skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In most constitutional democracies, the majorities can legally tyrannize over minorities with the minorities having no recourse at all.

That's simply not true. Minority rights are growing, not just in theory but in practice, in constitutional democracies all over the world.

> Anarchy is about eliminating the monopoly of violence that governments use to obtain obedience from minorities.

That's nice in theory, but you can't run a country on theory.

I don't accept that as the definition of anarchism, any more than I accept "The Best Person On Earth" as the definition of my next-door neighbor. In theory, it would be nice if my neighbor were the best person on Earth, but I doubt very much it's true, and I don't intend to act as if that person were utterly without flaw by removing the locks on my door.
Big projects are often composed anywhere from 10 developers up to 100 or more.

Usually with high rotation of developers coming and going, since parts of the project tend to be delegated to be other companies, many times with developers that aren't all at the same skill level.

When you work at this scale, memory errors and misuse of resource are quite common.

No developer is able to have the whole code on his/her head and sometimes also does not have the time to understand the whole codebase.

So mistakes happen quite often.

This is why C got out of love in the enterprise or why companies like Google and JPL have such strict C++ design guide.
So the only reason mandatory minimums are not unconstitutional is because of the word 'and'? I guess you can then make any cruel punishment constitutional by making it usual.
> Key problems include connection issues with SQL Server,

What sort? If it's intermediate connection problems .NET 4.5.1 added Connection Resiliency to ADO.NET [1]. If you're using a recent enough version of Entity Framework it goes even further [2].

[1] http://dpaoliello.wordpress.com/2014/03/30/connection-resili...

[2] http://thedatafarm.com/data-access/ef6-connection-resiliency...
H1B portability is a misnomer. All that happens is that the new employer applies for a new H1B for you, which is not subject to the cap. So you are just tied to the new employer. Portability here just means that you can choose which employer to be tied to.

http://www.immihelp.com/visas/h1b/h1-transfer.html
The jury system seems crazy to me - do you really want to put these important decisions on a bunch of random, in the worst case easily influenced people? I expect judges to see through the prosecution's or defendant's bullshit, they should have the competence, experience and knowledge to find a fair ruling. Locking a bunch of people in a room and telling them to stay there until everyone's on the same page feels a little bit like amateur hour.

Your anecdote seems to confirm this.
I wonder what the Surface experience is like, I can only hope it's better.

This also reminds me of when I got world of warcraft CDs and had to spend almost 48 hours just to patch up to the most recent version.
Keynote: AtScript
There are two reasons (both sort of hard to fix) for why contracting is screwed up.

1. Co-employment- Large companies like Google or Apple would love to hire contractors directly but are very scared of being sued by contractors that can claim they were actually employees-not contractors because of the unclear rules around who is/is not an employee. So they introduce a staffing agency in between to become the 'employer of record' and offset the risk.

Things like hiring and paying contractors directly, giving them laptops, keeping them for long terms, training them, etc. actually makes a stronger case for contractors that might want to sue them, which is why you see the weird ways these companies treat contractors (not allowing them into morale events, restricting how long they can work, etc.)

How to Fix- Labor laws would need to change, making it clear to companies how they can hire contractors without becoming liable to be held as employers. New labor marketplaces like Taskrabbit, Homejoy, Workmarket, etc. will push lawmakers into doing something soon, but this is going to be tough given how strongly labor unions are against this.

2. Non-transparency. Large companies don't like to advertise that they hire contractors. They instead give their open jobs to staffing agencies, who are not allowed to disclose the client name when they advertise the job on job boards. The staffing agencies are incentivized to provide the lowest cost engineer that meets the minimum bar and these are usually the engineers on visas that need to find a project soon or leave the country.

How to Fix- If large companies publicly share all their current contract job openings (reqs) just like they do their full-time jobs. If that happens, anyone can apply to those jobs and even nominate the staffing agencies they'd be willing to work through. They already have Vendor Management Systems (VMS) that they use to share their reqs with staffing agencies, so its just a matter of will.

