skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am an "enterprise" programmer currently working on an invoice automation project. Since invoice approval processes vary across clients, we provide a (3rd party) workflow designer to personalize/customize the process.

And it sucks.

It sucks exactly for the reasons in the article. It sounds great and looks great for simple processes. But that isn't the reality of approval processes and integrating with existing systems. The complexity of these "visual" workflows grows exponentially with the complexity of the real process. Complex to the point where it can no longer be easily tweaked and maintained by the original designers/maintainers much less the client.

Yes, there are some systems that apparently work great: visual effects (which sounds much more functional (in the programming sense) than real world programming), and Scratch: to help kids make games. Scratch is inherently simple and I bet if you asked someone who has a history in programming what it is like to scale a program up in Scratch, you find the same thing. That it starts off great, but as complexity of requirements increase linearly, complexity of the "program" increases logarithmically. That they wish they could just port it to something like Python or at the very least, embed a language in it.

(Side note: I wonder if this says something about (natural) language as well. No natural language looks like a visual workflow. Not even hieroglyphics. You gain much more expressiveness and flexibility by the simplicity of the concepts. It doesn't get much simpler than a single linear string of words. And I think programming languages gain the same expressiveness and flexibility by having those characteristics.)
The problem with your philosophy in the age of the internet is that the question and answer stays up for others to use a search engine to find for themselves. In the style of the Chinese proverb, "Give a man a fish on the internet, and you will be giving a million men a fish"

By requiring everyone to deeply understand every conceivable task they might need to do, you are limiting the amount of tasks a person can do in a certain amount of time.
Haven't had time to try it, but how is this different from LaunchRock? http://www.launchrock.com/
Carl probably shouldn't write blog posts drunk.
Why is he not using a low-power Xeon? The 17 watt max TDP CPU is pretty amazing.

We've got a server design in house using commodity parts for a three-server cluster that's less than 60 watts per server. The whole thing (including AC/DC conversion overhead) is less than 2 amps at full draw.
Already posted - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4496098
I know of many families that live off of one car that costs no more than $3000-$5000 that are many years old. Notice the author never once mentioned what kind of car, so it's definitely possible to live off of a very cheap car.

Btw, living in the country and working in the city is a luxury. And in terms of the suburbs to save money, you can usually find employment that's closer or find a decent solution that can simplify communiting. People do it everyday ;)
Work as in productive activity is a part of who we are, but this world in which people have to deal with the stress and misery and downright inefficiency of a subordinate context is a disaster. And it's not stable. What happened to agricultural commodities in the 1920s-30s (leading to rural poverty and the Depression) is now happening to almost all human labor. The work of unmotivated people is worth almost zero, but most people don't have the social access and trust to get out of the subordinate context and into a motivating role.

The next 50 years may be really great, or we may see a violent, global class war that kills millions. It depends on how the surplus and resources are distributed.
I'm sorry about all the negativity. Python includes all these things, sure, and the code is not great, but it's a learning project. Can we treat it as such and not criticize it so much?
Interesting that Texas, arguably one of the most rigidly Christian states in the country with evidence of moral legislation, is actually reasonable in this regard.

Rich makes a lot of assertions about fundamental Christians, but provides little evidence to back them up.
Hi Verg, thank you for that correction. I've updated it.
This template language is only superficially the same, but the code between the <% and %> would need to be python in this version, not JS, so you can't actually share anything. You would need to combine something like this with a JS-to-Python transpiler for that to work.
I'd be curious to know: does your friend make much use of names in Excel (i.e. assigning names to ranges and then using the names as variables in formulas)? and does she write VB code to do things that can't be done in cells?

The analogy to FP is striking, but not quite that complete. Excel doesn't let you define functions (i.e. it doesn't let you lay out formulas in cells and then call them repeatedly with different data) or types (i.e. it doesn't let you make multiple instances of a common model). It has variables, but the naming mechanism is primitive and not well integrated, so most people just work with raw cell addresses. And it arguably does have mutable data, because you can change what's in any cell at any time. I say "arguably" because one can argue the opposite: a spreadsheet defines one big pure function and if you change a cell then you're really just calling that function with a different input or changing the definition of the function. But I don't think anybody "feels" (or, for that matter, implements) spreadsheets that way. The cell contents feel like state and editing them feels like altering a machine as it runs.

To some extent it's a matter of how you frame it. If one expanded the identity of, say, a Haskell program to include both its code as it changes over time in the editor and the data that it gets applied to over time, it would seem mutable. No one looks at a Haskell program that way because we draw sharp lines between editing it, compiling it, and running it. But in spreadsheets those lines don't really exist. The program, the data it's applied to, and the editor are all together and the whole thing is live.
They can add up. I've known people who spend more than $1000/month on these types of things. That's easily your payment. I strongly recommend anyone to watch at least a few epsiodes of Til Debt Do Us Part: http://www.slice.ca/shows/showspage.aspx?title_id=93097 Many people don't realize just how much they are spending on luxuries. It can add up much more quickly than you think.
Incredible endeavour and i wish this catches on in a bigger way.

