion and impossibility to regulate by democratically elected governments a point in favour of bitcoin.

That being said to get back on the technical merits of bitcoin, I agree with the OP that I can't imagine every individual handling their own bitcoin wallet and risk losing everything if it gets compromised (and waiting for transactions to be validated etc...).

So even if the currency is successful we'll end up with bitcoin banks managing the risk for us and visa-like credit cards for day to day transactions. And then I fail to see any advantage over what we have now (besides making a few early adopters extremely rich, of course).
> It whispers seductively to that part of your brain that lies to you about how important you are. Any story or idea that fills the need to feel different, special, and unique ...

And yet this gets harder and harder on a planet of 7 billion people, more and more of them coming online; entire previously invisible countries of hackers popping up on the global screen.

We've gone through this already in music where the number of musicians and releases went exponential. It became harder to get heard, and your 15 minutes gets shorter.

We are not unique - that's a relic of the age of the individual. Perhaps we should leave that behind as a relic of the 20th century. Crowd intelligence and emergent behavior could be the place to put our energies.