skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is this really a worthwhile distinction? Using the first example from the Wikipedia article on duck typing, I have a choice between exploding when given invalid values:

def calculate(a,b,c):
return (a+b)*c

or failing silently when given invalid values, which will often cause some other piece of code to explode, or at the worst cause some misbehavior that is difficult to detect:

def calculate(a,b,c):
try:
a=a+b
except:
pass
try:
a=a*c
except:
pass
return a

or

def calculate(a,b,c):
try:
return (a+b)*c
except:
return None

I would prefer to just not be in the situation of choosing what to do with invalid values in the first place.
New US $100 bill to debut Tuesday
The crucial question is why can women cope with low paying jobs, and men can't. I think the notion that the father in a family should usually be the main breadwinner has a lot to do with that.

Women have the privilege to be able to choose a low paying profession (which offers more flexibility/time for family). The privilege is theirs because they control reproduction.
Totally agree. The challenges are multi-faceted, but one of the biggest issues is that it's not for deciding the "whys" or "whats." Why we are doing something is strategy and what and when we are going to deliver is the roadmap. Kanban can be used for working on the "hows" (even though it was never intended to be a software development framework).
Paying off debt is a transfer, so while you're now spending less, your creditor is now able to either spend or make new loans.
Absolutely - we all would. But the problem someone creating a business around that model and targeting HN is that the level of expertise we might expect is far different from that which a government contractor/employee might expect. So asking us if we'd pay gets a different response than asking someone/somewhere else, I'd think. And that difference might make a whole lot of difference if you are trying to make a business case/model.

Man, $50 a month for 1-on-1 access to someone who knows x better than me? I could do a whole lot of damage with that!
As a tradition, no. Old books like this are often read in a management context. For example, at my local book shop, The Book of Five Rings is in the Business section[1]. The Art of War by Sun Tzu[2] can be applied to any context you want and it's usually still good advice. Re: The Art of War[3], wikipedia says:

> There are business books applying its lessons to office politics and corporate strategy. Many Japanese companies make the book required reading for their key executives. The book is also popular among Western business management, who have turned to it for inspiration and advice on how to succeed in competitive business situations. It has also been applied to the field of education.

Here's where I start talking out of my ass: If you think about it, aren't generals the original managers? They had to coordinate the actions of thousands of people. Sometimes hundreds of thousands. They have to delegate to their subordinates because it'd be impossible to micromanage everything. Also, I think it's more than a coincidence that the quote seemed to fit so well. Outsourcing is hiring mercenaries.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Book-Five-Rings-Miyamoto-Musashi/dp/15...
[2]: http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-War-Liddell-Hart/dp/0195014766...
[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_War#Application_outs...
oh no, how will my Enterprise Java Enterprise Application work on our Windows Enterprise Production Enterprise Datacenter Edition?
Octave is GNU, and the GNU project prefers to speak of free software than open source:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.h...

The philosophical distinction matters a lot to me. I don't work on Octave because I think this is a better development model. I work on it because I think we should all be free to read and share our code and our algorithms.
'Should' is a matter of debate.. but this does match actual iOS 7.
I think that's file name limitation. I think NTFS allows 32767 for full path...
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I've always felt like Burlington's wealth came from being a suburb of Hamilton rather than of being a suburb of Toronto.

All of the super wealthy trust fund kids I knew there had parents who ran companies in Hamilton and NOT in T.O.
Note the dates that all of these US scientists started their careers -- all began their first non-training jobs in the mid-to-late 1970s. This batch of winners is amongst the last generation of US scientists to have stable scientific funding.

Starting in the early 1980s, the US began to play political games with research budgets, and since then it's been feast or famine. Whole generations of trainees have been doomed to underemployment, faculty positions have disappeared, and a career in academic science has gone from a feasible choice for smart college students, to a long-shot on par with becoming a professional athlete.

This batch of winners is a reminder that in a decade or two, we'll be wondering why the US doesn't win Nobel prizes anymore.
I would strongly disagree in that there's no reason other than ignorance and frankly .gov/.com corruption that we don't treat sugars and grains and grain based products like cigarettes or beer. I don't think the opposite extreme of copying the War On Some Drugs is a great model, throwing street level dealers in prison for selling ice cream to minors is going a bit far. I see no reason that any corn syrup soda should not have a surgeon's general warning stamped on it, "this product is medically proven to fatten, sicken, then kill its users" or similar wording. Its illegal to market cigs and alcohol to kids, especially on TV, why not ban marketing of ice cream to kids? Breakfast cereal is a product designed and manufactured to make people fat, and probably shouldn't exist as currently marketed to kids.
You are greatly oversimplifying people's decisions about how to spend their time.

I am not trying to defend laziness. I am just drawing to draw your attention to some of the factors you are not considering here.