For now the average person can probably jump on this idea to some extent by switching to a tablet where possible. I think the ipad3 is around 4.8watts over a full charge discharge cycle with the charger unplugged after charging.
That's exactly it – SO has become a list of everyones problems ever, with solutions. I frequently find answers to things I need to know on SO, sometimes years after the person asked.
The public should be asked if they want to waste many billions, if not hundreds of billions of dollars in lost work to mitigate this "risk".

Frankly, nearly anything is possible if you're accounting for the unknown, like you seem to be doing. Perhaps we should also ban prayer – after all, there may be a god, right?
Journalists do not see through BS data. Any data is good data for news hits.

In a previous life I created data for media, and my attempts to provide correct analysis and context were disregarded or shut down.
Oh, absolutely. It is not something that a regular person would ever need to worry about, since statistically the odds of this ever happening to any one person are extremely low (and even if it did, the person may not even know it because of procedures such as the above). But it's important enough at a national level that security officials are interested in tackling the problem.

So yes, it's possible that drugs have been mailed to you without you knowing it. In rare circumstances (especially if you just moved into that address, for example), you might be arrested to figure out what's going on. But it becomes hyperbole to suggest that you will automatically be charged and put in jail because of a random drop shipment (though I'm sure some HN person will find a counterexample just for the sake of doing so).
So the scam you'd be afraid of is Facebook or Twitter.
> the law adjusts

Not according to at least two of the US Supreme Court Justices. The US Constitution is not a "living document" to them, not interpretable according to the norms of the time.
1) Currently auto suggest is only mapping titles that LIKE match. Search listing will now return results for the title as well as description. The auto suggest still needs some love and I will need to use something a bit more power / fast than SQL LIKE in the future.

2) The docs have all been selected by me. I haven't thought up a formal selection process but will try to write up some criteria. Basically any / all documentaries with English Audio or English Subtitles are welcome.

3) Not yet made a formal login page but will ASAP.

4) Im still thinking about ad placement but listing them within the content had crossed my mind as well so i might do this in the future.

6) Great idea I've added this

7) Im working on a more official logo with colleague. I've removed doc.umentari.es in the meantime from the navbar.

9) Agree - Done

11) Ive resized these now and cleaned up some more of the CSS

12) Seriously thanks for the heads up, I've edited this now. It was just a stupid oversight on dev.twitter.com

Thanks for the kind words and the extensive feedback. It really helped! I still need to clean up the listing style CSS and might purchase a Netflix account for some inspiration because im sure they're doing a better job of listing content than me.

Thanks again buddy :)
Hi Andy,

What startup are you working on?
Launch rock collects emails and that's about it. LookAft is all about tracking 'conversions' to see what % of visitors would likely sign up and use your service.

It also includes a preliminary pricing page so you can test price points (which is obviously important to see if a product vs customer acquisition balance works out) by seeing how many people click through each price point and give their emails.

Please let me know if you have any other questions.
(Regarding the US) I had a friend who went streaking on campus and was picked up by police. He got off of the charges on a technicality but almost was convicted. Had he been, he would have had to register as a sex offender. Same goes for public urination. We have a pretty insane system.

I'm not sure the general public could ever follow a nuanced argument like this to understand it though. We usually legislate like fundamentalist mothers with an IQ of 80.
I challenge anyone to find actual foundation for the claim that unwittingly recording a child rape in the park is a crime even if the witness reports it and provides the video evidence. Seems to me that this is the "slippery slope" argument taken to unreasonable extremes.
First, the ban is not just "during takeoff". It's actually from the time the pilot leaves the gate, until well into the air. If there's any delay getting on the runway, it's easily 45 minutes or longer, and the usual wait is closer to 20 minutes.

Both ends of the flight. On short flights, you'll spend more times without your smartphone on then you will with it.
Good enough is better than perfection - Lucy Kellaway on Jiro's sushi
It's somewhat pointless to ask people without internet access if they're interested in logging into websites using another website account.

So yes, that's the web using subset of total population, totally fine for this question.

That aspect is more of an issue if you want to use Google Surveys to determine whether to start a new supermarket on Main Street. I hope the Google Survey people propose some other service for such inquiries.
Off topic, but almost every link in that article seems to link the wrong part of the sentence. Is it just a linking style I'm not familiar with?
In my case, my loan "counseling session" was an online form I had to complete to unlock access to certain features of my online college account software. You do not get a sit down with someone to tell you about what you are getting into before you start. Even if you can get a person to talk to, we are seeing that lots of hand waiving and outright dishonesty is being used to propagate loan profits.
You can likely credit the fuel economy increase on the federal mandates for higher MPG ratings on new cars...

