skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Our company just started using Zenefits. Signing up for health insurance online was way less painful than filling out paper forms, and they had good summaries of the various plans.
Whenever people won't talk about how someone died, I (like most people) immediately assume auto-erotic asphyxiation.
A poor analogy but in general terms, if it is in the public's interest, yes.

Security by obscurity is flawed.
> Far too many C programmers think that unsigned ints are an appropriate type to use simply because the quantity in question can never be negative, e.g. the length of a list or the size of a memory allocation.

size_t is the type for such things and it is defined by the standard to be unsigned. I would like to point out that since it is the standard that defined it, it is not the fault of an average programmer.

> What they fail to appreciate is that almost inevitably such values will get used in subtraction operations down the road, and then your chances of having a corner-case bug grow exponentially.

C has always had the approach that the language is hands off; meaning that if the programmer wants to shoot themselves in the foot they very well can. Furthermore, not using an unsigned int is not going to help the issue for two reasons: you might very well need the entire address space provided by the 32 bits and somewhere down the line you will eventually need to cast to size_t when you call malloc. The solution is to simply make sure that you test for overflow/underflow where appropriate or choose a different language.
There's a semi-recent study showing that people's recollection of the material two weeks later is higher when they see a chart junk version vs. the clean chart. That's the real game changer imho.
Death was not suspicious. Confirmed by family. I'd rather not say anything more than that.
To be clear, it was at least $5 per notification, but the ARPU was much higher.
Well stated :)
If they haven't changed their policies lately you get a certain number of free articles daily as well (five, I think, but they might have removed that).
Even for a police officers, zero tolerance is a foolish standard. But in this case, even under the most lenient of systems, this cop should have been gone from the force a long time ago.

I have known a lot of cops over the years, and I can honestly say that there are a lot of awesome guys doing that job. But it also attracts these power hungry assholes, who could care less about law and order, and only care about pushing people around and compensating for what I can only presume their manhood inadequacies.

For instance, I knew a guy who was a very successful civil litigation attorney, very shitty attorney, but very successful. He worked part time as a patrol cop. Why? He did not need the money, he did not care about the law for a bit, and he could give two shits about helping people. But he loves the power. In his own words, he was bullied as a kid, and now it's his turn. That man is still a cop to this day, and he absolutely should not be one.
I'm not sure I understand this question?

If you're asking why I don't own a house, its because I'm not quite ready to make that commitment at this point in my life. :) I'm happy with the flexibility of paying rent, and I pay a REALLY low amount of rent (by San Francisco standards) in a nice place. I'm content.
One of the nice things about big-O notation from a mathematical point of view is that it allows you to avoid dealing with limits.

As everyone knows, calculus is based on limits, but when handled rigorously limits have a lot of subtle pitfalls that take a lot of work to deal with. For example, given a function f(x,y), if we want to take one limit after another, the result might depend on the order in which the limits are taken. In other words, taking limits is not commutative unless certain conditions are satisfied.

None other than the great Donald Knuth went so far as to claim that all of calculus could be taught without limits! Quoting from [1]:

"Students will be motivated to use O notation for two important reasons. First, it significantly simplifies calculations because it allows us to be sloppy — but in a satisfactorily controlled way. Second, it appears in the power series calculations of symbolic algebra systems like Maple and Mathematica, which today’s students will surely be using.

For more than 20 years I have dreamed of writing a calculus text entitled O Calculus, in which the subject would be taught along the lines sketched above."

[1] http://micromath.wordpress.com/2008/04/14/donald-knuth-calcu...
> police misconduct

How about an officer who has to break the law/procedure to expose corruption or save someone's life?

Life is rarely so black-and-white; zero tolerance strips us of our ability to use reason and discretion based on the arrogant assumption that our rules and procedures are perfect and infallible, which is just silly.
I want to chime in that I have been using a similar setup: nginx, ngx-postgres, postgresql 9.2.4 in production for a while. It has been very snappy and rock solid till this point.

I used android async-http to talk to the server from my app to have everything online. This is an intranet app so latency is not really an issue.
Oh Forbes, you pay writers like this guy to come up with some discomforting topics along a text broken into X number of pages on purpose to force readers to reload all those ads each time. That looks like a form of "passive income" to me.
No? Obvious hyperbole aside (no one retired to Tahiti that I'm aware of), it seems pretty close. A company built an extremely ambitious, bleeding-edge app, sold some early copies, were preparing to roll it out on every meaningful platform, then got a fat check from a tech giant and promptly became platform-exclusive, ripped out a lot of the more interesting features, and fucked over their early adopters. (The folks who paid actual money for the Siri app on the iPhone 4 were not amused when the app suddenly announced that it was disabling itself and they'd have to buy a new phone to keep using it.)

