skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
HN is notoriously bad where discussion of bitcoin is concerned.
Both the article and the research is a giant cliché.

Neither seems to have a basic understanding of either technology or even perceptions of technology.

>Challenging the assumption that all young people prefer to read on screens

Who believes this? They don't seem to source this claim. It's seems like academic karma whoring. State people believe something they don't actually believe, disprove it so you get karma.
Ask HN: Why does every Wikileaks article/question get flagged?
I remember a few years back that Wikileaks news would reach the front page. Now they're all flagged. What gives?
1. I’d like my PostgreSQL database to be Highly Available

Highlight: "The first is the complexity associated with it: it takes twelve steps to setup streaming replication ... open source solutions such as Governor and Patroni aim to do just that. That said, this integration again comes with a complexity cost."

I cannot believe it is 2017 and streaming replication is still considered complex. I have spent the last half decade+ of my life to try and make this simple, here is a demo: https://youtu.be/-i-11T5ZI9o

2. I’d like my application to not worry about failovers

Highlight: "most PostgreSQL clients don’t have a mechanism to automatically retry different endpoints in case of a failure."

Master-Slave systems are not conducive to failover (determining a new Master involves its own locking/election mechanisms). If we have streaming Master-Master replication by default, you can have some easy automatic failover - https://youtu.be/-FN_J3etdvY .

4. I’d like my database to scale horizontally

Highlight: "Deploying a distributed RDBMS into production requires a good understanding of both relational databases and distributed systems."

We can do a lot of work to improve understanding out there, Kyle Kingsbury (Aphyr of Jepsen Tests) has done a lot to spread awareness. A couple years ago I did a tech talk that explains the ideas with stick figures so that way even laypersons could understand what is going on: http://gun.js.org/distributed/matters.html .

5. I’d like automatic backups for disaster recovery

Highlight: "Distributed database backups are even harder."

See the (1) demo, this doesn't have to be hard, it can be easy enough for frontend web developers IF the system is a streaming Master-Master database to begin with. Ontop of that, check out our "backup to S3" prototype where we scaled to doing 100M+ messages for $10/day (all costs, CPU, disk, S3) here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_WqBuEA7s8

My goal and argument here is that database vendors keep propagating the message of "this is hard, so trust us and pay for systems" that Aphyr has repeatedly proven to be broken (although, actually, Postgres did really well, Kyle was recommending it as the best general purpose database) - as Craig notes himself: "In fact, I’ve been on calls where we quoted $300K for the services work, and never heard from that user again."

We need to break these cycles, and I do believe Craig is trying to do that with these blog posts, which is great. But, we have a long ways to go (all of us).
> Waymo, which originally said that two Lidar patents were infringed, on Friday in an amended complaint added a third patent. It also said that Uber infringed unpatented trade secrets, such as parameters and measurements for the light beam used in Lidar.

Are these trade secrets related to the patents? And if so, is Google risking having their patents invalidated by admitting they left out the best mode?
So You Want Continuous Time Zones
I have had so many problems with the implant in general that are just brushed off as "well, you're unusual." It won't even stay on my head without me putting a few extra magnets on the headpiece.
Any lawyers know what the likely time frame is on this for some sort of resolution?

This doesn't really seem like much of a development to an outsider. Just more added to the pile.
Amazon.com, even at its peak computing needs, is now a drop in the bucket.

Three years ago, in 2014, AWS was adding the equivalent hardware every day of what ran Amazon.com in 2004, when it was only a $700-million company. [1]

[1] https://www.enterprisetech.com/2014/11/14/rare-peek-massive-...
One thing I've been curious about for a while: would it be possible to survive free fall into water if equipped with a sufficiently long spike-shaped "base"? The sharp part of the spike, which would probably have to be 100+ ft long, would be oriented so that as it entered the water it would displace more and more water, reducing the g-forces experienced by the spike, and you atop it.

