skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> That state of affairs upsets France’s policy makers, as public finances have been stretched thin and French Internet companies struggle to gain traction.

and you wonder why....

Seriously, France makes it very hard for small business owners to exist. Either you are a tiny single-owner, or you're a big corporation, but the fixed costs to going from single owner to limited liability is pretty intense. That and all the smart people get convinced to become bankers or managers, while all the motivated (in terms of coding) people go into the abysmal university system.

The ultimate irony is that the grandes ecole system seems like the perfect storm to create some very intelligent entrepreneurs, but these students (technically incompetent but motivated and competent on a management level) are in completely different schools from the people with actual know-how , who get forced into consultancies mainly, to write Java enterprise code for the rest of their lives.
> Two years from idea to animal trials to safety trials (self-experimentation) to human trials to Nobel Prize. That was when pharma moved at the speed of software; that is what a landscape free for innovation can produce.

Well, we'd get new treatments a decade faster, but a lot of these treatments would not work and/or would kill people. But, as I said above, I don't think this would dramatically increase the speed of innovation, except for diseases where we don't have effective animal models. It's faster to run experiments on animals than people. For these diseases, removing regulations let people try treatments that worked on animals in humans faster. But the problem is really that there are many diseases we can't treat effectively in any organism, and letting people try any treatment they want in humans isn't going to fix this.

I think you are vastly overestimating what society has to gain by deregulating medicine. You'll get a one-time gain of 10 years of progress at the cost of an unknown number of lives.
I'm guessing this is against their TOS?
I think the whole point of HN Who's Hiring is that it's on HN using the message format as the rest of the site. That's like saying that Twitter is very inefficient for news publishing because we should be using Delicious instead... well it's efficient for people on Twitter.
Oh the joys of side-effects. Wouldn't you love to have a programming language that doesn't have them?
Further evidence that j is the one true imaginary unit.

Title is still sensationalist.
I'm not sure that logic is valid (and thanks to splat for linking a more expanded version of the argument), because the probability of you being born when you were born is now 1. I'm not sure it's valid to try to do logic based on using that as a random variable.
I'm saying that a change of tact is required if you're experiencing hostility from the communities you wish to draw readers from. Realizing and working around these preconceptions will be essential.

I use the phrase "quack" because these people exist in large number on the internet, and there certainly exist people who offer promises to the disabled community that they are not capable of delivering on. There's a very large burden of proof that many persons would wish to meet to take a hypothesis seriously. This isn't fanfiction, this isn't diet tips to swap, this, if real, would be a lot of promise to people. Sarcastic comments about the people who don't believe you implicitly are unnecessary, there are very real reasons why these barriers to belief exist.
IMO Matlab is the worst programming language widely used in production.

This perfectly fits my expectations of Matlab:

- i is a mutable, but should be constant

- It has a horrible, non obvious name because mathematicians are used to it. (And they are not used to var names longer than two chars)

- It is in the global scope.

- It's a feature that has a special syntax (sort of).

/edit Apologies for php programmers, maybe php is worse. But I'm not sure.
This is a bit scary. I hope it doesn't give any other countries some ideas.

Would there be anything Google could do to counter this?
Rubber is the British English word for eraser.
I would assume they were playing too much of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Series[1] or used it as source when writing the article title. Even half suggesting that animals would glow is link bait and just silly. I mean, it's not like animals glowed after the atomic attacks on Japan or anywhere nuclear weapons have been tested. Granted that there's differences in the radiation, but still it's kind of specious reasoning.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.T.A.L.K.E.R.:_Shadow_of_Chern...
PEP 8 only mentions truth checks, it doesn't mention if functions' return values should be True or the truthy value. Personally, I find it very unclean to have your function return half a string, or some unrelated int or something similar when your function is called, e.g. "is_member()".
I read An Imaginary Tale and liked it. That being said, I have more enthusiasm than ability when it comes to maths. You might very well be beyond these books.

In university libraries you can sort of pick out narrative/casual books in the math section by working off of the form factor. If you pull out books with a novel-like size and shape and read the backs you might find ones that are the right mix for you.

One last clue is that publishing houses like Springer will put out series of more narrative or casual works from time to time. Best of luck!
The cost for a payment processor 3% and 30 cents per transaction PLUS the costs (time-related, development-related, support-related) to manage to obtain a merchant account, deal with VAT, fraud detection, a nice customer experience, and many other things. For startups you end up way ahead by NOT rolling your own solution to this and other problems.
Does Varnish run on all four machines on the off chance they will claim the IP, or does it come up when needed?

When a machine becomes the Varnish server, does it stop being an Apache server? What port do you run Apache on?
The common case is (probably) not that a compiler detects an instance of signed over/underflow. Instead, it can assume that this never happens and generate "dangerous" code.

