skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> it's full of magic. You can feel it, but you can't really understand it without digging through the source code.

Are you trolling? If not, care to provide concrete examples?

I've written a number of small applications in Clojure and I find that it /lacks/ magic, even in comparison to something like Python (which is generally highly un-magical). For instance, Clojure's namespaces prevent circular dependencies; while a simple example, this is idiomatic to the larger philosophy of Clojure and indicative of a general dislike of magic that permeates the language as a whole, in my experience.
Putin: "Snowden still in Moscow airport"
No. The Commander-in-Chief might, for non-state military members that happen to be Americans and a few other "Law of War" provisos. But that's why you don't oppose the U.S. militarily, it's been shown to be hazardous to one's health.
Snowden himself said it in a recent interview: the NSA can not decrypt your messages if you use a reasonable encryption method. They rely on endpoint security.
JackDB Adds Two Factor Authentication
For those who were around in the early '80s, was the Prolog/Transputer/FGCS hype similar back then?

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose...
True, but I'm not sure I'd say the laws against leaking government secrets are unjust.

I think you have to consider context. To flip it around, the law may or may not be inherently unjust, but breaking it may well be justified in some circumstances. Nominally, this is part of the reason we have juries, and why juries are able to make their determination on any basis they see fit... so they can allow for this kind of "fuzziness" to the law.

There's also a reason that prosecutors have discretion in choosing what charges to pursue, what sentence to seek, etc.

Now, you can argue that, given our system and all its checks and balances and protections, that Snowden should come home and face a trail in front of a jury of his peers. But you can also argue that, given all the publicity around the case, he's correct in saying that he won't get a fair trail. You could also argue that even a "fair trail" is unfair from the perspective of the individual being judged, if they don't consider themselves guilty of a crime.

At the end of the day, this whole idea of "justice" is not black and white, sadly.
The video demo makes it seem like you can effectively "auction off" clients to lawyers primarily on the basis of who offers a higher referral fee. You are going to clash with the professional rules.

*

>New York rules do not permit a pure “referral” fee – that is, a fee for merely referring a
client to another attorney. (Some states do permit such fees under certain circumstances; as an
example, New Jersey court rules permit certain attorneys who have been certified by a state board
to provide a referral fee to another attorney without regard to the amount of work performed or
responsibility assumed by the referring attorney [N.J. Rule 1.39-6(d)]). The governing New York
rule is DR 2-107(A), which provides:

A. A lawyer shall not divide a fee for legal services with another lawyer
who is not a partner in or associate of the lawyer’s firm, unless:

1. The client consents to employment of the other lawyer after a
full disclosure that a division of fees will be made.

2. The division is in proportion to the services performed by each
lawyer or, by a writing given the client, each lawyer assumes joint responsibility
for the representation.

3. The total fee of the lawyers does not exceed reasonable
compensation for all legal services they rendered the client. [1]

*

The job of a lawyer is not merely to act as a "broker" who develops business and then sells the client to specialists who will pay her the biggest fee[2]. Referrals are a part of the profession, yes, but the emphasis is not on making money but rather directing your client to the best person for the matter because you have the duty of acting in the client's best interests. The referring lawyer should still do work on the case after the referral in order to accept a fee, too.

[1] http://www.nysba.org/Content/NavigationMenu/LawPracticeManag...

[2] Of course, there's nothing wrong with being a lawyer who counsels clients on picking the best lawyer for the job, or provides access to their network of contacts. However, the client should pay for these services (hourly or fixed), not the referee. When you sell the lead based on a referral fee there is going to be a conflict of interest and keep in mind the lawyer has to get the client's consent to this division of fees.
I think you misread his paragraph. He was proud of the business the day in its state that day he walked into the accelerator (and presumably for some time before), not BECAUSE he walked into the accelerator.
What are the import duties?
There were smartphones years before the iPhone, even ones with touchscreens and no keyboard. There were tablets decades before the iPad. There were online application market places years before the App Store. Apple doesn't often do anything first, they just do it 'right', and that means taking time and thinking it through.
As long as it's at least tangentially relevant you should be fine.
Absolutely. And I would still be waiting patiently except for the fact that this thing is actually being sold in retail now. I don't mind waiting. But I'm annoyed at being "worse off" as a backer.
There's a new edition of that out November:

