skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Slightly offtopic. I've always wondered why LaTeX doesn't value "composability". When putting some environment inside another environment, it's always a surprise whether it works or not (or even, whether it compiles).

At least, that is my experience.
There are several dictionary types in C++, but each has different performance characteristics and they all have good support. Thanks to the efforts to make built-in types and UDTs equal, Qt's map was for instance implemented as a skip list and was just as usable as the standard library types. Nowadays it's a RB Tree.

Go's strategy of picking hash maps and not offering the mechanisms of building your own data structures with the same syntax affordances and performance characteristics makes it easy to jump in and hard to make progress if you hit a wall with the built-ins.
Chaos Engineering 101
So, JSON passed between a bunch of Javascript things from Github means that the browser is the new EMACS ?
This proposal may be due to the increased calls to ban cash:

- Bloomberg: Bring on the cashless future [1]

- FT: The benefits of scrapping cash [2]

- Bloomberg: Europol Director Sees Case for Scrapping High-Value Banknotes [3]

- Handelsblatt: The death of cash [4]

- Norway's Biggest Bank Calls For Country To Stop Using Cash [5]

- Spiegel: Leading German Economist Calls For Cash Ban [6]

- Bloomberg: Citi Economist Says It's Time to Abolish Cash [7]

- Telegraph: Bank Of England Chief Economist Calls For Cash Ban, Urges Negative Rates [8]

And from a Morgan Stanley presentation, in which its head of EMEA equity research Huw van Steenis, points out [9]:

"What I learned at Davos: We should move quickly to a cashless economy so that we could introduce negative rates well below 1% - policy maker"

..adding: "One of the most surprising comments this year came from a closed session on fintech where I sat next to someone in policy circles who argued that we should move quickly to a cashless economy so that we could introduce negative rates well below 1% – as they were concerned that Larry Summers' secular stagnation was indeed playing out and we would be stuck with negative rates for a decade in Europe. They felt below (1.5)% depositors would start to hoard notes, leading to yet further complexities for monetary policy."

[1] http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-01-31/bring-on-th...

[2] http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/8ef4dcb0-ca6f-11e5-be0b-b7ece4e...

[3] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-08/high-value...

[4] https://global.handelsblatt.com/edition/354/ressort/finance/...

[5] http://www.ibtimes.com/norways-biggest-bank-calls-country-st...

[6] http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/bargeld-peter-bofi...

[7] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-10/citi-econo...

[8] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/bank-of-england/11874061/...

[9] https://imgur.com/qnEwiha
Any Haskell coder knows that.

Quoting myself

> ... support polymorphism and extensibility.

OOP isn't only the C# and Java view of the world.
And yet still forces you to file their taxes, despite having all the information available to them to simply send you a bill at the end of the year.
> I'd much rather be an anonymous technologist than an anonymous luddite.

Luddite? Do you even know what this word means? There is currently no anonymous payment technology on this planet that works universally and everywhere.

In face of this reality, cash has its value for everyone that wants to pay anonymously.
We need both. Cash is good and so is the right to privacy.
Reminds me to get around to Piper Harron's thesis. Which was made to be seriously readable.

Math seems to have a culture of systematically bad writing (as Bill Thurston discussed).
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> It can't even find anything in my own posts.

Ditto. I have seen this as a crippling deficiency in the Facebook platform. Not being able to search properly in my own posts or in the groups I'm a member of really sucks. For all the engineering prowess, open sourced tools, etc., shown by Facebook, the lack of a working search makes the company seem incompetent from the top down.

Sometime ago I started storing important information (like others links, my own comments, etc.) outside of Facebook where I can find them easily. I also started a Facebook page and added Notes into it to make it easier to document, find and share things. It seems ridiculous that I'd have to do this just to have access to information, but that's been the sad state for years.
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The 10 Day Metric Week
Financial criminals, you mean like the banks. Yes I would like something done about the laundering activity for criminal organizations by banks. How much money do you think your average criminal would move via cash? How much money do you think banks have moved to facilitate economic crimes. In total?

This is about power. Not about crime.

ex: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/avinash-tharoor/banks-cartel-m...
vagga is built by vagga itself, so you can look at how to make musl rust here: https://github.com/tailhook/vagga/blob/master/vagga.yaml#L23...

There is already a musl libc distributed with rust since 1.5: http://static.rust-lang.org/dist/index.html
http://static.rust-lang.org/dist/rust-std-1.6.0-x86_64-unkno...

But we had not used it yet.
Just to make it explicit - what kind of trade-offs do you have on mind?

I have some stake in https://Codility.com - I could perhaps ask them to add a new kind of tests :)
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Bullshit jobs are already the "best" case result here, the other option is rampant unemployment (see also, Europe).
I agree that there should be strict, well-defined standards for which votes count, and the examples you mention shouldn't count.

