skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Anybody else finds it ironic that Python and Ruby are doing their major releases on Christmas, but Perl who started all this "ready next christmas, but we won't tell you which" meme, doesn't? They did their big one last year, but only once.

Kudos to Python and Ruby for nice major updates.

[duplicate to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13244337]
There's a line of thought that annihilation of one species is the only possible outcome from two spacefaring species meeting. This stems from the assumption that both are growth-seeking, which makes sense since they wouldn't be likely to meet without being expansionist.

Seeking growth, they will need more and more resources. Direct competition inevitably ensues, leading to conflict and destruction either via warfare or economic means.

That's all pretty theoretical, but just one example of why aliens might not be benign. I don't think it's reasonable to say we have nothing to fear.
genetic diversity may be not so common elsewhere and worth mining
Hey thanks for the links. I'll probably take a little while to go through these; it often takes me a few listens to 'get' a piece of music (regardless of genre). I don't know if anyone else gets this, but I find after listening to an album a few times through, pieces that I initially didn't like sometimes end up being my favourites.

I get what you're saying about Lisitsa; if I has to make one criticism, it's that she can play a little 'mechanically' at times. This is often the case with talented 'technicians'. Well, with the exception of Horowitz, who was some sort of freakishly talented mutant, with his crazy 'flat-fingered' technique and heavily modified Steinway (that most people find unplayable). Although, given the level of her technical talent, Lisitsa is not so bad in this regard. If you really want to see a concert pianist with no feel for what he is playing, take a look at some of Lang Lang's performances. I suppose a lot of people must like him, given his success, but he just isn't for me.

As for nice harmonies, I'm a little unsure what to recommend. I only did a little formal study of music theory (mostly forgotten), so am not the greatest theorist... Maybe try Liszt's third 'Liebestraum' (which has an interesting, and bloody difficult, 'three hands' technique where both hands contribute to a 'middle melody' in sections of the piece): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpOtuoHL45Y . Also, a famous Chopin Ballade that you've probably heard before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ce8p0VcTbuA

As for the term 'syncopation', I think it has fairly broad meaning. The kind I was referring to is when the timing/tempo of one clef doesn't neatly divide into (or 'match up' with) the other. For example, see page 2, line 3 here: http://www.mediaphorie.com/pdf/PSU_Demo_En.pdf

And first page, line 2 here: https://www.ibiblio.org/mutopia/ftp/ChopinFF/O66/chopin_fant...
I don't think you read my comment, or at least if you did, you didn't understand the point I was making.

Micro-services are the appropriate design pattern that means frameworks are redundant in a micro-service architecture.

Code structures do not need to be standardised in a service you can read the entire source code to in 20 minutes and replace in a few days if you need to.

Micro-services do not want or need the integration of a variety of plugins, and little to no boilerplate is required.
The Zen of Elixir
You mean Cyanogenmod.
Cyanogen is the company that parted ways.
The problem with all these quantum gravity theories is they cannot be proven, or falsified, by experiment.

Not the theorists fault, we'd need an LHC the circumference of the galaxy, or build a black hole in a lab, to test quantum gravity. But it means we will never know if the theory in question is actually how nature works.
+1 for Dan Carlin, his WW1 series is incredible, astounding, it should be played at school.
> Completely ill-defined. Who is "us"? Is this definition impredicative, where "us" is defined over the set of minds? If so, it's useless.

If you think in terms of behavior, there is the agent, the environment and some kind of reward signal to be optimized. The article "is saying" (liberally adapted by me) that behavior depends on both the agent and dynamics of the environment. Of course it does, the mind learns its values from interaction and rewards.

Why are people still trying to solve the mind-body problem when we have Reinforcement Learning? It's a much better conceptualization - without definitional problems, concrete, implementable in both biology and AI, and most of all, it's simple. It does away with most words used in psychology and philosophy, which is a good thing, because they have really imprecise meanings. Just try to define "consciousness" or "mind" - it's a 2000 year old mess.
Haskell Communities and Activities Report – Thirty First Edition – November 2016
The la Repubblica article linked from there I found much more interesting a read as it includes the whole transcript of the interview: http://www.repubblica.it/esteri/2016/12/23/news/assange_wiki...
The Pentagon couldn't even do anything against the previous Russian version, the Granit. The new Bulava is just an upgrade over the Granit, and those Granit's were already practically undefendable. The Bulava ditto, they just have a longer range.

That's why btw Russia doesn't need those hugely expensive aircraft carriers. They just need to maintain their defensive arsenal, contrary to the USA and NATO which need offensive weapons. The Granit and the Bulava are their strongest weapons.

And according to one popular 9/11 conspiracy theory by Dmitry Khalezov, the Granit was the missile which hit the pentagon on 9/11.
there are lots of small improvement in ruby too, they are just not on this release notice.

