skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I learned C it was in the air. Everyone around me was using C at my jobs.

I learned C by programming in C, talking to my neighbors, and obsessively reading comp.lang.c. That used to mean usenet, but these days most people will get to it via Google: groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c

The best thing you can do is work on some really hard shit for a long time with a smart set of colleagues.

My first book was K&R <glances up at bookshelf> but my favorite was Harbison and Steele <glances up at bookshelf>. These days probably one of the O'Reillys is good enough.

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/C-faq/

http://c-faq.com/

These days I don't think I could program my way out of a paperbag with C. But I did like it a lot back then.
I'm not exactly sure what to call those people without being derogatory (brogamers, etc), but generally I consider those people to be separate from those who play a wider variety of games.
Yes, part of it is registering vets into the system. The other part is a combination of the enormous number of claims and enormous amount of documentation required.
As a physician, I worked in C&P (compensation and pension) clinics for a number of years at the VA, as a consultant.
The amount of documentation required is astronomical, likely because vets are being compensated for their injuries with taxpayer dollars. Fair enough, but a physician providing these services could find other ways to use their time productively (for themselves).
Then there's the volume. You don't just see vets who have lost an arm or a leg or have suffered traumatic brain or spinal cord injuries. You also see the guys who may have sprained a knee or ankle playing basketball in their free time but while they were officially on duty. Throw that into the mix, and you have too many people to examine so thoroughly. They tried to fix this by contracting with an agency and have vets come into a private medical office instead of doctors going to the VA, my partner did this for a while, but the reimbursement offered for the amount of paperwork required ultimately made it impractical.
To fix it:
1) screen vets better, some are clearly more severely injured than others
2) better compensate providers who see all these vets and complete all the necessary documentation.

The screening part is tricky though, as it can quickly get political.
Android File Browser with Built in Hex Editor, Can Handle Large Files
Also, just as a general user experience thing, not having labels can be detrimental if the field's purpose is forgotten or unknown. Having a placeholder is fine if there is no value in the field, but if I submit a long form after filling it out, only to be shown an error, what if I don't remember what that particular field was for?
As someone else working in the BI space, my coworkers and myself have been saying similar things. I feel like "Big Data" has the same feel that BI had years ago.

Also, we're all pretty sure that the title "Data Scientist" will be applied far too liberally. I have friends at other BI firms who are already calling themselves data scientists because they attended a convention where the words "Hadoop" and "Cloudera" were spoken.
Vaguely related anecdote:

I had a really bad experience trying to use node.js for a project. Eventually I figured out that the module I needed was just broken, so I decided to at least update the documentation. As it turned out, not only was it not documented how to update the documentation (...) but I had to go back and forth on undocumented style guide rules (for documentation that gets displayed in the browser anyway!) and then sign the CLA, all to update a single line of text in the docs to say 'don't use this module, it's broken'. It literally would have taken less time for them to make the change themselves.

This soured me even more on node.js than actually using it had. It's bizarre that project maintainers would actively put so many walls between themselves and valuable (or not-valuable, for that matter) code contributions.

I can only assume that the legal downside to not having a CLA signed for every single-line commit is enormous. Are there previous court cases in the US where not having a CLA got someone destroyed?
Go out in the desert with one captive and torture them and we'd try to stop you.

Enslave a few million and successfully arm yourself against potential rescuers and you meet all the accepted standards of a sovereign nation.
When you've reduced yourself to arguing whether 80% is "mostly" or not, perhaps it's time to reconsider your position?

In any case, I won't be responding to you anymore.
Report: Blizzard delays unannounced MMO until 2016, resets whole project
Peter Norvig: http://pn.smugmug.com/Family/Peter/i-qG4SMC9/1/M/nutcracker-...
You've got to be kidding me. Belarus is a landlocked tinpot dictatorship with an unreformed state-run economy, notoriously arbitrary government, strangulatory red tape, sanctions up the wazoo and virtually no access to EU markets, as it's outside every single European institution:

http://boingboing.net/2011/03/12/venn-diagram-illustr.html

Hint: Belarus's flag is not in there at all. Add in a near-total lack of workers skilled in post-1950s technology, English, or for that matter any language except Russian, and I'm hard pressed to think of a worse place to locate a factory.
Do I regret choosing MongoDB a couple years ago to augment Postgres for several data analysis applications? Not really. But I do wish Mongo has been more mature. I'm happy to see each step forward taken, but it does bother me that often serious issues get overlooked for press-friendly feature additions. Until Mongo adopts some form of compression I won't be using for new projects aside from personal ones where development ease trumps everything else.
Israel warns Russia against giving Syria missiles
You can see them all if you add ?share=1 to the end of the URL (or any Quora URL)
This comes at an opportune time with the downsizing of the forces. The younger service members are the ones more likely to be pushed out in their mid to late 20's. It's a solid job for those who go back to school and need something part-time.
When I gave up on perl, I considered other scripting languages and it turned out that ruby was the best match for my programming style. I think ruby users and ruby on rails give it a bad name, though :)
Fees for LR were generally much higher, because the way they structured it was to have 3rd party companies[1] handle transactions in and out of LR - who usually charged somewhere around 3-5%.

