skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How is this different from practically every kind of ID card? Don't they all usually have

1. Your name

2. Your picture

3. Your date and place of birth

4. Date and place of issue

5. Validity date

6. Some sort of number or alphanumeric code unique to your card

7. Anti-forgery measures like holograms etc.

You shouldn't leave something like that dangling from your neck, of course.
Most of the models that we use everyday are "leaky abstractions". They are useful in most contexts, but they get fuzzy at their boundaries.

My favourite example is the "chicken and egg" problem. The difficulty of it is to define what a chicken is, everything is trivial afterwards. The answer, IMHO, is that "a chicken" was born from an egg put by a "non-chicken".
Targeted ad talking about targeted ads, so meta.
Presumably there have been points at which you've said "this space isn't generating enough return any more, I'm going to stop advertising there". And while few businesses are set up in a way where it's ever politic to say "I think other departments could use part of this budget more effectively than mine", ultimately that kind of choice gets made one way or another.

You're right that this is part of the normal cycle of capitalism, with all the creative destruction that entails. It's quite normal for a new, growing industry to support a whole forest of new businesses, and then as the industry matures some of those will die off. But I think there's one extraordinary thing here: the advertising industry is growing like a new market, the kind of market you see when the customer base is growing by 100% every year, like the early days of the Internet. But that growth simply isn't there; advertising is by most measures a mature market. So what's fueling all this expansion?
What do you think is not quite right about errors in tranducers? When you use them with core.async channels you can supply an optional exception handler, which is quite nice.

In terms IDEs, Cursive for IntelliJ is great, and it gives almost Java-like capabilities (with limitations inherent to more dynamic languages, of course).
Some good points have been brought in this article. Another reason to have your own startup is the fact that you are so called your "own boss".
Anything anyone is trying to sell you in this space is a con. If it were profitable, they'd be doing it themselves. Exactly the same as gambling systems.
It is the systems programming language of the Java platform, if you see the JVM as an OS.

So you need to be comfortable with it, as there will always be cases you need to jump out of the alternative language into Java.

Also, most companies will only hire to work with Java on the JVM, because they don't want to be hostage of the cool language some of the dev team guys/contractors decided to use instead.

It is very rare to see traditional Java shops to use alternative languages.

Usually the ones using them are either startups or companies like Facebook and Twitter, which aren't the typical business culture.
Hardly a satire - more probably markov chains CS101 homework ...

Sadly EF is serious site and not affiliated with the onion.
I've worked in quant funds for over a decade. The article is right that there's a lack of rigour, and it's true the number of trials is an issue. However it doesn't go into why it happens:

- People with phds often have an authority that is unwarranted. People with advanced degrees in similar sounding fields may have spent their time doing very different things. Phds are also coming from an environment where getting credit matters a lot, so you get political struggles that appear to be mathematical in nature to the uninformed manager.

- Programming skills tended to be crap in the places where I worked. Most of the researchers think of coding as a necessary evil, and their code looks like the kind of code you write when you're trying to take shortcuts. What effect does this have on overfit? Well, it's simply impossible to know how many tests are actually being performed. There's a lot of informative errors, too: something gets coded up, you see a backtest, you realise there was an error after. Now you have information that you can use to get a better result, having not incremented your number of tests.

- There's a lot of pressure to come up with something new. Pretty hard when there's loads of people attempting the same. The most natural way to try to make something "new" is to take something old, add a twist to it, and see how it goes. Of course when you add a twist, there's more parameters to fit. And because it's supposed to be complex, you can get away with an elaborate fitting mechanism. Often something that hides the fact you're doing more tests.

- Backtest fetish: it's natural to think about how a system would have done in the past. But unfortunately we all know about the past. Anyone coming up with a strategy is going to know volatility spiked in 2008, so he'll avoid anything that would have lost money then, or worse, just restrict the parameters so they are in a safe zone. Basically, there's a bunch of tests that aren't done, but should have been counted anyway.

- How to fix this: well, there's no magic bullet. You should start by being wary of adding parameters. If you add one, it should work with a number of reaction functions. If it works with a step func, does it work with an s-shape or a ramp? Does it work when the parameters are perturbed? Does it work when the input data itself is perturbed? If you've built a model, does it work on simulated data? Something I rarely see is when someone says "model is an ARMA(2,2)" that they've generated an ARMA22 with the same parameters.
I really like Hawaiʻi. It's expensive though. Like more than Manhattan expensive. But you can't beat clean air, clean water, mild temperatures, all kinds of water sports, beautiful nature, lack of trash everywhere (unlike many Asian tropical destinations). And if you want to stay away from the tourists, there's a bunch of islands to choose from.
It depends a great deal on whether it's possible to unlock the bootloader. Unfortunately, many of these cheap phones are loaded with the carrier's software. They don't want you to uninstall it, so they don't let you unlock the bootloader, which would enable you to modify the system partition on the device. This means you can't do much with it unless someone discovers a vulnerability that grants you root access.
Chauka Cricket Scoring App
> E-mail as notifications (push) is lacking

Let me introduce you to IMAP IDLE.

