skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm just going to address your three points with my personal opinions.

1. From a convenience perspective, it is easier for me to manage payments from my phone. That's less space being used in my pocket, and less physical operations that need to be completed for me to pay for something. Yes, an individual card does not take up much space, but I rarely carry just my debit card in my wallet.

2. The battery life of my phone is decent enough for me to not worry all that much. I recently switched from iPhone 4 to Droid Turbo and find myself only needing to charge every two days. Also, I use a car charger while I commute if I'm streaming podcast or music, so for the most part I'm not concerned with my battery.

3. Unless you buy things with bitcoin or the like, someone is collecting and analysing your data. I think Google does a better job at security than POS readers and vendors. I've already had to replace my card after home depot and target breaches.
An article recently made it onto HN about how rape is seriously underreported by men, and that the real rates of rape or sexual assault are nearly equal. This of course is a controversial finding, but not obviously flawed either. According to this study, it's roughly 1:2 men to women, not 1:10 as the CDC reports.

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/04/male_...
Replace "men" and "women" with "blacks" and "whites". Is it reasonable for white people to feel a need for caution talking to black people in an elevator?
Hm, you/they think the interviewer intentionally made Richards look as bad as they could, or something? I don't really know.

The article you link to is worth reading -- it's critiquing a different article by Ronson in the NYTimes Magazine, not the OP by the the same author in Esquire. Obviously he used the same research for both though, and the critique might apply to both. The NYTimes one indeed reduced Richards to 'an anecdote', it was not focused just on this case, like the Esquire one was, and the Esquire one is a lot more clear about the consequences Richards faced. I think he did a somewhat better job of depicting the fucked up stuff that happened to Richards in the more recent Esquire one, but perhaps it's still not fair.

Obviously Richards has actually suffered way worse 'retribution' than 'Hank', and it is indeed illustrative.

But I'm struck by Richards comment in the article you link to:

"This has been my M.O. for several years, and it's how most people who run blogs operate: You experience something that generates strong feelings; you wrote a blog post. Pretty straightforward."

Yet she blames 'Hank' for tweeting about his own strong feelings about getting fired.

I have no idea if he was wrong to tell the joke or not; I am absolutely sure she was right to complain to conference if she felt threatened by it. I think the conf hosts did the right thing -- they didn't kick him out, they just told him, hey, cool it.

It's fucked up that he got fired; and it's even more fucked up that Richards got fired, and harassed and threatened by a mob, and had her career ruined way more than 'Hank'. What happened to Richards is definitely instructive, and that women in tech _know_ that there's an internet mob of misogynists waiting to try and ruin their lives... provides some context explaining where she's coming from, for sure. I'll admit I don't think she was or is responding compassionately or entirely rationally... but I understand why.
Clearly not the kind of women we need more in tech... well, we don't need fanatics anywhere really.
Also, the K in Kernighan Lin (Graph min cut)
and the Lin-Kernighan heuristic (Traveling salesman)
The problem now is that GMail is so big, it becomes "well your emails are being filtered in GMail so you need to fix it". With smaller providers it would be that they were being too aggressive with email filtering. Fixing the problem is sometimes very hard with large providers as you really have nobody to contact for help or whitelisting. You can do all the best practices for sending emails (SPF, DKIM etc) but that will not help if you get filtered or blocked for some arbitrary and unknown reason.

So for this reason people give up and either send their emails through well known mail senders or switch their users to services like GMail. This is sad as perhaps the last communications medium with open standards is being forced proprietary due to the difficulty in dealing with the large email providers. My company switched to GMail for our email, and Mandrill for sending out our mailing list although we have competent sysadmins.
Disclaimer: I work for Rackspace.

We have a once click Orchestration install of OwnCloud that will install and fine tune your server according to their best practices and specifications,. We also have a developer+ program where you can get $50/mo for 12 months in credit to try us out (developer.rackspace.com/signup)
>... it's small enough to keep in your head...

While I mostly agree, the flip side of this statement is, the language then does not automatically take care of things that then you have to keep in your head while you're solving the problem.

I guess this is the underlying trade-off people make when using "higher-level" or "lower-level" languages. More "powerful" languages do more for you automatically, but you need more up-front investment in really understanding the language and applying it to the problem at hand.

And since we are all individuals with individual preferences, whatever choice you make is totally valid for you. It does not make sense to look down on the choices of others. On the other hand, there are some concepts that really are well-understood enough and apply to a large spectrum of languages. These should see widespread adoption, and it does not make sense to deny this either.
The Apple Watch: What we don't know
I believe your interpretation of the Dunning-Kruger effect is slightly wrong. The effect is not that the least skilled estimate their skill to be above average. The effect is that the least skilled tend to overestimate their skill level greater than those with higher skill levels. Also, those at the highest tend to overestimate the least (and indeed often times underestimate).
They're not wasted. Odds and ends go into a bin to be ground up later for "salads."
Can you provide information as to where you are located? These rates seem pretty low IMO, and you speak to location being an important variable, it would be helpful to know what region you're referencing.
Ironically, one day later there's a post in HN that links to old copy protection schemes.

