skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Using software you pay for, or pay for software you use? In the end, the money goes to the same place.
SpaceX seeks to accelerate Falcon 9 production and launch rates this year
Wordpress exploded in popularity largely in part because it's easy to use.
I don't see why you would expect node.js to be faster than anything else; despite all the time that's been poured into it I'd think JavaScript is still inherently difficult to optimize (and I'd guess they also need to do a lot of extra work to deal with numbers in the proper precision since they are handling money).
If we take "Functions" as a baseline, then we have...

Floating Functions / First class functions (thanks to comments for reminding): Functions that can be passed around as variables. e.g. All functions in Javascript are floating functions.

function callback() { ... }
// function assigned to a variable
var x = callback;
// function is an argument to another function
doSomething(..., callback)

Anonymous functions: functions with no name.

// an anonymous function
(function() { .... })()

// anonymous function as an argument
doSomething(..., function() { .... })

Lambda functions: A style of writing functions without a block, where the function and return value are expressed as one single expression without the usage of a block or explicit returns.

employee => employee.name

Closures: When a function references a variable outside its scope, and that "frees" the variable from its normal lifetime, thus creating a "closure" between the function and the now-free variable.

function a() {
var x = 1;
return function() {
// here a closure is created
// now "x" outlives its lifetime and
// becomes a free variable
return x + 1;
}
}
Watson is no longer the system that won Jeopardy. It is a collection of technologies that have nothing to do with machine intelligence and some that do. What is clear is that by no means has IBM won the game against FB, Google or Baidu. In many cases they can't do it. They have invested too much into a specific technology framework.

But what I believe is that IBM will survive. Their ability to sell will win over technology.
I have incredible admiration for Barack Obama. His book, "The Audacity of Hope" was logical and articulated the positions of his opponents better than his opponents were expressing those opinions themselves. He is a brilliant politician who embodies the Confucian principle of leading by example, and a man who really appreciates science and technology. I especially enjoyed his description of seeing network traffic on the World Wide Web:

The image was mesmerizing, more organic than mechanical, as if I were glimpsing the early stages of some accelerating evolutionary process, in which all the boundaries between men--nationality, race, religion, wealth--were rendered invisible and irrelevant, so that the physicist in Cambridge, the bond trader in Tokyo, the student in a remote Indian village, and the manager of a Mexico City department store were drawn into a single constant, thrumming conversation, time and space giving way to a world spun entirely of light. [1]

I love that one of his first initiatives in office was to put so many government resources online. I also loved his rational perspective of religion, and that he respects spirituality, but made it clear that we can't govern on religion alone. That everyone must find empirical justifications for their policy proposals:

We all know the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham is ordered by God to offer up his only son, and without argument, he takes Isaac to the mountaintop, binds him to an altar, and raises his knife, prepared to act as God has commanded. Of course, in the end God sends down an angel to intercede at the very last minute, and Abraham passes God's test of devotion.

But it's fair to say that if any of us leaving this church saw Abraham on a roof of a building raising his knife, we would, at the very least, call the police and expect the Department of Children and Family Services to take Isaac away from Abraham. We would do so because we do not hear what Abraham hears, do not see what Abraham sees, true as those experiences may be. So the best we can do is act in accordance with those things that we all see, and that we all hear, be it common laws or basic reason.[2]

I appreciate Brooks' commentary, and share his disappointment with all of the candidates running for president. No matter who gets elected, it's going to feel like a step back to me. Obama has played the long-game, and I think history will remember him positively.

[1] http://mxplx.com/reference/28/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOwzy-vKaFI
I've been pondering corporate roles in modern OSS projects for a few months, especially those in projects that have no single owner.

Supporting developers or community members of an OSS project your company uses through employee time or financial means is less of an investment, and more of a hedge. You've picked up a product off the shelf, however that product has a future direction decided by a number of people in a community.

A company that chooses not (through inaction or action) to participate in the project is relying on the existing powers-that be, and their existing influences, to make decisions that will benefit the company. This is a risk.

A company that chooses to participate cannot control a decentralized project, but they can absolutely influence the software and community by choosing what projects to fund, what kind of roles to hire for, what projects to sponsor, and what to publicly talk about. This influence nudges the community in directions beneficial to the company, and ensures the project doesn't head in a different direction.

For example in the last year the Ember.js community has seen an influx of larger companies hiring positions that include OSS time for employees. Large companies sponsoring OSS work is becoming more common. This means the parts of Ember that benefit large company needs (lots of devices, big dev teams) are getting more focus. The transition is exciting and fascinating to observe.

