skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
[Man's name] is a detached dude with a terminal illness. He's approached by a science company that provides him with a new option; being frozen to wait for a future cure. Protagonist knows it's bullshit, but doesn't want to deal with watching his parents and wife watch him die. So he goes for it, intending for it to be kind of a gentle suicide, so his family still has hope for him to live someday.

Anyhow, he seemingly wakes up moments later, annoyed that the procedure didn't work. Turns out that it did, and he woke up ? years later, except that he's surrounded by children. They talk with and about a detached voice that's audible in every room of their "house" called "mother".

Turns out that "mother" is a computer system, the children are the remainder of the human race (aging was abolished years ago and they settled on the goofy, yet most enjoyable age of 8 to spend eternity). They chose to awaken the protagonist because they were bored.

There are some other antics that I could imagine some eternal but bored youths to get into, such as variable personalities (they "play" with their personalities, for 50 years child1 is funny and carefree, after time is up he decides to take on a whole different persona).

Anyhow, I think the plot would actually be slowly let out, until the protagonist finally found the whole truth out. I'm not sure what happens after that.
Pretty much any software that you buy is going to be a rounding error in comparison to hiring a developer.

Do you skimp on hardware too?
Designing Project Spark to make game-building fun and easy
I've lived in at least two cities where, despite cars being allowed, a significant number of people choose to park outside the city at mass transit depots. This is fairly parking-limited, but the wider you cast the mass transit systems the more space you can create for parking while simultaneously reducing the need for it.
I'd be surprised if F#, all-in-all, has more complexity than C#. For instance, C# has crazy duck-typing rules, but they only apply when using certain keywords (like new Whatever{} or foreach). Or all of C#'s type-coercion stuff, like C. Floats, integers, even strings - let's implicitly convert them galore!

F# has a fairly coherent model, which makes most of the design principles deducible. For instance, that quote about DefaultValue. You're using a keyword to introduce a field without initialization. Since F# avoids uninitialized fields, so you don't end up with nulls, it forces you to be explicit here, noting that you're requesting the compiler to allow an uninitialized field, which is not something you often want.

Microsoft's marketing is shit as far as F# goes. They've invested a lot in C#, and it's embarrassing for some people to admit that MSR came up with a far superior language. So instead they mumble about how F# is great... if you're like a rocket scientist or quant or like, really super-duper smart. The implication being that C#/VB are the only practical languages for normal get-stuff-done programmers. In truth, the only real advantage C# has is the tooling. There are drag-n-drop designers, and codegen tools that F# doesn't have. Some libraries make implicit assumptions about C# compiler implementation details. But that's hardly a language problem, and something MS could fix if they cared to put resources on it.

As a side note, the F# team has some of the same people responsible for actually designing and getting proper generics into the CLR. Without that team, the CLR wouldn't have proper generics, but probably eventually would have gotten a lame model like Java's.
Our attitude towards any law really should be a presumption of doubt, especially laws that interfere with consensual activities. Laws are blunt objects that come with their own enforcement costs and unintended consequences. We should be especially wary about regulations whose benefits are sharply concentrated among a small group (say, hotel owners), and whose drawbacks (say, slightly higher hotel costs for everyone else) are widely dispersed. That's standard public choice theory. That doesn't mean that no regulations are ever justifiable (far from it!), but it does suggest that we not favor regulation for the sake of regulation.

I don't like to psychologize people, but I wonder whether this attitude is a sort of mental heuristic on the left, which often finds itself fighting with folks on the right who seem to believe, roughly, that regulation is intrinsically bad, and should be abolished. This has encouraged the counter-formation of the view that regulation is intrinsically good, and should be preserved. I guess that's a little easier to remember than the subtler view that regulation is intrinsically bad, but should sometimes be preserved when it can still improve outcomes over the status quo.

It's almost as though you have to examine things case by case and decide whether a dangerous tool should be applied, instead of just forming a mental affiliation with it.
This is Thomas--founder of Smart Air. Thanks for the ideas!

I totally agree--we've been doing tests with more powerful fans, and the results are great. We'll be coming out with a more powerful model soon. Of course, it's a bit more expensive to get a more powerful fan.

We've avoided using pre-filters because we don't want to cut down on air flow (and HEPAs aren't all that expensive), but we'll probably use a pre-filter on the more powerful model.

About where to put the filter, is there a reason to put it on the intake side? I've heard several people make that argument, but I've never heard a good justification for it.
Yes, but they are trying to make JS/HTML developers feel welcome as well.
A quick introduction to Lucene Searches in Cloudant using MyCouch
Possibly yes. I would imagine that doing so would basically subject AT&T to the Sherman anti-trust act, resulting in having it broken up again like in the 80s.
"Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System" is among the best papers I've ever read, many other great pieces here as well.
Worse yet, the TDD in that tutorial didn't even use the standard test framework built into Rails - so you're taught from the start to use something non-standard. So irritating.

