skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What I remember most about that era was some guys that ran themes.org who lived up in Tahoe and worked. I was living in Texas at the time and wanted so badly to be able to work remotely from a ski town. Virtually nobody got to work remotely back in 2000. Years later, I finally got my wish and moved to Park City, UT and lived that life. Good times. I can only imagine how much fun it must have been in the big-money dotcom days.
I'm not really sure that furthering precedent for giving away equity in oneself is a good idea--consider the novel The Unincorporated Man.
Ask HN: What are the most difficult aspects of running an online/app business?
For those who have significant income from side projects, apps, ecommerce sites, small businesses:
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6431573)
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4467603) etc.

Particularly for those who have worked/work as a salaried software engineer and run a business,
I'm curious how the work differs. Are there roles that you have been forced to take on that are particularly frustrating/exciting/challenging? What are the most difficult things that you have to deal with day in, day out? What are the most rewarding things?
When CA entered the union, it held well less than one percent of the US population. Since then, the US population has gone up about fourteenfold. CA population has gone up four-hundred-and-fourteenfold. When our borders were drawn, we had industry and population like Wyoming, and it's not crazy that we had borders to match. Now, we have industry and population more like the eastern seaboard, and we should quite arguably have borders more like the eastern seaboard.

As it stands, our voices are systematically underrepresented at the national level and our state government is too big to be responsive.

I have some mixed feelings about this particular proposal, but I am more than sympathetic to the notion that we should carve up this state.

And the notion that residents of Humboldt and residents of San Diego have more of a shared identity than residents of New Haven and New Bedford seems... a stretch.

As an aside, Texas and Florida would also be good candidates to split, if they wanted to.
> So is building a complex scalable system that break the laws of physics or theorems. The world is eventually consistent.

You kind of hit me during a moment with this. You're basically describing the theory of relativity. I suppose in a way, the ToR could be rephrased to be a theoretical upper limit on information propagation with ramifications for ensuring consistency in local state.
Passion first of all for me.
"Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life."
If you think of reasoning like a linked list, you want to make sure you keep a pointer pointed at the head of the list so you can quickly find your way back out and into the right context.
Ok, we'll change to that (from http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html).
Remember the post on Slashdot about suddenly becoming rich from the VA IPO? Can't remember if it was Rob Malda or Eric Raymond or someone else but it seemed so unreal and ostentatious at the time but was completely laughable just a few years later.
Not really; C++ now has closures and I'm not going to say it's ideal, but it's not that awful either. The whole "reinventing lisp" argument really only applies to macros at this point (ie: something that fundamentally would require a Lisp to do properly), the other features have been scavenged by other languages without being a lisp just fine.
Do you remember when civilian drones were just called RC planes and RC helicopters?
My niece got here measles vaccine two weeks ago. Ten days afterward she came down with, you guessed it, the measles. My first reaction was utter fear that she was going to die. But the doctor wasn't at all concerned. She'll be sick, it will suck for a little while and she'll get better.

So what the hell? First of all, the vaccine gave her the fracking measles! So who is actually spreading these diseases around?! Secondly if there's no concern of it being deadly than why the endless hyperbole over the few hundred people, out of 300 million, who get it per year?
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=good+and+bad+procrastination#!/sto...
Glad to see someone posted this again. This is without a doubt one of the best papers I've ever read. Drives home that Alan Kay is truly brilliant.
"beat the CAP theorem" ... "break the laws of physics" ... "lie and market-speak their way out of a theorem"

Strong words, but the article doesn't advocate any of the above. It advocates choosing consistency over availability and lays out the reasons why that is a good choice. Choosing consistency is hardly a radical idea and many of the most popular NoSQL databases actually choose consistency (e.g. HBase, MongoDB).

