skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bitcoin is Dangerous for Consumers so What is It Good For
Very good point. This was an artifact of the way my wife originally structured the function (dispatching on the keywords :up, :down, :left, :right), and I just kept that.
Ah. I misread then. That's... odd, to say the least. About in line with the expectation though, I suppose.
You didn't write the post he originally replied to. Keep up the good work!
>On the other side, we have some people who have always forecast an imminent heat death of Malthusian malaise for us all. Those people have never been right, so I'd say they bear the burden of proof that This Time It's Different.

Never been right? They'd been right in predicting the Big Depression. They'd been right saying this "gold rush" thing was BS.

Heck, there were people who predicted the decline and fall of Rome quite accurately. There were people who predicted the dot-com bust quite adequately. There were people who warned about the dangers of Nazi germany (or even the dangers of the Versailles treaty) before it was even a consideration for most. There were people who warned about the housing market bubble quite adequately.

Now, as for why those people (doing the warning) might seem to be wrong more often that others saying it's all OK.

Consider someone playing russian roulette -- perhaps with a 20 bullet chamber. Some other guy warns him: what are you doing, are you crazy? But he pulls the trigger and nothing happens. The other guy warns him again, stop it man, you'll kill yourself. Again, nothing happens. This goes on for a while, until at some point, say the 14th try, the guy blows his brains out.

Well, this same thing happened with situations like the recent economic crash.

Now, some people view it like the person giving the warning was wrong 13 times, and only right once. They'll say, dismisingly, "Well of course he eventually got it right: he always kept to the same warning even when he was wrong. Even a broken watch tells the right time 2 times a day, etc".

But I'd argue that that person was right ALL ALONG. Even when nothing had yet happened. And that if some other kind of action was chosen as he warned it should be (e.g putting the gun down), the tragedy would have been avoided.
I actively worry about this and I'm skeptical of your thesis that people will naturally reach a point of "enough really is enough". Even in your own story you are saying that you have enough now, but up until this point your expenses have grown to meet your income. The same is true for me, and I worry that it will always be so. I tend to believe that the majority of people will continue to grow with their income to very high numbers. I don't see the majority of people making $1M/year living a comfortable $250k/year lifestyle and investing/donating the rest. Some yes, but certainly nowhere near 50%.
As a counterpoint, software development arguably suffers most from the combinatorial explosion of behaviors. In other words, testing software is easier but less effective (or at least less complete).
I think Snowden inadvertently demonstrated the only effective way to get media to publish leaks: Send them to multiple outlets in different countries. Doing so provides publishers with both impetus and cover.
Sure, we're in violent agreement. I took pron's statement as if he were referring to the explicit constructs in Clojure for managing state, i.e. refs, atoms, agents, vars. These are in fact about managing state, with or without concurrency in the mix. But in my experience, these represent a very small portion of Clojure programs. Whole libraries are built without using any of them.

I think Mark's right about "lightweight data modeling." It's central to Clojure programming.
At some point I'll be doing these. This is super cool, thanks!
Familiar Actors and Possible False Flags in Syrian Malware Campaigns
Elsewere, say you want to sort a non-omogeneous list, or according to a custom order (attribute1 descending, attribute2 ascending) cmp make this easy

You can do this in python with the key function returning a list/tuple:

mylist.sort(key=lambda element: (element.attribute1, -element.attribute2))
Yeah I'm not talking about hundreds of thousands of requests, I'm talking about three developers and fifty code files. Which I thought I made eminently clear by talking about dev scaling in my posts rather than load scaling.

That isn't a "pseudo problem".
Just get the 200m2 penthouse and you can stop worrying about #6 ;)
Even in among the lower middle class lifestyles, you'd have exactly the same minus the "relatively large house".