In the meantime, we (http://www.oncontracting.com) are trying to solve this non-transparency by crowd-sourcing the list of preferred staffing agencies for the Fortune 1000 companies. Contractors can avoid bad labor brokers and instead discover who the preferred staffing agencies for any Fortune 1000 company are and approach them directly.
Google Trends: Interest in Git vs. Mercurial
>Thinkable is a more democratic approach

Pedantically, it's a more market-oriented approach. A democratic approach would be if everyone got one vote (not proportional to how much money they were willing to risk), and voted on which drugs they thought should get funding, and the rest got nothing.

Forgive me, this is a personal pet peeve of mine :)
"That could work completely offline and sync transaction data periodically with the central server."

From what I've gathered you want the app to sync data when possible but still work as it should when offline? There are several solutions in the space of this.

A simple solution would be to split or abstract the logic with handling the data versus the functionality of the mobile app itself. In which case you should not be tied down to specific backends.

Anything that works for mongodb or other databases you can usually find something that converts said backend to something working for postgres or whatever for server side.

As for mobile your data backend should be something lightweight and it may be beneficial to use something that is agnostic to mobile like html5. Key players for web data usually are Indexedb and somewhat basket.js : https://addyosmani.github.io/basket.js/ . As the web is usually the way of using what mobile apps are using for storage gathered from a look at angular.js in retrospect. And another popular database for mobile is couchdb.

Some of the other stuff you mentioned:

A more accurate terminology for what you may be looking for in the future for communicating with several distributed systems would be a CRDT key-value(for example; https://github.com/dominictarr/crdt ) if you want it to be purely distributed over many devices completely and provide the same updates to many devices. There is still a lot of on-going research in the area with Riak and Redis having somewhat successful uses in the box at the moment. A newer idea is something called SyncFree: https://github.com/SyncFree

As for resolving git transaction conflicting updates there is a solution that is being developed talked about here: http://the-paper-trail.org/blog/subverting-sinfonia/

A more json version for updates would be something along the lines of: https://github.com/Operational-Transformation
> if they have an I-485 application pending for six months and an approved I-140

That is related to a green card. And yes, employers typically try to file your I-140 under EB-3. This means that you need to wait 10+ years before your priority date becomes current. Once the PD is current, you can file your I-485. After another 6 months elapse, ONLY THEN can you invoke AC21. In effect, the employee is tied to the employer for 10+ years since companies only file for your green card after you spend ~6 years on H1B. The decision of EB-3 vs EB-2 (about 5 years shorter) lies with the employer. These two categories of green card cannot be self petitioned, only an employer can do it.

EDIT: So to summarize, the employee usually is first locked in during the 6 years on H1B, with the hope that the employer will apply for a green card (i.e. file the I-140).

Then, the employee is locked in for another 10 years, waiting for the PD to become current. And then, after 6 more months, the employee is finally free to change employers.

I don't understand how this isn't indentured servitude.
Do you know of a way to limit your undo stack not in terms of undos (snapshots) but in terms of memory usage? i.e. limit the undo stack to N megabytes of memory?

Furthermore, do you know of any ways to perform automated testing for memory leaks?
> It's actually pretty easy once you realize that you have to pay for the licences on all Microsoft technologies once BizSpark ends

For the most part, the stuff that runs on Azure doesn't have a discrete licensing cost. You pay the hourly rate for the resource.
Compared to OCaml, F# has slightly nicer syntax, real multi-threading, and type providers (can e.g. automatically generate a type from a database schema). It lacks OCaml's awesome module system, higher-kinded polymorphism, OCaml's neat but rarely-used object system (it has C#'s object system hacked on instead), and on Mono at least it is generally slightly slower than OCaml.

In my view the .net libaries are probably the biggest advantage over OCaml and Haskell. Similar to how access to Java libraries gives Clojure an advantage over lisps like Common Lisp and Racket.

