skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like Asimov's calendar [1]. The year is divided into 4 seasons of 91 days (13 weeks per season), with one extra day a year that is not part of any season and is not part of the weekday count. For leap years, another extra day occurs between the second and third seasons.

I'd make one change to Asimov's scheme. He gets rid of months. I'd keep them, with each season consisting of 3 months: 2 of 30 days and 1 of 31 days.

[1] http://calendars.wikia.com/wiki/World_Season_Calendar
> I can already do this with a wine club... Why not a pot club.

I'd be happy to have the wine club. It's illegal to ship alcohol to more than half the US states, including mine. Can't buy it at the grocery store either.
Calling out the big dog for some impressions?
Oh I should have mentioned that New Zealand does indeed have much better technological infrastructure than Australia though, two years after moving to central(ish) Melbourne the maximum internet speed is less than 1/10th what we had back in New Zealand years ago.
YC is playing in the big leagues now. This should be viewed as no different than Obama (or other campaigning politician) going to Google or Facebook. Such events don't fundamentally alter the organizations involved and could be a great opportunity to advance issues like the founder visa & patent reform.

Regardless what you think of Obama or his policies, it's better that the most powerful person on earth hears from startups as well as the giant corporations that already have his ear. Startups are a huge part of the real tech industry, but have been politically invisible to this point.

There is no organization today that can better represent the policy needs of small, scrappy startups than Y-Combinator.

This is great.
The mob can definitely limit speech but the XKCD comics is right. The first amendment is about government infringement. The mob has the right to protest you just as much as you have the right to say what you want.
My first thought is that it's going to be pretty challenging for a compiler to optimize this without runtime information.
There is no definition of free speech, it's an interpretation issue like everything else. You can be intolerable while you "speak freely" and intolerable while you stop people from doing the same. You can be intolerable for not speaking at all. We don't even have a static definition for the individual words speech or free.

It's important to understand that much of society is an attempt to tolerate each other and the concept of "free speech" is just a constantly moving bar of tolerance. Each individual has their own bar and each jurisdiction has one too. XKCD is just as wrong as anyone else and as long as he's not giving legal advice any contrasting opinion you have about it is just a contrasting opinion.
Whenever he visits Chicago, my 45-60 minute commute goes to 2+ hours (escorted motorcade from ORD to downtown with traffic blocked from on-ramps on the Kennedy/I90). Work from home if you can.
"thugs beating up journalists" and "afraid of being murdered by Islamic fundamentalists" fall under various laws which protect people from physical violence, or threats of physical violence.

"when the "Ada Initiative" got that talk canceled at "BSidesSF" last year" and "I was attacked for my speech from OpenSSL defenders who want me to quietly submit bug patches rather than making OpenSSL look bad on Twitter" were not due to acts of physical violence. They are acts of social opposition.

I think it's a bad idea to mix the first two and last two as all being opposition to free speech. The "I was attacked" in the last case is indistinguishable from "I was criticized."

Not only are those latter two themselves protected under free speech rights, aspects of them also a protected under the right of free association under the same First Amendment that protects speech. ("Freedom of assembly" includes the right of free association.) A call for a peaceful boycott, rally, or protest march are completely within the letter and spirit of the First Amendment.

I believe that any essay which argues for an overriding moral basis for a more universal sense of free speech, must also argue why there isn't an equally overriding universal basis for the freedom of association. This essay did not.
He says writing the first paragraph is the most difficult part of writing a novel, and that he would take as much as several hours to write a single paragraph back then. Yet, he effortlessly comes up with sentences that could very well be the beginning of ridiculously beaultiful stories, such as:

"It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination."
For minorities it's not a small matter. i502 is about so much more than getting high, it's about eliminating a policy which was so often enforced at the discretion of the officer and prosecutor, which opened the door for all kinds of discrimination.

the war on drugs is one of the most damaging policies for society, and i502 is a substantial step in the right direction.
Fallacy of measuring non-tail(logging) vs tail(presidency) data, and then using means/averages to derive a conclusion. Epistemologically meaningless; further than incorrect.
I stuck with ~30K bps a lot longer than was reasonable (it's still been years...). HN would be fine, a few seconds waiting for a few minutes reading. Megabyte js monstrosities were the problem, they would time out.
The Citizens' Councils used economic tactics against African Americans whom they considered as supportive of desegregation and voting rights, or for belonging to the NAACP; the tactics included "calling in" their mortgages, denying loans and business credit, and boycotting black-owned businesses. In some cities, the Councils published lists of names of NAACP supporters and signers of anti-segregation petitions in local newspapers in order to encourage economic retaliation. For instance, in Yazoo City, Mississippi in 1955, the Citizens' Council arranged for the names of 53 signers of a petition for school integration to appear in a local paper. Soon afterward, the petitioners lost their jobs and had their credit cut off.

