skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't say anything about them raising money or not. Hillary could avoid the complete destruction of credibility by simply saying "of course, raising money this way creates biases, but that's the challenges of the system and here's how we're working to minimize the biases…" or something like that. It's precisely by denying any influence that her credibility is utterly erased.
Python is dying the same way Apple is dying. Only to people addicted to the new and the exciting.
They plan to hire 8 engineers, 2 data analysts, and 4 team leads. Relevant details on page 8.

https://twitter.com/dtunkelang/status/699049083806167040
>Tech is small potatoes in the global financial system

I don't think this is how it works. The problem is there is too much speculative capital floating around; it creates bubbles anywhere some rich dudes smell opportunity. It does not have to be a jackpot; any hope of a fat percentage will bring the money around.
GOOGLE IS SHUTTING DOWN PICASA
Stewart Butterfield seemed remarkably astute in the reasons he gave to the NYT as to why he was raising the money when he didn't need it:

"It’s pretty straightforward. I’ve been in this industry for 20 years. This is the best time to raise money ever. It might be the best time for any kind of business in any industry to raise money for all of history, like since the time of the ancient Egyptians. It’s certainly the best time for late-stage start-ups to raise money from venture capitalists since this dynamic has been around.

And as a board member and a C.E.O., I have a responsibility to our employees, to our customers. And as a fiduciary, I think it would be almost imprudent for me not to accept $160 million bucks for 5-ish percent of the company when it’s offered on favorable terms."

It surprised me in the 1999 boom and crash how few players seemed to recognise there was a bubble and game the system. Most of them believed the hype and went bust. Only a few seemed to recognise their valuations were crazy and that could be taken advantage of such as AOL merging with Time Warner. I think Butterfield is one of the few to recognise the hype and take advantage this time around. Many others are using the available cash to hire excessive numbers of expensive employees which may bring them down when things dry up.
I don't see how Ruby saves you from optimising (to my limited knowledge, it's not exactly a fast language), but I agree with you that naming stuff sensibly and extracting functions (which you can then name sensibly) is most important for maintainability and can make "in-code" comments unnecessary in many cases. However I strive to always document what a function does if its not obvious -- though I'd call that "documentation" and not "comment".

Example for obvious: Int add(Int x, Int y) in a typed language. Example for not obvious: add(x, y) in an untyped (or "dynamically typed") language (Does it auto-coerce? How? Can it add complex numbers? In my particular representation? ...).

Someone mentioned that sometimes comments are useful e.g. to document a quirk/bug in library function you call, and I have some examples of that in my own code. But most often you should be able to rectify that by wrapping said function in your own one that omits the problem.

If a function seems impossible to give it a sensible name that isn't ridiculously long, split it up. The more clear code of the individual parts and how they are combined should give a hint of what is actually computed here. Maybe it's a new concept in your business logic, in which case providing a clear and exact definition makes sense anyway (put it into the appropriate place in your documentation). This whole procedure can take a significant amount of time, but it will be worth it in maintainance!
Massive compatibility with the biggest installed Python codebases?

People already know it?

The most used?
indeed. and my point is that all Hillary had to do to retain some benefit-of-the-doubt was to say "yes, of course, influence happens, but…" blah blah, whatever excuses or transparency or anything. The only thing I was commenting on was the complete unacceptability of claiming to be immune from influence. The "never never never" comment was about trusting someone who claims immunity from bias. All people have biases and influences.
More information on the Dwarf Fortress Wiki: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/User:BaronW#Armok_Inv...

A video of it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2cMHwo3nAU
Don't worry man, lots of us (me too! I'm 33!) started companies while young. Shutting them down is liberating, not every effort comes to monumental financial success. Some say that the true measure of a person is how they respond to challenges. Knowing that there is no set direction in life, it's really healthy to embrace moments of reconsideration. Don't worry about deviating from some social obligation of fervently chasing dollars. Changing physical and social environments can be very powerful. If you have some money in the bank then I would highly recommend going to travel on the cheap to some different countries. Learn about where you go, explore. Try to limit the time while you are away spent with people from your own culture. It will help you relax, and stimulate you in new directions. You might even try something new that pops up on the way, and find new directions you might like to consider: Diving. Studying. Teaching. Writing. Art. Picking up a new language. Running a hospitality business. Maybe even someone who gives you a shared direction in life?

Personally I shut my first company in 2009 after getting some recognition from VCs and support from angels, found success working for others for awhile, did a few years of remote, and now - some 7 years later - I'm starting businesses for myself again. It took that long to re-energise. We don't even have our website complete yet, but yesterday just signed our first client for enough money to buy a nice shiny new mountain bike. I plan to let it grow slowly and organically, not stress and to ride that mountain bike at least as much time as I spent in the office coding. Wiser these days.
Why you should write software design documents
The sibling comment about renaming is good - particularly with regard to the first function. However I think the other two are better suited to documentation rather than trying to make the function signature explain itself. Sooner or later you'll just remember that it takes a float, not the variable name.