I'm not sure how likely that is. Seems to me that when gas is cheap, people buy big, powerful cars (e.g. SUVs) with little regard to fuel economy. When gas prices rise, people buy small economical cars. People buy what they think they can afford and makes sense for them, and automakers make more of what the customers are buying and less of what they are not buying.
Exactly.

There's absolutely no requirement or testing that says your portable device can't interfere with an ILS. Landing on instruments in zero visibility with untested consumer electronics that don't conform to aviation specs is a bad idea. Maybe it's time to change the regs so anything that can go on a plane has to be tested and regulated to not interfere with aircraft navigation.

When PCs came out, they interfered with TV. There's a set of standards for consumer equipment, eg won't interfere with your neighbor's TV, and a set of standards for aviation, eg won't interfere with an instrument landing system etc. And even if in the current crop of digital devices, it's a low-percentage problem, new devices get invented all the time, with new power and frequency profiles. There is so much change that eventually something is guaranteed to interfere.

In any event, the reg about no cell phones on during flight (as opposed to no electronics during takeoff and landing), is an FCC reg, not an FAA reg, to help out the cell phone companies not having to deal with fast-moving cell phones on max power talking to all their towers at once.
Oh, sorry about that. I just meant that it has only a $ sign which makes it small.
I know people who don't spend $1000/mo on those type of things. Anecdotes cancel.

The reason that there are TV shows about that kind of thing is because the occurrences are far enough out on the bell curve that people can get the entertainment from "watching the stupid people", combined with the frisson of moral-superiority-combined-with-just-enough-fear-for-their-own-situations.

If it was typical, the TV show wouldn't exist.
This AirBNB Mixergy interview is a must-watch - they explain how they hacked their way onto top news sites like CNN & NYTimes (start watching at 31 minutes in):

http://mixergy.com/airbnb-chesky-gebbia/

They explain how to get press coverage using the "pyramid" method: start at the bottom, with small bloggers in your space. Email them, ask them to cover you. Then move up the chain. At the top of the chain are the big media people like NYTimes, CNN, etc.
I highly recommend crypto & machine learning. Tina Seelig can also be quite phenomenal but I only attended seminars of hers so can't speak about her full course.
That also means 65.5% of US Internet population is using Facebook or Twitter, a mind boggling statistic
You'd need a client side app sandbox [...]

Or you could use, you know, a native client. It may increasingly become a foreign concept to the "facebook generation" but your computer is still fully capable of running a mail client on its own.

Of course you don't get to sell SaaS-subscriptions when you implement tray.io as a procmail GUI...
There's easily an infinite amount of email addresses (eg. spamgourmet). A browser extensions to automate that would be nice, though.

FB and twitter both spread enough tracking beacons (those like/share buttons) across the web that any attempt to use >1 accounts to distract FB or twitter are probably futile.
A little tough to get a hold of and to read, but The Myth of Masculinity by Joseph Pleck [http://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Masculinity-Joseph-Pleck/dp/0...] is by far the most thorough take on male masculinity I've ever read.
If Achilles Used Facebook...
Perhaps, but we're optimizing our journalist/blogger relationships for the long-term, i.e., when they have a question on X topic, they will call us first. Sure - they might not write about everything we offer them, but we want everything we send them to be seen as credible, interesting, and sometimes contrarian. I'm not sure a few extra press hits will be worth the hit to credibility of taking a short cut.
Notes on Redis (2.0) Memory Usage
This isn't some mail-order-MBA-translated-to-the-internet, your Illinois example is apples and oranges.

In fact it's not even about course credit. It's free. People from Africa, South America, India, China and so forth are getting access to professors at Ivy League universities.

That's a big deal in my book!

Yes, One professor can throw some videos on youtube, but this is a structured environment to bring full courses to students. And more importantly, it's a 'hot' idea right now, it seems professors left and right are coming out of the woodworks to join in.

So yes, education is certainly changing. It's hard to say where to exactly, but something is stirring - and I think it's good.
It may be a edge case, but we use edge cases to map the territory. To illustrate in the case of the cocaine throwing madman, the lesson is that there are ways to come into possession of cocaine which should not be prosecuted. If we therefore ban the possession of drugs in every case, then it is possibly that innocent people will be prosecuted.
For those interested, here is a link to all the papers by Mochizuki:
http://www.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~motizuki/papers-english.htm...

