skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks to Aha for bringing together this powerful group of product management thought leaders.
Ask HN: Introduction to the Java Ecosystem for Someone Wanting to Learn Clojure?
I've never been been particularly interested in Java, but I've found a recent interest in Clojure. The problem is that, despite being a separate language, Clojure - along with its documentation, tutorials, and general usage - is heavily tied to the Java ecosystem.

As someone with a strong background in and working knowledge of C, C++, Python, C#, and other imperative languages, I have little interest in learning Java as a language, but feel somewhat lost when dealing with the baggage that comes with a language built on the JVM.

Is there a good tutorial or resource out there that outlines the basics of the Java ecosystem (e.g. JRE implementations, tooling, a basic outline of .java/.class/.jar/etc files, a very general outline of the Java standard library, etc), but does not try to teach Java as a language, or at least only introduces the very minimal set of constructs of the language necessary to understand the ecosystem?

Given the long history of Java, I feel it would be hard enough to find a reasonably up-to-date guide on Google, and even more difficult to find a guide for an experienced programmer looking for just a cursory glance. Any suggestions?
You might want to check out Adam Curtis, if you don't know him yet. Start with "all watched over by machines of loving grace". It's a series available for download on archive.org.
Thanks you for posting this link. After having a family member go thru a concussion this year, I see how difficult they are to deal with. I hadn't even thought about this in terms of bicycle helmets. I'm going to replace ours now that I know more about it.

Thanks again!
Well, he did release his code, although it is a very simple app.
Shutterstock's Live Labs Experiment
So what you're saying is that without domain knowledge you can make an accurate allocation decision ? I don't believe that.

Can you demonstrate ?

I'm making a device, it doesn't matter which kind, rocket or car, or what it does. Why don't you give me a plan to allocate production of this device. Of course, it has to apply to all possible devices, rockets, boats, cars (fisher-price and the regular kind), ... Since you say this decision can be made intelligently without domain knowledge, there must be a general solution.

As an AI aficionado, I am EXTREMELY interested in this solution and I can personally guarantee this to you : If you have even a basic (but non-trivial) beginning of a plan that actually works, I'll make sure you get the Fields medal at least 5 times, or 1000 billion dollars, because a discovery of that magnitude absolutely merits such a reward, and the money would be easy pickings with such an algorithm. Hell it'd be rather easy to become the leader of a robot empire that easily defeats the US and every other nation on earth if you have such a solution.

But frankly I expect that you're bullshitting. Out of the dozens of lunatic proposals I've received from various sources, from students to foul-smelling people I'd never seen before (or again), they at least mentioned the method they claimed would work. None were even remotely workable. You just claim that "some people have learned it". I disagree in the strongest possible manner. Please, please convince me wrong. If it can be learned, it can be taught : so teach us, right here in this thread if it does indeed exist.

I claim these people who have learned "allocation" have not learned a thing. If they did, capitalism (a learning algorithm itself) could never possibly win against communism or dictatorships (because one of them would have had a leader that got allocation right). Instead, manager success is attributable, exclusively, to either the skills of the people they "allocated" and got things done (usually by undoing at least some allocation decisions), some external factor (it is no great feat for a microsoft product manager to build a program used by 500 million people due to monopoly), or shear dumb luck. Oh right, there's also bribery and nepotism to account for management positions (as opposed to success).

This sort of arguments makes the ideas behind software development methodologies make much more sense. Especially scrum, but agile before it and others seem to be highly focused on taking allocation decisions out of the hands of people with this "allocation" "skillset", like managers and project managers and the like, and into engineer's hands by moving them into systems the engineers control.

I would also like to add that, in the business article/book way of saying things, "most" successful companies, from Ford, over Microsoft to Google, became successful and grew when "allocation" of resources was effectively not done at all in these companies. Especially human resources that brought these companies their big wins were often going against management decisions (or management was giving them 20% time. Except of course, they spent a lot more than 20% on it).
I feel like Apple's rejection of this app / DMCA shutdown of apple-tracker supports its brilliantly annoying marketing - scarcity creates mystery. The fact that you might not be able to get it makes you want it more; not knowing what iPhones they have in stock adds a weird level of excitement to the process of purchasing one.

Apple could make this app in a second, but they don't because they want you to wonder, they want you to fret, and they want to make it that much more satisfying when you actually get it.
Brian Kernighan: Elements of Programming Style (video)
Q: Why doesn't the Postal Service use pointers?
Currently, a mailing address is the name of a physical location. Every time someone changes address, she has to setup mail forwarding and notify every entity she expects to ever possibly receive mail from of the new address.

Would it not make sense to 'virtualize' mailing addresses, such that they no longer map directly to a physical address, but to a database entry containing one? So that a change of address is a simple process of updating a single record and is completely opaque to mail senders?

