skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Startup School NY 2015?
Any news or dates?
Apple Music is just $2 per month in India–80% cheaper than the US
Why can all this new syntax be added, but the "use strict" pragma is still specified by a string? It made sense to send messages to the interpreter in a backwards compatible way, but now it just seems odd.
The conversation that can be had is about slander and false accusations leveled against the tech industry as a whole. And the motivations of those who propagate such narratives. There has been no connection established between said emails and the "tech industry".

The implication that only girls get nasty emails on the internet and they obviously come from the "Assholes in the tech industry" is childish, not credible.
Ask HN: Becoming an independent technical consultant
I'm trying to work out a different income stream for myself. I'm getting older, and would really like something more appropriate for me as I'm dragged kicking and screaming into old age (I'm 46 - so, not too late to be doing this).

I mostly work for large organizations, but I don't want to spend the rest of my life doing that.

Over the years, I've been contracted by small and medium sized companies as a technical consultant. They are usually friends of friends, or someone I worked with in the past. Including time for paperwork, they typically last about two weeks. It pays well, so it doesn't need to be constant, just steady. As it is, this comes up about once a year.

Feedback I've received has revealed some advantages:

- one point of contact, they always talk to the same person
- low to no sales pressure, since I don't have a product line to push
- much less expensive than a full consulting firm, because I have little overhead
- deliver solutions appropriate to the business. No tech for the sake of tech.

I'm getting ready to do the meetups, technical and business. Before I begin stumbling around, could I get some ideas of what small and medium, preferably technical, businesses might be looking for? What are other benefits? What's a good approach for initiating conversations - the "elevator pitch"? Are there other places I could look?

For what it's worth, I ran a small hosting company for a few years, but got out when everything started consolidating. I'm comfortable with the paperwork, taxes, etc. I'm terrible at marketing, and that's where I'd like your help.

I don't want this to be about me. I think there are others that would be interested.

Thank you.
I meant to upvote you but accidentally downvoted,sorry! I strongly agree that this is a gendered phenomenon.
Interest groups lying with statistics is a specific example of confirmation bias. It's sadly so prevalent that I generally assume that any statistics I find are intended to lead me in a particular direction.

I am skeptical of the final implication of the blog entry, that improved gun-safety legislation would solve this issue. For someone taking such a strong approach to statistics, it's a shame that they focus on only one facet of such a complicated situation. American culture, mental health treatments, social programs, and gun laws are all different from most other countries on their list - it seems disingenuous to mention only the last.
Debunking Linus Torvalds on microkernels (2006) [pdf]
I used to engage to in this sort of behavior to some extent. I grew up with a repressed sexuality and no knowledge of how to relate to women. Then, I suffered endless social rejection. I spent all my time in front of computers, and got good at programming.

We need to educate people
(1) How to relate to other, respectfully
(2) How to get over their anger
(3) Tell them this behavior is unacceptable

Tech has many misfits. There are many guys, who've spent their lives in front of computer screens, and haven't developed healthy ways of relating to other people. Yet, they can still be great at technology with the power that brings.
Two more excellent Jupiter Broadcasting shows:

3. TechSNAP (http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/show/techsnap/)

4. BSD Now (http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/show/bsdnow/)
I don't think refusing to take blame for the acts of others is sweeping anything under the rug.
I actually think this comparison is quite apt. Like those others, the science of linguistics has become heavily politicized in the US, most notably regarding the validity of AAVE as a first language.

Though I'd still argue linguistics has it worse. You don't really expect people in educated society to get into heated arguments with the 10-day weather forecast, or jump in to correct your "biology mistakes" while you're eating...
A little nationalism is healthy for a country, though I grant too much is a problem.
South Korea is fairly recently free-ish. Up until 1987 South Korea had a heavily US-influenced authoritarian government with a token legal opposition. The US still has a very strong influence in South Korea. There are also recent incidents that betray a lack of confidence in democracy: http://www.wsj.com/articles/south-korea-court-dissolves-left...

It's a perfectly nice place to visit. People there apparently feel free to talk about everything: The war, the Park era, etc. Unions can be quite militant. But they are not as free as Americans.
This is interesting to hear from science's PoV:

> "First, emotions organize — rather than disrupt — rational thinking. Traditionally, in the history of Western thought, the prevailing view has been that emotions are enemies of rationality and disruptive of cooperative social relations.

> But the truth is that emotions guide our perceptions of the world, our memories of the past and even our moral judgments of right and wrong, most typically in ways that enable effective responses to the current situation."

