skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>If you are stuck with a group of developers who have no interest in learning anything new and wish to use Java until they retire then Java is the only choice.

Put another way: if you're on a dev team where nobody knows Clojure/Scala, and everyone knows Java, (and, optionally, the codebase is already in Java), and your team doesn't have time for everyone to learn an entirely new language (including cleaning up the beginner's mistakes that come with that process), then Java's the better choice.

Don't get me wrong, Java grinds my gears sometimes, and I frequently wish I could use Kotlin or F# or some kind of typed Ruby in my Java-shop workplace, and I enjoy picking up the cool ideas from languages like Idris (dependent types are really cool!) in my free time. But I'm sympathetic to my coworkers in the environment where I work: 4 devs in the whole company, startup pressure to get to a break-even point so we don't go under, and a backlog longer than all of us could finish this year even if we froze it now.

Sometimes circumstances require what looks like a short-term decision in order to ensure that there's a long term to worry about later.
XMPP is all but deprecated...

Just a short English usage note: "all but" means something like "almost". Judging by the rest of your post, you probably mean "XMPP is far from deprecated" here.
Anonymous announced #OpParis against the ISIS in response to the Paris attacks
I really like Richard Dawkins explanation of this, where he has you imagine taking a photo of yourself from your are born to you reach adulthood with 1 minute intervals.

If you stack these pictures, there is no single picture you can pull out and say: "Here I transitioned from child to adult" e.g. Likewise with animals and evolution. Changes are so minute that you can speak of a transition from one species to another happening at the point of birth.

Only when you look at pictures of yourself far away from each other in the pile can you start differentiating them. Likewise with animals.
The original iPhone was $600 with a 2 year contract, this is $10 with no contract, that's the comparison.
How do you determine which is the best next point where to evaluate the model?

Simulated annealing is blind, what you do with simulated annealing you just move locally around the current point.

If you had a partial picture of the landscape of the function, how would you locate the most interesting unvisited point in the landscape?

I do have to admit that what I'm seeing here is only the application of Bayesian sampling algorithms, there are startups doing similar things for A/B testing and similar.
Qualcomm SOC abandon all hope!
> They're real, like, but not really real, you know what I mean.

You mean.. the real reality?
The reality that can't be easily explained through observation and empirical evidence? The reality that can't be perceived through our basic physical senses? The reality where causation and correlation don't mean a thing?
If you mean that reality... there's no such thing, and even if there is, there's no point in talking about it, it's way beyond our reach.

If you mean the reality in which we've done most of the division and classification work very poorly due to lack of data... I know what you mean.
My US passport lists my place of birth but not where it was issued (unless you mean "the US"). My drivers license lists my DOB but not my birthplace.
A modern file tail utility
Sharecropping is a better metaphor.

Facebook owns the audience (land), but they don't yet have the ability to fully satisfy (farm) that audience. So they direct traffic out to publishers who provide content to fulfill that demand. Like sharecropping, they split the revenue.

Of course, there's a reason that sharecropping has a bad name: all the power is held by the owner (Facebook). They can, and probably will, shift to a model of owning the content directly.

In 10 years, I wouldn't be surprised if most publishers were dead, replaced by Facebook directly paying creators. (We can already see this in television, with Netflix directly producing their own content.)
Debt Market Distortions Go Global as Nothing Makes Sense Anymore
When I was working in a startup, I remember to be constantly shown ads from the startup itself, even though it sold something I would NEVER buy.

The way these recommendation systems worked is heavily flawed at a large scale.
The answer, IMHO, is that "a chicken" was born from an egg put by a "non-chicken".

And the thing is, you could not determine when exactly the non-chicken became the chicken i.e. when it is chicken enough. You could not draw a line.
I agree with this article but I think it should be noted that advertising is much more powerful/effective today than it ever was before. Modern advertising is capable of messing with people's lives in extreme ways.

Advertising is not about selling individual products - It's about selling a lifestyle. Any media which encourages you to 'upgrade' your lifestyle should be considered advertising.

