skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Much or most of the Amiga and Atari ST installed base in the '90s was "low quality" though: users who didn't have hard disks and likely couldn't afford one, who were possibly using a TV and likely couldn't afford a decent monitor, who didn't have a printer and who were mostly buying games that came on booter floppies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_booter . Those guys would have had trouble using business/"productivity" software effectively even if they'd been interested in buying it. Obviously there were better-equipped Amiga and ST systems too, but by and large Apple and the PC had run away with the users who had the budget and the inclination to run application software.

(In general, the serious cost barrier of a hard disk and a decent monitor as more or less the price of entry to serious computing almost certainly had a major impact on the shape of the computing industry until pretty recently.)
And for those stuck using javascript but with they had static typing there is:
http://flowtype.org/

The arguments for flow seem to resonate nicely with the points raised in the article.
Posting a link in this thread would be a good start :-)
Good to use for specific surveys
That's true. Are you trying to make an additional point, though?
Oh! You were looking for audited sync clients.

Yeah, I've got nothing there.

Edit: I would ask "How hard could it be to solve 90% of the problem?", but various BigCos have had spectacular failures in recent memory, so I guess the problem is pretty damn hard.

I wonder how terrible using git as the backbone for one's sync software would be.
Yep. Also this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_ruin
I like the fact that interpreting subjectively what 'Dynamic' and 'Static' means for a language, the author is able to pull a rabbit out of his proverbial hat ... except that we see the hole beneath the hat, and the rabbit is a dead rat. Clearly programming in Python vs C++ is a world apart in terms of how 'fast' you can get simple things up and running.
Exactly, another use is prototyping value. A language in which you can hammer a prototype out without thinking about or solidifying all the exact details -- it's more about trying out the concept, after all -- is infinitely easier to prototype with. After testing if the concept works, move to a more rigourous type system so you can bulletproof it against possible errors, etc.
The real revolution comes when gene splicing technology becomes so ubiquitous that complex organic molecules (i.e. pharmaceuticals legal or otherwise) can be produced in anybody's cupboard using plain old S. cerevisiae.

No, they won't be able to stop it. Yes, there will be social upheaval.
That's exactly how it happens. Overtaking in blind corners with fairly big vans (these things exceed 3 tons fully loaded and they're 6.6 meters long) and then ramming their vehicle back into the lane they're overtaking if they run out of room counting on the rest of the drivers to absorb their mistake.

And if that doesn't work then too bad for you...

The first time this happened it scared the crap out of me, now I'm more prepared and I will keep a very large truck in front of me on the most risky parts of the passage, they rarely try to overtake that combination, it's just too long.

Defensive driving gets a totally different meaning on those roads.
C++ is probably in that land of bad languages the author was referring to.
Take PHP or Python's standard library. Both are built around types, yet this is legal:

$foo = "hello, world!";
$foo = 12;

When you use a string-related function in Python, you expect the parameters to be strings, yet there's no type-safety enforced until runtime.
We are no small part of that positive feedback loop, either.
Are there some more in-depth demo videos? I'd love to see how/whether it is able to interact with databases, for example. Can I see records directly in my code?

Looks like a neat tool.
I heartily welcome the opportunity to troll the chemtrail people when we do begin geoengineering experiments at scale, in earnest. I know there's going to be a conspiracy-theory movement around anything we do to save our planet.
Huh? Why is harder to ask "is that a question or an order?" if you're black?
The author specifically says C++ is too restricted, and that it makes no distinction between the "class" and "type" the author is talking about.

C++ has no sum types (afaik, the language is so huge I might very well be wrong)
The last line of the article: "Let a thousand flowers bloom - as long as they're all static."

More to the point, things that are formally equal to each other do not necessarily have equal value in certain uses. (For example, think about Stokes' Theorem. It says that an integral of a function on the boundary of a manifold is equal to the integral of the derivative of the function on the whole manifold. That's useful precisely because sometimes the integrals, while they have equal results, are not equally hard to do.)

A dynamically typed language may be formally equivalent to a static unityping, interpreting the tag at runtime. That doesn't mean that they're equally easy to use, though. When I want to do that kind of thing, I want to do it like it's dynamic, not where I have to do the book-keeping to make it dynamic.
> and no signatures.

It's probably time to retire unauthenticated encryption as useless.

Now, if what you meant is that it uses AEAD, that amounts to the same thing as a signature. It has all the same failure modes, namely failure to authenticate.

