skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"adoration or devotion comparable to religious homage, shown toward a person or principle."

"devotion or loyalty to a person, group, or cause"

Can you tell which definition I cut and pasted the above from without using google? One is allegiance and the other is worship, but its hard to tell them apart although as a hint the "comparable to" does kind of give away which is vaguely religious.

Hard core nationalism/statism never ends well. As a cultural vaccination program, forcing children to pledge themselves to blind worship of a bunch of crooked leaders should be banned on general principles.
New free expression tools from Google Ideas
Rethinking the Seductiveness of Mobile-First
This comment isn't helping, but I can't resist - HN is inevitably devolving into /r/technology...

Kind of sad.
Google announces Project Shield: Protect your site from DDoS attacks
Stepping Stones for HTML5 to be Commercially Viable for Games
INNER MONSTERLOGUE: Every girl's struggle to find a Halloween costume
Switzerland is far from being innocent saints when it comes to surveillance:

The Swiss SIGINT equivalent is called PTSS:
https://www.li.admin.ch/en/ptss/index.html
https://www.li.admin.ch/en/ptss/legal.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_intelligence_agencies

And don't get me started in HK, NZ or Iceland. If you really want to protect Osamas IRC server and worse with your VPN service, you require specific political protection from the host country.
The determinant factor is not the direction, but the current angle of both entities.

The monster will always have to run towards the direction where the angle between itself and the boat is smaller, otherwise it'd be choosing a longer path.

In facts, if at some point the monster decides to go clockwise, the boat could simply choose the symmetrical direction compared to the relative position of the monster.

This being sad, I'm not sure I am convinced that no other trajectory can be faster, since many of the arguments seem to be a little too wavy.
"Pressured to drop out for the economic gain of the professors?"

Give me a break. Taking a break from Stanford undergrad for a few years with a few awesome peers to run a startup happens a few times a year, if not more lately. Some non-trivial portion of the CS majors join to start a company. Timing often dictates market opportunity. This seems like an amazing one - faculty want to join, you're backed by the president Stanford university.

An absolutely fantastic opportunity that the students owe to their luck of having gotten into Stanford.
No doubt on the quality but the reality here is that even with proprietary hardware and thus able to optimize everything for the surface like apple does it this has a low battery life.

It's all the x86 baggage windows has, osx threw everything from the powerpc years away, let alone the stuff from the previous 20 years of systemOS. Windows still carries crap from when 32mb of ram was more expensive than a computer today.

And for what? I got several winxp apps that don't work with 7 or 8, it's pointless.
India’s first rocket transported on a bicycle
Sounds good, but I really hate the video format (article or book would be better).
But that sounds like an argument to appeal by authority.

Firstly, the title page says "presented March 1, 1998". That's pretty old. And then the PDF shows creation date 'July 30, 2004'. I'll assume that there were 6 years of updates to this file between the 2 dates.

So that still is about 10 years old document. How have things changed since then?
mmm they wouldn't unless many individuals push for it. This wouldn't be used by management, so people below would have to push for it. I would recommend some type of freemium model.
It would really interesting to see the same battery life charts normalized for the display's power draw. I could be totally wrong here but my understanding is that that's an extremely significant factor in a lot of "casual usage" battery life benchmarks. If you take the display into account, then you can start to see how relatively efficient different OS' power management code really is.

Of course, if what you care about is the efficiency of the PM software, looking at total battery life probably isn't the most meaningful factor either, as they all have different-sized batteries, so what's important is power drain as a function of time.
> I almost found a permanent counter-balance, a woman, who I thought would end up inspiring me permanently - though that opportunity never ended up not being possible.

I've been in this trap before; it's a bad idea. A support network is critically important, but don't put a lover on a pedestal to act as your muse. It's murder for a healthy relationship.
But it isn't as though they were educating the general public. Most people back then never applied to college. Since we decided that everyone without severe head trauma should have a diploma, that's no longer sustainable.
Aspects of e-Learning
We are going to repost now -- apologies again for the crash.
Where did you hear that Amazon doesn't want FreeBSD on AWS? Colin Percival's postings on the matter seem to indicate otherwise however its just not very high on their priority list. Also I believe there are FreeBSD images in the Marketplace.
They still have to pay back those loans. There is no way I would be able to get financial aid to go to stanford without paying loans.
The shortest human read- and understandable answer to this poorly written bait article is: Mac OS is designed to run on only x, y and z hardware configurations whilst Windows is designed to run on the complete alphabet (a to z) of hardware configurations. This allows the developers of the former to have total control of the hardware and build specific workarounds, instructions and such as they know it will only run on that hardware. Windows, however, can be licensed to any hardware manufacturer. "It just works" (kinda) but that comes at the price of poor battery performance (and other things) as it isn't (and can't) be optimized as well as Mac OS.
This is interesting to me since I have a Lenova Windows 8 tablet and it the battery life is pretty impressive. If I use it consistently, I can easily get 10-12 hours out of it.

