skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unfortunately that is far too simplistic.

For example eating meat: if you don't eat meat because you love cows, becoming a vegetarian might actually hurt cows. If people weren't eating meat, there would certainly be a lot less cows around than are now.

I am all in favor of feeding all hungry people, but once again it is not so simple (note: not trying to pass off hardcore opinions, just thinking and playing devil's advocate). The problem are always the incentives. If you know your children will always be fed, maybe you'll worry less about having kids - you'll just have them. Eventually because of overpopulation it might become impossible to feed everyone. If people worry about having to feed their kids, maybe on average they'll only have kids when they know they can be fed. (I don't know a good solution to this).

It get's really bad when he claims that "people who don't want what they should want are usually just deluded".

The incentive problem goes further - if people are only allowed to get "equal" things, competition is eliminated, and hence also progress. In former eastern Germany, there was only one kind of car, made from plastic. It is a bit like with the cows - you think you are helping everybody, but suddenly people are forced to drive in shoddy vehicles endangering their health.

As I said, it is a dilemma, I don't know the answer. But I suspect that ultimately there will always have to be some competition and struggle. Unfortunately.
Don't be ashamed. It's an awesome game.

Who knows, maybe there will be adult intramural leagues some day, like there are with kickball and dodgeball.
Thanks for the response,

You seem to have summed up our take on it. Does Matasano offer stock options or profit sharing or run across similar issues? It seems to be the opinion of my partners that saying how many shares are outstanding is just about the limit of what we can say without an NDA.
"But Gates was in no hurry for Microsoft to take this same rite of passage [going public]. He did not want to open Microsoft's corporate doors to the public. For one thing, the company did not need the instant infusion of cash that a public offering would provide. It was making a great deal of money. Pretax profits were running as high as thirty-four percent of revenues. And remaining private had definite advantages. There were no sockholders to please, no onerous filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The only disadvantage was that Microsoft's key employees and managers who had been getting stock options over the years had no tradable security....

"Reguardless of what Gates' wanted, however, his hand was about to be forced. It was only a question of time until the day arrived when Microsoft would have to offer its stock to the public. The 1934 Securities Exchange Act required all companies to register and file public reports as soon as stock had been distributed to 500 or more employees. As far back as 1983, Gates had projected that Microsoft would reach that figure by 1986 or 1987...."

_Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire_ by James Wallace & Jim Erickson, page 320.

For Google, just search for articles around the time they went public.
Thanks Peter. As I mentioned earlier, javascript solutions work great but have two major limitations: not all hosting providers allow embeddable js; and javascripted highlighting doesn't work too well in rss readers.
So. Squares violate the assumptions that Rectangles established. Where did these "assumptions" come from? Surely the programmers are not looking at the implementation of a class rather than its interface?

If we have a language and a system where you have an elaborate vocabulary for constraining the types of messages we can send to an object and the parameters we can associate with those methods but we have absolutely zero ways to constrain what those messages will return and what changes of state those messages will cause...

Well then there are going to be these kinds of arguments. I think tools can help here. For one thing, we could use languages like Eiffel that give us Design by Contract that is checked by the compiler. If setting the width is not supposed to set the height, we can make that part of the contract for the setWidth(...) method of a Rectangle and our compiler will not allow us to write a Square class that is-a Rectangle.

And alternate approach with less strict languages is to write tests for Rectangle. I'm a big fan of Strict Liskov Equivalence (http://weblog.raganwald.com/2008/04/is-strictly-equivalent-t...). In a project with tests, I believe that any test written for the Rectangle class should work for instances of all of its subclasses.

Therefore if we write a test for the rectangle class and we include a check that setting width does not affect height, then a Sqauare cannot be a Rectangle whether the compiler barks at us or not. The test in our project establishes that expectation for all Rectangle subclasses.

OTOH, if no such test exists, than the programmer making that assumption is wrong. She should either drop the assumption or add the appropriate tests to the project to document her understanding of the contract of a Rectangle.
What isn't true? That Microsoft had to go public because of the law? That Google had to go public because of the law?
What VCs Want and why they call it Vulture Capital
I'll see your Quine and raise you a Bolzano:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bolzano/

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bolzano-logic/
54 minutes plus questions. Here's the Monty Python sketch refenced in the talk:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUhb0XII93I
Agreed. Ethics has been challenging human civilization as long as we can tell and we still don't have any answers (and there probably aren't any). The only people I worry about ethically (besides psychopaths) are those that think they have all the answers. Whether they are religious fundamentalists, political fundamentalists (Communists, fascists, etc), or what have you. I only know one thing: once you think you have ethics figured out for sure, you're wrong.
The word "passionate" has become a meaningless corporate buzzword
Australian Government breaks up Telstra
How does having less cows being born hurt actual cows? It might "hurt" the cow species, but that's a metaphorical point -- surely you don't consider the cow species actually capable of pain.

