skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He feels confident that he doesn't owe the IRS taxes since he has never earned sufficient money to file (less thank $1,000). It turns out, according to the present rules, that he is incorrect: self employed and earning more than $400 a year requires filing income tax.[1]

It does not appear that he is purposely evading taxes. I agree that it is his fault that the IRS is pursuing him, on the other hand it seems pointless for the IRS to pursue someone with so little material wealth.

[1]: http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/Do-You-Need-to-File-a-Federal...
That somewhat reminds me of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLIT_(short_story)
I no longer live in India but have a large extended family that does. Being in the minority, they are filled with paranoia about what this could mean. I'm still skeptical if anything bad will happen but I am also not living there.
WTF? "why i didn't seek job all these years? well, i can only say i procrastinate and is ok living on a dime."
Same for me. I came across his site (through some usenet emacs stuff) and read his blog entries...I'm all for free speech and all, but I don't think a lot of his opinions would be considered, especially on HN, "unacceptable". Some of it might even be considered "creepy"[0].

It also doesn't help that he is insistent on using his own brand of English[1].

I don't mean to say that you shouldn't help him out. And I definitely can't say if he "deserves to be homeless/near-homeless". Just want to point out that the reason why he hasn't been hired isn't mainly because he has had "no corporation to witness to [his] ability", as someone else pointed out.

[0] Recent example blogpost: http://xahlee.org/sex/pretty_girl_racism_facial_expression.h...
[1] http://wordyenglish.com/musing/xah_style.html

Edit: Just realised his writing style is only used on his blog, and not in professional stuff.
What about simply putting a "deploy" script into your main source directory? Executing

./deploy

is even less work than "git push" into a special remote repository/branch.

This "deploy" script would execute RSync and whatever needed to update the destination machine, without any server-side magic behind the scenes. It could also execute "git push" so you don't have to remember to push before deployment.
That's what I'm doing and it works very well. As a media device, it's the best option I've found. Built-in wireless, fast CPU, lots of RAM, supports Netflix, Amazon Instant, Hulu, XBMC, Pandora, and more. Roku has more channels available, but doesn't have any options for streaming content over a LAN.

I played a few minutes of Minion Rush on the Amazon Fire TV. It had some laggy moments, certainly not the gaming experience that they claimed it would be.
Maybe they can use this money to hire someone who can fix their !$!@# pinit button [the small gray button with numbers on the right] to actually stay where I put it (and not move to the right 20px and bleed over other content).

Really, it's the only social button I put on each of my wife's blog posts [echoing what others have mentioned, she likes pinterest for the 'bridal trends', recipe ideas, art, ...], and it's easily the most annoying thing on the page... sure let's have the JS totally remove all the css/elements that were there and recreate it differently.
Don't quite know why this is here, but if you haven't read any Douglas Hofstadter, this is probably where to start. This is a book that will A: change your life, B: require a pencil and paper to read with, C: Introduce you to Bach's genius, and D: will probably give you a greater appreciation of social interactions and language if for no other reason than it boils all of consciousness down to, essentially, language.

I'm so over simplifying it, and there's a lot more here than this. But I still found it extremely interesting to read this and contemplate just how intricately tied to our inner-narratives we are. Without that never-ending dialog in our heads, we're not really sentient, and without a language, we can't have that dialog...

Again, way more here, but this was the big thing I took away. I am a strange loop, after all.
Only sorta kinda.
Yes you did:

> I think there's a lot of room for boisterous, outspoken and even aggressive developers, but you really gotta prove you have the chops to earn that.

This sentence of yours strongly suggest that you think Xah Lee didn't prove he has the chops to earn being outspoken. You may even think he probably did not earn such a right at all. Even if you don't think so, the suggestion is there for all to read.

