skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, I'm certainly not meaning to belittle your efforts. I wrote something similar (based on jamesjyu's gmailr stuff) for my thesis last year. It's the best way to do it for relatively simple one-off projects.

The first big challenge is definitely just having a shared toolkit, but it's next to impossible to provide backwards-compatible APIs when the Gmail UI changes.

Oh... and IMAP. :-/
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IMO the problem with the unstoppable torrent is that the people who decide where company dollars flow to can hardly tell C from Clojure so they rely on the opinion of those whose job would then be to say "ah yeah right, me and my team have been using the wrong tools all the way" which doesn't happen for obvious reasons.

I started up with clj and I am trying kinda heavy arbitrage here :)
Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

Daily reminder the Matrix is a work of fiction.
Can someone explain to me whats wrong with using V8 in Go? I mean what's the point in building js interpreter in Go, when you already have a better one made.
Java (at least prior to Java 7), has some severe limitations in how code can be abstracted. As an example, it doesn't allow you to pass functions as arguments to other functions directly. As a result, the canonical way to handle situations where you would do this (such as passing a comparison operator to a sort function), is to declare an interface, define the function in a class that implements that interface (command pattern, etc.), and then instantiate an instance of the class and pass that. Closures are imitated by explicitly passing data to class constructors and storing it in member variables, and currying imitated through patterns like the onerous abstract factory pattern.

Additionally, the abstraction features Java does offer are implemented with some heavy language syntax, and often can't be generated at runtime or pre-compile time, at least not easily, and so there's a limit to the abstraction, even taking into account Java Generics. That's something where homoiconic languages like Clojure have a particular advantage.

As a result, abstracting things in these ways (which in other languages is incredibly common) gets to be painfully verbose. Often, things that would be beautifully abstracted in these ways are just left unabstracted (as in-line boilerplate) - the verbosity introduced makes the code less readable, rather than more, and so there's a stigma against "over-abstracted" code. The result is that code that does, or could, make use of these things takes exceedingly more code in Java than in a language like Clojure. Of course, conventions in Java of, e.g., giving each curly brace its own line aren't helping its case in line counts, either.
https://www.hnsearch.com/api
Well, first of all Clojure is a substantially simpler language than Scala, which counts for something.
Secondly, I believe that Clojure does a better job of presenting the developer with a new way of thinking about problems, which (as alluded to further up the thread) can be a big source of productivity gain and inspiration.
Interesting point. I wonder if it would have an effect on how non-programmers view coding if programming language constructs were renamed like that.
I can only think that if someone is smart enough to create an our universe, they would also be smart enough to prevent us from finding a lattice..
Regular expressions were simple and straightforward tools until Perl. They were originally intended to be equivalent to finite state machines, but, thanks to Perl, you can write regexes that may or may not halt, and no one can can ever prove one way or the other. If you want to take the best parts of regexes and leave the rest, don't bother with all of the Perl extensions and just study the basics.
> gold has this one minor benefit test it is intrinsically valuable

You can't explain the high price of gold merely by its intrinsic value. OK, it's shiny, but there are other sniny metals. It can be used in electronics, or as filling/crown material - but it was valuable before people started using it for that. So much for the intrinsic value.

So it must be something else that makes gold as valuable as it has always been. It's rare, fungible, divisible, portable - an ideal medium for storing value.

Well, bitcoin is all those things and more.
Ask HN: Thoughts on using mobile backend as service?
I am working on an mobile search app for photos across sites such as FB, Instagram, Twitter etc. . I am wondering about the pros/cons of using a mobile backend-as-a-service (e.g. Parse, Kinvey etc.)

Have you used them in your apps, and benefited? Any service you'd recommend?
Tom Christiansen (of Perl fame) made a much, much thorough analysis of Unicode problems in his OSCON 2011 presentation:
http://www.oscon.com/oscon2012/public/schedule/detail/24252

Here are the slides:
http://training.perl.com/OSCON2011/gbu/gbu.pdf

The site seems down ATM, but Internet Archive has it:
https://web.archive.org/web/20121224081332/http://98.245.80....
Unless the purpose of the simulation is to see how long it takes a civilization to find the lattice.
There are potential downsides, like unexpected social consequences. One of the reasons HN users restrain themselves from getting into flamewars is because they're expected to. When people are expected to behave, they usually do.

Each HN user is, literally, their comments + their submissions. This may be an anonymous forum, but people feel a strong connection with their HN identity. When they make comments that cause them to look silly, they feel silly. Why is that?

If you let people change their identity, people may subconsciously stop trying so hard to live up to their current one.

