skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sorry, I didn't mean to paint such a bleak picture. There are good and smart people working on these sites, and some newspapers have technically very good code (apart from ads :)

There are also lots of very hard constraints. The publishing process is complex and on strict schedules, especially if it's connected to printing of a daily newspaper. There are hundreds of people involved, so upgrading CMS for a newspaper is like changing wheels of a car while it's moving.

And on top of that monetization on the web is hard. Users hate paywalls. Nobody wants a mobile app, especially not for overpriced in-app payments. But something needs to bring money, and even getting ad inventory that's higher class than "doctors hate this!!!" is also a very hard work.
The solution is so simple -- have a more reasonable time limit on "hard" copyright (i.e., where no distribution is allowed), then when that time expires have it go to "soft" copyright. This is where the copyright item would be treated similar to trademarks, that is if the copyright holder isn't actively using it then the work would be free for non-commercial use. Then the third time period would be public domain.

Then, give the option for copyright holders to extend the "hard" copyright time period with a periodic maintenance fee. That way, it still gives Disney the ability to hang on to Mickey Mouse, yet any work without a clear owner (i.e., where an old software company went defunct yet the assets are technically held by some holding company) will be able to be preserved (along with any movies and recordings that are no longer published).

The thing I can't figure out is why the governments don't go for this. I mean, it is an effective way to get additional tax revenue (from rich companies such as Disney and Hollywood), without raising taxes on the voters. Win/win; well except for some campaign donations. But if I was in office, I'd take votes over campaign money any day.
As someone who writes fairly SML-ish OCaml, there definitely are benefits to using OCaml (even if only for the library and tool support... opam really is pretty awesome) over SML. I rarely end up even using the object system and other features that SML lacks, but I find the syntax a bit nicer to read and write. And unlike C++, the standard library doesn't force all the bloat you don't want to deal with on to you, so it's no big deal to write code in SML style.
Right now, Denzel's points are spot on. I would add Go the compiler itself is something of a footgun. It routinely compiles things it shouldn't. Go vet is the bandaid on this.

Common Lisp's biggest footgun is probably its lack of opinion about anything. It's truly multiparadigm and probably not in a good way. Alan Kay: "Lisp is not a language, it's a building material." A real world example: I had beers with the SIFT guys (a local AI consultancy here in Minneapolis) a couple of years ago. They explained to me that when they have a problem, they go and type text in an editor that explains the problem formally. Then they type words in that problem's "language" that allows them to express a solution. Then they go an implement that language they just came up with using Common Lisp.

Clojure on the other hand is a Lisp with an opinion: parallelism can be done in the same idiom as non-concurrent logic if you use immutable constructs. So the language will push you in this direction. It turns out writing code without branches, variables, objects and yes even state can be done 99% of the time this way. And yes it is simpler in the truest sense of the word.
> You say "talking politics" like it's a bad thing!

That was unintended. But it is difficult: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Politics_is_the_Mind-Killer
Some people cannot see the trees for the forest. Others cannot see the forest for the trees. If you do not understand that they are both true and real and right there in front of you, you have missed something important somewhere along the way.
You seriously make money from writing articles for websites?

Jeezus! —I lost count of the grammatical howlers in that piece, by about the third paragraph. Hint: learn the difference between a comma and a full stop. Then read up a bit on sentence construction.
Cool, i also had an "aha" moment while reading:

“It was only after grad school that I learned (from Lockhart’s book Mathematician’s Lament) to consider natural numbers as stones that can be arranged in various patterns that illustrate the different properties of a number. For example, evens are piles of stones that can be arranged into two equal rows, and square numbers have just the right number of stones to make a square! It’s really fun thinking about various operations in this way, and there are some beautiful proofs based on this technique. For example, why the sum of the odd numbers 1 + 3 + 5… Is always a square.”

I should hang out with maths teachers more often!
Thanks for this feedback--
It's very accurate that 13Fs do not pick up hedge fund activity such as short sales and derivatives. 13Fs are not necessarily comprehensive of all of a single hedge fund's positions as certain funds sometimes make amendments at a much later date.

Hedge funds, particularly activist funds, do sometimes try to conceal the stocks they buy - usually by using derivatives which have different disclosure requirements. However, it is pretty rare for a hedge fund to be long and short the same stock unless they are doing it for tax reasons - this does not happen often. Going long a stock to create confusion about a short position (which is not disclosed) does not happen in the wild.

