skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How would you even be able to abuse inference? If someone leaves some types to be inferred and someone reading that code is confused, the compiler already knows the type of the function so it should be able to spit it out for him in something like a REPL or even to 'inline' it in the source code.

Maybe you mean that people should write some types as some kind of assertion in case the code changes (and it compiles again, coincidentally because the change produced valid but different types, somehow)? I guess the same could be said for always putting certain assertions in the code in order to make sure that assumptions are sound, for example putting "@Override" on all methods that are intended to be overrided methods in Java. And again, since types are inferred, I guess it is conceivable that it can be automated like a code-style thing as a hook, since the compiler knows the type.
Neat idea.

But if you were a time traveller, what would you use Google for, and why?

I'm not convinced you're going to be Googling the future pope, because it's trivially easy to Google the current one.

The possible telltales are not obvious.
Also, what if the first rule of time travel is:
1.) Don't talk about time travel
>You'll be bundled into groups of people who have similar problems, and entrepreneurs wanting to reach your problem group will need to pitch us their solution and convince us it will be effective for you.

How do you bundle people into groups? Manually? How scalable is this?

>If we come across someone with a worthy solution, we'll put you in touch.

How? Do you have database of experts or what?
dammit, I'm stuck on 11. Has anyone got a solution?
Who says your reality is the same as my reality already? :)
A "startup enemy" is someone who puts their own interests above those of the startup.
http://www.metacademy.org/ is a great tool that shows you all the prerequisites of a concept. As well as those concepts prerequisites and so on, and where you can go to learn them.
Eh. I own a lot of stock in one of the companies I used to work for. I can't legally sell it. That doesn't mean I don't own it, but I mentally adjust its on-paper value appropriately, basically multiplying its on-paper value by the chance that the company might go public. In effect, what I own is a lottery ticket, but I do own that ticket.
Unblock - A guide to the new Continuous Agile
"But that’s not what the phone is about. It has to stand on its own as a fantastic phone. It even has to make phone calls."

I chuckled here, but seriously, why do we even call these things 'smartphones' anymore? The voice calling aspect has been the forgotten feature for years.

I remember getting a cheap Android phone and the whole dialpad UI would freeze up, or I couldn't answer the damn thing when it rang because the UI was locking up due to god know's what. Mine still lags, but is fast enough to react within about 5 seconds of me pressing a "button". Same for clicking on the voice-command feature.... I hear the audible "ping", and 5 seconds later the display comes up.

Let's be realistic: all smartphones are basically just handheld tablets whose radios/SIMs happen to allow access to voice channels.
I feel really bad for Chad. I agree with @didgeoridoo that it feels like I just watched a dog get kicked.

He's on a quixotic quest toward a certain kind of world, with openness and transparency. Unfortunately when he tries to interface with the rest of the world it can often go horribly wrong. His general attempts at embracing those who disagree with him, eg by thanking them and retweeting, exacerbate and lend weight to unpleasant comments.

It's truly unfortunate that Chad didn't manage to support the diversity activist community in a way that was acceptable to them. I think fundamentally there missions are much more similar that they're acknowledging now, and each is loosing out on what could potentially be a great ally.

I hope in the future these sort of things can be more constructively handled on both sides that either has so far.
This sounds like a good candidate for submission to the Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis, my favorite journal, http://www.jasnh.com/ .
Guy Wears Mentos Suit, Drops Into Tank Of Diet Coke
Java Pain
Computer Scientists 'Prove' God Exists
Right on brother man.
> Remember that WildTangent is still on the books as good CAFC precedent holding the exact opposite of Alice.

There is no such thing as "good precedent" from a circuit court that contradicts Supreme Court precedent on the same issue. (Leaving aside the question of whether there really is a direct conflict between WildTangent and Alice given the procedural differences in the cases.)
Well, for me, the latter would masquerade as a trivial expression seen thousands of times, and which now may or may not have unexpected behavior. Every instance of something like a + b must now carry the slight extra cognitive load of potentially having a sort of "optional type annotation" in one's mind. Usually normal, but might not be.