http://pragprog.com/book/jvrails2/crafting-rails-4-applicati...
Rise of the Minimalist Workout
He confessed to infiltrating the NSA via B-A-H for the purpose of grabbing material to later leak to the public. He may not have realized it at the time but that's very damning, especially since he went out of his way to get information relating to Chinese hacking activities.
Am I missing it, or do they not have an option to see the PHP source of the website anymore? I always thought that was a neat feature to have for a language's website.
Yea, I think what some people are worried about though, are the (a) possibility of many false positives and (b) the collateral damage with "common crimes". In the latter I mean: how far into the realm of everyday rule-breaking will these agencies go? Will you get a ticket mailed to you because you rolled through a stop sign and your license plate was captured? Will you get police officer (with warrant) at your door to search your premises because you purchased a book about marijuana growing?
Perhaps "mentor" does not paint quite the right picture, but working with smart people (and solid professionals) rubs off, and that, in my experience, has been very useful.
Git isn't an SCM, it's a SCM building toolkit.

You personally do not have to understand all the parts, but you do need someone to build a SCM for you out of it and tell you what the parts are then.
Looks very nice - probably covers the ground for a lot of use cases.

Big question for me would be - how do we go through "due diligence"? How do you communicate your bona fides to me the seller and to my customers? I suspect this needs addressing in some substantial manner.
As no war has been officially declared since 1945, and we still have treason and traitors, I suspect you could use the War on Drugs as an excuse if you tried hard
On Hartl's site, the most recent update is from May 15th for Rails 4.0 rc1. I'll feel more comfortable when Michael confirms the tutorial is valid for the final release.
This doesn't answer the author's question. We know the difference between performance and scalability. How does it perform compared to Java?
NeverWet: Superhydrophobic Spray that Waterproofs Everything
What have you done for me lately?
This, a thousand times this. I could write an entire post on the key metaphor alone. I don't think anyone has ever had their conceptual understanding improved by calling the codes you use to encrypt and decrypt things 'keys'. If we insist on calling them that, can we at least make sure to explain why it's called a key, instead of giving people the impression that it somehow works like an actual key?
Its why I don't get the idea that being an employee is a 'safe' option. Your only as safe as the company you are working for. And frankly you look better as failed founder, then a developer at a failed start up.
50% Fear self-driving Cars
It would certainly seem to me (in London at least) that scala has most of the "enterprise functional programming on the JVM" pie. I hardly see any clojure jobs pop up. From what I've seen I'd say demand for FP skills looks like:

Scala > F# > clojure > Haskell (really bummed about the last one!)

In London finance circles. Does that sound about right?
Here the example for 3 bits.

0 -> 0
+1 -> -2 -> -1 -> +2 -> +1
+3 -> -4 -> -3 -> -4

The first cycle takes care of 0, the second one of -2, -1, +1 and +2. The interesting thing is the third thing - it consists of the cycle -4 -> -3 -> -4 and the attached chain +3 -> -4 entering the cycle via -4. This one correctly maps +3 to -3 and -4 to -4 (-(2^(n - 1) is its on inverse) and only fails for -3 which is incorrectly mapped to itself, too. There you go, 7 out of 8 correct.

(This is the essence of my way longer answer on Stack Overflow [1] although it is not necessarily any clearer because it evolved a lot.)

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/a/731857
Same here. My three favorite Ruby books are POODR, Eloquent Ruby, and Hartl's tutorial.
I recognize a lot of this from startups I've been involved in.

