skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
2. Re zero value: If pointers were by default not nullable, then the zero value of a struct containing pointers would have to recursively allocate objects to fill those pointers. That's a deal-breaker for the notion of zero values.

3. Null values are almost always what result, as opposed to undefined or incorrect values. So it's a product type that is effectively a sum type. As for code smells: actually, there is a greppable equivalent in Go, and it is "... , _ := ... ". Future Go compilers might allow for a flag that treats "error" types specially in this regard.

Interesting to hear about fromJust, didn't know about it.

My own experience is that unchecked errors aren't where Go's 'debugging load' lies. The load is often in reasoning about concurrence, causal dependancies, and state machines.

4. If you're saying that because pattern matching isn't a core feature of Go, you wouldn't use it for everyday code, you're right. I'm a fan of pattern matching, I use it in Mathematica all the time (albiet unchecked). But my point stands: you can build sum types through interfaces, and when that makes a design significantly cleaner, a decent Go programmer will use it.

5. "Type systems don't become cages": well, a lot of people will disagree with you there. Ask C++ programmers about const. Ask Java programmers about checked exceptions. Ask Haskell programmers about logging. So I guess that's just, like, your opinion, man. :)

5.1. Go may not offer you as rich type verification as Haskell, but it does things Haskell can't: it can detect race conditions, for example, in concurrent code [I shudder to think how you even write concurrent code in Haskell].

Another closing thought: you focus a lot on Haskell. Haskell seems to be a very fecund place to devise type-theoretic patterns and techniques. And it seems to have taken the niche of "programming-language research testbed", which also results in a lot of interesting ideas. But there isn't nearly as much evidence that it is a smart choice for production code.

I've been impressed by what I've seen, read, and understood about Haskell. Still, I have an unshakable impression that a lot of the quality that is associated with Haskell code is explained better by the hypothesis that the bar for writing Haskell code is very high: bad programmers can't write Haskell programs that do the things they want to do, so we see a lot of nice Haskell code and little bad Haskell code because of the base competency of the audience.

But that doesn't imply that an experienced programmer would write higher quality code in Haskell than in Clojure or Go. We all have a complexity budget to spend on using tools to their full potential and doing things a certain 'proper' way. Simple languages leave more of that budget to spend on your program itself. Type-heavy languages leave less, with the promise that the cost is amortized. Calling Go a "sad language" and implying its authors are incompetent because you don't agree with their particular choice of budget demonstrates, to me, a certain arrogance and lack of imagination.
Programmers should market
I don't want to slam your site too much, but just because You don't log Typeview information doesn't mean someone doesn't. If you're using regular HTTP then everything the user types in your textbox can be intercepted by people on the network or logged on proxy servers anywhere. This is not something the user expects to have to worry about.

Mentally, the google search box has a very different contract than a textbox to communicate with support staff, the user generally gets immediate feedback and understands their data is being sent as they type.
No, it isn't innovation. People have thought of this and dismissed it because it's unethical. Your optout won't solve this in a way that doesn't clutter the UI. And even if it is fairly loud, not everyone will read it. You'll need a clickthrough.
You should watch the video at the end: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJkHwulsac4

That just demonstrates the algorithm and makes it clear how it works.
I'm a current user of Spark Inspector. One of the things I saw in the Reveal demo that's missing in SI is the ability change the 3D Z-Index spacing between the views to make it a little easier to see.
A company that has a better business model, better customer service, or better goods/services is not the issue here. The issue is a competitor can tank your rankings by dropping $100 on crappy links. The disavow process is a good step forward but negative seo can still destroy several months worth of revenue while waiting for Google to sort it out.
> Also, we do not log Typeview information.

Anything "sent" is "recorded" IMO. Besides the fact that we just have your word for it, all transmitted information is contained in a log somewhere in the company. That's the reality which may or may not be under your control.

