skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Maybe it's a complete coincidence.

The word "correlated" means that it is NOT just a complete coincidence. One might not cause the other, they might be correlated because of a separate factor that interacts with both, but if they are "correlated" then complete coincidence can be ruled out.

> [...] So the lead is correlated to crime historically, even though neither causes the other directly.

Yes, this is what I mean by a third factor affecting both. But lead is a physical effect -- there are only certain sorts of things that can cause it. Things like eating lead, breathing lead, or having a diet that causes one to incorporate less lead into neurons. Thinking happy thoughts cannot change your lead levels (directly). So there are only certain categories of separate factors, C, that could be the cause of both A (lead) and B (crime). Where your name comes in the alphabet might conceivably cause crime, but it simply cannot cause lead. C, if it exists, must be a physical effect.

That's why I mentioned controlling for location where people live. That is a likely candidate for C: it is plausible to correlate with crime and it is possible to correlate with lead. If you control for it and still find an effect, then either A causes B, B causes A (not reasonable), or there is a different C'. Perhaps a genetic mutation that increases lead absorption and also alters brain chemistry to increase propensity to crime? That one is already a bit of a stretch.

I guess what I am saying is that it is true that correlation does not imply causation, but that there are reasonableness constraints on the kinds of interactions one can hypothesize, and after a certain point Occam's razor implores us to consider causation.
In Syria, America Loses if Either Side Wins
Thanks for reminding me about Jesse's book(s), I knew there was something I was meant to do!
Yeah totally. I'm with you there. It would be great and I hope they do it.
Backbone.js + PubNub: Real-Time Multi-User Backbone Collections and Models
I'm running Puma on my RaspberryPi for a pet Rails app and it's incredibly fast. Would recommend.
The technique that you outline is one that I discovered myself as an easy way to fall asleep. I think of it as "starting a dream".
Any falsifiable hypothesis is scientific.
Has anyone here used Haskell in a production environment?

I want a language that is small, clean, and can provide a lot of static guarantees. I know many people find static guarantees and unacceptable curtailment of their "programming freedom", but frankly I think it's the answer to many of the problems we face in software today. Small is another thing. E.g. Go and Scheme are small. C++ and Scala are large. You know what I mean..

Now, static typing is just one kind of static assertion[1] I'd like to have. Side effect isolation (i.e. language-enforced purity) would be another feature I'd like to see become common. For example, the D programming language has a "pure" keyword that lets you mark a function as side-effect free. (In Haskell, all function are pure by default, and you escape the confines of purity via monads.)

I'd like to do research into (inventing) other forms of static assertions. One thing that's been on my mind lately, has been static "complexity assertion" for programs. I don't know if this even possible, but it would be nice to be able to ascertain before running a program, certain time & space complexity bounds on it. This would perhaps require us to drop the programming language itself to some level "slightly below" Turing machines -- but this in itself could be achieved via a keyword like D's "pure" or something more elegant. (Note: my point is not that we're going to make the entire language non-Turing complete -- but rather that we'll have subsets of the language that are not, and this reduction of power would/could bring with it a greater possibility for statically asserting stuff.)

[1] FYI I made this term up. Let me know if there's something better that describes this.
UK Casino's Odds on the Next Microsoft CEO
A sense of purpose. Long-term financial stability.
I'm using Go in production, and migrating existing Python services to it. I've found nothing wrong with using it for "serious production work". The ecosystem obviously isn't as mature, but it's getting there. There don't seem to be any gaping holes.
The Ignorant Entrepreneur
CF engineer here. The main pain point of pdns and CloudFlare was all the additional logic needed to support CloudFlare's cdn product. For example, for a given record, should this resolve to the origin server's IP or CloudFlare's edge node? In the case of an edge node, what particular set of CloudFlare's IPs should be returned. These are both user settable options, and need to be propagated to all dns servers in real time. Supporting this meant supporting an increasingly hacked up fork of pdns, with logic scattered though the code base. Eventually it became less work to build rrdns as a clean platform.

