skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In college, I feared taking English classes. The only courses I feared more were Public speaking courses. I really feared public speaking, but that's another story. I knew my grammer was horrid, and I just wasen't interested in writing.
I was interested in science--and girls?

Well, I remember this one English 101 instructor. No one in the class could please this guy. His favorite saying was, "I don't grade on the curve, because I've had too many stupid classes!" We all nervously laughed, but we were scared. Everyone seemed to try, but all our papers were given back with so much red felt tip graffiti; everyone just wanted to get through his class. We just wrote short choppy sentences, and tried to keep the grammatical errors down. He once had the nerve to say, "Most of you are passing, but your papers are so boring!" I remember thinking, whenever we get slightly creative, you beat the hell out of our papers? I personally think he would have liked to fail all of us, but he didn't have tenure? Well I got through class, but with some horrid memories.

Well, I needed four, or five (He taught us to write out numbers under 10. I'm still not sure about that, but do it out of fear) English classes in order to graduate. I took all the courses in my last semester of college. My other instructors were great. This one guy scared me so much, I just figured everyone in the English department was like this guy. Well, they weren't.

The other instructors were great. They weren't easy, but sincerely wanted to help. I had one instructor tell us I've met very few natural writers. It's a craft. Yes, like woodworking. (It wasn't a cliche back then.) I'll always remember that advice. Plus--he told us his personal story. When he was in school he hated writing, but with the right training, and encouragement, he went from a science major, to a Engish major. I think he had a PhD, but didn't want us to call him doctor. He had such a thick Indian accent, I really had to pay attention in class, but learned more in one week in his course than all the rest. I forget his name, but I remember him saying, "My name rhymes with Desi--from the Lucy show." He was a really good person/teacher.
Bezos can even make raw matter work extra hours for him.
Ask HN: Anyone looking for remote entry level web developers from Guatemala?
I am starting a full-time web development bootcamp in Guatemala for low-income students.

Anyone interested in hiring them as interns when they finish the program? They all have good English skills.

The curriculum is the following:

HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Jquery, Meteor, MongoDB, Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, TDD(Rails) and REST-like APIs in Ruby.
On “best practices”, and *genuinely* evidence-based science communication
Oh I think it was misunderstood. The full quote is: "Byzantine agreement guarantees distributed consensus despite the Byzantine failure of participants. However, it requires unanimous agreement on system membership by all participants. Each node in the network must be known and verified ahead of time." It is comparing SCP to Byzantine agreement protocols like paxos.

As in Stellar doesn't have this requirement. Here is the white paper: https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol.pd...
Compilers, for start.
Interesting to see how well-made some of these pieces are. The overturned horse and the killer whale look very high quality. I wonder how Banksy produces these and maintains his or her anonymity, as the pieces look like they are the work of large teams of professionals.
This is a post I just wrote about dealing with failure in adventure, but having worked on a few startups, I think there are a lot of parallels with the startup community. High risk, low chance of success, big challenges yet highly rewarding.
I think the motivation is pretty clear here:

* It was not typed, and with the advent of Hack, we wanted to have types.
* The actual setter method was not defined. If you searched the codebase,
you wouldn't find it. If you looked at the class, you couldn't see which
methods you could call, which made it harder to discover other calls,
such as ifNotNullSetName.
* IDEs can't autocomplete the code.

What this boils down to is metaprogramming. If you want to create an array that contains twenty items, you aren't going to do:

array.add(1);
array.add(2);
array.add(3);
...

You'll use a loop, some imperative code. That's because data structures like arrays are within the domain of things you can touch with code.

But what about class definitions? What if you want to add twenty methods to a class? Fans of dynamic languages will rightly say that class definitions, functions, etc. should also be in the domain of what your code can affect. Smalltalkers and Rubyists will happily write imperative code to build and modify classes.

This is really powerful. It's exciting stuff.

At the same time, for better or worse, most programmers are not spending their day in a live editing environment. They aren't in a Smalltalk browser all day. They're in an IDE or text editor.

That means the window into the program that we have while editing doesn't see any of the results of that metaprogramming. All of the static analysis tools, auto-completers, go-to-definition-ers, etc. can't handle dynamic metaprogramming because they run before any of that metaprogramming is invoked.

Code generation is a way out of that problem. It lets you do imperative dynamic metaprogramming, but then bakes the result back out to the file system where the rest of your tool ecosystem can see it.

It's not the most elegant solution in the world, but I think it beats trying to reinvent the entire world of tooling that programmers use all day: grep, text editors, IDEs, etc.
Some IMF economists' best guess is USD 5.3tn per year.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/18/fossil-fu...
In as much as Stripe allows you to customize the colors of the Checkout modal and add your company logo, Checkout helps create a smooth, trusted, "first-party-ish" experience. The modal behavior however detracts from this quality - it hints to the customer that a third-party is involved. On my most recent project, feedback from users to this effect caused me to go and make my own form using stripe.js instead (pretty easy :) but means giving up the benefit of Checkout's thoroughly thought-out, always-getting-better, broadly-tested UX :( ). I have also observed others asking for an inline version of Checkout in #stripe on freenode.

