skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why is Google experimenting with ferry route to get employees from San Francisco to its headquarters in Mountain View? Does this has to do something with San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee who has just proposed to charge $100,000 a year per tech companies whose commuter shuttles stop at public MUNI bus stops? This is a very interesting move. Read Mayor Ed Lee's Tech Crunch article at: http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/06/charging-tech-shuttles-for-...
When I first learned of Go I thought it had a very narrow use case. The language is basically simplified Java (or a reinterpretation of Java), and works on the same level of abstraction. It's not low-level like C/C++ or Rust, and not high-level "productive" like Clojure. It seemed like Java sans JVM, and as Java developers know, the JVM is the best thing about Java (some would say its only grace). It lacks the JVMs runtime profiling and monitoring tools, as well as the JVMs most powerful features of dynamic class loading and runtime bytecode instrumentation. Its only advantages, as I saw them, were a much reduced startup time and a lower barrier to entry for beginners; its only use case, I thought, was for writing fast command-line apps. Most people who seemed excited by Go were Python and Ruby developers who liked the speed boost and the easy set up.

Now I think Go actually has some very good use cases. While I would never dream of developing a large, complex or critical app on any platform other than the JVM, the fact that Go produces self-contained executables makes it very convenient sometimes. Fast command-line programs are actually not too narrow a use case, and Go is not useful just for those. I can see myself using it for other small web or network services as well. I still think Go is a JVM-less Java, or a Java Lite, but apparently Java Lite is a very useful thing to have.
RSA Conference speakers begin to bail, thanks to NSA
Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour
Rather than storing data structures directly in the hashmap, I would store them in an array and map the keys to array indexes.

Then the types of the hashmaps would all be the same (all map key->integer), and I could develop reusable procs for each set operation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoid
I find that every generation thinks this of the next. For example here's what the early 1800's thought of students using paper: http://i.imgur.com/Od2BB51.jpg These kinds of declaration have been going on for centuries. There will always be some people who waste their time and others that produce. You can't produce, even low brow media, without some active members of the population who have to first create it ;)
Bangalore-based Little Eye Labs is Facebook's first Indian acquisition
That's an extremely web-centric view of the world. There is more to DNS than its use in URLs. And doesn't redirecting to www. do the expected thing anyway?
We actually have studies on this. Amateur photographers have worse awareness of a scenic environment than people who just look around. And people who just look around have worse awareness than professional photographers and painters. Donald Norman talks about this in one of his books, Emotional Design IIRC. Makes sense.
Online dice games vragen strategisch doorzicht
Some of the bad I've read in the past couple months alone are bad enough that no amount of positives base on loose reviews of recent users is going to counter the few bads.
7th paragraph:

> Now I'm not calling for abuse; I'd be the first to complain if a teacher called my kids names
Those three steps are basically:

- New technology is introduced. Nobody's really heard of it or used it, so beyond a few "Look at this new thing!" articles, nobody talks about it.

- The technology gets some penetration. New users pick it up, probably because it solves some issue or irritation they have. They write about how the technology helps to deal with it, or why it's interesting; if it didn't/wasn't, they'd probably not bother using it, and would be pretty quiet about the whole thing.

- If the technology made it this far, there is an explosion in popularity as more people pick up the tools and use the technology. Typically this results in quite a few people using it in the wrong way, or because it's the current 'hot stuff' (rather than because it will solve a particular problem), or maybe picking it up a little bit too early. Lots of these people will write about how the technology sucks, or how it doesn't solve particular problems. That's fine; it's the public knowledge-gathering phase, and although there will inevitably be a lot of negativity, other people will discover the benefits, and the technology will frequently evolve to address popular concerns.

- The fourth step, that you didn't mention, is that the technology and discussion around it becomes more "mature" - it's widely-used, everyone's more-or-less aware of the pros and cons. There will be the occasional post called "X Sucks, I'm Moving to Y!" or "Why I'm still using X and not Y".

tl;dr: that's the way it goes - it takes a while for new technology to work out the kinks and for the community to understand where and how it should be used. And while that happens, they'll talk about it.
> the article is a sorely needed voice in the HN echo chamber.

> personally i'm waiting for rust

See, this seems weird to me because Go is actually a language that you can build nice things with right now. Check out coreos's etcd[1] for example.

Rust on the other hand gets a lot of adulation in this echo chamber but is so, so far from completion that you're going to be waiting like a decade or so before you can do anything networking related with it. And personally the varying clumsy degrees to do the same thing many different ways in Rust (the various boxing and unboxing and other memory handling options) are a real turn off.

Comparing Go to Java is fair, and of course Java will come out on top given its maturity, but Go offers a lot of good things. Comparing Go to Rust is not, Rust is not ready for any kind of real world use.