A good post describing how these optimizations come about is http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/120

More options to warn about uses of or disable these optimizations would be welcome in compilers.
I just quickly had to check that again:
Google is making about $30 on average for every person living in France. Even taxing Google alone 5-8% would earn France a significant amount of money, not to speak of all the other large companies making tons of dollars in online business.
Fascinating.
Meh, I really don't like the "Virtuous Cycle of Web Applications" [1]. It claims that retaining users amounts to doping them up every now and then with a "new functionality" to excite them and get them to use it again. Basically, feature spam.

This is a novelty approach, and it has no longevity. It doesn't last, and those aren't the users you want anyway. The webapps I use the most are the ones that actually offer something valuable to me. This sort of value is timeless. Google Docs is the first thing that comes to mind. I open Docs all the time on my own accord. Google don't whore themselves out with shiny new features because they don't have to. They wrote good software. It's a useful product.

I could see this strategy being more valid with web games, but as long as your webapp is a utility there's no dopamine burst you need provide users. Just help them get something accomplished and they'll be back.

[1] http://media.tumblr.com/600e20abfacc231409d9a715fd985b86/tum...
I work in London so I'll chip in.

As others have said, rent is extremely expensive in the City however transport links are outstanding. I live just outside of London and pay significantly less rent than most of my colleagues who live in the City and yet it still only takes me 45 minutes to get to work, door to door.

The start-up scene in London is arguably the strongest in Europe and there are tons of meet-ups and events to help you network. The jobs scene is equally vibrant. Rails is in huge demand with both start-ups and established companies so you'll have no issue finding work.
Could you provide some details (or a link)?
it is very funny that this page isn't responsive.
Did a bit more poking around. Could be a temperature inversion causing a spike (http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/slc/climate/TemperatureInversions.ph...). Would be heavily dependent on the location of the sensor and surrounding topography, which all fits. If I find time, I might overlay weather data and see what it looks like.
Using HIV to attack itself
HTTPS is now enabled on the site. Thanks for letting me know.

Just curious, do you see any other red flags in the system?
No it's more analogous to him trying to break into a bank vault because it has his money.
We will be using Paymill for our upcoming project. We haven't yet gone live, but the api was very easy to use and it seems to work very well. One downside for us is that they only accept Visas and Mastercards.
Why did he get the correct results when the script was run stand-alone?
So having a system that cannot be safely shut down because someone has opened a file handle on a remote fs that became unavailable is preferable to special-casing one signal?

But by all means, if the signal thing bothers you - fine, I just really want some way to stop the process. Let's add two new system calls, something like "terminate with extreme prejudice" (abbr. twep) and "unmount without mercy" (abbr. uwm).
What Kurzweil is Forgetting
Kim Suozzi cryopreserved January 17 at Alcor
I'm quite sure it's exactly as you mentioned - the B2B payer needs to be VAT-registered. That's how it works in Estonia, anyway.
I explained my point below in more detail regarding the equation and why I think it should be remembered.

When someone is scanning your system and you haven't authorized it, you will definitively treat it as malicious. In a given moment, you don't care about attacker's inside motives, because your system is under attack and you better act accordingly.

I know a story about a guy who lost his job because of the unauthorized Nessus scanning in his company. Every story with a convicted hacker has some kind of a scanning tool (at least nmap) that was used in scanning phase, you can bet on it. Every scanning tool is an attack tool. In fact, scanners are most useful tools for any kind of attack, because they minimize amount of manual effort needed.

I don't know much about Canadian law, but most current laws forbid unauthorized access and _atempts_ of doing it.
DRM Removal, DRM-protected Video & Audio Converter
Despite being the person who said I was loathe to use it, I agree with this to a degree. I feel icky about doing it, but right now they're the only people offering a sane solution in Europe, I respect them for bringing it to market here.
Libdash - a C++ library for the the MPEG-DASH standard
Brin riding NYC subway with Google Glasses
The patient experience survey does not require patients to give permission for a third party to perform the survey.

(http://www.nhssurveys.org/faq)

> I've seen them withhold these from the patients intentionally and have had to ask for the forms

That would be illegal if it was happening wrt the patient experience survey.

The link that you provided tells us so.

> Once statistics have been designated as National Statistics it is a statutory requirement that the Code of Practice shall continue to be observed.

