skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What is a hinderance to freedom of speech is not the bullying itself, but the mindset behind it. If you can't make a foolish joke without having your entire life ruined and getting fired, then yes that is the very definition of lack of freedom of speech. Getting fired for a joke, come on? Action and reaction are completely disproportionate. But worry not, I will absorb the downvotes like a sponge for I know that my common sense has not gone missing yet.
7 Little Known Fitness Hacks That Will Change Your Life
Not mentioned in the wikipedia article: There are no trash cans in the lunchroom because Renzo Piano apparently hates them. Instead, weird conveyer belt tray thing.
Catastrophic Prototyping and Other Stories (2011)
All right, I don't know why I said it like that. Fixed.
The Two Big Bangs
I think he was referring to the fact that the request completes in finite time isn't a tight enough bound.
> Smartphone batteries could easily last a week right now, with current technology.

Source? I always assumed the the main reason why modern cellphones' battery life is a lot worse than a few years ago was because of power-hungry processors and screens.
This could also be said about passwords:
I have bad memory I can't remember a long complex password.. Point being that there are issues with all forms of security. Bullet proof glass for example can be taken out by an RPG this reasoning is only detrimental to the advancement, innovation, and implementation of layers of security to protect consumers. I think it's neat and my take a way from the article is that the author felt comforted by the fact that at least someone at the bank appreciated the movie sneakers and was attempting to increase security measures through innovation.
I learned about the API change a few weeks ago from a buddy who works at LinkedIn. He said the old API was a complete horror ("evolved over a long period in an uncontrolled fashion") and no longer even matched what was going on at the back end. I do know a lot of it was flakey.

This friend is a developer and was excited about the change -- I am sure he had no idea about the terms that marketing attached to the new API and will have to see what he thinks. I also wonder what the company is really trying to do by being so restrictive.

Linkedin has never really made a lot of sense to me as a business -- I use it to look people up before meeting with them to see what we might have in common, but apart from that I don't understand how they function. But the people I know who work there seem fanatical about it, and they do rake in a lot of money.
Angularjs Directive – Accept Number Only
Best-case scenario (for them) is that the random data is "truly" random. 72 bits of the ID are sourced from Math.random(), which means you need to start worrying about collisions when clients attempt to generate 2^36 events with the same timestamp. That's about 70 billion, so it's not something that would keep me up at night.

What's harder to quantify is the role that sub-optimal random number generators would play in this. Implementation of Math.random is left to the browser, but you could imagine a simple LCG with just a 64-bit long as its state, initialized with the current time. Having only 64 bits of state is the limiting factor here, both for properly filling out the 72 bits of entropy (you can't) and for 2 users to have the same internal state in their LCG.
Natural optima occur in the middle
I don't see any mention of any Hangouts or XMPP issues over at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google.
I don't see anything in the article to suggest this is exploitation (see my response to girvo). He is choosing to work in a low wage job because it offers him flexible hours.

I hold public institutions to the same standard of efficiency in accomplishing their goals a private ones (mainly, not paying people extra for no reason). The only difference is that their goals are public, not private.
What Do I Do Now? The Startup Lifecycle
I was never cool, which is why I was so active on Wikipedia :-) thanks for your kind words!
Boy, I should stop reading HN. The more I read about the scientific advancements that are going on in this field, the more I think about getting a second degree in, say, biology, to try to work on biological computers or stuff like that.
I agree 100% - the people in PhD programs have a long track record of being the best undergrads, the best MS students. They are good, obedient students who trust their professors, even when those professors may have obtained their tenure-track jobs in the 1960s and 70s and have no understanding of (1) the opportunities outside academia and (2) how the academic job market really is. A lot of them have some vague idea of "oh well, the good grad students will always get academic jobs". The answer is, "maybe, after 2-3 postdocs, at age 38, if they are lucky".
Curious... I live in suburbia where putting solar panels on one's domicile would most likely be met with an order to remove or fines.

I had an experimental panel in my backyard to provide power to a work shop shed. The shed was there when I purchased the property & house. About 6 months after planting a pole in the ground, behind the shed, but in view to my neighbors garnered a letter from the township where I live that basically said to remove it for being an eye sore.

Has anyone else ran into this problem?
Really? No sympathy? Did you read the article? Obviously what she said was inappropriate but there are very few people that should be dragged through the mud as roughly as she was. Especially over less than 140 characters.

Should she have lost her job? Yeah probably being in such a high profile position. But should she be reviled as an truly awful person when her only crime was an ill-conceived tweet? I don't think so personally, and it scares me that we are willing to judge and condemn people for so little.
In all honesty, you did a really poor job explaining why racist jokes are bad. You're being downvoted because (1) you assume that her joke was racist, and (2) you assume that racist jokes are bad (without showing understanding or "open-mindedness" about people who think otherwise).