And there's a pic of the manual of course:

http://www.vintagecomputing.com/wp-content/images/copyprotec...
Dallas recently built a park[0] over a highway smack dab in the middle of the city and it has been a huge success. It would be great to do this in more places.

[0] http://www.klydewarrenpark.org/
It can feel maddening, I know.

What's important to realise is that we live in a society that is inherently sexist (that much is clear simply from the statistics), without really having many 'sexists' in it as you would normally define them. Nobody walks around saying (or even thinking, I suspect) that they hate women. The only sensible conclusion is that the bias is a product of our inherent subconscious prejudices, and unfortunately that's really hard to combat because it means we have to inspect every part of our behaviour to try to make sure we're not doing something that puts minorities at any more of a disadvantage.

I'm not defending the really extreme feminists who can definitely go way overboard, but I can understand where they're coming from -- how else do you fight this institutionalised bias that puts you at a significant disadvantage for your entire life? I don't think anyone has a great answer right now, and that has to be so frustrating. As a white male who's never faced much discrimination, it took me a very long time to empathise with that, but I think it's important.
I was looking into using email for rich content delivery yesterday as part of this "Watch me program" thing I'm doing. How difficult could it be to send rich html to somebody on email?

Turns out, freaking difficult. For one of the simplest protocols in the world, email is now a byzantine disaster. Different clients render things differently, different providers block or don't block things -- and that's not even getting into trusted domains and spam issues, which you end up depending on third parties to assist.

Add into this mix Google's notorious black-box/impenetrability/lost-in-space-customer-support? I don't see an optimistic future for you.

I'd rather go back to hand-coding COM in C++ that become a network email engineer. That's got to be a brutal job. You're dependent on so many moving pieces and you control so very little.
I know who created Go, because everyone does.

Being created by Pike, Thompson, and whoever else does not in and of itself make Go better than any other language. It also does not make it immune to criticism in such a way that you should brush off anyone who has anything negative to say about it.
> We deny her feelings, and in doing so we exclude her and other women.

Now that comment is sexist, because you deny men the right to have the same feelings. It's easy to pick nits, especially in those fields.

I don't think that anybody denies Adria's right to feel offended, at least not really. Feelings are irrational, that's why we don't get to fully explain them logically (quite convenient). Actions, on the other hand, should be rational, and we are often judged by their rationality.

We can only speculate how Adria felt, and it doesn't really matter. Her actions and words are what got her into trouble. When compared to the comments she overheard on the conference, it is not just out of proportion, but completely out of direction as well.

Perhaps the worst part is that this kind of attitude actually _hurts_ tolerance instead of improving it. I'd love to have a productive black Jewish female on my team. I'd hate to have someone obsessing about racism, sexism and hurt feelings, regardless of their race and gender.
We won't have a cloud SLA until GA but for end-to-end latency our goal is to be only slightly slower than inherent network latency.
Only if you have a policy of not having positions for Junior programmers.

Fog Creek has the same hypocrisy as any other company that demands X years of experience from applicants but consider it somebody else's problem how they get that.
Hmm. Must go with Umbridge? Maybe the guy that David Tennant played that impersonated Mad Eye Moody?
Google quest to make art available to everyone was foiled by copyright concerns
I feel some real cognitive dissonance when I read about how this situation unfolded.

Allegedly Adria felt threatened, fearful for her life. Her reaction to this fear was to turn around, take a photo, post it on the internet and presumably stay where she was. Hank expressed confusion over how the organisers found out about it - if she'd left her seat that confusion wouldn't exist.

So we have a woman fearing for her life, sitting in a seat mere centimetres away from the threat, tapping out an accusatory tweet on her smartphone.

It might just be me, but in that circumstance with an obvious breach of conference protocol my first reaction would be to leave the immediate vicinity of the threat and find a conference organiser to raise the issue with.

Posting it online does nothing to defend against the immediate perceived threat - it just doesn't add up.

I'm not saying that Adria shouldn't have felt threatened, but her behaviour does not fit the profile of someone in that mental state. Beyond that, public naming and shaming is not the way to deal with this kind of a problem. Talk to an organiser, get the breach of conference policy dealt with in private and if you feel it's warranted, post about the experience and how it negatively affected you in a constructive way that doesn't cause a witch hunt.

