skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many companies depend on Java for their mission critical infrastructure and applications.

I used to work at a world leading investment bank who's entire low latency, high scalable trading platforms were built in Java.

Just about every large financial firm that I've worked at plus both telco firms and one management consultancy used Java to build large, fast and scalable applications.

You may have no use for Java in your small bubble of a world where you most probably work on insignificant, crappy pay and waste of time projects, but people who work on important stuff in the real world do. I'm sure other people can tell you why Java is important in ways that I cannot. I just get annoyed when I see people slag off a piece of technology just because they don't use it or like it.
We the Giants
Legit. Git for humans
None - I should have been more accurate and said uniqueness typing. Technically, linear types do not require uniqueness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniqueness_type#Relationship_t...

Uniqueness guarantees that a value has no other references to it, while linearity guarantees that no more references can be made to a value
Yeah, I don't see the benefit. If you default "from" to Current Location, the maps interaction is three taps (edit, bookmarks, choose). While this app would be one swipe, there's the added decision of which app to use when wanting directions, and I think that probably takes up more brain space than the extra tap.
It is unbelievable that this is not illegal.
Nice catch, We are working on it!

dumply knows the exact size of each image as it is saved in the DB on upload, and all the zip byte headers are fixed, so the zip file size should be deterministic and calculable even before the first byte is sent. Remember we don't compress the already compressed images.

If you didn't know the file sizes, for example you had raw unknown input streams, or had compressible data, you can still guesstimate the content-length so the user got some progress bar, even if it wasn't 100% accurate.
I have the vague hope that this insight about the nature of the brain being a type of computing device might be kind of obvious to us as IT and information science people.

Ever stopped to think that the very "obviousness" of it might just be a product of professional bias as IT persons?
Do you know where your company's directors partied last night?
There are two issues in this thread.

First, a confusion: this book has nothing to do with Zed Shaw's Learn X the Hard Way series. (I have no idea if Zed ever heard the title even. He may have come to it - the title - completely independently.) This book predates Zed's series, and has a very different goal. Zed's book, as I understand it, targets novices. The difficulty in the title is that you must do all the exercises and learn from a lot of repetition and trying things on your own (as well as looking up docs, further examples, etc. online). The Downey book, on the other hand, is aimed at people with a programming or CS background who want to learn Perl rapidly. The difficulty is that he moves very fast and assumes you can handle things like a fairly dense Markov text generator by page 26.

Second, a lot of people say (assume?) that the book is out of date because it's from 2003. Actually, for its goal, I think that's wrong. If you are an experienced programmer who wants to rapidly learn Perl's core syntax, I think this is still a good place to start. You certainly might follow it up with Modern Perl or lots of readings in perldoc and perldelta, but the core syntax and features of Perl 5 have not actually changed that much I think. I can't think of any book that covers as much, with as many examples in such a short book. It's also very clearly written.
I consider myself introverted because being in a large crowd is very exhausting for me.

But recently I found that the main problem I have with lots of people is that the sound level gets so high that I have problems following individual conversations. It takes me a lot of concentration to understand the person next to me.

That's why I mostly avoid crowded or loud places, since I wouldn't understand a thing anyway. I generally hear well, but seem find loud sound painful earlier than other people.

Because of this, I wonder if hearing problems could be a cause of introversion.
It is especially strange that Tech companies making their living in the "cloud" can't manage off site employees. If they can't even manage their own employees remotely why should I trust them to manage my data remotely.

Unfortunately for me, all of my jobs generally have had actual technical reasons for working onsite. If you are working with interfacing to hardware, especially very expensive custom hardware, onsite work is generally needed. For everything else, just let me work from home and come in as needed.
Why is the White House preceded with an article? I don't think it's significant.
Sure you could use Erlang for that, but what Dharmesh is saying is that building this kind of solution in node.js would definitely be easier and possibly faster to code that writing it with other languages/frameworks.
How to Build a Python Bot That Can Play Web Games
Update: use the official word list from DrawSomething...
I didn't downvote, but does overlaying italics on a quote really contribute much to the discussion?

I concede that the GP's multiple basic English errors don't reflect too well on the supposed benefits of an ivy-league education though.
Instagram opens registration for its new Android app
Tests are what hold people accountable for meeting the objectives, they don't define them.

Why do you feel that not holding teachers accountable for meeting the objectives of their school system will improve education?

I agree that some schools may have bad goals, but why do you believe teachers/admins have better ones?
You can guess, but browsers are quite picky about this header --- guess any amount too low and the download is truncated. Guess too high, and the browser will wait for an amount of time just to be sure the server isn't going to send more data.
Why can Dropbox be super fast compared to FTP?
I tried the same, but it hangs often so i switched to boxee (which is just an a XMBC clone, but seemed to work better. Maybe i should give the new version a try.
TL;DR:

1. Better memory aliasing to use SIMD instructions. But you have to trade in pointer arithmetic for those cases. Only useful for number-crunching and GPU-like workload AFAIK.

