skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you use RL, you might not know it. Multi-armed bandits, for example.
> Her opponent at the time of that quote was Bernie Sanders

The opposition on that issue was not. Candidates in a primary campaign making statements designed to counter positions of potential (or known) general election opponents (or positions associated with the opposing major party, even if not actually embraced by any particular candidate of that party for the particular office in question) isn't an uncommon thing.

Politicians may, all too often, be shortsighted, but ones with even modest amounts of proficiency at campaigning aren't so much so that they can't think in terms of the broader campaign for an office (and even setting the ground for success in that office) when competing in a primary campaign.
Have you learned how to search it? :)

As if one can, it is indeed a perfect choice (money aside).
Actually, Foundation is being ported to Linux and there are already quite a few third-party libraries out there. I am successfully writing cross-platform server-side applications in Swift.

https://github.com/open-swift
https://github.com/VeniceX
https://github.com/Zewo
When the sun rises in the West, Hell freeze over and HR goes back to be Personnel.
Which subset of functionality do you need?

Issue tracking? Kanban? A means to align corporate initiatives with dev effort? Defect tracking with built-in links to commits and vice-versa?
They don't have an interest in fixing the problem. They want to get as much research done as possible---and so they benefit from exploiting cheap labor. (One could perhaps argue that they are harmed in the long run, but this isn't clear.) They also don't see PhDs leaving academia as a bad thing at all. To the contrary, they advertise it as a positive externality; the research money isn't just staying inside an insular academic community, but is giving companies across the economy access to skilled labor.

Giving money to staff scientists would work against both of these benefits. It would cost more and could reduce the number of trained scientists entering industry. (Although that isn't clear. Creating more NTT positions might just give hope to more of those eternal postdocs.)
Maybe its not that popular but I would mention ATS programming language
http://www.ats-lang.org
Does anyone know where this quotation comes from?
Well .. it is a tournament model so price is misleading. Top researchers at industrial labs get paid a decent amount. The problem is (a) getting a coveted job, and (b) mobility when things eventually go south at your employer and they decide research is expendable.
Isn't the golden ratio x = 1/(x-1) ?
Flat files, ISAM, and IMS

Those were all good ideas at the time.

Infact IMS was such a good idea the hipsters just reinvented about 1% of its functionality and called it MongoDB!
Germany has excruciatingly expensive health care compared to the UK and the NHS. Definitely not free or anywhere nearly free.
Shouldn't you just use Handbrake and H.264/AAC? (Assuming your computer is fast/new enough to play it back.)
I've worked on a project that migrated an old cobol system and it went fine although everyone said it would not.

But it's not easy and not cheap.

The problem for the banks is that they have so many systems, typically thousands, and they are all interconnected.

Enter the 'enterprise architects' that draw power points with boxes and buses on top of all the old shit and you have a receipt for a very expensive soup.
Being a Sous Chef for a number of years taught me a lot about resource contention in real time systems, far more than I ever learned in the classroom although having the knowledge base definitely helps.

When you've allocating shared resources in a limited space frantically working with multiple other people during the rush, you really can see the algorithms at work and can learn to optimize and even come up with alternate algorithms solving these types of problems.
Oh really. Is this Haskell program anywhere online?
The slowness and the pan-everything global namespace for the primary libraries are the two biggest problems. The interface for performance-targeted optimizations (mex files) is awful and doesn't hold a candle to Cython. These are downsides that would prevent me from using an open source and free tool ... so when you add that it's closed source and expensive, it just simply does not ever make sense.

If a place finds themselves having a lot of MATLAB code, it means that earlier they didn't refactor and retool when the choice was cost effective to do so. That's strong evidence that for whatever they are working on right now they also will not refactor it to at least try to avoid the future costs of current poor designs. That's a huge red flag.

I guess if they paid an insanely high salary or gave you some other type of assurance that you personally valued, you could trade it off against the red flag evidence. But generally these places also tend to just hire maintenance engineers, since they know they can't offer interesting work. It's best just to avoid and work for places that bend over backwards to refactor and evolve their tooling over time specifically to prevent this problem.
OpenCOBOL is available to learn the language. I do not know it, just checked macports and yes it is there.

Description: OpenCOBOL is an open-source COBOL compiler.
Homepage: http://www.opencobol.org/

Library Dependencies: gmp, libtool, db44, ncurses, libgnugetopt, libiconv, gettext, mpfr
Platforms: darwin
License: GPL-2+
Maintainers: egall@gwmail.gwu.edu, openmaintainer@macports.org
Few people know it but it was written with the idea of very human-like descriptions of what's to be done. I'd wager anyone with a basic introduction to programming could quickly become productive in the language. Although you wouldn't guess it if you went to my college in the early 80s.

