skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have limited experience as well. It's the reason I decided to try a port of VerbalExpressions. As I've learned more, I recognize that most of my puzzlement in regards to regular expressions is based on a misunderstanding of what they actually are.

In ordinary language it is simple to say, "A regular expression describes a pattern to be matched."

Mathematically, however, a regular expression describes a language. The typical use case is to test strings for membership within the language.

What regular expressions do is provide a formal description of a language. Once we attempt to construct regular expressions based on informal descriptions of a language, we are constructing arbitrary languages, and the only way to test whether an arbitrary language is the formal language we wish to construct is to construct the formal language and compare it to the arbitrary one.

There are two ways we can construct the formal description - as a regular expression or as the set of all legal strings.

Frak replaces formal description with a formal enumeration of all legal strings. But what does this get us in terms of regular expressions? We don't need regular expressions for:

boolean matcher? [list los string str]
[foreach [token in str]
[test memberof? los truth-value=or]]

matcher? ["foo" "bar" "baz" "quux"] ["barber"];

In other words, how do we get

(?:ba[r-z]|foo|quux)

by giving examples without including ["bas" "bat" "bau" "bav" "baw" "bax" "bay"] in the input list to Frak?

Then consider that some contexts are case sensitive. Which of ["bar" "Bar" "bAr"..."BaR"..."BAR"] are and aren't legal?
Hmmm. Shameless self plug here but you sound like some Spreedly customers' we have. Your developers just work with our API's to avoid the arcane payment gateway API's but your customer doesn't have to change their processor/gateway relationship.
Sundance Kid Takes the Sales Plunge
Why don't more designers have founder skills? Or why don't more founders have design skills?

Good designers are rare, and good founders are rare. Individuals who are both good designers _and_ good founders should be extremely rare.
This is my favorite:

"If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable." - Seneca
Now this is interesting, I entered in my name (Dillon) which is gender-neutral and it returned:

{"name":"dillon","gender":"male","probability":"1.00","count":1}

I'm interested is how its decided there was a 100% probability that I'm male (It was correct though).
Reinventing iOS Automation: (Giant) Editorial Review
It's gotten worse over time, and the user base has correspondingly shrunk AFAIK. But the causation is probably in the opposite direction.
I have no shame in admitting that I would rather use high-level mathematics and programming to play "multi-million dollar poker" on Wall Street than join half of the startups and big tech companies and have a boring job churning out insignificant apps at a desk.

In fact, the way you phrased it, being a quant sounds really fun :) you don't want to play multi-million dollar poker?

I mean, sure, meaning and existentialism and all that, but I bet it's at least somewhat exciting.
> I do not think it is lost on you or I that...

I believe you will agree that this is just another way of saying, "I believe you will agree that..."

Also I'm confused about the disagreement between your first sentence and your second one. I think you're saying that it's effective but that you loathe it nevertheless.
Here's some violent agreement...

I think this is a great product - if I am building a site, I want to concentrate on building features for that without first building technical bleeding-edge interaction from the ground up.

Sooner or later I may want to do something with this that isn't possible in the proprietary system, yes (although that's not guaranteed at the starting point).

If I get to that point with traction and money to invest, I probably would do exactly what you suggest, i.e. build a bespoke solution.

And, in that case, since the Firebase system acts as a modular component, refactoring this solution might even be a better option than refactoring a messy roll-your-own solution.
To get an idea of how likely it is, how many startups are reaching a $100+ million valuation in a given year?
Relevant xkcd (mostly the alt-text): http://xkcd.com/728/.
Going on Facebook, I see how everyone's social life is better than mine.

Going on Hacker News, I see how everyone's startup is doing better than my failed attempt.

Going on Hackaday, I see how everyone's working on cooler projects than mine.

The only place I feel good about myself is at work.
Was confused for a moment, though this had something to do with "Likes" on Facebook. Just a small note, but should be Facebook-like, eh?
I agree. I don't think it's a solvable problem. It's like people who champion the removal of SAT/ACT from college admissions.

Okay, so statistics demonstrate the SAT only correlates with the first year of college...great, what do you have to replace it with?

We work with what we have, and take the benefits it gives us.

Systems can always be gamed, and that's an unfortunate (fortunate for some, I guess) reality.
Thanks but I don't see how security rules will prevent someone from manually setting their own score. Take your 404 Astroids game as an example. Right now anyone can set their own score as they wish. Is there a way to prevent that using security rules?
How do publishers know that the scripts that go on their pages are safe?