Is it generally accepted that the Logic 'vs' Emotion dichotomy is a false one?
They were stonewalling a UN investigation into selling their services to Sudan during the civil war.. Unbelievable..

https://twitter.com/csoghoian/status/617892200618291200
> Why go to great lengths to preserve content?

I don't think it's great lengths. And why? Well, because you want your userbase to trust you and increased transparency helps that. I don't care about that sub but its complete removal lends credence to the FUD you mention, or at the very least leaves it as an open question. Many people don't trust Facebook, but it's irreplaceable. It's a great way to communicate with your friends and share photos, there's no easy way to migrate your contacts list to another system, plus user adoption of a new interface would be difficult, etc. Reddit doesn't have any of those leg-ups, and as you mention the users are more technologically able. The only thing going for it is the existing architecture and userbase, but as we've seen, given sufficient alternatives, users will move.

At the end of the day, EP said Reddit should not be a free speech platform, and that's something with which I'll never agree. If she had instead said, "We ARE a free speech platform, yet we also remove personally identifiable information and ban those who post it" then it would be an entirely different story. As it is, it looks like she's trying to enforce Europe's definition of free speech, which limits hate speech, and that brings more hate than it limits (see: Muslims trying to sue Charlie Hebdo, failing, and then killing them 7 years later). The scale is much different but the concept is the same.

> It really feels like there's a bunch of users who are doing their absolute best to try and stoke up the fires and create a witch hunt

That may be. I think there's an opportunity here for management to be proactive and more open about what direction they are taking the website. Right now I don't see that. "Wait six months, I'll give you useful tools" is not something I could say to my manager at work about my software architecture plan, and it's not something Reddit should be telling its users.

EDIT:
> Why go to great lengths to preserve content?

Also, because this should not be a great effort. If it is, then you are admitting that the job of a moderator is difficult, and therefore they should be given more support. This is the realization reddit management is now making. I suspect the truth over what happened to FPH is both what Reddit Inc says and what the moderators say. Moderators say they have inefficient tools to tackle doxxing, and Reddit says moderators aren't doing a good enough job. Whose burden is that? The banning of FPH clearly demonstrated that admins felt it is the moderators' burden. The blackout showed the mods feel it is Reddit Inc's. I'll side with the mods as they are unpaid and don't need to do any of this. I personally don't need to see FPH, but I can see that Reddit Inc does not understand the needs or wants of its user base, inside or out of FPH.
When banks die: Greece's economy under capital controls
> The tone of the article suggests the author is ready to disregard the templated responses from Save Domain Privacy and others.

I didn't intend to suggest that they be disregard, I just didn't have much to say about them other than their number.

Without these efforts to promote opposition, /I/ wouldn't have heard about this proposal I believe. I certainly don't think that the template messages should be ignored just because of their form.
>we as an industry troll our women and minorities

Is one person enough to blame the entire industry? Or two? Perhaps 10% of the industry is trolling women and minorities. Is there any evidence of that level of participation?

>In order to "un-fuck" this industry, we do need to accept that we do this.

This sort of ultimatum is exactly the thing that promotes hostility against confronting these issues. If somebody wants to help, why do they also have to take blame? It actively turns people away who refuse to take that blame. It makes no sense.
Well that depends on the point of view, if you're okay with Cocoapods being designed to modify your Xcode project, etc etc. That should be fine. Again, all of this is a pretty big overhead to just 'script out' something.
Recommendation: "The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course" by Andrew Scott Conning is a modern version of RTK. Same concept, but better organization, more kanji, and a more natural layout and learning order.
> You are not voicing a valid opinion

I'm not sure how an opinion could be invalid? Maybe to another, but obviously not to the person who has that opinion.

> asserting that gender has nothing to do with it

Of course it does in her case. I feel bad for her, and it totally sucks. However, this is what trolls do. They troll people for various illogical reasons.

> So let's fix it.

I am not trying to be rude, but this is so naive it is painful. You can't do anything to stop trolls online, especially intelligent technically proficient ones. You can behave respectfully and enforce societal norms in your own office and daily life. That is all you can do. Be a good person in real life and hold people to a reasonable standard.
Not entirely sure if browsers require "use strict;", but io.js (node) does.
I think this http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.2317/E-39.1 is the paper they mention, sadly though I can't find a version of it without the pay wall.
Several thoughts, some reasonable and some probably stupid, split into separate comments so the reasonable parts can be discussed and the stupid parts torn apart separately:
Yes but 'Merica is freedom... I know because we just had 72 hours of colorful explosions declaring the freedom....
Hi, I'm a colleague of Jess. I entirely agree with everything you said about the industry as a whole. My thoughts in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9836573

But you should know that her colleagues (me included) take this super seriously, and so does our employer. We are doing everything we can to support her, and to make the attacks stop. We also want to contribute to fixing the problem beyond this one instance, and are looking for the best way to do that. If you have ideas I would love to hear them!
The Effects of Intermittent Fasting on Human and Animal Health
I'm interested in the source(s) for these numbers, if you have them.
Book production quality declines with increasing switch to groundwood paper
Just looking at the torrent I found Coca Cola, Google, Carrefour, and Movistar. I would love to see an index of this information to quickly search the content.
Part 4.