2. Pre-compute time-consuming constants during compile time. Though I see no reason why you cannot do this in C.

3. JIT and runtime optimization. I doubt this though, given various overhead of JIT and runtime optimization (GC, memory, etc), that JIT can beat carefully crafted C. Of course it will make it easier to write many types of programs.
There are different levels of telecommuting. Sometimes it is easier to hash everything out in a face to face meeting. Ideally the telecommuter would live close enough, say up to a few hours drive, that given proper notice they could come in for a meeting. I could see that being abused, but it would give everybody the flexibility of telecommuting but with the ability to meet in real life occasionally.
Thank you for that recommendation; I had not heard about the book before.

An extra nice thing: the book's chapters are available for free --- for downloading and viewing, and not for other uses --- from the book's website: http://matrixanalysis.com
Wouldn't guestimation cause problems (on user's end)? I don't know, but how browsers/curl/wget/crawlers/... react if you tell them Content-Length is 1000 bytes, and then send them 900 bytes and close the connection? or overshot and send 1100? I have a feeling that they wouldn't like it, or at least it varies between fetcher library implementations.
> Do the people you know have experience with other comparable* languages, and still think PHP is a well-designed language and platform?

For the most part, yeah. There are the obvious quibbles you get with any language, but for it's domain, it's the best bang for the buck. Does that mean it's the only language in our stack? No. But for my money, for the web side, it can't be beat. If I were to do a site in a non PHP language, it would be Python hands down. That being said, it all depends on what the project is, and what it entails.

Listen, I can't help but wonder if your imparting some past on the current crop of PHP developers (and by current, I mean those that moved to PHP5 some 8 years ago). Maybe you had experiences with another group of people that focus on just one language.

The PHP community of today is far from that. It's made up of practical people, who focus on more than just PHP. More to the point, calling someone a PHP developer these days just reflects that when they do the server side web code, they are using PHP. Not that it's their only language.

To be honest, my personal experience is that everyone I've met who pans PHP and proclaims to have switched happily to Rails (because that's what they switch to first, never Ruby), or Python is that they needed the extra structure these languages enforced. Basically, the PHP code they deride so much was code they helped write.

That, of course, is just my point of view. I don't know many people who use Ruby for web development, so it would be unfair for me to suggest the entire community was like that.
How exactly teen pregnancy is related?
Ye, 100% true. I've spent many man-years writing entire systems like this in C and Java.

It's just in node, doing it in the evented way was actually simpler and quicker to implement, than the 'ghetto' way. This isn't usually the case, and I always recommend doing the simplest thing that works first. It's just nice here that the simplest thing is also a tight solution.
You left out the part parallel to "I would guess that there is a subculture of school administrators who feel that No Child Left Behind etc. are hurting curriculum and unfair to teachers and schools."

The standards schools are being measured against (and rewarded or punished for their performance relative to) are far less objective than "made or lost money". You have not applied the same logic to a different profession, because it misses out on the fundamental point of the comment you are parodying - that the standard is, in many cases, judging the schools wrongly.

The dilemma is not whether or not to lie about failing. The dilemma is whether or not to lie about a shitty metric that _says_ you are failing when you can see clearly that you are not.

I'm not going to make a claim one way or another about what I think of that argument. I'm just pointing out that the argument you are parodying is not the one you appear to think it is.
I thought the whole point about Java is that it's supposed to be extra verbose (which is also the reason it sucks a bit).
wtf is this shit
Do you carry a phone and a tablet with you?
How many of you must carry both with you everywhere?
What is the optimal screen size of tablet for you all? 7"? 10"?
Do you wish to have a phone with a bigger screen size?
Maybe you're just burnt out from all the time you spent working on it last year. Since it seems pretty low maintenance right now, try taking an extended break from it totally. When you go back to it, you may feel differently and more motivated to work.