They use technologies such as Google Caja to control access to the global object.
The Dark Side of the Expat Life
Chinese zoo under fire for disguising hairy dog as lion
EmberUI - An interface framework built on EmberJS
I wonder if the feature to install workflows from pages like this would run afoul of the terms:

http://editorial-app.appspot.com/workflow/6231550869897216/6...

I seem to remember Codea having some sort of sharing feature (via email?) that they had to remove for that reason.

That's kind of a drag, but this looks like a cool app even without 1-click install of workflows.
Alright, you got me there. General security holes stay open for months at a time, and remote holes in the production site that are actually vulnerable to a PoC get workarounds installed a day or two after. But still, nobody's going to use an unannounced 0day for a defacement.
"Rest, rest, perturbed spirit!"
-Hamlet, Act I, Scene V
UPS has a trademark for a shade of the color brown. Your blood may or may not be boiling about this.
Isn't this Apples job?
Ask HN: Co-founder running company to the ground. What can I do?
Background: I am the CTO, co-founder and sole inventor of a very promising technology company (<25 people) and have $1b opportunity, seriously!) . I now have a minority stake (25%) in this company, after my original co-founder was bought out by an angel investor who put in almost $1M and is now the CEO.

The problem is he is a big jerk (one customers' words not mine) and is running the company into the ground, because of his ego and imperious/dictatorial personality. This is narcissistic personality disorder to the nth degree. Customers - who are super eager to work with us - offline mention to me that how "difficult" he is to work with, I am very concerned we are headed for complete disaster.

I have tried talking to him to step away, mildly and couple of times confrontational. It has only led to yelling matches and strained our relationship and I am at a loss what to do.
I have even tried to ask him to sell his stakes to me so he gets his $ back - no avail.

I know since the CEO invested and technically owns the "IP" (which is a nebulous term), is essentially algorithms which we developed over last few years. Can I quit, legally "hand over" the code-base, repositories, computers etc. i.e. fulfil my legal obligations. Following that rewrite the algorithms from scratch as separate entity? Would that be violating the law?

p.s. I am talking to an attorney and seeking legal advice. But would like to hear similar experiences

p.p.s. We have filed for patents, but those won't be examined until 2018 or so...As with many complex systems, can be challenged in court as being public domain vs proprietary - some components use public domain algorithms.

Thanks so much in advance!
New JavaScript & NodeJS Snippets for Sublime Text
Re 2.: I have taken some code challenges in the past and I find the Amazon open-ended questions the best. Sure, some people can (and possibly like to?) memorize different data structures and algos, but broad thinking suits me best and companies like Google and Facebook don't seem to be doing it enough.

Basing it on the interview questions posted online.
Why Your Mobile App Sucks And Will Never Sell
Accessing the World Bank Data APIs in Python, R, Ruby & Stata
Whenever this topic comes up, I'm confused as to how commenters railing against sociopaths for breaking social rules reconcile that idea against the reality that the collective (government) that sets these rules also routinely breaks these rules (see treatment of Snowden).

If the rules are not consistent, why so obsessively stand up for them?
In general, you shouldn't assume that tomorrow's implementation behaves like today's, or today's implementation X behaves like today's implementation Y, unless there is documentation that says so. Looking at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9459657/synchronization-a..., it seems that Java does not guarantee that println will synchronize.

The exception is if you have tight control over your environment, have tests in place to verify that environment upgrades do not break your assumptions, and you desperately need to bend the rules, but even then, you should look really hard for better alternatives.
Sounds like the Modules implementation isn't ready yet, that's too bad... probably one of the most useful parts of ES6
Even old, the examples given are good for those not familiar with Python threading. IBM Developer Works has been a surprisingly decent site for assorted topics/examples over the years.
Handy tracebacks instead of uninformative segfaults
Hey Dillon.
It only found one match for "Dillon" in the dataset, which was a male. If Dillon is gender neutral the probability will probably change into some decimal when the dataset grows.
Sound Band - Headset without speakers
Hi James, thanks for the thoughtful reply to my grumpy trolling.

I can at least tell you what would dispel my concerns:

1. Some kind of death-rattle clause. If your company doesn't make it or shuts down this service, all the code necessary to set up the service would be released under a permissive license, something like that.

2. The ability, even if it had a high cost ($100k a year or something crazy), to license the source to the engine that powers Firebase and deploy a modified version (obviously just for our own use).

I think those two things would mean that if I were making decisions on the technical direction of a company or large project, I wouldn't feel like Firebase might suddenly cause a major disruption in the future. At least if there were a major incident or insurmountable problem with the service, we could bring it in house and proceed without having to go back and re-engineer all the previous work.
How to Build an Awesome Professional Network
You mean internally? The paradigm they use is immutable-message passing and asynchronous/concurrent processing.
Best Buy offering upto $200 for iPhone 4S trade-in for iPhone 5 purchase
So I guess iOS did turn out to have ways to let apps talk to one another all along.

