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I agree that this series is great and I hope we can support more content like it!

I don't agree that the NY Times is bleeding money though, it's a rare bright spot in publishing AFAIK. They seem to run a profit every year, though their revenue does not appear to be growing[1].

[1] see financials here: http://investors.nytco.com/files/doc_financials/annual/2014/...

> Ironically, your advocacy for lack-of-privacy is exactly what would put people into more potential danger. First step to harming someone: knowing who they are to begin with.

Just a small note. I actually currently do support pseudonymity with the caveat that we need to find a way for it to exist non-hatefully. If Reddit, by shutting down problem communities or some other approach, manages to clean up their act while staying pseudonymous I will be very happy.

Incidentally I don't think your "total privacy" solution will work as we live more of our lives online. People will post PII. It's almost impossible for most people not to.

I believe that screenshot is of /r/all, actually though I pulled the screenshot from a news story on daily dot as I don't have my own screenshot from that day.

These points are all well-taken. Real names don't magically make people good to one another. I don't think the problem will go away with the removal of pseudonymity.

I do see cases of people behaving hatefully in a way that is connected to their real identity sometimes having consequences in the real world, for instance this case recently in Toronto: http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/firing-of-shawn-simoes-for-o...

Of course that case is controversial, but social consequences are one thing that can help protect against this sort of behaviour (note that this is not really a free speech issue in that he was not put in jail).

So what are social consequences we can levy online, if we want to support psudonymity and stay disconnected from our meatspace identities? One such consequence is having your hateful platform (the FPH subreddit in the Reddit case) closed. I am fine with this approach.

No doubt it will be a constant complicated debate, as social norms tend to be. But we don't throw up our hands and say "we can't have social norms! Who picks them? How do we vote?!"

Unfortunately I don't think we'll come up with a simple set of universally applicable rules and move on.

I do know that my abuse-free internet experience is very much a bubble, and every time I have been given the opportunity to see the experience of a "woman with an opinion" online I get to realize this. So let's as a society say "this isn't acceptable" and then deal with the much more difficult question of "what to do about it".

In any other commercial venue if a patron started shouting racist and sexist epithets, we would be ok with the owner throwing them out. We don't get caught up in slippery slope fallacies.

I can't scientifically prove that Fat-people Hate was objectively abusive but that's the beauty of social norms, I can say "I think it's abusive" and put pressure on businesses to remove its platform. Which is what I'm doing :)

Did you see the front page of Reddit when they were blowing up at Pao over the fat people abuse subreddit? I think it's disingenuous to claim that this is just polite disagreement: http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2015/6/10/...

I just posted this in the earlier submission[1], but I'll put it here too:

I really worry that if we don't find a way to fix the abuse problem, pseudonymity online will be looked back on by future generations as our time's Klan hood.

Abuse stories like these make me embarrassed to support any form of privacy online. Platforms need to take a stand and find a way reduce hate and abuse, or public opinion (and my own) will turn against support of privacy. If it turns out pseudonymity is fundamentally incompatible with safety of the abused online then I'll take the latter, but I'd rather search for a way to have both.

Platforms banning abusive subcommunities seems like a good start.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9898366

I really worry that if we don't find a way to fix the abuse problem, pseudonymity online will be looked back on by future generations as our time's Klan hood. Abuse stories like these make me embarrassed to support any form of privacy online.

Platforms need to take a stand and find a way reduce hate and abuse, or public opinion (and my own) will turn against support of privacy. If it turns out pseudonymity is fundamentally incompatible with safety of the abused online then I'll take the latter, but I'd rather search for a way to have both.

Platforms banning abusive subcommunities seems like a good start.

> it seems that a person who needed persistent servers could set their spot max price at the same price as an on-demand instance and always be ahead by doing it that way

Not if you need persistence: the spot price can go above the on-demand price. So if you set your max spot price to the on-demand price your instance might get terminated.

See this blog post by the author showing his earlier work in visualizing binary files: http://corte.si/posts/visualisation/binvis/index.html

Relevant: looks like they will strike http://www.thestar.com/yourtoronto/education/2015/02/12/u-of...

One thing I've found frustrating with Swift, and that we've had to deal with in libs we've built, is that there is an unavoidable boilerplate of placing an `[unowned self]` at the top of your callbacks (e.g. `map` in the linked framework), or else you introduce a reference cycle.

If you forget this `[unowned self]`, which is very easy to do, everything compiles fine and now you have a subtle memory issue to track down. I wish there was a language construct to allow you to define closures that have every captured variable unowned (or weak) by default.

I would, at the very least, emphasize somewhere in your docs with big bold letters how important it is to add the boilerplate, or users of Bond will definitely get bitten by this.