Certainly calling things like "x_returnsNaNIfNot0to1" works, but I find it a bit ugly and it gets complicated if you have multiple or more complex constraints.

This is where languages with docstrings are nice. In Python all I would do is add a """ comment describing the inputs and the return values.

You then have a) a comment describing the code; and b) documentation that's standard so people can pull it up with pydoc or ? in Ipython. When I'm working in Jupyter, I often hit shift-tab to check what a function is expecting.
Zuckerberg: ‘Your Map’s Wrong’
As you watch the video, notice how Mario is moving along with the shells. This isn't just for show: the shells will disappear if they move too far offscreen, and the music-note blocks won't produce an item when hit unless they're actually visible. Building a circuit this complex under these constraints is a huge achievement.
It would have been cool if the original was linked here http://fjmubeen.com/2016/02/14/202/ and not the medium repost. But still interesting.
I liked the smoking reference. Years ago a friend explained that part of the allure of cigs was to have something to do with your hands so you can look busy and avoid awkwardness. I remember thinking a few years ago that smart phones are the new smoking.

Only they are more antisocial. When people smoke they talk.
Human failure mode is an interesting way to put it, although that does presuppose that there's a "normal operating mode".
> Date/time handling in particular is a really poorly handled area

Just use Arrow http://crsmithdev.com/arrow/ everywhere, all the time(s). Now your date/time problems are solved.
What Most People Don’t Understand About How Startup Companies Are Valued
Yes. Some of the decline in smoking is attributed to smartphones.
Anything that allows people to momentarily escape consciousness is a sure seller. It hurts to be aware.
Why brands should work with travel bloggers
What if you crafted a program that mimicked the functionality of an ntp server, and but it had a built in memory of what times have been given out to network clients? Couldn't you in theory send a series of NTP answers that quickly stepped back the clock of the target system, with the stepback value being whatever the maximum value the ntp client will handle? Answer one subtracts the time by 24 hours, the next by another 24 hours, the next by 24 hours? Is there a limit to how frequently the time can be stepped back?
Anyone else find an uncanny resemblance between the Clintons & the Underwoods?
A set of CSS aliases.. Thoughts?
Show HN: An Open Source Wit.ai Alternative for Natural Language Processing
It would be really nice if all it took to understand difficult mathematics were some easy programming tricks.

The problem with looking at old code is you forget what is going on or what the purpose of different components are. The problem with looking at old mathematics is that it is genuinely very difficult to understand. You work very hard to be an expert in a field and get to a level where you can read a cutting-edge research paper. Then if you let that knowledge atrophy, you won't be able to understand it without a lot of re-learning when you look at it again.

Unfortunately cute tricks like comments and concrete examples won't save you here (if concrete examples even exist -- oftentimes their constructions are so convoluted the abstract theorem is far easier to understand, and often times they are misleading. The theorem covers all cases, but all of the easily understandable concrete examples are completely trivial and don't require the theorem at all.)

Programming has existed for, say, 50-100 years. We have recorded mathematical history going back thousands, with contributions from most of the most brilliant human beings to ever exist. Do you think perhaps there's a reason why a simple and easy trick like commenting and renaming lemmas has been discovered and solidified as standard practice in programming, but hasn't been adopted in mathematics? Are mathematicians really just SO dumb?

The answer is those tricks just aren't good enough. Mathematicians do exposition. They do plenty of explaining. Any textbook and even many research papers spend a huge amount of time explaining what is going on as clearly as is possible. As it turns out the explanation helps, but the material is just plain hard.
Edward Snowden has documented extensively what is NSA is doing with big data, same goes for British intelligence. But it always them(Russians, bad asians, stazi) but not us (democratic Americans, westerners etc etc). You get my point eh?
If you apply rigorous filters ("I will never vote for a person who _____.") to all political candidates, you will have nobody to vote for. You can't isolate in on one aspect of one candidate, in isolation from the other qualities of the other candidates, and say that disqualifies them.
Apple’s Elephant in the Room
~7M temporary fixes on GitHub
Hillary has claims that her taking tons of donations from Wall Street etc. has no effect on her.

From http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/clinton-plays-defe...

> "I have never heard a candidate," Sanders said, "who has received huge amounts of money from oil, from coal, from Wall Street, from the military industrial complex, not one candidate say: 'Oh, these campaign contributions will not influence me. I'm going to be independent.' Well, why do they make millions of dollars of campaign contributions? They expect to get something. Everybody knows that."

> Clinton snapped back, "Wait a minute, he has basically used his answer to impugn my integrity."