> E-mail as an interface to software systems (e.g. ticket tracking systems) is lacking.

Jira, for example, has a pretty good one.

> We have essentially abandoned the federated nature of email and handed over one-sided control to a small group of companies (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, perhaps a few other) in order to effectively curb spam. The alternative would have been the end of email.

I've been running my own mail stack for 8+ years. The reason is simple: only I can mess it up. No 3rd party to lock me out from my communication, no 3rd party to decide what I can send. If it fails, it's my fault only.
And I'm still using email. I do occasionally get spam, but most of them is already dropped by blacklisting and a few intelligent rule; the rest is catched by dspam.

XMPP is overcomplicated, solving nothing IRC can't solve already ( imho, of course ); that is why it's failing.

What we need for the more open source approach is people to value their communication and not to trust 3rd party because the look/act cool.

> Hopefully, at some point, the IM features of Slack, Twitter, Google Hangouts, iMessage, HipChat, Yammer, Skype, Whatsapp and friends are going to converge enough that an open source application can emerge and define a basic set of features through domination, in much the same way Wordpress ate the blogging world, and that can then lay the foundation for interoperability.

They won't. WordPress was open from the start and the current trends are locking-in APIs, not open standards. There is no profit in openness.
A web deployment tool – Walle
"A very large number of different human and non-human individuals are struggling inside us for control"

Interesting article, but I think it should be careful with exaggerations like this, "a large number of humans" is something entirely different than "possibly one if you had a born or unborn twin"
Are they wrong? If I were advertising Batman I'd expect maybe 2x as many people on a programming site want to see it as on a random internet site. And the marketing budgets for these films are so massive that any opportunity like that is well worth spending on.
Did you actually need a welder before you watched that show? Were you actively looking at different welders and weighing up their features vs. costs?

If so, had you considered the possibilities of hiring a welder for those seldom/rare occasions you need one? Or just paying someone to do the occasional bit of welding you might need done? (I am assuming, maybe incorrectly, that since you don't already own a welder, you are not someone who actually has high demand for welding at present. Perhaps you're planning some future activities that imply "lots of welding".)

If you were not actively Welder Shopping, then their advertising worked, didn't it?
It's not a proven thing that humanity would excel if people co-operated instead of competed. So what we have instead is this hybrid: groups of people co-operating in competing with other groups, think team sports, the various tech challenges, companies competing for market share and so on.

The only places in which people are really competing directly with each other are in the labor market (which drives the price of labor down) and in professional sports or other one-on-one contests.

Almost everywhere else we co-operate before we compete.

So far this model is a bit like democracy, it may not be optimal but it seems to be the best we have. If you can improve on that model you'll go places but you're going to be ironically in competition with everybody else!
Yep, somewhere at Xerox PARC in the early 80's

coll := ((1 to: 100) select: [:x| ( x * x ) > 3]) collect: [:x | (x * 2)].
Speaking of McDonald's, I really learned to appreciate them and if anyone starts whining to me again about "americanization of everything" I'll tell them to go spend a month in southern China. As a westerner, unless you're particularly fond of sweet food and sea food, you'll likely quickly appreciate that there is always a McDonald's, KFC and Starbucks nearby. Being able to buy safe food that you know you'll like is godsend when trying to ease into another culture's cousine.
Did you intend to answer to my comment? I never used the word "modern" :)
How to Best Approach a Mobile App Redesign
Visualising Markov Chains with NetworkX
> No species are unitary individuals.

Well,... excepting unicellular ones, no? ;)
My favourite hashtag this year is #NationalOffendACollegeStudentDay
I don't know if it brings anything new on the table. Also, I am not convinced that Ocaml is state-of-the-art in term of development productivity, relase-management, debugging, etc. Anything any non-trivial project could want. Language features is not the only thing we need.

Yes, the OCaml tooling has really improved recently, and the OCaml workflow has been more and more smoother. Still. I wont recommend it for a business.

So, if the original author read this, could you answer these questions about how do you ship products with Ocaml:

- How do you do Quality Assurance ? (anything from unit-testing, integration testing, functional testing, etc. I guess you have to do it a lot to check that Gmail didn't break its integration). Testing in isolation has its share of challenges in Ocaml.

- How do you manage your builds and releases ? Private Opam repositories ? Directly shipped to Google ? Do you have beta/staging channels ?