I really like the figure showing the nearest-neighbour graph of MNIST being stretched as it goes through the hidden sigmoid layer. Really helps build an intuition for those of us who think visually or geometrically.

He quotes Bret Victor at the end:

"When Hamming says there could be unthinkable thoughts, we have to take that as “Yes, but we build tools that adapt these unthinkable thoughts to the way that our minds work and allow us to think these thoughts that were previously unthinkable.”"

Great work!

As a datapoint: we build the Minuum Keyboard (http://minuum.com), and our iOS version was written from the ground up in Swift. That is shipped in the App Store and has been since iOS 8 launched.

To echo much of the sentiment here: the language is definitely usable in production now. The tooling is not ready yet. We have wasted untold hours dealing with XCode crashing. If you're contracting this out keep in mind those hours.

There are also some issues with the bridging to Objective-C for Cocoa APIs. As an example: we've had a few cases where for performance reasons we've needed to replace Swift arrays with NSArray objects.

That said: there's a lot to like about the language and there are parts of our codebase that are really nice by virtue of being Swift.

EDIT: I want to agree with a number of people here about using the language your contractor is comfortable with. If you don't have a strong in-house reason to use Swift, Objective-C is going to be around for a long time, so I wouldn't worry about that.

They're referencing the structure of the phrase "Driving While Black". It gets the feeling of oppression across in 3 words in a way that "Speaking as a Woman" would not.

And if you're just in it for the pretty pictures, here are more visualizations of graphs from the dataset by the same guy: http://yifanhu.net/GALLERY/GRAPHS/index1.html

These images remind me of Piet[1], an esoteric programming language where the programs are images. There you see the structure of the algorithm, rather than the binary, visually presented.

[1] http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet/samples.html

That document is surprisingly readable! I expected something very dry and bureaucratic, but this is written at a high level with historical context, and narrative.

Hey all, we make one of the keyboards on the list, Minuum. It has been really fun to see the iOS community jumping on to third party keyboards so whole-heartedly.

I'm curious, since I've never really asked the HN community about this: what do hackers look for in a virtual keyboard? We all have strong opinions on optimizing our hardware keyboards, (I suspect HN has one of the highest proportions of DVORAK users out there) but I've seen less debate for soft keyboards.

Software keyboards have the potential to be much more flexible and customizable than hardware ones, is this something that we want or need? Is lack of a good coding keyboard the thing that stops us from really writing code on a tablet?

Although they do say in their FAQ: "Google is not requiring any IP or licenses be granted except a non-exclusive license to be used only for the purpose of testing the inverter and publicizing the prize."

Hey all, we spent some time porting Minuum over to Android Wear. It's still very alpha, but if anyone wants to try it out on their Wear device, they can sign up at minuum.com/watch and we'll send instructions on side-loading an APK. I'm around to answer any questions.

Do you have adblock? Disabling that fixed it for me.

We do have English, German French, Spanish, and Italian now actually, but the experience of switching between them could be improved.

My cofounder (spaky here) seems to be comment-limited on HN, but here are his thoughts on this:

I completely agree. I speak two languages regularly (English/French) and I also find it to be a pain point.

It's something that I hope we can address over time with Minuum. Certainly the first step will be making it really fast and painless to switch languages.

We've also considered having a quick way to disable auto-correction/disambiguation on the fly.

Do you have a favoured solution? Sounds like maybe simultaneous language support doesn't quite cut it for you.

I'm getting a Muse soon :) Hope I can type on it.

Shame about the spacing issue, out of curiosity, how large is your device?

We actually prefer to use the right slide gesture for a space, the added bonus being that then you can disable the space bar in the settings and save even more screen space.

After you've used it for a few days, I'd love to get your impressions. You can get in touch with me at xavier@whirlscape.com if you're interested in sending any thoughts.

I agree! I love the thought processes of programming, but I hate staring at a glowing rectangle 2 feet ahead of me to actually synthesize those thoughts. My blue-sky hope for wearables is that they get me up, moving around, and interacting with reality while also producing great code.

Hey, that's great to hear, we'd love to get feedback from you after you've had a chance to use it for a few days. My email's in my profile, drop me a message in a few days!

I think a big part of the appeal of Dvorak in the dev community is that there's something very satisfying about a keyboard based on real research. That research was done for 10 finger full-size keyboards though, and doesn't really map to the current generation of keyboards. As I allude to in that footnote, we've actually done some really cool research into optimal keyboard layouts in ambiguous scenarios. We'll probably do a follow up post diving into that! (also stay tuned, there should be a paper coming out soon).

Hey tavoe,

A quick point: you can actually access the 2d keyboard with a gesture by long-pressing two fingers on the keyboard. Not a very discoverable gesture, unfortunately, we'll definitely need to improve that.