skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, and this is the basis for a sizable industry in the United States.

The accused must post a bond to ensure that they will appear in court when scheduled. A bond is just an agreement backed by money. Fail to fulfill your end of the agreement, and you lose the money.

Often, the accused do not have the financial means to satisfy their bond requirements. In this case, bail bondsmen put up the cash to satisfy the bond in exchange for a fee paid from the accused. This fee is non-refundable, and is usually some percentage of the actual bond amount. If the accused do not appear in court on their scheduled date, it is up to the bail bondsman to track them down and deliver them to the custody of law enforcement.

The system is on the sketchy side, but it serves a purpose. Bail bondsmen have tremendous incentive to make sure their clients appear in court. In this way, they act as a kind of outsourced private detective in charge of keeping track of people who are out on bond. Their business model works because bond amounts are paid back when the accused appears in court. In reality, bondsmen don't post the capital for every bond. They are, in turn, bonded with the local jurisdiction they serve. They put up a single large sum of money, giving them the ability to move in and out of individual bonds with low friction. They make 100% of their money on the fees they charge to the accused.

The industry gets a bad rap, but there's an upside as well. Those in need of bond are infrequently the ones who post their own bond, even when the amount is only a fraction paid to the bail bondsman. It is more often family or friends who post the bond. A bail bondsman is prepared to come and find you if you skip town. They have the resources and the reputation to incentivize the accused to show up as agreed, which ends up saving families from huge losses due to posting bond for delinquent relatives.
It looks like you got downvoted a bit for saying this, sorry. You're totally right. If enough people /can/ see it that it can get to the front page then fair enough. I was feeling a little more cynical earlier, assuming that the voters hadn't read it.
It's possible that new investment instruments, such as YC's Safe [0] which removes the friction of convertible notes by offering warrants for future equity, could facilitate this sort of thing.

[0] http://blog.ycombinator.com/announcing-the-safe-a-replacemen...
The arrows are better because they're shorter, more math-like, and because there's two of them (skinny and fat arrows) that do useful things.

For what it's worth, the arrow syntax is likely going to be in JS at some point:
https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2012-March/021...
Exactly, the patent system is broken. What the hell are we doing? Why are we writing public specifications that anybody who reads them is liable to get sued even harder than if they hadn't read them? This is against the whole principle of what patents are supposed to do.
The key difference is internal vs external motivation. Those highly productive long hours are unsustainable on external motivation.
>> Why CoffeeScript Isn't the Answer

What is the question for which CoffeeScript is a compelling answer?

"I needed to speak to Germans, so I learned French and spoke through a French-German interpreter. Things were occasionally lost in translation and somteimes I couldn't get my point across, but French is prettier. Can I recreate this experience in code?"

"My team can't learn to write `var` or `===`. Can we just learn a new language instead?"

"Indentation speaks to my aesthetic sensibilities, but braces do NOT! What fits my needs?"

"I don't want to use JavaScript. Fortunately, since I never make coding errors, I'll never need to debug transpiled JavaScript. What's the right language for me?"

Seriously, though, what is the problem that CoffeeScript solves?
I think the death-knell was that you didn't want to bother learning CoffeeScript so that you can actually make an informed decision.
The way I understand it, is that Scala does support tail-call recursion by way of compiling to a loop. Compilation was definitely a pain when I experimented with Sit.
Making a Target Tracking Orthographic Camera in Unity
I'm not sure whether I am parsing you correctly, but did you just call Lisp not influential?
Cross posted from the blog:

The only thing that I really don't like about the acquisition is that it is certain to delay the consumer product by some significant time. The shot that Sony fired over their bow (almost into their ship) made them fully understand that their time was up. Their planned time frame wouldn't work in competition with Sony because their pockets weren't deep enough to technologically one-up Sony. To come out with something at best on par but further down the road than Sony would sink them like a stone.

Now those pockets are deep enough and there will be substantial delay as they order the development of new tech and cost reduction engineering to create something truly competitive. This is not speculative, they have stated that they are going to do that but without mention of the time it will take.

This may be good in the long run but I think the run-up to their product has been far, far too long already. What this all means is I want one, I want it now and it just got further away, perhaps much further.
As an aside, I wonder to what extent trademark laws could be made obsolete through technical means (using cryptography for example). Pfizer could cryptographically sign its labels. The problem is that counterfeiters could still copy labels from existing products. Maybe Pfizer could use a distributed ledger (e.g. Bitcoin) to prove the authenticity of its products?

When Pfizer sells a product to a distributor, said distributor would require Pfizer to send a tiny transaction to their address.

