skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like the sentiment very much and I think the demo platform looks like a solid foundation. Not crazy, like others, about the "OS".

That said, I think that, as far as revolutionizing elections/politics in any important sense, something far more drastic than this will be required. Finding new ways to debate hot political questions of the day, as a function of what is coming out of the news (any news outlet), is missing the point.

There is a lack of disengagement with politics, and moreover, it is absolutely justified. The manner in which most of the discussions are conducted are nonsensical. There is an abject lack of nuance and thoughtfulness. Discussions are necessarily vague and always conducted with superlative certainty.

Here is a fact: there is not enough information on this page[1] to form a reasoned opinion about the Bank on Student Loan Fairness Act. There probably isn't enough information on 20 pages. Yet that is the script. Learn about a complex issue in 60 seconds, and then decide where you come down on it. It's patent nonsense.

If there is to be a revolution, it will need to deal with the reality that there is a facade between the machinations of governments and corporations and the people, and that facade is the news. The news is our window into vast, vast complexity and the basis for making choices that supposedly affect our local quality of life all the way up to the direction of history. So long as the important decisions are organized in this top-down hierarchy of power, a website isn't going to change much.

No, the most promising ideas about upending hierarchies try to actually redistribute the power from the top. Imagine a politician running for office in the context of some website like this, who, through some formal, public process, granted certain levels of access to online advocates, in the event of a win. For example, someone able to marshal something in the order of 10 votes would be promised one lunch in the first 2 years.

The details are less important than the inversion of power hierarchies that new technologies enable. Until that can be practically harnessed, approaching electoral matters along conventional axes is unlikely to get much traction.

[1]http://demo.democracyos.org/law/54766690be6cbe0c0023e08f
https://www.palantir.com/solutions/healthcare-delivery/
There's some weird conception in the medical industry and public at large that the software has to be perfect the first time, every time.

Come again? In the real world the reliability problem has been solved. Nuclear power has been around for 60-odd years now and atomic powerplants do not regularly explode. Software on the other hand, has been around for the same time, and we expect it to be bug-afflicted. What is is that nuclear engineers have but software "engineers" are missing?
Maybe I'm slow, but I've seen this a couple times now and went to the website, read the "about" section and I still don't understand what this is or what problem it's solving. I think OS in the name lead me to immediately assume it was another operating system. So considering I thought it was a new operating system, the more I read the more underwhelmed I am. Good luck on the project, but IMO you've not named it appropriately nor described how it uniquely solves any problem. Sorry if that sounds harsh, just giving honest feedback.
Do you have a written & signed offer letter? Or is it all verbal/over-the-phone? If it's not in writing & signed, then it's not real.

And as many others are saying, it's a HUGE red flag that the company said they offered the job to more than just you - it's a deal breaker, in my opinion.

Knowing only what you've written here, I would tell the company "thanks but no thanks" and walk away.
seconded. geo-rectictification is insanely difficult and computationally intensive
Three startups I want to promote:

1) Onu: A cloud computing framework based on GPUs. I have worked with both of their co-founders and have really high hope for this company in the future of cloud computing market. They are hiring top GPU programmers:
http://anticipate.onu.io/

2)Tachyon Nexus: memory-centric distributed storage system. Just announced a couple of days ago by my friend Haoyuan Li from Berkeley AMP lab.
http://www.tachyonnexus.com/

3) Mental Canvas: A spin-off from Yale professor Julie Dorsey, they are working on 3D reconstruction from 2D drawing. Very cool stuff and one of my friend is the early employee there:
http://www.mentalcanvas.com/
I think it's interesting, and indicative of the subject, that a severely downvoted comment of mine has a huge thread of discussion under it.
I would suggest pushing back against the pressure. Tell them that you don't appreciate it and you'll decide in your own time after you get the offer in writing.
Amazon's open source selfishness scares off potential talent (2014)
> If you accept before then, they have to employ you

I've never seen a job offer that doesn't explicitly disclaim any implication that it's a binding agreement to employ you.

Maybe in California it's different but in Illinois it's unheard of that a company would legally obligate themselves to employ an engineer with their offer letter.
Hard to say that, we don't know what the final price of the Boeing plane would be. I liked the Boeing design better, simpler and should have been cheaper and more reliable. Complexity just kills budgets, schedules and reliability. IMHO, the Lockheed plane won because it looked nicer and maybe because of politics (up and out).

The VTOL and the complicated avionics is what is really killing the F-35 plane. The software is going to be massively more expensive that what they had planned. Debugging will take years.
Even the person who got a smaller bonus is still doing pretty well.
A few questionable statements here.

Can you provide a source for your claim that 1) offer letters require an expiration date 2) they have to employ you if you accept?

