skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A few comments:

> valuable service

I'd think that what makes a good api should be characterized independently of what makes a good service. You can have a useless service, with a fantastic api. No one is going to use it, maybe, but the api itself can still be objectively seen as being good.

> Design

I agree with most of the points, although I'd say that the single most important part of the design is ease of use. I'm not a professional software engineer, so I don't have a good appreciation for the other elements.

> Documentation

Now that is the most important part for me. I recently had to use the API of a service I won't name. It was a disaster. The API was documented, but the documentation was basically unreadable and confusing. It took me a long time to figure out how to work with it. A good documentation, with extensive examples can save the user an awful lot of troubles

Addenda: I have two other considerations, somewhat unrelated:

- The last API I had to deal with use OAuth. I assume that there's a module or package for it in most languages. But this is the kind of thing you want to check, because if your language of choice doesn't have it, then good luck implementing it.. (rule number one of cryptography: don't write cryptography code yourself). I'm sure there are other examples of tiny details like this that make certain languages harder to use.

- Support for JSON is usually appreciated (by me anyways).

Edit: Fixed typo (without->with)
The Nuances of Informed Consent
> People complain that go fmt isn’t customizable and that it puts braces where they don’t want them.

I assume this is referring to putting opening braces on the next line.

IIRC, this has nothing to do with the `go fmt` tool - unlike in C, this is actually a syntax error in Go: http://play.golang.org/p/bn30UNkr1z

One of the reasons for this decision is because it helps enforce a truly context-free grammar for the language.

Ironically, the fact that Go has a nearly context-free grammar is what allows tools like `go fmt` and the obsolete `go fix` to make modifications to the code deterministically, with guarantees that it will not change the behavior of the code.
It depends on the language and library. You can implement them, or any loop for that matter, or any computing construct furthermore, with function application alone. This is what the lambda calculus [1] and combinatory logic [2] are all about.

In actual languages, it depends. In languages without tail-call optimization [3] (i.e. Python and JS), a loop is probably the most efficient way. But with it, it's not particularly important. In a purely functional language, loops indexed by mutable variables aren't on the table, so you have to go the recursive route.

A basic flatmap on a list is pretty easy to define without for loops in JS (although I would definitely recommend just using a library for all sorts of practical concerns):

function flatMap(list, f) {
if (list.length) {
return f(list[0]).concat(flatMap(list.slice(1), f));
} else {
return [];
}
}

flatMap([1,2,3], function (x) { return [x, x]; });
// -> [1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatory_logic#Combinatory_l...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tail_call
First production release of Ceylon language
Thanks for the feedback. I don't understand your second comment though, how is it 'unfriendly to people who take their security seriously'? You can email me instead, if you prefer.
Confidential negotiations are good for the negotiators, because they can make bluffs and propose compromises without the public breathing down their necks, or second guessing every move. As long as the final text is public before it's put to Congress, I'm fine with that in general.

My problem with the TPP is that it pretends to be a trade agreement but is really targeted at expanding intellectual property laws. The nature of what's being negotiated is being hidden behind the excuse of confidentiality.
This is great, if only the field of Economics would start to use models based on mathematical assumptions in order to predict the outcomes of policies.
As an American living in France, this is how I feel about the French.

But I've heard the opposite from other brits about Americans. We're too friggin nosey. We want to know where you live, where you went to school, what you do (this is really big blunder a lot of Americans make), and why you're here.
Because taxis are cheap and taxing private cars so much cuts down the traffic jams immensely.

I'm happier taking the bus in Singapore than I would owning a car in half on the United States.
As far as I know, Alaska's permanent fund pays to children too, as long as they're born in the state or have lived there long enough to be counted as residents (2 years, maybe? Can't remember.).
As long as the situation is mathematically more complicated than the board game Go (for example), opinions probably beat code.

Expert opinions certainly beat naive code.

This is not to say that code cannot be valuable, but the justification for this code does not even begin to touch upon real macroeconomic issues.

One of the possible concerns of a basic income is rampant inflation - it's clear that the author has not even considered this.
Makes much more sense that what you have to declare in the US landing card:

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3289/2949309916_5393a54eb5_o.j...

I mean, seriously.
Surely there must be a solid reason why endpoint authentication and transport encryption must be extricably combined into one program.

Personally, I would find great use for the authentication function of OpenSSH as a separate program. In other words, a program that does one thing only: it verifies an endpoint is who it says it is.
I concede to your point, that makes sense. The rise in difficulty is to regulate that fixed rate of producing new coins, I'm certainly wrong there.

Scarcity of coins to the market goes down w/ each new coin mined, you're right. BUT, because we know exactly how many coins there are available to mine, doesn't this make the total number of coins available to you via mining go DOWN? If all the world's gold was in a single, perfectly measurable and publically accessible vein, would someone moving it from that publically minable place to a private reserve make its scarcity go UP or DOWN? There is the risk of the blockchain failing drastically, but past that it can be assumed that you have THAT MANY FEWER COINS available to mine, in total, right?