Personally, I disagree on both counts. I like offensive jokes of all kinds (I mean, if they're actually funny). Coming from a very homogeneous Central European country, I have never been on either side of oppression (other than being bullied in school for being weak, small, smart geek), so I definitely don't have your experience of being "hurt" by jokes, but your experience doesn't translate into a universally-applicable moral/rational argument that racist jokes are bad. However, even if I agreed with you and would personally dislike racist jokes, I would still strongly oppose restrictions or censorship on racist/offensive jokes, to avoid situations like the recent Charlie Hebdo attack.
I just noticed this was authored by Michael Nielsen... co-author of the text on quantum computation, and now a huge open-academia advocate. And he's open-sourced the micro-lisp he wrote in this article: https://github.com/mnielsen
If you add pws=0 to your querystring, it'll search without personalization. Actually, there are other factors at play too [1], but that alone should work well enough.

1: http://moz.com/blog/face-off-4-ways-to-de-personalize-google
The "finite time" requirement isn't actually related to performance, it's needed to make sure we can prove meaningful things about the return value. If a function never returns a value (or it "returns after an infinite amount of time") then anything we say about its return value will be a counterfactual, and open to all kinds of paradoxes and inconsistencies.

If we want to enforce some actual performance metric, we can use something like cost semantics ( http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5021 ) to enforce complexity bounds (eg. the "big-O" behaviour), then use a few small-scale tests to relate the constant factors in the model to real world values.
There are problems with using DC in a consumer environment incresaed losses and nore fires ( problem in Amrica with its use of wood as abuiding material)

Talk to any telecoms workers and they will tell you amusing stories about acidents with the DC supply - the Painters shorting out the bussbars whilst decorating an Echange (Central Office) was one I remeber.

48 V might be posble but that means 2 Diferent sets of wireing.
SJW here. Private communication works well if the problem is specific people behaving badly in private, and public ostracism is, in fact, inappropriate. But usually the goal is to establish a changed social norm, and to combat an existing one, which needs to be done in public; ostracizing an individual is not the goal (and, to be clear, isn't a good thing!).

Someone brought up the example of Ben Noordhuis and node.js elsewhere in this thread. Assuming for the sake of argument that Ben's behavior was something that you didn't want in the world, it's not enough to message him in private and say "Hey, this was wrong for these reasons." That gets you change within the node community (well, provided it's Ben acting), but not anywhere else. Meanwhile, if you object in public and write a blog post about it... do you think io.js is going to risk rejecting a pull request about gendered pronouns now? Or any other equally large, somewhat-overlapping language community?

I would definitely agree with the criticism that the blog post should have tried harder not to look like an attack on Ben as a person. But it reads to me like it wasn't the intention; it was an attack on anyone who acts in the same way.
Why Did Facebook Acquire Oculus VR?
I agree.

And about the "not my job" part. This is definitely a problem, especially in a startup where everyone basically have to be jack of all trades.

But as a company grow it's important to find a way to utilize each others skills in such a manner that things actually get build and the responsibilities are clear.

Often you end up realizing that what one person did half-hearted because they also have other obligations, could actually benefit from having someone only doing that also financially.
Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places: The Dangers of Dating Websites
sweet, so we could attempt to find out the queue size!!
Applications for YC S15 are open
I totally agree. I was also surprised to see the author of the article defend the tweet as well.

>But after thinking about her tweet for a few seconds more, I began to suspect that it wasn’t racist but a reflexive critique of white privilege — on our tendency to naïvely imagine ourselves immune from life’s horrors.

Her comments that followed seemed to agree with your second point.
For the most part, 'they' is 'us'. We have to live with the results. My power company is the REC, and I could run for the board but I don't. Anyway its my neighbors trying their best to keep the power on for everybody.

You didn't mention issues of connecting to the local grid. There may be issues adding solar to your house, relative to the transformer and neighborhood substation. That $100 may be what it cost them to adapt. Likely its a tiny fraction of the cost of dealing with customers with unusual requirements.
my Chrysler Town & Country van has 110v outlets in the rear of the van. Occasionally, we trip the breaker but for the most part it works rather well too.
> And we agree that's bad, right?

Sometimes. It's less clear-cut in some cases - specifically, when a statement or action is more directly against some group's human rights, or otherwise directly dehumanises people. However, what I'm suggesting that it's not going to stop - all sides are going to keep doing it, and always have done.

