skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, yeah, but XML has attributes. I was writing about how that was a problem and so on, but I came up with this

<look attr="at" attr2="up"> this <awkward> problem </awkward></look>

(look (|attr at) (|attr2 up) this (awkward problem))

just by saving "|" as a meta to annotate an attribute pair.

And the weird problem of lone tags looking like unclosed ones magically flies away (I think) since

<script type="text/javascript" src="foo.js" {">", "/>", "></script>"}

is just

(script (|type text/javascript) (|src foo.js))

...sometimes I wonder why isn't everything ever made out of S-exprs.
Ask HN: Thinking of leaving open-source project
I'm involved with an Open Source project that has recently been attracting a lot of media attention. I do really like the project but I'm thinking of leaving for the following reasons:

* A lot of people in the project who do little to no work (coding or organisational) seem to have a lot of influence, mainly these are people who were involved in the project from the very start. They email the list with their opinion a lot or give interviews to the media but do nothing in terms of actual work.

* A lot of the real (coding) work being done by a couple of members is very questionable in terms of long-term goals. Nobody feels comfortable calling them out. This would generally be fine but it is affecting the whole direction of the project.

I'm not sure what to do, I feel very uncomfortable discussing this with the other members, I've been involved deeply in the project for 2 years but now I'm thinking it's time to move on. Sorry I can't give any more details on the actual project.

I hate to abandon the project and my friends, but at the same time the stress is starting to affect me negatively. Has anyone been in a similar situation and have some advice to offer?
If I were presented a very large pile of money, a large consensus and the task of changing that consensus (in order to stop changes that might cost me a very very large pile of money), I would fund both. The goal doesn't have to be changing everyone's minds.

The "moderate" voices actually hold a great swaying power in this situation. If you fund the extreme opposite to give them volume, you now have a base to provide "reasonable" voices (that you also fund) the power to say things like:

"lets not make rash decisions - lets study it more"

"Reactionary policy is awful - lets instead migrate to it slowly"

"Let's question the shady underworld of the consensus"

"Let's compromise"
Note the OP often mentions that the algorithm doesn't work for lenght == 1, which is unacceptable for a general library function.

I didn't read every update of the code but it looks like it is written in c only. Critical code is usually implemented with the best algorithm and then converted/optimized manually to/in assembly.
Photos of the Utah data center, located 25 miles from Salt Lake City:

http://www.hangthebankers.com/pictures-of-the-new-2-billion-...
Just as an FYI, Google and Google execs have been prosecuted in other countries.
One aspect that's missing in these comments is an acknowledgement of the complexity of the projects which are the subject of defense contracts. The Pentagon and its contractors are literally at the edge of the state of the art in fields like aerospace. Very few companies have the expertise to even attempt to take on these contracts, and most projects have ill-defined specifications simply because nobody is quite sure what is technologically possible until the project is well underway. And nobody knows how much money will be needed up front. That's like asking Zuck in his dorm room: "how much money will you need to build Facebook as it exists circa 2013?"

I used to work at a company that did DOD contracts (in the wireless sector). In that area, what the DOD was playing with in the early 2000's is what VC-funded companies are playing with just in the last few years. For the work we did, there were no detailed specs because nobody really knew what was within reach. In response to the question: "what do you want?" the DOD's response is often: "what could we have?" Pointing at how much more efficient private industry is makes no sense. Take an example like Space X. They're a shining example of private industry, and are doing very innovative stuff, but they're treading a lot of the same ground NASA and DOD contractors did in the 1960's. Of course they're getting it done for a lot less money! They know what's possible, they have a general idea of what works. The contractors doing this stuff in the 1960's had none of that to work with.

