skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed. Plus, the current notation is a result of multiple iterations by some brilliant people. If you look at older attempts at formal mathematical notation, some of it is laughably bad in comparison. We are standing on the shoulder of giants :)
its called "Abstraction"
Rebuttal via recent news [1]. The key here is down ticket races, especially off-cycle, your vote has a big impact.

"The razor-thin margin between Herring and Obenshain, which has fluctuated consistently since Election Day, stood Wednesday morning with Herring carrying a 106-vote lead on his opponent."

Given VA's election turnout (for this seat) of 2M voters (only 25% of the population of 8.7M), this is a hairline-thin vote split. Electoral history in the USA is rife with these kinds of very small splits. See MN: Coleman vs. Franken, for example.

[1] http://www.wjla.com/articles/2013/11/va-attorney-general-rac...
Good introductions for beginners. This overview was useful: http://www.greycoder.com/recommended-products-and-services/
the best advice anyone can give you is to
do what gives _you_ the most enjoyment,
because that's what's going to keep you
plugging away, day after day after day…

-bowerbird
This seems similar to the logic behind TOR entry guards:
https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq#EntryGuards
> Hence, more money going into bits. And more instant billionaires. Also no cure for cancer, or flying cars or (insert 1950's projection of the 21st century here).

Other countries like China have close to zero regulation compared to the USA in many areas. Why are there no Chinese cures for cancer or flying cars, if regulation is the overwhelming reason why?
Srsly. It is unbelievable that they didn't fix this in Version 9. In many ways MMA is incredibly sophisticated software, but it lacks this most obvious of features.
This points to a problem with the idea of early adopters getting an unfair advantage. Say you are an early adopter and you bought at $0.10. Should you cash out at $10? How about $100? At any point along the path an early adopter could cash out and a late adopter could get in.
Fair enough; I wasn't aware that there was a difference. I've always thought that a person's "character" is "the aggregate of features and traits that form the individual nature of some person or thing"[0], but it looks like the most common usage only refers to concern moral/ethical characteristics.

To be clear, I'm not singling out people with mental illnesses; as a person with a physical illness, I would have considered it to be one of my "character flaws".

[0]: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/character
Oh, I was on that train. Ended up missing my flight.
The problem with numbers is you have none until someone tries something different.

The Chargers took a chance with Aussie Darren Bennett and the drop punt "Aussie kick" is now in everyone's playbook.

It's probably worth someone recruiting an ex-Union fly-half and see what tricks he can teach a quarter-back.
Well, for any of those people, they simply chose to not prioritize voting over whatever else they do (with the obvious rare exception of people who had emergencies or circumstances entirely out of their control), so it's really not all that different. The guy who chooses to vote "none of the above" might just have more free time than another guy who doesn't consent to any candidate but didn't make it to the polling location.
Agreed. At a minimum you should have a rep stay in contact and at least keep the guy up to date on what's going on. People will give you a break as long as they don't feel like someone dropped the ball.

90% of excellent customer service is simple communication. Even if it takes a week, if I get a call every two days letting me know what's going on and where they are with the credit or charge back, it shows the company cares and I'm not so quick with the chargeback call to my CC company.

It's 2013, companies shouldn't have a hard time communicating. With so many direct and indirect channels to get a hold of people, this should be easy.
I'm long on Uber and Lyft but their approach to billing is lacking.

Uber really should provide some sort of cost breakdown on your previous rides. (They provide quotes, but not itemized receipts.) But at least you can get a sense for how much they charge on their website.

Lyft, hilariously, doesn't tell you how much they charge! At all! What on Earth is their thinking behind that? Is it miles? Minutes? Am I charged based on my Klout score? It's a total mystery to me.

I hate taking cabs, but at least their pricing is 100% transparent.
It's pretty clear that requiring a Github history is discriminatory. I wonder, though:

(1) Are there any companies which literally remove a person's resume from the running if his/her fit seems to be good in other ways, just because they do not have a public facing github repo? Or is this just something that people are talking about but not actually implementing.

(2) In what sense is any job requirement not discriminatory? Requiring 5 years of Ruby experience discriminates against those with only 6 months of Ruby experience. Requiring a Masters degree discriminates against those with a Bachelors or no degree. Making the candidate do a programming test discriminates against people who don't perform well on tests. The question is whether the programmers that a company hires based on a Github criterion are measurably "better" than those hired using different criteria. As far as I know, no such comparison has been done.
Trouble on the horizon for ad-supported busineses?
Congress is talking about slashing corporate tax deductions for ad expenditures. Which could mean fewer ad dollars to go around.
Doh, "without SNI".
Consider ES6 too. It also does a good job at removing some Javascript quirks and adds sensible looping constructs, list comprehensions, generators and generator comprehensions, proxies, rest/spread arguments (removing the need for the magical `arguments` identifier), classes (just sugar for what we already wire up with prototypical inheritance), modules, fat arrow functions etc.

