zipfle

I find it amazing and heartening to see this kind of humanistic, self-reflective discourse on hn, where I generally expect to find macho posturing.

I think the policies you cite as bad ideas do in fact enjoy broad support in the areas that enact them. "Hearts and minds" campaigns led by outsiders are notoriously difficult and prone to failure. Can you suggest a way to start the conversation about these policies in a way that you think is likely to succeed?

She didn't leave it out.

"I think Prof Taleb did get annoyed when I said that I had read his ‘pop risk’ book, not the others. But I was actually trying to make clear that I had some knowledge of his work, though not a lot."

We could try to regulate away the good fortune of the people who bought the house, or we could try to convince the tech industry that they actually don't all need to be colocated, alleviating competition for resources in that area. What I've observed about human nature suggests that neither would be very popular.

I know I'm in the minority about this, but I still prefer callbacks. In one common case, you're only doing one or two async things in a given area of the code, and in that case the async primitive you choose doesn't really matter. In another common case, you're doing a lot of async things that depend on each other's outcomes. In that case, I find that it's easier to build a reusable pattern for handling the specific type of async interaction you have using callback-based functions, whereas with promises and async/await, you tend to try to write straight line code that can't be reused and hides the asynchrony in a way that makes it difficult to debug.

The Tao Te Ching spends a lot of words talking about this. I'm partial to the Stephen Mitchell version.

Also Ecclesiastes (basically, the Judeo-Christian reimplementation of Buddhism) is pretty vocal on the subject.

http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/%7Ephalsall/texts/taote-v3...

This is the problem my startup is going to solve! It's going to be a service connecting muggers and burglars who steal your physical stuff with criminals who want your passwords! I'm going to call it Robbr!

I think that the author is defining memory leaks as permanently out of scope but not deallocated memory. In that sense I don't know of anything in vanilla Python, or Java, that would qualify as a memory leak. In the more intuitive sense of a memory leak being any failure to make objects available to garbage collection, (such as by retaining references to them in an unexpected place) leading to unchecked increases in a program's memory footprint, memory leaks are possible in either language.

I really wish I could get 16gb RAM without paying for a touchscreen. It was possible to get an Ubuntu XPS configured that way as recently as two weeks ago. Should have pulled the trigger then.

For the reference of people commenting here, the definition of quandary is "a state of perplexity or uncertainty over what to do in a difficult situation"

I imagine that if you are Sylvania, or if you are thinking about making large investments in LED manufacturing capacity, then yes, this is a quandary.

It is hard to take an article about "focus" seriously on a site that pops up an email subscription request as soon as you start to read it.

Make blue apron for food pantries. One summer I volunteered on a kind of food pantry truck; twice a week, we'd load up this box truck with whatever the local supermarkets had donated-- pallets of turnips about to expire, pallets of bread, cucumbers, whatever--and we'd drive to some designated areas, set the food out on tables, and people would line up to collect a share of it. We had to limit based on availability; maybe two loaves of bread, three cucumbers, as many turnips as you want.

The donations we got were usually either past their best or unpopular or both. When food expires, there's a period when it's still fine to eat, but it's best not to leave it too long.

So if you're a single parent working two jobs, and you get home at 7:30 to make dinner and you have a turnip you need to use tonight before it goes bad, what do you do?

Wouldn't it be great if someone with great logistics skill and insight into the stocks of all the area food banks could scrape allrecipes, find the most efficient use of the stock as ingredients, and maybe move some things around so that the people waiting for the trucks could get meal kits with online instructions, rather than just bags of turnips?

Just a thought.

Edit: The cool part of this might end up being the supplier side. I imagine that a supermarket has to work much harder to donate to a food pantry than to just throw out stuff. How could you make it easier for them to donate what was really needed? Could you have finders who go around to stores, enter the stuff to be thrown out into your system, decide what it would be worth it to take, take it, and keep track of yearly donations for the retailer for tax purposes? Could you cut their waste disposal costs and save them taxes and build goodwill?

The bigger idea here is that just because the consumers of your service aren't very focused on new technology doesn't mean that technology can't drive and enable your business model. There are probably many kinds of businesses that provide services to the underprivileged that would benefit from technology in the back office even if technology isn't their product.

