skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Julia, a dynamic language with statically compiled performance
Here are the 97 contributions compiled in one gist : https://gist.github.com/pauletienney/6639605

Pull request are welcome for text formatting, linking, etc ..
So, specifically in software, if it is simple for "thieves" to "steal" the work, it probably wasn't worthy of protection in the first place.

I will admit, you can be a great engineer and a terrible businessman, and thus fumble a first-mover advantage, but I don't think patents are the solution to that.

Would you mind elaborating on your experience?
The thing, IME, is that someone writing code in C++ is more likely to be aware that they are using an approach with suboptimal O. In a high-level language you can just as easily write a routine with bad O, especially if you don't understand the PL's underlying data structures. So then you get bad algorithm performance + bad Python performance.
There are several reasons for this.

Originally, the biggest was legal: When OSSv4 first came out (2002), it was not free software, so it could not be included in Linux. In 2007, it was released under the GPL, so that went away. However, this created animosity towards it from the kernel devs.

That explains OSSv4, but what about v3? OSSv3 was the only sound system in Linux 2.4 and earlier; why didn't they continue developing that? There are various criticisms of it; that it doesn't map well to modern audio devices. I am under the impression that a lot of the design criticisms of OSSv4 are actually against OSSv3, and they haven't bothered to learn OSSv4; but I have no real citation for this.

The OSS people don't really work with the Linux people, so the Linux devs don't want to invest a lot of time in someone else' code. This makes even more sense when we consider that Lennart Poettering claims there are only about 3.5 paid people working on sound in Linux--they would of course be fairly heavily invested in ALSA.
How to get World Cup 2014 for free
1. Dispensing charity on the local level, rather than the federal, reduces fraud and gets the funds directly in the hands that need it most. And there is a lot of fraud in the food stamp program

Sure, except they are removing the federal support without increasing the local support. In addition, local governments are already quite pinched and where would the funding come from?

2. One of the biggest problems the US is facing currently is the inability to pay for entitlement programs

Food stamps is a drop in the bucket compared to the big two, but politicians refuse to change those programs that take up 2/3s of the federal budget.

Even when spent properly, they're usually spent on processed poor quality food because that's the cheapest stuff around.

For people that are hungry, some poor quality food is still better than no food.

4. Any entitlement programs reduces the incentive to work and become self-sufficient.

Citation?

5. Having been on food stamps myself, I can tell you right off the bat, it's absolutely degrading.

Doesn't this defeat point #4? It's degrading but people want to stay on it.
It is definitely not something likely to "just work" on your laptop, a la Ubuntu. I absolutely love FreeBSD and enjoy learning about it and using it and digging into its internals, but it is not intended to be a replacement for Ubuntu. For example, the installer only installs FreeBSD itself, which does not include any GUI components such as an X server.

I don't really see this as a failing of FreeBSD at all- it has a very specific scope and the developers are focused on fulfilling the requirements of that scope with the highest degree of quality and architectural coherence that they can muster. However, people looking for an Ubuntu replacement that don't want to mess around on the command line or edit text files for system configuration are going to be disappointed.

This isn't to say that it can't do all of the things that desktop-focused Linux distros can do. It has a really nice system for building third-party open source software (the ports system), or you can just install prebuilt binary packages with its package manager. So, you can pretty easily get X and your preferred desktop or window manager and your favorite apps on there, but it requires learning how to use ports (and therefore, building everything) or figuring out how to install the binaries from the command line with the package manager.

Having said that, you might want to try out PC-BSD. PC-BSD is a desktop-oriented system that uses FreeBSD as its core. My understanding is that every PC-BSD release is tied to a corresponding FreeBSD release, and what you are doing when you install PC-BSD is installing a stock FreeBSD system plus a graphical interface (including an X server, the desktop of your choice, and a graphical package manager), using a nice, simple GUI installer that attempts to "just work" and do the right thing with minimal input from the user.

You can think of the relationship between PC-BSD and FreeBSD as analagous to the relationship between Ubuntu and the Linux kernel, in the sense that PC-BSD builds a complete desktop system by shipping a bunch of integrated higher-level components layered on top of an upstream core system. FreeBSD is a standalone project focused on providing that core system, and PC-BSD is more of a distro that brings together a bunch of other pieces to build a complete desktop system around that core.

I also get the impression (someone please correct me if I'm wrong, or go into more detail if I'm right) that there's a high degree of commonality between people working on the two projects, and that there is a pseudo-official relationship whereby PC-BSD is considered by many people to be the blessed desktop version of FreeBSD.
FreeBSD's license is GPL-compatible[1]. I believe they just prefer not to use GPL code.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#2-clause_license_...
PayPal is building an iBeacon too for payments in store.
In the Loop: Stackato, a PaaS That You Can Deploy and Manage Yourself
My personal opinion. If you are hiring for a fulltime role where you hope to have that person on the team for a long time , then it is a heck of a lot more than just technical ability that matters. I learned this from an ex-boss who taught me the value of skills that matter in the long run. Hint: technical skill is just one aspect and not enough. It matters what the attitude is, what encourages/discourages them etc. Why do these matter ? Because we are humans and we use our experiences/emotions/values in practice a lot more than just technical skills.