For convenience, here's a link to the Wikipedia article on the ABC conjecture and its importance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abc_conjecture
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."

And then the OP runs a questionable survey that doesn't warrant the conclusion (which by the way, is not earth-shattering).

- You could not be on Facebook / Twitter and still pick one of the other answers.

- You could be one of the services but not the other, and pick the first answer. What does Facebook "/" Twitter mean? AND or OR? Completely unclear.

- If the order of the options wasn't randomized, you would likely get a bias towards the first option. Don't know if this was the case.
E145 is ok. I took it in person at Stanford. I think if you have no clue about the ins and outs of tech, it can be a nice starting point. My other recommendation would to just read venture deals and check out jake blakemaster's cs183 essays. I sat in that class and it was phenomenal.
>Google has a whitepaper explaining how this tool works and why it’s as good if not better than doing telephone surveys. I’m going to trust that Google’s stats wizards know their stuff

But... they have a clear bias in favor of telling you that it's better than telephone surveys. Clearly you should not trust a claim like that without looking at an independent analysis.
Interesting that the percentage of a group that claims not to be on FB/TW goes from

* a high of 41.7% for the 65+ group.

and moves steadily down through the groups to

* 27.4% for the 25-34 group.

but then jumps back up to

* 34.7% for 18-24 year olds.
Indeed. In a functional society the district attorney would decline to prosecute as there is no benefit to society in going after a public urinator, streaker, or sexting teenage couple. But here in the US a politician has to be "tough on crime" or work for the "benefit of the children".
Switching to Heroku (the SendHub Story)
You're right, I had the two confused.
Open data movement: how to keep information from being politicized.
Texas is hardly small government.

I would call them more right-wing conservatives (neo-cons really).
How are collection functions not useful in python? I use map and sort (or the comprehension equivalent) daily. The rest I use at least once a week, with the possible exception of groupBy - as my workload doesn't really need it very often.
Remembering Bill Moggridge
I'm sure this is one of the things you're least interested in, but there are JPEG artefacts visible in your logo, pretty badly.
Out of curiosity, does your hand-rolled Python implementation actually pass this test suite? http://autobahn.ws/testsuite
Capital Gains: An Essay on Nouveau Riche in Delhi
Hey Elon Musk, can you confirm this correlation?
"U.S. Total Gasoline Retail Sales by Refiners"

does this include imported gasoline from foreign refiners, I doubt it, we import more gasoline these days.
From the page itself:

Please keep in mind that this is just a port of a javascript library, please don't get started with the "but it's not pythonic" stuff. This library has no intentions to be pythonic, infact it tries to bring same underscore experience from javascript to python.

You have to give the author credit for his candor at least.

That said, I like that the author of this is trying new things out. We can't let Python become petrified by rigid definitions of "pythonic".
> right time, right place, bloody clever manager

So true but I'd like to add: amazingly innovative producer (George Martin) and brilliant engineer (Geoff Emerick).

Without those two guys the Beatles recordings might have been just ordinary.

Interestingly, the fiddling by Capitol Records might have contributed to their success early on (when they weren't destroying the intended album track sequence) - for example I prefer the US mono version of I Want To Hold Your Hand over the English version.
Same here except one thing is the same for me: the feeling of the photos or the "vibe" if you will. Because I've seen so many black and white or sepia photos of the past I have this weird image in my head that everything back before color photos was dark and dreary and even people living in that time, in color, saw everything as washed out and bleak. After seeing these in color, "true" color (as in not added after the fact), one thing stays the same. If you pay attention you'll notice that every shot with people in it feels dreary. No one is smiling. Everyone has the same almost depressed, somewhat emotionless expression on their faces. So while I have a hard time dealing with the fact that the world was in color back then the one thing I don't have to reconcile with my preconceived notions of the past is how gloomy the people all seem. I wonder why everyone in old photos states blankly like that. Is it because they're genuinely living a hard life? Could it be that smiling for photos wasn't customary back then? Both?

Also, photos from the 60's through the early 80's also seem to have a unique feel to them. I live in Chicago where some of the buildings have been around since just after the Chicago Fire and to see pictures taken of such places through the 20th century is so strange. I know intellectually that people saw the area in full color like I see it today but somehow older photos of the same streets and places I walk by feel like they're just not the same place. In an old photo a certain building or park will seem, well, old yet when I walk by it, it seems modern as ever even though the place hasnt physically changed much if it all since the early 1900's.

It's weird and I'm glad to know other people have that same sort of relation to older photos. I don't even quite know how to describe it but I did the best I could here.
Are there any decent projects created so far by the 'udacity / OCW' generation? It seems like they should be out in the wild now.
Hi theta. I had to quickly resize the logo when I created the page. I will take a look at it in a minute. Thank you for the feedback.