Without clear visual cues or one of those cookie-notice style "This text field will send back everything entered into it. By continuing to use this text field, you're consenting to this" message, it's unethical.

Legally splitting hairs : If I'm in a cafe, I have no expectation of privacy. But if I lean over to tell someone something private, you still have the equivalent of a boom mike over us.

But hey, "legally", I should have no expectation of privacy right? But is it ethical?
Rap Genius: Sorry for hammering your server but here is what I found
First and foremost, if you are from Rap Genius let me apologize first. In the past few days I have absolutely hammered your servers. I ended up sifting through 9.1 GB of data. You may or may not have noticed Crawlytics as the user-agent...

Now to the interesting part, a few days ago I spent some time browsing Rap Genius and as I was wondering around I thought wouldn't it be fun to find out which artists are most shared and more importantly how is Rap Genius doing in terms of social media traction.

Here is what I found:

Total shares 440524

Total pages scanned 824001

Total download bandwidth 9.10 GB

Social Spread:

Twitter: 27.7%

Facebook: 67.4%

Google+: 2.7%

Pinterest: 0.1%

Stumbleupon: 2%

Delicious: 0.2%

LinkedIn: 0%

Most shared artists:

Lupe Fiasco

Jayz

Kanye West

In case you were interested how I got these stats, I used https://socialcrawlytics.com/ (Full Disclosure: It is an app that I have created.)
Yes, but only stuff with the right digital signature, so Bob's Happy Exploit App need not apply.
They were told they must stop if they are not exempt. The companies position is that they are exempt. They have chosen not to gamble that the commonwealth will rule in their favor during the appeal; however, that is their choice and they could have continued to operate.
With regards to OS kernels you may be right (though not for performance reasons), but some high-performance applications would be very hard to write without a GC, especially if they're to take advantage of multicore. See my explanation above about scalable, concurrent data structures. Even hard real-time systems can benefit from a GC, and Java has a few GC implementations for hard real-time apps.

FYI, object allocation and de-allocation for short-lived objects is much faster with a good GC than with dynamic allocation, and even for long-lived objects GC gives a higher throughput than malloc/free. The problem with GC is latency issues (pauses) when maintaining very large heaps with many long-lived objects.
Furthermore, it has two more consequences.

1. Americans will read the news and think "Oh wow, I'm not going to Turkey anytime soon" then move on. (Much like when they read an article about violence in Mexico, etc.)

2. Americans will read the news and think "What a hell hole out there. I'm so happy America is the best. We have it so good here". This will further re-enforce their (incorrect) views about America.

I have to wonder, who stands to gain the most if these full-page ads actually run in American media?
I think it was http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2372-successful-negative-seo-... (Comment by trevin https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5701104)
As it's implemented I'm not a fan of the idea for much the same reasons that have already been discussed. But I think there's a way to implement it that makes it more transparent to the user precisely what is going on:

Aside from providing a banner indicating that the keystrokes are being sent, you could also show something in the conversation log window as the user types, similar to the way the CSR view looks with a small "sending..." caption above it. If you updated that with each keystroke, the user would see his message being composed in the composition field, and in the conversation log window at the same time. I don't have data to back it up, but if implemented properly, the cue would hopefully inform the user that what he's typing and re-typing are being seen by the CSR without requiring the user to understand whatever text was provided in the banner/notice (I subliminally dismiss those anyway).
All, thanks for the feedback. We've disabled the Typeview functionality and rolled that update out. We're going to:
1. Provide an opt-out on the site operator side (so a site operator can choose not to use it).
2. Provide a clear indicator that typing information is being sent in the chat widget (so a site visitor or mobile user knows it is happening).
3. Provide a clear, easy to reach opt-out so that the site visitor or mobile app user can opt out of Typeview (if it is enabled).
Oh, I'm sure it's happened in many places. But that doesn't make it an any less extraordinary claim that that explains what happened in Gezi, given the spontaneous nature of the protests. Also, by all accounts, police moved in on peaceful (if illegally congregated) protesters. The point of instigating is that you can paint the protest as violent before you move in.
The operators of the site believe that they are in the right. If they were 100% confident of this they could continue to operate. They are not 100% confident so they are shutting down to make sure what they are doing isn't illegal. They are not being threatened with violence by the state anymore than any other law abiding citizen. They have simply been informed that what they are doing may be illegal and are adjusting accordingly.
So what, not related. More noise...
Would be awesome if the demo app was baked into the download. I'd love to be able to try the UI instantly without even having to load up my own application.
That's probably someone attempting to you for a DDOS reflection. Take a look at http://openresolverproject.org/ and make sure you're not providing an open resolver to the internet
I think a more important part of the thought process was hubris and a lack of concern for privacy. I think you've lost a lot of potential users today.
'cal' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file :).
Gc support is the important first step.

