skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a real problem here, but I think you're laying the blame a little unfairly at Microsoft's doorstep. It's probably fair to say that at least until relatively recently Microsoft has gone to far greater lengths to ensure compatibility and longevity of code build on its platforms than any other organisation in the history of software development.

We used to value writing portable software as a skill, we used to value languages and libraries with robust specifications that could be used to write portable code, and portable code is also relatively future-proof code. I've worked on large projects that shipped on literally a dozen or more different platforms at any given time and were maintained for well over a decade with the significant variations in platforms that happen over that kind of time frame. Those projects built probably 95+% of the same source code for each platform, with platform-specific APIs and conventions carefully isolated.

That attitude and the related skills seem to have been much less valued in recent years, not least by the Linux community. (What, you want to build this C or C++ code with a tool chain other than GCC and friends?) If people carelessly scatter platform-specific code all over their projects, then of course they won't be easily portable, but more often than not such limitations are entirely artificial and could easily be avoided at negligible cost. In my experience, this is also true of a lot of libraries with the likes of Node and Python where native code is used in managed packages, and I think it's fair to consider that the resulting portability limitations are a potential disadvantage when choosing the language for a project.
I lost it at:

> Out of an abundance of love for the mobile web, Google has volunteered to run the infrastructure, especially the user tracking parts of it.
At least the last time I flew with them, JetBlue had wider seats and more legroom than any other airline I've recently flown on... but the seats had this incredibly uncomfortable lumbar support that felt like a huge wedge poking into my lower back.
You mean Overstock?
RethinkDB Founder Looking for Technical Cofounder (2009)
Direct Benefit Transfer for internet data packs instead of Free Basics
My last startup was built on top of Node.js, Sequelize and Postgres, which worked fine for us.

At my current one, we are re-implementing a ton of very detailed business logic from a PHP/Cake app, while writing comprehensive functional and browser tests. We considered Sails.js but decided the framework was immature vs. Ruby on Rails.

Rails has worked great for us, and has a ludicrously evolved ecosystem, with fantastic gems available, Stack Overflow answers, and lots of other users filing and resolving Github bugs before us (most of the time).

Rails is not as trendy as Isomorphic Javascript, but Ruby is a pleasure to develop on.

The turbulence with Sails.js makes me feel even better about our choice.
At least for one of my previous employers, the secondary market was not interested. I personally wouldn't count on it unless one is working for a highly visible startup ;)
https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2no4me/im_a...

There's no good mechanism for this case, either.
Little background about the author: Nandan Nilekani is the ex chairman of Infosys, the first "big" company to start in India, and UIDAI is Indian equivalent of social security number, which was his brainchild
I'm looking forward to hacking this into apis/chrome extensions that will let me update my 10+ jobs profiles all at once.
> The article somehow contrives to be 18 megabytes long, including (in the page view I measured) a 3 megabyte video for K-Y jelly, an "intimate lubricant".

I wonder if he realized this might have been a case of interest based ads following him around and whether he would have still mentioned it.
I don't think anybody has a right to expect me to support Microsoft's product. That's insane.

True enough, though it's also fair to consider a language/platform/ecosystem inferior for some work if it relies on that kind of individual and often less portable contribution for its effectiveness. A lot of FOSS advocates will promote community support and a broad contributor base as advantages of that style of development, but there is another side to that coin, which is that sometimes you get just what you (didn't) pay for and you're on your own in terms of support or working around any problems.
There's a good reason Scott is at the top of the C++ world. He's the hardest working C++ person I know, and the most committed to perfection and delivering the best value to his clients and customers.
All of us in the C++ world owe him a large debt of gratitude.
Kayak shows seat pitch for many flights — at least those where the equipment is known — if you expand the fare to see the details. It's right down there with the icons indicating whether the fare has wifi or seat power and stuff.
Allowing sender and receiver to specify different byte sizes (1971)
> I could provide the tweets of the guy I spoke about, but to what end?

To provide credit to your claims, otherwise what you are doing is defamatory.

>Sources are: emails between myself, core, and the FreeBSD Foundation. I'm not providing those. A phone call with the FreeBSD Foundation, which I did not record and will not provide.

Sadly, none of that is verifiable from an outsider perspective.

>Instead, I hope people talk about the issues of harassment and legal shadiness regarding trademark claims.

This is the only thing I can claim to have an educated opinion on. Any entity who owns a trademark has the rights to ask you to stop representing their likeness. By using "freebsd" in your name and actively participating in politics surrounding the open source/FreeBSD community, you are representing their likeness and in this case you are not protected by fair use.

