jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
This raises some interesting questions. E.g. why this does not work: [1,2,3].map({2:4}) (in JavaScript)?

It seems obvious to me why, but the author's question made me realize that I couldn't immediately express why that's not possible. The glib answer is that it doesn't make any sense, but that's not very useful. I think what is more fundamental is that JavaScript, and most other languages, have separate concepts of data and code. A dictionary is data, a function is code.

Forgive me that I don't know JavaScript, so I'm going to switch to pseudo-Python for my examples.

def f1(n):
if (n == 2): return 4
return null

f2 = {2:4}

I said pseudo-Python because in real Python, when I query a dictionary for a value that is not there, it throws an exception. In my pseudo-Python, I'm going to assume that it just returns null. If we assume that, then f1 and f2 can be used to get the same result, even thought they have to called in different ways:

res1 = f1(2)
res2 = f2[2]

Both res1 and res2 will have the value 2. In that way, dictionaries can be seen as a kind of function. I'm going to posit that the main reason we don't treat them the same in most languages is efficiency and simplicity. Dictionaries can only represent a limited number of functions - functions with integral and finite inputs. Even so, it will often be quicker to write a closed-form function than to write the full dictionary for a task. For example, if you want an entity that given an N between 1 and 1000 it will return to you the sum of all numbers from 1 to N, it is much easier to just say that this quantity will be N(N + 1) / 2 than it is to exhaustively list all options from 1 to 1000. (Of course, the dictionary could not represent if we wanted something that could handle arbitrarily large N.)

Going back to the author's question, if we assume that question was asked with this pseudo-Python, and we could query dictionaries in the same way as functions, then the answer would be [null, 4, null]. Is that useful? I'm not sure. But perhaps there is value in unifying how we call functions and how we query a dictionary. That is, if I give it a value, and it returns a value, it should be invisible to me whether it's a function or a dictionary. I know I can achieve this in C++ with operator overloading, and I think Python gives mechanisms for me to define classes that can behave like this, but there is still a fundamental difference in the language.

Lisps, of course, don't have the data-code divide, so querying a data structure and calling a function can look the same. But it's interesting to note that other languages don't have to make the two look different, but they do.

Finally, [2,3] + [1,4] gives a string "2,31,4" in JavaScript, but shouldn't this produce [2,3,1,4] (which is equivalent to Array.concat([2,3], [1,4]))?

In most languages I'm familiar with, you will not get a string, but instead a concatenated list. I think that fact is a byproduct of the fact that JavaScript was designed for use in browsers. To the author, try exposing yourself to more languages. What you observe there is a quirk of JavaScript, not all programming languages.
How do you "install" a game?

For example, let's say you have 150MB of art assets. You wouldn't want players to have to re-download the assets each time they go to play.

So how would you cache: 1) a texture, 2) a vertex+index buffer?
It seems we've argued over different things. I picked up the "perfect" from the headline and came up with a counter-example. Comparing it with an obviously broken system doesn't make it any more perfect.

If you're looking for possible alternatives, I find Germany's model not too bad: two votes, one for per-district representatives and one for parties which is evaluated proportionally. Not perfect, but works out in practise.

I'd like one mode change though: instead of giving one vote per list, I'd like to allocate an arbitrary number of votes per list, but you can give at most one vote per candidate or party. That way you can vote for blocks of parties/candidates, or even vote against somebody by voting for everybody execpt that one party/candidate.

This would remove a lot of tactical debate if you're vasting your vote on candidates/parties who don't have huge chances for success.
A lot to do about this posting: http://razorfast.com/2011/04/25/dropbox-attempts-to-kill-ope...
Yes. Throw enough smart tax lawyers at a problem and limit your tax regardless of what law is passed.
Sometimes people come to the correct conclusion without knowing how. And sometimes people come to the wrong conclusion with a painfully detailed process that really just led them astray. So maybe gut-level reactions shouldn't always be dismissed, and detailed reactions shouldn't always be held above gut level ones.
> Peloton is firing over 2,800 employees — 20% of its corporate workforce

Why does an exercise bike manufacturer employ ~14000 corporate people? Isn't that a bit much?
I'm pretty sure the creepy ice cream child was an actor.
Guaranteed Stress Reliever for Busy People.

Write. Write down exactly what you are thinking. It will probably be hard at first, especially if you are not used to blogging, creating copy, or writing essays. That's okay: start by just taking a pen and putting words down on paper. Do not worry about grammar or structure. Switch from point to point as they come to you. The purpose is to get each idea down on paper. Structure can come later: read it again and rewrite it.