At the height of the bubble I co-founded a vanity e-mail business. We wanted it to be a paid service. Our only competitor was a paid service. But when we looked around, we saw ludicrous valuations per user for users that provided little to no revenue. And the VC's saw it too. And everyone were seduced into going for a free service and figure out monetization later. So that's what we did.

Of course the bubble burst, and the lofty valuations disappeared, and we had to hunker down. The business survived, but we fired 45 or so people - the vast majority of the team, and the VC's lost most of their investment.

I have two big takeaways from that experience: Be conscious whether or not you want to gamble. A gamble can be worth it, but you may be much happier building a company that'll stand a reasonable chance of giving you steady returns and pay you a salary than taking a long shot at millions. We started out wanting that reasonable chance, but got seduced into the long shot without really thinking about it.

Secondly: Keep in mind the VC's often have a vastly different risk preference than you. A founder is usually investing all his/her time in a single business, often for years. A VC spreads their investment over a wide range of companies, and spreads risk accordingly. For them, it's not such a big deal if a few of their portfolio companies fail, if they get the occasional massive return, so it may make sense for them to be willing to take risks with your business that are not in your interest.

It's vitally important to think through how much risk you're ok with before going out and getting investment, and to look for money accordingly, as well as consider how much control you're willing to give up depending on how aligned you think your interests are with the profile of any investors you bring in.

Failures makes valuable lessons (and I've had more lessons...).
An undercover cop, who swears allegiance to a gang he is infiltrating, only to testify against them later, is he deceitful? Wrongly so?

It may be that Snowden did an immoral thing. But I think it is possible to hold allegiance first to a higher ideal, and break later promises to uphold it.
Probability will have the same face looking at the star thanks to tidal lock.

I realize that the earth/luna system is tidal locked, so we always see the same face.

But why is this true of this system, but not the earth/sol system? Why would you expect tidal lock in the cases of these three planets with their sun?
Difference between Binary Prediction and True Exposure
You didn't bother to look up the author, did you?

Tony one - of - our - most - dazzling - public - intellectuals Judt? Whose special expertise was modern European history?

This is taken from the introduction to POSTWAR, finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize:

""" p. 9

We should not idealize this [pre-1914] Europe. What the Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski called 'the incredible, almost comical melting pot of peoples and nationalities sizzling dangerously in the very heart of Europe' was perilously rent with riots, massacres, and pogroms -- but it was real, and it survived into living memory.

Between 1914 and 1945, however, THAT Europe was smashed into the dust. The tidier Europe that emerged, blinking into the second half of the 20th century had fewer loose ends. Thanks to war, occupation, boundary adjustments, expulsions and genocide, almost everybody now lived in their own country, among their own people. For forty years after WWII Europeans in both halves of Europe lived in hermetic national enclaves where surviving religious or ethnic minorities -- the Jews in France, for example -- represented a tiny fraction of the population at large and were thoroughly integrated into its cultural and political mainstream. Only Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union -- an empire, not a country, and anyway only part-European -- stood aside from this new, serially homogeneous Europe.

But since the 1980s, and above all since the fall of the Soviet Union and the enlargement of the EU, Europe is facing a multicultural future... voluntary and involuntary migrants from failed or repressive states at Europe's expanded margins have turned London, Paris, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Berlin, Milan, and a dozen other places into cosmopolitan world cities whether they like it or not.

This presence of Europe's living 'others' -- perhaps fifteen million Muslims in the EU as currently [2005] constituted, for example, with a further eighty million awaiting admission in Bulgaria and Turkey -- has thrown into relief not just Europe's current discomfort at the prospect of ever greater variety, but also the ease with which the dead 'others' of Europe's past were cast far out of mind. Since 1989 it has become clearer than it was before just how much the stability of post-war Europe rested upon the accomplishments of Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Between them, and assisted by wartime collaborators, the dictators blasted flat the demographic heath upon which the foundations of a new and less complicated continent were then laid.

