skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you want strong type guarantees, don't use a dynamic language. If you're able to not make such silly mistakes and enjoy the power and expression of a dynamic language, then use them, you won't miss types much at all.

I use Smalltalk daily and such type errors are so rare as to be virtually non existent. If you pay attention to what you're writing, you don't make such silly mistakes often, and when you do you usually notice it immediately when you try to use the code you just wrote.

Bolting a home-brew type system on a dynamic language just seems rather pointless, if you need it, you're not really ready to be using a dynamic language.
Depending on the meaning of value. I value lots of works of art very highly, but I've hardly ever considered buying art.

I think art can have value without being particularly saleable. And with certain kinds of art, the fact that it's popular and lucrative may even be a sign that it's crass and inauthentic. Think Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol.
Huh? What's the point? And what exactly would I receive in return for my $20? A PDF certificate stating some crap that I won't read.

No thanks. I'll just create my own PDF docs using Old English font or whatever that was.

And this might have actually been kind of funny if it was actually intended to be a joke. (And minus the part of the $20 fee.)
On another note, it is this kind of mindset that is both unadaptive and uncreative. Rather than tout the benefits of the new social world, it focuses on the negatives. And then, rather than focusing on how the negatives can be fixed, it focuses on just complaining about them.
It saves a lot of gas too. I've always tried to get through stop and go traffic smoothly without using the brake, but I always did it for my own gas consumption. I never had this macro look at it.
It's worth being aware, though, that if you're not careful one of their burritos can easily run up past a thousand calories.
Yeah, I saw the link but wanted to formally express my interest. I figured the OP might appreciate concrete feedback that people are interested.
In the UK it still is, and passing on the left is illegal. I like that system more that all lanes equal.
Probably, if the student was not an EECS major. I studied physics there, and Big-O notation was not something that came up. Heat and entropy, however, was things that we talked about a lot.
Heck, this should've been linked to just as an example of amazing web design.

Typing in "commands" is somewhat buggy however. Still... freaking awesome design.
Interestingly enough, this game is a clone of Civilization, which happens to have a multiplayer mode, and a very active community which basically gives you endless online game time, if you so desire. Why would one take this game over the original one?
If advertising is entertaining and interesting then more power to the promoter.
Real world objects don't have this property?

Some do. When the gear shift lever on my Mazda is in one of the automatic slots, you can't upshift or downshift manually.

In business this is even more obvious. Contracts might have states: proposed, drafted, agreed, signed, and so forth. You can't sign a draft, it has no meaning. That's part of the business process.
IIRC from drivers' ed, it's illegal to do this unless you're passing or preparing for a left turn.
This argument I'd concede partially to - that there are social advantages some of us have. This needn't however be an argument about income mobility - which I think is a separate issue (and I do believe exists), but even those who get there because of social advantage does not mean that to stay there one does not need to be creative and at least have a valuable work product. This isn't to say that all rich people (particularly if it was inherited) are creative, but I would argue on average, most high income earners must be because of the value that others are willing to pay for.
Any way of getting the secret menu options on this app? Doesn't look like it, and my kids only eat off the off-menu stuff.
Brilliance From Siggraph: Bokeh-Based Tiny Barcodes
It's a shame you didn't take the opportunity to gather ZIP codes. That would allow for some adjustment of your salary figures based on avg income modifiers for an area (hell, you could use the GS modifiers the Govt. uses even for ease-of-use).

But this is a great idea, I commend you on the experiment!
Y Combinator for non-techies
What do you think of creating a YCombinator-like venture to help startups that are not founded by techies or are not in the tech-related field?
Looks like Darl McBride has been sleeping in his car for a few months.
likewise. :)
I had about an hour and a half to kill before district 9 started this weekend...after screwing around in Best Buy for a while, I went next door to Chipotle. I figured I would be the only person in there, would be eating some veggies and stuff that had probably been sitting out for more than a few minutes, etc. etc...(it was 3:30 in the afternoon...from working in a restaurant during college...this is the WORST time of the day)...