In terms of dns updates, see the blog post http://blog.cloudflare.com/kyoto_tycoon_with_postgresql for details on how CF does it now.
Profile your code. You might be surprised.

You might not.

Or, you might be surprised when you find something like "I'm making 5000 DB queries?" instead of your language being slow.

But certainly if "enough" people take my advice here who have not profiled one of their web pages before, there's a non-empty set of them that are going to go "Oh crap, I didn't realize that's what was so slow, I just assumed it was the database!" Not every web app is a glorified select statement.

And there'll also be quite a few people who discover that their page isn't "slow" or anything, but who will discover that the CPU vs. IO is closer to 50/50 than they realized or something.
If you're on mobile, the link doesn't work. You can dig into it, or you can just look at the actual odds. :)

Stephen Elop 5/1

Kevin Turner 6/1

Steve Sinofsky 8/1

Julie Larson-Green 8/1

Qi Lu 10/1

Kiril Tatarinov 12/1

Terry Myerson 12/1

Satya Nadella 14/1

Tony Bates 14/1

Paul Maritz 14/1

Kevin Johnson 16/1

Reed Hastings 16/1

John Donahoe 20/1

Dale Lee 20/1

Vic Gundotra 25/1

Jeff Raikes 25/1

Robbie Bach 25/1

Scott Forstall 33/1

Marissa Meyer 33/1

Cheryl Sandberg 40/1

John Legere 40/1

Sir Jonathan Ive 40/1

Jack Dorsey 40/1

Bill Gates 50/1

Tim Cook 100/1
Do you mean Startup School? I don't recall him talking at Hacker School.
This is one of those community consensus things. Most of the style guides and Apple's own examples usually include the opening brace on the same line as the conditional or method.

The real 50/50 proposition is having else on a new line. Some people love that and some hate it. It was hard for me to know what the consensus is, so I picked one way and if it turns out to not be what the majority find correct, others can correct it.
I find your comment quite odd, as a web service is just about the most functional thing you can get -- it's just a function request => response as you note. I don't see where you'd need to make it "more functional."
Well then his algorithms would still be wonky if he wrote them in Python or Haskell.
Start-ups cry foul, claim they're blocked from local markets by est. businesses.
I think he, quite cleverly, submits these just before the week delay for subscribers expires to maximise the advertising for both Lwn's excellent content and their early-access subscription service.
Any thoughts on how to implement a channel trading algorithm?
If you are talking about a breakdown of time consumed during a single request's processing, then yes on slower platforms/languages/frameworks, the database access portion may not be the most significant percentage of time used. But this is not that relevant as even the slower platforms usually can handle a single request reasonably fast.

What I was talking about was more about in the scaling of a system, i.e. what happens when your architecture needs to handle lots of requests. In this case, it is very rare for the application server part of your architecture to be a bottleneck in scaling because it is generally stateless (for normal web apps at least) and hence very easily horizontally scaled out. Of course a faster platform will allow you to use fewer servers but 15 servers on Go vs. 20 servers on Python is not that big of an issue.
Do you have any sources that can quantify what 6 IQ points is for the average person? Is it a percent benefit (does it benefit someone who would have had a 90 IQ more than someone who would have had a 130 anyway) or absolute benefit (you can quantify an IQ point the same for everyone).

I imagine it's the former, but I'm wondering if you have any other IQ-related sources.
> I just would like the simplicity of use of sqlite on my server.

The simplicity comes from largely from not supporting multiple user accounts (authn/authz are left to the owning application), and secondarily (I think) from not being designed to support large numbers of connected processes. If your server need fits that profile, then you can use SQLite and benefit from its simplicity. But if -- as is often the case -- it doesn't, you can't, and its not because no one has merged SQLite with PostgreSQL, its because there is inherent complexity that comes with serving certain use cases.
And the US isn't purely capitalistic either; public police/fire dept/sewer, has semi public health care in medicare.
Right, because your stomach and head really care if they are hurting when you are held up in a room by Port Authority vs NYPD. They looked like police officers vs TSA officers.