DNSSEC is a clusterfuck, but if somebody can't put the right public key in the right place, I'm not convinced they'll be able to put the right public key in the right record with DNSCurve either. The exact same thing will happen, and then the solution will be "click here to disable dnscurve".
Patent Theory versus Patent Law (2002) [pdf]
A well kept secret was that Apple sold an AppleTalk card for the IBM PC, which was hands down the easiest way to network PCs. That's how I laser printed my dissertation. ;-)

The Apple II could not evolve. It was locked down by the expectation that new systems would run old software, and the old software made all kinds of nonstandard system calls, e.g., jumping into the middle of system routines to save one or two cycles. In other words, Apple didn't know their own software interface. Even upgrading to the IIe was a heroic undertaking. This experience is why, I believe, the Mac was always a closed system.
There's little risk of CO2 shortage. Every animal on the planet exhales it. Burning fossil fuels was never necessary.
Clementine is Joining Dropbox
Sorry if I wasn't clear... I do agree with you - if anything I'm more skeptical :)
I really hope http://maidsafe.net/ doesn't end up being forever perfected and never released.
> static languages often require a bunch of gymnastics to get the compiler to accept valid code

I'd rather do the gymnastic and have the compiler tell me where I screw up right away. That's a tighter, more accurate feedback loop than a REPL. (Source: trying to implement a simple depth first search in both Lua and Ocaml.)
We use a footnoting system to reference books, although with increasing digitization this should be less necessary. As for the Tom Hanks example, you're right, that should include the YouTube "start time" parameter to link directly to the exact time he talks about his ancestry. Adding that parameter shows another advantage of direct linking -- that it can go deep into a video source.

I don't agree that the footnotes system is good for the reader or editor, because it obfuscates the link between the text and the source. It is very easy to add biased information to any wiki page. Let's say someone writes "Donald Trump calls McCain a war hero" but the reader thinks, "Hmm that's not what I heard". On Wikipedia they have to go to the footnotes and then click through, losing track of where they were at on the main article. How many people will do that? Not many. So the reader gets misinformation, and loses trust in the site, and the bias remains.

Instead if a link direct to the video is added then the person will know straight away. Even better if the video is embedded directly, but that's another story.
Is the audio the same?

Is it possible the original audio stretched to fill the old "glitched" video?
I'll chime in here from the 18-24 crowd. I've been using Spotify since it became available here, and Premium on top of that for a few years now and it's a fantastic service. My Phone syncs properly, my iPad runs great and my Laptop has all my playlists when I need to use it. As for Apple Music, I gave up after two weeks, its just nowhere near as polished and functional, and its missing quite a few of the songs and artists I like.

The sad thing is they both still sound and feel nowhere near as good as my CD library proudly built over my life so far, and I don't see this changing any time soon.

@loop - You have really pretty excellent music taste...
Diversity: The Elusive How
> Of course it was coincidental you dolt.

I'm thinking this was probably a joke gone awry, but please don't do this on HN.
How hard you see the owner working shouldn't be the primary motivation for you to work hard. There are other levers (dollar compensation, equity allocation, promotion opportunities) that should fill that role instead.
Ah, I completely missed that. They have absolutely fantastic documentation for the entire product. Thanks for the links and info!
It obviously gets bored sometimes and decides it'd rather draw pretty pictures of mountain ranges or something.

http://imgur.com/uz60af1
C++ (like C) has union, with which you can build tagged unions (aka sum types).
How enterprises use functional languages, and why they don’t [pdf]
The trick is, most of the time it doesn't matter. So long as it quacks like a duck, and we need the value to quack like a duck, we don't really care that it's a wolf with a duck call.
The problem you have here is you're presuming that the officers suspicions are invalid. If you're lawfully stopped and you act suspiciously shouldn't an LEO investigate further?

If the apparent exaggerated agitation was due to say drug-driving then the officer will have made a potential increase in the "safety and peace for the public". There is no way for them to find the facts without questioning the person and their refusal to comply peaceably makes it impossible.

If you're going to stop people for road-traffic offences, which does appear to increase safety, then do you really want LEO to let people off if they're obnoxious and evasive?
Thanks for replying. Was it possible for you to monetize the videos as you saw fit? Were you allowed to place your own ads with them? Or strip Youtube's ads and place your own in the metadata? Or did you have another way to monetize?
> But what do you propose we do if a developer gets sick or has to travel?

- don't run a skeleton crew dev team unless you are ready to handle the risks,
- better project management upfront to cater for this risk - maybe allow customer to choose risk tolerance upfront like some fintech companies do and
- include some internal reward mechanism for over delivery so you can better manage resources.

There are prob a ton more but these are the 3 that popped into my head. Apps don't solve problems but good business models behind apps do. Sort that out 1st.
Is this supported on Chrome for Android?
Peek into pied piper engineering team
imho, the distinction isn't relevant because it's not about the justification. diplomacy and bombs can both end wars but the culture that glorifies bombs is always going to be morally suspect to the culture that glorifies diplomacy because it's possible we forgot why we needed bombs.
Qualcomm announces a 15% layoff [pdf]
Well said. Furthermore, data on the joy of writing a birthday card (to borrow one of your examples) can be useful in other tasks (such as determining what to write).

