skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Startup theory 101: your customer is the person who pays you. What they buy is the story about how you're solving their problem.

What the universities are buying is not access to the papers. No-one in this whole system gives a monkey about papers.

The universities are buying a solution to their filtering problem. Allowing anyone to produce "proper science" with no filtering mechanism will kill the universities' business model.

There needs to be a filtering mechanism that stops "crackpot" science from getting in. The journal system works well for this. If all "proper" science is in the peer-reviewed journals then everything else can be ignored as crackpottery.

So the universities sell qualifications that are a prerequisite to being published in journals. People without qualifications do not get published. Papers not published in journals are ignored.

Universities pay Elsevier for journals so that they in turn can sell qualifications to students and farm research grants from governments.

None of this has anything to do with science or access to papers.

If SciHub develops an effective filtering mechanism (like ArXiv has apparently done) then that's the existential threat to both Elsevier and the Universities that support it.
I use Google's YAPF [0].

[0]: https://github.com/google/yapf
I don't think it is in princible impossible to find objective moral values hardwired in our brains that makes us uncomfortable when we do things that is not good for ourselves, or our families, or society.

But if it's a mechanism of our bodies, while it might be "objective" in the sense that it's a physical thing, it's still relative to each human. Just like someone is born tall or bow-legged, one might be born with 'wires' that make them uncomfortable with different things. If they act accordingly, are they moral? Even if what they do makes most others uncomfortable?
You probably already found it, bit the Game Programming Patterns[0] website is a great read. I bought the book, but all content is available on the site.

Also nice is this archived post[1] on getting started as game programmer.

I am making my first real game this year, also using SpriteKit.

[0]: http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com

[1]: http://web.archive.org/web/20051104034215/http://www.lupineg...
What does it take to get listed in the Visual Studio extensions dialog? If there is a review process, it should probably include a requirement that "transmitting your code across the wire" requires explicit consent each time, or something similar.
A working transistor-scale replica of the classic MOS 6502 microprocessor
What happens to the losing team's championship t-shirts and caps?
Or even more clearly

def is_palindrome(str):
return str == str[::-1]
Despite cutbacks, Intel is doubling down on Internet of Things
It's very easy, if that person say he/she doesn't have anything important on their phones, they have a GPS.
TTIP is a threat to democracy? There’s another trade deal that’s already signed
You'll probably have more luck raising issues on an "official" Microsoft repo: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-spell-check/issues/33
Lot of people made tiny fortunes writing "How to interview" kind of self help books and blogs, just like this article they want people to believe that there is a formula to this madness and for a price you can know it. Smart people should realize that there are no shortcuts. You can't fill the void by pouring money and time into these products. The only way is to face the rejection and keep on focusing on the skill, solve real world problems, write code, learn to express ideas better, take internships.

One has to be good at programming, analytical skills, problem solving and communicating ideas. And after that a little research on how a company interviews should help. Even if someone reads all these books and cracks the interview, its very difficult to hold on to job with out the required skills.
We could really use a decentralized spell checking service. I'm thinking a blockchain, maybe Ethereum.

Edit: Poe's law.
Here's Ryan Clark (Crypt of the NecroDancer) writing about what makes a game commercially viable:

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RyanClark/20150917/253842/Wha...

Here's Jan Willem Nijman of Vlambeer discussing a large number of small improvements that make games feel good:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJdEqssNZ-U

Here's Rami Ismail, also of Vlambeer, explaining how making a game a week helps you develop an intuition for some parts of game making:

http://ramiismail.com/2014/02/game-a-week/

Here's a talk by Sid Meier (Civilization) about Interesting Decisions:

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015756/Interesting
How can you find a goal (not a subgoal, as in "to achieve X we must do Y", but a top goal) empirically?
> It uninstall vim and install emacs.

If a package system is well designed, having the package for vim on my system shouldn't be doing any harm even if I'm not currently using it, so the system you are describing isn't really any better than just having a list of packages I want installed in a text file.
This should be obvious.

If my job is largely coding, I expect to demonstrate coding abilities.

If my job is largely bullshitting, I expect to demonstrate bullshitting abilities.

And so on.
Doesn't work well at all on my android phone I must say.
"The world is rapidly moving to SSL by default, defeating broadband provider's ability to invade their customer's privacy."

SSL or not, my ISP still knows every URL that I visit (unless I use Tor, a VPN, etc.). Thus, they know where I shop, where I bank, what news sources and blogs I read, what web sites related to medical or psychological conditions I visit, etc. They can also figure out where I work based on my employer's VPN that I connect to. If I use my broadband provider for home phone service, they know every phone number I call and every number that calls me. If I subscribe to cable TV, they know every show I watch. Since they have my real name (required for credit card payments) and home address (where their cable goes), they know who I am and where I live, and can correlate that data stream with my real identity.