Maybe allow each user to change their username only once.
During University one of the projects we were given was to write a regular expression parser and evaluator. From the moment that project was complete I have never had trouble understanding regular expressions. I thought it was an excellent way to learn them.
Top 5 free Movie Library Software for Windows
The large majority of transactions are completely safe with zero confirmations. For those less common situations that require additional security, it generally doesn't matter much if you have to wait 2.5 mins or 10 mins, especially considering it takes a couple litecoin confirmations to achieve the same level of security provided by a single bitcoin confirmation.
I don't usually write regular expressions that are complex enough to need maintenance. If you are writing one that is enough effort that it isn't disposable, then you might want to reconsider whether you're using the right tool.
If you want to post something anonymously, at least HN doesn't force you to use your real name so what is the problem?

Sure, you might want to delete something after x months. But you can't delete it from the internet. Think about Google Cache, Archive.org etc...
Hopefully it will be worth it. I'm looking forward to see what the DarkMail protocol is about at least.
its a advertisement i guess. But not sure how that is possible?
Bitcoins are divisible to 0.00000001
"Text normalization in Go" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6806062 was here yesterday and made me wonder: how can you handle ligatures, accents, digraphs etc in fixed-width?

Perhaps text parsing is just a hard problem?
Okay. Fictionalism[0], Brian Cantwell Smith's term "semiotic alchemy"[1] as an explanation to the "no theory" theory of Computer Science, Crispin Sartwell's book which roundly demolishes all emergent narrative structures[2] as a form of disease, the Extended Mind/Embodied Cognition school à la David Chalmbers, and philosophers like McTaggart with Time Series paradoxes along with other philosophers (John Mackie) who have created Error Theories and Paraconsistent logics (Graham Priest).

"Fiction" is not an inherently meaningful term.

[0]: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fictionalism/

[1]: http://www.ageofsignificance.org/people/bcsmith/papers/smith...

[2]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4171744-end-of-story
From the pitch it sounds like a Droplr or CloudApp competitor
err.. I think there are lot of mono software written in c# that runs on Ubuntu .. and Java not used outside of Android? ROFL
I like the idea but I also have a few issues with how simulated universes are commonly seen or how we assume we could detect them. I'm not a mathematician or physicist by any means, so I guess my opinion is purely subjective and could easily be discarded.

The first one is that we assume this would be a computer simulation, i.e. a very complex program with potential bugs and such. While I'm not against the idea that some sort of computer might be behind it, the chance that it wouldn't behave anything like our computers seem more than likely. It also assumes that every projection (for lack of a better word) is the result of complex calculations, rather than the result of how the many inherent properties of a system behave together. This is something that strikes me as odd with a lot of people in sciences (broadly speaking), is that they often start assuming the tool they're using is in fact the basis of what they're trying to study with it.

My second issue, which sort of ties into the first, is that a lot of people often assume that the laws of physics would therefore be bendable. I guess the Matrix (a film I really liked, and still do) might have been partly responsible for that. It seems to me that even if we were simulated, it would in fact not change much, if anything, we would still abide by the simulated laws of simulated physics, within a simulated environment which imposes a set of restrictions on us.

Finally (sorry if this is dragging), my third issue, is a God complex one. We assume that our Simulators actually realize what they have, or rather all the intricacies of what they have made. What seems to be billions of years for us, in my view, could very well be a fraction of a second for them. Our existence may very well be (not that it currently isn't mind you) completely insignificant in their whole experiment, or whatever the simulation may be. This reminds me of a discussion with my AI professor when I was at uni, I argued that we might not be able to tell we've created a successful AI if its lifespan was too short for us to witness (I also think the first real AIs will be suicidal but that's a completely different story). It could also be that we are, in fact, unable to recognize its existence as such based on our standards.

Not really tied to any of my points, but there's also this story about simulated reality which I really like http://qntm.org/responsibility
Well, maybe they will come with a better Google Closure in Go

Because Google Closure Compiler is unbelievably slow
> So, in a sense, the real price of all consumer goods also remains constant.

No, you're ignoring GDP growth. As the bitcoin economy grows (more goods and services available), the share of the pie 1 bitcoin represents correspondingly grows. This results in decreasing prices, i.e. price deflation.
So we'll never have any new lights?
If you really want to master Regular Expressions in a way you are not likely to forget do what I did in the '80s. Write a regex interpreter and then a compiler. I was doing a contract for an embedded controller and found a great use for compiled regular expressions within it (I remember every nuance of regular expressions but can't for the life of me remember what my use case was.)

