skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed. If Mayer was awesome, she would have been CEO of Google, infact she was best positioned to be one at some point. All the people she hired were getting promoted over her. She was pissed, obviously could never show it. Bided time and took up the CEO position at Yahoo. Anyone with big ego would. I wouldn't blame her. She did what is best for her. Just like any other economic actor. What I really felt bad for - Yahoo's employees and customers. Only qualified person who was willing to take up the job was Marissa. Rest were no-name hacks who had no idea how to build products. Board had no choice but to hire her. Hailing her as Obama with Obama change posters, I felt was a little over the top. Yahoo's employees were desperate. She improved morale initially. Had she shown results, she would have won huge loyalty from employees and board. She tried. Made some bold moves and failed. Not bad in my opinion. I wonder, if any other CEO would have made such bold product moves. Acquisitions - lots of them, mail, home page improvements, new redesigned apps, attempting to build an internal product for search. She at least tried. RIP yahoo.
Advertising is thousands of years old, so it's hard to say. My point is the industry has become toxic over time.
https://www.youtube.com/user/KiyoPhotography/videos
Wouldn't every company that could afford a part-time CFO be hedging currency exposure?
New Perspectives on the Active IPv4 Address Space
http://gizmodo.com/heres-what-happened-to-all-of-marissa-may...
What I meant was that the contracts and OO are integrated strongly into racket's stdlib: instead of providing a basic paradigm, and then providing alternatives, like most schemes do, Racket's default paradigm is, "all of them." That creates an overcomplicated mess.
This would maybe be possible in C if the "functional" keyword was added (as suggested in the letter), and the compiler can be sure that the function doesn't use anything apart from its (const) arguments to generate a return value.

Then it also would need to make sure that those parameters can't change between different calls within the same function.

This wouldn't be feasible in the example above, since that function explicitly depends on outside variables. If you were to supply both `health` and `alive` as arguments, you could pretty much write the check yourself from the beginning.

Of course, there are many bigger checks that could benefit from this, but still, you (or the compiler) have to make sure that all functions are pure, that no arguments can change etc etc. I imagine that this could make compile times quite slow (and also complicated to write the compiler itself).
For many years now "commando" is no longer a title but rather a state; a state where one lacks under garments, and of course a lack of support. ;-)
If you read Mark's story, it's clear that he was aware of what was happening at the time but didn't drink the kool-aid, while if you look at the other dot bombs, they definitely thought the world was changing and the rules had changed.
I'm really saddened by the first thought that came to my mind: "I could have never pulled this off because of my skin color"
Looks very nice!

One thing: the "Handle exceptions of setuid() and setgid()" commit message caught my eye, so I took a look:

if (setuid(uid) < 0) {
fprintf(stderr, "Unable to set process user ID");
}

You probably want to add an exit() here, as well as to the preceeding setgid() call. Also, the earlier initgroups() can fail, too, so its result should also be checked.
JeK+LoY
I've heard (but can't verify) that the Pragmatic Programmers have their own tool chain, and that it's quite good. It will, for example, check that code snippets are syntactically correct.

I have a few of their books, and they're pretty good. Their store is also very straightforward and friendly.

Does anybody have experience writing for them?
Why?

Define "meaningful".
Video Tip: Antonopoulos Demystifies Bitcoin Mining
https://www.youtube.com/user/CrazyRussianHacker
Mainly what is wrong with it is that we're then caving in to a few people who don't like a word. "Crash" isn't a perfectly good word because negligent drivers can cause an accident without themselves crashing. That word is used anyway, and in practice it is no more or less informative than "accident".
> Hacker news readers often live in a bubble that is well insulated from the outside world. A world where everyone is very smart and money and opportunities are a dime a dozen.

I was speaking specifically for that audience and not for the broader one. Of course my way of dealing with money only works for people like me. I refer specifically to the "upwardly mobile", which is generally taken to mean those who make more than the average and are still capable of climbing the social ladder.

When you are climbing the social ladder, you develop skills that make you more useful to people. When you learn accounting, you are learning a skill that will keep you from shooting yourself in the foot financially. It will not make you much more useful to others except in that regard. Sure you can get a job accounting, or use it to help run a business, but the benefits are too limited to justify doing it yourself. Hire somebody and use the time saved to learn something more useful.

I never intended to say that people should not have a handle on their spending. Accounting / budgeting is one mindset that will give you such a handle but not the only one.
I have had the pleasure to work with lots of other people's code of varying styles and quality. Nothing is harder to read and understand than code which is deeply nested calls from one little helper (or wrapper) function to another. Nothing is easier to read and understand than code which just flows straight through from top to bottom of a big function.

There are other tradeoffs of code reuse and speed and worst-case-speed and probability of introducing bugs. If you haven't read the article, do, its worth it.

