skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most of the problem was lack of trust of women making allegations, not undue deference for Savile.

Other problems include lack of communication between local police forces, so a number of allegations from women in different areas don't pile up in one report.

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21756150)

It's easy to say that these are because of deference to Savile, but let's not forget that many young women told police that they were being raped and forced to work as prostitutes and those women were also dismissed and ignored, and their attackers were not famous.
Yeah typically collusion is explicitly not allowed when considering the games.
One difficulty with these discussions it that there is no standard, objective definition of readability. Without one, it’s hard to debate statements like the title of this thread, “Readability can mislead”.

After thinking about this a lot, I settled on a personal definition of “ease of extracting useful information from the code”. This recognises some principles I’ve found to be important when discussing readability and how to improve it. For example, different knowledge will be useful depending on what you’re trying to achieve and what you already know, so code may be more readable for some purposes than others. Similarly, information may be relatively easy to extract for someone with one background or set of tools but harder for someone else to obtain under different circumstances. This means readability is always a balancing act, and something that makes code more readable for one purpose or reader may actually harm the readability in another context.

This explains a lot of subjective preferences based on the reader’s background. For example, in the Good for Whom? article by Daniel Lyons[1] that was cited by the article we’re discussing, there is a question of whether a one-line regular expression does anything to aid readability, and whether a much more verbose Smalltalk-style implementation of the same logic is more readable. I believe the most important thing to recognise in that debate is that the readability of the regex version is dramatically different depending on whether the reader understands regex syntax. If so, it is probably much easier to read than the long form version, but if not, it's just executable line noise. Therefore whether it is helpful to employ a regex for that task depends a lot on who you expect to be reading the code later and what assumptions you are willing to make about their skills and knowledge. A similar dilemma is almost inevitable when choosing almost any significant coding standard.

[1] http://www.storytotell.org/essays/good-for-whom.html
See that: yet another issue with characters in filenames/directory names with aren't printable ASCII characters.

This kind of stuff is precisely the reason why we make sure that every filename we create is only using a subset of ASCII (and no space of course). In our source code, in our builds, in the desktop app we're serving, etc.

Unicode characters entered by users should go in one place: the DB.

I smiled the other day when I read about the build script for Chromium: it clearly specificied that the source directory must not contain any space in its name.

Of course it shouldn't. That's experience.
You're looking at this from an engineer's perspective. Yeah, great, we can build Cassandra -- who cares? Google papers have tons of performance benchmarks -- how is it scientific if none of those are reproducible?

Am I defending academics who can't or won't turn over all their data? No, of course not, but most of them don't try to pretend you can do science and still be proprietary.

P.S. I'm not talking about all companies. Intel and MSR turn over a bunch of stuff. I'm talking specifically about Google.
>One could adopt some kind of event-based system in scala or clojure, but Erlang and Go are alike in being the lone runtimes where running millions and millions of very small messaging processes is AOK no problem for the runtime

Is that really the case? Scala's Akka actor library seems like it would qualify just fine: http://letitcrash.com/post/20397701710/50-million-messages-p...
Well, if you got a decent hoster, you can get SSH access (or "shell access", it's the same term). Then you can edit on the linux commandline using e.g. editors like vi, joe, emacs or nano.

Bonus point is that you will earn experience in Linux shell usage.

Also, leave your fingers off Python for web. It sucks already enough for commandline, and it's a nightmare for web stuff. Use PHP if you want to do web development, just as everyone other does (okay, Java and ASP.net exist, too, but these are enterprise-level solutions, not available at usual hosters).
"Deceased respondents no longer pose a risk," the letter said.

- classic! Yes, science stops when the scientist is dead, says the US government ...
You'll probably have to contact him (or the graduate student who did the work, realistically), but if you do you'll probably get it.
I have both Hacker and Hacker II and they weren't that exciting to play. It's pretty disappointing because we played a lot of Illuminati in college. It's the Illuminati game play with a lot of additional pieces and rules scattered on top, all wrapped with a mostly sensationalized Hollywood-style hacker theme.

The work that got Steve Jackson Games raided became GURPS Cyberpunk. I think I got my copy signed by Bruce Sterling when I saw him speak on his tour for "The Hacker Crackdown".

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Crackdown
> impossible to maintain expert level skills in more than one or two language + library environments

And the crappier your language and libraries, the more time it takes to be an "expert."
The real problem is that HN needs a mascot... How about a little alien?
Or be hosted with a company that has a sustainable business model from the get-go.
Well, most don't. But shared among two or three. :)
Horizontal page scrolling crashes my Firefox :(
I just didn't get that one is supposed to drop a file from the computer - you might clarify the wording a bit.
Funny that you should post this, and the next day on the front page of Hacker News an article talking about Ruby taking 30 servers, each of which running at 50% CPU utilization -- and still Rails would go to 100% utilization and crash the cluster when usage spiked -- while Go could run on a single server without even seemingly using CPU (5% was typical). [1] That's greater than a 40x speed improvement -- closer to 300x, going from 5% on one to 50% on 30.