Edit: also I was doing some digging on the subject, and there is an opinion (not condoned by Stripe) that Checkout is "more PCI-compliant" than Stripe.js because the iframe is sourced to Stripe, and Stripe is PCI-audited. Therefore having an inline option for Checkout might please folks wanting the inline UX without giving up the potential upside of Checkout with regard to PCI-compliance.
I don't want to put words in Sam's mouth, but I read his point as referring to the patterns of thinking and behavior applied by the founders more than hours worked. I equate "intensity" with "focus," as I've seen (and been a part of) many startups that have lost focus after achieving a modicum of success and taking their foot off the gas.
Moodle MOOT
Thanks! Will look at prey. I read a few of his others but missed this one.
It depends on the country, Canadian Stripe accounts support USD denominated Canadian bank accounts.
FBI Had 12-Page File on George Carlin Because He Made Jokes About Government
But the info was stolen - so inadmissible, right? They're all safe because of this leak.
Join MMVC15 and claim your certificate.
http://www.acronymfinder.com/FAC.html

i can't guess from that. friday afternoon club? if i was pushed to guess from the context. i'm bemused how anyone can use an acronym like that twice and expect everyone to know what it means. or maybe it's just me and you!
Native speaker of both Japanese and English here. This looks quite nice and I've forwarded it to my friends who are learning Japanese. :)

I was initially really skeptical when I saw the tagline about "learning from songs and games", because songs are grammatically broken and often nonsensical, while games/anime/manga often have brash speech that you stop using once you're past Junior High. But being able to learn off of your interests in a digitally integrated way is quite awesome (I remember meeting a South Korean guy in college whose Japanese was quite good just from learning form Anime/manga).

Commonality is useful as well, since the language has changed dramatically in the last 100 years, particularly pre and post war.

Kudos! :)
It's ludicrous to even think of this as an "attack". Just sounds like some conspiracy theory based on this guy's insecurity. Let's say Crichton did mean to use this as an attack. How did it hurt this critic guy? After all, no one would have recognized that it was him if this guy didn't go through all the trouble to come up with his "theory". Even after this guy wrote this blog post, how did this theory hurt him? Based on what you say you did, it just sounds like it was Crichton who's the casualty from this event. Lastly, I think it's stupid to stop reading an author just because of something like this. Let's say everything on that post is true. (Although it only sounds like this guy's theory) Even then this is just some childish personal behavior you can laugh over (It's not like Crichton attempted to bury this critic guy with "underhanded" tactics), it has nothing to do with his ability to write good books.
Hi Chris, looks like an awesome start. Some quick suggestions and questions:

1. You should fully support romaji entry for looking things up. The mechanics of switching input methods on iOS are pretty terrible so it is really inconvenient to have to switch into Japanese input mode. I searched for "hana" but got only 花合わせ and 花を引く as matches -- because those have 'hana' in the English definition string. Searching for はな brought the two obvious matches (花 and 鼻) to the top, but I had to go back and cycle through several other input methods to get to Japanese input mode, which was annoying and took longer than the rest of looking up the word. Some other dictionaries do this, and even sites like Amazon Japan now do this for searches as well -- dealing with input methods is just a hassle in general.

2. The understanding of verb conjugation seems really awesome and jumping between things on a "learning tangent" works really well.

3. You have to sync vocab lists and spaced repetition drill status/progress to the cloud. It's just too useful not to do it -- you want to be able to do that in quick downtime moments from any device. Luckily there are many easy ways to do it nowadays. I don't blame you for shipping without that, though! ;-)

All in all, great start!
That was a fascinating book, all right. The idea that the author of the hyper-rational The Andromeda Strain could be so credulous is still something I struggle with. He comes across as someone who automatically believes anything suggested to him until it's proven wrong.

There were at least two people inside Crichton's head, maybe more.
Computers Are Showing Their Biases, and Tech Firms Are Concerned
This shouldn't fan political flames; it's a reminder of the work that needs to be done in educating people about what encryption actually does and its importance in our lives.
On a continuum from "so robust you don't even consider it codegen" to "well, some people use it": microcode, compilers, virtualization, visual interface builders like XCode and Android Studio, dynamic HTML pages, ORMs, protobufs & other schema definition languages, autoconf & friends, compile-to-C languages like early versions of C++ and Go, ES6 transpilers like Traceur and Babel, compile-to-JS languages like CoffeeScript. Probably others I've forgotten or don't know about.