Liberty Reserve wasn't in the business of actually converting money in their system to or from real-world currencies, and handed off tasks such as indentity verification and anti-fraud to the companies who actually exchanged those bits for real money.

In some regards, LR was very similar to a protocol.

1. http://web.archive.org/web/20130424151449/http://www.liberty...
Secure Boot isn't the only problem facing Linux on Windows 8 hardware
Scripting languages are "real" languages. Also, RubyMotion projects are compiled down to machine code, not interpreted.
Ask HN: What exactly is DevOps?
Curious as I've been seeing the title more recently
Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah clinically dead: Report says
In part the problem arises from the interface between systems. If you walk into any normal hospital internal medicine floor you'll see about 5 different systems in use, with varying levels of interoperability: the VA, operating what is the largest network of healthcare centers in the country, takes that issue to the next order of magnitude. A lot of paper gets generated at these interfaces. Although the core VA EMR system is solid, there are multiple other systems laid atop it. The VA is attempting to address both the software and processes issue (people outside healthcare don't know this, but the VA is the place to take your career if you wish to do healthcare services research - they're, collectively, the single most innovative group of providers in the country).

The main problem lies with the paper backlog of attempting to get people into the system. I'm personally not aware of how/why military personnel's medical records don't transition directly into the VA, but what happens in practice is a gap between military med. and the VA, where vets find themselves forced to file claims. I suspect that this is in large part because the set of "Vets" and the set of people qualifying for VA care, while overlapping, are not the same (that assertion comes from anecdote: I had an ex in the military, and when she finished her tours I recall that she was not qualifying for VA care because she hadn't been disabled nor gone career, as she explained it). While it's fair to ask why this process is done on paper, it's worth-while to note that prior to just the last handful of years the portion of health records that had been digitized was nearly nil (up until about 5 years ago it was standard practice in most hospitals and private clinics to go digital-to-paper-to-digital). Essentially everyone's records were on paper, and all record transfers happened via fax (and still do, if a receiving physician is not inside the same hospital system on the same EMR as the referring physician).

source: work in hospital QI. I haven't worked in the VA, personally, so I am relating a lot of stuff second-hand, but the boundary between most hospitals' QI staff, the IHI, and the VA tends to be pretty porous, if you're in a healthcare capitol city - so I've heard a lot about the VA from co-workers that have worked there, or are currently engaged in ops research there.
Exactly, I find there is not enough definition and way too much overlap. Even on Kaggles front page where they show 3 examples of 'the worlds top data scientists' it says:

Alexander Larko:
-Experienced Computer Scientist & Data Miner with wide ranging skillset

No disrespect to this man's skills but I'm sure there are hundreds of us on here that could easily fall under that category!?!
This is very cool. Simple enough to reason the invariants easily. I guess one of the key insights is that each data has a canonical server owner which enforces the consistency of the writes of the data at a single place.

I have one question regarding the determination of the latest version of a set of peer data when overlapping transactions occurred.

Suppose initially s1/x=0 at server s1 and s2/y=0 at server s2. Client1 updates s1/x=10 and s2/y=10 at transaction v1, and at the same time client2 updates s1/x=20 and s2/y=20 at v2. Suppose the clients contact the servers in different order and the update messages arrive at the servers in reverse order, such that s1's pending queue is [x.v1=10, x.v2=20] and s2's pending queue is [y.v1=20, y.v2=10].

After client1 and client2 send the make-good command, s1's good queue is [x.v1=10, x.v2=20] and s2's good queue is [y.v2=20, y.v1=10]. When a third client3 tries to read the latest value of x or y, what is the latest value of its peer data? It looks like depending which data client3 starts with, it would get a different version of the peer data? Like starts with s1/x got s1/x.v2 == 20 and s2/y.v2 == 20, while starts with s2/y.v1 == 10 and s1/x.v1 == 10.

Am I missing something or this is the semantic in determining the latest values of peer data?
Sounds like a Droid for ya. (He said, mostly in jest. Lol.)
Great.

Just to expand on the switching of axis. It's harder to compare data between graphs, but upon second inspection, it appears the colors from the first graph are not used in the secondary graphs.