>We have come to understand that developer time is vastly more valuable than computing resources

I get that, but still, 30 servers is pretty expensive. Having a full time engineer just to manage the cluster and write load balancing code is pretty expensive. Having down time because of a usage spike is pretty expensive. I'd rather pay for the smarter dev team myself, but I'm an engineer, so I'm biased.

Though fundamentally I wasn't talking about servers above. I was talking about desktops, and mostly Windows desktops. And having to install Python because that's what one developer prefers, and .NET because of another preference, and Perl because of a third, and Ruby because of a fourth, and Java because of a fifth...where does it end?

My own "scripting language" of choice is Lua. It's TINY, it's faster than all of the above (except, under some circumstances, Java -- but give Mike Pall another year or two and I bet LuaJIT will be beating Java in all the benchmarks instead of just many of them), and using it gives developers that productivity boost you're rightly saying is important.

And if you need more speed than Lua can give you, Go is a good option, if it comes to that. But as you point out, not every app needs every cycle.

[1] http://blog.iron.io/2013/03/how-we-went-from-30-servers-to-2...
> As many will attest, it’s easy to live life without an ordered map in Python, but the moment you need one Python starts to suck really fucking hard. This should be built into the language somehow.

OrderedDict [0] was added with Python 3.1, and there's an equivalent (pure Python) class provided in the docs for backwards compatibility. Just in case the author reads this, it would make the code nicer to implement the appropriate "magic" method names that make it act like built-in containers [1].

0: http://docs.python.org/3.3/library/collections.html?highligh...

1: http://docs.python.org/3.3/reference/datamodel.html#emulatin...
Xero: Senior Android Developer

Wellington, New Zealand

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We're looking for an Android Developer to bring the Xero experience to Android devices. You'll be fanatical about user experience, knowledgable about the Android platform and committed to creating great Android applications.

We're looking for someone to join our team in our Wellington office, so if you're looking for an opportunity to relocate to New Zealand and embark on a grand adventure on the other side of the world, this is it.

You'll be the first hire into our Android team and will lead that team as we bring on more staff and our needs grow.

For more details and to apply:
http://www.xero.com/about/careers/job/1232743

Happy to take questions at matt2[at]xero[dot]com.
Also, there wasn't an incentive to defect, since they get maximum value by cooperating.
Thanks for the constructive suggestion - I don't have much invested in this particular little debate so I'm not sure I'll take the time to do that, but it's definitely a good idea.

I will say that in my opinion, the alternative in the reply above this (which I can't reply to) looks fairly nice, is clearer, and not even a little bit harder to follow. But I'll allow that as a very casual Haskell programmer, my opinions about Haskell are probably not particularly valid.
Why is it so important to save all this information? Seems like projects like archive are just contributing to more information clutter. We generate more information every single day, what makes a few million peoples blog posts so damn important? We can't just keep saving shit forever, though the progression of technology I guess makes it easier and easier, but eventually we're going to hit a limit.
Sure, but it's still polite to observe robots.txt restrictions (or whatever analogous mechanism could work here)
Aww you were so close...

*Y Cottonator
For what it's worth, I was thinking the same thing. I don't feel this way about Google hiring programmers in general, but I think at this point they've hired some significant double-digit percentage of the world-class machine learning professors in the world, and as I understand it those people don't publish (many) papers anymore.
Your inability to understand their clear description of a basic cascading failure mode under load speaks poorly of your actual knowledge and experience. Given that, I have to take everything else that you say with a large helping of salt.
Google snaps up object recognition startup DNNresearch
The export feature would be really awesome if it could handle larger documents!

Also, sharing a document with someone else seems to throw an exception when they try to sign in...
Customized Google Maps Using Google Map API V3
Agreed. However, you can grind out a book with more certainty than you can create a prominent open-source repo.
Absolutely, but not relatively. It's as-good-as-everyone vs better-than-everyone.
It would be interesting to see Rust used in Android in some of the parts that are now C or C++.
RPS is generally credible.
ok ,mea culpa. the research part of microsoft is pretty decent.. even i have already stop by and read some of those good papers.. :)

but the point i was made was about open culture.. and since google publish much more(and heavy weight) open source software than microsoft i tend to think they are ahead in the curve at least in that matter..

but with the current trends of online education model our academic institutions are in threat, at least the classic model we used to know.. so this make even more dangerous if corporations are the only safe place to big minds to continue their work..

so while companies are getting more open.. in this hypothetical future.. i think this is not enough.