I have discovered, and I want to prove this but I do not yet know how, that when a person writes down an idea, the mind no longer stresses itself to remember that idea. This makes sense: why waste time and space indexing new information if it can just be looked up? Instead, your mind just remembers where to look.

Moreover, because they are out of your mind, these ideas will not rise to your conscious thoughts every few minutes to worry you. That project you have due next Monday won't stress you out every hour. Write it down. Write down everything you worry about that project. I might not finish in time. The package might never show up. Ken is so unreliable. Tim hasn't answered my email yet, should I email him? I haven't written the first page yet, but I have to write 20. Maybe I can write an outline first. Can I outsource this part?

Write it down, wr....

http://www.jperla.com/blog/post/guaranteed-stress-reliever-f...
Whoa. Thank you so much -- I didn't realize the Zeo could actually talk to anything in real time.

I've done most of the other parts several times; maybe I should make a packaged service in January. There are probably plenty of people with macs, maybe with big TVs attached, in bedrooms, with Internet access; adding the Zeo and some kind of computer-controlled lighting (optional) isn't much to ask.

Unfortunately having to mess with a serial port is so 1995. I wonder if anyone will make a simple serial to bluetooth dongle so the whole thing can be done from an iphone/ipad, or if it will end up with serial to usb to PC.
The potential for pharma spam is HUGE.

1. Detect keywords like Depression, Sad, Lonely

2. Serve anti-depressant ads

3. No ??? Just profit.
Start off by not writing my own cloud database. Putting stuff in SimpleDB or MySQL would be easy, a little bit more difficult would be merging. But merging two TEXT BASED, TIME STAMPED and SHORT items is a solved problem for which there are many many implementations. I'd find an appropriate implementation and copy it.
I like the 'willing it into existence' meme. That's one of the things I've always liked about software: I'm playing God, just a little. My will becomes manifest inside the computer.

...
We're also using that with several clients.
Fellow facebook deserter here...

"they always have the same reply: Why would you want to hide something ? "

Privacy to me is about giving a stranger admission into my private life and personal details. Its not about hiding.
I see the sole previous top-level comment here [edit: which has now been deleted] started out with a misstatement of fact. In fact, age-adjusted cancer death rates have been steadily dropping in the United States[1] and in general death rates from cancer and from other major causes of death have been decreasing throughout the developed world throughout my lifetime.[2] What that means in practical terms is that life expectancy at age 40, at age 60, and at even higher ages is still rising throughout the developed countries of the world, so if you have reached the age of 50, you can be ever more confident of reaching the age of 65, and if you reach the age of 65, you can be ever more confident of reaching the age of 80, and so on.

It is possible for expanded cancer screening programs to produce the illusion that rates of age-adjusted cancer diagnosis have increased because of a real increase in cases of cancer,[3] but what is really going on with increased screening is increased detection of early cases of cancerous growths that eventually die off and never cause clinical disease. The human body has some defenses against cancer, and many cancers reach a growth dead-end not long after starting. Screening programs sometimes detect harmless cancers that don't need any treatment except watchful waiting.

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/31/us-cancer-casualti...

http://www.bloomberg.com/dataview/2014-04-17/how-americans-d...

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_...

[2]
http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box...

[3] http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/recent-developments-and-...
Then the attacker does a POST instead, which the caching layer passes on, and your work was for naught.

I'm sure it's possible in theory to prevent all kinds of attacks, but it's not like not pressing the breaks, more like trying to plug every hole in a sieve. The tool just isn't built to help you do that.
"It also happens to be as hard or harder than most other types of software engineering."

I would disagree with this point, as evidenced by the fact that people coming out of code schools are still getting hired. To do software engineering in other fields (financial, embedded systems, game dev, operating systems, enterprise LOB, cloud platform, crypto, big data/distributed systems, etc) takes a lot more experience and training. A competent programmer can crank out a rails based Mom & Pop small business site in less than a day. You can't really crank out Big Table, or Unreal Engine. However, the market size for small business web sites vastly exceeds that for Big Table.
Dropbox it's ok, but what I'd really love is a software which does something a bit different: to arrange all the unused space in the hard disks of a LAN as a big virtual folder, with redundancy and all.

Every time I think of the Outlook-and-Word users I have at the office with 500Gb hard disks...
I like how his version of the story makes it sound like he rolled QDOS himself in a few hard evenings. He neglects to mention that they found and bought it.
You might also want to read up on the "Double Irish" and "Dutch Sandwich" approaches to dodging EU taxation. But if you're at work, searching those phrases without safe search might be a bit interesting... ;)

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_44/b42010431...
That's awesome! I'm going to work on a script that will scrub the array of domains that are already registered. That way, you should always be able to generate an available domain.
"A dictum of classical physics states that in nature everything is continuous. However, in quantum physics everything is discontinuous. Both models of the physical universe have their uses."