For reasons only known to my computer science dean COBOL was a third year course after after BASIC, Pascal and FORTRAN in 1985 or so when I was working through the curriculum for a CS degree. Fourth year was BAL (IBM mainframe assembly) followed by a language of your own design.
Exceptional, huh? :)
Congrats Steve, Scott, and Danny!
We play tested this with 10 year olds at the San Francisco Public Library recently and the kids LOVED it -- keep in mind, these were not middle or upper middle class privileged kids, but lower income at risk ones.

The challenge is that after about 45 min of "play" time, they want to 'build' something and create--and Playgrounds doesn't provide the environment to do that. Then, they get bored and feel encumbered.

After working with over 1000 kids in our beta phase, we've tested almost every product on the market.

I personally like Scratch + Learntomod.com which uses Minecraft to teach Javascript and CodeCombat.com (My YC batchmates).

We're soon launching an online course (for a nominal fee) that has progression, milestones, and support for parents who want their kids to 'complete' a project. Message me or check out our beta site if you're interested to in being a beta tester for our online product--would love to hear from you.
Really? What about Ireland? They call it the Celtic tiger, but it is really the Celtic leech upon the rest of Europe.
It's way more plausible to assume that the average person (the average family person, not the average hippy) doesn't like to live in a neighbourhood where his children see prostitutes and drug users day in and day out.
I really like nand2tetris [1] in which one builds a computer from NAND gates upwards. You build the ALU etc., an assembler, compiler, a OS and VM on which you can run your own version of tetris, snake, whatever. It doesn't teach programming directly, but could be used to teach programming when the first parts are reached that require programming (I believe it was Chapter 6 - Assembler).

The hardware part of the course is also available on coursera now. [2] Previous discussion on hn [3].

[1] http://www.nand2tetris.org/

[2] https://www.coursera.org/learn/build-a-computer

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5888705
Wanna Stream Netflix at 4K? Forget Chrome
You also open source if it's in your best interest for something to become the 'standard'.

In google there is a regret that they didn't open source a lot of stuff, because it ends up being reproduced outside of google in some form. The open source companies have an advantage in hiring and overall advancement of their product by using the open source version whatever their internal version was.

You also see it in facebook's open source initiatives, like react, buck, haxe and so on.
Don't forget about SeatGuru (http://www.seatguru.com), a TripAdvisor company, which specializes in collecting and curating exactly this kind of data. They're not exactly n00bs at this kind of thing…
> I think housing costs and quality of living per Dollar are two different things.

Well, I don't. I consider living in a place I don't like or a property I don't like to contribute to poor quality of life, and I'm definitely not alone in thinking that.

Having >40% of my income eaten up to pay for a mediocre living situation is not good quality of life.
Never mind, they both work out to the same value.
Building an Open Source Company: Interview with GitLab's CEO
I know, I use it myself. It's just isn't that user friendly especially if you use many different consoles because you'll often require different settings.

For some consoles that output different types of resolutions depending on the game you'll also need to change the settings on a per game basis.

So it's only something for enthusiasts.
I absolutely agree that the parent didn't do justice to the range of opinions, and your post improves on the discussion.

I'd like to nitpick the word "requires" (vs "is best served by")

> everyone would agree drug addiction is a problem that requries some government intervention.

Personally, I believe that it is absolutely theoretically possible to address our societies drug addiction problems without any government intervention, if only we as a culture were willing to do so.
> It was my understanding that Gavin and Wladimir were part of the MIT Media Lab payroll.

They aren't. The Digital Currency Inititive (DCI) != MIT. Rather, it's a separate entity that's effectively paying MIT for use of the MIT name and administrative infrastructure; we do not know who is actually funding DCI.
That seems like it would be covered by defamation without adding any new laws to deal with cyberspace.
> did you actually read the article?

Yes. I used to work with the person who wrote it.

> One of the reasons for C is that the tooling around it gives you much more support.

That's because C is an unsafe language, so to write safe code you need that tooling. If you start with a safe language the need for that tooling simply evaporates because many of the mistakes that the tooling is designed to catch are simply not possible.

> For safety critical code, you need that, because programmers make mistakes, no matter what the language.

That's certainly true, but many of those mistakes are mistakes in the rendering of the desired semantics into code. Neither rules nor tooling can catch those kinds of mistakes.

> But for safety critical systems, their rules say that you can't write code that has even the possibility of falling into those holes. That makes C much safer.

No, it doesn't. All of the rules that are not specific to C can be equally well applied to any other language.

> So, snark aside, what is your actual alternative that you recommend?

Good heavens, just about anything is better than C if what you care about is safety. Ada. Java. Scheme. Haskell. OCaml. Python. Go. Swift. Common Lisp.
One must be cautious to avoid the "Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc" fallacy.

Furthermore, take care to notice "newsworthiness bias", which is when disproportionate media interest in an issue makes it seem more prevalent. Also, "if it bleeds, it leads" has been a journalistic aphorism for a long time. Watch out for articles in the next few months about injuries caused by "Pokemon Go" specifically, rather than something more generic and mundane, like "mobile phone games".

