skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your argument is good for showing the value of consisent units.

But it could be base 2 or base 16.
This is really a private payment network that happens to be denominated in Bitcoins. You have a balance denominated in Bitcoins on a server at "21.co". "Before you can execute an off-chain transaction in the 21 system, you need a bitcoin balance at 21.co." It's a centralized micropayment system. So only people with 21.co accounts can play. Hey, it worked for PayPal.

You can initiate a "flush" transaction which asks "21.co" to sell you real Bitcoins in exchange for their book-entry Bitcoins. Sellers would presumably do this at least once a day, avoiding keeping a substantial balance on "21.co". Given the track record of "hosted Bitcoin wallets", which tend to be "take the money and run" operations (anyone knowing the whereabouts of Cryptsy's "Big Vern", please contact the Silver Law Firm) that's a good feature.

There's no real reason this needs Bitcoins at all. This scheme would work if it was denominated in dollars. There's a startup opportunity here. Reuse the micropayment system, forget about the Bitcoins. You'd deposit money into your micropayment account with a credit card, and your computer can then spend against that balance. Merchants could "flush" their balance via an ACH transfer to their bank.
Sorry, but I feel I need to be harsh to express how much I disagree; it sounds like you are a terrible teacher.

Beside feeding them with the "just write mediocre code" you are also taking away the beauty of software development: "you have to write something just good enough and move on"...
Microsoft Forcing/Coercing vendors into preinstalling Windows
It could be but my guess is its just a question of the money tap flowing freely so there is more competition on the VC side.

VC's set the prices after all.
Your description of "human intelligence" sounds more like a bounded random number generator. Also, your thinking is restricted by sensory input - just like the AI.
>Less hard drugs, less pregnancy.... But in the big picture, I'm not sure I want a generation full of wimps. It sounds like the beginning of enslavement to me.

What? How does enslavement follow from lower rates of teen pregnancy? Perhaps it just mean higher usage rates of contraceptives, which is backed by evidence. It might also imply that young women are choosing to be more independent.
No, coffee shops are full of people on laptops. Starbucks seems to be able to make money on this, even though people camp for a long time.
Do you have an email I can reach you directly at, instead of Twitter?
Everyone laughs at these mistakes, including me. Mine happened while holidaying in the Lake District, we were planning to hike to Scafell Pike (highest point in England), from Seathwaite. So we rolled out of our tent at 5am, got in the car, punched Seathwaite into the sat nav, and drove. We passed ominous warning signs. We thought that sounded reasonable for the highest point in England so we ploughed on.

We did get out the car at Seathwaite an hour or more later, feeling slightly puzzled as we had recollections it was about 30 minutes away from the campground. We put it down to google underestimating the time taken to go on the slightly scary steep, single track roads.

After stretching our legs, we consulted our actual map + walking instructions and couldn't get anything to match up. We flagged down a local and they pointed out that there's another Seathwaite about ten miles away as the crow flies and that was probably the one we wanted. The catch was that three mountains lay between us. I've rarely felt so embarrassed. The drive over the Wrynose and Hard Knott pass was very picturesque though.
Answer this question honestly : would your employees feel that it is in their best interest to learn new things and teach them to the company ?

Having a learning-oriented company can only happen if people are aligned, and if making the company smarter makes sense to them.

Most of the time it is the contrary and what makes sense is the status quo and protecting long-earned corporate political capitals.

This is the root that you need to address, the rest will follow.

On another note, I'd be concerned that your junior devs don't like coding. It's a very bad sign. The best senior software managers still insist to have control on the design and the architecture. Bill Gates remained the chief engineer and architect for a reason. Your folks won't be good software managers if they are not passionate about writing good softwares and continuously improving their practice. I think you should replace them.
I trusted Google Maps untill few weeks ago it sent us down a road that became undriveable and dangerous -- costing us about two hrs. Although, this did happen in Martinique, for the most part I've had good experiencea with Google Maps in US.
Is Marching Cubes not already outdated algorithm to do this !?

