skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a math/stats/data person who doesn't dabble much in web optimization -- can someone explain to me what's awesome about this?

Not to belittle this nice package -- it looks like a basic stats calculator for calculating sample size confidence levels with friendly visualization, and I'm just trying to understand what's being valued on the market/industry right now. Is it because current A/B testing software doesn't provide these basic calculations? Or is it that it's well presented and visualized to a lay crowd?
Promising company, but this "fate" mindset doesn't really jive with the whole testing business models against reality thing.
Here is weev's info:
http://freeweev.github.io/

Obviously people's opinions of Weev vary, but I am fairly certain that the punishment does not fit the crime in this case.
Since Google internally uses Linux on desktop extensively, Linux Drive client is going to be released soon — they need it themselves.
You could do the "not yet open for business". That's a little rude.

The polite thing to do is say, "Great! That product isn't ready yet. We'll contact you when it is. What's your email?"

Or you could say, "Hey, we're still working on this. Could we contact you to find out what's most important to you about this product?"

Another option is just to flash an error message and redirect them back to Facebook or Google or wherever they came from. They will pretty much instantly forget about you: things are broken all the time on the web. That's kinda lame, though, so I'd generally lean for something that invites further engagement.
Sounds to me like his girlfriend got him jealous.

Seriously, if he could quit a start up and go into charity over night I don't think his bank account was hurting.

It always amusing to me how people try to pet their egos, oh hey guys I'm loaded so I'm going to quit my job and sell water to poor kids.

Please look how kind I am, everybody else is so selfish and stuck at work because they are not loaded!
> C (and C++ is even worse) has a lot of very large low hanging fruit to cull when it comes to writing languages with faster compilers.

I look forward to seeing the speed boost that C and C++ get if/when modules are available: http://llvm.org/devmtg/2012-11/Gregor-Modules.pdf
If you beat the "Atari Breakout" level the search term switches to "great white shark". Anyone know what the next levels are?
If they're trying on their own dollar, no.

But there's a difference too in how they do it. I don't think we should try to make people equal, but to make people equally represented by society.
It's also a performance boost when you're passing something non-trivial, to pass just the pointer, rather than have Go make a copy of whatever you're passing by value.
Awesome work! If only this was the way GoogleGlass worked, it'd be one of the biggest things to revolutionize the computer market in years.
Epic IRC chat from past
Why do you see a contradiction? CPAN is a central repository while vast majority of packages development now is backed by GitHub, for example.
Show HN: HelpHub lists tasks, that need to get done in open-source projects.
For some reason this runs terribly on firefox, blank in ie, chrome works great however (which you kindly point out at the end!)
Indeed. I have been very happy with Login Security Solution over the last few months.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/login-security-solution/
As a recent college-grad who'd moved to suburbia, I think the automobile-centric culture in America is what is killing intimacy. If you were not able to make close friends in college/early-life, than once you live on your own in the suburbs, it often feels impossible to get any sense of intimacy. Intimacy is built up with small moments, and when every interaction has to be a commute-laden ordeal, you lose the opportunity for spontaneous and random social interactions, making the process of building of relationships orders of magnitude slower.
Personally, it's just another ML I need to think about.

If it's JSON, I can at least pretend that my data structure stays coherent from A to B (ex: node.js webapp to js frontend).

It's also easy to look at, appearing much like a dictionary or hash + array set in many programming languages.
Yep. Which will marginally decrease the purchase of smartphones, which will marginally decrease the revenue to the french telecoms, which would force jobs to be lost, but <sarcasm>thankfully</sarcasm>, french companies aren't really allowed to fire people.

This is a classic deadweight loss. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_loss
- Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (a fun read. Pretty insightful. One of the best books about success, I think.)

- The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil (opened my mind to what the world could be)
As a no-go programmer looking through the data race detector docs (http://golang.org/doc/articles/race_detector.html), it to me shows snippets of a really ugly language with poor readability. Examples from Google's page:

var service map[string]net.Addr

When I read this it's easy to skip seeing string, aside from the fact that ] as a delimiter also looks like net.Addr was accidentally combined with the previous line.

func ParallelWrite(data []byte) chan error {
res := make(chan error, 2)
f1, err := os.Create("file1")
if err != nil {
res <- err
} else {

Here we see no parenthesizes used in if statements, yet we retain {. In skimming it's easy to miss the if in the first place. Yet everywhere else they're happy to use parenthesizes. We also see that "make" is lowercase yet a method, but os.Create and ParallelWrite has caps for a method.

There's also the fact that the array (I'm guessing) of bytes diverges from every other language to put them in front of the type which looks like crap. We see the same poor choices of delimiters as with map value types.