Obviously the time is due for modernizing the accounting system. But it's important to realize that a lot of the mess dates from the Cold War, where keeping up with the Soviet Union was the priority, not satisfying the bean counters.
I've had similar experiences in the last month of interviews i've been through. I was asked how i'd design a secure backend API in asp.net, various algorithm questions, some basic javascript questions ("what is a closure?", "what does the var keyword do?", etc") and other very non-specific things. At the end of most of my interviews when they ask if I have any questions about the positions I tend to have to ask "Is this a Front end Developer position you just interviewed me for?" Not once have any of the interviewers been front-end devs, only SVP of Development or Director of Design or some other inflated title. I want to talk about problems i've had building Angular or Knockout apps or or cross-browser JS/CSS issues.
Brazil debates asylum for Snowden
The DOJ themselves said HSBC is in violation, therefore the point is made without the need for us lay readers to know the exact part.
Yeah, I took that to be a dig a Paul Graham, whose early essays all seemed to have unlinked footnotes.
Yes, that's one way, although I think it would be safer for the verification to be done by other peers (on the answers provided by other peers), as opposed to peers doing it themselves by connecting to many DNS servers. The reason being the possibility that the traffic on a network is controlled entirely by an adversary, and thus all outgoing connections to port 53 (via UDP) could get routed to the same IP, regardless of what the destination IP actually is.
So how are you going to succeed where Livemocha failed for instance ? To be frank , I liked Livemocha,too bad they couldnt monetize their application without selling out to someone that doesnt care about users.
please not
Said no more counting dollars, we'll be counting stars....
The "right" way to generate Fibonacci numbers is not via the closed form, but by exponentiation of the matrix A = [0 1; 1 1] that defines Fibonacci numbers as an element of its endomorphism ring Z[x]/(x^2 - x - 1). This doesn't rely on explicitly computing the eigenvalues of A and scales well to more complex recursions. Sample Haskell:

fib :: Integer -> Integer
fib n = fst . loop (0, 1) base . abs $ n
where pmul (a, b) (c, d) = ((a + b)*(c + d) - b*d, b*d + a*c)
base = if n >= 0 then (1, 0) else (1, -1)
loop acc sq m
| m == 0 = acc
| m `mod` 2 == 0 = loop acc (pmul sq sq) (m `div` 2)
| otherwise = loop (pmul sq acc) (pmul sq sq) (m `div` 2)
Those are excellent suggestions in the "My Suggestions" section. Thanks for the article.
I was thinking along the same lines. I would be curious to see his resume, as the content could potentially influence the interviewer to ask certain types of questions.
Show HN: Raspberry Pi powered thermometer with Web UI
Why must i upload a picture. Use my gravatar.
Similar in NYC. I remember an interview where I was asked to bit-shift in Javascript, for the sake of itself.

I've also had good experiences though--I liked one where I had to build certain UI components and get my code evaluated in real-time.
Worlds best plumbers?
I told these guys that I would promote them at every opportunity after they fixed my burst pipe in the bathroom last month - saved me a fortune by helping me sort insurance and everything. Brilliant!
Open Data Graphs Can Boost the Global Economy
The NSA does not raid people, even in the US. It is not a law enforcement agency. However, the raid was conducted at the behest of the US DOJ.
Longstanding laws intended to prevent corruption and conflict of interest [impose significant costs]

Just because they have costs to them doesn't make them bad. But maybe there are more efficient ways to police corruption? Or maybe a small amount of corruption is acceptable, if the cost of preventing it would be greater than the amount lost?

The Standish Group, an information technology firm, deemed just 4.6 percent of large-scale government contracting projects executed in the past decade to be successful. More than half were “challenged,” and about 40 percent simply “failed.”

https://www.google.com/search?q=percent+of+software+projects...

