skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can, but Node.js is often a better choice than PHP.

Caching: you can have ONE node.js process listening to all requests, and it can keep the cached info in memory, to be looked up much more quickly. In PHP, you'd have to load the entire script environment, connect to an external source like Memcached or APC, etc.

Waitlist: Similar to caching, except Node.js can hold off on responding to the request until the response came back. It's MUCH harder to make something like PHP iterate through the waitlist because a bunch of scripts might get called at once, and the way it works, all of them will have to sleep. With Node.js, only one process has to sleep -- or handles something else while you're waiting.

etc.
By the way, I'm not complaining about Java here. I _like_ Java (or at least I like the JVM; the language is something one puts up with, or sometimes not, for the JVM). I just don't think it's terribly fair to say that c compilers require all these arcane options for performance, without noting that JVMs have their own just-as-arcane (or maybe moreso; garbage collection is harder to wrap your head around than compiler optimisation, and can hurt you more) options which are required for performance.
I'm surprised at the 100 student limit they impose. I'm currently following MIT's 8.01x Physics course on edX along with 33k other students. So far I haven't had an issue that's a direct result of the number (like felling I don't get enough attention from the staff.)

So on one hand we have options like edX, which reach a lot more people and are mostly free ($50 for a verified diploma) that reach orders of magnitude more students, and on the other a paid-and-accredited degree.

I personally hope they'll be more of the first ones, because of a) not being able to spend $6k and b) the warm feeling I get in my stomach when I think about free and high-quality education that reaches tens of thousands of people.
I'm working on my application now. I barely meet the requirements, so it'll be interesting to see if I can get in for the trial period or for the Fall 2014 semester.
If I knew this course was imminent, I might have but the Computer Science subject test was discontinued (see the note here: https://www.ets.org/gre/subject/about?WT.ac=grehome_gresubje...)
Pilot to display bitcoin logo on glider during world’s first Mt. Everest flight
Sure, sorry for the delay!

I applied to Kaplan straight out of high school and started telling everyone I was going to work there before getting hired [I was not]. Instead of making $16/hour I ended up getting privately hired at $25+/hour by my classmates' siblings. At Brown I applied to Ivy Bound - they work with students across the country, both in person and via Skype. For my first job, at 19, I was paid $40/hour plus $90 just for travel, since I was the only person willing to head over to Newport to tutor at the boarding school there. After that, I began increasing my rate by about 50% each year. I jumped to $100/hour one summer because a family really wanted to hire me, I didn't think I had the time, and I asked for that rate because I figured they'd say no [so I wouldn't have to] - and if they didn't, it would be more than worth my time. They said yes, and it was. I still work for Ivy Bound and take private referrals in NYC through friends. Best side job ever, and I love the students I work with / trying to get them to stop stressing over the college admissions process.
No, the author isnt. This is the full quote:
"The price after the Silk Road seizure has remained fairly constant but the currency itself has fallen from a high of $260 to about $130 this morning."

It is a horrible worded statement as it doesnt specify the time frame within which the price fell from 260 to 130, but they clearly state it has been stable since the SR seizure
> Scala doesn't enforce safety anyhow, so why spend so much effort on removing each and every cast?

Because then the computer knows what I'm doing, and not just me. Whenever I write a cast, I am assuming I'm smarter than my computer--so smart I never, ever need the computer to check it. This is pretty stupid, because I'm not that smart. (Neither are you.)

> What you've described is what Scala programmers want Scala to be, or what they use

This is a pretty silly line of demarcation. Scala is what people use. So is JavaScript. There's no prescriptive use case for it.

I'd like to like Kotlin, but it wasn't done enough soon enough and I now know Scala intuitively enough that there's no real reason for me to use it. It's just-different-enough from Scala to throw me, while being a step back down the continuum of expressivity. If Kotlin had come out three years ago, it might have grabbed me, but at this point it holds no value to me.
Question - is there an export option included? A cursory glance around the pages doesn't turn anything up.

I've had to stage an emergency exodus of blog content from third party hosts more than once because reasons (most recently: Thanks OVH billing department!), so having content in a non-exportable site scares me a little, especially when I'll be using that site as my primary writing area.
Anyone considering doing business with Dwolla should read up on how they treated their customer TradeHill. (Google it). The internet has a long memory.
Generally in the US the application fee isn't refundable. I've always understood it as a way for schools to offset the cost of processing applications and prevent folks from applying to every college under the premise of "Maybe I'll get lucky and be accepted into MIT"
> I have to constantly step my game up to stay relevant

This doesn't strike me as the case in other skilled professions. A successful middle aged CPA, MD, lawyer, or finance exec often has the option of more or less coasting on accumulated relationships and prestige.

