skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How can anybody have knowledge about compression algorithms without knowing what BFS is? This is like claiming to be a mathematician and not knowing what rational and irrational numbers are.

You speak about the problem domain, but the primary problem domain we are facing first is programming. And without a shared vocabulary, you can talk with other software developers, but you aren't going to be very efficient in that communication. So going back to the problem domain, as software developers we are supposed to master whatever problem domain we are facing, in order to efficiently communicate with the business side in their own domain-specific language. How are we supposed to do that if we haven't even bothered to learn our own domain-specific language?

But it goes deeper than that. Many software developers these days rely too much on libraries, without knowing how they work. And this hurts them a lot.

This is all about standing on the shoulders of giants. And it all starts from the most basic data-structures and algorithms. BFS is right up there with the characteristics of a List or a Map. It's common knowledge that everybody should know. And this common knowledge is half of "Introduction to Algorithms" by Cormen et al. So instead of reading another fluffy piece on Agile methodologies or on soft skills like the "Pragmatic Programmer", or other such bullshit, maybe people should read this one instead.

One recent problem we had was one of scaling out our micro-service-based infrastructure. And I've heard from colleagues wild ideas like "oh, lets introduce an external queue, like Kafka". DevOps for some reason think external queues are the solution to all problems. Yeah, great, but this isn't a freaking webpage reading from a database, we've got singletons, as in producers of truth that need strong consistency in their decision-making because we aren't that smart and you're just moving the problem around, because locks don't freaking scale, no matter how smart your queue is. Or "we'll just add Akka Cluster or Finagle or whathaveyou, should take care of it". Dude, yeah, we've got singletons, which means we need to do sharding and have a protocol for failure detection, so maybe we should talk about that first.

This is just a recent example. Developers are so eager to jump to the latest fads and the latest cool things, without thinking for a second if those solutions would work, only because they can't imagine how these tools are even implemented. And this isn't something that a superficial Google search can fix, because the unknown keeps piling up, the more complex the system is, until the shit hits the fan and you throw your hands in the air and bring in external consultants to fix it. And if you think the UI is spared from all of these problems, think again. I've seen dozens of Javascript-enabled interfaces with performance issues, only because of the "thundering herd" problem happening due to sloppy event handling. How many UI folks understand how Facebook's React works? Not that many.
World's largest wind turbine now operational
I'm honestly curious. What do Windows developers use that matches Accelerate framework? It looks like this new Intel implementation is incomplete and they didn't use any SSE intrinsics which is disappointing coming from Intel. I have some Mac apps I might consider porting to Windows desktop (not Universal) if I could find the comparable APIs.
I wasn't aware of Fix My Street, thank you for that.

The reason for bringing it to HN's attention was because I too read about the service on the BBC News website and their plight with Instagram.

I was a little perplexed - it's a British company, operating entirely within the UK - why is Instagram getting involved? The 'gram' prefix has been around for quite a while [citation needed], is it an infringement of trademark? Then again, the company is posting pictures with captions, which is very Instagram-y, so I can see a certain level of cross over.
Language Agnostic Web
I'd say he missed out on an opportunity to use that button to build a viral feedback loop! I honestly thought it was an "email to friends" button.
What about being hired at CTO and tasked to improve the tech experience for all their stores? From connected services and employee efficiency due to better tech for making some of the meals, etc.
Give it a few years doing the same thing, and it'll probably get boring as hell..
> we're likely to see prices at the pump go up by orders of magnitude over a relatively short timescale

Do you really believe that in a short period of time gasoline is going to cost a few orders of magnitude more... that's 1,000x the current cost?

Post-fracking that's unlikely to happen. Prices may return to previous levels, but they won't move much more than that. Alternative energy will reduce demand for oil and therefor depress the price of oil, not the other way around.
"To truly support Open Source" MS should open the source of their main products like Windows and Office.
Nice read. Product placements didn't really bother me. I just skipped them.
This seems like an interesting idea but, every time I read about a land value tax (LVT), the description is very high-level and leaves me with more questions than it answers:

- How do you measure the basic value of the land?
Is is it the amount of rent collected minus
maintenance-and-improvement expenses? Does
this mean it is impossible to turn a profit
as a landlord?

- Is the tax also applied to land that is not
rented? Is it harder to assess the value of
that land?

- Does this system discourage conservation by
incentivizing everyone to sell their unused
land to someone who is going to develop it?

- A common type of investment in today's no-LVT
world: I buy an undeveloped plot of land that
noone would pay anything to live on in a town
just outside of Worcester, MA. I spend $100k
building a house on the premises, and then I
proceed to rent out that house for $1k per month.

Under an LVT system, do I still have any reason
to buy that land and build a house on it? How
much money can I make?

