skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It used to be the model for reform, with many education and work skills programs so leaving inmates would have a career to enter upon leaving.

I believe it had one of (if the the) lowest recidivism rates in the country. Here's some relevant quotes from an article I found[1], I've heard a few programs about the prison system during that period on the radio:

Before 1977, all California prisoners had an indeterminate
sentence. They were given a range of time in which they
would be imprisoned, with five years to life being a
common sentence. To be freed, inmates had to prove to
the parole board that they deserved it, which could mean
enrolling in reform-oriented programs, learning a trade,
or taking classes. The aim of indeterminate sentencing
was to rehabilitate prisoners and, when they were ready
to reenter society, free them.

Although the system had its flaws, it also had its
successes. According to state statistics, just 15
percent of inmates released in 1977 returned to
California prisons — an extraordinarily low recidivism
rate in comparison to today. Nonetheless, in 1977, then-
Governor Jerry Brown signed a law that completely
overhauled the state's sentencing system, switching the
focus from rehabilitation to punishment.

[1]: http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/how-the-prison-population-exploded/Content?oid=3172693
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/snowden-powerpoint/
Johnny-Five requires a PC (it runs JavaScript on the host computer). On Espruino you can program it, then unplug the PC and it keeps working.

One of the big benefits (apart from running on its own) is that you don't have the latency of USB, so can respond to things far more quickly.
Surround Yourself With Positive People
You may have seen a recent comment, looks like the main page was posted a year ago -- I relied on the URL duplicate checker when submitting it (it was new to me today to come across and I wanted to see thoughts from the HN community on it).

I ran a the search and found the previous:

A modern, concurrent web server for ruby (puma.io)
16 points by kachhalimbu 1 year ago | 2 comments | cached
US research findings are America Strong
OnStartups: The Growth Hacker's Dilemma: Process vs. Tactics
Do you not consider anything a polyfill if it doesn't support IE 1.0?
When I tried to benchmark a standardized app under MRI, I found that Puma works great _if_ your app is io-bound as opposed to cpu-bound.

This makes sense because multi-threading is still a win under MRI even with the GIL, only so long as your app is io-bound (so threads can be switched out when waiting on io, for instance waiting on a db query).

Most web apps I've worked with tend to be io-bound.

https://github.com/jrochkind/fake_work_app/blob/master/READM...
Debate cogently rather than reverting to childish "go back where you came from" type "arguments"?
Yes, Brick is a set of components developed with X-Tag (the web components sugar library)
The Tim Roughgarden course is Analysis of Algorithms, and hence it deals a great deal with the complexity and mathematics with the algorithm and leaves implementation only to the pseudocode level while Bob Sedgewicks Algorithms course is more related to explanation and implementation of the algorithms, hence the dependency on language.

I've signed up for both and pretty fun both seem to me.
That's a false dichotomy.

A framework DOES include stuff that you're not gonna need, and also makes several architectural decisions for you. That's a given.

A custom build (with libraries) site does not imply it will be done in some bizzaro way ("cereal in the closet", etc). That's NOT a given.

So that particular accusation against frameworks is definitive, whereas what your particular accusation against projects not using frameworks is a maybe.

(Not to mention that some frameworks, e.g a lot of Java ones, do enforce themselves a "cereal in the closet" --or AbstractFactorySingletonFactoryProxy -- mentality).
I'd like to believe you, but these days I think it's fair to say that one should try to leak the least possible amount of information to the outside, even seemingly harmless information or data could easily find its way to storage somewhere, and in maybe 10, 15 years have become less harmless than it once seemed to be.

