skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think that an unknown Amazon employee going public could add much to the damage that the current media coverage has already inflicted. HR would probably just shrug it off. Also, taking a dispute with your employer public might cause other companies to think twice about hiring you in the future (your publicity will show up if they Google you). If you're down to your last alternative, it's probably time to find a new job.
React is ultimately a framework for managing DOM mutations, so it would make sense that a pure logical model that doesn't touch the DOM also doesn't have a dependency on React.
Well, it would also be very strange if P=NP because you could use algorithms like this in polynomial time:

bool isComposite(n) {
guess a number d magically
if (n % d == 0) {
return true;
} else {
fail;
}
}
Until its time to build that new datacenter.
So, why use Linux instead of z/OS? Is it cheaper? Offer more tools?
>if that's your profession, you should strive to be the best at the given task.

My best takes 10x the time and, in most cases, is 100% unprofitable. Standards and status quos exist for a reason - because they work.

I used to work with a "perfectionist" personality and he was ultimately let go. He just couldn't keep up and had this ridiculous "I'm the best" attitude that was incompatible with most acceptable schedules. He didn't even seem all that talented, just obsessive. I suspect "being the best" usually translates into "learning the test."

The reality is that when we look at creative and productive and satisfied people, we see a mix of traits. More common than not, the lazy half-asser wins out as she can provide something of value (convenience). She gets annoyed by problem y and produces solution x. The guy who looks at problem y and has a "okay I'll spend 10 hours on getting this perfect" attitude falls behind the girl who says, "Lets write a script for this and fully automate it." Why shouldn't the automator feel as much satisfaction as the obsessive perfectionist? Honestly, the "be your own mountain man with endless time on his hands to do simple things" ethos shouldn't be applauded. Its just a lot of questionable things taken to an extreme - obsessiveness, distrust of others, inability to be on a team, inability to be efficient, etc.
Judging from the circumstances of his termination from the BBC, he'll probably be quite comfortable at Amazon.
Worked for me and my building is next to Copley. But Boston is very fragmented when it comes to service distribution—just see the broadband provider map:

http://consumermediallc.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/bos_cabl...
Light Table is dead or alive at this point? I hear so little about it I can't help but feel it is on death's door or dead. I'm sad about that. It seemed like it could have been something really cool.
I remember messing up my math in high school physics and accidentally designing one of these of my own.
https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

"Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize immediately that #7 was a little joke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not give a shit about your day."

"We're talking about a guy who in all seriousness has said on many public occasions that people should be paying him to work at Amazon. He hands out little yellow stickies with his name on them, reminding people "who runs the company" when they disagree with him. The guy is a regular... well, Steve Jobs, I guess. Except without the fashion or design sense. Bezos is super smart; don't get me wrong. He just makes ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies."

"At this point they don't even do it out of fear of being fired. I mean, they're still afraid of that; it's pretty much part of daily life there, working for the Dread Pirate Bezos and all."
Call people fanboys all you want, but after the code was released, numerous glaring issues were found, and still haven't been addressed.
Visual web survey-chance to get a gift card
This. I was going to mention Java and other JVM languages.

About the Windows only thing, though: The mono project is excellent for compiling and running C#/.NET on other OSes. We use it on CentOS without much trouble.
I agree with you. Many of the NP-complete problems are appealing because they don't seem difficult to solve at first glance. The fact that there are simple physical processes that do a good job for small cases doesn't surprise me, one can solve many of these problems by hand for small values of n. But, O(e^n) makes the big cases intractable even if the small cases are very very easy. It is the behavior of the algorithms as n gets large that is important and demonstrations of physical analog methods to solve modest cases doesn't seem relevant for the reasons that you mention.
What about freelancer.com? (formerly vworker)
> What makes dealing with the borrow check hard is that it triggers on code that intuitively is correct, it can be hard to envision why it's not.

Because it's more expressive than just forbidding mutability. You could program in Rust the same way you program in Haskell, by encapsulating mutability in functions with different types (&mut). Then the flow sensitivity and other issues would never bother you.

Rust's flow-based control of mutability is strictly more expressive than the monad system of Haskell. If you don't like that expressivity, don't use it.
Web development.
Is silentcircle no longer offering the service for consumers?

Cache shows this:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oiqIFBt...

Starter

100 Silent World Minutes
Make Calls to 120 Destinations
Unlimited Received Calls
Unlimited Member to Member
$12.95 /month

etc

but their website now only has you contact sales for enterprise:
https://silentcircle.com/products-and-solutions/
> But neither of them really found a satisfying answer, a way to say "hey, for making your web app or whatever, if you throw away your existing stuff and use this tool/process, now it's super-easy."