Indeed even Riak, the biggest advocate of eventual consistency, is working hard to build strong consistency into Riak 2.0.
Poll: Do you believe intelligence is fixed?
The business value of joy
GCC's nested functions are implemented with trampolines, so there will be a performance penalty. For the amount that you gain, they seem like a bad idea. Tying your code to GCC for the sake of a small amount of convenience is a bad idea.
Some vaccinations use animals or animal byproducts which are deemed unclean by some religions. Some religions make vague statements about blood and cleanliness, etc. which might be construed one way or another.
I'd love to see this done with temperatures, other kinds of precipitation, etc. I think I'll have to make it a weekend project...
Can you give me a specific example? I've looked at cardpool.com, giftcardgranny.com, giftcardzen.com, and giftcardrescue.com and none of them have Amazon.com gift cards at more than 1.8% discount (I know I'm moving the goalposts a little but that's the only one I buy).

Quick edit: and they only sell the $500 gift card at that discount!
Eric Raymond: "Surprised By Wealth"[1], and "How I'll spend my millions"[2]

[1] http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/1999121000105NWLF

[2] http://www.zdnet.com/eric-raymond-how-ill-spend-my-millions-...
This article is actually really confusing...
What does intelligence mean in this context?
Yes, the system is an embarrassment, but Obama knew the Only
possible way to provide Americans with Insurance was to use
for for profit insurance companies. I have huge concerns over health care, but at least I know I won't end up in Superior Court and lose my house if I get sick. I didn't
have insurance when the Obama administration was trying to provide a Universal Healthcare Plan--the Republicans and even some Democrates were ruthless, and beyond dogmatic at
attacking him. Obama knew if he didn't do something; we
would have nothing!

So Yes, Health Care is a mess and we need to fix it. I feel we need some drastic changes; We need tort reform for
Doctors. We need to build more medical schools, and offer
a free education to the best applicants. Many drugs should
be OTC.(If people abuse the system--they would lose the privilege). Use of fingerprints could weed out the Narco
pill poppers? Patients on long term, daily medication should be able to refill their prescriptions--up to a year.(This would include long term pain management drugs). I
could go on and on, but we need to drastically change the
system, or at least do pilot trials?

I don't have all the answers; I'm just tired of doctors dragging me into office visits for no real reason--other
than to take my money, or charge the Insurance companies.
The next time your refills run out and you have to schedule
an office visit you will know my frustration.

I'm a Nobody, and basically just venting. Sorry about the
lenght of this post.
> Aaronson IS the liberal academic establishment, so it is no mystery that his writing appeals to his peers

I'm afraid you got cause and effect in reverse.
Semantic web trust layer maybe? C'mon, reinventing the wheel???
This is great.... NOT.

"people could understand the machine model behind C" -> that is why every substantial C program is ridden with undefined behavior, overflows, memory leaks, race conditions....

"C succeeded because it was doing the right thing" -> If the right thing is giving rise to the software exploit industry and causing billions in damages..

I suggest you read Richard Gabriel's "Worse is Better"
(http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html) and forget
anything that Stepanov has to say on the matter. Either
he is utterly clueless or a dangerous imbecile.

C has been in use for decades now. We only have to look
at the facts, not listen to fallacies that various cretins
feel the urge to proclaim.
The problem with clang blocks is they're represented as a Objective-C object, this makes them unusable in APIs that expect a function pointer, the only way you can cast them to a function pointer is to define the structure which represents the block and mmap executable code pages to marshal the call. Such a library exists that binds them to libffi here https://github.com/mikeash/MABlockClosure
This feat alone makes blocks essentially useless unless your entire API is also block-based, as in T (^foo)(...) vs T(*foo)(...).
One of the interesting policy problems of forcing vaccines is that you have to ensure that people who can't get vaccines for medical conditions are able to get around in society, and that people with absurd anti-vaccine conspiracy beliefs don't get medical waivers.