I'm wondering what the difference is between the hardware the Surface uses and other Windows 8 tablets.
1) So? Instead of breaking your head on "how and where do I get a player which supports the codec I need", you'll worry about "which of these from the same manufacturer supports the codec I need". I surely prefer the second case to the first.

2) Why doesn't it support Vorbis? Let them make it low power low cost and add support for all modern codecs. It's doable. Apple sabotages it not because of any technical reasons.

Also, modern SoCs allow optimal decoding of any custom codec potentially, by allowing it to be defined programmatically, even if hardwired decoder is not available. See:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEON_%28instruction_set%29#NEO...

* http://mobile.arm.com/products/processors/technologies/neon....

3) Let them debug it. Or they shouldn't make players if they can't support modern codecs because it's "hard to debug".

It's not about what users or developers and publishers can do. It's about what they can't (because of Apple). And what people can't do is using open codecs without worrying that some users won't be able to access them.
Great advice but I wish more alums would share their actual application and video. There are a few floating around and we all try to divine as much from them as possible but the bigger the sample the better.
I do this too. Is this common or are we weird?
Yes, as far as I could tell that was part of the Labs mission (this was between 2006 and 2010). The confounding factor at the time was that "labs" was one of about four different ways something went from idea into "production" (aka visible outside Google), a tremendous amount depended on the project manager you worked with. There were people who had been at Google long enough that they could get an idea from first successful build to production in a month, knocking down all the various stubs of process that were in the way (like Marissa's UI review). These folks were well regarded by the fact that they got a lot of stuff done. Pretty much anyone, with the right set of people, could ship nearly anything. The downside was that sometimes things that came out were not as baked as they might appear to someone on the outside.
> The point is whether asking math questions at all is valuable compared to the other questions you asked.

The author uses a graph search problem as an example - which is a very typical problem in IT. How do you approach such a problem? This is a valid math question that certainly adds value compared to other questions I might ask. It actually checks for multiple things: Does the candidate have a grasp of the underlying mathematical concepts. How does the candidate approach a problem decoupled of the actual real-world constraints of a programing language? Can the candidate describe a problem in clear, concise terms? Same for set theory: intersection, union, functions mapping input to output. Complexity analysis of algorithms - all of that is valuable knowledge and it's absolutely valid to ask people for that. How does binary AND/OR/XOR work? How does an exponential decay curve look like compared to a gauss or linear curve? This GH issue https://github.com/elasticsearch/elasticsearch/issues/3423 was posted on HN as example of a great feature description and it's full of formulas describing how it works. Vectors, matrix multiplication is a fundamental thing when you're doing natural language processing. Statistical problems are not exactly uncommon in programming either. Map/reduce are mathematical concept. What's wrong asking for that? Failing the answer does not mean that the interview is over, but to assert a candidate I need to know what she knows. As annoying as it sometimes is, math is _the_ _fundamental_ underpinning of what we do every day.

> As far as that goes, I try to question them about school projects.

Totally fine and I agree. Still - what's wrong with asking math questions?

> Google has admitted that all of their algorithm type questions are not good predictors of on the job performance

You're running into a problem if you hire only for math knowledge. But -repeat- that's not what I've been advocating.
I wonder if he'll work remotely. ;)

I never understood the appeal of this guy, nor his qualifications. Both he and Mossberg were woefully non-technical for technical reviewers.
BEM and OOCSS to create a set of buttons
In college I studied English and geology. I drifted by playing with computers, and having outdoor adventures.

Since college I have made my living entirely in the outdoor and computer industries. It's been a fun and productive career.

I think that's what the author meant by drifting--not getting drunk all the time, but exploring other interests.

If I didn't drift, I'd have a much harder life today: writing and geology are industries that have become less lucrative since college. My current career--building and operating websites--did not even exist when I matriculated!
A Beautiful Person
That sounds closer to reality. I'll be most software companies could defend such a requirement if it ever went to court.
Was the first point really relevant enough to include in your discussion?
The service seems pretty nice. Would be great to see links to 'about markdown' or related posts from the homepage though.
I concur. Even in software engineering job positions a lot of times people advertise for X but end up asking Y and judging according to Y.
Yeah, that. Providing portable, perfectly-consistent universal FP is needed as an option (going without it kills whole classes of networked computing applications), but should never be mandatory, not for a language that claims to be general-purpose.
Now the world runs on software you'd think the Times could find somebody to intelligently write about it. Or not assume the reader knows nothing -- they don't do that for cars.
That was unnecessarily condescending. Incivility is against the guidelines. What I have to say doesn't lose its validity simply because you shame me for my point of view. If you were sure enough of your position, you wouldn't need to humiliate me about mine.
That tree example perfectly illustrates why arguing about definitions is pointless. There is no reason at all to ever really disagree about definitions (except maybe for convenience).

