skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know you & the parent have both been down-voted, but it would be great if you could explain some rationale behind why Objective C is such a disaster in your opinion(s)?

When I first started learning it, I absolutely _hated_ it. With a burning passion.

It is probably now my current favourite and most productive language.

I seem to very rarely write buggy/poor/badly structured code and almost never hit compiler errors/hard crashes unless they are something relatively obscure. It's quite common for me to write 1k+ lines of code, hit build and have exactly what I wanted compile & work pretty much first time.
Whether or not that is the case, it is completely irrelevant to the topic of the article, unless C++ would help with the "shouldn't have to exist" part. I imagine that a language like Racket which can embed (vector) images directly into source files might help, but C++ has nothing like that, nor do most languages. You could argue that making icon sets for iOS is harder than it has to be, but that would be an IDE and/or tooling problem, not an Objective-C issue specifically.
I did something very similar to render scaled ASCII-art text (a la Figlet):

https://github.com/briangordon/vector-figlet
>A website is literally just text and pictures. And video. That's it.

And CSS, which supports transform and animation and is inching towards Turing completeness, and javascript, and maybe HTML5/Canvas and WebGL.

Like as not, we seem to be converging towards a point where websites are as much applications as documents.
You did get 55 upvotes from people that appreciated your post, and possibly didn't leave a comment. I hope you can see that as the positive feedback it's meant to be?
Ask HN: How do you build the perfect SDK?
Hello HN, we are building 2 sdks (iOS & Android) to create an easy way for developers to connect their apps to our PaaS. (www.xensify.com)

We already have the first release up and running but we are working to create something that is truly remarkable in terms of B2D or devops experience.

Are there any must-read guides we should follow?
Any tip, hint, suggestion, dos and donts some experienced Sdk/library developer could share with us?

A note: the sdk is wrapping a RESTful set of Apis

Thanks!
Cheers
Great. I'll make him post next time there's a hiring thread.
Probably because it's speculation with no tangible proof behind it, and not even a plausible mechanism for the connection. Is the judge a militant feminist or something? How would these two things even relate to each other?
Actually, I sort of think the cost of living is high because tech workers make so much money. So you have your cause and effect reversed. They do seem to be the primary reason why rents and housing prices are going up so much in the bay area.

E.g. I've read about landlords who raise their rent because of the presence of a google bus stop nearby.
What I see here is proof that this is a bad model that produces insane results, rather than it proving that I've made a bad decision.
I will write the promised README, btw :)
This might work in the UK. There is no national water infrastructure, so although it rains a lot, there are regular droughts - especially in the South East where most of the population lives.

There's been some noise about fixing this, but after privatisation there's no commercial interest in taking on national-scale projects without government subsidy.

Somewhere like CA is largely desert anyway, and there's no obvious wet climate area to collect water from.

So practically, only draconian conservation laws and perhaps a huge string of desal plants can save CA. I guess neither of those are likely. And then you get a repeat of what's happening in Sao Paulo and Rio in Brazil, where there's no water for days on end.

The terrifying thing about climate change is that it's literally making some areas uninhabitable. Large parts of FL have less than fifty years, CA and NM are drying out, the East Coast will become more prone to flooding and perhaps also to extreme winters.

Europe is going to have similar problems as flooding becomes common. There are already places in the UK where buildings insurance is no longer affordable.

At some point the economics stop making sense. Not long after that people either leave or become homeless.

It would have been smart to avoid these outcomes, but that doesn't seem to have happened.
I'm confused; how is this not comparable? It's creating a pixmap directly from strings. I'm not saying this project is bad or uncool, I'm just saying this isn't a completely new idea.
The issue is the waste... the salt that's left over. What happens to it? In the Persian Gulf (I think...) they have basically killed everything in the water from the abundance of salt that's been put back into the sea water.[1]

There is a theory that if we continue making the Gulf warmer by putting so much salt in, it could be a catalyst for plunging the world into an ice age. Who knows if that's true.

Already here in New Zealand we are exporting some of our fresh water to very rich people over in Saudi Arabia and neighboring countries. Can't link the source, it was a court news article about some guy who assaulted someone. He was exporting prime NZ lambs, and water tankers...

A previous comment I made, with quote from National Geographic about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2094701

[1] http://gulfnews.com/news/uae/environment/waste-dump-threaten...
This kind of report is aimed at influencing the stockmarket, not at reporting success or failure of a particular therapy.

As a Phase I trial, its stated goal is to determine if the treatment is harmful, not if it is beneficial, and to test if the dose range potentially affects whatever they are measuring [1].

Thus, the title of this post is misleading, there was no test to determine the effect of aducanumab on Alzheimer's disease.

Biogen's stock will go up nevertheless... apparently it has by over 9% [2]. There is such a large gap between basic understanding of science and biology and those who make markets....