I love that Carmack tries to measure which styles introduce more bugs! Who else does that? Seriously, I would love to see more of that.
Afrikan Countries Export Just 0.3 per Cent of the World’s High-Tech Products
John Carmack's version of hell must be extremely laggy for him, but no one else notices.
You could keep your ledger on Nextcloud, and tell the Android app to keep it available offline. Then edit in an Android text editor. Obviously a fancy Android app that reads/writes the text files would be great, though.
What it seemed like to me reading over the stories of Mark Cuban was that he realized (with the help of some frugal advisors) that he just made a ton of money on paper and didn't want to lose out transferring that into real actual dollars in the bank. It just seemed he had different goals than everyone else: everyone around him wanted to get as rich as possible, Cuban seemed to want to have as much money in his bank account as possible. Two very different things.
Not really. He suggests that if a function is called from multiple places, one should try to make it pure to avoid subtle bugs. If called from a single place it may be better to inline it.

Citation: "I don’t think that purely functional programming writ large is a pragmatic development plan, because it makes for very obscure code and spectacular inefficiencies, but if a function only references a piece or two of global state, it is probably wise to consider passing it in as a variable."
WW3 AMERICAN MILITARY TARGETED BY TURKS,OBAMA DOES NOTHING,
After taking a quick glance, this implementation seems quite large, and cluttered with details, such as dealing with tcp connections. Wouldn't it be possible to have a much smaller reference implementation?
Netflix shares plunge 15% as subscribers give streaming service cold shoulder
Just because memory is indispensable, doesn't mean its more valuable for its designer/manufacturer, since competition may force them to accept a much lower margin. There are multiple companies designing memory chips, but only one can license ARM chips.
Yeah but to make an appropriate comparison, I'd have to make my own app "The Worst People On Earth", give it the tagline "Some people are literally the worst. TheWorstPeopleOnEarth.com lets you tell 'em by mailing physical protest postcards, all online. Research the worst people doing the most terrible things to all the nicest people and join the people-powered mailroom blitz." Ohh, but by the way, every single person listed is Mexican. Sorry I didn't mention it earlier.

To be clear, I'm not defending Republicans, I just don't appreciate the Trojan horse partisanship.
Yahoo's problem was that it was masquerading as a tech company when the only valuable asset it had in its books was its media side of the business. Yahoo had many media agreements, and it had developed much negotiating strength in that business.

Unfortunately, Yahoo also had these random properties like mail and games that made it difficult to forge one path.

Further, Mayer was someone who had reputation as a tech leader. She saw everything from a tech angle which made it difficult for her to direct the company in another direction apart from tech.
This was the reason why Flickr and Delicious were being shutdown.
Show HN: The SwiftyBeaver Logging Platform for Swift
Linux Inside
Being first to market is rarely a long term advantage, it's more like a shot of adrenaline. Over time you build up technical, and structural debt. As the front runner you have to make all the mistakes, after you've made them a competitor can swoop in, avoid your mistakes, and outperform. You may not pivot because hey what you're doing seems to work, or you may avoid a pivot because you have too much technical debt. But it seems to prove itself over and over again to be a very weak advantage.

Yahoo finance sucks compared to google finance, yahoo search sucks to google search, yahoo content sucks. Yahoo mail sucks, yahoo shopping sucks. Everything they do is not as good, but they were one of the first to do it all.
The New IBM Beats the Street with the Help of Watson, Cloud and IOT
The Raise of the Algorithm as a Service Model
I'm definitely a bit biased as I'm working on a startup for financial planning but I agree with you completely.

Many people are not going to make big progress towards their longer term financial goals (getting out of debt, buying house, putting kids through college) without sitting down and creating a budget. "You can't change what you don't measure."
I found this the most useful thing about StackOverflow - it taught me how to both ask and answer questions more effectively.

Bad:

> "I have an error. What do I do?"

Better:

> "I have this error: {BLAH}. What do I do?"

Best:

> "I'm trying to do X. I have this error: {BLAH}. I read the documentation and tried doing Y, but it didn't fix it. How I can I do X?"

Similarly, I try to avoid giving answers that are just "change this line to x". You're just a code-fixing machine into which you pump questions and answers are spat out. Nobody learns anything that way, and you're going to answer the same question over and over again, and get annoyed.
You're right... this is a tangent, and I've been debating whether or not to respond for that reason. That said, a couple thoughts.

First: you focused on the 'evil' part of my statement at the exclusion of the 'good'. Is this intentional? I don't think it's possible to have a reasonable discussion if you exclude half of the 'domain'.

I don't really think that people within large corporations have a higher likelihood of intent to do evil than people within small corporations. However, given that a larger entity is a more effective way to effect change, I do think that both evil-doers and good-doers can be more evident in large organizations. There's also more of a network effect, etc. An evil-doer in a large corporation is more likely to have a spectacular impact and in a small. (ie: the collapse of Enron vs the collapse of the local propane shop.)

