skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Humans will always figure out a way to combine the resources they have to generate additional value. It doesn't matter if these resources are wood, sand, oil, water, steel or software.

In the example given above, the owner of the business buying more automation is actually an explicit example of an enterpreneur REINVESTING. A manual job is being traded by a specialized job. Demand for specialized jobs is being created. I fail to understand where on earth that would be a bad thing.

When resources are reallocated, some people lose their jobs on the way, that's just the way life is. A responsible individual doesn't take a job for granted and saves so that he or she can go through bad times.

By visiting a third world country it is very easy to observe the lack of automation employed by its society. Yet, quality of life is ridiculous. Can you explain why?
Are standalone applications becoming obsolete?
I was wondering if standalone applications were becoming/are obsolete to web applications. The reason I wanted to know this was that I know a decent bit on how to develop standalone projects (primarily in Java) but am having a hard time learning Web Application Development. I just wanted to know if there is still use in me working on my standalone applications or if I should just push through the learning curve of web development. I could do either option, but I would rather stay with developing standalone applications. However, I don't want to focus on a dying field and get left completely behind.
I'd rather support Firefox, to be honest. I still like a lot of what Google does, fwiw.
Addicted to work
How naive is this reply.

An idea can be smart all day, if the market doesn't need it - it's just an idea. It will never be a successful product.

It's that simple.

Turns out, the hard thing...is not coming up with "ideas"...it is building successful products.
Immutable data structures are harder to implement yourself, not to reason about.

Anyone who has spend a few days with Clojure realize how much more easier it is to reason about them and to work with them.

Immutable data structures combined the software transactional memory that Clojure provides are a godsend.

In a lot of case they're also much faster then the good old copy-on-write and because they're immutable you have lockless concurrency. This is huge.

But it gets better: if you really find a performance bottleneck due to the use of immutability, you can fallback to mutability / place-oriented-programming.
Thanks for the interested! You're of course very welcome to help out with that. I just wanted to let you know that the source for it, is available at https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/universal-tracker

You're very welcome to join up our IRC channels!
Case study of two crowdfunded science projects
New Software Developed at MIT Could Call Your Bluff
It's always been interesting to me that someone publishing a paper in computer science (especially someone working at a University) would not want to open source the code that produced those results. It's the best kind of repeatable experiment.

I recently went looking for any code published by Hinton, since I've been doing some neural network research as a hobby, but was unable to find any at all.
I think it has more to with mathematicians seeing programming as nothing more than an implementation detail. They spend their time designing an algorithm on paper, writing a paper on it and probably has a whole pile of versions sitting on his desk. They see no value in the program itself and thus they simply translate the formulas to source workout any thought of it being maintainable or even understandable.

That said, I do remember seeing mathematicians calling for a better math notation that emphasises readability and longer variable names. I'm not so sure it'll happen though. I prefer to simply avoid having them write code others have to maintain.
That is a caricature of Joel Spolsky's dog, Taco. He/She is a Husky I believe.
Higgs At Last
Postmaster at Pycon 2013
I think this is unfair to at least Microsoft Research, which as far as I know has outpublished Google by a wide margin. (Full disclosure - I'm a contractor working on F#-related stuff at MSR)
Have you seen http://www.iawriter.com/mac/ ?
HTTPS is more secure, so why isn’t the Web using it?
Chrome on Windows 7 here, renders most of them as boxes.
Contextual error reporting in Haskell
I'm missing the connection between poor API performance under Rails and the decision to do a ground-up rewrite. Was the initial performance problem due to an API problem or a platform problem? Was there any profiling of the poorly performing API server? I'd love to hear the story behind that analysis and how it impacted the tale told in TFA.

I ask all this since I've lost count of how many times I've participated in or witnessed an averted rewrite via a good dose of profiling and a few key bugfixes. I'll acknowledge that's not as fun as a clean-slate project, but vast amounts of engineering time were saved.
It's an interesting tale, and I honestly have no bias toward Ruby or Go, but the cause/effect relationship is poorly illustrated (we switched languages). We all know runtime / performance / scalability is more complex than that. I'd like to hear where the bottleneck(s) were and how Go solved them.
Spotify's Social Maneuvering
Not quite. He's saying that people who think Ruby is slow are often people who have no idea how to performance-tune it.
indeed, and the biologists are some of the harshest.
It would be interesting if during the 2003 Iraq war if Saddam had organised a retaliation instead of looting his own country. [1]

Causalities on both sides could have easily increased by a factor of 10. If the U.S. resorted to a full on genocide the situation would have escalated, possibly brining other nations (even westernised ones) into the mix. It wouldn't have been pretty.