Thank you for your time.
JavaScript Challenge Spring 2016: Word Classifier
Subtitled A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity
Last year, I had a talk with Stephen Wolfram, he said that, for him, the most important secret helping him solve problems is "some version of confidence or arrogant". That make him never fear any difficulty, but this arrogant inevitably behave in some other aspects of his life, and affect people's impression of him.

Then, his writing style never bother me again.
It was merely that "it's okay to befriend a coworker, and if it doesn't work out, was it really a friend anyway?" kinda thing.

I think he mostly got it from my wife and I sitting down with our children after having a fight and telling them that we're still mom and dad, we've put it behind us, and it's okay not to get along all the time.
Wonderful idea.

What about DOM nodes generated by JavaScript? Will Jam render the page before scraping?
Well, seeing fellow citizens everywhere fail at critical thinking and accept what's presented by media or whoever as truth, I'll say it's not hard to influence people's opinions. Mob mentality, convenience of soaking up what one has been told, and just enjoying a comfortable non-critical life. I don't blame people who don't want to critically question things, but I do object to most people's tendency to take anything presented on TV or News as truth, while you or me telling them the same unbelievable story will be brushed off as insanity. We have to constantly fight for freedom of thought as well as expression, since many places time and again try to limit it, so I wouldn't want to silence liars in order to protect my right to tell the uncomfortable truth.
IKEA Launches Pilot VR Kitchen Experience for HTC Vive on Steam
MNUM – Mooph Numberz - numbers game for browsers – speed increased
If you have adjusted the seat height yourself you know that the seat tube slides within the frame. So the first/left-most bicycle is wrong because the seat tube is vertical and the frame tubes are at angles. Then you scan the four diagrams to find the one where the seat tube and one of the frame tubes form a straight line. None of them.

At this point you give up and just answer randomly.

The experimenter claims "People made lots of fundamental mistakes." but I think the experimenter made a fundamental mistake and his subjects lost interest in the experiment.
But in that case wouldn't it be better to just stream games, provided the connection is sufficiently low-latency?
There are games and experiences that people seems to think are interesting enough to play on the GearVR. The PS4 will be more powerful than the phones powering that. Obviously you have to adjust your expectations compared to the Rift but it seems like there can be value for VR platforms that are not as fast as the Rift/Vive minimum specifications.
You appear to be ignoring the fact that even if you consider the NSA's work benevolent, it is only benevolent to US citizens. Meanwhile lots of us on here are, in fact, not US citizens, especially at this time of day. So the NSA's activities are all negative, no positive to non-Americans.
And it's important to recall that VR works best with >=90fps which requires more horse power.
I hate proprietary connectors, but I love MagSafe—it's saved my laptop many times. Why can't all connectors be magsafe?
Even weather forecasts aren’t safe from Windows 10 upgrade prompts
And you made my day:)
It doesn't currently do that, I think it'd be an interesting challenge to try and do that though. It's definitely possible to do.
I would have an opened and honest conversation with those at the YC company that requested that you do not apply to YC. This way you can get a sense of why they think you should not apply. Ultimately, the decision to apply or not is entirely yours.
Look up "content marketing"
Guarantee the poor remain poor, only teach them what they're interested in
What Are You Trying to Pull?Cache miss is more expensive than many instructions
Interestingly, Plankalkuel was predated by Ada Lovelace's notes on calculating Bernoulli numbers.

Then for Lovelace, lets go back even further. Mathematics itself already contains the base principles that enable the formalisms of lambda calculus.

Additionally, the Antikythera mechanism was predated by many admittedly more crude but still important calculating mechanisms like the abacus. So its wrong to say that those automata would have existed independently.

Its almost as if everyone's work is built upon the work of those before them and wouldn't be possible otherwise. Does that invalidate their achievement?
Paul Thurrott quoted a Microsoft person that Ubuntu on Windows is a client side thing. It may be possible to use it on Windows server but I believe that is not the meta.

I would say it is easier to just spin up an Ubuntu instance than to use Ubuntu on Windows on the server. What are some use cases that you're thinking of? Am I missing something?
Hell, some people are still chugging along with 2003sp2

I'd think this is for the same reason XP lasted so long --- it's a good stable platform free of all the hassles and complexities of the ones that came after it. A lot of home users are already quite disturbed by the privacy implications of Windows 10, and if anything big businesses would be even more cautious of the same for its server counterpart.
It's worth 50-200k when you can make it look exactly like a non-motorized wheel in front of many spectators and race inspectors :) if you don't mind people seeing the motor, there are tons of DIYs in the hundreds to single-thousands of dollars range depending on how far and how fast you'd like to go: https://m.reddit.com/r/ebikes/ etc
Who Will Debunk the Debunkers?
Towards the end, it reminded me of the book "Gödel, Escher, Bach".
Why not use Mini-TOSLINK or something similar? Digital connection but backwardly compatible with existing 3.5mm audio.
I disagree. I don't know if you read the studies cited, but there is good reason to believe that plants are sentient as animals are. Besides the fact that they are aware and responsive to their surroundings.