People often watch TV while doing things like cooking dinner or housework, which aren't compatible with serious exercise.

People often watch TV at hours of the day where outdoor exercise is impractical or at least inconvenient.

The decision of how to spend time isn't binary: TV or exercise. People with many family responsibilities have less free time. People who can't afford to buy time by paying for their oil changes, plumbing, etc. have less free time.

It should be telling that many people who do get regular exercise get up very early to exercise before starting their normal daily activities. Even people who make exercise a priority have a hard time fitting it into a normal schedule.
ExactTarget is also built on MS technology.
those are apparently user funds that were in escrow or otherwise stored with silk road at the time of the seizure. his personal commissions are the funds being discussed here
>NY's history is all about 1%ers, like Vanderbilt and Rockefeller and Bloomberg.

Not New York's creative history, which is largely based in gradual urban decay and eventually the default. Affordable housing for artists near affordable venues for art are what creates art (if that's not too obvious.)
>Because, if you attempt to use it to prevent asset forfeiture now your breaking money laundering laws.

That would require intent to be proven.

(Not impossible or unfalsifiable, but it's another hurdle)

>Additionally, a judge could put you in prison indefinitely until you disclose and transfer your bitcoins.

If a third party spends those coins because they have the wallet file, the other copy of the wallet file becomes worthless and is no longer in your control to do anything with.

>Finally, the public paper trail of bitcoins will make it hard to "hide" them.

Not really. Between tumbling services, and the fact that it's stupidly easy to create a wallet out of thin air, at that point you've broken the ownership chain. (If wallet 123, known to belong to me, sends coins to wallet 456, you can't prove whether wallet 456 is under my control unless you happen upon the file in my possession).
Yes, NTFS would support much longer paths than 260 characters.
Physics is often needed for many CS programs. I was a bit worried when I applied to UW CSE with a 2.9, 3.2, and 3.7 in my physics reqs.
Silk Road 2.0: A concept of a distributed anonymous marketplace
Octave is good if you have to write matlab compatible code (or just like matlab and don't have access to it).

The new kid on the block Julia[1] is actually pretty nice and as someone who has written a lot of matlab code is quite similar and easy to learn.

If you don't need or want syntax similar to matlab python+scipy+numpy+matplotlib is pretty great.

I was stuck with matlab for most of my work though because of simulink+control systems toolbox and preexisting codebase.

[1]: http://julialang.org/
To clarify, I was only responding to geuis' interpretation of what the article said, not whether the article was correct or not. I honestly have no idea if the article is correct or not, but I also think that geuis was misrepresenting what the article said as written.

EDIT: I think you meant to respond to notahacker and not to me.
Under the third section "hashing" it says:

>For example, one could take a hash like bcrypt, give it a random input, and hash it for a month. Each hash depends on the previous hash, and there’s no way to skip from the first hash to the trillionth hash. After a month, you use the final hash as the encryption key, and then release the encrypted file and the random input to all the world. The first person who wants to decrypt the file has no choice but to redo the trillion hashes in order to get the same encryption key you used.

Then it lists this downside:

>"This is pretty clever. If one has a thousand CPUs handy, one can store up 3 years’ of computation-resistance in just a day. This satisfies a number of needs. But what about people who only have a normal computer? Fundamentally, this repeated hashing requires you to put in as much computation as you want your public to expend reproducing the computation, which is not enough. We want to force the public to expend more computation - potentially much more - than we put in. How can we do this?

>It’s hard to see. At least, I haven’t thought of anything clever"

I have! Rather than hash n as your seed, after finding n (which you will still release) hash (n+m) instead, where m is a random number in the range (for example) 0,100. Discard m, do not retain it after you've started the hashes. Release only n. Now, rather than starting at n, they still have to start at n, then when they find that m wasn't 0, they have to try all over again hashing n+1 a trillion times, then when they find it's not a good key, they have to try hashing n+2 a trillion times, and so on until they've bruteforced n+m as the correct initial seed for the start of the hash process. i.e. you make them bruteforce what m must have been.

if m is ten, someone would have to repeat your process up to ten times (an average of 5 times) before they found the seed.

Likewise if m is large, like 1,000,000 the force multiplier is 1,000,000x as much work as you had to do, in the worse case and 500,000 times as much work on average.

I've emailed the offer this suggestion.
I think the seizure of Silk Road absolutly had an impact on the value of BitCoins. The benefit of using BitCoins is that they provide a way to operate outside of traditional currency structures. Once BitCoins becomes something that can be seized, regulated, tracked, it becomes just like regular cash. That makes them a whole lot less valuable.
> I always thought this limitation came from NTFS, or at least a previous version of.

NTFS allows paths up to 32767 UTF-16 code units (after expansions) with each path component (between `\` separators) up to 255 code units, and this is available through UNC paths.

