skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this argument, with respect, falls into the fallacy of we've got by so far so we always will.

Look at the population crunch arguments - saved by the Green Revolution right? Well that was just pouring fossil fuels on fields... we've burned through a lot of those and topsoil since. The sustainable carrying capacity of the planet is nothing like 7 billion by most sensible studies I've seen.

95% of the world's food production is dependent on fossil fuel inputs. As we pass peak flow - and we are clearly at peak oil flow rates right now (I feel confident saying as someone who worked in the oil industry and studies this stuff) pressures on those inputs will rise.

We used to mine 70% ores we now mine 5% ores of many key metals. We can do this, it's just more energy intensive. But eventually we've used all of the easy to access natural state resources and we are in a very different world.

Smarts don't replace atoms. Nor do they replace joules.

Most of the alternatives that folks have in the backs of their minds as "don't worry we have X" are net energy return on energy investment negative.

Then don't get me started on NPK inputs - cast an eye over Potash or Phosphate stocks recently? Nope most people haven't. But there's a reason the Russians are using their oil wealth to corner the market there.

Just because we have overcome serious problems before doesn't mean we always must. After the Great Depression we had vast stores of oil and most of these resources were barely touched. We don't have that get-out-of-jail-free card again. Just more mouths to feed and a world where climate change is increasing conflict and dislocation of populations.

Economic growth which gives us confidence in buying our way out of problems (which is a very utopian view given that you cannee change the laws of Physics as a great Scotsman once said) is not a given either. For all the economic theories out there, none have been tested in sustained periods of declining resource availability. Indeed nothing correlates more closely with economic growth than energy resource access - it's almost one to one if you plot them together over the centuries. So it's highly likely there's a causal relationship there that will have negative consequences as we slide down the other side of the energy resource curve.
Not a prof, sadly - last year of my PhD, though! Thanks for the additional info on your peers.

I don't know what the undergraduate pay is like for 20-somethings. All of my friends (and wife) are > 30 and were experienced developers before entering the field. Most of them have bases above 200, but _all_ have total comps well over 200.

I'd be surprised if you make more at Google Chicago than at, say, Getco or Citadel as a new college hire developer. I'll ask around.

Certainly, though, if you accept with one of the butcher shops you should not be surprised to be treated like raw meat. The last time my wife was transitioning, she certainly experienced some offers that were just insulting. But these were also places just barely scraping by, so it shouldn't be a big surprise.

Of course, many of the top shops won't even hire new college grads in CS. They don't have or want to build the infrastructure required to take someone from barely pulling together a few thousands of lines of code to writing realtime software.
So - I've always wondered, but never looked into this..

Why does dial-up always sound the same? That clip is exactly how I remember my modems sounding!

Edit: Hah, Scroll down Kiall, scroll down.
C++ is absolutely not context-free. It is probably in fact the worst and is "undecidable".
http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/defective.html#defect-2
Compiler writers have to use heuristics to sort out the all the ambiguities and cross their fingers they are correct.

Lua might be context-free. I forgot how to do rigorous proofs. But is one of the cleanest and most elegant languages ever made. See the complete (tiny) syntax of Lua in extended BNF at the very bottom of the manual.
http://www.lua.org/manual/5.2/manual.html
University of Illinois Disconnects Pirating Students, Staffer Asked To Leave
"Gittip is designed for long-term, sustainable funding, and only supports recurring gifts at this time."

Did I miss some great reason why they don't do once off tips? Sometimes you just want to throw 10 bucks at a person and not worry about recurring transaction. I imagine allowing this would increase overall tips due to cheap folk like me.
This company here (small.. 40-50 git users) are using GitExtensions, Gitorious - and exclusively ssh for git.

So while I don't claim to be representative, for us that means that this announcement is good news, but not usable so far.
Oh they missed a great opertunity to sell rebranded hardware and move there enterprise software onto linux. That would of opened up a more rubust and profitable area they ended up giving away selling lots of copies of Microsofts exchange for others.