The evidence (look up "demographic transition") shows that the only reliable way to decrease birth rates is to decrease death rates. In practice, people seem to have more kids when they expect some of their kids to die. That's how societies keep from dying out.

I don't say people are just deluded, I say they're often confused.

I never said people are only allowed to get equal things, so I have no idea what you're talking about.

Nobody disputes that things are sometimes complicated. But that just means you need to work a little harder to find out the truth -- not just spout random ideas you have.
What friends' applications can extract from your Facebook profile
Presentation given at BarCampMelbourne 2009 by Paul Fenwick.
Jason, I have a lot of respect for you but saying that C# doesn't have anything going other than the IDE is completely wrong. With LINQ, lambda expressions, continuations, reflection, extension methods, automatic properties, I believe that C# is the no.1 strongly typed language.
oh yeah the girls get spammed like crazy. They get like 500 emails a week. Hell a chick I know didn't even provide a picture and STILL got over 100 emails the first week.
In 2003, I almost left Arbor Networks for a dev job at Bloomberg. I had a (very significant) salary bump on the table. Arbor kept me with a small raise, but put some effort into a breakdown of how much my equity would be worth under some acquisition scenarios.

I'd have been better off taking the Bloomberg gig in retrospect, but I liked the negotiating approach; it allows you to put your spin on the equity numbers (which I think is fair, because people are dumb about equity), while still being forthright.

Everyone in your company should know what "the number" is. This is just an extension of knowing the number; "if we make our numbers, and then 2 years from now get bought, how much am I likely to make?"
My issue with ideas like the "startup visa" is that they require restrictions and bureaucracies. You end up with more draconian restrictions on immigrants causing resentment. You end up with more distortion of market signals.

What happens when a startup goes under? Visa cancelled? Well that's reason to pour more resources in or just pretend it's still alive. What happens if they do some consulting on the side to stay alive? What happens if it ends up all consulting? What happens if people come out with the intention of doing this. How are you going to stop it? Force them to develop products?

What is a startup? Does a lawn mowing startup count? How about if they invent their own lawn mower? in 'The Founder Visa,' Graham proposes that the Governemnt could "use investment by recognized startup investors as the test of whether a company was a real startup." Recognised by who? Do you really want to erect an official barrier to entry for investors?

What about an existing startup in country X that wouldn't mind moving to the US. Now they need an officially recognised investor. They don't need an investor. They need a visa. They can pay for it. The investor is in a position to sell a visa, even if it looks like he is just getting a good deal on some stock. It might even look like that to the investor. I offered a deal. They took it. The power to grant a visa is worth money and even if you can control the granter's morals or incentives (you can't), you cannot control the grantee's reasons for accepting a deal.

4 consultants doing remote work for mostly US clients decide they could double their (say $150k p/a) revenue by moving to the US and doing the same. Theoretically, they can afford up to $150k p/a for the visa. Say they take $100k "investment" form a recognised investor in return for a promise to pay $50k p/a. How would the visa process weed these candidates out. Review the business plan? Make sure that they are planning to build a business that scales? Consulting doesn't scale. Are you sure? Will we have a list of business plans that scale?

The article mentions setting up "a board of investors, entrepreneurs, and tech lawyers who are used to vetting tech ideas; they'd review applications and choose which ones are worthy of a Founder Visa." This, it reckons, would be open to corruption.

I don't think it is possible to have "controlled immigration" that is this controlled to this extent without these ugly issues.
FWIW: argparse is not google's
Some words of advice: Don't make up your own crypto.

I didn't look at what your construction is, but there appears to be a flaw in the implementation. Your code does not generate a strong primes for the modulo. So, the order of the cylic group may be small.

You generally want p = 2q+1, where q is a large prime. Then there are only two subgroups of order 2 and q.

For your example prime 9062412837773369110292196105482480248709337252604489001268564868178757630921032967632809984689867835102097066512990361073635001670558988501315334600583471 is definitely not strong, so Z_p^* has many small subgroups.
The New York Times explains how it got hacked
approximate pacific ocean volume = 7.24176e24 cm^3

median ocean water density = 1.028 g/cm^3

temperature difference = 1 deg C

specific heat of water = 4186 J/(g·K)

multiply all together should = energy required to heat the ocean by 1 deg C is 3.12e+28 J

Maybe one day! Haha
John Carmack's account of the Lunar Challenge flights.
Botha took the words out of my mouth:

Roelof Botha: I don’t like it. Money was invented for a reason, we’ve seen people try to use beans etc. and it doesn’t work. I wouldn’t invest.

