skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, in effect the correct response for seeing someone you happen to know get hurt in the US is "don't give a toss". As if caring for someone was a crime in itself?

I am left speechless.
Usually Fabien gives a high level overview and dives into some of the pieces of the project that he finds interesting. I don't think this is the type of review that focuses on overall C practices unless it's something really unique to the project.
I agree with some the things he writes, but others seem blatant absurdities:

> "the + operator is still both numeric addition and string concatenation. That is frequently listed as one of the bad parts of JavaScript. Why no provide separate operators for the two?"

The problem isn't operator overloading: the problem is implicit type coercion.

Having to use 2 separate operators/functions for separate types when writing code, is useful only if types are actually checked at compile time, and the compiler can do inference on them (see the + and +. operators in F#)

If you have a dinamically typed language, you can have sane semantics if you make it so that type conversions are explicit (e.g. Python, Ruby...)

See also: http://james-iry.blogspot.it/2009/03/operator-overloading-ad...
Yahoo Is Considering Creating Its Own YouTube (And Poaching YouTube Stars)
In the 911 call audio, he states that the accident victims asked him to call 911. In a situation like that, I'd say it's proper to call 911.
I attended a 'leadership training' session recently, where the instructor said to do just the opposite. By telling everyone your goals, you will have more eyes on you if you fail, so you will have more incentive to follow through with those plans/goals.
Is your degree worthless?
Using a signal may also have side effects on your program.
'License Plate Profiling' in Idaho
This is not an argument for software patents but it is not necessary to actually read the patents yourself for you to benefit from the knowledge they provide. You could read about an patented algorithm in a wikipedia article, a blog, or in an academic paper.
It would seem that training programs may help. After all, people respond better to meaningful requests than to arbitrary orders.

Something like "Sir, I'm going to need you to move to the other side of the street while we ascertain the situation." may work better than "Move to the other side of the street.".

But some of it is unavoidable. Americans seem to live with a siege mentality that I found uncommon in other developed nations (except the UK to a lesser degree). The police reflect this mentality with a constant fear that the people they're talking to will resort to violence. Of course, it is somewhat justified in their case because of the relative lack of safety in American cities in comparison to other developed nations (a homicide rate comparable to India, for instance).
About an inch if you're face down in it.
I don't know CoffeeScript, but this syntax is common in Perl.
What is the main attraction behind buying a Tesla or other electric vehicles? The main sources of energy in the United States are still oil, coal, and natural gases. This means that most energy use in the US will still contribute to pollution and consumption of a non-renewable resource. It makes a lot of sense to drive an electric vehicle in a country like France, where 75% of energy comes from nuclear and around 15% comes from hydro sources.I think a Model S would still be an interesting car to drive given the torque provided by an electric motor, but the car still is pretty heavy (5,000 lbs due to batteries) and uses a lot of electricity to charge.
This is generally true. On the other hand, interfaces are a good thing, especially in a language like Go where you can explicitly declare them and then pass in anything that happens to match that interface. (In JavaScript, this is unfortunately implicit, so it requires better documentation and sometimes runtime checks to ensure sanity.)

If you implement an interface using delegation, you get something quite like subclassing, except that the subclass-superclass interface is explicit and the superclass's type is entirely hidden. Sadly, few languages make this easy so it often requires some boilerplate or meta-programming.
Ever since I've started writing Objective-C, a lot of Javascript's glaring issues have started to melt away. Yes, JS doesn't have an understanding of protocol, but that's just a matter of implementing convention and being disciplined. JS is remarkable in that it is so malleable that one can use myriad patterns with it.

I've found that the delegate pattern, for instance, can be incredibly powerful when used in conjunction with JS, especially when it comes to extending classes functionality that may not be inherent to its topology (think class Ant, to describe an Ant, and class FlyingAnimal -- wings, etc. --, to describe a queen ant).
Because of low barrier to entry people who didn't learn about jitter, network latencies, BSD sockets, etc.

That is the promise of WebRTC -- just a few lines of JS and you've got yourself Google- Hangouts.

One can argue this happens in web frameworks and other technologies that make it easy to get started with, which is a good thing.

But unfortunately a lot of these easy abstractions can't completely abstract away things like speed of light latencies, limitation of network bandwidth, funky NAT setups and so on.

So far there are very few peer peer technologies that work reliably and are successful.
RetroShare – F2F and secure decentralised communication platform
Freak
I'm studying for the Hacker
GraphSketch
> But the takeaway should be to use care. Not to avoid at all costs.