We need to start including some internet human interaction training in high school or elementary school. This should cover two things.

First, it should cover how the person on the other end of an internet interaction is another person, with feelings, and so we should keep that in mind. It should cover how it is easy to forget that, and so say things online we'd never say to someone's face.

Second, since that isn't going to stop the problem, people need to be warned about the jerks who like to harm people for the sake of harming them (see part 1), told that they are likely to encounter such people at some point, and get shit directed at them. They need to be told to not take it personally, the senders are not mentally well, and just filter their messages out.
Also worth reading, on related matters: Philip Greenspun's "Women in Science:" http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
An Amazon for renting things. All the top Google search results looked antiquated..

edit: my search query was just "rent anything"
Part 3.

Since the power that the attackers have in these messages is the reaction of the recipient, it might be possible to turn this around. In part 2, I suggested filtering and trashing (or sharing for research into de-anonymizing the senders). How about going beyond ignoring the empty idiots and embracing their idiocy?

Make a game of this. Have a scoring systems where you get points based on the number of threats you receive a month, with bonus points for photoshops and such. The person with the most cumulative points for the year could get an award and a nice prize for being best at annoying internet idiots.

This is reminiscent of one way that the KKK was fought. The "Superman" radio show in the late '40s ran a 16-episode story in which Superman took on the KKK. They presented the KKK as an organization of ridiculous people with silly and stupid rituals, and it greatly hurt the KKK.
Part 2.

These kind of email threats are overwhelmingly empty, in the sense that the person sending them is almost certainly not actually going to come over and do the things threatened [1]. Their power lies entirely in the threat itself.

Consider training your spam filter to recognize these threats and automatically trash them. I would hope your normal correspondence with friends and coworkers, and the correspondence you solicit, is sufficiently free of rape threats and the like that it should be easy for modern filters to separate out the latter.

Actually, don't trash them. Separate them out and make them available to anyone who wishes to study them. If many victims pool their threat data, someone may be able to infer enough to bust the anonymity of some of the senders.

[1] Exception: if you are doing things that will anger the kind of people who are willing to physically harm you even if it means they will likely be jailed or killed, then you need to treat these as real physical threats. For instance, if what makes you prominent on the internet is your work in successfully keeping abortion clinics open in deeply religious states, take threats as being serious physical threats.
Part 1.

It's not really a tech industry thing. It's a more general aspect of humanity. There are a lot of people, who enjoy harming other beings [1] if they can do it without bringing trouble upon themselves. The internet greatly helps these people do that, because it provides a way for them to communicate anonymously.

Since so much of tech industry interaction involves the internet, becoming known publicly in the tech industry will attract this kind of asshat behavior. It's probably not much consolation, but you'll get similar harassment on the internet outside the tech industry, too. Heck, even online chess gets surprisingly nasty when anonymous players are involved.

[1] I said "beings" instead of "humans" or "people" because I think there is probably a connection between the kind of lack of empathy that allows one to try to harm a stranger over the internet and the kind of lack of empathy that allows far too many people to torture animals for the sake of torturing them.
The first module example is incorrect:

// myModule.js
export function myModule(someArg) {
return someArg;
}

// main.js
import myModule from 'myModule';

The import is importing a non-existent default export. Either the export needs to be changed to a default export:

export default function myModule(someArg) {

-or- the import needs to be changed to importing a member:

import {myModule} from 'myModule';
> The terms aren't mutually exclusive.

'Conflate' doesn't mean that the terms are supposedly mutually exclusive.

> Nor is Piketty saying they are the exact same thing.

The only example of 'external debt' Piketty is talking about is war reparations. There is nothing else suggested there - it's all war reparations. That's not the same kind of debt as the debt that Greece faces.

War reparations are an arbitrary debt anyway, only paid by losers. Where are the war reparations the US is paying Iraq for storming in and destroying everything? Germany doesn't shoulder sole responsibility for WWI; they simply lost, so the other guys got to demand payment. It's not like Germany exchanged that debt for goods or services rendered, living beyond their means. And even when the war reparations were being decided on, there were plenty of people on the victor's side saying "whoah, this is ridiculous!".