They then overly focused upon the consumer market at a neglect of the business area, which was the core. The upshot is they ended up alienating a lot of influential business types and that filtered down into lots of bad words about them and a share price reflected it as in they could do no right in the end.

Now QNX was a good move, but that has been a overly slow adoption to the extent that they ended up having to release newer versions of there older OS. During this phase they lost a lot of good staff and things got messy. But we now after years laetr have the product they should of had at least a year ago.

The new OS is nice, but for many it is too little too late. They have now in some ways aliented there growing market by not having a cheap device available and no OS upgrade available for there lesser handsets. They will for all appears end up alienating there growing markets in an attemt to regain there lost business customers.

Still the same opertunities being missed and whilst I wish them luck they have yet to try and cash in on Apple and Android users via a paid for application that does there email and messaging. Some would pay for that and it could even get people thinking about there phones next time they upgrade. But that is another of many missed opertunities they just seem to let slip by. The upper managment has changed, a lot of staff have changed and with that the problem really has to be in the middle.
Show HN: Push button deployments with Arduino
Afaik both Lua and Python are context-free.
The graph is a spectrogram: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrogram

You've probably seen one before in relation to music. However, since we're dealing with computer-generated tones here, the spectrogram looks very very sparse (few overtones). You can see patterns in music as well, just not as clearly (because there's a lot more going on).

If you'd like to make your own, consider looking into GNU Octave (http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/) or possibly Scilab, both of which are free.

EDIT: I might add that Audacity can easily view the spectogram of a sound file, but if you want to manipulate the signal programatically (filters and so on; signal processing is a great subject), try the above.
It sounds like you are really questioning the usefulness of client-side JS apps in general. Certainly not every app makes sense to be a "single-page app". But if you are creating a single-page app, then why not also allow it to render on the server?

I like to think of Rendr as just another Backbone app, that happens to be able to serve HTML from the server as well.
Why do blind studies need the regulation on active placebos to be non rigorous?
Idiot-proofing is for Idiots
Upgrade to Solr 4.1 and Save Space
Agreed. I was surprised when I received an email from Heroku letting me know that a few of my apps needed to be updated after the Rails vulnerabilities were uncovered. They also named the apps that needed to be updated, which makes my job that much simpler.
Amazon Elastic Transcoder Review
The attack would be easily detectable, and lack any deniability as the use of a CNNIC cert as root is manifest. All in all, it would be a better move for an intelligence agency to take over some marginal Authority in the west and use that for dirty work.
>That's the part I think is the meat of the issue.

I agree. I think the main issue the author wants the reader to take away is that since the ingredients in placebos are not disclosed, what's to say they can't add ingredients that will skew the results? I'm not saying that this happens, but what is stopping them? They obviously have financial, and other, incentives for their drugs to succeed, so why not take that extra measure to maintain integrity in studies that use placebos?
> No! The answer is: YES THEY HAVE AN ENGINEERING PROBLEM.

How are you eliminating problems with maintaining and operating a new technology? Those wouldn't be Boeing's engineering problem.
I'm not sure if I just misunderstood the post, but wouldn't a more suitable title be "How to stop loading stylesheets and javascript files in WordPress"?

The current title makes it seem like we shouldn't load any of the those types of files at all.
JAIL.
Nice, I hadn't seen that one yet either. I love the testimonial, "Finally I can share what really happened".

By the way, I'm getting a warning about your SSL cert in Chrome. Firefox was fine though but it could be b/c of an inconsistent server configuration:

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=https%3A%2F%2...
Deja Vue in so many ways in what happened to Palm. They had a new OS and devices, they were also Canadian based.

So given that somebody will buy RIM aka Blackberry and then do an HP on them.