This is some good science here.
Because it's a fluid that has pressure and velocity everywhere, like all fluids. I don't know how you would describe circulation in terms of a macro result of some other effect.
Dropbox had helped me accomplished the impossible.

Convincing a girly teenage girl to have a habit in backing up her computer regularly.

No other service could do that, not even Time Machine.
Imessages are encrypted end to end according to apple. How do would you process the plain text without compromising privacy?
One good thing about reading/browsing HN is that you can get an impression of the ideas that are starting to emerge. One thing that seems to be emerging now is that people are rethinking the grueling technical interview process.

There was a huge emphasis on avoiding false positives in the interview process - largely because a single bad hire can do great damage to a software development team. But people seem to be learning that these grueling processes may not do as much to avoid the false positives as we thought, and are creating a vast number of false negatives.

I am no longer interested in participating in this sort of multi-day technical exam taking. I've studied stochastic processes, mathematical optimization, data structures and algorithms. I've taken exams on them. I've hit the books for a couple of weeks prior to interviews where I've been grilled on these subjects in greater depth than I experienced during my exams in grad school. It's important knowledge, I get that, but I don't want to have to mentally reload the material in "exam ready" memory simply to pass yet another interview. I will rely on my general knowledge and my ability to look things up on the job. My interviewers should feel free to evaluate my knowledge, but does this really have to be more grueling and take four times as long my final exams in college/grad school?

It's not that a technical screening isn't valuable, it's that the grueling nature of these interviews means that if you can't recursively print out all permutations of a string on the spot, right now, don't get confused up there at the whiteboard, you're a no-hire. It can be very clear that the interviewee is aware of what mergesort is, how recursion works, the importance of run time in algorithms, and that the candidate almost certainly at one point implemented it. They want to see it, now, in code, on the whiteboard. Or, these days, typed into a screen that an interviewer is looking at.

A couple of years back, last time I was looking for jobs, I spent one and a half days in interviews. I was asked to code a singleton, add a branch to a binary tree, traverse a binary tree, now without recursion please!, find the long term probabilities in a markov chain, formulate a linear program and prove that the dual of the primal is the primal of the dual, now with matrix notation please!, write a bunch of outer joins, convert a curve into a piecewise linear function (don't lose convexity, please), on and on. Each interviewer was fresh, I was shuttled from room to room. Then I came back for three hours of interviews with management. No hire.

Another special one was where I only got to talk to a recruiter, passed a few java tests (about an hour), and then took a homework assignment (spend no more than 5-7 hours, please!). Didn't hear back, didn't hear back, didn't hear back. About a month, and the recruiter calls, oh, they've decided not to pursue this any further.

This is a rant, and perhaps an angry one. I feel bad about that, and it doesn't feel great to admit that I've failed in these interviews, either. But I'm glad that some pushback against this practice seems to be building.
It could be some rouge admin who actually deleted Facebook.
Probably DNS. It's always DNS ;)
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada here.
You can't go from diffs to snapshots. Two identical diffs can be applied on different branches - looking just at the diffs, you don't know which branch it is.
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26743971
I'd say the opposite: you're closer to the ceiling for raises. If OP's compensation is mid-range for L+1, it is probably near the top of the range for his actual L. So future raises will not be great (since OP's comp has already maxxed out for his (incorrect) level. You want to be near the bottom of the comp band for whatever level you are at, so there is lots of room for future raises without having to get promoted.

I would seek to correct this for the sake of future raises.
I'm guessing this has do something with the recent graph api scraping?

Facebook is kinda rude now, they probably adding api bot detection and more phone number verification.
For anyone else that was wondering how much this test will run you-

"Cost is just $40 – $70 and it’s covered by most insurers, including Medicare..."[0]

[0]http://www.forbes.com/sites/melaniehaiken/2011/06/17/3-lifes...
It is also my perception that as western european countries (France for me) want more and more surveillance and US-like "security" laws, former soviet block countries are adding to our safeguard in the European parliament.

The number of small level scary stuff I have seen discarded because the EU told us "seriously, you can't do that" is crazy (did you know that until recently, you could be detained by the police with no lawyer for several hours in France ? The EU forced us to fix that [1]). That is the one and only reason I have always been against turkish being in the EU, not religion or anything else like that like the medias like to claim.

One has to wonder what will happen when the former soviet countries start to forget what oppression means too.

