skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seriously?

I never thought humour writing has gone to such lows, both in terms of content and presentation.

Okay, I first thought it's another "bash them winz" post but I thought give it a try and I am back with the feeling that it's worse then that. At least those bashes have content and analysis even though very trite and non-significant.
'Support' is not a binary thing in such a complicated domain as governance, society and culture.

In many respects, Singapore has a small government which is efficient on the narrow set of things almost everyone agrees governments must do. That makes it worth learning from, in those respects.

In particular and with regard to your point about highly-paid officials, I'd prefer the US government be much smaller, but I'd happily pay US officials far more if they did fewer things very well with businesslike efficiency.

The things Singapore does well don't excuse their censorship... but every extant government is a mix of good and bad, legitimacy and abuse. We don't learn by rapidly sorting things into Manichean all-good or all-bad categories – even though activists of all creeds try to demand this sort of simplistic 'with us or against us' thinking. We learn by delaying judgement, studying the details, and being open to new information.
Actual novices are more likely to get tripped up by such things as understanding mutable arguments to functions before they even try working with threads.
Ben Bernanke to Princeton Grads: The World Isn't Fair (and You All Got Lucky)
Sorry, your last claim of Singapore being a real democracy is a lie. In Singapore, you cannot assemble and protest if you want to. You need to apply for a permission before. Opposition parties cannot organise rallies f they want to because it becomes 'unlawful assembly'. Newspapers cannot publish an article criticising government unless they can support it with a proof that can stand in a court and win a case, when the government sues them for libel with thousands and millions in penalties. (And Singapore government has not lost a single case against newspapers or opposition parties, be it NY times, Straits times). If opposition criticises the ruling leaders, government sues them and some courageous leaders who did that before became bankrupt. Singapore leaders are obsessed with stability and have managed to convince the general public that it is for the good of the people. So, many Singaporeans will defend this, if you say that this is not right. Similar thing exists in China where people are convinced that democracy will lead to instability in a large country like theirs and one-party rule is better for China.
I'm not sure of many advantages, other than having an extra button or 2 available for the pinky finger. Otherwise it's basically just a matter of shifting your keyboard about an inch right or left.

I started as a WSAD user in 1999, but I turned EDSF in 2004. (And I'll argue the letters should be arranged in "up-down-left-right" pattern, not "up-left-down-right" :p )
Firstly AWS sets the benchmark for security, transparency and compliance which we know you won't get from Linode for example. Secondly AWS has a damn good network. Thirdly lots of software 'understands' EC2 e.g. Cassandra, Hazelcast.

AWS' popularity comes not just from the wide array of decent, well integrated and cohesive services e.g. S3, SQS, ELB, ElastiCache but also all of the third party services that are hosted within the AWS network e.g. MongoHQ, IronMQ/IronIO. AWS is very much an ecosystem.

If you are building a new app from scratch there a lot of benefits to having others manage the commodity parts of your infrastructure.
New ROCKING syntax!

#!/usr/bin/env glas
#
# Yay, and hear these spoken words of wisdom, Stranger:
#
and: he ~ walked: through the valley ~
valley + shadows &
valley + shadows + death -->
and: he ~ feared: not: evil
#
# versus the barbaric cries of the past!
#
#! old pythonic
#
and(
he.walked( through_the_valley.combine(
[valley, shadows], [valley, shadows, death] )
).and( he.feared(not(evil)) )
I second that, this is very curious.
Examine your day so you can learn from it
EC2 will not become faster. However, at least, for web traffic, CPU and IO are not the only factors.

Network is, in fact, a major player in the latency, and by being globally distributed, configuring Route53 appropriately, and integrating CloudFront CDN, a given web-app gets a boost that I doubt a faster computer can beat.
Price Fixing -- And How To Stop It
Agree with others here, a very captivating read. Couldn't stop reading once I started.