The game changes however if you need an expert consultant/contractor/freelancer who can solve a very specific problem with a very short period of time. For those, go hard on the specific tech. questions.
In a single meeting, I believe it is often easy to determine if there is likely to be no fit. Going with your gut here makes a lot of sense.

But it is completely unrealistic to believe that in a single meeting you will be able to predict with any certainty that a candidate will work well with your team, enjoy the position and remain loyal. You simply can't establish these things until a person is on the job.

If you do a good job not hiring obvious poor fits, the odds that your relationship with your new employee will be a fruitful one obviously increase, but don't fool yourself into believing that there isn't a lot of luck involved.
There is a link in my profile. The landing page has an email at the bottom.

Thank you.
When typing the comment, I actually had written a sentence about Rust and later deleted it. The concurrency model of Rust is restricted compared to C++ and D: "lightweight tasks with message passing, no shared memory". However, Rust has potential. Maybe. Interesting times. :)
I agree with you about patents, but overall, I don't things are worse or less open now. Visicalc wasn't patented, but it was a commercial, $99, closed source product. The open source movement is much bigger and stronger now. Linux and Github would have been mind blowingly awesome in 1979. They are mind blowingly awesome now!
Efficient markets require all players to be rational...

This is simply false.

They merely require that the net sum of trades of the irrational players is not significantly larger than the total depth of the market.

tl;dr; Knight Capital was wildly irrational on at least one occasion. The market remained efficient and simply took most of Knight's money.
Here while Nokia was dominant they had no foothold, mostly because the cost-benefit of Nokia was better (ie: buy the phone for a reasonable price, and keep it for 4, 5 years... Here phone being sturdy is a very valued feature, and Nokia was notorious for that).
>but Java's not exactly state of the art these days.

Nor was it when it was created. It was born outdated (just like go!).
What is Debranding?
I'd imagine some of the far left thinks its far easier to make it impossible for the government to do these things then to make it illegal (since the government seems to have little problem twisting laws to justify what they do). Moreover, you can and should take both paths at the same time.

Plus, even if you curtail what the FBI can get, there will be circumstances when they legally should and will be allowed to get data from a business on an individual(e.g. with a subpoena/warrant). As such it makes since to make verify Apple's assertion that they can't hand over anything.

Finally, he's not just asking about the government, he is asking about any third party.
So C++ is bad because certain functions should be avoided and has no garbage collector. (With C++11 STL normally there's no need for manual memory management or naked pointers.)

C# is good, just you should avoid the garbage collector and 90% of the standard library. Roll your own web server, raw sql commands, have manual memory management, use undocumented calls, emit byte code and there you have: almost 40% of the C++ performance.

I'm the only one who thinks this does not make any sense?
Since you've got some experience with it, do you have any idea how hard/easy it'd be to get an iBeacon working from a Raspberry Pi equipped with a Bluetooth dongle?
Green Yellow Red
coloring never fails.
Pre Packaged Organic Fuel Rods For Biolite Wood Burning Camp Stoves Trail Stove
Looks great, you should totally make a short presentation showing it using http://shelr.tv/ or one of these ttyrec to gif converters.
Guess I should have been more specific, it is an official D-Notice by the MOD relating to Tempura:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/17/defence-d-bbc-m...

http://order-order.com/2013/06/08/d-notice-june-7-2013/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempora
Could you do this with a Raspberry Pi, a Netgear antenna, and a crossover cord? Very tempted to try this out, Linux style.
Thanks! I saw some references to it scattered about but was sort of turned off by the team-centric presentation. Are you just using it for your own personal stuff?
Hi, Scott, Alejo here. :-)

My perspective is similar. I do a bit of Java, C++ and Python, and recently wrote a ~1K LOC backend in Go. I figured I'd share it in case someone finds it interesting.

For low-level infrastructure projects that don't have very complicated business logic (e.g. caching systems, gateways between different RPC systems, etc.) but which run in many machines and must handle many requests per second, I'm sticking with C++. It's sometimes painful to troubleshoot race conditions around resource destruction issues, given that I use lots of async calls and threads, but still ... I don't think I'd feel comfortable investing significant efforts building this kind of systems in Go or even Java. That said, I'm trying to gradually migrate away from callbacks spaghetti and data sharing between threads towards ... specialized threads and message passing, a model far more similar to Go's. But I prefer C++ over Go and Java because it feels more predictable and, barring bugs, seems to have a lower operational cost. I don't want to imagine things like Bigtable or Google's other storage systems written in anything other than C++.

