skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Erlang (and by association Elixir) tooling has a nice progressive approach to managing state.

Agent -> ets -> dets -> mnesia -> riak (or sql tooling etc.)

(Agent http://elixir-lang.org/docs/v1.1/elixir/Agent.html is just a state-holding process. Erlang folks can probably write one of these in their sleep, Elixir added a bit of wrapping-paper around it.)

If you're writing an app, I think it's best to be storage-agnostic from the get-go. You shouldn't be building up queries in your core app code- push it to the edge of your code, because otherwise it's not separating concerns. All your app (business logic) code should delegate to some wrapper to work out the specifics of retrieving the data; your app code should just be calling something like Modelname.specific_function_returning_specific_dataset(relevant_identifier) and let that work out the details. That way, if you ever upgrade your store, you just have to refactor those queries but your app code remains the same. On top of that, in your unit tests you can pass in a mimicking test double for your store to do a true unit test, and avoid retesting your store over and over again wastefully. (You'd still of course have an integration test to cover that, but it wouldn't be doing it on every test.)
Now, if the Navy wanted their sailors to be truly hardcore navigators and be totally immune from cyber hacking, they'd have them use an abacus for calculations rather than a calculator or computer.
MITM attack = Man-in-the-middle attack
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-in-the-middle_attack
This is great. I always thought an advanced et would want to build something like a dyson hemisphere around its star.
> Amaya, after all, didn't prevent HTML 4 or CSS 2 from having unimplementable sections.

Amaya was always in an odd place — it was a "testbed" and not a reference implementation. (Also, if you actually look at the parts HTML 4 that required anyone to do anything, you end up with things like dbaron's table (as in, a desk) implementation of it: put quotations mark at either end of the table, and whatever HTML you put on the table, it has fulfilled all the requirements of the standard.)

But yes, the underlying problem of different approaches is a large part of the reason why you want multiple implementations — the other large part is you want evidence the standard is clear enough to lead to interoperable implementations. These are the two big reasons the W3C now require evidence of two, distinct, interoperable implementations of a specification to proceed down the Recommendation track beyond Candidate Recommendation (i.e., to Proposed Recommendation)… and this is the reason why so much around the W3C takes so long, because people by and large don't want to fix ancient, obscure bugs which are often time-consuming to fix for the sake of the standard progressing.
It amazes me how few biologists / bioinformticians use an IDE.
Microservices and API Complexity – Inside and Out
Tracking blood sugar: Continuous glucose monitoring sensors
Tesla is to electric cars as Apple is to electronics
I spent a few weeks a few months ago learning R. It's not a bad language, and yes, the plotting is currently second-to-none, at least based on my limited experience with matplotlib and seaborn.

There's scant few articles on going from Python to R...and I think that has given me a lot of reason to hesitate. One of the big assets of R is Hadley Wickham...the amount and variety of work he has contributed is prodigious (not just ggplot2, but everything from data cleaning, web scraping, dev tools, time-handling a la moment.js, and books). But that's not just evidence of how generous and talented Wickham is, but how relatively little dev support there is in R. If something breaks in ggplot2 -- or any of the many libraries he's involved in, he's often the one to respond to the ticket. He's only one person. There are many talented developers in R but it's not quite a deep open-source ecosystem and community yet.

Also word-of-warning: ggplot2 (as of 2014[1]) is in maintenance mode and Wickham is focused on ggvis, which will be a web visualization library. I don't know if there has been much talk about non-Hadley-Wickham people taking over ggplot2 and expanding it...it seems more that people are content to follow him into ggvis, even though a static viz library is still very valuable.