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phases_of_clinical_research

[2] https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/q?s=BIIB
Wow. That looks like a dream come true. (if only it worked on my computer)

I guess a Windows or Linux version is never going to happen? I'd love to be able to run this.
I didn't say what the author did was bad, uncool or not clever. But it certainly isn't a revolutionary thing that's never been done before.

Additionally, XPM sucks (I'm aware), and I've been wishing for a significant update to it for a long while :P
Can part of that education touch on the morality of voting?
For all of our talk of meritocracy, we're still just following multi-millennia-old social programming. Having "Harvard" next to your name in any way gives a force multiplier to anything you want to do in life.
Being too harsh? He publicly admitted to using xrumer, I think he deserves whatever criticism he gets.
Right -- gut morality is strongly based on small, local interactions.

If someone invites you over for dinner and they have a live calf there, nursing at its mother, and they're intending to slaughter it in front of you, it's not the same (to gut morality) as if they slaughtered it the day before, and really not the same as if they just bought some veal at the supermarket (i.e.: paid someone out of sight to do it).

Likewise; buying something that was produced in a way that involved significant human misery and/or death feels awful to gut morality if the sweatshop, diamond mine, or whatever is next door. On the other side of the world? Eh... well this one is $6 cheaper...

Why should it be so different? Well, gut morality isn't logical, at all. It's worth a bit of effort to do better.
Not OP, and I agree that Objective-C is great. However, it is potentially troubling, from a performance standpoint, that practically everything is allocated on the heap. There's no support in the language for stack-allocated objects, for example. Now that I've used Swift in production, I also really miss generics. Casting to and from containers gets really annoying and unsafe!
What's funny? You can't talk about your business?
I tried.. Non of my emails shows as being tracked though..
There's more info about Charles' ASCIImage at http://asciimage.org , including an OSX based editor for the file format it that we put together with Charles during NSConference (direct download link to the ASCIImage Super Studio editor: https://rink.hockeyapp.net/apps/8ac351501c5c3db78ececb2f7e26...)
But I could argue that the act of voting is itself an immoral, even violent act.
> If I need to draw an oval 10 times, I shouldn't have to copy and paste it, forcing me to redo the entire thing if I decide to make a change

Indeed you shouldn't! That's why all serious image manipulation programs have this capability built in.

Most of them also let you write your own plugins for those cases where you need more than what the interface provides.

I think going to all-code drawing is more limiting than freeing. It seems more like a case of having a hammer and seeing that everything can be made to look like a nail.
See my reply to waterlesscloud for an explanation. There are some big problems in the defaults, particularly around political topics, however, these are not issues of scale. They are issues of diversity. Reddit will need to address the diversity issue in order to succeed.
I'm really glad I didn't fall into the trap of just trying to "make money online". It could have easily happened. My inspiration was the timeless milliondollarhomepage.com. One simple idea, and boom - a million dollars. Awesome! So I decided to learn how to build web sites. Then I could make some kind of site where... maybe people could rate ads. Or something. That sounds like it would make money.

Fortunately, I decided it didn't make sense to jump straight into a real money-making idea until I knew what I was doing. So as a little project to learn the ropes, I'd make a site to help with something I was doing at the time - shopping for a used portable air conditioner on nearby craigslist sites.

So, I made a really simple little site that just generated links to craigslist results pages with criteria you specify. Using a mix of really ugly js and (iirc) Dreamweaver I even programmed some selection boxes that let you choose multiple states and cities in a more convenient way than a default multi-select. It was hideous, but I was kind of proud of it, and it cut my air conditioner search time considerably (although obviously by not nearly as much time as it took to make the site!)

When I signed up for $5/month GoDaddy hosting (which I've fortunately left far behind, but that's another story!) I got a $25 Adwords credit. So I used that, because why not. Also, earlier in my air conditioner search, before I'd even considered making the site, I had found a few forum threads while looking for a site like the one I ended up making. So I replied to those as well, in case it might be useful to anyone else.

A handful of people found the site those ways and started using it. (Like, probably double digits.) One day one of them posted on some other random forum to tell people about it, and a few more people trickled in. I certainly didn't have Adsense at that point, and wouldn't have made anything if I had. But gradually those people told more people, and I had a slow exponential growth curve going. They started requesting features, and so I made them. Once I got up to a few hundred users a day, I decided to try some adsense ads, and made maybe a few bucks a month. Then a few tens, then hundreds. I remember how exciting it was when it covered the rent for my basement suite. A little while after that, I looked into other ways to monetize, while hopefully adding to the user experience; the first really successful one was adding (optional) search results from eBay.

