skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I don't know any accountants or optometrists very well, but I wouldn't be surprised if the passionate ones spent time outside of work learning about the latest advancements in their respective fields.

My grandmother was a corporate tax specialist for AT&T, she certainly seemed to enjoy doing her personal income taxes (and those of some of my uncles and aunts). This was way before Turbotax, Taxcut, and the variety of programs that have made it less unpleasant.
Pretty sure Snow Leopard was a release aimed at doing just that, rewriting a lot of the core system libraries for x86_64 and also clearing house on a lot of old cruft. No new real features were delivered with the release.
(LUT = LookUp Tables, for anyone that is confused)
Cars provide an illusion of freedom. Yes, you can get in the car and go "anywhere" on a very extensive and well-maintained road network. A good thing? Absolutely. On the other hand, a saccade in your attention (and those happen to everyone, albeit rarely) can have fatal consequences, you can be ticketed for driving at an objectively safe speed (posted speed limits can be well below design speeds, often by intention) and total costs, amortized, are somewhere near $20-30 per hour of driving. (Gas is only a small part of it.) Then there's parking, which is a fucking nightmare if you go anywhere interesting in a populated area. Having access to a car for a weekend trip is great; the car-dependent lifestyle is the absence of freedom.

Suburbia was supposed to kill the urban "slum landlords" but, for the average "middle class" (actually upper-working class; true middle class starts around 85th percentile) American, the car is the new landlord. So many people work hard just to afford the car they need in order to get to work. It's a huge waste of resources.

Also, I think that the suburban lifestyle is largely about control, especially when it comes to children. The suburban parent has to set up "play dates" and thus gets to control who the kids' friends are and make sure they're only exposed to the "right" social classes. The downside of this is that depriving children and adolescents of so much independence just makes parenting a monstrous, 18-year, chore. The "Calvin and Hobbes" childhood is impossible when the land is cut to pieces by roads. Since the current crop of kids is so controlled by their parents that they need a chaperone just to take a piss in the woods, the result for "middle class" parents is that having children means they no longer have a life. (The true middle class and upper-middle-class suffer less sacrifice; they can afford nannies and boarding schools and such.) It's not a way to live, IMO.

That said, I'm not as much of a booster of the "traditional city" as the OP. You simply can't have a city like New York without a lot of public transit. The wealth generation that comes from large cities (2+ million) is that they allow extreme economic specialization, but you don't get that unless people have rapid access to a large number of people.

Also, as ugly as the 20+ story apartment buildings may be, we're going to need them in order to make housing affordable... and that may just be a losing battle at this point. We also need to stop letting corrupt foreign officials buy real estate in New York and San Francisco, but that's another issue for another time.
If you are a planet, you are going to be ok.
> we advocate the prohibition of sales to people under 21.

What a fucking racists! The article started so well.
I definitely believe this is part of the business strategy for OS vendors. Microsoft actually successfully did this with new versions of Windows too, up until Vista (their incentives were less direct since they didn't produce the hardware directly, but they still got a royalty for every new PC purchased with a Windows license, which was all of them). Every new version of Windows would require a comparatively beefy machine to successfully run. Vista wasn't all that different in its requirements differential, but the market had started demanding devices that traded down computing power for more convenient form factor (the first generation of netbooks were big when Vista hit the streets) and expecting these devices to run Vista just as fast as they had run XP. Microsoft's failure to anticipate this shift in consumer behavior is mostly responsible for Vista's bad reputation.

Apple can continue to behave this way specifically because only Apple makes hardware that runs Apple software. If they opened up to third parties and someone created a computationally weaker but aesthetically preferable device that ran their software they'd be in trouble.
Physicists discuss quantum pigeonhole principle
Many commenters on this thread point out that people don't have time to code, or have other interests, and question what other profession expects people to give up their free time to continue work.

This is not unrealistic in other professions as well, maybe just not as easily recognizable. I have friends who are Ad execs and love advertising as an art, they'll often discuss ideas they've had, things they've been thinking, etc. etc. which is outside the scope of their work. It may be the client they'd like to bring in and the ideas they have to improve that client's business, etc. etc.
What about doctors who vicariously keep up on all the latest knowledge in their field and are actively collaborating with other doctors on discoveries and research (my sister does this as a veteranarian, and is also randomly helping people in the park on a Saturday morning who have questions about their pets, as well as doing a spot on the local news about caring for your pets).
This is unpaid/hobby work, but it isn't as concrete as what we do, and therefore, people don't consider it.

We aren't the only group that is passionate about what we do, and we aren't the only one's who work on our craft outside of work hours.

I think a better way to take what the author is saying is that he is looking for people who look at software development as a craft, and people who are so passionate about it that they are constantly engaged in their craft even outside of work hours. They love what they do so much that they just can't stop.

