skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Absolutely! And just follow that to logical conclusions, to me it seems to answer the question of why we don't have it, right?

On the web, "|" (pipe) means integration with other services, and it comes with all the associated trials and tribulations. To make web pipes work, just to even get started, you first have to solve authentication and data format/transfer standards. Those things are a big pain, its not surprising that most services attempt to provide the service directly.

Unix pipes were designed for builders, technical people who understand the structure of the data they're piping around. Posix commands come in a minimum standardized set that work well together, and while there are some commands here and there to pipe structured and/or binary data, the core set and what most people use pipes on and love pipes for is plain text.

The internet just doesn't have the same foundation or purpose or user base, its usage is not centered around technical people building pipelines, so its not surprising that web services by and large haven't flocked to meet a unix analogy -- its technically much harder to do than writing unix, and its not even clear its even close to a useful thing to do, for most people.
HN seems to be the official support channel for Google.
Interesting. I'm the opposite. I was sorta curious, so I started reading Flash Boys. It became immediately obvious that A: the author is fucking clueless, and B: I didn't know enough about how this system worked. The book called "Dark Pools" was a bit better (mainly as a light history of electronic trading). "Flash Boys: Not So Fast" was really fun, mainly because it systematically trashes the author of Flash Boys.

It was interesting enough that I've picked up a few books on market microstructure, that really get into the details. It's fascinating, not just technically, but from a standpoint of looking at humans. It's odd to see how such strange systems persisted for so long (like Patrick mentions in this post, the crazy 1/8th spreads that were gamed). Or in "Dark Pools", they discuss how some of these traders would call up Nasdaq wondering why a certain trade did or didn't work how it did. And they'd find out all sorts of strange rules. Which makes me wonder, wtf? Are Nasdaq's rules hidden? Or were people doing this as a living just too lazy to read the specs? [1] I can only guess how much easy money there was to be made 20 years ago.

I'm so looking forward to Stockfighter, enough that I started looking at FIX and OUCH (OUCH looks far faster since there's ~no silly parsing - just copy into a struct) just in case that's what they offered. It's too late for me to actually work in finance (far smarter people with more experience in math and compsci), but playing the game is still an option. (I've actually been thinking of how we might run some fake exchanges, federated, as a game.)

Anyways, I guess to each his own. But I'm guessing I'm not the only one that will find this scenario intriguing.

1: Even basic stuff, like market orders, are weird. Who the hell would ever submit an order that's literally saying "Sell at any price, including $0"? (Well I suppose now it's "current price minus circuit breaker limits".) Or "buy at any price up to $MAX"? Sure, most of the time it works out fine, but if you can't be bothered to come up with a limit, perhaps you shouldn't be buying or selling?
Best option is perltidy https://metacpan.org/pod/distribution/Perl-Tidy/bin/perltidy
Is it embedded Fortran or a Fortan cross complier for the target on the space craft.
That's an overly optimistic appraisal of the hiring process for tech-at least in 2015.
Yeah, I'm assuming the interviewers either tell you how many cycles each instruction takes, or expect you to ask them. I had to tinker a bit to figure out which instructions cost a cycle and which didn't. Would certainly be much harder under pressure and without a cycle accurate simulator.
> Also, the deterrent effect of prison is more dependent on certainty of punishment, rather than severity of punishment.

Good point. I suspect its even more based on the perceived marginal increase in likelihood of punishment if an act which is intended to be deterred is committed vs. if it is not. Certainty of punishment is one factor that weighs in that, but certainty of nonpunishment of the act is not committed is also a factor.
Didn't read the article but I wanted to share this quote I read once:

"Mathematics is a language where truth rhymes".
I'm sure that's one consideration, but there are a lot of other compelling reasons. It's fun, it's relatively accessible, it's easy to scale difficulty and it's easy to add competition. Performance is directly quantifiable along multiple axes and they can release multiplayer scenarios in the future.