I think the takeaway here is to not try to use JavaScript as if it was some other language that has support for classical inheritance, but rather to embrace the prototypal inheritance model and compose your apps in a different way. It's not a "GOTOs considered harmful"-style rage post, but rather a warning to budding JS developers who are coming from a more classical perspective. It's not that you "shouldn't use classes", it's that you shouldn't build complex hierarchies and type systems. Keep it simple!
WikiPearl – Plastic-free food packaging
In concrete terms, Amazon and Google are both companies that have run popular services that lost money, or profited very little.

Cloud services are neither company's primary offering.

Therefore it's reasonable to believe that the list price of their cloud offerings are not at all related to the cost of building and maintaining them.
Amen.

The most important part about patents to remember why they exist.

Why would congress grant a legal monopoly to anybody? The reason is (or should be) to protect any investment that went into the invention; for the benefit of society as a whole - to make sure expensive research is still going to happen.

An idea does not cost anything. It might have some value if nobody had that idea before, but the idea would have been had anyway regardless of any legal protection. It might suck for the individual having the idea, but society is not served by protecting ideas that came without cost.

Copyright on the other hand is useful and needed, it protects a specific expression of an idea.

If you translated software patents to books, a patent would be like a legal monopoly on "science fiction stories", or "crime stories".
Whereas copyright protects a specific store - as it should. Other folks are free to write other science fiction or crime stories.

Anyway... I am not holding my breath. Also there are so many patents already out there, these will likely not be invalidated retroactively.
Disclosure: I have never used CoffeeScript. However, based on the article, the death-knell against CoffeeScript for me was the variable scoping rules.

With no variable declaration keyword (a la var, my, local, private), adding a variable assignment anywhere could radically change the variable scoping.

I'm done, this isn't suitable for prime-time, time to go somewhere else.

I spent too many years in the 80s working with xBase. I've been shafted too many times by calling a (coworker's) routine that forgot to declare its variables "private", which stomped over one of my variables. (private in xBase is similar to local in Perl 4) To have a language which doesn't let you declare the intended scope of a variable - ugh.
I find it interesting that the Ancient Greeks thought that "decision-maker" was one of these jobs. Their lottery-based election system wasn't intended to be representative of the whims of the people, but rather to protect their decision-makers from the inevitable "moral fatigue" that comes with being made to choose with no clear best option, while being lobbied at by groups that are willing to pay you to say this or that option is best.

I wonder about this in the modern day: if everyone who ran a country was made to step down before their idealism was shattered--and if they didn't have to play politics to get there in the first place[1]--what kind of structures and rules would result?

Or: what would a software company be like if every "journeyman"-level team member took rotation as the team's manager, and knew that whatever pain they put on the shoulders of others, those others would inevitably get their turn to be in charge?

---

[1] I think the "not having to play politics to get there" bit might actually be what the neoreactionaries are talking about when they say monarchies work better that democracies: inheriting the throne by divine right means you don't have to lose your faith in humanity to get there. The Greek lottery system is basically the same thing, but with an artificial "line of succession" controlled by time rather than death.
Isn't it more efficient to have fewer large power plants rather than lots of little power plants (i.e. car engines)? Maybe not with the transmission loss and factoring in the batteries...
Destroying trade secrets may be a benefit of the patent system, but it's historically inaccurate to say that's why the system was created in the first place.

The Constitution itself gives the reason as "to promote the progress of science and useful arts". Numerous letters written by the Constitution's framers support the interpretation that the goal is to incentivize creation by granting monopolies.
Research[0] in politics has exposed the exact opposite - identifying and sharing concrete plans for voting has a significant impact in increasing voter turnout.

[0] eg Nickerson and Rogers, http://scholar.harvard.edu/todd_rogers/publications/do-you-h...
They are not financially responsible. If there's a chargeback, stolen credit card, etc they reverse the charge on the merchant. In other word the merchant pays for the items purchased with stolen credit cards. All the credit car companies need to do is keep theft low enough so that the perception on them is good. Make no mistake the crest card companies do NOT pay for items purchased with stolen credit cards, the merchants do.
Stephen Lawrence would probably disagree with you.

The basic upshot of this story is to keep your contact with the Police brief, friendly and say no more than you need to.

The Police have been doing this to black people, gay people and other minorities for years, it's actually quite ironic that the Stonewall riots happened in San Fran too.

All that's happened this time is a well off, straight, white chap has realised just how hard life gets when you're treated as a minority.

I hope he gets his day in court and if the story is true they will sort the copper out and pay some compensation to him.
They do that by going slow - building up a base for most of their season, and peaking for maybe once - or twice in a year - sometimes a career. The time they take for speed work is a small percentage of their total training time. What you're seeing is not someone sprinting for 26 miles, what you're seeing is someone comfortable running at that speed, for 26 miles, because they've slowly built up the engine to allow that.

A 100 meter sprint is done well over 20 mph these days. If anything, it's a prime example how halving your speed can reap rewards when it comes to Going The Distance (endurance) - which works better in the long run? So many metaphors.

