skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Could you clarify what he means in this quote?

Between the famous "whenever I fire a linguist..." quote and the "fuck computational linguistics" meme, I would be hesitant to reveal my linguistics background in a interview.
In practice const very rarely allows any interesting compiler optimizations (passing a reference to a const local variable to a function whose body cannot be seen is pretty much the only place where it's safe to do so). The const overload of a function with const and non-const versions could in theory be faster, but copy-on-write data structures are the only common example of that actually being the case.
>Man, we really need a module system.

And you might be getting one: https://isocpp.org/files/papers/n4214.pdf

It's under consideration for C++17, as I recall.

EDIT: Also, CLANG allows you to use modules right now, but IIRC those are CLANG specific extensions and the final module spec. may or may not be compatible with them.
Just because a business is too small for investors like YC, doesn't mean it will not be profitable if the team stays small and delivers to it's niche.
Please elaborate for those of us who are not radio engineers. Why would this frequency band not be useful for 4G data? And what might it be useful for instead?
This is a novel idea, but 10% of an employee's time seems high.
Hotmail Account Password Hacker No Survey 2015
Don't be confused about the process. It isn't there to be fair to anyone, or to weed out efficiently, or to give feedback. Its there to maximize the chance that some big winners get funded. The final metric is, do they find and fund big winners? The answer is yes, clearly. Any other criticism is moot.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy
I chose to "live rough" for about a month before I found an affordable room to live in when I first got to NYC. But I was bootstrapping my move to NYC.

This past Saturday, I served homeless from a soup kitchen in Harlem. Most of the people we served were on their own, and a sizable minority were loopy. Some of them probably weren't homeless.

Anecdotally, I know a guy (who I tried to help again and again) whose bad decisions and self-sabotage screwed up all of his chances. He has lost job after job. And he has two kids he can't/won't support.

Whenever he gets a chance, i.e., someone hires him, he works a max of two weeks, then gets trashed on his first bit of money and gets immediately fired because he doesn't show up for work. And he'll live on the street, in a tent in the woods, or where-ever he can keep his head out of the rain.

It's hard for me to drum up much sympathy for him and others like him.

Then there's people who make poor educational decisions, family planning decisions, and financial decisions, who live paycheck to paycheck, then lose their jobs simply due to changes the economy - they may have made sub-optimal economic decisions. Or there could be health problems that destroy their finances, and but for the grace of God many others of us could be in their shoes. And they deserve to have some help, and I even give my own money (my after-tax income) to help people like that. They don't deserve to be thrown out of their house. What they need is a second chance and the help from those of us who could easily be in their situations.

We need to try to get the aid to those deserving, as opposed to the wastrels in the earlier example of my "friend," and similar lifestyle hobos, or in the case of those who are making a conscious bootstrapping decision like Austen and myself.

This is America (or perhaps, a civilized global society). We don't let people starve in the streets.
Some of these things are simply to "nanny" us, but there's a very good reason for private / protected: The Namespace is a precious and limited resource. It's a good-thing(tm) not to pollute it with internal details, and what is unexposed need not be well-named, which is after all one of the 2 hard problems (along with cache invalidation and fencepost errors).
That said, YC could be missing out on opportunities if they fail to have the foresight to see the cups that could eventually become oceans -- ie the ability of sniply to (hypothetically) bring their users over to other products in the future.

Just because a particular seed from a startup isn't going to sprout into a forest overnight doesn't mean that particular startup doesn't have the potential to find other seeds that do.

I guess what I'm saying is YC would do well to consider funding people with good ideas as much as the ideas themselves.
The Breakdown of Education: Political Correctness in College
I am not sure I agree. How would they quantify and publish their instincts?

"We've got 43% hunch that you will wet your pants in first 10 board meetings."

I don't think so. It is too complicated for the numbers to be disclosed or published, even if they use some metrics as a system to weed out initially. I am sure the final selection metrics are not easily quantifiable.

Moreover, I am fairly certain YC gets more fully fundable and qualified teams than they can actually fund. In that case, maybe they are just trying to bring together groups that will benefit the most from each other? Maybe they are trying to create an ecosystem or a team during the summer? Maybe a company will just not fit in? Too many possible reasons.
I run a ton of ads on Facebook (full-time), and if you target both desktop and mobile newsfeed users, I find that for the same bid I get 90% coming from mobile vs. 10% desktop.

I could bid higher for desktop, but that would increase my cost per conversion. It obviously varies from campaign to campaign and client to client, but it's safe to say that I've moved almost entirely to mobile. It was even better when mobile was newer and CPCs were far lower.. but that's another story. The gold rush is over for marketers.
> I find it disingenuous to imply that developers should not be venturing outside the little garden of code they or their company has written except on certain days and that the developer will even have a choice in the matter.

