skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>These are typically areas in a project where Parkinson's Law of Triviality rears its ugly head in project planning meetings. Everyone feels the need to bloviate about 2 vs 4 indents, tabs vs spaces, or which lint flags to enable/disable.

It was in one of the numerous Go talks/videos/presentations where I think it was Ken Thompson who said that he could walk around the Google cafeteria and hear Python programmers arguing all day long of how white space should work, and in Go, those discussions just don't happen. It's done. It's been decided. Move on.

It really struck a chord with me. It's amazing how smart people, given enough free time, will argue non-stop about the most irrelevant, insane things and stop themselves from being productive.
I struggle with this all the time, even with my wife. Spring break? You mean catch up on math / work extra hours week?
Hey, I'm finally going to <insert location> next month! Oh, you've been there regularly since you were a kid? Then I suppose it would be boring.
Oh, did I pronounce another word funny? Sorry, I only ever learned it from reading, nobody ever said it. But you can't say that shit out loud; you have to just grin and bear the embarrassment.
I've learned to never ever bring up things like collecting cans/scrapping/etc.
When I arrived in Oxford, I did realise there were some interesting characters around. One guy with a posh accent stuck waved his chequebook outside his room during a tuition fee demonstration, offering to pay for everyone's tuition if he could just be allowed some peace. There are dudes walking the street in top hats. There are kids with sports cars.

When were you in Oxford? In my day I never saw any top hats, barring the occasional actor; and even the richest kids didn't have cars, because (a) there was nowhere to park them, and (b) you could walk faster than you could drive anywhere.
> The closest I can come is to say that this idea of inclusiveness is terminally broken.

The term "inclusiveness" is utter bullshit. (no criticism towards you OP) The idea of "trying to include everyone with diverse backgrounds" was created by top leaders who wanted to prop themselves up even more by characterizing themselves as benevolent stewards. Hint - they're usually not. Let's face reality - we're naturally biased and we still don't have any definitive, scalable way to select (include) other human beings without our short-minded biases blinding us.
This is exactly the issue I find with a lot of venture capital firms. They're letting Ycombinator kill their deal flows because they're too stubborn to consider deals from outside their networks. It's a shame really. Some of these firms have the nerve to say Silicon Valley is merit based when they're simply just taking institutional capital and funding their rich boy network.
"The people who designed these places, maybe eighty, a hundred years ago, they had the idea they'd make 'em as self-sufficient as possible. Make 'em grow food. Make 'em heat themselves, generate power, whatever. Now this one, you drill far enough down, is sitting on top of a lot of geothermal water. It's real hot down there, but not hot enough to run an engine, so it wasn't gonna give em any power. They made a stab at power, up on the roof, with about a hundred Darrieus rotors, what they call eggbeaters. Had themselves a wind farm, see? Today they get most of their watts off the Fission Authority, like anybody else. But that geothermal water, they pump that up to a heat exchanger. It's too salty to drink, so in the exchanger it just heats up your standard Jersey tap water, which a lot of people figure isn't worth drinking anyway."

Finally, they were approaching a wall of some kind. Bobby looked back. Shallow pools on the muddy concrete floor caught and reflected the limbs of the dwarf trees, the bare pale roots straggling down into makeshift tanks of hydroponic fluid.

"Then they pump that into shrimp tanks, and grow a lot of shrimp. Shrimp grow real fast in warm water. Then they pump it through pipes in the concrete, up here, to keep this place warm. That's what this level was for, to grow 'ponic amaranth, lettuce, things like that. Then they pump it out into the catfish tanks, and algae eat the shrimp shit. Catfish eat the algae, and it all goes around again. Or anyway, that was the idea. Chances are they didn't figure anybody'd go up on the roof and kick those Darrieus rotors over to make room for a mosque, and they didn't figure a lot of other changes either So we wound up with this space. But you can still get you some damned good shrimp in the Projects ... Catfish, too."