However, if you go back 50 years earlier, the lower class lifestyle was not that different from the favella living in slums around the world, where entire families lived in one or two rooms and everyone in the family who was able was responsible for contributing to making ends meet.
Not at all, as the latest web framework benchmarks showed: http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r8&hw=i7... (see rack-jruby, 86.3%)

It's really a question of how and what you run. And yes, the JVM is one of those options.
There's no reason this can't be done with any language, as long as there are good reference implementations to be found.

But as long as you can read Python there's no reason you couldn't do these in your preferred language with the Python references.
No one is missing out, at least not yet, and I don't think they'll miss out any time soon. I say this as a person who has a Nest thermostat, Philips Hue lights, and a Nissan Leaf. All of those items can be remotely accessed with my phone. I've never fiddled with the Nest when I'm not home (turned the heat down from bed once. Once, because I could.) With the lights I have no choice but to control them from the phone. But that was my choice to buy lights that require a computer to control. I can remotely turn the heat or A/C on in the Leaf, start charging, or check status. When the free 3 years is up on that feature, I would only pay a pittance to continue service.

Let's also consider that the Nest is $279, the Hue lights run $60 per bulb, and the Leaf is a $30K car (all in USD). If you can afford those, you can afford an iPhone.

The author thinks there's a gap that doesn't exist, and my guess is that is because he lives surrounded by that remotely-controlled world (and perhaps helps create products to fit that world). Let me give another side to it: it's a pain in the ass. Fire up the phone, unlock it, go find the app, fiddle with the controls...all to just turn on a light in the living room or turn up the heat. Yes, pity the po' folk who are reduced to walking over and flipping a light switch.

No one is missing out. The title is accurate in the app-controlled world is closed to those without the devices. But I don't buy the argument that one gains an advantage by living in that world. As it stands now, it's a nice-to-have world of expensive devices that fit well with the smartphone you already have. Let's wring our hands when app-only devices like door locks and thermostats become commodities and the devices to control them are still expensive. I predict it won't happen, as the price of smart door locks comes down so will the price of smartphones.
The man against the State.
Tiny Arctic town's weather site approaches 1 millionth hit
Great, First Watson smokes us at Jeopardy, now this is going to prove computers are better than humans at one more thing. Our slow walk to being obsolete is hastened by our own efforts.

Cool project. Would be interesting to see how much effort it would take to do something similar for the Classic TV version of Scrabble.
Setting up Apache to serve raw Ruby .erbs or .rhtmls like you'd serve .php files out of a folder is nearly identical in length and difficulty of steps if you're configuring it yourself:

http://iamjamesblog.wordpress.com/2011/11/14/configure-apach...

Nobody does it because there's just no demand for two crappy default hosting configurations (this isn't even a criticism about PHP the language, it's just a bad model to use for hosting web applications).
"In development" as in,

"will be out in the mass market in 5 years",

or as in

"some research centers are taking grants and producing hald-assed results and/or there are some ho-hum products rushed out that don't work as expected and cost a ton"?

In other words, as in "next generation SSDs" or as in "memsistor drives/holographic memory for everybody".
Scientists Successfully Forecasted the Size and Location of an Earthquake
[Lightweight comment]
The main thing that puts me off from learning Clojure is the name. I mean, why not go the whole hog and call it funargs4j?
Open Letter to Google About Rap Genius SEO
Convenient tool to rebuild package.json dependencies from local node_modules.
Having spent a very long time in the PHP community I doubt that quite a lot. I am strongly skeptical of the notion that most are in the headspace to be able to evaluate alternatives effectively if they know they exist. Because most of them sound like you in your posts in this thread: circle the wagons and call everyone who says PHP isn't a smart choice a "hater". It's a very insular, very screwed-up social dynamic that resists change (despite the efforts of some really smart folks like @fabpot to drag your average PHP programmer into some semblance of good practices).
Very nice idea. Congrats!

One thing that I've always thought it's missing is a list of projects in domains other than programming for motivating people that don't have an interest in programming per se.