I always recommend the Pragmatic Programmers book for new learners.
C# 4 added serious dynamic typing, so that you can make ruby/pthon/js-style dynamic objects;

// properties not declared anywhere; runtime property definitions
dynamic myObject = new JavaScriptStyleObject();
myObject.firstProperty = "hello";
myObject.secondProperty = 1;

C#5 added async/await, which I think is one of the most 'integrated' ways I've seen of doing async programming. Think node.js with a lot less syntactic cruft around the callback functions; in C#5 you could write, say;

// evented I/O using the 'await' keyword;
var fileContent = await ReadFile(@"c:\foo.txt");
Console.WriteLine(fileContent);

rather than;

fs.readFile('c:\\foo.txt', 'utf8', function (err,data) {
console.log(data);
});

This eliminates the need to write lambdas while retaining the evented I/O style.

Both of these seem pretty significant.
We will support Smart TVs at the start, so you can download it from the app store.
There seems to be a lot of attention on cost of the tools and almost nothing on developer productivity.

Assume I have to buy the expensive $10K Visual Studio license then pay $3K/year after that. Put developer cost at $100K per year. You need only a 10% productivity gain to break even in year one.

My thoughts are that I'd get 10% just from the awesome Intellisense code completion and navigation support or from the Entity framework.

...

My only reservation about C#/.Net is that all of my peers are in the Unix side of the world. I feel like Microsoft has been losing mindshare among the top tier of engineers. Oh, and it is really nice to be able to spin up 1000 VMs without having to pay an OS tariff.
Angel or Devil: Who's really investing in your startup?
No, it failed because it was managed by technically inexperienced and/or incompetent people. These people know who they are (the contractors), but they won't admit it.

Talk about process all you want, but everyone is just waving their hands around spouting buzz words. A technically experienced (in large scale systems) management team can make sure the project is done right regardless of the process they use.
This is Thomas--founder of Smart Air. Interesting question. I've seen plenty of studies showing the effects of air pollution on people's health (the study showing pollution shrinks fetus size is particularly scary: http://www.news.qut.edu.au/cgi-bin/WebObjects/News.woa/wa/go...)

But I haven't seen experiments done with home air filters using health effects as the DV. I'd actually love to donate some filters to anyone in public health or medicine who wants to run that study!
Thanks so much for this. Now I can use GoodReader on my iPad.
You mean apart from discriminated unions, pattern matching, computation expressions, units of measure, partial function application, immutability by default and general lack of null reference exceptions?

See also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExWfh6sGyso
Extra-Life Charity Downtime Caused By DDoS Attack
Could you point out a few features? Would be interested to know.
They will support all and any platforms as long as they are windows.

Don't let reality stand in the way of your irrational bigotry.

But in case you'd like to learn something new - here is the pricing for hosting Linux servers on Microsoft's Azure system:

http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-ma...

It works very well and is price competitive with Amazon EC2.
I do think the JS should be obligatory. Depending what you are doing, it can be an ambiguous term. For example, I'm working on some chef infrastructure where the word node refers to any top level attribute used by your cookbooks. There are also other people working with graph software where node has another definition.
Hey, this is Thomas, founder of Smart Air.

Excellent question! Particulates are very important, but gases can be a problem too. We talk about gas pollution in our workshops, and I've written about it on Particle Counting:

http://particlecounting.tumblr.com/post/60881490803/the-limi...

However, I don't know of home filters that target gases.
You gain way more experiences by exposing yourself to different environments. More challenges and more money is a good reason. It's just a job after all, not a ship.
Yeah, it's kind of one of the first things to read on distributed systems too.
This should be made as a service
The "Good Browser" message that greets NoScript users is unfortunate. One can use a good browser and still have a whitelisting policy for javascript.
What widely used platform does have a large mindshare among top tier engineers? Those pushing the edges usually enjoy more esoteric platforms.

Either way I'll take my high paying stable multi year .NET contracts in F#/C# by day and code in Haskell by night.

As a full time .NET consultant I have never needed more than the $500 VS Pro + Sql Server Dev Edition ($50) + Resharper ($80).
Joshua, a developer costs $100k per year in United States.

Now consider India, Latin America and other countries.

For example: I live in Salvador - Brazil here a developer costs $10k-$20k per year.

In this scenario, this tools represent between 50%-100% of the developer cost.

I think that in India it's even worst.
Another excuse: 33 employees is a lot

If you have a 5 members team you can remember the name of everybody’s dog (or who hates dogs), who likes milk in the coffee, and be approachable and spend a lot of time with each one.