When it works, you forget that the only thing that computers understand is their native instruction set, and everything on top of that is built on some form of codegen. When it doesn't, you curse out the programmer who left you a pile of buggy scripts to maintain.
They only make sense to me if all the functionality was based out of a single (or two) type of unit. Camera/Ram/CPU/gps/etc was all just a matter of software. Need more memory? Buy more phone-goo, designate it as RAM, and bam. Basically computronium.

So, in conclusion, completely unrealistic in the near term, or our lifetime.
The tricky bit is that "successful" does not necessarily have to mean "makes people happier".
Ask HN: Do people like gamified social apps?
I just read an article on TheNextWeb[1] and I wonder do people like gamified apps?

Recently I see a lot of mostly mobile apps doing this, like collection coins and other virtual goods for some activity (checkins, doing workout etc). Do people like this or is it pushing them away?

[1]: http://thenextweb.com/opinion/2015/08/20/swarm-3-0-over-gamified-missed-its-chance-with-me/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

Mankind has been altering environments since when they only had stone tools. Your argument is basically, "I don't believe modern humans (with its 7+ billion population and sustained alteration of the majority of land area) have any noticeable effect on the Earth's ecosystem, therefore scientists who say so are wrong."

Stop being so willfully ignorant.
Should be back up now!
Maybe Bob should just Let It Go.
I think its actually because you don't need Twitter to get the information that is there. Anything worth knowing that happens on Twitter is on every other main stream outlet. They have a unique problem in that powerful people use their platform but anyone can get that information and re-post it anywhere. Probably for that reason I've signed up for Twitter a few times and both times lasted no longer than a week, realizing it just isn't useful to the normal person.
There is but a small niche between "project is not important enough to care about a modal vs. an iframe" and "project is SO important that I carefully style my own payment form." A dead-easy Stripe-built solution appeals in this small niche; however I'm not going to introduce a third-party dependency in this case - at that point I'll just make my own form - which is what I did :)

(Is my memory wrong that Colin's tool predates the launch of Checkout? Perhaps even Colin's tool inspired Checkout to a small extent?)
That is actually very interesting. I was wondering how Pocket (or any readitlater service) could operate if that was the case. I did this mostly for myself so didn't think about it much
For those following along - this method attempts to do anomaly detection in 3 dimensions: time, 'metric' and query. I interpret query to be something like 'polo shirts' or 'PEZ dispensers,' and metric to be something like 'sales volume' or 'median sale price.'

The 'aggregation' method just takes a preset number of changes (10 'percentile' or 'quantile' - the language is inconsistent) in a metric-query pair for a given time. After that, I get really confused (if you fix T, how can you have timeseries in T?) but the final output is essentially top 90 percentile of metrics, plotted over time (and independent of query). It's difficult to see how this method is groundbreaking or novel.

At any rate - the final step in this post is to search for anomalies by metric. So if you have more than k anomalous metrics for a given time t you classify that as a disruption. I think this is calculated by median absolute deviation, which is probably fine.

What isn't clear in the paper or in the post is how many (or which!) anomalies in the metrics are sufficient to qualify as a disruption. It's probably not a great idea to assume equal weight on the features, but I don't know if that's what's going on here. The associated paper also claims that 70% of the 'alerts' were on-target - but makes no mention of how many disruptions were uncaught. You're always going to have pretty good hit rate, but you're not always going to catch a lot!
I agree with you there. I really enjoy being able to swipe throughthe stories like that(hell give me all the content that way with a swipe right on mobile to access the hn comments).

Note: mobile users swipe left/right for stories.
So let's discuss Wired's Privacy Policy.

>Our servers may also automatically collect information about you, your online behavior and your computer, mobile or other device. The information collected may include, without limitation, the make, model, settings, specifications (e.g., CPU speed, connection speed, browser type, operating system, device identifier) and geographic location of you and/or your computer, mobile or other device, as well as date/time stamp, IP address, pages visited, time of visits, content viewed, ads viewed, the site(s), application(s), destination(s), and/or service(s) you arrived from, and other clickstream data.

Wired wants to know where I am going!

>If you choose to access, visit and/or use any third party social networking service(s) that may be integrated with the Service, we may receive personally identifiable information and other information about you and your computer, mobile or other device that you have made available to those services, including information about your contacts on those services.

They want to know my contacts!

>We reserve the right to use, transfer, assign, sell, share, and provide access to all personally identifiable information and other information about you and your computer, mobile or other device that we receive through third-party social networking services in the same ways described in this Agreement as all of your other information.

Awesome! So even if the third-party social networking services isn't selling my personally identifiable information as per their privacy policy, Wired can and will!

>As discussed below, you may opt out of third party tracking on the Service at any time. However, we do not currently support any browser based Do Not Track (DNT) settings or participate in any DNT frameworks, and we do not assign any meaning to any potential DNT track signals you may send or alter any of our data collection or use practices in response to such signals.