But then the next step of work is scheduling work in a locality aware way. The libnuma lib in Linux and the portable hwloc lib that's part of the openmpi project are example substrates.

Admittedly, for most applications this second step won't make a large difference, but in my application domain, numerical computing, better memory locality at any given granularity can yield an order of magnitude improvement.

Locality aware scheduling in this context can actually yield a slightly super linear speed in the multicore / multi socket regime because of vagaries of a systems memory bus topology.

Ill hopefully be in a better position to quantify this last remark more precisely middle to late summer, assuming Wellposed's numerical product launch results in signing some early customers in the next 2 months.
MOOCs Raise Concerns About Academic Freedom
Vine launches Android app
I'm using GAE for QueryTree (http://querytreeapp.com) which is a data analysis tool.

The GAE data store is really nice for persisting objects that come from users filling in HTML forms, or equivalent. One user can only type in data so fast and that kind of volume is fine on GAE. Plus you get great read scalability.

However, if you're creating data in some sort of simulation or loading it in from elsewhere, use a relational database (you can connect to external servers from your GAE app). Loading a few million rows into the GAE data store would cost you a fortune and the lack of joins or proper SQL probably means you have to get them all back out into memory again before you can do anything useful.

QueryTree uses the GAE data store as a central hub for user account info and settings, then shards lots of MySQL instances for actual data work, which seems to work well.
We have chickens.

They have access to a rather large chicken run and often have complete free range through our large lot (& sometimes the neighbors...). My kids were just watching a hen follow a robin around, waiting for it to get a worm out of the lawn, so the hen could rush in and steal it.

The hens peck each other, often viciously drawing blood.

We've continued feeding hens after they've largely stopped laying.

We got mixed runs of chicks, and when the males started crowing, they were freed on a neighbor's farm to live out the rest of their natural lives. (Neighbors liked the idea of chickens, but not roosters crowing...)

So, I imagine we're enslaving the hens and abandoning the roosters, as well as consuming their unborn offspring.

Oh, well.
There's something off-putting about these kinds of articles. I think it's because there's an intentional subtext that start-up founders are some kind of rare breed of unwilling knights who have been called to noble action. "We must suffer so the world can experience the glory that is Docstoc." It's disingenuous. Start-up founders aren't being put-upon: They're making a conscious choice.

Most people work harder than they want to and must make trade-offs. People with minimum wage jobs. Doctors, lawyers -- as others have mentioned. Pretty much everyone except the idle wealthy or unemployed.

Pretty much everyone alive thinks they work too hard and wish they could spend more time with friends and family or working on hobbies, travelling, etc. Human condition.
What about for soft launching? I wouldn't mind a little time to respond to any initial issues that show up.

Is there significant value in the first submission? In particular, for getting onto Apple's notable list?
I use it a lot, but to read other people's blogs and discover interesting content.

PS: I blog at http://webstreams.tumblr.com
For better or worse, a great deal of humanities (especially philosophy) has been rendered defunct (i.e., it's "bullshit") due to advances in science. So before studying philosophy one should study science, so that one knows what to keep and what to discard.