Why not use state pf the art algorithm for this, like Marching Tiles ?
Pharmacists aren’t just people selling drugs. They know exactly how to combine them and why you should take one or another based on how you are, what disease you have and if you have allergies. They can even sometimes replace physicians.
Similar to Hugh Stegman (operator of Ominous Valve) is Tom Jennings: http://sensitiveresearch.com/
Indeed. See the for example the Disruptor pattern for something that look like a (cyclefree) Petri Net.
Selection of best examples of branding a museum
> My point though is this doesn't fit "we didn't start early enough" IMO. They knew how much time they had. No one was/is dicating too much work. They can cut the scope at any time. But they rarely do.

Doesn't knowing how much time you have, and then not cutting scope when you see your plans don't fit into that time, count as not starting early enough?

I also came from games, and I agree that scope is rarely cut, and often self-inflicted. I was also under Mr. Very Large Publisher, and it was more complicated than that- we had control over scope, but not over schedule. We had control over how much work to do and the quality, but not the budget.

The major problem in my experience was that the team was excited, motivated and willing to work hard, so optimistic about their ability to do great things inside the limited budget and schedule. Therefore, they tried to do too much. All other things being equal, more time would have helped, every single time. Which can be summarized as "we didn't start early enough." That doesn't mean that actually starting earlier would have solved the problem. Actually starting earlier might have led to even larger plans. So, IMO "we didn't start early enough." is not meant to be taken literally, it's a way of understanding the problem, not a way to solve the problem.
> Some worry sex robots might hurt already marginalised sex workers

I doubt that anyone actually worries about this.
Isn't the library already out here? https://testpypi.python.org/pypi/two1
I shortened the headline because, well, it didn't fit...and also, I think "silences minorities" is a little strong. If the 538 map [1] in question aimed to argue something along the lines of, "Why do minorities have so much voting power when they represent so little of the country?"...then sure. But sometimes a standard choropleth is used when geopolitical boundaries and distinctions are important. I'm not sure that they're particularly important for "The Facebook Primary"...on the other hand, in the context of presidential elections, geopolitical boundaries are generally more relevant to the reader...because of the way presidents are decided via electoral college rather than popular vote.

That said, I absolutely agree that awareness and practice of cartograms is needed, as there are plenty of times when such geopolitical-agnostic granularity is needed. But it's not just a tradeoff in difficulty in production and design...cartograms are more abstract to the viewer, and the more geopolitical data that you fuzz over, the more you might as well just make a labeled bar chart...which also is an underused format these days, because very few people will want to decorate their articles and essays with bar charts when maps are just as easy to make.

[1] http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/facebook-primary/
I suppose I'm similar to the way you write code. However I'd like to note that this 10%-70% in my case (and may be true for you) is applied only in cases when I'm implementing something very unfamiliar to me.

If I'm working on some familiar problem or in a familiar area I tend to write nice, clean code from the beginning. As I have more and more experience in various areas it reduces number of times when I have to do this process of dirty code->refactor.
Longer treatment of similar material by same author:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/946076.Why_Does_Software_...
Just to give further explanation to everyone commenting on the 'warbot' phrase... The robots iRobot makes for use in war, are designed to save lives. Not take them. They saved my life, as well as the lives of several coworkers, on many occasions. They are designed to dismantle IEDs or road side bombs as you may know them. The number one killer in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If I can send a $150,000 piece of equipment down range to handle an IED with a skilled operator at the controls, instead of risking human life to make the route / area safe for passing friendly troops, local nationals, or coalition troops, instead of risking my life... I'm going to it every single time.
even if your downvoted. I think what you wrote is somehow true. it's really hard to optimize. but I don't think that Scala is the only language which has this downside.
Also you could write really really awful code with scala.
Automation can still greatly increase their productivity.

