skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The standard argument I've heard against "accountability" is that "leaders" won't "lead" properly if they know they could be held accountable for the consequences after leaving "office". It's utter bullshit, and there is absolutely no way for any of us to change it, or do anything about it.

I'd call for us to 'scientificize' the shit out of politics, but it would do no good. We all know what an utter failure the social sciences are when it comes to the scientific method. Mainly due to unpredictable human nature and the vagueness of social and political policy.
assuming startup 80+ hours/week.
Do rockets?
The owners stuck around. Why didn't the employees? Serious question... were people fired for having too remunerative packages? Or did people just move on mostly?
Not so small either - as of 2011 they were the 3rd largest architecture by units shipped, with 656 million units sold, after ARM and ARC (Synopsis), and easily outdistancing x86... Latest numbers I've seen still estimates 300 million+ units last year.

They're "just" mainly in niche fixed-function products, so few people tends to get to program them.
What has this to do with the desktop environment.
That was my reaction as well.

But I hope they've done this intentionally, because I hope nobody would be stupid enough to produce a new backdoor while fixing the first.
Does that jive with their stated plan to do software only? Does the FitBit hardware have an open API that Nike could integrate with?

Or are they stepping back and waiting for Google, Samsung, Apple, etc, to make a successful hardware device? Whether that's things like the M7 in smartphones or an extra device.
Huh, that's a good idea!

I wonder if it would be possible to integrate a Mono-compiled version of Javascript (e.g., IronJavascript) into Unity?

Some cursory Googling produced these interesting posts on integrating IronScheme[0] and IronPython[1] with Unity.

[0]: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/76266-Facilities-for-script...
[1]: http://techartsurvival.blogspot.com/2013/12/embedding-ironpy...
Show HN: Hummingbird – Design/HTML Previews to Target Devices in Realtime
The best language to write a compiler in is the target language of the compiler.

Citation please? Writing a compiler in the language it's targeting is not always "best", but it is often done to reduce dependence on external toolchains and to flush out bugs in the language or compiler itself (since a compiler is usually a fairly complex program).

Every language has it's own benefits and drawbacks; the ML family of languages (which F# belongs to) was purpose-built for implementing compilers (and theorem-proving tools), so it would have been an excellent choice for implementing Roslyn, or at least parts of it.
Not so strange, given that there are still hundreds of millions of shipped units a year.
They are in factory control tools and in-car automation systems, for example.

Although the latter are starting to use J2ME systems as well.

At least that is my feeling from job posts here in Germany.
Too late to edit, but I should probably make it clear that I personally don't approve of or use voting rings.
I agree that it's common for products to become more difficult for beginners as more and more features get added, but I don't agree that it's unavoidable. I think it's possible to package advanced features in such a way that they don't add additional complexity for the novice user. The problem, IMO, is that developers lose sight of the importance of such users in the process of trying to keep their existing/expert users happy.
Art of the Problem has the best explanation I've ever seen of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange (the basis for TSL/SSL). I wish this video was shown in my Crypto class: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NcDVERzMGw&list=PLB4D701646...

The whole playlist is also worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB4D701646DAF0817
New York City Basic Tips and Etiquette
Rekindling my excitement to see a demo of the Raptor engines.
Noise, Dynamic Range and Bit Depth in Digital SLRs
I suspect that is selective memory at work to some extent. You are first to arrive sometimes, and the rest of the time you can say "well, we just didn't have the manpower" or something.
This is a dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7612156.
I'm not sure if this is feasible and certainly it would be more of a process than 'building some kind of dam'. A few reasons:

- The bridge spans 2700m and the channel is 350+ feet deep in some spots. For scale, the Three Gorges Dam is 2300m long

- Sea levels will rise so incrementally that a massive public works project might seem unnecessary or hard to get support for

- Shipping traffic needs to be able to pass through to get to the port of Oakland, Richmond, Stockton, etc...
No, don't enable revocation checking
Interesting, but I don't know if I would be able to use this for more complex uses of ajax, e.g. pjax/phah, etc. But I could definitely see how this could possibly be used over Angular for certain projects.
> A good C# developer can use it without any problem as well.

This is not true (I've been a C# dev for many years already, and I've been learning F# for the last months). It's not so easy to switch the mindset and the syntax.

> PS: a good JavaScript developer will probably be even more productive than both C# and F#, despite the language being horrible.

Yeah, more productive the first days (at a PoC phase), but more productive the next months? I don't think so. You need to watch this talk: http://vimeo.com/72870631
Well, no. You're right. I don't know whether that invalidates my point though. It may not be necessary to model the human brain to achieve machine intelligence. It may also be that any sufficient machine intelligence would wind up modelling the human brain to a limited but necessary degree, in a similar way that birds and airplanes share wings with similar lift effects, but different mechanics. Until there's something real to point at, I think it's semantics.
Calling a reasoned, even-handed assessment "ridiculous" sets a pretty bad tone at the outset. That tone continues through your post (e.g. hiring difficulties are "nonsense").