"""

On my trips to Europe I have seen students in Prague (none in Plzen), Arabs in Paris, some British tourists in Ljubljana.

Overall I was not surprised to learn that when Poles gained the right to emigrate by acceding to the EU, the richer member nations were swept by waves of anxiety over the arrival of a slightly different kind of white person.
What is it exactly that Snowden did that so many Americans consider to be bad?

I think many Americans assumed such practices likely existed, and believed them to be useful tools against terrorists and criminals. They believe that Snowden has reduced the effectiveness of these tools.

For example, most people know we have spies. But I think these same people would be upset if someone said, "We have two spies in Pakistan working with this group. And a common technique for this group is to infiltrate via this mosque, where we have several spies, etc...". While this isn't a list of the names of the spies, people would probably believe at even this high level of specificity that the effectiveness of their intelligence gathering would be reduced.

I personally have mixed feelings about it. I do think that to the extent that the gov't is doing something illegal, whisteblowers should be empowered to stop it. On the other hand, I think the capability of our intelligence gathering should be as secret as possible. It's not just what can they do that should be secret, but what they can't do.

Some people think that terrorists are hyper-aware and practice perfect security. I suspect that they make a lot of mistakes and have a lot of assumptions.

Is Snowden a hero? I think history will decide this question. If we see a freer US as a result then I think he may likely be viewed that way in the future. If instead it turns out that our intelligence agencies were practicing disciplined filtering and thwarting attacks, and in the future we're outmaneuvered due to these leaks then I think history will view him in a different light.
Hah, I was just wiki-ing Emergence this morning after listening to Russ Olsen's great talk from Ancient City Ruby[1] on the topic. Creepy.

1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQp1CFJxgs0&feature=youtu.be
Senior iOS Dev Position available at iSpeech
iSpeech is looking for a senior iOS developer to be part of the team.

We are looking for a motivated candidate with experience developing mobile apps and the ability to support the iSpeech API. You will be familiar with and have had hands on experience with many of the processes and techniques related to:

•	Responsible for iOS development.
•	Maintain existing App Store applications with updates and bug fixes.
•	Maintain an SDK that is distributed to third party developers.
•	Be responsible for the development of 1.0 iOS applications that requires extensive Objective-C and iOS specific knowledge.
•	Knowledge of SVN useful.
•	Experience in interacting with web API's useful.
•	Meet expected developer productivity with weekly goals and deliverables.

If interested please contact me at anna (at) ispeech (dot) org
Can I suggest you use this forum as a way to test your ideas, publicise the book and get tons of real life examples

in short - how do I, with an idea, test it? How do I use AdWords, keyword search, mailchimp etc etc

Got a process - validate it here

(As I suspect you are)
Ask HN:  Is this a bad interview question for an intern?
> There's a 50MB log file. Each line starts with ERROR, INFO, WARN or DEBUG, indicating what type of message was being logged. How would you figure out how many errors occurred? The technology you use is not important. We're just interested in the technique you would use.

(This is a simplified version of the kind of stuff we deal with on a daily basis)

Only one out of 4 managed to answer the problem in a satisfactory way ("count how many lines begin with the word ERROR"). The others seemed to be completely thrown by the fact that it was a 50MB log file. Is this just a bad question?
It should be easy to detect whether any radio signals come from that direction.
I would be interested to know this myself. Some insight into the $->£ 1:1 conversion would be nice.

I'm not saying there isn't a justification here, it's just I've never heard of one. There may not be one as we all know that price is often best set at what the market will bear, and someone probably decided that it was a good price point for the UK market.
I think the OP was arguing against calling a bootstrapped business a "startup", and on that ground he has a point (at least according to PG's and Wikipedia's definition of a startup).

