skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Boy am I glad I added LuvvieScript (Erlang dialect) to it last week. Its sits a bit lonely, the last transpile-to-javascript language to come in. Robert Virding of Lisp-Flavoured-Erlang pointed out that once I get it working all the other compile-to-Erlang languages (Elixir, LFE, Joxa) will also run in the browser (so no pressure then).
Agree with all the above except the red light camera thing. Running red lights has a non-zero risk of killing someone and while I can construct a scenario where my bad parking kills someone, its pretty unlikely.
The Seven Stages of the Programmer (2007)
"I've always thought that government shouldn't benefit from fines or seized property. I'm not sure what a good solution is. Perhaps they should take the money from fines and just light it on fire."

In the case of parking violations, it could go towards directly subsidizing the cost of legal parking -- building new structures, etc. That way, you're not creating a perverse incentive of people directly benefitting from the fines they issue.
Agreed.

I've always wondered how differently municipalities would behave were the fines forbidden from funding operations. For example, what if all fines had to be paid to a trust, and only the interest from the trust may be used for capital projects? Then only taxes could be used to pay for operations. At the federal level this change wouldn't make a big difference, but at the local level it would affect 50% of some budgets.

I imagine a lot of what seems like frivolous ticketing would shift towards something else.

Edit: @stinkytaco -- Agreed. Maybe frivolous tickets would be replaced with frivolous taxes? The money does have to come from somewhere, and I agree that the vast majority of civil servants are just enforcing otherwise reasonable laws :) Still a fun thought experiment.
In Tokyo, trucks are only allowed to unload during the nighttime. The Japanese attitude toward government regulation (and staying up late for social obligations, etc) is quite different, for better or for worse.
Indeed. His newsletter is chockfull of great content.
There's also a commercial product called Quant Alea (targeted at the financial market) that gives you CUDA on F#, including live Excel adaptors.
"Calling the CudaSharp.Translate method reads the CIL, translates to LLVM IR"

Does it open a door to transpiling C# to asm.js (sorry for off-topic)?
> Running red lights has a non-zero risk of killing someone and while I can construct a scenario where my bad parking kills someone, its pretty unlikely.

Most of the folks getting red light tickets are getting them from rolling forwards at 1mph while they look for oncoming traffic, though.
As someone who works for local government, I think you are over thinking "heavily incentivized". Governments are heavily incentivized to respond to political whims. It's the reason NYC has free street parking and that North Dakota has no parking meters, despite some cities desperately needing them. The fact that it's so easy to be released from a parking ticket is proof that this isn't some cash cow localities are sitting on.

I frankly see no problem with citizens benefiting from people who don't think parking laws should apply to them through the increased services and lower taxes gained by parking revenue.
In which case someone running red lights should have their license to drive revoked to a certain extent, e.g. "run three red lights and you will lose your privilege to drive for five years." or something like that.

This will go far more towards curtailing people running red lights than the existing "pay $100 and go consequence-free" system.
Agreed that no language/framework should be the default. Best tool for the job and all that.
Undo button is awesome.

More web apps need an undo button.
I have never quite understood the problem with speed traffic cameras. There's a problem if they're set too close to the speed limit for that road, but other than that they only catch people committing a criminal offence. The problem there is not the speed camera, it is either an inappropriate limit on a particular stretch of road or the speed limit law in total.

In England speed cameras have gone through a few weird changes. The first is that they must only be put up in accident blackspots. The second, following from the first, is that the cameras must be highly visible.

So now instead of grey cameras installed on many roads helping keep all drivers under the speed limit we have a few very visible cameras in known locations that many drivers can slow down for, but driving fast at all other times.

Frankly, anyone getting caught by a UK camera deserves the fine.
As someone who prefers high-DPI screens for workflow management across programs (spreadsheets, web layout, graphic design, etc.), this scaling problem in programs is a frequent frustration.

Particularly working with media (DSLR images or 1080p video), it is difficult to scale GUI to a readable level while viewing the media itself at an un-scaled 1:1 pixel level. Do any editing suites for photo/video do this well? I'm talking about an un-scaled video window with a GUI that scales/wraps to an arbitrary window/screen size...
Does it do logging in to websites then fetching?
Do you plan to add scripting to it?
I thought to myself oh boy yet another web scraper as a service but got surprised. I haven't been this impressed with a product video since Dropbox.
Linkbait trash.

"Don't do this thing everybody says you should do. But I do and I like it."
tried gotoMeeting?
Really sleek interface, and looks like it could be extremely useful (I just spent a few hours cranking out Nokogiri this morning).

Oh, typo: "Notice that toolbar at the toop of the screen?"
I can’t help but lead with “ego” and “legacy” because the entire ability to create something from nothing (programming) and to get disproportionally rewarded for doing so (programming salaries) comes along with more than a touch of blind privilege.