In my experience, developers often do everything possible to avoid working on dependencies (in a way that can be contributed upstream). While it may be the case that developers in SF or other big developer hubs do so, where I live most developers are content to either hack a fix into it, or work around it in their app code instead. Luckily, it makes getting a job easier for myself as I do have a number of open source contributions I can point to, which a lot of other devs around here lack. I had to explain to a recruiter what GitHub was, once.
It's worth learning. It's one thing to not like it; it's quite another to be simply unable.

Learn to float. Then learn to use your limbs to move around without a ground to push against.
When I first heard of GSS I thought it was the solution to layout that we'd all been waiting for. Unfortunately it's not all roses. It's possible, and quite easy to inadvertently create cyclical constraint dependencies. Depending on how your constraint solver is written this might mean that a layout will fail or that your system will lock or crash.

I'm subscribed to a couple of constraint solver mailing lists. A common question is "why is my constraint solver doing this...?", or "how do I massage my constraints to achieve this...?"

With CSS You can't build a layout that 'fails' (in the sense that a solution cannot be computed due to improperly defined dependencies), and you certainly can't send your browser into an infinite loop by applying an incorrect style.

I still really like the idea of constraint based systems, but I think they are more suited to (web)applications rather than documents.
Getting High with Lyrical Data in Hip-Hop
> If YC has internal tools to assess all the applications (as they claim) then what is the harm in publishing those criteria, and publishing the results publicly.

Isn't that like asking for the recipe to their secret sauce?
I think the idea is it sets up Neural Networks that are then run in Torch, with some nice diagram generating tools. I don't know if that's something people will actually use, but it looks like a pretty concise way to generate a pretty complicated Neural Network, which could be a worthwhile idea considering how complex the more advanced ones are.
Why not give developers 2 days a month to work on projects of their choosing? If the project they want to work on is an open source project, then great.

This is what we do at my company.
I think I'd rather just manipulate HTML with Javascript. At least then I only have one problem, which is HTML with inline styles. No separate CSS file to maintain or CSS rule precedence to worry about.
Just a reminder: there's a new rule to avoid gratuitous negativity in posts. Some of your wording comes across pretty harshly.

source: http://blog.ycombinator.com/new-hacker-news-guideline
So what service does Sam's Club offer now? From what I remember, checking out was a pseudo-dystopian experience anyway, with having to rummage in a big bin for recycled packing boxes to bag your items in yourself, then having someone give you the hairy eyeball on the way out as they looked over the receipt and your haphazardly packed boxes of groceries.

I guess there's always the free cocktail weenies...
There are a lot of ways of creating context in NLP. When a normal person thinks of contex, they probably consider the meaning of the sentence and from there they'll figure out the POS.

For a simple POS-tagger you would today probably use an HMM. What this means in simple terms in you look at how likely is the next word (regardless of what word there may be) to be a given category. Let's say the next word has a 50/50 chance of being a verb or a noun. Then we look at the actual word "project" which has a 20/80 chance of being a verb or a noun.

In another context the POS might have a 90% chance of being a verb, and then project would probably end up being. Tagged as such.

You can also start looking at bi, and trigrams (series of two or three words) and so on.

So what you describe is pretty much an actual thing.
Perhaps 'private' is oversold. It can be used simply to isolate variable changes. So you don't have to grep the entire source for references. So you can make changes confidently. Yes there can be some leakage; but don't throw the baby out with the bath water.
I don't want to be "that guy" but it sounds like you're not writing Swift, you're writing Javascript in swift syntax. Optional as part of the type system instead of falling back on nulls and exceptions is IMO a very good thing. Try to embrace it with an open mind for a few years (yes, years) before declaring it a useless pain in your behind.
I can literally look up my hourly power usage online. The 4-6 hours my pool pump is on is almost 2x higher power usage than any other time. I consider that a lot of power.

Edit: we had our house unoccupied for 2 months with everything unplugged and off, but our pool pump and sprinkler system. Based upon that, and looking at our historical usage, I would say our pool pump accounts for about 65% of our monthly kwh.
Dude, YC is not obligated to do anything for you, or anybody. They're not a college, and even those aren't transparent with selection criteria. Christ, checklists out of 10?

Life is a crapshoot.

People need to also stop thinking that incubator == success, or that not incubator == not success.
In case anyone is wondering:

Woody Allen says those words in a movie... and McLuhan shows up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXJ8tKRlW3E
it's closed captions, which kind of ruins my experience by captioning every sound effect in a movie or TV show.