-- Count Zero, William Gibson
Yes, but erroring out on something like that is not good for other reasons.

Among other things, that moves it from a local problem to a global problem.

It's the same problem with undefined behavior in general. It's an example of a local problem causing global problems.

You don't want your rocket to crash just because something threw an unchecked exception.
The Monster group is my favorite example. It may very well have the same nature of "just falling out of definitions in an unsurprising manner" but it's certainly too large for any human to ever feel that way. Monstrous Moonshine was this project and is mentioned in the article.
The First Round team doesn't seem very diverse. Lots of white men, white women and a few Asian ladies. Not a single Asian male. Is there a glass ceiling?

http://firstround.com/people
Instead of embedding Facebook's "Like" button, I prefer to use the fb share URL to create my own "share" button that does not have fb tracking code. If I want to show a share count next to the button, I can make a call to graph.facebook.com with the URL and then show that number.

I can't think of a reason to put a fb Like button on a web page anymore.
> Those have problems, among other things the cost of double-initialization.

Compilers optimise away significantly more complex things than initialising a variable twice.

> I'm looking for a c-like language where the compiler is free to assume that an uninitialized variable is anything it wants - but it must be consistent about it. So, for example, "return x - x", where x is an integer, will always return zero.

So you're looking for C? Because whatever garbage's in there will be the same garbage in both references to x. I have issues with your qualification of that as "sane" though.
I try very hard to focus on what the candidate knows. Most of the other stuff is bullshit anyway.

Recent interviews:

- A somewhat well-known poster here, the kind of coder who parachutes in when startups are having trouble shipping and need help. Didn't actually know the programming language very well, which is sadly common amongst coders of the language in question. Sometimes that's ok, but this person presented themselves as an expert in the language and did not know very basic things about it.

- Again, not very strong with the language, but very strong in other languages and overall quite an impressive candidate. I recommended to hire this person, but for a different engineering role. Got hired for a different role and is doing a great job.
I'm the guy who did this; really happy this is trending on HN!

Hope everyone enjoys the game tonight! :D
When I was in my 20's, and I first started making "good money", I splurged on some $170 dress shoes. Those shoes lasted a good 15 years and they were the best shoes I ever owned.
When 3D Printing meets Lollipops
Various core Go team members seem to have a different philosophy regarding generics. They actually don't have a united front on this.

It seems Russ Cox and Rob Pike are either anti-generics or in the you-dont-really-need-them camp, but Ian Thompson and Brad Fitzpatrick have seemed very open to the idea - what they can't, however, agree on, is exactly how to implement them so that they make sense in Go. That's it.

If you or anyone out there manages to produce a proposal of how they should work/look like and even a fork of Go implementing the idea, it will be taken seriously, at least by some core Go members.

I have a feeling that generics are coming. And I have a feeling they'll be very Go-like - an external tool with code generation, not special syntax. Just my 2 cents.
Last time I looked into OCaml it seemed to have most of everything I'd need for most projects.

But I think it'd be hard to find an employer willing to pay me to work in it.
Thanks!

I use it to make requests to my server and display the results. For example, the way I look current positions and stats of my apps in App Store. I also monitor the status of my servers (and errors in apps) in DO and much more.

In the next release I'll add more predefined scripts and features. Also in the next release you will be able to take the current clipboard text and do something with it. For example, translate into any language with some API.
Author writes review criticising book for misleading readers.

Adds later note inline to explain that he really does know what he's talking about, and any accusations that he doesn't are either pedantic or comprehensively challenged.

Fails to reflect on how this may relate to the subject of the review.
Not the person you asked but: I have met people that became wealthy and acted like you describe and they usually ended up broke some years or decades later. I've also met some extremely wealthy people and they in fact were visually very modest (but worth more money than one could spend in a lifetime).

The contrast runs something like this: German dude, worth $10M made his money in real estate, started an online company, lost it all but bought Porsches and hired fancy places, in the end turned to crime in order to continue to finance his life-style.

