skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You want to use apps/mobile as much as possible to control the experience.
Still very much alive, just not quite as popular due to the death of Google Reader.
And most of these people can't code fizzbuzz... Which is why it is so important to ask a question line that. Most of these people will also fail a whiteboard interview spectacularly.
Using yahoo! pipes I created a lifestream application[0] some years ago that won an honorable mention for the 10k javascript challenge. It was nice to have a dynamic site that required no server work on my part.

Updating it for this would probably be a neat way to test out the RSS feed usage.

[0]:https://github.com/Xeoncross/MicroStream
Currently HTTPS sends domain in clear-text before establishing a connection. It allows to host (and block) website by domain, not by IP. May be HTTPS should have optional extension to send URI in clear-text before establishing a connection. This way, if censors decide to block Wikipedia, users can opt-in into this behaviour and have unblocked Wikipedia except few selected articles.
This is my problem as well. I just installed 5.3 on my system but it looks like nobody really supports 5.3. There really is no clear guidance on what to do - do I just not use the latest version of the language?
Critical side note, from a tax perspective: Be very careful with the suggestions to have the stock bought back by the company for a 10% or 20% discount off the price in the round.

I assume your 5% stake is common stock. The common stock valuation will not be 10% or 20% less than the preferred price in the round. It'll be more like a 75% discount.

What this means is that even if you have long term capital gains on the appreciation of the stock, that tax rate will (at best) only apply to the delta between the common stock valuation at the time of repurchase and the price at which you bought the stock.

The delta between the common stock valuation at repurchase and the price at which the shares are actually repurchased will be treated, for tax purposes, as an employee bonus. So, it will be taxed like employment income.

Just want you to be aware of what you're potentially getting into, from a tax perspective.
Hack Online Colleges Site Credit Cards Method
It isn't the University's job to teach people how to code. University isn't a vocational school. Yes, one should know how to code when they graduate. But the school is usually trying to teach the theory not the coding
It won't last, at least for China. Their government is working on a clone of wiki, scheduled for 2018[0]. Once that's done they'll likely completely ban the original.

Wikipedia publishes database dumps every couple of days[1]. So it shouldn't be that expensive for smaller governments to create and host their own censored mirror. You'd maintain a list of banned and censored articles, then pull from wikipedia once a month. You'd have to check new articles by hand (maybe even all edits), but a lot of that should be easily automated, and if you only care about wikipedia in your native tongue (and it's not english) that's much less work.

The academics will bypass censorship anyway, since it's so easy[2], so an autocrat won't worry about intellectually crippling their country by banning wikipedia. Maybe they don't do this because the list of banned articles would be trivial to get.

Better machine translation might solve this by helping information flow freely[3]. We have until 2018 I guess.

[0] https://news.vice.com/story/china-is-recruiting-20000-people...

[1] https://dumps.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html

[2] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-great-firewall-censors...

[3] https://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2015/12/17/anti-wikipedi...
Good point! I missed that and focused on the emphasized Boolean test, which is the first time I have seen any code in the NYTimes.
Lookin at the graph of graduates and the dip in CS from 2005 for a few years, I'd suggest the cause is that the potential cs students skipped doing their degree and went straight into a startup.
Thank you ! Also http://vis.searchreddit.net to visualize search results.

Also http://searchhn.com for a realtime hacker news search. All of these demos are being rebuilt from scratch and hopefully will be out in a week.
Maybe you haven't gotten any response because it's a leading question -- why did you choose those specific languages to compare Kotlin to? Anyway...

* Swift is for the iOS platform, which Kotlin doesn't target.

* Apache Groovy is primarily a dynamic language with static typing as an afterthought, and is really only relevant anymore for Grails development. Gradleware are no doubt busy writing a tool to automatically convert Groovy-based build files to Kotlin-based ones for the next big upgrade to Gradle.