1 http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/05/06/sprj.nilaw.ban...
Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O'Brien [video]
Poor grad students :-/

Anyway, if you are unfamiliar with his work, here's Hinton't Deep Learning Saga ;) for your enjoyment: www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlXzufEk-2E
Carter, no it is not. I know Twilio has a great API and a number of integrations, this was one of our first 3rd party integrations on our new API. Why are you so upset?
If you send a small amount of bits over the network, the amount of responses you can get is commensurately
small. So if you aren't sending a lot of bits, it would be possible to simply have a local mapping of inputs to outputs. There is a certain size the message has to have for it to be worth it to send it instead of solving the problem locally; obviously, I don't know what that size is or whether SimCity's packages where smaller than that size. But the claim of the OP isn't totally absurd.
Wow, as an end user, I think you are so wrong.

I think multi-platform development is more important than it has ever been. Since these days the data lives in the cloud anyway, I want to pick up whichever of my various devices fits the situation and get the absolute best user experience that the company can design.

Web apps still don't (and still won't in 2023) provide the very best software user experience on any platform, even the desktop. Certainly not on mobile.

When choosing among competing cloud-based services, I always award bonus points in my evaluation to services with good iOS and Android native apps. Even though I don't currently use very many apps on Android, if there is a native app for it in addition to iOS, I feel more confident that the company behind the product gets it that users need native interfaces on the platforms they care about.

I think this is a key reason, perhaps not well-understood, why services like Evernote, Trello, and others are doing so well.

E.g. my wife uses Evernote all the time on Mac and iPad, but there is no way she would use the web interface on either one. She just wouldn't use Evernote.

She may not consciously think 'I prefer services with good native apps in addition to their web interfaces', but she does. (And I suspect so do many people.)
Best of luck with this, I just don't see how it can scale successfully. And what did you need those millions in funding for? To pay the delivery wages which you can never make back?
Wifi is so much faster than most 3g connections for my phone. The only place I've seen my phones 3g connection being as 'instant' as wifi was in London. Also using 3g uses up a lot more battery than wifi. Also it could be handy for giving the pw out to others (easier than reading out a long random password. Especially if there's an error and have to read out and retype the whole password to your friend)
Good thing that's an old post..
I imagine people often use io domains because it is hard to get a good domain name as a .com. I don't think it is being done for reasons that could be considered as "overkill".
I wish more people just used Google/OAuth.

We all have Google accounts. Just use those, devs. You even get two-factor for free.
I don't think so. More than likely, English is not the author's first language. As a one-time ESL teacher I noticed that students from other cultures often used exclamation points in place of where a native English speaker would have simply used italics. That is to say, they use exclamation points to indicate emphasis rather than excitement. But who knows, maybe the author just really is excited about their topic (!).
These seem to be working now.
Note that you could make curl http://demo.telesc.pe/ work just fine with Meteor's Spiderable package, which is simply not installed for the Telescope demo.

Also, obviously the goal is that it should work properly without any package. Meteor is still young, give it time.
Seems OK to me. I don't have an iPhone myself, but I do have an app on my phone that tracks battery usage, and it would be easy to enough to test the accuracy of the charging log on the defendant's iPhone - copy the existing data, then plug and unplug it at random intervals, recording the time from some external source while doing so, and see if the stored log provides an accurate reflection of that record. Of course you'd also need to test the reliability of the defendant's charger and the integrity of the wall socket it was plugged into, but it's up to defense counsel to raise those questions. It doesn't appear from this report that the defendant has claimed the phone's charging was an unreliable, hit-and-miss affair, as might result from a damaged connector or somesuch.

‘There was a false positive in the tests,’ Mr Roberston, of the Queensland Police Service’s Electronic Evidence Examination Unit, said. Mr Robertson’s initial analysis found records of a FaceTime call on Mr Baden-Clay’s iPhone 3GS about 12.30am on April 20. ‘An iPhone 3GS isn’t capable of making FaceTime calls,’ Mr Robertson said.

‘So the whole thing is just wrong,’ Mr Davis said.

This is called a fallacy of composition - because one aspect of the forensic report was erroneous, it must all be false. Errors like this are certainly an argument for heightened scrutiny of other claims from the same source on probabilistic grounds, but they don't logically invalidate parallel claims (whereas they would invalidate claims made pursuant to the non-existent Facetime call, such as a claim about the recipient or duration of said call).