That means no Lisp interpreters, no command-line palindrome detectors, no reverse polish calculators, no Collatz sequence generators, etc., but things like card game emulators, embroidery pattern creators, guitar tablature generators, etc. Thing that could pick the interest of people that have very specific interests, and that don't see how programming could be of any use to them.

When I was learning to code, I wrote a program for computing the standings table for soccer league tournaments. It was very rudimentary, but it kept me motivated since it did something useful for me, and I could tweak it ad infinitum.

Year later I taught programming to first-year university students, and a big problem was keeping them motivated. Every one of them had different interests, and computing large Mersenne primes was certainly not one of them.
I think if you shine a light in the darkness, the darkness will go away (or find another corner).
>I'm confused as to why you think data structure literals are part of Clojure's core thesis.

I use refs, atoms, and agents very sparingly. You just don't need them very much when you have a suite of performant, immutable data structures (with literals). These data structures, and the assortment of polymorphic functions provided in the language to operate on them, imo are the crux of the language. They dominate the experience of the programmer. As far as managing state goes, they make it so that you rarely have to reach for the explicit constructs listed above.
I can write it as multiple functions without the multimethods just as well.
I bet it wasn't inadvertent at all. I'm sure he saw it the same way you do.
I think we are in agreement!

I only gave the example to say that what's basic is relative (compared to current standards), so saying that a trailer-park person has more access to more things than a peasant doesn't mean anything.
In case, like me, you didn't understand the algorithm description n the text: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_transposition_cipher
I totally agree that it's up to Google to deal with it how they deem fit. There is nothing wrong with a private company altering how they list things.

I originally asked because he seemed to be personally offended that they may have gamed a system put in place by a private company that has financial motives besides just serving you the best content.
This looks wonderful guys!! I'm looking forward for a Linux/Win version
Here you go -- a classic post by Hacker News heartthrob Derek Sivers, founder of CD Baby,

"7 Reasons I Switched Back to PHP":

http://sivers.org/rails2php

I threw away 2 years of Rails code, and opened a new empty Subversion respository.

Then in a mere TWO MONTHS, by myself, not even telling anyone I was doing this, using nothing but vi, and no frameworks, I rewrote CD Baby from scratch in PHP. Done! Launched! And it works amazingly well.

Mind you, this is from 2007 and there's more to the story -- Sivers learned a lot, as he says, from hiring a Rails guy and from the attempt to use Rails:

It’s the most beautiful PHP I’ve ever written, all wonderfully MVC and DRY, and and I owe it all to Rails.

At the end, he describes his 7 reasons why PHP worked out better in his case and they may well make sense in other cases as well -- that is, while some of these reasons reflect his personal tastes (e.g. #6 - I LOVE SQL), some are solid business reasons, like reason #2, which I'll quote in its entirety, since it's worth keeping such considerations in mind:

#2 - OUR ENTIRE COMPANY’S STUFF WAS IN PHP: DON’T UNDERESTIMATE INTEGRATION
By the old plan (ditching all PHP and doing it all in Rails), there was going to be this One Big Day, where our entire Intranet, Storefront, Members’ Login Area, and dozens of cron shell scripts were ALL going to have to change. 85 employees re-trained. All customers and clients calling up furious that One Big Day, with questions about the new system.

Instead, I was able to slowly gut the ugly PHP and replace it with beautiful PHP. Launch in stages. No big re-training.

I'll suggest that, like other writings by Sivers, this is worth reading since the issues he dealt with in migrating to a rewritten system are ones that are not uncommon.

(For a list of all his blog posts about entrepreneurship, music (and the business of music), life, etc.:

http://sivers.org/blog )
Wikipedia describes "computer science" as an umbrella term covering everything pertaining to software development and algorithmic thought. Academic computer science programs generally offer courses in both the theoretical and the applied.

Even the very term itself has often been described as a misnomer, not necessarily having anything to do with "computers" or with "science".

