skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Jordan here (I work on Reason)

I've mentioned elsewhere that the primary goal for now was to get the tooling automated as much as possible, so that when we receive common feedback, we can adapt to that feedback and trivially migrate people's code forward.

I don't think JavaScript's syntax is a selling point and I am someone with a lot of JavaScript experience. I also don't think that OCaml's syntax today is a selling point, and I have a bit of OCaml experience. Both of these syntaxes have evolved over time, working within that limited precious syntactic real estate, trying so very hard to maintain compatibility with decisions made decades ago. Reason's approach is totally different in that it knows we won't get it right on the first shot so it puts into place the tooling for upgrading and beautifying as we learn lessons and take feedback from the community. It places the syntax closer to the user, even if only conceptually.

That being said, the current syntax is not intended to be a JavaScript clone by any means. It actually started in the opposite manner - by taking the top 15 complaints about OCaml's syntax, by experienced OCaml programmers (not JS programmers) and fixing them. There were a couple of things that didn't really matter (such as how you express comments) that were just changed to be more familiar because, well.. simply they don't matter, and even experienced OCaml developers want the largest possible set of people to be able to read their code as long as that comes with little other tradeoffs.
A large part of the rise in costs is due to the conservative political movement.

For one thing, conservatives are very hostile toward higher education because they consider it a hotbed of marxist atheism. In fact, one of the founding books of the conservative movement, <God and Man at Yale> by William F. Buckley, focused on exactly this point.

Secondly, conservatives believe in making government as small as possible, so they have been shrinking tax support for universities. And when universities respond by becoming big businesses in partnerships with profit-making corporations and neglecting teaching, the conservatives think this is just fine.

In the meantime, countries we are competing with like China continue to support public education as a way of beating us in free market competition. Conservatives never seem to make the connection.
Ostensibly, you're right, but then the answer to "why do we need a system daemon" is "because Linux distros don't control the firmware of all printers nor can they tell manufacturers what to do."
That could be called hungryPOT ...

ah, good ole toilet humor
Nobody believes or has claimed that supply and demand are "not real" and reducing the housing crisis to "Econ 101" is highly disingenuous. It ignores non-economic factors (environmental, cultural) that are contributory. Everyone wants to wave a magic wand and fix housing, but until we acknowledge that such a wand does not exist (and that the situation far exceeds Econ 101) we will continue having the same unproductive conversations.
As @elcapitan said, licensing is the same as for software. Fonts are intellectual property (IP), just like most other intangible products of R&D. It is too bad, of course, and my usual opinion about IP applies. However, we don't live in an ideal world, and many of us are stuck following rules we don't agree with.

What I'd personally find more interesting is a first-principles research effort to find out what makes some fonts so much better than others. My gut tells me that such an effort might yield, as a side effect, a formal method for creating such fonts that are especially well suited for a specific purpose.
Ask HN: UGC Software
What software do you guys use to allow your users/community to post user generated content? Reviews, recommendations, blog posts etc. Looking for something out-of-the-box that allows for similar functionality as Yelp/TripAdvisor.
Not really. Renaming the username-part of the user's home folder has all kinds of data loss potential (apps not being able to find documents, documents linked to each other etc.). Therefore Windows takes the perfectly appropriate approach of leaving the user's files named as they were. Permissions etc. all remain unchanged and allow the same renamed user access. Just the folder on disk shows the old name.
The evidence shows that these uninformed and biased non-voters would take different views on a variety of important issues if they were less biased and more informed. Essentially, the voters represent the 'enlightened' views of the citizenry.
How long is that though? Decades? More? How do you train a neural net to take a vague description of a desired outcome and produce results that fit the requirements? We are no where close to the general AI that would be required.

I certainly believe that classes of automation problems will be done by machine learning but I have a very hard time believing all programming tasks are going to be replaced any time soon.
Sure, but if I had heard several news reports of people finding and returning wallets being falsely accused of theft and subjected to serious legal threats, at that point if I saw someone's wallet lying around, I would just ignore it and keep going.

The bug bounty isn't only about the money. It's also the company's way of advertising 'we aren't crazy assholes like those outfits you heard about on the news'.

(Yes, fixing the law would be a good idea. But in the meantime, a bug bounty is the solution.)
No expectation of privacy in public in the US. Its fair game.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Roadcam
I have a policy of keeping personal browsing on chrome and work based browsing on FF. Every now and then FF will inexplicably hang for over 5 seconds on a page that is probably already cached. I never notice this on chrome, and my connection speed is over 100MBps..

