skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having worked on a large python code base as well I can tell you that sometimes it's hard. Look at the types, determine if they're instance of and try build small test runs around existing code before you modify it. python tools for visual studio is sweet and may give some help with getting around, as will pycharm. If figuring out where logs are or other configuration details are hard to find get them into configuration files. I guess you can draw the high level of how it fits together but start small, pick a class or method and follow it through. Oh, enjoy it. python was lots of fun for me
My “Must Try” List of A/B Testing Tools – Compared
ISTM the ratios involved are very different. Even a first class air passenger with fifty kilos of baggage only takes up slightly more space and weight than an economy air passenger. Since they might be paying five or more times as much, the service makes sense for airlines. The realtime network you envision is already available to users willing to buy e.g. dark fiber, for less of a premium (relative to bandwidth) than that. If that doesn't work for you, why not?

Yes we know that big ISPs regularly raise examples like this as a reason why they shouldn't have to provide neutral service, but that is manifestly self-serving on their part.
A few months ago there was a great blog post by the Instagram team on their particularly advanced flavor of this for their continuous integration. Highly recommend: https://engineering.instagram.com/posts/496049610561948/flex...
If you have a RBAC setup it's pretty easy to setup feature testing. It's the second most awesome reason why I setup RBACs on any and all projects.
What bubble though? Meituan or Chinese tech in general?

Meituan had a multi-billion dollar valuation before this burst of funding, and just went through a merger with it's major competitor, they've got their market locked down. Baidu is trying to get it's offering in the space to become competitive, and it's throwing 3.3B at the problem.

Using American companies, think of Instagram and Snapchat merging, getting a billion thrown at them, and Facebook pledging a billion at getting their offering in the space off the ground. That'd be just another day in the valley, wouldn't it?

I mean if you're referring to the greater Chinese tech industry, then yes, there's probably bound to be some kind of contraction at some point in the future. With investors being scared of real estate and the stock market in China, a lot of money is getting thrown at startups that don't really deserve it, along with the sheer amount of hype that there's in the industry. It ain't dot-com bad, but it's certainly not good. But the companies that are making the headlines? They're edging around 90% market control, and up to 90% market penetration in Tier 1 cities. When things contract, they'll be the ones left standing.
There are also Andorra, Lichtenstein and probably Macao and Hong Kong (They could be just fine without England and China).
Planning a Conference? Go Global
Most Python code does not involve the creation of classes, so I think you're wrong to associate it with true OO message-passing languages such as Ruby and Java.
Neil deGrasse Tyson and futurist Ray Kurzweil on what will happen to our brains
Too bad the rest of the world is gutless weasels.
Close...you got the SoundCloud right but there are so many more! I have at least 3 facebooks , linkedins and twitters
Telangana TSPSC Group I II Reference Books – SarkariNaukriZone
Just to clarify, to me "data migration" is just a fancy name for a one-off script that you run during (or after) a deployment. We don't actually use the rails migration for it. (Mostly because it would overwrite our schema.rb IIRC.) But in general, yep.
There was a nice talk about feature toggles at RubyConf 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBBLMmr9e-k
Zero-day Linux kernel security flaw leaves millions of Android users vulnerable
You could argue that standard libraries should be enormous and try to be everything to everyone. In fact, this is one of Mathematica's selling points -- they have many complex algorithms implemented.

However, this also means there is an enormous, aging codebase that Wolfram continually must maintain and add new features to. It means that coders from different communities (who use different sections of documentation) likely have very different standard practices. And, I am concerned that this philosophy of "always having to look everything up" really hinders their knowledgebase product due to lack of consistency.