The former is at least potentially self-documenting. And even if it's a badly named function, at least you know it's a special function, and you know you'll have to go look up its behavior.

[Edit: Clarity]
Self-Employment Questions Answered
Vote to get Atlassian SourceTree Graphical Git Client for Linux
I actually think the strongest point of C++ is the nature of how template metaprogramming is done. Is there any other language that competes with C++ as effectively with templates? I feel like all these "C++ is bad" comments and articles are from people who've really only scratched the surface in C++. The expressiveness that's available to a programmer using templates in C++ is, to me, quite awesome.
Path Looks To Combine Commerce And Messaging With TalkTo Acquisition
The way stingray works is reportedly by pretending to be a cell phone tower. It seems to me this can be used by a smartphone app to monitor for stingray usage.

If the phone knows that it's not moving very fast (Androids certainly know this, I'm sure iPhones can as well), and a new cell phone tower appears suddenly, it seems to me that would be a good indicator somebody is stingraying nearby. (this isn't bulletproof, but would be a good starting point for further data analysis)

An app like this could record and report such incidents, so that we could form a larger picture of how often and how widely it's used.
Path: Introducing Talk
It has been fixed in the new client. Check http://next.scrollback.io
Compass2 is your friend.
The Time I Doubled My IQ
I think making firefly part of the Amazon app, or even as a standalone app, would have more effectively accomplished their "impulse buying" task.

Asking people to switch to a phone with inferior app selection and a clunky UI in order to be immersed in the Amazon experience seems a bit short sighted to me.

High end specs have become a commodity, the top priority the average user has when buying a smartphone is whether it has the apps they use. Try convincing a friend of yours to switch to Windows Phone, and the first thing they'll ask is "does it have x+y apps?" Ecosystem is everything.
The Startup School NYC 2014 Talks
I would imagine of they happen to be an S or C Corporations. I believe C-Corps are mandated to go public if they exceed 100 shareholders per SEC. It also depends.
Locust.io – A modern and open source load testing tool
Satoshi planned for this 51% mining attack problem, and so far we're ok.

His premise was that if a miner ever grew so large as to be capable of performing a 51% attack, that they would have so much wealth invested in the Bitcoin network that they would never dare try anything.

The Bitcoin network is GHash's golden egg laying goose.

The Bitcoin network is entirely safe in GHash's hands imho.

The only real worry comes in when the 51% miner is a bad actor.

>at 35% hashpower and 3 confirmations, this means that GHash can currently steal altcoins from an altcoin exchange with 15.6% success probability – once in every six tries.

Yes, but come on. They never would. Would Bill Gates jump into an active volcano to pick up a penny? Even if he had a 15.6% of picking up that penny without dying a fiery death?

>So what if, for the sake of example, GHash gets over 51% again and starts launching 51% attacks (or, perhaps, even starts launching attacks against altcoin exchanges at 40%)? What happens then?

I'll bite. The ~75% of GHash's mining power that is being pointed at GHash by regular Bitcoin ASIC miners who are enjoying their 0% fees and merged mining drops off overnight. Their domain names are DDOSd at a record breaking level for weeks on end, and every other pool adopts a modified bitcoind that hard-forks (erases) any damange GHash might have caused.

GHash is left with a few thousand nearly worthless Bitcoin (because the USD/BTC value would tank on their 51% attack news) and they are also left without the possibility to basically print themselves free money until the end of time.
My Top Junior Developer Pitfalls
> This is what I was getting at. It's great if the Supreme Court overturns this stuff, however if the Federal Circuit goes on ignoring it

The Supreme Court affirmed the Federal Circuit in this case.

