skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I hadn't checked it out recently, but it looks like they're still doing fine as far as having a ton of great photos posted. As long as the "community" aspects don't bug you, maybe it's a winning strategy?

It's fashionable to bash on flickr because it's "languished" and, one redesign aside, hasn't moved a whole lot in a long time. I've certainly taken casual swipes at them myself.

However, the truth is that--while I can imagine some features I'd like--it works pretty well and has a lot of great photography. At the end of the day, it's entirely possible that I wouldn't like it if they were constantly taking the site in new directions because social or mobile or big data or whatever the current hype is.
Because no one wants to set up the account to fund micropayments.

Any solution which would require the visitor to pre-fund an account, no matter how small of an amount, is destined to fail.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2490
> ...if only S. Wolfram would finally have the most obvious insight that he's totally missing:

> Open-source it!

Agreed. But I think the main reason for doing so, is in service of open, reproducible research. I'm sure if you're modelling blast patterns for a rocket to replace the Hellfire, you don't really care if your model stands upon series of locked, proprietary stuff -- as long as it is useful.

But if you're modelling influence effect of various ways to organize voting in democratic government, or doing publicly funded fusion research -- it's much more important that your results are transparent and easily reproducible (now, and in the future, which could be decades, or even centuries, away).

And I think that exploratory research and experimentation is exactly one of the strengths of Wolfram. But it needs to be much better than open solutions for it to even make sense to recommend a closed tool over various open tools -- for producing open research.

Consider if Einstein's research was locked up in some proprietary platform, rather than presented as simple text. While we'll see many papers and innovations in the space that is readily covered by human readable equations and text -- we're already firmly in a world were there are real discoveries that are made and proven only with the help of code.

I really can't see any future for a closed system in such an academic setting (but I can certainly see that closed systems can sell, and be used as tools in companies... provided that those tools continue to be taught and used in universities...).
CurrentC will never take off. It requires a debit card and a bunch of personal information and puts all of the burden of dealing with fraud on the customer. Users aren't going to be signing up for it in any sort of numbers like they will (and have) with ApplePay, I'd bet. If I go into a store and they either don't take credit or charge extra for credit, I literally stop going there.
Congress pays for all these programs. It is not holding the military accountable.
I'd love to understand the logic of why a retailer would buy all these payment terminals that "don't work". I run into this scenario a lot in the stores I frequent: I notice that the store has a fancy new payment terminal with the RFID logo on it. Great! Try Apple Pay. Cashier: "Sorry I don't think that works." OK, I pull out my physical card and slide it into the EVT (chip card) slot. Cashier: "Nope, that doesn't work either. Can you just swipe it?" OK, so you went to all the trouble to buy these fancy new payment systems, and you're still doing everything the 1980's way?
Propylene Glycol - the base of many e-juices - is sometimes vaporized in hospitals to prevent airborne infections.

http://www.jpeds.com/article/S0022-3476%2842%2980046-3/abstr...
Polyglots need not apply.
I did the same. I understand being anti-smoking because cancer, but this whole anti-vaping movement seems way misguided. I mean sure, if over time we figure out that certain flavorings should be avoided, fine, ban their use. However, don't deny people an easy way out of smoking. baby with the bathwater cliche.
What I consider her accomplishments,
1. Firefox deal
2. NFL Live on Yahoo!
3. negotiating out of the search agreement with MSFT is considered as accomplishment by some (not by me)

If Ms.Mayer is able to sell Yahoo! assets to Google in a profitable way for shareholders, that would be a WIN, without it, her regime is a failure not a total failure, but a failure none the less.
New Clues to Ceres' Bright Spots and Origins
The ideas behind SQL started with Codd's relational algebra, which has some very large differences from SQL. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_algebra for more. Query languages were developed based on that.

However as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL documents, a team at IBM implemented something called System R (R for Relational) with a query language called SEQUEL that was renamed to SQL for trademark reasons. Then Relational Software (now Oracle) implemented a database that could run on non-IBM software, and made their query language mostly compatible with IBM's so people could port to their database. And everyone who came after has made their implementations compatible for the same market reason that Oracle originally did.