#Fail

http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/11/03/software-engi...

Programmers are well-compensated compared to most people outside of the 1%, but this idea that we're this overpaid class of people is ludicrous. Look at the Bay Area: there's immense value being created entirely by some of the world's top programmers, most of whom can't even afford to buy a house there.

We make enough money that no one should pity us, but the general payoff we get is on the low side of fair, especially in VC-istan where the upside is mostly hogged while the downside risks (damaged careers, sudden firings, constant reorgs, rapid obsolescence of skills) are externalized to the engineers, who are almost trained to personalize their failures amid the dysfunctional institutional miasma (marginal, poorly-managed companies) the VCs have created.

Even if it were true, it would be against our interest to say that we're an overpaid, entitled class. The fact that it's not true makes it even more ridiculous when I hear people say it.
I like what you've done. I hope to see you take it all the way through. Nice job!
>I don't understand calling him a "vile idiot" is so terrible.

Then you are a vile idiot.
I am so glad that this comment is at the top!

Some other points - std.dev shows up in nature and is easier to understand, and analyze, simply because variances from independent sources add up. That's why something called ANOVA exists.

In OLS regression, we minimize the std. dev. of the error, not the MAD. (It is not because statisticians "thought" std. dev is actually MAD, it's because minimizing std. dev or square error has very nice properties that we use it even though the solution to MAD minimization is also known.)

Lastly, I don't follow who he proposes to be using MAD - if he decrees statisticians and physicists should still use Std. Dev?

Often it is that I find these articles, and I let them pass by. But sometimes, they have a potential to come back - and I stand a chance to be quoted this article, by someone else, who I then have to drain my energy to make the point that it's not really worth reporting MAD from now on.
Hacker News Enhancement Suite (Chrome Extension)
Taxes would be higher, for one. Instead of using that revenue, they would reduce services or raise taxes. When a city department draws up its budget for the year, one of the things they need to account for is expected revenue. Budgets are set based on that revenue. If that revenue were not there, something would have to give.

It's not like they are walking into your driveway and giving you a ticket. People who get tickets are parked illegally. Those who are not are welcome to challenge the ticket and not pay it.
Using a high-level mainstream language to increase math calculations performance in an affordable way.
great idea. i'll have to keep this in mind for future projects.
In some cases, but even in those cases, only to a limited extent. Is winning the lottery is a function of hard work and preparedness?
Can’t believe how long this list is. Would be great to have some kind of maturity rating system for each item.
Still waiting to see a red-light camera that physically stops the car from entering the intersection on red and killing someone.

If red light cameras were there for safety, they would ding your driving record, not just be monetary fines.
The problem with red light cameras that the OP is referring to is the fact that red-light cameras aren't pointed at the straight-through lanes, where running a red light would potentially cause a fatal T-bone accident. Instead, they're pointed at right turn lanes, where they're more likely to make money from people who didn't stop 100% when performing a right-on-red.
This looks pretty cool -- would love a version of it that didn't modify the design. (Apart from the necessary additions to make it work)
Awesome, thanks for the kind words. And for catching that typo, will fix that now
Disney is the example, which is a big company, and big companies are evil right?

No, just a few :) My problem with Disney is that in protecting their own interests, they also extended copyright on tons of other people's works as well. http://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2014/pre-1976 I believe the original creator, big or small, is not as important as the rest of the people in society. If big corporations make most of the money from derivative works, that doesn't prevent other people from making their own as well. But copyright means there is a state-granted monopoly on nearly all creative works.

If you have a problem with Disney... then your problem is with the system that allows such things.

How would you "fix the system" so that only certain people get a say? Disney can lobby if they want, I just want them to lobby for different things.
>I was establishing that there are plenty of people who don't really realize there are other distributions.

Something I never contested.

From Glyptodon:

>>"This is std dev. This is how you compute it. Make sure you put it your tables and report."

>>it wasn't always a sensible thing to be asked to calculate but was instead just an instinctive requirement.

I hate to break it to you, but this is how rote mathematics is taught. You can't communicate concepts purely, and hammering instinctive math is better than no math at all.

To reiterate, there's nothing wrong with the normal distribution. We're not about to retire addition or subtraction just because there are "plenty of people who don't really realize" there's more to math.

>You seem to be having some trouble reading what I'm writing, rather than what you think I should be writing.

Sure whatever, same to you.
Another way to handle this is to NOT hire teams, but hire independents. That's what I do on oDesk, to ensure the person you hired is the one doing the work.
http://blog.esurance.com/are-red-light-cameras-actually-caus...
“Dead Man Walking” Walks: COO Henrique De Castro Out at Yahoo
What about some navigation tools there?