Besides, I have read a good chunk of his website. Even when he goes full insult-mode, he generally has a point.
Good read and echoes my experience. Something that I've been doing more and more recently is building more of my business logic into my models - that way no matter where they are used they maintain consistent behavior. This allows my views/templates/controllers to be extremely simple and lightweight and just reference the appropriate model methods.
Yeah, the abstraction was very leaky, and it was too easy to end up with megabytes of ViewState going back and forth, or a screen refresh on every button press.

React, and Om built on top of it, seem very interesting. They also seem to be built on abstractions that that get out of your way while guaranteeing good performance.
The 16 Most Badass Monsters from the Godzilla Movies
It's because ACH's version of chargebacks require that you sign an affidavit as part of the process.
What are some examples of these clauses, if you don't mind sharing them? Presumably you don't actually ask for brown M&Ms, but rather for something technical and infeasible.
Do this the same way you'd get more people to buy it, if you were selling it.

* Reduce barriers to entry - make sure that your product is easy to find, easy to install (or to setup an account), easy to use, easy to see its value
* Figure out who your ideal user is. Who will get the absolute most value out of your product?
* Document exactly how easy it is for your ideal user to get some specific "quick wins" with it. Pick one as your "primary pitch".
* Figure out where your ideal user hangs out and describe the "quick wins" from above. Find people who are actively complaining about problems and say "Oh by the way, this easy-to-use free software will fix that for you".
* When those users are happy, ask them to tell their friends.
The Russian is terrible too, reads like Google translate. They left in the "silver bullet" idiom, which makes zero sense in Russian.
I couldn't help but see what tqOSxqI.jpg is on imgur. NSFW
Duster doesn't tell your friends that you removed them.
Theoretically, do you think CloudFlare would hire Xah Lee?
I finish reading after first paragraph... When do people will learn that using locks, shared memory does not work? It is just wrong. Things should be immutable, you should share nothing. And by nothing i mean nothing at all. It is just WRONG.
BBC – Future – The Surgeon Who Operates From 400km Away
Vinyl Me, Please is your monthly vinyl club
my question is, if he's "procrastinating" why didn't he just rent a room instead of a whole apartment? Better yet why not move back to his parent's place? When I was single, I never rented an apartment on my own. I always had a roomate(s).
If you only interact with people in private messages and not wall posts, photos, etc, than the algorithm won't pick it up ( because we don't get permissions for that)
While semantically your suggestion may seem equivalent to his, there's a big difference between saying "My cola of choice is Pepsi" and "I equate Coca Cola with murder".
"No candidate" is too strong a word; around here we have a few that are certainly anti-business.

(EDIT: Note that I'm not an US citizen, and this is not a jab at anyone, it's a statement of fact. I can assure you that the candidate of the Reorganized Movement of the Party of the Proletariat is indeed anti-business)
I don't think that bothers him. He has discussed his views and tastes regarding pornography (with explicit examples) before on his site. He also has a travellog from Las Vegas that includes a visit to a prostitute. He's quite a character and his site includes posts about everything from math and tech to the stuff I mentioned above.
Ask HN: What do you use Go for?
I was playing with go since last week and it feels good while I code in go, today morning did some benchmark and found it's faster than interpreted languages like python, ruby. So I was wondering in which cases you code on Go in production?
If you are a person, there is a very good chance you masturbate sometimes.

So the next time you masturbate, think about how you are similar to Xah Lee, except that you are also a hypocrite and a public bully about this thing you also do.
Agreed, until we become actively involved in the economic and political decision-making that drives our planet, we can't seriously expect technological change to create a better future.
No shit. ET is set off by everything - exercise, alcohol, caffeine, lack of sleep, etc. In a perverse way it forces you to stop addictions to stimulants, otherwise you can't help but look 50 years older in front of friends and family because your fingers shake nonstop.
Absolutely. Unfortunately, there is no API call for defriending someone (there's only one for adding someone). So this is the best we could do. Stupid facebook
x86_64 will never die, it's too pervasive, and as much as mobile fans think the future is underpowered ARM with the actual processing being done by a third party sifting through your personal data (who generally use x86_64 anyway), reality isn't following their expectations.
Pro-business is a really narrow way of describing Modi's ideology.