- And last but not least, what have been the pain points so far and have you been able to fix them or do you just work with it ? (it happens with any tech stack, but it's good to know what the trade-off are)

I am very curious how this could work at "entreprise-scale" and I would be glad to have some real world examples of ocaml in production.
I find it entertaining that you simultaneously critique the lack of rigor and also complain about economists making the math rigorous.

The point of proofs, simulations, and the like, is to make sure that your model is at least internally consistent and your assumptions actually yield the results you think. A lot of times models specified with vague verbiage don't even do that.
> IME macros have major maintainability issues in a multi-person codebase.

I have heard this a bunch, and I believe it, but I've never personally had an opportunity to use a language that supports macros for a multi-person codebase. I'd be interested to learn what are some of the pitfalls you've seen, if you don't mind sharing.
Well... depends on who you ask. I, personally, was more in the "about time!" camp. But I have met several programmers who didn't think they'd need those "newfangled features" at first. Especially in the "early days" of Java 8... And sometimes I still meet people like that. So that scentence was targeting those developers that are still stuck with Java 5 or 6 or 7 and have never tried Java 8.

Also, I was once co-teaching a C# workshop where we showed people how to work with LINQ and extension methods (long, long time ago ;) ). Some participants asked us if there was a way to configure the compiler to forbid those features for their team.

Not everybody likes "modern" features, I guess ;)
Please give links to those even cheaper phones.
I assume there is resistance against it because it wasn't mandatory to have one before (in my country carrying an ID became mandatory in 2005 and there was quite some resistance). Furthermore there is some privacy/security risk because these cards seem to have a (RFID/NFC or similar) chip on it.
Tried to play my favourite game of "find the license" but couldn't. Anyone else found it?
They're dismantling Google Plus. I know that's not the root cause for all the changes, but I think it's the major one and will result in significant upheaval until it's complete. I suspect that in a year or two, things will be a lot more settled and stable.
How much does it cost?
So where's the data from?
If your business is dependent on Facebook you need a plan for if all that traffic goes to 0. It's happened to the news media, it's happened to games on Facebook, it will happen again.

Like the scorpion, it is in its nature.
That's exactly what upvote button is for.
It makes sense for an industry to grow if the consumer base is growing. E.g. maybe all these home-cleaning startups make sense because a whole lot more people are now getting their homes professionally cleaned than were a few years ago.

But how can advertising "consumption" increase in the same way? Either people buy more stuff (unlikely, because people already spend all of their money on stuff), or advertisers spend a bigger proportion of their revenue on advertising (which also seems unlikely, because their business models haven't changed). It seems more likely that most successful advertising companies are making their money by cannibalizing the rest of the industry. In which case, why is the industry growing?
The most popular curl download – by a malware
Scheduling Delay is different from API response time.
The Way a Sovereign Currency Works [video]
Why do we still think that they were built with chisel and hammer when we know is impossible with these tools to cut the stones from king chamber to laser precision or cut stones to make a perfectly symmetric pharaoh statue?
Can someone get one to me in Australia? (Happy to pay)
I think parent's point is that, precisely, it does work, when things are intelligently targeted, rather than unintentionally weird and annoying.
We're mostly saying the same thing. There is too much money flowing into startups, causing them to spend it less efficiently than they should. Part of that spend is in buying ads (increasing demand), and being willing to pay higher prices than they would if they had to be a little tighter with their capital.

But anyways, all I was trying to explain was why I think there is a lot of negativity towards ads here- because HN'ers are sick of being outspent on ads, and they're being outspent in a (perceived) unfair way.
I've always had some sort of mistrust of Java (neo-Cobol ohnoes!) but I'm liking it more and more. Mostly I've come around to the fact that static typing isn't as bad as my young self thought (and can in fact be quite cool). The verbosity and "enterprisy" and committee oriented feel are still a bit off putting but I've made a commitment to try some Java on a couple of weekends. Did a bit of research and there's actually nice looking lean web-stuff, too (Spark Framework, Ratpack).
Played with the J8 features back when it was released and they are pretty cool.

Cliffnotes: I think I have discriminated against Java mostly on a "religious" basis. I think it's a great time for people like me to give it another shot (especially if you have grown accustomed to functional ideas form other languages in the meantime).

The repo is an excellent resource, bookmarked.
Is Israel Venting Its Fury for France’s Recognition of Palestine State?
Ryan Bigg Resigns from Open Source Work
There's oversupply if more inventory is available than can be used effectively. If you accept the idea that there could be an oversupply of e.g. lumber then it doesn't seem too much of a stretch to say the same could be true of advertising space.
People even complain about complaining in the New York Times.
possible home automation projects:
- ultra cheap smart wifi motion sensor (using the camera) or vibration sensor (i.e. stick it to a window and u can use the accelerometer to detect break ins).

