skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are so many toys like this out there. It's very simple to hardcode few simple commands in python script and show that as an advance in artifical intelligence. Some examples are

Simon https://sourceforge.net/projects/speech2text/
Vedics http://sourceforge.net/projects/vedics/
Palaver https://github.com/JamezQ/Palaver
Voicekey http://sourceforge.net/projects/voicekey/

I could add 10 others. Unfortunately all such projects are practically unusable for a wide audience just because they lack very important features and provide only basic functions. The problem is that advanced development require understanding of speech recognition internals, close cooperation with engine developers and hard user interface testing.

Here is the list of features one have to implement to provide even basic user experience:

1. Implement and test proper keyword spotting for voice activation. This feature is missing in Julius engine and all workarounds which are used do not provide enough accuracy.

2. Implement invisible speaker detection/online adaptation to deal with environment issues. With adaptation accuracy is extremely high for a few speakers. You can easily dictate free form speech.

3. Implement free-form speech. This part require data collection and native language understanding work.

4. Implement a framework to detect microphone and noise issues. Microphone issues like clipping are a major source of accuracy problems in speech recognition. Most engines do not care about proper microphone.

5. Provide an easy way to add new commands with no training and no knowledge of phonetics. This reqiures G2P component which converts unknown words to phonemes like the one provided by CMUSphinx.

6. Implement dialog management and error correction. So that user can not just run queries but have a conversation with the application. Interstingly, that requires update of the previous engine results and analysis of n-best lists or lattices.

So I hope someone would start doing real work on speech interfaces with close cooperation with engine developers. That would create amazing things to demonstrate.
I tried it and didn't get much value out of it: What appeared was mostly just JavaScript that should have been there all along, had the page not been broken. That animated clock? Yeah, well, I can do without it.
I've had good experiences with something like "$90 first 30 hours, $60 thereafter". You have incentive to finish work fast because you want to start new projects to get the higher hourly rate, at the same time, the tail hourly rate means they won't be changing requirements too much.

When you must estimate a timeframe, make a honest estimate, and multiply it by 4.
Almost, except that you still do have to be conscious of argument and return types. The one thing that still catches me (and I'm a relative newbie in Go, so that's probably why) is attempting to return nil when the return type won't allow it, such as the case when the return type is a string. It feels weird, but at least the compiler catches it so I can fix it and move on.
I made a suggestion in the official 'Feature Request' thread, in case anyone wants to vote for it there:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5807651
Yahoo Starts Scanning Emails
https://www.jottit.com/7a9fv/
Error handling in Erlang
"Gigantic font size" is just as bad. If I can only see 10 lines on my monitor in a size that would fit a book for toddlers, my close tab reflex is quick.
Structural typing is nothing like duck typing. People saying that don't know what they are talking about.

Yes, both features allow one to escape the manifest typing present in languages like Java. But duck typing is so much more, as duck typing allows you to make shit up at runtime (e.g. come up with new interfaces based on the data you have).

By definition a static type system will reject pieces of computation that are correct when described in a dynamic type system. Also Go's static type system isn't even a good static type system, as it makes it next to impossible to work with monads or Haskell's Maybe. And serving as proof that Go's type system is weak, consider how these are non-issues in Haskell or Scala or dynamic languages such as Ruby or Clojure (yes, Clojure developers are know to use monads when it makes sense to do so).

Go's type system is a rather poor implementation of features that were properly implemented in other languages, such as Ocaml or Haskell. It's a shame really that such an awful implementation gained so much popularity on account of Google, but on the other hand I view it as a fad that will pass like all the rest.
major city, what do you mean?
Don't forget low contrast fonts. I've seen many pages where the designer likes a soft font color that blends into the background and is hard to read.
Well, python 2.7:

>>> a = 1/3
>>> type(a)
int

python 3.2

>>> a = 1/3
>>> type(a)
<class 'float'>

brython:

print(type(1/3))
<class 'float'>
Richard Feynman's account of his experience teaching in Brazil speaks to your first point. Focusing purely on test scores, fact regurgitation, and formulaic problem solving misses far more important abilities such as grasping underlying fundamental concepts and applying them to novel situations.
Well would you believe that it is not uncommon for one or two people to die on a cruise? I went on a 10 day cruise a few years ago and three people died on it. They chucked 'em in the fridge and carried on the trip like it was normal.
Yes, this is what I meant.

Libertarianism is defined by a focus purely on negative liberty, classical liberalism (e.g., liberal parties in Non-US Anglophone countries) has a more broad focus, and social democracy/left-liberalism (generally called just liberalism in the US, but best expounded through John Rawl's excellent work) also adds the idea of social justice.

