skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I honestly would have much preferred they had a keyword so that it kinda matched the rest of the language. It feels a bit tacked on and hard to parse.

Something like:

lambda(arguments):capture list {...}

Just seems way more clear. Looks more like a function or a class (and a lambda is sort of an in-between kind of thing anyway)
You're rebutting almost all of seanmcdirmid's arguments by essentially saying "it's not a problem because some SV startups/companies do it too." But:

1) You don't become the next Silicon Valley through cargo-cult entrepreneurship.

2) SV is successful in spite of those things, not because of it, because SV is starting from a position of strength and inertia. SV succeeds in spite of its current problems because of the massive self-reinforcing feedback loop and culture it developed decades ago when these things were not issues.

When SV was becoming a startup hub, most of what you and seanmcdirmid talked about were not problems. Housing was cheap, software patent lawsuits were not prevalent, many people were hobbyists, and so on.
I really hate to see such a negative reply being the top comment, especially when much of it is subjective (what sucks to you is great for me).

Hybrids, plug-in hybrids, parallel and series drive trains are all different as clarified in the other daughter comments. While they use differing percentages of electric power, I still think the key is using electric for 0-10 mph and for regeneration. Once you do that, you can overcome some of the inefficiencies of the ICE.

The article doesn't go into the details of how the subsidies are allocated, so it doesn't make sense to assume one way or the other. I do like your suggested allocation, but for all we know, that could be how they are planning on doing it. Or if you are German, write to your representative to suggest it.

Finally, I have driven the Nissan Leaf and totally disagree with your dismissal of it. It drives way better than equivalent ICE cars of similar size and price range (after US gov't tax credit). For suburban driving, the range is sufficient, it just requires a home charger. Looks are subjective and I agree I find it a bit odd, but there are alternatives. There is a Kia Soul, Ford Focus, and Mercedes B-class that are electric and identically-styled to their ICE equivalents. So I really think your exaggerated claims are based on ignorance.

What it boils down to is that you can't have new products and dismiss them for not not being exactly like the old products. Somebody has to be the beta-tester.

edit: just remembered Hanlon's razor.
Reading The Meaning of Science by Tim Lewens right now. It's an introductory "Philosophy of Science" book, and I'm enjoying it so far. Up to where I'm at now, the author has covered Karl Popper and his falsification oriented framework, and Thomas Kuhn and the "scientific revolution / paradigm shift" model.

A couple of other ones from this year that stand out to me:

Disrupted by Dan "Fake Steve Jobs" Lyons

It's Not The Big That Eat The Small, It's The Fast That Eat The Slow by Jason Jennings

In terms of fiction, this years haul includes:

The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King

The Last Mile by David Baldacci
Upvote it and it will be in your list of saved stories.
> What's wrong with your tap water? Don't they have the same safety standards to meet?

Tap water quality varies from place to place. For example, in SV (at least Sunnyvale, Santa Clara) it stinks so badly that I barely care whether it meets safety standards or not. OTOH, in my home city it's pretty fine and at some other place I lived it was halfway between.
Understanding them tends to lead to overconfidence and being more affected, in general, actually. We might improve by gaining experience in compensating for them, though.
Wow, the topographic print is great. Although the technology is already quite old, I still get shudders somehow when looking at mountains and valleys in Google Maps. Creating little relief maps of the world around us would be awesome. That used to be something that public offices would showcase in their entrance, but it was a huge individual effort to create them. Today you could feed OSM data into a 3d printer, very nice.
You can have wildly differing viewpoints inside a culture. A democrat and republican can be further apart than an american and a frenchman. Culture and identity are complex phenomena. You cannot reduce a person's identity to a single label without removing almost every aspect about them. A global culture would be a baseline for mutual understanding, but it would not cause homogenous identity anymore than a person's citizenship does.
Honestly, even I was just thinking today the amount of garbage that has become radio today. Everyone just keep playing the same list of crappy songs by few artist, that I do not even understand why they are famous. Many times, when I switch the channel to escape a crappy song, the next one is also playing it. Once the same nikki manaj song was playing in 4 channels, that was scary.

I viewed radio as a medium to find new good songs and listen my favorite ones.
Stockholm has produced a few successful startups, but it's not a competitor to SV. It's is a global competitor in telecom systems and games (though I guess many game companies are now owned by US companies). Spotify is basically the same service as when it started, just with more users. Stockholm has no real momentum in building something of their own.
Randu: a bad random number generator [pdf]
And now that I think about it, how would you differentiate Latin and English?
I believe it is weakly typed, so type-checked on compile time.
> If that's true we are moving into a scary world pretty much like 1984

This became obvious since the proof delivered by Snowden. And we don't need more proof.