For higher-level backends with more business logic but which still must handle many requests per second, I lean towards Java. I feel that Java brings a few headaches for the production engineers that for some reason happen less in C++, such as having to tune the GC for performance and latency. Systems in C++ feel significantly more predictable, from my production perspective. But I'm willing to lose that predictability and switch to Java for the gains for the development team. I'm not sure I would be ready to switch to Go: I perceive the state of internal libraries on Go as trailing significantly behind those in Java. I guess this may change (or my perception may even be already dated).

Finally, for internal servers with little load, I'd already pick Go over Python. I come from a strong Scheme background and originally really liked Python, a very nice subset of Scheme. However, I'm coming to find projects in Python relatively hard to maintain. :-/ I feel that when Python projects hit a certain size (when a program reaches something like ~20 non-trivial classes, with some inheritance or interfaces, something like that), it becomes hard for new comers to extend it successfully. It may be just me, but I find that the lack of a canonical way to do things like interfaces means everyone has their own adhoc way to do this and ... things just get messy, or at least more messy, faster, than they do in the other 3 Google languages. It could also be the lack of type checks at compile time, I'm not sure. But I digress, all I meant to say is that I think Go may actually make things a lot better than Python in this regard, so I'm starting to use it in this area.
Wow, you and your fancy calculator sure showed me.

Anti-poverty programs don't automagically give $200 to everyone with no job. And (I assume) the $1/day was a somewhat arbitrary value anyway.
Looks like the anti-spying-stories brigade is out in full force today flagging this and the two stories about GCHQ hacking the Belgian telecom companies
If someone is threatening to sue you and you need advice, the advice you need is probably from a lawyer.

IANAL, but you may not be right to assume that just because you didn't sign a contract, you don't have a contract (signatures and writings are useful for contracts -- particularly as evidence of what was agreed to and that it was agreed to -- but they aren't generally necessary to form a contract), and even if you don't have a contract, there may be some other basis for a claim. OTOH, refunding what he paid may have done enough that there is nothing left for him to claim. But you'll get more concrete answers (well, presumably) from a lawyer.
User Interface Is About Comparing Choices
Good point—there are more effects than just "learning about the problem" that carry over to the next time you write the program. Once your brain has imprinted on a particular design for solving the problem, you'll probably carry that over to the next implementation. It may not be the design you'd have come up with if you were thinking in B in the first place and, short of erasing your memory and starting over, there's no way to test that.
Bleh. That definition of unit tests is so bland as to not differentiate between any kind of testing. That definition explicitly states that having a person (like QA?) go through the app and see what happens also constitutes unit testing. And that's bullshit, manual testing is not unit testing. And neither is testing an entire module at a time.

A useful discussion on the terminology problem can be found here: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?StandardDefinitionOfUnitTest

Most definitions define unit testing as testing the "smallest piece of code that can be tested in isolation". Then my criticism definitely applies.

And given my code reviews, it's obvious that the vast majority of programmers see unit testing as testing every individual function/method in isolation. This actually hides problems by increasing total source code (actual code and the tests + "compromises" for testability) and locks down internal structure of supposedly encapsulated logic. Both are very, very bad things.
I am pretty sure that the payout per video is 40 micro bitcoin (it was recently dropped from 50 micro bitcoin). Unfortunately to see this number, you need to register. It's a common amount for watching one Virool video (e.g. another site ABitBack pays only 30 micro Bitcoin per Virool video).

I am surprised too that the error hasn't been corrected yet. The difference is 10 times, which isn't insignificant.
In the immigration debate, an amendment to the bill was proposed to double the number of border patrol agents at a cost of $40 billion. Maybe they are just cutting food stamps in order to pay for border patrol agents.
Introduction to CocoaPods, the library dependencies management tool for Cocoa
I've read a lot of articles like the OP and the zerohedge one. What rises out of noise is not so much 'good' or 'evil', 'correct' or 'incorrect', or even 'legal' or 'illegal' but an continual sense of anger that person A is getting away with cheating and I want to cheat too but can't because of condition Y. I suppose at some level its "fair" only if everyone can cheat.

I watched a very strange film, a comedy, called Kung Fu Mahjong [1] in which the central theme are ladies that play Mahjong. And what struck me, perhaps as a westerner, or perhaps it was intentional, was that everyone in the movie cheats in some way or another, and everyone knows it. It reminded me of the kinds of things you would read about in the HFT blogs and forums. You could make a 'Kung Fu HFT' movie with the same theme.