Here's a disturbingly comprehensive post that paints a more complete picture:

Narendra Modi and the rise of India’s neo-fascist Far-Right: The facts

http://www.loonwatch.com/2014/04/narendra-modi-and-the-rise-...
OS X uses HFS+ resource forks for a variety of things, beginning around 10.4. Prior to Mavericks, they were used to handle ACLs, to track Time Machine metadata, to track whether a file was downloaded or native to the file system (which in turn shows up as a Finder warning when launching applications you downloaded from the Internet) and where it was downloaded from, and some other minor things. Beginning with Mavericks, they were also used to support giving files arbitrary tags, which is what I had in mind. You can read more about the implementation at http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/9/ .

Notably, while all of the above use resource forks, they're not exposed to the user directly as resource forks, but rather as additional Finder widgets and behaviors.
Spot on, I have the exact same sentiments about the book. It was such an incredible read, albeit a bit dry at times, it is defiantly worth reading if you haven't already.
Sure; I won't argue that it was a jerky thing to do. However, being jerky doesn't make it criminal, and when you say "this is analogous to mugging a passed out rich man in the gutter", you are saying that it's criminal.

Was the British government up against a wall? Yes, but only because they put themselves there. They said "We will buy British Pounds, all you want to sell to us". George Soros said "Well, damn; I bet I can get a lot of pounds. Let's do this." and it turned out that George Soros's ability to borrow pounds was greater than the government's ability to buy them. How is an entity, full of ostensibly smart people, who continually say "Bring it on, I'm not done yet" the same or even similar to a drunken, passed out man? How is somebody who says "You will buy British Pounds? I have some pounds right here; would you like to buy them? Oh, you would? Well hold on, I'll be right back; I bet I can get some more!" the same or similar to somebody who sees a passed out man and slips off the dude's watch?
If you want an at scale scala user, twitter is a huge one.

https://github.com/twitter

Apache Spark is also written in scala.
http://spark.apache.org

Scala is used for a lot for systems programming. I personally use the JVM for my distributed machine learning work.
It's odd. I think of 'live chat' as cheap-o support manned by folks who likely can't fix anything, since that's been my experience. To the point that I won't use something for production if that's all they offer. The cheap guys offer a live support linke, often offline, and call it 2/47 support. Well, if that, the very inexpensive guys offer web-based tickets only. No phone, email, or live chat.

Rackspace has folks that know how to fix a complicated issue on RHEL stack at 3am, which is nice. And, unlike a cheap host who has an SLA that guarantees 100% uptime but only refunds you for time lost, Rackspace's SLA incentivizes them to fix things ASAP. Things like a dedicated box having a hardware failure will be restored in an hour and they credit you 5% of your monthly fee for every hour over that. Or 5% for each 30 minutes of downtime due to data center issues (power, network, HVAC, etc). And they do make good on it.
Well, I'm not trying to pick on people with neurological disorders. For those people I'm sure it's an incredible struggle. I'm mostly thinking of average people that just aren't willing to put forth the effort.
Great article!

Just in time, as I am tracking down some A* implementation issues on an old codebase I am trying to revive.
Mozilla To Sell Ads In Firefox
Another alternative is how Luis Zingales puts it: "Pro-market, not necessarily pro-business".

Though to some this might be a distinction without a difference, I prefer this viewpoint.
In this analogy, what are the lemons and who is the car dealer?
Reedy: speed reading that actually works
Samsung to rebrand Heathrow airport's Terminal 5 'Terminal Samsung Galaxy S5'
Calling Modi "pro-business" seems like a bit of an over-simplication. He's a member of the RSS ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashtriya_Swayamsevak_Sangh ), which is arguably a violently anti-muslim paramilitary group, as well as leading the BJP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bharatiya_Janata_Party). It's not unreasonable to call the BJP centre-right on economic/business issues ... but they have other policies as well, some of which are rather disturbing.

