skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Makes sense. In Finland the only constant between parliaments seems to be the Swedish People's Party. One or two cabinet seats since 1979 (support ranging from 4.2 to 5.5%). They basically exist to maintain the Swedish language's position in Finland. Since their demands are predictable and relatively trivial, they end up in all combinations, even the current mongrel six-party coalition.
I love the phrase "excessive regulation could drive innovation in virtual currencies overseas". Depending on your view of the US dollar, the US is already the world leader in virtual currencies - trillions of dollars created out of thin air by the federal reserve.

bitcoin deserves a better classification - "digital gold" - anonymous and resistant to inflation as is gold, but portable and easily divisible for use as a medium of exchange. corrects some key faults of gold, although secure long-term storage is a different kind of challenge.

since all inflation is created by the US government as an unofficial policy (or official, depending on how you look at it) to fund an ongoing operating deficit, I can't see them taking lightly to any serious challenger to currency transactions.

the pricing of oil (among other things) in US dollars around the world is a major pillar of US economic strength and the government probably will tolerate bitcoin as long as it is a diversion, but will get serious if it grows, and try to ban it on money laundering grounds (because USD clearly can never be used for money laundering, right?).

i also think the "innovation in virtual currencies" is an interesting claim because there are plenty of other non-US virtual currencies to use for transactions - yuan, rubles, etc. they just don't have the gold-like aspects of bitcoin.
Yes. NSA is controlling Chinese water plants. Oh my god.
I have a different stance on this. The technology that drives the company is strategic business decision, not a technical decision. Sure - create the MVP in whatever you want, the technology is less import - but don't do that for Rev 2. Rev 2, the true architecture of the company should be based on A) what's the right tools for the use case B) are the resources with that talent available to keep from hindering the company? For example, I wouldn't start a company with Go/Rust/etc anywhere but in SanFran - because to most of the country these languages are still fads.
Server side device stuff is annoyingly hard to get 100% correct though, you need to get a giant library that needs to be updated every week and requires a massive amount of resources to scan over the list of devices to find the one that is currently browsing.

But I kinda of agree, if you are browsing at 400px's you shouldn't be getting stuff for 1024px's. And vice versa.
especially when you think about the fact that a lot if not most traffic jams are ghost jams, where a slight overreaction ripples through the following cars causing them all to stop for no apparent reason.
In the meantime why not create a Chrome extension or Userscript to do this for you?
Mystery of the ancient caves in Nepal
I used to use nxlog to collect Windows AD logs to a Linux server. Often, it would end up deadlocking (2-3/week) on the Windows Side and would stop shipping the logs. It was very useful to have the logs but I'm very glad we were able to replace it.
So how does that affect its usage in Germany? It's hard to imagine English speaking companies being comfortable with using, say, RetardDB.
This is the most awkward introduction video Ive seen so far. I really enjoyed Erik's introductory course on haskell so really looking forward to this course.
Exactly, there is never a better moment to start learning something new then now.
CSS3 media queries can often fulfill the missing link for screen sizes, aspect ratios, etc.

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-mediaqueries/
> I'm not comfortable with dying or being injured due to a software error regardless of whether its likelihood is higher or lower.

Why on earth is dying due to a software error worse than dying due to a human error if you can chose one or the other, and the chance of a software error is lower?
I always though Tesla's were going the no-brainer for driverless cars.
> Google has driven +200K miles on real highways and streets

I have got to say, I am pretty amazed they have managed to swing that. Permission to drive autonomous robot cars around the everyday streets of litigation and safety-obsessed California? An accomplishment of equal size to any one technical challenge in the car's making, I would say!
Why did you leave public service?
Validating Algorithms
I am sure that the automated drivers will react faster, but the problem is that they can only react to events they have been programmed to react to and only in the ways they have been programmed to react.

There's no ensuring either of:

a) It will react to everything that it needs to react to / not react to things that it shouldn't.

b) It will react in the proper way when it does react.