For example, I can't make a twitter called TacoBellGuy and post about food related politics. If Taco Bell got upset with me, I'd have to change my name. Very clear cut.
From my limited understanding of QM, it would appear that their assertion, that all "mixed" states are really part of a "pure" state, is just a restatement of the Many Worlds hypothesis. In the MW hypothesis, reality is described by the wavefunction of the whole universe, which is a single "pure" vector in Hilbert space whose operators are observables on the whole universe.
> they could choose to "sync"

They can't discuss it. That would be a difficult social experiment, that would risk your life.
I think most of the problem is from images. Images, and especially videos, take up way more space than text. The Russian novel comparison is somewhat misleading in that regard.

But it shouldn't really be an issue because of progressive image loading. At the very least, the text should always load first. Back when I had dialup, it could take ages for a page to load completely because of the images. You could watch them slowly fill in, line by line. And if you didn't care about them, you could ignore them.

There's also now FLIF, which progressively loads images at higher and higher resolutions as more of the file downloads: http://flif.info/ The images look very good even at like 10%. Ideally once the image gets to the desired resolution, it wouldn't download any more of it. So it covers resizing issues too.
On the bright side, Unicode would not be necessary, since a company in China could specify a byte size large enough to represent any Chinese characters, and likewise for Iran, Korea, Hindi, etc.

Variable length byte sizes is one of the more interesting evolutionary paths that was never tried, but seems interesting.
The reason why Node.js cuts down on development times is due to the fact that you can have the same engineers working on both the frontend and backend - Basically it puts you in a situation where you can have a single engineer own a feature's development end-to-end.

When you have a company which is split up between frontend and backend teams, this requires your engineers to coordinate their work with one another and this reduces overall productivity (you usually need a lot of back-and-forth to bring the feature to completion).
Reduce the problem to 2 blue-eyed people and it should be more clear. If Alice and Bob are the only people with blue eyes, then yes, Alice might think that the speaker was only talking about Bob. But when Bob fails to sacrifice himself the next day, that must be because he also sees a person with blue eyes, and that can only be Alice.
Prof. Tao himself links to the wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_%28logic%29 which uses this as an example for Common Logic.
50 Wonderful Things from 2015: Monkey See
I believe the sales function is very much incentive driven. As a sales staff, your pay is very much correlated to the sales you do which means the stuff needs to sell. I think of it as, you get money for company and company gives you a small portion of that but in the process company is essentially paying you only when you bring in much more than what you cost.
Windows 7 added a number of APIs on top of Vista so implementing backward compatibility means a lot of additional complexity with minimal benefit.

A prime example is the windows build of Electron (https://github.com/atom/electron) that uses some touch control and notification APIs that are only available in Windows 7 and later. People have been asking for a long time for Windows XP compatibility and the answer has always been a firm NO.
None. :)

And I'm not violating the rights of somebody by pointing out they have an illness, sorry.
I've consulted a lawyer. You are incorrect.
Consider the case of 2 blue eyed people, Ben and Betty. Everybody knows there is at least one blue eyed person. But does everybody know that? That is, does everybody know that (everybody knows there is one blue eyed person)?

From Ben's perspective, Betty might be the only blue-eyed person, so Ben does not know if Betty knows there is at least one blue eyed person. This is important because Ben needs to correlate Betty's actions with her knowledge; he can't do that if he doesn't know what her knowledge is.

After the traveler's announcement, Ben knows that Betty knows there is at least one blue eyed person. This is the new information.

And with three people, we add another layer: Ben does not know if Betty knows that Bobby has blue eyes. And so on.

The visitor's announcement is special because it is infinitely layered. Everyone knows one person has blue eyes, and everyone knows that everyone knows, and so on, ad infinitum. This is called common knowledge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_(logic)).

Though to be fair, this isn't explicitly stated: the traveler "addresses the entire tribe" but it's critical that everyone in the tribe knows this is common knowledge. Merely addressing the entire tribe is not enough: if the traveler's announcement was in the form of a BCC mass mailing, there would be no new information and so no suicides.
On that note, I had a year where besides doing (and finishing) a bunch of decent size projects that I thought my manager was going to highlight, I spent like a day or two optimizing some daily batch process. All I did in the end was change one line of code to enable batched inserts, which brought the finish time from later afternoon to early AM hours. Come yearly review time, one of the bullets high up on what the manager wrote was that particular speedup, which surprised me given it was done just in passing and I forgot all about it.

I guess you really never can tell what the other side is thinking. But at the same time, in hindsight this was predictable since it impacted a bunch of high-visibility reports and the manager probably got feedback from upstairs.
JetBlue has the only economy seats of the US and EU carriers that I can tolerate. Every other carrier that I've flown, I have to upgrade to at least premium economy to get a decent seat.