There's nothing worse than listening to a young person who is an eager proponent of, say, "postmodernist philosophy" when you know that he hasn't a whit of knowledge about evolution or science in general. I usually mumble "that's interesting" and shuffle off to another conversation.

But your point is well taken: philosophy still has much to contribute - a great deal of it passes through the scientific filter unscathed. But it is important to study science first. Only then does one have a firm foundation for examining philosophy.
I see. I'd assumed that you were competing primarily on ease of use and pleasant UX, which if that were the case, you'd want potential customers to see what you are doing.

If it's actually about trust, it sounds like word of mouth is actually more important to you. It just seems a shame that you'd be extremely unlikely to get my business (assuming I were looking for such a service) simply because I wouldn't be able to evaluate your service without handing over data that I'm loathe to spread around, particularly for services I might not actually want.

[By the way, another model that might work for website checking as well as restricting the number of sites is delaying the notifications on the free account after the first week. Anyone who really wants the service almost certainly needs the notification immediately. It also gives you another excuse to email them 'by the way, your premium notification speed add on is expiring, upgrade to a full account to keep your instant notifications....]
Would be interesting to see how much traffic RG gets from Facebook and Twitter.
I have been under the impression that the point of Facebook is to log in regularly, scan through postings from the Ridiculous and Obscure, and to deduce, accordingly, that life could be so much worse. On the bright side, the product ("Facebook Therapy"?)seems to work so well that, in time, logging in no longer becomes necessary..
Founder Boot Camp in San Francisco
The Cost of an ACL Injury
Comparing ASM.js and NaCl
Verizon (and Google) Helped U.S. Government to Spy on Reporters
A smaller entity being threatened by a larger entity is a form of force.

Do you think you pay taxes "voluntarily" also?
The desktop client is indeed written in Java Swing. Fun fact: for PDF printing and getting updates, it actually does interact with a web service in the Ruby on Rails application. Both are ungodly bits of code put together years ago which shame me but seem to continue functioning.
This is why Google and technology in general should stay away from foreign policy where the end always justifies the means, no matter what the rhetoric is.
As I discovered myself, Hawkins' algorithm is not the best place to start learning about machine learning. I would suggest getting an overview elsewhere, such as maybe Andrew Ng's Coursera course, then coming back to Hawkins.
They have some pretty fancy acronyms ("Cortical Learning Algorithm (CLA), but also the Online Prediction Framework (OPF)"), but is this just an n-th generation autoencoder? "Encoders turn raw values into sparse distributed representations (SDRs)."

I feel like they're making up their own terminology in a bubble instead of integrating with the rest of mainline research?
The eye ball profiler, preferably:

foreach
for
while
if
for
if
return
Also, search-as-you-type data is probably discarded immediately, not recorded for a human to review later.
But how do you go beyond the paradigm of linear / affine types and nested regions that Rust gives you when you remove GC? Lots of programs are difficult to write with only these features, e.g. a web browser, and when you do you just end up writing a garbage collector yourself anyways. Either you add optional unrestricted allocations or increase the complexity of the type system to allow for the expression of more safe deallocation using dependent types or another similarly strong logic.

I really like Rust, but I wonder how it is going to get over this hurdle that previous languages like Cyclone never fully solved.
No deja vu: just repeating myself so folks don't have to scroll through the entire page looking for responses that may apply to their comments (they may still do so if they choose, but they don't have to).
Hi Ben - thanks for the feedback (also responded to you on twitter). We've disabled the feature as of now and we'll only roll it out again once we can give visitors clear and easy options to know what's being seen, and opt out as well.
When Do Apps Become Rituals?
My friends and I made a Canvas game about Pitbull. Yes Pitbull.
We'll be 'pre-integrating' a few apps available on GitHub soon so you'll be able to play with Reveal by simply cloning and running those iOS apps. A full sample may be on the cards when we're out of beta.
Ethical? Absolutely not. I'd boycott the hell out of anything like this.
DARPA's Virtual Robotics Challenge Simulator Previewed
7 Lessons From outside Silicon Valley
Oh, I know. I guess we're supposed to be thankful for being able to submit a single file, though.