Reported numbers vary widely, but a 40% failure rate doesn't sound clearly worse (or better) than private industry. The 4.6% success rate sounds rather bad, but a quick look doesn't immediately show private industry numbers to compare to.
I asked that question a few days ago and received a detailed answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6939681
Show HN: TipperCoin - Send Bitcoins over Twitter
I think the HN-specific landing page is not as informative as the actual main page: http://boards.coffeestrap.com/#/welcome

The HN-specific page reads like startup satire.
I have a Synology atm but I'm thinking of making a FreeNAS machine when I'm done with the Synology. What would you say are the biggest differences? What features did you miss the most? What features did you gain by using FreeNAS that you thought were very nice?
Climate change tends to be a small (if even existent) policy area addressed by most of these think tanks. It's highly misleading claim that all revenue over several years was used exclusively by these think tanks to deny climate change.
The Ca' Foscari one (university of Venice) was a pilot that we launched last week. The cool think about that is that we are able to automatically certify people that comes from Ca' Foscari. We are planning to have a 'karma' style reference that goes up based on languages certifications, institutions in which you studied and so on.

So definitely yes, we want to repeat that for other Institutions as well.
You have more experience here thanks for correcting me :) What I meant was that they are not two very different worlds. I myself picked Haskell over Lisp hoping to gain the benefits that I would get from Lisp but with some advantages.
Would you also recommend the other way around? Learning Lisp after Haskell? I don't mean the syntactical differences or the real-world usage. Solely the "way of thinking".
> Imagine if someone thought US policy actually worked literally as presidential speeches suggest; you'd think they're an ignorant tool. "Everyone knows that speeches are just speeches," you'd say, with no connection to the actual practice of governance.

I don't agree with this at all. For instance, Obama has done what he promised: More big government programs and spending, nationalized healthcare. People knew what they were getting with Obama when he ran for President. There are a lot of problems with America but I can't stand it when people attack it for reasons that it actually doesn't deserve.

> None of the very numerous Iranians here leave one with the impression that they are from a place with "no logic".

I was referring to the government, which was pretty explicit. Fundamentally, there is a tradeoff between religiosity and logic in any religious government. The two are opposites. We cannot assume that Iran will never instigate a war for religious reasons, or that no rogue element of its government will ever share its weapons with outside religious groups.

> Turn off Fox News.

We can discuss the issues, but you cannot dismiss me by trying to claim I'm ignorant. I actually don't even watch Fox News, but I disagree with maligning Americans who do.
I think this would just make me sad.
How I created a better HBO GO
Author's statement: "Censorship is bad!"
Author's point 1: "Some censorship is okay! But this is more censorship than I personally agree with!"

If you hold the premise that minors must be protected against media by the government, then you can't possibly argue that this move is radical or illogical.
Well, ok, then what do you do with all the money sitting in deposits in the bank? Just mail a check back to people?

This is why the executives should be criminally chargeable. Banks are systemically important, but the executives are not.
Isn't that like saying:

"Modern racecars are designed with high performance CAD / simulation software - race mechanic culture is therefore inseparable from this software culture" - that would be the absurdity
That webpage is just wow...

It looks pretty awesome, I think it could be ported to PHP fairly easily.
You'd hope that before they bring you in they know that you know basic front end stuff. To be honest most front end tech is simply memorization of standards and idiosyncrasies between browsers. Anyone can go through and figure this stuff out via a simple google search. On the other hand taking say data from a Ajax call and sorting it or filtering it with custom logic takes some creative problem solving to do it gracefully.

Interviewees always forget to figure out why they interviewer and company is asking these questions or requiring particular knowledge. Next time just ask them!
Nice. This is mainly the reason I find kurzweil's predictions hard to swallow. Although he essentially argues that a series of s-curves for each separate technology add together to form never ending exponential growth overall. Not sure I buy it. I mean you could look at the music industry growth as a series of s-curves for each genre, which have produced good overall growth, but then that growth has now stalled.
Putting who pays for the leave aside, employees will always be punished to some degree when they take a leave of absence. Employers are disadvantaged (again, to some degree) by the missing employee. For example, they have to invest in training a temporary replacement only to let the go when the leave ends. That disadvantage will, intentionally or not, affect the employee.
What a preposterous article, everyone who reads HN comments has learned that anything other than non-fiction is 'fake,' offers only the heavy-handed opinion of the author and is a waste of time to read.

