skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems like neither Inn nor even Piknic (which is a true masterpiece) is the their most profound work. I would suggest "Snail On a Slope" (which I have read at least 10 times) and especially "Ugly Swans" - these novels, it seems, has the brother's philosophy fully developed and refined.

The Roadside Piknic is the first enlightenment, so to speak, the bold conclusion that there is no way out, but selfless wish for happiness to everyone as the only way to hypothetically change the world (the way of the East - to focus on inner rather than social development, in hope that a proper social system will naturally follow, at least to some extent - the way of Gita or Spinoza, the way of India, and some Buddhist countries).
It's a figure of speech. It's also a bit derisive, since we humans like to think we are so much more rational than that. A more accurate term would be primate social instincts. But this stuff I suspect predates the neocortex.
You're forgetting when he showed up at Netflix. It was after their disastrous splitting of the DVD and streaming biz when they lost 1 million subscribers and their stock price crashed.
Snapchat may not be useful to the world by your definition, or for that matter mine. But it provides enough value for 100-200mm people to regularly use.
"Chicken hawking is when a middle aged man takes a young sociopath as his protege..."

O M G

There is a term for this!!?!?!

Clap clap clap...
Why Tesla Employees Fear Elon Musk
I'd be careful to generalise, Faceboook was Mark's first job.
Good write up. It'd be good to publish md5 hashes of the files you recommend to download.
Btw, here the B.B King documentary on Hulu.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/691662

Enjoy it while it is free. Just saw it and now I know why he is a big deal! Didn't know much about him before today!
> The kernel doesn't have a DOM.

Also, the kernel's written in C (maybe Rust in part, soon). So much for language choice!

Sure, in userland, many languages compile to assembly. Hmm, where have I heard that word lately?
Sounds like the icing on an otherwise delicious cake of an adventure that she calls her life.
In my opinion, the more esoteric uses of the blockchain, like using it as a platform for smart contracts, will require a very large investment of time to realize, but have practically limitless potential to advance the world and create new revenue sources.
Which is exactly why all cops should be wearing video cameras.

It protects the cops as much as it protects the public.
A mention isn't even necessary. Imagine being Light getting his source of information from the internet, his ISP has a small incident with a lightning storm and they lose connectivity completely for a few days while things get sorted out. Involuntarily information has just been leaked irregardless of all other protections, the deaths of criminals would have been disrupted. In this situation you would ideally be working to some great latency of days or weak to give a buffer of information. It's talked about in the first few episodes that he works ahead in case of sickness, but it's not mentioned after that, possibly because it means he can't use those events as cover for on the spot murders (which would stand out from week old information based murders).
"Yet suddenly, the startup was the talk of the town when it managed to raise $25 million in seed funding in June 2013 from top investors including Peter Thiel, Andreessen Horowitz, Marc Benioff, Jim Bryer, Accel Ventures and Index Partners."

These guys are all supposed to be amazing predictors of the future. Who really cares whether payment data is transmitted via ultrasound, bluetooth, NFC, or over the wifi/cellular data connection? How does adding ultrasound to the mix shape the future, as all of these guys claim they want to do?

I blame the investors in this case more than Duplan. There are 70 people that wouldn't have been hired and fired if those investors hadn't written this apparently very immature 21 year old kid a $25M check for some hokey technology. Duplan clearly had a knack for communicating a believable grand vision, but little ability to deliver on it. Investors at this level - allegedly some of the most sophisticated VC's on the planet - are supposed to be able to identify people like this.
I believe Fedora was the first to begin this trend.
Far too vague if you're trying to find interested early adopters. The only thing clear to me: The photo and video were taken in West Seattle.
Why did this only get 1 point? It's one of the first todo / organize your life type tools that I've actually used in a long time.
Findings like this, I think, are the most convincing arguments for retaining NASA's highly productive climate science division. There is a breadth of talent there squandered by horrible management both intra-agency and inter-agency. The fact that it's run by Congress and has little, if any autonomy is also a very sad, sad thing. I'd much rather see it spin off into its own thing that receives a set amount of funding but lets Dr. Bolden and the board have a degree of autonomy on where to spend it, much like USPS or Amtrak. Having anthropologists and attorneys decide critical science for the future just seems archaic, myopic, and horribly miscalculated.
After 5 attempts, I made it. Out of 17.5k test takers, no matches yet? Birthday paradox be damned.
Serious Linux futex_wait() bug on Haswell (fix available)
I am not a quantity.
I've been to around a dozen in the past year, here's my take:

Stable Wi-Fi. Don't charge for admission. Adhere to a strict fresh code rule. Limit teams to 4 or 5. Stick to your judging criteria (fun, business, innovation -- whatever it is, be consistent from start to finish) and find non-sponsor judges to choose the overall winners of an interestingly themed challenge. Provide enough water and food for everyone. If you're hosting it in San Francisco, there are plenty of hungry people who will eat the leftovers. Have 2 rounds of presentations if there are more than 30 submissions. Have someone go around and tell hackers to simplify their ideas and explain the meaning of a weekend MVP.