A few improbable things would need to also hold:
1) Spike would need to stay straight as it entered the water.
2) Spike should not significantly increase terminal velocity, at least not for most of the descent

I think (?) it's doable, but would be fun to see the physics worked out. E.g., how long should the spike be? What should be its shape? How could it be kept maneuvered into the right orientation for entering the water without significantly increasing terminal velocity?
> - if the system uses a login + password scheme: 12 chars min and mandatory mix of all among non-caps/caps/digit/special

P a s s w o r d 2 0 1 7 .
Good.

Metaprogramming is programming -- it's scripting the compiler, to produce code that is faster (at runtime) or catches more errors at compile time. But for some reason in C++, metaprogramming is written in a completely different language from everything else -- a functional language, but not a very good one. As a result, code that relies heavily on metaprogramming ends up inscrutable to most programmers.

Instead, we should embrace metaprogramming and allow it to be performed in a language that is similar to other code, so that we can understand it. Give the compiler an actual API and let me write code that calls that API at compile time.

(I don't know enough about Rust to know how well they've accomplished this.)
Agreed. Same reason we won't get Trump's tax returns without some sort of discovery process. Ours are protected, so his are too.
Short people live longer than tall people. Short people eat more spicy food.

Average male Indian height: 5'5"

Average male Thai height: 5'7"

Average male Mexican height: 5'6"

etc...
It's easy. If your product practical application was actually more important than it's speculation aspect then price manipulation would be greatly reduced.

As bitcoin exists right now that's not the case of course. Bitcoin is now a mostly speculative asset since the amount of transactions you can do is extremely small compared to the market value of bitcoin at the moment.
As a fan of python -and think python is overall better-, but also as someone that have learned (and used professionally) many languages, learn both. Even take a look at erlang/elixir or any other you think is interesting.

Ruby on Rails was a eye openner (my exposure to web was ASP classic (auch!!!) and ASP.NET (auch!!)) and the tutorial of

http://poignant.guide/

Was something good. I choose later python just because I think is a better overall language, but I have always read what the other side have to say. I will not hate to work on ruby, in contrast to, let say, js or java.

Not hate a language is probably a more nice thing that just like it ;)

----

You must balance much more that just the superficial aspect of the syntax, despite that I agree syntax MATTER A LOT. With time the superficial syntax will become a more deeper aspect of the experience (when you truly understand the language and see the semantic behind the words), but the ecosystem, the thing you plan to build, how well you absorb the knowledge, etc are also important.

Even when 2 languages look "nice" is possible that down the road one be "better" in your mind and other "harder" or the opposite. For example I get lost reading C-like languages and get easy Pascal-like language for the same thing and the same level of difficult.

For example, I read

http://learnyouahaskell.com/

And I loved it, but I can't make haskell work for real (to me). The language look nice at first, but it not "connect" to me. Instead I get F#.
I agree this is bad but why is it bad if an employer says they want a genetic workup done and just don't hire you if you say no? I just wouldn't take the job and I don't see what's wrong with that.

If you're employed as a test subject for a new cure to something getting a genetic workup seems very reasonable and is about the only time I'd acctually say yes to something like this. That's really the only case I can think of where this makes sense.

Why do companies actually want to do this? Do they think people will still work for them if they do?
The App store took the classic package management idea from the Linux/OSS world and butchered it.

You can add a 3rd party repository in most Linux distributions.

I really wish mobile/ARM devices were more of a universal platform like PCs. That way we might have seen more fully OSS linux distributions come to mobile and give us a real viable alternative to Google and Apple.
Are you saying I should stop knowing things because it might lead somewhere you don't like?
How would they lose their patent by omitting the best settings to make it work?
> That has to start with some big company developing an abstraction layer and open sourcing it, and then we can go from there.

I work for a company (Pivotal) that's had such a product -- Pivotal Cloud Foundry -- for several years. It creates an abstraction layer for apps or container images, your choice.