So, insofar as the precedent on this issue which the Supreme Court applied in this case, its pretty hard to say that the Federal Circuit was ignoring it.
Interesting but an obvious result to be honest.
I was fooled and completely shocked. It is a relief that the story isn't true.
So information is collected regarding what IP addresses are accessed from our network, it isn't traceable back to customer accounts (in its usual form anyway, I’m sure if some data forensics people got hold of it they could maybe do something, but that’s outside my scope of knowledge) this information is used to improve customer experience and reduce network traffic.

For example, in 2012-2013 almost 40% of traffic on our Network was Youtube related, not just streaming, Youtube specifically! Obviously millions of these requests are going to be for the exact same video, say for example Gangnam Style. So instead of us pulling the data from Youtube every time a user requests that particular video we store that video on our Network, so when a user requests it (even for the first time), it actually comes from us. All my company needs to do is check for any changes to the specific page. The result is a better customer experience (faster streaming) but also far less network traffic (this literally saves millions).

Without the storing of IP addresses accessed we wouldn't have the information needed to determine what sites/data we should be cashing and what we don’t need to bother with and this sort of thing would be considerably harder to pull off.
A lottery ticket with 5% odds of payoff would be phenomenal. I think $0 is the proper value - I've never worked for a startup that paid dollar one on options.

Warning, if I work somewhere, you should short that stock / not take options. Sorry.
Is there room for legislation to ensure at least some liquidity in employee stock? I hate turning to government, but the current system makes it literally impossible for an employee to value options.
Amazon made a phone because it has become a big company with no vision. Making tablets was in, so they made one, making phone is in, they are making one. Maybe in 5 years, making your own VR headset will be in and they will make one as well.
e.g.
$ cgrep -r --header "stdio.h"
to search recursively for headers

$cgrep -r --identifier VARname
to search for a variable

etc..
> This article explains what it's about in language that's easier for people who aren't legal scholars to understand

More accurately, this press release puts the spin of an interest group popular on HN on the decision; it is not a neutral explanation of the decision.
Google cache because the site is down:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Z3RhU-_...
Impressive. It's not their fault and they seem to be good and talented, but I can't stop thinking about a possible marketing line: "DDoS as a Service".
First, I agree with everything you said whole-heartedly.

I don't believe that most cops out there actually have an intent to do evil, or to trample your rights though. They deal with criminal after criminal after criminal, I think their perspective is more likely that these tools and methods help solve cases quicker and there-for save taxpayer money and that us civilians aren't able to see that perspective.

I think that they aren't aware of the long term implications of what they're doing and that they should stop, but also that it's important not to think of them as evil if you want to have a dialogue with them about change.
never depend on it as part of your compensation in any way

This is very true. I've been in the position of having worthless share options before. It's something everyone who's tempted to work 80 hour weeks because they have share options should remember. You should also remember the Google cook, who had $200m in options that the company tried to do him out of because he wasn't a developer.
I'm not sure what to say. Mostly I'm just frightened for the future. It's very disheartening to watch civil liberties be dismantled so rapidly.

When you combine this with the secret transatlantic talks for the proliferation of extremely large multinational corporations and the rapid militarization of the police, it almost feels as if there might be a coup being slowly but silently executed right under our noses.

And no one cares. I did my first stand up set and had a joke about going to an ACLU meeting, and no one even knows what the ACLU is.

As scary as it, I certainly understand, that it is not as bad here as many places, but that doesn't mean I can't be concerned with the recent developments.

I just hope the American spirit will shine through one day and turn all of this around. The house passing to defund back door NSA research is heartening at least. Lets see what happens in the Senate.
Friday Round-Up: Boats, Cars and NY
You can accuse amazon of a lot but not having vision is something I'd be very careful with.

Kindle, AWS and a whole pile of other things were quite the gamble when the launched them.
I'm pretty sure those days are gone forever. Even if there's a slowdown of CPU power, there's still quite a lot left over for the sloppy coders of the world. Especially when we consider a lot of software isn't CPU bound, but storage bound, and even the most commodity SSD blows away the spinning disk. Oh, we're also all 64-bit now and computers shipping today come with 8gb of RAM.