Check the NEWS[0] file for a bunch more.

And Ruby 2.4 is about 10% faster than 2.3.3 according to some non-micro benchmarks[1].

Re funding: AFAIU the problem for Ruby seems to be the paucity of long term sponsorship deals, rather than one-off funding.
Python has a bunch of those[2].

The lack of an important "ruby foundation" might be an issue there.

[0] https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/v2_4_0/NEWS

[1] https://gettalong.org/blog/2016/ruby24-performance-looking-g...

[2] https://www.python.org/psf/sponsorship/sponsors/
Your comment implies a vast private-sector dragnet, obtainable by subpoena.
E2E Tests: Test as a user would
Kamala Harris slaps new charges on Backpage, threatens tech sector
Kotlin is cheating on me… (a Christmassy tale of abuse and Stockholm syndrome)
Merry Christmas, American crypto tinfoil hats. From the summaries I've seen, your govt's attitude to crypto is considerably more enlightened than that of the UK's.

Mind you, aren't most of your state level adversaries in the US above the law anyway? What difference does legislation make when it isn't enforced? Does this report contain any suggestion of penalties for organisations or individuals involved in say, global dragnet surveillance? What provision for oversight is there?
Induced demand from organizations.

Organizations are not people.

That's why we work harder despite being more efficient.
Neat. It's like a tiny toilet.
On one side, the CA certificate network forces a different kind of trust than SSH certificates. With a CA cert, you trust the browser company, and (sometimes) distrust the host. With SSH, the choice is only whether or not you trust the host.

(Please note Windows uses a similar cert for RDP, with the same options to trust once, trust forever, or disconnect immediately.)

Certificate Transparency is almost a type of blockchain, where what's stored is a website's decryption key.
>life is a property of the universe not a phenomenon

That is a bizarre, quasi-religious assumption. What evidence do have in support of it? I understand that you're making an assumption and proceeding from there, but it seems to revolve around a misunderstanding of what "property" means. If life is a 'property' of the universe, everything else also is, and the word ceases to have any meaning.
I'll be the devils advocate. Why? I can understand calculus perfectly fine without understanding how people got there. In fact, I'd argue much of what you learn before call--in the order of discovery--actively hinders understanding.
Today we are faced with a three way choice:

1) Just do the task yourself every time

2) Build a system to do the task every time

3) Get an open source system and learn how to configure it and hope it does everything

In the end, #3 wins if you can afford to hire people who know the system.
I appreciate how nice the functional style is, but sometimes a for loop acting over a few local variables is simpler to read than a bunch of map's and lambdas. Does this look readable and nicer to you than a for loop?

print pipeline_each(bands, [call(lambda x: 'Canada', 'country'),
call(lambda x: x.replace('.', ''), 'name'),
call(str.title, 'name'),
extract_name_and_country]

Sometimes it's easier to implement directly what you want done than to remember the name of the function that plucks a field from a list of records or something like that.
Cliff Stoll has a page about this. He calls it a Cup of Tantalus and it's part of his Klein Bottle collection. Makes for a fun gift for geeks.

http://www.kleinbottle.com/Tantalus.html
We should really require commenting while downvoting unreplied comments. The community has gotten lazy.
Mostly it amuses me people would rather judge than converse. What's the point of even reading this echo chamber?

I'm done with this community.
The solution is to build ways out. Shelters and job programs do help. Direct charity, giving money to beggars, only keeps them begging.

Employ homeless people.

Give a homeless person a break. Maybe just ignore them in their shelter. They must do everything in public, for they rarely have a private space. They can't afford the luxury of choosing which actions others may view.

Learn how communities in your area address the homeless people who live there. Remember that homeless people do still live somewhere. This is not a part of their life they will be proud of, but it's not the end of their life, not a permanent placement.
A Yacht, a Mustache: How a President Hid His Tumor (2011)
Grover Cleveland had secret dental surgery on a yacht in 1893
That's orthogonal to my demonstration that there is in fact "such a thing as variable declaration and initialisation in Python", given that the cases of an undeclared variable and a declared but unassigned to variable both exist with very different errors.
Short answer is no.

Problem with the velocity is that we developers are really poor in estimates and the velocity is rarely accurate enough.

So what I would like to recommend is that you first check your definition of done and then start experimenting with velocity by following how many stories you get done per week. After 4 weeks calculate the average. Each week through out put should be fitted in 1 Standard deviation (Normal distribution). Make it a strict rule that only ready for prod is done done.

This contains a problem that the stories are not equal size but when we experimented with this we used shirt sizes (S, M, L) and made a rule that only S and M size stories (Small enough) where only allowed inside the sprint. Our S was max 2 days and M max 5 days. We got to a point where our through out put was 3 stories per week (Small team: 2 devs + a test expert).
Channels have some other annoyances that make them less useful than they seem at first glance.