Oh, and if you want to use Windows without mingw then F# is a far better choice than OCaml or Haskell. The OCaml packaged manager doesn't even work properly on Windows, as far as I'm aware.
Money has no intrinsic value, it only has value based on trust that the money We receive can be used to purchase other goods. The value of money is set by the markets (and indirectly by prices, wages, and printing new bills).

If you produce and no one buys, then you stop producing because you are providing no value; simple. If your production is non perishable, you could pay rent and upkeep to stockpile it, but value is lost regardless.

People have an incentive not to invest because investing is risky. Many would just sit on a gold hoard than to risk losing it, but that behavior doesn't solve any consumption problems (worse, it leads to temporary deflation, since that gold is taken out of circulation).

This isn't rocket sicence, most of us have college degrees, this is just Econ 101.
This is great. Had I known about this couple of weeks back, I would have opted for this instead of singing up for Dropbox and going to the initial painful step of uploading ALL my local photos (hundreds of GB) to it.
Do you know if PictureLife works with Dropbox?!
Exactly, the volatility is why people wouldn't use it as a store of value.

P. S. I like how you went "...or even EUR" ;)
Individual wages are always lower, but the following can and often do end up ballooning the overall cost of the venture:

* Lower quality net result (& higher support costs).

* Additional headcount

* Higher coordination costs (e.g. paying these bloodsuckers)

The point is that it goes ahead even when it makes no financial sense even 5-6 years out because management prefers a pliant, docile, easily controlled workforce.
It's weird and frustrating that people label many abnormalities as "diseases".

When I read a list of ADHD symptoms I keep asking myself - how is that a bad thing? Being bored doing unenjoyable tasks, hating homework, "Not seem to listen when spoken to",Struggle to follow instructions,Dash around, touching or playing with anything and everything in sight, Have trouble sitting still during school and homework, Be constantly in motion, Have difficulty doing quiet tasks or activities....

These sound like symptoms of being a kid...
Of course MOOC students "fail" the courses, the whole point of it is to do self study, not to adhere to deadlines. Why would I follow an artificial deadline for my own studies?
True, if we expect the BTC FX risk to be lower, than the inflation risk of the best possible fiat currency choice, then BTC would be the superior choice.
Which aerospace companies have their designs peer reviewed?
IT Change Management
At Izooble (http://www.izooble.com - social product recommendation site), our entire backend is written in C#. We use ServiceStack (v3, which is still free) for our API, PostgreSQL for data.

We host it all on Mono and Docker on Linux VPSs. We wanted Docker because we wanted PaaS-like deployment but not vendor lock in.

Our team uses Linux, Windows and OSX to work on it. MonoDevelop is a pretty decent tool, on some areas actually better than VS.

We're really happy about the choice. C# is a great language, NuGet beats pip and gem by miles (none of that virtualenv bull). If Mono support is a requirement from the set-out, you don't run into many compat problems.
No, you prove what you know at a technical interview. I think a college degree is not the best indicator of knowledge. There are really useless people with Masters degrees in CS.
>It's unfortunate that this kind of innovative idea seems to illicit a knee-jerk negative response in terms of ethics.

Why, why let ethics mess up a perfectly profitable business idea?

>Of course, it would be ideal if resources were simply abundant and all these trials could be funded without giving special treatment to wealthy donors.

I don't think it's about resources, it's about their distribution. Such trials CAN be funded "without giving special treatment to wealthy donors" -- we're spending trillions more giving special treatmeants to wealthy people,(such as bailouts).
> management prefers a pliant, docile, easily controlled workforce

I am trying to understand why, and what the incentive is. If the overall cost balloons up, what is it about a docile workforce that is so lucrative to these companies? Ability to pay lower wages? Not having to search for replacement employees every now and then?
Swimming is a pretty good exercise for those who are bored by most other exercises. It may take six months or longer to see results from exercise, though, so it's hard to suggest exercise as a be-all-end-all fix.
Brownout: building more robust cloud applications
I'd be delighted to receive even a dollar for the work I did for free. If an old lady gives you 0.50$ for carrying her groceries up the stairs you just take it to aprecciate her apprecciacion.
Improving Cloud Service Resilience Using Brownout-aware Load Balancing
> Large companies don't like to advertise that they hire contractors.
Do you know the reason for this?
OK, you make a fair point. :)

The difference between one-vote-per-person and a vote proportional to the amount of money you are willing to risk, is a significant one. So I suppose Thinkable is halfway between the plutocratic and democratic approaches?