My father, for example, can't get flu vaccines. The last time he got one was decades ago and he ended up hospitalized, completely paralyzed with minimal respiratory and heart functions, able only to move his eyes. He recovered, but it took weeks. They think he has Guillain-Barré syndrome and it kills many people who suffer from it (though they likely don't know until they suffer from it, the flu vaccine is one of the known triggers). The risk of immediate death is so high that he avoids most vaccines altogether.
It's true literally.[1] If the language was designed around closures that's one thing. In C, it would be one language paradigm too many.

If you want a language with closures, and all you have is C, the time-honored solution is to write an interpreter and give the interpreted language closures. That is a good way to go.

[1] http://matt.might.net/articles/compiling-scheme-to-c/
Even under that analysis, a consistent system is completely unavailable (0% of clients can get service) when a majority of replicas suddenly go down completely.

The point about eventual consistency pushing inconsistency too high in the stack makes sense to me though. The spanner paper makes a similar argument.
Yes. I'd wager Jewish infants adopted into a random family would perform better than black infants adopted into the same family, in a controlled study.
Young talent
I worked for a company that sold EMC products. one of those was an email product that made sure companies captured ALL emails for ETERNITY. these were mainly banks, where (pardon my spelling) sarbanes oxley required banks to keep them (always and forever). emails from say exchange would be copied before it went to their in box, stored on disk and also immediately stored to optical media, which would also automatically be copied. not getting into the other parts that prevented emails from being lost,

I havent worked at that job since 2007. I find it unbelievable that any major government organization such as the IRS does not make sure ALL emails are never lost.

edit: the fact that they lost emails is a huge scandal in its own right IMO
Disclaimer: I'm a software engineer working for AWS. But not on EC2.

I feel the margin number conclusion is deeply flawed for variety of reasons.

There are some questions the author cannot have answers for, that greatly change the margin numbers for EC2. A couple that comes to mind are:

1. What percentage of time are customers being charged for the available servers?
2. What percentage of instance hours are being charged at on-demand prices, vs reserved instance?

Also it completely ignores services that makes EC2 stand out from plain hosting, and adds much value, such as AutoScaling, CloudWatch, Elastic Load Balancing, OpsWorks, and Elastic BeanStalk. And believe me when I say that support cost is NOT trivial. In many cases, the number of engineer hours involved makes the support pricing look like a real bargain.
Seems like a poor prescription to ONLY go off of referrals. The bigger the company gets, the more likely people will not want to bring in talent that they might view as competition. I know that's cynical, and perhaps placated by referral bonuses, but it could happen. Also, what about people straight out of college that find you on LinkedIn and apply to a job posting (which I did in NYC since I knew no one), and end up getting trained to be a senior employee? There are just too many scenarios where you're limiting your pool of prospective employees, why not try everything and double down on what works without discounting new opportunities to bring talent in.
Anybody skeptical of Lyft needs to try the service for FREE

1. Download the Lyft app
2. Enter code LOSANGELES (works nationwide)
3. Request and enjoy your FREE ride
4. Repeat on another phone to ride home for free
Correct or not, the doctor is confident that the attenuated virus in the vaccine is sufficiently attenuated that your niece isn't going to get the bad consequences of the wild type virus.

According to Wikipedia on the MMR vaccine, "10% of children develop fever, malaise and a rash 5–21 days after the first vaccination" With numbers that high, it sounds like statistically this isn't a serious problem.

Your niece is of course not a statistic, but at least based on what I know about medicine and biology, and what I've just looked up, the odds are strongly in her favor.

Skim comments to this Daily Kos diary for testimony from people older than me about just how bad things were before we had these vaccines, including of course the family and friends who didn't make it. My parents were born in the middle 1930s; they too attest to it.
It's a she, Megan McArdle.

I'm not trying to be that guy, just letting you know. If you have time, check out some of her other articles. She's a pretty balanced commentator.
That was Trae and Co. Much as I liked the guy the "fame" he got went way to his head and his contributions were far short of his ambitions. He alienated a lot of folks with his constant demands for what would otherwise be perks for senior engineers (or higher), and mid-day snowboarding excursion... and -to be brutally honest- preening when he visited HQ.