We believe that "knowing" in the aggregate just the stocks that managers are long has value. It is noteworthy that equity long/short strategies take a few quarters to materialize so using quarterly data is still valuable (hence we have excluded hedge funds that follow a short term statistical arbitrage strategy with many positions and very high turnover).
How do you find the GPS coordinates of your photos?
That's a good point, and I mostly agree with it, but it's less true now than it was in the past. There's plenty of shops that switch around data stores for part of all of their data now. It may not be all that common to go from one SQL variant to another, but there are plenty of cases of people moving from SQL to NoSQL (and back or vice-versa). Think BigTable, Dynamo and Cassandra.

That said, there's as little hope of being database agnostic in those situations as there is being language agnostic. Really, being SQL variant agnostic is like trying to make sure you stay away from language features that you can't rely on if you switch between a C/C++ implementation and JVM hosted implementation of the same language. It's relatively easy (in the context of what we are discussion in this conversation at least), and as such may be feasible to take advantage of the flexibility it gives you later.
I think, you are making mistake here. You shouldn't treat objects as objects, but as instances of modules. If you see it this way, everything looks much better in OO languages.
Can't you learn new knowledge?
One Russian dude, to be precise:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilfak_Guilfanov

I don't know if it's just perception bias or something cultural, but I seem to hear a lot more about famous/advanced Russian reverse-engineers than anywhere else.
The second sentence doesn't necessarily follow from the first.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Superinvestors_of_Graham-a...
To each his own. As far as macro fests go, that file looks very reasonable and legible to me. It's a single pattern repeated consistently for each function family. Writing out a dozen variants of each function explicitly would not only be much more error-prone, but would also be much harder to read and understand as a whole IMHO.
What I still do not know and always wished to know when I learned Haskell was how to write efficient code easily. I wrote huge projects with thousands of lines knowing nothing about C++ execution model and had insanely fast code (that could have been made even faster - but I was not that kind of expert) but with Haskell I have to be an expert to really write code that is as performant as something that would take me much less time to write in C/C++.

Just writing simple efficient matrix multiplication is a pain. It took me a couple of days to write a working quicksort.

I couldn't find any resources that provide a very serious introduction to optimizing Haskell code.

I found out way too late in my adventures with Haskell that Monad Transformers and similar abstractions have a significant runtime overhead and aren't free, I thought I was just playing with types that won't get in the way when the code compiles.

No one seems to cover this aspect of Haskell.
If Go has any legs, I'm sure that JetBrains will get around to building a version of IntelliJ for it. They've even got empty space for it in the IDE section of the products menu on their site :-)
Linux Light Bulbs: Enabling Internet Connectivity for Light Bulb Networks [pdf]
Oh, that one's easy. At the state of current science, we're pretty much sure that the Star Trek transporter doesn't kill the traveller. The "copy" is the original, in fact. Basically, this is because we're kinda made of particles, and the origin of the quarks you're made up of doesn't matter. As in, current physics don't even have a notion of the identity of a particle.

The part where it gets weird is, if you don't destroy the "original", you end up with two originals.

More (much more) details here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/r9/quantum_mechanics_and_personal_id...
WinZip comes to mind.
> MacBeth and Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet are great, timeless works

Not an original plot among them, by the way; Shakespeare was a great plagiarist.
Let me give you an example. MS Access and a database. Sure I could use the database as a dumb store and write reams of VBA, but that's not how I do it. I write functions in plpgsql and have minimal code in VBA. In my practice VBA and JavaScript are used in very much the same way.

One of the great things about writing apps this way is you can easily migrate your MS Access database to the web. Or use both at the same time, say, MS Access for the desktop and Envelope for mobile users. Then when someone hits a "ship" button the same code runs regardless. This is the original Oracle model published in their very earliest manuals.

I know lots of people don't take advantage of the database for stored procedures/functions but I wasn't thinking about them when I wrote my previous comment. I apologize.
> Everyone I knew would be dust

Have them sign up with you!

Seriously, do have them sign up with you. You don't have to be alone.
I don't think anyone would be surprised that a bank can't necessarily let you withdraw arbitrarily large amounts of cash from any given branch at any time.

On the other hand, 1500 pounds doesn't seem like much.

The largest amount I've ever personally withdrawn in cash was about eight thousand dollars, and they needed to check they could handle it, but did so without complaining.
> And of course Go vs Python is not a good comparison, as Python's lack of types

Nitpicking: Python has types, they're just dynamically determined instead of statically. That said...