With 33 employees you have only 1/6 of the time and it’s probably not evenly distributed, so the new junior hire will probably don’t know how/when it’s a goo idea to talk directly.
While your points are valid, they are not relevant in a legal sense (at least in the United States).

An electronic signature is as good as a paper signature under the ESign Act of 2000 if they follow this definition:

`electronic sound, symbol, or process attached to or logically associated with a record and executed or adopted by a person with the intent to sign the record.`

Hell, even sending the words "I accept" via Morse code over telegraph was considered a legal signature in the 19th century.

However, if there a dispute over the authenticity of the signature and found to be fraudulant, the courts have ruled that it's not a signature then.
We have been looking at Bounty Source which has many similar ideas. It is tied into GitHub while Bribe.io will work with any source repository or issue tracker. Bribe.io may also work with smaller tasks while Bounty Source looks like it is taking on very large projects.
Are OCaml's main libraries even threadsafe yet? Is there a smooth editor/debugger like Visual Studio? Just a quick look says the Windows version of OCaml doesn't even have a debugger. OCaml is neat, and more advanced than F# in some aspects, but I'm not sure the dev experience is nearly as slick.

Another thing not mentioned: libraries. Anything half-well designed on JVM or .NET has access to a massive amount of libraries (and both stdlibs are pretty complete). Depending on the project, that's not a trivial consideration.

More info from a biased source: https://www.quora.com/Functional-Programming/How-does-F-comp...
Have the events occur at specific absolute times but show the time in the player's time zone. If they switch zones they see different times, not change the behaviour of the game.
Tell me about it. All we get is simply spinning methods into separate jars every six months or so. Not a solution, IMO.
Ask HN: Getting paid to work on open source full-time?
For those of you in the HN community that get paid to work on open source full-time or almost full-time, while still making a decent income, how do you do it?
"I spend less and less time with each employee. Some know very little about me, and I about them."

If the employees have expectations that the CEO should spend time with them, that seems to imply that the CEO hasn't hired anyone to delegate management to, and he essentially has 33 direct reports (every one of his employees). That sounds like way too many for any manager to be able to handle effectively.
Yes, but you have to make an effort. Quick google: http://tomasp.net/blog/fsharp-mvc-web.aspx/
How exactly would AT&T acquire the second largest mobile network operator in the world, who happens to have a similar market cap and apparently larger profits? Obviously it would be a merger, but the article makes it sound like an aquisition. And what could AT&T possibly offer to Vodafone?

https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AVOD&ei=FW91UrjjOqq...

https://www.google.com/finance?q=at%26t&ei=EG91UuCSGaX2iwK8Z...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Inc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vodafone
I would love to know what version control software was implemented throughout the project.

I suspect that the answer is none.

But if I'm wrong, it'd be interesting to know what tools they tried to use and where there processes worked, if they ever worked at all.
does 'upstream' mean push to the branch that this is tracking from?

edit: yes. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10002239/difference-betwe...

"Tracking means that a local branch has its upstream set to a remote branch."

edit two: second question. does 'simple' mean the same as 'upstream' as long as the upstream branch (the one you are tracking from) has the same name as your local branch? I believe so but thought I'd double check.

I have been using git for 4 years. I like it a lot more than svn. I never rebase. I still don't understand some of the things, like why they call it upstream, 'the branch you are pulling from', and tracking, when to me they all seem to mean the same thing.
Grading on a curve helps normalize the resulting letter grades based on how well everyone else in the class understand the material, as it was presented. You are correct in this.

I believe it acts as a check to make sure that the class is well taught, and the questions of an appropriate difficulty level.

If every student receives an F for a 40% correct (and they all only get 40% correct), a curve normalizes that. Students who understand the material as it was presented and tested better than others receive a higher grade.

Makes good sense to me. The problems arise in the Harvard situation, where nobody is curved down. If you down curve inflated scores downward, then a curve only serves to inflate grades and is less useful.
Red book is following the current version. I believe they had 3.x edition for a while. Anyways, why you'd care about 3.x if you are targeting iPhone/Android?
"Telecom infrastructure is entirely too important to a region's sovereignty to allow any foreign company to own and operate."

While I agree with the premise, the conclusion is too strong. I'm ok with foreign companies running telecoms as long as they are heavily regulated - up to the point of full forfeiture of the infrastructure if they screw with the national interest. Mostly because it is not that easy to define 'foreign' and once you do, it is not clear why 'non-foreign' companies would be less likely to screw the region's sovereignty that 'foreign' ones.
Because Microsoft can update the Skype architecture so that it is more centralized like other IM applications. Right now a lot of Skype is peer-to-peer, which is not good on mobile. I, for one, am really looking forwards to this change.
Yeah and the costs are more like $1000 a year vs 10, 000 so it only takes a 1 percent improvement. I don't know the exact numbers. But I know your example is an order of magnitude off.
I hate the fact but C# might actually be cheaper to hire than e.g. Java devs. Enough to pay for SQL :(.
Bravo to the New York Times for putting out an article on the NSA that doesn't fall into the hype trap that Glenn Greenwald/The Guardian/Washington Post/etc. have all fallen into. All we've had up until now are documents showing how the NSA is collecting information and theorizing that the same technology is being used to collect on everyone. The only thing that does is stir up hype, fear and distrust of the government.