* Scala is comparable to Kotlin, but Kotlin is officially supported, along with Java, by the Android team at Google. And Jetbrains make sure Kotlin and IntelliJ (and Android Studio) work seamlessly together.
Then there's a major earthquake and your GPS co-ordinates change.
ticker(entity('TimeWarner'), 'TWC', date(1999-01-01), date(2014-04-31)).
ticker(entity('TimeWarner'), 'AOL', date(2014-05-01), date(9999-01-01)).

Slightly OT, but half-open intervals are just better for this sort of thing. After all, the change date could have been '2014-05-01T10:05:23.3982Z' instead of '2014-05-01'.

[EDIT:] In case it wasn't clear, I'm suggesting that it would be better to write this:

ticker(entity('TimeWarner'), 'TWC', date(1999-01-01), date(2014-05-01)).
ticker(entity('TimeWarner'), 'AOL', date(2014-05-01), date(9999-01-01)).
Maybe. But I am sure I had put in a thousand hours programing my C64 by the time I had finished 8th grade. And I doubt I'm alone.
Now I can't solve it :( This is my best so far:

http://i.imgur.com/eYgcMqs.jpg

Please help!
That is what they changed the weekly problem sets to be... except not optional and graded before you left the session. It was a much better system, at least for me.
Primer on China's New Cybersecurity Law (takes Effect Tomorrow)
It only had submodules in the sense that you could embed a pipe, but IIRC, they were always sources -- you couldn't pipe data into them. It had a notion of the 'output' block but no input with which you could implement such decomposition.
Let's keep it real, the cheaters aren't opting out of learning to code because they want to dedicate all that extra time to mastering the theory instead.
Just completed Witcher 3 at almost 270 hours. It was an amazing experience and comes highly recommended. Started The Last of Us (ps4) now, and so far it's been very good as well. Skipped FF15 after playing half an hour (used to be a huge FF fan, but they ended on 9 for me).
Ask HN: What would it take to build the Etsy of Food?
I'm wondering if the only reason it doesn't exist yet is the big legal question around food safety/food handling.
>And the answer is a resounding no.

Agreed. Apart from understanding logic, complex math is such a small part of development. I would say programming requires the overlap of knack for math and a pure creative interest like painting. That's much, much rarer.

During the dot boom, there were plenty of CS grads, but after the dot bomb and the market dried up, people lost interest. Also, the pay and incentives aren't nearly as good as they were during the dot boom.

Add off shoring, constantly pushing down wages, and the fact that most US businesses make programming miserable, that's probably most of the big picture.
Ancestry.com takes ownership of your DNA forever
Difference between 1. computer scientists who are by nature of their CS training able to write high quality software and 2. the presence of CS subject matter in programs or the role of algorithms in today's Western societies. No one disputes #2.

Of those CS majors who write software, I see others with no CS degree, e.g., PhD in maths instead, who write better software. Conclusion: ?

Difference between earning a masters in Economics and actually needing that knowledge to do one's job at Salomon Bros. If the degree was needed for the knowledge it provided (versus window dressing for interviewers or clients) then I certainly missed that part in Liar's Poker because I recall the book arguing exactly the opposite. Back in those days I had a friend who was a Philosophy major and was extremely successful on Wall Street.
Sure, but that is all about attention to detail. It isn't really about how smart you are rather how much effort you put in.
Ack. I misread "hundreds to thousands" as "hundreds of thousands." My mistake! Hundreds to thousands is def reasonable.
I was on a team that used Lua in production on tens of thousands of machines running 24/7. The Lua interpreter was the weak link in the system, requiring at least daily restarts. Squashed so many bugs over the years, and still found more and more all the time. What I'm saying is, the Lua interpreter itself is flawed and I can't imagine using it as a runtime if I had the chance to avoid it. That said, the language was fun and fast and got the job done. The interpreter could use some work.
YPG and PKK are two different entities.
This is a fantastic was to end up with a code base 15 layers deep with each layer converting the properties of one object to properties on another object. It sure looks pretty in architecture diagrams though.
Can't agree with that. Having used both Lua and Moonscript quite a bit I think Moonscript is what most dynamic scripting languages should be. Simple, succinct and does what you need for a scripting language.

