skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I remember reading this article when it first came out - it's biting and does a good job criticizing things that probably deserve some criticism.

But, I agree with that top comment - the real value from coders come from solving real problems people have. One non-profit near me said to me once: "We spend so much staff time entering data into our CRM software from the forms our clients fill out. We wish our staff could spend more time helping the clients."

And this is a great (and easy) problem for technology to solve. Solving problems like this is where technology is great, it simplifies life, it reduces unneeded work, etc. And often, it's actually, in my opinion, more fun than the 'glamorous stuff'.
Products for which you are supposedly the target user: tell him why you think you would not not currently use it.

Products for which you are not supposedly the target user: you don't know enough to tell him it wont work. (edit)

In all cases: you can help by pointing him to tried and test methodologies for validating ideas. e.g. Lean Startup (Reis).
Adventure destinations that slip through the cracks
Weekly Ice Links (5)
The startup idea failed and the founders do not have another idea / the seed investors do not want to give the founders any more money than what's already invested. So then you should let the markets decide what the price of the assets are. The assets of the idea and the assets of human capital.

1) The investor can still say that they had an acquisition exit and make their portfolio seem better than it is.

2) If you don't have strong enough connections where the strategic players will throw you a bone for a long-lasting relationship with your fund then you don't deserve the bone.

3) Investors gave founders education but the founders also gave investors education that they can leverage lessons in future investments.

4) Investors frequently say that they're investing in people but at the end of the day, they investing in people to execute the good idea and they would not hesitate to replace another set of people to execute that good idea... so in essence, they're investing in a good idea. What kind of investing are you doing when you invested in a bad idea and expect to get paid PAR for making the wrong call. A zero downside early stage investing but 1000x upside seems like a fantasy market that, even if it lasted for a year or two, would have never worked out in the long-run.
> Just ask yourself one question: what did all the bootleggers do after alcohol prohibition was dropped?

"Bootlegging helped lead to the establishment of American organized crime, which persisted long after the repeal of Prohibition. The distribution of liquor was necessarily more complex than other types of criminal activity, and organized gangs eventually arose that could control an entire local chain of bootlegging operations, from concealed distilleries and breweries through storage and transport channels to speakeasies, restaurants, nightclubs, and other retail outlets. These gangs tried to secure and enlarge territories in which they had a monopoly of distribution. Gradually the gangs in different cities began to cooperate with each other, and they extended their methods of organizing beyond bootlegging to the narcotics traffic, gambling rackets, prostitution, labour racketeering, loan-sharking, and extortion. The national American crime syndicate, the Mafia, arose out of the coordinated activities of Italian bootleggers and other gangsters in New York City in the late 1920s and early ’30s."

Source: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/73745/bootlegging
I can see that were not going to connect here. And I shouldn't have called you naive. I should have said your position is naive.

But is it really such a stretch to expect alignment between swiftly declining rates of violence and declining rates of all anti-social behavior.

Keep in mind, doing drugs, just recreationally doing drugs, minding ones own business IS NOT A CRIME (or shouldn't be) and isn't anti-social (or doesn't have to be, and isn't for most casual users). Think: casual alcohol drinkers. As most are. Are there alcoholics? Of course. But that does nothing to diminish my case. It was never expected that all crime would vanish (or perhaps...you expect that?).
I live a block away from Emery's store. There's a seed store still there that is doing exactly what Emery was doing (selling pot seeds to Americans) yet they haven't been busted. This is probably because it's owner didn't give a million dollars to NORML in the US to fight prohibition of Marijuana.

Emery also writes a federal prison blog, interesting insight into how foreign prisoners are treated in the US, like the time he spent at D.Ray Fed prison where it's entirely made up of foreigners. No racism/forced segregation based on skin color, no homogeneous gangs of all one ethnicity, they all live together in dorms without any of the problems he saw in other fed prisons like Seatac where some guy threatened him because he was playing dominos with a black inmate and that was "not allowed".
I've felt like this my entire life. You're in a good spot. You know a lot about what you don't know. You are prepared to learn these things as you need them to reach your goals. It's the people who feel like they are experts who have actually stalled.

You can easily spend the rest of your life shaving these mythical yaks and when you are old and surrounded by mountains of yak hair, you'll feel exactly the same as you do now.