> make it difficult to reason about large programs quickly

... I agree 100%. At $DAY_JOB we have a very large Python codebase and it can be extremely hard to understand what's going on, let alone refactor safely. I really miss static typing.
Hopefully, the scientific mindset didn't pass you by, as that was the real point of the courses.
My desire to be productive is at odds with my appreciation for Haskell. Don't get me wrong, I love the language, it's elegant, absolutely awesome (apart from whitespaces with semantic meaning). But sometimes I feel like the language, despite its expressiveness, is like a tight straitjacket. And then I just write some JavaScript or Java or C++ or PHP and feel so much freer.
First thing, never say never. They could still get higher in price. I agree it's less likely then the other direction so for today you'd want to have less bonds in your portfolio. Over the long term however, which is what we're talking about, a mixed portfolio beats 100% stocks with less volatility.

EDIT: If you look at buying a 10 year bond right now you get ~2.2% interest per year guaranteed today. If you buy the total US stock index it's hard to tell with any degree of certainty given today's high P/E ratios that the stock market will beat that. It might. But it's more risky. Hence there's a premium you're paying for risk. It's true that yields are likely (but not certain) to go up and so over time your new investments + rebalancing will buy you into those higher yields. Otherwise you're just trying to time the bond and stock markets which isn't simple, you can play a little of timing game (e.g. saying you think stocks are cheap and bonds are expensive today) but you can't usually predict better than the market already does.
No it doesn't. You need to handle every error or your program will panic and crash. You are forced to think of and handle every error by the if err != nil construct.
It's unfortunate this is basically (another) piece on the funding that chain.com recently landed. The article itself has about zip in the way of new content related to blockchain technologies.
Unfortunately you are right, but this does not help us consumers to spend less on medical. If we do not grab this issue at heart, prices will continue to move up together with deductibles and consumer with insurance will not get care when needed. It is not good for the society. we are the only force to try to change that by publishing all the prices in our app. Please support us https://goo.gl/PvPypQ
The social problems from multiple instances, I can understand. The original being dead however, doesn't make much sense. As far as current science goes, it doesn't even have a physical meaning. All that matters is the result: if there is an instance of you, no one died, period.

(Well, not quite "period", actually. If you let one instance run for a while (a second, a minute, a day?), then destroy it, that certainly looks like murder.)
I know Clojure, looking to learn a statically typed functional language. Narrowed it down to Haskell and OCaml (are there others I should know about?).

I still am unsure what OCaml is good for. Ex., Ruby is good for webdev with Rails, Python is good as a general purpose language, Clojure is good for async and quick iteration/integrating with Java code, C is good for OS work, C++ is good for native applications.

Is OCaml general purpose? Can I use it for NLP? Statistics? Numpy-like n-d array math? Writing a compiler?
Well this is a potential side-effect of global climate change/warming that I had never considered... And I don't know this for sure, but off the cuff, I'm betting neither have 7,999,999,000 or so of the 8 billion people on the planet.

And I'm not talking about the Godzilla-esque viruses, but the possibly dormant but not dead strains of smallpox, etc.

Great illustration though - we may not have eradicated any viruses on the planet - just on the surface. (Paraphrase the article.)
This comes down to whether self-improvement is useful. You could "tweak" your brain into working better: giving you more raw data, filtering for more relevant data, making connections more quickly, etc. such that you can get better knowledge from the same data, and therefore act toward your goals more effectively.

This especially applies to situations where the brain starts off "tweaked" into some messy suboptimal configuration (depression, ADHD, anxiety, etc.) where it's making very bad use of incoming data.

(I always thought Gibson's real argument was just that your goals shouldn't be considered in terms of sensory inputs, unless you want to end up like AIXI, converting your own mass into paperclips because you don't realize that that will kill you.)
Hyper-V is lightyears behind VMware in all features beyond that free little Player product - that's not even Microsoft or VMware's focus. Thanks, but I'll stick with the leader in bare metal hypervisors for my virtualization.
Random Numbers Generated from Audio and Video Sources (2013)
This is a really helpful way to think about natural numbers. I like to remind myself that we can gain efficiency through abstraction, but true, intuitive understanding comes through concretization/deconstruction.

Interestingly enough, I use round stones to represent ideas when I meditate. As the ideas come to me, I pick them up, examine them, and weigh them. If the idea is pressing, I delve into it and think it through. If not, I put the stone down and wait until my mind picks up the next.

Mental stones: some of modern life's most useful tools :)
Up to a point. The brain is very plastic and molds itself to its environment. If the person is older, and the environment is too different, it may just give up.
Perl Incompatible Regular Expressions
As important as a city hosting 1,000,000 people. No more, no less.