Last I heard he's settled down some and does good work back in his home territory in Georgia.
The sum of all receipts from these 3% payments is supposed to cover the corresponding expenses. In a way the successful stock broker's 3% makes up for the starving artist's meager 3%. So the scheme breaks even if enough high earners bail out the school's investment in low earners.
Por que hacer link building
"Hell, I'd be surprised if my mum could tell me I'm wrong if I said Apple released a bigger iPhone and showed her a Samsung Galaxy."

So? I could show a new Mercedes model to a non-car enthusiast and say it is a BMW and they couldn't tell the difference.
VA as its initial raison d'etre went dead with the purging of the hardware division (disclosure, I am a biased bastard who worked at VA from 1998 - 2002 and have a deep romanticized attachment to the people and events of that period). Everything after was something pretending to it (or in the case of Sourceforge.net for several years, surviving as a remnant in an otherwise unrelated shell).
It is so refreshing to see a genuine writeup about a project that's still in the works as opposed to a fully done bootstrap page that's more part of a marketing campaign than an actual effort to share and exchange info. Kudos to you. I love the idea and I totally get the problem here because there's not a single app on android that actually looks good and stays minimal. Keep on polishing! :)
So then we need to shoot for 59.
I had the impression that most AirBnbs in NYC were not owner-occupied but full-time AirBnbs and that's what people were complaining about.

Anyways if you improve the legal alternatives and the margins get low enough I think a lot of the owner-occupied ones will simply give up. Right now it's so insanely profitable that it's well worth the work and inconveniences (and legal risk!) even for middle class people.
A few years ago I interviewed for a senior architect position on an IRS contract. To get the job I had to interview with the subcontractor who was filling the position, then with the prime contractor and finally with the IRS. You had to be accepted by all 3 layers, plus get through salary negotiations to get the position.

The principle job was to build a fraud investigation system by integrating a COTS analysis tool into the IRS systems to automatically generate cases for fraud investigation officers to review. One hitch, as I found out after getting through the gauntlet of interviews, the COTS product that they wanted to use wasn't built to support this kind of integration and the vendor wasn't interested in forking off a special build just for the IRS.

So I asked them a simple question "knowing what I know about this product, and the fact that it can't be integrated as desired, it seems that this is an impossible task, as the senior architect, I'd want to be clear that I have powers to restart the selection process of the tools and systems so I can build a solution that would actually perform as required, would I have this authority?"

At this point, the senior manager from the prime and the pm from the government side got very agitated. You see, there was only 2 months to get a basic system functional and as a result the selection and purchase process had already been completed.

"Without anybody leading the process?"

This was apparently the wrong question, as I had hit some sort of embarrassing point I shouldn't have dug into. They pretty much just wanted somebody in the role to rubber stamp the crap decisions they had already made. They became very defensive, there was some raised voices. I told them I wasn't interested in that kind of position and walked out.

2 years later I found out that they had scrapped the program completely after spending goodness knows how much money and were restarting the entire thing from scratch.

My gut feeling is that this new program too will fail since any working system would likely detect the fraud in their IT acquisition and management.
I used to check FM every morning for years as part of my ritual to look for "neat stuff" to install and play around with on my various boxen. It was great while it lasted. I worked at VA and a common form of watercooler talk in the late 90s was akin to "hey, I found $APP and I think it might really let me do $USEFULTHING or at least be an interesting waste of time"
How is it being too clever? That is one of my favorite things about the site. If you want to quickly check the comments, you can without leaving the page. If you want to open a few to check later, you can just Cmd/Ctrl+Click the comments link and it'll be on its own page.
'Miss Lovely' Exposes The Underbelly Of India's Film Industry
Yes, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7926256
This deserves a lot more attention than it's gotten so far.