I myself have fallen victim to advertising. I used to live in a big-ish town where the cost of living was low. Advertising (in my case; the promise of a higher salary and access to a wider range of consumer goods and services) convinced me to move to a bigger city where the cost of living is ridiculously high.

So I am working harder and longer, I am able to save less money and I have a lower standard of living overall (in spite of a higher salary).

This lifestyle was advertised to me and I bought it. Much of the value I lost (in terms of quality of life) went into the pockets of advertisers (in the form of cash).
> Mostly I've come around to the fact that static typing isn't as bad as my young self thought

That's not exactly a point for Java though, considering it doesn't really have a good static type system.
Aum Shinryko drew upon Tibettan buddhist teachings.

There are plenty of buddhist terrorist attacks, and these can be found with simple web searches.

Tibetan armed struggle also happens, but because it's in China i) Chinese authority hides it ii) Chinese authority uses a too broad definition of terrorism. But there was armed resistance in 2008 in Lhassa.
At the last Belgian Julia meetup there were 2 local companies present (10+ employees) that do all their development in Julia:
http://www.tangent.works/
http://www.dynactionize.com/
I understand Blackrock has been sponsering the debugger work.
Give me a tablet this cheap and I'm ordering 10 of them, to finally hang touchscreens in every room of my home and wire them up to an LCARS interface.

(Actually, I recently had an opportunity to get some tablets for $8/piece from a bank that was getting rid of the equpiment, but unfortunately me&my friends got outbidded by some company :<.)

EDIT: any source for tablets that are less than $40 / piece and decent enough to work as wall-hanged touchscreens (doesn't look like total crap, is able to run Android and some apps while connected to Wi-FI without getting unresponsive) would be much appreciated.
Original paper was linked from article and is here [1].

Although I'm vaguely familiar with MCMC and Metropolis, it's not nearly enough to pass comment on this advance.

[1] http://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.1694v4.pdf
Yes, 24% is about right. The 4% every month growth is for mobile BROADBAND users (phone + dongles). The current base of mobile BROADBAND (speed greater than 512kbps) users is 97m. I couldn't find the monthly growth rate for (non-mobile | non-broadband) internet users so I have assumed it to be the same. Total internet users in India were about 125m back in 2011.

My source for these numbers is TRAI (India's equivalent of FCC) reports. Happy to be corrected.

And no, the problem is NOT that some people get to use FB for free. The problem is that we have no reason to give a privileged treatment to FB, given that they are NOT contributing in expanding the network at all. FB doesn't bear the bandwidth costs for internet.org, the telcos do. And telcos are already regulated under TRAI and have corresponding obligations. If they want to do commercial deals like these, let us first open the telecom industry to full competition.

http://www.trai.gov.in/WriteReadData/WhatsNew/Documents/PR-T...
The central problem I observe, orthogonal to the one outlined in this post, is this: there has been, for many years, a symbiotic relationship between publishers and advertisers. The publishers are the host organism; they draw life-giving cash money from the advertisers. The advertisers are the symbiote, and they consume nourishing eyeballs secreted by the publisher. Print, TV and radio publishers increasingly used the money to subsidise their consumer offerings, which increased the yield of eyeballs. Everybody wins!

The trouble with the New Era of internet-enabled everything is simply that the bottom has fallen out of ad revenue. There is not enough money for this old relationship to continue. Advertisers on the web are parasitic, not symbiotic. They get plenty of eyeballs; the publishers get chump change.

This is an unsolved problem - analogous, say, to the streaming/Spotify problem. How many billions of people would have to lay out $10/mo on Spotify to keep the major labels in the junket-hopping, coke-hoovering manner to which they had long become accustomed? It's not going to happen. The reckoning, to my mind, starts not with the 1,876 marketing startups, but with the dying revenue models of mainstream publishing, broadcasting etc.