They also make friends have self-awareness and can feel pain.

I think it is a mistake to just discard the entire article based on the misconception that he is making a flawed argument, specially if he is citing resources to back up his claims.
Yep. Have a look at phantomjs [1], or other phantomjs wrappers like casperjs [2].

[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/phantomjs

[2] https://www.npmjs.com/package/casperjs
I'm wondering if the OP also factored in the increased cost of living?
While I agree with you that this article is utter rubbish, no-one should be in doubt that we must devour other lifeforms in order to live - vegetarian or not. We're just making choices on what life we are willing to kill.

We're all monsters really.
Life Lessons from an Everest Sherpa
> the right model is an art studio, a movie set, or a band

> Knowledge workers aren't cogs, they're part of a team.

That's a bit ironic because movie sets and bands (almost always) are structured teams with industry standard roles (drummer, audio technician, key grip, gaffer) that make it easy to hire people for the duration of a gig.

Developers, analogously, might operate instruments; manufacture their own instruments; compose and/or improvise music; manage their own careers; negotiate their own contracts; edit their own recordings; package their own work for distribution; distribute their own work; and even perform their own focus group studies. Sometimes there's no time to figure out all those things out so you have to pick up one of the instruments of your predecessors and play something useful immediately.

I can perform the same exercise for film production, sports teams, and surgical centers. One of the big problems with software development is that we don't have distinct roles. Everyone is a developer/coder/engineer. It would be as if the entire music industry were executives and music developers. Or the entire film industry were producers, directors, and film engineers.

Anyway, I actually agree with you underlying point that the health of a team trumps the skills of a team every time. And since the structure of a software team is so fluid, cohesiveness and cooperation is actually more important than it is in a band.
Plain and simple, Ramanujan was the Mozart of mathematics. Seemingly god-like insight into numbers that even he could not completely explain. There are excellent anecdotes about his life in the book Music of the Primes.
I can see that having gone a totally different way if it wasn't a upper middle class family.

>cops show up at multi-family house in blue collar neighborhood
>guy in tank top chewing tobacco answers door
>"can we step inside and discuss some stuff"
>locks door, steps outside, closes door
>"ain't nobody with a badge going in there without a warrant and after what happened to Jim who lives upstairs nobody around here talks to you people without a lawyer"
>cops escalate situation
>guy they're talking to does something that plays into their trap
>police beat him senseless, taze him a few times, arrest him, wind up charging him with everything and then dropping everything except some circularly defined charge

And all that could easily happen to a middle class white guy. God forbid you're not white or Muslim...
To me this seems like a poor analogy. It's the evolution of technology. Print first, terminal first, desktop first, web first, mobile first, AI first, quantum first, etc, etc. Mobile is exponentially easier than it was in 2007. Machine learning is, arguably, becoming exponentially easier than it was in 2012. I think most agree that strong AI is many years away, but the learning curve will pass just as it has for all previous technological breakthroughs and we'll collectively move on to the next.
I think "CRUD" applications are getting an undeserved bad rap.

There's always interesting challenges involved, which sadly gets dismissed as "business logic".

If CRUD apps were really so brainless, there would have been a race-to-the-bottom plethora of platforms/tools by now that allow domain experts to create their own applications.

Another way to look at is that CRUD apps put food on the table for you guys. Be grateful!
Bow to our bot overlords?
I just get "invalid json" when I try to use the form on the page.
In Silicon Valley, I see people all the time riding >$5k bikes as commuters. It's also not uncommon to see people here riding carbon aero wheels (thousands of dollars for a set) on casual rides or getting groceries. It's the "taking the Ferrari to pick up milk". Free country and all, I just find it a massive waste; they'd be better off with some sew-ups and light rims instead of deep-section carbon jobs, but I guess they do it for the bling more than the performance.
If you mean the article, then I disagree, for I read him as using this person, candidate, and even the gender neutral "them" in the singular.

As for "guy," the word is like nation and nationalist: it must be read in context: nation can mean Kurds and Quebec, or Iraq and Canada. Yes, if you want Quebec to separate then you are a nationalist, and if you want Canada to stay whole then you are a nationalist.

In talking to two women I can mention a gorgeous guy in my classroom and then ask, "Are you guys going to the concert?"
DevOps Team Assistant, 1.61.9 released
How Project Management tools kill more companies than any other SaaS out there
That type of story grows old after the 100th time you hear it.
Orders of magnitude doesn't mean 1000x - just 10x is enough.

As to fracking - the wheels have already fallen off, low oil prices forced a production hiatus, stop/start is inefficient and costly, and you need only look at the headlong rush in the UK that kinda petered out to get an idea of where fracking is going - nowhere.