MAX_PATH is a Windows API limitation, and thus a limitation implicitly inherited by many windows-based software which use MAX_PATH as storage limits and buffer sizes.

Changing filesystem will not fix WinAPI issues.
Ah, I missed that in the description, thanks for reply.
all javascript everything
For most us, the Holy Grail is to reach a point where you're financially independent. Once you reach that point, almost anything is possible: you can devote your creative energy to producing your vision, instead of wasting it in a 9 to 5.

Attaining that billion dollars (which isn't assured) isn't so desirable or important anymore once you reach this point.
> Rather than offering a free trial, you make everything paid upfront and offer a refund if they don't like it.

Financially identical deals can have wildly different uptakes.

You get better results from "Cash discount!" than from "Credit card surcharge", for example.
Definitely. I am actually really worried about the effect of NSA Surveillance and data collection on industrial espionage. How does a small and growing company know that a big company/interest group that feels threatened by it won't get access to NSA data on the company by using their connections?

If Snowden, an individual contractor, can dive deep into the data how do we know that others are not doing the same for other purposes?
I've been on the "good problem" side of scalability on the MS platform. It can scale if you can scale your wallet. Monthly bills of ~$54K hosted at Rackspace became monthly bills of ~$18K after a rewrite using Java, JRuby, HBase over C# and SQL Server.

We tried Mono. It was a headache to convert (2010, 2011).
> Scala is the best language out there today for general purpose programming, FULLSTOP.

You have a very narrow view of what makes a good general purpose programming, it's not just about its syntax and its type system.

Scala suffers from a lot of hurdles that make it awkward to use in production and which lessen its productivity:

- IDE support, still very shaky, each new version of the plugin adding new features and breaking old ones, and the plugins randomly refusing to work now and then

- Tool support in general (it's sad that the best build tool is sbt, I was hoping we had learned from ant and maven that we can build better build tools)

- Slow compilation and getting slower at every release (memories of C++ and template linking)

- Backward compatibility still a problem. The compiler is a bit better now but the library story is simply a non starter for most production work

- And overall, the overwhelming impression that Scala is to Java what C++ is to C. It's a very big language that keeps getting bigger at each release, despite Typesafe promising they are working to fix that. They also promised that Scala development would no longer be driven by papers published at conferences, but that's a lie as well.

Also, some influential Scala people have been leaving Typesafe recently, and not in very good terms (e.g. Paul Philips, who was the guy keeping the releases together).

I just have a bad feeling overall about the future of such a language.
How to make hospital videos better
From Classmates to Soulmates
Not working here either (Chrome 30 on W7). Bandwidth maybe?
In fact, bitcoin was only priced at $260 for a few hours in April 2013. Even then, the price was mostly between $80 and $140.
Thanks, I'll take a closer look then. How do you think it would handle with rendering massive images for canvas printing, like, say 3'x2'@300dpi or bigger pixels?
Turing award in computing?
The "forever" in the title does not exist in the linked response, and I would also note that the question seems to be in regards to Visual Studio and has a very VS-oriented response.

Some Windows APIs support 32k paths but since not all do, very few applications can claim to support more than 260.
Love the post, Alex! Looking forward to the re-designed Fetchnotes.

My issue is I take notes and never get back to actually doing them. I need smarter notes to remind me of next steps to get stuff done!
I only did undergrad there, but was friends with several MS students. It seemed to largely differ course to course. Some were more research/project oriented, and others seemed more like an undergrad course with a narrower focus. Format might have even differed based on professor. Either way it doesn't seem a stretch to use autograding for a MS, at least for non-thesis options.
> as an OO language that's still largely imperative at its core

Why do you say this? vals and immutable data strucutres are clearly emphasized in Scala, so how can you say that FP isn't at its core?

>Scala isn't a pure-FP language, and trying to treat it as one doesn't really...work

Why do you think scalaz concerns itself primarily with enforcing 'purity'? Scalaz' effects library isn't even part of it's core repo.
Her point 2 is interesting. It has long been to the great bafflement of Westerners why Sony's software is so bad. You will know what I mean if you ever tried to use Sonic Stage for your MP3s. And the reason is in the West we expect(ed) to have the PC as the hub into which we would plug everything to manage it. Whereas in Japan, your camera would just print directly to your printer and that was that, so in their home market Sony never had to learn to write software for PCs. Anyway, we might be seeing something similar happen here too now.
Excerpt from "Keep It Simple" about Apple and Frog Design's collaboration
I understand what you're saying but I fail to see how your M is related to Kolmogorov complexity. You're not free to define some contrived M with particular properties that make your assumption true. Kolmogorov complexity explicitly asks for the shortest possible M for each individual string (i.e L1 and T0). Here's the definition from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity):

"More formally, the complexity of a string is the length of the shortest possible description of the string in some fixed universal description language".

