skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think a good reference for what people mean by "designed by committee" is to look at the reference spec for a language.

I remember picking up the Common Lisp reference book in my college library. It was one of the thickest books in the entire CS section. Obviously much thicker than any books on Scheme, but even on the same level as "The C++ Programming Language". And the latter spends a lot more time explaining things than the Lisp book did.

CL is a huge and complex language, and I'm still not sure why there are 80 different ways to loop. It's a confusing language, with not nearly as much orthogonality as it could have.
Wonder how and where they recruit their top-talent. Pretty much every top scorer in my school went to Facebook/Google/Msft/Amzn. The mediocre ones went to Northrop Grumman/Raytheon/Rockwell and the like.
tl;dr: the optimum solution is not found in the extremes
It also makes things difficult for those of us who are trying to make a living out of education/training.

I get that people do it for passion, I enjoy sharing knowledge too, and in an ideal world where I didn't have to earn money, I'd be doing it along with everyone else as part of a great virtuous cycle.

However, the current situation is mostly at odds with making a career out of education. I really can't invest as much time as I'd like into educational work because I have a family to support, and I barely break even on the hours invested.

It means that trying any new interesting approaches is out of the question, and advanced topics with a smaller audience are unlikely to see the light of day, which is a pity.

But I guess as long as there is a supply of people willing to do this kind of work on top of a regular job, the situation will only become more entrenched.
>James Siebe, a lawyer in Coeur d’Alene, put it another way: “Come on vacation, leave on probation.”

Who the hell is going to Idaho for a vacation aside from neo-Nazis.
I don't think it has to solve a problem. It just has to make it easier for people to do things that they're already doing, only better and/or cheaper and/or faster.

That said, your questions are valid. Yes, people memorialize their pets, and many do it online. For many, their deaths are as affecting as losing a human relative, and humans have memorial sites.

How will this site reach those people? How many will actually want to use the service? And would they pay for something they could do for free on an ad-hoc basis on a different website?

This is just my gut talking, but they should probably pivot to provide an end-to-end, just-lost-a-pet wizard (NOT a native app, but a website). Step 1 connects you with a crematorium, step 2 lets you buy an urn, step 3 lets you send invites to friends/family for a service, step 4 lets you set up the memorial page.

I know that might sound ridiculous, but losing a pet can be expensive and time-consuming, just as it can be when you lose a human. People just want to be connected with inexpensive services quickly, and Forever Fluffy could take a very small cut for making the connection.
To get a sense of how big a problem this is - americans reportedly had to recover 2 Billion USD* as a result of nigerian scams in 2013 alone, followed by China at $1750M, UK at $1210M and India at $870M.

What % of that was recovered is unknown.

Any team recovering even a small percentage of this makes it a fine acquisition target for the biggest banks in the world for a solution that works.

time saved in prevention of fraud; is time saved for banks not handling fraud, angry customers or hiring lawyers or training staff.

Expect one team applying to YC, trying to tackle this problem.

[*] See page 33 of http://www.ultrascan-agi.com/public_html/html/pdf_files/Pre-...
TL;DR: Aspergers is now considered part of the Autism Spectrum Disorder.
I think rather than using decimal numbering system lots of your logic (like finding the parent square, or all its children), if not all of it, really calls for a binary scheme: like this: First two bits defines which quad you are in (relative to root square), then the second two bits represents which quad within the quad you are in, and on down recursively. The number of bits in your system is perfectly determinable based on the granularity, you go for. Then bit masks, can be used for determining what are all the children of a given block (as integers), and what are all the parents. So the definition of your bit sequence IS 1) as efficient as possible with storage, 2) provides actual "free functionality" by bit masks, and so forth.
Actually the "immobilizer" (basically a kill-switch) is cited as one of the main reason that cars are less stolen today ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8166698
I don't see anywhere that it discloses what is being sent, just that it's sending something. Did I miss something?
Change "rich white tech workers" to "Mulsim" or "Indian". People move, things change, if you've got a problem with white techy folk driving house prices up then I'm sure you also have a problem with various amounts of South Asian immigration driving house prices down.

Anti-immigration / anti-change is stupid. Nobody would be where they are today if change never happened. Get off my lawn.
But aren't you making an assumption here that I have full, transparent knowledge of both the short-term and long-term efficiency of charity X and Y?

The diversification buys me reduced risk of concentrated failure, I would assume just the same in philanthropy. If I give 100% of my donation to one organization, and it turns out they "perform" worse than I expected, it may have been better to split my donation among multiple organizations all of whom I expect to be highly efficient but cannot necessarily predict. Particularly in cases of multi-millions or billions when, even split, the money will meet a minimum threshold to make a difference.
Clicking downloads big WMV file.