(Even really simple things like computerizing prescriptions and flagging known bad combinations make them more effective, roughly for free)
How Apple Sucks the Profit Out of Mobile Phones
Be careful, this may equally well be a reason to advertise RAM sticks as having 8.589GB capacity :)
http://duckduckgo.com also doesn't collect personal information and supports built-in queries like "whois example.com". How is this search engine different or better?
They really shouldn't; I work in IT, and typically describe file sizes to my clients using the metric prefixes; if they're curious I'll explain the difference (1000 is actually 1024 at each level) but the difference is usually negligible, and modern operating systems round the difference away when displaying the simplified sizes to the user.
Mandatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/394
FYI: ReJit, as of now, can match only on null-terminated strings. Most regexp engine support matching arbitrary byte sequences.

What's the benefit of using ReJit over RE2? I can think of no C++ dependencies and the support for backward-references.

Benchmarks 2...3 years ago: http://coreperf.com/update/rejit/2013/09/01/rejit_pcre_bench... It looks like much faster than RE2 for various regexps.

The documentation doesn't say if it's worst-case matching time is exponential. RE2 is always polynomial.
Re: the last gun in the article:

> The rifle’s effective firing range underwater is about 25 meters at a depth of 30 meters and 18 meters at a depth of 20 meters, according to Russia Today.

Earlier in the article they associate an increase in depth with a lessened range, but with this one it's the reverse? Is that a typo or a nuance of the technology?
Don't you find it alarming that the only motivation you have to work is so that you can afford to not have to work m-f 40+? What are you going to do if you fail to 'create value' (read: create something that is successfully monetized) and you're looking back on years of your life that you didn't spend more w/ yourself, family, and friends in your little free time, instead giving yourself for the success of a startup? How will you feel, seeing others do little and earn hordes of cash due to being on the right side of automation or being in the 'right' networks?

Wouldn't you prefer to be free to work for things that you think are valuable... not in your free time, y'know, the time that should be for yourself and the things you love?

What's up with all these weird open source folk, working hard to create value and giving it away for free, uplifting for all? I hear this linux thing is pretty cool. It's almost like we can capture productivity in code and then copy it endlessly for practically free and everyone benefits. How are these people motivated?!

Maybe we should pursue this cooperation thing... who am I kidding. It fails every. single. time.! Right?
Just to drive the whole "this comparison is misleading" point further: https://github.com/atemerev/skynet/pull/23

Lwt is a cooperative multi-threading library with a particular semantic: A task that doesn't block doesn't even yield, it returns directly.

Yes, it's comparing apple to oranges.
I have a lot of experience with Rust, so take this with a grain of salt, but as long as a library exists, I feel about 85% as productive with Rust as I do Ruby. While it takes slightly longer initially, I save a lot of time writing less tests and virtually never debugging.

It's a much younger ecosystem, so there's not always a library though. Then it clearly takes longer, because there's a lot more to do. We do have a pretty respectable number of libraries for our age though, I'm constantly surprised at what DOES exist.
Does anyone have any nice examples, other than the UK parliamentary seats map? It's widely used in the UK, but it's also perhaps the only decent cartogram I've seen.

Edit: Here's a reasonable one for the USA: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/Cartogra...

And an interactive version of the UK one: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2015/may/...
To solve this issue I keep component-specific .scss files alongside each component's JS file, in a component-specific folder. A root index.scss file imports all of the components' .scss files.

Coupled with BEM, this also helps prevent component style interdependencies.
Professional Software Industry Forum (PSWIF)
So more drugs means less wimps which is better in your opinion? You think teens taking drugs is a positive?
"Can anyone provide an example of a problem that would be better solved with grid computing/micropayments instead of cloud computing?"