However, I applaud Wolfram for the ambition and enthusiastically sticking with it over so many years.
He is very personally tied to fitness -- by far the most "fit" CEO I've ever known. Huge into CrossFit, he spent a ton of time in the gym at Twitter. It's not surprising at all that he would go in this direction, and it comes from a very authentic place for him. I'm just surprised he didn't weave beekeeping into it. ;)
Donated just now, wish there was a way to give 20 years of compound interest along with it :(
Yes! Closer. Yes to Indiana university ..yes I have an acer...who's Katie Herzig? Is this a potential girlfriend? Yes Seattle...but I'm talking all of my digital identities....here ya go..offer raise to $108 if anyone is reading this...scouts honor...must get them all..all digital identities... Surely someone can figure this out?
unit test first so you know if you've broken it. Then lots of test input variations best taken from production sources.

Refactor thereafter and test after each iteration of changes. It's not a rewrite, so don't lose the plot just Refactor into smaller methods :)
Pretty amazing how organizational incompetence took what could have been a minor inconvenience or even a positive (your car gets driven by Elon for 50-100km is probably a plus, if it is already used) to a pissed off customer.

Otoh, I'd far prefer a company screw over a rich guy who is the very definition of an equal party to contract/informed consumer. The "buy here pay here" used car dealers catering to poor, relatively uninformed, and powerless consumers do things far worse than this as routine business practice.
Pink Panthers
Spoiler: the homebrew solution didn't have WiFi. Unless your LAN is servers-only, how much of an option is no-WiFi these days ?
Mine too! I have the V.92 version, which gives careful listeners the impression of a slight anachronism since most people stopped hearing those tones before V.92 came out. :)

It definitely causes double takes on the rare occasions my phone isn't on silent and I receive and actual phone call.
Not sure what you're getting at? The ribbon breaks office for frequent users. Around office 2003 I could have files, fonts, formatting and review all on the same amount of screen real estate as the ribbon.

This was invaluable when working on complex documents. Post ribbon all that's forcibly broken up across multiple tabs. Instead I get giant buttons for functions I don't use permanently taking up space, rather the. An efficient array of those I do.
as somebody who hasn't been following this at all, can someone please explain all of the hostility toward fb? I get that what fb is offering is far from ideal, but isn't it slightly better than the status quo of no internet for a large amount of people? and as Facebook is a business, not a charity, shouldn't they be able to recoup money on their investment? I imagine giving free internet access, albeit limited, to the world's soon to be largest population doesn't come cheap
It's even worse. Not only is time an illusion but your observation is being sabotaged by sysadmins that make one of the nodes of your distributed system jump back in time several hours (by changing the time zone info) and other naughty deeds.
It's self, not __self__ (it has never been __self__). Double underscore names are used for special methods, which are typed relatively rarely, the most common probably being __init__.
Grafted plants' genomes can communicate with each other
Careful, it's a great way to still get k-line'd on many networks.

The DCC SEND bug is still pretty common too.
This article has motivated me to do this for my parents. They are plagued by wireless reliability problems. I added another WiFi router at the other end of the house and bridged over Ethernet (it was a PITA to configure bridging in the extension router's firmware). I'm not even sure if it helps, though I did ensure that the two APs are operating on the two least-noisy channels. I regularly have connectivity problems when I visit, and feel bad that they have to deal with it on a regular basis. Updating to newer consumer routers has only offered marginal improvements.

Their house actually has acquired quite a bit of CAT 5E runs to the far corners, so I'm thinking about getting them a router (small x64 machine as described in the blog post), a gigabit Ethernet switch, and some Ethernet-connected WiFi APs around the house.

Does anyone have experience with Ubiquiti APs? They seem to understand that they exist primarily to bridge WiFi and Ethernet, not solve every networking related problem on Earth. I have to say, my WiFi experience at the office improved dramatically after the AirPorts and Cisco APs were tossed for Ubiquiti...
If you work at Trello, please feel free to claim and update with your current tech stack. We're using this blog post from the official Trello page.

http://blog.fogcreek.com/the-trello-tech-stack/
"The tradeoff for the bad hours/pay is that you'll get more autonomy in your work and the ability to really influence the product. To me, this is why you should work for a startup."