Even today there are people who want to return to some of the ideas that Codd had which SQL does not implement. But there is such momentum around SQL that it is unlikely to ever happen.
Too bad you can't just call functional interfaces in Java 8, or you could just do something like this:

BiFunction<BigDecimal, BigDecimal, BigDecimal> add = BigDecimal::add;
add(x, y);

Unfortunately you have to do:

add.apply(x, y);

Which is kind of cumbersome.
RE #4 -- I always just start the Apple Pay transaction while the cashier is still scanning my items. In fact I do the same when swiping a card. Almost all payment terminals support collecting your payment information before the clerk has finished tallying up your transaction. Shaves a couple of seconds off the total experience regardless of whether I'm using a card or RFID....
10 things to discuss when negotiating operating agreements
I recently heard about RethinkDB on a few podcasts (SE Radio and The Changelog) and it sounds very promising, and has been designed to solve real time web application use cases very well. Glad to see they now support Java so we can use it easier from JVM based languages
The World's Smartest Bad Investors
Developers are also far more productive when using a programming language than when developing a programming language. So let's not have programming languages.

The thing is, a million developers can use a generic library, but only one has to develop it.

Excuse me now, I'm going to tune out a million boring arguments of the form "higher level languages are amazing ..." and go back to debugging IBM 360 assembly language program.
Undertale dares players to make a mistake they can never take back
I might have taken the content of this article more seriously if it had been titled something like "Why Go Is Not Good for Embedded System Programming" since the original author of the article seems to have more experience in embedded system's domain[1].

Also, the article say "Go is a regression from other modern programming languages" and I find it amusing that a significant numbers of people here taking the article and its claim seriously when it is coming from a student[1] who just finished his 'Computer Programming' university course in Fall 2014[1] (one of the reason, other reason is mentioned in the next paragraph). Don't get me wrong here: I'm not saying that you can't say anything significant when you're a student; what I mean here is that one needs to come up with more detailed explanations and with many more examples which are valid for a wide range of scenarios and use-cases when you make a general statement about a programming language which has been created by some of the highly-respected experts in the field of programming language. The list of problems mentioned in the article are important but they're not very critical for the kind of the system development that Go language has been designed/developed for[2].

Since Go language has been developed for system programming, the term 'system programming' is not restricted to embedded system only (as few people have already mentioned it in different threads here) which are mostly limited to one component (or small number of related components working together). With the advent of internet and IoT, we are forced to develop very large software systems (read, software systems as infrastructures) in order to make next generation of internet and IoT applications possible and usable (talking from business perspective). Development of these new large scale systems bring different kinds of theoretical and practical problems like complexity, concurrency and inefficiencies in system development process (for example; code compilation of large codebase and running regression test suits). And, Go has been specifically build for this new kind of large scale system softwares[2] (competing/working along with some other programming languages in this area).

Here, I would read the initial set of high-level problems which forced Rob Pike and his team to create a whole new language[2], instead of only considering issues/problems which one face while developing a single machine software/hardware program (as I've already said that they're important but they're also not everything). Once I know the strength and weakness of a programming language, I know when I should (or should not) use it, under what circumstances it's the right tool and what advantages/dis-advantages I've to trade off when I use it.

---

[1]- http://yager.io/resume.pdf

[2]- http://commandcenter.blogspot.de/2012/06/less-is-exponential...
Anecdotal is fine. E-cigs are relatively new. I had a friend die of cigarette smoking. He just couldn't stop. I think he would still be around if e-cigs were around a few years ago.
I would like to add that maybe the problem are not the [micro|macro]-loans, but people. Loans are basic bricks for an economic development in any society. Sadly, they can't save a bad business from failure.

So my point is that maybe a poor borrower investing in a bad business will end up poorer. Other scenario, mentioned in the article, are poor people lending money for non productive expenses.

A basic financial advice applies here: Invest in a productive business and try not to borrow money for non productive expenses.
Or... they could be chaining polymerases to tiny tuning-forks to tune the speed and fidelity of DNA replication... sounds pretty cool!

From a patent granted to Anita Goel / Nanobiosym: https://www.google.com/patents/US7494791

"Denaturation of double stranded nucleic acids, primer annealing, and precision control over primer extension by polymerase can be accomplished by applying stress to a nucleic acid. These methods can provide one ore more benefits over conventional PCR methods including: precision control over the PCR process; generally improved fidelity; improved accuracy over problematic... [etc etc]"
I couldn't reach the https version of the vsync site. Perhaps it's my company's web filtering.

This worked.

http://vsync.codeplex.com/
>>who can make an above-average salary

An above average salary in most common cases is interchangeable with 'living within means'. You can start with whatever little you have and grow.

Its really not about how small you start, its about how quickly and consistently you are making an attempt to grow.
Not likely.

Rust, while lacking in various aspects as any v.1 release would, already has means of extension. A library can mostly replace a lacking feature while playing nice with the rest of the ecosystem by use of the type system and the macro system.

Roughly the same kind of extensibility is possible in Python (some later language features first appeared as approximations in third-party libraries) and even Java (where a kind of code post-processing is possible via annotations).