Follow these and you should have an acceptably successful hackathon. If you want to be memorable though, try something new!
Thank you for the link -- I suppose it should've been obvious you'll have some use for command line tools internally, if only for automation (but automation is important, how else can my backup cron job let me know it's completed/failed? :-)

Not so good that you don't (currently) interop all that well. I can understand that gpg/mime is a bit hard, and have some properties that aren't great (metadata/subject header...).

As for plaintext being "broken" when reaching gmail, I suppose I've grown to be a different kind of pragmatic lately. Lets put it this way: I still enjoy postcards, and while (some) encryption is trivial (with the right tools, some of which you are building!) -- I really don't need "another messaging app" (but secure!). I need email that is easy to secure/so easy that always encrypt is useful.

Then again, most of the email I send and receive go to public mailinglists -- without clearsigning, I'd have no use for your product (yet -- none of my private contacts use gpg, and are likely to move to your platform just to get it).

That's not to say I'm not interested to see where you end up, and wish you all the best with your project!
I am an anime zealot, and Death Note is really high up on my list of "best series"
"the world does nothing."

What would you have the world do? Invade like the US did to Iraq, causing a million deaths?
You can find some more {complex, idiomatic, not terribly hacked together} Rust kernels at https://github.com/thepowersgang/ .
This is very stupid and dangerous if real, but it smell like a misunderstanding.

He probably told the FBI (and Wired) about modifying the trust in the simulation and about some peeping into an actual plane system, and the information probably got mixed.

Perhaps the FBI exaggerated to male him look more dangerous, perhaps he was confusing to gain some street credit, or perhaps it's true. Until the airline release an official plane log dump, I won't be sure.
What I meant is that for any node in the tree, sort the immediate children by karma, and treat each level as a separate sort. You would still keep all of the parent/child relationships, but the order they render in would change.
Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans
I'm genuinely curious. Let's say things had turned out slightly different, he'd been able to negotiate the deals with the banks that he needed (let's say he had a Board Member who helped open a few doors, or perhaps a Sr. Executive who had deep experience with the banking industry/regulations, and could expedite) - and let's say that clinkle had taken off, and was generated sufficient revenue to be a $10B company. Would you still blame the investors, or would you be impressed by their willingness to take risk?

From the New Yorker article on Marc:

Each year, three thousand startups approach a16z with a “warm intro” from someone the firm knows. A16z invests in fifteen. Of those, at least ten will fold, three or four will prosper, and one might soar to be worth more than a billion dollars—a “unicorn,” in the local parlance. With great luck, once a decade that unicorn will become a Google or a Facebook and return the V.C.’s money a thousand times over: the storied 1,000x.

A16Z invests in 15 companies/year, knowing ahead of time that ten of them will fold. Being able to predict the future is hard.
A little context:

They will use an overlay blockchain called Factom that timestamps commits into the Bitcoin blockchain to provide it with a base consensus. The goal of this design is to leverage Bitcoin's security while having the freedom to store much more data than would be practical to store in the Bitcoin blockchain. How it works in practice, we'll see.
reminiscent of the Marshall McLuhan "medium is the massage" thing. Everybody "knows" it's the medium is the "message" because, of course, it's about media and communications... But that pesky objective external physical reality keeps sneaking back up and proving long held memories to be bogus.
Not everything, just a lot in the Engineering area and some in Design and Operations (Growth, Business, and Product don't have anything.)
Mathematica has lisp essentially as a subset built on top of its rewrite system. In other words its rewrite system is so powerful that lisp can be naturally threaded into it.

In particular the symbolic nature of the language means that everything is first class, functions and function constructions ("functional programming") and expressions in general ("macros") being just basic cases.
Probably not a popular opinion to pin this against someone nobody knows... but just that photo they used to headline the article makes the guy look like a typical sociopathic marketing type who talks smoothly but has no real game. He probably sold investors with fancy dinners and a great pitch with no tangible skills to back it up with. Just saying.
24 year old CEO?

I don't care if he went to Stanford. I went to Caltech. I didn't have the first clue when I was 24.
that seems to be a folklore on the swimming requirement...

And they actually did some historical research on it,
http://asklib.hcl.harvard.edu/a.php?qid=31265
>Ten lane roads are not infrastructure unless you have something to ride on that roads. India and Vietnam provide citizens with all kinds of bikes, tuktuks and motorollers. NK not so much.

The embargo makes oil very expensive in NK. Hence the costs of running a vehicle are prohibitive.