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Citizens%27_Councils
What you said is definitely true from my personal experience, except rather than algorithms for me it's more that complex systems are easy.

I'd prefer to master a select few languages rather than risk getting syntax, functions, and language specific concepts confused.

Different languages (including programming languages) require memorization, and I'm much more of the type of person that can just figure things out rather than rely on it being memorized, not that either method is better, just an observation.
Flagged right out of existence. There's some irony.
Google's chance of winning its patent fight with Apple just improved a lot
If your program needs to read 4K from /dev/urandom multiple times per second, you're doing it wrong. There is little benefit in reading anything over 32 bytes at a time.

According to the man page for /dev/random and /dev/urandom:

> no cryptographic primitive available today can hope to promise more than 256 bits of security, so if any program reads more than 256 bits (32 bytes) from the kernel random pool per invocation, or per reasonable reseed interval (not less than one minute), that should be taken as a sign that its cryptography is not skillfully implemented.
This is disappointing. Marissa Mayer is probably already a lost cause, but for Sam Altman to co-host a Democratic fundraiser starring Obama shows that Y Combinator is firmly in the "establishment". How, in good conscience, can they support a president who has done nothing of substance about the NSA's abuses?

I can see this being cast as a pragmatic move--this is part of how you buy and sell influence, and YC is a big enough player now that if they can buy influence on behalf of their interests (i.e. the interests of the startups they fund) they derive a real benefit, but it's disappointing to see them participate in a corrupt system instead of trying to disrupt it.
Given the hosts and the venue, the best topic to bring up could be software patent reform. This is something pg has written about in the past [0] -- I wouldn't be surprised to learn this issue is the driving reason for hosting the dinner.

[0] http://paulgraham.com/patentpledge.html
It might be constructive to create a "top 3 questions from HN to ask the President".
For me they would be around political funding & the power of lobby groups, immigration reform and privacy/surveillance.
You'd think that, but in fact, it fosters such a collaborative and unselfish environment that people who might otherwise be "along for the ride" can't help but be caught up in the team.

Build a culture of productivity, not productive individuals.
Haha I don't think is actually a thing. But it would be really cool if they did stuff like this. It would be sweet to get an icon every time you hit a significant number, like 1024, 32767 or 80085
Agreed. I don't work for equity ever... don't feel like gambling with my livelihood.
> Exactly like a broken but popular API. It's still fundamentally bad.

And yet, not bad enough to @deprecate.

> Still much more elegant that the current mess

I'd argue that it's just as much of a hack... if there was something that was obviously better, I'd be all for it, but this is just a different mess. I'd rather deal with the devil I know...
I don't understand how this can be called "Big Data SQL in real time" when that is not even their selling point. Their selling point is the scalability.

Their demo is only working against ~190,000 records. I don't now any databases that aren't going to perform the demonstrated operations quickly.
Who is going to host him? pg or sama?
The comic (as I understand it) is using a persons right to free speech in the colloquial sense, the legal right to free speech and that, as the comic states, only applies to the government. The comic is addressing people like the person that submitted this support ticket regarding a ban on a forum I manage:

You are in violation of the Constitution of the United States First
Amendment by Violating my Freedom of Speech. Also are you
aware that obstruction is a crime?
The current system was built for agriculture - "quarters" matching periods of different agricultural activities. It just does not make any sense in post-agricultural societies. This was clearly recognised at the beginning of the XX century, then abandoned as anglo-european elites slowly retreated into cultural traditionalism (as a defensive reaction against the rise of socialism).

Saying that it doesn't matter because computers do it for us is just hiding dirt under the carpet. I agree that timezone and second adjustments are more problematic, but having a more rational overall approach would also help there: you would have a "hack zone" where to dump all the madness (the special 1-day/2-days period), making it easier to deal with any adjustment. Currently, you are inserting most changes on 1 January and / or 31 December, but then also hacking February for no particular reason, all the while not being able to use the week as a meaningful unit.

Throughout history, we experienced periods when people would not shy away from bold cultural and rational changes in order to improve life for future generations. Holding the (adjusted) Gregorian calendar as an ultimate taboo is just sad.
I've spoken with people who work for the state of Oregon.... state employees who are working on the software infrastructure for recreational marijuana dealers. Licensing, taxing, etc. It's basically a scaled up version of the current system of medical growers/distributors but tailored for recreational use.

