skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This makes no sense to me. There is no opportunity for "extend" or "extinguish" for either StackOverflow or GitHub. Similarly, if they ended up destroying the various non-microsoft .NET implementations (mono..), it would affect the platforms they run on very minimally. There'd be a couple of pissed off people, but meh.
This is fantastic.

I love this little anecdote:

I found Hamilton to be extremely bright and knowledgeable, although sometimes I wondered if there was more to him than it appeared. I knew he gave regular briefing sessions at the Pentagon, which seemed strange for an electric car guy. But there was also a time we were speaking on the phone about the possibilities of wormholes and the like. He asked me if I thought it would be possible to create a wormhole with one end being on the surface of the Sun and the other over an enemy on the battle field. I think I was stunned into silence for quite some time, but eventually regained enough composure to say while I had not thought about that before (an understatement!), I supposed it was theoretically possible.

Off topic rant:

Crazy conspiracy people have no idea about how this kind of stuff happens all the time. 99.99% of things never go anywhere, but 0.01% turn into DARPA projects, and 0.01% of those actually turn into better saucepans, and 0.01% of those turn into actual weapons.
Especially humorous, considering "Linux" is technically a kernel, so "a chroot on Android" actually has zero Linux going on, just the GNU userland.
Which is basically what was happening already. Like the article says, over 40k questions are already asked and answered on stack.
> Which, funnily, leads back to a point others and I were making in a different subthread[0] - that any device that allows interplanetary travel in timespans reasonable for humans is at the same time a weapon of mass destruction.

We already have plenty of weapons of mass destruction -- sufficient to eradicate modern civilization if not human life entirely -- so its hardly as if not developing technologies necessary for interplanetary travel protects us from such weapons.
I don't see what's so amazing about this move. SO is well established at this point and Microsoft are just moving a small subset of their vast technical support effort to another platform.

It is an excellent publicity stunt, though. It'll certainly fuel more of the "Microsoft has turned over a new leaf" discussion, but in the grand scheme of things with all their previous announcements like open-sourcing the C# compiler and .NET platform, this is a pretty negligible move.
I'd like to hear arguments for why it would be unfair competition for Google to put spammy ad agencies out of business.
I can't comment on that because I was not physically there, I only "attended" in a figurative meaning of the word.
The distributed system of the fairly near future is json/yaml over websockets/http2/spdy. All accessible from the command line or other.

9fans will bemoan the bloat but it will work (mostly :-) and will be popular.
There are no "review fees" (we review papers for free) and most editors (who select reviewers and select the papers) are not paid. So, basically, the cost is the cost of a website.

At any rate, to 'disrupt' conventional journals, you need to convince the big names to be the editors/reviewers (which is often hard!), in order to give some credibility to your new journal.
Ask HN: JavaScript resources
I've been using JS for years. I'm pretty comfortable, but I definitely have room to grow. What are your top suggestions for learning intermediate/advanced topics (pure JS only. I'm not looking for frameworks at the moment)? I prefer video based training over books/written training. Paid or free, it doesn't matter.

Thanks for the suggestions!
You think that's nuts, consider that I just did a review and got paid nothing!
If you're happy using PHP for this, I don't want to get in the way of your happiness - but if you applied the same standard to that practice as you do to Python libraries you'd certainly see that invoking a separate PHP process is "an obscene amount of bloat for the functionality".
I don't think you appreciate the joke.
Is an e-commerce business a tech-start up?
Full disclosure: I'm far from a hacker/techie. If my terminology is off or I'm over using the word tech, lol, please feel free to correct me, I am eager to learn within this arena.

I am someone fascinated by the idea of creating a start-up using tech, but I have no tech background or experience. I can design a pretty snazzy, aesthetically pleasing site using templates etc., but wouldn't know where to begin to build one from the ground up. I have an AMAZING e-commerce start-up idea (don't we all though?!). I've tried shopify and similar sites to build a template of what the site would look like, but there are numerous web components I want to add which go beyond the scope of what they offer. I want to have someone come on board to help with that side, and have started looking into a few of those founder-matching sites.

I'm curious as to what people on the other side of the fence might think. Would an e-commerce business be considered a tech start-up? Are they the type of projects a hacker/techie would get behind. Or is it more something you just hire out for an initial build?
If you're looking for a job, I'd give ThoughtWorks (http://www.thoughtworks.com/) a try. They are a very unique company, very open and very inclusive.
"... prints out a high resolution color image on Instax Mini or Polaroid 300PIF film. ..."

Access to Film is the weakness here. Polaroid used to be pretty cheap & widely available ~ <https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/tags/polaroid> Then Polaroid stopped producing it.

