skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great comment. You have hit the nail on the head.
One has to immerse oneself into the ocean of sweat, dirt and garbage to see the real india and what makes it tick. It is like swimming in an ocean of raw-sewage with a 1000 foot, 1000-headed serpent.

>> The most unfortunate in India are amongst the most fatalistic - they give up trying.
: This is again so true. Experienced first-hand with some of my relatives. You might be initially surprised at their mindset and the self-reasoning, but then you will realize its part of their coming to terms with life.

If you consider the rain-forests of Amazon as an evolving experiment by nature, I consider the human-forests of India as an evolving experiment by nature as well.
Flume is only related to MapReduce in that it is able to write to HDFS. All Flume is is a transport mechanism to send log-like data from one place to another. It can be made fancy by adding decorators to manipulate the data along the way, but at its core, it just moves bytes around. Unfortunately, at this stage, it's highly unreliable with its fault tolerant design causing more problems than it solves. Hopefully FlumeNG will improve upon this. I speak as someone who runs Flume in production and has to deal with it constantly failing on me, usually silently.

It's a great technology, but it just isn't there yet.
> the widespread acceptance of Agile

somewhere in a parallel universe.
My target customers are hackers/tech people and the companies they work for.

I've had great success with hackers taking Tarsnap to their employers and saying "hey, we should use this". Picodollars don't cause any problems there; they say "it costs $0.30 / GB" and in the unlikely case that management actually looks at the Tarsnap website, it's just a technical thing and they trust their technical people.

The market I am excluding is corporate management seeing Tarsnap and deciding that they want to use it without understanding anything technical about it. I don't mind losing that market -- in fact, I'm happy to lose it, because I don't have the time necessary to provide hand-holding support to non-technical users.
Very elegant and well done! I recently went through the process of learning 6502 C64 ASM (an unfulfilled childhood dream), by writing a simple Tetris clone:

https://github.com/cjauvin/tetris-c64

The basic concepts came very easily (with a quick skim through Jim Butterfield's ML book), but I struggled a bit more with the C64 hardware intricacies: zero page addressing, IRQs, double-buffering to avoid flickers, etc. This was a very interesting and enlightening experiment (in terms of the perspective it sheds on modern-day tools and languages), and I plan to write about it soon.
Vague platitudes like "we need more scientists!" or "a college degree will get you a good job" are misleading and dangerous.

Data scientists are in huge demand, anthropologists not so much. Although there are few jobs in physics, physicists are some of the most brilliant general problem solvers that I have met.

Students with a specific and informed plan can ignore articles like this. But few students have such a plan. The biggest problem within the education bubble is the complete absence of guidance about what any given degree program really can do for you.

China tracks the employment success rate of each degree program. Successful degree programs get more funding, and failing degree programs get less.
When I made my comment is was appearing as a lighter comment. I don't know how much (can't see anymore than you can) but by the time I posted the above comment it was back in the black. (I just had no idea what in that comment would cause it to be downvoted and was curioius as it was up for 5 hours by the time I saw.)
Thanks, author, for the drip of your contribution to the ocean of everything-has-to-die-for-linkbait.

http://technologizer.com/2010/08/18/the-tragic-death-of-prac...
Come on, that picture is more exception than the norm. I travelled by bus for years when I was in school and college. There are definitely people hanging near the doors but nowhere as close as to what you mentioned in the picture.
It's already done: StatusNet uses two core protocols for sending messages around - Atom + PubSubHubBub - and a few extra for describing the messages: Salmon + ActivityStreams.

These are all open, distributed and already power a Twitter-like social network.

http://status.net/2010/03/07/understanding-ostatus
>Some significant percentage of Google's employees are gay...vBy lobbying to improve the lives of its employees, Google is improving Google.

Does that mean that if a company has a significant percentage of homophobes working for it, it should lobby against gay marriage? I work at a company that employed an obviously trans woman, and some of the cis women complained about sharing a bathroom with her. Since their lives would be improved by not having to share a bathroom with her, by your logic the company should lobby against TG rights.
Where are you getting your information that we have to chose between safe but expensive plants, or cheap but dangerous ones? On some level you can cut costs just by using thinner pressure vessels or containment structures, but the key issue with facilities like Fukishma is that when things fail the reactor starts to go critical unless you actively stop it. Many new designs are specifically design to go sub-critical when failure happen.
The Journey of a 999 Call
Touché. I see your point.
The average Indian is likely making less than $2 a day [1] and likely illiterate with not having the ability to read or write ANYTHING[2]. Is a dirt poor, illiterate person "politically empowered"?