The personality of the protagonist is interesting to think about. Disturbed individual or hero? Both? We are presented with his actions, wonder what was going on in his head. Left his wife and kids to live for 3 years in a strange country. Did it again for 10 years. Remarried there to someone who doesn't speak his language. Had other kids. Left them.

A hero because, I guess there are few who would do that. Provided an interesting insight into the inner circle (but I don't the sacrifice for humanity's lack of information on Kim's family is what drove him). Very disturbed person as well. The childhood probably left some pretty large scars on him. Abandoning his family many times over is disgusting to think about, the scars it will leave on his children are no less harsh than those left on him by his father.
Sony PS2 Slim 7000x Spindle DVD Drive Motor Part - TooSell.com
Not necessarily. AWS has a far superior network to almost anything else out there. Machine performance is not the only important part.
This article is written as if shared memory is the only parallel programing paradigm. While it is true, that threads are a very useful construct for writing high performance parallel software, distributed memory programming is also a valid approach.

If your problem can map to distributed memory techniques, then you have multiple advantages over shared memory programming. Most importantly you can parallelize over multiple machines. Other advantages include decoupling of each parallel task from each other (fewer race conditions and other hard to debug problems).

There are several ways to achieve distributed memory parallelism in Python: multiprocessing, zeromq, raw tcp/ip sockets and mpi4py. Which approach makes sense to use will depend on your problem.
> Is a total lie. And, yes, I will happily compare it to various "not perfect" non-dictatorships to make this point.

Fair enough. The question is whether or not the Lee family qualifies as a dictatorship. Outwardly at least, it would appear as if they control much of the government.

> The reason for PAP continually winning elections has more to do with the fact that they dragged the country from being a 3rd world country on a par with Tanzania to being richer than America. That wins elections.

Great, they get a cookie! But I would feel better if there was some successful transition of government that involved someone opposing the previous. There has been no such transition in Singapore yet, and its not clear that such a transition is even permitted under the current political system.

> It is every bit as real a democracy as the United States, which has similarly draconian controls over the press by the business elite, but which has deluded itself into somehow thinking it's the world's gold standard in freedom of expression.

Bull. The US and most of the western democracies have a much more free press than Signapore does, and they have healthy adversarial political systems to boot to ensure that power isn't concentrated in one place for too long. These two features are not unrelated.
Introduction To Unit Testing In Python and Ruby
In that case, I don't know what you are driving at by bringing up America.
> People need jobs to provide for themselves and their family.

No, these people were seduced by promises of a big payday for copying other people's work -- plain and simple. There are so many tech and gaming companies to work for in Silicon Valley that I just don't believe it's possible to pick the most egregious one simply by accident.
The problem isnt Facebook, the problem is People who have built their lives on the skeletons in their closet, and technology allowing people to know more about each other.

Your neighbors know tons about you, but you're only worried about people working in datacenters.
I thought the comment was in jest, or, at least, I certainly hope so.
But the point is, we have to buy the costly VS AND pay a third party to get the real goodness of an IDE.
Хорошего дня
Had the same procedure done and paid equally as much. I was shocked how much it cost.
> The restrictions on one's freedoms are not significantly greater than in Europe or the US.

Is that really true? If I lived in singapore, I would be worried about saying anything critical of the government, to avoid things like this happening to me:
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5g_-nIBIauDZSr9xDuY8K2Ja8...

I live in the US (but not American), and I have and will say things critical of the government, and I do not fear any repercussions. I think this is fantastic.

Mind you I'm not talking about extreme things that will warrant investigation from the secret service, but stuff like what the blogger mentioned in the article said.

Are you saying that what's mentioned in the AFP article above doesn't happen? Or that I will indeed face repercussions for similar speech in the US, but I'm just too naive?
To get around the paywall.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Obama+Plans+to+Take+Action+A...
Now you can use the familiar

do something: a dict ['some key'], coordinates['x']
I don't know about these cases specifically, but usually it is done by threatening their families back in the other country.
I find that an interesting contrast to my position. If anything even mentions facebook I avoid it. Social network integration to me is a privacy concern, and it's overuse a social liability.
BazaarBot: An Open-Source Economics Engine
Can someone explain the situation that started this?