(And now I'll just get back to the massive undertaking of updating my contact info with all the different vendors and institutions I conduct business with.)
Show HN: Plug, the best way to discover new music on Mac
The real issue that needs to be discussed, but no one wants to, is how one particular three letter uses drugs as a source of black ops funding, so that it is beyond congressional oversight. Of course, congress is so compromised they are much less afraid of oversight these days, but until people understand that the drug war is about money more than just in regards to asset forfeiture and other LEA uses, and the very top structures in government benefit from it.
Yes, this is very complex and there are a lot of points we could discuss from a factual perspective.

It's very hard to know what's the most profitable LOB of crime organizations here. What is well known is that they operate on a wide "portfolio" of products and services since there are strong dependencies between them. Drugs, weapons, bank robbery, ATM stealing, truck robbery, kidnapping... the list is long.

Drugs is a relevant LOB because it employs a great deal of terror on the human structure of the organization. Debt with a drug dealer is usually seen as a death sentence. So the dealer knows he can manipulate those who cannot pay their debts by forcing them to commit various crimes as compensation. Dealers don't need money to finance crimes, they do it mostly through terror. Drugs are just the foundations.

Black market. If the legal drug is sold for $15, drug dealers would sell the same amount for $10. Like the do with stolen medical drugs sold mostly in slums.

Government/private companies would have a hard time trying to sell legal drugs anywhere near slums. Not only the dealers would exterminate the workers of those places, but would also steal the products to resell them.

I'm pro drug decriminalization. I believe people should be free to experiment anything they want in their lives, of course, being properly accountable for that. But my problem is with people that generalize the success of ANY decriminalization campaign only because Portugal made it right. There are so many variables in this game, so many social and cultural pre-requisites that we cannot treat this subject with just a couple of lines.

I appreciate you time articulating your ideas while commenting my point. I think that's the type of exercise that this subject deserves.
This might be more than what Google earns from Android.
Bitcoin Is A Joke
This thought is a "triumph of hope over experience", (as was said of second marriages by Samuel Johnson).
Let me rephrase that - if I, somehow, had to be in that accident again and fall head-first to the pavement, I would once again choose to be wearing a helmet, and I don't need a scientific research to make that choice. If you don't like that it's anecdotal - well, I can't help that.

And I think that hitting the pavement with the helmet instead of my head is indeed how the helmet should work, so it most certainly "works to some extent".

Unless you want to argue that I would have been just as fine hitting the ground at 25km/h without a helmet?

Or is your entire(and only) point that no one should ever mention anything they have ever experienced unless they can back it up by research by an approved institution?
Great way to visualize the unlocked areas!
GP wants additive synthesis, not subtractive or FM.

As for copying a file to an Arduino... you know you can play wav files on your computer right?
Why doesn't google consider an attack against their vassal states aggression against its empire? Like a Cuban missle crisis of sorts.
Great group. Easy to support such a simple powerful and intuitive product.
I'd be really curious to see video of how this works with some common "updo" hairstyles. My girlfriend wears her helmet most of the time. But if we're going out for a nice dinner, she'll wear her hair up in a bun on top of her head. If we're on bikes ( a common event ) she generally skips the helmet to accommodate her hairstyle. I wonder if this inflatable helmet would get hung up on this wad of hair and prevent full deployment.
Here is a user test from an early adopter:
http://alfabravo.com/2011/11/hovding/
That article does not appear to be making the argument that helmets are worthless, only that they don't protect against concussions.

The $40 helmet is one of the great success stories of
the past half-­century. Like seat belts, air bags,
and smoke detectors, bike helmets save countless
lives every year. They do a stellar job of preventing
catastrophic skull fractures, plus dings and scrapes
from low-hanging tree branches and other common nuisances.

Likewise, US safety standards haven't been updated to reflect more modern medical research on their seriousness.
Use Chrome, FireFox, or blame Microsoft/HP?
Should Free Operating Systems Be the New Standard?
Glad that you can make it work. It sounds like you're very reasonable about the costs and sacrifices involved. It's not just "invest consulting money in product development", rather it's "invest and save every dollar possible."

Again, it's good to see that it works for you, and that you haven't had to sacrifice your family for it. Perhaps the supporting family is one reason why you're able to pull it off. (Kids care more about your time more than money anyway)
Is it that it doesn't work with pre-2012 MBPs, or that it hasn't been tested on them?
I think that if you send a letter to say, Washington St., Boston MA, (of which there are several) you'd better have the correct zip code.
A year ago I approached a designer on Dribbble about using his design (http://dribbble.com/shots/595176-Hype-Machine-Mac-App?list=u...) to learn Objective-C and maybe create a cool way to use the Hype Machine on OSX.