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_India
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_India (the numbers here are severely underrepresented - there is consensus among most NGOs that more than 50% illiteracy prevails)
With the serious caveat that the program you are writing must only be vulnerable to the kind of errors which Hindley-Milner can show aren't present. ie: no IO, no non-deterministic concurrency, no non-total functions, etc, etc.
If you're interested, this is called a natural monopoly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
I think you're conflating two different issues here -- advertising prices in picodollars, and what the price per GB ends up being.

As far as picodollars go, I figured that hedge funds would understand those perfectly -- after all, they're in the business of shaving microseconds off their order times so that they can extract a few extra microdollars per share, right?
This really should be getting more attention. HN is so good (read bad) at burring posts randomly, it's scary.
While I love Rudin's Real and Complex Analysis and Functional Analysis, I've always thought Loomis and Sternberg's Advanced Calculus could serve as an interesting alternative to more conventional texts like Baby Rudin for introductory analysis. It also seems particularly suited to self-study: surprisingly self-contained, good exercises, a nice selection of applications, and available free from Sternberg's Web site [1].

[1] http://www.math.harvard.edu/~shlomo/
Well, I honestly don't think Clang needs fundraising through KickStarter :) Apple's $100B+ should be enough. GCC is now deprecated on Apple platforms and will be completely replaced by LLVM family in a year's time, so their whole ecosystem (OS X, iOS, cloud infrastructures) depends on LLVM and certainly they would spend as much as necessary on it.
Not sure this guy has much to complain about - wife, kids, money, intelligence, plenty of opportunities. Maybe he just enjoy his life instead of wishing he was some hot shot.
Cheap harvesting > organic solar cells! ;)
How exactly does his position equate to being a "late bloomer"? Even if he hadn't done everything he did in the last 10 years, he would still have achieved more than 99.99999% of the world population. Think about that to get some perspective. I think he's being ridiculously harsh on himself.
If a car dealer sells you a car he thinks will break down in six months, you definitely have a case against him.

Answering "caveat emptor" to everything is what's crazy. We're civilized people, we should abide by reasonable standards of business conduct. Especially when you're in a profession that holds itself out as representing the interests of its clients.

You wouldn't have a problem with your lawyer taking bets against your case? Or your accountant using the information he learns from auditing you to profit on the side? I think these things fall below the standard of reasonable business conduct. I think the excessive reliance on caveat emptor is the product of a failed economic ideology.
Exaggerations abound. While I agree with aspects of poor governance and garbage accumulation and many other observations, I realized the author was out to represent a preconceived notion of a nation, when I read, "homeless people sleeping on the tarmac, the city is so crowded and disgusting that people decide they’d rather sleep on the airport runway."

I will pick on that lie to state my point. If you have been to any of the smaller metros in India, you generally get thru immigration at Mumbai before taking a flight from the domestic terminal. Getting to the domestic terminal from the international terminal is cumbersome. You are escorted in a bus operated by the Airport Authority of India, accompanied by security personel.

The aspect of the ride that is of interest is the route taken by the bus. The bus operated within the premises of the airport often running along side the tarmac and taxi way thru numerous and repeated security check-points while it meanders to or from the domestic terminal. This gives you the best view of the runways at ground level in slow speed often around 15 kmph and includes a section of the ride around the cargo terminals.

Most international airlines operate to and out of Mumbai during the night often after 12 AM. I have taken this ride on at least 3 occasions and have not seen a single individual sleeping on the tarmac on even one occasion.

What the author might be referring to could be the people you find in a semi sleep state around the terminal, more so near the cargo terminals. These are employees in the cargo section often on a break. The employees are usually uniformed and any one can observe the security batches hanging around their necks.

You would then have to assume that the intent of the author is intentional mis-representation and sensationalism. Take everything written with a large serving of salt.
I'll third How to Solve It, and would also recommend Polya's Induction and Analogy in Mathematics.
Good question. Unfortunately, the Canadian dollar hasn't taken its rightful place as a pre-eminent world currency yet, so advertising prices in Canadian dollars would make it difficult for all the Tarsnap users outside of Canada to figure out what it costs.

I could theoretically take payments in both US and Canadian dollars, but practically speaking that would be a huge headache for my accounting systems.
Linux Mint Maya vs. Windows 8
There is a bunch of past work in this area. Circuits have been evolved in simulation (John Koza did a ton of papers on this) and directly on FPGAs (the seminal paper here was Adrian Thompson). There is a field concerning doing this, called "evolvable Hardware". GECCO is going on right now in Philly and should have some new papers on the topic.
I find this happens a lot with Haskell. I can write hundreds of lines of code and have them work perfectly as soon as I get a error-free and warning-free compilation.

The type system is definitely a big part of this, but almost as important are algebraic data types and compiler checks for exhaustivity when scrutinising values of such types.
So the drawing code redraws the entire UI from scratch at each loop. This seems to work OK for now, when the UI consists of printing out a couple of lines to the console.