The point remains that dissecting the blog on that level just reveals Fish for a piece of crap he is taking money to publish whatever they gave him.
Neither. What's even better (at least for creative workers like programmers and designers) is autonomy and ownership.
This debate has been around for half a century. It's far, far more nuanced than this article suggests. Here's the original formulation of it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y

But it's not that Theory Y is necessarily "better". It depends on tons of different variables. And there have been plenty more theories after X and Y...
Well, you probably need some kind of foothold for legal reasons somewhere in the EU/EEC (probably some tax-haven like Luxembourg), but after that it's not really that easy, as each country has its own legal and technical banking peculiarities. A pretty big mess.
I can see it but only with the technology changing. My husband has a 3D printer and uses it all the time for little projects around the house. Once the technology advances, you can have printers that are the right size and the right interface for the common public, they can 'buy' or create a design and have it just automatically print. Think of having toys for kids or household products printed faster than driving to a store to get it. Right now 'makers' are already doing this. It's not very friendly for most people, but its been very helpful for household uses.
I think one of my favourite things about Go is that it makes it easy and obvious to code well. Generally the first thing that comes to my mind is going to be performant and extendable.

The reason this is the case, I think, is that Go strives to make algorithmic complexity clear: you know when you're allocating memory, but you don't need to jump through hoops to do it. You know the rough performance costs of what you're doing because the core team works hard to make it obvious. For example, some regular expressions features (lookahead, if I remember correctly) aren't implemented in the Go standard library's regular expression package, because they're impossible to achieve in O(n) time. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang-nuts/7qgSDWPI...

This level of care in making simple, clearly-defined tools with known properties makes it easy to code well. Ruby, Python, PHP, NodeJS... you can shoot yourself in the foot and not even notice.
And this hypothesis presents no testable predictions. It's more or less equivalent to "A wizard did it."
> You place a limit order in advance to buy at 5.00 (market orders don't guarantee price) and if you get filled you'll be hoping to short at 5.15 or so later.

Minor nitpick.

Since you've bought the stock first, your second trade will be a sell and not a short, unless you overfill on the second leg, in that case you'll have a partial sell and partial short.
It's good when languages try to help. Reprimanding someone for not doing enough work is useless.

My problem is that the language is guessing wildly, in ways too obscure to be mentioned in the documentation or known by you (a user of the language), even when both operands are strings. That means it appears to work much of the time even if you don't think you're being lazy, but might actually have a bunch of false positives you didn't expect. And that's kind of a bad thing in a programming language. Same sort of reason manually escaping everything is hard to get right: if you forget, your code still works fine under "normal" circumstances.

Now, if == did a strict comparison and there were a separate imlazyjustslopittogether operator, there wouldn't be a problem. Defaults matter.
On page 25 of the NCWIT scorecard it states that in 2009 women earned:

57% of all undergraduate degrees, 52% of all math and science degrees, 59% of the undergraduate degrees in biology, 42% of mathematics degrees, 18% of all computer and information sciences undergraduate degrees

We cross-checked 2 other sources for 2012 numbers as well.

http://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/resources/scorecard...
>>I trust my diet to an unqualified individual (me), as do most people.

Sorry, but this is straight out wrong. You will lose nothing and it will cause no harm in anyway, and I mean it literally if you experiment with natural foods. Go eat bananas, or apples, or mixture of those. Or say mixture of 20 fruits. It will never cause you any harm. Eat rice, wheat, meat, ragi, vegetables you name it. It will cause you absolutely no harm if you eat what is supposed to be eaten by a normal adult.

This is true, even if you occasionally eat junk food.