Want to get that 5x4" old-school Polaroid look? try the "Impossible Instant black lab" ~ https://shop.the-impossible-project.com/shop/cameras/impossi... It uses the old 600 Polaroid format with new film chemistry. I love the way Impossible is improving the film. It's getting close to what the Polaroid reproduced at it's peak. cf <https://www.the-impossible-project.com/>
Don't get bankrupt for this, its not worth it. Shut it down temporarily, try to make the MVP really minimal in your spare time.

The product you describe seems to have huge scope. Try to make it really focused, like an an NFL only fantasy league (the most popular sport).

You should really get developers that know already Angular and Node, those technologies are just not learnable overnight.

Other than that it seems like a nice stack, I personally would go for a backend based on socket.io and mongoose.

Any change of having people working remotelly to reduce office costs?
For full effect, read this comment in the voice of Phil Hartman's Simpsons character Troy McClure, performing in the Planet of the Apes musical.
Now it does, but there was a time, at least when SO came online, when IE had a much larger install base, and older, troublesome versions of IE were still fairly popular.
Tax payers aren't funding publishers. Don't like it? Go publish it on your blog.
I'd say it's more of a marketing play than tech. Sure, technology is involved and you'll need a strong tech team, but that can be said for a lot of things.
To be clear, I'm a pathology resident trying to do research. My code wouldn't affect anyone. I just want to think in python instead of perl.
What do you think about Quora?
Can this not be reported as a bug on the project's issue tracker? I don't understand why people trash things in public instead of at least filing a polite issue.
"Reverse racism" is like "political correctness" in that anybody who uses it in seriousness is going to have shitty opinions.
The site thought you were a bot (probably because you were browsing privately), so rather than assuming you are a human, it decided to challenge you traditionally.
I wrote a paper about a very different way to debug Ruby http://www.chrisseaton.com/rubytruffle/set_trace_func/ by AST rewriting and dynamic deoptimization.
I'm very surprised articles about OCaml (and more generally functional programming) are popular on Hacker News. FP isn't exactly a new thing. I would assume most CS graduates have experience with functional programming (I learned "Caml Light" as an undergraduate in 1996).
Oh damn, you're right. My brain got wrapped around the wrong way, length is contracted and mass is increased.
How would you propose using that from Python?
Show HN: I made a web utility belt for the browser
halis.js has native dom query wrapper, ajax wrapper, various url and query functions, classical inheritance, and other methods to make developing web apps simpler.

Any feedback is appreciated.
I mean this with utter sincerity: try tapping harder. I too was confused by the landing page and its silly two button-like things that don't work. Then I tapped it again, harder, and the link followed.

It's a trick I learned from industrial SCADAs. Sometimes buttons simulate how a literal contractor works by watching for down-debounce-up events. No idea if that's the case here, but it seems to help to dwell slightly on the button to let the event thing really catch the event fer sure.
My reading of Nietzche left me with the sense that he was about as conceited and anti-egalitarian as they come.

https://www.google.com/search?q=hitler%20nietzsche%20philoso...
You're kind of proving his point, aren't you? Your default assumption is that his roommates are probably right. What if he had crippling fibromyalgia? Or some horrendous cancer?

> especially when he complains about being tired all the time

He never said he complains all the time. He says he is tired; he did not say he complains that he is tired all the time. So why did you immediately conclude he must complain all the time?

See, I read the point of the post as this: when you have a disease with no name -- no one can classify you as having a thing. You just have symptoms. I read his point as being that people sympathize with those who have a disease, but if you can't name your disease, it's almost as if you didn't have one. And hence his roommate who decided it'd be awesome to ride their exercise bike in his room as a form of punishment for not having a better sleep schedule. His roommate couldn't sympathize.

Here's an exercise: you know how recent security exploits all have fun little names? And how those exploits have all gotten fairly extensive press mentions as a result? Do you think they would have had the same if they were left nameless, as most exploits in the past were?
Ah, your Royal Highness tptacek. The main reason I stopped commenting here several years ago! Words cannot express my contempt for you.
Show HN: Extreme Sport Generator
How an online marketer bootstrapped a 6-figure software business
I've read this article (http://bartoszmilewski.com/2014/11/24/types-and-functions/) , and the first article in the series (http://bartoszmilewski.com/2014/11/04/category-the-essence-o...), and the introduction (http://bartoszmilewski.com/2014/10/28/category-theory-for-pr...). They've all gotten a significant number of upvotes here on HN, but no commentary about the contents.

Reading them makes me fear that I simply lack any proper capacity for abstraction. I liked thinking about the throwaway line that "an object should have more surface area than volume", but there hasn't been anything else that I've been able to grasp hold of. Nothing seems wrong, but so far, nothing seems particularly right either. He could just as well be discussing typography as type theory.[1]

Could someone who understands where he is going with this series jump ahead and talk about how a better understanding of category theory has improved their programming? Insights that wouldn't have occurred without it? I'm all for pure math as pure math, but I'm struggling to see how he's going to make the leap to practical programming. Or perhaps that isn't his intention?