Eventually I contracted, and then hired, a designer/developer who helped make the site look halfway professional. Then I quit my day job to focus on it full time. Then hired another developer and built a spinoff site. We've got a team of 4 now, and are looking to add a couple more. It's been 9 years now since I started work on that first prototype, and about 6 since I quit my day job. Thankfully I never got the chance to try my "real" idea. (But seriously, HotOrNot for ads? How could that not make money?!)
It sounds pretty sexy in the startup class [0].

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sz_LgBAGYyo
Hi, all. I am the blog post author, blown away by the attention this 1-day hack is getting! I am the author of Findings, a lab notebook app for scientists. Check it out and show it to others: http://findingsapp.com

I also created this page: http://asciimage.org, with my friend @mz2. There is a simple editor as well called ASCIImage Super Studio.

And check out Monodraw, I love it!! http://monodraw.helftone.com

(see comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9240942)
What I have found hardest building a startup. What have you found hardest?
This looks vaguely like xpm, but monochrome and vectorized. xpm is an image format that is also valid C code, so you can #include "image.xpm" in your C source code.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_PixMap#Comparison_with_other...
Huh, this is the first I've ever heard that idea professed. My understanding was that West and East correlated reasonably well to Occident and Orient, so the Americas, Europe, Africa as the west (Occidental), and Asia, Oceania, as the east (Orient), with "near east" being the middle east and "far east" being eastern Asia.

Not sure how Australia fits in there. Geographically it's eastern but culturally it's western (though that pretty much came as a result of westerners kicking aboriginal people out of their home, so far as I'm aware).
> Many people face such hardship everyday, some far worse.

Most don't go to court.

Most of those that do go to court aren't high-level executives.

Most of those that do go to court aren't in industries where there is already lots of media discussion about the underrepresentation of women and a culture portrayed as hostile to women.

Those factors serve to distinguish Pao's case in ways that attract media attention from the "many people" who "face such hardship everyday".
Can you go into more depth on your tax/accounting incentives theory?
I've read antirez's post on this, but has anyone written up a summary of Matt Stancliff's original presentation?
So at some point you need to say that "person being hurt X" is fine, but "person being hurt X+ one speck" is not.
I don't think we'll be able to desalinate all that water, but figuring out an affordable pumping solution to combat sea level rise would be worthwhile, nonetheless. It's a "pipe dream" (sorry) at this point, but who knows what kind of energy technologies might make this doable someday. And if we have the affordable energy to achieve that, then I think we'll have a lot of options. Not buying Florida beach-front property any time soon though.
I hate sounding like some kind of prude but rap lyrics have got to be the worst advice being dished out to millions of impressionable young people.
The notifo link is dead - I think the site is gone.
The Japanese probably didn't wargame the possibility that cryptography by the Allies revealed their plans. See [1], where General George Marshall is quoted as saying: "as a result of Cryptanalysis we were able to concentrate our limited forces to meet their naval advance on Midway when we otherwise would have been 3,000 miles out of place." [1]

[1] http://www.navy.mil/midway/how.html
I am a pretty strong feminist, and agree that a comparison to ISIS is far off base.

Nevertheless, I believe that one reason for the backlash against feminism is the perception that feminists are spiteful and would rather argue against straw men and make ad hominem attacks than actually argue their point of view.

Actually, I've found that most feminists are surprisingly patient and eager to explain their point of view and their experiences with sexism, even to skeptics or to ideological opponents. Although I've learned that feminists have a very good point whether or not they are being nice, it was by meeting and talking with such feminists that I was converted to their cause.

I urge you to please adopt their tactics.
Ha, I noticed that on my map after I posted. My other mess ups:

CN -> CT,
PE -> PA,
IW -> IA,
MO -> MT (and I even had "MO" on Missouri)
What if you allowed composing multiple "layers" into a single output to make different parts of an otherwise busy diagrams more clear? For example, I found the bug one particularly obfuscated:

· · · · 3 · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
· · · · · · · · · 7 · · · · · · · ·
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
· · · 1 3 · · 1 · · · · · · · · · ·
5 · · 5 · · · · · · · · · · · B · ·
· · · · · 2 · · · 7 · · · · 2 · · ·
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
· · · 1 · · · 1 · · · · · · · · · ·
· · · · · · · · · · · B · 9 · · · ·
· 8 · · · 8 · · · · · · · · · · · ·
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
· · · · · · · · C · · · · · · · · ·
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 9
· · · · · · · · A · · · · · · · · ·
· · · · · 2 · · · · · · · · 2 · · ·
· · · · C · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
· · · · · · · · · · · · A · · · · ·

But if you split it into two diagrams it becomes much more clear what's going on:

· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 3 · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 7 · · · · · · · ·
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
· · · 1 · · · 1 · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 3 · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 5 · · 5 · · · · · · · · · · · B · ·
· · · · · 2 · · · · · · · · 2 · · · · · · · · · · · · 7 · · · · · · · ·
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
· · · 1 · · · 1 · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · B · 9 · · · ·
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 8 · · · 8 · · · · · · · · · · · ·
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · C · · · · · · · · ·
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 9
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · A · · · · · · · · ·
· · · · · 2 · · · · · · · · 2 · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · C · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · A · · · · ·

Especially if you name them. Here, "body" and "legs". Edit: add spaces for clarity. Edit2: use cdot.
Well, I'm not advocating all-code drawing! What I'm suggesting is a WYSIWYG editor like any other, but with a 1-to-1 script mapping for all the commands under the hood. If you want to generate an oval in code, go for it; but you can also create one using the oval tool (and edit it later in script if you change your mind).

As for plugins, that's not really integrated into the workflow in the way I'm envisioning. I shouldn't have to write heavy code just to experiment with a quick artistic idea! Think web development. It should be as simple as editing a JS file and refreshing the page.
Only gov't paying for employment and basic income sound extreme, and only by US standards.

I'm not saying they're not there, but what are you seeing that's about subsidized employment and basic income anyway?
Some thoughts on building a high-growth startup with an open source product
I don't speak for YC, but I'd guess it has to do with demonstrating that you're not just a coder in a basement, and that you'll be able to get things done in the "real" world.

Sam's answer to his own question is probably a great indicator of the type of thing that he's looking for:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9239203

edit: also this - have you done the impossible
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9239229
I tried to use Opam on Debian Unstable a few months ago. It was 1.1.0.

When requested to install a second package with overlapping dependencies as a previous package, it would try reinstalling all dependencies, including previously installed ones, and would fail.

That is, in my book, an epic fail for a package manager, let alone a supposedly >1.0 version (if that even means anything today). I'm still annoyed about that. Searching online found recommendations to get the latest version from Github.

1.2.0 has since been released and included in Debian. I keep meaning to give it another go, but I must admit being wary after that first experience.
I would imagine it'd be fairly hard to the competition to know and revoke the money. Bad guys are almost certainly exploiting various undisclosed vulnerabilities. The bigger issue, I'd assume, is that by doing this competition, you've now killed that bug you previously sold. So long that was disclosed to the buyer though, I imagine you're all set.
Observation: People have been writing this exact letter since day 1 of the GNU project.
TBH, the bug is an example of where this hack should not be used :D
Here's what you should do
Perhaps, but I thought Bill Gates/microsoft better represents a person that sits at the opposite end of the table.
Ask HN: Is Amazon violating consumer protection laws?
I placed an order on Amazon this week and selected the free "No-Rush Shipping" option so I can receive a $1 credit that can be spent on Amazon Instant Video, eBooks, and digital music. After the order shipped, I received an email that states the credit expires on May 4, 2015.

Gift cards are heavily regulated[1] and cannot expire within five years from the date they were activated.

Are there any similar laws for credit that protect consumers?

1. http://www.ncsl.org/research/financial-services-and-commerce/gift-cards-and-certificates-statutes-and-legis.aspx
The ASCIImage rendering code described in the post we're discussing is actually resolution independent vector graphics. You can draw neatly pixel aligned stuff with it, as is shown in the screenshots, but it's vector graphics.
Really cool concept. Well done.

I didn't quite understand how the single points worked. It seemed to me that your definition for, say, 3 single points was the same as a triangle. How does it know which is which? Or do the curves have to be closed?
Is it really slow to draw these waiting for compile each time?
> You can still sell your exploit to the black(site) market and later collect a bounty on it.

Sounds like a good way to make dangerous enemies.
I wish I could go back and read that book for the first time again.
Maybe some comments in the examples would help explain what the code is capable of and what it is intended to do. If you're going to do this in PHP then make more PHP examples.
I think it's time to replace 'Make something people want' with 'Solve a problem that people have'. This works regardless of if people can cogently articulate their problem.
More debunking:

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-gender-pay-gap-is-a-complete...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christina-hoff-sommers/wage-ga...

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/01/no-women-do...

http://time.com/3222543/5-feminist-myths-that-will-not-die/

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/08/gende...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/04/16/its-time-tha...

While it must feel convenient and comforting for those who are unsatisfied with their income to blame a societal boogeyman, there is no evidence for its existence.
http://bohemiancoding.com/sketch/support/developer/
Hmm, I have been a vegetarian for 25 years, but I am unfazed by it, broadly. It's a quantity vs. quality argument; the chicken has a much more complex nervous system, much longer lifespan, and frankly is a more empathetic creature. Cows and pigs, even more so, on all counts. So I would personally consider it a significant step forward in human morality if fast-food burgers were made of crickets.