As an aside (tangent to your comment about the rest getting nothing), I don't know what Thinkable does if a campaign doesn't reach its funding target: Whether the money is restored to the sponsors or the researchers simply have to work on a smaller budget (maybe once a minimal funding threshold is passed).
The man who made a game to change the world
In fairness, it sounds like this was Asus, not Microsoft's fault.
Neat. However...

Getting real tired of these $XX/month "works only in the cloud" services.
>I think it's absurd that people are legally prevented from purchasing drugs that haven't been FDA approved. I think it is reasonable to e.g. force companies to put "Not FDA approved", but I don't think it's reasonable to preclude sale at all.

Whay would happen is the snake oil industry would get huge, and all accountability will be lost. The drug industry after all WAS unregulated in the past.

>* It seems to me that the existence of the FDA, EMA, and any number of other national and private certifying bodies is more than sufficient to allow people to make an informed decision for themselves.*

You'd be surprised. People already fall for all kind of BS "snake oil" remedies and magic pill solutions (not to mention stuff like homeopathy and aromatherapy, etc).

What would happen in that case will be that they would consider FDA some "bureucratic, antiquated" organization, that is "too slow" to respond to new drug needs etc. And of course all the propaganda from the snake oil salesmen will help in this.

Plus, remember the thamilomide baby situation back in the fifties? That would be a much more frequent occurence with non FDA approved drugs.
I think this is because a lot of people didn't like Win8.
>I'm sick and tired of hearing this bullshit repeated over and over again. Let me say this once: H1B workers are not tied down to a particular employer.
>
>It used to be the case that the were, but in 2000, Congress passed a law (known as "AC21") which brought job portability for H1B workers. I don't know why I keep hearing people on HN and elsewhere talk as though AC21 never happened over and over again.

If you are fired or laid off there is no grace period to find a new job. So, if you are lucky and you time it right you can transfer to a new employer. If you don't, hard luck and get out.

So it is false to say that you are not tied to your employer. The tie is there, it is has just weakened since 2000.
RedPhone lately fixed it's issues with quality of sound and latency. It's usable.
>That would not result in impartial juries. It would result in juries that are prejudiced in favor of the defendant.

Yeah, and that's a good thing. The prosecution should work hard and provide facts to PROVE the defendant done the crime, not pick jurors to help them in burrying anyone they set their targets on.
You and I may believe that a college degree is not the best indicator of knowledge, but industry at large (both inside and outside of technology) does not. Furthermore, proving a lifetime of learning and knowledge in the span of at most 8 hours is dubious at best and impossible at worst.
The takeaway from six years of economic troubles? Keynes was right
Transform Your Photos with a Magic Word
Hell will freeze over, eventually. Expanding universe ftw.
Who said a docile workforce is lucrative for the companies? There are many reasons they may not be. However, in most cases, "the company" doesn't make these decisions - managers do. And plenty of managers prefer a docile workforce whether or not it's good for the bottom line.
I bet he did. Do you have experience with how these things turn out to work in real life?
Setting up Vagrant with VirtualBox and DigitalOcean
Why?

Because

a) it's profitable, and

b) they can. That's all, really.

Excessive money (== power == domination of your peers) corrupts everybody. We don't need any new studies to prove this.