The submission asks a question that many shops confront when F# is proposed. And the reality today is that many come to the conclusion that no, it isn't ready for production, for many of the reasons the submission notes. Your outrage will not change this reality.
>Perhaps a combination? A minimum number of annually expiring PTO days, with an open policy of UTO beyond that?

This is how my last salaried job worked. It was universally agreed that it was the best possible situation.
That's also disingenuous.
Here's an update: http://vivekpanyam.github.io/Hummingbird/
In my experience, CS faculty are more open to the idea that their PhD students probably won't be pursuing academic careers. In biology, the attitude is more like, "if you don't want to be a professor, what are you doing here?"
And most importantly, no identity system which end users know about. (i.e. people know about email addresses, but Facebook users use XMPP without knowing how to refer to people on other services)
I think that one thing that people are missing when they think AI is not a threat is there does not have to be a singular AI for every problem.

Chess computers are better than humans, but I wouldn't trust them to manage the electricity grid. What if there was an equivalent quality of computer specialized for every significant area of society - electricity grid, packet routing, high speed trading, etc etc.
I'd argue "unfiltered" or "less filtered" rather than "unbiased". You're going to get multiple biases, including both the party line and the opposition (either or both of which may have its own distortions).

Sorting out the truth from this is itself a challenge. Economic historian Philip Mirowski has interesting comments on how neoliberals see deliberate distortions of the media as an arguably good thing (Mirowki, and I, disagree with this). Determining credibility (and advertising who is credible) remains a challenge, even with social / decentralized media.
I have recently joined a small successful ISV selling and developing a couple of Delphi apps in an industry vertical in which I have significant experience; my prior experience has been C#/.Net for quite a while, and before that Java. I recall buying the Delphi IDE way back in the day; possibly when I was still at university, definitely when Borland was still around!

So some informed observations:

1. The quality of the IDE is incredibly dire compared to Visual Studio+Resharper or Jetbrains IntelliJ. Perhaps it will be improved if a buy a license for Castalia. That said, I've been using XE3, maybe the more recent versions are better but it seems that Embarcadero have been focusing on getting into the cross-platform mobile game (one which I think Xamarin/Phonegap/Titanium, etc are playing better) rather than increasing the quality of the tools or enhancing the language. XE6 may have some improvements under Embarcadero's "QPS" (Quality/Performance/Stability) project. We haven't upgraded our licenses since the versions since XE3 didn't bring anything for us, but if we want to see Delphi survive then perhaps we should be chucking some money Embarcadero's way!

2. The language is quite verbose, and I find the need to declare the 'interface' for a class separate to the implementation of the methods quite cute. There's so much ceremony around anonymous methods that it hardly seems worth it some times. Lack of built-in multicast delegates for event handlers.

3. I recently attended a local symposium put on by the user group. There didn't appear to be much diversity amongst the attendees. I would charge that lack of diversity is not a sign of a healthy software development community. Speaking with one of the organiser's, they mentioned that Embarcadero doesn't introduce new Delphi customers to the user group any more since it is just "grumpy old men".

4. At this symposium one of the talks was on dependency injection. I was bemused that this was a new idea to the Delphi world. One of the advertisers in the symposium papers was a consultancy whose pitch basically was "so you've been making money from selling a product, but you're getting old and want to retire. Pass the source code and rights over to use and we'll work out an arrangement to continue development whilst maintaining a royalty stream for you".

5. Packaging of open-source for easy reuse is challenging in Delphi. Unlike managed environments such as .Net or Java, reusing well-known open source components is as simple as adding an assembly or a JAR to your project (yes, I acknowledge that in the past this has had its own challenges, but I think in the .Net world at least Nuget has largely conquered this). The native binaries nature of Delphi has meant there is no such equivalent (that I'm aware of), although I'm considering leveraging Nuget's packaging format and tools for BPLs.
I was talking about error bounds expressed as a confidence interval, e.g., in political polling. Not error bars used in various plot types (e.g., box or whisker plots), which are based on standard deviation.

As I noted, it's a convention, and really, the CI should be explicitly stated.
Using LESS with WordPress – A Beginner's Guide
That was the blog post. I took all the feedback I got and turned it into a Github site. Want me to delete this submission?
Will do, I've got a lot planned so long as I can keep it going
In Canada's case, 100%. I have seen one hospital bill, and that was $200 for a single room when my wife gave birth to my son. Which my supplementary insurance then paid. It is the only time I've ever even had to use my work insurance plan.
5% does seem a little high. I think Sam Altman called for a minimum of 10% (so the allocation is equal to x such that x us equal to or greater than 0.10) to go to the first ten hires. Perhaps, this would be a scenario where the first hire would get half of the allocation (so the allocation to the first employee is equal to x such that x is equal to or greater than 0.05).