American dude, worth > $50M (at one point...), spent money like it was toilet paper, golden taps in the bathroom, fancy Rolls-Royces (multiple...), used to be the #1 in a hotly contested tech field, lost it all when the market turned and he didn't adapt.

Swiss dude, worth >> $1B, modest house, drove a VW Golf (ok, a nice one), absolutely incorruptible.

They're nice examples to have and I understand that for someone worth that much there is no need to signal anything and that Germany guy may have had to keep up with his 'circle' in order to be seen as successful but still it makes you wonder how much pain there is behind all those frustrated faces in fancy cars living in expensive houses.
> You don't want your rocket to crash just because something threw an unchecked exception.

Good news: the error is a compile-time error, not a runtime error.
This is really awesome. I've managed to do something similar, but for the Washington Capitals. When the game starts the lights change to the color of the home team, and when they score the flash. I'm using a little web scraper to pull from nhl.com to get the data, however, sometimes it's quite out of sync with the actual game (streaming or live tv). Usually about 30 seconds to a minute delay.

The best part is when I forget that they are playing and the lights start flashing randomly. Always scares guests :)
+1 granted it was in the 80s but off the top of my head 40% on major financial aid and work-study, 40% upper middle class, maybe 20% were playing the wealth card and gentle mockery would usually keep'em in line. Not sure if times have changed that much or class consciousness is just a perennial trope for whinging.
My PL friends tell me he has a reputation for being a little bit of a troll (and the content of this post is likewise), but if you meet him in person, it's hard to dislike him. It's frustrating talking to him because there's a grain of truth to what he says.

For example, that laziness makes parallelism harder. I mean, cmon, the last thing I'm worrying about is whether the thread is going to evaluate its results to weak-head-normal-form.

So yea, mostly, he confuses people who aren't familiar with the material. ;)
'Telling whether i will be accessed before being assigned' is equivalent to the halting problem.

Not in C it isn't, thanks to variable scope.
As an embedded programmer, I have to say that C11 atomics are a much better fit for device register access than volatile. Unfortunately, since many commercial C compilers don't even support C99 fully, I don't expect to see C11 in common use anytime soon.
Scaling to 500M monthly active users
b. Anecdotes are not data. I'm a Gen Xer as well, and avoid both voice and SMS as much as possible - I communicate via IM and email, and use the web for things like "ordering pizza".

If the phone rings with the sound I've chosen for my mother and my SOs, it gets picked up. Otherwise it goes to voicemail. I skim Google's transcription of it and consider calling back.
Well, we're going to have to agree to disagree there, because I think Windows packaging is fucking insane.

One of the things I loved about my move to linux and .deb land was that if I uninstalled something, I knew it was uninstalled. I didn't have to rely on the packager remembering to remove all their bits, or even remembering to include an uninstall option at all. Or rely on them not to do drive-by installs (which big names like Adobe still do, out in the open). And not have every significant program install it's own "phone home" mechanism to check for updates. The crapstorm that is Windows packaging is a fantastic example of a place where developers love and care for their own product, but care not a jot for how the system as a whole should go together.
The reviewer fails to understand Zed's approach to teaching…

His approach is that new developers need to get something that works so the reward of it working is motivating before you explain how/why it works to them.

Based on my experiences with my kids I think it's a perfectly valid approach - an led that turns on motivates them to understand why it turns on.
Just fixing the language is not possible without major problems though.
How each Game of Thrones House would approach Corporate I.T.?
Show HN: Double O – RSS News Reader
Is there any reason why one can't be both a writer and engineer simultaneously?
Huh, I had completely forgotten about that. I had the same experience in Oxford -- my college served breakfast/lunch/dinner 6 days a week, but on Sunday there was just a brunch, and most weeks I ended up not eating dinner on Sunday.
At successful startups, the board controls the company and the founders control the board. Equity mostly a separate issue.
I am really curious is there is data on "Scrolling is easier and more enjoyable than clicking". That seems like it requires evidence from trials on a variety of different types of webpages. I can imagine if you are browsing visual items like clothing, art, memes, etc the scrolling flow is great. However when reading long documents or forums it may be the opposite.
Right. That's the kind of thing I meant with "Choosing non-minimalism has advantages too."
And I wonder how vulnerable it is to consensus abuse like search engines are. If a few people name someone "Douchebag", what comes up on other phones?
Excellent point, I just changed the license to MIT to be consistent with curl. Thanks for catching that.
Actually, they already launched a GeoEye-1 satellite on September 6, 2008 at 11:50:57 a.m. PDT.