In the US (his situation is in SF), employment is at-will and offer letters are not contracts. They can cancel the offer at anytime and after acceptance, can terminate your employment at anytime.
It's not going to hover, that would be insane (in fuel use if nothing else) but the USMC wants/needs a close air support platform. A jet that will fly sufficiently low and slow to attack ground targets effectively. Even when the friendly troops are only a few hundred meters away.

That's intrinsically different from the Air Force and Navy whose planes will spend their time closer to 30k feet then 3k feet.

Flight at low altitudes and speed requires fundamentally different characteristics then flight at high altitude and comparatively high speed.
Yes I think so, the pane on the left already allows the user to control which section they are reading. I would assume that once a reader is in a section they would likely want to read/scan all of it. Excellent work by the way!
Thanks! I honestly hadn't even tried it. Just following best practices and doing the least amount of styling to achieve the desired look.
In case the name is not clear: It's not a link-finding tool, it's a text-mode web browser, a cousin of lynx.
Actually, the modern interpretation is that it's ok to take an order and store it in an in-memory database, but you can't commit a transaction to disk or even write it to logs. This functionality is built into ShabbatDB (shabbatdb.io).
> is asperger (or would be if that were still distinct)

What do you mean by that?
Whatever created existence (or the big bang) is by definition supernatural (which means outside nature). So my definition is not different, just differently formulated.

> If you can accept that a supernatural being with superior powers created existence, then you cannot be atheist.

Using your definition no atheists even exist, or at least they are illogical because clearly existence exists. It was created somehow. Or are we going to argue about the word "being" in that sentence?

Because if you are, know that I use that definition because any other is not sufficient to describe the full range of human beliefs. So yes, there is a range in atheism, it is not binary.
It is a useful concept because there are languages with pass-by-reference constructs. C++, Swift (sort of, with inout parameters), are two examples that come to mind. Java and C are simply not those languages.
True. Reading HN must obviously be work, since we all spend so much time here when we're supposed to be working instead :-)
This post by joel spolsky is relevant...

How to split equity:
https://gist.github.com/isaacsanders/1653078

* link to a backup, the original post disappeared
They do have a firm idea, but not for a good reason. Doctors want to diagnose with yes or no (and it has its legal consequences). Yet, all current evidence shows that most likely there is no sharp transition between having autism and not. For some readings, look at papers at https://www.mendeley.com/groups/519371/asperger-syndrome-and....
Escape Goat 1 was really great too. Fantastic sort of DOS-era, strange/mysterious platformer vibe.
That's true. But you can hire him full time.
>It doesn't even matter if it is their own code. The fact that they will have to talk intelligently about it means that it will accomplish its task.

I think you missed this part. Anybody can go on github and grab a repo and pick a specific section of code to talk about. This still accomplishes the goal of finding out if the candidate can understand code and communicate about it.
One other completely unrelated thought on this matter is that I really think that 1000 years ago, children that exhibited the type of developmental problems I've described would likely have been left in the fields to perish.

The Germanic myths around "elves" stealing children and replacing them with "changelings" often referred to as "oafs" seems to correlate with the behavior changes commonly seen around 3 years old in autistic children.

The myths that I've researched commonly described parents leaving their "changeling children" outside in the hopes that the elves would return their original children - but three year olds are not best known for their survival skills even when they're not autistic...
As others have pointed out, not much was known of that area at that time (1746).

In James Boswell's "THE JOURNAL OF A TOUR TO THE HEBRIDES
WITH SAMUEL JOHNSON", which occurred in 1773, he writes:

"Talking of Phipps's voyage to the North Pole, Dr Johnson observed, that it 'was conjectured that our former navigators have kept too near land, and so have found the sea frozen far north, because the land hinders the free motion of the tide; but, in the wide ocean, where the waves tumble at their full convenience, it is imagined that the frost does not take effect'."

So there was certainly speculation about the Arctic at this time by educated people, but clearly they didn't know a great deal about it.
PHP unfortunately has the same issue because it copied Java's terminology to describe object reference values (introduced in PHP 5), yet it has always also had "references" which are actually pass-by-reference.

To demonstrate, object references/pointers/whatever:

$foo = new Foo(); // $foo
$foo2 = $foo;
$foo2->x = 3;
// $foo->x is also 3 now, $foo and $foo2 point to the same Foo object
// that is, $foo and $foo2 both contain an object handle/pointer/reference/whatever that points to the same Foo object

PHP references:

function swap(&$a, &$b) {
$temp = $a;
$a = $b;
$b = $temp;
}
$a = 3;
$b = 2;
swap($a, $b);
// $a is now 2, $b is now 3
I think the data format is more the problem. What you describe is a problem, but of the annoying sort. If all the vendors spoke JSON (or some common, generic format) then you would only need to figure out a mapping for each vendor to your unified, internal schema. Granted it would be time-consuming because of the high dimensionality but it is doable. Instead they each have their own data format and in some cases binary and proprietary which is the worst combination. And they may not be willing to share a data format spec for some reason so you have to reverse-engineer their format.