However, I'd argue the first hire isn't "the least important junior assistant developer" no matter what label you put on them. Other than a first (or maybe second but that's stretching it) hire, I fail to see where someone would get five to ten percent.
To be honest, I think that "not getting the love it deserves from MS" is the best thing that happened to F# :-). They did really good job at supporting the community - by open-sourcing F# and now also accepting contributions to the official MS release.

But the fact that they did not keep full control of F# means that the community had time to setup "The F# Software Foundation" (http://fsharp.org) and develop a really healthy open-source ecosystem around F#.

If you look at the data-science story around F#, there are libraries like F# Data, Deedle, R Type Provider, etc. I'm biased, because I contributed to most of them, but I think that community did much better job than Microsoft would in this area. So "not getting the love" is more like "getting freedom". And I think it really helped F# in many ways.

Do not get me wrong - MS is an important contributor and everyone in the community acknowledges that. But they are just a part of the F# story (there is excellent Xamarin support, great open-source projects etc.)
Many people just moved on over time for non-monetary reasons.
Here is the original article that I assume this Medium post was based on. Seeing as they essentially share the same title. http://designrope.com/design/find-stock-photos-dont-suck/
This is the one thing that I will not forgive MS for. They bought the lead guy from Borland rather than compete against the product. I guess it's all fair in business, but it was a gutless defense of VB - an admission, actually - that VB wasn't up to the competition.

The summary for me is that Delphi was more productive and way better designed than VB with the performance of C. I never understood why it didn't have a broader following. My guess is that developers enjoyed the challenge of C/C++, call it an aesthetic judgement.
I agree with this. I find that a lot of enthusiasts get caught up in learning to use tools, instead of understanding fundamentals.

Vim, git and Linux are great, but they are tools for getting a job done. Once the fundamentals of computer science are learned, these tools can be picked up rather quickly.

I'm all for this approach, as I'm a huge Linux/vim/git fan, but all of this must come after the fundamentals are in place. It's very easy to overwhelm someone with too much information about tools and terms.

Now if you're the next Linus Torvalds, then this is an excellent approach. Us mere mortals shall marvel at your talents from afar.
NYC Subway Data REST API
The photos from deathtothestockphoto look decent, but I see no central place to search through them. You can only get them by email. Their Instagram feed only has 46 photos. The rest of these look like the usual generic photos.

However, it is refreshing finally find some sites that actually offer free photos. Most sites that pop up in a Google search have a few free ones, then billions of affiliate links to Shutterstock. Nothing against Shutterstock, but it does get frustrating to search for free images and constantly end up on a page requesting payment.
As bitJericho already noted, nothing in the protocol or the format prevents encryption--and as a matter of fact, you can use end-to-end encryption with email now, even though it was not originally explicitly designed for that. That is one of the really great strengths of email: It can be adapted and extended in many ways as technology develops.

Other than that, I still don't see what your criticism actually is.

All of that is not to say that the email protocol stack is somehow particularly elegant (it most certainly is not), but most often when you hear people say that we need to reinvent email, they don't actually understand what the problems with email are and just seem to think it's bad because it's old--all while being completely oblivious of the lessons that have been learned with email. Despite its lack of elegance, it does actually incorporate a lot of wisdom, as well as its fair share of stupidity.

But what tends to be overlooked in particular is that for quite a few of the most obvious problems with the usability of email (namely, authentication of senders and spam), those problems are not problems that the people who invented and extended the protocols and formats failed to consider, but that despite a lot of effort and intelligence applied to them, they failed to come up with a solution for. And the reason for that tends to be that those problems are fundamental social problems that just crop up in email just as they do elsewhere, which can not be solved by simply inventing "modern email".

As for how difficult it is to set up your own mail server, I don't really have a clue. I mean, I do it all manually, but that's probably just because I learned how to do it quite a while ago, and now that I know how to do it all manually and I have a working setup anyhow, I don't know what easier ways might be available. But in principle, I don't see why it shouldn't be possible to put together a package of a pre-configured mail setup for standard cases which shouldn't be all that difficult to deploy. I mean, if you look at how many magnitudes more awful the web stack is, and ordinary people still manage to install and use a web browser, completely oblivious to the hilarious complexity of that piece of software.
I'm on OS X too. Possibly could be an extension messing with it. That's usually what causes behavior that not everybody else sees on the same release version.

Some above in the comments have confirmed what I saw.
Ladar Levison claimed, "There's information that I can't even share with my lawyer, let alone with the American public."[0] I'm not familiar enough to say whether this level of gag is legally documented, or has been upheld, etc.