This idea that a skilled software engineer must always be training up on his own dime and time is really kind of strange, in the bigger picture.
Java is the definition of enterprise level language. Very newbie friendly.
It's nice for the newbies but it's verbosity and small set of features kills it for any experienced programmer.

Please don't tell me about the fabled Java 8. Google doesn't care about new java versions, so we are stuck with Java 6.
Most people will move to other languages until Java 8 gains any traction.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately (and in fact probably driving a lot of my friends nuts with my views on this), but I think if you take a look at what Airbnb has done with Rendr and what ex-Google Wave engineers have done with Derby, it becomes immensely clear what the potential here is.

Traditionally you've had to maintain two codebases for things related to rendering (think generating URL slugs, or formatting dates). This code duplication is obviously solved by running node layer in the middle. But the benefits go well beyond unifying rendering code and separating "backend" developers from "frontend" developers.

My excitement is the ease of building highly interactive apps while staying true to how web pages were meant to be architected. Since your client and server runtime are aware of each other, the framework can handle things like partial rendering, multi-client sync via OT, request caching, incrementally pushing required css/js/html payloads to the clients as necessary (instead of doing one massive push at the beginning). Right now the client and the server talk to each other through a constricted API layer you have to create endpoints for manually.

It's exciting to think how much of this can be automatically handled by the framework. I believe this generation of web architecture will finally bridge the gap between "websites" (often progressively enhanced HTML payload) and "webapps" (massive javascript payload, almost no HTML).
Remote Works: Shack Co., India
How I Don't Get Scammed on Cables and Gear
The links and prices you've posted are for a different program.
"I didn't sell out son. I bought in."
It looks good. How does it differ from Ghost?
One problem with this article is the absence of any reasoning process.

How do you know there is such a thing as a death spiral? How do you know these symptoms apply to the "death spiral" condition. How do you know your solutions actually alleviate the symptoms or abandon the condition?
Fox News debuts bizarre, giant tablets in its newsroom
It obviously more than just fire regulations. Hotels are probably required to be inspected on a regular basis, probably required to maintain a presence at the building, required to have a process to clean every room after each stay. They probably require a "manager" with "5 years industry experience" (by the way, from researching the parking industry , even a valet parking outfit needs to have such a person).

The fact is this would kill AirBnB. It would make it too expensive to operate as a small host. Someone renting out their apartment to make ends meet, and very often in the process making lifelong friends with those who stay, should not in any sense be considered a hotel. It's a totally different experience for both the host and the guest.

I stayed at one of the earliest AirBnB spots, literally a "tree house" high in the santa cruz mountains in the host's backyard. It was advertised as such on the site, and was an amazing experience. We chatted for hours with the host, who told us all sorts of stories, including that a replica of her treehouse now sits at the offices of AirBnB. How is that in any way a hotel?
I didn't read the last paragraph that way and you're taking only part of it:

>The price after the Silk Road seizure has remained fairly constant but the currency itself has fallen from a high of $260 to about $130 this morning.

I thought it was pretty clear that the SR seizure didn't have an affect but it was mentioning that it is down from a high earlier in the year.
Yes, I noticed that as well. The formula seems to be: a) identify trope, b) throw down cards, c) leave.

Each of your points of evidence is true in-and-of-itself, I think. But not enough compare-and-contrast with outside situations for my taste. Programming is a good career. So is finance. So why no campaigning there? 2) You're right, Men don't campaign for teaching or sanitation careers. What do men campaign for? Further, I might compare-and-contrast with the transitions of other groups which were formerly underrepresented within their industry and ask whether it was campaigning which won that victory.
A list of useful commands for linux and other programs
Business creation in Germany
Is a hosted blogging site the best way to "own your own brand"?
This looks really cool, so I'll sound like an ass for saying this, but: for $6.99 / month, what do I get over a free blogging solution?

> Full ownership of your brand and data.

This is the only thing not provided by anyone else afaik.
mirror cache: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/734346/html/programming-...
The value for big-tent languages like C++ and Scala comes pretty much from the following factors:

1) There is an existing language that has become widely used in a domain (or a variety of domains) with a well-developed ecosystem, and

2) There are well-known limitations of that existing language for the domains in which it has become widely used, and

3) The existing alternative languages that take conceptually pure approaches to addressing the problems with the existing dominant language have problems making use of the ecosystem that has evolved around that dominant language and/or pose a difficult transition for programmers versed in the dominant language, and

4) The "big-tent" language provides an easier transition for people versed in the language than purer alternatives (by way of more directly supporting the idioms of the dominant language) and has better support for leveraging the existing ecosystem that has grown up around the dominant language.
I disagree, being a good server side software developer means that you understand fully how your models and APIs will be used and what consuming developers really want from it. You enable them to easily drop your solutions into their stack. Be it an external JSON API or an internal class's API.