At the same time, I think it is important for employers to recognize when and if they need somebody who meets this criteria.
There is another possibility we should consider: a society that has retained the capacity to operate and maintain technology, but not create or understand it. We seem to be increasingly moving toward such an era -- I don't have numbers, but I think the ratio of people who understand technology versus those who use them has been gradually dropping over the past fifty years, mainly because more and more people are using technology and the technology is becoming automated. A scientifically illiterate society with giant mining machines is not entirely outside the realm of possibility.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8056597

"Skimming three chapters reveals no sign that the author of the above book knows first-year undergraduate economics, why the current economy is arranged the way it is, or what policy tradeoffs would be involved in their hopeful ideas. May I recommend to you the standard introductory text Intermediate Microeconomics by Hal Varian, which I recently gave to a friend of mine?"
So you want to move your startup to Silicon Valley Now what?
Swift should theoretically deliver faster apps with less message passing overall and other big improvements.

At the end of the day the latest phones need to keep up with competitors and added features and resimplified experiences that are more costly to implement cannot be avoided. The only way to really avoid it is disallowing older phones to upgrade - which is far less desirable IMO.
This is awesome! Necessity is the mother of invention, and all that. The idea of using lispy syntax while dropping the requirement for the outermost pair of parentheses is definitely a neat idea - I'll try the shell out in practice to see how much easier it makes usage, but it seems like it would allow for 99% of the consistency of Lisp/Scheme less 20% of the annoyance for general shell usage.

Looking forward to what's in store.
You were downvoted, but my experience (submarine fleet, USN) mirrored yours.

Likewise I wouldn't even know where to begin to describe it, so much of what I learned was tacit knowledge.

Though I wouldn't necessarily use the reserves as an example of what the active component is like, at least in the U.S. If you end up at a reserve unit that never deploys then you'd likely come away with a very different experience than going active duty (or active duty first and then falling back to reserves).

I'd also say that many people could gain a lot personally from what they'd learn with military service, but you have to have a compatible-enough personality. Most team-based constructs do not work nearly as well if the team doesn't have enough 'chemistry', and the military is no different (which is why we weed out recruits who 'fail to adapt').
It doesn't mean you can't have created a sub-project of a larger project, if you want to get picky with semantics which doesn't seem to be the nature of the interview.
Orwell's answer to this is interesting, for those who haven't read it.
AFAIK in a lot of places knowingly transmitting an STD is a illegal. I guess the key part is 'knowingly.'
That is a true statement, about Wall St. Less true about C-level, until you hit pretty big companies. A typical C-level or VP-level earns between $200k and $500k, typically towards the lower-end of that (obviously, Fortune 500 would be millions for CEO -- I'm basing this on companies of ~100 employees).

I don't know typical Wall St. income, but the friends I have there are around $300k. You can cite Google and Apple employees too as spending $50+ on clothing. That's all the elite.

Median household income is $51k in the US. That's 1/3-1/6 of a single salary at Google (and most have working spouses as well). It's perhaps 1/6 of Wall St. That translates into many times that difference in disposable income.

I appreciate the appeal of making products for people similar to yourself, but if you think that makes for a good business plan, compare you $750MM in revenue to TJ Max with $18B in revenue, Gap at $13B, Ross at $10B, etc. If you look at relative prices, that's probably about 100x as many items of clothing sold.
Said commenting, not silently reading. "Ok you worked here... and here... you worked on this? Ok..." without saying "explain your work here" etc.
Why do we need a new 'real programming language'?
https link that is not shortened: https://pay.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2bti96/the_nas...
Or that their new phone feels slower than promised, and those Googling are the owners of the new models?
Last month attempted to integrate it into a product that needed something in between local storage and IndexedDB. All the fallbacks worked perfectly. But the lack of an index (and therefore the inability to do bulk reads) was a deal-breaker. I ended up going for IndexedDB with a WebSql-based polyfill.
I took the NYT quote from Eduardo Romano to mean that after controlling for some of those confounding factors, there was no evidence of increased risk. I posted the NYT article because the abstract didn't mention much about marijuana specifically.

Specifically, drivers who test positive for marijuana or self-report using marijuana are more than twice as likely as other drivers to be involved in motor vehicle crashes.

Without having read the study, do you know if this statistic controls for age or anything else? If so, I stand corrected.

Thanks for your polite tone, it's not every day I get called a "fucking moron" before 7 a.m. :)
What Chinese Dumplings Have to Do With Global Warming
Hardly less valuable. It's not like news search is the killer function of Google's services.
> arbitrarily small citations fall under this law, and it includes hyperlinks.