The fossil sector is in big, big trouble - this chaotic oscillator will not stop until the market decouples from energy. The only question is whether they'll be allowed to collapse, or if we'll see state bailouts that keep them limping along.

As to reduced demand - that's also part of the problem. Oil prices are not purely demand driven, they have costs to meet, shareholders to appease, and massive capital investment needs that will not be met with a suppressed price, which will feed the death spiral they've been in for some five years now.
Really cool and awesome work
I wrote a language that's basically a superset of this (https://github.com/fizx/parsley/wiki) back in 2008 and used it to crawl a variety of insane job posting sites.

As crawling complexity increases, pretty soon you want an actual programming language to specify things like crawl order and cache behavior. Multi-page behavior was very hard to describe declaratively for misbehaving sites.

Also, it's a terrible default (for security reasons) to let the web pages you're parsing automagically initiate new requests to arbitrary urls.

Such as it is, I believe that the following works in some version of parsley, though I doubt its an official release.

{
"articles": [ {
"title": ".title a",
"comment_link": "follow(.subtext a:nth-child(3) @href) .athing:nth-child(1) .default"
} ]
}

At some point, these json things might as well be as readable as regex :/
> I'm really surprised nothing like this has existed before

But how would you monetize it?

Unlike an RSS feed, you really don't know how the JSON response would be used, so you can't inject ads into it.

And if you charge for it, wouldn't people assume it would continue to work, but site "scrapers", regardless of how they are configured, are likely to break, so it would be tougher having customers pay for something that could break at any time leaving them having to figure out if its the service that's changed/broken or the page that's changed.

Don't get me wrong- some great businesses have been/are based on "scraping" in one way or another. However, as cool as this is, it's just another way to "scrape". If the person hosting the page would provide an API or JSON view instead, you'd be loads better off.
The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t
What about running Docker containers on desktop/laptop machines during development? It's a major part of the Docker usecase.

Trying to keep track of Windows licensing compliance across multiple versions and deployment models is confusing enough as it is. Different sources will give different answers to the same questions when interpreting licensing scenarios, and you can never know unless you get audited (?)
I can see why Instagram want to defend their brand identity but hope they in turn are sued by a collective of kissograms.
> The nonce is an integer value?

An array of bytes is an integer value - just an arbitrarily large one. You could also just tack the bytes of a 64-bit uint onto the end of the nonce instead of incrementing the nonce (I'm not sure if that is secure, it's just an explanation).

A real example of this is RSA. The length of the key is in bits (and therefore bytes) but is still a representation of a really big integer.

> how does the client know it has finished the work ?

Let's remove hashing from the equation. I, as the server, say to you I've got the following equation:

Y = (5 + X) * 10

Please solve it so that the last 3 digits of Y are greater than 100 and tell me what you used for X. The simplicity of this equation means that you can easily solve for Y and respond with `12335`. With that response I can just plug X into the equation and see that you've done the work. Now, imagine that there is no such thing as division. Being unable to solve the equation, you'd be forced to brute force each value of X - but proving that you've found X only requires that you run the equation once because we can still multiply:

Y = (5 + 12335) * 10

With POW, you say that you are looking for a specific pattern of bits or bytes. The pattern can be quite arbitrary: "I want the last 8 bytes to be a 64-bit integer larger than 12345" or even just "the last 64 bits must all be 0." The client will have to try multiple values of X to see which satisfies that constraint. Once the client knows X you no longer need to go through the effort of finding out the value for yourself, you just need to plug X into the equation and see that they found a valid value for X:

POW = HASH(NONCE & X)

It's like salting a password, but requiring that a portion of the final result has a specific pattern. This forces the client to do a lot of work in a way that is cheap to verify from a computational standpoint.
and all of those home users are on Facebook already, so it probably doesn't matter.
Top hidden costs of developing a mobile app
I agree that Wolfram has a tendency for self promotion, and didn't claim otherwise. When people on HN constantly point this out and assume negative intent, every time something he has written is submitted, the result is tiresome noise. But having read both of your extensive comments, I get it that you feel strongly about this: that comes across very clearly.

Edit: second sentence for clarity.
There's also the power factor. These hidden motors are on the order of a few hundred watts. While enough to make a huge difference, if you want a non-hidden version, you can get a few hundred watts for a few hundred bucks: https://www.electricbike.com/12-kit-power-levels-360w-to-800... to well into the thousands of watts range for $2500. The price is because it's stealthy.
So everything was fine in countries that didn't keep such records when the Nazis invaded?
Agreed. Data before algos. Isn't that what Linus said too?

Over my looong career doing CRUD applications (& proudly loving it), I've seen too many over-engineered programs and "business logic" introduce just to compensate for poor data models.
I have no context on the game but it's awesome for such a prominent figure to share public feedback like this.