skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Technology has shitty leadership, and society as a whole has even worse leadership.

Thiel is right. Global economic growth was 5-6% per year in the 1960s. Now it's around 4%. The main culprit: disinvestment in R&D. Those "cushy jobs" for engineers whom the MBA dickheads claimed "weren't earning their keep" were actually the R&D pushing the country (and the world) forward.

Transportation is another thing we suck at, as a country. We're frozen in the 1960s, but with worst traffic. Trains are expensive and slow, planes are only cheap if you play the constantly changing, convoluted system, and cars are probably up against the limits of human reflexes and the roads.

Finally, the middle class has had its collective face ripped off by the Satanic Trinity (housing, healthcare, tuition costs). Things that used to be comparable to utility bills are now life-wrecking constraints and, because no one has any fucking savings anymore, entrepreneurship is at an all-time low (whatever nonsense the VCs fund isn't entrepreneurship; in that world, investors are just bosses by another name).

Thiel is right. We've had a lack of vision and leadership for a long time and it has really slowed the world down.
Haha, whoops. Thank you.
> then wouldn't let their users export their photos

Huh? They said they would be implementing an export function, have in fact now done so. It can be found here, at the bottom of the page:

http://twitpic.com/account/settings
True, this is very naive and presumes you can sell everything for their accounting values without moving the market price or people realizing what you're doing.

However, $17bn is a pretty big window of error, and this isn't even taking into account the crazy notion that you could keep running the actual business. It has revenues of $1bn a quarter, nothing to sneeze at.
yep, I just fixed it then. Trending on hackernews is not always a good thing.
> However, Y-combinator's partners in particular have a habit of advertising "we don't care as much about your idea as about your team because the idea usually gets overhauled drastically anyway".

This is not true for any ycombinator startup I have worked at. The idea has always been key, but the team is also very important.
Neal Stephenson's Kickstarter Game Is Dead
Stock is not cash. You can't sell it at the current value price. You can't even sell 0.1% of it without driving the price to zero. The liquidity is just not that large.
So strong, pure FP coding will lead to a naturally decomposed system of small pieces -- once the re-factoring is done. There are no large pieces. That's the beauty of it. I believe that the premise of your question is in error.

The sucky part is that there is no guarantee that you will ever get there. A bad programmer or two and you've got a mess. Large FP systems crucially depend on high-quality coding. There is no place for everything to go, that's what the coders figure out!

Contrast that to an OO system, where things go where they naturally belong, but you really don't know what the algorithm is. Hell, you can spend days just wiring stuff up and putting stuff in place before the actual "real" code finds a home. But you always have a plan for where things go.

I don't think you can find a large, complex FP project because I think all the good complex FP projects are clusters of small executables.
The poor are far better off than they were in the 1970s but that doesn't fit the narrative that things are always getting worse. If anything technology is moving too fast for regulation to keep up and any decrease in acceleration could be helpful.
Microsoft would have to sell 92,592,592 copies of minecraft to break even. So far, 16,730,534 have been sold.
Consumer-level quality is not a thing you can easily spec. You're going to give a 3D model to a manufacturer, and they'll put the parting lines, ejector pins and gates wherever is easiest/cheapest to manufacture, not where it'd minimize evidence of molding. You can then spend a lot of time learning about processes and redesigning your form to meet both cost and aesthetic requirements, or you can have someone with manufacturing experience iterating with you from the beginning.
Pretty awesome that voice recognition is also included. Cool.
Is anyone bothered that this has no references, seems like a nice helping of hearsay to me.
> Both of them require you to do exactly the same steps - that is, connect to a hardcoded port of a server at a hardcoded IP address, request a user-defined resource, receive and display reply. DNS is not magic, IP addresses of DNS servers are hardcoded in your network configuration and/or in your router configuration and/or in your ISP configuration.

The steps are not exactly the same. Any sensible ISP give you at least two redundant DNS servers with your DHCP response and most public DNS providers also give you multiple redundant servers. When you do a DNS lookup, your OS or browser handles failover between the DNS servers automatically, client side. When accessed by IP address, as you've demonstrated, HTTP offers no client-side failover mechanism built into web browsers to fall back to a different IP.

It's additionally important to note that architecturally, DNS servers are far more scaleable than most HTTP servers. They don't run anywhere near as much code per request and don't require the overhead of TCP or HTTP.

Note that I'm also not encouraging using DNS instead of HTTP for serving websites, I'm just pointing out that DNS is a more reliable technology and has client-side failover mechanisms so the pros which mrb listed are very real.
Most of Larry Ellison's charitable contributions have been to a foundation he set up with the goal of reversing aging in Larry Ellison.
Congrats! Well deserved!
I'm not sure whether anyone managed to get that to actually work. People were complaining it never gave them an archive they could download.
Planet Money had a decent piece on Alibaba recently: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/09/03/345310125/episode-...
On Switching and Lock-In
On the Marionette Theatre by Heinrich von Kleist (1801)
Not a big Matrix fan. I agree it was extremely well-executed.