But don't get me wrong, it IS great and working fine, especially the simplicity and ease of use are awesome!
I will be drawing full salary for the time being but people on the bench are the first to let go since we are overhead. Looking for another gig is what I have come up with as well. The uncertainty is the scary part. thanks a lot
I will second this. My kid was able to play it at 3, and do decently, despite the concepts involved being (approximately) identical to solving equations.
Show HN: Using complex gestures to prevent accidental actions
The problem with frameworks at the time this piece was written (to be clear, I think they've gotten somewhat better since) is that the abstractions they provided were so horrendously leaky that you ended up writing more code, not less, because you need to do things that the framework was never meant to do, or was supposed to do but was bad at.

This has been my experience anyway. Even recently, I've had this kind of problem (not to name any names, but socket.io), but only because what I'm working on is somewhat more specialized than in the past.
NumPy: The Road Forward
Facebook's hands are probably tied on some of their reporting here, but there's still some interesting stuff about the US in this report.

1. The US is by far the one requesting the most data. I'd have to run the numbers to be sure, but it looks like even controlling for population and number of FB users, the US is definitely outpacing other countries' data requests.

2. The US is the only country where FB is reporting in ranges instead of precise numbers. There could be several reasons for this, but the reason almost certainly is not that they don't know the precise numbers. NSLs seem like a safe bet here.

3. The US also has one of the highest "success" rates of government requests. 79% of government requests yield some data. This again could be interpreted several ways, but the two most enticing ones are that the US isn't sending a lot of fishing requests because when they request data from FB, they're already pretty certain about what they're looking to find. The more disturbing concern would be if the US only queries FB for things where the NSA's database is insufficient, which would mean the number of requests they submit to Facebook is not at all indicative of how many queries on user data they actually do.

EDIT: Here's a quick Gist I made of this report as a CSV.
https://gist.github.com/Cowen/adb2d335862a95870773
I don't know about the rest of your argument but I know that police officers have to take an IQ test in many places, and if their IQ is too high they don't get the job: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/01/too-smart-to-...
paymill-sales = customer selling through paymill, hence the name.
Furthermore, there a large number of cultural precursors that existed from before Hitler was even born.

Hitler didn't invent antisemitism. Martin Luther clearly envisioned a genocide of Jews, in what was one of Hitler's favorite books. [1]

Eugenics was bigger in the U.S. than anywhere else.

The U.S. even invented modern nationalism, and it clearly remains more popular here than anywhere else in the western world. (Though, at least originally, this was tempered by the idea that Enlightenment ideals were universal, though admittedly, "Freedom" and "Liberty" are now just empty newspeak)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Jews_and_Their_Lies
Yeah, there are a lot of unstated premises here.

Volatility is important to option valuation but the mechanics of real option valuation (what we are talking about) are materially different from black/scholes. In fact, black scholes is more descriptive of option trading than predictive of option valuation. Since there needs to be an active market for this to be relevant, I wouldn't use it for thinking about startups.

That said, these highfalutin financial concepts are definitely applicable to startups, but really the question is "what do you think the terminal value of your startup is?"

If you think you have a shot at owning a big chunk of a billion dollar company, the value of that shot is:

(Probability of success) * (Terminal value)

If the undertaking has a 1% chance of being worth 1,000,000,000 and 99% chance of being worth nothing, then the whole opportunity is worth about ten million dollars.

So, yeah. Volatility doesn't matter all that much. Also if you are doing a Startup because of a black scholes model you are probably insane.
Very applicable to a large portion of people who comment here :)
Visualizing the first 700 binary tree structures
It /would/ have been less unsavory if he were talking about his boyfriend, though; women are exposed to violence (especially in relationships) in a way and at a scale that men just aren't. The way this is presented -- of /course/ everyone can relate to wanting to kill their ex-girlfriend -- is especially gross.

I'm not sure what Hans Reiser has to do with anything and it's a little strange that you brought him up. Wikipedia says Nina Reiser's disappearance was in 2006, a year after this post was made.
Nope.

Your homebrew framework is going to have to go through all the same growing pains as any other, but you won't have anyone to lean on when the going gets tough.