The mistake might be nothing more than a clerical error, such as inaccurately referring to a series of text messages as a Facetime call. Such mistakes should certainly be pointed out as such and the overall reliability of the forensic analysis questioned, but the mere existence of errors in the prosecution case does not invalidate the case as a whole. A miscarriage of justice would only occur where a conviction rested solely upon erroneous evidence. Often you hear people challenging their convictions by correctly pointing out flaws in the prosecution case that were not discovered at trial, but you have a keep a sense of perspective. Suppose the prosecution says A stabbed B and was taken into custody dressed in a blood-drenched green t-shirt. Defendant argues that he never owned a green t-shirt. Years later the t-shirt in question ids covered at the bottom of a crate in a police evidence room, and what do you know, it's blue! definitely a mistake, the defendant was telling the truth. So he's innocent, right? Not necessarily; if he was caught in the act of plunging the knife into the victim and there's abundant other evidence of his guilt, then the screwup over the color of the t-shirt won't set him free. At most he'll be granted a retrial and the other evidence will be sufficient to convict him again.
Yes, that's why I think the article should mention reboot.
I have ordered my t-shirt as well.
I think you might be waiting in vain. Unlike most other franchises, The Sims in particular seem to have an extraordinarily long half-life when it comes to DLC cost. I'd be rather surprised if Sim City was any different, given how well it's sold despite terrible PR work.
71. Become a graphic design company and dominate your niche the way Sun and Silicon Graphics do.

Er, that worked out great for those two.
I think Trello is vastly overrated. We have been using AgileZen http://www.agilezen.com/ and find it much more effective. Trello has some nice features, but I think that the cards get too busy very quickly. It becomes hard to scan the tasks and details get lost on the back of the card.
A guy with an axe to grind tricked some websites that either aren't focused on games or are just desperate for page views? That's not going to change my view of Rock Paper Shotgun's editorial chops.

Maybe you're right, I'll wait for the Maxis PR statement, that's where the truth will lie!

Those with an editorial reputation in the gaming press are (perhaps even uncomfortably) close to the guys in the industry they cover. They knew better than to run with that hoax, and Rob Crossly even called the hoaxer out on it (read the emails he posted to twitter if you want to see the hoxer have a hissy fit).

If RPS says they got a Maxis duder, they probably got one. One has to be suspicions of all reporting, but even though the NYTimes fucks the pooch sometimes, its not really grounds to handwave away every bit of reporting ever.
The PHP core itself suffers from a serious lack of docs, if you have some time left...
Curios what people think of this post.
It seems that in this case, the university was self-policiing; it just wouldn't listen to itself.
Everything that goes online is kind of online for as long as the Internet Archive and Library of Congress decide it should be. But I started worrying about where my account info might end up (I should really worry about that before signing up for every dang thing...), so I just found this info on deleting one's account:
http://posterous.uservoice.com/knowledgebase/articles/36544-...

Maybe you can get to it before the Wayback Machine does.
The article only mentions 2,813, not 5,000.
I think that this is an interesting example. Can I read this code? No. But, I can't read Czech or Finnish either. The person who wrote this C code relied upon idioms that they either developed themselves or are part of a culture around J. I think that with that context we would understand it.

The real question is whether there is enough discipline and regularity in the structure and idioms for someone to pick them up quickly. To me, that is the ultimate measure of comprehensibility. There are plenty of codebases with good naming that remain incomprehensible because they randomly violate the reader's expectations. I really think that internal consistency around a small number of concepts is ultimately more important to ease of learning than anything else.

Look at this C code as a DSL, but one that you just don't have a crib sheet for. And, yes, that is a problem but it is definitely not the worst problem you can have.
The future of email is... email
> I'm very sympathetic to your tech-on-tech-on-tech-on-tech hogwashery promulgated by open sourcers & vendors prosteltyzing their wonderful solutions and the other acculturation factors that permits developers approaches other than trying & seeing & exploring-

Are you studying for the SATs, or just trying to make your argument sound more compelling through the use of unnecessarily complex words?
Duh?

The top comment here is more elegant, but EA is clearly lying. Their "apology" was a joke and amounted to "Sorry we've had so much success, it's your fault for assaulting our servers."
In a way, yes. Research in industry has the advantage that you don't have to "waste" your time applying for grants in order to fund your own research group. A lot of people seem to live in an illusion that professors actually spend most of their time doing research, they are the managers of research groups more than anything else and growing those research groups is hard work and takes up close to all of your time (then add teaching to this). You are unlikely to have more than a few permanent researchers under you and these researchers will most likely be trying to leave within a few year and get a professorship of their own.

Add to this that it is an enormous pain to solve engineering problems at a university, you usually have to hand this to students, limiting what you can produce and maintain. The best I have ever seen for a group was a single full-time software engineer and this was at arguably the most prestigious university in the world. And don't get me started on the fact that there is a poor incentive to produce good software in academia, even though said software can be essential to make research possible.