Regarding my last statement, overall the healthcare software landscape feels like pre-2000 in the greater sofware industry where everyone is trying to build every possible product to own every market and there is little or no cooperation.
Or you need to get to a desired position first,which is a function of total time, not top speed.
I see where you are coming from and I felt urges to leave a comment on that page for reasons similar and others as well. It's almost as if the diagnosis permits the parents to allow their children to misbehave. The diagnosis explains away the need to punish them, it's just the way "I made my kid". That sounds worse if you ask me!
> SLEEPING WELL

I sleep 3 to 4 hours per night. Sleeping pills leave me groggy for days, so they are out. Every 2 or 3 weeks my mind and body give up and I manage to get maybe 7 or 8 hours sleep. Insomnia sucks.
As a former user there are two primary features: Network Graphing and Concept Linking

The big feature is basically tagging words or phrases in a source document - like a medical report in this example and then linking it with other documents with the same tags to reveal associations.

Generally it kind of just gives you a nice visualization of what you already know. However in a networked environment when you "expand" your links by ingesting other people's tags and nodes that is where you get some interesting links and patterns.
> already paid for by one customer

.... tactics sims for militaries ?
And retail and restaurant POS software. They all seem to like primary colors and lots of big, gray buttons.

It's like staring into an alternate dimension where VB6 never died and no version of Windows past 98 was ever released.

We use all our own file formats! You want to migrate to another software? Well, there's no current way to export your databases and reports to anything readable by anything in existence, but if you tell us the feature you're looking for, we'll just glom it on for you like we did with our pet project from college until it became the bloated fortress of invented-here syndrome you're using now!
This a common misconception. Partial application is like taking f(x, y) = x + y and turning it into f(y) = 1 + y by supplying x = 1. Currying is like taking the same function and turning it into (f(x))(y) = x + y. Expressing f as a higher-order single argument function in this way gives us the advantages of partial application using normal total application.

A good example is the derivative function from calculus, which could be specified in at least two obvious ways. A simple, but ugly solution is to have it take a function and a point as arguments and return the value of the derivative at that point.

Alternatively, it could take a function and return its derivative as a function, which could then be evaluated at many different points.

This is the difference between e.g.

(Float -> Float, Float) -> Float, and
(Float -> Float) -> (Float -> Float).

Taking this idea to its logical conclusion and applying it to any multiple argument function gives you currying.
Beautiful story and so rare of a parent to be willing to own their child's condition this way. That's one lucky kid.
It's as well tested in combat as any of the other fighters still flying. Pending a US-Russia or US-China war, that's all that's ever going to happen.
Call/pass by reference means you can write a function that swaps the values of two variables such that the caller will see the values swapped. See the examples in the posted article for Pascal and C++. This cannot be done in Java or C, which is why they are not pass by reference.
The confusion around whether or not Java has pointers comes from people comparing it with C or C++. In Java, you can't dereference a pointer to an Object and get some sort of Object value. Similarly, you can't perform an "address of" operation on a primitive value and get a pointer to that value. Similarly, you can't pass-by-reference (in the sense of the parent article) or do pointer arithmetic in Java.

While Java technically has pointers (in the sense that it has pointer types), it has dulled them so that you can't hurt yourself with them the same way that C (and C++) permit.
Agreed. Within the demographic that understands the acronym (OS=Operating System or Open Source, etc.), it's likely to be confusing. Outside the demographic, it's not useful as a metaphor because they don't know have an expansion for OS in their heads.
http://healthimpactnews.com/2014/cdc-responds-admits-omittin...
I stopped reading after this "Now dedicated advocates for vaccines and evidence-based parenting"

Suure. If you pro-vaccines then you're "evidence based" mature parent. If you against, you're a monster.

For every story like this you will find counter story of children getting all sort of diseases BECAUSE of vaccines.

Internet if full of good read, here is an example: http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/48/4/456.full
> IMHO "pass-by-reference" means you can mutate the attributes of the thing passed (as in java when you pass an object) and also means you can be operating on a "volatile" area of memory, meaning another thread can CHANGE the data while the function is executing.

Sorry, but having an 'opinion' about such definitions doesn't help. Just [use the definition](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaluation_strategy#cite_note-1). This clearly states what the article tried to explain with helpful examples.

> If you tell me that passing an integer and passing an object are both the same thing (pass-by-value) in Java, then I will tell you that pass-by-value and pass-by-reference are not very useful concepts.