"Google, which has its logo on the side of the rocket, has exclusive online mapping use of its data."

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoEye-1
If you're talking about dress shoes you don't expect the soles to last especially longer than those on cheap dress shoes. With the higher quality ones you can, and it is worth it to, resole and remanufacture them multiple times. My best dress shoes are ten years old, have been redone once, and are likely to last another 20 years.

That said, I don't think this accounts for rich people having more money
I really enjoy Saunders MacLane's Mathematics Form and Function for sight at the "answers" this article seeks. MacLane's argument is that mathematics arises from a relatively small number of meaningful forces and "good" mathematics arises when those forces all align in particular places. You could of course go further by asking what exactly it is that makes those forces all align—why in these fields?—but the point of his book isn't exactly to answer the philosophical question but more to provide a little bit of a humanistic POV on the development of mathematics with just enough historical happenstance stripped away to make things intelligible but not so much as to lose the line of sight on why things (probably) developed the way that they did.
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I tried to build it (Ubuntu 14.04), but fails (OCaml 4.01.0) after calling make:

File "types.mli", line 11, characters 14-15:

Error: Syntax error

make: * [types.cmi] Error 2
This seems unlikely, as cell phones are generally rectangular and have flat screens.

EDIT: maybe you could try drawing a screen with a 5.44" height and 4.7" diagonal. Euclid will not be your friend.
Dance Video Collab of the Year BEATSTREET 2015 (Jerkin Aint Dead)
Too bad proprietary projects can't link against it. A loss for us all.

Seriously? GPL stuff can be used with any internal stuff, and almost any Free stuff. Isn't that enough? Where is the loss exactly?

Edit: okay, that wasn't the author's intention, and the consistency argument is a good one (least astonishment and all that). Still, the general argument holds.
The best entrepreneurs will always find a way into the networks of top-tier VCs.
I suspect part of the motivation for the automatic VPN on public WiFi comes from Republic Wireless's troubles with firewalls that interfere with standard VoIP protocols.
Old school? It's the best thing to do in my opinion. An ACID relational database that can do even more than that! I think it's one of the best DB for startups.
Yeah but as a T-Mobile customer myself, that plan which is only available if you purchase the SIM card online or through Walmart, isn't sufficient for my needs. As much as I like being able to call via the Hangouts Dialer WiFi calling is still not of very good quality.
Sony Z3 Compact. Is 5.01 inches tall, but your original Moto X was 5.09 and you seemed to like it fine. Fast/recent specs. Runs a recent version of Android.
It builds with 4.02.
Maybe it's a purchasing nuance with the data supply chain?

As in, it's more expensive to meter everyone's data and charge per 100 MB, and cheaper to charge in 10 GB blocks and then refund retroactively. They are piggybacking off of other networks, which may not accept 100 MB purchases.

I can see them doing a purchasing scheme with the suppliers and then transferring the savings to the customer.
This is a cool idea, but the light show going off erroneously in my own home for the opposing team would be disheartening to any die hard fan. Any chance of this happening, let alone once every 4 games, would be unacceptable. And the pain of knowing I rigged it up myself would make it that much worse. I applaud OP for the wherewithal it must've taken to see this project through to the end.
What kind of quality shoes? Good dress-y shoes can be resoled so they should last more than 4 years.
i never really took the advice that way. this is probably down to my stereotype of the rich person...

people who stay rich do not just spaff their money around left, right and centre. i think rich people call this 'new money' and using such a term would be an example of acting like a rich person.
From reading Harper's works and also listening to his lectures (but not meeting the guy, sadly) I'd back that up. He's more than happy to say something that's both insightful and... inciting! In a lot of communities this rallies the troops to descend upon what he's written and strip mine it for goodies while aggressively discarding the rhetoric—clearly a useful tactic.