Deploy with BOSH to raw metal, OpenStack, vSphere, AWS, Azure or GCP. BOSH creates an abstraction layer over the IaaS.

We're also the main driving force behind Spring, Spring Boot and Spring Cloud Services; the latter is in part a generalisation and integration of Netflix OSS.

We cooperate a lot with Google and Microsoft. For example: https://cloud.google.com/solutions/cloud-foundry-on-gcp
Thanks for sharing your experience. Last time I switched jobs was 2.5 years ago. My domain is pretty stable in terms of technologies, I'm up to date.

I had a little bit of everything, mostly linkedin. My "conversion rate" is actually pretty good, I usually get contacted when I apply. I made it to several on-sites even though I failed at a couple of technical phone screens at the very first stage. I'd say I nailed about %50 of my all interviews. Sometimes I'd "score" %100 at a tech interview, leaving plenty of room for me to ask a lot of meaningful questions (well prepared in advanced) to my interviewers. I mean, when you nail their coding questions, answer all their technical design questions and describe your past projects in details, what else do they need? I stay pretty humble usually and try not to come up too cocky.

I feel somehow confident about all the on-sites I had and usually got a good feedback right away (during the actual interview). Though, as I said, none of them led to an offer which is pretty amazing.

Also, I went through 2 jobs from 2 friend referrals. Failed on both. I also noticed that companies are super messy sometimes. I would apply for a position and in the middle of the process they would switch me to another position thinking it would be a better fit for me. I end-up talking to a new set of people (WTF??) who haven't heard about me nor selected my application in the first place. I feel like a bag of potatoes.. So it puts me in a weird situation where they're like "well, let's talk to him at least see what's up" without really carrying too much since they're already talking to a bunch of candidates. At the end they email me saying I'm not a great fit. Like... dude...

I'm a bit speechless right now to be honest...
Would you rather not be asked?
Several Wikileaks articles have been on the front page over the last few days. Here's a search of the most popular ones from the last week:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=wikileaks&sort=byPopularity&pr...

Many of the ones that get flagged are essentially duplicates of articles that have been previously discussed, and provide no new information.
Where did you find them? eBay?
If most people are willing to say yes, it becomes more difficult for you, or rather a hypothetical prospective job candidate, to say no.
Gross links to this archive, which has more material:

http://wayback.archive-it.org/3671/20150528171650/https://ww...
I strongly suspect that this is a rearguard fight and that - barring something along the lines of a French revolution - sooner or later this will all be made acceptable and what few jobs will be left are going to come with mandatory genetic testing, assuming it isn't done at birth and made part of your files which are either made public or will be accessible in the same way credit records are today. Medical privacy is on the way out.
Leaked Report Slams European Link Tax and Upload Filtering Plans
The Rule of Least Power leads people to lock themselves into low-power languages, only to find that they need more power, which leads to extending the language incrementally to support incrementally more power, which inevitably leads to a mess. Most heavily-used file formats (even "config" formats) eventually evolve into turing-complete languages, but inevitably they are bad languages, because they were not designed with this end-state in mind.
> The amount of stuff you have to learn in Python is a lot more than in Ruby.

I couldn't disagree more with this.

Python is pretty thin when you get down to it. Magic methods alone are 80% of the way to knowing how everything in Python works.

Multiple inheritance in Python is way simpler than the two-pronged inheritance scheme of Ruby, where you have both a parent class and modules (which can be loaded either before or after the parent class) to deal with. Want to see what order ancestor classes are applied? `object.__class__.__mro__`. Done.

Meawhile, in Ruby, you can call a function like this - `my_function(a, foo: 1, bar:2)` - and it feels like you're passing keyword parameters... but Ruby doesn't support keyword parameters. Instead, it's implicitly creating a Hash that's getting passed as the second parameter. Even more confusing, every function has an implicit "block" parameter that can be passed to it, and is silently ignored by default.
'9 to 5' Turns 35, and It's Still Radical Today
> Interesting idea on using ML to help non-signers understand sign language.