One is the ownership model. You can close a channel, and sends will then panic (there's no way to check if a channel is open), so ownership is always in the hands of the code that writes to the channel. You can -- and must, if you ever want multiple producers with a single channel -- abstract ownership into a wrapper that keeps the channel and a tracks whether the channel has been closed, but it's tedious to implement it over and over (it needs to be thread safe, too).

It's tempting to use channels as part of a public interface (between two cleanly separated packages), but this nearly always is a bad idea. Channels just don't compose well as an iteration construct, and you encounter ugly surprises such as realizing the caller is using an unbuffered channel causing stuff to block. It's almost always better to offer a callback interface (push) or an iterator interface (pull), and then either side can use channels internally, or not at all, as needed.

In practice, it's sometimes surprisingly hard to avoid goroutine leakage with channels. It's a simple mechanism that gets complicated fast, especially as you combine them with mutexes and error handling (though ErrorGroup is a timesaver that ought to be part of the standard library).

And finally, the behaviour of nil channels (they block forever!) is unfortunate. It is touted as a feature, but for me it has been exclusively the source of surprising bugs.
The introduction is a very nice example of how a lot of academic cryptography works and what disconnect there is often between applied and academic cryptography.

They quote Bruce Schneier, basically saying that nobody needs this and we already have plenty of ways to generate secure random numbers. This is countered with some handwavy arguments why you'd need them anyway that aren't really explained.

The truth is: We don't need any theoretical work to generate better random numbers, because we know how to do it. All security problems about random numbers come from the fact that people aren't using the secure random number sources we have.
Aliens arriving today must be technologically superior to humans by several orders of magnitude. If they are not they would exploit their local resources first before finding need to expand. So the changes of technologically equivalent aliens arriving today is negligible.

The amount of material present in Jupiter is rather large. If a species arrives that is routinely capable of converting gas giants into habitats and is currently in pressing need for housing then yes, we may be bulldozed into extinction - there might be even some poetic justice in that. But why would the Developers choose Jupiter, why not some other system with many more Gas giants or currently coalescing clouds ?

Resource based arguments don't hold much water for me, not at this scale anyway.
This is for technical book or fiction ?
Ask HN: How could I erase an SD card without hurting it physically?
I got an microsd card and it decided to get write protected. Now I can't erase or format and I need to remove sensitive data off it before sending it in.

I was thinking of microwaving for a couple of seconds but I'm worried it'll pop.
To be clearer, I should have included "these researchers".

I don't have a low opinion of researchers.
Time cube is leaking...

http://timecube.2enp.com/
>"The barrier to entry in the FPGA world is tooling and expression"

Regarding tooling, I'd say it's not quite the barrier it used to be, now that Project IceStorm exists.

http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/
And what does the one-sidedness of the attacks and releases suggest?
Not even a mention of functional programming? Makes me wonder
I wonder why I would be downvoted for pointing this out? The gender is assumed here, when we don't know. Why is this wrong to point out? I don't see anywhere in a Hacker News profile where one can indicate one's gender, so we can't assume what it would be.
In Windows, one can use a certificate signed by the internal enterprise CA for RDP. This means that if one trusts the enterprise CA (which is the case within an enterprise), all internal RDP connections are immediately verified without prompts.
There has been no suggestion that Trump is willing to seriously dismantle the MIC, in fact to the contrary, he is calling for expanded capabilities.

> The CIA and mainstream news is clearly lying to American people to trigger war.

These kinds of claims are not appropriate. You have not offered any evidence that this true, yet state it as fact. It is a wild accusation and an irresponsible one.
I live in Romania, where 100/100 is the cheapest and worst service you can get for $6.45, while the most expensive option is 1000/300 at $9, without any data caps.

It always strikes me as really weird and potentially bad that providers not only don't invest in infrastructure, but actively try and limit the use of their current one in every western country. I'd love to see a study on how much profit the economy's losing out on thanks to this.
Which would involve a few abductions and/or some probing...
Yes and no. The difference with computing the design of the physical hardware influences the design of the programs that are written for it. If the astronomy analogy fully applied then the design of the telescope would influence the design of the universe.
Wouldn't that be an argument that an alien race wouldn't annihilate us, rather than they would? I mean, what good is a dead planet for genetic diversity (and, I suspect that if enslavement were the goal, humans would resort to extreme lengths to try to prevent it, up to and including destruction of large swaths of our own planet)?

But, I don't think enslavement or a human zoo is a very likely motivation for a species advanced enough to travel light years to get here.
I don't know about American conditions, but I remember that many struggled with epsilon delta because it was their first encounter with formal logic. "For every... there exists a..." took some getting used to for them.
> If life is a 'property' of the universe, everything else also is, and the word ceases to have any meaning.

