skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What makes you say that this kind of study can never ascend to the level of science?

Because the uncontrolled nature of the observations means evidence cannot be reliably collected in a way that separates one cause from any number of unintended causes and side effects. The only way to get around these obstacles would be to feed one group of people doses of lead and compare them to another in a controlled setting, or isolate two groups of people, give one group the right to birth control and abortions, deny the other group those rights, and keep them from finding out about each other. Things that cannot be done for ethical reasons, and things that prevent social psychology from rising to the level of science.

This is why social psychology cannot be a science, and it explains why the field has the terrible reputation it has and deserves.

Link: http://chronicle.com/article/As-Dutch-Research-Scandal/12974...

Quote: "Even before the Stapel case broke, a flurry of articles had begun appearing this fall that pointed to supposed systemic flaws in the way psychologists handle data. But one methodological expert, Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, of the University of Amsterdam, added a sociological twist to the statistical debate: Psychology, he argued in a recent blog post and an interview, has become addicted to surprising, counterintuitive findings that catch the news media's eye, and that trend is warping the field."

> Anyhow, I strongly disagree that you can say that this isn't science.

Yes, I understand, but you haven't the slightest idea what makes science science. If you did, you would recognize this sort of article for what it is.

Social psychology deserves its reputation, science operates at a higher level, this is Science 101, and you have no idea what you're talking about. Not a clue.

There is a one-word summary of what science requires, that word is known to every qualified scientist, and you do not know what it is. How do I know this? You defended social psychology for over four hundred words without even mentioning it.
O'Neill clearly wanted it to happen and let it bias his estimates. But what bothered me the most was that even if you did follow their strategy of build-powersats-in-place-out-of-extraterrestrial-materials, you could do it cheaper with workers in tin cans (and lots of automation and teleoperation) instead of livable colonies. The argument against this wasn't too convincing, but I was a teenager and figured "Hey, a lot can happen in a few decades." A lot more than actually did so far, sigh.

I still think large-scale work could have been done in space, and wasn't more for societal than technical reasons.
The Funny Farm puzzle
This whole situation is more depressing than anything. Who would have thought that exemplars of our industry would cheat their own employees to this degree. One might have expected this in some other industries, but software?
My experience circa ~2011

> Is Scala used exclusively for systems programming in Twitter or are there other languages in the mix?

Java and C++ were also used.

> The majority of other big software players seem to be not using it for various reasons. Is that a concern?

Not really.

> - How is the learning curve for new hires? How long before they become productive? How long before they write great code in Scala (as opposed to still figuring things out but maybe being productive)?

Took me about four months. It would be easier these days because the related tools (mostly IDE and build) suck less.

> - Isn't the JVM too big of a performance compromise for large scale software where every bit of performance matters?

It's mostly fine. It's just the very highest throughput systems (load balancers where you expect to saturate the pipe and not pause for 5ms) where you wish you had C.

>- Is it easier to hire people for Scala positions? Harder? The same?

You mostly train into it.

>- How do engineers in Twitter with a lot of experience in other platforms and languages feel about Scala after having used it for a while?

Mixed bag. Some love it, some hate it.
> differences in wealth hardly matter

This is obvious from any comparison between the United States and any genuinely poor or developing country.

In the United States, the "poor" own cars and televisions (with cable!), enjoy smartphone service, live in air-conditioned houses, and eat lavish meals. The standard of living they enjoy is fantastically better than the poor or even middle class in any developing nation. Not only that, but their standard of living is far superior to the standard of living of the "poor" in this country 10, 20, or 50 years ago. Economic growth has lifted all boats. What's more, no one in this nation has a valid justification for envy.

If your neighbors are eating well while your children are starving, okay, be envious. It might be justified. That's not the case here. As Maggie Thatcher once responded to an accuser, "you would prefer that the poor be poorer, in order that the rich would be less rich". Greed and envy are not to be confused with justice, and should be rejected.
Wow, $100m a year is a lot of money.

Could hire a team of 10 top notch devs for $200K + $100K in benefits for $3m/year. Supposing you had a sales staff that cost the same, that's $6m. Make it an even ten with hardware designers and support staff.
This doesn't strike me as surprising -- capitalism rewards capital, not labor. Ideally, each generation is able to use labor to acquire a bit of capital, and share it with their children until the family is financially secure.

Rather than inequality between brackets, or even people, I'd prefer to focus on whether the system of "save some each generation" is breaking, and if so, what can be done to fix it.
I would disagree that general programming knowledge doesn't change. While most of the ideas currently on the forefront of software engineering were invented decades ago, many of them have only hit mainstream very recently. While pure functional programming isn't used very often on large projects, current best practices prefer a declarative functional style whenever possible.