After that, well, you can be neither a symbiote nor a parasite without a healthy host, with a ready supply of tasty eyeballs.
I think you'd enjoy this philosophical dive into why we have categories and how to properly use them.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-mad...
Maybe just have generic restrooms?
It's a tiny problem. You simply walk into the ladies restroom and use the changing table. It's not as if the door won't open, and it's not as if the women there won't understand. I've done this without a problem in plenty of places.
ZTE has made several phones for carriers that have sold for $10 over the past couple years without contract. They are locked to the carrier and require airtime purchases.

No contract needed but unless an unlock is available, you are stuck with their minutes/data rates.

Target stores had "Brightspot" which is a T-Mobile mvno and it went under, but they had $10 phones with these same specs last year at this time.
Eh … targeted advertising certainly worked on me. Pretty definitely and pretty much guaranteed better than non-targeted ads.

My purchasing decisions tend to be pretty long and drawn out (it will take me months to decide that I want, for example, a camera and then to decide which one I want), but targeted ads have several times caused me to pick up the slack and continue my line of investigation into what to buy.

Their aggressiveness is an asset – and they also don’t really annoy me. Comical, sure, but they also remind me: Ah, I wanted to check out those cameras.

Obviously it’s a blunt instrument and not a scalpel (we know for to little about how human brains work to make that work – we need the blunt approach), but it’s a different blunt instrument compared to other advertising.
If you've a look at F#, you get all of the things you said plus OCamel syntax (without functors etc.).
Will reshipping service like Shipito work for you? https://shipito.com
That's true, but Bayesian methods were handicapped by a lack of computational resources for quite a long time. Modern Bayesian methods, although fundamentally the same, are in practice quite different today compared to a century ago. Frequentist statistics gained popularity because it was more tractable to apply to complex problems until computational technology caught up.

Edit: one can argue that frequentist methods are generally approximations to Bayesian methods, much like Newton vs Einstein
I am not a specialist but my intuition is that history does play a role in France's hostility to Al Assad. France has been traditionally close to Lebanon and the Syrian sponsored violence and terrorism didn't go well with the French diplomacy (Chirac in particular was personally outraged by the assassination of Hariri).

But I doubt it has anything to do with ISIS. It's a relatively recent creation, and mostly a Saudi inspired organisation so I doubt there is much to do with France.

I think France is mostly involved because they are the largest western contributor country to ISIS in term of jihadists.
Noun – ter·ror·ism – \ˈter-ər-ˌi-zəm\ – no plural
It's not like I have a lot of experience (macros are much rarer in my primary language, Scala). But it's usually just someone doing a refactor that "makes sense" according to the logic of the regular language but not within the macro. A lot of it is simple, "silly" things like trying to extract a repeated piece of logic into a method call, only it doesn't work because the logic uses something the macro hooks into, or just is transformed in a surprising way by the macro that makes the reasoning incorrect. To take a completely trivial real-world example, renaming a field is usually a safe operation that you can do automatically (with an IDE) without even testing, but if that field's used in a macro then maybe it represents a key in a JSON object and you've just broken your web API. You notice it pretty quickly, and it's a two-minute fix - but these kind of "thousand cuts" scenarios really slow development. Outright production failures are less common but I've seen those when test coverage was poor or other failures interacted.
Oh, they work alright, on a statistical basis. They work better than non-targeted advertising, that's all it takes. After all, you're definitely not the only person who can be influenced this way.
So.. can I just throw the SIM card into trash and use it as is? Or is there any catch?
Helpful for devs and CTOs. Time tracking through Jira made simple
A while ago I decided to teach myself how the common machine learning algorithms worked and, to make things interesting, decided to implement them in parallel in both Clojure and Scala. I expected Clojure to be a better fit for this since Lisp has historically been strong in AI. But I found as my codebase grew that the Scala code was much easier to maintain, refactor and understand. So these days I am a big fan of static typing provided it's in the form of a sufficiently expressive type system (Scala, Ocaml, Haskell, Swift etc).

Lisp got a lot of things right but I'm not sure dynamic typing and s-expression syntax were among them.
Slightly different but similar, Comcast buying NBC and Verizon buying AOL.
If the consensus itself is the reward, and all interested parties have a stake in the consensus - which would seem sensible, though I admit the article doesn't say - the incentives don't need to work in the same way.