[1] https://github.com/coreos/etcd
How the US Government Almost Killed the Internet
Show HN: Pinegrow Web Designer, multipage editor with Bootstrap & Less
probably this: http://research.swtch.com/generic ? go had 3 options for implementing generics:

1. leave generics out : the c way (slows programmer)

2. do it at compile time: c++ way (slows compilation)

3. box/unbox everything implicitly: java way (poor perf)
Show HN: birdy - super awesome Twitter API client for Python.
"Themself" or "thine self" or "thyself" or "theirself" all sound ok. But theirself looks incorrect written down. I would use Themself if I was writing.
> Because the world is a complex place and the truth is often subjective.

This statement is misleading and ultimately false. Truth is either subjective (as you seem to believe) or objective. I believe the later.

Here is an interesting dialog on the subject. It's old but shows a point:

# IS TRUTH RELATIVE?

Protagoras:	Truth is relative. It is only a matter of opinion.

Socrates:	You mean that truth is mere subjective opinion?

Protagoras:	Exactly. What is true for you is true for you, and what is true for me, is true for me. Truth is subjective.

Socrates:	Do you really mean that? That my opinion is true by virtue of its being my opinion?

Protagoras:	Indeed I do.

Scorates:	My opinion is: Truth is absolute, not opinion, and that you, Mr. Protagoras, are absolutely in error. Since this is my opinion, then you must grant that it is true according to your philosophy.

Protagoras:	You are quite correct, Socrates.

Now imagine if we all took everyone's opinion as an absolute truth... Mathematician's have a hard time accepting that Riemman was right and still refer to his conjecture as a Hypothesis, after a trillion (or more?) 0s on the same line, it's still a hypothesis!!!
Why would I ever pay for CDN service, now that GitHub Pages provides CDN service for free? Am I missing something? We can all use Fastly for free now...
Conquering the Command Line - Free eBook
How is this different from "Google Now"? The basic premise appear to be just the same as Google now apart from the launcher grid layout. Is this Yahoo's answer to Google Now?
the CPU utilisation ... was around 370-380%! I was now totally stumped

I guess that his code allocates a huge number of objects as all input and output classes are final. The JVM's garbage collector is able to run concurrently, so I guess it's the GC that takes so much CPU. AFAIK Go uses mark-and-sweep collection which is very slow.

That would explain the unexpected difference in running time as the JVM's garbage collector is very mature and fast.
Learn to master and conquer the most valuable and useful command line tools for Unix and Linux based systems. In this book you will find not only the most useful command line tools you need to know, but also the most helpful options and flags for those tools. Conquering the Command Line isn't just a rehash of the MAN page for these tools, but rather a human-readable walk-through of these tools to make you instantly more productive in your daily development life.
as with any original content that is older than the average HN user memory threshold, which somewhere between 9 months and 3 years, there is also an old thread for it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=627476 1687 days ago | 17 comment

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1554733 1259 days ago | 81 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4607098 461 days ago | 79 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5433283 289 days ago | 17 comments

[EDIT] well, there at least 5 now, including this one.
The thing with the BBC is that they just fail to report any stories their agenda doesn't agree with or summarise other news agencies' reports after the event.
> Now I'm not calling for abuse; I'd be the first to complain if a teacher called my kids names.

No, the article explicitly creates a separation.
I think he forgot to set GOMAXPROCS.
My analogy is that the US shouldn't spy on it's parters because it is wrong and not because they may or may not get caught.
> As far as SSD, can your user tell the difference between a cache file that takes .001s vs .0001s? Probably not. For many of us, I think the more critical question is: How much does SSD improve MySQL performance?

Doesn't MySQL store cache in ram, so wouldnt more ram/$ be better?
It would be good to hear about some more concrete examples of this sort of power use (or abuse). Selling political ideas already happens (FOX news), and they don't even need to know your personal details.

I do not like my personal information being collected, I find it tacky and generally only submit details when it's absolutely necessary. But I'm struggling to see the extreme short and long term consequences of a society which submits their private data in this manner.

Your suggestions about charging more for certain customers already happens, on airline ticket websites. But it's not a dire consequence, it's a tacky, classless act by greedy shortsighted people.

Sometimes I feel like the people collecting personal details really don't have any power at all. That personal details are overvalued and simply attract funding for these companies.
Do remember that SMTP makes no guarantee of delivery - so in what way is that "the only reliable way..."?
"himself" is the technically correct word for singular reflexive when the gender is unknown
OP here: we just launched this project. Thanks in advance for your feedback.
QuickCast: 3 Minute Screencasts
To redirect to www.example.org I need a server listening at example.org. If I have www.example.org on heroku because I don't want to run a server, I suddenly need a server just for that redirect that I need to have because I don't want to run a server.
Link appears to be just advertising their product
Kindle Führer: “Mein Kampf” Tops Amazon Charts
You forget a category of people in the list of what is good. Unless it falls under the "utopia" category, there is the people that wants what mostly what we have today but durably available to a larger portion of the population.