I also hope Gilliam hits this one out of the park on general principles.
Why do you think that a CTO has to be highly technical? Does a CTO at a big technology company write code? Line level engineering managers don't even write code a lot of the time. You just deal in the high-level abstract.
It doesn't link, but to nit-pick (and show Teacher I did my homework!) it does reference studies. But you do have a point, I agree.
tl;dr; Girls work harder than boys and are more diligent about getting things done. Awesome for them. What's the problem?

The article does raise one real issue - grades in school are based on more on obeying arbitrary rules than on actual mastery of the knowledge. That's a problem worth fixing. But it's a problem worth fixing because grades are measuring the wrong thing, and it's worth fixing regardless of it's affects on statistical gender disparities.

But I guess "modern grading systems measure the wrong thing" is far less of a clickbait topic.
Time-keeping in 12's and 60's dates back to the Sumerians, whose basic unit of time was the "beru", which is usually translated as "double hour". There were 12 of them in the day, related to the 12 zodiacal divisions of the sky, related to the lunar cycle (presumably).

So unlike our measures of distance, weight, etc, our divisions of time have been fixed (mod a factor of two) for over five thousand years. On that basis I'd say anyone attempting to shift to decimal time is more than a little optimistic (much like people who think that even though every single variant of gender-neutral pronouns has been tried and has failed to catch on in the past century, their new one just might work!)

Reform of time-keeping, reform of spelling, reform of language... all great ideas, but their history is a painful illustration of how challenging it is to shift habitual norms. Inclusive language has been moderately successful, but it is basically conservative: the notion of the "gender-neutral masculine pronoun" was bolted on to English in the late 1800's as a legal convenience so laws wouldn't have to be re-written to explicitly apply to women, who were slowly gaining meaningful legal rights. "They" was the preferred gender-indefinite pronoun prior to that, and it is slowly becoming so again.
Wouldn't this make it super easy for Google to ban (show the security warnings in Chrome) the domains?
Consider that if I have a bunch of gold bars sitting in a vault somewhere, I don't have to sell them to make money off of them. I can borrow money against their perceived value, currently practically for free.

This becomes particularly interesting if I can buy $100 of gold bars for $50. Even if I can't sell them, I can use them to my advantage.
They also pretty commonly use in-browser JS SHA256 to derive private keys from human-generated passphrases: https://brainwallet.github.io/ There have been reports of pretty obscure, but still guessable, keys being cracked this way.

Bitcoin is fascinating just because it makes these sorts of things worth untraceable money, sometimes a lot of money, and puts it in the hands of people who have never had that sort of responsibility. Whatever else cryptocurrency does, maybe it will teach laypeople about these things, devise new ways to teach them and new technological measures to increase their safety.
They do that for refurbs.
It's just another design challenge. For a great experience, you don't need to spend a lot of money on packaging - just have an element of surprise and thoughtfulness. That can be done in cardboard and smart graphic design, or even off-the-shelf packaging used in a different context (see: T-shirt in a can).
I think that for the most part, you get what you pay for. Mathematica is expensive, but it is awesome. I'm not sure that it's easy enough to use for the price point they are asking, but it's definitely better than the free options.
If most of my wealth came from a dubiously valuable social media site, I might be just as pessimistic about technology.
From a few days ago:

https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/512042070861950976
Should now be fixed. Thanks for the heads up.
Hm, I (@circular) am 1-2 against the monolith. Could be more helpful but I can see the showing-off-on-twitter potential.
I don't think you understand his hack - but then, that's understandable, because it wouldn't work anyway without modifying the browser. You'd need a special client (or a proxy) to feed the content of DNS TXT record directly to the browser, because you're not using HTTP (or even TCP) anymore.

Exercise for the reader (the proxy soln): write a server called txtdns.com that returns the content of TXT records as HTML. The path would look like http://txtdns.com/example.com - and the key is that the server is only accessing DNS, even though your client is using TCP and HTTP.
Malicious iOS Apps
As a man who left school not that many years ago, I'm amazed how well I feel this describes the situation back then.
I remember being frustrated by grades being all about who (I then thought) manipulated the teacher best by acting like a "Good Boy/Girl". By being neat and by being timely rather than the one who knew what the grade requirements asked of the students.

I wonder, is the article true or does it just appeal to my feelings?
This article, like many that cheer functional programming, falls into a certain cognitive bias, that prevents it from seeing what OO is good at.

Alan Kay wrote "The key in making great and growable systems is much more to design how its modules communicate rather than what their internal properties and behaviors should be."