Why isn't this data used to do something for good, rather than for what we can safely presume to be evil? For instance, I'm sure we could use this data to track down every evil junkmailing sub-human "direct mail marketing" moron, publicize their contact info, and let's see how they like getting nothing but poop in their mailboxes?
I almost closed the tab when I saw the screenshots of the "other apps". They all look pretty terrible and because I hadn't actually read anything on the page yet when I saw them, I assumed they were screenshots of your app. I would suggest that you lead with screenshots of your app, especially since it looks a lot nicer.
Very little of our taxes winds up in the state, and even less funds education. Many local students wind up in other states. It's not that easy.
I had a question in case you might happen to know -- why does the site require email addresses?
The measles vaccine is live attenuated, so in the rare case it does cause disease, it's less severe than wild type.

Measles is one of the most infectious diseases known to man. In a fully susceptible population, one infected person can expect to infect 14 other people. The reason only "the few hundred people" get infected annually now is because of widespread vaccination campaigns.

Measles used to be all but inevitable, infecting literally millions, and killing hundreds each year in the US. The only reason we have come to fear vaccines is because we as a society no longer remember fearing these diseases.

http://www.cdc.gov/measles/vaccination.html
Twenty years is a long time and I fear the implied selection mechanism embedded in that time horizon. At the margin I would expect this to attract people who don’t have a vivid mental image of the distant future. Furthermore the terms of the program discriminate against those who expect high earnings or for that matter those who expect to finish. In other words, the drop out rate of the marginal students here may be relatively high. And what are the payback terms for dropouts? Do they get off scot free? Pay proportionately for what they finished? Pay much much less to reflect their lower expected wages?

This captures my intuition. English and Sociology majors will choose this, not Math majors and Computer Science.

I had heard that Yale had experimented with a similar program. The problem is the distribution. It sounds great for the median student. The low end don't make enough to pay their way. The high end make a ton of money, and push back on paying. In Yale's case they may not have had all the forceful levers of the state. (And Yale wouldn't want to push too hard on the top 1%, alienating their best alums)
These diagrams are interesting too: http://homepages.cwi.nl/~tromp/cl/diagrams.html

There is also Bret Victor's Alligator Eggs game:
http://worrydream.com/AlligatorEggs/

I know about these because I'm currently trying to learn λ-calculus by deriving and implementing functions in CoffeeScript:
https://github.com/rbonvall/lambda-coffee/blob/master/lambda...
But choosing consistency over availability in all cases is not an answer, one is not a strictly superior choice over another, as he article proposes.

At one level striving for consistency in a large distributed system is fighting with the laws of physics. It has been attempted and so far Google probably has a better handle on it but it requires tight coupling with a time synchronization service.

> Choosing consistency is hardly a radical idea

_Claiming_ to choose it is not radical. Actually doing it, is. If you read the "Call me maybe" you'd see that most of supposed consistent databases fail. Granted that measures partition tolerance but at the same time usually that is not a choice to be made (according to the author Aphyr).

> Indeed even Riak, the biggest advocate of eventual consistency, is working hard to build strong consistency into Riak 2.0.

That is what I've heard. Consistency for some data is the right choice, no argument there. At the same time they are _not_ throwing away or switching away from eventual consistency.

In fact they are the database that when preserving conflicted siblings actually did better than most in "Call me maybe" series. CouchDB is another database that does this right. It preserves merge conflicts explicitly during replication. Users can chose to ignore them but it doesn't arbitrary throw data away. It is not in the series because replication and cluster topology is user defined and managed so there is no default, single distributed cluster setup.

Most of the failures of databases come from trying to sweep under the rug effects of conflicts in eventually consistency. Even Riak's last-write-wins did that. MongoDB and others failed too. That doesn't mean eventual consistency is flawed. Eventual consistency is a physical reality, and in some case it is also a viable business application pattern.