I'm not Indian and have no connection to the sub-continent. But it does not fill me with the warm fuzzies to read in wikipedia that:

"In 2005, Modi was denied a diplomatic visa to the United States. In addition, the B-1/B-2 visa that had previously been granted to him was also revoked, under a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act which makes any foreign government official who was responsible or "directly carried out, at any time, particularly severe violations of religious freedom" ineligible for the visa."
Do you know of many such companies started in the recent decade or two ? that achieved near monopoly state , without unfairly crushing competitors, without depending on network effects(which naturally favor one winner), and without unfairly using regulation ? or without so greatly benefiting from an initial advantage , to the point that even if they stopped seriously competing , no one could harm them ?

Probably not, maybe a few. Why ? because the economy has became a network economy, where almost all industries benefit greatly from network effects. And network effects are unfair by their nature: they give such a huge advantage to the to the leader , even if he doesn't constantly improve.

But why we see so much disruption you ask? well ,disruption also works on monopolies, by making it unprofitable for them to compete. And of course there are always new niches and people's preferences change so that hurt monopolies too.
The gist, as best I recall, is that there's really no alternative to air travel. Even with ideological stances, there's a cost vs. benefit question.
Don't mean to put too fine a point on it, but could you give me any example of a consumer solution throughout history that you would not class as obvious? I'm wondering what your standards are.
I don't read a lot of books and this one is enormous but I did read it cover to cover. In its best moments it's genius, in its worst moments it's either dry or over my head. But it was a combination of delightful to read, educational, and mind blowing in parts.
Dropbox can actually hook into these and save screenshots into your Dropbox folder, copying a sharable link instead of the image content itself. It's brilliant when you want to quickly share a screengrab with a collaborator.
Wow, that's pretty shocking. As an emacs user I'd often stumble upon his articles. Even bought an emacs autohotkey-mode from him. It's so strange to see a person you thought was this amazing genius that surely did well for himself struggle like that.
Hope you take care of your problems Xah.
>Are there many here that were BeOS lovers?

Yep, I recently stumbled across my Beos 3.1 copy with complete packaging, separate intel and powerpc discs, BeOS sticker and a 'We Be Geeks' plastic pocket thingy which gave me a huge burst of nostalgia.

I'm also (perhaps unsurprisingly) a fan of Haiku, while I run a Linux distro 24/7 these days and only play around Haiku in a VM, I would love to some day be able to use it for my desktop needs.

It's an uphill battle though, few developers and few porters means there's a shortage of progress and software available which most potential users would consider a 'bare minimum' these days.

Perhaps the most obvious is the lack of a modern browser, WebPositive is an attempt to rectify this but it's a huge undertaking with at the moment only one guy working on it which means progress is slow, despite him putting in a ton of work.

My hope is that a R1 release complete with package management and WebPositive working sufficiently well for day to day web use, will serve as something of a tipping point where people can start to see it's potential as a day to day OS and start using it while also developing/porting further software they feel it is lacking.
The portrait of the college grad painted in the article is consistent with what I’ve seen as an undergrad at Harvard in econ and CS circles.

> [College students want money, structure, and sex appeal.]

But I’ll add another motivation to the laundry list, that draws smart grads to selective/prestigious programs (including Harvard, Goldman, Google, and even YC): Smart grads want to be surrounded by other smart grads, because they want to build peer relationships with future co-founders and business partners.
"AAA" is a marketroid term which means at least three things: a good game, a popular game, or a game with a large development and especially marketing budget. To the marketroid, each is coterminous with the other two.