We recently played the constraint game with the mobile/tablet space. It was fun while it lasted, but now with quad-cores and 1 to 2gb of RAM standard, its over as well. Tablets have become the new laptops. Phones have become the new tablets. Its boring.

I think the days you pine for are forever gone, at least in the general computing space. I find that once something new comes around, its naturally constricted and if it allows people some level of freedom and creativity, then the weirdo early adopters will rush in, and in that group there will always be a handful of super-stars. This minority makes the big crazy strides or the crazy efficient game and then go into more respectable work.

We also saw this with the early web, which was so much more innovative and experimental than the "social marketing" mode we've all agreed works best. That matured quickly as well. Look how the web browser is pretty much a platform, if not a quasi-OS, in itself. We keep reinventing the big bloaty OS and big bloaty applications for reasons that make sense; because people want big bloaty toys and the bells and whistles they offer.

So where's the next new constrained system young hackers are going to blow ours minds with? Maybe 3D printing. Maybe drones. Maybe VR. Maybe automated and electric cars. But even those have a certain level of maturity already. We might not know until it actually happens. Who saw TBL and the www coming? I suspect very few.

I personally hope to wake up one day to a new Jobs/Woz combo offering me something straight out of sci-fi, like a home robot with useful arms and enough AI to make use of it or a lucid dreaming machine that actually works or a nootropic that makes us all near geniuses. Come on guys, stop writing bejeweled clones and financial apps and blow our minds again. I suspect I still have a few mind blowing events left in my lifetime (almost 40 now).
Microservices and the failure of encapsulation
Not sure why this is news. Virtually every privately-held corporation or LLC has a stock transfer restriction. Any company that doesn't is an outlier.
For non-UK voters, UKIP is the middle-class racist party. Not going as far as neo-fascist parties like BNP, but happily taking votes away from the Right wing of the Conservatives by pushing a isolationist, return to glory days agenda.

They have no seats at Westminster but their leader is very telegenic and their message apparently popular at the "mid-term" elections. They are now expecting to win a few seats and are rapidly chucking out people and policies that are too dodgy to be allowed onto newspapers or TV.
Suggestion: Xenon 2 Megablast.

Megablast became Bomb the Bass.

Great version of Assault on Precinct 13 by John Carpenter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon_2_Megablast
What You Could Expect from Google I/O
Ask HN: How do I come up with a name for my startup?
See title. I've done everything I can think of, and am not coming up with anything. I've searched synonyms of words matching what we do, looked into other languages, looked into naming firms, etc.

Haven't had that "Eureka! That's it!!" Moment.

Can you help or have suggestions?

I think Uber is great. AirBNB is great. Google naturally. Simple and concise.

What do we do?

Think Facebook events + Meetup.com + Crowdtilt + Eventbrite + Some special sauce

Basically, looking to make meeting up with friends and organizing events/gathering easier.
I'm trying to imagine Jobs using an android phone and that really shows how absurd it is that Zuckerberg would not use his own company's gear.
What a non-story.

This is a typical way for a private company to manage who owns its stock -- namely investors, employees, and former employees. It's basically a right of first refusal.

You sell your options back to the company at the current market rate -- the rate at which that most recent investors purchased equity. That's your liquidity. The company will do this because it believes the options are undervalued compared to what they'll be worth in the future. If you don't want to do that, you hold and wait for the options to go up (or unfortunately down) in value.

If the company doesn't want to buy them, you _should_ be free to sell to others. Restrictions in _those_ cases would be worth writing about.
I'm finding that an inherent psychological part of software development is to accept that nothing will be perfect. Everything is fucked up at some level, and there's no practical way around it. You just bite the bullet.