What problem does this company solve that banks and bond markets don't solve with incomparably greater efficiency?
This reminds me: did anything ever come of Zed's "Curing Python's Neglect" blog post? He wrote:

> but I realize that none of this will be fixed until
> there’s a cultural shift in Python away from this
> habit of Neglect.

Did that end up motivating any positive change?
If you already have a predicate function, it is not hard to say

all(filter(f, items))

Composing calls like this looks cleaner than incorporating into the function interface all list manipulations that the implementor expects you to want.
Cartoon: Stress test failure
Gotcha, I was thinking along the lines of staringispolite 23. Either way, Pip > Ocean
True happiness is akin to achieving enlightenment. It takes years to even realize what happiness actually means, and I guess it's something different for every person. Then you have to care enough to pursue your definition of happiness, which includes overcoming a lot of fears.

The flow chart is pretty spot on though. I think it's sort of implied that 'change something' starts the cycle over again.
Hate to rain on the parade but I don't see this going anywhere unless they use humans to transcribe the phone calls which presents privacy issues.
Speech rec simply isn't there yet.
Hurting cows - I just wanted to point out that if you love having cows around, you might be in for a surprise. Without a judgment, just that it might be an unexpected consequence - just as a lot of other actions that seem ethical might actually backfire.

"The evidence (look up "demographic transition") shows that the only reliable way to decrease birth rates is to decrease death rates."

I don't know about that, but I know that in my country (which has a very good welfare system) there is a lot of discussion about the poor and uneducated having more kids than other parts or society. And their kids tend to go the same route, that is, they tend to end up on welfare. That might be sensationalist reporting of our newspapers, though. Also not saying that the solution would be to "curb" the birth rates - you might find a twist to make the kids fare better than their parents or whatever. I don't know - but it makes me wary about incentives and treating everybody equally. People are not equal - I wish for everybody to have a good live and a fair chance (and that includes if you are born dumb - which might mean you can't take advantage of chances, and it is not your fault - but then what if suddenly a lot of people are dumb - a ka idiocracy?).

Also, about the demographic curve - how come human history is a history of war, struggle and genocide? So people had kids because they were afraid their kids might die, but then they didn't die so they had to exterminate their neighbors to get more room to live?

From my experience, not everybody is friends with everybody. I trust your friends from MIT would feed me if I ended up under a bridge, even if in my previous life I had been a drug dealer?

"I don't say people are just deluded, I say they're often confused."

Sure, but how can you make sure that you are right? The cookies example seems like a no-brainer, but maybe it isn't. Maybe the world would be a worse place without cookies.

"not just spout random ideas you have."

That sounds as if you are entitled to an opinion and I am not. Why - because you read more books on the subject than I did?

For what it's worth, I suspect trying to create value is probably the best way to make the world a better place. If there is enough food, people don't need to fight over it. Thanks to technology, normal people can live today as kings used to live in former times. So it seems to me advancing technology helps the most.
Honestly I thought the question was rather pointless to begin with.

Sprint didn't make the Pre. Sprint doesn't compete with the iPhone. The iPhone is a device, Sprint is a carrier. The iPhone may very well end up on Sprint in the not-too-distant future.

Also, if you look at the subtext, you might see that Hesse is delivering a veiled attack on the iPhone--that it's all about branding and hive mind. Michael Jordan was a great basketball player, but he was far from the greatest, even during his career. His style and flash are what got him his place in the spotlight, just like the iPhone.
Hey, that's cuil!
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Yext does seem pretty useful for a small business that is getting a lot of calls and perhaps doesn't have a person able to triage the calls. Perhaps they will win, though I'm not convinced. They seem to have setup a big hurdle they'll have to get over that we in the tech-web bubble like to forget; namely that not everyone in the world is so web and computer focused, especially in the market they are after. In fact I believe the Yext presenter stated himself that the businesses they talked to preferred receiving phone calls when obtaining business. So maybe their solution will work for many businesses, or maybe the speech => text won't be good enough and it will be another annoyance that a pen and pad of paper can solve just as well.

Why do you think it will win?

An aside about tc50 in general:

I feel like a lot of the products I saw today were taking shots in the dark, and trying to solve problems they felt the need to convince the audience existed. I didn't feel that there was a lot of innovation or the sensation that the software / products demoed would really make my life or others lives better. It felt more like the presenters were taking problems that have already been solved outside of the web and trying to bridge the gap between the current solutions and online solutions. That's not to say doing so they won't be successful, but it did leave me feeling constantly disappointed, like I was being sold a bill of goods while having someone yelling at me about how my life will be so much better by using their service. I should add 1) I didn't watch every presentation and 2) I think I've been having a bad day so maybe it's just rubbing off on watching the demos.
Implementing Data Parallel Haskell
Hey Google, gimme back my widgets
Experience trumps theory every time.
Aaaaghhh....page...by...page...