Hope I'm wrong, but I see a Nortels chance of it not panning out that way sadly.
Their takeaway is the same one I got, so perhaps you are reading it differently than we are? The piece I read was alarmed that a very important detail can only be found in 8% of the studies they examined and wondered what's up with that.
I think that amphetamine has been used as a placebo for LSD in some studies. I've also heard of researchers using threshold doses of the psychedelic as the active placebo. This is probably the best option most of the time.
Sustainability is a core design goal for Gittip. I want to be paying my mortgage from Gittip gifts, so it needs to be predictable and consistent. Does this limit growth? Yes. But it makes the growth we do get much more reliable. Gittip grows slowly and shrinks slowly, and that's by design. Once we have the recurring baseline well-established, I fully expect we'll mix in one-off gifts.

I added a +1 for you here:

https://github.com/zetaweb/www.gittip.com/issues/5
incidence of side effects can frequently be judged by comparing to incidence rates in the general population. This is indeed how Phase I trials are done to gauge the safety of the molecule and decide what side effects need to be emulated by the placebo in later clinical trials.
Dropbox now guaranteed success after Ballmer dismisses it as a "little startup"
Yeah, that one is great. If I hadn't built https://onetimesecret.com/ that's the one I'd use.
> "memory management isn't an issue for developers like it is on Android or even iOS."

Memory Management is a issue on android development? Ive been dev'ing for android for > 2 years and i have never had a memory management issue. Not saying there isnt one, but i would imagine you would have to be doing something wrong for it to be an issue.

> " Native development is not as demanding as Android"

Could you elaborate on what you mean by "demanding"? The vast majority of android apps happily spend there entire lives never touching native code...
Goodbye Web Analytics, Hello Customer Analytics
Who are you arguing with? Surely not me. But the case you're making isn't the case the blog post made. The blog post suggests, with varying levels of overtness, that there is something shady about active placebos.
Yes yes, I know I have to start a blog...
Yeah, I don't enjoy the instant search experience and have used it on multiple laptops and desktops.
Actually, you do know -- but only if you read my posts and related discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4971002

We're going to add this as a FAQ on the site with the next rev.
That "you need to think the whole process through" is exactly my point. In my experience, administrative overhead is rarely given this kind of consideration, and it results in a lot of wasted effort and upset users - like shunting a bunch of cars around just to even out toilet spacing, when it's simpler to put a toilet in every car and be done with it (especially since the story tells us that the shunting yard is already heavily loaded).

Sometimes this lack of end-to-end attention to a process results in serious mishaps. Let me give you a concrete example - thin provisioning in SANs. It can help you efficiently use your storage, but if no one on staff has time to keep a watchful eye on storage utilization growth rates, you can get into a situation where the SAN fails in a way that's very difficult to fix. If hiring isn't possible and you lack the resources to automate storage monitoring, it's probably better to switch to thick provisioning, even though on paper it's a less efficient use of the SAN. I'd argue that an opaque LUN that goes down because it can't expand is harder to recover than a file system that's full.

Change isn't only good, it's critical to continued success. That said, too many people optimize a process or service prematurely, without a deep understanding of the process or service. This, I think, is why Dijkstra describes how managers get more and more annoyed as the story progresses.
Signing gems should be mandatory
Study on data sharing leads to PLOS ONE retraction
PyCon Poster Selections Announced
As a (now former) long time Window developer, and even though people like to bash on it, I still think VS (>2003) is the best god damn IDE I've ever used.

And with .NET it leaves everyone in the dust, IMHO.
How do you market to developers, the most skeptical audience?
Very cool. Just gave it a test-drive with my company's domain. It seems visually spectacular and data-rich. Most importantly, the trends feature is logically organized with quick renderings of charts/textual data as needed.