Actually, we think we did. We're just not choosing that as the primary focus of the workflow in Eve. Now with a better version of the editor and with a bit more work on the UI builder, I suspect we could rebuild the entire foursquare clone in under a week. If we had VCS so that multiple people could work together on it, it might only be a couple of days. This foundation for programming has lots of implications for building "real software" - it's actually based on research for making distributed systems much easier to build. [1]

We'll see more of that as we go since we're bootstrapping bits and pieces. One of the first things that will transition over is the compiler, if that gives you any indication of the level of sophistication you can achieve with this programming model.

[1]: http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/eurosys10-boom.pdf
freelancer.com is a similar, race-to-the-bottom type of system.
I don't even play the game, and I was immediately confused by the HN headline. I thought it was going to be a blog post about the history of the game and its first version.
Apples and monkeys. Option rom is extensively documented and part of every bios hacking writepu. Example: https://books.google.pl/books/about/BIOS_Disassembly_Ninjuts...

authors blog http://bioshacking.blogspot.com/

free book download: http://www.lejabeach.com/sisubb/BIOS_Disassembly_Ninjutsu_Un...

It isnt some arcane knowledge only dying out grey beards would know about.
Back when a single person could make a top-notch game, and a really large team might be 4, I feel like there were a lot more games. This, of course, meant a lot more crappy games too, but diversity makes for a more rapid exploration of the problem space.
How can you build a platform that doesn't race to the bottom but allows it to extract the value added (and hence profits) from collecting and vetting great talent?

I always imagine the interaction with supply (quality freelance developer) and demand (company needing work done) to be like this:

Company: "I need great freelancers!"
Dev: "I'm a great freelancer! My rate is $100/hr [or whatever]!"

[Company interviews Dev, sees prev results, feels happy w/Dev]

Company: "Great! We'll pay you that for the first few days on this platform, then engage you for long term projects off the platform. That way, we don't have to pay Matching Site the finder's fee."
It accidentally triggered a spam filter. Sorry; we fixed it.
Why DNS is awesome and why you should love it
What happens if you fall into a black hole?
With a fully distributed model, everyone is essentially running a backbone server. If you don't feel comfortable with such an arrangement, then you'd probably have to opt out. There are plenty of people willing to put up with it, evidenced by the number of companies who have no problem operating the current Internet backbone despite knowing for a fact that their networks are used to distribute child porn and other illegal things. Generally, I think the law is on the side of the distributor, but that's only a legal consolation, not a moral one. I just don't see a way around it. To be fair though, the likelihood of this happening is probably going to be much lower than for a backbone provider, especially if users only serve up content they've consumed themselves (seems like a logical assumption in the distributed system I'm thinking about, but does not have to hold true for all such systems).
I see that sort of thing a lot, where a simple model appears to violate some algorithmic boundary, but a more complete analysis reveals that all is well.

For example, take "spaghetti sort." This is a weird physical sorting algorithm where you represent each number to be sorted as a physical strand of uncooked spaghetti of corresponding length. To perform the sort, you grab the spaghetti in a bundle and place it on a table so the bottom of each spaghetti strand is on the table. Then you put your other hand on top, find the longest strand, and pull it out. Repeat this process once for each strand, and you then have all the numbers in order.

This is described as a "linear time" algorithm because you perform the same procedure once per number, so it's clearly O(n). It's obviously impractical for real-world use, but if you had some utterly ridiculous quantity of numbers, maybe it could be the best way!

But of course this ignores important factors. For example, the radius of the bundle will increase with the square root of the number of strands present within it. Whatever you use to select and retrieve the longest strand must move at some finite speed to traverse this distance, which means that the actual running time is O(n^1.5), substantially worse than the theoretical O(n log n) limit!

Another factor that is often ignored is the fact that analog systems don't actually have infinite precision. If you look at their actual (or even theoretical) precision and convert that to bits, it's not all that many! Lots of analog solutions can look extremely clever and quick, until you realize that it's just solving the problem for a 28-bit number, or whatever.
Thanks for trying it out!

What was your search query? I'd like to investigate why, if I may. :)
I think you are searching for something like dat.GUI [1], most WebGL-demos are using it.

[1] http://workshop.chromeexperiments.com/examples/gui/#1--Basic...
Ask HN: How to learn algorithms and become a good programmer?
Hi HN'ers,

I am from a non-CS background. I find myself able to make stuff work and resolve issues in case any pop up, but i do not find myself writing the most optimized code.

How do i learn algorithms ? The problem is that the suggestions posted in various posts in HN are pretty intimidating to start. Is there a beginner friendly book or a youtube lecture that de-mystifies and simplifies learning algorithms ?

I mailed a few people whom i admire if they could provide guidance and / or mentor me, but haven't found help. IRC channels are intimidating too.