Support OSS projects important to your company, or accept the risk that comes with allowing foundational parts of your business to be managed by others (without your needs in mind).
There's more explanation at the link, it's largely a tax thing where a donation ends up being more expensive than an invoice. It's also apparently uncomfortable for the donation to come from the company.
I considered that -- we're effectively subsidizing research. I feel way better about that, then giving defense contractors 300/hr to drag&drop some Telerik components into Visual Studio. I figure that's the lesser of two evils IMO. Some companies don't even pay taxes -take Apple[1] who posted 30 billion in profit (for those of you who haven't paid retained earnings taxes, that's ~10 billion that should have gone to the federal government, and if you live in California, your state wouldn't be broke anymore (or significantly less broke)). More than $100 billion dollars homed in a nominal 'headquarters' to rob hard working Americans. (Granted I'd be transfer pricing too if my corporation could afford to retain Skadden, haha.) On the upside, I think they pay the salary for a few LLVM guys.

We digress. Support other startups, if you have a startup - use Tarsnap. ;)

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/may/29/apple-tax-... (The Guardian does have a bit of a liberal slant, FYI. Think of them as the UK's NYT.)
Holy crow, 1000? I follow about 40 :)
There's also the group of people I'm in: I _like_ the explicit semicolons.
I congratulate Forbes in successfully blocking my attempts to read their articles but I really don't care enough to turn off adblocking on their site. Usually there are other tabs with articles waiting for me to read and Forbes just saved me some reading time. That being said I'd probably turn off adblocking for Wired, I did with The Atlantic a while back but they started to autoplay their videos and I just blocked them again. How can that practice be in so widespread use in this day and age? Let's hope Wired isn't doing that.
How about memory size? A pointer to a function is just a single pointer to the called code, while a pointer to a closure has at least 2 pieces of data (pointer to code + closed over data or reference) which seems incompatible.
Last time I was on an FX trading floor (2010) clients seeking voice quotes for spot would get a sales person who would be using the sales version of the FX single dealer platform. Sales guy would voice quote the electronic rate made by the auto trading system that was shown in the Java SDP GUI on their desktop. For top clients the spread might be tightened slightly, but most would get the vanilla electronic rate. No human trader would be involved, and there would be no manual price discretion at any point.
Not only that, it is a nice example of using Go in a role that many would use C for, so it might convince a few to try their hands to safer programming languages.

Next step, bare metal runtime! :)
It's for those times when a signup could be useful for you but you don't want to give out your real email adress. Questions? :)
> In any case, a DHS spokesperson said the agency is looking into the reports, though “there is no indication at this time that there is any breach of sensitive or personally identifiable information.”

Except, you know, names. Merely being identified as a person moves you from not existing in the criminal universe to target. From name and other information comes yet other information, comes economic damage, or in this case, possibly life threatening damage.
Its just that (almost) nobody pays for open software. Its the tragedy of the commons or some such. Being the only guy to do so, hardly begins to help insure the product will be around in a year.
* Federated vs Centralized

* Usenet vs Internet.

* IRC vs AOL Instant Messenger

* Email vs Xanga / Myspace / Facebook

* Torrent vs Dropbox / Cloud Storage

Federated has its advantages. Centralized has its advantages. 40 years from now, people will continue to use the federated platform. The centralized platform only stays around as long as it is profitable.

But while the centralized platform is around, things are a lot more convenient and mainstream.
So you meant to say that with programming, the problem is complicated because it opens up the market from people from all over the world, and for industries that can't be outsourced, like barbershops, things aren't that bad?
> 1)

Linked-in actually has this but I still get messages from recruiters. I'm not sure if the Linked-in flag affects search results but I can think of ways to circumvent "search ghosting." For example, I could be found without search by looking at the company profile or the connections of people in my company.

I'm sure there are ways to fix this but the only one I can think of involves penalizing the recruiter and at the end of the day these people are just trying to do their job.
Maybe I'm unlucky, but I've never seen a company where this is true, if they are > 5 people. And those were non-profits where growth wasn't really a concern.
No, it is for something bigger than a company, it is for the world: if there is a earthquake or tsunami you want to receive the alert immediately.

I am not pro Twitter, I am just saying that from the computer science point of view you can't find a distributed solution to one of the problems Twitter is trying to solve.
Realtor.com Predicts a Broncos Win in the SuperBowl and a Touchdown for RealEstate
This was important enough to me that I put it into a blog post: https://ohthehugemanatee.org/blog/2016/02/09/an-open-letter-...
The answer to "why do people not do this already, even when rational and well-educated?" is likely because in most families both parents have to work, and are probably tired at the end of the day. Relationships take work and it's sometimes easy to slip into a routine where you let the relationship just coast (especially once you have young children and any free time you used to have is out the window).
Biggest takeaway: the drawing looked like a 6th grader drew them.

Very interesting nonetheless.
> Legally not allowed? You can donate to anybody you please I would think.