I may be thinking about this in the wrong way entirely, appreciate the comment.
You're conflating encryption with DRM. It's likely other people were using your open route, hogging your bandwidth and making your traffic slow, which is why when you went with WPA2 it got faster. It's impossible for encrypted traffic to be faster than plain text by definition.
That's my complaint on Roku as well. When I'm doing housework, I like to have the TV on in the background. Having to stop every 22 minutes to play the next episode breaks my flow.
Anxiety disorders affect over 40 million Americans. You are not alone.

Yet fewer than 10% will find adequate treatment. Simply speaking out is the first step to combating the symptoms. Treat this like any bacterial infection or virus. It requires dedicated strategies and medical professionals can help. So too can simply writing your feelings down, talking to friends and family, and good sleep and proper nutrition. Again, consider this a cold or flu whose time will pass with proper treatment.

The challenge is determining the triggers and actively combating them. Cognitive-behavioral therapy is terrible branding but it is as effective at treating excessive anxiety as well as prescription medications. Therapy can mean talking to friends and family - some of the best people in our lives are there for times like these.

Please keep speaking about your concerns. The more you do so, the more you will face and conquer them.
How many people start new companies since they have a little fallback support?

This is partially modelled by the jk_rowling() function. If you feel that is insufficient (I agree, it probably is), add a term you feel is realistic and check if it changes the result. For any parameters you don't know, choose a probability distribution that you feel encompasses all plausible values of the parameter.

Then run your new model. Who knows, it might be the case that no matter what plausible value you choose, it doesn't matter. Or it could change things entirely. These are both useful things to find out, and we'll only know if you write some code.
>But maybe crazy fine resolution isn’t as important for metal.

I'm trying to think of any practical application for which fine resolution isn't more important for metal than polymer
Thank you for your thoughts and suggestions ! :)

The "valuable service point" struck me now. I'll refactor that section on the blog soon.
There's a lot of information there... probably take a few days.
Yes, puritanical is an adjective but the Puritan movement is a proper noun as it is the name of a movement. That is the point I was making. In English the phrase 'proper noun' does not mean I was implying the word puritanical was a noun, it means I was saying it is not a name (which we capitalize and call proper nouns), and therefore I was using it as an adjective. I hope that clears up your confusion.

As for the "addict gene", again, this was supposed to be a synonym phrase for a notion of hereditary weakness, I was not implying it has a genetic basis or that genetics was known before Crick. The phrase "addict gene" was quoted because I have heard it in Sweden (in modern times) when discussing these issues.

I'm hardly an expert on Swedish history, just a person who asks questions when I travel. What I know of Swedish history could be written on the back of a postage stamp. I'm afraid I wasted more time on Roman history in school (as you can imagine, Swedish history doesn't come up very often).
Not sure if you're trolling or not. Trying to give you the benefit of the doubt but your comments have been killed and now I can't reply to them.
Stream yourself (webcam) over GIF
What is the "other way"?
US wants $10,000 from Lavabit owner for dodging order for Snowden's email
Those five hours are an outlier.
That looks super-interesting, thanks for pointing it out.
Yes, contrary to Betteridge's law of headlines, apparently.
Only "light treason"
The Next Big Thing in JavaScript: Js2Js compiler
Lol.. the US is to Russia what North Korea is to the US - a small nuisance. Talking about Obama starting a war with Russia is a ridiculous fantasy. Heck, the US has lost every single war it started over the past two decades - even to the poorest and least organized enemies you can imagine.
HTTPS involves multiple servers that are interchanged regularly and commonly use different keys. The keys change regularly. There'd be no way to know if the key changing is part of regular operation or a man in the middle.
But you in Germany seem happy with ID cards and reporting house moves to a police department which struck me as very odd given the recent history and especially the stazi in East Germany

Id cards facilitate stop and search which is more worrying especially given the recent judgement by german judges that its fine to do this disappointingly to black citizens.

In both the UK and the USA - there is more disquiet about this than what the NSA and GCHQ get up to.
I'll wait for someone who doesn't want to blow their brains out after reading the first few pages to do an analysis.
This is interesting to me personally as Netflix had contacted me to potentially work there specifically on the WebKit engine and apps roughly 18 months ago. That is, at the same time they were already making it obsolete. I wonder if it was secret even within the organization.
It's not that arbitrary really. 95% equals 2 sigma.
Overall I really like Fastmail. I had 1 bad experience where my inbox became unusable for about a week because of spam. Support eventually fixed it.
The problem is information asymmetry. But not between the parties negotiating. They all see the working text.
So what you're telling us is that being a whistleblower and fleeing to Russia turns out to be a poor career move?
Students turn to online tutoring
WikiLeaks publishes secret draft of Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty
I recall lighting the dinning room table on fire with one of these. Yet... I too still have all my fingers. Luckily my grandmother was over that day to put out the fire before the house burned. Supervision is a good idea.
The multiple levels is a good comment but I'd suggest a inside/outside analysis.

