skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
GitHub CI and artifacts are great ideas. Owning the chain of Dev - test - deploy would be a superb move, one worth paying for!
This! If a task is not on the list I don't feel good about completing it. It's like it never happened, and I look at the list and it's still full. "Nothing got done" scumbag brain says :)
Referencing their less than rigorous journalism track record recently: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/04/06/rol...
> These are great, but they're bugfixes.

I agree with every you said but that first sentence. How are these bugs? They are features that never existed.
Looks awesome! I would love real time updates of counterfeit products as they are posted to ebay, etc - especially in all regions/locales. We automated the process of sending the take down notice once a listing was identified, but we're manually searching & identifying right now. Seems like a good fit for us.
Value is escrowed by the network, so there's an increase in efficiency due due to reduction in ftd and litigation risk.
Our maker space at Google Seattle (which is not a full on machine shop, although we should have the mill online soon) is explicitly for personal projects only (for liability reasons, I believe, although IANALcat).
Presumably if you got a nice big RV with double-glazed windows, aircon, heating, TV, and there were electricity/water/sewage hookups, it could be quite comfortable. It might be worth google making hookups available for employees who want to live in their RVs on-site.
This is excellent. I'd love to see something like this for college degrees too.
I always wondered how clauses like this work for married people. After all, the law considers everything created within marriage to be property of both spouses. So, technically, should employers be asking both the employee and their spouse for an intellectual property assignment agreement?
actually this is pretty astute from a startup viewpoint.

startups are the one who usually fear ex-employer non solicit, IP and non compete clauses. So fundamentally, Hawaii is building a startup friendly ecosystem.
Right. $30,000 is not a small sum of money in most other places of the world...
Ops, misread, sorry. Anyway, I wasn't criticizing the number itself, I just wanted to understand more about the measurement process.
> You have found a mouse that doesn't implement the Bluetooth spec properly. That is contempt for the end user.

The mice I have work perfectly with all incarnations of Windows I have (XP, 7, and 8) and OS X version 10.6 (don't have access to 10.7 and 10.8 anymore).

So, which is more likely, those mice all implemented the Bluetooth spec wrong yet still managed to work, or Apple screwed up their stack?
So don't use them. Virtually all my work at Google was with vanilla JS and I had the DOM APIs memorized in my head.
Serious question; what is the deal with the something-ly.com names? It just seems really odd and me-too-ish to my ear.
That's subjective. I'm quite productive writing system software in C++11/14.
This is one of the more troubling aspects of the parts of the Go community that I am exposed to--aggressive insularity. It's perhaps cyclical--in the past I've made similar criticisms of Node, and did of Ruby before the hype died down and the more aggressively enthusiastic people calmed down or moved on--but it's kind of a pain in the rear at present. That said, Go's deification of a single individual is unique to me; of Matz, Guido, Bjarne, Gosling, or Rasmus, I don't know any who are quoted as if it's by itself persuasive. What Rob Pike says about things is not necessarily correct--and sometimes it's not even accurate--but seems strangely, to Go advocates (as separate from "Go users"), to immediately enter a sort of canon to be trotted out at every opportunity.
Hey Mikey! The first generation certainly was a blast! Amazing how far things have come. :-)
The "Cattle vs. Pets" argument is basically that. You want all the cattle to look the same and you can't do that if they are modifying themselves.
It's actually more like a combination of ALGOL, Oberon, and practical solutions to problems. It's supposed to be simple, effective, easy to compile, and efficient at run-time. Like Wirth's languages. But with extras to help it go mass market, esp standard library. So, although I often poke that it's not-novel, I at least give credit that designers chose wisely in what to copy for their simple-to-use language.

Pretty much the opposite of the mess that was and is Java.
Mobile rules in local search!
An employer may offer free sushi and beer on Fridays. Does it mean they encourage fish and alcohol consumption? What about employees who don't consume either due to health or religious reasons, or just plain preference? Do they now deserve make-up compensation?

As a parent I never come in late and stay for dinner. This means the dinner service is an employer cost that I get no benefit from. Clearly the single people are the primary reason for this unnecessary cost to the company. I also don't drink soda and I'm not sure why my employer encourages this behavior by spending so much money on free soda everywhere. Lets nix that too!

Maybe you see what I'm getting at. The employer is just trying to accommodate and please people with various life choices for good retention and hiring rates. There's no reason that they absolutely shouldn't offer something to kid-free people only, it's just that they don't currently, probably because they don't think it will help much.
It's rare, but some startups prefer their early hires to have degrees tier-1 schools. I assume this is to impress investors and (enterprise/gov) customers. Today's market makes this nearly impossible but I recall it being a thing in the 00's

However, they are looking for a very specific type of college graduate. Merely having a degree with a good GPA is insufficient for them. It must be a tier 1, name-brand institution.
It's a perfect example for "science, it works." They managed to conclude quite a lot from a miniscule amount of data with the information that was never planned to be used for such purposes.
How to Build a Smart Game Economy
CRIU actually doesn't solve the right problem.