The point patio11 makes here is that as a company things are not so easy:

> Both countries are very lenient with regards to necessary business expenses (必須経費 over here). Neither particularly likes arbitrary money moving out of the company; that smacks of unreported income.

("unreported income" here means money paid to an employee but not reported as income). With a proper invoice and line item, all the boxes are checked and a random audit won't fall on the company like a ton of bricks.

Even if the system handles company donations, that tends to be more complex both internally and externally than a "software license" line item, and thus to have way more overhead and to be way more likely to be refused.
Behold the Grammycam
> Arguing that the CAPTCHA method itself has more benefit than cost completely destroys any future lawsuits.

The judge said that.

> > Moreover, users’ transcriptions increase the utility of other free Google services such as Google Maps or Google Books. Plaintiff has failed to allege how these numerous benefits outweigh the few seconds it takes to transcribe one word.
> choosing a free engine is a cost-saving measure, at which point you're no longer making an AAA game by definition

Not necessarily. 2 of the most popular game engines, Unreal Engine and Unity3d, have very good free offerings now and many AAA games have been made with them.

You can have multi-million dollar development budgets and only be using "free" engines without issue nowadays.
Kill Your Dependencies
I'm enjoying the meta - ad machine that sometimes writes about ads writing about its own new ad plans.

So tech is having a shake-out at the moment - many assumptions being questioned, many business models being challenged, many unicorns revealed as dead horses.

Considering how little of genuine value these businesses contribute - including Wired - I'm not sure they're going to be heavily mourned if they disappear.

Is anyone really going to mind much if the Distraction Economy dies over the next few years?
Open letter to Wired Magazine: keep your market instead of shutting them out
It'll get captured from time to time. Its precisely why mass surveillance is a terrible fucking idea.

They'll never admit it gets stolen either.
Mandelbrot and NN Taleb's claim requires non-Markovianness of the walks. Fractional brownian motion, for example, exhibits long-range dependence.

Also "randomness" is measured using Kolmogorov complexity, a quantity which is incomputable.
Good point. This is also what I do with projects that have some (partial) implementation. Local TODO/IDEAS files are a very good thing.

However, most ideas didn't come to live (and probably never will), and I prefer to have those in a single file instead creating a separate file or directory for each topic. The reason is that some ideas are vague, and sometime I split or merge them.
>"the vast majority of people using ad blockers doesn't get enough value out of Wired.com to subscribe"

Agreed. Subscribing isn't an option for casual readers of any online publication. Nobody is spending hours on Wired every week! Whitelisting Wired isn't a great option either, so there's not really a good solution yet.
They definitely should - wouldn't be surprised if they are already.
I wish the OP had used less sweeping terminology – WordPress is definitely easy to install but keeping it running, customizing it, and staying secure are all areas where reasonable people can have different opinions. It'd be nice if people didn't slag off other projects but instead mentioned what they'd found better/worse about the one they're recommending.
multiple professions.
I frequently use the tilde ('~') for this purpose. Others use "/s".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation

Most of the marks historically used for insincerity or irony would fail today because they cannot be typed on any keyboards.
Open Season: Pancake Flipping – The Aperiodical
The amount of money they used for lobbying and andverts was enough for them to pay for actual costs of internet packs if they worked with carriers on that
As far as I know Amazon are going to start making their own games as well. Makes sense to use their own engine so they don't have to share any profits.

https://games.amazon.com/
Well, I think we mostly agree. I don't think debt was the original issue ("what brought us into this situation").

What I personally think is that the whole debt-money creation is just a broken, arbitrary system that the world outgrew (Just like we outgrew classical mechanics - it was sufficient and then turned out to be incomplete)

How it will turn out? Painfully, because the assumptions are out of touch with reality. (cough Alan Greenspan cough)

More worthless money will be pushed in, rates will remain stuck (or go down!), more "busywork" nth order financial derivatives, the can will be a little further down the road.

Up until there will be no way to pretend anymore
(what one can't hide away at some point:
http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/)
Life After Parse – the opportunity?
Amazon bets on games with dedicated dev engine Lumberyard
Amazon GameLift
The Biggest Mistakes to Avoid When Presenting to Senior Management
This is the exact problem that an algorithmic timeline is intended to solve.

Maybe not every tweet is as important as all the others. Maybe I want to follow a lot of interesting people, but not necessarily see every tweet about how much they like the hotel breakfast, or whether the conference provided a good enough AV system, or how good the broadband is in various SF neighborhoods.
I'm glad private institutions exist too. But remember you can only get the education you can afford. Since brilliance is not necessarily related to parents' income, private education is a poor substitute for efficient, timely public education.
Might want to check the ToS also for Lumberyard as there's some interesting terms. https://twitter.com/XenosNS/status/697069050837475328
Funny, I immediately associated it with Team Cymru [1] and apparently they did use the original Welsh Dragon as their logo but changed it to a more modern variant [2].