Luckily, staff on hospital wards have nothing to do with collecting anything connected to the patient experience survey. Again, what you saw was not part of the patient experience survey.
Ortiz says suicide will not change handling of cases
Or just make it not mutable. Throw a big, fat error when someone assigns value to i.
How do you boot up yourself to be productive?
I find that it takes me anywhere from a half hour to over an hour to get ready before i'm productive. I'm just curious what kinds of hacks you guys use to go from walking in the door, to "finding the zone" as quick as possible.
What do you mean add two of the same things together exactly? If I'm not mistaken, what you are talking about is possible but I don't totally understand what you are saying. Could you provide an example?
Graph Traversal: solving the 8-puzzle with basic A.I.
You know, that Microsoft website doesn't look so bad on IE5. Information appeared to be the king, nicely situated with clean interface.
Matlab: the language designed so poorly it makes PHP look good.
Excellent. Documenting successive transformations on code is much more instructive than showing a final snapshot. This is one reason I really enjoyed doing live-coding when teaching programming.
This just makes one realize how broken the standards really are. All these things should, to some extent, be taken care off without the developer needing to apply it.

I know how things work, just sayin'...it's broken!
Emulating the programming greats
http://www.zmescience.com/ecology/chernobyl-fungus-radiotrop...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus
nginx can support websockets via the tcp_proxy module: https://github.com/yaoweibin/nginx_tcp_proxy_module
They could hardly be worse. That doesn't make them good, though.
I like it. Feels like a stronger statement if anything.
Getting attention doesn't always identify easily addressable factors, there's a lot to un-knot. Granted, I don't think the slactivism and internet petitionry is going to do a heck of a lot with Aaron's case either.
That's British "rhyming cockney".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyming_slang

http://www.phespirit.info/cockney/slang_to_english.htm
New on Ohloh - project activity indicators
This is a classic pattern: when advocating for one of several competing approaches, you spend more care optimizing your favourite approach than the competitors.

Prof. Geoffrey Hinton specifically calls this out as a pitfall in research. It's better to compare your promising new approach versus another group's approach (not your own implementation thereof). This, assuming that the other group has deep knowledge in tuning their competing approach.
0% Churn Rate? Is it Possible?
Yes.

Chelsea & Westminster A&E and their burns unit.

Hillingdon (an orthopedic ward; and an ITU) (before they rebuilt it)

*UCH critical care unit.
Yamato Global - Imagination buys MIPS.
I would like to know the opinion of others more knowledgeable: can't it just be because humans have such a long life span? So, maybe the animals die before the radiation actually has any effect?
I only suggested changing tcp_tw_reuse but you are right, especially tcp_tw_recycle can have adverse effects.

According to this reference: http://www.speedguide.net/articles/linux-tweaking-121 "[tcp_tw_reuse] is generally a safer alternative to tcp_tw_recycle"
This is not the worst bug ever. Nice story, however, the title is way over the top.
100 nodes of MemSQL at Zynga
Daily wtf: asus transformer website
The 'line reader' version of the code (not shown in the article) was actually a lot easier to read than either one of these but the article was already over long. I do have that version, if anybody is interested I can add it.
Ah, sorry think we are talking about different things. I thought you where complaining about:

if [something]:

VS

if [something] is True:

In the case I think you are talking about I would probably agree with you that returning some non-boolean is less clean, though I would probably just use the equality operator to force a boolean result:

def foo(i):
return i == 0
"Paradoxically, the current version of Chrome runs just fine in XP."

Well, actually it doesn't. As per the lead developer of the Chrome (when last time I was defending XP):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4860203
Great initiative but I do have some feedback. The first thing I notice is that the top menu is unusable. I have no idea what the links do, I only can guess when seeing the icons. The smiley icon is the most confusing.

The second thing are the icons besides the posts. I guess the goal is to help users categorize posts, with the current number of categories it helps. But when all posts match a category you will could have, in theory, 20 categories. This won't help categorize, this will only help confuse people.

The third thing is the text. The lack of dots between the timestamp, username and count of points completely confuses me. When I read the entire line, I will think that Benjamin F. added 3 points 28 minutes ago to the link above. When in fact there are a total of 3 points added to the link above, the post submitter is Benjamin F. and the link was submitted 28 minutes ago. Placing two simple dots helps users not get confused.

I notice a lot of designers want to design something visually attractive but completely don't think about UX/UI. This is a perfect example.
Maybe the web server that generates the report is on a desktop computer that the user shuts down diligently overnight to save electricity? - Not exactly legitimate, but the only reason I can think of.
TerminalHero. My Response to Guitar Hero :)
Some time ago I had to write a small academic project in Perl. I wrote this and it's so cool that I feel I should share it with you:).

http://ciemborowicz.pl/terminalhero

https://github.com/ciembor/TerminalHero

Today I published PKGBUILD for ArchLinux, but it would be nice to write build scripts for other distros like Debian/Ubuntu or Gentoo. Contribution is welcomed;).