Sometimes procrastination is a sign that you're unhappy with how things are going. Maybe you miss the thrill of creating something new and challenging yourself. Maybe try recapturing some of that excitement by pushing yourself and your startup further. Try growing it more, make it better, try out a new crazy idea. It could help you ignite that passion again.
Plex requires snow leopard which you won't find on old mac minis.
Overview of Theoretical and Experimental Progress in LENR
Cloud Apps of the Week: Comondo Cloud
Cloud Apps of the Week: Comondo Cloud
Cloud Services Brokerage: A Must-Have for Most Organizations
Cloud Services Brokerage: A Must-Have for Most Organizations
Cloud Computing Calls for Rebuilding Enterprise IT
Cloud Computing Calls for Rebuilding Enterprise IT
Fair enough. Bad is too broad a term. But I think most developers agree that PHP is inconsistent and lacks type safety. For a long time it lacked namespaces which made for some really silly design patterns. It lacks some neat features too, like lambdas and its support for closures is minimal. The list can go on.
Datalink Achieves Cisco Cloud Infrastructure Designation
Datalink Achieves Cisco Cloud Infrastructure Designation
Host Virtual Continues US Cloud Capacity Expansion to Meet Demand
Host Virtual Continues US Cloud Capacity Expansion to Meet Demand
In Russia they used to do that; later on the telcos were forced to require an explicit confirmation: a code would be sent to subscriber which they then has to willingly submit in order to subscribe.

And now half of the malware and shady websites would ask for your phone number and then trick you into telling them the confirmation code.

I think that such services should be illegal in the first place. That's the only way to protect subscribers. And they need to be protected: imagine it can be your granny who will end up paying tens of dollars monthly for nothing (I've got the impression they don't even send the SMSes you "subscribed" to, just charge the money)

I can't imagine a SMS subscription worth ten bucks monthly. Every one of them is a fraud.
> The weakness of callbacks is the lack of multicore support.

You suggest that gevent won't work in preemptive environment if it wants to support multiple cores, alas I'm still not convinced as to why.

The greenlets are cooperatively scheduled coroutines, as we know, but with proper multicore support I don't see why they couldn't adapted to be preemptively scheduled. If we're imagining that Python now has multicore support, we can also imagine greenlets being updated to work with it. Assuming gevent would receive no modifications to work with such an important update to Python is why I accused you of speculating.

> It's because gevent context switches on I/O events, not preemptively, so you have some control over when context switches happen.

That's correct. They are cooperatively scheduled coroutines. If someone wants to context switch, they can write code that does it or wait for I/O events. The lack of an explicit yield statement does not prevent coroutines from switching. In fact, greenlets are quite powerful here, more powerful than what's offered by Twisted and Tornado, because they don't have to yield directly to the caller. You could imitate CPS which is impossible with the explicit context switch model.

I am not disagreeing with you on this point, btw, just trying to be more explicit for other readers about the cooperatively scheduled nature.

Interested readers might want to check this out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_multitasking#Cooperati...

> I'm curious how large gevent code bases are in the wild

Well, eventlet itself was written to support Second Life and sits behind multiple big video games.

Gevent is in production use for many large companies, most notably Spotify. They are moving to gevent from twisted for performance and cleaner code.

> I didn't realize when I started using Erlang I signed a contract saying that. I also write Ocaml, so I guess any criticism I levy against Java is a product of that too, not rational thought.

My statement is facetious, but the reality is that Erlang got concurrency right and Python is trying to glue concurrency ideas into the language as an afterthought. If Python didn't have it's lousy GIL we wouldn't have to pull such tricks to work concurrency into a single threaded system. Alas, it has the GIL.

Now, to conclude some of my thoughts, I believe gevent is an excellent way to build web systems. The coroutines are short-lived, exist to fetch some data with an easy nonblocking interface and then concat some strings together to produce the web page / API output.

If folks were building CPU bound systems it would straight-up be a mistake to use Python for that. Ocaml could be a better choice, alas, as you say, it has the same issue with a GIL though the computations would execute a LOT faster.
Almost, but not quite. I'll quote a few key phrases from [1] to distinguish between what I want and transients, though I imagine in real life transients probably capture most use cases fairly well.

The second feature of transients is that creating one does not modify the source, and the source cannot be modified via use of the transient. Your source data is immutable and persistent as always.

Note in particular that transients are not designed to be bashed in-place.

The unique linear pointer would allow direct in-place mutation of the source. As it is guaranteed to be unique, no synchronization is needed. Transients do not modify in-place and do not allow you to mutate the source type directly, but allow you to add to the source and the added data is mutated directly for performance. There is a lot of overlap in use cases and transients are an excellent middle ground for Clojure, since it allows you to code against immutable types but with the performance benefits of partial mutation. The pointers I described would be less flexible in that you cannot have references to an immutable portion as you can in Clojure, but at the same time the owning code has completely mutable access.

In general, I love Clojures concurrency model and I don't think unique pointers would really mesh well with the rest of Clojure.

[1] http://clojure.org/transients
Cramming is illegal but there are two reasons why enforcement is lax: First, as the article points out (and attempts, by inference, to get the carriers to convict themselves of), the billing carrier earns a cut, usually in the 20-30% range. Second, the individual amounts are usually quite small so it's not "worth" anyone's time to actually investigate unless that person is the subscriber who got dinged.