Other times, FF is lightning quick - near instantaneous loads - only other thing I can think of is that I'm running FF on Fedora?
I wouldn't equate sick days with "taking days off" in the colloquial sense; Assuming those sick days are due to legitimate illness. A day spent at home due to a fever is not equivalent to a vacation day, and I can't imagine anyone would say its a "good thing".

If it was about vacation days then I think I'd agree with you.
Mathematics is a lot more rigorous than programming. But considering I'm learning Group and Ring Theory with the 1999 textbook 'Learning Abstract Algebra with Mathematica [Library]' I don't exactly disagree. Working with abstract structures in a more concrete way is a crystal-shattering way to intuit them -- I don't know if it will be an ultimate downfall though yet. As a programmer it just seemed natural to me to be able to manipulate these structures as if they are instances of an abstraction -- of a type. If it peels out for me, I will have a unique perspective among mathematicians. I just see a large sect between those who appreciate the abstractions, and those who bastardize them for utility. I didn't have love and enigmatic affinity for mathematics until I realized that even up to Calc II, the number-crunching utilitarian bastardization of mathematics was conveyed and taught to me -- not the beauty or philosophy of mathematical approach and thinking. Unfortunately, when only results and empirical justifications fill a programmers' mind, the beauty is lost. I feel there is definitely a more mastered perspective by being both a programmer and an inspired mathematician that is lost by being in exclusively one camp or the other. Until education reform is had, this unique perspective will just be for those who incidentally stroll down the path.
Absolutely, honestly, I would turn out to vote for Bernie Sanders, but that is seeming to be less likely as time progresses. So, I won't be voting at all, since I could care less if either Clinton or Trump get elected. Clinton gets elected and the status quo doesn't change very much, Trump gets elected, and maybe---just maybe some people will begin to sit up and take action.
Chrome had the advantage of being pushed by the largest internet company in the world, with one of the most widely used operating systems in the world. Firefox chased after the look of Chrome after being shocked by its sudden rise, and successfully made itself indistinguishable from it.

Compelling things about Firefox that are wasted:

1) It's operated by a non-profit which lacks an ulterior motive.

2) It isn't inherently privacy-destroying.

3) The vast number of extensions.

Instead of depending on these things, they sneakily put in opt-out features that do destroy privacy and generate revenue, hide the ways to opt-out, and act shocked when you question their motives. They constantly break extensions. They unintentionally highlight that they share the thing that bothers people the most about applications in general: they arbitrarily change UI, something about your workflow is as likely as not to break on every update, and you will spend hours trying to get it to work the way it used to work.

There's no reason for them to do this other than some Silicon Valley mindset - it's in the culture, not in the mission. It's as if the Salvation Army kept moving the front door. Worse, it's as if the Salvation Army kept moving the front door because they saw Wal-Mart moving the front door.

Firefox should be saying: "We're the safe as milk, simple, straightforward browser that prioritizes privacy and public service, and is infinitely flexible in order to prioritize our user's individual needs." Instead, they're like: "We're an off-brand Chrome. We'll make a phone and an OS, too, just a little crappier. You have no idea where our money is coming from, but our drive to expand beyond what we once did well should make you suspicious. Also, we're removing that button on the next update."
Yeah, I understand what you're saying: there's a shortage of housing, and there's not a shortage of economy cars. But that's not a rebuttal to the argument I'm making.

The question is whether or not new luxury housing makes rents cheaper for poor folks, today. Even here, in the epicenter of a housing crisis, there's not a lot of evidence that it does. But there's evidence that preferentially building low-income housing does make a difference.

This isn't a controversial or irrational or counter-intuitive argument: there are a lot of great reasons that a rich person might choose to live in a cheaper apartment. It isn't a given that rich people will self-segregate to luxury buildings because "luxury". So at the end of the day, you're back to aggregate supply vs. aggregate demand. And if that's the case, why not build for low-income people instead?
The conclusions of this article are wrong. The vast majority of Github repositories with no license are those that also have no followers and no stars. These are repositories with little useful code most likely.

I more useful metric would be to measure repositories that have 10 or more stars or followers, and to see what percentage of such repositories have no software license.

As it is, the whole digression into the failed state metaphor is premature. The author should have done some digging for better supporting stats before spending so much time on a stretched failed state metaphor.
My socket library from 1997 is still handling thousands of sessions a day. I just checked the CVS log, and it has only had 2 minor changes since 2005.
Applies to
...
Windows 8.1 with Bing

I'm perplexed that a windows version "with Bing" exist...
I hesitate to say I'm an AI researcher, but I dabble, follow the work closely and run a research program in related field.

I'm generally considered unduly optimistic about AI progress, but 3-5 years is way too optimistic.