While a "for" loop may not have changed, someone who has only coded C++ may not understand why it's often the wrong way to iterate over a collection in modern environments. They might not understand why you'd use function parameters instead of inheritance, or lots of tiny single-method classes instead of one class that handles every aspect of a data type.

While these may seem like simple implementation details, they can lead to different approaches to problem solving, and conflicts over programming style that you might need to mediate. For example, if one of your group's goals is test coverage, then it would be helpful to have done some TDD, and know what characteristics are more or less conducive to testing.

While none of these ideas is brand new, there are a lot of teams that have only recently started embracing them, and a manager who hasn't kept up is probably not going to be a very good fit on a team that has.
I always customize my Win installs by moving dock to the left, same as Ubuntu. It makes sense on laptop with limited vertical space
Stress is a mental health issue. All mental health issues are not chronic mental illnesses. Stressful circumstances can create poor mental health. That's one of the ways we identify signs of stress - i. e. by a person's behaviour.
It is the least painful OS that still has good performance and scalability. I would use openbsd if it weren't for the fact that it is 50% slower and is basically useless on SMP systems (which is everything now). FreeBSD might as well be gnu/linux at this point it is so bloated and convoluted.
Wow. Napkin math can be powerful. This is the most insightful comment on the page.
Not necessarily an outlier. I was dumber than him and sat out the whole four years. I spent a year doing something I hated because that's what my degree got me.

I now have a job I love that has literally zero to do with what I studied. If I had focused on the acquisition of knowledge when I realized I wanted to program for a living I could have saved a lot of time, money, and opportunity cost. I know more than a handful like me.
Square's primary problem is not the lack of an API.

Square's problem is that the margin on processing physical credit cards is razor thin, especially if you are just using other people's networks. My thought has been that Square will eventually launch its own credit card network once they have a large enough share of the credit card processing market.

Square could have launched an API and done what Stripe did, but the problem of processing credit cards over the Internet are different from the problem of processing physical credit cards. I don't think that anyone could have simultaneously succeeded at both.
Idea: ShowMeThere (needs better name, camanywhere?)

An phone/web app that allows you to click on a place in google maps and request a "cammer" for x minutes, you pay $x and anyone running the software on their phone that is near that location can accept the offer and start streaming video from their phone to you, allowing you to have a kind of "live" street view.

There is UI for the payer to click on arrows to inform the cammer to move here or there, and to zoom or focus on certain things, also a pre translated set of things to help communicate with cammer. Cammer gets paid after the x minutes is up.

Cammer gets cheap money for being a personal camera man for someone somewhere else in the world.

Client saves a trip out there to see something for himself.

Use cases: Want to see if an antique you are looking for is at the markets but cant get away from work?.
Want to check out markets in turkey but live in australia? Want to see what the surf is "really" like right now and whether you should bother heading out?
Police work/chases! heaps of uses.

For popular events and markets, a cammer could setup shop and offer high quality streams etc.
The brain injury that made me a math genius
Think Customers – 5 Secrets to Success in Retail
I like it.

I really like it.

Banner, video, graphic ads are annoying.

Many users intrinsically ignore them, others have ad-blocking software.

This will work.

Publishers will love it (if the CPM's are high enough).

User's will engage with it.

Websites will look less spammy.
Why all placeholders' text are John Doe?
I'm curious about corn rotting.

I live in a country that produces quite a lot of corn. Some is sold as fresh produce, but any surplus ends up on the rooves of farmers' houses, dried, consumed during the winter as the major starch. The husks are used for fuel - quick and hot burn stir fry. There is no need to let corn rot.

Why let it rot?
Why do you have to "become economically equal" in order for wealth to be an incentive for work? Can no one "earn wealth by working" except in reference to Bill Gates or Paris Hilton or someone? Is wealth defined only in terms of "who I'm ahead of"? If I go from rags to riches, is it meaningless because in the same time Bill Gates went from one mansion to another mansion?
Don't believe anything until it is officially denied.
Could you elaborate on that? I looked at the article and look at a description of Alloy, it doesn't seem to me like a good example to use for Alloy.
> Rejecting the entirety of a science because it deals in confidence values rather than "facts" is foolish ...

I'm not rejecting pop psychology. I'm saying it's not science. Science requires something fundamental, it can be expressed in one word, and I invite the readers of this post to say what it is. As soon as the word leaves their mouths, they will realize why social psychology cannot be science.

When the physicists at the LHC observed what they thought might be the Higgs Boson, they refused to announce a discovery until the had a five sigma result. Five sigma is approximately equal to 2.8 * 10^-7 (explanation: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/07/17/...), and it expresses the probability that, if there is no Higgs particle, a random observation might create the observation that has been made.