Unfortunately, it's unreasonably hard in Go. All you got so far is un-hygienic macros, slightly better than C #defines.

This is sad because a number of other ideas in Go are right and well-implemented.
The biggest problem for ANY alternative ROMs is the total and utter lack of transparency for chipset drivers and documentation.

And even if the manufacturer publishes source trees for drivers, they're based on year-old kernel versions. Same goes for bootloaders.

And that's a problem for the entire embedded Linux ecosystem, not just phones.

I wonder what prevents the vendors from committing their drivers upstream? Can that be worked against, i.e. by the manufacturers or independent organisations financing people to integrate and maintain the drivers?

It 'd be a huge benefit for the entire embedded ecosystem if people could find and fix bugs in out-of-mainline drivers, there are a shitload of bugs in them.

edit: oh, and another thing, mainly concerning Android phones: the refusal of the Linux userland community to learn from Android and cut the craft accumulated in decades (x-server! the need for autotools which check for stuff that's been standardized for 10 years or longer without a way to cache certain tests systemwide! lack of really deep sleep, central to embedded systems! a shitload of "sound servers" resulting in 100+ms latencies!) to keep compatibility with even OLDER systems certainly does not help developers of alternative OSes.
Well, yeah, I don't think it should be surprising that public institutions are sometimes better at serving the public interest. That's sort of the whole point of having them.
Africa's Continental Space Policy Is Bold but Is It Workable?
There can certainly be value if you think that teaching others what you know is more valuable to you than making a (larger) profit. Altruism is a thing.

Another way to give it away would be to play a long game of sorts by requiring people to sign up to the mailing list to get the free book. That way, you're still building up a list of interested people to spa--… market to when you write your follow-up books (and sell those for a profit).
> is it really 'ludicrous' to speculate that those in power seek to destroy bitcoin in any way possible? especially when taking into account how vocally anti-establishment the bitcoin community has become.

No one is that afraid of the bitcoin community, or of bitcoin itself. The bitcoin fringe is only novel in their application of the blockchain towards the problem of reducing the risk in organized crime. The world has heard the anarchist, anti-bank rhetoric before, and for that matter, from groups that actually blow up banks and murder people to further their goals.

There seems to be no evidence of any government seeking to "destroy bitcoin in any way possible." One would expect there to be fewer bitcoin based companies openly operating if that were the case. Rather, it appears that governments have reacted to bitcoin by defining it in terms of their existing regulatory frameworks, and deciding whether or not, and how, it can legally be used and taxed.

So yes, it does seem a bit ludicrous.
Your post (and in turn, my reply) had absolutely nothing to do with the article.

> I don't think a language's popularity has anything to do with it being a good, well-thought-out language. Just look at Javascript.

My point is that it's popular because we've been forced into using it, and the web is now much larger than it used to be. I'm explaining why it became popular, despite it's downfalls.

No other recent (past decade) poor language has come close to popular because we haven't had a similar issue arise in which we were grandfathered into.
2015 Christmas Sale of Gaming and Office Chairs
Well, yes, kind of. It's not something you would really use a lot. It doesn't help you with generic types, but only with generic functions. Since it only makes sense when coupled with macros, it really only helps with functions that are written out but accessible by the same name. For example, selecting sinf() or sin(), or writing a max() function.
Note: article has slight spoilers, but there is not enough plot context given for them to be truly spoilery. (I've been planning on writing a post about Undertale and this article danced around the issue much better than I ever would have.)

Buy Undertale. Seriously. It's only $10.
This sounds almost exactly like my experience attempting to develop an app for MySpace back in the day. "Oh shit, Facebook has apps! We need apps!" → I copy and paste their example code, and try to run it → Nothing happens; no hello world, no errors.
Nice to see this, and completely agree with the sentiment. There is a lot of academic stuff, which is great but not always easy to evaluate or apply, and there is also a lot of harrumphing about how distributed systems are really hard without going into much in the way of details about how to actually evaluate and approach the problem.
Soft clustering does a much better job of classifying people into generations.
Exactly, I always have an Emacs window (with tons of buffers, split screens) running.
Amazon's Echo also has an API https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-sk...
The article explains it itself, even though it metaphorically apparently doesn't want to listen to itself:

"Should someone take an interest in buying one of these homes, it might be priced as low as $500 or $1,000.... And the cost of rehabbing these cheap houses and making them livable can range from $50,000 to $90,000 for a small bungalow. Renovation will cost more than these homes will sell for."

Emphasis mine.