Is this law retroactive? What do you do with the already existing links on the Spanish web and Spanish wikipedia ? It's not just a Google tax, it's a Hypertext tax.
I suspect it'd be easier to just move your global, internet operation out of Spain completely with no legal ties for them to sue you with.
No kidding, any Maps user can see their GPS location being collected when they use Maps. I think mynameisvlad may mean they wouldn't necessarily know if you stopped at a specific place as part of the location data collected when you're not using Maps, because in that case it may not use GPS. But I have a nice phone, battery life isn't really a concern to me, some software on the phone probably knows that too, and I don't trust the word of a random person on HN that the software wouldn't do an opportunistic GPS look up at least every now and then. In any case I want my phone to use GPS whenever it can so that it's as accurate as it can be, that's why I have in my settings GPS always enabled, with high accuracy (uses GPS, wi-fi, and mobile networks) and indeed I have Google Location Reporting on as well which looks up my location throughout the day whether or not I'm using Maps.
I've been using wreq (https://github.com/substack/wreq) recently and it's worked a treat. Yes, it hasn't been committed to in 3 years - but I've had 0 problems with it. It just works like you'd expect it to work.
The Judges Approving the NSA's Surveillance Requests Keep Buying Verizon Stock
So the real question now becomes - which organizations with political clout are still fighting to keep Marijuana illegal?

I've actually never smoked weed in my entire life (seriously). I have no interest in smoking weed once it is legal either. But I'm very sick of paying to support a stupid wasteful policy. So who are the people that are actually fighting to keep it illegal? I honestly can't find them, I'd love to read their arguments.
We seem to have this huge fear of humanity collectively forgetting things, this idea that has seeped into so much fiction as well, but is it really founded?

Even before digital storage and the like, is there really any relevant information that has been lost in the past 150 years? And as to the whole "language barrier" thing, we figured out hieroglyphs with a much smaller corpus.

Hell, we know about the meaning of loads of sites from over a thousand years ago.

I feel like we'll have ways of knowing what the site contains forever.
Re: samsung: while they don't make the operating system, they do bundle apps and sometimes even their own filesystem (Galaxy S1). This particular filesystem made android slow.
I don't know much about PowerShell, although I've heard it's good but somewhat verbose (something I can't stand). I should probably read more about it to see what lessons it has, but of course, as an OS X user, I can't use it.
I'm curious - do you source your fabric within mainland China mainland, or import it? I live in Beijing, and have found the selection and quality of fabrics at tailors in Beijing quite lacking (compared to Hong Kong tailor shops, or compared to ready-to-wear shirts from Charles Tyrwhitt).
Can’t seem to find your contact information here on HN so I have just shot you through an email to your support email.
> [Google] uses coarse location (GPS being too taxing on battery to get constant location updates) which has an accuracy of 100+ meters.

You mean Google Maps -- the app -- doesn't use location data from GPS? I am pretty sure that isn't true.

If you meant Google Maps -- the service -- then the sentence doesn't make much sense, since it doesn't use any location service on the mobile directly. It is just interfacing with the mobile app over a network.
Ask HN: Traction, but no scalability, nor revenue model
I recently restored The Technicolor Web Of Sound, a fantastic 60s psychedelic radio station that went offline in 2011: http://tunein.com/radio/Technicolor-Web-Of-Sound-Redux-s223835/.

It has 25 followers, regular listeners, and one evangelist.

However, this not really a "startup" business with rapid scalability nor revenue model.

That said, it has the beginnings of traction (listeners, growth, passionate reception). Having tried two startups previously, I appreciate just how difficult and rare it is to get even a small amount of traction.

My question is, should I continue to pump time and energy into this at the expense of some of my other side-projects, some of which I believe to be far more lucrative, but without traction yet.

In other words, I've (re)built something that a few people absolutely love. And if I understand pg and others writings, this is an incredibly important first step in building a successful business.

Perhaps the best strategy is to just have faith that I will eventually hit upon an idea to generate revenue and make it scalable to large numbers of people.

E.g. one idea might be to take the best ideas behind TWOS redux and apply it to a plethora of other music genres. Make a large number of very good radio stations, think soma.fm.
Keep in mind the people that he reported the issue to are at least 3 steps removed from the people that change the design. There are the military guys that use the equipment (including his commanding officer), there are the military guys that spec the equipment, there are civilians that work directly for the military that oversee its design, and then there are civilians at a military contractor that actually design it.

I was the last step in that change for a few years - a civilian for a contractor that designed weapons. I would have loved the opportunity to talk to the 'users' to get feedback. It was seemingly impossible due. This was either due to unintentional bureaucracy, or purposeful separation of people for security measures. I'll never know. But it's entirely possible that his commanding officer was completely sympathetic and thought the design was fucked up, but had no idea where to go to get it changed.
Relevant:

http://www.businessinsider.com/police-unions-and-pharmaceuti...

https://mayday.us/
Clickable: http://tunein.com/radio/Technicolor-Web-Of-Sound-Redux-s2238...
This is specifically about technical interviews as one of several steps, though. "What is your plan for being effective in this job" is the kind of question that, in the OP's three-step interview, should be asked by the manager.