I also noticed that the help page states "(the file type must be .txt and it must be encoded in UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII)". How many non-technical people even know what that means?
Services that change money into bitcoins, or vice versa.

If you accept bitcoins for your dog-walking service, there doesn't seem to be any new regulation.
I'm just going to throw this out there in the hope that someone enlightens me.

Ever since I first read the book "On Intelligence" I thought Jeff Hawkings was on the right track with Strong AI. The insights I got from reading the book I thought were invaluable. I don't know how close they are to Strong AI or if they are closer then anybody else but I would expect that if they were making any real head way into the field that Google would already have made an offer to buy them.

At least that is what I would do if I wanted to be the first to control the technology. The fact that nobody seems interested in acquiring them sends the signal that they probably are no better than anybody else building AI tools.
Ryan, thanks for the pointer: we're going to turn this off while we try and fix the privacy/user experience.
Track the ROI on your alley oop
Why Foxconn? So many human rights violations...
Whatever is happening in Turkey, things don't get solved by a revolution. A revolution is the worst thing that can happen to a country at this time. I'll list here a few of key reasons:

1. Vulnerability: A loss of the leader will cause wide internal and external vulnerability. Any party will try to somehow colonize the vulnerable country which doesn't have a clear leader or a clear path. Certainly, for their economic, political and geographic benefits.

2. Economic deterioration: It's even worse in Turkey. Loss of Touristic money flow will cause the economy to deteriorate and joblessness to increase, increasing instability and feeding that loop.

3. Less Freedom and democracy: Indeed, a revolution on the streets doesn't bring democracy or free speech. If anything, it encourages extremists to kill/censor/stop the other party.

Seeing how things developed in Tunisia in the last 3 years, I'll advise against revolutions at any time. And I'm talking about peaceful ones.
Images like this never got me excited about space as a kid. But I remember the first time I saw the images from Pathfinder, and it blew my mind:

http://www-k12.atmos.washington.edu/k12/mars/nasa_jpl_mpf_pi...

It's very weird, because on the face of it, it just looks like desert. But then you remember you are looking at the surface of a totally different planet.
The fact that all citizens are afraid of state violence does not mean we can redefine word "voluntarism". You abide the law non-voluntarily. You abide terms of service in McDonalds voluntarily because you can always choose from millions of alternatives + you can have a peaceful dialog in case of a dispute. Neither McDonalds manager, nor you are willing to fight each other on fists or in court. It's in your mutual interests to figure out problems through discussion.

You don't discuss with the state. You can have your input, but you are totally dependent on existing powers that allow you some freedom and some voice. That's why you have no problem arguing with private companies and having them listen to you, but everyone avoids state courts as much as possible (in majority of cases courts are used as a threat, not as a real dispute resolution mechanism).
The kicker is that the unit overheated and was destroyed in the first attempt. Something about that makes me very suspicious. If you were going to game the review to fake things, wouldn't you want to do a dry run first to see how the reviewers were going to do things? Then you could tweak your fakery to cover all your bases.
This has quite obviously been tried before. See Koko the gorilla. Yes, she was able to understand quite a few signs (1000+), but the idea that they have the capability to be anything close to human is clearly not true.
WWDC iOS App Side by Side 2011 - 2013
How secure is your web stack?
Why Foxconn? So many human rights violations...

Don't get me wrong, I really really want this to work out... but someone like Mozilla shouldn't be in bed with the likes of Foxconn.
Sony, Lego team up to create programmable, interactive Lego bricks
Cool, but I'm mega lazy when testing new tools... The splash screen should have a big 1-click "Try Demo App" button :-)