Have a fun!
Didn't he famously fail the whole class one of the times he gave it?
Same old story: judging people by stereotypes isn’t such a great idea but remains tempting due to potential savings in cycles.
Fair point. For the analogy I was going for a hypothetical rigid broomstick, made of stuff that's as incompressible as physically possible. The speed of sound in that would be c. Yeah, that isn't very realistic, but I don't think that hurts the point it was illustrating.
So you think he is talking to that department at Google full of MDs? :)

Just to make sure I got the point across - the above joke was meant to say that people working in Google usually are also not sufficiently educated or academically positioned to pursue cures for diabetes. Being a programmer is not some aptitude test that means you can do anything. I'm a great programmer but I can barely watch House MD without cringing at the sight of innards or blood.
Some time ago I had to write a small academic project in Perl. I wrote this and it's so cool that I feel I should share it with you:).

http://ciemborowicz.pl/terminalhero

https://github.com/ciembor/TerminalHero

Today I published PKGBUILD for ArchLinux, but it would be nice to write build scripts for other distros like Debian/Ubuntu or Gentoo. Contribution is welcomed;).

Have a fun!
Having worked with both Matlab and VBA, it's hard to say for me what is worse.

Nowadays, whenever I have to do something (UI, non-numeric data processing) in Matlab, I tend to write a Matlab-shim that calls a Java-component (the Java interaction is fortunately very nice).

The mere fact that one gets things done with less hassle in Java than with a scripting language is a quite damning verdict for said scripting language.
I barely even use h and l anyway, in favor of b and w. And it turns out j and k are ubiquitous in Unix by their own right.
Opera is ditching Presto for WebKit with Opera Ice
One Book Every Entrepreneur Should Own
So, a) this actually is more common than you think it is and b) the cause is generally not the website per-se. Many websites are front-ends on top of non-web systems. This particular system is likely a legacy system dating back to e.g. the 1970s, and once available only to employees. They often had e.g. their maintenance schedules determined by the schedules of the office employees who worked there, and may -- for ongoing operation -- require a daily "batch job" scheduled outside of office hours which can take non-deterministic amounts of time and, crucially, cannot be guaranteed safe until the program (whose architect is long-since retired) terminates. Given the potentially severe consequences of shaking up the system (which is pretty bulletproof if you use it exactly as envisioned by the architects in e.g. the 1970s), the simplest solution is to refuse to broaden the acceptable hours for active operation from the ones that are printed in the docs from the 1970s.

Rest assured, in 2050 there will be people cursing our names, too.
Two of the four are simply the standard ASCII control characters:

· Control-H is Back Space: it moves the cursor one position left.

· Control-J is Line Feed: it moves the cursor one line down.

The other two seem to be arbitrary on the part of the ADM-3A designers, and having Control-L (Form Feed) perform cursor-right rather than clear-screen seems a bit dubious, but given their constraints and the desire to keep all the motions together, it's hard to argue for any different choices.
Yep, we agree exactly. I just don't like "return i", and would rather do "return i is True" or something.
What Wi-Fi Would Look Like As a Physical Object
I don't get it. What's wrong with profiling?
College student expelled for discovering network security flaw
A rather good write-up, though I'm not convinced the author's points justify the "Megabad" in the title. The decisions made are not always the most secure, but in general appear to be reasonable given the nature of the service - i.e. that this is material meant to be shared not just backed up.
> After a couple of paragraphs brainwashing you about how good functional programming is, you finally get to some code.

Whenever I see a page about a new programming language I usually skip all the marketing speech at first and look for a code fragment to examine first. After that I'll start reading the actual text.
Or perhaps they just fake it better.
"disagree with him because of hypocrisy and finger-pointing"

Neither of those are ways to disagree with someone's words. That's the Ad Hominem fallacy. What you may mean is that you dislike the fact that I'm saying them, or the way that I'm saying them, or the color of my tie, or something along those lines. Which is a perfectly valid feeling to have, but it isn't disagreement and Hacker News has specific guidelines discouraging incivility as well as a long-standing antipathy to Ad Hominem abuse.
NASA Eyes 'Hedgehog' Invasion of Mars Moon Phobos
soundcloud is not claiming to be 'safe', and if you are hosting sound files on a public website with any illusion that they are not going to wind up with whoever wants them you're mistaken. even if the method detailed in this article did not work, you could still just record the output of your soundcard.
How to launch your product? Feedback from OpenERP 7
A good practice there is to do tricky DELETE/UPDATE inside a transaction. In e.g. Postgres, executing DELETE/UDPATE tells you number of affected rows, so if you see 1243 rows were updated rather than 1 as you expected, you can ROLLBACK.
Gym’s smart floor uses LED lights for changeable boundary lines
You need to add new features to survive. Look at Writely before and what Google docs is now. There's been a lot of new improvement, especially in google spreadsheets.

I didn't mean it was "new functionality" every week like spam, but over time. That's the beauty of Labs for gmail.

What apps do you see that don't introduce new functionality to users over time that is successful?
I guess the web isn't technology...