You stop worrying and learn to love the bomb.
I think that anything more aggressive that the right-of-first-refusal at the third-party offer price is unconscionable.
I stand corrected. This is a design-time tool. I mistook it for the consumer feature of the same name.
One way is to build an app which the client runs on his/her machine and then accesses an interface via the browser. I played around with that some in this project here: https://github.com/JohnMunsch/selfhelp
Fair enough. Maybe it is more like .1-1%. I made up the 5% number off the top of my head tbh. I'd really need to sit down and see what % of startups actually go public. That would be a fairer number to use. 1 in 20? 1 in 50? 1 in 100?

Please keep your profile updated with where you work so I can short them. <3
Good stuff. I understand Christensen's complaints.

Jill Lepore (the author of the "takedown") puts off a weird vibe in her writeup, as if she's personally frustrated, as opposed to just saying "hey here are some issues"

I agree that there's a bit of a cult around "disruption". As with lots of good ideas: Agile, Lean, disruption, there's a core truth, and then there are the people who take it too far -- the zealots.

Seems like she must be surrounded by the zealots, hence the frustration.
I would try reading your agreement, it usually plainly talks about what its restrictions are.

For instance a very common clause is called "first option" (don't quote me on these names, not 100% certain they are correct), in order to sell the stock you must first offer the company the stock at the same price.

An alternative (probably the one in the Uber example here) is "first option at market" where in order to sell you must first offer to sell to the company at the market rate ("helpfully" determined by the company).
So, basically, your VC money is awesome, wonderful and welcome until the check clears...and then you're the "enemy" for wanting to stay in control of it.

Doesn't this reduce every early investment in a startup into a binary thing? You either lose it all, or hit a home run. Unless you pull a Groupon and exit everyone before the IPO.
Apparently it is not DDoS enough as the load test was mitigated by Google ;-)
Not that I think Uber is handling this constructively, but there's a valid reason why they would not offer the valuation bandied about in the press: they are not buying the same equity as the $17 billion+ equity.

The venture investors bought Preferred equity, the shares being sold by the employee are almost certainly Common equity. Common equity is worth less than Preferred equity. The times I have seen offers to buy Common shares in connection with a Preferred round, the discount has been as high as 50%.

This makes sense: assume you are an investor putting $1.2 billion into a company that has previously raised $300 million (this is roughly the recent Uber situation.) You are investing at a $17 billion valuation. Now assume that you were very, very wrong on the valuation and the company ends up selling for 90% less: $1.7 billion. You still get your money back. If the company goes on and sells for $34 billion, you double your money. This asymmetrical payout is one reason venture firms are comfortable taking the risk of such a high valuation.

Now assume you bought $10 million of Common shares from a former employee. If the company ended up selling for $1.7 billion, you would get back roughly $100,000 (assuming the preferred owns half the company.) You don't really have an asymmetrical payout: you stand to lose money if the valuation is wrong.

A wider the spread between the Preferred price and the Common price implies less confidence in the Preferred valuation. The actual valuation is the Common valuation, and the extra amount paid for Preferred stock is a kind of option value. So an alternative explanation to Uber short-changing its Common shareholders is that they believe the expected value of the company is closer to $4 billion than $17 billion and the Preferred buyers think the range of possible outcomes has an extremely large standard deviation.
hehe, that's actually a good one!
Path Talk – Smart, Private Messaging
The fusion triple product has improved exponentially, and is 10,000 times better now than it was in 1970. It's a hard problem, but it's not so much "we keep trying and failing" as "we're consistently improving, but the bar is really high."

It's as if computers were useless until we had a 6th-generation Core i7, and people were saying "bah, computers, haven't succeeded so far." We're not there yet, but we're getting pretty close.

It is true that early researchers made some over-optimistic predictions. But they conditioned those on a certain level of funding. For the funding they got, they said it would never happen.
"If you got into a legal battle with your employer, there would be consequences to future employment."

I mean, is this really the case though? Any reasonable employer I know of would say, "Oh, well, that's unfortunate, but your business", and move on.

I think this repeated meme is just a good way to keep workers in their place.