I think the reason people mix such things around so much is because what "computer science" is has been ambiguously defined all along.
I'm glad they stopped. I'm also glad they deleted this comment, although I would have been happier if they simply never made it. When I read it, I felt like I was watching a toddler who, after being caught cheating, complained "so did Sally!"

Just announce your _mea culpa_, and stop doing it. And, if you need to adopt strategies that do boost your ranks -- _which, given that RapGenius is a great service_, I don't think is long-term necessary -- avoid the patently obvious ones.
Could you share your pelicanconf.py? Maybe it's a configuration issue.
The queen was already reigning when Alan Turing was brought to trail.

May be the queen is who needs to be pardoned.
>This assumes that wealth is a zero-sum game, so it can be traded around but not created.

>And it very much is.

You may be confusing wealth with money, which is in fact a zero-sum game. Wealth, on the other hand, can be created and it's been constantly created all the time throughout history. The section on the Pie Fallacy in this article may help clarify it: http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html
I would say some of Computer Science is mathematics. Mathematics is the foundation of Computer Science, but CS is not a branch of mathematics, although the origins of the field are found there. It is an important, core, part of the subject, but it does not entirely encompass it.

For example, CS also includes Psychology, Graphic Design, social science, art, etc.

Also, CS involves the teaching of programming, which is a craft (ignoring edge cases) - crafts cannot be taught through maths alone.
Anecdote time:

My wife worked for Netflix customer service (CS) back about 9 years ago - in their formative years. She likens her time there as similar to any other large company. The individuals were great, but the management was your typical bureaucracy. Rankings were heavily based on seniority, not actual individual value.

As CS reps were considered to be fully interchangeable (and the first to be let go to maintain profit margins), it was a terrible department to try and gain seniority in.

Never seemed all that different, HR wise, from any other company. Perhaps they've changed; I can't say.
Quora’s Technology Examined (2011)
Root Access: 3 Startups Aquired by Web Giants
I bring Chuck Norris.
No, plain maps are nothing more like plain assoc lists (and similar stuff) in plain old Lisp. We were modelling key/value data structures like that from the earliest Lisp. Sure its easy to use. Up to a point. Lisp had an evolution. Things changed. I've seen quite a bit larger Lisp software over the years and the ones not using explicit classes turned out to be harder to maintain.
I would be happy if the XO recognized USB mouse inputs for non-gaming actions.

While it recognizes a Logitech wireless keyboard, it does not recognize the same keyboard's trackpad. For entering messages, codes, and even web browsing, mouse interactions would make the XO a better media center.
I agree Java 8 will be big. I have started experimenting with Java 8 language features. I use Clojure a lot, and I occasionally use Scala. Java 8 features might get be using Java again for new projects.
Sheltered = have a stable community and a strong work ethic? To say we're 'sheltered' is similar to, say, the way a lighthouse is 'sheltered' by being built of the right stuff and having a strong foundation.
Programming is a crucial part of CS. There is no separation of the two

Programmers who don't know CS are programmers who are less educated in the theory of their practice.
Why functional programming?
I've been seeing all this stuff about functional programming, and I don't get it. Why should I care?

I'm not trying to be a troll. I'm trying to understand. And I don't.

I've been a professional programmer for 28 years. I don't care about "the one right way" or "ideological purity" or anything like that. I care about efficiently building programs that work. (Answers that say that functional programming is in fact the one right way will be dismissed as ideologues or trolls.)

I don't think that functional programming can be the one right way, because I have spent most of my career in embedded systems. Those programs tend to be full of states that changed many function calls ago, but are still relevant. If I understand correctly, that doesn't play well with functional programming.

But once you don't buy that functional programming is the one right way, then you have to ask, "When is it the right tool for the job? And when is it not?"

(And by the way, once you don't' think that functional programming is the one right way, then things like tail recursion and the Y combinator stop looking like elegant solutions to important problems. They start looking like crocks that you were forced into because you're using the wrong tool for the job.)