This is the problem.

Like I said if it were all automated drivers on the road, I think we'd have a really amazing safety record. But the problem is that with human drivers and automated drivers on the road, the human drivers are going to do all kinds of stupid shit, and how much of it will be reacted to properly? I don't know.

It seems to me most people on HN significantly underestimate the complexity of solving this problem of automated drivers alongside human ones.

Plus, I am also uncomfortable with training human drivers to just trust the computer and pay no attention to what's going on around them. I think that's the worst outcome of automated drivers.
Researchers reverse-engineer Dropbox,crack heavily obfuscated Python app
Tested to 1 kilometer, mentioned in the Features section at the link.
Interesting take, but I'm disappointed that Groovy wasn't broken out into a separate entry. Groovy is a great choice in that you can leverage the entire world of Java libraries, while using a modern, dynamic language that is mostly backwards (syntax) compatible with Java - but without the verbosity. And Grails is a first-class convention-over-configuration framework for building webapps.

IMO, Groovy is absolutely one of the top platform choices a startup could make. We've been using Groovy and Grails at Fogbeam for 2+ years and haven't regretted the decision at all, FWIW.
I was going to say this. People aren't going to work hard for someone else (they'll work enough to get by but that's it). If you empower them they'll be working for themselves, and they'll actually want to do a good job. It reminds me of a blog post by a guy managing a few open source projects. The quality of the pull requests he got were poor, and required a lot of fixing up. He decided to add anyone who gave a pull request as an admin, and suddenly the quality of their code went way up. They weren't working for someone else anymore. They were working for themselves.
Cars are way too dangerous. We accept the absurdly high number of injuries and deaths they cause only by lack of a better mean of transportation.

I hope self-driving cars will have hyper-efficient safety mechanisms, especially to protect pedestrians and bikers, not just the car's passengers. This would be a huge progress for humanity.
Twitter Poaches TicketMaster CEO For Commerce Chief Role
"(In Haskell, all function are pure by default, and you escape the confines of purity via monads.)"

This is not true. Nothing about monads, in themselves, allows you to write impure functions.
I haven't taken Odersky's first course, but I'm fluent in Java and Clojure. Do you guys think that would suffice or will Scala knowledge be a prerequisite?
I recently finished reading "Crypto: Secrecy and privacy in the new code war" by Steven Levy - and it sounds like bitcoin is going the way of cryptography in the 90s. The US Government wants to control it but doesn't get it enough to be very effective, and it's out of the bag so it is used internationally.

I seriously wonder if this is a bug that can be squashed - who says there won't be more variations of digital currency that's based on cryptography.
Commercial cargo airplane pilot. Now I'm graphic designer, specialized on UX/UI.
Thanks! Didn't know about it, sounded like a cool name for a web crawler: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opiliones
It looks like they are using TI chips for the wireless (CC1101 for prototyping but it looks like they are targeting the CC1200 for release).

The have a little more technical information on their website - http://www.flutterwireless.com/press.html

http://www.ti.com/product/cc1101
http://www.ti.com/product/cc1200
The thing is, you're trying to say that automated cars are a bad idea, but all the arguments you make actually militate for getting rid of the humans ASAP!
I am skeptical, which is why I don't put much value in your comment. Want to convince me that corn oil is bad or that cell phones cause cancer?

Cite proper studies on these things, and don't cherry pick results you like, give me a fair sampling of all research. If the data supports your claim, I'll believe it.
The truth is our lives are in the hands of more software programs than we may care to admit.
ARM, IO pins, on board antenna.

$30 adds an external antenna and battery charging circuitry.

ISM bands, mesh networking. The chip they are using do 1200bps and 2400bps at low power, but the data sheets talk about 600kbps capabilities of the modem. I'd plan on the 1200 or 2400 if you are thinking 1km. Look to IEEE 802.15.4-2003 (Low Rate WPAN) for more information. (TI CC1200, or currently TI CC1101).