My current employer has candidates do a brief presentation about a project they are proud of. It's useful but imperfect (some people just aren't good at speaking to a group, which is okay for this job; some people aren't legally permitted to go into a lot of detail about their earlier projects).
Because it's both a real programming language and a shell, which is rare.
Airports are a fine substitute if you're going from one major city to another, but I sure wouldn't have flown from Houghton to Traverse. It was only when I moved to Boston that not having a car meant freedom.
RPC has to solve the type protocols issue often. Eg Google's protocol buffers.
This is something the OP doesn't discuss well. The "traditional city" provides a sense of beauty and "place" for the tourist, but it's an annoyance for people who live there. Housing gets expensive, quality goes down over time, and building up becomes impossible. Living without a dishwasher, as one might have to do in old housing that can't be economically upgraded, gets old really quick. That's not to say that "traditional city" equals "no dishwasher"; I'm only pointing out that there are some serious hassles (noise, expense) to that way of living.

The driver-centric planning of the US is pretty terrible, because cutting your urban land with ribbons that are dangerous to cross, unpleasant to look at and hear, and utter non-places turns out to have catastrophic effects on urban life, even in objectively great cities like Chicago and New York. I will agree with that. I don't think that four-story buildings and narrow streets are a workable solution. That will just make everywhere decent unaffordable, so you'll need transit or large towers nearby anyway to keep the local economy from falling to shit in bad times.

What we've learned about the car is that it scales horribly. Robert Moses re-designed cities for the car because he was an elitist asshole. At that time, most working class people didn't have cars. "Parkways" were thus named because he intended them as actual motoring parks (for rich people). In the 1940s, cars became affordable to average people and promised to "disrupt" urban landlords-- a hard thing to oppose, as anyone who's lived in New York or London will agree-- by making previously useless land livable. However, we found out that when everyone drives, the result is congestion, misery, pollution, and actually surprisingly expensive. Between insurance and gas and maintenance and parking-- and the suburbs actually failing to be affordable except far away from urban centers and jobs-- the car became the new landlord in suburbia.

I agree fully with OP that suburbia is ill-planned (who doesn't?) and that car-centric cities are a mistake. But the 21st century is going to call for something new and transit will have to be a big part of it. Personally, I think we should tax the tits off of landlords and real estate owners (beyond one house, owner-inhabited) and use the money to build a first-rate rapid transit system. Since their wealth comes directly from inefficiency of geography, we should tax them to pay to fix that inefficiency. It's only fair that those who benefit from a bad situation be called upon to pay to fix it.
>Maybe if you turned a side project into a real business, or were a senior contributor on a large, long-lived open-source project, or something like that.

Well that is exactly the point.

The idea of some amazing "code monkey" detached from real life requirements, constraints and development timelines is a fiction and does not represent reality. The best developers have a deep understanding of the tools and the applications and it is that devotion that I am referencing.

There are in fact people that think in terms of building new things through code ALL THE TIME - and then implement them. Those people are going to have an advantage in the hiring process.
"Common opinion dictates that we need the state to take care of public health; thus, in common opinion, public health is an issue of crime and punishment."

Your logic is incorrect. The vast majority of the time in fact, public health is absolutely not an issue of crime and punishment.
PowerShell is a great source of inspiration (I went through a PowerShell reference book before I started Elvish), but IMO it's too complex and has too many (avoidable) pitfalls.
Sigh. I thought it would be obvious to people that I was speaking of traction. Ruby and Python were not viable Enterprise options back then. And even if someone claims they were, they did not have that perception.

Yes, I could've been more precise in my wording. But a lot of people could be less pedantic too. I already interact with a compiler all day long. Didn't think I was talking to a bunch of compilers here too.
Theoretically, those are the same thing.
> I just drove half way across the UK. Google knows that because I was using Google maps.

I think you're a little confused.
Whilst reading up on the evolution of our current economy may be worthwhile to get a fuller understanding of human behaviour, I do not see what relevance it has in understanding how a fundamentally different economy would work. We don't expect chemists to study alchemy, we expect them to work with current day ideas of best practices. Its clear our current economic practices are fundamentally broken, they're almost a lesson in what not to do.
Really? Illegal drugs are an enormous business, I'd guess the people currently making money from it would be fighting to keep it illegal. The same goes for the police/DEA/etc who are paid to enforce the law.
... and a few more mentioned here:

http://www.republicreport.org/2012/marijuana-lobby-illegal/