But really, while I am struck by how apt the idea of The Odyssey as a parallel to imprisonment is, it's not so surprising that Homer would resonate. It's not self-absorbed academic stuff, it's gritty human drama. The Iliad is more gruesome and brutal than your average Tarentino film-- perhaps even more harrowing as it constantly introduces people who are neither bad guys or good guys just as spears shatter their teeth or pulse in their dying hearts.
Ronald Reagan made her an American villain. Her other sins were far worse.
Invisible Chains: Consumerism, Debt, and Consciousness
It's more like, "we want smart people, so let's optimize our interview process to find smart people, and give everyone the same interview questions."

The problem here is that firms tend to prefer giving "engineering interview problems" to everyone, and do not want to segment interview questions by position.
I've put it on my list of things to write about. It's a long list, but I hope to knock a few things off it over the holiday. Thanks for asking - I'll post here if/when I get something done.
I take it you mean Rosetta Stone? All emails I get now from Livemocha are pitching them. The thing is it actually works. Hell just from the demo CD years ago I can still say "The horse is white" in Welsh!
> What will you do when you have the opportunity to trade your privacy as a currency?

The common view that people are doing a simple economic trade has some problems. Namely, people don't know what their personal information is worth when they give it to Apple, Facebook, Google, or whoever. Additionally your privacy can have latent value (i.e. it may not be important to you right now, but may have value to you in the future when you don't have it): http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2059154
I can't agree. The rest of those books contain roughly the same amount of actual information as his first. I went to his workshop, in which he seemed to be showing as much restraint as he could to not talk exclusively about his lawn sculptures.

Tufte has some great ideas, but would benefit from a ruthless editor. As a guy who's self-published, he does not get the benefit of that kind of feedback.
2014 will finally be the year for Linux.
Why on earth would you want to learn danish?

//Dane
Introducing AIR, the best seed funding tool to invest in France
It's not, we're trying to put together people with different backgrounds, and different approaches to langauge. We started from the two context we were most familiar with. The line between what is satire and what is community culture may be kind of thin, especially for online communities such as HN. Don't you think? :-)
I'm thinking about building a NAS this week. Any build recommendations, suggestions on where to start? I know people used to recommend NAS4Free over FreeNAS, is that still the case?
TVShow Time, TV show guide and tracker
I'm not sure what the negatives of adding length == 1 would be, but I don't think they would decrease performance enough to make it more then strstr.
Amusing read.

Not sure I agree w/ the mental illness diagnosis though.

Sounds more like a person (who maybe should lay off the stuff) taking wild guesses and hoping to score.
In his mind - big upside, little effort/downside risk.
The way monetization of MU content worked, is they would send the average internet user to a page that mostly hid the download link and tricked that person into clicking on the 'sign-up to download it fast' area, selling them access.

This was not a business model that proved something noble about pirates, it was a criminal enterprise that for the most part, took someone else work, and sold it pennies on the dollar.
Also, in a thread about censorship: an accidental showing of a half-covered nipple on terrestrial broadcast TV would not result in a half million dollar fine and many many years of legal action. (I think the original fine was eventually overturned, but only because the FCC had changed a policy before taking action??)

US TV shows have to censor their language unless they're broadcast on cable or satellite.
What about those who choose to have one parent stay home? If there's a deduction for child care, I think my wife forgoing a career should result in us taking her expected salary as a deduction.
Every time I hear the name, I have to re-remind myself that it isn't bootstrap rewritten in coffeescript.
Because that takes a lot more time for the interviewers. For a growing tech company, they could have as many open reqs as they have engineers. Crafting questions for all of those positions takes a lot of time that most companies don't have time to do.
Field theory, not group theory, at least not directly. The two are linked by the fundamental theorem of Galois theory.
Hitchhiker's guide to Vesta's hidden attractions
It's O(log n) because Haskell is smart enough to implement exponentiation by repeated squaring and summing as appropriate? (There must be a better name for that.)
Indeed, this is covered in one of the references in my article, which didn't actually approach the issue of the "best" or "right" way to calculate the numbers.
Of course the outrage comes from the fact that corporate structures offer so many layers of plausible deniability. At the end of the day, we would have to be fools to believe that billions in money laundering or price fixing are happening at these banks orchestrated, as the executives would have us believe, by a small group of malevolent peons expertly covering their tracks. It's just common sense that lots of people know what's going on and turn a blind eye because it's good for business and there's virtually no chance it'll actually get pinned on them.
Bad comparison, you cannot compare their total income to the fine, you have to compare their estimated profits from the scheme to the fine.