>Having said that, no electricity during most of the day

They get pretty frequent seconds-long brownouts, but they do have electricity during the day.
Yawn. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9554673

Oh no, I've been caught, called out on my Throne of Skulls on my Skull Island again! Yes, I had so much power over all the people working on Mozilla, I clouded all their minds with my superpowers.

And post-Chrome, I still do, since apparently in spite of Chrome, your hero, villainous-me managed to kill Dart as a 2nd VM-based language in browsers -- even in Chrome. Mwahahahah!
I was a bit surprised at the uncanny parallel between the author's description of the ships and the mechanics of ships in Eve. I am not sure about the familiarity of Eve with the author, but a cool parallel nontheless.

I have also been trying to break my mind of the "space ships are boats" mindset[0] and into the air-force notion, but they are called spaceships, and sci-fi art looks prettier when not everything is a sphere or cylinder.

[0]http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/misconceptions....
The most energetic particles
>There have been 0 matches with over 12,000 tests.

I really don't believe their number of matches. Why... We're on the Internet, it's full of trolls.

I'm sure any number of people will have taken the test at two different locations and answered the questions the same, just to get a match.
I grew up in Brisbane, as did my wife - we both support you being from an alternative universe.
We don't know who invested how much.

At least a few years ago you could get ~$50k in seed funding from a16z really easily (just needed to seem promising, without needing to meet the general partners, etc.). It has probably changed now that a16z has shifted more towards the larger, later rounds. VCs do these deals because it costs them nothing and they now have their foot in the door for later rounds.

Entrepreneurs love these too, cause they can bandy about these big names. I wouldn't read too much into the big-shot names unless there's a $$ figure attached.
Using V-Models for Testing
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/UsrMove and people sure did hate on it too.
I know from experience that prosecutors feel quite free to tell blatant lies. If you don't believe me, go watch a criminal arraignment sometime.

Defense attorneys do to.

For the most part judges are clued into this. It's not testimony unless it's under oath - and even then, sometimes witnesses commit perjury.
I don't believe their no matches counter. We're on the Internet. The first thing some Redditor or 4chan'er did was take the test from two different places and answer the questions the same way.
Andrew Ng: On Life, Creativity, and Failure
> the way of the East - to focus on inner rather than social development

I think it's not the way of the East but more like an image created by westerners.

You will break this illusion by simply visiting Thailand, India, Korea or Japan. And it's hard to imagine more materialistic culture than Chinese.

I'm not saying the ideas of Hinduism or Buddhism are bad but look how people actually interpret them:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Muslims_in_Burma
I think we both know certain bad actors in common. I assume they've screwed you somehow.

How've you been? I've been well.
Internet firms: Eat or be eaten
I think that he's oversimplifying the dynamic, and I don't think that the emotional/"reptile" dynamic is the only one. Some people (even very powerful people) respond to posturing and dominant/submissive relationships and some don't. Not everyone is going to respond well to "You need to give me $50 million now", but some people will.
> How did the founder manage to build a company of 70 employees without a product and securing 30 million fundings after 2 years of not really showing anything? And to top that of, it didn't look like the founder has any track record before this company.

Welcome to the tech industry! We're not in a bubble, it's different this time...
It's better than the rest, but even the rest of North Korea sure as hell looks a lot better than many 3rd world countries.

The western media gives an exaggerated view of the level of poverty there, partly by subtly pretending that it's still 1994.
Or its just badly developed. I hit question 4 and it failed.
Bizy (Android App) – Automatically manage your phone's volume on a weekly basis
Pgsql: Support Grouping Sets, Cube, and Rollup
I'll donate later this week. Great nonprofit. Question: do you feel there is added value to using the "all-or-nothing" crowd funding model? How would this be different from simply earmarked aggregated funds with individuals following the families they helped support?
> It's not supported at all on Windows or OS X

It's supported everywhere I care about…

More seriously, though, there was a time when I had to install MacTCP and others had to install WinSock or Trumpet or whatever it was called. The upgrade was worth it then, and I bet it could be worth it again.
Why You Should View Everything as Optional
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallels_%28Star_Trek:_The_N...
Extensive discussion 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9542548
Going to Mars is a first step. It wouldn't surprise me if large space stations with artificial gravity come about someday either - and come about much sooner than they otherwise would have if Musk hadn't decided to pursue his goal of making humans a multiplanet species.

Anyway, perhaps I could have worded things differently as I didn't mean to imply he had the exact same visions as those from the 70's, just that he decided to go after grand ideas now that the government decided it isn't worth their money.
A16Z invests in a lot more then 15 companies/year, that article is way off in that regard

here is a tweet from dec 2014 where Chris Dixon (General Partner) said they did 30 seed deals last year adding up A, B, C, etc. they do closer to 50-100

https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/544570097465954304

crunchbase shows they have done 31 publicly known ones in 2015 so far

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/andreessen-horowitz/...
Same for me (Chrome on Mint)
Another vote for SSLMate. Used them recently and was stunned at how great they are. Definitely an SSL company for developers/sysadmins (in a good way).
> Erik clearly states that he thinks the attribute/element distinction is "_incredibly_ stupid,"

Yes. And I'm saying he's wrong. Not only is he wrong, he's clearly wrong. Not only is it not "incredibly stupid", the distinction between attributes and elements is both reasonable and useful. And the reason it's reasonable and useful is because it reflects a reasonable and useful distinction between data and metadata.