There was a line of about 20 people...and the place was nearly packed.

I think I need to abandon this whole "internet" thing and open a chipotle.
Speaking as a Starving Artist, I've noticed that part of the problem lies in artists trying to achieve success by aping corporate methods, which rarely work for an individual artist. I did that for awhile, and it got me absolutely nowhere.

There's also this attitude (in the US, at least) that you're a failure if you're not instantly successful. Rare is the artist who takes the time to build a solid foundation of fans/patrons. You're going to eat a lot of ramen in those years, but the base you build will be solid enough to build a house on.

It also helps to be unflaky. The article mentions artists as being elitists at least once, and that's an unfortunate stereotype. It's a stereotype you have to fight against in the minds of your fans, and you've got to fight it in yourself sometimes, too.

I'm still poor--by standard American standards. However, I live in a 4-bedroom house with a bedroom all to myself as a studio. I have cable internet, A/C, two cars, and a couple different computers--one for working on and another which serves as a file server for the studio.

It's slow and it's grueling, but it's making me a better, healthier person. Making your own bread (for example) is not only cheaper, it's better for you. And the stupid impulse purchases I made when I had a Day Job are no more. I sold off many of the things which were cluttering up my house just because I bought them on a whim. My credit cards are used only in emergencies, and are always paid up ASAP.

I'm currently working on $650 worth of private commissions. Ten years ago, that meant that I'd be doing 12 projects at the same time. However, after taking the time to work up a rock-solid fanbase, I can happily say that the $650 is coming from only three different projects.

Now, if that sort of thing could be a little more regular...but that's the preconceived notions talking again.

It's a rollercoaster ride, but it sure beats all the years I spent answering the phones in my tech support Day Job. :)
I didn't see any cynicism in article, and I don't think that, in general, self-promotion needs to involve anything cowardly or cynical. I do think that anyone who believes their tweets will be viewed as some kind of artistic statement must have a very cynical view of their audience.
> I value lots of works of art very highly, but I've hardly ever considered buying art.

Then either the art you admire is way out of your price range (I admire Alphonse Mucha, but I don't own any originals!), or the artists you admire are doing a poor job of letting you know that their work is affordable, and would add to your quality of life.
Are crowds really all that wise?
There are situations where it's very useful. I've used similar modules for code doing financial calculations. Because Ruby has weakly typed numerics, it's quite easy to inadvertently coerce a value to Float. Once this happens you will start seeing, as you say, obscure bugs from floating point errors. The location where the bug manifests can be entirely different from the location in the code where the type coercion occurred. Placing type constraints on functions involved in these calculations seems quite warranted.

I wouldn't use this module on every function you write, and it doesn't seem like the author is advocating that. But strategically enforcing the expected types in critical portions of your codebase can be valuable.
Gmail are a very obvious example of a large-scale product doing this.
These ideas work, but only if you can get everyone else to play along, knowingly or unknowingly.

In Chicago at rush hour, if you leave more than a car's worth of space ahead or behind you, it will be filled instantly.
Unexamined Civil-Military Relations
Drug companies have always favored trials that show positive results. Maybe they've refined their ability to construct favorable trials to the point where they're exaggerating the placebo effect. Maybe there's an optimum level of distortion that maximizes the difference between a mildly effective drug and a placebo, and they've gone past that point.
The smartness required to implement and/use a language feature which could catch some given error such as this at compile/parse time would be much greater than the smartest that today's OO has/requires.

I agree that encapsulation and full object-orientation are pretty much ideological - an object encapsulating what would otherwise be a two-member structure but with twenty members is an example of OO's horror. But if you avoid Bondage and Discipline Languages (java, c#), OO doesn't have to be that.

I've gone from Ruby back to c++ with Qt, and I find c++ nearly as good IF I let myself be comfortable with public member variable since I have access to easy, flexible list/hash object via Qt.