However you define sound, the material facts of the situation are unchanged. You do not change anything in reality by defining it differently, you are merely changing something in your brain, i.e. how sound is represented inside it. That is also why the tree question is anything but deep. It’s extremely straightforward, there is no mystery, it’s only our brains screwing up (in the way it represents things).

Therefore, if it seems like some word is differently defined by different people all that has to be done is that everyone has to make clear what their definition is, that’s all. There is no point arguing about it, there isn’t even much point in trying to come to an agreement (except convenience).

If everyone know everyone else’s definition of something it’s perfectly possible to talk about it, even if all individual definitions are contradictory, it would just be hard to keep track of everything.
That's a sad story, and the alphabet caused some confusion, but the cell phone didn't kill anyone. Ermine's sociopathic father and Turkey's misogynistic culture set the stage for a man to man to lead is futher to gang-murder someone over an oblique and ungramattical insult to sexual purity.
Disclosure, I'm a science postgrad at UCL.

You're a bit limited with A levels, 'normal' load is 3, most undergrads in top institutions take 4 or even 5. I took a standard physics/engineer's load: double maths, physics and chemistry. I also took AS computing, but it bored the pants off me quite frankly. An ideal loadout for A level would be maths plus any two other subjects. I would be willing to be that most courses may overlook anything else, but maths is usually the bare requirement.

For science courses, you almost certainly have to have taken the pre-requisite A level. For non-science subjects, you don't need any particular qualifications besides a set of A levels at defined grade points. Some exceptions are for music, languages and arts where you'll probably have an entrance exam of some type. Oxbridge make applicants sit entrance papers for almost all subjects these days.

Point being - you only have to make compromises if the university you set your heart on forces it. Even Oxford and Cambridge generally don't specify subjects unless you're going for a science degree.

Maths/Further Maths was incredibly useful and coasted me through the first year of my degree. Most universities compensate for the fact that not all schools teach further maths (hence why first year physics is a cakewalk if you've done it). Standard maths is basic calculus, bit of series, that kind of thing. Further maths is much more advanced and introduces matrices, complex numbers, differential equations and higher levels of statistics and mechanics. Particularly for physics, knowing about matrices and complex numbers was a massive head start. At college you're still in rote-learning mode where someone shoves 100 equations in front of you and says "Solve". Most people don't have that kind of motivation at university, but it is incredibly effective at drilling in knowledge in something like maths.

The physics I learned at that time was fluff, chemistry and biology was memorisation. I can't speak for humanities, but languages seemed fairly rigorous and a big step up from secondary school.
Frontend components in React and why not bother with MVC
In a nutshell, I presented why we chose React among other available options (ember.js, angular, backbone ...) in AgFlow, where I’m leading an application development.
Show HN: omnipapr - Share the Internet (EARLY ALPHA)
Just a side project I'v been putting some time into.. Feel free to login with a test account user:test pass:win
Is anyone running azure in production?
Debating internally between Engine Yard, AWS, and Azure for linux virtual machines. I've worked with AWS and EY in the past, azure seems like an unknown. Anybody have personal experience with production apps in Azure?
BBM rolling out to Google Play, AppStore TODAY
Have any companies ever been compelled to stay in business? How does that even work, especially if the company (not sure if its applicable in this case) is losing money at the time? Does the government subsidize all of the operations at that point? Can they compel people not to quit their jobs in this case too?
If 95% of programmers have misconceptions about floating point arithmetic, we should stop using it as the default rational / real number type. Floating point is a great optimization, but in a lot of situations it would be a lot better to have arbitrary-precision rational number types, continued fractions representations, or something else that better approximates what programmers expect.
See http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/built-... and http://awsofa.info/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5542368)
as well as http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/inside... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4764864) for comparison.
The problem here is that for some people's coverage to be lowered, impoverished people to be covered, and pre-existing conditions paid for, a bunch of young and healthy individuals (without families) are now required to sign up for insurance. And the cost of that insurance for those healthy individuals is now 2-4x more expensive than it would have been before Obamacare took place (obviously the money has to come from somewhere to balance it all out). *This is of course for the lower and mid level coverage plans, the higher end stuff reduces that margin between the pre and post levels - but not for everyone, and in some cases people are going to pay 15-20% of their TOTAL income for worse plans. And that's going to enrage those people.
Thanks, I did check out Yesod and HaskellDB a while back when I was researching ways to escape from Grails hell (i.e. pre grails 2.0). Yesod looked promising, HaskellDB, not so much (IIRC was developed in early 2000s and not actively maintained).