No help on the DSL front though - still stuck with various kinds of brackets and parens.

On the other hand, it doesn't do the utterly horrible mistake of conflating variable declaration and variable assignment while forbidding shadowing, resulting with surprise bugs and spooky action at a distance.
Pictures are worth a thousand words! Now let me put the quadratic formula in disguise as well.

Suppose we wish to make a rectangle with a given area and perimeter. This is an interesting problem! Does the number of possible answers depend on the specific area and perimeter? Certainly! It all comes down to thinking about squares, since squares maximize the area given a fixed perimeter. If the area of a square with the given perimeter is LESS than the desired area, then there's no way we can make such a rectangle. If the area of the square is equal to the desired area, then that's our only answer! Now, how about if our square's area is larger than the desired area? We'll get two possible different lengths of a given side of the rectangle - one representing the rectangle's width, and the other representing it's height. Or we could also think of them as two different rectangles - a tall one, and its rotation by a quarter turn (which makes it wide). By symmetry, we know that the difference between the square's side length and the shorter side will be the same as the difference between the square's side length and the longer side. How large is that difference? Exactly enough to diminish our shape's area from the square's area to the desired area. And that difference in length is simply the square root of the difference between the square's area and the desired area!

It would have been better with pictures :). Anyway, the quadratic formula is probably the greatest mistake in all of mathematics education. Somehow we use the word "quadratic" and even the phrase "complete the square," but never have I ever seen someone draw the said square!

While I think notation is often great for expressing ideas concisely and precisely, I think an excess of notation not a good way to communicate concepts. Nobody should memorize the quadratic formula! We should understand instead how to think about areas and lengths, and then we solve the problems in quadrature that we want.
How far out of your way do you go to protect a single randomly chosen cell?

You may be made of cells, but no one cell is worth your attention. Only in situations where you have the opportunity to save or destroy a very large number of cells is it worth your time to do so.

Maybe your analogy is shitty and doesn't say anything about voting, or maybe the point here is that voting is pointless unless you actually enjoy doing it, though campaigning might be worth your time if you find a candidate you actually believe in.
If you can sustain 5% interest, that's $500k a year taxed at 15%. That might not be fuck-you but it's certainly good enough for pretty much anything you might want to reasonably do with the rest of your life. (Barring ultra luxury of course.)
It seems that Bitcoins keep getting stolen from the bitcoin "banks." I've not followed closely in those cases but I imagine that people don't get those bitcoins back like at a real bank with real money. I suspect THAT will kill bitcoin.
That's kind of an extreme leap. I read this back in 2005 and it impacted my thinking a lot. After delving deeply into anarcho-capitalism and the whole "Mises" thing however it's very much a long shot political philosophy that doesn't seem to understand how humans work - typical then of Economists (Full disclosure my BS was in Economics).

I would instead recommend Bryan Caplan's "The myth of the rational voter."
How much effort would you be willing to invest in diverting a single raindrop? None of course. You wouldn't get yourself out of your chair to go divert a raindrop unless you thought you had a plan to divert lots of raindrops.

You could go outside with pots and pans to collect all the raindrops that you could, so that the water could be slowly released at a safer dryer time, but even those thousands or millions of raindrops wouldn't be worth the effort. If you had a bulldozer and found a strategically located ravine, you might actually bother to construct an earthen damn. That might actually make a difference.
They don't have a phone number and their contact form even has a silly captcha. As such the above post constitutes mindless and unreflected spam.
Number of lines of code in Lotus is unrelated for many reasons which I hope are obvious.
I think your information might be a little out of date. The Sioux City stockyards have been closed for over 10 years: http://amarillo.com/stories/032802/usn_smelly.shtml

I grew up in Sioux City in the 80s and you could smell a little, but even then the stockyards were significantly scaled back from their 1924 peak. I was there a few months ago and there is no smell any more.
No easier then driving around the nearest gated multi-million-dollar community. Or a trip through the Trader Joes parking lot.
Small world. I just happened to have left early enough that it was fine.
The best analogy I have ever heard goes something like:

Everybody knows that one piece of trash won't make
the streets dirty. So what does it matter if I litter?
On the other hand, if everyone littered, the streets
would certainly be dirty.