"he signed a one-year contract to teach sushi-making skills to young chefs in Pyongyang"

Was this just in the classified ads? I thought North Korea was closed off from the world and Japan an enemy. Was this a low point in military tensions?

Similarly what kind of flights went between Japan and DPRK?
Here's a link that will actually get you around the paywall:

https://www.google.com/search?q=Obama+Plans+to+Take+Action+A...

Just click on the top link to read it.
This is not entirely correct. AWS does offer AWS GovCloud which, provides an environment that enables agencies to comply with HIPAA regulations [1]. You have to be a US government organization to use it though.

Updated: AWS also has a whitepaper on Creating HIPAA-Compliant Medical Data Applications with AWS [2]. Looks like this is support on the standard non GovCloud stack.

[1] http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2011/08/16/announc...

[2] http://media.amazonwebservices.com/AWS_HIPAA_Whitepaper_Fina...
Its an interesting question, but I would have as much concern for someone who conducted their social life primarily via hand written letters as I would someone who spends 10 hours a day on Facebook.
Great.

Please:

1. Do away with the browser plugins and come out in the open about your tracking and storing private user data.

2. Develop a backend or service that we can use on other clients as well, not just inside your almost ugly and non-intuitive browser plugin powered website.

3. Finally, set a price. People, who love their services and become dependent on them don't like to see them sink and/or read my private data to sell not to avoid the sinking. If you are free you are doing sth fishy because no-one can believe you receive grants for Greenpeace or PETA.

4. Keep my data exportable and takeout ready at any time, in a format that I can use elsewhere i.e. Have your service conform to some standard standard(preferably "open" open, not Google's open).
Not now, but deep recessions can happen even in big cities. Nobody is as invincible as they feel.
I completely agree with you. I live in SG too and I love the government for all their efficiency, clean corruption-free, intellectual approach to managing the country, but hate it when they still have draconian measures like this to control the criticism. I find them stupid in this case, because most Singaporeans are happy with PAP and they will elect them anyway even if criticism is allowed.
" Who trains doctors on new equipment in hospitals?"

Dirty secret. Equipment vendors. Ditto for pharmaceuticals.
Hardening WordPress Basics
Great defriending of Facebook
It seems the implication of the article is to say that we have potentially drawn the wrong conclusion on "which straw" broke the camels back.

And that if we drew the wrong conclusion that somehow this might impact or could have impacted the rationale for developing nuclear arsenals.

It's also popular in the US war college that officers attend, the statement that "Wars cannot be won by air power alone".

But beyond these details, whether the history is exactly right on what caused the Japanese to surrender, there is no doubt that the conclusion of WWII precipitated an arms race and a space race as Nazi scientists and technology were divided among the superpowers.

Nothing would have stopped the advancement of war making technology, no convenient conclusions about the strategic causes or effects.

Technology will advance whether we want it to or not. And whether or not its in out best interests as we perceive them in our posited "future".
Honestly, in my case, for my day job, it's way, way more "business use case" or more frequently "misunderstanding between 2 services" than it is an implementation error. We catch 90% of implementation problems with unit testing and/or just plain sanity checking it before release. Maybe Haskell could help us by making unit testing easier/unnecessary but of course there's no switching at this point.