Known Pfizer address associated with product -> Distributor's address

When the distributor sells the product to a retail shop, the retail shop could verify the product's authenticity by requiring the distributor to reveal an address that can be linked up to Pfizer's "known address associated with product".

As part of the purchase process, the retail shop would in turn require the distributor to send a transaction from said address to their address so that they can in turn prove authenticity to their customers and so on. A valid transaction should spend the full amount of the seller's address (e.g. 1 satoshi) so that there is only one possible path from Pfizer's address to the final owner of the product.

Known Pfizer address associated with product -> Distributor's address -> Retailer's address

A product would then be considered counterfeit if a seller is unable to produce the type of transaction described above.

One possible issue with this scheme is that it would still allow an hypothetical scammer to produce a valid transaction (assuming they previously bought the authentic product) and sell a fake product. However, there would be little economic incentive to do so given that their authentic product would now be valued as a fake (since they would have "lost" the ability to prove its authenticity).

Essentially, it would let a scammer buy an authentic product for the price of a fake. Not bad, but it doesn't scale well unless your goal is to acquire a bunch of authentic products for personal use with no intention of reselling. In other words, individual sellers (e.g. on Craigslist) might do it but it wouldn't be practical at a business level.

PS: I think I might just have described "colored coins" in a convoluted way.
> Educate me. What terrible outcome is expected from this?"

The information discrepancy between people and companies. The ability to make good deals means that your opponent does not already know what you are willing to pay.

With immersion and VR there will be possibility to predict the mental state of person below 500 milliseconds. It will get us into the realm where companies can influence unconscious decision making much better than before. VR and it's immersion will allow companies to really surround us with control in the level that Web or ads in TV can't.

Accurate knowledge of the impulse control limitations of the consumer will be huge. When is he tired, distracted or stressed or his general alertness level is down. Quick, show him/her ad he/she has no will power to refuse just now.

Marketing people always remind us that you can't create needs with advertising. But you can attach needs to products and services and create culture where needs are satisfied with products. Detect need for spirituality or inner reflection, woo the consumer with serene images. Detect loneliness, immediately show something that looks like human connection with price.
You're right that the scoping rules in CoffeeScript are unintuitive for someone coming from a statically-typed, declare-everything paradigm. But I'd hesitate to call it a problem. It's a feature not a bug that the same symbol in nested scopes always refers to the same variable. As I said previously, I believe code that relies on variable shadowing to work correctly is broken.

I've been hit by the scoping rules many times, but every time I ask myself why I'm using identifiers like i, j or x to refer to different variables in nested scopes anyway. Names like that should be reserved for only the tightest of scopes.

Is there another aspect of the scoping rules that you're referring to?
Related: Told mother about a friend the other day. "Where does she work?" she asked. "Uh," I explained, "most of her income at the moment is in Patreon donations." Then I had to explain Patreon. "And then she also has some commissioned music and writing work, and one or two other things."

Said friend isn't convinced that this is a stable situation either, but it's the position she's working with. Mother, of course, was left dumbfounded by this bombshell, among others regarding friend.

Mother describes her own employment history as "I took whatever gigs I could get," and this time I asked where she expected that to lead, at the time. Said she thought there would be stable employment but the rise of recorded music everywhere killed most of the market for live gigs. Which, in hindsight, seems so, so obvious. But also speaks to a common ideal that the market discourages now, when expectations are that every job that's already there will be automated away someday.
Probably a lot like Clojure's protocols, which are precisely that. Effectively, functions declared in a protocol are just lookup tables that resolve to a particular implementation based on an object's type at runtime. You can query a value at runtime for whether it implements a protocol, too.
Fair point. The problem is solved in Haskell by having default implementation in the typeclass, leaving the programmer with only a few methods to implement (eg, 'equals' is defined in terms of 'unequals' and vice-versa, implement the one you want to get the rest of the typeclass working).

That said, that's a fairly rare case. Classes with such a large surface are often a code smell.
You pay the minimum amount that gets a suitable candidate.
As George Santayana didn't say, those who fail to study the history of programming languages are doomed to repeat it.

As long as language designers persist in making unnecessary and unfortunate errors in their designs, we need to point these out.
If all you want is a sane subset of JS, then all you need is a JS linter. The whole point of the language was more compact syntax.

Shortening lambdas is one of the most important changes because it makes heavy callback/DSL code viable. Exhibit: http://coffeekup.org/.

Now renaming JS's `for (name in obj)` to `for name, val of obj` and redefining `in` to `for x in array` is indeed confusing (coming from other languages I can see how it's better than JS ideosyncratic use of `in` but still confusing...)
Sometimes, the original title is meaningless, and either the subtitle or a short, neutral summary are more informative.