As we've learned from the recent discussions of the NSA's bulk data collection, a lot of personal information can be deduced from just this kind of metadata. I'd actually be happy to see some legislation, perhaps based on the E.U. data protection laws, that limits what they can do with all this information (e.g., I'd prefer they didn't sell it without my consent, or retain any more of it than is required by law).
Having worked at a large and (within the industry) well known ad agency I think you're vastly overestimating the amount of knowledge the people making those decisions at ad agencies have regarding things like web best practices and security. For larger household name brands the ones doing the purchasing of ad space online are almost exclusively ad agencies. Even if the agency doesn't make the ad unit and the accompanying creative, they're still likely the ones negotiating the price and making sure everything gets trafficked on time. The level of client involvement varies, but it usually hovers between "none" and "too small to measure".

Frankly, the people in the agency world making the kinds of decisions about which ad network to use are not the most tech savvy people. They're typically two or three layers removed from anyone who actually understands the difference between HTTP and HTTPS. Until that changes (hint: not for another 20-30 years when the current crop of middle aged account executives is retired or dead) then ad networks won't receive any major pushback from the people who are their largest most reliable customers.

Even if every person in the agency world understood the harm of poorly made ad units tomorrow it would still take ages for any changes to occur because of existing relationships and contracts.
85 percent of Facebook video is watched without sound
Multi-platform stick figure animation program
I don't know. Why should we? I mean, it's a good way to achieve some goals, if one prefers to do so.
Apple may find it harder saying 'no' to bad ideas
I would not be surprised if sites running https have lower conversion rates per click.
> This peaked my interest - who were the people behind this service?

I just had to check, and am sad to report After the Deadline wouldn't have caught this error ("peaked" for "piqued") even if the author had still been using it.

More relevantly, am I wrong in thinking that After the Deadline does actually support HTTPS? An HTTPS request [1] seems to work fine. The article muses on this point a little, but maybe it is just the "teacher" module at fault after all?

[1] https://service.afterthedeadline.com/checkDocument?key=test-...
hallelujah!
Define "created". There's Datalog, LINQ, and Dedalus at the very least, but these aren't available for any widely used data store (except perhaps LINQ on some object database, like NDatabase).
I'm a big fan of knowing the standard libs, so my thoughts on that are summed up by, "the people who wrote the language are much better programmers than I am." I'd probably get dinged for lack of confidence.
Please make a compelling case as to why a distributed solution is warranted for spell checking?
Having worked in ad tech, I didn't know anybody who wasn't running an adblocker in their primary browser.
All abuse problems are security problems. Abuse is by definition a misuse of authority.
Can you elaborate on what is the "common sense problem"?
This article assumes I'm going to marry anyone...
On fonts and dyslexia
There have been some efforts along these lines in computer science and math:

http://theoryofcomputing.org/ (has some nice surveys if you're into theoretical computer science)

http://discreteanalysisjournal.com/ (the arXiv overlay model is interesting)

This is a bit apples to oranges—journals are not as central in CS as in biology or other older fields, and the norms about authorship and preprints tend to be more relaxed—but hopefully the trend will spread to more old-world sciences over time.
I like this idea. Making it possible to look at any two consecutive pages side-by-side is, IMHO, very useful. Especially for technical papers where the text refers to equations on other pages.
How Africa’s Kiro’o Games Is Shaking Up the Gaming Industry
Are you suggesting that interviewers should try harder to conform to social beliefs of a company -- as a valid interview strategy?

I'd instead suggest that it should never get to the point of an in-person interview unless both parties have already applied the necessary culture filters. Sure, you could get surprised at the on-site and then change your mind, but you're just wasting a ton of your own time if you either don't properly vet the important culture properties aheadof time, or else sublimate away your own culture standards because you believe you have to appear conformist in order to get the job.

A good example would be open-plan offices. I have many friends in tech who deeply loathe the cognitive damage done to them by their employers forcing them to work in open-plan seating conditions. Yet they also are too afraid to either speak up or to reject employers who use open-plan seating, thus perpetuating open-plan dogma.

My perspective is that if an employer feels I'm worth the investment to bring to the team, they must feel that trivial other things to accommodate what helps me work best are also worthwhile. If, instead, a company would reject me based on "culture fit" for these side issue accommodations, or would refuse to grant them and try to pressure me to work without them, then in either case I'm dodging a massive bullet by either rejecting them or letting them reject me.

