skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you might be conflating skepticism with jealousy. Sure, some are probably jealous, but others might be wary of the ebook pimping that was for a time, quite prevalent here on HN, and all from the same circle of folks.

If anything, I think it's preferable that the community engage in pattern matching and question where their heroes come from. It doesn't mean Patrick is a fraud, but it might mean that he's not the god everyone makes him out to be.

I will admit that when I first arrived here on HN, I too believed that his 'status' was a reflection of BCC's success. The way I saw it evolve was that the consulting discussions were only made possible by the fact that BCC was touted as a model product for bootstrapping success.

That could very well be my mistake, but judging by this discussion, it seems I was not the only one to make it.

I think this is why so many people are surprised by the low revenue numbers.

As for the sale itself...3x on a dying business is a pretty good deal if I must say so myself. Questioning the time he put into making the sale is silly. You can't put a price on peace of mind.
> It's unpopular in our industry, but I personally don't believe in ownership of ideas or information.

What else would you expect from an industry that drives on ideas?
Youtube comments are great for finding out the name of songs in the background of the video.
>The term was easy to repurpose.
But the World Wide Web is very much here and very present.

And educated programmers call various text styles, "fonts" even though technically, a font is actually a specific size, and specific weight of a "typeface". The "font" is a subset of "typeface". Even though typefaces still exist, almost everyone uses the word "font."

And programmers will also call SQL (without CTE) a "programming language" even though it's not Turing Complete.

Even binary black-&-white-thinking programmers will exercise a lot of leeway with how words are used.

I want to emphasize that this all started with my response to the "web is best as a document platform."

I think most of us can substitute "web" to say "http+html is best as a document platform." That's what TBL meant.

Today... if we have Dropbox/GoogleMaps/Sudoku/etc, with millions of users as reality, what does "web" in "web app" really mean? The "http+html" has become a universal transport mechanism (with some apps even tunneling through http to do interesting things.). As the years progress, there are more examples of http becoming a "dumb and dumber" generic transport pipe for things that are not documents.

Let's say a startup company wants to create a website to crowdsource music promotions. They want the service to offer programmable access so people can write open source clients. The presentation slide / whitepaper will not use the phrase "internet api". Instead it will use "web api". If every corporate firewall and user' homes computers with Microsoft Firewall had wide open UDP ports, it's possible for the phrase "internet api" to have more currency than "web api". But that's not how history has played out.
> What about the detriment the web brings to having apps that work offline reliably and ensure control over their own data?

The web has supported this for years, but few use it.
To be honest, people pay me to do a job, but I am a fraud. I don't work for a living. Somewhere on a piece of paper my name is printed and it says that I will receive a sum of money each month in exchange for some effort at programming computers or some such thing, but I never really pay attention to it.

I program computers all day. It is quite an enjoyable pastime and I look forward to it almost all the time. Although it would seem like it is better to selfishly work on my own personal projects all the time, I have found that if I do things that other people like, it makes them very happy. I really enjoy making other people happy. It is fun.

I have not always thought this way. At one time in my life, I tried to limit the amount of things that I did for other people. I wanted to make sure that I always prioritised my goals above theirs. I would feel resentful if I were forced, through the circumstances of living, to do things that were not of my choosing. I demanded compensation. No matter how much compensation I received, though, it never seemed enough. Let's face it, I was giving up my time -- my life -- to further goals that were not my own. How much money should I receive to give up my life? I have never been able to answer that question.

I suppose there must have been a day where I changed. If there was, I can't recall it. Whatever happened, I started to realize that I was enjoying what I was doing. Not all of it, of course, but at least some of it. I went to my boss and I said, "If you have more things like this, can you please let me do it?" He was quite pleased to hear my question and readily agreed. Over time, I asked for more and more things that I enjoyed and my boss gave me more and more of those things. Eventually, virtually everything I was doing were things that I enjoyed.

There have been times where I was stuck in situations that I didn't enjoy. Most of the time it is because I lacked some skill to do a task, or because I lacked the ability to interact gracefully with certain people. These are big challenges for me. I enjoy challenges and I push myself to see if I can overcome them. Some days I give up and sleep, or play video games or cry. The next day I am usually ready to try again. I have crossed some big mountains this way and it is something that makes me very proud.

It has happened to me that I have found myself in situations where I just could not cope with what was going on. In those cases, I have simply gone somewhere else. I'm lucky because I live in a rich and free society where I can do what I please. I admit that I fully utilise this freedom and feel sad for others that can not do as I can do. Sometimes I feel a bit guilty, but should a seed planted in rich soil struggle because other seeds are not so lucky? I think there is no point in making life any harder than it already is. I will take my luck wherever I can get it.