Surprisingly, does not include the Goupil Golf, which I had the displeasure of building and maintaining for a few short months in 1990: http://musepat.club.fr/ggolf.htm
somebody want to explain this?

infinity = 1.0e400
Switching to out-of-site has two big benefits:
1. OkCupid's chat system is horrible, and results in lots of missed messages.
2. An IM handle gives an easy way to ping people later, the other person is subscribing to be IM'd by you in the future.
I sell tickets on the secondary market, so I'll answer for them. They aren't doing it because it's risky and the margins are small. Probably the least risky thing they could do with ticket trading is monitoring ticket listings in real time and buying ones that are listed below the prevailing market price, for events that are expected to have an increase in prices over time. However, 85% of events decrease in price as it gets closer to the event, until the last 48 hours which are harder to predict. Of course, the most money is to be made from buying from Ticketmaster at face value before events sell out.

Also, the secondary ticket market is very sensitive to momentum, so if SeatsGeek did a lot of trading they could unintentionally move the market in ways that cancelled out their profit.

They can make more reliable money from the affiliate fees on their sites. The prices for sold out events may vary by 40%, but the sites like Stubhub and Ticket Network take another 20% which makes it very difficult to flip tickets for already sold out events.

Something that often works better is short selling tickets for events that haven't gone on sale yet -- the price will crash down to the true market value after the market has more than a few tickets available.
Now I want to know who else is living in UTC-10 (who else is living in Hawaii!)
Poll: Thoughts on a Boston/ Cambridge HN Meetup?
Do you live in the Boston area? If so, would you be interested in grabbing a beer sometime?

*Note: Only answer if you are living in the Boston area. And if you answer yes, please leave your email in the comments.
(Not to put anyone down) I agree with you about the demos, except Yext.

I believe they hold promise - outside of their core "local search" business, if they port some additional/basic features of crm's into their app I believe they would be head & shoulders above pretty much everyone doing crm/contact management.
Udorse Leverages Facebook Photos For Social Product Endorsements
You seriously have 800 cable channels?
The importance of User Experience
Our rule demands one do everything they can to help the poorest -- not just spending one’s wealth and selling one’s possessions, but breaking the law if that will help.

Sounds simply dreadful. Not an attractive way to live and not an attractive society to live in.

Not that normal people would ever try to live this way. I suppose you could terrorize them into saying they were trying to live this way.

By the way, breaking into buildings, stealing food, and then donating some money to a fashionable cause is thrill seeking and attention whoring, not philanthropy.
Sure... as long as those nanobots know where the nutrient solution stops and us people begin.
Ellipses have major and minor radii; in circles, both are the same length. Attributes in these kinds of objects are a bit of a red herring, though, as one set of attributes can be calculated from another, and vice versa. A circle can be described as a parametric function of angle, x = r * cos(t), y = r * sin(t); or the more familiar r^2 = x^2 + y^2. Which attributes you choose as the canonical, and which you choose to calculate, is just an implementation detail.

FWIW, I've felt for some time that the benefits of object orientation have been over-emphasized, though the general pattern of industry and language development has been moving in a better direction of late (say past 5 years).

I also have no well of respect for Uncle Bob - that's not to say he isn't a very intelligent, wise guy with lots of insightful things to say, it's just that I haven't read much of his stuff, and had never heard of him until a few months ago. But when I read him try to make an analogy between types in a program representing things in the world, and two lawyers advocating for a divorcing couple, and saying that since it's not the lawyers that are divorcing, you shouldn't model your types in an isomorphic correspondence to the things in the world you're modelling, well then, I think he's overreaching. If all your world is immutable rectangles, and you need to handle squares differently, and you're solidly orthodox in your subscription to OO, then I think modelling the relationship with inheritance is perfectly fine. In static languages, the fact that inheritance creates a subtyping relationship and introduces the possibility of polymorphism and dynamic dispatch is usually more interesting than the inherited scope of member lookup.
I would be very scared about the long-term prospects of a company whose customers were defined by "inability to pay for goods and services critical to our business needs."

The whole startups-targeting-startups thing strikes me as a bit of Valley-thinking, too. Its like people think there is a parallel virtual economy where there is an entire ecosystem of venture capital, startups receiving venture capital, startups servicing startups receiving venture capital, web designers working for startups servicing startups receiving venture capital, etc etc, and no one has to actually sell anything to real people at any point. I think this virtual economy is a consensual fantasy which crashes with reality every couple of years.
hm. "And sure, when things crash and you fsck and you didn't even get a clue about what went wrong, you get frustrated."

It seems that a serial console, even though it doesn't give you as much info as a full kernel dump, would at least give you the panic message and a back trace, which is usually enough clue to figure out what happened or to ask for help.