As some organizations with political clout have vested interest in continued prohibition and some influence of mainstream media, my opinion is that there is a slight bias in favor of running news stories that tend to portray marijuana use in a negative light. Of course, there has always been significant bias in the counterculture in favor of portraying marijuana as harmless or benign.

For a benchmark, acetaminophen causes roughly 450 deaths/year (in the US) from acute liver failure, as a verifiable medical statistic. The CDC believes about 88000 deaths/year (in the US) can be attributed to ethanol, from all proximate causes. Perhaps 480000 deaths/year (in the US) may be attributed to smoked tobacco.

Clearly, society has some tolerance for fatalities from legal drug use.
We switched from Hipchat because of this.
Resolving the Firebase and Parse Platform Choice Dilemma
It's not too surprising that a displaced ruling class would find ways to lead in the aftermath of a failed nation building effort!

The piece you linked also reads like propaganda. Why do we need to hate ISIS just because it has the objective of creating a solidarity movement in the middle east?
Better than we do.
I saw that "We fire people" ad on Muni here in SF. It certainly caught my attention. Now Expensify is on my list of places to never work at.

It's like someone read the Netflix HR presentation and took the message a bit too seriously.
I was just trying to write my custom Swift Accessibility Application, but hopefully Hammerspoon will suffice. Then I might get rid of Spectacle and SmartScroll, which are nice, but I do not need all these features.

Then I can just put a Lua file in my dotfiles.
>The past few decades of globalization have resulted in the greatest destruction of poverty in history.

At the same time there are still more poor people than ever before in history, ~3 billion, so what is the net? 50 years ago there was only ~3 billion people on the planet.
> Not compeltely related to article but I've often heard that banks argue that COBOL is more reliable and maintainable then any "modern" language.

What I've usually heard is that code that already exists and has been demonstrated in many years of use to work correctly in COBOL is more reliable and less costly to maintain in COBOL than the alternative of replacing working components with something in a modern language when new business requirements required a change.

Having been involved in a big-bang replacement of a large, working COBOL system with a from-scratch .NET solution, I'm not unsympathetic to this argument.

I've never heard the argument (though perhaps its been made somewhere) that COBOL is, for a clean slate project, more reliable or maintainable.
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2016/415/

This is just one example.
Yeah i mean, this is basically why we switch to Slack. Right as we were deciding if we should start investing more money and time into Hipchat.
I guess it is the same equation (x-1 = 1/x)
Most Uber drivers I've had have used their phone... and gasp often in another language.
If you read the newspaper articles and speeches from the time, what the war was about depended on who was speaking. In the South, in the legislatures who were voting for secession, the war was very much about slavery, and states rights was waved about because that would allow them to keep slavery.

Slavery wasn't even in danger at the time, but Abraham Lincoln was just elected and was very vocal about limiting the spread of slavery to new territories. The southerners were freaking out, believing that if slavery couldn't spread, then it would end up dying out, and all their livelihoods would die out too.

Most of the people in power in the southern were wealthy slaveholders, so they cared a great deal about slavery. For them, it was definitely about slavery.

The non-slaveholding majority weren't as concerned about slavery, but if their state government decided to secede, they felt a loyalty to protect their state. I'd say that for the average southerner who had no slaves, the war was less about slavery and more about a feeling of loyalty towards their state. To me, it seems that the upper class of the southern states dragged their citizenry into war to protect their own way of life, but I don't think that's how the typical southerner viewed it at the time.

This attitude made things very difficult for Jefferson Davis, who was trying to get all the rebellious states to cooperate and work together at a time when they were all screaming about state sovereignty and independence from a federal government.

The average northerner didn't care at all about slavery. At the beginning the northern states had no intention of abolishing slavery. They just wanted to keep the country together and stop the southern states from seceding. Some of the northern states were slave states: they weren't at all in favor of abolishing slavery. Even Abraham Lincoln said that if he could save the union by preserving slavery, he would do so.

Eventually, much later in the war, when there was no hope of the southern states returning voluntarily, Lincoln went ahead and abolished slavery (in the rebellious states only) as a way to hurt them as much as possible. That was really only a way of sticking it to the south and was definitely not a focus of the war for the North.

I definitely would agree that the CSA is looked on in the southern states through rose-colored glasses, and a lot of the more unpleasant realities are glossed over as attitudes change. That's human nature. People who really believe in something tend to reinterpret it as attitudes and opinions change, usually burying the unpleasant aspects in the process.