- car GPS tracker (its actually smaller than dedicated ones)
It seems to me that difficulty is not so much defining what a chicken is, but what a chicken egg is - is it an egg laid by a chicken, or an egg a chicken hatches from?
Vague statements, low information density. Dislike
Show HN: Incredibox
https://github.com/askucher/nixar/blob/master/package.json#L... seems to be MIT
Show HN: Pay at any NFC terminal, using a Blockchain based decentralised network
I guess it's not proven, though it seems intuitively obvious (which, I admit, is often the sign of pitfalls) ;). I think what hit me during that talk wasn't glorification of competition per se, it was promoting ruthless competition. In the end, team sports and tech challenges are healthy as long as everyone remembers it's just a game and doesn't treat it too seriously. It works in business too, but there people often forget - sometimes because of greed, and sometimes because money is like hit points - losing them hurts; lose enough and you die.

Also interesting note: from my experience, most tech companies aren't really competitive. The market is big enough that most successful companies either compete superficially or sometimes outright cooperate, even when working in the same market.
I've been on the advertiser end (of Facebook and Google ads) and it didn't work. At all. I guess this is what you mean with 'being brutal on inexperienced advertisers', and I want to believe you.

Most of the time, I've been at the receiving end of advertising as a publisher (web/mobile). And I'm looking at the money stream from a different angle. What I hope (and fear the opposite of) is that for all the money I make with advertising (plus Google's share) there's actually more money earned (profit) by the advertisers. Because only then the system as a whole is sustainable as it is now.
OK, what then is Java < 8?)

The point was that if one has a proper old-school computer science (to realize the crucial importance of first class procedures and the power of uniformity 20 years ago) all these modern features are coming for free, to which the code above is an illustration.

But who cares. There is a whole industry which praised Java for almost two decades even without these "modern features".

Any PL student of a decent school, if he is not a hypocrite, would tell you that Java is the worst thing that happened to CS since MS DOS, but who cares about PL theory or even CS? Availability bias and Cargo Cult is enough.
Where is aysnc await?
Strange comparison. The iPhone is 8 years old.

But it wasn't really top notch back in the days either. I had a Droid/Milestone and the iPhone just looked and felt like some plastic garbage in comparison to it. It took the Apple til the iPhone 4 it became a real gem and now it seems that they're going back.
Pilots lament their passing in the cockpit. Plenty of readings and buttons that were available instantly are now only available after the perusal of menus used to multiplex a single display or button across many readings or actuators.
Advertisers Looking for a Niche in Virtual Reality
Didn't Rafaello and Michelangelo use those tools to work with rock?
And this is why I treat people who complain about complaining with skepticism. It's a pretty good question to ask why there are no tampons in men's rooms. I often ask myself why there are no baby changing tables in men's rooms. Anyone who has ever needed either and was the "wrong gender" by social convention to be afforded that convenience knows it's kinda not a small problem.
No, just less common. Humans tend to get used to even terrible things if they happen frequently enough.
Most of the controversy is because they've never had a mandatory identification number before, and there's always going to be fear and resistance against introducing that kind of thing. I think Japan is a highly privacy-conscientious society, for instance it's still very cash-based.

The less populistic and more informed resistance is, as I see it, based on the fact that the My Number is designed to be a "secret" number you're only supposed to share with the authorities (as in, high risk of identity theft if the number is leaked) similar to the US SSN. But in order to try to increase popularity (and adoption), they're trying moves such as adding a grocery tax-refund scheme, which necessitates showing the ID card with the number prominently printed to minimum wage cashiers, etc. They've tried to placate fears with comments such as "but it's illegal for the cashiers to look at the number" and "you can have a new number issued 3 times!".

I'm from another country with a personal ID number. I find it very handy. But there it's not assumed to be secret (even some online shopping sites will accept it as entry to auto-populate your address from the population register), so there's some extra e.g. ID checks when you use it, lowering the risk of identity theft.
A bird's eye view on API development
Sorry to be pedantic - but every model is, by definition, an approximation of reality. Everything we experience is a blurry rendition of the inconceivable volume of information dancing around us.
Show HN: A React.js yearly calendar component
Lob (YC S13) Is Hiring Full Stack Engineers
This is true. I probably waste more time thinking about Bash than is useful
It's called an eco-system for a reason, the parallels are many and the differences few.
No, his argument is that he won't buy the same kitchen sink faucet, or any other kitchen sink faucet for that matter, anytime soon yet gets them advertised for month. This should also hold true for those people that "do occasionally buy things because of advertising, particularly targeted advertising".