That's the sick part of our economic culture - the "natural" tendency of concentration of money/power (instead of spreading it as equally as possible).
Why on Earth would a for-profit, capitalist corporation not force down labor wages to maximize profits? Maximizing profits is their sole imperative. They do not love you, nor do they hate you, but your labor has a market value they can use for something else ;-).

If we don't like it, we can unionize.
Sorry to say it but what a mess.
Ahh...that sounds right, and looking at how provided is used elsewhere in 1401 it fits.
Branson and the Vigin team are absolutely brilliant at PR. All day the top headlines on Google News have been about his "determination" to "find the cause of the crash" and "move forward" with little reflection on how big a screw up this was.

This (along with good HR) has been the secret to Virgin's success in what are basicly commodity businesses (retail, music, telecom, airlines). The free advertising and friendly governments (also PR targets) are a big advantage against competitors. Very little innovation required. However it is of limited value in a business requiring overcoming multiple technical challenges.

The cheap spaceports and celebrity endorsements are still quite valuable. They just need a partner that could actually make it fly but apparently these are in short supply. Perhaps only SpaceX?
Hi, design-wise, it looks pretty clean and polished.

One thing though, the animation for me was way too slow. Try speeding it up.

Being more objective, I don't really understand the point of it. Sorry.
Transaction fees aren't relevant for average Joe. Most payments would be happening off chain within those centralized systems. You only need transaction for something like bank-to-bank transfer. With the only difference that you are also your bank and you keep full control of those funds that you didn't put in the centralized service.

I would be perfectly fine with digital currency system backed by gold. Only that there's no way to make it work. People tried. You need some 3rd party that you need to trust and you are never really in control of your funds.

CPU, storage and network capabilities are keep growing which should be making transacting those 0s and 1s cheaper and cheaper. And regarding cost of the network, it's really low based on what does it accomplish. It's just that you can estimate this total cost, while not being able to do that for say total cost of inside parties at Chase.

This is all just my opinion, but as I said, I see bitcoin mostly as a decentralized storage of value. From that, you can fund your account of 3rd party payment system (without giving them your personal info or ability to spend the rest of your funds), and then you spend your money within that system. It can offer fraud protection, insurance and whatever you want. There can be also those that don't provide it, but offer even lower transaction fees. But since it's centralized system and it's just moving data I would assume they will be able to make it happen for below 2% of payment value.
>what is it about a docile workforce that is so lucrative to these companies

It is not just about the money. It is about the power, too.

It is peculiar naivete unique to our dominant school of economics to think that the bottom line is at the heart of every decision made by C level executives.
Microsoft's fault here is that they haven't tested products that they are selling in the own Store. Or they have, they saw the issues and they decided to go with the selling anyways. It's a logistical/delivery issue on the Store end, but it does reflect badly on Microsoft as a whole.
Podcasting is more accessible, and the fact that it is far better than the mundane competition (traditional radio) means people are happy to jump to the alternative of choosing their own programming.

Sure, the iPod made it easier, but beyond connected cars, which the article suggests, capable software and Wi-Fi (or 3G/4G) on every device means it costs almost no effort. When I first got into podcasting, I had to plug in my iPod to a computer every night to let iTunes handle the transfer, and sometimes even then it didn't work and I would be stuck the whole day without my programming. Now, you can just pick a podcast aggregator and download the latest five episodes of any podcast in a matter of minutes. The fact that it has become so easy is what drives people to switch from listening to their local talk shows to listening what they actually want to hear.

I believe a parallel can be drawn to the threat felt by cable TV now that HBO is offering content to subscribers independent of their cable subscriptions.
Microsoft sold it as a signature device, so it's just as much their fault.
Our tech stack at Entomic (www.entomic.com) is all done in .NET. We've got a pretty common stack (at least we think so) - MVC5, WebAPI, SignalR running on Azure web and storage.

Like others here who get set up on a MS stack, everything integrates very easily. Visual Studio IMO is still one of the best IDEs out there for what it does, and having that supported by a good CI system means very little is left to do except code.