Discrimination is indeed a challenging matter: obviously law against govenrment discrimination counts as negative liberty, but you could (and I personally would) also argue that restrictions on certain type of discrimination by individuals and businesses (in employment, housing, contracts, e.g., prohibitions on restrictive covenants for future home sales) might technically infringe on negative liberty of one group, but greatly increases positive liberty of everyone else.

There are no simple answers here and I not having a true political science, law, or economics background I would not be qualified to offer one. That's why I tried to make my appeal for NNI as broad as possible: it is clearly a policy that -- compared with what we have today and other politically viable options -- is more just no matter which one of the common political philosophies you subscribe to.
> [REDACTED: several hundred words, presumably describing it.]

How to build the Super using a conventional initiator?
Funniest Computer Book?
As a suggestion to, "You've buried the lede.": use an About link. Even his example, Basecamp; I have no idea what they do. They "help groups work together"? Details, please. Have an About link so I can go and get a complete description of what you do. This is especially important for startups. (Put it next to the Contact link.)
Since when does a help system have posts?

Oh, you mean the website. I always thought Yelp refers to the 'yelp' command...
Maybe it's just me, but I pretty much never see that. Are there any common examples?

Though I do notice when text is well laid out. A nicely chosen font, a page that's comfortably wide-but-not-to-wide, good spacing and thought out contrast. As well, when there's nothing but the text (or as little else as possible) it's just perfect.

I've really tried to do that with my own projects like http://xwl.me . I really just wanted the nicest reading experience for random [0]things that I feel like writing and posting on the web.

Btw, I'd actually love it if there's more I can do for readability. I really just want this to be as easy on my eyes as possible, but I'm often not the best judge of that.

[0] - http://xwl.me/md/b4aa7u4hof178z2
Rare staph infection you say?? Was he recently in the hospital for an unrelated reason?
> Michigan Central Station stopped serving trains in 1988 with multiple plans to redevelop the building falling through since. The Morouns have owned the building since 2001.

FTA
Silicon valley didn't become what it was because of cheap housing. The entire west coast was built up for high tech electronics and aircraft because of proximity to japan in WWII and later to russia/china in the cold war.
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You lost me at Hello.
The issue with web (although this could be expanded to apply to most languages) is where it's used/interpreted. Browsers aren't a quickly changing environment (haha, IE 6). It takes a few years to adopt the latest and greatest. Shit, it took nearly a decade for us to see native curved corners (border-radius).

Again, not that I don't agree, it's just hard to stay up to date with the greatest while still trying to support outdated tech like html tables.

The W3C is the 'authority', but is really at the hands of the major browser manufacturers. Implementing an interpreted version of Python sounds great, but is it worth the time and effort? Will it increase my productivity or compliance compared to JavaScript? As of now, nope.

I'm happy writing bastardized JS (not that my code is bastardized, rather that's just the language [took way too long to understand == vs ===]) for the web right now. Every day new tools and frameworks are developed to make it easier, and I just don't see the advantage and overhead just to write a weird version of python that compiles into JS.
I think there's quite a strong divide between the creators and the consumers of (low level) technology, even in San Francisco (even though I've never been there). From what I can tell, there is a shift going on in the sense that the number of consumers will grow relative to the number of creators.

This all is the (natural) consequence of the successes of SV. These days, enough kids aspire to be the next Zuckerberg, rather than the next great sports player. These kids will move to SV and consume existing technologies, in the sense that they will follow a couple of a rails tutorials and build the "next great webservice" by combining a couple of the patterns they've learned and create a twitter-bootstrap website that goes along with it. They may create some trivial extensions and post it to Github, but that's about as far as their direct contribution to technology goes.

This isn't necessarily bad, some of the world's problems will be solved by this new generation of entrepreneurs. The presence of more high level developers may also make SV even more attractive to the developers that can actually create cutting edge technologies, which would make SV an even 'richer' place in the sense of talent. However, the number of times I hear people say "I've wasted 4 years at university, and wish I dropped out after the first month" makes me think that they have not understood what university is all about, and makes me wonder if they will be among the ones pushing forward the frontier of technology.
Well, if you have better ideas how to identify "best and brightest" that can be implemented by bureaucrats, backed by paper trail and not easily exploitable - everyone would be happy to hear it. O1 works for scholars quite well it's just programmers are not usually scholars so they are out of luck here.

H1B already has salary floor and protections against body shops built in. The problem is with enforcement: most recipients of H1Bs are working for "consulting" companies (Tata, IBM, Wipro, L&T, Cognizant etc) and one can safely guess that these people are going to be contracted out, something that you should not be able to do on H1B. However the USCIS ignores this and keeps stamping these visas.
You have been breaking the law before they contact you. They are just sometimes nice like that. In contrast to the

If you want to know the specific part of the traffic law: StVO § 14, 2 (safety when entering and exiting the vehicle) [http://dejure.org/gesetze/StVO/14.html]:

"Kraftfahrzeuge sind auch gegen unbefugte Benutzung zu sichern."