The dream for me is something like Google Glass with an app that can subtitle spoken, written, and signed language.

> Because people with 20/20 vision just need a sign language dictionary handy and some patience.

I would think a LOT of patience... the easiest way at that point would just to have the other person fingerspell or write what they're saying; if you're watching something where that's not possible, then the dictionary will just be an exercise in frustration.
Only three Google accounts for me, but otherwise that sounds consistent with my experience— running on macOS, I need to restart Chrome typically once every day or two. Otherwise everything just eventually crawls to a halt.
Another great reason not to use Geek Squad
Is the license for Shen still odd? I know Tarver doesn't believe in free software.
We (perhaps stupidly) make the assumption that compilers halt all the time, such as in shared CI environments.
I think first you want a market strategy - are you competing on price or quality (features, speed or whatever.) Then the rest of the market is a guidepost for this - if competing on quality, accept you will make less sales but have higher margins.
The investment tax (on individual investment income) and insurer fees (including fees on self funded plans at large employers) were used to pay for the ACA subsidies. So those taxes and fees inject a bunch of funds into the individual market.

So no, they aren't entirely off the grid when it comes to the ACA, they kick in billions of dollars, as shown in the chart I mentioned above.
Getting infected with an illicit-chemical producing variant of that might be quite inconvenient!
What infuriates me is when I attempt to login to a site with a password that doesn't conform to their password rules, the site doesn't give any indication. It would be so easy for sites to return an error "The password you entered couldn't possibly be your password because it doesn't conform with the site's rules. Here are the rules again FYI" so I can figure out what dumb workaround I had to go with to make an acceptable password.
Next think you know cars will transmit information to cop cars such as the number of passengers, speed history, red light violations, and seat belt buckle status.
Follow Pages, Instagram alike for Facebook Pages
I'm surprised by the memory differences between OS's. Is that just a measurement artifact?
>With the extremely rare exception of

Police malfeasance is not extremely rare in the United States. What's rare is one getting caught, and even more rare suffering a meaningful consequence, and rarer still prosecution for crimes committed by police.

>a few bad apples,

You do know that you're misusing the quip, right? A bad apple spoils the bunch.

>very few police plant evidence at crimes.

On what basis do you make that statement? They plant evidence, they invent it from thin air (I smelled marijuana, alcohol, etc.) They misuse drug dogs. Some of them are very much "ends justify the means" types who will take shortcuts to convict people they "know" to be dirtbags.

>it's not a system which incentivizes and rewards the behavior.

You should study what motivates police officers. Fact is, such malfeasance is rewarded, a lot of other terrible behaviors are rewarded officially and unofficially. But the thing that's rewarded the least in policework? Admitting mistakes.
Palantir building infrastructure for ICE to do deportations
Is this crowd into protests & rallies? If you are, or if you're not, tomorrow at 3pm 2920 Broadway St. meet up in front of Peter Thiel's house to make fun of him for being a poseur libertarian, and to bring attention to the tools Palantir is making for ICE.

Here's the fb: https://www.facebook.com/events/1265081476861525/
Here's the Intercept article that started it all: https://theintercept.com/2017/03/02/palantir-provides-the-engine-for-donald-trumps-deportation-machine/
In a statically-typed language, the starting point is "nothing typechecks". Then each additional language feature (e.g. generics, records, ADTs, lifetimes) must be implemented as an additional capability of the type checker. This "nothing is allowed unless explicitly permitted" is a necessary condition for soundness.

The most important goal for any programming language is that it is useful, i.e. it can express common patterns without hacks or kludges. Languages that are not useful tend to be forgotten.

However, chasing the dual goals of usefulness and soundness inevitably leads to type-system bloat. If "nothing is allowed unless explicitly permitted" and "everything must be somehow allowed" then it the list of things that are explicitly permitted will end up being very, very long.
If only. Prolog is actually reasonably pleasant to program in.