Companies by their own standards dont have to think about the society greater good. they can, but they dont have to.. contrary to what academia and republics were created for
OrderedDict tracks insertion order, not key order. Additionally it is not possible to start iteration from an arbitrary key.

The method and variable names here mostly reuse the names from the original skip lists paper, although in a real generic implementation, reusing the mapping protocol would be a nice touch. I posted this more due to the ridiculous simplicity of implementation: skip lists themselves are far more worthy of note than my horrid example code.
New Dropbox desktop client released: new menu, notifications, and easier sharing
African Drummers Invented an Internet
Wrong and you know it. Go does not have generics so you have to use void* (interface{}) and casting. It ends up being about an order of magnitude uglier and more verbose. Which is why map, fold, etc don't exist in Go.

You go fanatics are incorrigible.
Neanderthal large eyes 'caused their demise'
> Use PHP if you want to do web development, just as everyone other does ...

I can't believe you just recommended PHP to a newbie. This is like recommending Fortran to someone asking about modern scientific analysis software.

In any case, the OP should probably start by learning static HTML design, before moving on to various automation methods. But PHP -- wow. It's like recommending BASIC instruction to a programming student.
It is comparable to the difference between digital cameras and film cameras. I see results sooner.

Sure, I can take good film pictures if I know the lighting conditions, shutter settings, business about f-stops but being able to see how you failed sooner is a big plus.
The common lament about Google being just a place that optimizes ad clicks is overused, and lazy thinking.

I don't even think it's a conclusion that's the result of actual thought anymore, just reverb.

Google is a big company. It would not even be worth it or effective to have every single engineer dedicated to this ad click business. There's a team for that, and there are lots of other teams, for lots of other interesting things. Many of them do serious intellectual research.

My impression of Google's leadership, employees, and choice of projects often leads me to believe that they sell ads so they can continue making really cool stuff - not that they try to come up with cool stuff so that they can sell ads.

I also disagree with the whole premise that goal-oriented or profit-driven intellectual study is in some way less pure, less worthy, less boundary-pushing, or more short-sighted than purely academic study. How does the initial incentive for a thought affect whether or not the conclusions from that thinking are new knowledge about our universe? It doesn't.

As long as he's not sacrificing what he does to become a paper pusher, which he isn't doing, I don't see how it's different. And I think ultimately the closer his study is to being manifested in real things that we use, the faster his knowledge will be refined towards the path of truth, and the faster humanity will actually learn and benefit.
oh, yes, I didn't even think about this. I've wanted to learn vi for a while now, too! Thanks!

So, my plan is to try and weild PHP, mySQL, CSS, HTML and, (ugh) some Javascript. Does this seem like a good goal to shoot for?
Have a look for your self:

http://research.google.com/pubs/MachineLearning.html
Not to say that there isn't bureaucracy in a company their size, but the launch of a game this size is a really big deal. There's a tremendous of PR, and they're getting scathed. Polygon downgraded their review of 9.5 down to 4.0 because of the server issues. I think if they could cut a decent size check to fix the issues, they would. The problem is likely in engineering, like a database that isn't scaling.
At first it was open internationally but then they ran into legal issues because every country has different regulations and record labels, etc. I don't know all the details, but to avoid it, they shut out international traffic. Countries like Japan that sprang on to Turntable couldn't use it anymore.
SSDs are great. But I have exactly one hard drive bay in my laptop, and it currently holds >580Gb of data. Some of that is bloat, but MOST of it is real data; I have lots of raw video, source art for games, music, and many folders of compiled object files. I'm a game developer, so I use a lot of hard drive.

From what I've read, an SSD has an expected life of about 1-2 years. Aside from not being able to afford $2500 JUST for an SSD to hold my data [1], I can't fathom paying that much every 1-2 years as the drives die. Not to mention downtime and potential lost data (between the back-up and the failure).

I'd love to have an SSD. In a year or two, I probably will, as the costs will likely drop.

But until then, yes, the performance has objectively dropped.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/OCZ-Technology-2-5-Inch-Performance-OC...
Posterous...meet oblivion. Have a nice eternity.
Choice quote from article: "So the drum languages seem to put importance on uniquely identifying individuals, something that our Internet is just starting to figure out. (See ORCID.) Reputation of individuals was important; I wonder if creators of particularly compelling drum poems were identified by custom, as we're starting to learn how to do with Attribution licenses."
Telepresence robots
Go as of today doesn't have too many libraries available. So there is really nothing to learn besides the language itself.
Spotify Soundrop
http://research.google.com/pubs/ArtificialIntelligenceandMac...
Glad to see this. I use Trello every day with the company I work for. A great tool for managing day to day tasks and projects.
One can argue that not everyone has an i7, and offloading work to the server enables it to run on weaker computers.
Just no. Some abstractions are light years faster than not having them. To the point that this is a silly statement. Consider the elementary abstraction of an array. The slightly less elementary one of a map.