The simple approach - small objects that interface in an ad-hoc way with each PLUS big, well defined, flexible interfaces between real, functional divisions of the code. It does require a thought-out design separate from the immediate implementation but a little thinking is good. Not all the "big, upfront design" stuff was bad.
I didn't suggest that, I was merely pointing out that your reply didn't make much sense.

> Many rich people are entrepreneurs.

Yes, and many rich people aren't, so what.

> Entrepreneurship is one of the fastest ways to income mobility.

Agree, but no one was talking about entrepreneurs, you just injected it when he said "rich".

> That being said, other high income earners tend to also need to be highly creative

No one said anything about high income earners either. Rich is about net worth, not about income. Lots of trust fund baby's out there who could hardly be called high income earners as if they did something for it.

He trolled you with a vague statement and you swallowed the bait hook, line, and sinker and injected your own ideas about what he meant to attack. You're tearing down the straw-man you setup yourself.
Excellent! Creativity doen't stop at the techies's desks.
Ha, according to the linked article it sends orders to the dev server by default (look in Settings). Looks like they forgot to remove the development switches. Maybe it was made by the same folks as the last one...that one was awful.
I think I saw another similar "unsolved mystery" posting about the Dyatlov Pass a few days ago. This one is at least related to current events, but how did the other one come up?

And yet, it is possible to stretch it to make it look like it belongs to hackers news: trying to resolve a mystery is like hacking through the fog surrounding the mystery. (Not only is it a stretch but also a mixed metaphor. Oh well.)
I always like this approach for dangerous (almost anything which messes with files is dangerous ;) ) scripts: output the commands it would execute, but don't execute them. The user can eyeball them and check that those commands are what he wants and copies them into a shell toe xecute them.
> The world demands something like 85 million barrels of oil per day.

No, it doesn't. The world needs a certain amount of energy - any kind. They are almost totally interchangeable.

You could pump 0 barrels a day, and as long as there was a transition time (about 10-30 years) there wouldn't be any problem at all.

If coal was cheap, you can gasify it, or convert it to liquid fuel. If all you had for nuclear power, then battery powered cars would be much more used, plus you could thermalyze water (similar to electrolyze), then combine with co2 and make liquid fuel.

The ONLY thing that matters is how much does it cost. Oil is the cheapest thing right now, so that's what we use. If oil got more expensive, then no problem, we'll switch to something else. It doesn't even matter if there is plenty of oil, if it's expensive we'll do something else - that's why so many wind farms sprung up. We didn't run out of oil, it's just wind suddenly got cheaper than oil.
This works, but the trouble comes when some guy in a big truck starts heavily tailgating you and flipping you off.
It's not 'out of nowhere.' It's because we're humans. We're paranoid and reactionary. You wouldn't see that with robots.
Those who feel that if global crude oil production continues to decline there will be great economic disruption base this on two unstated assumptions. The first is that alternatives for crude oil will be much more expensive than the current crude price. The second is that crude production will fall so fast that there will be a gap before good alternatives can be developed.

Regarding assumption #2, there is no way to predict how fast production will drop, if it does continue to drop, but it seems there are enough reserves to cushion against a preciptous drop especially if prices remain high.

Regarding assumption #1, any technologist can tell you the cost of reducing consumption is quite low. As for the ultimate potential savings, imagine insulating all of the houses in the US, adding efficient windows, putting in a combined heat/power co-generation system, adding some solar heat collectors on the roof, and switching the fleet to the natural gas saved by eliminating home furnaces. No imported oil needed. Or course, it would be a lot of work.
Jams move backward, a well known phenomenon. That they appear "out of nowhere" is more interesting.
Declining ROI is a good thing:
It stimulates use of more advanced technologies as well as research.
It stimulates interest to alternative energy sources.
What sort of broker?
Alice 3 released
Probably not. Herd behaviour is not necessarily wise, mostly to the contrary. Buffett wasn't successful because he followed the crowd but the opposite.The "madness of crowds" is well documented. Wisdom of crowds? No thanks.
Tag suggestion for the symfony PHP framework
Travel like they did in the old days: ie, travel for hackers and eccentrics
GridEcon - A marketplace for buying and selling cloud resources
Logical impossibility.
Not correct. Energy is exactly equal to the cost.