[1] http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garde_%C3%A0_vue_en_droit_fran%...
Well, we had thousands of people violating the 4th Amendment willy-nilly looking at our email and phone data and it's taken years for that to credibly leak out. Bucking authority like that is not only unusual, it's downright rare. Don't count on it.

Not that I believe that there's a secret button.
I find D3 to be frustrating because it promises so much and yet it's less of a library and more of a "way to write JavaScript". There really isn't an abstraction so much as a convention for calculating the 3 subsets of an intersection and associating each subset with DOM elements, and then 'doing something' with those DOM elements, possibly as a function of the associated data item. Mike has created some amazing visualizations with D3, but for each viz the code is fairly long and hairy. The worst thing though is that it's not composable - or rather, the unit of composability is very low level. D3 doesn't have any helpers for data that changes over time, for example.
A hypothetical moment of realisation.
Honestly, I think that the final answer really ought to be state-run hospitals that provide intensive and emergency care for free, and state-run doctor practices that serve as GPs and whatnot for communities. Private practices can exist, but they get to play in the market normally and price accordingly.

The problem is the metric crapton of Americans who will grind the system down as they fall prey to the beetus and obesity, and the number of wrongheaded bozos who think that letting the .gov handle this is somehow automagically a bad idea.
Hmm..

* I quit using Facebook (didn't delete it.. that data's already out there), and if family really wants to get ahold of me, the messages point at a disposable email address which itself points at one of my real ones.

* I quite using Chrome, not out of any Google animus, but because Firefox has a better plugin ecosystem wrt. privacy.

* Noscript, donottrack.me, adblock, HTTPS everywhere, the whole nine yards.

* I'm in the process of quitting all cloud services I comfortably can. I purchased a HP microserver and a static IP from my ISP, I no longer need most Google services or Dropbox (Owncloud is amazing), soon I'll have my own email locally too and I can quit using them for anything but searches.

* I've started using PGP to communicate with everyone I can convince to set up the software, and always always use it if I have the option.

* I'm still looking for a way to encrypt VoIP in a reasonably palatable way. Skype is right out, but most of its alternatives are terrible for one reason or another.
So you're fine with the ideas presented in the article, until you realize that the author is associated with groups that tend to share those ideas? I don't understand.
Israel does a marvelous job of it by a brief interview of every passenger. It's a matter of how each person reacts to initial eye contact; with proper interrogation training, ill intent is obvious.

The TSA technique does everything but what works. Gross wholesale violations of multiple Constitutional rights doesn't work.
What circumstances would cause you to shut down this project in a year or two, and how likely are those circumstances?
38C is very hot. You'll be sweating in 5 min. Parking garages are generally not air conditioned. Cars don't cool down from 50C quickly. The sun stills shines on you through the windows.
Is there a way of converting those into actual USD?
I didn’t miss the point, I just have a different opinion.
This!

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26725185
I have SeaMonkey installed alongside Firefox on my laptop simply because it's kind of fun to browse the web in a browser that sort of looks like the late Netscape Navigator, or early Mozilla browser. It's fun loading a Netscape site in it.
Logged in to say this. Market share is a confusing stat when customers don't exclusively use one service.

Netflix is still adding subscriptions at a good rate.

https://www.businessofapps.com/data/netflix-statistics/
The issue isn't that Twitter is refusing to give a copy of it to NARA: it is that NARA wants to host the archive on Twitter.
That loaded fast.

Also, seeing the network request for background gradients takes me back to an era of CSS I don't miss. Anyone remember the hacks for drop shadows and rounded corners?
Ok, I want to give my highest recommendation to this non-netflix show: https://www.viki.com/tv/22943c-nirvana-in-fire

It's one of the best shows I've ever seen. From the plot, the acting, the music, the visuals, it's exceptional.

Previously I used to watch only netflix & hbo, but the world outside of western entertainment is rich (as one would expect), but I was only familiar with a limited set of choices.

This is my invitation to you to expand beyond netflix, hbo, amazon, disney, apple, etc.
Implementations are not standards.
John Milton
Thomas Campion
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Robert Bridges
Ted Hughes
Seamus Heaney
Charles Baudelaire
Paul Verlaine
Edgar Allan Poe

... just for fun Clark Ashton Smith for projecting a Lovecraftian view of the cosmos into poetic form.
I think Hamming's quote pretty much sums up my personal experience with both open and closed offices. In a private office, your personal productivity is maximized; you get the most lines of code written, the most research done, the hardest problems solved. And yet the cumulative effect of that productivity seems to be much less than that of peers who write little, endure distractions, but are always in tune with which problems people are interested in.
Reddit is a part of the parent company of Conde Nast; they've been siblings for a while.
Charles Baudelaire.