...which is what deaf disability advocates have demanded, and my understanding is that it's a requirement now by FCC rules[1]. If you don't have that stuff, guess what, no TV sale until you supply it. Again, Netflix relies on the producers to supply this stuff, and from the producers' standpoint, it's just another expense. It costs about $500-$!000 to get this done by a post house, last time I checked. I would expect this to go up a bit now that the FCC has promulgated detailed rules on the subject.

1. http://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-moves-upgrade-tv-closed-capt...
> I find it disingenuous to imply that developers should not be venturing outside the little garden of code they or their company has written except on certain days and that the developer will even have a choice in the matter.

I don't think this was the intention of the link — I think it's a good faith request for engineering time. It's asking for two days per month in situations where there are presently no days per month. If someone in management is focused exclusively on what the next feature that's being implemented is—what things cause a developer pain isn't ever going to get captured by that. Probably at least half of the time, by the time I work out a bug in a third-party (or even first-party) library, I already have a hack or workaround. The cheapest thing, in the extreme short-term, is for me to just go with the workaround, and let every future developer experience the same pain. Of course this is a bad decision, but I suspect this is part of what is motivating the author of our manifesto.

Of course, the downside to not sending things upstream (and contributing to FOSS in general) is that developers end up solving the same stuff over and over again. I can, off the top of my head, think of a couple problems I've solved myself multiple time, across multiple employers. Wasted time.

edit: to be clear, I see your point, I think: the spirit here is what we're after, not rigid adherence to 2 days / month, and it fair to say that perhaps the link should speak to that, lest someone read it too literally.

Also, keep in mind that it takes a good bit of work: if you patch a third-party dep, you need to somehow deploy/integrate that patch into your process in the meantime; you need whatever approvals internally you need to upstream the change; you need to ensure the patch is reasonable (e.g., not a hack) to upstream; you need to actually send to upstream and deal with any feedback from upstream (and in some cases, hope the upstream is even still alive). It can be several months later that upstream finally accepts the patch and cuts a release, and then you need to upgrade to that release.
There is one for addiction issues. Maybe it's more generally applicable, but it goes like this:

They are an addict, and somehow, each day, they are going to get whatever it is. And they are going to do it, because they have to do it.

And for some of these people who are homeless, they are going to do what they do, because they feel they have to do it...

In any case, getting that thing, whatever it is, can go the easy way, or the hard way. They could be giving blows in an alley, or pay with some money they got on the streets from kind people, or due to the property crime.

We can't make people do anything. Not really. They, themselves have got to resolve to improve, or do things differently, or they simply won't. We can put incentives out there, punishments, and all sorts of things, but in the end, they really do have to resolve to do things differently, or it really won't happen.

Every year, a few of these people get there. One day, they see something, experience something that brings that resolution about! And with that comes motivation, and with that motivation comes the doing of things differently.

Nobody but them knows when this is, and often they don't even know when this is.

And until they get there, it's the easy way, or the hard way.

If we look at the cost of this, those costs can be low, average, or high, depending on how often it's the easy way or the hard way.

And when they get there, how much potential remains? That too is determined by the easy way and the hard way.

So when we give, we are helping to pay down those costs. It's up to them to get there, and when they do, they will appreciate all of us who helped get them there at a much lower cost and risk to themselves as beings, and they will be capable of that much more too.

One of us, who gives that dollar, thinking they will just go buy another beer, will be that person who gave the dollar that got them there. They don't buy a beer, instead a razor, clean up and improve from there.

We can't make their choices for them, but we can continue to present the option of doing things differently, and that happens one gift, one less hard way at a time.

In general, we are helping out. And the help is in the form of harm reduction to preserve their options, health, and buy them time during their struggle.

If you think about it, real help, selfless type help, not controlling help that comes with strings and such, is a gift. It's a gift with the best of intent, and in this world intent is what matters.

When your intent is to help, you are doing the right thing --and it's the right thing even when it doesn't appear to have done much, or the bad outcome seems your doing.

It's not, and it can't be, because we can't make their choices. Only they can.

And if we don't give that help, so many more of them won't ever get there at all.

It's nothing to most of us. Every so often, it's all that ever did matter to them.
Yeah the whole experience was slimy. I just went through your checkout; why are you inspecting my cart? In fact, what gives them the right to rummage through my stuff at all?
I thought OP was simply sharing a unique way of searching Google for all YC rejections. I've done plenty of complex searching and I've wondered what the reasons were that various companies get rejected; for whatever reason I never thought to try a tight search like this.
You didn't acknowledge my claim that your view of the tech industry is rose-colored and inaccurate.
> what is the harm in publishing those criteria

Makes it that much harder to game...

Does Harvard, MIT or any other major university publish their selection criteria? (I truly am unaware of the answer to this question)

> As it stands it seems to be a real crapshoot

Sounds like the University game too. And professional sports. And record labels.