Then there's this

func main() {
c := make(chan bool)
m := make(map[string]string)
go func() {
m["1"] = "a" // First conflicting access.
c <- true
}()
m["2"] = "b" // Second conflicting access.
<-c
for k, v := range m {
fmt.Println(k, v)
}
}

<-c looks like its just dangling, and if this is meant to say there's some kind of stream or assignment then does it just go to /dev/null? Yet "c <- true" is also correct? I'd argue for either void <- c, _ <- c, or c.read() if wanted to support something like that.

It's also difficult to tell in the for loop if v is being assigned as "range m", or if "k, v" are a tuple resulting from "range m"

It's too bad because the goals of the language are quite nice from a CS perspective.
Gengo is amazing.
Going Home With Facebook: An Early Review
When you said Revel is "heavy" - did you mean slow, uses lots of memory/CPU/other or just has lots of custom bits to learn/use?
as far as global hegemons go, the U.S. is the most
benevolent such entity in the history of the world.

Well, that's some real comfort. You heard it here, better than the Roman and British empires!

The reference point should be absolute moral good, not third-world dictatorships. The whole "city on a hill" idea and what have you. That is what the top-level comment is getting at: Blatant hypocrisy from a state whose denizens have proudly proclaimed it to be "the greatest country on Earth" or "the greatest nation in history", some beacon of freedom and humanism, throughout its existence: The farce that is American Exceptionalism.
SQL actually first started out as SEQUEL and then was changed due to trademark issues, so calling it "sequel" is not all that incorrect.
Hai there France, its the WTO calling.

PS. I can't for the life of me understand why having TV equals culture. Honestly, IMO they should impose a tax on televisions so people buy less of them so there is LESS TV if they really want culture.
Awesome idea, because as we all know the choice of implementation language is absolutely crucial to the success of a startup.
What is this referring to? I see nothing obvious that mentions a donation or PDF.
what do you mean by "Much of the world embraced French culture" ? What parts of the culture are you referring to ? Certainly not politics...
I think it's important to distinguish between different contexts. There's a difference in what can reasonably be expected from a free service and a paid service. Some startups that get bought up and get shut down have been free services.

However, if you provide a service that people pay actual money for that's shutting down, I think you owe them some warning and options to export their data to the best of your ability. If the service is being shut down completely, you should also ideally work to find them a comparable service.

In closing, I don't begrudge people for wanting to exit out of startup for millions. For every startup you read about on TechCrunch where the owners get bought out by Yahoo or Microsoft for X million dollars, you have probably hundreds of entrepreneurs that work 80 hour weeks for months/years trying to survive on savings/minimal income who don't make it and end up failing. They're not assholes for taking a reward and running. The reward should be great because the risk and sacrifice is also excessive.
I built HelpHub, because spending more time contributing on open-source projects was my new year's resolution. Here's to finding interesting tasks and keeping that promise.
Title appears inaccurate, according to the article itself:

> on technology giants like Apple and Google

> taxes on sales of smart-phones and tablets

> The proposed tax would mirror fees already paid by television users, TV and radio broadcasters and Internet service providers

So it's nothing specific towards Apple or Google, or "anti-American", as far as I can tell from the article. It's just a device tax. So, seems a bit sensationalist.
Yes, this isn't the first thing I've seen recently that Google could have announced at I/O. Makes me wonder what they are planning to announce there.
Very neat discovery and great write-up about it! Were you able to get in touch with somebody at "Spacer" to let them know about the mistake? If so, are they going to correct it?
I know there are commenters who don't agree with me, but I think there's a lot of value in this bit of polemic. Sure, it's not fair to everyone who exits-- sometimes, people have no other option-- but the VC-istan careerists who use acq-hires to legitimize themselves and get real PM positions or pole-vault into VC positions deserve it.
> So it's like PHP where I need to pass in `function modify(&$foo) {` to modify a variable passed by reference.

If you're thinking in terms of PHP's primitive types, then yes: that's probably the best equivalent. PHP has the whole objects always being "passed by reference" [0] thing going on too.

0. http://php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.references.php
And when you can't find the packages you write them. And at the end of day that's so nice to have a bunch of packages for each not-so-popular task, yeah.
Something that touched me was: "Love is the evidence of the oneness of all things" ... how to say it, there really is only one thing, the universe, and the ego notions that we have of our separateness are an illusion.

When you and your couple "become one" you're just like drops of water running together. Love is the good feeling of like rejoining with like.

When you are in a couple, you still can be "couple lonely" -- you seek out other "couple friends" ... maybe have kids? You want more love, you want to continue joining together with other pieces of the universe.
Have a good time chasing platonic ideals. You can sometimes achieve them in programming; People, however, are too broken to ever achieve them in politics.
> That’s not messy; that’s idiomatic Go.