Some flexibility in that regard would improve my HN experience.
Author here (and woha, didn't note that it was posted to HN. Explains the sudden github traffic.).

Do you mean that you did that without actually passing /etc/passwd to as a --log arg to psdash? If so it's definitely a bug. The intent is to only allow viewing logs that was explicitly passed to psdash.

And as mhurron said; it shouldn't really be public anyway.
Yes. My parents would never consider purchasing a car over $30k, much less one that costs $40k. I really want a Tesla because it's the environmentally responsible thing to do (provided that you must drive a car). If it ever became affordable, I would buy it in a heartbeat and so would a lot of people who aren't rich (like my parents).
I don't know any software engineer billionaires either.

I guess they exist, but I've sure never met them, and the chance of becoming one is statistically indistinguishable from zero.
Saskatchewan Equity Crowdfunding
Hardened has nothing to do with being immune to BS. It means that they adopt the mindset needed to do a job that involves potentially getting killed, potentially dealing with murders, murderers, rapists, and similar things that require hardening psychologically to handle working with. That mindset doesn't make them immune to BS, it makes them able to do their job. It also makes them the kind of person you don't want to have interactions with professionally, so if they tell you to leave an area, you leave the area and don't linger and piss them off pointlessly. Hanging out and obstructing/distracting them from their work is the kind of BS they have no tolerance for, which is what the guy in this article was doing out of mind-bogglingly profound ignorance.
I like these articles, but I think there are more than enough of them out there and not enough of those that show you how to use composition.

Everyone who has spent enough time with OO and classical inheritance knows the problems, but most have never seen how to convert a mess of classes and inheritance into a more functional approach with composition.

Don't get me wrong, there was good content here, but I was hoping that after the conclusion, the post was going to go into how to use composition as an alternative.
The world must invest in mangroves
Not sure why I'm getting downvoted. It was a fairly long article without any kind of TLDR. It could either be babble or really interesting and some kind of summary would help me know if I should invest the time or not. Apparently it hurts asking but thanks for the responses anyway.
Combining the power of gdb and valgrind
thanks for the reply.

> The problem with JavaScript is not that it is a dynamically typed prototype based object-oriented language without classes. That is actually JavaScript’s strength.

the above suggests disliking static typing as a premise.

At dox (http://www.usedox.com) our stack is basically haskell/yesod in back typescript/angular up front. sure there are annoying limitations of typescript relative to haskell but compared to any of the AltJSs that we've looked at or used (coffee script, elm, fay, roy, purescript, dart, actual javascript) it has far and away the best combination of safety and ease of integration with javascript libraries.

We love coffee script's syntax but the type safety of TS has become a must-have that we can't live without.

Typescript, once you start adding annotations, does actually combat some of the bigger warts in JS. specifically erroring on wat-ops like 1 + "" vs 1 - "" or [] - "".
Yeah, if there were an Android app I'd try this out in a heartbeat. I use Lastpass currently but I haven't been liking the direction it's recently taken. This seems like a much more elegant solution, but it's a no-go if I can't use it on my phone.
Well I'm not going to say "improvement", but as far as new, they are attempting to replace X11 with something call Mir - https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Mir/Spec
They are unsustainable, period. In fact, the "highly productive" aspect is usually simply delusion.
OLOO is quite different from both inheritance and composition. It embraces delegation rather than covering it up or running away from it. :)
You're absolutely right, and I'm a colossal idiot for not making that absolutely clear.
Yeah, maybe bring the video just 1 frame earlier, before that drumbeat.
The ideal purpose of grades is teaching. It's a way of informing you of the parts of the curriculum that you do not yet fully understand. This sounds like an entirely appropriate situation to lose grade points on.

Unfortunately, grades now also serve as some poor measure of intelligence or competency in many people's minds.
Relevant quote, "The point is that even if prices are high in the overall market, they are being backed up by earnings to a much larger extent than in 2000. That’s important, because back then, when the dot-com bubble burst, the downdraft brought most companies down with it."
It seems weird to think that there exists any language currently which will wind up being the one-true-language.

As an industry (and a research area) there still doesn't seem to be any real consensus around "what's best"; just a bunch of differing opinions and trade-offs. I don't think any amount of evidence (were it even to exist) would convince someone not amenable to strongly-enforced static types to see their value.

The entire practice of software development seems oriented around feelings and past experience. I can appreciate that their are groups of people doing research to try and bring rigor and quantified data to the process, but if at the end of the day, a developer can spend a weekend putting together a node.js web app and have that take off and prove successful, you've pretty much lost any opportunity to convince them that they should stop using their tools and switch to some different tools.

I don't actually think there's anything wrong with that either; good for them for being suspicious.

