skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And the publish/subscribe model being a possibly superior alternative to a two-way opt-in friendship model, is probably the reason for twitter's success not the 140 characters. So by keeping the subscription model but allowing for longer content, I think it's a win-win.
> The way I see it, they tapped into a widely held belief, rather than fears.

Yes, and they trumpeted it several times per day in a variety of advertising channels

While the belief may exist, they had deceptive ads turned to 11. You don't see puzzles or similar product being advertised
almost 24/7 on tv.

I think the FTC is not being heavy handed at all
Because citizens are more important than employers.
I actually really enjoy the process of having to re-write my thoughts to have them fit. Reminds me what is crucial and what is superfluous. (139 chars)
What do you do that's different?
Show HN: Emburse – Employee Debit Cards with Oversight
Your buddy is whitewashing to an absurd extent. The Cuban government regularly engages in censorship[1], religious persecution, stifling of free speech, indoctrination of children, and imprisonment of political dissidents.[2] It's getting better, but it's still really bad.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Cuba

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Cuba#Contempor...
If this is intended for people new to Python, I expect they will also have no idea what IPython or Jupyter is; there should probably be a blurb at the top about how to use this notebook with a link to the appropriate "Here's how to install IPython" page.
When I think about unsung software heroes I think of Rob Scharein[1]. He is the creator or KnotPlot[2] which has enabled topological research to flourish. He recieves regular acknowledgement among topology researchers, and he's an awesome guy. Do yourself a favor and play with some knots.

[1] www.hypnagogic.net/rob/
[2] www.knotplot.com
Yeah, this annoys me. Japanese swords were folded over hundreds of times not because it was a superior crafting technique, but because they were using inferior steel with more impurities.
This does happen. I've had paper reviewers request results with an appropriately selected uninformative prior: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffreys_prior

Typically, if you are practitioner in the field, it is not too difficult to identify instances where the result is highly dependent on the choice of prior.
I gave the TripleByte application a try very recently, but this step wasn't a part of it:

> 1. A fizzbuzz-like programming assignment. Applicants completed two simple problems. We tracked the time to complete each, and manually graded each on correctness and code quality.

Instead, I was presented with a single, rather convoluted, 1-hour long programming problem that was most definitely not anywhere close to the difficulty level of a FizzBuzz test (the solution they're looking for probably involved dynamic programming, which I honestly haven't had much practice with). This was before I even spoke to any humans on the phone screen or interview steps of the process.

I couldn't finish it in 1 hour (I kept going at it on my own time for another 2-3 hours before I finally arrived at a sub-optimal solution, at which point I had enough). I'm sure there are plenty of people who are much better at this than I am who can finish it in an hour. But I do want to question the wisdom of using something of this level of difficulty as a screening test.

Your clients seem to value the "Product Programmer" very highly. Using a question like that as a screener will weed out a significant portion of these "Product Programmers" before they ever get a chance to showcase their product skills. Most "Product Programmers" I know (myself included) don't do enough convoluted dynamic programming problems in their spare time to be able to solve a dynamic programming problem like that within an hour with any level of certainty (and yes, solving problems like that quickly involves either extraordinary talent or lots and lots of practice). Instead, in their spare time, these "Product Programmers" like to build things, and learn new technologies and techniques to help them build things in a simpler, more maintainable, and more productive way.
Where does that money go?

I really hope the FTC doesn't get it. It's a conflict of interest that permeates local law enforcement all across America.
I fail to see the rationale behind this.
Do you have actual science (comparative studies --plural, not some single paper--, etc) behind the assertion of "better" for the functional approach or is it just blind faith?

An empirical observation says that the most important software in the world, including most of the internet infrastructure, OSes, databases, filesystems, office suites, embedded systems and such, powering 99% of the modern era is written in an imperative or OO language.

That's a fact. Whereas "there would be less issues if we had made them in a functional language" is mere conjecture, unless proven otherwise.

Note that common errors such as null pointer exceptions are not only avoided in functional languages for example, but in any imperative language with optionals, bounds checking etc too. So if one is gonna bring those up as something in favor of functional programming they're not giving the full picture.
Sounds like a viable strategy. That's basically my device upgrading plan. Wait for three new releases (in the same series) then "Alright, time for a new tablet/phone/laptop!" I haven't quite jumped on the watch bandwagon yet.
Forgot to add, my only exception is when working on a team project it helps to be in the same room. Otherwise the open office is a surveillance scheme where everyone is watching everyone else.
Especially if the work was funded by public money.

What should be done in the case of when a researcher creates a private company as a result of publicly-funded research, but the research isn't fully released or is obfuscated?
What? Not at all!