(Of course, blockchains are so hot right now, and that can attract all sorts - so who knows what the real motivation is here? But I think dismissing it as a transparent con is premature.)
Delivering Insanely Great User Experience
Baby changing tables in men's restrooms is becoming much more common in parts of Canada, but you are 100% correct that it wouldn't have happened if people didn't at least question the ingrained idea that changing tables only belonged in the women's restrooms.
If you comparison shop for a faucet online, it would require collusion between all faucet vendors for them to know when you finally purchased one.
We buy lots of cars, equip them with lots of different sensors, design and manufacture data recording systems to fit in them, organize configuration-management systems to manage and track changes to these test platforms, then drive them around collecting data, driven by the requirements that are placed upon our algorithms and systems, then analyse the data using both automated and manual methods.

It is a time-consuming and capital intensive endeavour, no doubt about it.
They're streams on map views, a stream on Map itself doesn't really make sense because there are multiple ways to interpret a map as a sequence and it's not clear what should be the default (e.g. Python defaults to the equivalent of keySet().stream(), but Rust defaults to entrySet().stream()).

keySet() and entrySet() return Set-conforming objects because they can, values() can't and only returns a Collection, but these three objects delegate much of their logic to the map itself.
"system calls being expensive is obsolete now" - utter nonsense. System calls are still expensive. Argument checking, copying data between user space and kernel space - none of that cost goes away.
but calling us "superorganisms" kinda devalues the word. If we're superorgansisms then so are cats

Do you think that the author was writing this to somehow elevate your self-esteem? :)

But you are raising a good point. When talking about such concepts we should not forget that there are other animals that would also share it.

We are still animals, only with a little smarter brains.
I forget the exact behaviour, and maybe it's been improved. But I remember that it didn't map cleanly onto values - sometimes you want to continue after a single error, sometimes you want to bail out immediately, and the ways of doing this felt very ad-hoc.
Free Relocation Platform for Nomads Goes Viral After Being Featured on WIRED
Could you define good?
This will decrease the efficiency somewhat. The urinals are very efficient load capacity/space available.

I generally support them though. And getting more shameless with age is well documented phenomena.
The question is whether this additional effort is strictly necessary or whether it’s just nice to have.

Why do complicated things when something simple already works pretty well? Your thinking that just because something is possible it will be done is not very close to the practical reality in the trenches. Because something is possible it might be done if resources are there. If not, best effort, done.

All of this analysis is expensive, so don’t expect it all to be done.
How to deal with hostage takers: soviet lessons
CompleteableFuture[1] is the closest we got for now in the JDK.

[1] https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/util/concurre...
Stalking apps are “perfectly legal” in US, but banning them won't be easy
Ah, now I see these things changed recently. I wrote original comment because at the time of Go 1.1 or 1.2 my colleague wrote racy code which accessed global variable without mutexes. I tried to educate him to use mutexes, by reducing his code to the minimal version demonstrating race condition, but failed. Then I digged into the source code of Go runtime library and discovered that only one thread could be in the running state at any moment (other threads could be in the state of blocking system call).

So, things changed since that time. OK, nice to see Go evolves. Interesting, how many code in production got broken during upgrade to Go 1.5 due to this backwards-incompatible change. Overall situation seemed totally reasonable to me at that time: Go is a language for average programmer, so it should prefer safely over runtime performance; and coding cowboys who are comfortable with mutexes, interlocked instructions, memory barrier instructions, and lock-free data structures will use C/C++ anyway.
Furthermore, Maps have a .forEach method

m.forEach((key, value) -> System.out.println("key: " + key + " value: " + value));
TL;DR Over-fitting investment models is pseudo math.
Git commit --verbose
>music made by computers

This is repeated ad nauseum by the musicians community and really annoys me. Music is about what you hear and feel, not about how it's made.