It used to be that if you learned that something was OK, it'd be OK for the rest of your life (more-or-less, ignoring major political events). Now, that's not so much the case as the progressives have more power and visibility, and so it's more visible when someone says something that might've been accepted 10 years ago and isn't now, vs someone saying something that is generally not accepted now but might be in 10 years.
Also, what are the chances that someone can have a similar pitch/tone/voice as the password holder? I bet someone with enough incentive could find another like it.

ie. Google Glass fiasco where you could say, 'OK Google, porn,' behind people who are wearing Google Glass.
Perspectives on the CAP theorem
> the fourth I suspect you're misinterpreting as "Tech managers don't want to hire women", when I think it's more "Tech managers don't care about the gender of their developers"

You're giving that the most contorted, charitable reading possible. In your reading, the reference to a "unicorn" is nonsensical. I would argue the accurate reading is: "Tech managers don't spend time worrying about hiring talented women because [like unicorns] they are mythical and don't exist."

Now, the further implications behind that statement might be:

a) Talented female developers are rare--we need to make serious efforts to improve the educational pipeline and get more young girls interested in programming.

b) Talented female developers are rare, but it's not the tech industry's job to worry or care about that.

c) Talented female developers aren't rare, but [usually male] hiring managers are too blinded by sexism to recognize them.

> regardless of the reality of his actions.

That's the thing. We don't know the reality of his actions. Based only on his tweets (I don't know him personally), he certainly sounds like he might be the kind of guy who would discriminate in his hiring. He might not even do it consciously, he'd just think "Well, I only hire the best" and in his mind, "the best" does not include women.
I was probably a tad harsh there. Sorry about that. I guess it's a matter of degree - she wrote something she thought was ironic which came across badly, but instead of getting a chance to face up to the music and explain her side, the entire Internet went insane and she lost her job.

It seems a little much.
You see this somewhat in mobile computers (phones). The power and thermal constraints limit performance, so developers limit features vs. their desktop counterparts.
App Store reviews delivered to Slack and your inbox
Maybe decorate it with flowers? Or talk with your neighbors? =/
MRV?
This makes the name of his company interesting homage to Nicola. Nicola competed with Edison and Edison eventually won out.

While Musk's plans aren't the same as Tesla's, the idea that an important part of the new structure of the modern electric grid bears his name is great.
I'd argue the former.
I don't think you really need a source for this. Current smartphone batteries last about a day in normal use. If you made it seven times larger, it would still be portable (just less so), and would now last a week. Increasing battery capacity by just adding more battery is trivial. What's hard is adding capacity without adding bulk or cost.
> then you would never need the ServerValue.TIMESTAMP hack

ref.push({
foo: 'bar',
date: Firebase.ServerValue.TIMESTAMP
});

Seems way easier than synchronizing a clock in the browser and one on the server, and you don't have to try to account for network latency between browser and server.

> If at any level there is a clock which can skew and is being adjusted with a stochastic process, there is jitter, and you can get out of order

My understanding is that Linux has support for a monotonic clock. As long as its a single box resolving the times this shouldn't be a hard problem.
And does require the right geography
Betting with Buffett: Seven Years Later
What about Crunchbase?
You don't even like us do you? Why are you even here?
Apparently he is about to publish a book about public shaming, so this article was pulled out of a broader set https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Ronson
agree. Also, you need to heat your house here in Michigan if you don't want your water pipes to freeze... or your kid's pet cockatiel to die or suffer.
I've called this out before on HN and was downvoted quite a lot for it. I don't remember the startup, but they did something mundane like Pinterest, and claimed they were doing it "to make the world a better place". It's weird that people here try to defend this sometimes.
That's probably averaged over all disciplines. The better-funded disciplines (CS, engineering, natural sciences, etc) have better outcomes in the sense of shorter time-to-completion. There's a lot more attrition in arts and social sciences, as I understand it.
I am at a quite similiar situation, where i realize that i mentally will not be able to do my job for a several couple of years from now on. ( Also working as Freelancer )

I guess there is no "fast way out", but in the transitional period to something new(whatever it will be), it is important to find a new point of view on your work.
What i mean is, that it often helps to look at the activities you dislike, as they would be more of a tai-chi training.
Also: Focus on other aspects of your work, in multiple ways (Your feelings while working /or: aspects you neglected in the past / the product not the code / etc etc..)

Work less, slower and more clever.

While doing that, slowly find out where you would REALLY like to see yourself in 5 or 10 years.
And don't panic.
The original paper on "memcomputing" has also been posted on HN[0], not that it is worth reading in details.

But I can recommend Scott's paper "NP-complete Problems and Physical Reality"[1], the whole thing is a brilliant piece of work.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8652475

[1] http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/npcomplete.pdf
An interesting idea. I've written an "active code" system for my blog, based on the excellent Pandoc ( http://chriswarbo.net/essays/activecode/index.html ) so I can write code inside my posts and have it executed during rendering.