Maybe you could get paid for being a botnet node.
Anything that would currently use AWS spot instances. Amazon created it, so we can assume there's a market for "cheaper, but lower availability". Google has something similar https://cloud.google.com/preemptible-vms/

>I like your example of the power grid as an explanation for how owners of small amounts of computing power might interact with the larger system and have an impact on market prices. But if the analogy truly holds, it would be a good indication of how negligible rewards would be to smaller entities (individuals running computers or smartphones).

I'm not thinking of individuals making a living off of their one computer. But surely there's a significant amount of computing power in datacenters that goes unused, or not optimally used. Now, they could manually partner with other datacenters to absorb excess capacity, and bargain a price individually. But if grid computing becomes a thing, all they'd have to do is hook up a bidder to their excess capacity.

Admittedly, focusing on high capacity entities makes it harder to see micropayments as helpful. Even if the minimum transfer amount was $100, it would still be worth it for datacenter operators to trade on such a market.
Yes, this appeared to be a very lazily written article. It basically lists a bunch of variations of materials molders and postal workers.
...just months after TC seemingly can't run itself out of breath highlighting and hyping up all these same companies enough. Constant fanfare or doom, all hyperbole, nothing in between or representative of reality which is somewhere in the far less exciting middle.
Kudos for them if they are embracing this wholeheartedly
Previous discussion from 2010 (including spolsky and dhh):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1719975
I don't know who invented the term 'unicorn' but it's getting increasingly more ironic.
I'm not complaining... just observing. I'm not one of those who pines for the "good old days" of cooperative multitasking, unprotected memory, and application errors taking down the whole system.

Although I do find it remarkable that they were able to stuff so much into such a tiny amount of space (everything had to fit on a 400KB disk plus the 64KB Toolbox ROM, and the OS plus applications only had 128KB of RAM to run in).
Q: "Why does my computer list the size of my drive as being smaller than what the box says it is?"

A: "Because drive manufactures chose to use a different way of counting to make you think the drive is bigger than it actually is."

Problem solved.
They're not major, mainstream distros.

Linux on mainstream distros is dead.
Browse the web like a hipster
LIGO's PyCBC
Laws say pharmacist must give you the prescription, in a pharmacy. So there's little automation.

But with online ordering(PillPack ,etc) ,the laws are different, so there's more automation.
Not anytime soon, as far as I can tell:

Brendan Eich: "wasm is really starting out as a target for static languages like C++, it’s gonna be a while before we get other future extensions to wasm like garbage collection and just-in-time compile to wasm, features we need for dynamic languages to perform well, that’s gonna take a while to do, too"
Well, IHS locally has a pill dispenser (looks like a pipe organ filled with pills that drop into the container), but they have two pharmacists. I guess there are still errors.
You clearly misunderstood my post. It may have been badly phrased.

What I meant isn't "don't share it". I meant "get it right before you share it".

I'd have thought the fact I spent a significant amount of time reviewing his implementation and giving well-meant comments would have made that clear. I have no interest in suppressing anyones development -- the more everyone learns, the better for everyone. And do I care about that.

However:

1. HN submissions are 1:many communication. Like, say, mailing lists. For which I've been taught that the sender should make an effort to send a good message. freddiearch didn't put in that effort (see post #11098621). I care about HN, and I'd prefer to see high-quality articles here.

2. Beginners learning about new techniques and then immediately going on to write a low-quality tutorial is a very common phenomenon on the internet. It makes it unnecessarily harder for other beginners, who can't tell. The code didn't work and had several major flaws. It's just not good code to learn Ansible from. (Except for freddiearch of course -- writing bad code, then improving it, is part of learning. Nothing wrong with that! Everyone starts small!)