Here's the price for those message lengths:

141	$0.01

142	$0.03

143	$0.07

144	$0.15

145	$0.31

146	$0.63

147	$1.27

148	$2.55

149	$5.11

150	$10.23

151	$20.47

152	$40.95

153	$81.91

154	$163.83

155	$327.67

156	$655.35

157	$1,310.71

158	$2,621.43

159	$5,242.87

160	$10,485.75
Common Lisp Recipes
I got my current job by being reached out to on Dice.com
> The FTC is being very heavy-handed here.

Are you kidding me? A quick Google search turned up revenue of $24 million in 2013. 2014 and 2015 numbers did not come up on my quick search, but I'd imagine based on the amount of advertising they do it's at least held steady. And then there's the many millions of investment dollars they received before that. $2 million is not even a slap on the wrist. It's like blowing in their ear gently.

As far as Lumosity believing their own claims, first this is not a mom and pop store. They have the resources to know for sure whether or not it's true, and they have a duty to find that out before making claims. Second, I don't buy it. Anybody with half a brain knows it's baloney.

Lastly, as far as I can see they're not being forced to make amends to the customers they ripped off, nor to make public apologies for false claims AND if they can gin up some bullshit study to support their claims (shouldn't be hard with their resources), they can continue making them.

Also the whole time this lawsuit has been going on, I've been hearing claims that don't differ much from the ones in violation on NPR constantly. Just enough to skirt the law.

Heavy handed my left foot.
Check out some of the items traded on Steam, specifically for CS:GO, and Dota2. The 'value' can be shocking, considering they're generated items with zero certainty around further duplication.
YYYY/MM/DD is the best format(edit: it's the same one used in article ofc), since it is also sort-able
This one?

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2015/07/08/Finnish-te...
The best programmers I've worked with had this quality:

They'd always heard of everything, and they had a good idea of what everything was, even though it was quite far from the current task to hand. For instance, plenty of people have not had the opportunity to work with functional languages, yet still have a good grasp of why they're useful, what languages there are, who uses them, and so on. They tend to see coding as a vast field where you can make many valid decisions, each with their own pros and cons.

The kind of people I'd root out are the ones who merely see programming as a tool. Something along the lines of "I've got this data in a spreadsheet, I need to calculate this statistic, so here we go..." They almost always end up creating an unmaintainable mess, and they never mention any well known pattern. Quite hard to identify in an interview, though. Perhaps the lack of key words that suggest a deeper understanding?

(Hey, that's an interesting thought. You could machine learn what words good devs use vs less good ones.)

As for coding in the interview, I think this can only root out the absolute novices. It's quite hard to think of a short test that will demonstrate that someone can't write elegant code. Perhaps a take-home, open-ended test would work, but you're gonna lose people who don't want to spend a whole weekend doing it.
Well, beyond what a human player would notice, to be able to be dealt any possible hand in solitaire, a random or pseudo-random number generator would need log 2 (52!) bits of state or > 226 bits, which is the point I think the commenter was making, compared to the 32- or 64-bits of information a built-in function would take.

Something like a properly seeded 256 bit xorshift might satisfy this as a random number generator. But even that setup may not be sufficent.
Well deserved results from a strong team!
> Also: If bank accounts are involved, inconsistency is not acceptable. Someone will bankrupt you. That's not BDR's fault.

Fun fact: a large portion of bank accounting systems are not fully consistent. It's a but scary at first, but of you think about it, it's not that surprising: e.g. not all ATMs and shops are always online, particularly in the past. Many systems also couldn't and some still can't, keep up with the full load on peak times in a central manner.
Good.

My biggest issue with Twitter's 140 character limit is it removes all opportunity for nuance. Within 140 characters you can just barely voice and opinion or thought in the most basic terms. Yes you can split your thoughts into multiple tweets but people will typically only focus on the first tweet that really expresses the basis of an idea and that's what will get shared the most. Allowing more wordy and nuanced tweets probably won't solve the social media over reactions that seem to flare up, but maybe it'll help if people aren't forced to awkwardly clarify their positions with a bunch of tweets that have to be read from the bottom up.
Huh? You mean the Kolmogorov axioms? In what sense are these 'frequentist'?
mentioning intervention by mods is always good for a few downvotes. Sad but not unexpected. Can't avoid the po-po wherever you go.
Are you sure the FTC wouldn't go after a carrot company marketing carrots as improving vision? I've never seen them try, have you?
The Mersenne twister algorithm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_Twister) has a period of 2^19937 - 1, way more than 52!~2^256 possible shuffles, and is fairly widely used. I know for a fact it is used by the python standard library.
Foxconn sends 30-person delegation to US to shop for robot manufacturers
This made me chuckle.
Ouch, you are correct.