More close to heart, the abstraction that source control gives you. Imagine not having git (or whatever tool) and thinking you will compare this weeks code with what was available last week. Now just do the same based on the changes introduced by a single developer. Trivial with the abstraction of source control. Hella tough without.

So, no, just because there are layers of abstractions does not automatically mean things are going to be slow.

All of that said, I can see and ultimately agree with your point. Excessive abstraction can be bad. Unfortunately, I think the jury is out on where the hell that line is. (Likely they are distracted with other pointless questions while others are out solving problems.)
Hah, this was my impression of PHP. I am fine with static HTML design, I get CSS, tables, and I've set up a bootstrap site or two. I don't know anything about interacting with a database, which (I think) is where I need to go next.
Underwater networking
Memory "probably contributed to it"? You don't even know why the old version was slow but you want to credit golang with making it fast? Hype much? The lack of critical thinking here on Hacker News is astounding.
i have a thing about mis-spelt units - it's a kWh /nitpick

also, did you mean 0.10 $/kWh ?
I think Electrostatic engines will be a huge leap forward for jet engine travel.
All Krugman All the Time
or sink the wellhead processing unit to the sea floor...
This is fundamentally untrue. The most charitable reading I can give you is: /b/ has more, and more diligent, mods.
I used CreateSpace (Amazon). I discuss it a bit here: http://bitmason.blogspot.com/2013/02/decisions-i-made-when-p... I wanted a "regular" book including a printed version--it's effectively supporting material for my day job and I needed a physical, as well as an electronic, version. It was all a bit of a learning process but I'm happy with the result. And Amazon's a good platform to be on.

Leanpub's an interesting-looking concept but I'm not especially sold on the value. Why would someone want to buy an unfinished manuscript? If you want to flesh out some ideas, that's probably better done through discussion forums and blog posts before assembling into a book.
I think there is a lot more to this. Yes, better naming can help at times but when a mathematician is looking at math they are seeing structure. It is a different mode of perception than reading a program as a narrative.

It's not better or worse, it's just different.
What he meant to say was "widely recognizable".
if people are skimming this thread, the link above is quite entertaining. a nice example of how much care is needed to thwart timing attacks.
Another problem in the airline industry is pricing stability. current prices have been climbing over the last few years and pricing has always been confusing. I think there are several possible algorithm and economic models that could be leveraged to solve pricing on the fuel side, and on the consumer ticket side.

Stable prices means that consumers and airlines can both plan better.

For consumers, it means confidence in buying a ticket.

For airlines, it means predictable revenue, and costs, which should add to the market cap of the companies.
Haha, only the people working on the site have 10000 invites (I'm assuming you're going off the screenshots?). And we're only "open-ish" for the first few days.
You probably stopped at the half of my comment, because I did write Go had advantages (over the likes of ruby&friends anyway).

But it's the wrong way to think about it, that's why it's in the second half of the comment. Else, people will just use go because they're told it's the cool kid on the block. WRONG way of thinking.

That is all :)
Cheers, looking forward to it!
One can also argue that not everyone has google fiber, and running locally enables it to run when internet access is slow or unreliable
It's a good time to be disrupting commercial real estate.  Join us
Google is matching your query against a humongous database. In Maxis' case, the only relevant data is some aggregate data from the other cities in your region.
This implementation may look ghastly at first sight, however it's worth note that:

* The node pointer list is reused for the node structure to save memory, otherwise a minimum of 72 bytes is wasted per node on CPython, in addition to malloc slack for 2 allocations (the list object itself, and the array of pointers). As it stands, CPython burns about 100 bytes per record, so 'clean' code here would potentially double the memory requirements in addition to added runtime cost.

* Numeric, rather than symbolic indexing wins 5k lookups/second on CPython. It's debatable whether using speed hacks like "search(key, IDX_PREV=IDX_PREV, IDX_NEXT=IDX_NEXT)" is uglier than the bare numbers themselves. Using accessor functions to pretty the code also costs quite a lot.
Simplicity In Scala Design
Find Tower for iOS – Locate all the cell phone GSM towers near you
I wish Go has named arguments like Python and Scala. Reading and debugging code could be so much simpler.
You're right. Turntable isn't dead and I'll admit to using the word, "killed", somewhat superfluously but there's no denying it's decline and failure to retain a majority of its users.
Same issue (3 hours later) but now I can't even load the page to logout :/