Look, I get that all of computer programming is mathematics. It's all Turing machines, too, but that doesn't mean that I want to write programs like I'm writing on a Turing machine. I don't want to write them like I'm writing an abstract algebra paper, either - unless there's a real benefit.

Again, I recognize that this sounds like a troll, but I'm really not. I can be convinced. Somebody say something convincing (hopefully in terms that a professional programmer with very little abstract algebra can understand).
How on earth are the sellers "cashing out" and how are they taking payments?

Why can't the money be followed?

If the NSA is such a powerhouse with billions of dollars of assets to track every electronic communication, why aren't they focusing their entire resources on people like the sellers?

Or is it like the TSA where they just hassle the completely innocent people at the airport for show while the real criminals take other paths.
I appreciate the philosophy of getting rid of HR rules in favor of treating people like adults with good judgement. However, good judgement is probably one of those things whose definition is open to disagreement. E.G. one person's good judgement might mean taking risks and another's might mean playing it safe. Is Netflix just forming a monoculture of people with the same definition of good judgement.

Also, it's interesting that the writer validates Netflix's efforts by saying the company's stock went up, 3 Emmys were won, and the firm acquired a bunch of new customers. Are employees expected to optimizing these metrics, first and foremost, which seem very short sighted to me? What about fundamentals like profitability and customer retention?
In that case Assembly language programming should be sufficient right? That's as simple and readable as it can get.
As a few other people have said, the only possible way you're going to have a popular dating app is by having a lot of fake users in the beginning.

When Tinder first launched, at least 90% of the profiles I came across were, after a little investigation, very obviously fake. I became suspicious after being "matched" with every single attractive girl I "liked" after having just created a profile. These "girls" had the mysterious ability to travel vast distances in extraordinarily small amounts of time. One second, a girl's location would be 7 miles away, the next, she was 1407 miles away - incredible. If they responded at all to a message, they were vague, short answers that had nothing to do with what I was saying. I also received 10s of the exact same messages from different girls. They weren't trying to get me to click links or buy things. Their sole purpose seemed to be to create the illusion that Tinder was full of gorgeous women who wanted me. After a while of using the app, the fake profiles dropped off, and I seemed to encounter more real people. I thought initially, that this was because they had gotten enough users to show me real people, but I've now noticed that any time I use the app in a new area, I'm flooded with fake profiles and fake messages all over again.

In short, create fake users.
"electric" is not a source of energy. Is a way to transport energy. No oil / fossil fuels => no cheap electricity either.
It's more a lesson in how you can't take a non-anonymous account and turn it anonymous. If a pseudonym has ever linked to sensitive information, you have to abandon it entirely.
I've often wondered whether the structure you describe, which is also used by law, consulting, and investment firms, could be adapted to startups. It seems like it might be a way out of the employee/founder dichotomy.

The key concept here is that of partner. I like that word, but would like to know exactly what it means in such a structure. How, besides having high status, do partners differ from non-partners? How are they compensated? What sort of equity do they get?
> You may be confusing wealth with money, which is in fact a zero-sum game. Wealth, on the other hand, can be created

So can money.

Neither wealth nor money is zero-sum.
Can anyone post the original controversy? The letter mentions it but doesn't link to it.
The lower middle classes can't own any house at all with just one wage earner.

Your second point (which I agree with) seems to imply that the US standard of living peaked in the 50's
This case strikes me as an indicator that people are seeking out things to be offended about, and that "popular news media outlets" fan the flames to increase page hits or viewer counts. I believe the term is manufactured outrage?
>it looks to me like the instructions for the recipe under discussion stops at cracking them open.

Seems like developers and open-source. There's no proven instructions on how to have a profitable career developing open source software. There's a few exceptions, but mostly it seems to require selling services, or intentionally crippling the software and using open source as a marketing scheme.
If you do a CS degree that does not involve being taught to code, and code well, then I would ask for your money back.