To start to see what this means, consider the annoying String / Data.Text split in Haskell. String is very much in the "leave data alone" mindset, baring its guts as a [Char]. Now you're stuck: you can't change its representation, you can't easily introduce Unicode, etc. This proved to be so rigid that an entirely new string type had to be introduced, and we're still dealing with the fallout.

Great and growable systems! The large scale structure of our software, decomposed into modules, not just at a moment frozen in time, but in the future as well. We are tasked with thinking about relationships and communication.

So here is how "the better way" is introduced:

> Data is immutable, and any complex data structure...

There's that insidious FP bias: to immediately dive into data structures, to view all programs as a self-contained data transformation. So reductionist! It's completely focused on those "internal properties and behaviors" that we were warned about above.

I would end here, but I just couldn't pass this up:

> To come up with a better solution [for dispatching], Haskell and Clojure take very different approaches, but both excel what any OO programmer is commonly used to.

"Any OO programmer?" No way! OO as realized in truly dynamic languages exposes not just a fixed dispatch mechanism, but the machinery of dispatch itself, i.e. a metaobject protocol:

"...there are not only classes for workaday tools, such as UI widgets, but there are also classes that represent the metastructure of the system itself. How are instances themselves made? What is a variable really? Can we easily install a very different notion of inheritance? Can we decide that prototypes are going to work better for us than classes, and move to a prototype-based design?"

This is far richer than the anemic switch-style dispatch that Haskell's guards and pattern matching provide. For example, try modifying a Haskell program to print a log every time a string is made. You can't!

I'm not familiar with Clojure but I'll bet its object model has its roots in CLOS. Whether or not you call it "object oriented," CLOS is solidly in the spirit of having a dynamic meta-structure.
So that's a self-referentially constructed explanation for dystopianism in film :) Nice.

The budget for Blade Runner was US $28,000,000.00 in 1982, which was A Lot. It's so much that the IMDB page says "(estimated)" .
No, needing sessions with flash cards is cramming. Knowing those answers and communicating them should be something you can do on the fly.
The US pulled out once they thought they had installed stable vassal governments.

Moreover, the US will try to gain control over energy resources in the Middle East long after US energy independence: They remain valuable as a means of influence against countries that rely on externally sourced energy.
Heh, and people nit picking that you can't get 17B$. Sheesh, lets just sell the crap for 10 cents on the dollar and get $1.7 BILLION in cash for "free". That would make a hell of an entry on the old 1040

proceeds from short term capital gains: 1,700,000,000

I'm sure someone at Goldman Sachs is all over this :-)
I'm curious to know how they then attach that skull to the rest of her body. Is there a skin transplant that somehow lives on top of plastic? Do they just screw it into other bones to hold it into place? But what about the juncture, and how can you ensure nothing gets in at that juncture?
Larry Ellison Stepping Down as Oracle CEO
I have a Paperwhite. It's not that bad--still less effort than turning a real page, and the screen doesn't show fingerprints much. Still, this will be better.
TwitPic has gone out of their way for years to make it difficult to get your pictures out. Some services were created to try and make it easy to move your pictures to another provider and TwitPic always blocked it. They said that people could export one at a time manually only.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison Steps Down, Catz and Hurd Named CEOs
I think I could agree with your point if I agreed that we're slowing down. But I don't think that's going to happen. A lot of the stupefyingly awesome and expensive tech is going to miniaturize and cheapen faster than people will rise up.

Your example of a CT scan got me to think that way. I don't think it's practical to assume that such a device would be widely distributed; heck, I'm not even sure it's possible to fuel them all with liquid He if we tried to proliferate it. But I would bet anything the tech matures and branches such that the cost incrementally drops and the quality incrementally goes up. Or it leads to a breakthrough tech that supplants it (prolly more likely).

So I'm optimistic that the incremental improvements will compound faster than unrest; I think that's what's historically different now than times past - the compound improvements are taking less than a generation. We've made the jumps in tech, now to refine it to be available to all. (Cell phones are a pretty good example of this happening, I think.)

But I suppose there's no telling other than time passing. I prefer optimism, as the alternative is heartbreaking, as you note.
> The big advantage of OO is that it acts as a distillation of how humans think.

Honestly, while I think OO programming in the broadest sense does that, I think class-oriented OOP (what the article mostly focusses on) languages, particularly statically-typed class-oriented languages in the C++/Java lineage--don't do a great job of either supporting that intuition or facilitating applying it intuition to the construction of correct, maintainable computer programs. They aren't useless in that respect--there is a reason why they flourished--but there's also a reason that after them an important programming paradigm for several decades, and a dominant one since at least the late 1980s, there's a whole lot of moves away from traditional class-oriented OOP in newer languages.