What we need now is a way to roll the surveillance state back.
Love thy coworker; thy work, not necessarily
That example is not precisely on point though, because it involves a federal warrant - there's no doubting that the US Government can pass laws overriding relevant State laws where it has jurisdiction, and Federal warrants are ultimately authorised by a Federal law.
Off Plan Properties in Dubai
The frame rate and delay on a tablet is horrendous. On some slides I can swipe down and on others I have to swipe left, with no indication which directions are possible, some times I don't know of i can't swipe down or if the page is just loading. Is the presentation linear ot is it supposed to be a 2d grid? If you go to the right then down then left the left will go up instead of actually left.
Containerized Nvidia Docker Image for GPU Applications
Big +1 on Delicious. I use Pocket now, but I find myself saving things and never ever going back to them.
Whilst perfectionists might appreciate the idea, the difference between a normal round sphere and Earth's spheroid shape wouldn't be noticeable in a desktop-sized globe, to the bare eye. And you could maybe detect mountain ranges by running your fingers on them, but not really by seeing them?

It would be for those of us who like to apply a fairly big caliper to our globes...
There might be more game devs using Windows than Linux, just due to market share, so I'd say Windows was the right choice here.
Facebook didn't capture "everyone" until many years after it launched. It was limited to college campuses, and popular amongst college students.

Whatsapp replicated this growth and captured an even wider net. Especially outside of the US.

Agree that Facebook is far from irrelevant, but I'd keep an open eye on the hip new platforms. In the attention marketplace, the past is irrelevant. All that matters is the present, and the now. The network that captures the highest level of engagement wins, and amongst certain demographics, Facebook is certainly losing its relevance.
This is one of the best pieces about work I've read in a long time.
original announcement discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11686029
Is that based on a common book on numerical analysis?

Because one thing I'd miss in the examples would be a few lines of comments - if they're meant to be illustrative of a book that's ok, but learning the other way (looking at source code, structure and comments) is also a good way for many people to understand. If you're well read in source code, you can read it to understand the math better.
They are helpful enough to announce their locations to the dispatcher on every call. It would not be difficult to find a specific unit if you wanted to.
I does not pick up my time zone correctly. I'm in Germany, does your bot factor in daylight savings time?
Such a method may also force the cancer to evolve to survive under such stress.
Not only that but it is very easy to create a very strong food aversion to whatever you have recently eaten. Your brain connects the very bad nausea that results from the chemo with whatever you last ate. This effect can be so strong that people can never eat that food ever again.
Show HN: Graphical User Interface for the Microsoft Azure Tables Service
I think educational materials should have different considerations than just market share. But that's my personal opinion.
You could (and imho should) use RAII semantics using unique_prts for this. Writing custom destructors will introduce unnecessary code that you'll have to maintain and unnecessary bugs that will creep in eventually.
Not the same thing at all.

Broadcastify requires self-censorship, their ToS prohibits broadcasting tactical, command, vice, narcotics, and other interesting channels.

Also, metadata and retroactive analysis is much different than listening to a live audio stream.
In Lisp things that would be syntax in other languages are libraries instead, so the impact is bigger.
Sometimes, it'll be faster.
Full-Screen Gameplay of DOOM on PC Running with Vulkan API [60fsp]
W3C’s Authoring Practices for Design Patterns
Beijing is most certainly the software center of China. I work in a Shanghai startup and when we raise funding we have to go to Beijing to find the VCs. Beijing also has the best universities in China, so the talent is there. China's version of the Paypal Mafia is more like the Microsoft Mafia. Look inside of most top software companies in China and you can almost certainly find a handful of execs who worked at Microsoft around the year 2000. Microsoft's offices were (are?) in Beijing, so most of them hung around after they left to startup or join other tech companies.

Shenzhen is the center of the manufacturing world, and as the article points out they have DJI which produces 70% of the world's drones. Essentially anyone who wants to produce something cheaply and quickly will have something being produced in or around Shenzhen. If the Internet of Things really takes off into a mainstream industry then Guangzhou and Shenzhen will become a secondary hub of innovation. I just heard recently that Cal-Berkeley is establishing an engineering graduate program with Tsinghua to be hosted in Shenzhen. For a university right outside of Silicon Valley to do this is definitely saying something.

Shanghai has a decent number of finance related startups, but people in Shanghai tend to be motivated to work in large multi-national companies. Go to a startup in Shanghai and you'll find mostly people from outside of Shanghai without the best education - not saying that it's impossible for these people to create a great company, but it's a far cry from Beijing where Tsinghua and Beijing University students are being recruited to early stage startups.

Alibaba and a few other tech companies are in Hangzhou, but that city still lacks the pre-A, A series type companies that Beijing and Shanghai have.