If I recall correctly, I heard this in a discussion on the role of social stigma in optimising game theory situations for the common good.
yeah I hate to be that HN guy, but this really killed it for me too. author should have silenced his inner CSI demons.
Not even at all close in terms of strategy and tactics.
The new HTML5 Test is here
Looks like your reply got attached to the wrong post somehow, but nontheless... what's your point? Is a month old Reddit discussion not potentially worthy of further discussion? So the data has changed, big whopping deal... Tiobe ranks tend to fluctuate, but that Groovy even broke the top 20 at all is significant.

HN auto-kills links from jaxenter.com, which is why I didn't link to that. But I'm not somebody who obsesses about the whole "only post original links to the primary source". That's complete bullshit as far as I'm concerned. If a discussion elsewhere adds value through context, insight, or whatever, I say "link to it". shrug
Well said.. and, why no numbers in this article?
Thanks for the feedback and the push, guys - I'm going to go for it! (and have already started taking the next steps to do so)
No need for sales nor marketing!
Yesterday my friends called an Uber to get home from a bar. The car arrived in a few minutes as scheduled - and the driver put his head out the window to say his last fare was still in the car, he was going to go drop them off and would be back soon. They cancelled it and called another Uber.
At a general level, the recommendation to avoid `eval` and `with` is worth heeding, particularly for people who are new to the language.

You need to be familiar with how `with` handles some ambiguous cases in order to use it effectively and safely, `eval` can have some security and performance gotchas. And usually there are other ways to do many of the things you can do with either of them that don't have those pitfalls.

That said, I think the recommendation got out of control -- we have this bad habit of collapsing studies of problems with something into blanket declarations that they're evil.

Here we've got a demo/proof of concept where one of the key constraints going in was code size and using only native facilities. `eval` is saving the developer from writing a parser/expression evaluator, `with` makes it easy to use `eval` while keeping the data in a limited scope. A bigger spreadsheet app would have its own expression evaluator that uses, but using them here makes sense to keep things simple.

They also occasionally make sense in other contexts. Just make sure you really understand the problems involved and have strongly considered other options before you break them out.
They will -- but I believe that's to be phased out by 2015 or so.
Deploying WordPress Using nix-docker
I'm pretty sure bacon has been a thing for longer than the internet.
The Bitcoin Crash That May Never Come
Chargebacks are a valid tool to use when a business doesn't act in good faith with you and is trying to take your money, but some people use them way too casually for the type of aggressive tool it is. Not getting an email response in 24 hours isn't an unreasonable or unusual situation. Chargebacks can have serious repercussions for small businesses; everything from being forced to pay an additional penalty to some faceless algorithm closing off their payment account and people ultimately losing their jobs because of it.

While responding to an email in less than 24 hours is ideal, many smaller businesses don't have a 24 hour per day customer service center and can't always respond to an email in that time frame. Some businesses say 48 hours - 72 hours on their contact page and I think that's pretty reasonable for anything that's not an emergency.
The electoral college is the crappiest form of democracy I know. (I find ironic that the US presents itself as "the champion of democracy" with that system) but if you don't vote you relinquish your right to decide.
(and your right to complain too)
We do currently only do email support, but we respond to each email quickly and in a personable manner. We also have a process to check every single transaction that occurs to make sure that no extreme or inconsistent charges occur. And sorry about the captcha on the website; we are still growing rapidly better fulfill the transportation needs of New York!
Y'all never had to study next to a latex-processing factory. Smelled like a million old sneakers. Consider yourselves lucky.
"Baseband" in this case refers to a dedicated CPU and software that handles all of the high-level cellular radio protocol work. It's where the logic would be implemented to handle the data coming from a chip like the cc2500.
> 2. Write me the identity function. (No, really. Stop. Try. Then read on.)

In Lua:

function id(...) return ... end
a, b = id(1, 2) --> a == 1, b == 2
c, d = id(3) --> c == 3, d == nil
e = id(4, 5, 6) --> e == 4, the rest is discarded.

I use it all the time :-)

The vararg system is built on a stack mechanism, and it is efficient.

Regarding map and other higher level functions, I'd only take the first return value.

If you have tuples it is indeed less of a concern. Better still if you have destructuring assignement, à la Julia.
1988 they were charging $11 per hour! (That's roughly $21 per hour). They had "more than 250,000 subscribers".

http://imgur.com/KCLwBzy

Notable quote, written over 20 years ago, from that image (about BIX, $9 per hour, which grew from a magazine.):

"This is the computer industry as it used to be: people sharing ideas and solutions without the greed and grit associated with today's corporate driven, litigation-laced, industry"
MBA programs not in the top 50 or so will let pretty much anyone in, even people with zero work experience.
After Twitter #Fail, JPMorgan Calls Off Q. and A.
2nd hire at YC S12 startup building Github for testing
Software and a Service - You may not need to choose the red or blue pill
Glad to help. :-)

I agree that a lot of sales and management types are sloppy and overly terse. That's just as bad. A good balance makes communication much easier and more effective.