If it's an open-source framework you're using, you can always fork and fix or monkeypatch if you've got problems. Most of the time your issue will be patched already in a pull-request, it's just a case of applying it. Rarely do you have a situation so unique that nobody else has experienced it.

Except, of course, when you're using your own framework.

I've seen so many projects flame out in a spectacular way when developers get it in their head that they can write their own framework, or that they don't need a framework at all. That's the first step towards unmitigated disaster. The next step is to fall into a hole that you can't get out of without a whole lot of work, and have to solve a problem that those frameworks you should've used in the first place have already addressed.

Don't forget that code you understand today quickly turns into code you don't understand in the future. Don't think just because you wrote it you're automatically golden when it comes to making fixes.
40-80% usage in healthcare, the single slowest-moving IT environment there is (well, maybe industrial controls and space travel, but those aren't typically targeting Windows).
Should JavaScript devs build real things?
The Most Helpful Service for Effective Instagram Marketing
Seems like everyone is discussing "wow, there is a report; it's from Facebook, so it can't be true" instead of "wow the US govt has made ~5x requests of the next-largest requestor."

Edit: see Cowen's comment on contents of the report.
I guess my rebuttal is very schoolyard...so what? I don't really understand the goal of meta-discussions about the speed of progress or lack thereof. This project seems potentially useful in the here and now, which is where we are living.

I didn't mean to imply judgment of the licensing of your software - I think everyone should license whatever they make however they wish - a fully free version of anything is simply more useful to me personally, as someone who isn't a deep-pocketed business, and who enjoys reading code.
Re 3, couldn't it simply be that the US government has the most leverage over Facebook, since Facebook is headquartered in the US, and the majority of its staff and all its senior management live there?
A framework like this would probably scaffold the inputs for you based on your model structure, in which you do get back that you don't have to write boring ass crud stuff. Great for doing admin pages.

But for consumer facing stuff, you should probably abstract to something that templates (HAML, mustache, etc).
I would also note that if you're/they're using a recruiter, the recruiter often does this stuff. A recruiter contacted me for a local start up I was interested in, so I sent my resume along and they "made some small adjustments" and sent it back. They added things like "MS Access", "Agile Development", etc. Some other things just randomly pulled out of a hat.

As a side note; I can tell from your tone that you are indeed a cynical old man. The interview processes you describe are intentionally trying to make the person look stupid, and not ascertain what they know.

"Said person could not tell me what the default shell was under CentOS.", how is that relevant to being able to use a linux command line? I understand that many devs probably think being able to cd/ls counts for linux command line ability, which obviously isn't enough.
Interview with Peppermint's Co-founder Shane Remington
Let me know if you're still having problems.
Oracle? =)

Initially I had the same thought as the parent post, but this is a good point. No one ever really heard about 10gen; it was always MongoDB. Their events were always Mongo titled (MongoDB Days) and even their emails are @mongodb.com. In a way it was already their primary brand, might as well make it official.
So you re-implement another framework? Brilliant.
Please delete your above comment. It's derogatory and wrong. In fact, I believe the following:

There are a great many intelligent black people. Christians in America's underclass are just as likely to cohabit without marriage as non-Christians. If gay people, as a class, are really excited about taking up the burdens of marriage, I have no objection. They can't change their sexual preference, after all.
You're really not grabbing the intellectual high ground here.
That is the page for removal requests.

This is the page for user data requests:

http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/userdatarequests/
I've been trying to come up with a general way to rank Haskell experience, and so far I've got:

Beginner: Can read the basic syntax, knows about E.G. Monads and folds

Intermediate: Understands and can use the more advanced classes like Applicative, Arrow, lenses, and how to use things like fix

Advanced: ??? Makes new powerful classes/libraries like Pipe, Conduit, or Netwire? Can easily translate a problem domain into a concise and elegant type representation.

Maybe there needs to be some more layers in there, I don't know... also the advanced level feels weak to me. I'm still somewhere between beginner and intermediate myself.
So, is this because they're microtargetting Acid compliance? Or do they actually have 90% of a browser layout engine?