But what if we wanted a more ncurses type UI, with persistent indicators of the score, current location, etc, and some chrome around them? The impetus to do some kind of change-based incremental updating of the display would get strong, I would think. How is this generally handled in functional-reactive type UIs?
Lets do these 10 things in a day?
it's a matter of how much you put into the type system:

add :: Integer -> Integer -> Integer
add x y = x * y

in any moderately complicated code, you need to test. types only go so far.
Why not develop cross-platform applications? As Zenst said, you could go the HTML5 route and use something like Phonegap. Personally, I'm a Corona SDK user. I can't comment on Phonegap, as I've never used it, but Corona makes it trivial to develop cross-platform apps written in Lua.
Do you know why the pilots of that plane didn't use GPS to determine their altitude and speed? I read that it's suspected they slammed into the sea because they didn't know their altitude and speed, due to frozen-over measuring devices.
An interesting point was made comparing the proliferation of the Beatles vs contemporary musicians, and suggesting that this is why (more artists producing less) past the 90's we've become increasingly culturally ambiguous.

Of course, there's also the view that we're still too close to the 00's to properly realize what identified it.
Only peanut butter 1.0, and there may be legacy support for ranch3, but you'll have to check the docs.
Do You Like Facebook or Everyme?
Do You Like Facebook or Everyme? Face Book Song http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92zTigbWnME&feature=plcp
SOPA PIPA Internt Freedom Song http://www.youtube.com/my_videos_edit?ns=1&video_id=tbil6lCbn0I
Carl T Please Share
> People management is still necessary, and good people management is extremely valuable

People management is necessary to mitigate the corrosive affects of the one or two bad people in the group. Valve's idea is to recruit only good people.
Color quantization with Python
This post shows how to perform color clustering and color quatization using the KMeans algorithm.
The Cloud I'd Like to See
I have experience of both. I ran a Microsoft practice at EDS, where there were too many managers. The highlight of that one was losing a multi-million £ contract because another project manager felt my approach didn't produce enough paper work, stopped the project and started gathering requirements, again, formally.

After that I worked for a smaller software house I'd better not name, where I was responsible for 70 developers. I had no idea who was working on what because no one ever did what the status reports suggested. I resigned.

The frustration in both cases was that engineering management has been solved. It's been solved in the 80's. Any attempt these days to introduce principles I learnt from books like Wicked Problems, Righteous Solutions, Peopleware or Mythical Man Month got rejected, because most organisations these days have a chosen way of doing things that some manager thinks of as a personal fiefdom. Any attempt to stray from the defined approach is squashed, like, immediately.
Both. Learn both Objective-C AND Java. Learn cross platform development languages and techniques as well - javascript and Lua.

Whether you are looking for employment with someone else or starting your own company, having a broad set of skills is always valuable.
It's hard to be sympathetic when walking through Paharganj in Delhi and have hundreds of con artists just outright lying and trying to scam well meaning tourists. I won't go back to India because of it. It's one thing to pay a guy to take pictures of you at Taj, it's another to have someone be helpful then demand a tip for it.

China has a billion people too, but life there is far less horrid, dirty and bureaucratic. While the Chinese government is pretty deplorable, something is going right there, compared to India.
Another problem with India is the mind-numbing Colonial-era bureaucracy -- to start a small business in India it takes months of paperwork just to get a business license. You have to get papers signed, resigned, rubber stamped by ten different offices and then pay crazy expensive bribes to everyone along the way. The problem is the government. It's an obsession with administivia at the expense of entrepreneurs.
> You still can't regulate ethics. Some people are just slimy; they will be slimy no matter what industry they are in.

I think this is a bit defeatist. Professions can and do regulate their own culture. It's a question of having the will to do so. I'm going through the process of being admitted to the bar right now, and I have to say it's instilled in me at least a healthy fear. It's incredibly invasive. The character & fitness committee not only digs into your public data (speeding tickets, etc), but reaches back into things like expunged juvenile convictions. And it starts from Day 1. I had professors who were on the C&F committee who told me horror stories of people with $200k of debt failing to be admitted. There is a honor code culture. If there was cheating going on at my law school, it was below my radar, while it was fairly common at my engineering school.

I feel medicine is the same way. I have family members who are surgeons who feel incredibly uncomfortable just when drug reps bring in lunch. Even in engineering, at least in the traditional disciplines like mechanicals, etc, (I was an aerospace major), there is a strong understanding that when you go into work, peoples' lives are on the line.

I'm sure there are a lot of slimly people in these professions, but the difference is that the strong cultural condemnation forces such behavior under the radar. Meanwhile, the financial sector seems to reject the idea of professional codes of conduct as outmoded.
That bug is not a big deal by itself, but the circumstances surrounding it are a symptom of severe problems with how PHP is developed.
Opaque types like "Integer" don't give a lot of assurance, so either you get a stronger type system (Agda-style) or you have to test.