Please don't do this on HN.
Yes, absolutely. You are safer not saying anything.
> Could someone with relevant industry insight comment as to why we're not just using IMEI blacklists?

They generally don't work across national boundaries. A large fraction of the market for phones stolen from California is overseas.
My experience in school (and grad school) was similar, so I've been curious about the same thing. Perhaps, they only recruit folks from the industry after they've worked for a while and have specialized?
One Weird Trick to Baseline-Align Text
Why do you want to avoid it? Shouldn't you encourage it?
Sage builds and is tested on OS X 10.6 to 10.9, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Suse and Solaris 10. See http://wiki.sagemath.org/SupportedPlatforms
I think the data that is stored on phones will still make them a target. A better reference would be stolen laptops... I wonder how much they get stolen nowadays. (The TSA seems to have tons of them left a check points, so who knows what that means. http://www.americanownews.com/story/22046003/12000-laptops-l...)
Hence the name 'United States', and not Germany or Canada.
The Company doesn't exactly encourage recruits to advertise their new position. You mostly see people just vanish for a while. Young recruitment is largely done through direct faculty recommendations at schools, so it's more of a "don't find us, we'll find you" proposition.
It's interesting watching it unfold in real-time. I've expressed opinions that could be considered 'anti-gentrification' in the past, but the process itself is basically unstoppable. Attempts to stem the flow of gentrification arguably cause much more harm in the long run (e.g. as the author notes, disallowing high-rises most likely just increases the cost of existing units considerably).

The cynic in me wonders whether existing residents are just attempting to (and succeeding in) increase the value of their real-estate investments (however small) under the guise of protesting gentrification, though that might be a little far-fetched.

Ultimately it's an incredibly fascinating process to watch. I don't know that I'd exactly call it xenophobia, but it is incredibly interesting to see the gentrified residents use arguments very similar to larger anti-immigration arguments (e.g. 'they dont fit in with the local culture, they dont even try to integrate, they ruin my livelihood'), arguments that are often used to target those same resident populations on a national scale.
Do you think there would be a penalty for the shotgun wedding?
I used to buy a lot of technical books, but the last few books on topics like programming or web development that I bought are still sitting on my shelf mostly unread, and I'm not sure I've bought any new ones for several years now.

There is a simple reason for that, which has nothing to do with the economics of writing books or even the editorial quality: with the pace of the industry today, the material in a technical book about any specific development tool or technique or language may well be obsolete before it even hits the shelves.

If there were more technical books with general accumulated wisdom, insightful analysis, and advice that will stand the test of time, I'd be interested. If they had good production quality and editorial standards, I'd be even more interested (because frankly, hardly any of the last few computing books I bought did, even those from supposedly respectable publishers).

But take a look at the new releases lists on Amazon, and certainly at the bestsellers lists or what you find in a bricks 'n' mortar bookshop, and almost everything published in the past few years has either a version number or a "for dummies/beginners" tag in the title. Chances are that I can get material at least as good, often much better, and almost always more up-to-date, just by identifying a few experts on-line and browsing their blog/articles/project docs. Printed books are obsolete as a mechanism for conveying information on these subjects.

In short, there are a few classics in computing fields that still sell well, but how many books destined to become classics have been published in these fields in the past decade? And for anything that isn't, why would anyone buy the limited, ephemeral book when the Internet exists?
This is particularly interesting in combination with Gregory Clark's ("The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility") research into social mobility and relative fecundity by social strata.
These aren’t isolated bad endings. If you have the time and inclination for a nostalgic stroll through the list, you’ll see many more such disappearances.

This seems to be true at the smallest scales of businesses as well as the largest ones. I wrote about the phenomenon among smaller businesses here: "In business there are very few true partnerships" http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2014/06/06/in-business-there-a... .

A lot of junior consultants take a surprisingly long time to learn this. Evidently a lot of large companies suffer the same challenges.
I'm curious, how much is that Rackspace bill?

EDIT: Also, what resources are you using?
Haskell was designed by committee, and it's exactly the opposite of the stereotype: it's a small language with orthogonal features and a clean syntax. The few "features" the language has, like list comprehensions and do notation, are defined by simple translations into the rest of the language.

http://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/
I just wanted to point out that compiling ruby code to .nes has to be the single coolest thing I've seen all year. I mean it. I would love to either fork or contribute to this and provide support for GB/GBC/GBA games.

Amazing work!
1 in 5 adults is "impossible"? By what logic? There is nothing remotely impossible about that.
I love this, thank you. I've picked up a few things in the past hour just by trying to replicate the demos.
It's an interesting article, but I'm not sure I buy it. Boiled down, it sounds like the author is arguing for philanthropists to have only one cause. But maybe I care equally about helping this generation with hunger and future generations with saving the rainforest. I get that I could help hunger more by redirecting my rainforest money, but why is it logically the case that I should?