You can't sprint forever, and you don't get fast, by trying to beat your best time, in each run. Even if your discipline is truly sprinting, you still don't train by going fast all the time. A 100 meter sprinter works on various components of what it takes to run fast, and puts it all together, come race day. An elite 800 meter runner could have a program of 100 mile weeks - a lot of those are Long Slow Days.
The URLs are different.

In addition, HN intentionally allows duplicates after a certain time period -- I think it's 30 days. The idea is that the same information can become interesting and relevant again, either because of new circumstances [0], or to a new audience, or to an audience for which it has fallen out of memory.

(I leave it to the reader to determine whether this article has passed the "interesting and relevant again" threshold.)

[0] the best example I can think of: some of the things aaronsw posted to HN prior to his suicide became front page HN submissions just after. New information changed our perspective on his writings.
Maybe both are correct but for different kind of personalities.

Personally I don't like to state my plans, I do better work in stealth mode (or do I just enjoy it more ?) ; but my SO hates backing out of her own words and I noticed it's a good incentive for her to push things through.
This link is pimping you to sign up for some type of unspecified mystery meat. Don't bother.
I had the understanding that it could be more efficient to be able to use fewer power plants that can be operated efficiently or replaced individually rather than millions of independent ICEs. But I'm far from an expert on this.
Why not focus on his general point: that CoffeeScript does not fix the problems of JavaScript because it introduces other problems?

He obviously knows a lot more than "day's experience".

If you make the argument that he needs to learn to write better CoffeeScript then you're lending help to his argument.
looks interesting, will give it a try.
The only gripe I share is scoping, and that's fixed in LiveScript. I've started writing LiveScript in a fairly explicit style - for example I use parentheses where they improve readability and I always use curly braces for object literals. Qualitatively I think it's increased the readability of my code way beyond JavaScript. It's nice to have curly braces carry specific meaning instead of being littered all over the place.
Cocoa is good because, among other things, is treads lightly on class hiearchies.
Oculus Facebook deal could ignite equity crowdfunding
You can usually get code reuse via composition. If need be, you can have your objects implement one or more common interfaces (which may themselves inherit from other interfaces, that's not a problem).
You can get the isa relationship w/o much of the brittleness as there is no internal state associated with the interface.

You can even get the relationship without brittleness but with some internal state, as long as the superclass wraps the internal state in a property. For example, in Python, the currentBalance private state would obviously be implemented as a property, not an instance variable, so that it could be mutated by subclasses while still hiding the private implementation in the superclass. (This would be harder to do in JS, I admit, since JS doesn't have anything corresponding to Python's properties.) So the lesson here isn't really "don't use class hierarchies", it's "don't use class hierarchies stupidly".
They're coming. It's an artifact of working with a book publisher and the art department and all that. Sorry for the confusion.
There is a project that converts Typescript to Closure type annotations. If you do this, and put Closure Compiler in your continuous build/test phase, it will can catch when there is a mismatch between the caller and the library, not in all cases, but it helps.
The article doesn't deal with political commitments to others (citizens) but with personal motivation to accomplish one's own goals.
Photos of international borders
“The Expert” is Lauris Beinerts viral comedy sketch about engineering
San Francisco Police Department: Duties, Salary and Benefits
Could you try using Megan Fox's head next time?

Thanks.
It doesn't really send a signal to your program. It just sets flags inside cpython to make it think so. (pendingbusy and pendingcalls_to_do, to be precise)
I think that he should at least understand and know the CoffeeScript syntax to argue that it isn't great. If you don't know C, learnt half of it, then moaned that it didn't compile you'd look like a bit of a fool.

In this case, it's logical that a comma doesn't go there. A comma would go after the closing `}`, which is optional (and so are commas in objects). If you don't know the rules of a language, I feel like it's easier to criticise wrongly.
Have you looked at Minix yet?
Supporting Tesla supports lowering the cost structure for batteries. Widespread use of solar will follow.
Well said. In fact I would add that, what's needed are more focused frameworks,tools,products instead of tools that try to be all things to all people.

We are building a web app platform for the jvm called HiveMind (crudzilla.com) and a major design choice we've made is to be very focused on web development. No single platform,framework,IDE need to magically be great for all problems.
No, the correct response is to help in an appropriate way, assisting until emergency response arrives, and then walk away.
Show HN: What if Newton never got hit?
LiveScript fixes scoping and adds a ton of other nice features including let and const variable declaration keywords.
I'm coming at this from the view of an Objective C programmer, which was heavily influenced by smalltalk.