I really enjoy using it.
I'm sure the problem is tractable statistically, by normalizing some variables related to immigration.
> Immutable.js is great until I need to use a 3rd party lib that doesn't support the structures, so there is a copy involved and performance is lost and the code gets ugly.

Don't use a library for immutability, just don't mutate. Easy-peasy.

> Functional constructs were botched into JS, so most code out there is a litter of imperative and functional, as well as containing lots of mutable global state. It's object orientated, losing much of the benefits that come from being functional first.

Yeah, multi-paradigm code is a pain.

> Actually it is compiled on page load. Also JS has no macros

If we're being pedantic, it compiles continually during interpretation as most popular implementations use JIT compilation. But my point is that macros wouldn't benefit such a language because there is no discrete compile phase.

> it does have some metaprogramming capabilities at runtime (reflection mainly)

I guess I'm not very familiar with metaprogramming. Most anything I can do with macros in a compiled language I could do at runtime in a dynamic language without special standard library or language support. I'll take you on your word that metaprogramming is useful and that Clojure does it better.

Anyway, I don't think you answered one of my questions--how is Clojure's IDE support? Can it do gotodef or tell you about the types of parameters, etc?
> especially if, say, someone has infrastructure issues or decides to stop participating and removes their capacity?

The network uses Reed Solomon erasure coding to prevent against failures. You can pick your own redundancy scheme, but the default is 10-of-30 today. (3x overhead).

> Does the system allow those specific encrypted blocks to be removed

Hosts have the ability to remove specific blocks if law enforcement informs them that they are storing illegal material. The host must make the choice to remove it though, you can't just choose to take down data.

> How do you protect against correlated failures - i.e. does separate hosts rule out the same person operating multiple servers? Any geographic requirements so the same power outage, hurricane, etc. doesn't take out multiple copies?

A combination of proof of burn and ip address lookups help us guarantee diversity.
I have a theory that it's because computers are pushing coding stuff away. If you bought a personal computer in the 80s, you basically needed to learn how to program. The computer would come with a basic interpreter built in and easy to find. It would come with a thick dead tree manual on how to program it.

Windows, as far as I know, doesn't come with any programming language built in. You can do some shell stuff or js in the browser, but you can't make an application with that (easily.) And that stuff is hidden away and not encouraged, you have to do research to find out it's even there.

And mobile OSes are even more locked down. As mobile devices replace desktop computers for the vast majority of people, how are they ever supposed to get into programming?

In some sense it is easier than ever to get into programming. Programming languages are better, the internet makes learning resources much more available, there's libraries that can do whatever obscure thing you want to do. But all this is hidden away in a secret world that most users will never venture into and don't know exists.

I know this sounds like it shouldn't be a big deal, but I really believe it is. I was so intimidated by learning programming that I put it off for a long time. It seemed like it would be very complicated and difficult. When I did try to learn, I tried with C++. I also early on tried to program stuff with batch scripts and was put off by how limited it was. Eventually I tried another obscure proprietary language that I found through clicking on an ad. All of these were terrible choices for a beginner who wants to learn programming. But I didn't know enough to know they were terrible choices.

If someone had installed python on my computer and showed me some simple examples I could play with, I would have been so much better off. Eventually I stumbled across a blog post showing how to open up the developer console on a browser just by pressing F12. And some simple example stuff in js. It's like an new world just opened up to me. I know some people that had a similar experience with the computercraft mod for minecraft, of all things.
You need to use the Kraggle.
Coincidentally, I just bought this book the week before last. Definitely an interesting historical perspective. I've only skimmed it a bit, but one thing that struck me was at the time (1969) the metasyntax for specifying the syntax of a programming language wasn't a settled thing. BNF was relatively new, but there were several alternatives in active use. She did point out the possibility of ambiguities, but there was no mention of LR (Knuth 1965) or LALR (DeRemer 1969) parsing. I guess parsing techniques were considered research at the time, not settled practice.
You are simply mistaken: The immigration increase is so recent and so small compared to the population size that it can't have lowered the country's rankings.