Material costs: why does stuff cost? Because it takes energy to make it, and to transport it.

R&D, marketing: You have pay someone. Why does he need money? Because he spends it on things that cost energy to make.

Follow it all the way down and energy is exactly equal to cost.

(Note that energy is not equal to environmental harm, which also needs to take into account pollution, which is not reflected in the cost.)
> but even those who get there because of social advantage does not mean that to stay there one does not need to be creative and at least have a valuable work product.

Nor does it mean that because they're there they're somehow more creative than people who didn't have those opportunities and couldn't get there.

> but I would argue on average, most high income earners must be because of the value that others are willing to pay for.

Just because people are willing to pay for something, doesn't mean producing it is creative. Being creative is certainly "a" path to wealth, but it's hardly the only one, and having wealth does not in imply that you are creative or any more creative than the average person.

Now of you restrict the "rich" people you're talking about to the subset that were self made, from rags to riches, then yes, I'd agree that they are very likely much more creative than the average person; but you haven't done that.
That's a good thing for skinny active people like me -- I need to make at least one of my meals each day huge.

As it is I'm 6'4" 140lbs (and slowly gaining now that I'm biking 100 mi/week minimum)
> an object encapsulating what would otherwise be a two-member structure but with twenty members is an example of OO's horror.

Reminds me of: If you have a procedure with ten parameters, you probably missed some.

http://www.cs.yale.edu/quotes.html
5 Social Media Lessons Learned from Whole Foods
perhaps if this was enforced more routinely it would help with the principles discuss in the article.
How happy I am to live (and work) at the portion of Rt 128 which is separate from I-95!

But every time I go down to Boston, or far away to other urban areas, I can never keep the distance that I want because someone would certainly cut in. So I increase the distance again, to avoid tailgating, then another guy gets in between us, etc, etc. And so we have a peloton of cars moving at 65+ mph a few meters away from each other. Not too pretty.
"The Donkey Show"? SRSLY?

You could promote it by putting flyers up all over Tijuana and by hiring underage hype people that shout "Come see the amazing donkey show! Senorita loves the donkey...and the donkey loves Senorita!" [Just kidding.]

WHY, oh why, have you branded the site this way? I wanted to know, but the site felt so creepy I had to leave before I could figure anything out. Which probably isn't your desired response, right?
Er no, you're veering this discussion to the silly. I was responding to his original claim and why my response wasn't "moving the goal post" as you state. If you can't see that there is a relationship between high income earners and rich people (and my distinction in my original comment or even that entrepreneurs can be a significant subset of rich people/high income earners), I'm afraid there's nothing further useful to say.
Oh, I know you can buy real sudafed --- I do, in the dinky little 8 tab packages you get now. But with a fake ID?
I haven't used Version 7, but I have used previous versions, and I can assure you, it's not at all the Platonic bug tracker. In fact, if you take a look at this article, you'll see that certain basic features (such as setting milestones) have been pretty clumsily implemented through the first 6 versions, at least.

You'd think that a team of rock stars in a a cubicle-free paradise with the benefit of Joel's wisdom would be able to really nail an application as trivial as bug tracking over the course of 7 versions. You'd think.
Choosing a Karate Class For Your Child
Yes, I did research it. I found the arguments in favor to be lame, self-serving, etc.
Unfortunately (and unintuitively), a person's intelligence doesn't directly translate to the type of driver they are. That's a perfect example. Shame.
Six strategies for overcoming "chicken and egg" problems
From comment #7 (R.K.)
"Guilt naturally morphs into resentment... What works? Parents in therapy. This will help a lot."
"The principle of revealed preference." If he's not buying it, he's not really valuing it. Like the old joke about two economists who walk past a porsche. One remarks that he'd give anything to own that car --- the other responds, "Clearly not."
++1.