Seatguru and most flight searches will show you the info, but you do need to pay for more comfortable seats generally. Even on JetBlue, I buy the "Even More Space" seats when available.
Spack [1,2] is our attempt to do this for HPC, where we have two things going on:
1) Our applications aren't single-language. They include Fortran, Python, C, C++, Yorick (!), Lua, etc. etc.
2) We have a major combinatorial versioning problem, because HPC clusters (and scientific software in general) rely on ABI-incompatible libraries like MPI, and MANY different compilers.

Spack is build-from-source and takes a lot of inspiration from Nix and its descendants, but it adds support for things like swapping out compilers/MPI versions/etc., as well as a syntax for composing new builds of things on the fly That is, you can build something with a slightly different version of a dependency without ever editing a package file. Our users to be able to build a package with 6 different compilers and 3 different MPI library versions, and have their 18 versions coexist on the same system. This has been super helpful for testing production code at LLNL, because we have to run our stuff on other peoples' often very different clusters. For instance, at LANL, we prefer PGI compilers. At LLNL we tend to like Intel or Clang.

One reason languages tend to grow their own package managers is that there are all kinds of peculiarities about how different languages manage modules/extensions. Have you seen how many different ways there are to deploy Python modules? It's very hard to have multiple versions of things coexisting in the same Python env, and things like pkg_resources require editing client code [3]. Ew. Spack tries to address this by allowing different language packages to implement their own module activation/deactivation logic, so you can kind of have a language-specfic package manager for each install of the language. I'd rather have something more like Nix's profiles, though.

I wouldn't say that the project is huge yet, but we've had some interest from mostly other HPC sites. It would be cool if the project caught on in the "real" world, too.

[1] https://github.com/llnl/spack

[2] http://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/sc/2015/3723/00/280...

[3] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5265731
The force of gravity in low earth orbit is about 91.7% of the force at sea level.
This is a good resource for those new to R.

R has some really good GUI layers now. I struggled and struggled for years trying to learn the command line methods, but it was too much for me. The following do a great job (these are alternatives)

- Deducer

- R Commander

- RKWard
Well d'oh, should've clicked the link. Thanks :-)

I would argue that allowing 'let' values to be initialized on multiple paths is uglier than having them be always initialized by exactly one expression. But, I see their point.
Another thing I recall hearing during my days working in SEO. Is that more is better. The more words the more pictures the more content actually factors into the algorithms that put you at the top of the list.
It's only right to balance the availability of internet adage. Might as well call it Russell's Law.
I thinks it's provable that it's not a brute force process. Since combinatorial explosion means by definition you cannot play to the end, and humans can in fact play Go, there has to be something else going on.
Had to get one last one of these in for the year. The last dozen just weren't enough.

Nothing like tilting at windmills.
zensavona was using ruby and elixir in the client side though? What does he do to be more productive using those? Any thoughts?

Edit: Unless he is only using helpers? Then I wonder how much power he can do with client side applications compared with modern javascript/typescript tools...
Show HN: Shuffling strings based on string-based RNG seeding in JS
This comment is going to be long, so buckle in. A few different ways of thinking about this issue:

1. I note that you say that when N = 3, there's no new information given. But when N = 2, all islanders are still aware that there is at least one person with blue eyes.

I'm guessing that despite that fact, you see how in the N = 2 case, the two people with blue eyes can infer they have blue eyes. So the leap of intuition you should've had there is that somehow, new information is being conveyed, even though every islander already knows that there is at least one person with blue eyes.

2. But let's just tackle this with straightforward inductive logic. For now, we aren't going to worry about what new information is given, we're just going to do induction.

If I see that N people have blue eyes, then I know that either there are N people with blue eyes, or there are N+1 people with blue eyes, and I have blue eyes. If after N days, the people I see with blue eyes haven't killed themselves, then I know that there must be N+1 people with blue eyes, and I have blue eyes, ergo I must kill myself.

This holds with N=0 and N=1 and N=2, so it on some level doesn't matter what the logic is, induction works.

3. But okay, let's figure out what information is actually given. Let's say that on a 100 person island, I have blue eyes and Alice and Bob also have blue eyes. So from my perspective, I know that there are two possible scenarios:

a. Alice, Bob, and I have blue eyes.
b. Only Alice and Bob have blue eyes.

Let's consider situation b. In situation b, what does Alice think? Since we're stipulating that I have brown eyes, Alice sees that Bob has blue eyes and that's it. Therefor, Alice thinks that there are two subscenarios of situation b:

b1: Alice and Bob have blue eyes.
b2: Only Bob has blue eyes.

Hypothetical Alice in hypothetical situation b considers situation b2. She thinks about what Bob would know in situation b2. He would see that nobody besides potentially him has blue eyes. So he would kill himself when the visitor explained that at least one person had blue eyes.