Similar ambiguity exists around "hardcore" which means roughly the intersection of gamers who seek out challenging games, gamers who play competitively online, and gamers who enjoy adult content like sex and violence.
Yes. I don't think I have ever been required to install an update, with the exception of the one a couple years ago when Nintendo EOLed some of the default channels.
I have read the first 20% of this book 5 times... Each time I get a little further but still a long way to go!
I'll tell you one thing that I do not doubt. The splitting of the M, V & C is far better than bundling them in one page.

I'd take a crap MVC design over the pre-MVC stuff I worked on any day of the week.

The thing you don't seem to be saying is what you're doing instead? You're just waving hands at the moment and saying it's bad, but it used to be much worse.
"It's not Kickstarter's fault that he failed to budget the vast majority of his costs..." Definitely not. But this is a primary reason for authoring the article—a heads up to others who may launch a KS campaign and not fully understand where all the money might go.
I'm not on that team so I'll have to get back to you—it's quite possible that the code hasn't been written yet. Currently, we use the Chromium sandbox [1] for sandboxing where it's supported.

[1]: http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/security/sandb...
> I am confused. Are the locks requested sequentially, or at the same time? It seem like if they are requested sequentially, the the random backoff time would need to be a large multiple of the combined latency.

As stated in the post, it is ideal if using multiplexing we send the SET to all the instances at the same time, but this does not change a lot the difference between the chosen lock validity and the latency to set the lock, since with 5 instances it is still requires something in the "a few" millisecond range in the average to set the lock, with not very optimized clients, so 1 second is already three order of magnitude more.
I read some of his emacs related posts before, not that pleasant to read, but can be very helpful.
His party is all for 'stronger anti-terrorism' laws. I wouldn't be surprised if they pushed through a more Orwellian version of POTA[0]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevention_of_Terrorism_Act,_20...
How Duster works: http://dusterapp.com/privacy
(Sorry that page is really hacky)
When I was living with David Levitt, who worked with Alan Kay at Atari Cambridge Research, I was snooping around his bookshelves and read through some of the fascinating notebooks, in which Alan Kay wrote about the idea of a two way mapping/projection between the model and the view.

It's always seemed to me that the "controller" was just extra baggage, because the view knew the most about drawing the model, and naturally would also know what it needed to reverse that projection back from user input through to manipulating the model. But right now we usually meticulously write the view drawing and mouse tracking code by hand, without a lot of help from the system. (That's something I consider a high art form, which I enjoy diong, so I'd probably be horrified and out of a job it it were too easy! ;)

I think Ben Shneiderman's term "direct manipulation" describes the style of user interface that Alan Kay was getting at -- or at least DM has to deal with a lot of the same problems: "continuous representation of objects of interest, and rapid, reversible, incremental actions and feedback" according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_manipulation_interface ...

By that I mean DM user interface programming could benefit from some kind of automatic inverter, but usually it's just implemented in an ad-hoc manner, usually by input tracking code in the view.

I think the way Smalltalk and Self/Morphic use reflection to present editable user interfaces to objects is another example of a two-way mapping between projecting the view on the screen, and editing the model via user input. Booleans whose values you can toggle, numbers whose values you can drag up and down, color pickers and things like that are all fine and good, but for many properties it has to fall back to standard widgets that don't know much about the semantics of the data they're viewing or editing.

I had the opportunity to play around with Sk8 when I was at Kaleida. That certainly let you drill down, see and modify everything there was in the system, and it was totally prototype based! Plus it had cool looking windows with neat shapes, which I like! ;)

I'm curious about what Kay meant by "projection", and what successful examples there are of automatic bi-directional mapping, and powerful user composition. I take it that projection is the problem that you lose dimensions and have to hide information by flattening the structure out onto the screen (via a 3d projection or scaling or filtering or whatever infovis technique you're using), and there's no visible place to click or affordance to edit some every property of an object (or you have to build scaffolding in the form of clumsy indirect manipulation techniques like browsers, outliners and pop-up menus).