I think that we're seeing a model--which is mostly viewed as being within the FP tradition but which has learned a lot from OOP languages and supports a lot of OO thinking--emerge (and that this article points to a lot of its elements) that provides a framework that better matches the intuition than class-oriented OOP does, while also better supporting building correct, maintainable, easy-to-reason-about systems.
A UDP dns response will be truncated if it is longer than 512 bytes.

If you want more stuff you have to use TCP and that is not very preferable.
I think you're right. At first I thought it would be to bring out a knife fight. In reflection, it seems like they're going towards a triumvirate similar to Google. Larry wants to be Eric Schmidt, but can't be if he's got the CEO title. Everyone would defer to him for everything.
I don't think this is known, but I'll be surprised if it has more capability in that regard than the PW.

I can't see the PW light at minimum in a room with any lighting, though, and can't read the PW without lighting.

Aside from the probably-negligible battery use, what use case is it breaking aside from pet-peeve?
Not all research is ground breaking and sometimes you really do have to pivot. Any long term shareholder is probably happy since it cuts cost.
> Thus, I propose the only solution that has any precedence: Big R&D as a government mandate. Much like education, healthcare, and social benefits, Big R&D must become a central pillar of a modern society.

Health care and social benefits get politicians a lot of votes. Heavy government-sponsored research wouldn't, I imagine. To get this kind of support for research, you'd have to sell it to the voters (it was easier to sell during the Cold War, I think it's harder now, especially during a recession).
He's got to be on top of all the industry trends. Say what you will about Larry, he is on top of this.
Very good book.

He will be revered, but he was behind some scandals back in the day.
I recently did an analysis of Harvard and MIT's MOOCs to determine which gender gets the better grades in classes. (full post: http://minimaxir.com/2014/07/online-class-charts/)

Turns out, there's no statistically significant difference between male and female grades. http://minimaxir.com/img/online-class-charts/gender-grade.pn...
I find this incredibly sexist.

To say that girls worker harder than boys offends me greatly. These studies are never accurate and somewhat biased, and I think work ethic is something that can't be averaged out like this. I don't doubt a lot of girls out there do work harder than boys, but making statements like: "Girls succeed over boys in school because they are more apt to plan ahead, set academic goals, and put effort into achieving those goals." is offensive and heavily typecasting all boys into the same category.

There are boys out there who put effort into planning and setting academic goals, because I am friends with many guys like this who care and put the effort in, I also know as many women who do the same. If this study were truth, why are there just as many male academics as there are female? If anything, I have seen more male academics than female (in my experience and field). Imagine if the effort that went into this study was put to better use, to help solve a problem or achieve a result that would benefit society? Studies like this are a waste of time.

I realise this is just a study and the whole point might be to highlight issues with school curriculum and have no sexist undertones, but at the same time, studies like this are relatively useless. The modern school system being completely broken to the point kids are falling behind is a very well known fact, and sadly, no study is going to change that anytime soon.

Maybe if we had less studies and more action on fixing things, then there wouldn't be instances of boys getting left behind in the schooling system. Did it ever occur to those responsible for this study that maybe, just maybe, the system is actually broken? And maybe, just maybe, it has nothing to do with what sex you are? I feel like society already has enough issues when it comes to rampant sexism and gender equality without more fuel being thrown on the fire. All studies like this do is take a handful of people, average and collate the results and then proclaim they've made some kind of conclusive discovery that applies to everyone outside of the sample group. Unless this study leads to change or another longer and more conclusive study, the results mean nothing.

Regardless of what sex you are, nobody should be getting left behind. If it is true that boys learn differently to girls, then adjust the curriculum to make it more flexible for different learning styles. When I went to school I struggled, not because I am stupid or because I am a male, I struggled because the curriculum assumed everyone learns the same way and when I couldn't fit myself within the mould, I got left behind and taught myself everything I needed to know. Everyone learns differently, we are not all the same.

Sorry for getting worked up, Studies like this do nothing to help resolve gender equality gaps whatsoever.
Programming is a commodity? In a generation I hope so - now?

And to be fair I think that OoP and FP are the wrong paradigms for handling bad management of a large project. Open source methodologies are eating into that (I have just started at a major Fortune 500 with effectively a huge open source project inside it's employees) and even without that a good focus on risk management will help

In short, talking about your problems and taking early steps to resolve them will do more to fix a project than moving from OoP to fp.
> 1,700,000,000

You missed a few digits there ;)
You misinterpret my comment. He is masterful at running Oracle, the problem is he is mortal. Successions are all about building institutions that are immortal. Which is to say they continue to exist even as humans come and go. That is one of the key differences between a democracy and a dictatorship. In the latter when the dictator dies the country goes into civil war until another dictator arises, but in a democracy the 'people' in the system are constantly replaced by the country continues. Same is true for corporations. Technology companies tend to be driven more by one or two individuals who don't design an institution so much as they just run the business. I am fascinated that places like Ford and IBM have been as durable as they have been.