Chengdu in the West has offices for half of the Fortune 500, but although I've heard the local government is pushing hard to attract entrepreneurs, their startup ecosystem seems to still be lacking. It's possible that if some of these employees leave their Fortune 500 employers to startup then the city could become more of a hub in the future.
One of the comments nails it on the head (paraphrasing a little bit): lisp is the executable implementation of lambda calculus. So of course you will re-invent it. As much as any domain at some point takes on a computational flavor the closer it gets to having primitives that can be used to build a turing machine the closer it gets to being a lisp. That and having your computation being representable as a data structure comes in handy pretty frequently so you end up emulating lisp even if you didn't intend to because the data/computation duality is ever-present. None of this is an endorsement of lisp though since there is a very deep and fundamental reason that it keeps being re-invented. Lisp is the manifestation of the primordial soup of computation.
And this is why C++ couldn't use this notation, as they didn't want to break compability with this extension of Apple's.
The Tyrant as Editor (2013)
Lack of Trust in Internet Privacy and Security May Deter Online Activities
The Crystal Goblet (1955)
Scala-native was just shown. Article shows how to setup working dev environment
It is not only glucose that cancer cells can become addidicted to, but also amino acids. Often the cancer cells can overcome a lack of glucose by using an amino acid. An idea that was explored too soon (i.e. before we knew which cancers this would work on) was starving the cancer cells with multiple nutrient withdraws.
> Military satellites often cost a few billion

This needs a reference.
Career prospects after BSc in mathematics
This has probably been asked a lot, but since I can't figure out search on Hacker News being new here, I am going to go ahead and ask: what career options are viable after undergraduate education in mathematics?

I am not entirely clueless. I entered the programme seeking to pursue career in academia, but with the passage of time my chances have been diminishing. It's very likely no decent school is going to accept me into their PhD programme, unless I build my credentials pursuing a masters in mathematics and adding relevant research experience as I have had none yet which could be termed relevant or credible. I have also realized that my idea of academia as I fantasized it, is not entirely true. At this point, I am looking to switch fields. I know a bit of programming, so that's likely a decent area to dive further in, but being from a third world country I don't have the access to job market which someone in US or other developed markets may enjoy. I want to avoid wasting another 2 years in a masters curriculum, even though I realize I have ruined by bachelors having done terribly poor as far as academics are concerned.

EDIT: I am still in the programme, about to enter the third year. I am hoping to know a little about the job market so I can use the period remaining acquiring right skills.
And once you start reading the docs on the more efficient but far less consistent 64-bit calling convention, you may find yourself choosing words to describe it other than the "improved" that this author opted for.
OKCupid study shows perils of big data science
You guys aren't hiring in Portland ;)
My sabbatical research pivot
I know someone who works at one of the government backed incubators in Shanghai and he told me that a few of the companies they have are pretty promising, but there are a lot of accepted companies who don't have much of a shot. Startup solve a national problem of having too many college graduates and not enough job opportunities, so some of the incubators just soak up some of the extra graduates with the hope that maybe they could make something useful with time. Of course, with continued government support the incubators could improve and become more focused, but for now it seems at least a few are a way to provide jobs to what may otherwise be unemployed college grads.
The mystery behind our spine colors and animals
what-about-isms are pretty standard rebuttals to any criticism on China these days. I just got used to it :).

After the air gets cleaned up housing bubble pops, it could become a really cool place for startups. But those fixes come first; China cannot fix its problems by encouraging tech startups first.
Presentation Skills: ‘It depends on your telescope’
Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom, one of the leading minds analysing and developing AI as it relates to human civilisation.
1. You're conveniently ignoring the fact that Google did self-censor from 2005 to 2009. So the idea that it's "too expensive" being the reason is just FUD. Unsubstantiated speculation.

2. The question about whether or not Facebook/Google will succeed today is more misdirection. The real question is whether Google would have succeeded 11 years ago, and whether Facebook would have succeeded 7-8 years ago, because that's when they would have entered the market.
What is Elon Musk's diet/lifestyle like?
Most real life situations don't require you to solve 3 distinct problems in an hour.

That's why most degrees require you to produce a thesis, which is closer to what you'll need to do later.
Javascript though.
No, they never stop. 21st century governments use secrecy to avoid having to deal with the public. And they use national security to justify secrecy. Sometimes they screw up, or there's a leak (like with TTIP), but for the most part we don't know about what's happening until its too late to do anything about it. That's why you need to study history to see the pattern of abuse. Once you see how it happens historically, you can see pieces of the puzzle indicating where its still happening today. Or, you look to the few journalists still doing investigative reporting (e.g. theintercept.com) to expose the man-behind-the-curtain.
Intereresting Tweet from Elon Musk
Audacious has optional WinAmp-style GUI (with skins being WinAmp 2.x compatible AFAIK) and supports global hotkeys, including a "search and jump to file" popup.
Because worse is better.

http://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html
Every nation has protectionism. Every single one. What's important is the degree of protectionism. So pointing out examples of a nation engaging in protectionism contributes little to the discussion unless you compare it to other nations.
They should add an entry for the "bias awareness" bias. :)
> "Lisp is itself a unique model of computing, and it generally unifies Turing's and Church's computational model in a relatively unbiased manner IMO. For that reason, I regard Lisp as the most flexible languages of all "multi-paradigmed" languages."