I can't think of many options with all of these properties that also require the particular technical skills they're looking for. It feels like doing a market simulation reasonably well is actually easier than their other track (a security CTF).

One particularly nice aspect is how many skills an exchange simulator can test. You have low-level programming and optimization, interesting algorithmic problems and high-level data analysis. That's applicable to a lot of jobs outside of finance. As a game, it's surprisingly open-ended.

Personally, I'm glad they chose this. I actually wrote a market-making bot for a mock exchange as part of an internship. It was fun and a great learning experience and not just for finance. I'm glad somebody is bringing this experience to the public at large.
Instead of complaining, feel free to propose a better alternative. The HL7 standards development process is very open.

However usually the complaints about health IT complexity come from people with a lack of domain knowledge. The industry is irreducibly complex. Attempts to drastically simplify the IT systems and standards are doomed to failure since they lose the ability to cope with many common real world situations.
Yeah, I say that: "a trivial 5 line program that just mallocs can use TB of memory".
I don't follow your first point. For most web things (where there's zero marginal cost) profitability has nothing to do with scaling.
Because it's really convenient to be able to make a note on your phone or tablet, then access it and make additional post-meeting notes shortly thereafter, on a laptop, all in the same interface (so you have the same features, or at least a set of common features).

That's just one, assuming you never want formatting, tables, pictures, etc.
Almost every fun project I've worked on required me to learn something new. Heck, the last level of the Stripe CTF3 required me to learn how to fake a distributed fault tolerant SQL database!
Consider the fasta benchmark.

It would be completely disingenuous to suggest that Haskell is on top for any reason other than it doing a different thing to the other benchmarks. Haskell is just not that fast. So, in a sense, it cheats.

Of course, I copied these techniques in my Rust implementation. So, if Haskell cheated, I cheated. The same can be said for almost all other benchmarks - but not normally quite to this extent.

But it's not cheating in a literal sense, since (AFAIK) the Haskell program has been accepted on the basis that it follows the rules. So it doesn't cheat in that it follows the rules, but it cheats in that it should be breaking the rules.

I can be more specific if needed.
That's true on the one hand. On the other hand, Athena wants a significant chunk of your profits to connect to their API. At least HL7v2 interface were one-time, scale everywhere from a cost model.
Ok so where's the Job listing would be interested how good a match it would be for me :-)
Maybe there's a case for creating a tax credit to release things like this or donate them somewhere like the Library of Congress.
That's not something that developers would stand for. As a developer, I want to know that a permission was denied, so I can take action. If a permission I asked for was denied, it's quite possible my app won't run correctly. And I don't want to deal with idiots leaving crappy reviews because they decided to deny permission.
Another thing to break or to lose, and to charge, and it adds to the cost. A $200 chromebook blows away a $600 ipad+keyboard combo for majority of education purposes. Google also has much better deployment & operations for devices & apps.

Source: I know lots of people who deploy and manage these in schools.
I don't think quantitative finance is what he means though. It's a small, selective sector which is well-known and at least a bit glamorous. There's certainly money there, but far more hopeful candidates than positions.
Apple 'Broadcast OTT' Will Raise Bar for CDN
aww, that's a nice blast from the past.
This read to me like Stockholm Syndrome more than anything. I've spent time in a similar environment, and there is a unique bond you form amongst the people around you. But I think the author takes it a little too far when he starts projecting his outside experience onto his fellow inmates, and all but bestowing them with the entrepreneurial instincts of Marc Andreessen.

Yes prison sucks, with prisoners becoming better prisoners. But there are a lot of genuinely bad people in prison that belong there, and not on the outside starting companies and exploring there entrepreneurial lust.

This is why it is the criminal justice system, not prisons, that is at crisis point. Instead of decarceration the author pleads, we need to focus attention on making sure that less people end up inside in the first place.
Rob in that comic clearly hasn't used Unix long enough to know about the Arnold mnemonic[1].