Every end has a front and back.
Why business investment has been low
Thanks. Site was down for me.
There is no online label.
Thanks, for pointing out. Updated with a more sane bullet.
Yes, because I personally give a shit about your stupid downvotes. I am devastated.
The export option will be there in about 1 week. It's one of the top items on my todo list now. Data liberation is important.
New Startups and Tech Startups on Launching Next
Ask HN: What are the best tools for researching stocks and investing?
There are a lot of investing platforms out there. What are your favorite sites for researching stocks and executing trades?
Your mileage may certainly vary, but having used Scala pretty steadily for the last year, I find the strong majority of Scala code I see in practice generally very easy to intuit. You can do stupid things with it--see Scalaz, which is bad ideas[1] given form--but for the most part, people don't.

I used to have the same concern you're expressing, and a few others besides--I've written comments on HN along the lines of "I'm writing Scala that I can't read the next day"--but I got past that stage not too long afterwards, and I find it remarkably predictable and consistent in everyday use.

[1] - this isn't a fair characterization, see deeper in the tree
The scala scripting is an oft-overlooked feature, and I think it's pretty great. You can compile your codebase into a jar, upload it to a server and link to it from a script in Scala you're editing there in a console text editor. Advantages:

- no compilation required, while still maintaing static typing checks

- since the script is the same Scala language as your main codebase, you can copy/paste code snippets into script for increased productivity

From my experience, it's been great for one-off data processing jobs done on the server.
> Odersky is clearly a very smart guy, but I'm not persuaded around his way of thinking.

He is, and his way of thinking, if you watch some of his talks seems to be: sometimes you have this problem, and sometimes that problem. How can we write a compiler that tackles both?

If you listen to Rich Hickey or Joe Armstrong you see something completely different. They ask what the biggest problems facing software developers are, and what philosophy should modern software development adopt in order to face these problems. The features of the languages they've designed directly follow from their philosophy.

I think it is no coincidence that Martin Odersky is a PL researcher (and hence is interested more in sophisticated compilers), while Hickey and Armstrong come "from the field".
Cool beta social-media curration tool
API calling a Database
This is the limit for their "pilot program" and will be dropped in the future.
Rivest's puzzle (1999) http://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/lcs35-puzzle-description.... assumes that we're all using 10 GHz processors in 2012.

> The value of t was chosen to take into consideration the growth in computational power due to "Moore's Law". Based on the SEMATECH National Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (1997 edition), we can expect internal chip speeds to increase by a factor of approximately 13 overall up to 2012, when the clock rates reach about 10GHz. After that improvements seem more difficult, but we estimate that another factor of five might be achievable by 2034. Thus, the overall rate of computation should go through approximately six doublings by 2034.

I asked about progress on this puzzle at stack exchange here http://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/5831/what-is-the-p... and got some nice answers.
Maybe? I'm not sure the two are necessarily connected.
Kanban is the silver bullet of the day which sinking enterprises reach for. I've been a software engineer since 1989, and the entire time has been filled with process/method fads "which will fix everything." In 1989 it was Yourdon's institutionalized bureaucracy. Today it's Kanban.

Doesn't make Kanban broken; it just means that it is the non-solution for today's desperate souls.
Not to mention it isn't like the US and Croatia haven't worked together at least once in apprehending a criminal living in Croatia wanted by the United States.

http://daily.tportal.hr/211771/Ukrainian-hacker-wanted-in-US...

http://www.croatiantimes.com/news/General_News/2012-08-31/29...

American and Croatian police have worked together to arrest Ukrainian hacker Sergei Litvinenko in Croatia, reports Croatian radiotelevision.

Litvinenko was wanted by US federal police for fraud he had committed in the United States. The federal courts had issued a warrant for his arrest and he was caught in Croatia earlier this week.

There is literally no reason why they wouldn't extradite such a highly valued criminal to the US, formal treaty or not. The ties between the two countries are too strong.
Personal experience after being an early employee or founder of six software companies and knowing or speaking directly with folks in hundreds of others. Simple experience and pattern recognition. Not science.
Answer, because women have in-group bias, and men don't:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15491274
> Often method calls are 4 - 6 layers deep

This is hardly the fault of the language, more of the community, which tends to fetishise certain patterns a bit.
> Working at a small firm is very low prestige, unlike here. You want to have a big name you can tell to your prospective father-in-law. There are of course big, reputable outsourcing firms there, but they tend to either be hiring mills with low quality, or expensive enough to negate any labor arbitrage advantages.