We're probably a bit of an edge case being a very service oriented architecture. (1,000 servers, 6-7 major classes of server, handling 10B (yes B) requests a day). Most of our bugs consist of a flawed assumption that crosses 3-4 service boundaries on it's way off the rails. I'll admit I'm ignorant of Haskell but I just don't see a type system fixing that for us.
All of them. Which can you read at the end? Maybe your Python. Definitely not my Common Lisp or C.
Nevermind that, listen to this:

nevermind: that --> listen: this ~ to
# nevermind(that).listen(this.to)

# All you do is complain and whine to your boss,
# slacking, sipping a lot of coffee at the coffeeshop:
complain: and whine -> my ~ boss -> slack: sip coffee: a lot --> coffeeshop
# my.boss.complain(and_whine).slack(
# coffeeshop.sip_coffee(a_lot)
# )

foo: normal dict['some key'] -> bar

;)
>I bring up the Wumao tactics because they apply almost verbatim here: the common "criticism of criticism" in Asian countries is to assert that you can't criticize unless you somehow are perfect. Since perfection doesn't exist, all criticism is therefore unwarranted.

This is some pretty heavy racial stereotyping.

Most of the "defenders" of Singapore here are probably white immigrants. Like me.

I'm not saying you can't criticize unless you're perfect.

It just sounds like that because I'm unfavorably comparing what you (probably) assume to be a Democracy - the United States with Singapore.

Not because I think that Singapore isn't often authoritarian, or that it should be free from criticism, but rather because your claims that it's a dictatorship are pure, unadulterated (and probably racist) bullshit.
Foreign Policy is the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, a group summarized as early as 1986 by Noam Chomsky (who won a 2005 poll as the world's top public intellectual, invented modern linguistics, and is an outspoken critic of US government) as essentially the business input to [United States] foreign policy planning. The question, then, is which business interests are served by a given Foreign Policy story?

Speculation may be made in this case if we ascribe significance to the near simultaneous release of The New Digital Age by Eric Schmidt (Google CEO) and Jared Cohen (Council of Foreign Relations member and head of Google Ideas; somewhat spooky in and of itself), which Julian Assange variously described as a startlingly clear and provocative blueprint for technocratic imperialism and an enticement to Western soft power.

One of the advanced praise writers for the book (aside Kissinger, Blair, Clinton, Albright and Bloomberg - who, it must be noted, recently declined presidential candidacy as billionaire and 7th richest American to run New York) was General Keith Alexander, who is the present Director of the NSA (former Deputy Chief of Staff, Army; formerly Commanding General, U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command; Director of Intelligence, US Central Command; Deputy Director for Intelligence, Joint Chiefs of Staff). Jacob Applebaum (of The Tor Project, also Wikileaks affiliate) described General Alexander as the most powerful man in the world and a fucking liar for claiming to congress that the NSA does not routinely intercept the communications of US citizens.

Why has this article been published by Foreign Policy in the current climate? The author has been developing these ideas awhile (http://cns.miis.edu/staff/wilson_ward.htm).
Agreed.

And of course, the second letter stands for compute. If you find yourself using words like traffic instead of computation and discussing the finer points of the per-hour billing feature instead of how many CPU-hours of jobs are enqueued, you should definitely consider that you're trying to use a tool that wasn't designed with your needs in mind.

That said, AWS in general has a lot of useful tools for web developers, and certainly one use-case of an elastic compute cloud is temporary development instances.
Technology in help for the blind
Advanced computer vision to help visually impaired has the most advanced user interface: point at what you want
This is almost completely how I run my internship: A bit of background, I'm at an independent science research nonprofit, my research is in synthetic biology.

I will say one point of disagreement is in the selection process, I look at the college first. If a college student is at a big research university, and in their 2nd or 3rd year, they shouldn't be interning with us, they should be pursuing research opportunities locally. So I restrict my search to 1st years from big universities or students from primarily undergraduate universities generally. I will never take a graduate student intern. My second criteria is the essay, and I always cross-check what they say about themselves against the transcript. You can't proudly 'you really love math' and then pull a C- on your first quarter of calculus in the second-tier calculus class. You may actually love math, and just had a terrible quarter where your family members passed away, but in that case you should't say it in your essay, right?