This pattern is consistent too. She never says, "yes, of course conflicts of interest exist, but here's why this is not one" or "here's what I'm doing to address the influence this could have on my decisions" or anything of that style. She always says that somehow it's wrong and unfair for people to even suggest that she's susceptible to influence relating to who her donors are and the time she spends with them…

Effectively, Hillary is exactly making the claims you say are political suicide. And Sanders is continuing to mention that he has avoided this particular source of influence and Hillary has not. He's refusing to do real personal attack ads because Sanders has never run such true negative attack ads in his whole career. He'll never attack Hillary that boldly. He won't go beyond talking about the issues with her influence and priorities. He won't jump to saying she's a deluded or dishonest person or anything like that.
Take off the HN glasses and PHP, Java, C# and loads of other 'old' languages are still huge.

As for Python: I think it is starting to grow again in the Linux world.
> displacing PHP (which obviously no one ever uses

21% of the Internet uses Wordpress, which is built with PHP.
I like the look of a LaTeX document better than that of a Word document by a mile.

You can probably get a Word document to look great as well but in LaTeX it happens by default. It actually provides you proper typographical advantages without you needing to know anything about them.
Have you followed Jolla?
Jolla's phone is a true N9 successor, and far from being locked down.
Of course, neither darkness nor limited thought police manpower can save you in today's reality...
Yes this is the case; Through libraries we are trying to make it easy to CALL perl5 (and ruby and python and...) modules from Perl 6. But porting -- aka translating -- is another matter. Mostly it requires a similar amount of effort as if you are translating your program to any other dynamic language for nontrivial programs.

My understanding is that LOTS of Python2 programs work fine in Python3 with no (or very trivial) changes. Very very few Perl5 programs will work fine in Perl6 with no changes.
I like it! Hope to see it out of beta.

Multi site management is a dream come true for me. Great job!
Homage to Alan Turing
Also, this is by the same guy (BaronW) who made the calculator in DF. The one where an overflow error leads to overflowing magma.
I'm not sure that's true.

My objection to 3 was it did nothing for me. All I got out of it was work dumped in my lap just so my code would continue running.

Giving us a GIL-less pypy with jvm-scale performance would be worth a lot of hassle.
JOIN OUR HACKTIVIST TEAM IN GROUP CHAT
I think this was worse a few years ago than it is now. At least in Silicon Valley. I'm seeing fewer teens glued to phones than five years ago. They all have them, but don't seem compelled to look at them constantly. Maybe this is just something that happens right after smartphones are introduced, and once people get used to them, they're not overused.
> if you can't keep moving with Python, where will you go?

I think it's too soon to tell about the python 2 to 3 switch. I see people on here all the time making remarks about how many years its been and people still aren't on Python 3, but honestly, it's a big change and it takes a while to upgrade.

Python 2 is still supported (till 2020) and that's the line in the sand for a lot of companies. Many companies will have this in their roadmaps, but don't see a need to prioritise upgrading over other business priorities just yet.

I work at a small company for which this is the case. We absolutely will upgrade to Python 3 (before 2020), and can't wait to do so - there's loads of cool stuff in Python 3! But with a large codebase written in 2.7, this is not something we can just do in a weekend sprint. It will take several months of development and careful testing of our many dependencies. I'm sure many companies are in the same boat.

This clearly doesn't mean Python is dying. Both versions of python are still supported, and many, many people are actively using them and producing quality software. It's a great ecosystem to be part of :)
For those who are curious, he works at Skyscanner[0].

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyscanner
I used LyX mostly in my university year after Word crashed and took down a glorious formula document I needed for a test. LyX was better for editing math and the documents looked gorgeous without me needing to know what made them so nice.

I then started to hack on it and did some code (InsetGraphics), most likely since then that code was replaced already but it was fun and the community around it was amazing.

I'm still using it from time to time to create great looking documents when corporate doesn't require an official Word template.
Indeed. Hillary's claims are deductively logical and consistent internally. It's logically possible for there to be corrupt sell-out politicians and others who are incorruptible.

However, empirical research provides overwhelming evidence that basically everyone is susceptible to conflicts of interest. In other words, that logical model you describe doesn't fit observed reality.

Either Hillary is lying or she has delusions about her own immunity to influence. The only way to not get influenced is to avoid the things that would influence you.

FWIW, I care more about educating people to understand that all people are susceptible to conflicts of interest than about pointing out Hillary's particular conflicts of interest. I'm somewhat more offended that she is spreading the myth that people can be immune to influence than I am about whatever particular influences she's subjected herself to.
Google doesn't make that much money on research quieries. It's mostly your other queries are what enables them to sell ads.
Cost per employee is much greater than just their salary.
What saddens me is that the time my kids spend passively consuming electronics and software, is the time that I spent at the same age, learning how to actively create electronics and software.
Why have my IDE or developer tools take up all that? Instead, I like to save it to run a 4-node Kubernetes cluster running 8+ Docker containers to have a self contained distributed application locally during development (hey, it works on the airplane too when totally disconnected from a network).
"rote learning, treated like any other subject, lack of practical application"

I'm onto my second foreign language and you need rote memorization.