M is not that universal language. M is a program written in the universal language of Turing machines. I guess that is our misunderstanding. If you define M itself as that universal language but M only ever does that one contrived thing you said (i.e. there is only one program written in that language) then it is not a universal language any longer and any comparison of lengths would become completely pointless.
What happened for us is we tried to adopt it, but it was just so unworkably at odds with our current process, it got mostly ignored.

The manager had no hope to prioritize and minimize work in progress. As a developer I spent more time managing tasks than coding, as it was. For instance - sending out an email explaining how this task needs requirements, that task needs database work, and X, Y, and Z are all done but QA can't test them because we can't get a deploy in because.... etc.

The manager who tried to implement also struggled valiantly against these systemic issues, but he was powerless - a higher power than him had decided that QA (for instance) had to work on project Y right now, and there would be no testing for a few weeks, and so things just fill up.

"I have nothing to work on and I am forbidden from improving quality" was a very common state to be in.

One solution that was attempted was to create more queues that could be worked on for different parts of the app, or to create more buckets...

The point is, he was very aware of our problems, but Kanban couldn't fix them. I don't know what could. When stories got blocked, I definitely made him aware... so the visibility was there with and without Kanban.
Hey this uses Giant Bomb data! You have no idea how hard it was to convince the various business parties that a free API of video game data was a good idea.

Glad someone is using it.
Recently saw a company on HN that does something similar: http://www.airpair.com/

Don't know much about them, but they seem to be making a go of it. Apparently there's at least some demand in the space!
I don't think you could do a subscription model for this business. It's only profitable if none your customers use your service.

The value proposition makes sense - find a solution faster than searching for it yourself. However, I feel like you would have to pay per use and the level of expertise required would dictate cost.
Well done! Rare skills deserve rare money.
I doubt this is something affecting a bunch of other people, but I lost a dedicated server there through a combination of my own ignorance, a dodgy spam filter, and their strange billing policies (instead of charging you month to month, they generate an invoice you have to log in to pay).

I hadn't touched this server in weeks, so they generated their invoice, the notification email got filed away as spam, and the server was disconnected (again the message being filed as spam).

It wasn't until almost a week after that I noticed something was up and called them. They advised me to open a ticket, I did, one day later the server disappeared from their control panel, and I have yet to receive a reply on that ticket.

The missing the billing and their messages getting spam filtered is completely on me, but the not answering a ticket and linking ticket-creating-account-ness the payment status of the server is totally on them.

Back to Hetzner, it seems. I didn't lose anything but my blog (which is Octopress and thankfully backed up to Bitbucket) and a couple of VMs I used for learning things.
Errr, it says Visual Studio will limit the path length for now. Windows already support longer path names, if you use the right APIs.

My understanding is that it's not worth going over all of their code to use the newer APIs since they also rely on third parties that they can't force to update. Those would still break when dealing with longer paths.

Still sucks (the path length limit is indeed problematic, especially when dealing with Java code), but let's not exagerate things shall we?
because burying 80 million dollars would take a few hours and a lot of space...and probably a few big black barrels or something.

burying bitcoin can be done with a flowerpot.
> gets in the way of having a deeply-nested project hierarchy"

Do people actually want deeply-nested project hierarchies?

For example, from a real-world, full operating system, the deepest path I can find[0] is in a build directory and 184 characters:

> "./ports/lang/python26/work/Python-2.6.1/portbld.static/build/temp.XXXXXX XXXXX-vHEAD-amd64-2.6/XXXXXX-home/XXXXX.git/src/ports/lang/python26/work/Python-2.6.1/Modules/_multiprocessing"

(Names changed to protect the "innocent.")

[0]:

$ mkfifo ../names
$ find . > ../names &
$ python
>>> with open("../names") as f:
... l = 0
... nm = None
... for n in f.readlines():
... if len(n) > l: l, nm = len(n), n
... print l, nm
What the heck are you talking about? Most of the best universities in the world are in the states so let's start there. Most CS programs don't require any chemistry at all, and you would be crazy to take chemistry and compete with all the really grade-savvy pre-meds anyways. Now, that leaves math and physics, which are reasonable gates for CS and many other kinds of engineering.

CS is not a natural science, and even physics has a very tenuous relationship with it. It is more like a math or an engineering discipline, with a bit of design thrown in.

Disclaimer: I studied CS for around 10 years, getting a PhD out of it and doing "real" science.
Being a desirable place to live for the boring rich, driving up the prices so that the interesting poor all leave, is a problem for both the rich and the poor.

Taking away money isn't the plot of Harrison Bergeron, taking away ability was. Ability is spread throughout the population, not just (or even mostly) the rich part. The rich tend to pay people with ability, rather than to be people with ability (other than the ability to figure out who to pay.)
A Bombing Suspect, and the Rush to Judgment