What does it mean to be accused of 'not paying your debts' when even people on the other side are calling for the arbitrary punitive measures to be smaller?

> Where did he say never paid "any"?

True, he didn't say 'any', but there's still plenty of other problems in what he's saying - such as the timeframes for repayment. And there is zero mention of any of the other political factors involved, such as staving off the Soviets. The situation that postwar Germany is in has little to do with modern-day Greece.

--

Edit: Another thing that doesn't show up on the balance books in the aftermath of a world war is the redrawing of borders. After both world wars, Germany had it's borders redrawn, and disasterously in the case of WWII. Also, in addition to the financial debt from war reparations, after WWI, Germany had it's colonial holdings stripped.

Neither of these two things are anything like what's happening in Greece at the moment.
Pay for full time, beat-walking emergency medical technicians in shitty neighborhoods. This would prevent a lot of unneeded hospital visits and offer basic health services. A lot cheaper than 911 calls. I imagine having people on the ground would prevent a lot of problems.
Wait, what exactly is wrong about the last one? It sounds odd, but not so incorrect, to me.
Helmets protect your skull. They are not as effective at preventing brain injury.
Thank goodness! Looking forward to the Pluto close-ups, which will hopefully include the dark spots.
> The mention of "NP hard" in the first place just seems...unnecessary.

Furthermore, trying all possible passwords of length n for a fixed alphabet can be done in polynomial time, hence finding the password deterministically only takes polynomial time. Thus, it's only NP-hard if P=NP.

Edit: You're right, I mixed up length and size of the alphabet, so disregard that comment. I probably should go to sleep.
So...when the Greeks have no money tomorrow, how do you think that is going to effect their economy? I guess for me the ultimate question to the "no" voters is now what? No one is going to lend Greece money anymore and they have no reserves so basically they are going to have to cut no matter what.
It should be noted, however, that while many languages get by without explicitly marking definiteness, there are other linguistic techniques that can provide similar contextual clues that are required for understanding the pragmatic meaning of an utterance. Topic-comment structures[1] are often used to convey a sense of what is assumed as new versus known information. For instance, Russian's relatively free word order allows it to rearrange the constituents of the sentence so that the topic (what is being talked about, usually familiar to the listener) precedes the comment (what is being said about the topic). Japanese has this baked-in with particles that mark the topic (see [2]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_and_comment
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_grammar#Topic.2C_them...
This should say "1999" in the title, as this rant has been around for a long time.
Hey sdenton,

I agree with a lot of what you say about how Greece needs it's own currency to inflate, but sometimes I don't know if someone has a non-mainstream opinion or just needs a little help with consensus economics. So if you are like me a student of economics this post will hopefully help clear some things up. If not then I guess we disagree and the next person to read this post will have a better understanding of the different views of monetary policy present in economics :).

The consensus view in economics about issuing bonds is that it moves the needle away from inflation and towards deflation. Think of money in a very simple supply and demand model. More (supply)money means it is worth less. When the government issues bonds it auctions them off and takes money from people(out of circulation) in return, reducing the supply of money. This leads to less money, which is worth more(deflation, or disinflation).

The consensus view about lowering interest rates is that it leads to inflation. Imagine a country with a long term interest rate of 10%, then the FED turns the dial down to 0%. Vick the VC, previously had to average 10%+ on all of his start up investments because investors would move their money to banks(and make 10%) if he made less. So Vick previously only invested in the best start ups, all ex-googlers and previous entrepreneurs. But now he only needs to break 0%, so he invests in all the maybes. This leads to more start ups and more dev positions. Now if we go back to supply and demand, more openings(demand) means greater price. This same things happens across the entire economy. Many projects/start ups/buildings get funded that weren't before because of the drop in interest rate. And these projects create openings, leading to higher wages. Since labor composes most of the goods and services we consume, when we pay more labor, we pay more for good and services call it inflation.
People should really just use the actual name for it:
CQRS
There would be a lot less future confusion over what's flux or not. It's actually a really old design pattern called command query responsibility separation. http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/555855/Introduction-to-C...
It's all shades of gray. None of them on a trend toward lighter, it seems.
I was not re-interpreting the A.R. story - the facts were what they were.
EVERY STORY about harassment (or threats or otherwise troubling behavior) should be reported/heard, but putting the two stories we are talking about in the same basket is not fair - Jessie's case is in a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT CATEGORY - it is personal and threatening - unlike the other one.
Fix Reddit with Bitcoin
There's several cases in Chinese where you just have to add a da or some other meaningless word just to get things to sound the correct way with the right number of syllables and word spacing, however. The rules are different, but it's effectively just as useless but still required to talk correctly.