Also, I find it interesting that the article discusses multiple causes, but not multiple organizations within one cause. There are hundreds if not thousands of organizations focused on cancer - to which do I give my donation? Only one?
Alternatively, look at R6RS[1]. 90 pages, including the index. That language is also designed by committee, and looks like it, too. An effective committee, that is.

[1]: http://www.r6rs.org/final/r6rs.pdf
Take everything you read online with a grain of salt. People with good experiences with any companies usually won't take the time to post about it.
This, as with most of Greenwald's work on this subject, has been a slow effort to educate people about a very technical (for the average person) topic. Building on previous reports that showed the type of activity and the threat it can cause, this installment is about establishing the pattern of illegality.

If the NSA could justify the time and expense to make a search tool, there must be a lot of searching needs... which aren't legal for the NSA to send to the domestic-oriented agencies.

Also, more explicitly-stated details about how powerful "metadata" can be. Obvious to anybody who understands INNER JOIN, but this is still new for most people.

//Of course, I'm sure all this ignoring of warrants and the 4th Amendment, to quote a DOJ lawyer in the recent EFF mess regarding Jewel v NSA, is all for the "national security of this company". (emphasis mine)
Paxil
Jurors deciding not to convict (Jury Nullification http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification ) would speed along a change in law but the penalties for possession are so harsh that most people take the deal in plea bargain.
Now I Know: A Daily Newsletter of Interesting Things
http://www.pbase.com/flying_dutchman/image/157113241

I could be wrong, but I think it would be almost impossible to capture an 8-second exposure while flying and somehow manage to keep the stars from becoming light trails - at least not without some very serious camera stabilization equipment.

Since the photographer didn't seem to mention anything special used for taking the photos, I'm inclined to say they've been 'shopped.
While this is great for certain types of attacks, I wouldn't be surprised if the really smart attacks try to fly under the radar, by distributing traffic and activity. Does this app somehow help detect that?
And they say white people are racist.

Are they saying we should let the slums remain slums? Keep them in their place? Sounds like it.
Saya Mobile Acquihired
This reminds me of a lot of malware like fake AVs and ransomware - very poor spelling and grammar throughout (E.g. "You Computer Is Infected!!!" comes up often.) Although in that case, it might actually be the extent of their English skills since most of this tends to come from non-native-English countries like the far East.
Isn't that standard practice? (genuine question)
It seems that simple, profitable business models are hard to come by these days with tech startups, especially in the SAAS space.
Or 30 seconds for that matter.

http://www.pbase.com/flying_dutchman/image/157113240
What I want to know is if this search tool is the backend for the "parallel construction" application forms[1] from earlier this year?

[1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140203/11143926078/paral...
What happens when I sell the phone? Can you take the tags off? Or am I obligated to use the service if someone sends it back (as the new owner)? Also what happens if in the time that I lost the item, I've replaced it. Then do you keep my phone? Sell it?
Generally, a wiki, usually (though not always) internal / accessible via VPN, though increasingly publicly hosted.

I've used, implemented, and/or administered: Twiki, Atlassian Confluence, Mediawiki (the Wikipedia engine), and others. My general preference is for tools which are already well known and supported, with Mediawiki scoring well on these grounds.

Simply accumulating documents does not constitute a knowledgebase.

The biggest problem is that information ages, it's hard to correlate with other information (so your KB becomes inconsistent over time), and you need to edit, prune, and review. Failures of KBs to remain current indicate a problem of process not of tools, and must be remedied by changes to process, not tools.

I'm increasingly partial to systems which support creation of a book-type document, rather than merely an accumulation of articles (though there may be a place for both). In particular, a lightweight markup (my preferences are LaTeX or Markdown), a solid outline, and a regular review process, are probably a best-practice approach to this specific problem.

What I'd really like to see is a system which marries such an approach with conversations (effectively: a mailing list) and issue tracking (BTS or similar), and which allow for publishing a specific point-in-time document with revision control: PDF, HTML, ePub, etc. The latter are particularly useful as they allow for creating and distributing offline copies of documentation which can prove useful in circumstances in which online access isn't available or convenient (e.g., the server / colo / network has melted down).
I can't see an Arizona jury making this leap to rescue a Mr. Patel.
It sounds like you care not only about Dylan but also about advancing programming language construction in general. Have you considered writing, e.g., blog posts about design decisions you make as you work on Dylan? Maybe it would help other people learn from your work.
Have you ever looked at the moon while driving? It stays in the same position relative to the car, if the car is not turning.

Plane on autopilot + camera steadied by plane body + fisheye lens (which he was using) makes this very believable.