This is the kind of information that the public needs to ask informed questions on the NSA's activities, like: Is the collection actually valuable to national security? Is it of diplomatic value? Does that value outweigh the diplomatic costs when the collection is revealed? What are the financial costs of the collection? Are those costs worth it? What about all of the collection that is never analyzed? What aspects of the NSA's collection/funding/bureaucratic processes need to be changed to best fit the public interest?
When you phrase the question like that, the answer can only be "debt." I would think antitrust issues would be a bigger obstacle.
Protect Notes with Vim Encryption
They've admitted that progress has slowed but have also explained why and it's got nothing to do with enterprise customers.

The reason is that they're rewriting the C# compiler using, er, C#. It's as part of an initiative called "Roslyn" that aims to make the compiler a pluggable component with a public API for the compilation AST.

They did a blog post recently explaining that whilst this work is ongoing they are trying not to change the C# language too much to aid them with testing and verification. But that once Roslyn is released they will start a fresh wave of language enhancements for C#. I think we all have some ideas on what those will be to start off with... proper tuples support, and probably some form of pattern matching.
Agreed. These development processes and methodologies are pretty strange, actually. The confidence expressed by their proponents in the face of failure gives it a very cultish vibe, and I get the sense that they're just making things up for the sake of having "an answer".

The best answer is probably to get people who are experienced in similar projects to manage your project, and has little to do with the process they choose to use.
One big contributor to the problem is the ESIGN Act - passed in 2000 it legitimized electronic signatures but failed to define them in any technical sense. Instead the law defines them as any "electronic sound, symbol, or process attached to or logically associated with a record and executed or adopted by a person with the intent to sign the record."

The result has been that pretty much all "electronic signatures" are just fairy dust.

Here's a little discussion of the issue and how it played out in one case:
http://christiansenlaw.net/2011/10/caselaw-when-bad-security...
".NET applications only run (officially)" -- what's that even mean? I can rephrase it: "Mono applications only run (unofficially) on Microsoft's CLR".

The actual runtime is an ECMA spec (which has been unchanged since v2, as all MS has added since are implementation changes and more libraries). C# and the core parts of the runtime are under Microsoft's Community promise[1]. But you're right that MS could try to assert copyright over parts of the extended APIs, and some companies might be worried about that. OTOH the Oracle versus Google thing should alleviate a lot of concerns.

As far as F#, it's quite a bit more than a few small changes.

1: Writeup by Xamarin here: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Jul-06.html
Why I Switched to Silvrback for my Blog
any plans on bringing this to android?
In case people didn't read the blog post before coming to the comment section, the blog is actually defending Meteor as a new framework that might be worth observing.

I feel the same way about OP. Rails is awesome, but Meteor really excels at some things Rails lags behind in. Data binding between database and browser asynchronously which is doable in Rails but it is pain in the ass. Rails simply wasn't made for this kind of app. Times have changed and user are demanding different kind of UX for some apps. I am glad that there are new tools like Meteor in development to fulfill these roles.
But what about the technical/professional side of things?

I know there's no silver bullet but those of us who have been through a few projects have a pretty good idea of what's going to work and what isn't. We can tell, well in advance, what's going to work and what isn't both in terms of the technical approach and the management process. Agree?

If that is the case how do we convert that intuition into something that can work in the real world? Is certification the answer? Specialization? How do we recognize excellence?
F# isn't "just a[n] MS implementation of OCaml, with a few small differences". F# did start out as an OCaml port for .NET, but the language has grown organically from there, especially since the first public, supported release (v2.0, in VS2010).

The foremost difference is the ability to easily and closely interoperate with existing .NET code; this sounds very simple, but it's very tricky to get it right, and in fact this is widely considered to be a major strength of F#.

F# also has computation expressions (like monads in Haskell), sequence/list/array comprehensions, type providers (for strongly-typed data access), and built-in async support. Not to mention, since F# runs on the CLR, it has a well-tuned, high-quality, multicore garbage collector at it's disposal.

I know some of the folks from OCaml Labs, and I have nothing against OCaml. I just want to dispel the notion that there are no differences between OCaml and F#.
We envision that many times the bugs will be fixed by someone who has not already been working on that Open Source project. We also do not expect any projects which are intentionally buggy to become popular enough to make a difference.

Bribe.io will also include work on enhancements to an existing Open Source project.