Wednesday

OT, but can someone explain why this won't instantly be sued into oblivion by the former employers? It seems like some of the Otto team will be using knowledge they gained at their last job on what seems like a competing product.

A bit ot, but I've found that you can tell a good engineer by whether, when you tell them about the design of something, their first response is a question or a suggestion or criticism. With good engineers it's almost always a question.

JavaScript's scoping is much friendlier for creating closures than Python's:

    def why_is_scoping_hard():
        n = 4
        def print_n():
            print n
        def modify_n(new_value):
            n = new_value
            print n
        return [print_n, modify_n]

    >>> print_n, modify_n = why_is_scoping_hard()
    >>> print_n()
    4
    >>> modify_n(7)
    7
    >>> print_n()
    4

When you assign to a variable it is automatically created in the local scope, shadowing a variable with the same name from an outer scope. If you don't assign to it, you get the value from the outer scope. If you try to print it, but then assign to it later, the print call raises an error.

I wonder if it would be acceptable to link to the license ( possibly also hosted on your site) instead.

The guy quoted at the end seems to think it's the passcode itself that would be incriminating, rather than the contents of the phone. Weird. I've seen a theory that compelling someone to disclose a password can be incriminating because it is the same as asking them to admit that they stored the data in the first place, and obviously there's a case to be made that compelling disclosure of the data on the phone could be self incriminating, but the idea that the password would be something like yesiinsidertraded4 is new to me.

Edit: I missed the part where he's a former federal prosecutor. Mystery solved.

Presumably anyone exploiting this would end up sending such messages to many iphones as well, where they could not delete themselves. If there are no suspicious messages arriving on iphones, that suggests it may not be being widely exploited.

It seems kind of convenient that the replacement for ads on the web is just a different thing that requires google to track everyone all the time.

That's a super old story, at least as old as this zen koan:

http://www.ashidakim.com/zenkoans/48accurateproportion.html

Citation needed. Specifically, the patent office required that inventors submit working models of their inventions until 1880 [1]. That doesn't sound to me like the founding fathers' decision.

Edit: And they still require working models of anything claiming to implement perpetual motion.[2]

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/18/business/18PATE.html?pagew...

[2] http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s706.html

The UML thing made me think of this: http://thecodelesscode.com/case/137

The opening of the piece pretty clearly implied that the candidate did not have trouble finding work. The candidate made a good-faith effort to solve the question given in the interview while also using it as a tool to discover if this was a place where he'd like to work.

Interviewers use filters like this question to weed out employees they don't want. What's wrong with interviewees using filters like code style and problem-solving priorities to weed out employers that wouldn't be a good fit?

I'd imagine GP's point is something along the lines of https://what-if.xkcd.com/5/ that if all of the currently-moving machines were suddenly bent on destroying humanity, most humans would not be in much danger because they don't really have that capability on the necessary scale.

I find it really interesting to juxtapose this situation with the current furor over Brian Williams' not actually having been in a helicopter he said he was in.

It's odd, but not too surprising, that the only job you can actually get fired from for lying is "propaganda mouthpiece."

I find it really weird that on HN, which in general I find to be a pro-capitalist, let-the-market-sort-it-out kind of place, so many commenters seem irked at businesses 'being cheap' by offloading waitstaff salaries onto tips. I'm just a simple country hyperchicken, but isn't this that 'maximizing shareholder value' stuff I've been hearing so much about?

I think that where this falls apart is "laws and rules exist as a benchmark". That should be true, but the conduct of the US criminal justice system suggests it isn't.

It may be a bit different in sports, where handedness matters more directly. At least in fencing, a right-hander going against a left-hander is a very different situation than two people of the same handedness competing, and because right-handers are such a majority, lefties have loads of time to practice exploiting the lefty-v-righty special case. Actually one of the really interesting things is watching lefties against other lefties, because neither tends to be used to what for righties is the 'normal' orientation to the opponent.

while I think you probably have a point when you describe unauthorized copying of music as "taking [music businesses'] products for free," I also think it's hard to describe the mechanism of copyright (a government-granted monopoly on your goods) as something completely unlike a bailout. At least it seems a lot like a subsidy.