And, really, how many times have you heard someone say something like "Man, that service has gone to shit since Yahoo bought it"? It seems to come up pretty frequently. I'm sure there are entrepreneurs with actual integrity regarding their startups, but it seems like a lot of the big success stories end with "and then we sold to Google for $100 million, we win, the end."
Parts of both.

Some of the logic is ported from C++ to Go almost line-for-line.

Some of the architectural parts are completely redone.

But it has the same binary name and flags and RPC interface
Haskell has been used in large-scale projects. There's an algorithmic trading firm, Tsuru Capital, that uses it exclusively, in fact.

You might also be interested in the work of Galois. They've got some slides on Haskell in industry: http://www.scribd.com/doc/19502765/Engineering-Large-Project...
Higher standard, yes, but people will err, and not all errors deserve the same response.
The problem with zero tolerance is that large systems are about balance, so when you're designing a process to govern a large system, rules quickly become untenable when measured in absolutes, and become about managing probabilities. When designing the rules for a legal system, for example, we can never have 100% correct outcome, so we have to decide whether we're ok with 100 innocent people going to prison for every guilty person, or 1 innocent person, or 100 guilty people going free for every innocent person going to prison, etc.

Sociological systems are governed by laws of nature, and we can't just ignore them any more than we can ignore the laws of physics. Zero tolerance is a copout. It sounds good, but real systems simply don't work that way. It might be manageable for congressmen or senators because the system is small enough, but is completely untenable for a system as large as a police force.
The genius of the blog was taking on the surface boring topics and, through quality analysis, doing something awesome. That might be hard to identify programmatically.
What I'm about to say is a little trollish, but if you use words like, "Business logic," whatever you're writing probably doesn't need to be faster than Go. And anyway, if performance sensitive bits are your thing, cgo is probably the best FFI outside of C# that I've ever used.

Also, it's a sign of a defective language that the library guards against old environments? Really?
US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada are the Five Eyes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
I'm sorry that I can't suggest anything open source except for DSP hacking, and that would Miller Puckette Pure Data system - but like a lot of open-source tools, especially in this space, it's about as friendly as a leopard. Very powerful, but also hideously ugly. Most pro users use a commercial iteration of the concept called Max/MSP which also has a steep learning curve but is quite interoperable with other platforms such as Processing.

I'm largely focused on audio processing because I'm into synths, but also on sequencers which I find endlessfascinating in much the same way as wind-up toys :) The problem is increasing complexity on larger projects, of course; I tend to use the Nord Modular platform for preference because otherwise I could spend all my time building and never get around to making music.

One commercial application that you might find interesting is the IDA debugger. I found after I'd been doing this for a while that I developed a strange affection for assembler and low-level debugging.
Call it 'rent seeking' and there is not a lot of danger or fantasy to it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
(I wrote a rough equivalent of "payload_server" in Go at my current employer to solve authentication, access control, and some other business logic issues.)

> Does an off-the-shelf httpd support ACLs?

Not really. You inevitably end up writing custom code to conform to your particular requirements and/or existing systems. If you want high-performance, you end up writing it in C as a module for Apache/nginx/whatever.

> How easy would it be to make them support google storage instead of a file system?

Unless said storage system is presented to userspace through ordinary file interfaces, same as above. There's no general turn-key solution built into webservers. The problem space is too wide.

Using Go in this way gets you good performance, simple architecture, maintainability, and easy deployment with total flexibility to do whatever you need in order to solve your version of the problem. There are no straightjackets, you don't have to conform to (or find ways around) anyone else's conception of the problem space.
Well, I read it more as "if work is going to provide the meaning of your life, might as well have it be something you like to do." However, aside from the PWE, centuries of history tell us that liking your job is a luxury.
As an Audi owner, I wonder if I have standing to sue VAG for not allowing this to be published and thus fixed.
Are they ran by the same people? I ask because: http://www.zenefits.com/ZenPayroll
At this point in time, I'd settle for pretty much anything less than 100% tolerance for those examples.
NDA for private alpha/beta users?
I'm about to open my app to a group of selected persons to take part in private alpha/beta testing, Should I require them to sign a NDA to particpate?
I have no affiliation with either Google or Mozilla but I pretty much always upvote articles concerning Go and Rust simply because I'm interested in those languages and want to encourage more articles about them to be posted.
I've been using SSH for fifteen years. I have never read the man page because I have never needed to--I have scanned it for specific topics but I have never been quite so teeth-pullingly. This is new and useful information to me and so I upvoted it. On the other hand, I am certain that many, many things I consider trivial would be out of your realm of knowledge and relative understanding of what is and is not trivial should lead you to act better than you are acting.