Looks pretty good, but it does not really replace my scrappers. Maybe some of them...
The problem with being a programmer and learning category theory is two-fold.

First, category theory is very abstract. Indeed, mathematicians often jokingly refer to category theory as "abstract nonsense." The story goes that Norman Steenrod, one of the creators of category theory, coined this term himself. So, category theory can be abstract even for mathematicians.

Second, the "stuff" that category theory was built to abstract is highly mathematical and foreign to virtually every programmer who doesn't have a math background. What's worse, the bits of category theory that Haskell uses most frequently are typically not the bits of category theory that mathematicians use most frequently.

When you put these together, it's very hard to connect the dots between "category theory", "category theory as Haskell uses it," and "Haskell as a typical Haskell programmer uses it." To build up to the bits of category theory that Haskell uses requires understanding things like categories, morphisms, functors, adjoint functors, natural transformations, adjunctions, and commutative diagrams, to name seven. Trying to understand these without understanding their (inherently mathematical) motivations would be a tiny nightmare — they'd feel like a bunch of disjoint facts and diagrams that are supposed to mean who-knows-what.

And even if you get there, the categorial nature of monads in Haskell is not exactly apparent on the surface. Haskell exposes more programmer-friendly interfaces like "bind" that take some effort to translate into the language of category theory.

A major motivator in the development of category theory, for example, was as a tool to explore the relationship between topological spaces and groups, a field of mathematics called algebraic topology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebraic_topology).
Yeah, I'm not the biggest fan of the design change either.
> I really, really wish all the libertarians would get off HN and move to Somalia or some other place with no functioning government where they could finally be happy.

That's harsh. Most libertarians aren't anarchists...
Was it first observed and reported in these countries because they have socialized healthcare?
A cool idea, but cash-strapped local governments will find ways to get around this if it ever becomes popular. There are already jurisdictions where you have to pay your ticket before you can appeal it, and others where appeals cost money.
>Tickets as a revenue mechanism is a social ill, full stop

I never buy an argument that is so simple. Tickets are a revenue source and that keeps taxes lower on the backs of people who flaunt the law. If the alternative is New York where parking is such a cluster it's an impediment to business, I think I might take the corruption. It's a far more nuanced problem than you're making it.

Political oversight of revenue sources is necessary, yes, but to say they are an unmitigated bad is to be ignorant of most local budget processes.
http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2011/nov/11/red-light-cam-vendo...

TL;DR - One particular city stopped issuing violations when the camera caught someone turning right on red with a 'rolling stop' because those don't really affect accident rate, revenue drops by 90%, the maker of the cameras sues the city. In other words, abject evidence that the makers and marketers of these cameras only care about revenue.
I'm normally a bit worried when a thread quickly fills up with praise, but this looks very nice.

It's something I have thought about, as I'm sure many people who have done any amount of scraping have, but never went forward and tried to implement. The landing page with video up top and in-line demo is a pretty slick presentation of the solution you came up with. Good job.
It's easy to avoid being ticketed by an incompetent/corrupt parking authority by simply not living in the city they're employed in. You can even keep that up for millennia! That doesn't mean they never give out unjust tickets to the people that do live there.
re: nav tools -- you mean the ability to crawl multiple pages?
With such a great number of people around me dabbling in Category Theory, I'm not sure it's worthwhile anyway. I don't like crowded areas. Maybe learn something useful but less hot - cryptography perhaps?
>Has such a scenario ever effectively protected citizens from government in the real world?

Of course it has, unless you believe that all of our rights in the U.S. are a sham, and are routinely violated in private by our government. No, it's not perfect and it never will be as long as humans are involved. But, there have to be definitions of right and wrong with associated penalties--in other words, laws.

>well that's definitional, isn't it?

That's my point. These things still exist. The fact that we continue to battle one-off hackers, groups, etc. and frequently lose should give us pause to consider whether this is really the cat-and-mouse posture we want to assume with the U.S. government.

>It's hardly a reason to give up on trying to protect communications from "big brother".

I don't have anything against taking prudent measures to protect our privacy in general. But, this idea that technical solutions will ultimately protect us from "big brother" is pure folly. Without the law on our side, we will lose.
Google's plot to take over your digital life
You will find example here:
http://www-stat.wharton.upenn.edu/~steele/Courses/434/434Con...

There is relatively simple, yet illustrative problem described on the first page. The solution is on the second page. Try to solve it w/o looking the solution.
> So, sure, a fire department that services your neighborhood is great, but you probably wouldn't want to pay for one that doesn't service your neighborhood.