I suspect that if the southern states had never revolted and seceded, slavery would have slowly dwindled over time and would have eventually been abolished gradually. I don't think that Lincoln would have had the political backing to abolish slavery with the southern states still participating, but he probably would have been able to successfully confine it and make it less appealing.
rANS is really cool, but I think we tried it too early in the lepton research phase while some of the other ideas were still brewing...
We might revisit rANS now that v1.0 is out!
> Personnel

Wow, that's a much better name for it!
Sounds like the "content aware fill" algorithm [1], only for small scale features that are somehow stitched onto the low-resolution image

[1] http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/resynthesizer
If they didn't win why would any country want to use an American cloud provider? The USA could be shooting themselves in the foot in a big way. Trust is key to adoption.
"and we're gonna hire the best people, let me tell you about hiring, and by the way, also firing. we're gonna fire the worst people and we're gonna replace em with the best people, 10x people. You know, I have a friend who I hired, who's 10x, and let me just say he's more than 10x, he's maybe 100x, so right there, you can fire 99 people. And this friend he knows firing, let me tell you. he knows it more than anyone else I know. And that's why firing is so important."
There are tons of (young) Mainframe programmers and experts from India. Banks are facing no such problems. And no, they don't necessarily earn fat paychecks.

And I think you have broken a security rule if your screen shot of ISFP is from her bank. This whole article seems risky for her job.
As someone who once worked there and left to grow as an engineer, I'm not wild about the part where everyone who ever quit expensify:

> did so when they found their peers increasingly unwilling to tolerate to their disruptive attitudes, and thus less fun to work with — misery loves company, and if your peers aren’t as miserable as you, you leave to find others who are.
"It's easier to go chat to people about work."

That's a plus for the person who wants to chat. It's a massive negative (far outweighing the positive for the person who gets to chat right now instead of in an hour's time) for the person who was several stacks deep in mental context in chasing down some Heisenbug, or really involved in bashing out just the right code with a head full of flowing understanding. Especially when it's a chat that lasts thirty seconds.
Thanks for your response.

I can see how type checking helps with that in Hack, that makes a lot of sense.

Guess that in the case of Ruby for example we'd still have the same disadvantages as in JS right? Since there's still the possibility of calling methods in other modules and even in the class where the module is included, since that is discovered at runtime and you don't have any hierarchy that restricts who can call what.
I think you're straw-manning here.

The intent is certainly to make it more difficult, specially in the open.

The premise is, if you want to do drugs, you're on your own. There's so much risk. You'll be dealing with bad people. You have do it in secret. etc.
I'm a little skeptical. Yeah, interpreted languages are slow, but under the hood numpy / Matlab call out to BLAS/LAPACK. There's a constant overhead per function call, but if you "vectorize" your computations to work on arrays instead of single values, the difference is not that great.

Seriously, Matlab = MATrix LABoratory. It's a DSL for matrix math, and it's really pleasant to use for that.

Also, my Matlab code is a joy to read. It's not Matlab, it's that most people who write Matlab code aren't professional programmers / don't care about making it pretty.
T-mobile: Free Unlimited Data for Pokemon GO
Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think starting out with parenthesis based programming language is the best starting point for new programmers. You'll probably just scare them. I'm saying this with my huge love for Scheme. Of course, if you're already programming and want to learn/try something different, Haskell or Racket, or any other functional language is a great option.

What makes Swift Playground so compelling is that it seems to be specifically tailored towards new programmers, with the way it teaches -- it provides basic information about Swift, and does not overload information at the reader at once. And even existing programmers can make use of it because it's just a Swift playground (part of Xcode) underneath.

I think Swift Playground is genuinely fun as you can manipulate an object on an iPad. It's pretty much like playing a game in that sense. That's something you just can't get out of reading a book. It makes it that much more approachable.

If you show kids or even new programmers Swift Playgrounds along with something like Learn You a Haskell or Realm of Racket, or even tell them about Scratch, which do you think they would gravitate towards more?
Elon Musk: “vehicle logs show Autopilot was turned off in Pennsylvania crash”
Totally agree. There was a great example on /r/haskell the other day.

https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/4sdkch/haskel_newb...

Operators are certainly overused in Haskell, but sometimes they make something so much more readable.
This seems to be a sarcastic off-shoot of the discussion but I gave u an upvote. Your point is completely valid ... a stable research environment needs government funding. I think this might be a US statistic but I recall reading that we spend more on any one of the top 3 sports than we spend on all forms of cancer research. This should be a no-brainer but it isn't. There was an ACM Communications article a few years ago by Moshe Verde where he pointed out that computation has radically altered both theory and experimentation - the two pillars of science. As a professional scientist, I firmly believe we are at the precipice of great discoveries that will benefit all of humanity - except we are squandering time, and the resources of the planet on stupid bickering.
Yes, I'm still confused as well. By the phrasing, it sounds like HenryTheHorse is saying Yehudi Menhuin and Joshua Bell are different than Jim Hendrix (Menhuin and Bell are better?), but that seems to go against the first sentences.