For some business-algorithm tasks with large amounts of data we may begin to see tools like NTMs etc become viable in that time frame.
> possible effects or side effects in order not introduce bias

giving people psychedelics without telling them seems pretty irresponsible to me even in a controlled setting.
Engineers are so expensive that even minor losses in productivity will vastly outstrip most other costs. Payroll is almost always the biggest line item on the P&L yet very few companies measure how their employees spend their time.
Is it as simple as physical vs mental?

Or is it a gradient, where the high end of the mental work will remain performed by humans, and will grow to encompass more work?

And if it works like that, can our education systems change to keep people productive for longer?
>So it should be that party's right to decide who gets to partake in that decision. I mean, would it make sense for a whole bunch of Republicans to come and vote in the Democratic primary?

It shouldn't matter if a Democrat is voting Republican or the other way around. People can change their minds, and should not be disallowed to vote if they find that the other party is doing a better job in making the country a better place.

If a whole bunch of Republicans vote Democrat, it means that the Republicans have failed to do their job! Saying you can't vote because of that is like a childish loser saying you can't play for the opposing team.

My point is that such a decision should not be made and it segregates our democracy and makes it an "us vs them" fight, when in reality we're all in this together.
The way LaunchDarkly does it is to hash the user key, along with the feature key. This way the same users aren't always included in the '10% set' for all features, but they are consistently in the 10% set for a single feature.

This also allows the decision to be made in memory, without an additional round-trip to the DB.
There is rusti, but it is limited.
I want a really great text-only profiler for the JVM. Something like YourKit or JProfiler, but either entirely CLI-based, or with a built-in REPL that would let me run commands against the profiler, or with a very keyboard-friendly curses UI.

This could be really low-hanging fruit, too. Much of the above could be achieved my extruding SQLite output from an existing profiler. SQL-savvy programmers will do the rest.
Most programmers shy away from Haskell and OCaml. :-P

Seriously, the average programmer trying to learn Haskell starts with wanting to print "Hello, world", eventually winds up at a tutorial about monads, then retires with their head spinning. Haskell remains on the, "I should learn that some day" bucket list and remains unlearned.

This is not to say that you don't have plenty who don't learn them. But now we have another problem. One of the biggest reasons to use a language is available libraries. Because of the initial barriers to entry for these more sophisticated languages, there is a smaller pool of people writing useful libraries. Which means in the real world that when you want to get something done, you'll be more likely to find what you need pre-written if you use a more mainstream language.

Just to get a sense, in the (admittedly highly flawed) TIOBE index, the top language with a strong inference system is Scala, and the next is F#, then Haskell, and nothing else is in the top 50. The sum of popularities for these three would tie with Groovy at #18.

I have never written anything more than a toy program in any of these languages. I doubt I ever will.
I have seen no evidence that insurance companies have lobbied for occupational certification laws. I don't think you are right on this.
My wife manages large scale remediation projects and says that on average a government contract costs approximately twice what a non-government contract would due to time, not materials cost.

All contracts have to be proposed with estimates, awarded, negotiated, revised, and re-proposed. Everything has to be approved and the lead times for going into the field or requisitioning materials is counted in months, not weeks or days. All contract project managers have a corresponding Government assigned project manager who must approve everything.

She said procurement rules are onerous and have fun restrictions like "all materials must be sourced from the USA unless unavailable" that add to the time needed to find and vet sources.

Because of all this, the government typically awards contracts to companies it has worked with previously and not necessarily the lowest bidders. The contractors almost always subcontract out everything except management. It's also not uncommon when the government has to award a contract to new contractor, they will also contract with a familiar firm for PMs to manage the new contractor.

So maybe a little bit of your first candidate and less of the second?
That's only for changes that are important, though: we don't make unnecessary changes.
I like the old getters better (__defineGetter__).
The pilot wave theory is attractive partly because it is more easily understandable theory of microscopic particles, atoms and molecules than the alternatives (better visualizations and less bad philosophy talk). Also I suspect it is quite popular in some circles because the minions of orthodoxy could not convincingly refute it for decades now. Still a minority theory that has to fight for its place under the sun, it somehow reminds of the story about David against the Goliath...
Ask HN: Does HN know if 30 results per page is optimal?
Have they (you?) ever experimented with this to see what would happen?
Explicit Two-Source Extractors and Resilient Functions
I am not super specifically knowledgeable about these details, but Rubygems lets you upload binaries to make this not needed generaly.
That is a surprising claim. What is your basis for saying so? Perhaps some polls?
Things About Vim I Wish I Knew Earlier
rents are already slightly trending down, and it's been an icy few months for investment.

people keep questioning this year after year but the writing is on the wall.
JIRA needs a solid CLI tool. I wrote something like this at one of my past companies that has gone batshit crazy about agile. The process weighed so heavily on me that I felt the need to automate it via JIRA's REST API, which yielded (after some hacking) a CLI tool.