We've come a long way since then. Glenn (@glennui) has done some incredible work on the design (check out the iterative improvements: https://s3.amazonaws.com/f.cl.ly/items/1O1Z193I0i0J1y0R2a3X/...) and we think it's one of the best ways to find new music out there.

If you're not familiar with the Hype Machine, here is a quick summary of what's going on http://blog.plugformac.com/post/63340578035/introducing-plug....

We just released a public beta. It's free during the beta, so check it out and let us know what you think.
I agree. I think a tool like this could be useful if it allowed you to go from general area of interest like "backcountry skiing" to specific items/terms/products that are generating a lot of search traffic from shoppers at the moment "black diamond carbon megawatt ski." Such a tool could be used to suggest topics for affiliate blog posts or even items that should be stocked in online stores.

Instead I got terms like "backcountry gear".

The combination of only three test searches and a limited number of search results left me with the impression that it really just mapped general terms to related general terms which isn't particularly useful.

Perhaps focusing the ranking more on conversion would bias it more towards specific terms.
Presto is designed for OLAP type workloads and is thus primarily used heavily internally at Facebook for data analysis and reporting. It won't be replacing traditional databases (like mysql) that are typically used for user-facing features, but may be suitable for serving user-facing traffic doing OLAP type queries such as generating dashboards. We are actually looking into doing something like that right now for Facebook.
> If the helmet cracked then the force of the collision was transferred to your skull.

This does not make any sense at all. Your skull absorbs some force in all cases. The exact mechanics of what happens are definitely complex, but compressed and cracked polystyrene is still better than hitting your head directly on concrete, just as hitting your head on asphalt is. That is of course leaving aside the question of how much force was absorbed before it cracked and what was left afterwards, but in all cases it's not a binary assertion.
French court orders Google to block Mosley 'orgy photos'
I stand corrected here, actually it seems that in the default repeatable-read mode START TRANSACTION will not do any table/row LOCK-ing automatically..
Back in my day, real men had to buy all these damn synths! My fave setup was to use additive synths for a lead, analog for the bass/strings/background texture, and fm for chunky mid ranges.. Worked really well... I kind of missing having all that crap.
There is a paper [1] describing the algorithms used by Shazam.

[1] http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf
My guess is that the device manufacturers see some legitimacy to Microsoft's claims, or at least fear a judge would. Perhaps if all the manufacturers banded together, well mainly Samsung, they could fight it. But if that would have been profitable, I'd assume it would have happened by now.
I had a winter business trip to Edmonton several years back. I thought I was going to freeze to death. The locals told me it was 10-15 degrees warmer than usual. Despite this there were hordes of people in the wave pool in the mall. It was surreal.

I'm happy to see it emerging as a tech hub!
Apocalypshit by Molotov
I like your thought process, haha, but I think you have to ask how unique these things can be. Is everyone just given a "PO vBox" at birth? "Mail me at USA, 4921040994!" Does mass-mailout spamming become a lot easier? Hard to say.

Anyway, I think the real answer might just be "nobody thought of it at the time". Maybe you should write them a letter.
Do you guys have any link where the whole HealthCare.gov disaster is explained? When I first heard of it, I visited the website and saw no problem - actually found it quite nice.
Things can be in the public domain, but have restricted usage - example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_insignia#Usage
I fancied the notion of stealth poisoning by heavy water. Who'd bother to actually check for it?
Diary of a programmer with no clue about marketing
People don't always have the time or budget to work with me or the company I work for. When that is the case, I always recommend Weebly. It's nice that I can also recommend them for ecommerce sites as well.
Horse ebooks:

Female. Car owner. Pet owner. Married. Popular tweet: "Avoid situations" (5616 retweets)

Interested in: Business, Science, Technology, Sports, Travel
> Firefox got 2x Chrome's score on the asm.js benchmark!

And Google includes the asm.js benchmark where Chrome is only 2x slower when typically it is 4x slower. And puts it in an eval(). That's Google for ya.
this is great, but it wont save any lives if no one is around or if the kids are expected to be playing in water. There was a death at a day camp in my neighbourhood last year; the kids were under watch, adults were swimming with the kids,but because of all the activity (outing at the pool for day-camps can get really crowded) the life guards did not spot the kid in distress and he drowned. A device like this that inflates when distress is detected would have save that life.
You want to be using a DCT rather than a DFT most of the time with content like this, in order to avoid those boundary artifacts. Compare with the example on the page http://i.imgur.com/wOVMwxx.png

Source: I once maintained a small C library to do this, but eventually gave it up when it became clear how similar it was to the many existing sinc resampling implementations out there. That said, never stop experimenting.
I'm not going to comment on the blogs vs. real journalism debate, but I'd say Wonkblog is probably one of the best American political blogs running today.