I would be grateful to the community for any help.
Is there no real solar power market then? If your local utility is a monopoly then you basically have to accept whatever the utility wants to pay you (even far below 'market' rate). You have no power to negotiate, only capitulate or try to get the local regulator to enforce fair trade.
As a complete outsider, do you have a link or two to support that so I could learn more?

It would seem to me, again completely without knowledge, that a virtual DOM seems suboptimal. Web browsers should be able to optimize for that use case a lot better.
A giga coaster is between 300-399 feet, while a strata coaster is 400+. I guess they didn't include the two strata coasters (Top Thrill Dragster being the second) because they don't go through as long of a ride.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roller_coaster#By_height
Because a giga-coaster is specifically defined as smaller than that one:

"Enthusiasts use the term to apply to a roller coaster with a drop of 300 to 399 feet, meaning that its riders fall the length of a football field. (Anything beyond 400 feet and you’re in strata coaster terrain.)"

So yeah, weird article.
Supreme Court’s Free-Speech Expansion Has Far-Reaching Consequences
> Perhaps it should link to a solar installer, and a lumber jack :-)

Let's not be cutting down the carbon dioxide remover when we're trying to go eco-friendly. :)
P = NP just means that there exist some polynomial-time algorithm that's able to solve that problem. It doesn't mean that you can take that pseudocode and run it directly in polynomial time.
Supermarket LED lights talk to smartphone app for indoor positioning
I think the performance of Swiftkey improved about half a year ago. But I think around the same time I started noticing a significant drop in Swiftkey's accuracy. It "feels" less accurate to me than it was, although I use it with 3 enabled languages at once and I imagine that also brings lower accuracy by default. Still, I think it has become quite a bit worse than before, and I worry they did that on purpose as a compromise to improve performance.
> I think you overestimate how willing most developers are to fight with the borrow checker instead of using actor libraries or task libraries (TPL, TBB, PPL, Fork-Join, Akka) instead.

That seems like a non-sequitur. What does the borrow checker have to do with actor libraries?

Are you implying that these actor libraries give you the data race freedom guarantees that Rust's mutability rules give you? If so, that's trivially false. Those libraries guide you toward patterns that eliminate data races in simple cases if you follow them, but nothing enforces the rules. Moreover, being forced into actors or message passing for concurrency severely restricts the expressiveness of your program. Rust's approach lets you use shared memory if you like, or message passing if you like, or a combination of the two, with enforcement of the rules no matter which you pick.

> So far the Rust tricks with unsafe for certain data structures (e.g. double linked lists/DAGs) seem like fighting with the borrow checker. Or the issues to be solved with upcoming 1.3 changes for pattern matching.

Yes, they're tough. This is a downside of manual memory management (though one that can be improved in future iterations). But doubly linked lists/tree-like data structures are hard in Haskell too. "Tying the knot" is not exactly easy or intuitive.
AppCanary (YC S15) Helps Your Company Stay Safe from Security Vulnerabilities
Tubes are history, so you pretty much agree with me? :) I didnt say those manuals are unimportant and should go into the landfill, I pointed out they are of historical nature, not something you would actually use today.
I live in Fresno, AKA, the surface of the sun. It says my yearly savings on a leased system is $2300! Wow. I may be installing solar soon!
primality testing is a poor example. PRIMES is in P.

http://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/manindra/algebra/primality_v...
Median commuting mileage per capita are higher.[1]

Japan, for example, has reasonably high per-capita car ownership, but the yearly mileage is less than half of US usage.

I think it's reasonable to suspect that the standard deviation in the US is much higher too.

1 https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar4.htm
Closest that I could find was: "Talent is nurtured in solitude … A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude."
> It's basically a scam.

Why is it a scam that PG&E won't pay you more for power than they can buy it wholesale?
Maybe some non-programmers manage to solve the problem itself. But only a tiny part of them will be able to write down what they actually did (step by step) in a precise way suiteable to tranlate it into a computer program.
> what it seems like we need is something more akin to the original vision of Lotus Notes - an environment full of information where communicating that information to people or even other systems is a fundamental primitive.

Oh boy, here we go again. A more direct admission of not knowing what to build is hardly imaginable.
"We can't find a polynomial time algorithm" !==> "No such algorithm exists"

The height of arrogance. For these limited human minds, in limited time to declare that their effort has already exhausted all possibilities. The very core of ridiculousness.
The description of this product sounds like it was created from a buzzword startup generator, to the point that I assumed it was a parody or satire until I read the comments here. It would really benefit the article to just include a plain text description on what the app is and what it does.
Here's a video demonstrating your point [1]. I particularly like where he blows on it a bit to push it from a local minimum to the global minimum.

1: https://youtu.be/dAyDi1aa40E
Maybe I can clarify for the down voters because they haven't really responded with anything of substance (e.g. a comment):

* In the Python world, pip replaces/supplants/simplifies away easy_install much in the same way that cpanm/cpanminus made things much easier than the regular cpan command, or even cpanplus (at least in my experience). I feel like listing of "CPAN" as a whole, while breaking out "pip" and "easy_install" is disingenuous in light of this.