EDIT: not to mention, we are all hurtling around the Earth at around 1,000 miles per hour AS WE SPEAK. If that doesn't produce trails (it doesn't, see my math below), a few extra hundred MPH in a plane doesn't change jack squat.
Chs.xyz: free realtime multiplayer chess in your browser
I'm trying to find where you and others are getting this notion of a 30 second exposure. The watermark on the picture appears to claim 8 seconds and there's nothing else on the site that indicates much more than 8 seconds. Was the post edited at some point?
Got a link?

Are you charging? If not, maybe you should. If you are, maybe you are not charging enough.

Is there any way you can quickly reduce your costs? Anyway to optimize the software to save on hosting?
Ask HN: How can I enjoy my job?
I've been at three companies in just over a year and I'm already at the point where I don't like the third one. I don't know why this keeps happening, but I hope it's something I can fix.

The projects that I work on at these jobs aren't intellectually challenging to me. In addition to that, I seem to be stuck as a front end engineer. When I joined my current company, I made it clear that I want to do backend work, but I haven't done anything but frontend since I started.

There are certain problems that are definitely my fault; the least of which is my inability to deal with other people. Discussions about which design is better are pointless to me. Why don't we just try both and let the data decide? Meetings that are announced at the last second are irritating at best, because they distract me from my work, but I'm required to join anyways.

I want to work with people that are a lot better than me, but (at the risk of sounding arrogant) each time I move to a new company, my team seems to get worse. I'm looking for a place where there is a high level of rigour involved in the software development process.

How can I figure out why I can't enjoy any job that I take? How can I tell if I am the problem? How can I stop doing front end work? How can I identify a good team before accepting the job? Is it bad that I'm moving through jobs so quickly?

Any advice or thoughts are appreciated.
Authorities will ruin an individual's life and nobody will really think much of it. There's no accountability. No logic or sense to pop up at some point and say "this isn't right." No, if they can find a way, they will ruin your life for the most harmless matter.

Meanwhile another suburban soccer mom/dad doctor-shops and snags another prescription for fully legal, powerful opiates. He/she eventually overdoses and dies. Nothing is done.
So basically, spam the spammers? :)
But shorting does not speak of the value as much as what others are willing to pay.
Sorry, I still don't believe it. Even with a fisheye lens and an incredibly stable aircraft, you're still going to see trails. If you don't believe me, I invite you to try it.

EDIT: I assume all the downvoters can provide us with links to their libraries of long-exposure, night aerial photography without using gyros?
The star trails are not going to be very visible with a 10mm lens and the photos are low res. Also have to consider where he's pointing too.

I still see trails on the outer edges of some pics though.
It concerns me greatly that this could lead to more privacy violations.

It does not take a huge stretch of imagination to think that this software could be co-opted to track and report.
Amazon’s Twitch Acquisition Is Too Big to Fail
for this YC batch, it's not ideal. but, in the longer run, finding a good co-founder is likely worth it
Not entirely impossible. A fixed mount for the camera (such as a tripod) would be able to get such an image, assuming steady flying conditions. In 8 seconds, stars would not leave much of a trail on a fish-eye lens (since the field of view is large).
I find it odd that the author takes it for granted that we are in a tech bubble. Is this considered common knowledge nowadays?
The article mentions anti-development being conflated for anti-gentrification: " In San Francisco, residents who resist gentrification do it by blocking the development of new, high-density housing projects. They imagine that the city’s parks and neighborhoods will be destroyed to make way for gated communities of gleaming skyscrapers full of condos."

But, as the article goes on to point out, this also prevents new housing from mitigating the high cost of housing in low supply. The activists are completely wrong, high-density development has traditionally deteriorated surrounding communities - but there are ways to build up housing supply, while maintaining a pleasant civic environment.

But first let's address the activist's points: high density development traditionally has a negative impact on the surrounding urban space. By negative impact I mean things like: gated communities that segregate income classes, skyscrapers that create harsh micro-climates at pedestrian level and all-glass condos that create glare and require incredible heating and cooling energy to be liveable.

So is it possible to integrate high density housing into urban areas while mitigating the negative impact of the surrounding urban environment? Better planning and building codes would do a lot to prevent gated communities and unsustainable building practices. As for building density, which is tangentially related to my area of study (M.Arch candidate) - the best precedents are historic European cities, like Paris. Paris lies at a optimal sweet spot for building density, that allows it to sustain a rich urban life, achieve moderate energy usage (unlike glass condominium tower developments) with relatively modest densities - mid-rise buildings.[1]

So if there's a path forward to deal with gentrification, it will involve amping up the housing supply in the city using an integrated, consistent midrise development patterns. It is possible, but blocking development is incredibly short-sighted, you've got to tackle the development models used in cities.

[1]http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378778802...
The light would also be much bluer if it had passed through any significant quanitity of seawater. Red light attenuates very fast.