skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lapham's is second to none at what they do. I wish it were more available online. Some of their web productions are beautiful, but it's so hit and miss what you can find on their site that I eventually gave up.
Are there tourists lookouts that are above popular climbing routes? Seems a little contrived to me. What if a tourist drops a can of soda?

I guess if people really can't stand not having such shots the thing to do would be to license some people to use the drones and make sure they avoid doing the most horribly dangerous things (maybe they could use tethers or something).
Can you say more about this?

"As someone who 'created his job' initially, I was badly underpaid for the first 18 months and got sick of dealing with it even once my income grew to a 'normal rate'."

I think it is awesome that you went from 'no job in your area of expertise' to 'normal income' in 18 months. I have a huge amount of respect for that, I am looking for clarity on the 'got sick of dealing with it' part. What were you sick of?

I have never commissioned a survey on it but my experience from undergraduate to career was that there was a 100% correlation between passion for something and top 50% of people who do that thing. Every student I met at USC that was passionate about electrical engineering was in the top 50% of their graduating class, every clerk, salesperson, engineer, gardner, taxi driver, artist, and writer I've ever met who was passionate about what they were doing, did it better than most. That observation has been pretty foundational in my thinking about life and happiness. I would be intrigued to find a counter example.
Do you ever write code without doing any planning?
The issue is that operators rarely have obvious semantics when applied to non-builtin types. '+' makes sense for integers and floating point numbers, complex numbers and ratios, and almost nothing else. Those types can be built into the language, and '+' defined on them. It doesn't make any sense for strings and all the mismash of things people will overload it for.
The minority VC that gets left out in the cold? ;)
Reminds me of Gary Bernhardt's talk "The Birth and Death of JavaScript": https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
The solution is probably some sort of permit system so they can regulate the number of drones in use so it doesn't become a problem, just like they have for fishing and hunting.
Thanks Dan! Sorry about that -- I just pasted the link from my email, so I didn't realize it was a dupe.
I'd argue that << was a bit of a misfeature anyways. Providing operators for mathematical symbols with well-known meaning is sensible. == is an understandable hack, but a hack, nonetheless. || and && probably could have just used the words AND and OR like SQL does.

The << operator was just using symbols for the sake of symbols and would have been much more semantically clear with Shift(value, nBits) and would've avoided temptation to overload this meaningless operation.
Why? Not being dry/evil, simply just interesting in whether this project has practical offshoot or is pure fun (..)?
All software is algorithms, and the UI system can easily be tripped up by a patent on payroll systems precisely because of the universal underlying mathematics.
But if more people stay at home then socialising isn't a problem if enough people are doing the same thing. There's also then incentive for companies to move out of the big cities if they can hire a cheaper workforce.
This is still more or less the case in northern Europe. If you have a degree (in anything), the most likely outcome by far is that you lead a normal middle-class life. There is no big pool of unemployed Swedish BA/MA holders; rather, the unemployment problems are among people with no university degree.
There are privacy and security concerns to address. Similar to this situation: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/03/privacy-related-changes-co...
Funny, this is the same year the Mormon church was founded. They abstain from the consumption of coffee.
It's almost as if America has become a culture that if something doesn't directly impact the individual they don't care about it, no matter how unjust. We see this with the "well, I have nothing to hide" mentality as well as the "maybe they shouldn't have broken the law in the first place" mentality.

The average American has almost assumed the government to be perfect except for the few parts it dislikes and doesn't want to look more deeply to realize that other people have pointed out just as valid criticisms of other parts of the government.

What we end up with is a majority of people (say 80%) that all dislike a different small part of the government and think the rest of this group is complaining for no reason or should just accept the way things are.

We see this with things like teachers not liking the state-run testing but refusing to acknowledge that the state's interference with drug policies is having an equal if not greater impact.

No one is satisfied but everyone has a different problem.

We've become closed minded in being open minded. Once we decide we're open minded to one thing we feel that's enough and turn a blind eye to the rest.
> The problem is that "software" and "mathematical algorithm" are two terms for the same thing.

The Knuth quotation in the article, used in support of this position, actually seems to invalidate it in my view. "Algorithms are exactly as basic to programmers as words are to writers." The key being words. The value in a piece of literature has little to do with the individual words it's made from, just as a piece of software is clearly vastly more than the sum of its algorithmic parts.

Footnote: I mean this for multiple dimensions of 'value', not simply some measure of economic worth. Information processing and transformation ability, for one.
Given Suns history with EJB 2.0, I would humbly submit that "ease of use", work out-of-the box etc should not be the default expectations with Java.

Having said that (snarky response) having worked with Java from 1.1, I think the language is moving in the right direction. The latest release (8) adds a ton of syntactic sugar and there is a real impetus towards easier more dev friendly features.