Accidentally Turing Complete type systems are usually not all that pleasant in practice. Examples: C++ Templates, and now it seems, Rust.

EDIT: Just because people may not know this: A relevant quote by Alan Perlis: "Beware of the Turing tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy." This applies to type-level programming as it does any type of programming.

EDIT#2: Also, look into Shen for a principled way to do this type of thing.
The article gets all the facts and analysis right. The article is most likely meant for a less tech savvy audience than HN i.e the average internet user who falls for fake news such as "WhatsApp is hacked". Yes, such nonsense is circulating on social media.

Since this article does not bring anything new to the table for us HNers and has a reasonable number of upvotes, people start creating noise here.
My Gmail is at 240MB with Chrome 57 with 50 emails per page. With 100 emails it's 380MB.
Independent testing is lacking.

Right now all we have is marketing. This leads many to believe that Tesla is ahead in self driving tech, for example. You may or may not perceive that as a problem.

Regardless, I agree with GP that there is a space for independent testing. It could spur development further in the right direction. There is lots of investment now, though the target varies. Developing some tests could help consumers see what types of autonomy they want to buy, and give developers a chance to succeed in different areas, earning more unique awards than "best self driving car". We haven't established a public understanding of SDC testing criteria yet. I'm not clear whether developers agree on a set of tests either.

It's an odd state of affairs. Testing ought to be the first thing software engineers design.

California DMV does testing, but the results aren't sexy or widely known. Companies participate to varying degrees depending on how they feel it would affect their brand. Uber left CA and Tesla's participation was minimal. Also, the reports are only annual which seems slow these days.

We could use something like the league of women voters did for presidential debates, or like Netflix did for machine learning. Get the SDC community to scientifically show who really has the chops, and not just rely on marketing and branding!
How to explain stuff
I'm sorry, but you've completely missed the point of a single-payer system. You don't set one up to get better deals out of insurance companies. Under single payer you put for-profit insurance companies out of business.

Hospitals and pharmaceutical companies then negotiate directly with the state. And as far as what they can be expected to accept without going out of business themselves goes, we can get a pretty good idea from the expenditures of every other OECD country.
How to Generate Music with Deep Learning
The biggest threat facing middle-age men is loneliness
Warning: Division by zero in /home2/sam/public_html/m/calculators/uscompare/relativevalue.php on line 156
The article is about TDD. You can see on the page, that they are offering a TDD course using ruby/rails. TDD in Ruby community is overhyped. This infection spread to management too. If you apply to Ruby job today, you better have TDD or BDD in your CV. If you don't, you are garbage to them. I have experience with people infected with TDD in ruby land, they often look down on people who don't write tests for every single line of code they write. I am all for unit testing, but can we at least acknowledge that example based testing is just no panacea for bad software.

No, easily testable code does not always imply good design.

People that don't do TDD are actually doing TDD too, they test code in REPL/console/browser/whatever, they just don't save those "tests".

You can not write perfect example based tests, that would cover all possible inputs and states of your system. You need generative testing solutions for this. Let the program write tests for you. [0] [1]

See what Leslie Lamport [2] has to say about TDD --> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4Yp3j_jk8Q&t=3158s He nearly flips out on the guy :)) Surely Leslie knows what he is talking about.

I am ok with unit testing as a communication/documentation tool, so developers know how to use some piece of library. And to prevent regressions with new releases, but I would argue that you can never completely prevent those anyway, requirements change all the time. Maintenance of a large test suite can quickly get out of hand.

[0] https://wiki.haskell.org/Introduction_to_QuickCheck1

[1] https://clojure.org/about/spec

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Lamport
How to Generate Music – Intro to Deep Learning
Have you had severe withdrawals? I've withdrawn cold turkey off of a $500/day heroin habit. It is the worst pain I have ever experienced. If I had a gun on me at the time, I am 100% sure that I would have killed my self. You have no idea what you're talking about
I don't know for sure but I'm guessing spot pricing for instances went way up.