I did almost the same stuff the author did last night, getting everything ready. Its just my way, "be prepared" and all that. The outside actions don't matter.

The inside is the problem. I felt awesome last night putting my keys where they belong and thinking about lunch today. Wednesday is gonna be a great day, and so far, so good. However, author did the same external stuff and felt terrible. And that's the problem. Not that he couldn't sleep till he got his fairly reasonable preps done; I can't sleep either, but I feel fine about it.

"I'm concerned about the author of the article."

HN isn't gonna fix it, so superficially this is useless on HN other than a human interest story.

"I live in constant fear of failing."

Author needs to crash hard, dust off, and keep going. Worried about failure? Give it a try, its not so bad. And this is the HN and/or startup lesson for the story, which does make the story relevant to HN. Being scared to fail means you'll probably never succeed. Go ahead, do it.
I really, really hope the culture of leaking information becomes so strong that governments will become incapable of keeping anything a secret. That would give me some hope for the future.

Anyone that leaks information is a fucking hero.

Edit: Stop attacking me personally. I'm talking about the government's privacy here, not mine (nor anyone else's). I actually think my privacy will improve if this becomes a reality.
"The American fugitive, who revealed troves of classified information as he fled the country in May and is now living under temporary asylum in Russia, reportedly started at a job at an unnamed Russian website earlier this month."

How do computer industry salaries in Russia compare with government contractor salaries in the United States? And how much of whatever money people send to Snowden will end up with Snowden, and how much with Snowden's lawyer? (Another issue is whether the one-year asylum offered by Russia will be extended later or not. What will Snowden do if Russia decides not to continue to grant him permission to be in Russia and work there?)
While interesting, I think this demonstrates why numbers are basically useless in these kinds of discussions.

Even with a very simplistic model, there are too many assumptions that can be contested forever and that will ultimately only depend on what the people debating already think about it. I, for example, would make the assumption that the marginal value produced by a Basic Job worker in an hour would be close to 0, while administrative costs are underestimated by an order of magnitude. Now, it might be fun to try these out when I get home, but I don't think I can get any significant insight from it.

And if you were to refine the model, it would then become too complicated to discuss in ways that could be comprehended by most people - too much effort and they'll stop listening.

Moreover, it fails to account for larger benefits to society, which cannot be measured in the way such a simulation works. For this one we could seem crime dropping (happier society, prison costs diminishing, etc.), global health indicators improving (thus preventing tremendous cost), etc.
Cannot agree more. Besides $100 annually, a CA certificate is harder to manage (considering cloud hosting etc.), and it is not worth doing for many casual sites.

I predict that https only http/2 will be doomed.
EDIT: Anaconda worked, thanks. Experimenting with the code now.
Using NeoMailbox gives me peace of mind

This is essentially what I'm talking about. It probably shouldn't give you peace of mind. You click an 'Encrypt' button on a web interface and it encrypts it and sends it off. I presume that you can go into your 'Sent Items' and look at that email's contents even though you've encrypted it, yes? So it's either sitting there unencrypted on the server or they have the keys.
The EFF will definitely be issuing some manner of condemnation and praise, especially since a variety of nation's stances are made clear.

Skimming through it, it's entertaining to see "CA/CL/AU/NZ/JP/ETC oppose; US/BLAH propose" strewn about. One has to wonder where the line is drawn between self-interest and political favors.

Here is the section that might interest you, on ISP liability:

http://wikileaks.org/tpp/#QQI1

A small part of me feels like some party attributions may not be written by representatives of their respective country, and that there is some political/corporate hand-wringing influencing/forcing party attributions. To avoid political fallout, these party attributions must be kept secret (lest they contradict prior established stances).
Consistency and logic.

POST /users

GET /users

PUT /users {:id => 2, ....}

GET /users/2

GET /users/2/friends

POST /users/2/friends

etc
The purpose of doing a simulation like this is to bring the discussion down to more concrete levels.

E.g. "I’ll model this by assuming the number of non workers will increase by up to 5%, or decrease by up to 20%: I disagree, I made my model assuming that the number of non-workers increases by between 60 and 80%."