But complicated code may work with non-opaque types, and so it could still be reliable without tests.
goomwwm: Get out of my way, Window Manager
>>>The Internet Tablets were not intended to that market

Then why were they on sale to the general public in stores? They were intended as mass-market devices. And they failed on that score.

I'm hoping MeeGo will not be similarly botched. I liked what I saw -- from an Internet distance -- of MeeGo on the N9. I wish Nokia had gone with that instead of Windows.
One more thought about old layers.

It has only really been about five years ago that we could get rid of terminal-based access (as in a virtual tty) to point of sales. A lot of people demanded something simple, and highly optimised for rapid data entry. The nice thing about a text-mode display is there is no temptation to take your hands off the kb and move to a mouse. KB and barcode scanner are all you need.

Now we have a web-based interface with a fair bit of automation, but we have to have a trackball in retail environments. However we make sure there are keyboard shortcuts to all the right things and that people are trained on these.

Of other businesses I know of, the last ones moved from text-only POS programs to graphical ones really only two to three years ago.

So things change remarkably slowly. The challenge is to accommodate a flexible workplace.

The web works for many things but for POS software, it is rather sub-optimal. Controlling serial port pole displays from a web page is a bit kludgy....
Until the code has actually been tested, he doesn't know that it works, he just thinks that it does. The above point is that he has not completed the exercise, by verifying what he thinks.
Thank you for taking the time to write this. I come across articles and opinions like this all the time and always feel a little offended, but I do not know exactly what triggers that. Maybe its because I notice the progress happening, the hard work people put in, only to read articles and opinions that portray the situation so negatively.
And, if they bleed, that's a sign you haven't been brushing them enough.
They are giving Singapore an option to pass laws?

Singapore didn't have that option before?
The code was tested by the compiler, reducing the failure space to whether or not his declarative types are an adequate Proof.

It's an amusing anecdote. Even when using Haskell, there are some obvious constraints to relying on the compiler as the sole validation of correctness.
Putting Money In The Bank
And inevitably decides to fix the fact that those in power do not feel themselves to be rich enough.
I think the author understands the depth of this acceptance of Agile when he writes:

'Today they’re surrounded a vast army of scrum-masters and evangelists, recycling (competently, mostly) the same insights, and an even larger crowd performing half-assed renditions of steps learned by rote: “Yeah, we do agile. We have a standup every day.” Many of these renditions have the professionalism, but not the passion, of a small-town talent show.'

Which may be my favorite bit in the article.
It's the Harmattan UI that makes MeeGo on the N9 so gorgeous. I don't suppose they can use that?
As fond as I am of the Mockingbird book and Smullyan's books in general, I'd say that most of its puzzles are pure exercises in abstract symbol manipulation and not terribly enlightening.

If you have some prior exposure to the SKI combinators, one big aha-moment may come from the book's exploration of several alternative axiom systems that, while preceding the SK system chronologically, are often left out of modern CS-oriented treatments of combinatory logic.

Also, while I think the exercises on symbol manipulation are not very enlightening on their own, the syntactic rewriting point of view is a useful complement if your view of combinatory logic has been mostly semantic. Proving completeness in the syntactic framework becomes a matter of showing that any combinatory rewriting rule can be expressed in terms of your base combinators. This in turn can be done if your combinators allow arbitrary permutations to be expressed in addition to duplication and dropping of symbols (cf. lengthening and shortening rules in GEB). For example, K is a dropping combinator, and rather than viewing S as a substitution operator on the semantic level (as is done when translating lambda calculus to SK calculus), it can be viewed as a hybrid permutation and duplication combinator at the syntactic level. If these dual roles are split into separate combinators, you get alternative axiom systems.
i couldn't tell if he was trying to assert something as truth and contribute, or if he was just venting his graduate student frustrations.
There was a fratricide in Desert Storm where a bunch of Apaches drifted behind friendly lines. INS is mentioned as a contributing factor. IIRC they were hovering, but a slight wind didn't register with the INS.
Why does one have to be literate to be politically active? Do you think that most US voters base their political decisions (or their decision whether or not to vote) on something they read?
One of the theories behind cavity formation has to do with the pH in a persons mouth being perfect for the bacteria to grow and break down your teeth.

However some people seem to have a pH in their mouths that is not appropriate to bacterial growth and therefore they get less cavities. You probably fall within this group and therefore have a smaller chance of getting cavities.
That's not very surprising; Haskell's type system is really that ridiculously powerful. But I suspect many hackers working with other languages would be able to state the equivalent: "I released a library which I only unit-tested, without writing any helper project that actually uses it".
How Secure are Your Passwords?