Typical machine learning problems deal with isolated training sets and isolated problems. This approach seems strange to me; in the case of neural networks, this is somewhat analogous to a newborn child who is deprived of all senses except the limited training data to make up their world, and good/bad feedback from the loss gradient. How can one expect this hypothetical newborn to learn any meaningful representation of the world with which our machine learning problems are derived?

I think the first step towards realizing anything like "Hollywood General AI" will be a system that spends an early portion of its existence ingesting a universe of contextual data, before it is presented with a problem to solve (at which point it can make use of seemingly unrelated information to do something like handwriting). Andrew Ng's work on self-taught learning (built on transfer learning) is particularly relevant here, but I think those ideas could be taken a lot further.
That's certainly valid. I'd suggest it's a case where the remedy would be to update the zoning laws, so it's done in a somewhat more transparent fashion.

A developer just got my state to pass a law saying that a particular property in my neighborhood is exempt from our city zoning laws.
Pretty awesome story. All articles I've seen on women in tech talk of Fiorina, Mayer, etc. Yet, these women were awesome, their influence great, and I've never heard of them. Should probably get cited more often in discussions on either women in tech or historical accounts of entrepreneurs making it big on a budget.

An example on the technical side would be Margaret Hamilton: the woman who pretty much invented [1] software engineering (and coined the term) during Apollo project. The first CASE tool for it, too, IIRC. The reliability and integration capabilities of their production code exceeded [2] anything I see in Agile, etc. Yet, I didn't see her name in any mainstream article on the subject and only knew about her due to a casual mention by a friend while discussing high assurance systems. Seemed to be better known in research sector per Wikipedia [3].

So, next time Mr. Nadella at Microsoft wants to rag on women in tech, we can remind him of two whose management talent he still hasn't beat and one that his engineers lag behind in production code despite not being limited to 60's era tech. ;)

[1] http://htius.com/Articles/r12ham.pdf

(See more of how they started rather than USL itself. Talk about straight up hitting all the problems head-on, at once, and attempting once-and-for-all.)

[2] http://www.htius.com/News_Links/251093main_The_NASA_Heritage...

(see page 13 for specific principles she derived)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_%28scientist...
Generally, you don't work directly for a 4HWW type company. These types generally always hire contractors and choose their products so that they have enough margin to be able to afford them over employees.

The real risk of doing it this way is your market slipping away from you while you're on the beach checking out. Of course, you can always book a flight home and build a new muse once this one peters out, but the high margins that allow you to automate will run out eventually.
Seriously. But the man is very well respected in the security industry, though.
I'll remind you just as politely that when we post our experiences to public forums, judging comes part and parcel with that.

But, you know, I don't need to refer to your specific situation at all, and I stand by the statement: any business that requires 100 hours per week for years from anyone is either understaffed or (if it can't actually pay for people to do those hours) not really a viable business.

You can do what you want. If you want to work 150 hours a week, and scrape out 18 hours of sleep among those 7 days, go nuts, I don't really care. But to say "I'm a businessman, I have to put in 100 hours a week for years on end," no, sorry, I'm not buying that there's actually a very good business there, no matter what the business model is or who's involved.

And that says nothing about the questions about rent-seeking that kicked off this thread...
Fonticons (YC S15) Is A Subscription Icon Service From The Maker Of Font Awesome
Skype was secure?
Nicely put in the first line. Probably the first time I've seen it happen literally and just as nasty a result as I'd expected.
One common counter argument that people make is that users are lazy when you say they don't want to learn something new(lets ignore the physically challenged for now). But that argument is so fallacious I think.

What users actually mean is- for the delta value this new feature provides, it is not worth their time to learn to do this the new way. Everybody has to make judicious choice on where they choose to spend their time. And in that vein I dont think the users are being lazy in saying that it is not really efficient if they have to spend significant amount of time learning something new in what they perceive to be of little added value.

EDIT: BTW I do think that people are happy to relearn something if they perceive it to provide a "significant" added value. Hypothetically speaking if I had to relearn driving and this "new way of driving" took me from NY to DC in an HR for the same cost, I would try to learn that in a heartbeat. But I dont want to learn a new way of driving if it reduces my drive time by only 15 min.

I also think software/CS needs a school of thought that discourages significant change/variation in UX design. But unfortunately most people are incentivsed for change.
>Should it?

Yes.

Removing the ability to create passive income streams removes the incentive to invest time and money. Entrepreneurship can be switched off like a light if the incentives are removed. When Entrepreneurship is extinguished, quality of life for everyone decreases.

People start businesses knowing the odds are long but the rewards are great if they pull it off.

There are those that complain about 'trust fund kids' who are born into wealth. They're a very tiny percentage of population, the wealth doesn't usually last many generations, and 'passing it on' is also a major motivator for many people.