However, "is readable by a machine" is not a well-defined standard, and is IMO way too strict; it's more than likely that a panel of human readers would all agree on which name is written on a ballot, without it being readable by a machine.
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Yes. But that's on debian (IIRC) kernel, i.e. the patched one. On stock kernel it requires CONFIG_USER_NS setting enabled, and it just works.
Thanks Max, have read that one :)
I think I mostly agree with you.

But with source mappings, trans-piling is pretty neat. With ECMAScript 6, Coffee, or Typescript. I remember the days of buggy Coffee and agree it was ridiculous when you hit a compile bug. But all the transpilers are much more mature now, and with source mappings you always know which line is wrong, and can even breakpoint and debug etc.
Yeah you need to give it time as it unravels, very very good
thanks! added to list :)
But those things are not controllable. I don't just want to know who you are giving money to, I want to be able to stop you from giving money to anyone at any time for any justifiable flimsy explanation. Think about what PayPal is doing to VPN vendors right now. Their excuse is that VPN vendors are enabling copyright infringement. Not too far from the government claiming this tomorrow, literally. Do you want this?
brilliant. added to list
many thanks, have about 4 to burn through now!
What was so unreasonable about 1.5? That was my first python and it worked perfectly fine.
I was on a First Robotics Competition team in high school and interacted with Falcon Robotics, (Team 842), a few times. They're well regarded as one of the best and most gracious teams in the competition.
Outside perspective. Same reason companies hire (very expensive) management consultants.
Most likely two bugs. The bracket one, and the fact that sizeof(buffer) will give you the pointer size, not the buffer size if buffer is a pointer rather than an array.
"COINTELPRO-style" appears to mean for FBI/NSA agents to ""expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, neutralize or otherwise eliminate" the activities of these movements and their leaders." The obvious use-case that comes to mind would be for a leader of a politically inconvenient movement (ideally in the early stages) to have embarrassing, ideally career-ending or even jail-time-giving secrets exposed, to stop them from posing any further threat.

"Parallel construction" would be orchestrating a scenario in which the secret gets revealed in a way that isn't obviously the work of the FBI. Let's say... arranging for a suspicious item of clothing belonging to a secret lover to be "accidentally" left behind for the spouse to find; staging some kind of mundane theft, getting the local police to get a warrant and search the target's residence and discover his recreational drug collection; perhaps even trumping up a crime entirely (ideally something like rape or possession of child pornography, the scandal of which would probably ruin the target's effectiveness as a leader even if a court acquits them sometime later). Exercise your imagination.

If the above ideas are stupid and outlandish, well, I thought of them while writing this post; a large agency that systematizes the approach and applies it routinely could probably do much better. Harassment of any sort is probably useful in reducing a target's effectiveness; perhaps they first send disruptive internet commenters, then do more advanced things only if the target is still a threat.

The question is, how much do they actually do, and what effect do they have? The JTRIG Wiki article gives some examples; I think I'd have to read more to evaluate their effectiveness.
I wonder how much easier it would be to write the software in a language other than C/C++. Ada has a pretty mature toolchain for security critical software development. Where I work we still use C++, but mostly for political reasons. Rust also seems more suited for security critical engineering.
If you do manage to get signed up, would you be able to send an invite my way? Thanks
I guess that concise implementations (e.g. in a one liner) are often a complete bitch to debug when someone else comes back to it to fix a problem years later.

It is much more difficult to debug and fix existing code than develop it from scratch. Hence, if you found the problem hard to code in the first place, then when you come to debug it again later you've just screwed your future self.
Anyone want to hazard a guess at the technology they plan to implement to get this started?

Surely this is not designed to be written from scratch, so..

- Are they using known lexical & semantic scanners?
- Is it focused on English language first?
- What crawlers will scan content?
- I'll assume it's an open platform, but license for contributors?
- What database architecture will hold the graph?
- How does it know the mark of authority, and is this primarily based on human input learning or machine learning?

I'm sure $2.5M wont touch the sides, but maybe if it's a well directed project, with healthy user contribution, based on interesting technologies they might develop a good backbone architecture. Ambitious for sure.
Can confirm, am a quant.
I've been working with Haskell* for a couple of years and it is quite often that I work with code that I don't fully understand. I'll come across a terse bit of code, then carefully take it apart to see what it does (by taking bits and pieces out and giving them names instead of passing in using point-free notation and also adding type annotations). Once I see the whole picture, I make my own change and then carefully re-assemble the original terse bit of code. One could ask the question: wasn't the verbose version better? I'm going to lean on the side of no. If I left this verbose and other bits verbose then it would be hard to see the whole picture.