Simply shutting off third-party billing would kill off all kinds of pretty revenue streams that U.S. mobile and wireline carriers just love, such as purchasing apps from the Android and Windows Phone marketplaces without a credit card and "accidentally" (or intentionally, since they are somewhat popular) signing up for premium services via SMS.
Yes, I think this is exactly Rust's unique pointers. Rust has a lot of interesting language features and is one of the up-and-coming languages I'm watching with interest.
Strang is not adequate for someone looking for a rigorous presentation of linear algebra. Axler's Linear Algebra Done Right, and Halmos's (older) Finite-Dimensional Vector Spaces are superior in rigor.
Is it really not possible, even by plugin, to use absolute and relative numbering at the same time? While being able to switch is great, having both at the same time (in the form of a second column next to absolute numbers) would be amazing.

I have more than enough horizontal space, and this would be a great way to use it.
Nice approach.

This is how we handle it currently.

> User adds images to a virtual lightbox.

> User decides that he wants to download all the images in this lightbox, so presses "Download Folder". The user is then presented with a list of possible dimensions that they can request.

> The user selects "Large" and "Small" and hits "Download"

> This request gets added to our Gearman job queue.

> The job gets handled and all the files are downloaded from Amazon S3 to a temporary location on the locale file server.

> A Zip object is then created and each file is added to the Zip file.

> Once complete, the file is then uploaded back to Amazon S3 in a custom "archives" bucket.

> Before this batch job finishes, I fire off a message to Socket.io / Pusher which sends the URL back to the client who has been waiting patiently for X minutes while his job has been processing.

This works okay for us because when users create "Archives" of their ligtboxes, generally they do this because they want to share the files with other people. This means that they attach the URL to emails to provide to other people.

So for us, it's actually neccessary to save the file back to S3... however, I'm sure that not everyone needs to share the file... it would definitely be worth investigating if the user plans to return back to the archive, in which case implementing streams could potentially save us on storage and complexity.
It might be unrelated, but I followed the link to the critique of Bertrand Russell's history of Western Philosophy. The author claims its inaccurate, and proceeds to say anything about it but why its inaccurate. For instance, it says that the book ignores the role of Eastern Philosophy, well dah, the book is on Western philosophy. Russell is an admirer of Eastern Philosophy and has bee arguing that more of it needs to be consumed in the west (For more info, check Bertrand's The Problem of China). Then there is the claim that russell's logic lead him to believe that Rousseau led to Nazism, again no evidence of that whatsoever.

The piece was extremely unfounded, writing off at the beginning of the article because of that critique was a bad idea.
IGN's Code-Foo - code.ign
The standard trading desks are held to is also often less objective than "made or lost money". It's "made or lost money relative to some arbitrary risk-adjusted benchmark". If the risk guys disagrees with your model about how dangerous your strategy is, they could easily mark down your +400bps alpha to +100bps.

And yes, there is a "subculture of traders who feel that the policies enforced by Risk are hurting profits and unfair to traders." Actually it's not so much a subculture as the dominant culture.
Digital communications by Bernard Sklar. A close second is Wayne Tomasi's book. Both books provide great intuition into the matter with just about the right detail.

Once you have both of those down (and have the requisite linear algebra / probability background), read the texts by Proakis and Gallager. They are very math heavy, (but also very precise and thorough) and though often recommended by university professors, definitely not a good introduction to the subject.

recommendation on the basis of grad-level studies and research on communication / signal processing.
It is too soon to write articles like this. Let's talk again in 10-15 years. Contrary to the recently frequent rhetoric, a good college education does much more than getting you an interview.

It shapes your mind, teaches you to teach yourself, to research, to think analytically about unknown problems. It matures your and gets you to think in ways more "senior" and well balanced. It gives you the foundation to shine and go from being an hourly contractor to a desired full-time employee after a few months of work (and not the other way around as exemplified in the article).

It gives you a chance to meet and spend time with numerous interesting, brilliant peers of your own age. It also puts you in an environment where you can learn from smart, accomplished people much older than you.

If you go to college just to get the diploma at the end, you'll gain and learn less than what otherwise would be optimal. Even so, it is not time wasted at all.
You can separate legitimate payments from fraud.

It's not even hard. But surely they, earning a cut, don't even want that.
I looked at ZF a few years ago, it appears that most of the components are fairly loosely coupled so there's no reason to use the whole framework.

I don't really see the point of building atop a PHP framework anyway, most of the advantage comes from using the ORM and in that area you already have the choice of Doctrine / Propel.

For smallish apps/sites it's easy to write a custom router that will fit your application better than a large unwieldy one built into a framework.

For larger projects you should probably consider not using PHP anyway.