The tool was heavily focused on making tolerable the idiosyncrasies and vagaries of working for that one company, but this gave me food for thought: there's definitely room for doing bug tracking from the command line.
It's not a bad idea, that's a print server or IP printer. But it's a modern system, and the print daemon architecture predates printers having their own microprocessors. It may even predate TCP.
Sure. They had an incredibly bad time with the trip, far worse than what you usually associate with a bad trip. Violence, screaming, paranoia, gibberish. All stuff (maybe apart from the violence) that can happen on a bad one, but this was extreme. Setting was familiar and safe, no external stresses during the period. This was his first time with mushrooms, although regular cannabis smoker (which also might have caused an issue). Regular dose.

The next few days he was still recovering, but thoughts still very scattered and incoherent. Unfortunately this didn't taper off. I had not seen him for a few weeks until his family were in contact. The behaviour had become drastically worse, violence and paranoia. Eventually he was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

From what I have read, with a certain kind of predisposition it would have probably manifested itself later in his life if he was unlucky.

I don't want to put people off Psilocybin as it can be an incredible thing. Just be damn careful and do your research.
You're telling us that if everyone suddenly had to pay their entire education out of pocket (because the "conservatives" presumably cut all tax benefits) that it would cause a rise in tuition costs?

Free/easy money causes the price of assets to rise, as our Fed is demonstrating. Why would it be the opposite with education?
Interestingly RISC OS had something like this, where graphical programs were composed by dragging and dropping icons representing a document. So for example, to save a file, you open the menu and see an icon representing that file. You then drag it into the file manager, a separate program, to tell it where the file will go.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipeline_%28software%29#Pipeli...
This is great work!
The same as the relationship between OCaml and JavaScript, plus some braces.
Is there a coherent argument you can make that doesn't depend on upper-income people shunning lower-income neighborhoods in San Francisco? Because the evidence strongly suggests that they don't: that when luxury housing is unavailable, upper-income people in the Bay Area move on to claim lower-income housing.

(I lived in Bayview for a bit, and I was hardly the only tech person I knew who lived there.)
It worked well for a while. Then the DOJ nearly broke up the company, IE6 became a pariah, and they've had to spend the last decade rebuilding trust.

People will be more wary in the future, as well.
My favorite was a story from the 1980s of a program which would crash depending on the phase of the Moon!

Turned out to be because it was generating a date by calling a general purpose astronomical routine, then parsing the date out of that. The astronomical routine among other things included the phase of the moon, and during some phases you would overflow the buffer that was passed in.

Another classic was a tech support call from the 1990s where the person's computer rebooted every time they flushed the toilet. Turns out that the person was at the end of the electrical line..and on a septic system. Flush the toilet, the septic system came online, causing a power dip, and that was enough to reboot the computer. A UPS fixed that.
I used Irssi back when it first came out; it blew BitchX, ircII and even LiCe out of the water. Unfortunately, IRC isn't widely used in commercial contexts. Most of us are stuck using moronic graphical chat UIs. Shout out to HipChat, yo.
You should take a look at qutebrowser, it has Vim like keybinding http://www.qutebrowser.org/
I have my doubts about the timeframe but I agree that many coding tasks will go away. I bet the web will stagnate at some point the way desktop started to stagnate. Same for infrastructure for most applications. There will be plenty of areas where AI supported solutions will be "good enough".
I am not aware of any current major browser that does not support http/2. http://caniuse.com/#search=http%2F2
In any interpretation, it seems the same question remains:

Copenhagen: Why did the wave collapse into state A and not B,C,...

MSI: Why am "I" in multiverse branch A, and not B,C,...? (and who am "I" anyway?)

Pilot wave: Why is the pseudo-random seed = A', which I can only see indirectly by observing experiment result state A?
> 7 out of 9 of the states that were prohibited from changing their voting laws under the VRA of 1965 immediately passed restrictive laws once the VRA was gutted.

Here's a question that I'm not sure you can answer publicly: Ideally, support for voting should be non-partisan, and everyone seems to want to operate on that principle (including Vote.org).

But what if it is a partisan issue? What if the most important problem is that one party truly opposes voter turnout? Personally, I think that's the case, and I think our failure to address the real problem, for whatever idealistic reasons, is the primary reason we make so little progress.
Access to free and easy money causes the price of assets to rise, and a college diploma is a great asset.

Universities have been doing the same thing all businesses do: charge as much as the market will bear.
Can't they just lower the dosage drastically?