We need to run the app up until the point when it diverges -- i.e. when it first observes input that will be different across different runs of the app. For that, we need to be watching the syscalls and evaluating each one for potential divergence. As long as we are doing that, we might as well at the same record a log of those syscalls which we can replay later. Then once a divergent syscall happens, we dump the state of memory. Later, we can restore the memory and replay the syscalls to reproduce an identical starting process.

CRIU has no concept of divergence. CRIU takes an already-running process with arbitrary state and snapshots it whole.

CRIU's problem is actually orders of magnitude more complicated than snappy-start's: it needs to understand every possible file descriptor type that the process could have open, every aspect of process state, etc. snappy-start only needs to understand the specific syscalls that we care to implement; it can simply consider any call it doesn't recognize as divergent, and stop there. Adding support for more syscalls is then merely an optimization.

CRIU also requires special kernel features to support, which means more attack surface. Sandstorm wants to block everything except the most common kernel APIs for security reasons. snappy-start requires no new kernel features; it uses the well-understood APIs debuggers use, and we know we can still prohibit apps themselves from using those APIs.

Meanwhile, CRIU is much harder to customize. How would we decide when to do the snapshot? We'd have to re-implement much of snappy-start just for that purpose. And how do we teach CRIU about the specific assumptions that are safe and useful to make given our particular environment?

None of this is to say that CRIU is bad -- it's actually pretty amazing. But it's not the best fit for this specific problem.
Content Policy Update
My comments are about NORMAL businesses with NORMAL margins, not the Google's of the world operating at 60%+ margins with the ability (and a need due to taxes) to burn cash.

> Employees are increasingly going to start demanding them

Employees who demand that a NORMAL company pay 10x for a computer are not employees. They are babies who have not a clue as to how business runs and don't care to burn cash in exchange for zero returns. They either get fired or not hired at all.

> An organization will run more efficiently if the employees are more comfortable in their computing environment

Well, how do you explain the fact that PC's running various versions of Windows grotesquely dwarf Mac installations in companies of all sizes around the world?

Want them to be more productive? Buy them a second monitor. A Mac is going to do exactly zero.

BTW, I am not a PC or Mac fan-boy. We have large numbers of both platforms, with PC's running Windows or Linux depending on usage. However, we have them for a reason and not because we like one or the other. In the case of Macs the only justification we've been able to find so far is working on iOS apps. Other than that engineering, business, graphics, etc. can be done equal to or better than on a Mac on PC's running Windows or Linux.

NORMAL businesses can't justify paying 10x for computers just 'cause.

Let's put it this way. Money isn't infinite. NORMAL company:

A CEO decides to allocate $200K towards buying a bunch of Macs ('cause they are cool) instead of spending $20K for an equal number of equally capable (in a business context) PC's and allocating the remaining $180K towards sales and marketing efforts.

Again, money isn't infinite.

Do you know what you are looking at in this scenario?

A CEO about to be fired by the board.

One of my standard interview questions is: If we hire you, what kind of a computer do you need?

You can learn a ton about a person from the answer to this question. Some will say "anything will do". Some will say "I have to have a Mac". Yet others will ask pointed questions about the tools we use, how we use them, how the various teams work and what the various business processes require. The last group are the keepers. And, you know what, in a lot of cases the right answer turns out to be that they need one of each, or even three computers. The point is that they UNDERSTAND these are tools that have to exist in the context of a business process, not on a teenager's desk at home to watch YouTube videos and be cool at Starbucks.
I can see why's that would be frustrating, but my employees are not "mine" - so they are free to go at any time and hence, I need to treat them well.

If an employee is seduced by an offer that doesn't work out - they can (and have) come back and can bring back what they learned.

One of the thing that I learned from such exits an re-entryies is that money is not always the best motivator - I used to run really lean to have a high payroll. Now I run lean to provide a good work environment - I can now fire bad companies that don't respect my employees.
The "reward signal" aka objective function seems to be the challenging part here. In the parent post's suggestion, all you'd end up with is a neural network that could /maybe/ reproduce a picture (assuming CSS was capable and the network has the approximately learnable properties necessary). It'd be more interesting to have some "quality" measure that actually meant something to evaluate outputs.
Cost of stuff is only important if you spend all of your money on stuff. With a tech salary, the cost of food going up 15% should be nothing compared to the rent you will save.
See also http://computationalcreativity.net/
RMS, is that you?
maybe that's why... Not even for sale yet: http://www.autodesk.com/products/stingray/buy

"Stingray will be available for purchase on August 19."
As they say in finance, "price is what you pay, value is what you get". In these discussions about college, it's worth us differentiating those two parts. Many of those arguing in favor of college are describing the value of college ('what you get'), without discussing the price. Many of those arguing against college are focussing mainly on the price (tuition, lost earnings etc) without discussing the value. Clearly, the balance between the two is what matters, and that is different for different careers, and different funding mechanisms for college.