Something changed a while ago, my software stopped working with it, and I could only fix once I followed some LibreSSL guidelines. I thought it was this change, looks like I was wrong.
How a vietnamese refugee is rethinking food delivery
Pretty much every job I have had has had a three month probation period.
http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2015-11/v6perf.html
I was talking about qualitative measurement like this

Quote :

These measurements show that in a large set of 1:1 individual comparisons where the IPv4 and IPv6 paths between the same two dual stack endpoints are compared, the two protocols, as measured by the TCP SYN round trip time, are roughly equivalent. The measurements are within 10ms of each other 60% of the time.

While the connection performance is roughly equivalent once the connection is established, the probability of establishing the connection is not the same. The current connection failure rate for IPv4 connections was seen to be some 0.2% of all connection attempts, while the equivalent connection failure rate for unicast IPv6 is nine times higher, at 1.8% of all connection attempts.
It is not illegal to fire someone who can't do what they were hired to do especially when they were told what was expected at the interview stage.

My thinking is the first x days on the job is spent doing programming tests. This should generate enough paperwork to satisfy any HR department. You then have the time to test all aspects of the candidates skills, rather than the limited range you can test in an interview.
I usually would not post a link to a book that does not even provide a sample chapter, but Edi Weitz' code is of outstanding clarity and quality[1] - if his writing is only half as good as his code, the book is a must read.

[1] don't take my word for it, check out http://weitz.de/cl-ppcre/ to see for yourself
Like @pistle, I'm a little confused about the intent of this notebook. This doesn't seem super beginner friendly; if I was a complete beginner, especially someone with a strictly humanities background and no CS experience, I imagine I wouldn't be able to get past the first "quiz":

> In the code box below, write a simple program that calculates how many minutes there are in seven weeks.

How? We haven't talked about code at all yet! How do you expect me to know what Python looks like enough to write that program?

Am I totally missing the point of this notebook?
That is also a good point, though I don't see how the comparison to what banks were fined is relevant or enlightening.
One intuitive way to categorize products is according to the observability of the value. In one class, it's readily apparent: the storage is cheaper, it doesn't fail very often, there's little downtime, my payments always go through, the user experience just feels better, all my friends use it. This doesn't have to be objective, just 'noticeable'.

On the other hand, it's hard to judge the value of an encryption app, or a brain training program, because the true value is often hidden. It's difficult to tell, at least for the average consumer whether an encryption app works. There might be signs for the more immediately knowledgeable ('why won't the passwords take special characters, or passwords longer than 12 characters?'), but it's usually a small group.

Unfortunately, this is probably going to make it harder for the latter kind of company to grow quickly, because trust takes time to develop. I don't just need to trust that my data will be safe - the entire value of the product depends on my trust that it does what it says.

I have no idea if lumosity does what it claimed, but I doubt I could easily tell in a day or two. Contrast that with instagram or a better computer - the value (however large or small) is obvious.
Roman culture is gone. Ancient Egyptian culture is gone.
So, a blockchain is just a special kind of distributed ledger; and a ledger is just a particular thing to store in a distributed database. What makes a blockchain special (and thus, I think, what informs the common usage more than any technical definition involving proofs of work) is basically what it accomplishes, that a regular distributed database cannot: a blockchain allows N mutually-untrustworthy parties—that is, people who would pick one-anothers' pockets if they could—to co-author a history they're all happy with, without having to put their trust in any particular party (who, again, might want to pick everyone's pockets), but instead only in the system as a whole.

My favorite comparison is to leaderboard ranking in competitive games (let's use Starcraft 2 as an example.) This is another place where everyone would love to cheat if they could.

Let's say you set up a blockchain where each "transaction" contained someone's SCII 1v1 gameplay-record from their perspective (i.e. their own input events, and the received network movement- and action-events from their opponent) for a ladder match they played. You'd get two "transactions" in a pair for each match—each submitted by one player—and each one would would move the players' ladder rankings and leaderboard positions around (though in an idempotent way, if both records happen to be valid.)

In this model, instead of having to have an authoritative "ladder server" that simulates all the game's physics for the players, or building any sort of anti-cheating tech into the game-client, each player would just be part of the ladder blockchain and therefore would "audit" each entered game-record after the fact, by running the game's physics engine against the gameplay-records to determine their validity, and translating the valid records into changes in the ladder-ledger.

Every player that bothers to run the ladder-chain daemon (which might-as-well just be embedded into the game-client as a nice'd background process) would be auditing every other player's game-record for physics discrepancies. Records from matches where either player was using a hacked game-client would simply be dropped from history rather than affecting the ladder (or could be encoded as a forfeit for the hacker.)

The game's manufacturer could have server-nodes of their own, purely for auditing—but they likely wouldn't need to. In fact, there wouldn't even need to be a game company; the game could be completely abandonware with no server infrastructure, yet the ladder and leaderboard system would continue to function indefinitely.