I'm beginning to really hate hearing this over and over. So many people accept this at face value when in reality it's dubious at best.

Case in point: 6 months ago I left a start-up for a medium-size company (~300-400 people) that has been around for ~15 yrs with no ambitions of going public nor taking outside investment. I get both amazing pay and an insane amount of autonomy. I doubt this could be matched by a Big or Small company.

Here's the rub: Silicon Valley markets itself VERY WELL and if you're willing to internalize everything that comes out of this marketing machine, then yes... it's snake oil.

I'm not diminishing the the importance or impact of entrepreneurial ventures, but I think we can do better than Cookie-cutter Generalisms repeated ad nauseam without independent thought.
Title should change to: "Microsoft is donating several Billion dollars worth of lock-in into their proprietary technologies".
hostapd is a wonderful thing.
I only disagreed with his claim "Indians are least patriotic, Americans are more patriotic". I didn't say anything about the rest of the comment. I wrote a strong word because the claim was extraordinary.
The eye-tracking GUI concept is interesting. That needs to be tried again. It's been proposed before.[1][2] Dismissing notifications by looking at them is an interesting concept. It's not clear whether users would like it or hate it. That idea probably needs to come with an equally easy way to get it back. Maybe you want to do something about the notification.

One general insight about GUIs is that easily undone mistakes aren't so bad. That's the Amazon one-click purchase insight. The innovation is not that you can buy with one click. It's that you can cancel for the next 10 minutes or so. Most shopping systems had a "we have your money now, muahahaha!" attitude on cancellation until Amazon came along.

[1] http://hci.stanford.edu/research/GUIDe/
[2] http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~jacob/papers/barfield.pdf
Not that it would be hard to add and configure; the only problem would be that WiFi PC card offer a much shorter range than APs.

OP used Ubiquiti APs, directly managed from the homebrew router. Seems a sensible solution.
Architecture people tend to speak in trivial examples. Swapping out an algorithm with a backwards compatible one? Good for you! It doesn't matter how you do it because it's the most trivial example one could think of. (A more realistic example would be new functionality that touches large parts of the code base, or compliance with a new API that the payment processor switches that has more data on every payment as it crosses our systems.)

I never understood why some people are scared of branching. It seems to work pretty well for Linux development. Is your project really that much more complex? As long as you merge continously from upstream, you're golden. What's the problem you're trying to solve, exactly?

I _do_ have some reservations against #ifdef-sprinkled code. And it's not an unlikely scenario that your feature toggles turn into something very similar, if conditions change and maybe they're not that temporary anymore.
The author mentions using WiFi APs, basically Ethernet<>WiFi bridges. I've been envisioning a deployment exactly like this myself.
I think investing in faster non-wireless router is better with wireless technology changing every few years where you can simply add on wireless only solutions like Ubiquiti's Unifi for only $69.
I see Wolfram's offerings as an incredibly convenient prototyping and educational tool. I can't really imagine anyone sane is using it for anything that would result in a disaster significant enough to evoke a sword hanging over ones head.
"We must operate under the assumption that if "a good guy" has discovered a vulnerability in a product then "a bad guy" will also find it before long."

Today, we have to operate under the assumption that if a good guy has discovered a vulnerability, a bad guy is probably already exploiting it.
I found flights to Tallinn on flychecker at € 88
I started with a Linux, but eventually moved on to FreeBSD. I learned more about network technologies mucking around with an edge router then I ever did in my CS networking class.

It's been an interesting decade.
1990 means basically "they didn't even have digital cameras". In the context, that is not recent at all.
You could add WiFi if you wanted to. As the article points out, good wireless chips are hard to come by, but (also as pointed out in the article), you could still buy consumer wireless access points and use those.
There is no complete implementation of the Risch algorithm. None of the implementations fully implement the algebraic case. Besides, the Risch algorithm doesn't solve all symbolic integration problems in practice:

* Even when it succeeds, it doesn't necessarily give you the simplest possible form of the solution.