Or, put another way: don't be an asshole.
I like this idea. Managing a workforce like ours (DoorDash) is incredibly difficult, and our ability to do it well is probably the greatest advantage we could have. The idea is to make software that makes complex tasks simple.
I hadn't heard that one, but Yves Klein patented a color in France 50 years ago:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Klein_Blue
If cops have to break the law to save someone then the law is at fault. But I cannot, for the life of me, think of any such scenario.
As for exposing corruption or being a whistleblower, there are many who want to modify laws to make it easier(Infact, Obama's stance on it during his elections is a prominent example.), but by definition, whistleblowers are fighting against the more powerful and/or the rich which has made it a losing battle.
Steve Yegge on GROK - Stanford Seminar
But it doesn't. It expects the text to be coma or semicolon separated, which in my case it often is not.
That's not what the article is about, though. It's almost like you didn't even read it.
The 3dbrew guys are looking for $2300USD (I think) to have some chips inside the Nintendo 3DS decapped.

Byuu published some wonderful articles (including some figures) on having the SNES coprocessors decapped so they could be successfully emulated for the first time in over a decade.

http://web.archive.org/web/20130121234850/http://byuu.org/ar...
I don't understand your point. A normal user has very few options when it turns out there's a bug in their off-the-shelf standalone webserver, too. They can fix it themselves, work around it, or report a bug and wait for someone else to fix it. Exactly as in Go.

Are you saying everyone should write their own HTTP server from scratch?
Ouch.
I visited Hungary and the Czech Republic around 2005 and a pack was about $2. In the US it was $4.
I hope they do something slightly nice for developers and give everyone an extra year of membership or something (not that $99/yr probably matters to most accounts).
So freedom of speech is only morally necessitated if it's deemed to be in the public interest? That sounds like you're setting a restriction on speech.
Well, that's what makes it so weird, honestly. By making the statement, they're in a way admitting that yes, that's what they're known for, otherwise it wouldn't have to be clarified.

You'd think that if they could keep Prism under wraps for so long, that they'd have resources to cover up the torturing stuff!
There is information on Twitter that a short statement will be released, but the family needs some privacy, time and space.
Or thieves coming to you to get the keys ...
Error made by a tech intern
Calca Review & Interview
Bart Salaries Histogram
RE: In preparation for the BART Strike Round 2, I've decided to make some data visualizations of BART salary information from 2012 Long story short they want a 24.2% raise over 4 years.
Interesting, makes sense though that that would be the case.
Best of the best that apply to Google. Or in other words, their hiring process is "Hire the best people that apply here", or, you know, the hiring policy of every company in the world. You could argue they uniquely attract smart people with some kind of high IQ gravity centered at the Googleplex, but that seems unlikely. Makes for good marketing copy though.
Do you guys guarantee a job offer after the program? what about housing hook-ups
Pfsh.
It sounds to me like you're mixing up two things: "worst case performance" and "asymptotic performance." You say

> Big-O is concerned with worst case performance. Colloquially, f∈O(g) means that "Eventually, f performs no worse than g."

Aren't these two different concepts? Worst case performance deals with the worst possible input of any given input size (like pathological inputs to Quicksort), while asymptotic performance is talking about sufficiently large inputs (like the vertical lines you've drawn on the graphs).

When I say that merge sorting a set of n elements is in O(n lg n), I'm saying that there's some value on the n axis beyond which n lg n >= MergeSort(n). But when I say that Quicksort is O(n^2) in the worst case, it's as if I'm talking about another other function called WorstQuicksort which when given a set of n items always takes as long as Quicksort would take to sort the most pathological set of n items, and there is some value on the n axis beyond which n^2 >= WorstQuicksort(n).
If cops have to break the law to save someone then the law is at fault.

This may be, but it still means that they broke the law, and would still be affected by zero tolerance. Just because the law is an arse doesn't mean the law has no teeth.

As for an example of breaking the law in the course of duty, in a lot of places police are required to have lights and sirens before they break traffic rules - no sirens means no breaking traffic rules. There are times when police serve better by doing just this.
That's exactly right. I know it WILL most definitely happen to me, it's just a trade I'm willing to make.

An applicable analogy is athletes and steroid use, they know what will happen but triumph and success in their 20's is worth it to them.
This comment sums it up nicely:

"Conditioning the next generation into docile, subservient servants by using fear as a tool."