The emulation of a human is a human.
Reminds me of my leet DOS programming skilz :-)
Could a new sound format change music production?
Did spend.
By way of contrast I work for a financial company who provide research and recommendations to wall street and whose main 'unique point of difference' is that we don't take positions ourselves.

The downside of the idea "you can believe someone who back themselves enough to put their own money in" is that your recommendations are then, of course, not truly independent or unbiased.

Most big sell side broker dealers claim there is a chinese wall between their research analysts and their actual trading arm, but sometimes that chinese wall can be suprisingly thin. For example, when a merger is in the early offings, or other large deals about to happen, 'the street' can just go quiet on the subject. Only the (very few) truly independent research firms are still talking at that point.

Having previously been close to non-financial journalism it was a bit of a shock to me when I first realised how little truly independent (in the sense of not trading on their own opinion) news or research there was. But, I now understand why that is.

The optimum situation is probably to have a mix of approaches.
Companion: Safety app that lets friends digitally walk you home at night
Cyber leaders emphasize usability in security
This reminds me of a very recent TV series
The "shared ledger" analogy for blockchains is limiting. If you want to understand the potential applications, you should stop using it in your thinking.

Blockchains give us publicly writable databases. Such a thing never existed before. A blockchain has one or more programs that define what can be written to the public database. Bitcoin's program is mostly about distributing the 21 million coins to miners and preventing users from sending more bitcoins than they own.

A blockchain's program can manage any data, though. There are so many human interactions that are governed by private databases—that used to be the only way to do it. The sea change you are about to witness is those interactions transitioning to public databases. Everything will be rebuilt, especially where companies are charging for those interactions, like Uber and Airbnb.

Applications will be able to read from and write to all of the public databases, and they will all use the same cryptographic identities for seamless integration. Every application can trivially have payments built in. Or ride hailing. Or package shipping.

Network effects are public goods, and we now have the technology to provide them in a public manner. Go build something.
> It also seems he hadn't completely realized that a graph is merely a collection of points, not a nice line-like object. This last is more explicit in non-continuous functions, but you don't usually see those in high school.

Well, I find whole thing rather controversial, so to say. Depends on what do one mean by "collection" and by "point", eg. if we take point literally: (x, y) \in RxR, then we have to assume that "collection" is uncountable (which seems counterintuitive, esp. from the school student's pov). OTOH, one could treat "point" as representation of that point, eg. pencil mark, so that point is no longer single element, but rather an uncountable subset containing the point of interest, along with its neighbourhood => our "collection" becomes countable, so we could think about it as bunch of indexed points (much more intuitive, isn't it?), shifting our attention towards mapping's representation from the mapping itself.

tl;dr Treating graph as a collection of points is no more correct/better, compared to treating it as a continous line. Different problems require different approaches and different "angles" of view. Barely an insight from the author - the most of the mathematics is about abstractions and pattern matching.
President Obama's New 'College Scorecard' Is a Torrent of Data
Another important thing to keep in mind is that as yields go up stocks also go through a repricing, not just bonds. The interest rate is the measuring tape for all investments, if you can get a safe high return in bonds you don't go into stocks. If dividend yields are lower than bond yields you don't buy dividend stocks that are subject to other risks...

EDIT: And while we're talking about this it helps to recall that there's a continuum that goes beyond 100% stocks. If you're so sure interest rates are going up and stocks are going up then you can borrow money at today's rates and invest it in stocks. I.e. use leverage. If you're right your returns will be much higher...
I'm confused. I never stated that a users face should be used as a password. I was suggesting that their face (or other bio-info) be their username. Am I missing something?
You started learning Go a month ago and, as a total beginner, you've written 1,000 lines of code per day in it? (20000 / (4 weeks * 5 days)). 125 lines per hour! This is a somewhat unbelievable figure.

I'm also skeptical about coming to decisions like this:

> And it's good enough in enough areas for me to set Go as the standard, de facto language at my company, unless there's a damn good reason to use another language.

...based on a single, one-month, one-man project. That's like deciding to only use a hammer to build everything from now on just because the hammer worked so great with a birdhouse.
Yes, silent TCO. Isn't that what most people mean about TCO when applied to recursion?
Link to actual site: https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/

Github repo: https://github.com/18F/college-choice

18F digital services site: https://18f.gsa.gov/
This is such weird atomized view of a human life. Dare I say autistic. "Knowledge" and skills is not really the fucking point. You are built to serve here as part of a generation.