The properties that let you do this are what make a blockchain a blockchain. The other properties are implementation details.
Two of those three works cited to arrive at the "~70%" figure are ~thirty years old. It's not looking good for the author. Let's look at the paper by Edwards that's only ~9 years old...

Edwards's first citation for his "~70%" figure is one of those two thirty-year old studies. His second is one is a paper by Tanner from 1996. So, let's look at that one...

Sadly, the Tanner work is a dead-tree book, page 136 isn't available in the Google Books preview, and Mr. Edwards doesn't bother to mention the source of Tanner's numbers.

So. Two out of three sources for that "Government welfare programs spend 70% of every dollar on overhead" claim are ~thirty years old. One of those sources can't be easily verified. It's not looking good for the basis of that claim.

But, let's be charitable. Let's presume that the claims of the twenty-year-old paper were based on then-recent information that was correctly interpreted and is still valid, twenty years later... [0]

Remember that Tanner is talking about all US government welfare programs. We're talking -specifically- about Medicare. As mentioned here [2] the worst case overhead for Medicare is 8%. That's a far cry from the 75% figure cited by MCRed, and far better than the 25%->35% overhead figure cited by Mr. Edwards for private-sector charities.

Medicare is really well run and gives really good outcomes per dollar spent. It's a shining example of a long-standing, effective, well-run government program. Sure, if you look, you can find horror stories of bureaucratic failures and mismanagement... but the same is very true (and happens far more frequently) when dealing with private sector "health insurance" companies.

[0] Some reasonable contemporary scholars found much to complain about in the work. A choice quote from one criticism in 1997: "Tanner uses the familiar tactic of dividing this spending by the number of poor people ... [t]he intended inference is either that a lot of the money goes inappropriately to people who are not poor or that the bureaucracy siphons off most of the funds. Neither is correct. Most of the resources do go to the intended beneficiaries, but are not counted; about 80 percent of welfare spending takes the form of in-kind transfers, and poverty is defined in terms of cash incomes only. Administrative costs of most government welfare programs are under 12 percent." [1]

[1] http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=42...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10840804
This just means you can be fired for any reason in the first 3 months. You can certainly be fired on the first day.
Why the hell have they not emailed their customers about this!

This is not the kind of thing I want to learn from HN.
I don't think that's insightful. That's a typical neo conservative argument, repeated over and over for decades. Thatcher is famous for using that argument. The problem is the if in the ... "what if everyone was better off, yet with more inequality". We're not sure at all about that if. In fact data seems to say, probably no, people aren't better off when there's more inequality.

What if, actually, high inequality countries (with no free health care, no free schools, no financial sector regulations, and more tax on the poor than on the rich) shoot themselves in the foot? This is what the data seems to show, if anything.

A lot of people agree that a healthy middle class was important for progress in the west. I think they are right. I think the Thatcher argument is going in the wrong direction. Now that doesn't mean you want to waste taxpayer money on random hopeless bullshit. Not all socialist countries spend their money wisely. But taxing and spending wisely, to help the middle class, with schools and hospitals and smart regulations, is probably good for generating innovation and for the economy in the long term. The middle class can be pretty resilient in some countries, with still a lot of resourceful smart people, you can throw a lot at them and they will still survive. But it's probably better to help them a bit. It's probably better, for example, to significantly increase the number of truly smart kids that go to college in a country (there's more poor or low middle class smart kids than rich smart kids, in raw numbers, even if rich kids are more likely to be smart, on average).

The Thatcher argument really is a good example of a purely rhetorical argument, not based on any data, that was spread by neo conservatives, media owners in particular, to their strict advantage. It's an O'Reilly-no-spin-zone worthy argument. It's pretty insidious, a masterpiece of a meme. It basically amounts to accusing poor and middle class people of being jealous jerks for wanting free health care, free schools, wall street regulations and less tax on them than on the rich. Of course it seems to make a lot of sense at first sight. That's why the media uses that over and over again.

It's like saying "Be happy with what you have, because if we had free health care and free school and wall street regulations and taxes on the rich ... you'd be worse off". Well, that's just not true, according to the data. Countries with high inequality are generally the ones where nothing happens, in innovation or in anything else, there's no middle class, and it's sad.

There's nothing worse than dumb people voting against their own interest. That's the recipe for a dictatorship.

If you disagree I'll be happy to hear your opinion. I'm ready to change my mind. Thanks!
As of the (now quite old) 4.2 release of gcj, static linkking is quite simple (as opposed to before, when it seems like it was possible but somehow frustrating).
Come back when your crappy monstrous javascript runs on my attiny85.
All good now - thanks, AWS! And thanks to everyone for the feedback. Wasn't expecting to launch my game today, but I'm glad I did.
I like YYYY-MM-DD as it is also sortable and doesn't require any escaping as a file name on windows or Linux. It's part of ISO8601.