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/ggplot2/SSxt8B8QLfo/...
You are surprised facebook is censoring content on a massive scale? Wake up sheeple! Move to a decentralized, open-source platform like diaspora* if that type of thing bothers you, do away with facebook like we dropped myspace
Very picky, but beware constantly using "set.seed" throughout your R scripts. Always using the same random number is not necessarily helpful for stats, and makes the R code look a lot trickier than it need be
What features make the XPS attractive versus say a comparable Precision?
What about archive.is?
New Sysadmin Magazine about Data Security
I have very mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it's great to see a younger and/or less-traditional audience attending symphony concerts. But I wonder what percentage of these first-timers would ever come back for a non-videogame music performance? Because—the title of this article notwithstanding—if these concerts don't do anything to cultivate an audience who actually engages with classical music (or "art music" or "western concert music", call it what you like) then videogames are not going to save the symphony. Not even close.

People in the comments rightly jumped all over the guy in the article who said these concerts were “akin to Mouton Rothschild using its wine to make and sell sangria.” But there is a point buried under all the snobbishness: video game music (and film music) are not supposed to be concert music. In fact a good film composer would probably tell you that if their score for a film is so compelling and interesting that it can be extracted out and plunked down in the concert hall as a fully-fledged work, they're doing it wrong. Film/videogame scores are (by definition) supposed to be subservient to the whole of which they are a part. Thus it's the narrative of the game or movie that drives the formal aspects of the music. This isn't to say that there can't be greatness and even genius in scores, but that it's not being used in service of producing a stand-alone concert work. Which is why even very good scores usually have long passages of music that successfully create an atmosphere for a particular scene, but taken out of that context would sounds rather boring and aimless in a concert hall. Similarly the kind of drama evoked in a concert piece where you have musical themes that are presented and then developed and transformed at length just doesn't work for film scores, where you are working in much shorter time increments (like the length of a scene). This is why even the greatest film scores (Maurice Jarre's score for Lawrence of Arabia and John Williams' score for Star Wars, for example) are known for having a few really memorable, resonant melodies and/or for the way in which they contribute to a memorable scene.

I've gone to film music concerts and enjoyed them, but I'm under no illusion that it's necessarily the most challenging or profound stuff. I'm also aware that it's partly the memories and associations I have with the movies themselves that I am enjoying when I listen to the music. In any case, it's not at all the same experience as a classical music concert. I hope that some of the people who have dipped their toes in the water listening to an orchestra perform "The Legend of Zelda" might be curious enough to go back and hear what other, far more interesting kinds of things an orchestra can do. Because if not, these concerts will be a nice windfall that can help pad an orchestra's bottom line (and god knows they could use the money). But they won't do what orchestras need most, which is to develop a real, life-long appreciation for classical music in younger audiences. Unfortunately this article presents zero statistics one way or the other on that point.
Should be extremely good over the short to medium term. The trouble with INS is that the error is unbounded, so you have to use some other technique to get a fix periodically to reset it.
How to promote mobile app: Prerelease Buzz
I know I shouldn't get excited about this, as a more prosaic explanation is far more likely, but my heart still skipped a beat when I read “stellar-light collectors”.
Yes. I moved to Iceland from Tennessee, a state with no state income tax. However, I needed a permanent address where I was sure I'd get mail, because I hadn't yet found a long-term rental in Iceland, so I did my Federal tax return using my mom's address in Arkansas, where there is a state income tax.

A couple of years later, Arkansas wanted to know why I didn't pay them any tax on my income from that year. I called someone, explained the situation, and he just had me write a letter. Problem solved.

We're conditioned to fear the IRS because audits look horrible on fictionalized TV shows. In reality, I think you're right. The IRS is just a collection of people, and if you make an honest effort, the person on the other end isn't out to ruin you.
I don't know, but I do remember reading that one characteristic issue of them is that the errors compound over time. If you're say, dropping a GPS-guided bomb, and the signal is jammed, then they'll fall back to INS for the rest of the way. The distance between signal loss and impact is pretty short, so there isn't much time for errors to compound.

If you're navigating say, a submarine however, the longer you go without a real fix, the more unreliable that INS estimate is going to be, especially if maneuvers have been undertaken.