They are useful, just not in the way that you think of them. You could use these definitions to have a meaning in terms of side-effects, but only if you design your objects accordingly, i.e. there are no exposed methods to do an in-place change of your object's data, instead you only have class functions that return a new object and read-only accessor methods. Combining this with a language that is strictly pass-by-value (such as Java and a subset of C++ without reference parameters) should make your program side-effect free.
I call this "pass by pointer copy". Does anyone know if that's a term people use, or did I just invent it? I can only find one other person mentioning it when I google for "pass by pointer copy" (in quotation marks for the exact match).
The terms are not precisely enough to give meaning to cross-language comparisons. Within a single language like C++, you can usefully differentiate the various ways to pass references and data.
This is the "enterprise software problem," to wit: All enterprise software sucks because it's sold to administrators and not to users.

A friend of mine works for one of the EMR software companies, though he doesn't program any more. I've also experienced the adoption of large scale enterprise packages such as SAP and SharePoint.

As I understand it, the UI design is literally an afterthought, because it doesn't exist at the time of sale. The expectation is that somebody will adapt the software to the customer's processes by creating custom UI's, data base structures, and work flows. There is a mad scramble to throw this stuff together and make it work. I suspect there is simply no time to sit down with workers and respectfully find out how they do their jobs. And processes that worked because the employees didn't follow the procedure, suddenly stop working when coded into software.
And MY Russian friends would laugh at what you're saying too.

It's a kind of selection bias: the kind of Russian friends that laugh at RT are the kind of friends a westerner would make (especially if they are involved in entrepreneurship and IT or social media etc).

They are the kind of people with little experience of modern history and a strong western bias that westerners find everywhere (e.g. even in places like the Middle East, and make general examples out of them). They are not representative of the majority of Russian population, though, who predominantly voted for Putin.

Kind of like liberal lefties reading Counterpunch and the like are not representative of the majority of the US population.
You can pass double pointers in C so functions can change the original pointer's address value. You can't do that in Java.
That's great; they beat God on a technicality.
Aspergers in the medical community is no longer distinct from ASD (autism spectrum disorder)
That's one of the harder parts of the process, and it's partially because of poor expectations on the part of those doing hiring.

To me, it's absolutely ridiculous to expect to hire a junior developer and have them come with a fully-developed set of skills. If they do, that's great. But if you're hiring someone fresh out of school, you've got to be approaching it as hiring someone that you're going to train and mentor. For me, the number one thing I look for in a junior developer is the ability to learn.

Here's an example from early in my own career. I was just finishing up my 3rd year of a combined CS/EE program, and looking for a summer job. I got in touch with a biology lab that needed a developer for the summer to build some (very cool) software to support the neurophysiology experiments they were doing. I looked at the job requirements and thought "well, I don't know most of this stuff, but I'm sure I could pick it up."

The interview progressed like this:

> Do you know Python?

I'd heard about it, but have no real experience with it. I downloaded it last week and started playing with it though, and it doesn't seem too different than other languages I've used.

> How about VisionEgg (neurophysiology module for Python)?

Well, I downloaded it at the same time I downloaded Python. I've managed to get a window to open up, and I'm displaying a square that's got a cool animated habituation pattern on it. (Note: 1 week prior, I had no idea what a habituation pattern was) I do have a bit of OpenGL experience from a class I took, and that's the underlying library that VisionEgg uses.

> Well, so far, you're the only applicant who has actually made an effort to look at the specific tools we're using here. I've got one other applicant coming this afternoon, but unless they somehow have more experience with these tools than you do, the job is yours.

It turned out to be a great experience, and they hired me back on the following summer. I went from being a total Python noob to contributing patches back into VisionEgg. I think most junior positions should probably progress like that. Give me a keen junior developer, and let me shape and mould them into a not-junior developer.

The flip side to this: if you're expecting the person to be productive on day 1 or 2, you'd better be hiring someone with experience. Whether or not they have code they can show you, they should be more than capable of going into serious detail about past projects they've worked on (within the confines of NDAs and such, of course).
When initially diagnosed, the doctor refused to write a diagnosis become the new DSM was about to be published, and she wanted us to come back In two months once it was published so she could write the disgnosis as autism spectrum disorder.

Aspergers is now considered part of the autistic spectrum rather than a distinct diagnosis - and this is particularly only really important when considering what services are made available. For instance, having the autism disgnosis allows the public school she attends to pay for an individual aid for her in a mainstream first grade class, while a year ago, Aspergers as a diagnosis would have fallen through the cracks sand she might have been sent to a special education classroom because of her disruptive behavior.
How about "Future Democracy System" or "Joint Democracy Platform" ;)
But you broke the back button. Perhaps using frames might be better?
Ask HN: Are you satisfied with the state of the Web? What should be different?
Forget Harvard and Stanford. It really doesn’t matter where you go to college
"who care about their craft"
Oh yes, I forgot to even mention them because they're an automatic 'no' to me.