Great work. Might just talk management into signing up for out other domains too!
Why aren't gems protected by a trust chain all the way up like Debian does? Gems aren't even required to be cryptographically signed by the developer and from what I can tell are just thrown over http without any authentication. This seems terrible.
The best analogy I've seen is this:

html5 audio : web audio api :: html image : html5 canvas
What they should do next: A developer-friendly command prompt/terminal
Every Idea product I've used, with the exception of Rubymine 3.0, has been top notch. PHPStorm, ReSharper and IntelliJ are great. Some times there are benefits to having a small closed source, private paid team of professionals writing software. Some times it's beneficial to opening it up to the whole world and saying "what do you want to see added?"
Everyone regards Carmen Ortiz as this heartless evil witch, and this post is more or less defending her.

I was expecting more of a response from the community over the course of almost an hour.
Vinepeek - Real-time Vine viewing. Interesting.
Absent from the story is any mention of cost-benefit analysis. I'd agree with the unnamed director's decision to eliminate every other toilet if there was evidence that, in the long run, it actually did cost the railroad less.
Here's the part I don't get:

IP addresses, file ownership and payment info are stored unencrypted (http://bit.ly/VswkJi). If someone or something is advertising they have a trove of copyrighted material, the standard procedure for law enforcement is to subpoena the cloud provider for the IP of the user, then the ISP for the subscriber's physical name/address. When they confiscate their computer they'll find the data on there. What is to stop this from happening with Mega? Do they not have to respond to these subpoenas in New Zealand? What if CP is involved - will they respond then, even if not compelled by the law?

I don't understand how end-to-end encryption protects illegal file sharers if the file ownership information is stored unencrypted. I understand Mega's value prop is encryption, NOT illegal sharing, but my question remains.
Steve Ballmer calls Dropbox ‘a fine little startup’
Met these guys at Angelhack, cool guys with great tech. Go them!
For a mathematician, the problem would be much more interesting if it began "consider a train of infinite length in n dimensions", laid out requirements for spacing of m different amenities contained in disjoint cars, and ended with theorems about optimal construction of minimum-sized tiles.
Ah ok, they have to do the file handling in javascript for the decryption? I hadn't thought about that. Thank you for the link!
"I don't think any commonly used language has a truly context-free grammar"

It's a matter of semantics. (doubly so)

These errors that you describe during compilation are defined by what? Not by the syntax (at least not in r5rs Scheme [1]) but instead by the semantics. Conflating the two would, of course, result in the impression of non-context-free language syntaxes because if we require the syntax to also be the semantics of the language then the syntax must be able to evaluate the program i.e. the syntax must describe a turing machine.

I think the confusion is compilation. Compilation is a series of evaluation steps taken before complete evaluation.

All the errors (as they exist in Scheme) that you describe are DEFINED by the semantics of r5rs Scheme. For example, the semantics of variable reference are:

E[[I]] = λρκ . hold (lookup ρ I)
(single(λ . = undefined → wrong “undefined variable”, send κ)) [r5rs, Section 7.2.3]

Which basically says, if the variable has been bound, then use its value to continue the evaluation. If it is unbound, then stop evaluating and signal the error "undefined variable".

====

"That's not exactly true - one can rewrite (normalize) a context-free grammar into this form, but CFGs are often written in an "unnormalized" form which has multiple nonterminal symbols, because it tends to be clearer to read in many cases."

I think you misunderstand what the OP is stating. OP refers to the left hand sides:

E -> E + E
| E * E

Certainly the left hand side in a CFG normally has a single non-terminal. I suppose you could write a grammar with the left hand sides containing multiple non-terminal symbols and then, if it turns out the grammar you wrote is in fact context-free, you could re-write it in the above form, but does anyone actually do this?

[1] http://www.schemers.org/Documents/Standards/R5RS/HTML/r5rs-Z...
Ironic. I doubt Visual Studio could even compile the Git source code because of their 20 years obsolete C compiler which is two standards behind (C99, C11). I doubt the Git developers feel hamstrung to support stupid compilers.
As I have said (here) before, MS is a massive company so anyone making as statement like "MS does X" is almost assuredly wrong.