[1] http://i.imgur.com/Vf0An8J.png
I respect your opinion on this, but you might enjoy the tech tree which I keep describing as "low-level programming", which is what Erin and Thomas have been killing themselves over for the last several weeks. I haven't written about it much because, frankly, that's not my bag just like finance isn't your bag. (Granted, finance isn't my bag either, but I find myself warming to it after scratch-coding a stock exchange.)

Thomas describes that tech tree as "MicroCorruption the way we would have done it if we had dialed it to 11."

Sneak peak: https://www.evernote.com/l/AaedYkVFsB1Oa4eDakZay59-YF7Lu0mcJ...

(I don't have a good screenshot of it at present because they're currently doing UI surgery on the React 0.14 upgrade.)
In what environment? The environment makes a huge difference. A large project at a startup will have totally different characteristics then a large defense/government project.
If TI decides to leave the market, there's nothing to be done. You can't force TI to come back if they don't want to.
at my first job (after high shcool) I was told to get a FORTRAN IV book out of the company and learn it.
Essentially we have no idea what goes on inside that phone and inside the operators. It's all closed source hardware and software/firmware, and the companiea are pretty much unaccountable to us and could put all kinds of secrets in there. This is why Stallman was actually right all along. When you don't have open, public computer systems, you end up beholden to these huge entities.
This Guy Turned the Front of His House into a Massive Video Game for Halloween
Nope, because emacsclient ends up opening them all in the same process (that's the beauty/entire point): Fork off an emacs in the background:

emacs --daemon

Then run emacsclient to connect to it (open a new buffer in the daemon and switch to it):

emacsclient -nw some_file

When you "quit" (with C-x C-c), it really just quits that client, but the main emacs is left running.

This has a number of benefits: 1) no locks like you mention, 2) access to all open buffers (even unsaved) from every emacsclient that's currently running (since they're really all just opening buffers in a single instance), 3) blazing startup speed (emacs is already running, you're just connecting to it and splatting a new buffer to the terminal).
Role of prisons is threefold: incapacitation, rehabilitation and punishment. As they're run today, they're largely only able to accomplish the third.

It's almost reasonable to consider just abandoning prisons and simply return to corporal and capital punishment.
Facebook Is Making Enforcement Changes to Its “Real Names” Policy
Fantastic read, and a great introduction to the subject matter. Kudos!

I'm also really enjoying the position taken on OSS here:

> I’d personally be very disappointed in an engineer who, in 2015, defaulted
> to scratchbuilding their own clients for every API they consumed.
> Starfighter loves OSS and the OSS culture. Go nuts.

Perfect.
In a Rare Move, Apple Discounts the Apple Watch with New iPhone Purchases
I'm totally on board with FHIR. I just don't think we're there yet. I've talked with 3 of the Argonaut sites and real-life, production ready FHIR capabilities are lacking. There aren't many useful provider-facing applications that you can built with just GET requests. Most applications require real-time pushing and pulling of data. As sad as it is, until FHIR as implemented (not theoretically) that way, we'll still be plugging HL7v2 together. I, as an HL7v2 slinger myself, hope that goes away soon.
In this context...

"specialized" = Do one thing

"flexible" = and do it well.

That said, the key ingredient of the Unix philosophy that is missing isn't specialised, flexible tools, it's composability of those tools. Imagine if you couldn't pipe grep output to another program, wouldn't it be a lot less useful? I'd say so.

There are ways we can get around this, but they would require a fair amount of development time. To give you one example, consider how the JACK audio server allows programs to share audio streams. Similar data streaming arrangements could be made for other types of data.
> "open sourced" was a C header file [...]

Indeed. In my opinion too little to call it a day, but I haven't worked on
implementing file handling, so I may be wrong here.

> An implementation could be considered one way of providing a format/protocol specification.