* CPAN is just the distribution network (plus all of the meta stuff like search.cpan.org, metacpan, cpantesters, etc). Python also has a single distribution network: The Python Package Index (aka PyPI / "the cheeseshop").

* Talking about distutils/setuptools/distribute is the same as talking about many of the tools that are used to manage Perl packages/modules (I can't recall their names off the top of my head, but there are at least 2 or 3 of them, and they all generate their own Makefiles/etc for doing things). It's possible that these have been simplified away in the last few years (since I've been in Perl-land), but the legacy is still there (much like the legacy of Python's various distribution/packaging setup libraries).

I will admit, that as a whole, I like CPAN better than PyPI, if only for the fact that it's easy to fetch the author/package/etc lists as a gzip-ed text file whereas most tools interacting with PyPI are basically screen-scraping the website (rather than having a simple/easy api).
Yeah, I guess crates.io is missing that one. It should be straightforward to write though.
Harvard's Kaplan, Once at Goldman Sachs, to Head Dallas Fed
Introducing Kumquat: A Rails Template Handler for RMarkdown
Interested to see if you will have a featured conversations list where you showcase conversations between notable people in different verticals.

Would be particularly interesting for controversial debates. Would be a bit more thought out than tweetstorms, but lower friction than back-and-forth blog posts.
I really like this. The only issue that I found in my short time playing with it is that a/0 returns infinity rather than undefined. 0/0 does return NaN, though.
My understanding is that type inferencing allows you to omit specifying types in many places (the compiler uses heuristics to figure out the types in those places out at compile-time), but that you still need to specify types when necessary. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.)

I think Rust does this, but looking at Rust code, there's still types specified all over the place, and it looks much more cluttered to me than dynamically typed languages I've used.
Most runs, Top Thrill Dragster indeed has little anticipation. I have experienced an exception once: I was in the front seat and glanced up, straight ahead, as the countdown started. In that instant just before takeoff, I noticed a number of seagulls lazily floating a couple feet above the track. Watching those birds continue across the tracks and out of the path of my face were the longest two to three seconds of my life.
I have an original Apple Macintosh and 512Ke still in working order. Can't say the same for most of the floppy disks.
How is believing that P!=NP any more "defeatist" than believing P==NP? Or are you somehow under the impression that computer scientists aren't actively working on proving that P!=NP?
Even factoring would be a poor example, given that it has never been shown to be NP-complete.
Reminds me of http://tydligapp.com/ . I always thought it would make a great desktop app.
Pre-Crime in practice
Programming Languages Used for Google Code Jam 2015
i spent years thinking about p vs np, under the same intution you have - i figured p must equal np.

i even had it on my license plate:

http://s3.neyer.me/pnp.jpg

after nightmares involving np complete problems, i finally started considering that p didn't equal np, and suddenly the world made much more sense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUD9fDxiWKs
I will suggest that one way to find big problems that can make a major difference if solved would be to look for things people talk about as a necessary evil. It signals that they know it sucks as a solution, having no solution is so much worse that they are willing to accept the downside, and they can't even imagine a real solution that lacks that kind of big downside.
Is Windows 10 the Scariest Software Upgrade Ever?
The Telegraph has a less accomplished reporter falling off a similar machine http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/the-filter/11418069/AirWheel-...
I'd base it on the language and infrastructure/OS I/my team knew best. The worst thing for an early startup to do is to try and figure out new languages or tools when it isn't absolutely necessary. You have enough hard work to solve the business problem, so pick what you are familiar with.

Also, in the end, you will likely change your structure more than once from the first MVP, so I would just make a decision and move forward fast.

As for my opinion. C# is still primarily a Windows environment solution (although its getting better), Golang is a little bit more agnostic but I wouldn't use it anywhere but in a linux environment. My choice would be golang if those were my only two options, mostly because I feel the ecosystem, scaling and cost is better not to be in the Microsoft environment for a startup. However, if you are planning for a Windows based environment, then nothing beats C# IMO.

There are completely valid options that are neither of these languages, nodejs, python or some JVM based languages. I generally avoid the JVM, but that is a personal preference based on my experiences and I recognize plenty of amazing systems are built on JVM based languages all the time.
For those more knowledgeable in respect to WWII history and with Turing's contributions:

if Alan Turing hadn't been born, how do you think the WWII would have played out?

I know he made very important contributions, but were they decisive to winning the WWII?
And then, there's the (IMO certain) outcome that, when we come to "really understand," we'll realize that "eating a variety of foods, both fresh and cooked" is the most economically viable option for keeping optimal health, when there is access to a healthy natural environment.