Second, trying to get to the projects in the first graph, it's easier to exit the graph from the bottom. Otherwise, short bars (eg. node) are hard to "select" for the "Current" line, and in that case, I have to make a longer trip around the graph to get to the link. Maybe link the labels? Move the "Current" line underneath?

I enjoyed it nonetheless. If you're considering expanding or having a follow-up piece, I'd enjoy combining the three graphs with the format / filtering at http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/.
I don't think a lot of people know about the Insight Fellows program yet, but it's highly relevant here: http://insightdatascience.com/

They're taking people in STEM fields who are over-qualified and under paid, and helping them transition into new careers as data scientists at top technology companies (Google, Facebook, Square, LinkedIn, etc.). It's a really interesting model because they're filling a big hole that universities have right now in that there's no degree for data science. Close to 100% of their Fellows make the transition successfully and I think the idea is something that others are going to try to copy in the near future because it's clear there's a supply-demand mismatch right now.

Fwiw, the company is a YC alumnus (a hard pivot from their original idea).
I think email is a better forum if everyone involved is disciplined about factoring commits well, writing good messages, using an email client that formats properly, and is fluent with the tools. PRs are more intuitive, more tolerant of workflows, and more accessible to newcomers. At this point, nothing matches the archival quality of mailing lists. When PRs are rebased/refactored as a result of reviews, the original versions generally become orphaned, so the discussion vanishes.

When there are multiple independent discussions spawned from different parts of single patch, as is common in less disciplined communities, the granularity of email is too coarse, and threaded line-comments are much better. On the other hand, patches on mailing lists frequently spin off into higher level design/philosophy discussions, which isn't appropriate in line comments.
It seems that it's more of a product oriented (solve problems) culture than an engineer oriented (create something cool) one. Not necessarily a bad or good thing but it's consistent with the impression I got from Facebook in the last couple of years.
Destroying things is what armies are good at. They pretty effectively destroyed the Taliban early on. But, then, I think, it came home to roost that you can't just destroy something and then leave and expect everything to be fine if there was never anything to take the place of the thing you destroyed. We've been trying to solve that puzzle ever since.
This is a daily issue for me - having to resync replicas that run out of disk space because Mongo has no compacting strategy.

Resyncing will drop disk usage from 200GB to 50GB(!). So much wasted space.
When I moved to the states at age 15, I came from a very prestigious English language school from my native country. As a result my written English was excellent, but nobody could understand my accent and I could not understand the American (or, more precisely, Californian) accent either.

It was "Married with Children" with closed captioning on that taught me how to actually speak American English. It took me a while to figure out what a "hooter" is and why Bud Bundy would want to pretend to be a FIDE ranked Grandmaster without earning that title, but it was all very educational.
It should be, but is not illegal for the government to ask for private data, or lean on companies to provide it, (see the NSA Warrantless Wiretapping affair, specifically Qwest - the only telco that refused the illegal orders.)

You can be essentially compelled to break the law - and you gain no immunity for being forced. Damned if you don't, convicted if you do.
Always finish
You may want to recalibrate your idea of what "any semblence of privacy" means. Meanwhile I recommend http://www.whispersystems.org/
Another iOS only app.
The hosting sites need to start providing a way for a maintainer to update or supersede a PR, as well as a way to track prior versions of commits in a PR after the PR has been updated post-review.
I love Ruby's syntax. I tries Python, but I didn't like it as much as Ruby, what putt me off about python is the meaningful indentation (although I do not mind that in CoffeeScript). Also, Ruby itself is not slow, but CRuby (MRI, YARV, whatever you call it) is slow; Rubinius ("rbx") is a wonderful (and my personal favourite) alternative for MRI. In fact, I use rbx and EventMachine for a fun app that has a growing number of users! However, when I found some things were too slow in Ruby I just wrote a C extension (yes, yes, I know it's a bit of a controversy).

As to why I learnt it: it looked fun, and I was right, Ruby brings me pleasure!
>The way HireArt works, explained Sharef (who was my daughter’s college roommate), is that clients — from big companies like Cisco, Safeway and Airbnb, to small family firms — come with a job description and then HireArt designs online written and video tests relevant for that job. Then they cull through the results and offer up the most promising applicants to the company, which chooses among them.

So hireart is tackling the problem from the demand side for employees by improving the signal to noise ratio of applicants, so to speak.

This is only a partial solution, since at least a significant part of the problem is the skill mismatch of the more "ordinary Joes" (for lack of a better word) and the skills that are asked of them by their prospective employers.

I don't think there will be a one size fits all solution for the variety of employment related issues we face today. We'll probably see many "winners" in the market that offer very distinct sets of benefits to both job seekers and employers.