For each douchebag with rich parents there are others who use their financial freedom to work on hard problems.

Charles Darwin was the grandson of Josiah Wedgwood. Wedgwood was one of the first industrial entrepreneurs and developed many business techniques still in use today. Darwin was an original 'trust fund kid' who used his financial freedom to pursue science and write his books, which changed the world for the better. There will be countless modern repetitions of this pattern, and you'd discard this type of benefit of inherited wealth at peril.
This concept reminds me of http://tmate.io which I have used many times to help people out. This would be a very helpful product for remote teaching and paired programming.
The smart ones will make money designing the ads for the forgery software. ;)
Alive support C#. But we plan to include more!
If you've got a language suggestion please

"support"? Did you mean "supports"? And maybe get someone to copy-edit your homepage.
Frequently the answer is no, you don't need to change every function. If you're iterating through values, are obtaining the lookup value outside the function, or just passing it along, no changes are necessary.

Compared with your average statically typed language, you do have to update the function signature and everything that calls it.

Now then, admittedly, Haskel is not your average statically typed language - but then again it's very rare to actually run up against Haskel in production code.
What are the number of reasons not to add a physical switch so you can if you want?
Be that as it may, the tone of the article is clearly written 'looking down' at the readers, and tries to rack up some points by showing 'how smart I am (author) to be able to correct most of you...'.
If he simply described that the definition of the terms, with some examples and then lead into his point to correct the 'popular' assumptions, it would have been a lot better than feeling like you're being lectured from the pulpit on a Sunday morning.
find a technical co-founder if you want to make a startup work.

::::there are always exceptions::::
This is legal in Haskell:

let foo = "hello, world"
in let foo = 12
in foo

Whether bindings can be shadowed has nothing to do with whether typing is static or dynamic.
Hey folks. Dave Gandy here. Happy to answer any questions and hear any thoughts. :)
Andrew Ng gave a keynote at GTC in which he talked about bringing Baidu's Deep Speech technology to phones (for accessibility). You betcha they're working on it!
Impact of fossil fuel emissions on atmospheric radiocarbon applications
Arbitrage specialists continue to this day when you'd think every pricing disparity has been dealt with. But they keep finding more.

I don't think there will ever be a day when there is not arbitrage opportunities to be exploited.

In any case arbitrage specialists are adding value by eliminating pricing discrepancies and clearing the market. It's a legitimate practice and you get paid for your smarts and risk.
i did a presentation on quantum computing starting with a history of discovering quantum theory. it's a little over an hour. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Od08UbnFPI
I found this useful when trying to communicate with OOP programmers.
I don't know anything about your business.

I do know if I were talking to any of my business friends, and I said, "I've got a great new idea for a business. The model depends on me working 100 hours a week for years on end," they'd laugh.

It wouldn't sound like a serious venture, it'd sound like I was joking. (Or, to be totally honest, it'd sound like I was taking a mean-spirited dig at the internet startup people who think that's not just OK, but normal!)

I'm glad you made the decisions you did. I wouldn't be happy with any choice that threatened my health as severely as you've described above, but that's where my priorities lay, and I totally get that you have others.

I do hope you have success, and can stop working such long hours, and that it comes before you have to make further sacrifices to your health.
"So in the end you end up using it just like you would a static language, but with all the type checks done at runtime instead of before" When I first worked on a JavaScript project I found that there were explicit unit tests that just checked for types. I wasn't expecting that. You have to write more code than in a statically typed codebase. Dynamically typed languages are not for lazy programmers!
What kind of resources do you have that can't be modelled as materialized views and make sense to store in a database?
Jruby 1.7 simply doesn't work in GAE, and maybe it's not worth making it work there, which I would understand. I opened an issue a while ago (https://github.com/jruby/jruby/issues/2304) and I spent about a week trying to fix it. Each time I fixed one issue another one popped up and I gave up after hacking up JRuby beyond my comfort level.

Edit: I just want to stress, the JRuby team is amazing, and I've always been impressed with the responsiveness and openness of the team. This comment isn't meant as a critique in anyway, just a statement of fact with my experience trying to run JRuby on app engine.
Jeez, that's embarrassing. I'm fixing that now, thanks for the heads up!
Hey guys,
It's Nir from Yodas.
In Yodas we profile engineering teams and enable outsiders to peek into how they operate.
We created Pied Piper as a sample profile.

We would love to hear what you think of it.
Static methods and input data from unit tests only:

Why do you mention tests so often?
Because of side effects. Frequently, in imperative programming, methods
access fields and properties local to the method's class. Tests initialize or
mock all necessary resources, classes, connections and properties that
the target method will use.
Since I'll have to front this with nginx anyway, I may as well use OpenRESTy. I happen to like its REST setup pattern quite a bit.