Five sigma. That's science. Opinion articles whose titles end in question marks are not science. And I should not have to explain this to educated readers.

> I particularly love that you used the word "ascend"; I shan't be the first to compare positivism to scientism

Scientism is an irrational confidence in science as an answer to all the world's problems. Social psychology is an irrational confidence in the power of articles that observe correlations without either proposing or testing theories about those correlations to accurately represent some aspect of reality.
I hear microsoft's suite integrates well with each other to achieve that. But alas, that's just for .NET

But what's wrong with IntelliJ?? We use it for Java EE and it works pretty darn well. Repository Management, Local server management, Compilation/deployment, it has everything and its executed pretty well. Although i suppose it's restricted to java...
You really think that? There are a lot of families that got rich in the early 20th in the US who are still controlling huge stakes in production of the country. After a 100 years I'd start calling those dynasties.

Countries you cited have had the bad luck of having much of their means of production wiped out through war/political turmoil. But the places that haven't blown up... well the wealth doesn't seem to be moving as fast as you seem to imply .
Singapore Airlines' all-business-class flights (Singapore to to Newark or Los Angeles) have been withdrawn at the end of 2013 [1], but probably also due to fuel consumption of the A340-500, not just due to the all-business-class yields not quite working out.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-25/singapore-air-to-en...
As hackers, we should be able to look past all the heavy marketing and funding and see the idea beneath it. Airbnb has been a huge success in marketing and promotion, but what about the idea? Is the idea any good?
Right. Those are questions/concerns.

In terms of what I think is going for it: There's a nice IDE from JetBrains and Eclipse support is good. The REPL/worksheets. It does perform well on the JVM and running on the JVM means it's portable and you can also leverage a lot of the Java eco-system.

It seems that where performance really matters a lot of companies do choose to "drop down" to C or C++. I think there's still a gap vs. the JVM.

I guess I still need to be "sold" on it hence all the questions. It does seem to work for Twitter as far a large application and scale but I was hoping to get a little inside information on that. I thought what differentiated Twitter is how comitted they are to the language and the scale it's used so it seems there's a lot to learn from their story beyond what's in the presentation.
"Capitalism" is just a made-up word meaning the natural state of human affairs, in which people own property, do work, buy, sell, and trade with one another. The word only became popular in the past couple centuries as socialists and fascists tried to present capitalism as "just another -ism", just another "option" that society might choose or not choose.
Yeah, I did a project on this sort of thing in Uni with E10. We found that the few cents less it costs per litre at the pump was not enough to pay for the extra fuel you had to buy to make up for the fact that there is less energy in the fuel (this is in Australia - pretty sure that we have subsidies here too).

It was a few years ago, but I remember looking at research saying something like it not being really sustaiable (despite being renewable) because it requires too much energy to produce it for what you get out of it.
I ate lead paint chips I turned out fine... None of those felony charges stuck.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckeye_CableSystem

I don't doubt that the reduction of lead in our environment has reduced the amount of mental illness. But I also think changes to truancy laws in the US in the 70s helped, advancements in psychotherapies, and drugs for the treatment of mental illness helped. Identification of treatments for ADD and ADHD helped.

Changes in the economy helped, we had more women in the workforce which meant we had more ability for families to survive father's unemployment.

Wider adoption of TV meant people became more aware of crime, and criminals were easier to catch.

So yes, lead removal was probably a contributor, but I think it was bigger than that.
Well at least it's not in the memo. This guy illustrates it nicely via satire:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7619837
This reminds me of ELOP from Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears by William Hertling, except rather than being a single system we have a bunch of competing bots.
It's not just inequality, he also fights the statement " everyone's getting richer, even if inequality's increased"
They were also reprinted in Cosmos from Carl Sagan. It brings great memories back !
Not the same.

A coach would observe their players play everyday, and review their performance quite directly. Their bodies are not able to do it anymore, but they are "still in the game" so to speak. A bad development manager is often never looking at their programmers' code (or if they do, they might not understand it), only seeing and evaluating indirect results of their work. Even a good dev manager is not looking at their programmers' code very much, but at least they understand what is going on and are able to themselves in their programmers' shoes.