[1] Come to think of it, his comment that Haskell accepted a double colon or the single unicode character equivalently was one more thing I felt I grasped. It struck me as a dangerous design decision, though.
And their customers should do anything in their power to protect the interests of their own shareholders. That includes publicly complaining in hopes that the negative publicity will force Slack to change their terms.

Even if you accept that corporations must disregard ethics and legality and act solely to maximize the interests of their shareholders, that doesn't that you can't complain about their actions.
A potential synonym for 'potentially as readable as' is
'in practice, never as readable as'. Especially when we're talking about heavy use of user-defined syntax to hide whatever's actually going to have to be maintained about this code. It's the dark side of "DSLs"
U-M Student growing seafood in vacant Detroit house
> Ah, your Royal Highness tptacek.

No, I'm not tptacek. As the different username may have hinted.
Slightly off-topic, great job launching! You did ask for feedback on your site, just pointing out a specific copy that was bolded out:

"You are losing customers right now. Desktop viewers of your website are leaving without downloading the app..."

Here's a friendly tip from a conversation between Amy Hoy and Nathan Barry that can be found here -- http://nathanbarry.com/step-by-step-landing-page-copywriting...

Nathan: Good. I wrote out half a dozen headlines trying to get at the core pain.

Amy: How would you feel, though, if a stranger came up to you and said “You’re losing hundreds of sales.”?

Nathan: Who the hell are you to tell me what’s wrong with my business…

Amy: Right, me too. Not because you’re not interested in getting extra sales, but because it SOUNDS like you’re being attacked.

Nathan: Good point.

Amy: I tell my students to be very careful with statements that might sound accusatory.
Unrelated design gripe...

Someone paid someone else to make their website look like this:

http://i.imgur.com/dTQUQGd.jpg

A disturbing trend that seems to be increasing.
Yeah, in Haskell I'd probably have done something like

dropWhile (not . T.isPrefixOf "+++") >>> \case
[] -> return ()
(line:lines) -> do
header env line
modified env 0 lines

edited to add: code above assumes LambdaCase and OverloadedStrings extensions, and that you've imported Data.Text qualified as T
>Most of the articles written ARE about males. //

Could you copy a few links here on articles about YC founders that particularly focus on their being male, what it is about the masculinity that is relevant, etc., rather than just mentioning them as people? I'm not sure I've ever read such an article.

I'm fascinated to see what they discuss? The choice between fatherhood and career, the preconceptions to behave in a particular fashion, the unfair dresscodes and lack of paternity rights?

Because an article is about people, and those people happen to have a joint characteristic, that doesn't mean that the article is about that characteristic of those people. To recapitulate, if I right an article about people who inspired me growing up and it mentions Ronald Reagan and Michael Gorbachev that doesn't mean the article is about "light skinned males" any more than if it were about Margaret Thatcher and Germaine Greer it would be about "light skinned females".

FWIW the OP doesn't really touch on being about being a female founder except in one para:

>"We got an interesting variety of responses when we asked the women whether being a female was advantageous or disadvantageous in their roles as founders."

And in that the response appears to have been "it didn't make any difference".

Well if being a male and female founder is practically the same it does rather demand that we ask the question, so why are YC focussing on the sex of these particular founders then, what's it got to do with anything.

There is this bit of unexplained sexism:

>"And as YC has grown, so has the number of female partners. Now there are four of us and we are not tokens, or a female minority in a male-dominated firm. At the risk of offending my male colleagues, who will nevertheless understand what I mean, some would claim it's closer to the truth to say that that we run the place."

In what way is it fine to pick out that "we run the place" and specifically note that's related to being a particular sex? How is that cool. Maybe those people do run the place, but is that really because they're a particular sex rather than because that's the role they were hired for, or fell into, within the firm?

Why is YC so keen to maintain an actively demarcated line between males and females rather than just say Alex here is office manager, rather than noting first which sex Alex is. Baffles me how this is presented as progressively non-sexist.
Certainly some information is moving behind the scenes, given the "header ... ; modified ..."
Isn't Discourse software aimed at improving internet forums rather than a discussion venue in itself? It's not comparable to stackexchange, which is software plus a community.
They're just formally recognizing the state of affairs as it already is. When I have a problem with IE, I don't go to whatever MS had before (I don't even know what it was), I'd Google it and the first would invariably be StackOverflow.

MS has realized that they can save money and provide effectively the same support (since nobody used their support anyway) by recognizing the third party tool.
> Can you honestly say that you wrote this sentence in order to be understood widely?