In other words I guess, "it depends". =)
The combined income earned by anyone in the entirety of history who is the least bit related to me, adjusted for PPP, probably does not equal $800MM+.
History repeats itself, after all.
Amazingly, it worked during the day (on the ground) too!
This Bitcoin startup is changing its name and moving away from Bitcoin
Excellent comment. While the American revolution and American Civil War is well known[1], the British Civil War and the Glorious Revolution are probably not given the attention they deserve. If you look closely at history, you can see similar patterns: despotic monarchs run out of money, give more power to the nobles in return for taxation rights. Nobles use their new power to restrict the absolute powers of the monarch and then the monarch and nobles struggle. Britain was the one country where the nobles were successful in restricting the absolute power of the monarch and continued the tradition of sharing power, bringing democracy to Western Europe after a long time.

Anyway, that was completely off topic. I agree that the British Empire, while most certainly not the most moral or fair, cannot be characterized as despotic.

[1]: Perhaps I hear more about it because I currently live in the US. Not sure about how popular that part of history is in the rest of the world.
I'm only thinking about CRAN > PyPI in terms of statistical packages. CRAN is where new statistical analysis techniques / packages are initially published. If you're lucky they might get ported to Python after the fact. I didn't even mention Bioconductor, which is another beast entirely. There isn't an equivalent of Bioconductor for Python at all.

And the last time I checked, "pip install numpy" could be quite a pain, especially if you needed to compile dependencies. Rstudio makes it ridiculously easy to install R and add packages.

However - for all other types of packages, PyPI is obviously superior. The breadth of packages on PyPI is much better than CRAN.

It about choosing the right tool for the job.
I was thinking the same. I've got a couple bathrooms that need updating.
New Home Construction Fail – Hopefully This Home Isn’t Too Far North
This stuck out to me:

> Even under some very tolerant assumptions, the expected payoff from playing on, for either player, was greater than the expected payoff from accepting the repetition.

Payoff, sure. But it's well-known that the marginal utility of money is not linear, which means people tend to value money differently based on how much of it they have (poor people value a dollar more than rich people). This indirectly means some level of risk aversion is actually an optimal choice. Turning down a gamble, even if the expected payout is positive, can be rational.

This is well studied in economic theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Morgenster...
Why is that a racist term?

To be honest, I had never heard the term until recently when I heard it used on a TV show.
Historical Housing Prices Put in Perspective
Hadley is actively working on ggplot2. In fact, he just tweeted a list of improvements - https://twitter.com/hadleywickham/status/654283936755904512

https://github.com/hadley/ggplot2/blob/master/NEWS.md
PRINCE2 Agile – the long awaited savior?
Alpha 21264 (also from '96) had load store buffers that would notice the dependence violations and flush the pipeline during speculative execution. Sparc and power also had this to some extent with write buffers. I can't think of any that used a predictor though to decide whether to execute speculatively or not back then, they all just either did or stalled on the first potential violation. The patent appears novel for the time to me, thank you for digging it up and explaining.
One of the shopkeepers quoted in the article: "Shoplifting has always been an issue and as long as there’s stores, lower-income people are going to have a higher tendency to steal."

Beyond the obvious offense of profiling, the danger of relying on stereotypes is that they lead you to be suspicious of the wrong persons. According to a large CDC study[1]: "Shoplifting occurred across all sociodemographic strata. However, it was more common among those with higher education and income, suggesting that financial considerations are unlikely to be the main motivator for shoplifting in most cases. It was also more common among Native Americans and non-Hispanic whites, possibly indicating a racial/cultural dimension not previously documented."

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4104590/
FinTech Weekly Newsletter
Bitcoin Startup Funding Drops for the Second-Consecutive Quarter
50 years of Data Science [pdf]
I always thought of DC as such a multi-racial/ethnic town and that it would be much more welcoming-to-all than it is.
> > And it's really hard to beat ggplot.

> To be honest, matplotlib seems a good contender to me (http://matplotlib.org/).