That makes me think that my friend's startup [1] which does focus on the more basic tier of the supply side of the job market problem, training ordinary people to gain the specific skills that specific employers want.

We can't have enough hypotheses tested in this market, so I genuinely wish the best for all the current and future players in this market.

[1] http://www.learnup.me/about
How about compression on the replication links?

When I inquired about that, they suggested using an ssh tunnel. I can see why they like mmapped files for storing data.
I read through that link (admittedly somewhat quickly) but from what I read it seems you should have said:

"Former member of ABBA hopes to abolish cash in sweden."

There is also a bold prediction by a bowling alley owner. However the person with the closest ties to the swedish financial system has a different take :

"Before retiring as deputy governor of Sweden's central bank, Lars Nyberg said last year that cash will survive 'like the crocodile, even though it may be forced to see its habitat gradually cut back.'"

I'd like to hear from a swedish HNer or at least read something from a domain that ends in .se.
As a former professor at Harvard, this is a welcome move. However, I don't think it goes far enough, and it should have happened much sooner. One thing I will say: The fact that the administration felt the need to snoop on employee e-mail to "track down" a press leak underscores how backwards and insecure Harvard can feel at times. It's just shocking that anyone thought that this was a good idea, and that they continued to defend the practice once it came to light. Very sad.
learnup is awesome. we need lots of companies to solve this problem. Elli (co-founder @hireart)
I have never heard of this for a software service. I don't am skeptical that many businesses would sign up for the rev share plan. You'd have to be offering something incredibly valuable / rare to even entertain it.
YUI definitely needed a better CSS framework and looks like they are finally working on one.
Gold Age was most definitely not "solely for criminals", or even "marketed extensively to criminals"; I didn't follow Liberty Reserve much (their next thing).
I took a hireart interview recently, really excited for a chance to show off my skills. However, the responses asked for were basic interview questions like, "Describe yourself" and other personality questions. Which is fine, but I thought it had more potential.

One caveat is that it was time consuming and cost the company doing it nothing. I really hope such time consuming tasks do not become the first line of defense against job seekers, but are only used on already vetted resumes.
Are you seriously trying to convince us that while you're in-person sharing (shudder), your spouse / kids / siblings aren't in reality busy instagramming on their phones?
In most situations it is probably not illegal to hand over your emails without a warrant; it depends entirely on the terms of your access to your email service.
$ git fetch url-or-remote their-branch-name:my/better-branch-name
$ git checkout my/better-branch-name
$ hack, commit, etc
Realidades no teorias ni creencias.
This is a bandage to the problem, perhaps even a good bandage, but not a cure.

The issue is so much deeper than this.

On the "physical labor" side of the economy, the college system, in its current form, will not efficiently fill America's production lines with workers. It will not create more craftsmen. It certainly does not cure the average American college graduate of the mentality that they are above being a gardener in their own backyard.

On the knowledge side of the economy, MOOC can potentially add enormous value. The distribution of credentials (aka a degree from an elite university) is being decoupled from the educating of the knowledge workforce. Rather than a couple thousand or tens of thousands of people having access to the highest levels of education, it is now accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

P.S. I take issue with anyone who is 28 years old being considered a "veteran" at her job, let alone at McKinsey. Perhaps I think too old-school.
Except we can still play our SNES and NES. Due to the fragility of the systems and supposed rumors it is most likely today's 7 year olds won't be able to play their Xbox or Playstation when they are our age, sadly.

They sure don't make games and systems like they used to.
That's a zero-argument method but not a zero-argument function. That is, if you view makeAvailable as a function, storeItem is an implicit argument to it. In fact, storeItem is probably an object with several fields, so there are arguably several implicit arguments. To my eye, the name "makeAvailable" suggests a side-effect too.

In any case, it's fine for two rules such as "avoid side effects" and "prefer zero- or single-argument functions" to be in tension with one another. I don't buy that zero-or-one idea, though. A function should have as many arguments as it makes sense for it to have.
I had the impression that Google was engineer oriented but I wonder if this is still the case with their recent refocus into a small number of key products.

With that in light, how would we (to the best of our knowledge) characterize some of the big/promitent software players? (FB, GOOG, AMZN, MSFT, NFLX, RAX, DBOX, etc.)
I don't know about the first question, but:

2) Because Python would become Ruby, or at least Pubython, then. What attracts most people to Ruby is its humanist syntax, not sure what Pythons guiding philosophy behind the syntax is, but I tried both and ruby was just a lot better.

3) There is loads of little things that are just personal preference for me, but the choice of language always boils down to personal preference one way or the other! Never really tried Pip, so I can't answer.