Except we do pay them. I live in a fairly well off area in middle Georgia (by non-metro Atlanta standards at least). But we have a couple neighboring counties that, left to their own devices, wouldn't be able to afford much in the way of a fire department (median income drops by $10-20k, populations also lower so they can't make up the taxes in aggregate). Our state taxes get partially redistributed to permit those poorer counties/cities to have an essential service. (Note: I know that the state spends on fire, my brief search did not reveal a county-by-county breakdown)
I've never heard of asm.js before, but doing a bit of googling looks like it's sort of like an LLVM backend.

Theoretically, yes. However, that translation from CIL to LLVM IR isn't the easiest thing in the world. Right now I'm only supporting a subset of the instructions that roughly correspond to the things available on the GPU, and adding support for the entire C# language is an extreme task. There's a reason there's a huge team at MS dedicated to writing the JIT for .net.

But yes, it would be possible, it would just be a lot of work and probably wouldn't support much of C#.
It's not really Appendable though, because e.g. you can write a Monoid instance for various number-y things like Sum and Product.
Google Play Movies & TV on the App Store on iTunes
But "Appendable" is a terrible way to describe what a monoid is. Some of the really cool tricks in the way abstractions in Haskell match mathematical notions come from extending the abstractions beyond what you would expect. For example, integers under sum are monoids; naturals under the maximum operation too. And so is the "over" operator from computer graphics. All of these find applicability as general monoids in Haskell, but you'd have a hard time calling them "Appendable". All of these just need a binary operation that's associative and with an identity element.

The same thing happens for functors and monads: their use come from the properties they respect. And if you accept that abstractions will be defined as a set, some operations, and some algebraic laws respected by those operations, well, then, you arrived at abstract algebra, and you might as well use the right terms.
Replacing The User Story With The Job Story
Looks awesome, however I keep getting errors and 404s. Could this be an issue on my end (seems to be working for others) or just HN making the servers beg for mercy?
I'm not sure about that, but there have been complaints in some jurisdictions that it creates an incentive to shorten yellow lights, thus catching people who barely missed getting through the intersection in time. To me, just missing a yellow light feels like a far less serious crime than blowing a light that has been red for a while, but I guess the real issue there is the yellow light is timed incorrectly.
This looks really slick. What happens if a website you're scraping changes its design? Do you respect robots.txt?
The Online Avengers: Are antibullying activists the saviors of the Internet?
This is fascinating! Thanks everyone for answering.
How usable is Android without a continual involvement with Google? If you have to be involved with Google, there's no point.
That's a very dishonest summary of the article. What he's actually saying is this:

"Don't do this thing everybody says you should do, except if you're actually interested in the math."
Very cool, and I like that the link is your announcement page running inside of the demo. Really drives home the idea.

That said, it looks like it can't do media right now. I would love it if it could at least give me a url for images/other media.
One-Man Juggernaut Viral Nova Is Up For Sale
It's a daily blog post that rounds up some of the more popular .NET related posts around the web: http://blog.cwa.me.uk/
Running a red light is a moving violation that will result in points on your license and eventually the suspension of your license in many (most?) states.
Ask HN: startup customer support - Zendesk vs Jira
I'm hoping the HN community can help me here with a debate I am having with my co-founder.

When I started our startup (before he joined me) I set up Zendesk as our customer support channel - partly because it's one of those companies that I've always admired and really wanted an excuse to use.

However, my co-founder has more experience with Jira and want to replace Zendesk with Jira. (He is technical, whereas I am non-technical).

We already run our dev tickets through Jira, and I know that Zendesk allows Jira integration, but he still doesn't see the point in having Zendesk in the first place.

We are essentially a B2B SaaS product. At the moment CS is low-level, but we expect it to increase once we start getting traction.

Anyone got experience of both of them as a CS channel? Anyone used the Zendesk Jira integration? Any arguments for one but not the other?
I can see why folks would be opposed to this type of software. I'm not a fan of it either except for the use during the initial interviews and reviewing work. After the contractor gains my trust I never check the screen logs and half (if not more) of my contractors do not not even use the software. They enter time as "manual".
No event in NYC?
I agree that the commute creates a healthy firewall between work and personal life, this is why I recommend remote workers to find a coworking space to commute to.

Not only you get a clean separation between "home" and "office", but you also can socialize and have colleagues to go with to lunch. And you still have all the advantages of remote, because if you feel like working from home rather than the coworking space one day (or from a different country for a few weeks) it doesn't make any difference for the people you work with.
Some people don't mind it, but others (myself included) find it annoying even for things like scrolling, moving the mouse, etc. Also I suspect many (most?) of us at least occasionally game on our development machines...
I don't know if I can properly distinguish the difference between programmers being overpaid and the rest of humanity being underpaid.

> Even if it were true, it would be against our interest to say that we're an overpaid, entitled class.

Not everything that's true or right has to be in our interest.
I believe Stanford does something similar (as well as forces you to install Sophos bloatware)
This shows us how useful JS really is.