They're quite different, though, and I can see why many prefer ggplot. It's a declarative, domain-specific language that implements a Tufte-inspired "grammar of graphics" (hence the gg- in the name; see section 1.3 of [1], and [2,3]) for very fast and convenient interactive plotting, whereas matplotlib is just a clone of MATLIB's procedural plotting API.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/ggplot2-Elegant-Graphics-Data-Analysis...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/The-Grammar-Graphics-Statistics-Comput...

[3] http://vita.had.co.nz/papers/layered-grammar.html
just hypothetically speaking: wouldn't a dyson array need to beam energy to the planet where those aliens live?

we should be able to pick up that high energy stream with current technology, but we'd need first to guess at which frequency it transmits to (if it's there)

edit: ok scratch that I stand corrected I was still thinking in earthling terms
Wait, I don't understand. Because this person used a term that you describe as a racist and derogatory term, you are claiming the entire taxi industry is racist? As I asked elsewhere, how is this term racist and derogatory?
Workweek almost ready to go live with the perfect solution for freelancers
The article is light on actual details and heavy on rants about the current state of products built on the web.

However there is 1 thing that mnesia got absolutely and totally right. Database schema upgrades. You can create an mnesia database and upgrade it's schema on the fly as a part of it's operation without once bringing it down or running a script. I did this[0] for a toy project I did in erlang once that I unfortunately never finished since the need for it disappeared.

[0]: https://github.com/zaphar/iterate/blob/master/src/db_migrate...
Show HN: I've built an artificially intelligent news app. Thought?
Uber Accidentally Leaks Personal Data for Hundreds of Drivers
Varnish is a good HTTP caching server, but with the rise of HTTPS and soon HTTP/2 I'm not sure it'll change since last time I heard its developers don't intend to support TLS at all.
Who do you consider to be modern? I'd like to check them out. I haven't investigated classical music in awhile, but the only artist I know of that I've heard be considered modern is Stravinsky, and his most popular pieces are about a hundred years old themselves.
Whizurl.com – new clicks tracker/rotator/shortener (free)
How to Run a Remote Web Development Team
When I read the title I wondered if they had found a star that turns off for 215 of every 250 years...
Show HN: A superquick checklist to evaluate any inventory software for Retail
There was a talk about the port last year, with slides:

https://archive.fosdem.org/2014/schedule/event/openjdk_aarch...
The History of Failed Initiatives
I'm currently using both R and Python, having previously only used Python. At first I didn't like R for general purpose data munging and web scraping. That was before I discovered a few R packages that make it a breeze. And now it's a toss up for me. If it's an interactive data product that I'm buiding I probably go with R. If I need data from an API and the supplier gives me only a Python sample script for accessing it I'll go with Python.
That was my thought too. The "pain in the ass" factor associated with supporting a non-mainstream architecture is missing from the charts, and moves the dial away from IBM. That's not to say things couldn't change, but Xeons are proven, and unless you've got a surplus of money to throw at trying a new architecture (e.g. Google), you're better off sticking with the known good unless the predicted gains are sizable.
The Saudi oil minister has essentially said as much. The quote was something like "The stone age did not end for a lack of stones, and the oil age will not end for a lack of oil."
Those cores are going to be sold to you largely on their memory bandwidth benefits for the top end of the Xeon range.

If you need memory bandwidth, you will gladly pay for them, and look seriously at IBM (something we just did).

If you don't know that you need memory bandwidth, just skip them. Also, I would suggest you check out OVH or Hetzner for a new startup -- it's (sadly) very unlikely that you will need enough servers for long enough to make buying your own a good plan.
Mass is constant across all gravitational fields (and anywhere there isn't) for any given object.

People interchangeably use lbs <-> kg but the actual equivalence is lbs <-> newton (N). The difference doesn't matter in the average person's life since we're all down here where gravity is homogeneous enough for most applications and people.
I still think it's a good city and that the vast majority of residents are good people... but yeah, there are definitely (still) racial issues beneath the surface.
Thanks...I didn't know that (though I had been paying attention to bug fixes)...but my point exactly, he's prodigious, so maybe "maintenance mode" to him is "major features every 3 months instead of 2) :).