There is more to learn than you can ever hope to. Just learn what you need as you go. It's the key to all existential crisis: Try not to think so much.
I've discussed the MPI-on-YARN thing with quite a few people from both communities and really only found one use-case: MPI jobs you want to run with data in your Hadoop cluster, where it will be done so rarely it's not worth moving the data from your cluster to your supercomputer. Even then, I can't name an instance of this type of use case I've actually seen in the field.
Then outlaw hassling people on the street.
Surely, you mean an HP 16c?
VC investment don't guarantee a return. The market has decided that the company is worth little.
It is kind of high schoolish to say "Oh ya, those 'hard drugs' are used by doctors so haha they are not hard drugs." I mean, really that's just kind of ridiculous. It's sort outrageous, people already refer to pain killers as being part of the "hard drug" addiction. It refers to chemically addictive drugs that are also more dangerous than things like marijuana. This is just playing coy to pretend that in hard drugs don't exist or something silly.
> I don't know a good response, though. How would you answer?

"Yes" would be my answer.

I would ask the counter question: what is there to gain from criminalization?

Criminalization doesn't lower usage, it makes it harder on addicts (imprisonment retains them in the drug world), it increases the risk of fatality of the drug, and it increases crime, funneling funds from tax payers to criminals.

Every time I hear a story about drug cartels and their unspeakable violence and immense profits, all I can think of is "how can we be so stupid?". We are creating this problem ourselves, and we don't seem to even realize it.

The only argument for criminalization is the irrational one: it's not a good idea to do drugs -- it doesn't solve anything -- therefore we should make it illegal. Once you actually give the issue thought, the conclusion seems completely obvious to me.
Yes, I agree with the music bit. I had other examples in mind that Sivers mentioned like his opinions about Indonesia and gym that changed overtime as he got more exposure to both.

Science might not be the best way to view everything but I was pointing out to the practice of constantly changing ones beliefs without putting extensive emotional investment in any of them.

If I love someone today and tomorrow they turn out to be a betrayer, I will be hurt but knowing humans are complex, I shouldn't be too surprised and change my views about that person instead of living in denial.
Sure, but even if some number of drug dealers moved on to other crime, would there not necessarily be less crime, overall, if a major aspect of normal human life were to suddenly be decriminalized? In other words, when everything is a crime, we are all criminals. That's my basic position on the war on drugs, and so many other things.

Edit: whoops, meant to reply thecabinet.
Hm. I still think it's a rather thin distinction, and one more concerned with what programs, data and objects are (and their relation to source code), more than with what is possible in Smalltalk.

If we look at what is possible, namely changing data and instructions in ram -- it seems to me that Smalltalk already provides that.

I suppose there is some value to viewing a program as a kind of differential equation over time (where we assume the future has not yet happened, and all input has been given at certain points in time) -- and so be able to change the state at a given present, by changing the program, and accounting for how that change would translate to a different state in the present, given the same inputs... But we cannot stop time, nor the real world -- so most real systems can only be approximated in this way.

The best we can do (with any real system that isn't isolated from the outside) is to take a snapshot at a given time t, make changes to see how that state could have been at t with our new code -- but we then would have to bring our system back into the present -- either by playing back recorded input or by some other means...

I don't think your points about w manage to put weight behind (or communicate) your point: in Smalltalk you could either programaticaly alter all ws, or if you changed the condition on which w depended, all ws would update (in a GUI, or other system with an event loop...). I get that that's not your point though.
Data Oriented Design (ebook)
Ah! Good to hear they are legislating towards a bit more progress. Do you know if any pharma companies have re-entered antibiotic research since GAIN passed? I believe there's only a small handful of them left.

Not to mention creating new drugs without implementing any rational controls over their use in humans and livestock is like pouring more gas on the fire.

But I digress about leaving science to legislators....
From Ken Birdwell - the author - linkedin summary [1]:

Valve is the place to go as the culmination of a career. It's filled with 90% senior people, people who have run their own companies, not just projects or products. It's not uncommon to meet people here who have been here "only" 10 years. We lose fewer than 1 person every 2 years, and that's been true over the entire history of the company. Once you're here, you'll stay forever, there's no reason to ever leave. We're also a family oriented company. You're expected to work 40 hours or so a week. Maybe a 3-4 weeks of crunch time a year, but it's all voluntary. We'll actually send you home if we think you're spending too much time away from your real life. Vacation time isn't tracked. If you need to take time off, take time off. We don't care, it's up to you. Your colleagues are keeping track of your contribution anyway, we don't need some stupid accounting trick to know if you're valuable. On top of that, our schedule is our own. We have no outside investors. We own all of our IP. We have no "publisher". We do work with external folks to make and ship retail boxes for us, and they do a great job, but they have zero influence over what we do or when it's done. It's totally up to us. We're in control of our own success or failure. It's ours to make. Why anyone would want to work anywhere else is a mystery to me.

[1] http://www.linkedin.com/pub/ken-birdwell/3/997/95a
> So, there's nothing about not liking the addicts who hassle people on the street?