Plus Java needs a non-backwards compatible version soon. I suggest Java X be that where it gets rid of a lot of the cruft that has built up.

(Go Duke!)
I've never seen anybody confused by "+" for string-concatenation. It makes far more sense than, say, integer division where 5/3 = 1.

Just because C++ ruined operator overriding with their moronic << doesn't mean that every other language should live without perfectly reasonable operator behavior. I've been dealing with Java instead of C# and not being able to use simple obvious equality checks with the "==" operator is agonizing.
Java is Enterprisey. Enterprises survive and operate only because they by freak accident at some point began earning way too much money. They employ lots of people who have no incentive to save work. We are paid for our work. Effects of the work are secondary to almost everybody in corporate world. Why trouble yourself with figuring out code if you can get paid all the same for tinkering with claspaths and poms for few days.

Java is a decent language but its developers have way too much tolerance for pointless hoopjumping.
we troubleshoot everything through logs, makes sense.
Sure, it wouldn't be hard to re-load the data in a new dataset/table with more accurate types. Strings are just the default. I just wasn't sure how clean the data was and didn't want to debug bad data before loading. I was lazy basically.

But if you wanted to do it, it's pretty straightforward.

In the meantime I haven't found it to be too hard to just INTEGER(field) and FLOAT(field) wherever I need to.
I was wondering about this very issue the other day, and wrote a little C program to try something similar. I tried three things:

1. Create an array of random ints, (sort them, not that it matters), and then time how long it takes to compute the sum.

2. Create an array of ints (data) and an array of int* (ptr). Set ptr[i] to point to data[i]. Scan the data through the ptr array and compute the sum. Obviously there is very good locality of access to both arrays.

3. Same as #2, but first sort the ptr array so that * ptr[i] <= * ptr[i+1]. There will be good locality on ptr, not so much on data.

For arrays of size 10M, #1 and #2 cost about the same, and #3 was 5x slower. (This was on my MacBook Pro, using XCode.)

But my main point here is about Java, which has been my main language for many years. I don't care (much) about its verbosity, its lack of closures, etc. I can get my work done. But working with large heaps has proven very problematic, both in avoiding GC overheard, and in the effects of non-locality.

While you can have both true int arrays and Integer arrays, the same is not true of non-primitive types. There is no way to have anything like an array of structs, with the same compact representation, as you can have in C. There are benchmarks showing that Java and C are competitive in performance. But C/C++ can be used to preserve locality for arrays of structs and objects in ways that Java cannot. Java has to be slower in these situations.

There are well-known tricks to address this problem. E.g. use two arrays of ints instead of an array of Objects which encapsulate two ints.

For these reasons, I would be very happy to see an idea like Value Types added to Java: http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~jrose/values/values-0.html
No. HTTPS should be secure out of the box. If you want to break HTTPS then you should have to do work.
I'm not sure why Java is taking a bullet on this.

The default in other languages is often to not do any certificate validation.

That seems like the worse approach since no-one can tell their code is insecure. Maybe fine for a scripting tool, but I wouldn't want that on my production boxes.

I'm not sure why every language needs to be useful as a scripting tool. If there are things that help the common case and also scripting (eg classpaths being a pain), there's obviously an argument for "why the fuck hasn't this been fixed yet", but in other cases there are either fundamental tradeoffs or resource constraints.
The Tricks to Avoiding Burnout
Perhaps you didn't read closely, but the fact that computer engineering is a well-paid profession is only a result of its demand, influence and importance to the future economy. Devoting equal time and resources encouraging people to abandon higher education in order to pursue unskilled labor may sound like "equality" to you, but hardly seems like a sound strategy for the economy or any industry.
LOOKING FOR ALASKA: John Green | eBay
"For Apple, having a small, really focused organization made a lot of sense when Steve was there, because so many ideas came from Steve. So having a smaller group work on some of these ideas made sense," Kawano says. "As Apple shifted to much more of a company where there's multiple people at the top, I think it makes sense that they're growing the design team in interesting ways."

If anything turns out to be Apple's downfall, it is embodied in this paragraph. In most companies, to beat your competitors, you first have to defeat the other corporate divisions. The presence of Steve Jobs probably prevented this and resulted in a significant part of Apple's competitive advantage. The key here is not Steve Jobs per se, but that a single individual could champion particular ideas and see them through to completion without opposition and interference.