As a thought experiment, imagine the same college degree was available:
1) tuition free, with an additional $20,000 / year given to you for living expenses
2) tuition free, with no living expenses
3) at a tuition cost of $100,000
4) at a tuition cost of $1,000,000
5) at a tuition cost of $10,000,000
and so on

'What you get' in the degree would be the same in each case, but there come a point where 'what you pay' would be too high in relation to 'what you get'.
Sounds like a certain CEO

http://www.businessinsider.com/tony-hsiehs-home-in-a-trailer...
HN, r/compsci, Google News, a handful of blogs and feeds via Feedly.

I love HN, but I my interests have shifted away from tech industry and startup culture news. I wonder if anyone has any suggestions for more focussed theoretical comp sci sites?
Currently they're not fungible enough to reduce counterparty risk. The entire Bitcoin community is progressing towards complete fungibility, at which time, the risk is completely reduced.
Know hook and how to use it (v0.4.0)
Can't be, RMS likes parrots.
> I like how your asides move into paragraph flow as the page narrows.

Yup. This is a nice (deliberate) side effect of using separate <aside> blocks instead of jamming them in the middle of the paragraph. The original location of the <aside> tag determines where the sidebar appears in the text flow if there's no room for it on the side. In some cases, it may be a few paragraphs distant from where it shows up on the side if that leads to better reading.

This is also the fallback for users who don't have JS enabled. (Well, all both of them, at this point.)

> I really love using the Mobile Design View in Firefox and Chrome for inspecting responsive behavior.

Oh, yeah. I basically lived in that for a few days when I was tweaking the CSS.
Enough with the Salts: Updates on Secure Password Schemes
Been working on this stuff since the beginning. Looks right to me.
I wonder if Facebook will step up their 401k matching to meet or exceed this, particularly for their Seattle employees. I would ask the same for Amazon, but I seriously doubt anything will move their benefits needle much.
Good for Hawaii!

MA has tried to do this recently but sadly the big corporate interests were able to bribe the pols; not a surprise really since MA politics are completely corrupt.
This kinda seems like a choice that the subject is making. He could do a less "glamorous" job and not live in one of the most expensive cities in America if he wanted to.
Once you're confirmed on the Bitcoin network - you're immutable. This is completely unlike incumbent systems. Even in the case that Bitcoin 'went down' the account information isn't changing. Risk is normalized under a huge swath of actors from across the world who are burning energy to attest to truth. As opposed to a single company who has complete authority over the data and/or value.
Display and networking.

Graphics is so much easier to deal with on OS X than Linux it makes me cry. I take my laptop between a 4K monitor on Thunderbolt, a 2560 monitor on HDMI, and a 1920 monitor on DVI. And I don't have to edit a single file on OS X. I shudder with the thought of that on Linux.

Networking just works on incarnations of OS X prior to 10.10. I can pop my laptop open and it pretty much connects anywhere with no configuration changes and only asks when I have to cough up a password. Linux still regularly makes me do wonky command line dances when the interface suddenly disappears or goes down.
The theory is that all known pros and cons are priced in; unless you're a big enough player to move the market, investing a dollar in any one company is as good as investing in any other. This assumes a perfect market and is therefore pretty dumb, but the guys that move the prices are probably better at pricing risk and upside than I am, so I can't take advantage of the gap between theory and practice anyway.

The upside of diversification is that your return simply get closer to the mean as opposed to varying wildly as it would if invested in a single company's stock. You basically get increased predictability at no cost.
It's nuts how much we value a dollar over literally anything else. A neighborhood of people who've built up a life in an area? Too bad if some rich people want to invest in a building, you're out by hook or by crook. We've got to learn that as more people move to cities there are other important things to living than squeezing every nickle out.
And is very dependent on jurisdiction and changes over time in any given jurisdiction.

Illinois for instance went from "non-compete's were basically not worth the paper they were printed on" to "hmm, might need a judgement to figure it out, is it worth it?"
Bitcoin can transfer any tokenized scarce resource, just like Amex can transfer any fiat currency. In these cases, the bitcoin network is transferring bearer bonds. (arguably registered securities)
Attempting sorely technical fixes to political problems is a delaying tactic, nothing more.