(Vehicles are to be protected against unauthorized use.)

Also, your insurance might not like this ;).

As I said before, the german law is much more build around responsibilities. This is one example.
Instead of charging students, you want to be charging the schools for licenses that cover all of their students.

Or, better yet, charge lawyers, REO brokers, etc where there is a large pool of customers that will not be phased to pay you a reasonable amount monthly and give it away to schools for free.
That's selection bias in action. Many people with criticism about Go probably moved on.
Does panic isolate gracefully a query-of-death, or does it take the entire server down?

Does panic provide the stack-trace?
Cellphone pricing can be a bit of the wild-west...

I have unlimited free calls to anybody with the same carrier—but calls to other carriers are really expensive, much more than a payphone.

[I'm actually surprised this is even legal, but ...]
What I always find interesting is that the Python and Ruby developers are willing to loose abstraction power to delve down in Go, while they would be able to keep it if they would move to PyPy, JVM/.NET based languages or FP languages with native compilers instead.
30 Days of Creativity
Would it make sense for Arthur Andersen to help Enron cook the books and when it inevitably exploded go down with it? Probably not, yet it still happened.
Actually, when entities regulate their employees' trades in public and non-public equities, they typically also require pre-clearance for an member of one's household. At least that was the case for me. As a client paying sometimes in excess of $1,000 per hour, I think one has a right to expect this also.
The Netherlands has employee friendly policies. After three years in a company, employees automatically get an "indefinite" contract. An "indefinite" contract ensures that the employer cannot kick out the employee on a whim unlike in the US.

Good Dutch companies give out indefinite contract to the expats at the beginning of their employment itself but not Booking.com.

Booking.com gives out a 1 year contract to start with and after every 2 years kicks out its developers and gets new ones. So the frequent hiring you see is one of the side-effects of this cheap policy. I wouldn't be surprised if one of the big names Curtis "Ovid" Poe mentioned jumps on this mailing list to say - "not me", but the truth is this is their cheap game.

So after two years the delta of ones career capital can be summed up as:

1. experience in copy pasting code and cargo culting which would translate to nothing when you try out for another job.

2. no monetary benefit. Booking has the most underpaid developers in the industry. Those bonuses they promise never come. Given how expensive Amsterdam is, one wouldn't have saved up a penny after two years and if you have a family you might end up in debt.

In short one is ruining his/her best two years without any increase in career capital or monetary standing.
Not that I have anything against Brython (which imo is a cool project, although I'm not so sure if it's practical yet), but since you asked for it, here's an example where it does differ from python:

x = 0

def impure():
global x
x += 1
return x

print(0 < impure() <= 1)

In python, impure() would only be evaluated once returning True, but Brython's chaining evaluates it twice, and so it returns False instead. Of course, this example isn't exactly something you'd usually see in actual code (heck, it's probably even bad practice in most situations) BUT the point here is that while most of python might be compatible with this, there exists some inconsistencies that causes one's previously working python code to fail (and these bugs would probably be very difficult to trace). Of course, Brython is still young and has time to hopefully fix these issues. (In fact, this is the second time I've tried this project. Back then they didn't even have the chaining feature working, so it's nice that they are making progress.)
If you don't use recover it takes the server down.

http://blog.golang.org/2010/08/defer-panic-and-recover.html

http://code.google.com/p/go-wiki/wiki/PanicAndRecover
Being a front-end developer myself, I find such an idea a complete waste for people like me. We have put in a lot our time understanding how JS functions and most of the interactive interfaces you come across use jQuery. If Brython were to become a standard, then would you be writing a new JS library that would allow me work with DOM faster and in a better fashion?
Given the level of attraction of SV, the number of talented people from outside the US would be much greater if it wasn't for the way the US government treats foreigners. If the government doesn't become more receptive to foreigners it is quite clear that SV will never grow to its full potential.
A company is not a "patent troll" unless the company makes a living only doing it. However, what Apple brought against Samsung and what is being described here is a pretty clear-cut case of patent trolling.
they forgot the display screens in 2001
It's not karma. When there's a gang war, most people getting shot are gangsters. Not because it's karma, but because that's a gang war, what you'd expect? In the same way, when there's a rampant patent trolling war, patent trolls are getting sued too. Unfortunately, just as in gang war, innocent people get their quality of life severely degraded and sometimes are caught in the crossfire too.
> I think Go's multiple return values provide a very good way to do it...

Better than C? Sure. But not better than languages that provide sum types; some of which have been around since the 70s.
The missing part of the equation is successful businesses generate taxes, failing ones don't. So, as Tesla grows, it pays more taxes. That's how the government will collect the upside. If Tesla doesn't do as well, the government will also collect the (deferred) upside through stocks. The only way the government can lose is if Tesla goes bankrupt. That way the government can make their profits on all the businesses that don't fail, rather than just 1-2 smashing successes.