"Brave New World" being a mainstream worry is relatively recent, 20 years ago, it was not. 20 years ago, we thought of our hedonistic society would look like Start Trek. So definitively not despicable. My theory is that it is all those indicators pointing to more misery / less good (depending if you live in the first world or outside) for our children generation is what makes people think we are living in Brave New World. (our children will study more to earn less money, work more, on a earth with less resources, less nature, harsher climate)

Anyway, the defeatist attitude of dismissing people because of their "moral high horse" is tiring too. Especially in the First World where society is definitively not representative of "the essence of humanity" the majority would impose. We enjoy Freedom and Human Rights that are not natural and as everything that has happened since 9/11 has demonstrated, fragile.

We defined freedom roughly by saying you can do whatever as long as it is no depriving others from theirs. That goes against our nature. We should maybe think of limiting pleasure to anything you can have that does not deprive the rest of the world of it.
The delightful irony of refuting an article that painstakingly makes the case that the conventional wisdom is wrong by curtly repeating the conventional wisdom.

SAT scores are mentioned exactly once in the article (well, twice, but in reference to the same finding), I have copy-pasted it for your convenience:

> When she applied the ["Grit Scale"] to incoming West Point cadets, she found that those who scored higher were less likely to drop out of the school's notoriously brutal summer boot camp known as "Beast Barracks." West Point's own measure—an index that includes SAT scores, class rank, leadership and physical aptitude—wasn't able to predict retention.
I think risk is extremely pertinent to this situation.

The (relative) silent expert to those more audibly expressing/pronouncing is also considering the outcomes of releasing information that is highly likely to be correct, and what may come of that information becoming public.

They also take into account the scenario where they may be wrong or only partly correct, and if so what are the long term problems that may result in being wrong (or even in being right - take the heliocentric model of the universe for example). Therefore they may deem the risk too high.

We're still finding out what a search engine monetised via advertising does to the world.
I think there must be a psychological equivalent to the feeling that your kids' sports teams "play to their opponents."

I would not be surprised for research to demonstrate that children perform to the expectations given them, particularly when those expectations are clear and consistent. In fact, most people thrive in environments where they understand the rules, rewards, penalties, and where those structures are evenly and consistently enforced.
So in simple terms, "professional photographers and painters have greater environment awareness than everyone else" - isn't that simply intuitive?
From 2003-2011, I worked at an .edu and until 2009 or so, the "student information system" was an old terminal-based ("green screen") application -- written in COBOL and still running on a mainframe.

There was a "data warehouse" piece of the overall system and I was often tasked with writing batch jobs to pull various data out of it. The resulting files were in either fixed-width or CSV format and so we "massaged" them a bit before writing them out to .xls files that the end-user could work with.

The purpose of most of these was to build a mailing list so that something could be sent out (via snail mail). The criteria were often along the lines of "I need a list of all <PROGRAM> students who haven't registered for the next semester" and such.

In each and every resulting data file that was downloaded after the job completed, we had to filter out records for the name "ERROR, ERROR" (last, first). I never found out why but apparently the registrar's office had for years been putting names in as "ERROR, ERROR" when it was illegible/unavailable/whatever. Thousands of these had accumulated over the couple of decades they'd been doing this.

(Side note: they really regretted it once a new upgraded system was being set up. They had to manually review each and every one of the "ERROR, ERROR" records.)
Wouldn't that mean an extra level of indirection while dereferencing?
Hm. Which of these does C# use? Which does Haskell use?
Makes no difference to me, honestly. Calls, texts, IM, and of course email all go to my inbox, and all are equally accessible.

I never answer voice calls unless they're pre-scheduled (and even then I much prefer to call than be called). The transcribed message goes in my email. 99% of the time, the ringer on my phone is off, unless there's a specific reason to have it on. Often my phone is off.

Texts go both to my phone directly, IM, and as an email.
Five simple goals for 2014
and; go isn't the best language to write everything in.

I think that's a fair conclusion for him to have drawn. He certainly wasn't hating on go.

(golang-nuts is openly hostile to any kind of criticism, so much so that there's been talk of a community code of conduct; which the community didn't want. I don't blame him.)
Front-end Ops Deck
Note to self: don't try to foist an unfamiliar language on a client without actually knowing if it will solve the problem efficiently.
This just in: oppressive totalitarian regime, having developed the widest-ranging censorship capability in human history, censors another thing
Jaime Escalante

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante

"In 1987, 27 percent of all Mexican Americans who scored 3 or higher on the calculus AP exam were students at Garfield High"

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_and_Deliver
I do quite a bit of work in Japan, and you would not believe the amount of time I spend faxing documents back and forth. I once had a service provider — who I know personally — hang up and refuse to speak to me on the phone until I had faxed in a form designating myself as a contact.
Yes, a useful one at that :)
But there's already a non-Heroku server running for that domain, i.e. the one serving DNS requests. That server can be re-purposed to do HTTP-level redirects, too, and indeed many name server operators offer that feature.
> In GB and BG, he has only one way of telling you which is the boy. In BB, he has two. Thus, four possibilities a) GB, b) BG, c) BB and he gave you the first, d) BB and he gave you the second.