Pasi Sahlberg is the expert to listen to: "I don’t believe that the PISA results in Finland have anything to do with the language or the fact that Finland is more homogenous than others[.] Of course Finland has had fewer non-Finnish speakers or children who were born outside of Finland, but that cannot explain the progress in previous PISA studies or the declining results in maths." http://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/finlands_school_system_the...

EDIT: Same misconception propagated by BBC in the article here (for "balance"?): "Success has been attributed to a traditionally high regard for teaching and reading, as well as a small, largely homogenous population" How would population size contribute to the averages? Who has attributed? In the BBC archives I can find that claim by some right-wing British think tank.
The thing with instructions is always this: The first instant something goes wrong while following them you have to give up if you don't know quite a bit about what you're doing anyway.
Fair point; my criticism wasn't levied against the idea of dynamic languages so much as the many popular implementations which do include the likes of `isinstance()`.
You could make the one on the left even taller by tilting the yellow rectangle so it also utilizes the hypotenuse
Build a ToDo App in 2 minutes and 20 LOC [interactive coding screencast]
Wasn't it also the University of Sydney that recently made graduates take their tests in English and checked their ID before taking the test? I think some students sued after a 90% failure rate.

So many degrees are as valuable as toilet paper.
Have you thought about whether you really want to do this alone (i.e. without co-founders)? There's a reason YC has a higher bar for accepting startups with a single founder.
> Every time you get dragged through some pointless, patronizing and degrading interview process that assumes that you don't know your stuff - you can thank the cheaters and fakers, and the fact that our industry doesn't have the will to root them out.

Mostly the latter, though it's us (practitioners) not the industry (employers). We're a visible, highly paid field of work without professional body either settingnquality standards for schools or certifyiing minimum competency of individual practitioners.
I need to add, I clicked on the article, and totally enjoyed the content. (With a small caveat, noted above.)

Envy, I think that's the word for the weird vitriol in this thread.
I took melatonin for years (low dose 500mcg). In retrospect, after taking melatonin I don't recall any dreams. I'd only dream after not taking it for a day or two then taking a dose of melatonin.

About two weeks after stopping melatonin altogether, I now recall dreams every night. Stopped taking it due to insomnia getting worse and worse and figure I'd see what would happen without it. First week was rough, back to normal after that.

Meaningless anecdote about what is most likely placebo, but I found it a bit interesting. Forgot what it was like to dream every night. Not planning on taking it again.
Write and Run WebAssembly with WasmFiddle
You would probably realize pretty soon if you try writing anything meaningful with Prolog.

In my experience Prolog is conceptually the coolest, but practically the worst when trying to get anything done.

Basically, writing a program in Prolog is like solving a puzzle. Nobody wants to solve an additional "puzzle" on top of their already existing problem they set out to solve by programming. (Unless they're doing it for fun)
Ever used luaJIT?
Insofar as companies avoid it, they do so because it constrains their behaviour in some way. Call it what you will; my wording was perhaps sloppy.

For the increasing number of companies that do participate in the GPL ecosystem, they do so because the opportunity cost of not participating outweighs the concomitant behavioural constraints. This produces a strong network effect as GPL software gains contributors, making GPL software more useful.

Wikipedia's anti-censorship strategy is analogous in that the switch to HTTPS raised the opportunity cost of censorship to the loss of the entire Wikipedia "ecosystem", which for many regimes is more severe than the "cost" of not censoring. This too produces a network effect as Wikipedia gains more contributors, thus further increasing its value.
Yes, the assets of a company are supposed to be liquidated and distributed to the creditors (if any) or otherwise to the equity holders of the company.