That's how confident they are legalization is coming in the next few years.
Paradoxically I'm not sure this is true at all. It turns out that the tyranny of distance can make software even harder to do than tangibles. Why? Because software is intimately driven by domain and end user requirements. It's just not possible to build the right stuff unless you're intimately in contact the people who need it. If you're sitting in NZ, you simply can't appreciate what the driving needs are in an economy 50 - 100 times as big. (Obviously I'm generalising here - there are a few domains where you can - but in general, looking across the vast expanse of the software industry). And it turns out that for those areas where you can do the software remotely - there are nations with billions of people who are seeing the same opportunity.
That changes the negotiating perspective of the job seeker. If you're surrounded by a rather large number of companies in that range - http://graphics.wsj.com/billion-dollar-club/ - and are skillful enough to enjoy offers from multiple suitors, you're bound to do your analysis, perhaps employing some backchannel communication.

If the theoretical maximum of company exit is in single millions, then spending time negotiating 0.25% vs 0.3% equity package is meaningless.
'X shall not do Y to Z' is not a definition of Z.
Ha I think it's a wordpress theme (if you cmd + f in the view source for the page) so they may be able to change that setting but yeah by default it may be accelerated?
It's great work, but the title is still misleading. Computer Science deals with more than just operating systems. I'd have expected at least some more discrete mathematics before it could be called "computer science".

This criticism, by the way, should not be seen as in any detracting from the amazing job you have done there! Thank you for publishing this.
There's tons of plugins that provide color pickers. Here's one:
http://www.eyecon.ro/colorpicker/
I'd rather be paid in barley than to have to deal with BS politics like this!
> Right now, if a company gives you private stock you have to treat it as income and pay taxes for it. It's not real income yet, since you can't sell it, but you pay taxes.

I think RSUs do exactly that. They're taxed at conversion time which typically coincides with a liquidity event. At issue time they're not treated as income precisely due to restricted nature of it.
It's not too surprising that a community of wealthy entrepreneurs wouldn't turn away a chance to be close to someone that powerful and influential. I do really hope one of them gives him a polite earful though. It's probably a lot different for someone in his position (and with his need to fundraise) to hear a Democratic tech millionaire point out how certain policies have wrecked the tech industry than hearing it from some in the rank-and-file.
Hehehe. I think it's mostly the 1:1 ratio between upvotes and comments: that seems to send stuff to /dev/null PDQ. Which might also be "ironic": in this case it's too much free speech that has "silenced" this impassioned defense of free speech.
You guys should have an email sign up form so people know how to subscribe for updates!
I have made great progress learning Italian by simply changing my homepage to google.it instead of google.com. I search for words in Italian and read my news in Italian as much as I can. I also watch Italian TV.

I'm not an expert yet, but my point is that learning a language just takes more effort than most people are willing to put into it. They are looking for some silver bullet that will teach them without any effort. Just like learning how to code, or run a business, you just have to jump in and get your feet wet. Make mistakes and learn from them. The "silver bullet" is to immerse yourself in it.
For most of those folks, temporary is going to prove to be a very long time.
Holding Back the Freight Train
Update: Lyft is apparently already doing this through a "Trust and Safety" fee [1], but doesn't seem to be catching much flack for it.

[1] http://www.lyft.me/help?article=1263247
I love the transparency. Thank you.
The UK prime minister doea not have this level of bullshit surrounding him. Nor does the French president or the German chancellor. I'm pretty sure the Japanese and Canadian prime ministers don't. The Russians do.

I submit a further argument for the superiority of parliamentary over presidential systems. Less worship of politicians.
I really like the approach you're taking to moderation. Leading by example and providing constructive advice is definitely the way to go. Great job with everything so far.
As a broad first pass, have you looked into LSI and other related topic-modeling algorithms? I am a Pythonista and I like a library called gensim very much for playing in that space; maybe look at the documentation for that and see if it sparks any ideas?
Snowden defends Putin Question
Hm, does that mean you'll take a % of the deduction? Hm that sounds illegal actually, but maybe instead the software is free and you charge per hour to get access to a high quality, certified income tax guy to help with weird situations / edge cases / provide a personal touch!
If it's not obvious, doesn't that mean further research is in order before flagging it?
> I saw huge numbers of people just living on welfare because they could

Where were you living? The hardcore 'bludgers' are a minority of our welfare claimants.

Your portrayal of NZ strikes me as lopsided, considering we're working longer and longer hours : http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/money/7841749/No-rest-for-th...
I have no idea why everyone decided, all at once, that scroll bars should be invisible by default. The presence of a scroll bar communicates useful information! Why would you hide that?
These graphs are almost identical to the graphs of all too many Java generational garbage collection cycles I have seen in my life. Eden is the stupid stuff you do when figuring stuff out that hopefully never makes it into a commit unless shit gets crazy, survivor space makes it into a commit and maybe a release but hopefully gets cleaned up quickly, then once in a while you have a cleanup of the tenured generation.