I think doing maths would be better if it was done interactively with software. If equations were code then you could blow it up and look into fine details and then shrink it to a terse form while software keeps track of the transformations to make sure what you write is equivalent. Maybe it's time to add a laptop to that paper pad?

* not arguing anything language specific here except that Haskell makes use of variety of notations that makes the code shorter and more like mahts. More so than most languages.
Yeah, but that's evil. And even with the source code, the only decidable properties of Turing complete systems are trivial. (Eg you can't even tell in general whether a given function will eventually return or loop forever from the source.)
I like to imagine they envisioned the strings themselves being "pumped" up by inserting new characters in the center.
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Since we are in early stage of our app, we release android app once every two days. Most of the problems are because since features need to built faster, we are lacking in sufficient tests. Also multiple people end up working on same file. Major problem is that if some spurious code goes into development branch and other people create feature branches from it, it becomes a problem. I think using --no-ff flag to merge and the using revert to remove such code should work well. Will try that out.
Heck, if you're using MATE/GNOME on Linux, Engrampa/File roller or whatever they call it opens this and many other formats just fine. I click the link, and a moment later click the downloaded file in Chromium, and it opens right up. From there I can drag and drop into a directory/folder in Caja/Nautilus. Painless.
In eg Haskell a singleton needs to be tagged with IO. And that makes sense, because singleton are clearly evil global state.
Very interesting.

Here's a page showing the effect of using microtype, and some tips of usage: [1]

[1] http://www.khirevich.com/latex/microtype/
This.

I don't work in this area, but I'd say that 99% of the time I hear someone complaining about how Google is favoring sites that pay for advertising over them I find that they are making these incredibly basic errors.

For me, http://www.linguaquote.com/ gives a 404. It's only when I go to https://www.linguaquote.com/ that it works.
If you look at the HN front page there's an article on the Clinton "system". They get bribed - sorry - I mean rewarded with million of dollars just fine without any privacy or cash involved.
What's wrong with `''.join()`? It's fine as is, I think, same logic as '{}'.format().
Super, I really appreciate your time and effort in explaining this in a very detailed manner. I have an insight on what to do next however turning it into python code is going to be a big challenge as i move forward to it.
I don't think that programming and math are the same in a practical sense. I am studying math and CS and they're fairly different. Programs deal with specific things, types and data that you manipulate and see with your eyes. Maths deal with abstract concepts for which finding examples can be pretty difficult.

Also, while programming, you can design your functions and their interfaces before writing them down. In maths, that's impossible: you're constrained by what can/cannot be done.

Scrum or coding practice doesn't apply here. Maths don't have to "keep up", they're already way ahead of their applications. It also doesn't need to be fast or flexible, just rigorous. And while motivation and intuition helps (specially when learning) some concepts cannot be motivated or given an intuition, and even in that case you still have to learn the small details and formalizations.
Yeah I agree we are lacking in sufficient testing right now because since we are in early stage of app development, we are building features at fast pace. One solution is to merge changes using --no-ff flag and using revert to remove changes if there is major bug in that merge.
>C++ provides two calling syntaxes, x.f(y) and f(x,y)

I have to shamefully admit, I have no idea what this is referring to. In the second one, is this talking about the implicit "this" pointer that is passed to member functions?

I've never seen or written code like the second form -- if in fact f() is defined as taking only a single argument, I've never seen it called with 2 arguments.

My guess is that this is a discussion about the implementation of member functions, can anyone confirm?
I have a rooted Nook which I have Google Books, Kindle and Pocket installed on. It only set me back £25 :-)
ehm, then again, who pays for police?
It's also the jargon.

I remember years ago telling a coworker that I was an ACM member and subscribed to the SIGPLAN proceedings. He looked at me and with all sincerity asked, "You can understand those things??"

To which I responded, "About half," but I totally sympathized with his question. Both Math and CS need the reincarnation of Richard Feynman to come and shake things up a bit. There's too much of the 'dazzle them with bullshit' going on. It's no wonder that it takes so long for basic research to see application in real scenarios. You people bury your research under layers of obfuscation about half the time. Does it really help anybody to do that? Why do you do that?

"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." is my new favorite Albert Einstein quote.
It's an interesting saga. I haven't researched it much so here's my gut take from reading the story and remembering earlier discussions...

(Sadly) I think supplements and questionable weight loss products are a real market and will be bought in the future even without any scientific backing. Which makes me weary of Ackman's bet. It seems like Herbalife has actually changed stuff quite a bit and could very well just be selling to people if they changed distribution to direct sales. They are selling snakeoil (imo) but they still seem to sell to real consumers at the end of the line and don't stock stuff in warehouses.