Rather than moan that it's impossible and that iOS is 'restrictive', Ink have built a higher level library on top to make it easier for people.
"In my stars I am above thee; but be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em."-- Twelfth Night.
Unless you're ultra low volume I can't see why anybody would pay a percentage rate when you can use something like SagePay and pay 10p per transaction. It would be an order of magnitude more expensive to use this for us, so what have I missed?
The rule of thumb among VCs is about 15 per year. Assuming $100+ million is considered a "big success". The cap for big success might be higher.

See more here: http://www.paulgraham.com/invtrend.html

Actually, this article here has some good quantitative data. It puts the number around 200. It looks like most of the companies are non-tech/outside the Valley though.

http://bostinno.streetwise.co/2013/05/14/only-200-startups-p...
The following quote didn't really inspire me. But I still love it because I think what it says is really true.

“Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don't blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being "in love", which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.”― Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin
As long as it's not exceedingly difficult to drop down to using mutation, having immutability by default is ridiculously nice. I don't think I appreciated it fully until I used Clojure a significant amount, but using languages with reference semantics feels disgusting now.
FB Payments Test Isn’t A PayPal Competitor, It’s A Companion That Fills In...
Guide to Getting Traffic
Show HN: Create unlimited one-off Invoices (Built with AngularJS)
Yes, it does. Dealing with all of the security implications of this -- and there are plenty of tools available to handle it -- are beyond the scope of such a simple article.
Planning a Kickstarter campaign? Read this first
New audit logs give you the who, what, when, and where | Bitbucket Blog
The people you know have something to prove
It's a query API, no different than any REST API.
What's your keyword strategy? What's your keyword market? How much of it are you covering? (let me tell you - 0%).

Accept - in terms of content your website is pretty crappy.
That's a starting point!
Roll up your SEO sleeves and start working.

By the way what does you little website do? I looked at it 10 times and I still have no idea.
In your contrived story:
why did you choose a woman?
and why did you pick on a secretary?

the undercurrents of misogyny is depressing.
How does one try out this beta? Is this going to be open source?
All I can think of is a bit of old Internet humor: http://www.csh.rit.edu/~jon/humor/ha/java.html
Seeing people on Facebook is a little bit like seeing everybody you know pass you by on the street, but because it happens so often you stopped saying hi.
Actually, vice-versa. Spinning is the act of creating threads. You might have said, "You can't make a thread without spinning yarn".
My comment complains about the error handling comparison and then makes assertions about the "only legit reason for this change" <- "this change", of course, being the one to FreeBSD. I am not quite certain how issues Apple runs into with Xcode are relevant (and talking about hypothetical future IDEs, which certainly would not be FreeBSD-specific and which would treat clang as any other library to depend on, doesn't make the motivation any more clear to me).

To address your second paragraphs, I am responding to a comment (yours) justifying why clang should spend time on their website making comparisons against gcc 4.2, a stance you defend by stating that that is the version that people are using instead of clang. Now, in your response to my defense against that point, you are bringing up legitimate technical benefits of clang against all versions of gcc...

...but I would never, nor have I so far in this thread, complained that those benefits didn't exist; I especially haven't claimed that those version-independent architecture benefits shouldn't be mentioned on their website. My complaint, remember, is that there are specific nebulous benefits (error output) being touted against gcc 4.2 as the "most notable" (according to the SO answer being discussed) technical be benefit of this project.

That specific benefit only exists because of a licensing decision, as gcc after-4.2 does not have error output this bad (not do I believe it did in 4.3 trunk at the time that website was published). The honest reason, if "error output" is important, as to why clang is better than gcc for FreeBSD is thereby "licensing", as if licensing weren't the real reason that benefit evaporates: it is no better than just pointing out that gcc 4.2 is unmaintained.

However, and again, you are more than welcome to be happy or excited about any other real benefits, either to other parties or the ones in question, but your comments in this context are anticipating complaints I haven't made and in fact is aggressively arguing with me over something I don't even disagree with: it is as if you see anyone complaining about clang and presume "they must just be a hater" and knee-jerk your way through a muscle-memory argument over "why clang is better" (something I have no strong opinion about).
From an end-user POV, what will using an Arc app entail? Will it be like Flash Player and Java; ie, you download and install Arc once, and then all Arc apps will just work and be super awesome?