This is when you eventually come back and do some bigger refactoring and cleanup to drop back down before you hit your ceiling. But you have to decide if you want to stop all other development while you do this, or if you can be smart and pull off tricks to coordinate doing the work while stuff still happens and/or parallelize it without having too much overhead. All without really knowing for sure where the ceiling is because other stuff is going on outside of your JVM.

If your major GCs can't successfully clean up your survivor space then you end up caught in a loop of endless GC attempts without making progress, looking for anything you can clean up or refactor to reduce TDD, with very little success. You start wondering if it is even possible or if you should just SIGKILL it all and start over.

Sadly, the TDD side of it doesn't fit into this analogy ... at least not yet. You could definitely work the dark side of TDD into this though... brittle, inflexible poorly factored tests that are in and of themselves technical debt and take up valuable memory you could be using to scrape by.
I wouldn't want to join a 10-founder startup, either. A follow-on to my comment would be that an engineer looking to work at a startup should almost never take options as a part of compensation, and should rarely take actual equity if it isn't sufficient to be on near-equal footing with the other founders' equity. Startups also shouldn't offer such crappy deals. They should pay the market rate, or slightly more because of the inherent risk in being an employee of a startup entails, and forgo the charade of stock grants (in any form).
I'd like to see a total cost for these trips. Last time I saw the president drive by for a fund-raiser, they closed down the entire route on the roads he was to take. At every driveway, parking lot and intersection, there were police. The motorcade stretched a couple blocks. Preparation took place weeks in advance. Add in Air Force One costs and to me these fund-raisers seems like nothing more than money laundering.
It was Thanksgiving; I'm pretty sure 2013.
> Marissa Mayer is probably already a lost cause

Yep, pretty much. She's coasted so far on buying companies, closing offices, and Alibaba value, but it's gonna get a bit harder soon.

> How, in good conscience, can they support a president who has done nothing of substance about the NSA's abuses?

Because they don't care? Obama has no problem with war or drone strikes against illegitimate targets, or deporting more "illegals" than any previous administration.
Uber announced this change to all their drivers earlier this week in an email. What this article doesn't mention is that in that same email they also announced a new "Data Plan" fee for drivers. They are going to start charging Uber drivers $10 per week for use of the iPhone Uber provides you and you are required to use to be a driver for Uber.

In other words their lowering of rates was probably just a ploy and now to put them right back where they were again they stick in these extra fees on drivers and passengers. Kind of a crappy situation for all parties. Uber already takes 20% of every fare.
If Obama truly believes in the populist ideals that apparently got him elected, this type of thing wouldn't be effective at all. Hopefully, in this case, those conversations do occur and he does betray all of his rhetoric about rich people being unable to influence him etc. My guess is it will be much more "You're the greatest - keep it up" type of conversations, but we'll see.
I always thought HN and YC were largely apolitical. I guess not.
No one is going to ask him anything the least bit upsetting at an event like this.
Fair enough. But how easy is it for common citizens in those countries to buy a small arsenal of weapons?
The article says it's for the DNC, so that would be the party in general. The midterm elections are coming up in the fall, and people like Nate Silver have been suggesting the Democrats are in danger of losing the senate -- I'm guessing the fundraising will be kicking into overdrive as we head into the summer.
I know they are expanding, big time. They've purchased space in Portland and already started hiring. I think they're going to try and grow before they need to. And some backup doesn't hurt.
Aren't games of all stripes typically GPU bound rather than CPU bound these days, if they're complicated enough to be limited by the hardware at all? If so, dedicating more area to GPU cores would be better for them.
Religion and seasonality. 7-days as a unit of measurement is written into unamendable documents hold as holy by all Judaist monotheisms (Jewish, Christian and Islamic). The ciclical experience of seasonal-weather and daylight-lenght changes are also too powerful to deny.
yes:

"The change was made because of demand for tickets to the Obama fundraiser, which benefits the Democratic National Committee, sources said."
There are (at least) three levels of development in a game: engine, gameplay, and content. Depending where you draw those lines, Unity gives you the engine and you provide the gameplay and content. It sounds like you're interested in just working on content, in which case there are tons of games that let you do more or less what you describe through modding (eg Skyrim).
No, in Baltimore at least Uber has _always_ taken a 20% cut. What they don't mention in the article is Uber also started charging drivers a $10 per week "Data" fee for use of the Uber phone you have to have to get fares. So they are recouping more than just $1 per trip.
Look, a story which involves Obama. Time for me to shill for literally any political cause which occurs to me by pretending that I am concerned that we aren't all rejecting him more violently. Maybe we can slip in a plug for the Tea Party.
If it's not to personal; do you have any anecdotal indications as to why your bipolar improved after your early twenties?(or rather; why you haven't had a bout of extreme depression since then)