Okay, now instead of arguing about basic income in the abstract, you're arguing about projections of how much the number of non-workers changes. The latter is a lot more concrete and easier to analyze further.
The content isn't interesting[1] because bilateral free trade agreements are public[0], and having the USA force partners into accepting patent enforcement, copyright laws like the DMCA etc. are well known

What is a little interesting is the negotiations and diplomacy at work. You can see how each country is trying to further its own position and interest. Looking at this version of the document, it is impossible to see how a compromise will be reached since there are so many areas that are at complete opposite viewpoints - but you know that in a few weeks time an agreement will be announced as one side or another gives way (guess which!), and the public are nonethewiser.

Some are really good at watering things down, eg.

> The Parties shall endeavour to [US/SG propose: cooperate] [US oppose: establish a framework for cooperation] among their respective patent offices to facilitate

You can see already that they don't intend to cooperate. Establishing a framework? what the hell does that even mean ..

You can now see that Australia, Singapore and Mexico are on Team USA when it comes to copyright terms (Australia opposed it during the FTA negotiations), everybody else opposes, but they will eventually have to come around on this:

> [NZ/BN/MY/VN/CA/JP propose; US/AU/SG/MX oppose: The term of protection of a work, performance or phonogram shall be determined according to each Party's domestic law and the international agreements to which each Party is a party.]

[0] Here is USA - Australia: http://www.ustr.gov/trade-agreements/free-trade-agreements/a...

Here is NAFTA - https://www.nafta-sec-alena.org/Default.aspx?tabid=97&langua...

[1] It might not be interesting because we have seen a lot of this in completed deals previously, but it is very important. The USA enforces its business interest laws such as patent and copyright terms onto recipients of "free trade" agreements, in exchange for getting access to the non-protected part of their domestic market. This is why US laws are so important to the rest of the world, because we end up having to adopt them (this is what modern imperialism looks like).
Couldn't agree more. AfterFB it was just a pain scrolling to the next one.
man, you are out of touch with the reality. Lower castes today don't face any discrimination, but they take advantage of unfair amount of reservation. In fact general castes are discriminated against today, lower castes are exploiting the system like leeches.
> Profits relative to revenues isn't a useful figure. An investor who sees a business as a black box where you put initial capital in and get money out, doesn't care what the revenue of the company is at all.

I can't see how an investor would not care. It seems that given a more profitable business, for a desired ROI amount, the capital input is smaller.
You are being too generous. "The public breathing down their necks" doesn't happen when the treaty is over palm oil or sisal, even if there is some economic impact on the public.
Why should one help society? Is this your thought or is this a thought that arose out of what other people taught you over the years? For example, you may think that you want to be "good". If so, you should first start by defining "What does it mean to be 'good'?".

The danger of skipping this process of thinking for yourself is that you may spend many years in a direction that you may ultimately feel dissatisfied with. That's how conditioning works : parents, teachers, and society teach you what is "good" and "bad" and you basically choose the red pill or blue pill without realizing that there could be pills of many other colours (or that you could swallow BOTH the red and blue pills and go, "Hmm..that's interesting...", as one cartoon based on "The Matrix" shows! :-) )

There are several alternative directions that your thoughts could flow in once you start this introspection. Just as an example : by society, you probably mean, "the society of humans". Why are humans the only society to be helped? Isn't all evidence pointing to the fact that we are killing off the planet, including several species A DAY? Maybe the rest of Earth needs your positive energies more?
I really wish you guys had an API. My startup would love to be able to automatically provision mailboxes, perform Single Sign-on, and resell your service.
I'm actually more interested in the US-EU negotiations, I wonder how long that one's going to take :)
I used to be the very same but what really changed me, and it genuinely did, was thinking about the insignificance of the world, of everything in our lives and everyone in them. We are on a tiny little rock, orbiting one of billions of stars in the galaxy, which is itself one of millions and billions of galaxies. And we're all playing this silly little game. So next time you're worried about going to an interview say, or meeting someone you've never met before just think utterly meaningless it all is. It sounds overly simplistic, but really the attitude to have is: who gives a shit?
(Note: This most certainly does not to apply to everyone and if you have chronic anxiety, it's often a lot more complex than this and you ought to see a Dr.)
Find Out If Your Email Messages Include Your IP Address
I think thats one of the most important points of the article. People who argue definitively one way or the other on basic income are simply making assumptions they can not logically make.

I hope some country/state out there tries out an experiment with basic income (just not mine). Politically, I don't think it will happen. A few poor people getting benefits cuts will ring a lot more loudly than middle class and rich people getting benefits raises.
They will constantly and forever be improved.

For certain definitions of improved. Military victory will always be considered more important than civilian survival, so I don't think you can expect machines to improve the moral calculus of war (which always tends to total war).
This revelation proves Wikileaks is stil alive and relevant. I hope they see a renewed jolt of donations and interest. This is the organization of heroes that helped get Snowden to safety.

Also, I'm getting sick and tired of our "leaders" attempting to legislate free speech and intellectual property in secret through anti-democratic means. It's disgusting.

Edit: second paragraph
IntroJs v0.6.0