They are aiming for strong cryptography. Keys are kept in a dedicated crypto IC. (Atmel ATSHA204)

Shields planned for RC servers, LAN, and bluetooth.

This could be my new favorite Arduino class board.
A starter dev library for Groovy / Grails / Agile
As I understand, they didn't ask permission. They simply announced one day that they'd been doing it for a year, and then lobbied California to legalize it afterwards. Given the potential benefits of being the state that makes autonomous cars a thing, I imagine it was an easy sell.
Chrome On Already: An Open Letter to Google
the interaction between terrible human drivers doing wildly unpredictable, insane things and the inflexible, unadaptable automated cars.

There are only so many things bad human drivers can do, the physics is pretty limiting. It isn't like they can teleport in front of another car. Even the craziest things like opposing traffic jumping the median into oncoming traffic isn't all that crazy, it isn't conceptually different from a deer jumping in front of a car.

I'm not comfortable with dying or being injured due to a software error regardless of whether its likelihood is higher or lower.

Hard to argue with that.
The thing is that autonomous cars should just not allow it, like in the word autonomous.
There is a real driver behind the wheel ready to take control at anytime.
There is only one answer to this question: whatever your people are best with. Whether have any "people" (including yourself) who can code or not, you don't need to worry about the technology, you need to worry about your team.

If we're talking about Web apps, technology is much less relevant than the team's abilities. If you're also going for native apps, your options are mostly limited anyway (especially on mobile), but the same principle still applies.

Another reason for going with a familiar technology is that it will be easier for you to find future team members, as you will (presumably) already know the local community, thus avoiding what happened to Reddit.
I understand that you're talking about the interactions between real drivers and autonomous drivers. I still think that the autonomous driver will be better able to react to even a poor human driver than a real one. With all the sensors, they can detect when someone is drifting lanes, not stopping at a stop, etc. and can react accordingly with much more accuracy than a human driver.
I, as a user interested in both, did find value in the comment regardless of his/her intentions. This comes off as a 'shut up' when really, it could be a good opportunity to look at what Go does right for implementation in Rust, no?
At my last job (prior to joining elasticsearch), I had a cluster of 7 machines (16 cores, 16gb ram, 2TB raid1), each running logstash and elasticsearch.

The event rate going into this cluster was about 5000 events/sec on average (burst up to 10,000 events/sec sometimes).

During a maintenance (two machines going offline for disk repairs), I benchmarked the surviving 5-node cluster at 88,000 events/sec peak performance.

In terms of capacity planning, this means that we could have a 9x increase in normal event load and still not need to grow the cluster's processing capacity.

Persistent storage is another story. We stored about 300GB/day of events, getting us roughly 45 days of data retention before we would run out of space (2TB * 7 nodes / 300gb/day; roughly 45 days). I'm working on improving storage efficiency of logstash and elasticsearch, too, so retention should improve greatly in the long term.

For other experiences, it's useful to invoke the community and ask what others are done - the #logstash irc channel on freenode is very active as is the logstash-users@googlegroups.com mailling list.

Hope this helps!
Creating sampled instruments in Overtone
I used to work for a physicist who (still) codes in Fortran. I tried to show him Python. He said, "That's nice, use Python if that's what you like." But he always used fortran. It wasn't usually a big deal to translate between the two. He was giving out the big ideas, we were making use of them. To this day, he is still doing physics, still using fortran, still publishing papers.
I recently decided it might be worthwhile to learn the Microsoft stack, and had heard similar things about how you can just get whatever you need for free until you've scaled up. So I went poking around Microsoft's site for this free stuff. Half an hour later I gave up without having gotten my hands on anything but an impenetrable white paper about different versions of Visual Studio. So it seems that either people are exaggerating how free this stuff is or Microsoft is very good at hiding this.
A problem I see is every car manufacturer building his own system, maybe with a standardized communication channel to speak to other cars but the control software in itself will be bound to a certain manufacturer. This means different bugs in each car, fixing a bug in one car doesnt mean the error doesnt exist in other cars and so on. New players entering the market are facing pretty much impossible hurdles to enter.