But one thing I should absolutely never do is to compromise on those issues (e.g. "no matter how good you are, you won't get into a long-term relationship ... if you don't conform"). If my goodness isn't enticing enough for them to not just make the offer but also think hard about what it would take for me to be happy with them and make it happen, then I'm simply better off staying away from them.

As it happens, a lot of companies don't really care about the goodness of their employees. They just want warm bodies who will conform to the company line. I understand that represents most jobs.

I'd like the future to be a world where that doesn't represent most jobs, so I boycott all such jobs, even if it means my search space is drastically reduced as a result.

It's just too cognitively unhealthy to human minds otherwise.
one of his questions is, "does this need to support utf-8" and i'm assuming in his hypothetical interview it is, "no it does not"

also are you seriously going to quiz someone about i18n for a interview? does that really tell whether they are a hire/no hire?
I'll update the post, thanks!
Reminds me of graphics double buffering. Back in the days games would write directly in the video buffer, while the graphic chip would scan that same buffer and push the content on screen at the same time.

If your code is too slow (a complex effect, too many character at that point), you might not be done writing a full frame when the graphic chips starts to output the pixels.

This means your TV is now showing partly old and new state. Nothing important most of the time, it's only games, it's only a few ms of absurd information, people's brain can compensate. It is ugly to see though. You have that weird 'line' somewhere below.

Since people changed the structure a bit, with two (or more) buffers, the program computes the new image in one buffer B, while the chip shows another buffer A. When you are done with a picture, the chip will now scan B, while you can write in A. This means the output never shows partial frame anymore.
> I'm not actually testing how well you write code on a whiteboard. I’m looking for something else.

unfortunately not true with interviewers at other companies. they are definitely looking for the correct answer. if you can't "get" a problem, you are not getting an offer.
The Big Short 2.0
This is my thinking too. The use of HTTP is bad, but the real issue is trusting a third party with large amounts of potentially very sensitive information. Especially when the service in question was designed for people checking the spelling and grammar of their blog posts, something designed to be shared anyway.
Could be, but even so that wouldn't fix the "throwing your IP into a black hole" problem.
Thanks Tim - I had just started trying to track Sean down, so this will help! Will update the post if I hear anything back from him.
Out of interest, how'd you get your OS X builds set up? I had to do quite a lot of searching before I found a company [2] willing to lend PureDarwin [1] a box for a while.

[1]: https://github.com/PureDarwin/PureDarwin

[2]: https://www.macstadium.com/ (thanks!)
It's possible, in case of physical disconnection or power interruption. There is no guarantee that the copied data will be flushed out of buffers into nonvolatile storage before the delete is (unless the program asks for such a flush and the system honors it).
Disclaimer: I'm the author of the wrapper, and a LaTeXML and Authorea developer.

Indeed, LaTeXML has been producing great presentation MathML, since before MathJaX was created. But it's also a very different tool and the two projects are largely complementary, rather than competing. I'm happy to hear your first experiment went well, and as a note - most components, including and especially the math output, are highly configurable.

I recently counted [1] а 95% success rate by LaTeXML's math parsing on 350 million LaTeX formulas from arXiv.org. That number should be taken with a grain of salt, as it is a self-claimed parsing success, which may not necessarily mean correct+ideal MathML. But it quite often gets the job done great visually, and there is ongoing work to keep improving the coverage.

That said, MathJax has historically (and until very recently) fully embraced MathML itself, as MathML was used for its internal representation. The main problem that had/has to be solved on the web was the lack of displaying MathML support in browsers [2], and MathJax addressed that extremely well, as you know. But if, for example, you create an HTML5+MathML document with LaTeXML, and enable MathJax on it, you will get as good a result as using MathJax on HTM5L+TeX documents.

At Authorea we use both of LaTeXML and MathJax for our formula support, as well as some alternative renderers such as KaTeX and MathQuill. It's sometimes a bit too big of a hassle to do something advanced however (see [3]), so there is still some way to go.

There are certain trade-offs to be considered, but I personally see MathML as an instrumental part of making math accessible, actionable (as a native part of the DOM) and interoperable, and am happy that both LaTeXML and MathJax have embraced it historically. The MathJax team is now officially out of patience with the browser stalemate in displaying MathML, so they're looking for alternatives to move forward. Time will show how that goes I suppose...