Coming back around to the good, I also think that modern civilization owes its continued existence to entities that are larger than we might be comfortable with. Providing energy, etc. for 7B people is just too big a problem to leave in the hands of something like a vast number of local propane shops, even if a bunch of local propane shops are somehow 'safer'. It's a lack of effectiveness that makes those shops safer and it's the same lack of effectiveness that makes those shops less likely to be able to address large-scale problems.
I have finished reading the first chapter of this book.
It's very easy to understand.
I think there is a difference between raising capital through investment and selling the business. I'm not sure that the term "bailout" is appropriate here either.
The same question, from a different perspective: How likely is it that your mail would be kept (and remain accessible to you) if/when Yahoo! goes under?

I think I'd start making a local backup/copy of it.

Can you access it via IMAP? I'd recommend offlineimap or imapsync as starting points.
I only use it to host a couple low traffic personal sites but so far it's been fast & reliable. Configuration is easy because things like SSL cert management are baked in. It's perfect for my needs. Not sure if I'd recommend it for anything with a lot of diverse traffic, but it serves up basic WordPress blogs and node.js apps fine.
Shameless plug: if you're interested in knowing more about the Caddy webserver, I did an interview with Matt Holt - its creator - a few weeks ago on the SysCast podcast: http://podcast.sysca.st/podcast/1-matt-holt-creator-caddy-we...
As an average developer I find it much easier to keep the system in head when it's not cut into 10-line-long pieces in random order.

Hiding the complexity doesn't make it irrelevant suddenly. That's how you get code that does the same thing 5 times in 5 different branches of highly nested call tree "just to be sure".
> I had tried similar services before (Mint, Buxfer, PocketSmith, etc) and never found the sacrifice of privacy worth it.
...
> With YNAB 4 now unsupported, I started looking for alternatives. Would I finally surrender to Intuit and start using Quicken? Was a Google Docs spreadsheet enough to get me through?

So OP has privacy concerns with accounting services, but not with Google? Interesting.
Yes. Yes it is absurd. A lot of people have been screwed over by this situation.

I think it's basically a bug in US tax law. The scenario is such an edge case for most Americans.

The other not-so-nice aspect of this is that it disproportionately affects people who aren't already relatively wealthy. Theoretically you can avoid this trap by exercising your options as soon as possible and locking yourself into long-term capital gains. But if you're joining a relatively established startup it may well be pretty expensive to immediately exercise your options. If you don't have, say, 100k lying around you have to wait until there's liquidity, thus opening yourself up to this risk.
Alright. I didn't know. But I will say that Scheme is a particularly hard language to build an FFI for. In order to do The Right Thing, and have continuations work across language boundries, you have to integrate continuations into a system that is gleefully unaware of their existance. Depending on the design decisions made, making the FFI do The Right Thing is either impossible, or painfully expensive. So many implementations don't. The only thing RnRS could do is define as implementation inspecific an API as possible, and define any use with continuations undefined behaviour. And that would only be moderately better than not having them at all.
We are working on it as we speak. You can subscribe in the MERN website. We will notify you once it is ready.
It's the same group, and probably very similar devices. the fusor.net website is a community for building these things and has loads of plans and tips.
Whoever, initiated and approved that move!!. Quick Google search showed this name - Punit Soni. Why did he leave? Fallout with the CEO and team?
Just saw Gowers yesterday in the first row of a conference talk given by Peter Scholze about perfectoid spaces. I left after 10 minutes as I was lost after 5 minutes :-)

In my opinion conference talks are just not the right way to spread mathematical knowledge, except if you are deep into the subject matter. That can be seen because after the talk, there is usually just 1 question (maybe 2 questions), out of politeness. Blog articles like this have a much bigger impact!
PokemonGO as a #Brand revealed from Facebook
"Car crash" also doesn't specifically speak to gross negligence, only to some physical circumstances. Furthermore, cars aren't airplanes. In many crashes, two or more are involved, which is rare for airplanes. An accident is not always deemed to be the fault of the driver who crashed. Brazenly running through a traffic control which calls for stopping is gross negligence. A driver who does that might cause a crash, yet completely avoid it. That vehicle is involved in the accident though it wasn't in a crash.

Fault and negligence are for the insurance adjustors, police and courts to decide; it is not helpful in any way to start using some synonym of "accident" that has connotations of gross negligence as a general term for all accidents.
Tinkering toward AGI
>Web development is still that simple if you want it to be.

Starts off nice...

>Nothing is stopping you from writing for the web like it's 1991 if that's all you feel is necessary for your site.

Then you get that little jab in there.
Cut excess SaaS spending while letting teams use the top tools
I am enjoying funfunfunction.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO1cgjhGzsSYb1rsB4bFe4Q
by
Mattias Petter Johansson
https://twitter.com/mpjme
You then have the same issues as with electronic voting.