I don't know Hinton in person, but I can imagine that at his age both the possibility of something new and the promise of a strong engineering and financial backing for a large group is enormously tempting (also, do they force professors into retirement or start denying them grants in Canada?). Oh, and to those pointing out the potential salary, if my knowledge of the financial situation of professors that have been on tenure is generalisable I would be surprised if personal finances would mean much at this point.
Previous HN discussion on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229076
MediaWiki uses PHP. You'll have to check with them if they need help.
Not upset at all, apologies if it came off that way. Just trying to ascertain the legitimacy of the post, thought I saw some red flags.
We're talking about EA here. You need to include the latency required to go through enough bureaucracy layers to approve the expenditure of funds on another cluster.
All these commands are very fine and handy but...

Typically they're better when you can put them in context: you should run all these regularly on fully working servers which you know are operating normally so you have "something" you can compare your results to when the shit hits the fan.
Actually I don't think it passes as an instance of Prisoner's Dilemma". Post clearly says "The students waited outside the rooms to make sure that others honored the boycott, and were poised to go in if someone had." It would be, if they couldn't control each other - for example they could have been made to give non-blank sheet of paper after exam.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/number-dead-pigs-float...
I'm sorry to hear you have had tough times recently pawnhearts.

I understand that the road to recovery might feel hard to find, but you'll maximise your chances of finding it if you can get help from others. Please contact a counsellor. Reaching out for help is a humbling but often vital part of emotional recovery. If you can please do it today or tomorrow.

One piece of advice I can give you now is that looking back at who you were and trying to recreate that isn't likely to be helpful to you. Instead, consider what you can do now to help improve things in the future. If you're not sure where to start (apart from contacting a counsellor as discussed), can always start with improving your diet, finding time to exercise and getting into good habits with your sleep pattern. It's surprising how much our mood is influenced by these things, and they are simple tasks to focus on.

Best of luck with your recovery. :-)
You don't have to transmit many bits to perform an internet search.

When you perform an internet search are you all by yourself consuming more computing resources than the i5 processor in your computer? That's unlikely, but you'd also have a difficult time replicating the functionality of Google with your CPU alone and only the storage on your own laptop.
Ugh, no, I fought my way through git first, and I didn't think hg was the same when I encountered it, I thought hg was nigh-unusable after I thrashed at it for a week.
In one particualr website, it was much simpler when I removed Compojure. I remember thinking that was pretty cool. (Seeing clearly what Compojure did and dropping it in favor of a simple hashtable).
I think you are correct here. In my view, advanced languages facilitate the development of complex abstractions in the libraries. I find this to be the case in both Haskell and Scala. But I also don't think we will ever return to the innocent days of yore. Programming is growing up after six decades of trying to figure out what 'mainstream' ought to be. I suspect that the whole business will bifurcate into easy-to-use languages and increasingly complex libraries atop more sophisticated languages to meet the challenges of scale and speed.
>Firefox needs restarting all the time when I change extensions

Because the extensions are more powerful.
As I am not a contractor or affiliated with MSR in any way, I can back you up. In my field MSR is light years ahead of Google when it comes to research impact. Google has been gaining a stronger presence and they are generally seen as more innovative. But for those of my colleagues that want an industry research job, MSR and Google are both very attractive, the old stable one and the new kid in town.
Hotmail, Outlook And SkyDrive Service Disruptions
all good <3
I have encountered quite a few APIs which are both poorly supported and not well thought out. There is a lot of emphasis placed on supporting the product but as a developer I want the API to also be a first class citizen in the support priority queue. Take a look at Salesforce APIs. The documentation is horrid, the APIs are not very good and sometimes even broken (like with Desk.com), and there is little to no support. Customers for a product get support, but what about developers who aren't customers but are essential for building out the platform for your product?

I want everyone to be like NetDNA when it comes to their API. For example they went and joined a hangout to help someone out with their API.
Which way should be “on” for a switch?
Amazon rewards the thought train of: want to buy smart book, need device to read smart book on, buy iPad. Seems enlightened to me.
> I'm serious here, if you're serving thousands of clients in a web app, why wouldn't you want parallelism?

For the same reason you don't do parallel by default for every loop you write in java. It's overkill. You can successfully argue that multiple service calls across a network need to be parallel, but this is relatively little to do with a desire to serve many clients and a lot more to do with responsiveness. (a noble goal)

> but I love the ability to iterate rapidly in the repl on a web app without having to restart my JVM

HTML and mixed services > (any combination of java technologies you can dream up to serve web apps)
Ask HN: How do I begin web development without local files?
So, for the moment and for the forseeable future, I'm stuck on an iPad and library computers. I know html and CSS relatively well, but I would like to learn how to build a fairly simple web app and database.

Am I stuck? I am primarily using cpanel to write html. It's kind of a bummer, but it works, slowly.

I've begun learning python on codeacademy, but I'm definately not at the point of writing an app with it. I don't even know how to install the thing on a server.

Sorry for the totally clueless post, but even a couple of web apps to google or something would help me out a lot! Thanks.