The two aren’t mutually exclusive. If that URL goes down, is there a fallback mechanism?

For what it’s worth, I agree with oakaz’s sentiment that Go is “very imperative” and “not simple”. It is deliberately designed that way, with lots of syntax and types for representing (abstractly) the inherent complexities of its intended domain. Any ugliness, however, is purely subjective.
He didn't imply that; you're reading it in.
I don't want to start some kind of "XML vs JSON" holy war, but I really do prefer JSON over XML because of how compact and readable it is.

I really don't see JSON as a passing trend, I see it as (almost) the most compact, succint way to express hashmaps in both human-readable and machine-readable form. (XML is big, bloated, and bureaucratic.)

(It's tragic that Crockford left in all the qoutes around the keys, though. We really don't need to type those quotes.)

For the past couple of years, I really have been wishing for an "XMPP, but built on JSON, not XML". Really. I want this.
>There are no reference types in Go, everything in Go is passed by value.

Yes, but this value is not the ACTUAL value (e.g the underlying storage).

When people (especially newcomers to pointers like the person that started this thread) speak of "pass by value" they refer to their data (the actual value).

So that Go passes _the structure_ by value is quite misleading, compared to the expectation of what "pass by value" means.

For practical purposes, I think they're better off to think of it as a reference.
I call it squirrel.
Just because.
He is clearly sheltered, but he has a point. Most people live demoralized, defeated, horrible lives, and corporate work is the cause because it truly sucks. But let's remember that exceptions can happen for any of us. May the odds be ever in your favor.

Personally, I'm OK with working for money as long as I'm actually paid-- at a consulting rate, not a 40-hour engagement. At $500 an hour, I'll do boring work (for a couple hundred hours). If I'm going to be spending 40 hours per week at it, though, for a middle-class salary; the work damn well better be worth doing.
Kind of like an electronic benign tumour.
Yes. Charging LTV for a product upfront would be categorically untenable for both sides.
I always figured that this was one of those decisions that's easy to fault from the outside and find frustration with but feels so different to experience in person.

I had to clean out some Posterous blogs recently and was very disappointed when it was announced as being shut down, but had I been approached to sell a service like that, I don't know exactly how I would've reacted and prioritised things going forward.
Agree on that point. Also, I believe you have an extremely useful data set here, but the visualization of it could be improved. My goal when looking at the graph is to discover other subreddits that may be of interest, but this is very difficult to do in the current form.

Perhaps a way of inputting and highlighting subreddits of interest (as a short term solution)?
Only 150 of 3500 U.S. Colleges Are Worth the Investment
Mobile Carriers Could Have Anticipated The Rise of OTT Services
Because it's (often) spelled SQL (e.g. MySQL). But yeah, inconsistency.

At least we don't deal with inconsistencies in too many places as software developers. /sarcasm
"users connect their Facebook accounts and are then given three recommendations."

What a useless service, then. On the typical dating site, you at least have to create a narrative that indicates whether you can string a compelling sentence or two together. WTF am I supposed to get from a Facebook profile? The typical profile doesn't provide any of that; it's just a pile of links, quips, and pictures at best.

Not to mention: What if you don't use Facebook?

Lame.
I love this snippet: "You thank your fans for supporting you, and in the next breath you tell them you're no longer supporting them"

Although, I believe some start-ups require acquisition (of some level) to survive, I at least concur with the spirit that if a developer/developers objective is to get bought and then abandon their creation, it is a disservice to end users.

Side Note: exceptions to this rule Arthur Frommer (gotta give him credit for buying back from Google)!
You can use the "more" tags, similar to wordpress, and it still appears legitimate.
It seems to be random; I got a breed of dog after finishing the initial level.
`<-c` is the main routine waiting for the other goroutine to finish (`c <- true`). It's being blocked until there's something for it to receive.

> It's also difficult to tell in the for loop if v is being assigned as "range m", or if "k, v" are a tuple resulting from "range m"

The `range` clause returns two values: index, and value at that index. It's really pretty easy to read and get used to once you actually read some documents.
Why does it have to be one or the other? Isn't it reasonable to assume some are competent, some are incompetent, and others are malicious?
I agree that it is not trivial but the ruby bundler project seems to manage it reasonably well, why can't go?

Mind you ruby also has a central repository in the form of rubygems which allows for this kind of versioning.