What does that have to do with the War on Drugs? There is no evidence that it lowers drug use; quite the contrary.
Integrating Google Docs, Chrome, and IPython
Most gangs are not directly involved in the sale of narcotics, instead they are involved in extortion "taxing" those who are selling drugs in their area. If drugs disappear they will find another black market to tax like gambling, fencing stolen goods or selling weapons. However the difference is they won't make a million dollars per month taxing somebody running an illegal gambling operation unlike jacking cocaine drivers. It will be a much smaller criminal enterprise, they won't be able to afford a small army of thugs to terrorize an entire city like they currently do here now with all their windfall narco profits.

As for non violent street peddlers I imagine they will go into exports, shipping narcotics to countries where it's still illegal. After Marijuana was symbolically decriminalized by police here refusing to arrest people for possession, and the black market was swamped with declining prices, many former dealers and growers instead decided to operate unlicensed tourist operations selling weed travel packages, and running their own storefronts for legal drugs using their profits as street dealers to bootstrap it.
It's like calling a writer a writer.
This is such a good comment. It's amazing to think that, during our lifetimes, it is likely that we will see an image of another Earth-like planet outside our solar system. Lucky us.
I "love" how this got voted down, but replies attacking you personally weren't. That said, this sentence cracked me up "I hang with a clique of older girls and guys who had me"... sorry :P

While I don't mean to say your post is arrogant, because I don't feel it is, I want to leave this here:

"Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasion to change." -- Frank Lloyd Wright
In to machine learning, met him personally a few years ago.

Very interesting guy. I don't necessarily think all of his stuff is crazy outlandish. The key to think about with some of his theories is that his projections (stuff happening in the next 25 years) may not be all that impossible. Just like predicting a startup will fail 90% of the time and you'll likely be right, you can also say the same for crazy predictions like this. If we map his predictions to things that people 50 years ago were saying about our current tech now, some weren't too far off the mark, and we even surpassed some of the predictions (See the world's fair in the 30s as a good example of this)

That being said, he has still done some solid work in speech processing, he's definitely not just some crazy scientist. Google hired him FOR moonshot projects. If someone's not crazy enough to attempt them, who will?
I've always thought of "Big Data" as being big in the same sense as "Big Oil". It's not any specific capacity of storage or computation - it's the value being extracted from the data to make companies a powerful influence in their industry. I still think the term is overused as well, but I think the "Big" doesn't have to refer to the dataset itself.
Magnetic Compass Orientation in Birds Builds Case for Bio-Inspired Sensors
Related, but previously submitted without comment:

"Quantum positioning system steps in when GPS fails"

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22229694.000-quantum-p...
You're essentially describing a console: a system with fixed hardware requirements that will last for several years. That's the ultimate advantage of being a console dev - you have no variation in hardware whatsoever* and if your game works in the studio, you can be 99% sure it will work on any identical console in the field.

And generally throughout the lifespan of the hardware, the games get progressively more advanced as the developers learn how to fiddle the hardware to do what they want.]

*not totally true, but ignoring things like disc space and peripheral availability (like the SNES coprocessors - even then they were in-cart!) all consoles can be considered equal.
I always respond with "Find the money." That is, find a buyer today for the simplest version.

THOUGH, this did not end well when after many drinks I met a guy who runs (presumably illegal) gambling out of his house and wanted to expand on it with an app to let people place bets on the players. I sent him an email as a record of contacting him with the single line "Find the money." Apparently he was scared shitless for a week before he remembered who I was.
DJB is spot-on for the pipeline documentation. This can help many apps and workflows, ranging from the one he describes ( tiny tightly optimized cryptography code) all the way up to the entire JDK, JavaScript V8, Erlang, Beam and similar large VMs.
Yes. This. This is exactly the sort of thing I was thinking...
Wow, 2.5 GB, that will get you through a whole lot of educational videos. If your lucky and really careful with how you ration your usage, it might last a whole week! Only $50. I'm sure even the poorest of the poor can afford 200/month!
But that is where the violence occurs. That's where the anti-social consequences occur. Are felt most directly. Impose most directly on peoples' lives.

So while it's true those big shots will move (or attempt to move) to other areas (politics springs to mind), decriminalizing would have a major impact on the street level crime. Again the analogy of prohibition. But also, see other countries, where even more legalization (than just pot, which we see here in Colorado now) has already occurred. There are models, and there are successes. I'm not aware of any failures, in fact. Well, except US drug policy, and all policies like it.
One Day a Forest Could Store All of Humanity’s Knowledge
If you're a programmer and you can't even bother to download some files and unzip them, then...