Not quite. Look at OpenVPN, which has hilarious situation: code is open, but
protocol is effectively closed. You can't practically derive the protocol from
OpenVPN's source (yes, I tried that). Unless you can put weeks of effort, of
course.
Apple isn't forcing anything on OEMs. Google is, similar to how Microsoft was forcing things on PC OEMs back in the day.
He was driving, the autopilot stepped in to stop the crash only.
There are quite a few things in the fourth category, and I'd like to say, for instance: Beeminder. Specialized, but there is a lot going on. Honestly, I like it. I could just keep a text file if I didn't want those features, and I honestly can't think of any features I would subtract. Which raises the larger question: are the advocating flexible but simple tools, straightforward but domain specific tools, or are they just advocating against building something that is a complete mess and a waste of time?

It's important to remember that while quite involved and extremely domain specific, Beeminder has an API. He seems to care a lot about that, and I have no idea if his real point is "make things that don't suck and avoid digital vertical integration".
> How many members of the EPA & FDA are former employees of Arcadia and Bioceres

This line of thinking is so odd to me. Shouldn't we want people in regulatory bodies to have an insider's understanding of an industry?
Weird; I guess I'm in the outlying group then.
Who is allowed to call themselves a data scientist?
I think the primary issue here is, the more comfortable you are with technology, the harder it is to see the forrest (the goal) for the trees (the discrete tasks involved to get you there).
Ah, the GPU hype. Here's something the GPU vendors don't tell you: a huge part of scientific computing doesn't get any speedup at all from GPUs. A good example is fluid dynamics research, or essentially anything that boils down to solving PDEs or doing huge sparse linear algebra problems.

Even for the fields where it makes sense, like molecular dynamics, it's not obvious that you get more performance per dollar than with CPUs. Shameless self-plug: http://asmunder.github.io/2015/04/Inaugural-post:-on-the-ben...
Any topic you possibly want to throw an engineer at, an investment bank is already throwing a team of engineers at.

This comment makes me feel that I must live in an alternate universe of software engineering. I've spent 99% of my career working on things that would be of no interest to an investment bank: GUIs, graphics, video, audio, GPU rendering, mobile platforms, CAD, content creation tools...

(It's not the first time I've had this feeling. At one point years ago, when I had been doing professional programming for maybe 3 years, a friend and colleague asked me a question about databases. I had to confess that I had never worked on software that interfaced with one; that all my work exclusively dealt with local files and network streams. He almost wouldn't believe it.)
I know all Dutch timetable data for any public transport is available publicly. Even real-time streaming of bus & train positions for some public transport companies.
I didn't know half of this, thanks a lot.
Everyone wants to be the walled garden https://xkcd.com/927/
> Or were people doing this as a living just too lazy to read the specs?

Pretty much every domain I've worked in has stunned me with the number of people who do things for a living without reading the specs (often literally, or understanding the basics in areas where there aren't literal specs.) Both conscious cargo culting (where people know they are doing what they've learned to do from others without understanding the basics, and know what they don't know) and false knowledge (where people do things based on an understanding of the underlying process that is completely wrong, and so don't know what they don't know) are distressingly common.

And just to be clear, I don't hold myself to be superior in anyway. I avoid conscious cargo culting except when there is no practical choice; but I've certainly ran into places where I discovered I had been operating for a long time on false knowledge when good sources existed to correct that, but I didn't know that I had a gap that needed correcting.
It sounds like what he's actually arguing for is cohesion, not just simplicity. And if that's the case, I'm with him.

Cohesion is achieved when the degree of complexity is determined by both domain and audience, so Photoshop's relative complexity and Pixelmator's relative simplicity are both fine - in each case the domain is satisfactorily handled for the needs of the respective audience. They're both cohesive tools. Now if Photoshop decided to throw in a chat client (hello gmail), we'd be having a different conversation.