I plan well in advance what the student will be doing. Typically my strategy is a new project all their own that will be highly repetitious (i.e. doing the same tasks repeatedly) but which will culminate in a broad understanding after cumulative effort. I think it's a horrible waste to have your intern just do things that are your scraps or to try to have them 'experience everything'. They'll SEE everything that's going on around them, better for them to achieve mastery over one task with the short time. Amazingly, this year, my intern has gotten the ropes and is basically ready to hit hyperdrive after three weeks. I also let my interns have a lot of independence, if they want to pursue an experiment off of the agenda, I encourage them to do it (though I try to steer them away from foolish wastes of time).

I usually welcome my intern with a BBQ cookout at the beginning of the internship. This is in addition to other social activities that the institute provides. I also try to help them find things to do in town. One of my bosses is a Nobel laureate and he has a BFF; they're great personalities, so as a bonus, I arrange for my intern to have a private lunch with the two of them towards the end of their internship.

Thirdly, I structure the internship as follows: I don't plan for inordinate meetings, that just gets in the way. With three months, my structure is for the first month to really ramp up on the technique, the second month to explode in productivity with the learned technique (to saturate their time doing it), and I leave the third month for the student to take it in whatever direction they choose. Usually the project I put them on is HIGHLY risky, but one where after two months you can do an assessment to determine if the path is likely to bear any fruit - and I have a 'backup plan' for the third month, where I assign a different project that uses the same techniques that is almost guaranteed to result in something learned.
I just read that book last week. Amazing stories.
Fear - uncertainty - doubt. Basically when people kill good ideas by focusing on only the bad aspects and risks. It can happen when people are too conservative and want to keep the status quo, or aggressively to undermine competing interests.
> It is interesting to me how on HN there seems to be a disproportionate number (say relative to the general population) of Singapore fans.

Because libertarians can appreciate certain aspects of a country's policies without actually being in agreement with all of them? Personally, I am not a fan of Singapore's social policies but I do admire its mostly laissez-faire economic policies. I believe other HNers might admire Singapore for its excellent math/science education system. I would guess that most HNers would disagree with its censorship policies.
I read this in a print version of GQ (call me old fashioned), and as it turns out, they come out with pretty fascinating topics regularly. I think the urban explorers article or coast guard rescue a few years back piqued my interest.
I'm still amazed at how he stayed there 20+ years and never learned Korean.
Didn't we just go through a deep recession? Decent programmers in big cities had nothing to worry about!

Nothing is absolute, if our society collapses, then yeah, programmers might not have an easy time finding a decent job. Short of catastrophic problems, I think programmers are in good shape for a long time.
According to Amazon, their employees are not allowed to access to your data, so you don't need to sign a business associate agreement with them to be HIPAA compliant. I imagine this is similar to how sending patient information through the post office is not considered a disclosure to the post office.
Are you kidding me? At 1m15s you can actually see the stars behind her.
EC2 incstance start times are also horrible. Something like minute would be acceptable.
>Sorry, your last claim of Singapore being a real democracy is a lie.

No. I'm not claiming it is a "real" democracy. I'm not even sure what a "real" democracy is.

What I'm claiming is that it's no less a democracy than the United States or most of Europe.

Most of what you've written here is either downright false (e.g. "you can't protest" - there was a protest on immigration reform just a few weeks ago), OR, it is something that I could find an equally, maybe worse anti-democratic equivalent to in the United States or Europe.
Cool - you know I think we actually agree on most things to do with this subject.

I guess I was talking about the more serious, and thankfully less common, degree it can get to with some founders (anyone actually, this isn't a special club reserved only for founders, anyone can find themselves in a bad way, feeling trapped).

The 90% (pulling figures out of my arse) of founders who say they have no choice but to take their laptop on every 2 day holiday, and haven't had a decent break for years are probable self inflicted with ample ability to "just change it" - agreed.
Read it again, and note that not all news photography is photojournalism.
Hardware Idea: Aeropress Station
Who want's to use the woodcrafting full stack?