I decided to investigate Haskell about 8 months ago when I had an opportunity to write a big system for my job. It fit well within my constraints and requirements, and the little I knew of it at the time seemed like it would be a good language to spend time getting to know.

I liked that everything in the language seemed like it got there through reasoned debate and experimentation, and that it seemed like a language-feature sandbox that more mainstream languages were eventually pulling from (Perl advocates say the same thing about Perl, mainly that it already has all the features that other languages are now trying to figure out how to implement). I liked that they don't seem to punt on the hard problems (which over time become more and more of the problems left for languages to address), even if that means that doing complicated things in Haskell is complicated.

I don't know how I'd feel about Haskell suddenly becoming super popular though. Even aside from the "God I hate that this band I've been into for a while is now suddenly popular" trendiness, I don't think the community would be able to handle sanely what an influx of massive amounts of new users would do to things. It's hard enough getting all the category theorists and abstract algebra professors to deal with the fact that Cabal takes lower and upper bounds on dependencies.

If I could spend the entirety of my career using Haskell for everything, maybe that would be great. I haven't gotten good enough yet to have strong opinions about its failings, so I'm still very much in the honeymoon period.

But that seems like a silly thing to shoot for, even if I feel the same way about Haskell in 10 years that I do now. And it seems silly to expect that everyone else would feel the same way.
"the real world doesn’t work that way. It really doesn’t work that way. In zoology, for example, we have penguins, birds that swim. And the bat, a mammal that flies. And monotremes like the platypus, an animal that lays eggs but nurses its young with milk."

Former biologist here. Actually...most living things do work that way. A human ISA primate. Genetically. Functionally.

If you merely focus on outward behavior, you get to the same place that early biologists got to with what was called "morphological classification" -- you find the weird examples of convergent evolution (e.g. "OMG egg-laying mammal!"), and you're tempted to throw out the whole classification system, even though it mostly works, and the errors are merely distracting from the inherent truth of the idea (that we're all related by genetic phylogeny; we literally share implementation).

Anyway, programmers, learn from biology: when you see these kinds of errors it probably means that you're classifying things incorrectly, not that you should stop classifying altogether.
The Chicken Nugget Song
You can have polymorphic functions, but any given container still contains a single type.

This is the case for all typed programming languages, not just Haskell. So-called dynamic languages like Python, Ruby or Javascript are merely static languages with but a single type[0].

[0] http://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/03/19/dynamic-lang...
Why do ISPs show speed in bits and not in bytes? It's confusing
It is very confusing, because for everything else i.e file sizes the standard is bytes.
Cheaper Tesla car might be announced in early 2015, but it will not be available until Gigafactory starts making batteries. Battery cost is the main obstacle.
You completely agree with everything he wrote, after a year full-time? Really?

So you would use curly braces and commas to specify an object, and then be confused when CoffeeScript doesn't get it?

After a year you didn't figure out that its a best practice to leave off the parenthesis in just the outermost function call, but to include them in the other calls on a line to make things clear?

After a year, you didn't realize that with the CoffeeScript scoping rules, you couldn't just throw in a global at the last second without looking carefully to see if it was used somewhere else?

After a year, you still hadn't learned about function binding with fat arrow?

After a year, you still hadn't learned that the existential operator (?) means you don't have to use typeof nearly as much?
Yes I have always just used dedicated servers but started looking into cloud. It's looking very attractive but if you use a lot of bandwidth it's still much cheaper to go dedicated.
Is it a matter of supply and demand or the effectiveness of SFPD's union?
You're reccomending a high sugar diet for weight loss.
Yet its nutritional value is nil. How does it benefit? Low starch, high sugar, low fat, decent protein sounds like a diet that would be improved by omitting the sugar.
Google says Turkey is intercepting web traffic to spy on users
My guess is marketing reasons. If you use a smaller unit, you get a bigger number.

EDIT: Why the downvote? It's a perfectly logical explanation.
You may argue that, but it is undoubtly a good methaphor to describe my question. Won't you agree?
Um, right. And how did the law intend to "encourage inventors to share their ideas"? That's right, by protecting the investments made in their origination.

That's it.
There is difference between short term and long term. You achieve more today by working today more hours, especially if you are in the flow. The catch is that flow has an end and the productivity drops after that end.

People are tired and start making more and more mistakes or less then optimal decisions. Or they spend more time chatting with colleges or staring into screen without doing much or do longer meetings cause they are only option for socialization.
Yeah it's a total bugger.

The wrist rashes might actually be the sharp edge on the front of the unit and might be posture related.

This is what 2 weeks of using an MBP did to my hands as a comparison point:

http://i.imgur.com/HgDquuE.jpg

I put screen protectors on it in the end to stop having to touch it directly.