Definitely not interested in going back to string based SQL after working with ScalaQuery for the past couple of years.

Anyway, the thrust of the question was, can you do full stack web dev with Haskell. The answer seems to be yes, but you have to dig around a bit.

Would be a fun side project to hack together a site in Haskell, definitely a fan of the type system
Pushing prototypes with Quartz Composer
Well done. This is how one should made software - easy to use and intuitive.
The government took way too long to get started "bending metal", it had the inexperienced/no experience on this scale HHS Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services government bureaucrats be the integrator for this 50+? contractor effort, per the NYT "In the last 10 months alone, government documents show, officials modified hardware and software requirements for the exchange seven times." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6583327), those changes continued through the last week before the launch, and full testing obviously was delayed until that last week. Underlying their inexperience, evidently CMMS didn't see a need for bottleneck monitors, given that we've heard of them being put in place post-launch.

And refused to listen to the people waving red flags started no later than spring of this year, when one of these bureaucrats changed his goal/desire from a "First World" website to one that wasn't "Third World"....

So the customer completely screwed up, including launching when the techies told them it couldn't possibly work. Add to that the usual inefficiencies of contracting, plus government contracting, I can't see how this project ever had the slightest chance of success. Especially with them now talking about a "tech 'surge'", obviously no one in authority has even bothered to read The Mythical Man Month"; I just don't see these people as being used to the hard constraints of the real world.

Subsequently, as related in that NYT article, CMMS appears to be quietly panicking (we've heard that independently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6572467), and maybe not so quietly when per the NYT article they proposed 3 days after launch to through away the current identity system. Per that article, they have been consumed with working with the White House and hopes to have a plan for the contractors ready by Thursday; decisiveness is not part of their vocabulary.

So as things stand now, I wouldn't expect anything really working in 2014. I expect serious changes as this drags on for months, who know knows about 2014, but as for now....
I'm not questioning the author's credentials, nor do I even think he's wrong about what's most useful in his field (scientific computing). I just think that programming language design considerations (not wanting to admit implicit conversions) outweigh his objections.
I already boycott all Apple products, after using only Macs for years.

Google doesn't seem to do any rent-seeking (as MS) nor does it try to lock down its platform to prevent any competition whatsoever (as Apple). FRAND is a shitty situation, but I think it's fair to claim even with that, Google is a much less threat to freedom than Apple or MS.

Just don't count on them to provide privacy as well.

I'm hoping for Mozilla to become a major player in phones; they seem fairly dedicated to both freedom and privacy.
Exactly what I meant. Now imagine a horde of crooked businessmen (and bad money always chases out good...) purchasing .gov assistance in eliminating a free market in those areas as they start to pick your pocket. After all, you'd pay anything for those topic, so they'll logically take everything. Their purchase of .gov means there will not be any competition to keep prices down.

Finally another key to the puzzle is its perception that sells not the product. If you think your insurance company will stand by you to help you thru an illness, they would never try to screw you and your heirs as much as possible, well, I've got a bridge to sell you. "The system" is crooked enough that if someone is selling you safety you can pretty much assume they're just screwing you over; kind of like any argument in politics involving "its for the children".
Ok, here's a book on doing Natural Language Processing with Haskell: http://nlpwp.org/book/index.xhtml
Google concerned with corporate data in someone else's data center
Incivility is against the guidelines, I don't want to argue with it.
This is really cool and interesting. Do you think by allowing anyone to register you might run into the problem of "noise" as we've seen on pretty much all sites that let anyone post. That's an area where Svbtle clearly seems to be focused on.
They aren't talking about the campaign websites. Both campaigns had complex internal software systems to help target field worker campaign activities, get out the vote efforts, monitor and respond to turnout data on election day, etc.

According to various reports, the Obama campaign was hugely successful in this endeavor [1] while the Romney campaign's election day voter turnout system was a disaster [2].

[1] http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/software-deve...

[2] http://www.businessinsider.com/romney-project-orca-disaster-...
BBM for Android and BBM for iPhone: Official Launch Details
I find it incredible that someone would publish a web browser claiming to be safer:

a) without publishing the source code, and

b) acting surprised when people don't trust it.

Seriously, what was @jeremiahg thinking?
Lucky for me, I guess. I do not want to make a law about it.