All that this stunt has achieved is further marginalisation of female developers; the risk of having an offhand joke resulting in being publicly drawn and quartered just isn't worth socialising around them. If this case were handled properly - by talking to the conference organisers and dealing with the breach of policy - this wouldn't have become such a huge issue.

I don't understand why it had to be dealt with in public like this.
How are errors in deferred functions handled? How about division by zero?
i can only imagine people who work at Google are some sort of interview ninjas.
The Blub Paradox would only apply if the people using Go hadn't used languages with generics (or similar); for the most part that's not true.

> But "lack of generics" is definitely not the same as "simplicity.

It's not literally the same thing, but it is an aspect that keeps Go simple.
COBOL

If ever there was a language that comes close to matching the more notorious aspects of C, COBOL is the most likely culprit. Coming about in the same era as the venerable FORTRAN, the two languages together ran on mainframes everywhere in the early days to mung through endless business data, speeding up calculations previously done by hand, all in the name of "the greater good".

However, while their early goals were the same, FORTRAN opted for a bit more structured, concise approach, using strongly typed vars and adopting a few of the newer ideas along the way. COBOL, however, remained reliant upon horribly verbose incantations, and refused to cease use of unforgivable spells such as "goto".

FORTRAN went on to be a venerable, yet eccentric language regarded to this day as fastest in some of the more arcane calculations after so many years past its prime. COBOL, however, has for its crimes been largely ridiculed and its practice considered one of the darkest of magics. It has been relegated to the proverbial jail tower, its practitioners shunned. The famous wizard Djikstra once stated "The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense."

COBOL is Grindelwald, a crippled old relic rotting away in long forgotten mainframes.
At least the author heard of Haskell!
As an extra tidbit of information: Luxembourg was already violating EU rules for having a VAT percentage of less than 5%.
And that is the description for a fairly normal "forward all my mail to my personal inbox" scenario. Its not rocket science and it is not using gmail as his backend. We do it with part-time faculty.
Europe must be ahead of the US in terms of card reading. I can't buy lunch without having to sign a receipt.
I've been blaming my hosting company, getting everyone in their support chain to take a crack at the issue. I always just assumed that gmail was the working side of the problem, not the problem itself.
David Horne's 1K Chess on the ZX81 (2001)
It would also be nice if you could disable spam filtering entirely and run your own client-side.
-Website templates
500-2000

-E-commerce websites
10000 to start

-Wordpress/Joomla themes
2000 to start

-Some SEO from time to time
?? SEO is bullshit

-Adding responsiveness to websites
Too vague to estimate

-Website designs
500 to start

-Dynamic websites
2000 to start
Once she said she had no regret for him getting fired, and that it was ok because he was a white male, any sympathy that could have been had was gone.

She's like the white man who shot the black kids in Florida because he was threatened by their loud music.
I personally don't see what Adria was originally offended by but I'm male so unless there's something in what Hank said that I won't see as offensive unless I'm female then I don't have a clue.

Yeah, she did: https://twitter.com/adriarichards/status/312265091791847425
Watson in the Wild: Brewery Master
I worked in a poor area. The people who live there, by and large, don't give a shit what you think of them.
What I understand by "feminist" is somebody who is for equality between men and women.
I've been interested in this argument for some time. Does anyone have any additional sources here?
Surely the point of the intelligence services is to find out who is threatening a country in a certain way?
For me it's a combo between this /and/ just people's attitude - it's fine if you want to be slow, but you have to be considerate of others. I wouldn't be mad if you were walking slowly on the side of the street - probably wouldn't even notice - but I'll be mad if you're walking slowly in the middle. It often costs nothing to be considerate, and it makes life more pleasant for everyone!
Having separate work and personal emails is not asking very much.
Compositional Music Composition
Hey, the choice was between transit.js and velocity.js. I don't think we made the wrong choice to go with transit.js, but next time we will definitely try velocity.js :D
I'm not sure what you mean; do you mean that their search bar doesn't include spam filters? (I assume that's what you mean since filter creation is sort of built into the search bar.)
30 person engineering team, and no junior devs?
Not sure why you think that. I have found getting feedback from team members before user testing finds a lot of low-hanging issues.
John Lars Zwerenz – The Rose Garden – CD Baby Music Store
in addition to what logicallee said, it's common for inexperienced programmers to (poorly) "re-invent" concepts that were discovered in the past by those "smart old people". This is caused by a combination of factors, and one of them is the belief that one can solve a problem single-handedly without studying the fundamentals and previous strategies. Ignoring the work of the masters is a good way to start from scratch and do worse.
Thanks for the feedback, we really tried for it not to sound like an infomercial, while at the same time showing an example of how to move before friends and followers.