Lazy pays off because you innovate in the hopes of automating something, not that you just are actually completely lazy.
Unicode Snowden for You
I live near Zurich, which in the Nineties had a lot of issues with public drug use. For example, all bathrooms in public places and major department stores had blue lights instead of normal lights because you can't see the veins in your arm so it's hard to shoot up. There was also a serious crime element as addicts were robbing people to get money to buy drugs. Now, you can get them for free at clinics. With their new policies, the addicts are no longer nearly as visible and the related crime seems to be practically gone. The blue lights in the bathrooms are gone, needle park is gone and it's generally a very nice city to live in.
It's pretty low to disguise "more money for investors" as a half-assed argument for better employee outcomes.
Too sensitive: Apple prohibits masturbation game from App Store
I hope I don't come across as a dick but it sounds like your skills don't really match your location. I'm sure there are 10x as many .net/java roles in your area than node.js ones. Outside of a few major tech hubs the well paying jobs that will pay $70-$80k for a junior are more "boring" corporate roles.
Something like this would be great for mobile

Apple should include OpenEars as part of iOS to have an advantage for all iOS 8 apps
The problem with KIPP's character-education model
i need to get myself one of these.
nice story!
When Comic Sans was first introduced, it got overused and quickly became an eyesore that nevertheless, still got overused, despite the bitching about it.

Now we just kind of bitch about it because we've always bitched about it. Someday, your grandchildren might bitch about it, too, but they probably won't really care.
Maybe we should start a war on homelessness.
You are making an assumption that VCs believe all their investments will turn a profit, which in most cases isn't true. You invest in fifty startups, twenty lose money, twenty break even, ten make stonking, huge amounts of profit that cancel out your losses and leave you with a nice pile of cash left over.

You're right: 90% of funded start-ups probably don't deserve the money, and will fail to produce any return at all. That's part of the game. It is not always clear what exactly will make you billions until after it's big.
After reading this comment, I misremembered the VC fund's name as "third tier capital" and had to go back to the article to recall the actual name :p
> At what point does it make sense to have a separate crypto-core / offload-engine?

When you're building servers that need to specialize in encryption. The separate chips are often called "cryptoprocessors". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_cryptoprocessor

An example of commercialized cryptoprocessors: http://www.tiempo-ic.com/products/ip-cores/cryptoprocessors....

What DJB is asking (IMHO) is for improvements to general-purpose processors, for example the processor you already have in your laptop.
> what Sivers used to love that he now hates

Talking with wantrepreneurs about their business ideas. :-)
From Austin, I've seen junior salaries around 75k. Cost of living is pretty low. I'm in Seattle now, where most of the companies are in the 90k-120k for junior pay. It doesn't have the same cost of living as SF and is much more reasonable.
...well, if you actually read the TOS that they linked to you'd see it's right there under "Prohibited Activities". As WePay says, this is mainly to comply with payment gateway rules (adult services have a far, far higher fraud risk associated with them).

https://www.wepay.com/legal/terms-of-service
Who the hell downvoted my comment? for what reason?

Downvoting should require justification.
> Was? So what happenened, where did it go, why isn't it still filing the role you are aiming at?

VB6 still runs an astounding amount of apps that are used by millions of people every day.

I know you're not implying anything, but, there's several hundred billions of dollars done in the US annually with just VB6, excel macros, and shitty Access DBs. It's incredible, really.
De-mist-ifying the San Francisco Fog
This is the most honest statement I've read about the founder myth yet.

Dear engineer, you are the product.
Just an addition to your course suggestion: Coursera has a compilers course too, taught by a Stanford professor! I'm working through it right now. The lectures are informative and the assignments have you build a working version of a COOL (professor's own language) to MIPS assembly compiler. It's been very enlightening so far!

https://class.coursera.org/compilers-004
what about web mason?
I'm currently working on implementing this in a project called Restafarian

Not to be confused with my Ruby REST gem of the same name:

https://github.com/jamesbritt/restafarian
First identify what he's actually looking for. Does he want honest criticism, or a pat on the back? Then give him what he wants.
One might think it odd that Big Pharma doesn't do more to legalise drugs, then you realise they already have legal sales and distribution channels.
> 4) It's amazing that people just say banks deem adult content as risky, and just accept that this is ok.

That's because it is risky. No question. Adult services have a higher rate of charge-backs and fraudulently obtained cards than many other sectors.
I like asking bottle shop attendants "What's like being a drug dealer?"
perhaps if we (the US) would stop branding all our endeavors with battle phrasing, we'd stop being so apt to do battle.

How about we try to fix homelessness? It's surely a problem, I don't know if it's a battle, adversary, or fight. A struggle, perhaps, but can one call a struggle a war? I don't personally believe so.
As a junior dev, is it truly that hard to find a job once you're older?
How the CIA freed us from the threat of government by machine in 1973.