+1 for putting it out.
In general, I think there is a lot more risk to the institution for handing out accredited degrees to paying remote students than for handing out an honor code certificate. They are just taking baby steps, which is a good thing.
Is there a point to ranking impractical solutions?
That's actually worse, since if there's no DMCA-like safe harbour, they can be sued immediately.
Recently we (my wife and I) were on the search for a replacement nanny as our nanny of 2 years was going back to school. During the process, my wife posted to Facebook asking her friends what they thought about a "manny" she found. I was shocked at the whole situation.

First, even just the fact that it seems perfectly legit to call him a "manny" was enough. I can't even imagine how much the internet would explode if someone questioned hiring "womengineers."

Second, the fact that the question is even asked. Like there is something EXTRA we need to look at when hiring a man as a nanny that we would not look at for a woman. Skills are skills. A background check is a background check.

Lastly, I was appalled by the women that spoke up about how sketchy it was and that they would advise against it. Thankfully, there were people that spoke up about it being no different. That it would be great to have our boys see a man in such a role.

Ultimately, he didn't make the cut. But this was not a male/female reason. But seeing what I saw, I do feel a bit sorry for the guy as I'm sure this happens more than he knows. I'm sure he has missed out on great jobs because too many of people's friends thought it was too sketchy.
As someone from a liberal arts background who is taking steps to change careers, it's comments like this that are making me want to go into computer engineering rather than computer science. It'll be harder, but as someone whose career suffered from the last recession I've become a bit more sensitive to bubbles and the growing size of the labor pool in CS. I fear that in the next decade being a programmer could become more akin to being a lawyer today.

I'm not trying to make an argument about whether what I say is true. I'm just expressing a few musings.
I'm a big fan of using node for an intermediary web stack. It really plays well for handling your web layer with the tools available as well as handling builds with grunt and friends.

I think the real potential comes in when you blend it with a heavy lifting API written in go or on the JVM. Easy web layer that's agnostic to whatever heavy processing language should you decide to do.

Obviously there's a bit of complexity that comes with this, but if you need to scale up it's right there. Even then, node is pretty powerful on its own, where you might not need a crazy backend.
Create it using 50% of your lifetime. Or create one for your children.
The Unintended Consequences Of The Shutdown Of Silk Road
The primitive for this is a dead man's switch. I wonder what the cryptographic equivalent would be.

Some sort of computational network that will always make progress towards decrypting the data unless the soon to be dead man injects something using his private key that sets the network back preventing completion?

The network can't identify that the soon to be dead man is preventing progress?

Sounds like a fun research project. Maybe tie it to some coin mining network.
Yeah, overlay that map with this one: http://www.stratasan.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Obese_po...
Even Assange's example is suspect. The goal is not to release the documents eventually but to release the documents if he dies under suspicious circumstances. That is not really something that can be done with cryptography.

Here is one possible use case: imagine an offline digital cash system, so i.e. the bank will not accept the same token twice. To protect against an unscrupulous seller, the buyer pays by giving the seller a time-lock puzzle with the tokens; if the goods are not delivered by some deadline, the buyer will deposit the tokens at the bank, thus preventing the seller from doing so. Otherwise the seller solves the puzzle and makes the deposit. This is basically an anonymity-preserving escrow service, though in practice there are probably simpler approaches.
We need more conferences aimed at beginners
Very good points; I'll be writing my Master thesis on the topic of Corporate Social Responsibility / Human Resources and Open Source involvement for IT companies, and these are exactly the things I want to target.

It took me a good amount of time to explain my supervisor who is teaching management courses what is Open Source and how things work there. Even after that, I still think it's not quite clear for her.

The things that managers/purely business people don't get along with the most are the free and collaboration parts, because they are a bit "out of the box" for usual business mindset.

Good read.
This is pretty on point. I already left but I'm coming back to give it another shot.

After 25+ years in the city, those hardships really do take their toll though.
No.. it's still GPL.
The day you recognize that prices are tethered to perceptions and driven by emotion, it will be a new beginning. I have deep experience in capital markets, so feel free to quiz me on anything in this space. I am here to help as I am able.
Glad to see BitCoin gaining steam while the Silk Road was shut down. BitCoin needs to succeed.
It can figure out what information is most interesting by looking at the load order for the page and then also by analysis of the component assets on the page. For instance the JPGs, PNGs, the HTML itself. So for example in the cases of images the format of the data itself will inform us which bytes are most important (low frequency DCT's are more visually important than high frequency DCT's) or in the case of HTML, sending the <HEAD> section first is more important than the <BODY> or footer. You can find more info like whitepapers and webinars here http://instartlogic.com/resources/.
Very true. There is always some new "fix it." The problem is often that the engineering tools do not improve product management in the least and if the product strategy is bad and customer understanding is missing, no engineering team or tool can solve that.
Oh, hi, thank you for this!