Yep. At least some students and parents are not being bullied and file lawsuits, which is really the only reason why we even know about these incidents.
Have you tried (gawd, I sound like an advertisement) Chantix? That med worked great for me, relatively speaking -- kept me off for 8 months (took the med for 2.5 months). A significant part of the program is developing alternative habits in response to stress and other such things that would usually cause you to light up. Admittedly, that part of it failed for me, but that was a combination of my own fault and the circumstance of a breakup, which gave me a pretty high stress level.
It's caused tremendous cost to the business

Presumably you guys didn't have backups? If so, why not? Section 14 of Box's terms indicate IN ALL CAPS SO IT MUST BE IMPORTANT that they offer no warranty that the software will work in any capacity, or even be secure.

https://www.box.com/static/html/terms.html
A different way to look at this -- someone who believes in the affordable care act, and wants to build companies that will help this law succeed.
We love Zenpayroll, but, sadly, no official relationship despite the name.
The documentary on youtube, narrated by none other than Orson Welles, is awesome too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ghzomm15yE
Is solving the health insurance problem to single founders / freelancers much more difficult than 2 founders? or is it much smaller market? Honest question, because as far as I understand both Zenefits and SimplyInsured (both YC13 and pretty similar market) do not address the |company| < 2 market.
What situation would warrant breaking traffic laws without using light and sirens? It seems almost a tautology that doing so is a danger to everyone else on the road...
The first time I ran into this idea in a somewhat 'formal' message was in Tim Ferris' "4 Hour Workweek".

Was it this book that brought the idea of passive income (especially using the leverage of outsourcing) to the masses, or was there some other mass media fad generator before this book?
It may be frowned upon around here... but when my friends asked me to point them in the right direction to learn programming I just gave them a copy of "Beggining Visual Basic", showed them some simple code and how to make a simple app with VS.

It may not be the best language around, but it's simple and you can make something that works in Windows ridiculously easy. If they show continuous interest, then they will hear about some other languages but most people just want to see something working with buttons and text boxes and then after a few weeks they lose interest.

It's like going to the gym, some of us love it but it's not for everybody. And if it's your first time, don't spend time with a complex routine... just run on the treadmill until you feel tired. If you like how it feels, then you will keep coming back, and if you don't, you didn't waste time doing the advanced exercises that are useless without continuous workouts.

Disclaimer: I told them that programming serious applications takes a lot of time, hard work and lots of reading and practicing. They just wanted to make toy applications. They were instructed to never deal with secure applications or production critical applications until reaching programming enlightement.
Landing Your First Programming Internship
And excel is oversold as a general purpose CRM
Magnet like flying saucer gets rock-star status on 3,200-mile trip to Illinois
Cambridge CompSci here,
Dr. Anderson, apart from his academic work, is known to be a very powerful and influential scholar in Cambridge. He also orchestrated a campaign against university so that the scholars can own their intellectual property rather than the university and was very successful in his campaign. So it is no surprise that his response to such a phony request is glorious.
Brad even acknowledges that the original program was nice in it's day. C++ complicated things but it sounded like the bigger problem was developers leaving the team and new features being hackishly implemented.
I was referring to the death penalty when I made the parent comment. Not the possibility of him being tortured.

Is treason not a crime punishable by death in the United States?

According to this link, it is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treason#United_States
I think you got the original causes right on, but I don't think it's taboos that keep them in place; I think it's a jobs thing (for cops and DEA agents).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProgramByDesign has more on functional programming in high school. I'm surprised Haskell was such a success here (although I've mostly not worked with that age cohort since I left it) -- I'd expect a strict language to be more productive for beginners, combining the biggest part of the thinking-about-correctness advantage with an easier performance model. But if it's working, that's fantastic.

Also in that vein https://www.coursera.org/course/programdesign says it needs only a grade-school background.
I had weather.gov written down in my notes, I think we also saw weather.com. Thanks for clarifying. I also went for 'free' but that was 8 hours I could have spent writing code or playing with D3.

Did he also spend ~40 minutes ooh-ing over Google Image search? I remember seeing a bunch of blue sailboats or something and he was going on and on saying he prints out pages of google image search collages (except he had some artsy name that was more hipster than collage).
MVPToolkit
One possible reason is that indefinite inefficiency "creates jobs in the public sector"
The thing is I could throw a bunch of Haskell at you but in the end it wouldn't really mean anything. When I embarked on learning the language there were many times I almost threw in the towel. It was hard to see beyond the initial frustrations. Haskell code looked confusing, verbose, ugly, and so on. It was only by taking the time of going through this process that I came to an understanding - followed by appreciation.

But I don't claim to be incredibly intelligent. It is very possible you or someone else here could look at a heap of Haskell code and just immediately understand the advantages/disadvantages without having gone through learning all of the "why".

Your time is yours. Don't let me try to tell you what to do with it. Heck you can make a fortune just writing PHP so is there any reason to learn anything else? I'd say anyone who loves their craft would want to at least give all new things a shot and invest some time into learning what is out there.

The project I took on initially to learn Haskell was translating a real time sparse 3D reconstruction computer vision algorithm. It was incredibly daunting and challenging. But in the end very worth it!