Amazon currently enjoys something like this, I suspect.
Yes, the decision in question even mentioned this. The Court acknowledges that in some fundamental sense all machines are just mathematics + physics. But for the purposes of patent law, the fact that all inventions are nothing more than discoveries of special cases of physics and mathematics, is not the relevant level of analysis. Rather, patent law presupposes that some novel combinations of such principles are "inventions", and the question is which ones.
That works great when you need inspiration or a fresh perspective to get you unstuck. Those opportunities certainly arise in programming too, but additional time spent doing actual development are going to help too, both from a learning and practice point of view. If you want to become a better guitar player you need to spend a lot of time playing the guitar. Putting half of what could be your playing time into taking long walks in the woods or taking long showers will probably not be as helpful as actually playing the guitar. Programming is in many ways very similar, depending on exactly what it is you are doing when coding on nights and weekends.
How to keep the timewasters from taking over your life
What will this all means in terms of "smart" angel money versus "dumb" angel money? If angel investing is becoming more a matter of prestige than thrill/returns, it could become much easier to get an angel round, but at the price of dumb investors who lack the patience or stomach to deal with the ups and downs of startups.

I know I'm going to have to look for angel money in the next year. And when I find my angels, I want them to be the first people I turn to when things are hard. I want them to be genuinely helpful and supportive, not angrily demanding to get their money back at every little hiccup.
You are only selling me further on the ban. I think I would strangle some clown flying a drone right in front of a beautiful scenic overlook. Especially for a selfie.
Wireless personal drone detector runs Linux
As a founder, how do you attract engineers from places like Google to your startup?

"I am Paul Buchheit, I made Gmail" seems like it would work for you, and something similarly awesome might work for like 10s or 100s of founders.

As a Google employee (with pretty high, low variance, liquid compensation), it seems having stock/options or options even a successful pre IPO company are kind of terrible. When you seemed to have won (worked for a successful company, vested), you don't even really win, or at least, not yet. Stay in that same desk, working on that same project until some indefinite future liquidity event happens.
The author misses the gist of the Supreme Court's opinion in CLS Bank v. Alice:

> In Thursday's ruling, the court rejected a patent that claimed the concept of using a computer to hedge against "counterparty risk" — the risk of making a bargain and then having the other guy not pay up. The Supreme Court complained that in the process described in the patent, "each step does no more than require a generic computer to perform generic computer functions." Such a generic patent, the court said, isn't eligible for patent protection. The problem is that this criticism can be leveled at literally any software patent. At root, software is nothing more than a sequence of mathematical operations.

The Supreme Court in Alice came to two conclusions:

1) The concept of intermediated settlement is a "fundamental economic practice" and is so ineligible for patent protection under the judicially-created exception Section 101 for "abstract ideas."

2) The "method" and "system" claims in Alice Corp.'s patent amounted to nothing more than describing how to implement intermediated settlement on a generic computer in a generic way, and did not render the otherwise unpatentable abstract idea patentable.

The purpose of (2) is to foreclose on clever drafting that tries to get around the "abstract idea" limitation by framing it in terms of a specific implementation on a computer. What Alice says is that implementing the idea in a generic computer doesn't turn an abstract idea into a concrete implementation. It does not say that an otherwise patentable idea is rendered unpatentable because the patent describes how to implement the idea in a generic computer.
I ranked top 30 on typeracer at least once[1]. Here's one of the tricks: there's usually a countdown before each race starts, and anyone who cares about gaming the "words per minute" measurement will just paste the first word when the race begins.

Naturally, the other trick is to type really, really fast. This comes in handy when taking transcripts at events or meetings[2], but not often for anything else.

[1] http://www.seanwrona.com/typeracer/leaders.php

[2] http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/
> Are the consumer markets so much better in America that
> it's worth paying 4x valuation and competing with lots of
> other VCs for deals? The answer may be "yes", but it
> doesn't seem obvious to me

Don't forget that there are known quantities of legal/tax vehicles for VC investment in certain countries. If those things are not present, I imagine it would increase the risk for the VC, and impact valuation and capital availability.
MESS and PCem should be accurate enough.
Mostly apps that take advantage of tracking users via UDID / IDFA and not showing ads. At some level, developers still need a UDID for things like APN.
Honestly, I can see why C++ overrode it in the first place though - does anybody really give a crap about the "<<" operator? Why does a language need to dedicate a whole operator to bitshifting?

I assume Stroustrup et al took a look at the meaningless "<<" and decided it was available for whatever use they saw fit.
Surprise: Snapchat's most popular feature isn't snaps anymore
It won't be a constant factor due to the first of the Baby Boom hitting the age when many of them get chronically sick (if they're lucky).

I thought of mentioning that while an act of god (2011 EF-5 tornado) forced me to live with my father, that he's now 80 and starting to decline a little, and had a medical emergency last year, is one of the reasons I'm staying with him. That the cost sharing we've worked out saves, oh, as much as half on my cost of living is of course another reason, but duty is a lot stronger motivator.
C# has value types and is Java like.