Politics is such a polarizing and passionate issue that these blogs easily gain readership among people who already agree with their political agenda. It's incredibly easy to start a political blog that is purely speculation, vitriol, or outright lies. A lot of political blogs even devote themselves to minutiae like dissecting every single word out of Senator John Doe's mouth to advance some ridiculous pre-formulated conclusion -- "Senator Doe ate French Fries! Clearly he hates America!"

Wonkblog does none of those things, often posting only about actual reports or expert's interviews. It's both rare and relieving to see a political blog that at least attempts to stick to non-partisanship.

Even here you can see that they aren't declaring this event to be any bigger than it is. The guy who oversaw healthcare.gov resigned, here's his resume, here's what he's doing, here's what the CMS said about it. The end.
That's beyond idiotic. He claims they further went on to sue him personally on the grounds that "postal code" is a trademark.

1: http://eruci.com/2013/04/23/k2c-1n5/
I would like to sort of copy Weebly but make the core and all or most of the components totally open source and have a strong index/rating system for sharing and loading components etc. I would write it in ToffeeScript(https://github.com/jiangmiao/toffee-script) using Node.js.

I would also like to make something sort of like a web browser, except its based on a distributed hash table or something so that it is totally data-oriented rather than server-oriented, and instead of HTML and CSS its markdown (with embedded SVG) and optionally RDF (using N3) and optionally a sandboxed Go application that is compiled on the fly. Also the applications aren't restricted to a browser window but have a security system and access similar to that available on mobile.

Or a mesh of user-defined 3d worlds built on WebRTC and WebGL with portals and multidimensional overlays.
I've spent some time building apps on force.com and I have liked the process.

There is a lot of resources out there for you to learn and they seem to be pretty open to how things work.

You'll need to keep in mind governing limits and batch processes as they need to protect the platform but it's a pretty easy to use platform and with over 120,000 clients using the system, if you go ISV you can gain access to all those potential customers.

I would check out a local user group to learn more:
http://events.developerforce.com/dugs?title=page/Force.com_U...

Also sign up for a free developer account at developer.force.com
I am not sure if you are asking me, but in case you are: I do not know.
Reading about that now. I always thought they were 'federal employees', because it was a federal service.
Let's come up with a better name. Howsabout "I built and maintain a personal freedom machine" or maybe "this is an FU business" or perhaps "I am a small business supported craftsman" or maybe just tell the truth proudly "I built and run my own small business".
They do naughty things with their statistics:

>"Here's the trouble. Stat #3: As more people buckled on helmets, brain injuries also increased. Between 1997 and 2011 the number of bike-related concussions suffered annually by American riders­ increased by 67 percent, from 9,327 to 15,546, according to the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, a yearly sampling of hospital emergency­ rooms conducted by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC)."

>"Of course, concussions are more readily diagnosed now than they were 15 years ago. That likely accounts for some of the increase. It's also possible that some of the 149 fewer riders killed every year survived to get lumped into the brain-injury ­category. But that still leaves thousands unaccounted for. We're left with this stark statistical fact: The concussion rate among bicycle riders has grown faster than the sport." //

So, yes 9327 -> 15546 is a 67% increase and as they rightly say the increased survival rate contributes as does the improved diagnosis.

>"that still leaves thousands unaccounted for" //

Except they already said that daily commuting had increased over years 1995 to 2009 by 60%. Which seems rather like it would account for a whole heap of those thousands of extra injuries; that there are a lot more cars might account for a lot more injuries occurring too.

It's an interesting piece and the MIPS helmets probably are better but overall it just looks like it's there to sell the most expensive bike helmets as being the only possible option, especially the emotional CTA in the final para.

[OT the site's policy page appears to have been MIA since some time in 2012, http://web.archive.org/web/20120122171726/http://www.bicycli...]
I will try to think about the things that could be replicated and share that in an article later on; yes I think it requires a fairly accurate financial navigation, and focus on family for sure.
Otherwise, yes, if you provide me contact info, I'll get in touch.
Anybody got the sequence to draw Homer's head?

Reminder: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVuU2YCwHjw
Seems very impractical. http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2135/is-heavy-water...
Bicycle helmets are just bizarre. No one wants to admit that the problem is with 5 ton liquid fuel propelled potential wrecks and their woefully inadequate (both in what nature has granted them for the task and their attitude) drivers.

Give me proper streets, not pyrotechnic strapped to my neck.
My assumption has been that worrying about the unfashionable nature of bike helmets was mainly restricted to the developed world, and that people in the developing world were likely not wearing helmets because they are an added expense (above and beyond the expense of just getting a bicycle in the first place).

It is possible that airbag devices could 'save many lives' (if helmetless riders wore them), but I am not convinced that more wouldn't be saved by wearing helmets.

That said, the work on putting airbags on the exterior of vehicles to protect cyclists and pedestrians seems very promising, and I hope it comes to market soon.
Damn, thank you for the informative response! This makes more sense, I misunderstood the Fermi paradox.