If Bob does not kill himself, then hypothetical Alice in situation b knows that she is not in situation b2. There is only one other subscenario of situation b, and that is b1, in which both Alice and Bob have blue eyes. So Alice would kill herself on day 2 (as would Bob).

If Alice does not do that, then Alice clearly did not consider herself to be in situation b. The only alternative to situation b is situation a, in which Alice, Bob, and I have blue eyes. So we all kill ourselves on day 3.

And obviously since all of this is symmetrical -- neither Alice, Bob, or I have any privileged information, that means that if I can see three people with blue eyes, and they don't kill themselves on day 3, then the only other valid scenario is that I also have blue eyes, so on day 4, I kill myself.

The information added is information about what we know that other islanders know about people's eyes, not what we know about people's eyes.
It seems like this list is incomplete without mentioning that both RStudio[1] and Jupyter[2] notebooks now have really first class support for R. There are also two upstatrs, Rodeo[3] and Beaker[4] are doing cool stuff as well.

The company I work for, Domino Data Lab[5], let's you fire up a lot of these notebooks in a nice hosted environment on big cloud servers with minimal cost and effort. It's a fun way to learn how all these new environments can work together. From RStudio for exploratory analysis, to Jupyter notebooks for presenting a topic. The other two I haven't really found the superior use-case. The tools in this space are just getting better and better.

1. https://www.rstudio.com/
2. http://jupyter.org/
3. http://blog.yhat.com/posts/introducing-rodeo.html
4. http://beakernotebook.com/
5. https://www.dominodatalab.com/
> Now suppose inductively that n is larger than 1. Each blue-eyed person will reason as follows: “If I am not blue-eyed, then there will only be n-1 blue-eyed people on this island, and so they will all commit suicide n-1 days after the traveler’s address”

But no one knows n!

So I am not following the logic in the slightest.

Since no one knows n the entire logic sequence never gets started.

Specifically:

The only information the traveler gave them is that n >= 1. If n = 1 then the blue eyed person gained new information, which is how the inductive reasoning started, and I follow the logic that far.

But if n > 1 then there is no new information and the inductive process never starts because no one knows n, no one. There is not a single person who knows n.
Given the propensity of island based logic puzzles to define certain classes of people as always/sometimes lying or telling the truth, it's always bothered me that this puzzle never states that the foreigner never lies or is always believed.
Explains why there is such a focus on generating ever better and more efficient pattern matching algorithms. It also helps to be able to utilize ever more powerful machines. But I think well performing ones are all task-specific algorithms, there is no general purpose pattern matching capability that I know of that you can plug into a computer today and have it perform untrained tasks. I think it is possible, and it will be a big step forward. I would love to have time to work on this type of problem...
The Myth of Silicon Valley Libertarianism
> More verbose but so much more readable

First of all, "more readable" is extremely subjective.

Second, there are a lot of different parser combinators, all with very different syntaxes.

Finally, parser combinators are readable by people familiar with them and regexps are readable by people familiar with them. Regexps are also much more widespread and approachable. And very often, writing a parser combinator to parse a simple text entry is way overkill.

There are many good reasons why regexps are so popular.
Buy a business class ticket.

Because that's what the rest of us would be paying for coach if all the seats were big enough to comfortably fit you.
So did they pick anyone? This article from almost 1 year later only lists two founders (both from Stony Brook) so it seems like they didn't... http://primary.slate.com/articles/business/small_business/20...
As a corporately smart man once told me: Your job is to make your manager happy.

This has more to do with making their life easier and giving them bragging rights, than it does with anything else. If you can make your manager look good in front of their manager, then good things will happen to you.
Character-Aware LSTM CNN Neural Language Models
The puzzle does state he is fully believed.

> One day, a blue-eyed foreigner visits to the island and wins the complete trust of the tribe.

Why would it matter if he's a liar/truth teller in the classic island logic puzzle sense? It seems irrelevant to me because the islanders believe him fully and the puzzle is about figuring out the effects his statement has.
>You are missing the fact that these are a potential additional 100,000 positions. Those who leave the H1-B program for this program then free up those existing H1-B quota slots to be "reoccupied" by others. The net number goes up by the full 100,000 (or however many are awarded).

Sorry but that couldn't be more wrong. There is no total H1-B quota. Only 65,000 new visas are awarded annually, renewable upto 6 years. After 6 years, they're renewable only if there is a pending green card application in valid status and they continue to work. The renewals don't count under the 65,000 quota. There will be exactly zero positions that can be "reoccupied" if these folks get a work permit or even a green card.

>BTW, the Sessions quote is in regard to H-2 visas, not H1-B or L-1 etc. H-2 variants are primarily agricultural.

Which Sessions quote are you referring to? I think all of my quotes were by Miano?