(@freddiearch: If you read this: I really hope I didn't discourage you from learning about Ansible or anything.)
Show HN: A simple chatbot
Considering Go is showing under ~10ms GC pauses. Java's advantage seems theoretical rather than real world. I work in Java at my job and I have not seen such low GC pauses in Java ever.
edit:
Also considering huge garbage idiomatic Java libraries and user code generates, Generational GC in Java is a basic requirement not a powerful advantage over Go.
Yes, but at the same time, this is from the newspaper whose headline today was "Supreme Court Conservative Dismayed Liberals". Physician, heal thyself... https://twitter.com/NKingofDC/status/698927468883943424
The trashcan comments reminded me of a comment by the late Douglas Adams about how it was better not to know that the trashcan had things in it. You're tempted to empty it right away, defeating the purpose of having it there in the first place.
> That depends on which pairs

Portuguese and Spanish have more in common than many other latin-derived languages. Again, two similar languages, slightly different words for the same things... Most languages will have a basic set of concepts in common, and will have different words for each.

> (1) It gives a window into how each culture understands a given field and Universe overall

And be more interested in examples of this than analogies. If one culture say "get in the bath/shower" and another "get on the bath/shower" (ala. "get on a train") what understanding does it give us? Could we not get the same understanding by reading linguistics books instead?..

> Perhaps it would make sense to prune our English vocabulary. After all, less is more, and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts

less is more is an fashionable ideology in certain design circles, not a universal law. English is pretty idiomatic - that's where the missing words go. I don't think software analogies are useful here, natural languages are very less explicit than software tooling.

> Luckily we have two hands

o-k. Care to unpack that? this is an outright substitution of a sensible argument for a vague anology... How is confusion between incompatible grammer likely to make you fat and happy?
So systemd is not flawed by design?
Journalists are not loosing their jobs due to automation.

Well, the robots don't buy newspapers.
Frankly, while technology has a part in this, I feel this media noise is cover for the much larger impact of globalization, cheap-labor driven free trade, TPP, etc. that the banksters and elites push for.
Almost every movie depicting famous artists have the problem that they rarely show the artist actually working - because this is really boring to look at. Performing artists like musicians, dancers etc. are more entertaining to look at, but writers, painters, mathematicians, scientists etc. are not cinematic. Composing is not very cinematic either, unless you use narrative tricks like intercutting with performance of the finished piece.

So in order to be watchable, the movies instead focus on the artists personality and private life, and the actual work part is reduced to the cliche of a flash-of-inspiration followed by a short montage of frenzied all-night work, resulting in finished masterpiece. This is of course an unrealistic depiction of the artistic process.

The movie Amadeus makes a point out of how effortless Mozart creates as opposed to Salieri who has to struggle and only gets mediocre results. This is really the romantic myth of the inspired genius, and by playing up the silliness of Mozart, the movie shows genius as a divine gift wholly separate from the persons daily life. Showing Mozart practicing, struggle, making false starts, iteratively improving, having to scrap work etc. would undermine the message of the movie. This is the absolute opposite of the modern 10K hours myth which states that anyone can be a genius through hard work and dedication.
Well, it may be that the numbers are under / overreported, but the test could still be valid, in the sense that shifts in reported behavior are correlated with shifts in actual behavior. In other words, if you assume today's kids are no more likely to lie on a survey than in the past, you can get a sense of the direction of trends, if not the absolute values.
On a side note, does anyone know of anything like a technical certificate for robotics technician or an actual robotics engineering degree?
The Sakai Top
What is 'value'?
Escaping the rat race can be a great motivator, but I think there are many other valuable motivating facts of life that can successfully motivate people. E.g.: curing sicknesses, understanding nature and the universe, overcome obstacles to human well being... Why do you think that people like Bill Gates keep working, without the need of doing m-f 40+ ?

You seem to be justifing the concentration of capital and power in a few hands in order to 'motivate' the rest of the population.
No it will not, and can not.

"c <- num" is a blocking statement. Since c is an unbuffered channel, execution cannot proceed past the statement until a reader consumes a value. The reader in this case creates 10 goroutines executing "c <- num" and only then starts consuming values. If the statements you wrote were inlined execution would immediately halt in a deadlock.