> What is an example of this distinction between attributes and elements which is not just syntax?

I don't understand that question.

My claim is that, in the context of markup languages, there is a useful distinction to be made between data and metadata, and that this distinction is useful enough that it is not unreasonable to make this distinction syntactically. Of course, it doesn't have to be made syntactically. In Lisp, there is no syntactic difference between function calls and control constructs. Consider:

(foo (baz bar) bing)

Is (bar bar) a function call? If FOO is a macro that expands to:

(dotimes (baz bar) bing)

then BAZ is a variable binding. Arguably, it would be worthwhile to make a syntactic distinction here. For example, you could use square brackets for variable bindings, so that you could tell that in:

(foo [baz bar] bing)

BAZ was a variable binding without having to know how FOO was defined. It's not a slam dunk, but it is a defensible position.

Likewise, it is a defensible position that the difference between <foo baz=bar>bing</foo> and <foo><baz>bar</baz></foo> -- whatever that difference might actually be in practice -- is valuable and ought to be preserved. Again, not a slam-dunk, but a defensible position.

What makes Erik clearly wrong is this his rendering of <foo baz=bar>bing</foo> is NOT actually any simpler than a rendering that preserves the attribute/element distinction. His rendering has EXACTLY the same level of nesting, the same number of tokens. The ONLY difference is the location of a paren. And the way he moves the paren, he loses information. Without a compelling argument why moving that paren has more value than the information that he loses, that paren ought not to be moved. All else being equal (and in this case all else is equal) it is better to keep information than to lose it. Not only does Erik not make a compelling argument, he makes no argument at all. He simply proclaims that it is "incredibly stupid" and his acolytes, for reasons passing my comprehension, agree.
I've noticed this phenomenon with titles that might contain plurals or articles, but also might not: e.g. "Sid Meier's Civilizations" or "Mad Max: Beyond the Thunderdome". It's typical to eliminate these elements for brevity, but more jarring when people remember them when they aren't there.
http://chrishecker.com/Kurt_G%C3%B6del_is_Laughing_His_Ass_O... credits casey muratori for the quip
* Atom is open source, Sublime is not

* Startup is still slow for a lightweight text editor but it is faster than for IDEs and it is improving (see: https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/2654)

* Package management is easier

* Following releases/announcements Atom (http://blog.atom.io/) instills more confidence compared to Sublime (http://www.sublimetext.com/blog/) [also if Atom should be disbanded it is Open Source, if Sublime development stops, it stops]
> At least a few years ago you could get ~$50k in seed funding from a16z really easily (just needed to seem promising, without needing to meet the general partners, etc.)

Nope, both Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz actually came to Duplan's office and had a long meeting with him. Marc and Ben agreed to invest in him after the meeting, likewise Peter Thiel invested after having a meeting.
This was in a simulation. The article even says this. He only accessed the infotainment network.
TiVoizaton is bad thing of course, but sadly GPLv3 for example won't let to put any app using this code to App Store.

Though weird why don't they at least consider GPLv2 or later as it's give a choice for anyone who may want to maintain GPLv3 forks.
It sounds like the deal didn't work out, which the company was unofficially banking on, so the rest of the time has been the leadership frantically trying to figure out what to do with all of the resources so as to not turn tens of millions into complete worthlessness.

I wouldn't wish that position on my worst enemy. I know nothing about what the CEO is like, and he apparently has plenty of flaws, but I think I would be an awful CEO in that situation, too.
Yes. But the two structures at issue are:

((foo baz bar) bing)

and

(foo (baz bar) bing)

The only difference is in the location of a single paren. But latter representation (Erik's) loses information whereas the former does not. All else being equal, and absent a compelling argument why the lost information has no value, it is better not to lose information.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triune_brain
> No f128 type??

Ooh, that's a stinger. It would be like shipping a C standard library with "strcat" but not "strncat".
Underwater Graveyard of Hundreds of World War II Planes
There are people who are paid to work on open source full time or part time.

I don't see how server software has inherently more vendor-lock-in than a text editor.
That second link is basically an admission that he is Satoshi -- or that he and Hal Finney together were Satoshi. If you read between the lines.

I annotated with explanations of what I mean:

http://genius.it/unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/05/bitcoin-w...
I actually liked it for selfish reasons. I got to stay out way past my bedtime and geek out about Rust at the Boston meetup. :D