I had an idea like this, but instead of a VM, using a client-hosted server. The big concern I couldn't solve was security. If you have, say, Peggo.. What is to prevent other websites from being malicious and connecting to your locally-installed Peggo VM and trashing it or otherwise exploiting it?
The idea that Apple 'doesn't want apps to talk to each other' is just a lie made up to malign apple.

Apple built the URL launching system and the pasteboard which together allow apps to safely transfer arbitrary amounts of data to other apps and transfer control.

What they haven't done, is dictate how apps should interact with each other - they've left that open to developers to negotiate with each other.

Ink has taken these facilities and used them to build higher level functionality that takes this negotiation out of the equation for the supported workflows. As an OS vendor, this is exactly what Apple wants people to do with the technologies they provide.
Bigger guys may make you dependent, but smaller guys are easier for bullies to push around. I for one am not sold yet on the idea that these larger companies enjoy sharing data with the US government, and so I still think they're looking for ways to not have to do that if they're not literally compelled to.
"Fortune favors the bold"
Namecoin does a better job of jailbreaking the internet away from government controlled TLDs. There's already plenty of open source twitter and fb clones but one that runs over Gnunet would be interesting.

The not-so pocket sized server is cool and all, but it's running on what is essentially a blackbox with tightly sealed patents. Might as well just write an Android server in a dalvik VM and host off your phone what's the difference if we are going the blackbox route.
"Congratulations on arbitrarily incrementing a version number?" ...

Such a shitty attitude. I give the guy from firebase who replied to you credit for not being snarky when your comment started with that ignorance.
Site Search Should Be Sexy: How Swiftype Raised $1.7M
Correct. It synchronizes on the instance of the PrintStream, which has no effect here.

The bottom line is that the Point object should have been immutable, which would have made it safe for publication. That requires its fields to be final (among other things), which was not the case.
“If it falls to your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music ... Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.” -- Martin Luther King Jr.
The Twelve Factor App turned my head upside down. I'm day-jobbing in the enterprise J2EE world, and it drove me to the conclusion that the industry does enterprise all wrong. Integration and configuration management are generally nightmares with these big enterprise systems. With Twelve Factor, the chances for variation between developer desktops, testing environments, and production are greatly reduced.
It's a maximization problem. The goal is to have the best possible ROC curve for your hiring process. Maximize true positives while minimizing false positives.

My personal threshold attempts to minimize false positives even to the extent that I will pass on people that would probably have done a good job. I tune it this way because I think that bad hires are one of the worst things that can happen to a team. But, each individual has to calibrate this for themselves.

I'm not looking to solve the problem, I'm looking to make the best possible decision based on the information I have available.
You can enforce this as well as any other backend can. Games are a bit of a special case because you not only want to enforce access controls and a particular data model, you also want to make sure the client didn't "cheat".

It turns out this is an issue with any game that runs on the client though -- regardless of if you're using Firebase or not. Preventing cheating is tough because at some step in the process here you're relying on the client to tell the server the truth. Since the game runs on the client, you can't ensure that the code hasn't been tampered with, or that an AI isn't playing the game, or that the user hasn't cheated is some other way.

With Firebase security rules, you can enforce that only that user can set the score, and you can enforce that the score is of a valid format, but fundamentally there's no way to ensure that the score is "real".
Yeah. There are some other things that are actually impossible, like WeakMaps. But still, the stuff that exists is pretty awesome.
Being atomic is not enough. It's too easy to use two atomics operations and assume they'll be sequentially consistent.

For example, suppose we have:

A = 0
B = 0
Producer:
while true:
AtomicIncrement A
AtomicIncrement B

Consumer:
while true:
postA = AtomicDecrement A
postB = AtomicDecrement B
assert postA == postB // wrong

The assertion is wrong, when you're dealing with relaxed atomics. For example, the producer can be optimized into this either by the compiler or by caching layers:

int savedUpA = 0
while true:
savedUpA++
if (savedUpA == 100)
AtomicAdd A, 100
AtomicIncrement B

In which case the consumer will often see that postA != postB.

Thankfully, languages are apparently converging on "every atomic write is a release barrier" and "every atomic read is an acquire barrier", which makes these sorts of optimizations illegal (releasing B's new value requires releasing A's new value).
Never, Fortune 100 never gets hacked, they just go into maintenance mode.
I have a degree in design, I didn't learn such things in school. I've worked numerous jobs in design-related positions for around twenty years now. I've worked with countless people (I won't go so far to say they're "brilliant" because that's a hugely subjective thing) in similar positions or involved in my projects. I, nor anyone I've ever worked with, have had the attitude you are expressing when it comes to design.

You are seriously projecting, the world is bigger than your circle of friends.