But in other communities it feels really trollish and oversimplified. It's the equivalence of https://xkcd.com/793/.

Like physicists, though, he's got some phenomenally great points which most "practitioners" happily ignore all while eating the possibly enormous consequences. So if you can spend the time to figure out where he's coming from then you can really gain a lot.
I highly endorse this sort of thing! Reverse engineering online games is how I really got started with computers. It's a great teaching tool because the reward loop is short and immediately relevant - you get superpowers, in the game you already play with your friends, in almost direct proportion to how much you've learned.

Depending on the game you'll learn about binary reversing, executable formats, networking, rendering, x86 assembly, C, JVM bytecode, or more advanced topics. We dove right into hard things because it was fun and there was no one to tell us they were too hard for kids. The end result among my group of friends seems to be several careers in tech with a decided systems and security skew.

edit:
I remember Runescape in particular. They applied such an escalating series of obfuscations to the client code and network protocol that we deployed things I now recognize as AST analysis and machine learning to work past them. These days, I really wonder what the view from the Jagex security team was like. Did they have fun constantly coming up with new challenges for bored teenagers?
> automatically switches you to the "fastest" network available.

It'll be interesting to see what type of impact this has on battery life / reliability.

> refunding data

I'm surprised they didn't go with data roll over or just lower price per GB. Refunds add a layer of guilt / buyers remorse to the process. I suspect a lot of customers will cross a 1GB boundary and feel obligated to use less data to lower their bill.
Summary:

> Should everyone apply to First Round through the OpenApp?

> No. The best way to reach us is still through a referral.

Outcome: Zilch.
> The only thing Google's promising that Republic isn't is the international service.

Can you comment on tethering? IIRC, my Moto X through Republic doesn't allow tethering.
Sure, but there was methanol on base, it is known to be mixed with ethanol in some locations to improve the potency. I assume they also had denatured ethanol for lab purposes. It just seems like an obvious hypothesis if that much alcohol is being consumed.
Maybe he was bored? Should creativity just cease at that moment?
Ain't my lawn; I consider myself a mid-range sysadmin. I stepped out of support and into sysadmin land about 4 years ago. But I know some 'from-the-birth-of-linux' guys, who live and breathe this stuff in a way I never will. When I get home from staring at terminals, I want to watch movies and play video games, not swear at something on a breadboard :)
They just announced they got a Slack channel.

https://plus.google.com/+RobDodson/posts/eL1tjxgr1wV
> 'Telling whether i will be accessed before being assigned' is equivalent to the halting problem.

This is true. However, figuring out the most efficient program that's equivalent to a given program also suffers from the halting problem, and that's literally the definition of the goal of an optimizer.

So no: in general you cannot prove if an arbitrary variable will be accessed. However, you can, and will, take a conservative approach and narrow it down as much as possible.

In other words, if you can prove that it will be accessed before being assigned, great. If you can prove that it won't be accessed before being assigned, great. If you can't prove either... Meh, you have to include a redundant store.

It's exactly the same way that optimizers work to, for example, remove redundant stores to a variable. Because it is.

Except that, if you read carefully, what I proposed wasn't quite the same thing.

I'm proposing a language where a read from an uninitialized variable must be consistent with the uninitialized variable having been set to an arbitrary value (in range) before the first read from it. So compiling the static code {int x; return x;} into {return 0;} is perfectly allowed, as is compiling it into {return 42;}.
The product development customer map
It has nothing to do with Ivies or the US; it's humanity.