But if you go and pull only the essential 'ingredients' of these foods separately, mix them up in water and drink them. You are likely to cause a good enough amount of damage.

There is a very big reason, why our tongues have taste buds,why our stomachs have hydrochloric acid in them,why the stomach has a mucus lining, why we secrete digestive juices/enzymes, why we secrete bile. You see the whole functioning of the body is not designed to receive dosage of macro nutrients back to back in hourly dosage.

On a macro level if you look close, the food chain and the digestive system is perfectly optimized to survive and even thrive in the hands of unqualified individuals like us. If our body needed back to back dosage of macro nutrients in precise quantities to survive, our species would be extinct by now.

So the definition of efficiency when it comes to human digestive system is not, time saved in cooking food, or ability to receive and absorb exact chemical nutrients in precise quantities.

Also note the aim of the human digestive system and the way it measures efficiency is very different than our way.

>>An hour a day is 6% of your waking life.

You could say this about playing a game in the Google doodle, or say reading the news paper.

Its not like your receive 6% of your life in one shot. You receive it an hour at a time. For the kind of job we do an hour is not sufficient to even get started.
I'm not so sure. There's no lack of iOS developers, and most of them are using Objective-C...
It sends the User-Agent, which can be used to determine whether it's the desktop or not. It doesn't solve the portrait and landscape changing problem. So some client-side responsive design would still need to be used.

I think a hybrid approach would be too tedious for someone developing a website to do, in order to get the payoff of sending less to mobile browsers, but it may be worth implementing in a framework.
My views reflect Darwin's. Is he scientific enough for you?

May we not suspect that the vague but very real fears of children, which are quite independent of experience, are the inherited effects of real dangers and abject superstitions during ancient savage times? - Charles Darwin, A Biographical Sketch of an Infant (1877)
Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.
Show HN: BitBalloon, insta-deployment of static sites with forms that just work
Totally with you. I can't imagine using a language where I can't create easily re-usable data structures. It feels like a huge step backwards.
I guess it depends on what the data is. I've got a couple ideas on what I could use it for but that is just off of assumptions of data they use. Maybe have some more info on the homepage when you get it?
Neither.

Trust. Empowerment. For the really good folks: Just get out of their way (and have good channels of communication so that it's clear they're not utterly going off the rails).

Having people continually worry if they're going to be punished will make your org a hopeless mess. Supplying people with free snackies and flexible hours without giving them freedom won't make them work harder, it'll just give them a sense of entitlement.
Ha!
After my wife accidentally missed the checkbox and her laptop was "infected" with the Ask toolbar, I uninstalled Java on all my Windows machines at home.

Apparently I don't have any software that is depended on it. If I had known I would have uninstalled it a long time ago!
Pydap Turns Ten: A Decade of Open Source Development
The video Shell doesn't want you to see
In what way? As a user, you get your order confirmation and while it might take a bit longer for the money to arrive, that's really not even noticeable for most e-commerce transactions.

I much prefer debit, as it makes it much easier for me to get my money back if the seller doesn't deliver.
> The Indians have India.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_India

> "Not enough black folks, no black community" (aka "I want to be with my own kind")

Cool anecdote.
Methylation is like setting a preference in a config file.
Learn to run a viable business
>Another downside of Scala is its HUGE syntax. Processing strings? Here's a ten million ways to do it.. (a bit over-exaggerating). Oh and if you chose this way, then you should use this syntax. No, not that one, THIS one. Oh no, not that one, this variation of that one that looks like this.

On the other hand, Scala lets you deal with collections and Strings using the same enormous set of methods.

"\"foo\"".drop(1).dropRight(1)

is just

List('"', 'f', 'o', 'o', '"').drop(1).dropRight(1)
Can you clarify this point? Do you mean from a monetary perspective, private interests, public prisons, etc?
It is rather telling that PHP's design is based on whatever was popular at the time. The original design was based on Perl, further additions and the stdlib were designed like C++, the class system is a lot like Java, and recent features have been clearly inspired by Python.