Imagine a law like this: "You must be able to positively identify any person creating content on a service you control".

Nothing you have suggested does anything at all to address that in anyway other than to try to make it harder to enforce. That method has been tried for 20 years, and is quickly becoming harder and harder.

It's already extremely hard to buy a VPS with even pseudo-anonymity - most require credit cards, which means a law enforcement agency can retrieve your details trivially.
It's not all that easy or cheap to decentralize the last mile. Things were not any more decentralized when most people used dialup, and they were definitely more centralized when the main users of the internet were on a few campuses.
Because the major industries in Hawaii (tourism, agriculture) don't want anything to do with it.
I find it scales well and uses resources well, within the limitations of its design. For example, Storm does not attempt to handle concerns like resource rebalancing, contention management, or auto-scaling. It has a simple REBALANCE command, but this amounts to killing all your workers and randomly redistributing them in your cluster. It isn't a smart rebalancer based on load or throughput, or anything.

My understanding is that Twitter's rewrite of Storm (Heron) was mainly to make it work with Mesos as a resource manager. This is probably wise since Mesos handles a lot of the concerns I described above. But Mesos didn't really exist when Storm was written.

They chose to re-implement 100% of Storm's API in doing so, which perhaps shows that the high level concept of the framework has staying power even though you might benefit from a more advanced resource manager at 1,000-node scale. I wish they had reimplemented it as a competing implementation and actually released it as open source. But no, they decided to keep it 100% proprietary. So it goes. I guess once companies become a certain size, they turn their back on open source if it's not directly in their interest any longer.

We run it with 10-15 Storm nodes with 32 cores each and find it to be immensely helpful in this context, keeping each node in the cluster lit up to ~60% CPU utilization and plowing through 10K events/second on a Kafka topic, despite the fact that we are using Python and there isn't a line of code using threads or process management. People are often shocked we pull this off, since, in theory, CPython's GIL means you can't even run on more than one core at a time. But we write simple Python programs that run on Storm and utilize hundreds of cores at once, across multiple machines. And we get the Erlang-style "let it crash" / "fail fast" process supervision for free.

I have a more cynical view of the Heron paper overall -- if you're curious about that, reach out to me directly (@amontalenti on Twitter).
What are the courses on? Could you elaborate a bit more on what you provide for the X / month? Do you make 20 videos and then put them on? Do you have to grade their homework?
> With good libraries, C/C++/Others can be safer and as simple as e.g. NodeJS.

C cannot - there is apparently no way that is both reasonably efficient and reasonable foolproof to write C code; if you have large scale examples written by more than one person[0], I would love to see them.

I concur C++ should be able to, but I again request large scale examples, because I've never seen any. Have you?

> if you want 10-100x throughput increase with same hardware, you have to go to a lower level. That's the tradeoff. I.e. properly written in native vs properly written in high level language.

You have to define your terms. Is Lua high or low level? Well written Lua code that does not need millions of small objects seems to run to within x2 as slow as comparable C code when executed through LuaJIT2. I've seen well written Perl beat well written C in the past (the Perl was better written, but both were well written).

> The tradeoff in bugs and dev time can be solved/increased with a higher level abstraction, e.g. using high level libraries, so the developer could avoid risks.

With a language that so easily lets you shoot yourself in the foot like C or C++, this is not the case in practice, see, e.g., every C program ever written. Can you give the examples you're thinking of so we can discuss them?

[0] djb is an army all by himself, and even djb had security bugs - although, IIRC, by shear luck not exploitable on x86 or ARM.
Things I would build:

* Push conflicted branches so developers in a distributed team can work together to resolve conflicts.

* A git-powered version of Rake, which runs only those tests that need to be run based on the git history since the last run.

* A tool to identify what code changes caused a particular test to fail, based on the above.

* Language syntax detection for smarter diffs, improving the display when blocks of code are moved around or indented/outdented.

* Language linters built in, to detect when a change is introducing a syntax error. Same for coding style.

I'd also move the "Close Pull Request" button a little farther away from the "Comment" button, and make it possible to add comments to a diff when you've hidden whitespace differences (with `&w=1`... I'd also make it a bit more obvious that you could do that).
To combat falling ratings, TV networks are increasing ads up to 10%
Much of my work in grad school was episodic, so I often slept on my lab's couch. I'd work for an hour or two, nap for a while until it was time for the next step, and so on.

But I'd rather work at home.
I don't know if RPF himself had anything much to do with it, but the typesetting of the /The Feynman Lectures on Physics/ is beautiful.

It features the main column / side column design as discussed, with notes, diagrams and navigation hints in the side column and is a great demonstration of the value of whitespace!
You're talking about things that cost almost nothing compared an entire year's free salary.