Debugging it was the really fun part but my earlier career with IBM had taught me how to test software effectively and some embedded work with PAL's (an early form of programmable logic) taught me how to really use state machines. I was surprised how little time it took to write and debug. I don't think you can really appreciate the elegant logic of the regular expression language without implementing it.
It's quite clear if you study historical jurisprudence and relevant case law that the authors of the constitution did not actually intend to create a limited government that respects freedom and human rights, but an elaborate linguistic puzzle for future lawyers and politicians to find loopholes in.
That depends. The skills I developed with sed and awk have paid dividends. But when I hear someone speak of becoming a regex master, as if a regex was an entire tool unto itself and not just a way of representing a pattern, that makes me think of Perl regexes in all their absurdity.
Not really. There may be some larger idioms and concepts that are more expressive than scala, but simpler language? A case in point:

scala

if (x > 0) ...

clojure

if (> x 0) ...

The clojure syntax here is a bit absurd, IMHO.
Naughty hands will find a way to break a container/iterator metaphor just the same as a simple buffer. Point being is that it's much better to work with competent developers than to needing to rely an idiot-proof coding style.
Could you expand on why you believe the first real AIs will be suicidal? Is there a particular line of thought that has influenced your reasoning?
My neighborhood in Los Angeles recently switched over to LED. I am happy that they are trying to save money/energy, but having a bright white light outside my window has been quite obnoxious. The older lights were dimmer with a more natural light color.
What's the point of starting anything new, when something like it already exists? Why become a doctor when there are already good doctors? Why write a book when there are already good books? Why sing a song when somebody else already sings it better?
very interesting. I had a similar experience with elasticsearch in modelling a ecommerce catalog - however that was with jruby. In fact, it took me quite some convincing to not go with something like mongodb - elasticsearch served us quite well.

Could you comment a bit more on the interaction of functional programming to content management ? Intuitively, it feels to me that a lot of it has to do with the NOSQL-like data model of elasticsearch. Being a lisp beginner, I feel that a visitor pattern is very analogous to "map" in functional programming - again, without all the OO getter/setter functions (e.g. "accept", "visit").
Go's gc toolchain (as opposed to gccgo) tends to emphasize compile speed over producing optimal executables, so they may be flat-out deciding to leave some potential whole-program optimizations on the table to for link speed--pure speculation, though. (And don't know re: your question.)
There doesn't have to be a lattice to be a simulation.

A lattice assumes the simulation is using rectilinear coordinates, but it doesn't have to.

It could also use relative coordinates - each particle in the simulation is defined based on the angle and distance to the nearest other particle. (Where angle is relative to the spin axis of the particle - no global angle.)

This is actually a natural way to simulate things because in general particles only affect nearby ones, which then affect others in turn (at the speed of light. Could this be why there is a speed of light? Because of the delay of each particle affecting the next?)

Forces with infinite range are modeled by starting a particle at 0, then when a force "message" is received update the particle with the new force acting on it, and send the force message along to the next particle in the chain. This works because the infinite forces can never be created from nothing, they can only be moved from place to place (the electromagnetic ones usually cancel out), and forces propagate at the speed of light, so there is time for each particle to notify the next.
There's a real conflict here between the expectations of individuals and the expectations of the group.

The individuals are usually told via user agreements that the content is theirs, and that they own their comments and data and are personally liable for the content of them. That is... if you libel someone, this is your problem.

And the group expects that once a collaborative work has been created (a conversation), that the work will stand in it's original form. And that implies that when others post a comment within the context of some greater conversation, that the context for their comment is preserved.

Therein is the conflict. If an individual deletes (physically removes) their data (we did tell them it was theirs), the collaborative work is affected and the context of everyone else's contributions is changed.

To resolve this nearly all fora work on the basis that you can nuke your account but not your comments. And if you do nuke comments, that you can only nuke a subset of them and that a marker will be left to indicate that a comment once existed.

This works about as well as you imagine, it pleases no-one fully and everyone just a little.

The alternative that is also taken by some fora is to have your contributions licensed in such a way that the operator of the site has a perpetual right to reproduce the content. Great... the group gets their value, but you've lost control of your content whilst still being liable for it.

And who is liable for a comment that now shows up with a [deleted] author? Likely as not, it's the site operator.

Everything on comments is just a shade of grey in this conflict zone.

When it comes to accounts. I fully agree with you. The account isn't a collaborative work, and it is solely your work.

The vast majority of fora allow account deletion by policy, but the software tends to not have caught up with the policy. Meaning you have to email the site owner and ask for deletion. On the sites I run (mostly vBulletin, some XenForo, a few Vanilla) I do deletions within a week or two of being notified. As the software doesn't support undeletion I tend to warn people and give a cooling-off period until a confirmation from the person is received to acknowledge it's an irreversible action.

