lmitchell

Well yeah I guess so :P but I can still wish it were otherwise!

I love Hacker News, but my least favourite thing about it all is how we glorify 'startups'. It's honestly just a really weird business model, that seems like it's bound to inspire things like the recent Zenefits scandal, Uber and Airbnb's disregard for regulation, etc. etc. etc. I dunno... like this story implies, it just seems totally ass-backwards to focus on growth before you're profitable, and pretty unhealthy to boot.

Is that definitely the way it works? I don't think I've ever configured anything on HN and I see dead comments. I also think it's really nice - as grandparent said, it's a very clear indicator that I'm dealing with something I probably want to ignore.

Modern C++ could use lambdas:

    auto a = [] {frob(-1,0,0); grob("a"); blah(...);};
    auto b = [] {frob(1,0,0); grob("b"); blah(...);};
    auto c = [] {frob(0,-1,0); grob("c"); blah(...);};
    ...

    if (normal_order) {
      a(); b(); c(); ...
    } else if (...) {
      b(); c(); a(); ...
    } ...

This is the one thing I really took away from (way too much) recent reading about Scalia and textual originalism - in my opinion, it's almost downright foolish to obey 'the letter' of the original law, and it's completely right of anyone asked to judge based on the law to do just that. I think it'd be kind of stupid in this case in particular and in all cases in general to ignore the context surrounding the law, both at the time it was written and in the present day.

The Pinterest link to the statue submitted earlier (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11049681), if it's supposed to be a depiction, makes the dog look pretty damn big by today's standards. I would not fancy my chances against it with just a cudgel... :)

MonoDevelop's Vim mode just kills me - probably the worst Vim mode I've used in any editor.

> (1) lots of companies have job postings on their own web sites;

This is mostly where I've had luck when I'm searching - find companies in the area that you're interested in and check out their careers page!

Or you just posted mid-afternoon in the Americas and fairly late evening in Europe, instead of hitting American prime time right on the nose... :)

I'd love some background on the problem - I'm a big fan of well-explained proofs like this, but I'm not a mathematician by trade and I like hearing a little bit about why anyone is thinking about this stuff in the first place.

And maybe it is just busywork (maybe). But it's busywork that, for whatever reason, we will have to do in order to legalize marijuana.

These are nice thoughts, but you're brutally oversimplifying a lot of things.

> (re: advertising laws) None. Why should there be? Done.

Well, we have them around alcohol - and around tons of other things - mostly so people can't do things like advertise cigarettes on kids' shows, etc. And there definitely should be - I'm perfectly happy that cigarettes have to have health warnings attached, and I think marijuana should too.

> Release them. They broke the (unjust) law as it then stood, so they don't get reparations. Done.

Nice thought. Completely unworkable in practice. There's a lot of logistics involved in releasing at least six thousand prisoners [1] at once.

> Of course it's legal to sell. What business of the State is it if one citizen wishes to sell something to another citizen? Done.

Is heroin legal to sell? What about military-grade weapons technology? Customers' private data? Lots of things are illegal to sell, for good reason.

> If a private business wishes to permit its customers to consume something on its premises, why does the State have to get involved? Done.

For the same reason the State has to get involved and mandate no-smoking zones (though I'll admit those are controversial and frequently challenged).

> This is just the intoxication question again, and again there is already a system in place. Done.

There's not 'already a system in place' - there are different systems for cigs, booze, T3s, Adderall, and Lord knows how many more. I get that it seems simple, but the devil is in the details, especially with this one.

> What business of a State are another State's laws? Why should marijuana be any different from any other intoxicating substance at all? Done.

Well, it doesn't matter what each individual state's laws are, sure - but all of them will need to decide on laws, which is a massive undertaking.

> Why does the State have to grasp for every bit of power? Just let it go! Done.

So if something comes round that's basically pot, but also sometimes causes instant death in people who take it, we should allow its sellers to operate under our marijuana legislation? And how do you even know if it's 'pot enough' to qualify for marijuana legislation?

> Why should it be any different than any other seed. Done.

This ignores the fact that other seeds took shitloads of work to legislate [2]. And it's still an active debate.

I mean, overall, I agree with your sentiment - we're not helping anyone by leaving it in this gray area. But saying it'll be easy is willfully ignorant.

[1]: http://www.parl.gc.ca/Content/SEN/Committee/371/ille/library...

[2]: http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/regulations/C.R.C.,_c._14...

This is basically the problem with the whole Internet though ;)

See, now this was my first thought - if I were googling for back pain relief, I would be way more willing to click saveyourself.com than I would be to click painscience.com. One of those is clearly a help page, one of them seems a lot more like a collection of research - and I honestly would really rather help than research, on this topic.

The article does label key escrow as 'technical means that badly compromise their users’ security'. Now I'll be the first to admit that I'm not an expert, but saying 'well, you can use key escrow' ignores the fact that the authors label key escrow as one of the ways not to do it.

The article does imply that we know that.

> The photo-sharing, some of which took place in school,

And I thought open source software was bad... ;)

> provides “persistent wide area surveillance” for “30 days at a time.”

> massive, milk-white blimps can be grounded by bad weather

I mean... it seems like there is literally no way this could ever perform its stated mission. But then...

> vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff... arguing that it held promise for enhancing the nation’s air defenses.

This seems like basically criminal negligence at best and outright stealing money from the state at worst. It hurts my head to think about how that is allowed to happen. Also... whose idea was this?

> JLENS is short for Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System

Now I feel like they're actually messing with me.

Thank you for sharing this - my girlfriend has ADD and this is the best explanation of what it really feels like and how it affects you that I think I've ever heard. I honestly feel like I understand her better now, which makes me really happy.

And learning from past works of science and engineering is how we keep learning and growing as a human race. So yeah, history - specifically science history, which is arguably even more important than your average history.

You're right, of course - they're incredibly talented though.

I've lurked on the OSDev forums he credits on his website for a long time, and both Omar and Muazzam (mentioned as well on the website) are goddamn impressive for barely-teenagers. Someone hire those kids!

I did something very similar for work last summer and we basically realized the same thing - null-delimited fields seemed like the only way to really be safe.

It's pretty arbitrary, yeah, but why 'obviously faulty'? Seems to me like it's just a different threshold than you or I might have picked, I can't think of a better metric to judge by though.

It would be interesting to see which names were the 'most' unisex, though - ie. those with closest to 50% spread, regardless of popularity.

I on the other hand almost just stopped reading - I absolutely hate sad stories and I was sure it was going to be so sad :( I'm so glad I finished it though, it was incredible to read and I want to read the rest of the book very badly now.

I would say that's a problem with the system if it doesn't allow for a professor to have those interactions with at least a majority of their students. And the system definitely does have that problem. (Source: 100+ students in all of my third year classes. Maybe it's just my school's system, but I don't think so.)