I assume you know of it and have your reasons, just couldn't help but point it out.
This has nothing to do with heartbleed. This means you can just generate certs on your own machine that a lot of software will simply accept.
Cool, just grabbed it with
sudo apt-get install jq
I don't think you understand Math. I also don't think you understand legalese. I won't comment on the latter.

Software is fundamentally no different from a physical mechanism. (Math is everything.) Software is just more tunable.

The focus should be on eliminating bad patents or patents fully. Please don't muddy the issue.
> My nights & weekends developing software for my employer are investments in myself.

No offense, but if they were investments in yourself I think you'd be either:

A) Moonlight for $$

B) Working on a startup idea you were thinking about [you are on HN after all]

The skill gain from doing stuff for your employer for $0, at least to me, doesn't seem equal to the return from things that my benefit me financially one day.
As long as there are reasonable exceptions for legitimate scientific work (and I'm sure there are).

In Yellowstone, there's a scenic overlook where you can look through a telescope at a distant hot springs. The springs have a thin crust over boiling mud, so humans cannot enter them. I can see valuable scientific research on such areas using inexpensive drones.
Trending Weird, Funny and sizzling news WEEKLY:
I can see making the tourist vistas be drone free. Some of these parks are huge. Operating a quiet drone a mile from the nearest other human diminishes no one else's experience.

The park service allows automobiles, needlessly loud motorcycles, generators for RVs (within limits), and any number of greater nuisances. (Including the other 20,000 people who came the the Grand Canyon south rim on the day I did.)
That's a good point. Amazon and Apple are/were extensions of SJ and Bezos. For better or worse the companies did/do what they wanted. If they wanted X, then X is what happened political infighting be damned.
How hard is it to make artificial hydrophobic material? Wouldn't they make great windshields?
This could be enough to push me over the edge and buy a Wii U. It is very cool that Nintendo have embraced user made content, after being so against it for what seems like forever.

edit: a couple of replies made me realize that I was off the mark slightly with my comment. I should have focused on how their attempts to support user made content have seemed to run into their legal department's over the top desire to "defend" their character IP.
The quote mentions Uber investors, not employees, even though the article deals mostly with an Uber employee trying to sell shares. This is why I'm a bit confused.
You'd use a basic store/forward protocol. Sender sends message to a zero-knowledge server. If the sender has no network the encrypted message is stored locally, on the client device until the server can be reached.

Similarly, the recipient polls the server for new messages only when online. Any messages accumulated by the server since the last sync are downloaded. That's the easy part. More interesting is the key exchange that needs to take place between sender and recipient for them to exchange messages securely. The idea being that both parties each create a public/private key pair for each other, and then use each others public key to encrypt the symmetric key that decrypts messages.

Straight-forward enough. The problem here is when you want to exchange messages with Bob, you need to know that you have the real Bob's public key, and not an imposter's key. While an in-person, meatspace exchange will give you the assurance you need, that's not always practical.

Here's a bit more detail on how you might engineer the key exchange: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Needham-Schroeder_protocol
Most people are motivated by more than money. Working in product development at a place like Apple, or Google, or Amazon, etc, gives you a chance to work with very smart, accomplished people. It gives you license to do great work and maybe push some envelopes with what is possible in your field. It gives you a platform to have a major impact on society. It makes other people say "wow" when they hear where you work, or what product you helped create.

For some people that is a form of motivation, and even a form of compensation. Doing graphic design at a PR agency for a cereal campaign, even if it pays more money and gives more vacation time, might be less attractive to people than a harder, more demanding job that confers the above benefits.

It's also important to look at the entire career. Busting her ass at Apple for 6 years might set up a young designer to get taken very seriously if she decides to move to another company, or start her own. That would be less true if she was a junior designer working hourly for Brauny paper towel company (or whatever).
How much better is this than a program like WRK on a couple laptops on different IPs?
> javascript support would make it even more crazier

There's interesting research being done in the area of meta-circular interpreters. There's techniques for speeding them up; they're not as slow as I'd expect. For example, one interpreter can do type analysis and rewrite chunks of code.
I think you're right. "Marketing", eh. Today's business degrees, so I gather. E.g. what my father learned in the '50s getting one allowed him to take a company public in the '60s.

The other majors have a better chance of teaching something real, which is a good start. I certainly prefer working with a "writer type" when producing documentation, otherwise I end up doing it myself.
Amazon has a trade-in store: http://www.amazon.com/Trade-In/b?node=2242532011
Yes, because you will use "public" lands and enjoy them in exactly and only in the way we tell you to.

This is just a precursor to them selling a permit for $1000 a day or something.
Reckful rank 1
Microservices and Data Architecture – Who Owns What Data?
Designing in the browser, pro tips to make it work for you 
Designing in the browser used to scare me. Not because it seemed hard but because I thought I would end up with a design made up of a lot of little boxes, something that was so generic and bland I would end up redoing it in Photoshop.