The bottom line is that I have very little sympathy for these guys. As the 'early release' scandal broke and then was documented it felt like more crap to shovel out of the door and not like any sort of progress toward a more durable system.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Fu_Mahjong
That's a very well-researched comment! There a few things probably worth noting. Roth, Bobko and McFarland have been pretty active in this topic for the past decade. They've found the validity coefficient cited by Schmidt and Hunter in 1998 is likely an over-estimate due to relying on research conducted when there were less rigorous statistical and methodological best-practices.

[1]http://www.psychologie.uni-mannheim.de/cip/Tut/seminare_witt...

The validity coefficient provided by Roth and Bobko is likely more accurate. That isn't to diminish their value as they are still valuable, but the aren't the cure-all we'd like them to be. They do continue to show promise in reduced adverse impact though, which is great (note: the full article is behind a paywall - what is the HN-approved method of sharing the information?):

[2]http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-2389.2010....

That is for gender. With regards to ethnicity, the evidence isn't quite as optimistic yet. Like other predictors including cognitive ability tests, if they are showing notable adverse impact you may be in trouble Like other predictors including cognitive ability tests, if they are showing adverse impact you may be in trouble despite their validity.

[3]http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2008....

It's a problem with lots of predictors, though scope of the problem varies. There is work being done all the time, even in the most reliably stalwart predictor, the cognitive ability test:

[4}http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/apl/92/3/794/

Anyone interested in the great "diversity-validity dilemma" can check out this link for more information, though there's always progress. It's a great article.

[5]http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2008....

For my money I endorse integrity tests as a part of the solution. Decent validity, including incremental validity over cognitive ability due to a low correlation between the two, and small sub-group differences.

[6]http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2007....

Having said all that, I imagine the efficacy of work samples is moderated by the type of work, and I'd have to believe they are more amenable to demonstrations of technical skill like coding (I don't know of any references for this now, but I'll look later). Coding-related jobs would be nice because it would be possible to blindly judge on the output as well, and in programming-type jobs it would be much easier and cost-efficient to test large numbers of applicants than it would for many other jobs. Cost and ease of large-scale administrations are their big problems, so overcoming those would be gravy. I don't know how subgroup differences are impacted though.
> I think its everyones dream to walk into a store, type what you're looking for into your phone and see how far it is away from you.

Soon you won't even need to go to a store, the things you want will be dropped off to your home or business...
http://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/applicant_recipients/eligibilit...

Anyone with <$1/day of income would be eligible, unless they have >$2000 in a bank account or other "countable" resources.
>Go is, I believe, more expressive than C or C++

Really? Why does it always seem like everything he says about go is designed to make people question his grasp on reality? There is no way to reasonably argue that go is more expressive than C++. You might very well feel that the huge increase in complexity that comes with C++ is not worth the comparatively smaller increase in expressiveness, but pretending go is more expressive is simply absurd.
Athletes are by definition reasonably healthy and healthy people are as a rule both more intelligent and do better at work / school than non healthy people. Further, athletes are required to have a minimum GPA which has both a positive and dramatic impact on testing scores. AKA compare everyone with everyone with a 2.0+ GPA and you will see a positive correlation.

PS: You can correct for these factors, but it's far less common than you might think to do so as correlations are published more often than null results.
Mailtap: New USPS Documents Show Extent of Police Mail Spying
I think this is best explained as an effect of the "go to college" mantra shoved on kids in the 80s and 90s. There are fewer and fewer adults who are not already college educated. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_U...)
Dependency injection in node.js
OP here.. I created a quick little Ruby library for interacting with TrueVault's REST API: https://github.com/marks/truevault.rb
And yet they had plenty of incentive to invent the spreadsheet. Patents grant a government protected monopoly in order to encourage people to invent. If people have the incentive to invent anyway then it is better for society to allow competition, since competition benefits consumers much more than monopolies.
there's lots of ways music students remember the circle clockwise and counterclickwise, beginning with key signatures for C major (no sharps/flats), G and F (one sharp and flat) etc. Violins thru cello are tuned in fifths; double bass and the lowest 4 guitar strings in fourths (E-A-D-G from lowest to highest pitched).

If you want to read more, there's these little $6 books

http://www.halleonard.com/product/viewproduct.do?itemid=3309...

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/listing/2690028887554?r=1&cm_m...
CCC in Germany did the same thing, lifted a gov minister's fingerprint from a glass and made a duplicate to defeat a door lock
I don't know. But how did Facebook, Twitter, and Github grow without applying for patents for years. Twitter only started filing patents recently. Facebook started filing after it already won in the market against MySpace and Friendster.

Why didn't Google just copy Facebook and Twitter? Those would be easy apps to copy in the state they were when they first got famous.

It doesn't happen because its harder for people to copy ideas than you think it is. If you write software for a living and work in a big organization you will understand that they don't have a magic wand that they can just wave to make new products appear.