In this way I have found that I can align myself so that people pay me and I do not work. I'm not saying it's easy. It has taken me decades to work out how to do it for myself. I just think that it isn't as hard as many people think it might be.
Yes. I gave pagination in Instapaper a try, and turned it off after about an hour. I tried to turn it off in iBooks, but there doesn't seem to be any such option in the iOS version.
Coincidentally, less than 24 hours later, this story crops up, demonstrating how different the mobile phone market is in developing markets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9604049
Copyright law is strange and inconsistent. Contrast this story with this one ("red bus case"[0]):

http://aandalawblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/red-bus-suggests-co...

So at one end of the spectrum literally taking someone's photo and selling them without permission is NOT copyright infringement, and at the other end taking your own photo then altering it a certain way IS copyright infringement. Someone will have to explain that one to me...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Island_Collections_Ltd_...
You are going to have issue with telling the basic incomers in more expensive places (like cities) that they have to move or else you are going to have to adjust basic income by cost of living.

The former is politically very dangerous (more so than BI already is) while the later is going to quickly add complication to the issue that you are trying to simplify.
Glad to hear that. I think a lot of us are in the boat of struggling with our critical side.
Some people at MIT recently came up with a way to record audio from film of things like plastic bags or plants's vibrations:

http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/4/5968243/mit-turns-recorded-...

Pretty crazy... the one thing about the age of computers is that things like cameras, microphones, internet communication, gps dots and various other sensors are becoming as cheap as a restaurant meal... That's pretty scary to me.

Imagine in 1980 you could hire a private detective for $5 who would give you film, sound and location of an individual for days or months, and it'd be very unlikely that this detective was ever caught and traced back to you, and these detectives were widely available. That's sort of the future we're slowly approaching. We fear and criticise state surveillance, but the potential abuse of non-state actors is probably going to rapidly rise.
Making and Using Non-Standard Textures: Manipulating UVs Through Color Data [pdf]
> It seems that you're arguing that performative work is somehow deficient or inferior just because it can easily be reproduced.

That's not at all what I'm arguing. In fact, the kinds of artistic work that I most enjoy (books) are easily reproduced with little/no loss in quality.

> Literary works are no less carefully crafted, and large numbers of people seem to attach significant value to them judging by the amount of both money and time that people have traditionally chosen to spend on books, theater, films, and so on.

I totally agree that literary works are equally carefully crafted, but the rest of what you're saying is the economic context which I'm rejecting. You're saying that literature has value and therefore you deserve to be given money for producing it. I'm saying that I think everyone should have enough money to survive, and then they can and will do what they want to do. Doing things you enjoy is both productive and its own reward.

Your statements are based on a fundamental assumption that with enough rules, the monetary system will become meritocratic, rewarding those who produce with wealth and punishing those who don't produce with homelessness and starvation. But the fact is, monetary systems are not meritocratic--people's merits take time and nurturing to develop and monetary systems more often than not prevent that development from happening. I don't think this is possible to fix without a more fundamental overhaul of how we view the relationships between value, merit, and money.

> Of course not, but if I had no prospect of ever realizing income from working in film that would be a major disincentive to do it.

This is spoken from a position of comparatively extreme wealth. You have a prospect of realizing income from working in film, but literally billions of people don't. Copyright doesn't just protect your rights, it protects the rights of Sony executives who pay pittances to thousands of factory workers in third world countries. How many of those factory workers could have been Stanley Kubricks or Federico Fellinis?

And this doesn't stop with literature and art either: I think that science and engineering are affected by this as well. How many Albert Einsteins and Margaret Hamiltons have starved to death before even reaching adulthood because there was no economic value to their survival?

The truth is, starving to death is a much greater disincentive to people working on pieces of art than the likelihood that someone will steal their work, and copyright exacerbates the "starving to death" problem by creating inequalities. The vast majority of money made due to copyright is not made by individuals like you, it's made by corporations like Sony, and executives who didn't produce anything--they just bought it from the producers.
Hm, nice idea and service. Give it a try.
I saw similar things in the Israeli Army 10 years ago, but still looks nice.
Female Entrepreneur Creating Partnerships Worldwide with BeConnections
Teaching Kids to Fail Through Code
It is better to offer free health care that is paid via taxes/lower BI because it is cheaper to a society at large if people get regular checkups and fix problems earlier instead of waiting until the problem can no longer be ignored.
Section and header tags were standardized last year, it's definitely too early to tell how browsers will handle them, but with the ubiquity of CSS and for the reasons I already mentioned I doubt they will ever get any styling, unless maybe for when no CSS was defined at all.