Definitely agree. Judgment should stand. Sentencing should adapt.
SCO v. Novell appeal: $$ from Sun deal is Novell's; rest for jury trial
It's a great idea, but you'll benefit from focusing on a particular industry (so that the startups benefit from network effects & relevant mentoring/advice etc.). Also, one of the reasons YC works so well is the relatively low fixed overheads & scaling effects of success in software. If you can find a non-tech niche that fits then fantastic - good luck!
What possible solution would require spending more than the $100m/yr they're making? Thousands of highly paid expert moderators?
"The job of all artists is now self-promotion."

The job of an artist has always been self-promotion. An artist sells a brand.
Betfair Growing 30%, Easing over the Pond, and Hiring 50 Valley Engineers
I'd much rather authors write about what they know rather than make stuff up about things they don't know. It's up to the audience to determine if it's worth getting something out of it.
The "stretching it" is a game called "7 degrees of hacker news". Take any random page on the internet, and explain how it's really about hacker news. For example:

http://reviews.roadbikereview.com/blog/why-you-should-be-rid...

Carbon vs Steel road bike frames.

Bicycle frames are high tech, especially carbon fiber ones. Hackers are all about high tech. The hack is that for most people that aren't elite racers, steel is still better for the price/performance ratio than carbon fiber, despite the advertising and bandwagon effects pushing carbon. So, the article is perfectly at home on hacker news!
Whenever I think of polymorphism in C++, I think of base pointers, virtual functions and the vtable. I guess my mind just puts run time and compile time in separate boxes.
I was learning C# (had just come from Java/Eclipse land), and I was using the command-line compiler just to get comfortable and learn some in's and out's.

I was the first CS programmer they hired (I was still in school), they were crewed up with a lot of nice guy MIS's... it was funny when they hired another CS guy and he started doing the same things I did when I started, and getting in minor trouble with management.

They also wouldn't let us use ANY scripting languages for anything... everything should be compiled code based on "Principal", it runs faster and is "strongly typed" which is philosophically "better" I was told without a reason. Never mind that most of the other coders still used strings for everything (especially numbers), and 50%+ of the code base was XML serializers/deserializers. (Also the web apps were hideous,... WebForms what a shitty set of web-dev metaphors.)

I also got in trouble for wasting my time writing unit tests, we were an "agile" company with no time for tests.

Yeah, once I had a plan and some cash, I got the fuck out of dodge.

(ultimately, while still there, I ended up in vs+viemu, which I found fairly productive, and would highly recommend it to any VS code slingers)
Peak Oil translates to Peak Cheap Oil. Oil will never run out, it will only become uneconomical. Peak Oil has been a myth since the 1920s. You have to make the people believe that supply is limited.
> I never claimed that the current war on drugs is effective, only that meth should be illegal.

Why should meth be illegal if making it illegal isn't effective.

We're spending a lot of resources on the war on drugs. If the benefit that we're getting isn'g greater than the costs that we're incurring, why are we spending those costs?

> A more effective methodology for shutting down meth production is fine by me.

That's nice, but what do we do until then?

I'm all for trying experiments, but when something fails, it's important to take it down, if for no other reason than its continued existence/drain/waste demonstrates that the "we'll try this and if it doesn't work" argument is a lie.
Especially if you drive a standard transmission. Staying off the brake makes a huge difference, and makes for less clutching as well. For bonus points, you can put the car in neutral while coasting, although some don't think that's safe.
His blog is linked from the bottom of his post. I'm also a regular of the forum.

To me, it passes the smell test. Why go to such elaborate lengths to create pages of fake legalese, imitating a real lawyer firm? If it's fake, why would The Guardian report they've received a legal threat at the same time? Is it so surprising a company that has been alleged to take part in unscrupulous tactics suddenly decides to move onto sending legal threats to those who make accusations?