There are also a lot of guitar musicians who play a couple of basic chords, add some cheesy lyrics about love and call it a day. Nowadays, people prefer the same, with electronic sounds instead, not too different IMO.
I don't think Gmail would be able to block "own" email servers, because how would you tell them apart from company servers or web sites that send out confirmation e-mails or "forgot password" e-mails?

They do however require your server to be properly set up, with a correct reverse DNS etc. And Hotmail/Live mail does the same.
privateinternetaccess.com ?
Apple has supported XMPP since back when Messages.app was still called iChat. The XMPP support is not great, like most OS built-ins, but it works. I'm still using it to chat on Facebook. If Google hadn't dropped support for XMPP, I could chat with Google users too. I fail to see how Apple is to blame.
Yes. It is difficult to be innovative without the right IT infrastructure.

This does NOT mean investing lots of money in IT ... but it DOES mean being careful about what tools you use and about how they integrate together, and about how they can be modified as the needs of the business grow.

I.e. the organisation needs to focus on open standards and cross-platform APIs that can be built upon to meet short-term and site-specific needs rather than an over-reliance upon specific vendors or integrated and centralised toolchains that cannot be modified or built upon by individual sites and teams.
For $10, I'd use it as an MP3 player at the gym or when out walking... so I don't have to worry about dropping my expensive phone (as I'm prone to do once a month or so). 4 GB would hold more Spotify playlists than I would ever need at one time.

It's amazing that as recently as five years ago, I was paying around $100 for a dedicated MP3 player for exactly this purpose.

I'd have no interest in the "phone" feature... and would never even install a SIM card. I have to believe that many people have thought of this idea, and that has to be a problem for TracPhone since they're probably selling this device at a loss in order to sell phone/data services.

So since it's "Out of Stock" right now, I wonder how many ever were in stock in the first place? My suspicion is that they released a small number of devices as a P.R. stunt to attract publicity. The hope being that some number of people who click the link to check it out will proceed onward to buy one of the "real" devices that isn't being sold at a loss. I'd be surprised if you ever do see this $10 model "In Stock".
Exactly. I almost fell out of my chair laughing when I read that last line.
One of the books that I personally found easy to read with good exercises is Probability and Statistics by Morris H. DeGroot, Mark J. Schervish

http://www.amazon.com/Probability-Statistics-Edition-Morris-...
interfaces with default implementations? Doesn't this look like... multiple inheritance?
There are two things to keep in mind. Rafaello and Michelangelo worked with stone that wasn't nearly as hard as granite (granite being one of the hardest stones). Secondly, we don't believe metals were nearly as developed during the period of dynastic Egypt and some Egyptologists theorise (but I think this is crazy) that stone tools were used to carve the blocks.
Just an example:

(derive ::wizard ::person)
(derive ::warior ::person)

(derive ::weapon ::thing)
(derive ::dagger ::weapon)
(derive ::sword ::weapon)
(derive ::staff ::weapon)

;; defines dispatch function that returns (inheritable) categories to dispath
;; it's very simple in this case
(defmulti wield! (fn [p1 p2 thing]
[(type p2) (type thing)]))

(defmethod wield! [::person ::thing] [p1 p2 thing]
(say! p1 p2 " refuse"))
(defmethod wield! [::person ::dagger] [p1 p2 thing]
(take! p2 p1 thing)
(say! p1 p2 "accepts."))
(defmethod wield! [::wizard ::staff] [p1 p2 thing]
(take! p2 p1 thing)
(say! p1 p2 " gladly accepts."))
(defmethod wield! [::warrior ::sword] [p1 p2 thing]
(take! p2 p1 thing)
(say! p1 p2 " gladly accepts."))

It obviously could be done in half the lines without using multimethods, but the result would be much less extensible.

BTW, with just 2 lines you can add gandalf and it just works (because there are no conflicting methods right now).

(derive ::gandalf ::wizard)
(derive ::gandalf ::warrior)

If there were any - you can set preferences to avoid errors.
What's the alternate theory?
ML is just a must-have nowadays.
A nice solution is law that must ensure the consent of the owner of the devices for the software to be installed.

This will make illegal quite a big chunk of the "evil" uses.