We are really nothing like Facebook, and in many ways, the opposite. Id be happy to give you the demo some time. Jess@closr.to or 415-390-6808
That's another thing I forgot to mention, many people just don't want the first slice because it's been sitting out for a while. I don't fault them for that.
I haven't heard anyone, including the go authors, say that generics are bad and you absolutely don't need them in Go.

Personally I like Go a lot and don't miss generics much, but for some things I'd love to use generics some day. It's basically about trade-offs eventually. To quote the FAQ about it:

> enerics may well be added at some point. We don't feel an urgency for them, although we understand some programmers do.

> Generics are convenient but they come at a cost in complexity in the type system and run-time. We haven't yet found a design that gives value proportionate to the complexity, although we continue to think about it.
This is good fun. Where did you get the sound clips from?
Understanding Optionals in Swift
YES. This has been killing me for months- my clients keep crawling in my asshole and all of my efforts have changed exactly none of the problem.
> Your post makes me severely question your grasp of the legal system in the United States.

Question away, I don't live in the US and I have no intention to. I was under the impression that this could, indeed, be handled by a court of law or the police; today I learned, I guess :) but even so, I don't think it takes away my point.

Racism and sexism are very legal around here as well, because they are personal opinions. Wrong as as hell, but the state is (fortunately!) not in the business of righting wrong opinions. What is illegal (or considered as an aggravating circumstance) is making someone the victim of those opinions: firing someone because he's black or implying that someone can't be promoted because she's a woman and women are only good for sex and cooking.

> When people say you're hurting them, you need to accept that rather than trying to reason yourself into "well, I'm really not." That's just part of being a decent human.

I obviously do not disagree with this. I also believe, however::

* That this is not what happened in Hank's case. This was a private conversation that was overheard. Have you honestly never cracked a sexist joke with a friend in a bar? A racist joke? You sure you never laughed a bit too hard at that picture about Irish yoga? Alcoholism is no joke!

* ...and if empathy is indeed the solution, why would it not go both ways? When people say you're hurting them, why does it flow only in terms of "I'm sorry I hurt you, I am going to stop" and not also in terms of "He seems like an allright guy though; perhaps he didn't want to hurt me?"

I'm not talking out of my ass here: I have a very obvious defect in my left eye (crippling enough that I cannot e.g. hold a driver's license, and sometimes embarrassing enough that I drop or hit objects because my depth perception sucks), and I was the target of many mean jokes, both as a child and as an adult. I also understand, however, that there is such a thing as a harmless joke, and I am firmly convinced that not understanding that wouldn't mean "I'm accepting and acknowledging my condition". It would just mean I'm a bitter asshole. And, if I were to react with anger or disappointment when I hear someone behind me saying that the guy on stage should put his glasses on because the color scheme of his presentation is ridiculous, everyone around me would really be right to treat me like an asshole.

Upon hearing something along the lines of "In the world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king", the correct, normal reaction of someone who is socially responsible is not to instantly go into a fleeting rage of hurr durr this is offensive. I'm emotionally mature enough to tell when someone wants to offend me -- and if I weren't, I honestly don't think society should indulge me. We don't indulge many other symptoms of emotional immaturity. This shouldn't get special treatment.
My only real issue with it is that I really with it had algebraic types. That would save me a tonne of faffing about and help make code safer to boot. Type switches are a clumsy alternative that only cover some of the cases.
I think this discussion could benefit from some examples. I can readily think of Rails and Django as frameworks, but what are the library counter-examples? And what are the actual pros and cons of those particular examples.

I find it hard to think of these in the abstract.

Additionally, I suppose that the workflow around the library or framework should be taken into account.

For instance, if there is a large team, a framework might be better because you already know the conventions? But what if the team changes a lot? What if you have great on-boarding tools?

This debate needs more context.
There is a war for Women Dev's in silicon valley. Google's HR head mentioned in a podcast that they are simply poaching female devs' from smaller players to get their diversity numbers up. This puts smaller players at a major disadvantage as VC's have started tying their funding with diversity numbers. There is no way a startup can compete directly with Goog for the female dev's who are in major short supply.

This diversity madness is putting SV at a major disadvantage.
Makes sense for Amazon's store, where your books live in the cloud and you download some of them locally if you want.

Doesn't make sense if you are provided an .epub file to download.
There's a great TED Talk by Simon Sinek where he explains the golden circle, and says "people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it." This author plays the neutral card unlike many others who buy in (literally and figuratively) to Apple's "innovation", which is already widely available. Moto 360 anyone?

I think it's interesting how Apple omits key details, including price and battery life, if favor of spectacular displays and forged examples of everyday use.

I think as a society, we aren't ready for a smart watch yet, but if we are, I'd imagine the Apple Watch success would stem from the brand more so than the product itself.
She publicly shamed them first: https://twitter.com/adriarichards/status/313417655879102464/...