That is to say, a bootstrapped business can be a startup (if it gets to the point where it focuses on fast growth) but not necessarily (as in the case of businesses with gradual or no growth).
Lisper trend to write one-liners with functions such as map, doseq etc. with big combination chains with many other functions. When doing this in a dynamic type language with no documentation, I guess that's why he calls it magic.
Eval() isn’t evil, just misunderstood
Is Snowden even real? Seriously? I take it you read the whackjob Washington Post article too.
Agreed. I think PFCTs are good for generative part, not for the rest. They should be part of a build process really, not live infrastructure.
That's what I was thinking. Isn't Mars in a habitable zone as well?
Yeah, I've seen many similar, some examples:

http://www.mybigambitions.com/

http://www.bucketlist.org/

And probably the oldest of them all?

http://www.43things.com/
For folks interested in mobile A/B testing, also see an open-source alternative by Clutch: https://github.com/clutchio
so, just choosing a random file off github, is this a template?

https://github.com/symfony/Process/blob/master/PhpProcess.ph...

Or in other words, php files are only templates if you use them that way.
That's a tough spot and I've been there, as the employee that's on the fence as the management nail-bites over accounts receivable and wondering if they can make payroll.

I've since learned that you keep your ears to the ground at all times, in ANY company you work for.

You don't sit in your cube with your Dr Beat Headphones on, you listen to office talk. You overhear that phone call from a vendor asking where their overdue payment is. You notice the rise in closed-door meetings between management and the CFO. You make friends with the assistant that cuts the checks. When you've done it long enough, you know where you stand and when it's time to get the hell out before you're caught with your pants down.
The smart ones never used such unsecured communications in the first place.

I don't understand why people always trot this argument out. The dumb terrorists are capable of killing and injuring innocents also.
I think commanding on the Battlefield is the wrong metaphor, we use it a lot but its not a battle, its a sport. When you tell your developer you can't afford to pay him any more it isn't that he (or she) "dies" its that they move on to their next job. Is it painful? Of course. But it isn't death.

Sports analogies work better since there is always next season with some of the same and some different players. You decide to go for the touchdown for the win instead of the field goal to tie on 4th down. Its a choice, it works or it doesn't, you go on to the Superbowl or your don't. The decisions tomorrow will be affected by today but you will still have decisions to make.

Start-ups (and I think this is one, and I think pizza stores are start-ups too) are sprouts of a business. Sometimes they grow into bushes, sometimes trees, sometimes they can't develop enough to stay alive and they die after a while. But a start-up "dying" isn't people dying. Its people going on to do something else. For non-founders their work day may proceed pretty much unchanged other than office environment and neighbors in a new job somewhere else. As for founders? Well it demands reflection and inspection to glean the maximum amount of understanding about what worked and what didn't. Sadly its the only way to learn some of those lessons.
this situation simply isn't a problem for a conventional configuration management tool

Sure. But loads of other stuff is. The weight of tradeoffs is clearly against PFCTs here.

One could argue that Puppet and Chef are ideal tools for performing that automation.

Absolutely agree - but not within live infrastructure. Only build.
What Is 'This'? A Javascript tutorial on Context
That is super useful! Thanks!
One thing to note though is that forEach and reduce can both be /theoretically/ faster; for and while loops both imply an order in processing the list, whilst forEach and definitely reduce don't; in theory, the JS interpreter can take the array, split it up into chunks (one for each core / thread), and process the list in parallel, which would / could produce results faster.

But, atm, functional operations on lists are still executed single-threaded. Wouldn't mind seeing a WebWorker implementation, for example. Although somehow I think the overhead for a relatively simple calculation like this would negate the results.
And I'd very much like to stay here. :P
I am happy to see the speaker cites our project [1], although I've only seen the slides and not yet listened to the presentation. Not sure if he talks about it in a positive or dismissive light. :)

Edit: It's partially dismissive in tone, but so be it.

[1] http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/
Yeah, I'm just complaining because - well, because that's what you do when you live in Paris :D Still, it might be an idea to start slowly moving the date earlier in the year - April has far worse weather and shorter days than June, so it is far better suited to indoors activities ;)