* It is concerned with elementary functions, but real-world problem often involve non-elementary functions (like Bessel and hypergeometric functions). You can extend the Risch algorithm to work with such functions, but this is complicated.

* It doesn't allow computing parametric answers for common parametric families of integrals (this needs to be done using heuristics and lookup tables).

* It doesn't give you an algorithm for definite integration, except in simple cases. Even with proper definite integrals, you need to be extremely careful with branch cuts when applying the fundamental theorem of calculus. For improper definite integrals, systems like Mathematica generally try to go via convolutions of Meijer G-functions, using huge lookup tables and simplification heuristics.

* Even more fundamentally, the Risch algorithm (and symbolic integration more generally) puts heavy demands on the underlying symbolic computation engine. In particular, it depends on the ability to decide whether an expression is equivalent to zero, which in fact is an undecidable problem, and this strictly speaking makes the Risch "algorithm" a non-algorithm (though it is a proper algorithm when restricted to a ground field where zero testing is effective, such as Q).
Ask HN: Why is AWS so popular despite being impossibly complex?
Was planning to move to AWS & consolidate out server from Linode and Digital Ocean. OMG, it's been like the month from hell! I've had to spend incredible amounts of time trying to learn AWS & now I have a $1900 bill (highest Linodo bill was $150) b/c I checked the dedicated instance box I was playing around with.

I can't put into words the kind of frustration AWS creates compared to Linode or Digital Ocean. Why the hell are they still so popular?
More censorship coming to Facebook on 2016
Whoa. That's an ugly URL! b^) I clicked through just to see if I could cut out the random number, but no dice.
Float Left, I’m Trying to Explain It
1) __self__? I don't think I have ever seen that. Are you combining two problems? All metamethods are quoted with dunderscores, and the first parameter of each method is "self", both of which annoy some people...

2) That is a reasonable choice. I like expressing myself once, instead of repeating myself in both whitespace and brackets or whatever, but I get the argument for autoformatting after copy/paste. Of course, lua does this the best, by having neither significant whitespace nor semicolons, and just figuring out where statements end from the grammar.

3) Objects are wholly optional, and can mostly be avoided. the functools and itertools libraries go a long way to bring the functional religion to python.
Where I live (lived) there's no such thing as free local calls. Whenever you dialed anything the meter started counting.
I became very good at mentally preparing what I wanted to download before dialing :-)

That was pre-internet, at least where I lived, and we all used Fidonet[1]. Cant recall my node, it's been too long.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet
Comparing Nim to Lisps doesn't make much sense. Lists in Lisp are whitespace-separated, so `(- 1)` is different from `(-1)` for the same reason that `(a b)` is different from `(ab)`.
I would say that the answer is trivially yes. You need to know math to do great science.

Why?

Science is all about reproducibility. Without a strong grasp of statistics, you do not know whether you've actually discovered an effect, or whether you just got (un)lucky with your data. And far from being a theoretical problem, numerous scientific disciplines, especially those in biology and medicine, are currently dealing with a "reproducibility crisis", as they find that prominent results don't recur when replication experiments are run.

Far from there being too much math in science, I think there's currently too little math. If researchers knew more about the limits of the statistical tests they were using, rather than focusing on the magic p=0.05 level, we'd have much higher quality science, with a much higher level of confidence that the results being reported were real results, rather than statistical abberations.
The NFL Is Finally Tapping into the Power of Data
It's changed a lot for the better over the last few releases to the point where it doesn't matter anymore.

If it's still a concern, you can do what I did a while back and just write the app on top of Node.js. Then the startup time is more or less gone altogether.
REDS.box – Get your privacy back in the cloud
Also survivorship bias perhaps

"I have met a TON of Slavic people that have prodigy level capabilities."
I think the calculus changes when you consider teams with 1000s of programmers committing 100s of changes per day. Keeping feature branches up-to-date can pretty quickly adds up to a lot of time and creates a lot of friction for refactoring/cleanup-type changes.