Go, lacking the same thing, relies on people just entering github URLS which seems insane to me but could work I guess if everyone agrees to tag their projects using semantic versioning where appropriate. Then you could do something like person/project@v1.2.3

Mind you, of any of the companies on the planet I could think of that has the resources to to create, manage and maintain a rubygems equivalent for go, Google would be top of the list.
I've had no problems with my tiny node in the few days I've had it - what problems did you run into, so I can be on the lookout?
True, but viable means slightly more than that. It's viable when the average cost of acquiring a customer is below the lifetime value of a customer.
An exit which results in shutting down the product means we would need to feel the cash is greater than the business opportunity. Our team (investors included) believe in the vision of the business (and the data supports that belief), and it's almost certain that no acqui-hire could exceed that expectation. If it were, then I'd be the first to put myself in the "fail" category.
That's good to hear, but it still raises the question of what you're spending your time on. :) I imagine that all the low-hanging GC-related fruit has been plucked for 1.1, so what are users clamoring for now? Without a maximalist attitude, do you foresee a point where the language is declared as "done" and all the full-time devs just pack up and move on?
For every startup you read about on TechCrunch where the owners get bought out by Yahoo or Microsoft for X million dollars, you have probably hundreds of entrepreneurs that work 80 hour weeks for months/years trying to survive on savings/minimal income who don't make it and end up failing. They're not assholes for taking a reward and running. The reward should be great because the risk and sacrifice is also excessive.

Different pools. The people who get funded by VC-istan are not risk-takers. They're people with gold-plated resumes and connections before 35, which means they never made mistakes-- because you can't get that far by that age if you make a misstep-- which means they aren't risk-takers. They didn't have to live off of savings, and as far as TechCrunch and acquirers are concerned, they don't exist.

Yes, those "hundreds of entrepreneurs" deserve a lot of credit. They have cojones, and a lot of them actually fail (not acqui-fail, but actually fail). However, their stories have no bearing on the risk in VC-istan, because they live outside of it.

In VC-istan, Real Founders (people with the credibility to raise money without a 5-sigma success already in hand) don't take much risk. They get full salary from the go, and as long as they don't bite the hand, they get EIR sinecures afterward if nothing else works out. "Risk" is just an excuse to give less well-connected employees tiny equity slices because "the business is already de-risked" (when that's not even close to being true).
never a good idea to make the perfect the enemy of the good
Everlane (https://www.everlane.com/) - San Francisco - Fulltime

We are a small team of full stack engineers working to build a brand that changes how people perceive the clothing industry. You can read about our push for greater transparency in an article the NYT wrote about us: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/09/business/global/fair-trade....

We don't subscribe to the traditional SV startup model of raising large amounts of money often and sacrificing business fundamentals for user growth. We have grown our userbase steadily, and our users are extremely loyal. We are profitable, and will continue to be so indefinitely in an industry that will be around essentially forever.

We're looking for a smart generalist who is firmly grounded in Rails and frontend performance.

If you're interested, email nan@everlane.com with HN in the subject line.
I tried some super-simple test code and ran it through the PS3 compilers... but was unable to get either to turn the variable-width shift into a fixed-width one. With the right flag included, gcc was even good enough to warn me about the microcoded instruction.

I also tried gcc (OS X, x64) and llvm (OS X, x64/ARM) and they didn't do the transformation either. (I'm not sure I would expect this for ARM anyway, but for x64 the variable shift code looked a bit more involved than I was expecting. Perhaps a transformation into a fixed-width shift would be beneficial in that case as well.)

Test code:

float f(const float *f,unsigned mask){
unsigned i;
float t=0.f;

for(i=0;i<32;++i){
if(mask&(1<<i))
t+=f[i];
}

return t;
}

float f2(const float *f,unsigned mask){
unsigned i,m;
float t=0.f;

for(i=0,m=1;i<32;++i,m<<=1){
if(mask&m)
t+=f[i];
}

return t;
}

Compile options were "-O3" for SNC (this seems to be about your lot as far as options go) and "-O6 -fstrength-reduce" for gcc (obviously I could spend all day fiddling with all the possible options, but I won't, which I admit is a flaw in my experiment - but I believe snc is supposed to produce much better code anyway). And in both cases, the code for `f' includes a variable shift, and the code for `f2' didn't.

Still, I would stand by my maxim even if the data in this case were against me. It's the winning strategy. Why rely on the compiler's ability to second-guess your intentions, when you could just tell it what you want, straight up?
Ask HN: What are good HN alternatives?
Yeah yeah, HN is great, I spend too much time constantly checking for new whatever. I'd like to branch out. Got any suggestions?
The Honest Truth About Dishonesty
Don't worry, I wasn't proposing to cut funding. My point was simply that, if government hadn't taken over research since the 1940s, science would be in a better fundamental shape right now. Alas, that did not happen, and killing the NSF overnight is probably a worse cure than the disease. Also, science is first and foremost a possession of humanity as a whole, not a tool of industrial domination.
I agree, this guy is an absolute tool. What a waste of a minute of my life.