Also worth pointing out, he's actively working on a new book for ggplot2, which, AFAICT, he's providing for free (you just have to run the build tools)

https://github.com/hadley/ggplot2-book

I think if someone were to run an analysis of Wickham's Github activity, it would produce a freakishly busy chart.
Given that R folks are porting it to the JVM, I guess performance on the R side will improve thanks to Hotspot and Graal/Truffle.

http://www.renjin.org/

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/jvmls2013vitek-201352...

Then there is PyPy as well.

I also think they should probably add Julia and Wolfram/Mathematica to these comparisons.
5 Steps to Finding a Partnership for Your Startup
DockerCon US 2016 in Seattle
I've never had a interview which was only FizzBuzz. The problems given are usually much more difficult than that.

But I've also done interviews with no coding at all.

Point being, nobody is going to hire on FizzBuzz alone, in fact I would hatch a guess that most companies don't use it as a problem anymore given its prevalence.
Cornell Tech Challenge – Productize Sarcasm Detection
Uber and Lyft are licensed livery cabs in NYC. Livery cabs are not allowed to accept street hails, but are allowed to be ordered for pick up in other ways (such as through a phone call). The only way that they would be illegal is if you believe that ordering through a phone app is more similar to street hailing than it is to ordering through a phone call, but I think that is a huge stretch.
I have a client in the US (Illinois) who calls their custom admin panels the "back room" or sometimes "back end". For example, they will say something like "We'll just create the account in the back room". We always work in English. I cannot say I have encountered "back office", but it doesn't sound too awkward. I wouldn't be surprised by an admin panel being called the "back office", although personally I usually use the term "admin panel" since it's quick and less ambiguous.
By the same argument, though, why not just use Postgres? And I write that as a fan of Erlang. Indeed: https://github.com/epgsql/epgsql
Given the number of other sites that work with Github authentication, it seems silly to me to not want to save some effort and... just sign up for Github

Disclaimer: I'm pro-Github... well, other than the fact that it's centralizing a decentralized SCM. ;)
Ronald Reagan
IBM is a enterprise behemoth. If you look at their sources of revenues, they focus a lot more on B2B with a few selected spinoffs designed to generate some public interest. Its not surprising they don't publicize a lot of things they do.
> All of the proposed charitable objectives(as opposed to Facebook's own interests) would be served by just providing free internet with a limited data cap. Customers would want more data badly, local entrepreneurs would be free to make any kind of app to serve the poor...

Great point. "Small data payloads" would become a factor in competition, too.
(I agree with your first point.)

> As I asked elsewhere, how is this term racist and derogatory?

Gypsy is a racially problematic term.

Using that term to refer to unlicensed cabs links travellers (who may or may not be Roma) to crime and dangerousness.

If you care about this kind of stuff it's probably a good idea to move to phrases like "unlicensed cabs". You get some benefit it's more useful for an international audience.
Oh heck I didnt even know that. Yes, the IBM chips implement it on top of FPU with hardware/firmware combo. Googling POWER decimal gave me a PDF with floor plan and all. Their reasoning is that, unlike scientific community, most people use FPU's while thinking in and requiring decimal properties. So why not offer them a decimal unit, eh?

Glad it might get into C++ standard.
Not if the aliens in question live in computers being run by said dyson array.
Yes, except that XML has a schema (XSD).
Toyota to eliminate gasoline cars by 2050 - betting on fuel cells!
Apple Watch-ing: why wearables and their apps are worth it
"data analysis" means differently in R and Python. In R, it's all kinds of statistical analyses. In Python, it's basic statistical analysis plus data mining stuff. There are too many statistical analyses only exist in R.
It's extremely popular: it's on pretty much every smartphone, IIRC.
Java EE 8 MVC: A detailed look at Controllers