[1]: https://www.team-cymru.org/about-us.html
[2]: https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=team+cymru+logo
What a sad world. We have pretty reasonable judge with an reasonable verdict that seems obviously right but you can be sure there is automatically a bunch of lawyers looking for loopholes to crash it all and make money on it.

Sometimes I have the feeling like the whole judicial apparatus has gone from solving real life problems to creating absurd problems that allow you to sue somebody.
> The reason that I wrote sleep 3 seconds is that I want to see how the kernel reacts when init dies.

That was my favorite line in the entire post. I love seeing this kind of fearless experimentation.

When I first learned to program, I desperately wanted everything to work and would try very hard not to break things. As I've matured into senior roles, I spend of a lot of effort creating "safe" development and testing environments like the author did here, just so that I can break things and make observations and then throw the environment away when I've learned what I needed to learn. Tools like vagrant and cheap cloud computing have made this easier to do than ever.
Pichai-receives-record-199M-stock-grant
Young people ignore social media age limits
Twitter is the Two Minutes of Hate mixed with memes
Is the place to test the law in the marketplace, or in court? It's fairly easy for startups to argue the case that "the government is keeping you down", especially when their very existence depends on that argument. But there is also generally a flip-side to the argument as well. In Airbnb's case, zoning laws, insurance requirements and such are all in place not to protect the interests of Marriott (at least not entirely); they exist because populations as a whole want them to exist.
Couldn't the type of a passed around function simply be 'function'? Why does it have to be inaccurate?
You might argue that it's wrong but I think the sense of it is obvious.
These aren't new problems though; the same arguments apply if you replace "repos" with "Web sites" and "GitHub" with, say, "GeoCities" or "Tumblr".

Package managers certainly aren't tied to sites like GitHub; for example, I host my own Composer packages ( https://packagist.org/users/warbo/ ). Unfortunately each package does tend to get tied to a particular Web address, but there are sporadic efforts to overcome this (e.g. https://wiki.debian.org/DebTorrent )

If you consider GitHub to be a "central place for FOSS code", which represents the unfragmented community, and serves as the only neccesary search engine and update notification system, then I regret to inform you that you're mistaken. FOSS has been around far longer than GitHub, as has the Web. The community is incredibly fragmented, although pretty much all communicate via a combination of Websites, email, IRC and RSS feeds. GitHub has only ever been a rather recent fragment of this; although it would still be a great loss if all its projects were deleted overnight.

Like everything else on the Web, the current "solutions" are search and archiving on a massive scale. Perhaps P2P technologies like IPFS and magnet links will be (part of) a more scalable alternative going forward.
Why is it dumb? You increased conversion rates by 5%.
Publisher network with a single sub is a workable idea. This could happen, but from publisher's perspective may lead to further commoditzation of jouranlism as "content" to throw against subs. This is basically what cable TV is now, and I've noticed there's a bit of a race to the bottom in cable TV journalism, as well as advertising.
@CSDude: Thanks for sharing this very interesting project!

From a technical point of view, what are the reasons you chose Go over alternatives, such as C, C++, OCaml or Rust?

(Just curious, as all those languages have compilers that produce fast, optimized, self-contained binaries.)
This is really useful. I'm going to dump billings and use this to record time for invoicing to clients in a .yaml file and add a nice little preprocessor for creating a csv file for importing invoices into xero.
Errr...maybe the insurance carriers only want knowledgeable people selling their stuff? Who do you think gets sued if there is a problem? Insurance has been sold for a long long time. Another aspect is that if you a professional insurance agent, losing your license is a serious issue...so you won't act in ways to jeopardize it.
This is great news for the pagespeed people.
Yeah linkedin suggested I add my deceased grandfather using this method the other day. Obnoxious feature.
Is there even any concurrency in this case? Wouldn't e.g. OCaml be a better choice?
Since these tracks are here, does anyone fancy recording solos over these time-keepers and upload them here for fun?
Your Mobile Carrier Is Lying to You
I rather doubt the "without changing anything" part. For example, I write static media to a subdirectory of my Django installation. Will that work without any changes? How about Django uploads? How about temporary files? Etc etc.

I used to use Django-nonrel for GAE so I wouldn't be logged in, and guess what: By the time I wanted to move away, I had so much GAE-specific behaviour that I pretty much had to rewrite the app.
Oh, corporate rules. Sure. So "its legally difficult if I'm to keep my tax write-off" would be a better statement? Because it could be a personal donation.
When I do check out someone's twitter post (e.g. sanders, or dan harmon) then the replies are total junk. HN has tons of interesting people replying, twitter posts have tons of junk/spam as replies.