And if it's the latter, what would actually need to be done to build the rest of a browser around it?
This should work on the larger Arduino boards (the Due and 2560) and it already works on a bunch of other hardware too.

To be honest the new board is just to do something a bit different - and to give backers of the KickStarter something fun that they couldn't just go out and buy.
Heroku Redis Provider Comparison
But, for example, Meraki products are used to create LAN's that have an OOB control plane. Correct? That sounds a lot like "supernodes", where Cisco runs the supernodes. Is that "traditional networking"?

I'm not clear on the exact definition of "mesh networking", but I think it implies forwarding data traffic. If so, that disqualifies Meraki. But I'm not sure of the purpose of your point (with which I agree) because I never used the terms "mesh networking" or "mesh technology".

For the record, I used the words "portable" and "no telco needed". In my mind, this encompasses more than just "mesh networks".
Methylation of the nerve cells has no effect on the germline. Changes in the brain are not heritable.
This was California's prison system in the 70s, when we reached a recidivism rate of 15%. Then it was overhauled. My other comment has some more details.
Would you have preferred a joke about killing an ex-boyfriend?
I disagree. I work daily with Java and Rails and Rails is nowhere near as bloated as the Java frameworks I have to work with.
The internet is a series of round ducts, called tubes. Pneumatic tubes, I have heard.
That would be the same United Kingdom that now has posters on busses in London telling illegal immigrants to go home? The one with the opt-out web-filter to stop "terrorists" and "paedophiles" who can't Google "proxy"? The one where failing to turn your encryption key over to the police will land you in jail? The one where teenagers are arrested for obvious jokes on Twitter?

That United Kingdom?
Wow. This is such an amazing story.
Reasonable critique. Not -- the Asian guy was faster so I'm right and government jobs are for iq 85 people.

Which speaks to motivation as much as ability anyway. Thorsten Veblen observed that only the lower and upper classes get what work is for -- the middle classes are the only ones stupid enough to apply all their effort grinding through an imaginary career hierarchy. From that perspective the other guy, no doubt you mean to imply he's black given your other statements, is actually executing the superior strategy.

And actually, here's another thought: it's a good thing for society that we have a place for iq 85 people to contribute and earn a living. I don't hold it against people for having an 85 iq, just like I don't credit people with 150 iqs with an achievement. Those things are largely determined before you're aware of them anyway.

Also: which states have private DMVs with 5-minute waits?
I'd put CMSs (puppet, chef, etc.) in between, but otherwise I agree. These were the tools making a huge difference.
It's not a paradox, it's an almost paradox, which is kind of like being almost pregnant from a logic perspective.

Lamarckian and Darwinian evolution were debated and Darwin won. Lamarck's Lemma, which is a term I made up, points out that, were a random walk to create a mechanism for Lamarckian evolution, Darwinian evolution might well keep it around, as it could offer fitness.

That's why I phrase it as a lemma on Darwin's theory: even if it proves true, as epigenetics suggests, it doesn't make Lamarckian thinking correct. If anything, the opposite: it shows that Lamarckian effects can be explained through natural selection.

Plants can of course move, the classic example being the sensitive plant. Whether or not non-human animals can "talk" depends, basically, on whether one means "signalling" or "language proper". The bee dance can give arbitrarily complex instructions in one particular domain: there is no 'one' bee dance, each performance is roughly as unique as a sentence or so of text.
In Alabama we call them "trailers."
I might be a bit biased, but I've found that one of the biggest hurdles in pairing is the setup. I wrote this project to make that process extremely easy for both the client and the server sides.