Feature toggles enable some additional cool stuff like partial/incremental rollout and A/B testing, which really pay dividends.
> You don't have to "roll your own" for the cases that are always defined. That means, when NULLs and 0 aren't involved, realloc works, call it from your "myrealloc" function. For 0 and NULL, make sure that your "myrealloc" function handles them exactly as you'd like.

Ah, I misunderstood what you meant by "doing it in your own function". Yes, wrapping the semantics will work, though doing it right and without imposing some overhead takes a bit of work.

> It's not how C traditionally worked. Almost every function was knowingly made to be not "too good." I see modern programmers expect something else, what even 100 times slower languages not always give. Special cases have different possible treatments, and as soon as the exist nobody can make something that would please everyone.

As the original post pointed out, traditionally it didn't work like this. This is how it has evolved.

I did use poor semantics though, as "undefined behaviour" has a specific meaning in C that is of course how the language was defined. What I meant was "ambiguous or unwanted behaviour". Having a clear behaviour for a particular case, even if it is just returning an error code, is fine by me.
You're arguing that it will act like us because it will be intelligent.

That doesn't hold. Dogs have millions of years of evolution of being pack mammals with leaders, spiders don't.

We are superintelligent compared to spiders, we don't care about what spiders care about just because we grow up with spiders nearby. We still kill them, wreck their habitats, and ignore them.

We don't exploit them. They're too irrelevant to be exploitable. We bulldoze them away and put buildings millions of times bigger than them on top.

A superintelligence which is amoral won't care about us just from being near us, like we don't care about wrapping wasps in silk just from being near spiders. We can't associate with spiders, an AI won't automatically be able, willing or interested in associating with us - unless we code that in. It won't exploit us, it will go about its goals without considering us as anything special or interesting.
Did you know each manufacturer had a unique sound for their v90 handshake? This one sounds like a Lucent WinModem. (Based on listening to the sounds here[1]. Yay for RealAudio!) The USR/3Com modems were two "bongs" (four if the higher speed failed). But I was always fond of the Rockwell sweep[2].

Of course, required reading is HN favorite Oona Räisänen's excellent analysis of a modem handshake.

[1] http://modemsite.com/56k/trouble3.asp

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvr9AMWEU-c

[3] http://www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-sound-of-dialup-pictured...
We use feature toggled a fair amount on our SAAS application. It does create technical debt which at some point has to be addressed.

One thing that confuses our junior developers is the difference between a feature toggles and a client permission. Often they misuse a feature toggle as a client permission, simply because only one client is using that feature (currently).
"Let me put it this way - ever heard of Plato? Socrates? Morons."
If freedom helped it maximise paperclips?
> I never understood why some people are scared of branching.

Well this is branching (in the same way that if..else is branching), just not in the VCS. What's the advantage? This methodology can allow code to go to production for some or all users, either as dark launches ( http://agiletesting.blogspot.com/2009/07/dark-launching-and-... ) or as production code. VCS branching gives you none of that, and sometimes you need to roll things out sloooowly, either for quality control or for capacity monitoring.

> It seems to work pretty well for Linux development.

Well for example, if you're following the linux development model for webops, you're almost certainly doing it wrong. I'm sure your website doesn't have release candidates and LTS versions all at different URLs.

> As long as you merge continuously from upstream, you're golden.

This is not really true either. It's fine if you're the only one on a team following that model, but if everyone on your team follows that model, you're delaying collaboration and causing merge debt. Upstream ends up like a ghost town until someone like you dumps a week worth of work on it just before you're about to dump your week's worth too.

> I _do_ have some reservations against #ifdef-sprinkled code.

This is definitely a downside! You have to use a lot of discipline to keep this minimal and well-organized.
Interesting.

They are still useless things built on pseudoscience considering what question they're attempting to answer, and I find their use in court cases a blight on an otherwise advanced society.