Wired will ignore any Do Not Track headers I send them, and track me anyways. At least they're being honest.

Well at least Wired offers a partial opt-out that isn't "don't use Wired":

>If you do not wish to have your personally identifiable information shared with third parties, contact our Privacy Policy Coordinator as described at the end of this document.

Though they will still collect the data and it could still be transferred to another business if Wired assets are sold.

Why am I pointing this out? Because Privacy Policies suck. Practically all of them - and the sites ganging up on Spotify about this update have equally bad Privacy Policies.

Pot meet kettle.
I agree and disagree with this point. The absolute worse thing a startup can do is to "flip"/"redo" their code base, in an attempt to clean it up. We learned that the hard way last year. That said, going through code and occasionally cleaning a class or two in order to achieve a desired feature can save time while debugging, usually a lot.

This is like most things in life, taken in moderation = good for you, but the extreme might kill you (or in this case, your startup).
If nothing else reading this has me interested in trying Go. Kind of wish the new book by Kernighan was out before November, as that book feels like a great excuse t do a deep dive on the language.
Your comment seems unduly negative. This is pretty awesome and useful!

If they give attribution via link then what's the issue?
10 reasons you shouldn't upgrade to Windows 10
I think this is the same technique as Russ Cox used to search Google Code: https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp4.html
I don't think it matters at this moment. They are on a well good trajectory which is only going to change when they decide to go for IPO. Till then, Snapchat is Uber (the growth machine) for Early stage investors to get benefits in IPO based on eyeballs it collects as retention
Git-bisect for the win!

On another note, I find it very odd that this fell off the front page so quickly. Is there some kind of go/google voters club on HN that flags anything that seems negative towards go?
Clients would be irrational to pay for a recruiting service which removed 0 bits of uncertainty as to the quality of presented candidates (by the client's definition of quality). It's safe to generalize that recruiting services which survive reduce uncertainty or at least give a strong impression that they do, i.e., they discriminate among candidates in some way (I don't mean discrimination in the legal or pejorative sense).

This isn't an accusation of wrongdoing, just a simple observation about reality. The incentive for a recruiter using a game like this really isn't for every candidate (err, I mean, player) to be seen as equally recommendable. Even if you were so suicidally idealistic that you saw it that way, clients wouldn't. But you aren't stupid, you know that.

quote66555 is right to think that there is an incentive for extensively recorded details to be used as a signal of his individual "quality" as a candidate. And if he is not in the top n% (where n < 100) then at best he will not be recommended. So it is possible that his little delays or minor fuckups will count against him, assuming he cares about being recommended. It's a reasonable thing for him to think. He isn't scare-mongering.
On the topic of automated trading:

I strongly encourage anyone interested in real-world algorithmic trading to take a look at Quantopian.

https://www.quantopian.com/home

It's not HFT by any measure, but it manages to make algorithmic trading extremely accessible by providing a platform where users can develop their algorithms, backtest them against 13 years of market data, live trade them with paper money, or live trade with real money by linking a brokerage account.

They have also open-sourced the algorithmic trading engine used to run their platform:

https://github.com/quantopian/zipline
After para 1, I was going to ask "what's to stop someone from tossing a solution in a pastebin and sharing it around?" Related, "what's to stop someone from sharing the questions ahead of time?"

From the second, it sounds like you guys will seek out the top performers and weed out the bozos. I like it! Are you looking at a traditional recruiter fee model or something else? Apologies if this is posted somewhere else.
Thanks for the feedback!

1. I actually just finished implementing romaji entry, and it will be coming in the next version update. Honestly, after implementing it, I can't believe how much time I've wasted switching input methods. =)

2. Thanks!

3. I know, I know! I really want to, but I spent a couple weeks diving into it and found it really buggy and hard to get right. I'm using Core Data under the hood to store this stuff. Any suggestions for tools I should look at to help with syncing?
Btw if you own an Apple device you can bookmark this to your homescreen for app-like behaviour (i.e. no URL bar)
Facebook introducing GIFs in some pages and posts
I see that you aren't finding this productive to continue. That's okay. Thanks for your responses anyway.
It leads to lots of brittle and highly coupled tests?

It always focuses on the next immediate task which leads to going down a lot of dead ends, and a lot of local optimums that need to be refactored out?

The key benefit is that it helps you focus, even when tired or stressed. You get dozens of small wins/celebrations every hour which is great for your motivation. It also ensures you actually write tests (again handy with tight deadlines and high stress situations).

Does that make it worthwhile? Sometimes. I did a TDD exclusively when I had young kids and it was a great help with my focus. I'd recommend it to new parents, people with sleeping disorders, people in high stress work places, etc.