One of my favorite by-products of this is that it's super easy to disable access for when I don't want people connecting to my machine.
Sarama: a client for Kafka 0.8 written in Go
Business Not As Usual Cartoon
That is very amusing.
Android App to Scan food products and check if Gluten Free
ITunes Store down
Make Every Word Matter
Try asking you uncles why they say X before you share that diatribe. It'll help to temper your arguments with their perspective of how some particular inspector wouldn't even talk to them about an exception to a rule which maybe isn't applicable to this one of five locations. Seriously it wasn't till FEMA that you mentioned organizations people bad mouthing government employees might, Might, refer to. So as worded your talk will fall on deaf ears.
The author, a fellow of the AMS, is of course aware of this. He's talking about high school algebra, to a general audience, and says so in the OP.
Relevant to the article, and worth pointing out. It has no direct bearing on my comment, which was about (heritable) methylation of the gametes.

I believe what you mean to say is "We have been able to observe no correlation between methylation of the nerve cells and methylation of the gametes". Unless you can cite detailed studies supporting this null hypothesis. My understanding is that we have no idea.
There are easter eggs in many of the crucial services on the Internet. The HTTP status codes are the first that come to mind.

After all, what's the point of running a massive service if you can't have fun with it?
Germany politics are and have been for the last couple of years in a rather curious state where the opposition appears to have given up on attacking Merkel in any meaningful way. I think there are several factors that play into this.

First of all, after the 2005 election a grand coaltion between Merkel's CDU and the social democratic SPD was formed leaving only the three smaller parties with a combined 166 out of 614 seats as the opposition. This put the SPD in the position of the CDU's junior partner instead of their usual position of attacking the CDU's political agenda. What may be even worse from the SPD's perspective is that the are now in the position of having supported the decisions made in Merkel's first term which would make it less than believable to attack those decisions now.

In the 2009 election the CDU only lost a marginal amount of votes while the SPD suffered heavy losses to the benefit of the three smaller parties. This allowed Merkel to form the traditional coalition consisting of CDU and the liberal FDP thereby leaving 290 of 622 seats to the oppposition and allowing the SPD to resume their role as the main force in opposition.

Except they never did. Instead of mounting attacks on the government, they stayed tame and oftentimes even concurred with the government on decisions despite no longer being in power. I am not sure about their reasons. Their lack of charismatic leadership personnel may have played a role, but that can only explain so much.

The second and more important factor is probably Merkel's very specific style of governing. She tends to be extremely passive, never exposing herself and opening herself up to criticism. If possible, she avoids making decisions at all. If she has to make decisions, she will always take the popular choice. If hard or controvesial decisions have to be made, she never makes a proposal herself. A proposal is either leaked to the press or presented by one of her ministers. In case said proposals garners widely negative reactions, the minister takes the blame giving Merkel the opportunity to shield herself from the fallout. Should an extraordinary event like the Fukushima accident lead to a sudden reversal in public opinion (towards nuclear energy in this case), Merkel will immediately flip her position and take the opposite one. If you have paid close attention to German politics in the last couple of years, you will see these exact steps repeated over and over again.

The worst part is, it works. Her latest approval rating is at 60% compared to 25% for the SPD candidate. Somehow she has managed to lull not only to public but also her political opposition to sleep over her two terms in office. This leaves us in 2013, a month away from the election with an opposition that behaves more like her pet kitten than her political challenger. What is even worse, is the fact that it leaves the population without a real choice for political change.
Fundamentally, gov't policy at various levels allows organized crime to exist via things like the war on drugs. Indeed, it can be argued that undercover police of any kind is undesirable and that gov't policy should not facilitate large scale organized crime.
But what Germany's parties are offering instead of criticism is generic, meaningless feel-good slogans. Better than smear campaigns, to be sure, but still rather disappointing.
I completely agree here. I think frameworks excel at making easy-to-medium tasks nearly trivial. It's the space beyond the medium-hard task that frameworks have trouble with.
So your parent comment is derogatory and wrong, but your comments about unwed parents, government employees, and “the racial makeup of prison… after you started giving smarter people lesser sentences” aren’t? Did I miss something?