Since this is the crux of the argument from my point of view I wonder why he didn't conduct any large sample survey before mounting the attack. It seems like a good step 0 to gather data on one of your major arguments but in fact...

"""
“Surveys are notoriously unreliable,” he responds. There’s no substitute for seeing the distributors’ actual retail records, he insists.
"""

That doesn't sound convincing at all.
SAML and Shibboleth is awfully documented itself, so I'm not surprised at all.
Yes. Electronic voting can be made anonymous and secure, but only an expert would be able to verify (or even understand) that.

Everyone can understand pen and paper voting.
Also, from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cashless-society-erico-matias...

Pros:

- Enhance the tax base, as most / all transactions in the economy could now be traced by the government;

- Substantially constrain the parallel economy, particularly in illicit activities;

- Force people to convert their savings into consumption and/or investment, thereby providing a boost to GDP and employment;

- Foster the adoption of new wireless / cashless technologies.

Cons:

- The government loses an important alternative to pay for its debts, namely by printing true-to-the-letter paper money. This is why Greece may have to leave the euro, since its inability or unwillingness to adopt more austerity measures, a precondition to secure more euro loans, will force it to print drachma bills to pay for its debts;

- Paper money costs you nothing to hold and carries no incremental risk (other than physical theft); converting it into bank deposits will cost you fees (and likely earn a negative interest) and expose you to a substantial loss if the bank goes under. After all, you are giving up currency directly backed by the central bank for currency backed by your local bank;

- This could have grave consequences for retirees, many of whom are incapable of transacting using plastic. Not to mention that they will disproportionately bear the costs of having to hold their liquid savings entirely in a (costly) bank account;

- Ditto for very poor people, many of whom don’t have access to the banking system; this will only make them more dependent, in fact exclusively dependent, on government handouts;

- We wonder if the banks would actually like to deal with the administrative hassle of handling millions of very small cash transactions and related customer queries;

- Illegal immigrants would be out of a job very quickly – a figure that can reach millions in the US, creating the risk for substantial social unrest;

- If there is an event that disrupts electronic transactions (e.g. extensive power outage, cyberattack, cascading bank failures) people in that economy will not be able to transact and everything will grind to a halt;

- Of course enforcing a government mandate to ban cash transactions must carry penalties. This in turns means more regulations, disclosure requirements and compliance costs, potentially exorbitant fees and even jail time;

- Banning cash transactions might even propel the demise of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. The share of US dollar bills held abroad has been estimated to be as high as 70% (according to a 1996 report by the US Federal Reserve). One thing is to limit the choices of your own citizens; another is trying to force this policy onto others, which is much harder. Foreigners would probably dump US dollar bills in a hurry and flock to whichever paper currency that can offer comparable liquidity.
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I didn't mean to be taken so literally. I simply meant the tendency to "simplify" the world by reducing away the complexity of people and their concerns and focusing on numbers as if they mean anything in isolation. It just struck me as a very extreme case of what I call "spherical cow social science/politics", which is very attractive to some types. And the problem with their plan isn't that it's unattainable, but that it would cause much more harm than good, because their laser focus has led them to try optimize the wrong things at the expense of many right things.
Everybody in these discussions always mention privacy, but there's an equally important consideration which seems to be often forgotten: reliability.

With electronic forms of money transfer, both the sender and the receiver need to have an account with some entity. There have been cases where pressure has been put on these entities to close someone's account, like for instance https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/07/caving-government-pres... . With cash, there's no risk of someone closing your account, since it doesn't need one.

And, of course, there's the fact that all working electronic forms of money transfer I've seen are online; if the network is down, you can't do anything. Cash is offline.
The problem with people writing too concise code is with their motivation not with their abilities - and so it is probably impossible to test (at least directly), because on the test they would have the motivation to do the right thing.
The last time I checked quora put up a big "create an account to read this website", which seems to be gone now.
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I'm incredibly suspicious of any "government affiliated" startup programs. As far as I can tell, they universally suck (Startup Chile is the least bad).

They have growing "compliance requirements" class over class, most of which are irrelevant. While I appreciate that money is in short supply in an early stage startup, founder time is, too -- so wasting time of founders is absurd.
It's not about having written a terrible thing, it's about believing a terrible thing and upholding it as a principle.

I find this mod action very unfair and completely unsubstantiated.
I agree, where I work we use HackerRank (for most roles that require any coding, even designers) and we try very hard to set a challenge that is representative of typical daily work.
My advice (to the question, not the brilliant article), is to learn how to cook. A good or great diet, with fun food as well as easy healthy food is one big way to improve everything about your life. Its truly amazing what a difference it can have.