A good method for learning involves a combination of practical application+rote memorization. The problem is that in a classroom setting, if you just sit around talking, nobody will learn anything.

I also ran a language learning meetup group and tried multiple methods of study. Structured lessons with rote memorization plus practical application/speaking worked the best.

I also took Spanish in a US public school for 3 years and we had a combination of both. There is no magic. If you truly want to learn a foreign language, it takes tons of discipline and time.

Most people give up at any hint of difficulty or plateau at a very basic level.
If Hilary had even a hint of Robin Wright's charisma and presence she would have been president twice already.

I think this is the curse of the Clintons - the ruthless one is the more unlikeable one.
Er... wait no longer! Grab rakudobrew and perl6 some stuff :)
Writing code for Python 3 and 2 isn't that difficult.

I've been doing it for a while now while working on a variety of different libraries for the Pyramid project, as well as hacking on WebOb which is Python 2 and 3.

Especially if you drop Python 3.2 and lower from the Py 3.x series you have very little trouble writing code that runs on both (with a shim or two here and there).

It's not nearly as difficult as it once was.
https://docs.python.org/2/library/2to3.html
Python is the least-worst general purpose imperative not-performance-critical OO scripting language. It has lots of problems (weird scoping, community issues, roundabout docs, `''.join()`, crippled lambda, no variable declarations, some lousy naming, module distribution issues, yet more ways to do string formatting, whitespace-sensitive syntax instead of curlies+semis), but the alternatives have worse problems, so Python is at the top of the heap for its type of language.

I think Python could easily be replaced --- for greenfield projects --- by something better, but there's nothing better right now, and more and more people will keep using Python for that very reason.
To make an admittedly bad metaphor, it's likely a lot of that knowledge has been moved from main memory to cold storage, and it would take some time to bring it back. It certainly makes the case for why we write things down! Although the part about having to dig for the main result makes me think the abstract could be improved...
> I believe this is actually a good thing. We are letting people find solutions before someone finds problems to use them for.

This may lead to a few problems too:

(1) Prior knowledge can serve as a blinder. Our conceptual toolkits may end up consisting of unwieldy theorems that while useful are cumbersome to use.

(2) The number of theorems with no immediately evident practical use is so large that they may end up being "forgotten" anyways, and this will result in us having to do the "mental heavy lifting" all over again.
Maybe, but not until the distant future.

We do not have the battery technology to make micro-grids feasible for the USA at large (much less the world). In fact, we don't even have enough known lead and/or lithium to build batteries to do this with today's technology.

Here's a good read on the challenges:
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/nation-sized-bat...
In the reddit AMA, DW wrote:

> Myself and one of my supervisors had a conversation about this a few weeks ago. We did some calculations which suggest that if you were in a space-ship close to the merging black holes you would feel a force which was pretty comparable to the force you feel by standing next to a loudspeaker at a music concert. You'd feel a vibration travelling through your body, but we were pretty confident it wouldn't hurt you!

Maybe the gravitational waves wouldn't hurt, but the gammas etc would be painful. I'm reminded of Greg Egan's Diaspora.
One may be tempted to call this Hodge Theaters syndrome.
Remember this?

https://evolvingtrends.wordpress.com/2006/06/26/wikipedia-30...
> The real solution is not for Fedora to absorb all language specific packages but to integrate the different package managers so that they work better together.

Which is precisely why rpmdev-newspec has templates for this case. Simply running rpmdev-newspec -t ruby/python/perl/php-pear/ocaml/R mypackagename will generate a rpmspec file ready to go for any of these languages using their standard package managers (gem, distutils/setuptools, CPAN, pear, OPAM, packrat) - just add necessary metadata (Requires/BuildRequires, summary, description, version, and a changelog).

It's not magic, it still requires minimal effort (3 minutes worth of metadata + calling mock to test the build) - but it's hardly difficult. Sure, you could make some extra scripts to automatically populate the metadata from the language PM's descriptor of choice to limit the manual work to release bumps and editing the changelog - and I don't think anyone would be opposed to that, but that's pretty much all that would be left.

The biggest problem is outside of rolling-release distributions like Arch, Gentoo, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and Fedora Rawhide bumps in major versions within a release are highly discouraged - and a lot of people used to using language PM's have a habit of changing things rapidly even post-1.0 and not supporting old branches - often leaving the distribution packager with needing to backport patches for security or bug fixes. I'm not going to argue if it's better or worse, but it's an issue that needs to be addressed.
Redeye VC: Domino Rally Business Models (2006)