Why would life be all encompassing? It is just a thing on its own, and quite small in its manifestation. The way I framed the assumption is that life (I know it's hard to dismantle the meaning inside the word and see it separate from us) is just as time woven in, working in the opposite direction of time.

I have developed this here:

https://medium.com/for-for-thought-for-rainy-days/the-meanin...

As for the idea, it is exactly NOT religious I want it to be seen. A property is a characteristic and I don't know if life would be an essential or accidental property of our (this) universe.

Awareness, our subjective existence, subjects of religion and philosophy are completely separate subjects from life and the phenomenon of evolution it produces.

As for evidence, I would dare quote evolution and the spawning of it. But I can solely produce thought experiment type of evidence :) from my current settings.
Because advancing science and mathematics is not a straight line but full frustrations inside a cloud of uncertainty and anxiety. It is important to appreciate what the world looked like before the discovery and how someone tackled a problem to change this view of the world because when you yourself make discoveries you will be in the exact same situation.

However if all you care is to use what has been discovered, which is becoming less and less valuable, then you don't need to learn history of mathematics and science.

Although this is not good evidence but rather an anecdote, I cannot remember any significant person who has made fundamental contributions to mathematics or science that was completely ignorant of the history of the field.
[Leanpub cofounder here]

You can publish your Leanpub books on Amazon KDP as well. We encourage our authors to do so once their books are complete.

We think we're the best way in the world to write a technical book, and the best place to publish it in-progress. Once it's done, we're one of a handful of really good places to sell it, including Amazon KDP and Apple's iBookstore.

I wrote a fair bit about this in my pricing essay earlier this year: https://leanpub.com/pricing

In terms of how we're working for authors: we're closing in on $5M of royalties paid. Every month we pay over $100K of royalties. So, pretty well so far. And we have some great things planned for 2017...

For readers: our books are DRM-free, and we have a 45-day, 100% happiness guarantee. So, we think we're a nice place to buy and read ebooks.
Replay Table – script for transforming season results into interactive standings
Perhaps the downvotes are because the comment is pretty empty. You could say that about effectively anything. It doesn't add to the discussion. If, for example, you have information indicating that generics are on the horizon or that Pike et al. have discussed the possibility of adding generics, that would be a lot more interesting and substantive.
Why is information from your mind, like your phone passphrase, significantly different from other information to your mind, like the location of a physical key?
> committee of designers simply punted on every difficult decision instead of making a stand

Are you sure that it was a bad thing? If they made a stand, we would now had to use (arguably worse) UCS2 or UCS4 encoding instead of UTF-8 (which de facto won).
Minimisation would go something like this:

I have a function takes a list and fails if it has more than two negative numbers in.

Quickcheck first finds a failing test with a list of 200 numbers in. It then tries removing parts of the list to see if it can find a smaller failing example. The final output ends up (hopefully) as [-1,-1,-1]

Much easier to debug than a 200 element input.

I found this very useful when creating a tester for guis because I'd get minimal ui examples where things failed.
The hunt for dollars to build the $64B bullet train
I would love to help hosting Ruby on GitLab. If it needs to be 100% OSS we can maintain a GitLab CE instance. I heard that sequential numbering of commits is also on the wishlist.
Most of these issues seem to stem from identity and the ego. We wear many identities but at the root they all work in concert to strengthen the ego. People think they are their thoughts.

The system of mindfulness, and Eckart Tolle, in particular talk about looking for the consciousness behind the thoughts, removing attachment from your ego and possessions (not to ignore the utility, just in the sense of identity through consumption) and living in the present moment, free of the depression from the past or anxiety of the future.
Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying. -Arthur C. Clarke
قبیله بسیار ترسناک و وحشتناک آدم خوارها در برزیل+فیلم
Bring on the machine learning battery gauges?
Need a liver? You may have to move to the South
Jammed GPS antenna array signal for download
Flatbuffers in JS
QuickCheck et al do a random walk to find a value that fails the tests. Typically the value is large, complicated and unwieldy - particularly if the test involves nested structures. It might by 10s of KBytes in size, and most of the value is irrelevant.

Minimization is the process of starting from that known value and simplifying it as much as possible while still failing the test. For example QuickCheck discovers a 1235 element list, that fails. The problem happens to be a 0 in the last element. Minimisation might simplify that list to [1, 0]. So finding the cause is quite a bit easier.
Not sure about mathematics. History of math is interesting, but I have never found it super enlightening when it comes to actual concepts. Although it's probably good to understand some of it, because it helps to underline the reasons why various definitions have been introduced (for example, definition of continuous function and then later topology).

However, whenever I talk to other people (contrarians) about global warming, I very much recommend Weart's History of Global Warming as the only book to read. I think in this case, understanding history of the theory, the timeline and how convoluted the path of discovery was helps to break the silly conspiracy theories about climate change.
"The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken."

-- Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy
well, unless aliens are looking for trainable slaves