Ultimately, I don't think of the web as a page-based medium, it's document-based. Electronic documents that want to mimic pages are a relic from the past, imo. What you seem to want should probably be implemented as browser plugins.
You mean how the DOM is constructed via JS functions? There's this project to fix it: https://github.com/insin/msx
If all the variables are 'a' then how do you find the one that's yours?
I think it's not so much the fact that developers praised Angular, but rather this same above mentioned proliferation of frameworks - with so many choices, at some point it becomes paradoxically more likely that people will follow the herd instead of picking each his own framework (if I may oversimplify to make the point clearer) with the risks that entails (possibility of bad choice, of support ending while you still need it...). Nobody's gonna get fired for betting on a big name like Google.
Reality only splits in two in the sense that the observer-dependent reality of the person falling into the black hole and the observer-dependent reality of the person remaining outside of it can no longer exchange information anywhere except inside of the black hole's event horizon.

The half of your light cone that extends into the future remains entirely within that event horizon. The outside observer's cone can remain outside of it only as long as she avoids crossing the event horizon.

Even if the outside observer decide to jump in just seconds after you, it is possible that the physics inside the event horizon would prevent her from ever catching up with you to compare notes, or even sending you a message. You could send a message with modulated x-rays, and she might pick them up with a VLF antenna. She might reply with a deep infrared laser and accidentally cook your brains with cosmic rays. Assuming a steep spacetime gradient as you approach the singularity, everything sent inward would be severely blueshifted, and everything sent outward severely redshifted.

There might even be a sort of Zeno's Paradox inside, where once you cross the event horizon, there's another event horizon beyond that, such that anything that much closer to the singularity than you are can never communicate with you, in the same way that you can never communicate with the universe outside the first event horizon.
If you're talking about finding a job now, then I absolutely agree. But if you're talking about what technology developers will persuade their employers to adopt in the future, then developers are the ones who decide.

Employers seem to be influenced by what the developers push (maybe not short term, but longer term it seems to me to be that way). Recruiters go where the employers are. Therefore, IMHO, ultimately its the (vocal) developers who pick the fashion.
That same article (that you linked) showed how the RNN learned to balance parentheses.
Links into native apps are great!... Until someone doesn't have it installed

The few successful native apps with linking (iTunes, Spotify) go via the web.
The Most Adventurous Guy in Magento Community, Kuba Zwolinski
> The court also heard that Mr Hayes had been diagnosed with mild Asperger's syndrome.

Why am I not surprised...
RIP SF/F Author Tanith Lee
Agreed, both of those are better. Hopefully one will gain traction.

Thanks for the link, good to know people are thinking about the naming issues.
The mainstreaming of 'geek' culture is interesting. It feels like I'm increasingly being targeted - which isn't necessarily a bad thing, because hey, I generally like comic books and video games and light sci-fi / fantasy television shows, and there's a lot more of all of those lately. But why is this happening at this point in time?

Is this some sort of response to economic changes in American society? The job market has polarized, with 'geeks' landing on the more attractive side on the divide. Is this a case of an economic domination leading, gradually, to a cultural one?

I wonder if strapping on a geeky t-shirt and throwing oneself into geek culture is becoming the equivalent of dressing preppy in the 1980s, with both reflecting higher economic aspirations.
Decoupling in games is one of those things that is incredibly hard to get right. I cannot count the one of times I have ended up with giant bowl of spaghetti code. If anyone can recommend some material on this subject, please do not hesitate to share it
Seems kinda weird to limit yourself to only Apple Watch games.
Sorry, English isn't my first language, or second.

Here's a link to the talk: https://youtu.be/bo36MrBfTk4?t=3446
Yes, the use of macros is not always justified in the examples, because Python is quite expressive already.

However, the ability to have macros is orthogonal with the feature set of the language. What is interesting is the ability to inspect and modify a Python AST.

Of course, meta-programming is a way to integrate otherwise absent features of a language as-if they were built-in.
Python is sufficiently dynamic that most things can be done using existing facilities, like reflection and metaobjects (the @case example, as you mention).

But there is a difference between using those facilites at runtime and producing some code at macro-expansion time (this might be relevant for Cython, for example).

You can, for example, define a domain-specific language that is directly translated as Python, and not interpreted like an API-based representation would. You can even apply custom type checking for that DSL.

Or, you could analyze an existing python source code and produce a translation in another language without having to reimplement a parser (see the Python-to-Javascript example, or Common-Lisp's Parenscript).
It doesn't really bother me that much that someone else could sell your Instagram photos.