There's also the taxes the government collects through suppliers to Tesla, as well as sales taxes generated when consumers purchase electric vehicles, etc, taxes from capital gains and dividends of tesla stock, taxes from salary taxes.

I'm simplifying here because I haven't talked about the opportunity cost of the taxes from a petrol car the consumer didn't buy or the other job employees could have held. In general, however, the government will profit as long as value of taxes from economic growth and other benefits exceed the cost of the loan. And remember, for the government, the cost of the loan isn't for taxpayers to bear, but for all holders of US dollars, which include foreign nations and other non-taxpayers, through temporary inflation; Since the government can always print money to lend, and destroy money when the money is repaid, unless the business fails, in which case every US dollar holding person suffers.

Overdoing it, however, will mean displacing existing investors who are arguably better posed to select winners and negatively affect the economy. What I am saying is some level of government intervention may actually be profitable for taxpayers, even if the investment structure doesn't appear so on the surface.

It's like the "Why do governments invest in loss-making airlines?" The answer of course is to bring more tourists to their country by undercharging plane tickets.
Since this project depends on webruby and webruby uses emscripten, it could get close to 2x native performance in browser(only firefox nightly) because of the awesome asm.js support.

I am a big supporter of asm.js after reading John Resig's post on it(http://ejohn.org/blog/asmjs-javascript-compile-target/).
About point 1, if it were true, what would stop "rogue" managers from braking ranks?

There would surely be a lot of marketplace advantage in being the only one hiring trans-industrially if the industry-specific experience had little or no real value.
I'll bite. What are useful uses of monads, other than implementing exceptions, async, state and IO? Granted, it's aestethically pleasing to have a really tiny core on which to layer more sugar, but sometimes using the language as-is suffices.

The mother of all monads is Cont (http://blog.sigfpe.com/2008/12/mother-of-all-monads.html), but that belongs in the bowels of the compiler.
Arthur C. Clarke on Life (1993)
A fairly stupid article, which seems to be pushing the silly idea that as soon as neat new tech A becomes popular, old tech B suddenly becomes completely obsolete and useless. The "cult of the new" you might call it.

In reality almost all new tech, even that which is a good general replacement for something older, involves tradeoffs. Sometimes the bad points outweigh the good ones for use-cases slightly out of the mainstream. In other cases, the advantages of the new tech simply aren't great enough to warrant replacing something you already own.

[I own a (small) old CRT TV. A new LCD TV might be neat and appeal to my gadget instinct, but ... why bother? I don't really use it so much, and the old one works well enough. I just don't care about it very much, and would rather spend the money on something I do care about.]
Is this anecdotal or do you have data? If real, it's nice seeing the beginnings of programming jobs crossing arbitrary political lines.
Books?

Maybe one day when somebody comes up with an adequate replacement...
My knowledge goes as far as ~/.bash_history, how do you find out what they got up to?
>Basecamp has a great homepage.

Stopped reading there.
Agreed! I'm all for constructive criticism, but some of the comments in this thread are unnecessarily negative.
This project looks really cool!
Wait, just like Google have been doing for 8 years?
..squatters.
I believe TAL is from Public Radio Intl. but you can also just donate to TAL. I slip them a little bit every couple years. You can also buy the app.
I know SOOC, but "soe images"? Thanks
No, you were clear, and I seem to be thinking the same way your are. Mine was a more general comment on the common observation that Go is pulling more people away from Python than away from C. App developers who don't need the bit-by-bit customization power of C have already left it for more productive languages such as Python. Those who continue to use C are those who really need the bit-by-bit customization that C provides but Go and Python don't. Those who already left C for the huge productivity boost offered by Python can get back a lot of the performance and size advantages they left behind without giving up much of the productivity by switching to Go. That's an attractive option.
haha, a harsh dose of reality. repped.
The total cost to her employer is probably triple what her pre-tax wage is. It's nearly triple here in belgium as well (very similar taxation system). The net wage people make is maybe a quarter of what they cost to an employer. All those government services have to get funded somehow. This is very different to the US where the gap between net wage and total employee cost is much smaller but you have to spend more of your net wage on things you would get subsidized in western europe.
You're experiencing observation bias. Crime sometimes does pay, but in many cases it does not, and these cases are usually aren't reported as widely because they are routine and uninteresting. If you try to abuse your position for personal profit, you might get rich, but most probable outcome would be you initially get somewhat rich and then ruin the rest of your life. And you only have one. Do you think it's worth it?
I also enjoyed the negative territory over there : )
If you do it right, it won't. Many security audit companies are asked to do test audits, and I've seen security audit contracts starting with responsible disclosure of vulnerabilities. Of course, certain amount of trust is necessary so the sides have to behave in a way that is conductive to the establishment of the trust.
truth, better ad targeting