Best of all is if you can do all that and still show a unique personality. That's what I'm working on, because I feel like my writing is pretty bland.
A very simple change you could make to your writing would be to swap out commas for other punctuation. Parentheses, semicolons, and other less often used punctuation serve distinct purposes and add to readability.

I'm no expert. Here is a stab at fixing a sentence of yours.
>I mean, it's not perfect (or even very good by English-major standards) but compared to your average salesperson, well, I think highly of myself

That drops the comma count from 5 to 3 and makes it a little more fluid.

Just my 2 cents.
Microsoft's famous "embrace/extend/extinguish" is why they would have followed Netscape in implementing even a scheme-like javascript. They wouldn't have skipped the first two E's just because it was scheme-like instead of java-ish.
I just skimmed the whole thing. If you've paid attention at all to news related to IP issues in the last 10 years, none of the content of this agreement would come as a surprise. I don't see any radically different provisions here compared to current laws.

The portions on 'genetic resources' were most interesting I thought, only because everything was so vaguely defined that I worried how countries would interpret it.
I have an unusual opinion about this, that I can only convince a tiny minority of :)

I see the brain here as a completely mechanical thing. Your brain is very similar to other people's brains, and their sets of inputs to their brain is also very similar to yours.

The decision you make is actually a physical process, the same physical process that happens in many brains all over the country.

Whatever this physical process yields in your case, it will yield in all the other cases that are similar enough.

So when you decide to vote, or not vote, you're not only deciding for yourself. You are also, in effect, making a collective decision with all those similar to you -- about what you will all do.

This is somewhat similar to someone who decides to skip the gym just "this one time". Of course, the next time he planned to go, he skips it again. His brain and inputs (sets of considerations) are almost identical in all cases -- so whatever he decides in one of those circumstances is also a decision for the rest of the cases too.
In those days credit card checking was done offline using Luhn algorithms.

So you could download a program to generate numbers, and use made up data, to get free illegal access to Compuserve. Sometimes the accounts lasted a few months before being closed.
Higher fixed monthly charges will only delay the inevitable. In places like Hawaii, it could actually speed it up.

Suppose you were a homeowner with solar panels installed. Right now, you're not paying very little because of net metering. Two years from now, the utility decides you'll need to pay monthly for grid connection.

It might then make sense to just cut the grid connection. Adding panels and batteries is the obvious choice, along with upgrading appliances with more energy efficient ones. Batteries are expensive, though they could be in your electric car.

One step further, if neighbourhoods or condo associations organize in micro-grids, big utilities are again stranded with useless assets.
I never thought of bytecode as its own class with its own identity before. I guess you could say that a lot of the web runs on bytecode. Maybe 99% in fact, if you include bytecode that was passed through a JIT.
Durians are some of the tastiest fruit out there. Could never understand why people can't stand the smell. Although I did grow up with them.
I did notice this. I wonder if "Y Combinator" being in the title has something to with it reaching popularity again and again.

My curiosity-- has anyone here actually used Storenvy? Sounds like a nice guy for a founder, and the product is good, but the USERS! Ugh.

I sold $5-20 Storenvy design templates for a while and have never done business with such awful customers. After the zillionth person decided, post-purchase, that they wanted me to redesign the template completely just for them, by tomorrow preferably-- I had had it. Don't know why such miserable people have set up shop there. Totally different crowd buying WordPress stuff.
> I honestly doubt 99% of consumers care, since the NSA isn't concerned with their business.

The NSA is hardly the only organization/party who could exploit a service like this. Every local police force could get a warrant to search your personal computer data without you ever knowing.

I recently attended a talk on wiretaps by a lawyer recently, and when there is an investigation going on, police used to tap 1-2 cellphones a few years ago. Now 50+ people at a time are brought up on a warrant. Including a lot of people who aren't related to the crime (for ex. the targets mother).

So who is the "1%" of that 99%? Who should care about their privacy? How do consumers know they aren't in that 1%? The answer is they can't and they don't know.

But ultimately, they just don't care. Until it:

A) affects them personally (or to someone they know),

B) someone explains why it matters (if they have a technical knowledge gap)

C) widely publicized examples of abuses become part of mainstream news

Those three combined could eventually become widespread enough to destroy services like this. But right now, yes, the risk is still minimal in terms of public perception.
If a company decides to be faceless by not providing a phone number and not communicating on their support practices†, then being penalized by some faceless algorithm sounds like the kind of lesson they need.

† It's not hard to send automatic emails if there are no supporters in the office for a few days or if the queue is too long.