What bothers me is that someone else would buy them, when they're available for free on the internet.
Dropbox at CppCon 2014,

"Practical Cross-Platform Mobile C++ Development"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcBtF-JWJhM

MuseScore

http://showroom.qt.io/musescore/

Qt show room has many others - http://showroom.qt.io/
An official leak of the iPhone 6C on the Apple website
Valve has a lot of interesting publications on their site: http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/publications.html
>I think we web developers should advise news sites, and in fact any site that prioritises features over performance, to go native

As a user, I have no interest in that. On the front screen of my phone I have the 'google news' icon which is a link to a web page with links other news web pages. Why would I want 20 siloed apps for the various news sites I visit occasionally?
Chances are React would be better supported long-term. React Native could be a selling point for a lot of people too.
Basically Dell, HP, IBM and everybody else all of a sudden also started offering Linux systems and the competition got too stiff driving down profits and market shares, leading to huge losses in the hardware part of the company. Combine this with the fact that they at the time had a large and seeming solid web and software side business it made sense to focus on that and simply drop the hardware, instead of trying to go head to head with Dell/HP/IBM.
These blogs are definitely worth a look:

1) https://molecularmusings.wordpress.com/
2) http://bitsquid.blogspot.com/
3) http://gamesfromwithin.com/

They can feel a little esoteric but there's a lot of golden nuggets if you're willing to dig a little.

Also, check out this book by Jason Gregory: http://www.gameenginebook.com/
"WHAT IS THE PRICE FOR YOUR PRODUCTS AND SERVICES?
Vricon offers competitive pricing"

oh... competitive pricing. Well I feel better. Thanks for letting me know.
I mostly wrote this: https://github.com/LanceH/Maze
while on conference calls before I started using that time to learn to draw.

I only ever ran it from within eclipse, I can't remember if it would run from the command line. It's a depth first search with solution also printed.

The only thing I added that I hadn't seen elsewhere is the "twisty" variable, which weights the random direction to either going straight or turning. I liked straight hallways on large mazes because it makes things blur together.
Ember would be a notable counter-example.

I think a more important reason would be that Facebook/Microsoft/Google media influence and corporate support creates massive brand awareness and generates instant interest. Educational projects anticipate the interest from developers and create courses, tutorials and reviews. The cycle continues and bam! we have an information cascade[0].

Rich get richer and poorer get poorer (in developer mindshare). Megacorps reap the benefits while indie developers are not able to achieve critical mass.

I shudder when I think about the possible Typescript/Microsoft, Angular/Google, React/Facebook domination in web technologies.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_cascade
wonderful! It's so good for health.
It is very interesting. I recently had burnout get so deep that I couldn't hide it anymore and had to react, I asked for a week off because I was burnt out. Got given that weak off, 3 days in was fired.

1.5 years 10+ hour days, 7 days a week with only 2 days off after my daughter was born.
None of your links support your claim that winding the clock back is even theoretically possible, and the stackexchange link seems to say it isn't: "The resolution is that entropy isn't a measure of the total information content of a system, it's a measure of the amount of hidden information, i.e., information that is inaccessible to macroscopic measurements." Even if you're assuming a physical God, that physical God can't get good enough measurements.
> If we focused less on revenue generation we'd have a much much smoother web experience that would run quickly on mobile devices.

I would flip that: we need to explore ways to generate revenue which don't rely on practices like trackers, structuring content to inflate page-views, etc. which don't benefit the user.

The most obvious example I'd use is ArsTechnica's approach of disabling ads for subscribers – I notice this any time I use a new browser and pages take twice as long to load because web performance just isn't a priority in the ad world.
What will be inside the Nintendo NX?
"But with that size comes responsibility."

Why would European regulators even care about Facebook? It's a completely voluntary service and anyone's free to create an alternative. It's non-essential.

If a huge U.S. retailer muscled into the EU markets and started driving mom-and-pop retailers and smaller chains out of business, I can see where the regulators would go nuts and try to stop them. It's a clash of U.S. capitalism versus European style capitalism and if they don't like the raw knock-down-drag-out American approach, it's understandable.

If huge Asian car manufacturers started undercutting European makers with high quality, low cost vehicles, causing thousands of factories and parts suppliers and dealerships across the continent to go out of business, I can see how regulators would want to limit or stop the disruption.

But Facebook? Just don't use it. Don't browse to facebook.com, problem solved. Nothing is affected. What am I missing here? It looks like just another shakedown of a highly successful foreign company that the regulatory bureaucracy regards as a threat of some kind. Too profitable, too entrepreneurial, too brash -- some combination of too many ick factors, I suppose.

As jakozaur says, why not promote and encourage domestic competition? There are brilliant computer folks in Europe and I'm sure they can come up with a few classy, high quality alternatives to Facebook. As an American, I'd love to see some competition to FB.