Having written Objective C full-time for 5+ years, it is rare to need to use inheritance in classes that actually implement application level logic, however it's used in just about every class you make as you inherit from Apple's base. (UIViewController, UIView, etc..) It's useful to subclass and add categories as needed. At a functional level it's not an issue, however with that in mind I'm not sure it's a great pattern for Javascript.
Then I'm not clear what you were referring to when you said that the "policymakers" agreed with Swartz. Can you clarify a bit? Which policymakers? About what, in particular?
I had a lot of niggles with CoffeeScript as well, which is why my compiles-to-JS language of choice is LiveScript[1]. It fixes basically all the annoyances and adds a lot of nice things on top of that. For exmaple, you can write more paren-free code with it and there are more kinds of useful function declarations (hushed functions, curried functions, backcalls).

[1] http://livescript.net/
How much load do tools like this add to the system. Ideally you want monitoring tools to be like using a voltmeter on an electronic circuit... display what's happening but adding very little influence of its own.
Nothing or everything. It depends what your expectation is from a modern programming language and the size of the project you're working on.
Cheaper but not cheap enough.

Until we flood the streets with under 20k electric cars.
Bret Victor: The Future of Programming (Video)
In my experience, if an instructor at a 'leadership training' session tells you to do something, doing the opposite is usually a good bet.
I agree there something to the timtowtdi axis.

However:

python's "B&D" principle is more accurately stated as TSBOAPOOOTDI" (There Should Be One And Preferably Only One Obvious Way To Do It) and that's not quite the same as oft quoted (over?) simplifications such as "there should only ever be one way".

Similarly the Perl community TIMTOWTDI's principle has a related variant TIMTOWTDIBSCINABTE (There Is More Than One Way To Do It But Sometimes Consistency Is Not A Bad Thing Either).
But, like "cloud" or "web 2.0" or any similar buzzword there obviously is some substance to it unspecific, un-novel, abused, or not. It just break into unsatisfying mush when you look at it to closely.

Web 2.0 was some sort of a shift over web 1.0, the line between publisher and consumer melted. Cloud is etherealizing computing and data. There was a thread a few days ago about the film Her. "Where is Samantha" (the AI) is borderline nonsensical statement. It doesn't come up to a viewer. That's because people are used to cloud as an idea now It doesn't really matter that servers, replication, dumb clients, remote data or whatever were invented a long time ago.
Very good - then don't you also share my skepticism about this as a viable product?

The first meetings I had about Que was actually with Hearst, if I recall. The Plastic Logic play was backed by content providers seeking a new channel, including Barnes & Noble. The Sony play is backed by a hardware provider seeking a new channel. So producers have this need, but what about customers?

I find myself having the same three doubts I had back in the day:

1) Nobody cares if a screen is flexible for these particular product applications (especially for the Que, which mounted flexible display tech in a rigid form).

2) It's a solution in search of a problem. Who is clamoring for this device at market scale? Even for a specific vertical?

3) Haven't we learned that these devices need the support of a broader ecosystem? That developers need to find opportunity in a platform for it to succeed, and that requires a certain critical mass? How is that going to happen serving a niche vertical market?

Interested in your thoughts.
Check out SLP http://www.startupleadership.com/.

Also heard several good things from startups who were part of Microsoft Accelerator ( https://www.microsoftventures.com/ )
With all due respect, I don't think you actually understand what patents do. Every year we hear of companies where people have invested much of their time and energy in giving life to an inventive idea or process, which at some point is acquired by another company in exchange for cash, stock, or both. And those negotiations would often not even start if the engineers building their idea were not able to protect their work using a patent.

That single process is the difference between an acquirer taking all of their work and just re-implmenting, now that its clear what the issues are, and giving them nothing. And that company having to negotiate with the engineers about their work and pay them fairly for it if they want it.

Patents have not always existed, and it is useful to see what it was like when they didn't exist to understand what it is they protect.

That said, patent administration has not kept up with technology, although if you've been involved with the patent office as long as I have you will know it has gotten much better at figuring out what should and what should not be patentable. Further, the judiciary is getting much more in tune to the abusive nature that people wielding bad patents can have on an industry. It is getting better, and the people who need to make it better (the Supreme court in the US and the 'patent' court) are motivated to make it better and have been making changes along those lines. Not a quickly as some might like but being quick in complex areas of law is often dangerous so some caution is advised.
Ask HN: have you ever worked on a startup with remote co-founders?
I'm interested in building a mobile app startup but all my contacts are scattered geographically and I keep getting referred to potential tech co-founders in different cities. Does anyone have experience building something with remote co-founders? Is there any way for this to work?
If you write JavaScript in strict mode the probability of incidentally declaring something as global is pretty much zero. Those mistakes can also be properly linted and warned against - which is not possible for CoffeeScript's implicit declarations. And at least I had real-life situations where CoffeeScript's scoping broke code in very subtly ways.