Spotting talent is easy, but not everyone with talent succeeds.
a bunch of non-breaking spaces on other side?
I usually love James Hague's posts, but this one has his head buried deep in the sand. And he's enough of a veteran to remember early Lisp and Smalltalk systems, where excessive openness in all aspects looked awesome for prototyping/hacking or academic toy programs (or what is considered toy-size in the last 20 years anyway), but was a disaster even for the mid-1990's definition of programming in the large. Attempts to discipline these languages came too late, so they got overrun by competitors with lots of "paranoid" rules like C++, Java, hell even Eiffel. (Not the single reason of course but one important reason; not even the gurus could help themselves to not abuse dark magic and write application code that would be compatible across minor updates of the language/frameworks, let alone other compilers/VMs/platforms.) If you need extra evidence with more current technology, see most "bad parts" of Javascript (successful, but in the same way that the Titanic was wildly successful for one week; people who build large JS apps have been in a mad rush to fix or replace it for the best part of the last decade, hopefully with ES6 coming as a first major win in that direction).

TLDR sorry James, we have tried the elegance of extremely simple and open language/runtime architectures, and that was always an abject failure.
I don't think this makes the problem any different, does it? If it were possible that there was a list of "yes" words and a list of "no" words that they could prick from randomly or something, then yes, that would be much more difficult.

But in both examples, there's one word for "yes" and one word for "no" and in both examples, the asker doesn't know which one is which.
Thanks for pointing this out (and parent comment too!). What are you advertising that you see such high returns on?
Submit GitHub issue via Twitter
Not only will they (attempt to) use them, but they will decry your half-assed documentation, and be right to do so.
It's a great book, too.
How to Hire a Virtual Assistant for $3/hr (Includes Exact Steps, Templates, Etc…
I remember that some years ago while reading "Hacker and Painters" I got the naive impression(I was 18) that I could just go to grad school and then become rich by just building a technically superior product, without having business experience. How wrong I was.
I've lived in downtown Seattle for the past six years and I agree with everything you've said, but it's also slowly changing. There are tons of apartments and condos going up right now in downtown, not the neighborhoods. But as you mentioned, there are still no schools, and these condos are intended primarily for 20-something Amazon employees who will get married and move to the neighborhoods (or farther) when they have kids.

Since we've moved from no one living in downtown to lots of 20-somethings living in downtown, I hope eventually that will eventually turn into people living and staying in downtown.
I think it is just a clever way of linking to a collection of related articles.
In-app sales.
Sweet. I figure only 15 more years until we get two column layouts working, and then we'll finally be able to publish like it's 1979.
Complaint: Commuter buses yanked disabled access for bar seating
They use the term isomorphic to mean that it is written in one language throughout the app. Typically, JS on the front and back end.

They really should be saying something like isoglossic (not a Greek scholar here) to imply that it's in the same language, instead of isomorphic, which implies a lot more than what they intend.
New Economy, it was called.

Oddly enough, we did end up with a new economy. Old corporations were torn down and new ones were built, and cultures generally changed for the worse. Employee stack ranking was still unusual when Enron rolled it out (leading to its demise). Open-plan offices for programmers were a minor startup negative to be put away after 50 people, not something to be celebrated.

We actually got a new economy in the early and mid-2000s (for those who don't know, 2002-5 and 2008-9 were horrible years for job seekers, especially recent college grads). It just wasn't a very fun one, and most of the newness had nothing to do with technical progress.
I'm not really sure how the author is making the link between post 9/11 safety versus liberty issues and safe spaces.

It is really quite confusing because the people that exist in these spaces are generally quite vehemently opposed to those same types of interventions. They see themselves as existing in a system which has worked against them for years, and they are suspicious of it. They see legislation as typically working against them, and they are working to fight it.

Personally, I support the right for safe spaces to exist, and for people to be angry when they are offended.

I am also personally opposed to safe spaces. I'm queer and they made me feel like I wasn't the right type of queer. I view them as another reinforcement of utterly meaningless hierarchies.

In this case though, the author's view of the people in those spaces seems to be that they are linked with a movement that they generally reject. The author doesn't have a very nuanced view of those people. I'd venture that they don't know those spaces very well.

edit: Its also quite confusing since safe spaces have a history that starts long before 9/11.
We should have taught them not to give up essential liberty for a little safety. Instead, we taught them that the government needs the power to send flying robots to kill anyone on the face of the earth without review and without telling us why.

Ken is a great writer and a great American. I'm grateful to him for pointing out these problems with great style.
- (very obscure) Henry Kuttner's "Hogben Chronicles" - about a family of radioactive mutant hillbillies, absolutely hilarious.

- Stanislaw Lem's "Tales of Pirx the Pilot"

- Clifford Symak's "City"