As part of the plan of dissolution, the company can "sell" its assets (including source code). If there are no creditors and none of the other shareholders care, you could "buy" it, most likely for almost nothing.
Don't worry! They'll just shadowban you like they did me.
I believe I'm not the only one who, when something goes wrong, I become more determined and think "I might learn something here" followed by searching the internet for things related to what went wrong.
Hanzicraft looks cool, though I feel like I should learn to speak Mandarin a lot better before worrying about reading it. Infact I'd be fairly happy to be a fluent speaker and illiterate.
20 Indian startups poised to expand in global markets
quite often the plan in the mind of these folks is that they will try to fake their way through and be moved up into project management

Wait a minute, are you saying all I have to do to be promoted to Project Management is to code really badly?

Hmm. I wonder if C# has GOTOs...
It still likely correlates well with IQ. That's the whole point of IQ. A bunch of different cognitive tasks like solving puzzles and memory tests tend to correlate very well with each other. I'd be very surprised if wordsums didn't predict IQ very well.
I've worked with a tonne of people in the industry like this, particularly in MS land where something is "impossible" if Visual Studio can't do it. Often you'll end up with a million projects for namespacing because they don't know what a folder is.

It's only going to get worse as we have a generation of kids that have only used tablets and don't know what an "exe" is, or even a file.
Yup, just pre-compile the code and load it into redis as normal.
Challenge accepted.

On a bike I can do around 220W for an hour, and 160W for an indefinite period (have done up to 12 hours before).

Biking is known to be 20-25% efficient from calories burned to power at the wheel, so that's ~700 kCal/h for an hour at 160W.
My idle consumption is ~1600 kCal/day, or roughly 70 kCal per hour, so riding on the bike uses 10x as much; therefore I'm going to be producing 10x as much CO2 (obviously).

It takes ~140 L of oxygen to burn those ~700 calories, resulting in ~110 L of CO2.

So if I do a 4 hour ride at 160W to produce maybe 600Wh of energy after conversion inefficiencies, that's 2800 kCal just for the ride and 4400 kCal for the whole day, around 2.75x my idle consumption.

Disclaimer: I've done this quickly. Feel free to point out any errors.

> Whether a human eats the plant or it decomposes naturally, the same amount of carbon dioxide is released.

Yes, but we produce agricultural crops to meet demand. If as per the calculations above, every human suddenly started consuming 2.5x as much food, we'd have to grow more.

And yes, this is part of the carbon cycle. The problem is that we use fossil fuels and release CO2 above and beyond what's part of the normal cycle.
Will Esports Be the Next Big Vegas Draw?
Typed Lua might be worth checking out: https://github.com/andremm/typedlua (disclaimer: I haven't used it yet)
Now fixed at HN, not in the original article.
Like all currencies and alike, they have to be exchangeable in order to be of any value.
The lesson here: If you gift a puzzle, you better be able to solve the puzzle ^.^
What companies let fresh CS grads start as Project Architect?!
Attention data scientists, we're building affordable machine learning servers
TL:DR; We want to build ultra-affordable GPU hosting for machine learning but need to make sure there's interested, you can show support and join waiting list by signing up here https://epochs.paperform.co/

Hey HN, we're aspiring data scientists that are looking to provide ultra-affordable GPU servers for machine learning.

Having worked on a few machine learning projects we've seen just how expensive GPU hosting from the big cloud providers can be and that have paid dearly for it. Because of this we spent a lot of time finding ways to optimise and bring down our costs. In the end, after a lot of research and testing we came up with a selection of cost-effective hardware and other little tricks that can really bring the cost down.

In order to go through with this though and offer affordable GPU hosting we need to make sure there's enough interest for something like this. If you are interesting in this, please let us know and sign up for the waiting list here https://epochs.paperform.co/ and if you want to see some more info about what we're planning on doing you can see it here http://www.epochs.ml
They're all made up terms that are mostly meaningless.
Seefood.com exists