Some kind of Android for autonomous cars would be quite nice I guess.
Still under controlled circumstances, though. This sort of mockup is necessary for full testing.

I'm not sure how autonomous Nissan is shooting for, and I think they're rather deliberately not defining it. You can draw a fairly smooth continuum between "antilock brakes" and "full autonomous car you'd put your unaccompanied children into in the middle of a Midwest winter", and I imagine they're not leaping straight towards the latter. But still, to get there, you need to be able to test things like "what does the car do on a street covered in a patchwork of ice when a dog jumps out in front of it?" without waiting for exactly those conditions to emerge.

If you want a fun thought exercise, imagine how an antilock brake system handles the left wheels being on ice and the right wheels being on dry pavement. And remember... torque. You can't "just" brake with the right wheels....
Agree. Discounting C# on prejudice against Microsoft "reeks". Ignoring the Bizspark programme, the Microsoft development ecosystem is now so large you can actually avoid Microsoft licences.

Look at the success of Xamarin moreover their tools that can be used to create systems in Mono in F#, C# et al hosted on Linux with Nancy behind Nginx using Postgres.

The OSS ecosystem is growing too look at Edge.js for a good example of some innovation where C# and F# can strengths can be utilised in conjunction with other ecosystems with more focus on web.

It may not be perceived as trendy but there's plenty of developers familiar with that ecosystem. If you're in London for example finding decent C# devs is not a tall order.
>Think of the positive places this could go!

My first thought reading it was that some coma patients could finally 'talk' to their loved ones and doctors (e.g., http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1230092/Rom-Houben-P... ).

My second thought was wondering whether we could crowd-source the origin. For example, multiple people sending commands, with the majority command being acted upon. Creepy, but potentially cool (I'm not sure what this says about me.).

My third thought was wondering whether the receiver would develop 'muscle memory' of the actions taken. In other words, could the receiver learn how to do certain movements.
The Unbearable Whiteness of Breaking Things
The curious tale of the element moving on hover
It starts in two months so could give Martins books a read. And I think that would be enough. Some of the lectures were based on his book and others on SICP.
Methods differ, of course, but keeping your eyes open is the standard practice in traditional zazen meditation.
I believe this is the reason Wifi USB dongles are so ubiquitous, even in other electronic devices.
I'm really wondering about how the social change will occur. Creating the technology will end up the easy part. How do we deal with our cars being software driven, and that software being created by companies which may not have the best track record on consumer privacy? (That's a concern I have about the hyperloop as well- wouldn't these proposed futuristic transportation involve a lot of surveillance by default, compared to old-fashioned modes?) How do we deal with the transition when the majority of cars are still people driven? How does government handle this revolutionary shift?
Odd move. Twitter has always been about optimizing the user experience. TicketMaster has always been about gouging the user and exploiting their monopoly on events to give ticket buyers a huge middle finger at every step of the buying process.

This does not bode well for Twitter--at least in my eyes.
What a great idea! That way the NSA can know your real-time location on the roads too, even if you have your cellphone off.
If you're experienced I'll bet you could get a great job at a dozen companies.
Java SE 8 Early Draft Review Specification — DRAFT 2
I was totally against this, but then I put on the cap, and now I can say I welcome it. Indeed, I must say that. Awaiting further commands.
I actually agree with you. My point was that types are a much better tool than hacking code and debugging. Once the types are embraced and used as a tool, instead of thought of as a straitjacket that is where the real power lies.
> Is Fortran actually the best choice for this application?

Fortran is like fast, typed, compiled Matlab (with smaller standard library, but a lot of numerical libraries available all over internet).