Organizational "visibility" is why it is so important for programmers to attend and speak up at meetings; the organization is incapable of valuing what they do directly. Also, "managing up" is the secret to getting things done with a non-coding boss.
They already process cards over the Internet with Square Marketplace. They clearly were interested in entering this area, but fell years behind everyone else despite having years+ first mover advantage.
Maybe, but we are still stockpiling weapons that can destroy our whole civilization at any time. It's not because we are currently in a relatively peaceful era that it's going to last in the long term.
Supposing you had a sales staff that cost the same

Napkin math tells you nothing of the quality of this assumption.
Happy 25th Birthday Game Boy
Spider.io used to release quite a few studies on this.
One such: http://www.spider.io/blog/2013/03/chameleon-botnet/

But they got bought over by Google recently - Didn't think Google would need to acquire a team around fraud detection and prevention - GOOG pretty much wrote the book on Click Fraud.

Personally felt it was a deal done more to prevent the release of such articles that might harm the Online Ad World or GOOG's creds.
It looks like React will only really speed things up when you have over a hundred items repeating. Seems like a pretty rare use-case scenario for the additional 112KB overhead React brings with it.
FRED WILSON Q&A: Retirement, Tumblr's Exit, And Getting Over A Tough Year
For the record, I (author here) also think it's unlikely Piketty simply ignored it. I think the reviewers of the book are either ignoring it or failing to understand it.

See this comment I wrote on HN discussing the book review which inspired this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7619412

...most reviews of Piketty, have to be misrepresenting...r > g...I don't think it's actually what Piketty is pushing.
> The OP stated that he is interested in what theoretical solutions there are

No, the OP asked whether there were practical solutions, not theoretical ones, and he gave several examples to make the point. I replied in that context.

> Which is wrong, regardless of the context.

The context is practical ways to leave the earth and make one's way into space. The OP's post makes that perfectly clear. Read his post -- he suggests a tether cable leading to the moon -- how exactly is that a theoretical argument?

> And you agreed to it after I pointed out the first result from a google search.

I was agreeing that, if magic carpets existed, or if Jack and his beanstalk were a rational proposal for getting into orbit, then my way of describing a departure from earth's surface would be unnecessarily complex.

>> Anything less than escape velocity and the spacecraft is pulled back into the atmosphere.

> This is ... you guessed it ... wrong.

Look -- learn physics. Stop trolling about topics about which you know nothing. Your magic carpet, Jack & the beanstalk objections to everyday reality really are just as absurd as they sound to an educated reader.

And STOP TROLLING.
ever since we have an induction stove, we're technically "e-kettle free". so I could state the contrary: "what? you still own and use an e-kettle?" ...
We get superhuman performance on most tasks we use computers for now; people forget that easily. Not too long ago, before electronic calculators, we used people as calculators; it was a good job for which you needed a brain; they would consider computers now superhuman. A Watson hooked up to Asimo presented a few 100 years back (I don't think you actually would have to go back that far; my grandparents would not see it as less than human, probably more) would be considered god himself.

And we are on HN, mostly smart people here who vastly over estimate 'normal people'. It's nice that we (me included) assume a human can be taught to be able to do anything other humans can (with some margins), but for now this is not true either. And if we want this empirical evidence thing going on; if a (kind of) Turing test would be done with a large part of the population who have not been told they are, for instance, we let a human with earplugs walking around a village in Arkansas and walk up to an average person and play the human interaction for Watson (or something like it), it would usually succeed. It would in my village for 100% sure; I could actually make a knowledge based script for talking to a lot of people and they would not see the difference. So I understand what you mean, but I don't think in a chinese room kind of way (and that experiment, as many have shown, doesn't matter) we are not that far off. When we reach your level of input/output you will 'see it' but still, because you don't have a definition, will deny it. I would wager that we are there are already in the 'fuzzy' sense of at least 40% (I think it's a lot more) of the population. My grandparents, bless them, definitely think they are talking to a human when they call they book a railway ticket (which has been a steadily improving AI for a little under 20 years now); for their 'fuzzy' it's been solved and strong AI exists.
Why would any square footage need to be destroyed? Have we run out of rooftops or deserts? And why do we never hear these arguments when it's about roads or more polluting plants and factories? If we're going to use space, we'd better us it for something that solves a problem than makes it worse.
If we are talking non-mobile and it takes 4 seconds off the rendering time, then I'm not sure why it's not worth 112KB? Especially since the 4 seconds are recurring costs per page and the 112KB are spread over the whole interaction.
Maybe there is an interesting story to be written concerning another heavy metal - mercury and its use in dental amalgam.

Aside from whether it's prudent - irrespective of current evidence - to permanently store a compound containing 50% of a neurotoxin an inch or two from your brain, the release of almost 3,000 kilograms (6,613 lbs.) of mercury (data for 2005 alone) into the atmosphere from crematoria is cause for worry. Wikipedia notes that 'Good empirical data on the magnitude of mercury emissions from crematoria, however, are lacking'. No one is interested I guess.