I agree that Lisp is a flexible language, what I disagree with is that this automatically makes it the 'ultimate' language. By ultimate language I mean the best language we can ever create.

The reason I can say that is I see Lisp's flexibility as a double-edged sword. On one hand you can adapt Lisp to match a task, effectively creating a DSL for the particular application you're working on. On the other hand, the flexibility means that you cannot automatically assume as much about an application structure compared to some other languages.

This point about application structure is probably easiest to explain through the lens of type systems. Some of the benefits that type systems can give to other languages do not necessarily apply to Lisp. Do any Lisps have type systems? Sure they do, but they're always optional. It is this that causes an issue. Consider if you were writing some application that used a Lisp type system, and now you want to pull in an external library that performs a set of functions that it would be non-trivial to implement. There are no guarantees that this external library has any types you can query, regardless of how you designed your own code.

Whilst I appreciate that some Lisp coders are comfortable with 'rolling their own' when it comes to reusable libraries, I'm sure you can think of libraries that would be a lot of work to put together. For example, a library on natural-language processing.

Lisp has its advantages, but I think we still have room to improve when it comes to programming languages. Even if Lisp can express everything that can be calculated, there are other factors to consider when looking at the merits of programming languages.
"When possible, the Go compilers will allocate variables that are local to a function in that function's stack frame. However, if the compiler cannot prove that the variable is not referenced after the function returns, then the compiler must allocate the variable on the garbage-collected heap to avoid dangling pointer errors. Also, if a local variable is very large, it might make more sense to store it on the heap rather than the stack.

In the current compilers, if a variable has its address taken, that variable is a candidate for allocation on the heap. However, a basic escape analysis recognizes some cases when such variables will not live past the return from the function and can reside on the stack."

https://golang.org/doc/faq#stack_or_heap
Which part of "recursion", "stack overflow" and "crash" did you not understand? Do you think std::list uses smart pointers?
Key West man riding high in Cannabis car
Why Docker's Pivot Worked
Don't worry .. it's Agile! We'll just keep pushing that feature back until we loose business. Later: "Remember people that was an MVP"
StartUps is time to focus on their growth rates
IIRC there was nothing specific to java or python, except for using opencv for the last exercise to visually solve ravens matrices. You could do the same with nodejs, I'd presume. It might be easier too, considering most of the code involved manipulating dynamic data structures.
Market data (closing prices good enough) including Indices data.

Bloomberg and Reuters are a monopoly.

Macro economic data (eg inflation, GDP) (the ones published by WB and sovereign states)
There are already plenty of people focused on those needs. In fact your previous comment seemed to be complaining about there being too many solutions already. Why are you so offended that some people are trying to solve a real problem they have, instead of piling into the server use case that's already very crowded?
I agree, and I frequently use unique_ptr only, and then pass naked pointers to non-owning objects who need a reference. In this way, the code is clear: if it is a regular pointer, it is non-owning always.

Some might argue that using shared pointers is better for this application, but then you must also deal with potential reference cycles and add weak pointers to the mix eventually, and in addition to these concerns, handle any runtime hits for the reference counting.
> Doesn't he realise that no one gives a shit about Linux desktop apps?

That explains the sad state of Linux on the desktop.
Perhaps you consider this splitting hairs, but I would say this isn't the borrow checker at work, because nothing is being borrowed! Instead it's Rust's move semantics, which is separate from the borrow checker. We can envision C++ with no borrow checker, but Rust-style move-semantics-by-default, and it would be a better language for it.

An example of #11:

use std::cell::RefCell;
fn main() {
let c = RefCell::new(5);
*c.borrow_mut() = *c.borrow() + 1;
}

this is equivalent to * c = *c + 1, which is conceptually safe, but crashes at runtime in Rust.

A real world example of this: say you are keeping a count of some event in a global or thread local storage. You pull out a mutable reference, so you can update the count more efficiently. You then call a function which accesses that global. Crash!

Rc/Arc have the same issue. This defeats the point of refcounting: it means you must have global knowledge of the refcount in order to reliably call mutating functions on the contents. But if you have that global knowledge, you wouldn't need refcounting in the first place!
> The sheer number of cases where embedding a little unification engine dramatically simplifies code is pretty baffling.

Would love to learn more about this, having done Prolog back in uni. Know of any good articles or posts showcasing "embedding a little unification engine" in modern/otherwise-sub-par programming?