Nut yes, exploratory data analysis, something interactive like NumPy + Matplotlib, Matlab or R might be better.

But NumPy + matplotlib is kinda painful to set up first to be interactive, R the language is wonky, and Matlab cost a lot of money (and the free alternative, Octave, has much more limited graphics, and they are kind of ugly, too).

Of course, Fortran has no graphing capabilities, so one needs some tool for that anyway.
For autonomous cars or not, whoever is liable in the case of an accident will acquire insurance to cover the cost of accidents. Currently, that's the driver. With autonomous cars, that may be the manufacturer, in which case 1) The cost to the manufacturer of insurance will be factored into the retail price of the vehicle and 2) The total cost of insurance will be lower because the accident rate will be lower.
You mean Darwin's Non-halting theorem? ;)
Ask HN: How do I get out of megacorp IT and get back to hacking?
So I pretty much bombed an interview at a fun, young tech company. I've been programming in Java at a megacorp changing 1 line of code or so per month for almost 2 years. For comparison, many "programmers" here don't even know how to program.

I knew I needed to get out. They asked me things like, what's not guaranteed in a HashMap? I answered "order." Good, now what are a couple other implementations of Map, what's different, and how have you used them. I of course haven't used them in this environment.

So, I go on HN and start reading about your guys fun with Scala and Go, remembering my M.S. CS courses on the topics, and start realizing I'm missing out on all the fun.

My question is, anyone else in this position? Anyone made a change successfully? Any advice on getting back to a more developer-friendly environment?
31 Things I Learned Traveling in Europe
I also would like to know more, it is a complex topic.

When investing you always have to consider the timeframe and risk you are willing to take. For example, for a long-term rather low risk investment you could buy an index fund - a fund that tries to replicate a market index such as S&P 500 - in that case you will know that your investment will do roughly as good as market does.
Because it's plainly a troll. ("Go will make you cry for using Rust" made that clear, especially considering the user's comment history, in which I've already explained why at least visibility on case doesn't make sense.)
Bitcoin is only as anonymous as the blockchain allows. The sooner LE & bitcoin exchangers unify forces and convince Congress to act on a national level (thus removing the regulatory uncertainty), the sooner BTC will be allowed by existing players to be adapted into mainstream financial system.

The shifting of BTC abroad aspect is a problem from the LE perspective, because it's akin to everything 'going dark.' Yes there are downsides to more regulation if you're looking for truly being off the grid, or are mainly a user of silk road --- but it will also allow the system to live in the open, much like the recent rulings from FinCEN equating BTC exchangers to MSB's and pulling them in to the existing framework that way.
Making cars autonomous would virtually eliminate traffic. Traffic only exists because of the inefficiency generated by cars driving at different speeds in a "pack" on the highway.

Aside from traffic caused by accidents or unavoidable roadwork, the vast majority of traffic - caused by raw inefficiency and poor reaction to the aforementioned two - can be regulated away.
If you were going to pass a law against humans driving cars I'd be the first to vote for it.

But as long as humans are driving cars, solving the issue of having an automated car driving alongside them is a non-trivial task which people seem to be underestimating.
Automation will certainly help with congestion by optimizing...

== No. You can't 'optimize' traffic away. LA is a case study.
I don't see any feasible way to transition to high speed linked autonomous cars. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who need to get to work via car, and these people will not be able to afford a new car. Transitioning from a driver based to a driverless technology would take a government intervention in the economy that is unacceptable to most Americans. If we utilize the same road system, there would need to be massive subsidies for the poor to swap out their cars and we would need to outlaw classic automobiles. Creating a separate road system would take a massive public investment.
No sale. Economic stimulus is completely nonfunctional when the lead time is in the "many years". The term "shovel-ready" was thrown around a couple of years ago for a reason.

Of course, I suppose you could just hope that you start planning for the project in this downturn, but it'll only start in the next one....