If they estimated they have made $1 billion from the scheme, doubling that is a little lenient, but not totally out of the question.

Unfortunately it is impossible to judge the situation without all of the facts. Nearly anything sounds damning when you know that guilt is involved.
The author is fairly obviously suffering from selection bias when claiming that "Lisp programmers tend to be ignorant of applied mathematics."

In the past I've been part of the overlapping communities to some degree, and that wasn't my experience at all.
Other than hacker news, how many other targeted landing pages have you created? (just for my own curiosity)
Sure. But people who do care will have access to the list. And the list will be leaked.
Same. And the Try CoffeeStrap button doesn't help.
Actually Haskell and Lisp a very two different worlds. Some basic abstractions are shared, but Functional Programming tends to be much much more advanced in Haskell. Haskell is the standard language for some branch of functional programming and has a good/great eco-system for that. It's main use seems to me to advance the state of art in Functional Programming and applications of it.

Lisp OTOH is a multi-paradigm languages with much more emphasis on OO and interactive development. Lisp is much more diverse and favors a very different programming style - slightly more pragmatic. Lisp had its main application domain in AI, but nowadays it's a bit more diverse - often it is used by individuals or small teams. One of the larger applications is the flight search engine of Google. Others are in music composition, planning and scheduling (satellites, people, logistics, ...), etc.
Yeah its bizarre I had to jump through hoops in the UK to open a new ISA account (tax free savings) even if I am a customer of the bank all ready.

Its not like I turn up with with 50k in 500 euro bills and want to open an account that day.
Conservative groups spend up to $1B a year to fight action on climate change
I think you're missing the point. The issue here is that we have two prosecution regimes at work: one for the banks which works by more or less the rules you propose, and one for "everyone else", which very much doesn't. Your idea of only prosecuting bank employees with direct connection to the crimes seems like cold comfort to all the people threatened with arrest, in prison (or hell, even shot) because of the activities of their husbands and roommates.

Strangely, libertarian hacker types tend not to come to their defense as quickly as they do bank executives.
OP here. I was waiting for that :P
Wouldn't it make more sense to live well wherever we are? I'm not saying we have to settle for Earth, but the focus should be on how people are living and not how many planets get checked off.
> Lambdas are relegated to relative obscurity until Java makes them popular by not having them.

Ok, that's pretty brilliant :)
Yes, that's the suggestion on Reddit too. It would make sense given his other allusions.
"Despite the woman’s mother explaining her daughter’s condition to police over the telephone from Italy, she was taken to a psychiatric hospital and sectioned under the Mental Health Act. Five weeks later, her daughter was removed from her womb without her consent."
Read the Docs 2013 Stats
Original concept was "Bootstrap your language with Coffee" :-).
I pray recruiters never find this
Props to Haskell, though -- p6 makes it easy to do, but Haskell is definitely more elegant here. Though maybe if I keep playing with it...
Because Denmark is awesome? A few of my best friends are Danish and I would like to spend more time there.
They are charging you for the extra channels. The call center people are motivated to make you pay more.

It's a bit different with this Internet filter.
This is very cool and will allow for a consistent appearance of book math content both online and offline.

Something about the cm fonts gives them an air of respectability.

Thx for porting these fonts!