I'm rambling... gist is: deletion of comments would affect the collaborative work that is the essence of a forum and should be managed with extreme caution by the site owner and attempt to leave things in context. Deletion of user profiles has no such impact and should be honoured, but unfortunately the buttons to achieve this tend not to be built into the underlying software.

And on a final note, I think systems that support aliases should be allow people to rename themselves too. But that's an even less-supported thing than profile deletion.

Forum software sucks, but it's not all the fault of software most of it comes from the social stuff surrounding a collaborative work.
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> Is my liquidity assumption mistaken?

Unless you're an investment banker, yes. There are multiple exchanges that handle daily volume in the 10's of millions USD, with order books deep enough that you could cash out millions of dollars worth of bitcoin without moving the price more than a few percent.

That's nothing compared to what Wall St or the city is used to, but it is plenty enough liquidity for all but the most well off individuals, and growing. When the Winklevoss twins get their bitcoin ETF to IPO, I expect these numbers to increase by orders of magnitude.

Also, none of that is counting the significant volume of transactions which occur non-public or off-exchange.
On the flip side, online retailers have a much stronger opportunity to up-sell products -- they can up-sell on a per-product basis, whereas physical retailers are bound by shelf space to up-sell/cross-sell.

Online can match products by consumer, too, and even do small A/B tests on pricing of individual items. That's powerful. Grocery stores have a much harder time price testing.
Everything I'd said there blows out of the water this idea that "simulation thought experiments" can similarly be classed as "fiction" in the usual sense of the term.

Saying "it's fiction" is only the beginning of the discussion, not the ending of it — namely in that this world only makes sense through the fictional-narrative structure which shapes all discourse from religion to science to programming.
It's not a question to keep my DNA confined, but rather making it random. If somebody wants to track my DNA, yes they can do that - here in Switzerland, far away - but I wont send it to them on a silver plate.
What you say is done with UTF-8 + such a flag - if the string is pure ASCII (codes under 127) then the UTF8 representation is identical. IIRC latest python does exactly that, sending utf-8 to C functions that expect ascii, if they are 'clean'.

But for common what usecases you're just dealing with ASCII? Unless your data comes from a cobol mainframe, you're going to get non-ascii input at random places.

Html is a prime example of that - the default encoding is utf8, html pages very often include unescaped non-ascii content, and even if you're us-english only, your page content can include things such as accented proper names or the various non-ascii characters for quotation marks - such as '»' used in NYTimes frontpage.
That would be very annoying to people living nearby.

It could work for highway interchanges though.
لعبة رعاية الطفل سبونج بوب
لعبة رعاية الطفل سبونج بوب

لعبة ,رعاية, الطفل ,سبونج ,بوب

http://www.bnat4games.com/Game-451.html
Just had a little touch of deja vu, eh?
It's only absurd since we're so used to assuming that (some) math functions are special and deserve special notation. The notation for almost every other function you're going to use is f(x,0), why should the function '>' get a different notation?

I agree that it is uncommon and take getting used to, but it does have the advantage of being consistent, and consistency and lack of special cases is a part of simplicity.
Also, check for your language's options for white space and comments within regular expressions [0]. Regexps don't have to be blobs of characters -- you can use white space to make them more readable and use comments embedded within a multi-line regexp to describe what/why you are doing.

Bonus: it makes them easier to diff, too!

We don't write our code on one line with no comments, writing regexps should be no different.

[0] Python example: http://docs.python.org/2/library/re.html#re.VERBOSE
This doesn't make any sense.

A high pressure sodium vapor lamp has an efficiency of around 150 lm/W. An LED has an efficiency of under 100 lm/W.

Where is the energy savings? If anything an LED uses more energy, not less.
Great post - So looks like MBAs aren't that bad after all.
Can Sharing Economy and Big Corp Get Along?
In the case of web application, you can have the same templating engine running in the browser and in the server. This means rendering the full HTML at the server level if needed or part of it or just at the browser level. You get a bit of freedom. It is painful to manage two different templating engines between the server and browser sides.
Applications can already manage their own memory in Linux. O_DIRECT bypasses the buffer cache when doing I/O, and there are plenty of ways that applications can influence or take control of their own memory using various system calls, many of which overlap or are redundant to some degree. It doesn't require a microkernel, and it's not new.
Cicada 3301 is the path to the red pill.

Be careful, agents are always watching.
OS Kernel in under 45 lines of Javascript
Aye. I thought of myself as a regex wizard, and had answered many regex questions on perlmonks.org, but even then did I learn a lot about regexes while reading that book.
IBM Research produces staph-killing polymers that leave healthy cells alone
< They will fail, because money that is not issued by governments is always doomed to failure.

Like what? Gold?