You simply can't mortgage a house like that, if the owner intends to renovate for living in it. There's no collateral. Of course it's a cash-only deal... what else could it be? What mortgage terms are we condemning the banks for not writing, exactly?

Should the city continue reviving, these property values will go up. Once the property values go up, the banks will be able to have collateral, and mortgages will resume flowing. But it will do all sorts of harm to try to push the banks to short circuit that process. Are we really demanding that banks write mortgages to poor minorities that they will basically have no ability to service if they experience the slightest economic disruption? Is that really helpful to anybody? Aren't we basically still in the recession we created by writing mortgages far in excess of any underlying value?

I'm all for helping the poor, but chaining them with unserviceable debt or forcing the banks to get screwed isn't "helping the poor".
"Increasing the wealth of a bunch of early adopters (who supported the network/technology when it was vital to do so), seems to me to be a feature, not a bug."

Why?
So not collecting taxes didn't generate enough revenue to keep things in the black?
There are regular criminal prosecutions of banks in the UK.

Regular. Criminal. Prosecutions.

The idea that there's effective regulation is bizarre. In reality the regulation consists of banks doing a lot of dodgy shit, and mostly not getting caught.

How long did it take regulators to realise that Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme?

I don't think stable, long-term businesses are capital constrained - I think democratically elected governments are.

And that's a serious problem for anyone claiming that that fact is compatible with effective regulatory oversight.
Thank you! You're not alone either. I'm pretty sure Twitter is going to discover that their data driven approach is only as good as the data, which based on their most recent product trends, has not been very good. It seems that many companies really struggle with understanding UX.
MS Botnet
Has microsoft created the largest botnet to date through its windows 10 deployment?

I am talking about the forced updates. With forced updates, they effectively have read write access to any system running windows 10. Theoretically, is it not extremely easy for Microsoft to use millions of computers to ddos a target, or decrypt anything using parallel processing, or even effect power grid drains?

What oversight is there?

slightly related: http://root-servers.org/news/events-of-20151130.txt
I guess I'm wondering if there is something clever we can do to get good information about the key questions - get closer to actually studying "ice" - but perhaps it isn't possible.
> in JVM land there is Frege

... and OCaml: http://www.ocamljava.org/
I would be interested if the windows version was compilable with mingw-64.
Domenic_S that's reasonable for a single group in a well ventilated area.

However, your friends are not the only smokers. A doorman may be slightly down wind of a 'smokers area' which get's a long swath of people over the day. Sure, he might get 0.1mg per smoker but multiply that by 200 people who go out twice a day and that's 40mg which is probably not lethal but still plenty to cause issues. Not to mention withdrawal issues on his days off.

In terms of e-sigs, the second hand dose is likely lower. Assuming the unregulated doses are as described. But, if people assume a poorly ventilated break room is ok then people who work next to it may also get a fairly high dose.
Those are the two house rules that drive me nuts too. To the point I insisted when I started playing again that those can't be in play. Once the few people I started playing with realized how much it changed the game from a 4 hour marathon into something far better balanced in an hour they've not brought it up again.
Safe, as long as you're not boiling down a pack of cigarettes and precipitating out all of the nicotine in order to then deliberately poison a child, yes. Pure nicotine is absolutely lethal. It's also hard to come by unless you make your own - which you'd only do if you wanted to poison someone.
I'm sorry, but this kind of pretentious schlock ("global paradigm shift", "emancipation") just makes me want Bitcoin to fail even harder.

It's probably a nifty technology. Stop talking about it like it's the second coming of Jesus.
Consolidate Media. More NFL, More Hulu, More Content like Finance. More Messaging, buying Telegraph or something. She was wrong person for the job, but Yahoo could have exploited the TV golden age, by picking some elements there. Yahoo should have double downed on Tech X Media, while improving the Mail. Her #1 job is to sell Yahoo! assets to Google, that is what she should focus on.
I was directly quoting someone that said Pure nicotine was safe which it is clearly not.
Or use

emacsclient -t --alternative-editor=""

and emacsclient will start the daemon if it hasn't already been started. You can also set the ALTERNATIVE_EDITOR environment variable to "" to achieve the same effect.
Again, another insightful and accurate assessment!
It's not as high fidelity as Visual F# in Visual Studio, but Ionide[0] is a great option for writing code in Visual Studio Code or Atom.

[0]: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items/Ionide.Ionide-fsh...
Periscope is Apple's App of the year
Yahoo mail probably makes a pretty good penny. Yahoo isn't going to die, IMHO, its just going to be separated off, with the unprofitable bits discarded. It'll probably end up as, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Sports and Yahoo Finance.

I think Yahoo makes a great case study on how optimizing for revenue per user can kill your brand.