Devdiv, to my knowledge, as a whole (VS, CLR, etc..) uses TFS. The fork of Perforce the original commentor is talking about is probably Source Depot. When I started at Microsoft we (VS) were still using Source Depot. As I understand it the primary reason was because we had been using it forever (okay, well back to the SLIME days) and there was a massive amount of history in there. Porting it all immediately to another source control provider was a large task. I 'fondly' remember the transition during development of VS 2010. Though to be fair the TFS team was great aboout finding/fixing issues exposed by suddenly onboarding the entire VS team and our possibly 'interesting' source control requirements. I believe Windows still uses Source Depot, likely for similar reasons (the amount of history they have in SD makes the devdiv history seem like a tiny blip).

As for merging problems, I don't know. We routinely merge huge branches with hundreds of thousands of files, including many project files, other XML config files, etc.. and I don't recall many 'insane merging problems' (just your garden variety merging problems that occur with that many files). Then again I am not intimately involved in the merges (other than for occasional fire-drills on files I may have modified). I suppose it also depends on what the changes were on both side of the merge.
What browser are you using? No issue for me in Chrome.
Blockcreate (prototype graphical content creation)
Baltimore, not too far away, is quite popping as well -- in fact there's quite a bit of sharing between the Philly, Baltimore, and DC communities. Check out the maps at http://foster.ly/map and http://map.baltimoretech.net/

And, TechBreakfast is coming to Philadelphia soon! This means a link between the "Lower Acela Corridor" tech regions - check it out at http://www.meetup.com/techbreakfast
Organizations and publications often have to receive documents from outside people for many reasons. Magazines accept article submissions from freelance writers. Academic journals receive papers from scientists. Companies receive resumes from jobseekers.

These documents need to be reviewed by the organization and then decisions need to be made - should the article be published? Should we interview the candidate?

Submittable makes it easier for the outside people to send the documents, and makes it easier for the organization to receive, review and decide on the documents.
Does anyone know a good implementation in Ruby?
Debian and Ubuntu solve this problem by having an archive signing key that is regularly rolled over and requires multiple people to re-assemble. The entire archive is cryptographically signed by this archive signing key, and each of the individual pacakges that are made up of that archive have been signed by the keys of the people who have been approved to be part of the keyring. This provides a cryptographic verification model that goes all the way up allowing you to verify each package comes from the right place. This would be a huge improvement over what there is now.

No, it doesn't solve every problem in the universe, but let us use this opportunity to improve the infrastructure.
I don't want to derail, but this this this this this. Anyone who tried to be Jobs 2.0 would fail in this position, and Cook seems smart enough to recognize that. Apple will be different under Cook, and that's a much more hopeful sign than Cook (or anyone else) putting on a black turtleneck.
how you manage ______ is how you beat your competition.

Thanks for the backhanded compliment, but no, how you manage hidden 'soft' costs is how you beat your competition.

Extending that to be "value x" is simply a race to the bottom. Measuring (and reducing) costs that other people also have but don't realize is the kicker.

For example: Understanding the cost difference between client acquisition and client turnover. Everyone focuses on growth, but in reality it's often cheaper to retain a client - even if you do things like give your product away - than it is to lose them and add a new one. (Which can often looks better on the surface).

Another one: Firing bad customers. Telling a customer that pays you a large sum that you aren't interested in the relationship anymore looks bad on your bottom line. Recognizing that you were actually putting 120% more money into servicing them than they were paying (or even worse, recognizing that those services are out of your preferred scope) is what puts you ahead of the game overall. You don't see that on any report though, at least not right away.
Music and Productivity
Rest assured, there are tens of thousands of people at Microsoft using TFS -- including nearly everyone in the Server and Tools division which produces Visual Studio and TFS.
Thx a lot !
I'm talking about the quote you used on your comment. That quote by itself does not sound particularly outrageous or ignorant.

You should have chosen a different line to illustrate how shady the author thinks active placebos are.