There's no requirement to do things that way, but it's certainly possible to write posts containing blocks of Coq code and blocks of shell code for compiling them, such that a failed compilation will abort the rendering. In fact, I'm doing that very thing right now! Although I'm rendering a PDF paper rather than a HTML blog post ;)
Really interesting.
“This American penchant for absolution via irony is foreign to them.”

(Late D. F. Wallace, Infinite Jest)
The secret to this is not genetics or something in our drinking water. We’ve had an environment that encourages investment, welcomes immigrants, rewards risk-taking, hard work, and radical thinking, and minimizes impediments to doing new things.

It's disappointing (though not surprising) to see Altman dismiss the possibility of genetic differences between populations playing a role in differential economic success. While it's true that the US population has enjoyed many non-genetic advantages, genetic and non-genetic factors are not mutually exclusive. Showing that non-genetic factors do play a role is not the same as showing that genetic factors don't play a role. (I'm tempted to call this the "Guns, Germs, and Steel Fallacy," since Jared Diamond's work on the subject is essentially a book-length expansion on this basic error.)

If you read Larry Bird's biography, you'll learn how in high school he became obsessed with basketball, practicing at every opportunity and shooting 500 free throws every morning. He also had the good fortune of having a series of outstanding coaches and living in a culture that valued basketball prowess. On the other hand, he also grew to be 6'9".
This is one of the reasons I would love to see the adjunct teachers unionize and strike. The ivory-tower professors love telling how great unions are for every other industry; why should they be left out of the awesomeness?
Even if we were to take the offensiveness of the tweet as a given, the reaction seems insanely disproportionate.

It's great to push back against casual racism, but I don't think anything is gained by turning it into a lottery where any given tweet has a one-in-a-million chance of provoking a national-scale, life-destroying burst of outrage, and the rest are ignored.
I don't think anything has really changed. iOS 7 ran sluggishly on an iPhone 4, just as Windows Vista did on machines that came out when Windows XP was new.
Interesting article, though I wonder why the title here on Hacker News is "How One Stupid Tweet Ruined Justine Sacco's Life" whereas the title on the actual article is "How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life."
Facebook Marketing: This trick guarantees higher organic reach for your Page
We've been using Go in production on our proprietary email platform for a couple years now for daemon services, web APIs and EMR jobs[1]. A few other teams have also picked up the language and are building out new systems to support comments, mobile and I think a maybe a few other pieces of the site.

Go is definitely not our only tool in the box and many teams (including mine) still use Python, C++ or whatever works best for the job at hand, but I think there definitely is a trend of Go being the choice for a lot of new server side systems.

[1] http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/10/emr-streaming-in-go...
Essentially, your argument is that the ends justify the means, right? Or, that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few? The issue is that we now know that things blow up in social media so we should adjust our behavior to be ethical.

The case of dongle-gate at PyCon is a good example to talk about. We should now understand that attempting local solutions outside of social media is far preferable. Individuals (on either side of an issue) should not be cannon fodder for social causes. Inviting/creating that sort of public ostracism is extremely irresponsible. I hope that we (collectively) are learning that lesson.

Maybe protecting individuals from social media attacks can be seen as a social justice cause? The most vulnerable minority is the minority of one.
I've compared using Locust to Gatling and the only downside is that Locust wasn't able to reach the same RPS I was getting with Gatling. It's a shame because Locust is much nicer to work with in comparison.
Are you seriously suggesting pay should be determined by how fun a job is and not how much skill it requires or how much it contributes to society?
I've used voice authentication with Nuance's SDK before and having a cold or gaining weight does not affect the verification process. It is based on acoustioc signatures in your voice and not necessarily a precise recreation of the original recording. This isn't a problem with this approach.
I... what? Hold your horses, there's an awful lot of projection here.

I haven't come in here to defend internet lynch mobs - there's literally not a word in my post condoning it.

The bulk of tech progressive aren't the ones spoiling for a Twitter fight, they're the silent majority that's reading posts on HN, rolling their eyes, maybe sighing a little bit, and moving along with their lives. They're not orchestrating backlashes, brigades, or downvote chains, or any such devices. The most they're doing is emailing a link to some comment to their friends with a "sigh, HN again" quip - and I've received many such messages.

Heck, I know people who read HN - but only the links - knowing what a cesspool the comments are going to be. Heck, this is me on most days.

These are the people I'm talking about - the ones who've largely left this place behind because the tone of the community has shifted to one where any talk of race, gender, or even age (or in fact any talk of institutional problems in the industry) is automatically the work of professional victims (and a largely fictional narrative of a "social justice warrior") out to oppress techies. The general tenor of the community here now has a very distinctly reactionary twist, which has caused people to bail for greener pastures.
That's a good point, but I think having a basic understanding of software development issues would provide a project manager with the insights needed to know that something should be done at all, at which point they would then need the ability to do something.