[1] http://prodg.org/talks/mnlp_billion_token_corpora#30

[2] http://caniuse.com/#feat=mathml

[3] http://prodg.org/blog/mathml_please
No. Using a columnar format means you can get compression and vectorization that blows a row oriented format out of the water for scans.
Yup - this is my fundamental problem. HTTP or HTTPS isn't the issue - sending everything I open in my editor to a third party is the problem.
It's been tried. JHEP [1] started like that, as a journal by high energy physicists, for high energy physicists, online only, with infrastructure provided by SISSA. But after a few years, they turned it over to Springer.

[1] http://jhep.sissa.it/jhep/help/helpLoader.jsp?pgType=about
Last time I looked. Babylon.js is an amazing JS-based 3D game framework. It relies on WebGL for the heavy-lifting; support good support of WebGL in the browser is needed.
Comments and tests? Are you serious?

I am told that the unit-test kool-aid has taken over the universe of common sense, and I respond: "surely not", and then this...

My position w/ something like Fizzbuzz to any level of developer wouldn't require much in the way of either comments or tests (or, if embedded in a larger system, bugs would be flushed out quickly)

Do you disagree?
It will be indeed as "objective" as what medicine/biology defines someone "healthy". That being said, we already define certain categories when it comes to disabilities, and with very few disputes. Moral values could also be like that, and indeed its like that for who are legally called psychopaths and such.

Anyway, I think the author of the article linked in the root comment is looking for something more divine for moral values, but as a disappointment, just repeats the same rituals of thousand year old fallacies like as if theist believes have objective basis from which other objective basis can be inferred.
"Is this client side or server side JavaScript?"

kill me now. are you testing for insight or implementation correctness?

a whiteboard is a place to draw a diagram, not code. see how they visualize and reason about strings would be better
I subscribe to this perspective. REST thinks of the web as discrete resources, for which it provides a sufficiently good model. But that model makes it hard to build complex GUIs that deal with a lot of hierarchical data. Such applications can't afford to treat every node as an independent resource sitting across the network. Yet we use the old ways of thinking to build complex new beasts and that unsurprisingly turns out to be a kludge.

Also, if the anti-Rails sentiment has reached an all time high (has it?), it would be because Rails adoption itself has reached an all time high. We do need a web framework that lets us build applications by seamlessly weaving both the front-end and back-end, and unfortunately nothing like that exists. In the absence of such an alternative, Rails remains the web development framework out there with the most bang for the buck. For front-end heavy apps, the easiest approach right now is a `rails new` with Devise and jsroutes, throw in a complex rails-react setup with server-side rendering, write almost all the views in Javascript, and many hundred API endpoints, and after thousands of tests to just validate the inevitable connascence, we have something that works. Something that took us months, which could've been done in VB6 or FoxPro in a week.

GraphQL and Relay promises to fix this, and even if they themselves don't, the conversation has started, and something great will emerge in time.
Why the enema?
No, "design-by-contract" is a matter of degrees, and pure functional languages tend to afford the most extreme degree. Most other languages have easier to access backdoor escape hatches, but also have other benefits, like faster dev time, wider standard library, less esoteric math knowledge needed to understand the language's core abstractions, etc.

Depending on just how easy the escape hatches are, just how secure you'd like them to be, and just how valuable the other benefits are, you just make some engineering trade-off as to which sort of language makes the most sense.

All I'm saying is that some part of this trade-off space includes staying in a language like Python for its benefits (access to a turn-key machine learning library and rapid development time, say) but needing to build your own machinery to eliminate some of the escape hatches (like decorator-based argument and return value constraints, as in the article).
Couldn't help but chuckle at this:

'use strict'; // avoid ambiguity and sloppy errors

If the line that starts (or ought to start) virtually every JS file you ever write can't stand without explanation, one wonders what can!
Don't share holders want some of this money back? 200 billion in cash just sitting there is not doing anyone much good.
Ask HN: First time in PyCon, recommendations?
Hi everyone,

I'm in PyCon for the first time (and first developer conference), and I'm curious as to what is the best way to take advantage of a conference like PyCon and this conference in specific.

Also, if any of you are interested in meeting I'll be happy to share a beer or two.
Just a guess, but they probably care more about selling to companies and other organizations where team members seeing your email address isn't a problem.
I love Kay and you should absolutely read any of his recommendations or at least examine them with earnest. That said, I struggle to remember anything he's created or written that's moved the needle (my needle). I'm honestly not hating and I have way too much respect for him to say anything on this list is not worthwhile. But, in my experience, Kay has been one of those brilliant uncles who's (written) work never seems to approach the peripheries of my (self-guided) computer science study (or main stream relevance?). Obviously I've heard of and studied him but if you asked me at a bar "madebylaw is alan kay still relevant in computer science?"