However, if the author is actually advocating breaking up Photoshop into a thousand pluggable little tools that everyone would have to piecemeal assemble into some sort of shared "workspace," that's where we (and most non-geeks) part company.
I am a Scala developer but I agree with your points. The only thing that just simply drives me mad in Rust is mandatory semicolons. Once you are used to be able to omit them then it gets really annoying to go back using them.
Python Anywhere has requests and lots of other libraries: https://www.pythonanywhere.com/batteries_included/
We've been hacking on something in this space for the past few months with StackHut - https://www.stackhut.com. We have a demo in a blog post at http://blog.stackhut.com/phantomjs-cloud/ showing headless web rendering-as-a-service.

We've tried to make it as simple as possible to get your code into the cloud. You write your classes and they're deployed as entrypoints into a lambda-esque service that you can call over JSON-RPC - making it trivial to write and deploy a backend.

As described in the blog, the great thing we think it has over tools like lambda is that you can describe your system declaratively, specifying any dependencies you may need, using a simple YAML file and it takes care of packaging your code. You can run this locally or deploy it to our hosted platform where it scales as needed.

Currently support JS and Python atm, and open-source at https://www.github.com/StackHut. We're super early but would love to hear your thoughts.
I agree 1000% that the best way to learn something is to start with a problem that interests you, and dive into it. The opposite way, where you start with a technology that sounds interesting and new, and learn it for the sake of knowing it never worked for me.
It's not. As you said, Apple just doesn't produce cheap laptops. If you compare like for like, the PC laptops cost about the same as the Apple ones.
I run a mid-sized (5-10 employees) trading desk for an automated market-maker. My first thought upon reading about this game, not knowing what Starfighter is, was "holy shit, I'd love to hire someone who excelled at this or even attempted it."

I've worked with tons of extremely bright, well credentialed people who get lost in the weeds of analysis paralysis or trying to build the world's most complex model. Many fail. The best hires I've made internalize the nuts & bolts quickly, work hard to try many ideas, and are "smart enough." They're probably just as smart as the other guys actually but use intelligence as a tool rather than an end unto to itself.
> Even basic stuff, like market orders, are weird. Who the hell would ever submit an order that's literally saying "Sell at any price, including $0"? (Well I suppose now it's "current price minus circuit breaker limits".) Or "buy at any price up to $MAX"?

In MMORPG games, those kinds of orders on the auction houses are awesome because they mean someone wasn't paying attention. Profit for the person who finds them! :)
"There might some really good devs who would do it just for the challenge"

There might. There was that ISEE-3 Reboot Project last year to reconnect to the International Sun-Earth Explorer 3 probe.

Were I a manager, my concern would be to have the in-house competence to be able to review those fixes. If it costs less to hire someone to make the fixes than to be able to review external contributions for the fixes, and/or if there's less uncertainty in being able to get a result in the right time frame, then I know which way I would go.

Failure to connect to ISEE-3 doesn't have the negative risk impact of making a mistake with Voyager.

Anyway, in this case it's more than just the code. The new position requires "combing through secondary documents and correspondence", and presumably that means access to the primary literature, in an archive with unscanned materials. And while some retired engineers may have no problems with others 'picking their brains directly', it would be better to coordinate those questions instead of having a dozen different people ask the same questions.
You'll be doing it in front of the other 99% of traffic who all have constantly in use cameras, which could be sent to relevant law enforcement with a voice command.
The stock market is incredibly liquid: for any stock listed on an exchange, you can buy almost any quantity and sell almost any quantity, at any time the market is in session.

I think that sentence would make most professional equities traders chuckle. I mean, it's true-ish for some of the big etfs and some of the highest volume individual companies, but there are 8k+ listed symbols in the US and you can't just go buying and selling "almost any quantity" of most of them. Nobody really trades that way. Trading in size typically involves chopping a large order into smaller orders that get managed by a trader or really a trader's execution algorithm.
By "OP" you mean the author of the article then, no, the article is not about web apps.
Thanks for mentioning! Working on getting an OS X packaged app out this weekend along with that Linux/Bash-as-a-service up!
Let's just say that Furry Twitter is having lots of fun with this news story.