How can you be sure your 'fair' algorithm is running for each individual court case? That it hasn't been tampered with, swapped out, hacked or otherwise changed? Do you give the entire court room the ability to look at the machine and what it's running?

How do you then stop any of them messing around with it when you're not looking?

You've then got the unfortunate implications that an automated system might create. Okay, the court system very much isn't neutral in regards to race, wealth, gender, nationality, religion or anything else. How do you stop an automated system discriminating based on those factors? Because there are probably different statistics and likelyhoods of different groups committing crimes.

And there are various other issues too. Do you trust a small group of people, a company, some open source contributors or an individual to program a system to make 'fairer' decisions than a country's worth of judges? Because the amount of factors that go into a court case means that a piece of software has to deal with a thousands or even millions of possibilities. Which provide a place for an unscrupulous, lazy or shortsighted programmer to screw things up.

And there's also the old trust issue. People tend to trust other people more than machines, especially those seemingly associated with a faceless corporation, large government or unknown force. A system that replaces people, no matter how good the algorithm, would get a lot of bad press in this sort of situation. People won't be happy about being sentenced to prison by a computer program. Heck, even a judge using a smartphone app would cause an uproar about how 'soulless technology is replacing human intuition' or something similar.

As for trying to make human judges blind to race and gender. That's its own challenge. Facial expressions and courtroom behaviour can indicate whether someone is guilty or not about as much as what they actually say.

Try and anonymise that, and you end up in a situation where those who can act regretful over the phone/without being soon have an advantage over those that can't.

There are also situations where being blind to race and gender would be a bad thing.

Economic information can cause bias, but it can also be used to treat a defendant more fairly as well. If someone was really poor/starving on the streets and stole to stay alive, shouldn't that be indicated somehow? There's a difference between someone like that and a rich guy who stole because he was bored or wanted more.
Why Ignoring Growth Marketing Strategies Will Cost You Sales
The entire concept of using statistical algorithms to 'predict crime' is wrong. It's just a kind of stereotyping.

What needs to happen is a consideration of the social-justice outcomes if 'profiling algorithms' become widely used. Just as in any complicated system, you cannot simply assume reasonable looking rules will translate to desirable emergent properties.

It is ethically imperative to aim to eliminate disparities and social inequalities between races, even if, and this is what is usually left unsaid, judgments become less accurate in the process.

Facts becoming common knowledge can harm people, even if they are true. Increasingly accurate profiling will have bad effects at the macro scale, and keep marginalized higher-crime groups permanently marginalized. If it were legal to use all the information to hand, it would be totally rational for employers to discriminate against certain groups on the basis of a higher group risk of crime, and that would result in those groups being marginalized even further. We should avoid this kind of societal positive feedback loop.

If you accept that government should want to avoid a segregated society, where some groups of people form a permanent underclass, you should avoid any algorithm that results in an increased differential arrest rate for those groups, even if that arrest rate is warranted by actual crimes committed.

"The social norm against stereotyping, including the opposition to profiling, has been highly beneficial in creating a more civilized and more equal society. It is useful to remember, however, that neglecting valid stereotypes inevitably results in suboptimal judgments. Resistance to stereotyping is a laudable moral position, but the simplistic idea that the resistance is costless is wrong. The costs are worth paying to achieve a better society, but denying that the costs exist, while satisfying to the soul and politically correct, is not scientifically defensible. Reliance on the affect heuristic is common in politically charged arguments. The positions we favor have no cost and those we oppose have no benefits. We should be able to do better."

–Daniel Kahneman, Nobel laureate, in Thinking, Fast and Slow, chapter 16
He cooked steak over fire. I cook steak over fire.

I'm just glad I don't have to hunt every day.
Correct me if I'm wrong (I only skimmed it) but this is less about not liking inlining than having deterministic/time-bounded performance.

These are two separate/orthogonal issues, I doubt he would turn his nose up at the processor doing less work iff it was also deterministic and had predictable worst-case timing.
Unless your question is: "How does this legacy system work? Why can't we make it do what we want to make it do?" I built my career on this :-) Give me your worst code! The best thing about this is that nobody gives a crap what you do with that stuff as long as you don't break it. Say goodbye to the endless conversations of how to indent your code.
You can look inside on Amazon to read the preface. More information is at https://unop.uk/book, including a link to read the first chapter for free (no sign-up etc. needed).

My thoughts on the writing process are here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12121084

Happy to take questions.
> If the column-aligned way of writing a multiline function call or expression is such a good thing, why don't we also format blocks of statements this way:

I don't see any reason not to. Your example is pretty ugly though, as it's not particularly aligned. What about:

if( foo == bar ) { if( baz == moo ) { console.log( "yes" );
this.that = true ; }
else { console.log( "no" );
this.that = false; } }