I've met more than enough PHP programmers who genuinely tout "it's free" and "you don't have to declare types" as unique advantages, or are unaware that you can even build a website in anything else.
Right, because is a community consensus thing, you wouldn't mark that convention as 'bad'. You could write that the same line curly brace opening is 'preferred'.
Fundamentals of concurrent programming
Ask HN: Cheap Assets and how HN invests their money
A lot of focus here on HN is increasing income through startups, consulting, etc and I've learned a lot about this from HN. Now I'm curious how you smart folks invest your money or grow your money (through assets, stocks, rental properties, and the like...)

I can't seem to find much in the way of small assets (thinking a few thousand dollars or so) that provides dividends or grows in value other than stocks. Stocks make me nervous because generally speaking they seem overpriced and I imagine that the specialists have grabbed most of the deals.

Thanks!
There wasn't much in roads or trucks for long distance travel in the early 1900s. I believe it took roughly 30 days to do the trip across the country on the Lincoln Highway as opposed to 7 days via the train.

I would expect if you look at the volume of freight shipped via rail vs trucks it wouldn't be until the 1950s and the creation of the interstate system that it really took off. Containerization in the 50s and 60s would be another big boon to trucking.
While most mobile devices have exactly 2 size, that may not be a good assumption. There are some devices that support split-screen and you would end up with more that just 2 sizes. You could send a list of all possible sizes, but If the split-screen is customizable it maybe not be feasible to enumerate all of them.
Yes, and there are lots of popular short term decisions that would be terrible in the longer term. Lower taxes, yay. Block immigration, hard on crime with long jail terms for minor offenses, deregulate banking etc. Just recently I had a friend who voted for the party that promised to lower taxes complaining about the lack of staff, being overworked and not having a pay rise. He works in a publicly funded institution. People don't seem to think even 2 steps ahead.
> While designed to make things easier for newcomers...

The idea that Rails was designed to be accessible to newcomers seems to be pervasive but I don't think that has every been a top priority for the project. The framework is described as "optimized for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity". It's great if this also leads to a design which is approachable for newcomers but I think it is a mistake to judge features as if that was the intent.
Tablet And A Glass Box Give You 3D Display – i-Lusio
Sure, but there are not many left anyway. There has been some anger because of US spying and the US ignoring German law (flying people to torture centers via Germany).
They are irrelevant and a non-issue on the federal level (I cannot remember when they were last publicly discussed there, much less controversially discussed). They are about equally irrelevant on the state level and certainly also not controversially discussed there.

On the very local level (city, county, region) they can be an important issue – but the perspective is nearly always an economic one: The base as a large employer in a region that might grow or shrink or close down. Best city marketing approaches for getting Americans from a nearby base to come visit and buy stuff. It’s always stuff like that.

Ok, I guess I can think of one current somewhat heated issue that was recently discussed and that I noticed, living somewhat close to a base and all – but, again, only on a very local level: the US Army being allowed to fly drones for testing purposes (also outside of and between two of their bases). But even there the discussion is not exactly a shouting match and never even connected with any kind of argument to close bases.

I think the general consensus in Germany is that having the US as a tight ally is a good thing. And you don’t throw a tight ally out of your country, especially if what they are doing there is (at least perceived as) completely harmless. Sure, there might be widespread general disagreements with the US military strategy as a whole, but that does not, in general, lead people to want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, so to say.

I think you might be able to rally quite a few people around a hot button issue like the stationing of nuclear weapons in Germany (but I’m not even sure whether the US still does that), but throwing out the US? Not really.

If you are an American who wants to close all US bases in Germany quite a few German politicians would be indifferent or worried about the US-German relationship and many local politicians with a nearby base would be furious about you taking away all those jobs (not that the bases matter for the German economy in general in any significant way).
why generics? Have you really understood how to write Go? Generics are not needed, you have interfaces.