[0] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/lavabit-founder-u...
Maybe we have an extension that is causing this. I'll try disabling them tomorrow and see if the UI works.
My university used to do the same, although as of this term that class is now taught using ARM on a Raspberry Pi.
Even C++ compilers (except gcc) mostly compile themselves in under 30 seconds. How is that impressive ?

Delphi compiles source code almost as fast as it can read it from disk. Megabytes of sourcecode per second on a 486.
Apart from all the other stuff listed: Set-top boxes. The WDTV Live for example, uses a specialized tri-core Sigma Design MIPS CPU, where one of the selling points is that one of the cores can be locked down by the board manufacturer with the intent of e.g. running DRM stuff.
There is a documentary video of this by the author, KUBRICK'S BOXES: http://vimeo.com/78314194
Did Israel steal bomb-grade uranium from the United States?
> IDE support even in Visual Studio 2013 is absolutely poor

It suits my needs well. References for functions/values/types would be a big nice to have, but I don't miss it that much. Refactoring? Rename refactoring is in the F# community Power Tools http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/136b942e-9f2c-... I've never missed it enough to bother. As for the show-stopping bug in the Power Tools formatter, I would not want software someone else wrote re-arranging the white space in my file. Beyond that refactoring support is rather ill-defined. Making a mish-mash of functional and imperative code more functional/compositional/readable requires thought.

> Options are great; nulls are bad

Many functions in the .NET Framework now support a try version which interface very well with F#, thank you. Other than that F# cannot perform the miracle of making external software null safe.

> F# was completely missed from Roslyn

I respect the OP, but I couldn't care less. (See my next comment.) Roslyn in many ways is just playing catch up with F#, anyway.

> There’s little info on what’s coming in the next version of F#

As a language, F# is pretty feature mature. (The big thing I would like to see is dependent types.) The action going forward is with the open source community, https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/fsharp-opensource/1C..., which Microsoft fully supports, as it should be with a fully open source language. I know people in the community who already have compiler enhancements, for instance, that should come around in the foreseeable future.

> Hiring developers is already very hard

Fortunately for Tachyus, we have a compelling technology company story and a growing team that makes the F# people (and not just F# people) we want to recruit also want to join us, going so far as to relocate across the country.

This of course does not work for the IT Department of Acme Industries in Flyover, Kansas. The HR department will hate you, but the best alternative is probably to build a core of F#'ers internally. You will have to be creative about your recruiting after that. You need to demonstrate your organization offers a career rather than just a job.
Thanks for pointing that provider out to me. Those are some of the best prices i've seen this side of Hetzner.
Thanks, yes, it's annoying, I'm getting weird exception from the code mirror API when I try to do in place replacements, but that's no excuse :) will try to resolve it, good point.
There aren't very many consulting jobs for it.
Unpaid time off is an interesting approach, but companies generally consider Unpaid time off not as neutral, but as a loss (due to missed opportunities, rent, and equipment cost).
Hmm. Since you did this so quickly, I guess we can make an exception and consider it an adjunct to the original post.
80+ hours per week? Are you joking? Most startups aren't 9 to 5, but please name a single startup where you believe employees regularly put in 80 hour-plus weeks.

Even in professions like law and investment banking, where employees do have to work grueling hours on a regular basis, the "80 hour work week" is largely a myth. I think medical residents are one of the few groups that really puts in these types of hours consistently.
I'd recommend Cay Horstmanns 'Scala for the Impatient'.
The grandparent is a consultant, how many of this niche is hiring consultants? What are his chances of having steady (consulting) work using Qt? Let's be reasonable, he has a better chance learning MFC (not that that's a good idea either).
This looks awesome, but I'm slightly confused with the mission of this project. Is it meant to provide a simplified operating system to encourage tinkering, or a minimal "old-school" environment in which to learn "higher-level" programming on?
Thank you!
Great question, the site is static and is open source (https://github.com/scalatutorials/scalatutorials.github.io/)

The execution engine uses a WebSockets API courtesy of http://codebrew.io, more specifically https://github.com/jedesah/scala-codesheet-api (see http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1ry70r/hey_this...)

Credits for other open source resources: http://scalatutorials.com/about.html

The tour steps are in a Google docs spreadsheet (lazy man's database) and I wrote a hacky google docs CSV to markdown engine to avoid some boilerplate at: https://github.com/eranation/ScalaTutorialsTourMaker
I had the good fortune to study the films (made and unmade) of Stanley Kubrick for a semester in college. If ever a filmmaker embodied the hacker spirit it was Kubrick - he taught himself still photography, dropped out of high school to successfully pursue the career, hustled chess, bootstrapped his first film, licensed the rights to a book, put together a round of funding, and built a career in Hollywood. Then left Hollywood and the U.S. and took huge chances with his career to pursue his art, hack innovative tech for his films, and change the history of cinema. Many years after college, I'm still inspired by Kubrick's life. But man was Eyes Wide Shut a clunker.