With respect to only the sentence above, why is the following table incorrect?

BG 1/3
GB 1/3
BB 1/6
BB 1/6
Using Sound To Levitate Objects And Move Them Midair
I much prefer people to spend the time constructing a clear request in an email than an ad hoc phone call, especially those that are out of the blue.

If you call me, you'd better follow up with an email.

If you email me and it's urgent, you'd better follow up with a phone call.

That's all there is to it.
I suppose this means I'm not its only remaining user. Has any of you found a decent self-hosted alternative?
The Healing Power of Data – video
> Its only advantages, as I saw them, were a much reduced startup time

Even that can be solved when using one of the many native compilers available for Java.

As the OpenJDK does not have one, people tend to forget other vendors have them.
There is nothing wrong with testing golang, certainly. But Haskell is 24 years old. Hardly the new kid on the block.
Yes Linode's support is perfect, they are up 24/7 which is important because big changes need to happen while most users are asleep. It's crazy to take down a big site during peak hours. Usually it's EARLY morning when I need the most help, in that middle-of-the-night lull when traffic is low. Just opened some tickets (hours ago) and DigitalOcean is not nearly as responsive as Linode. That's something to consider before moving!
I'm been thinking about ways to get around this. I'm using macros for __FILE__ and __LINE__, but it does interfere with breakpoints.

One of my open issues is to add an ASSERT_EQ_MEMCMP function that does print out the difference, probably as a hexdump. Similarly, greatest could have something like 'ASSERT_EQ_NUM' for the cases where printing the value is meaningful, and an ASSERT_EQ_STRUCT that takes cmp and print functions. I've been thinking about it for a while, because I want to get it right before I change the API.
Does this matter that much if you version everything?

Commit in library -> successful library build, failed client build.
Commit in client -> successful library build, successful client build.

In both situations you don't really care about the intermediary broken build - you still have the previous library/client versions and can use those. Once everything is committed & fixed you have the new versions and you can upgrade.

The only problem I see if there's a long delay before the second commit. But this can be prevented by a fast CI cycle (always a good idea) and sending notifications for failures across teams (i.e. the library committer is notified
that the client build for his commit failed).
The environment you describe doesn't include "ripping people a new one" for spelling errors.

Correcting mistakes is one thing but insulting people making errors is probably harmful not helpful.
Mark, on the title it says Free ebook however going to the site there is no option for getting the book for free?
And yet a phone call can be made, and a conversation can be had in 2 minutes, which would otherwise mean a half hour or a few hours of back and forth, distracting you from other necessary work.

I like email or messaging when I want de facto notes to refer back to, or when response isn't urgent. But, with issues urgent enough for me that I feel it's worth inconveniencing someone else's time or when I don't want that conversation in my active memory for half a day (waiting on the next response), certainly that phone call is going to be made.
Hollywood studios sign up for W3C membership
Ask HN: a good bank for digital nomads?
As of a few years ago I have been living between Europe, South America and sometimes Asia. So now I'm trying to structure my assets to better suit that lifestyle in the future. I'm trying to find a good bank (somewhere) that would serve as a central hub for the bulk of my assets.

It would ideally:

- not have (too) high yearly maintenance fees

- have moderate transfer fees

- be secure

- a plus would be low/free fees on ATM withdrawals (like some of the new online banks advertise - but this is not totally necessary as this will not be my day-to-day bank)

- have a great and liberal ebanking system in place that would allow me to do all transactions online

- be moderately accessible and private when dealing with international mailing addresses

- this will not be my day-to-day bank as I use local banks for that but I'd still like to be able to react quickly if I want to invest in stock, buy bitcoin, etc.

-----

I work irregularly (am a programmer) - sometimes nothing for months, other times regular payments or sometimes large transactions for projects.

A few banks I've tried seem to treat customers with foreign mailing addresses as suspects in a crime. I'm originally from a EU country so I usually register my old/family address with an account just because its permanent I don't like changing it every few months when I move.

Had a Swiss acount at a randomly picked small local bank but they've gotten pretty stressfull (canceled my ebanking, fees grew unresonably, started stressing about foreign mailing addresses and tax declaration). Also have a US account with BoA but its a pain (high fees and no international ebanking). My account in South America has a 5% country exit tax + am not sure how safe it is.

NOTE: this is not about money laundering or tax evasion or anything like that. I want privacy because I want to (and) do these things on my own terms.