I can't say I didn't. But perhaps my subconscious finally prodded me to go beyond lurking and post my first comment so as to ensure I engage with the masses and thereby improve the clarity of my hermetically sealed self expression. So let me rephrase that: Stuff like great novels and the writings of Nietzsche can make you feel as alive as when you consider the findings from the LHC or read the "Selfish Gene". That being said, I think we should use the ideas of science, and philosophy of science, to improve our art and make it more meaningful and fecund for ideas. Since the results of science have no intrinsic meaning at this point in time (nor do they say anything utterly conclusive about what really exists at the lowest level of ontology), we still need something else. Obfuscation is one way to encourage the reader to really understand the context and layers of some piece of writing by making them dig deeper (there was an interesting link about this a few weeks back).
You think you know when you learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program. -- Alan Perlis

As they say, that is, until you do machine learning.
What they should do is to marry men that want to stay at home taking care of the kids.
This is the funniest parody of a Mens' Rights Activist I've read in a long time. Thank you. Wow, isn't it remarkable that some people actually believe this stuff?
Prove it, other me.
I started learning how to code using PHP at 29, and 4 years later I am still an amateur. I can say with confidence that the day I started programming was the last day I got bored, and this no figure of speech.

I am not sure whether a late start is an advantage or not, for I would I have preferred the opposite, however I am glad I started then.

Now I can spend my weekends working on things for myself instead of posting requirements on Odesk and such.

I am in marketing, and the ability to automate tasks has proved useful countless times.

My opinion now is that of a good friend "Coding is today's arithmetic. Everybody should learn it, without an exception." Nothing should be so special about it.
Now FREE NOTE-IFY app for iOS
A Learning Technique Inspired by Computer Hackers
You weren't kidding, I like that kind of self-deprecating humor :)
That's a bullshit argument and you know it. If you have actually read it why don't you point out what part of their argument you consider to be flawed? You started out making a legal claim (that Obama had decided not to enforce parts of the law, and that there was no legislative backing for this decision). Now you're making rhetorical arguments, ie suggesting that appointees will serve up whatever argument the President wants - despite the fact the opinion includes a denial of presidential authority on one issue that was inquired about, and despite my (very briefly) pointing out the legislative basis of executive authority and non-controversial examples of its use on a collective rather than an individual basis.

I'm not expecting a legal brief but you haven't offered anything substantive at all. (Edit for formatting)
The force of these kinds of thrusters are so low that they are insignificant for Earth-based movement; only in space, if you keep the thruster running for a long enough time, would they make a difference; same with ion thrusters.
Interesting, thanks. I was really just making a joke: the questions I google up are somehow quite often flagged for one reason or another, which makes SO's uncanny SEO effectiveness kind of irritating.

I agree that is baffling the way interesting questions are always getting quashed.
dragonwriter, you might have noticed that the "Reply" buttons are screwed up here in Mr. Graham's Arc paradise, which is why I replied to your post.
If it weren't for Microsoft charging for software, he wouldn't have leverage to make this demand for free access. ;)
Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns
Dear Madam or Sir ,

We are launching within several days a simultaneous campaign on both Kickstarter and Indiegogo sites for a project named -
'scrmable , scrabmle, srcblame'

The 'scramble' program modifies plain text to frustrate machine analyzing by commercial entities (Google), and government entities (NSA).

Since official Kickstarter and Indiegogo project links are available only at launching time, I am posting for your reference:
- project video published at
http://youtu.be/NrP8fzJrijE
- product page -
http://arstech.com/install/ecom-prodshow/scramble.html

If you consider the project worthy of your attention, please check the material provided.

Sincerely,
Paul Arsov	President- ARS Technologies
(the guy in the video)
Regarding the gap between "people who want to do X but feel excluded" and "people who are already doing X", there's a really tough-to-measure additional gap, between "people who want to do X", and "people who would want to do X, except they think it's not possible/allowed/acceptable for them". Those people may not even be consciously aware that they're omitting a field (such as CS) from consideration because "people like me don't do things like that". Even if there are a few "people like me" doing that thing, they may assume that only the most exceptional such people will be successful, so they don't even consider it as a possibility for themselves.
> That's a bit inaccurate. Prosecutors have legal discretion on a case-by-case basis, but a President not enforcing large sections of the law has never been tested...what happens when the next President decides not to enforce the laws they don't like?

That's a bit inaccurate as well. Reagan and his administration were fairly open that they were not going to enforce sections of law as well, and in the same area, labor law. Particularly with directives sent to the Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

http://www.nytimes.com/1984/06/09/opinion/looking-for-loopho...

The idea that Reagan was enforcing OSHA labor laws, but that Obama is not enforcing immigration labor laws, is a bit hard to swallow.
The good news is that Upstart is in the process of being phased out. The bad news is its replacement. : )
The key post from that page:

"Since it goes through Google's servers, they can verify a lot of things. Whether you are logged in currently to google, have you been logged in the past, verify your activity on your IP address, etc. Even if you signed in from the same ip or ip range like a year ago, they can still tell it's you based on your previous actions."