skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
sigh.

>> Maybe you should take your USD-tinted healthcare analytics glasses off for a while and contemplate the possibility that human lives are worth saving.

FYI - I've dedicated the last 10 years of my life to the cause of saving and improving as many lives as possible. Haven't had a paycheck for going on 4 years. Personal attacks like yours don't bother me but are frustrating because it's an example of the difficulty we face as a nation in our effort to improve our healthcare system. We all (myself included) get emotional over individual stories (e.g. Armstrong's comments over 2 lives) but have a much harder time seeing the invisible wreckage and thousands of people dying because of our distorted economic incentives.
You're just quibbling over semantics now. It's still just one "news incident" if you're prefer that lingo. And it's still a mistake for any of us to assume that we now know all about Tim Armstrong as a result.
But why should that be? How does this encourage creativity? If anything it turns sample-based music into a legal minefield.
Google play annotates and highlights apps that you or your friends have downloaded or rated. 'similar apps' is also a more modern way of surfacing content.
I think that a lot of this is a problem with jargon and explanation rather than with the concepts themselves. For a programmer the difference between abstract and concrete is really just the difference between 'something I don't yet see why I would need to use it' and 'something you've given me a good example for'.

If you want to explain monads to a software developer, call it a 'design pattern that lets you chain actions on wrapped values' rather than "an endofunctor, together with two natural transformations".
In 3.5 Years, Most Africans Will Have Smartphones
This is insane. It's like saying LibreOffice can ruin your HDD, keyboard or some other BS that they can come up with. I have a Dell XPS M1530, it is five and a half years old and I remember the speakers blowing out in 2009. I got them covered under the warranty no problem. I know I am in the minority when saying that I like Dell and their support, I have had other problems and they have had no problem fixing them. This my start to change my mind...
As someone from Russia who is recently very interesting in the whole immigration debate, I would say that very conflicting news come from EU.

Some sources, like you, claim insane crime in immigrant ghettoes, when other sources act like there is no problem.

If immigrants have high crime rate and they make a sizable portion of citizens, how come it doesn't reflect in crime statistics? Because those are still low for the EU as far as I know.

What's the mechanics behind all that, in short?
...except the internet means that bootleg albums and unauthorized samples are used more than ever.
Whatever. The continued existence of rap, which reached its peak with the album "Toys in the Attic" is something really mystifying. I suspect it has a lot to do with the ability of completely untrained, possibly even tone-deaf, "musicians" making albums whose appeal seems mostly about attitude. It's obnoxious, it's hyper-masculine, it can't be listened to quietly, etc--and everyone can do it, if they, personally, have those same attitudes. There's appeal in that.

So, what? Maybe if sampling was completely illegal, they'd have to start over by renting a clarinet and playing scales. That's a bad thing?

http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-rap-song-samples-billie...
Golang overtakes Clojure in Goggle Trends
The win screen featuring a naked woman was off-putting, they write on their website that they are hiring "Eskimos" and I guess they think that is funny or edgy and cool or something.
This is trivially untrue.

Perhaps someday machines will be able to perform comparably with humans across a range of general actions, but it certainly not the case today.
When I was 8 or so, a relative gave me a huge pink plastic box full of barbies and barbie accessories. I hadn't asked for it, and I wasn't entirely sure what to do with it, but I said thanks and tried my hand at playing with barbies, because that's what was expected of me. After that, I kept receiving dolls as gifts--plastic dolls, porcelain dolls, dolls on stands, dolls in cases. I tried playing with all of them, because that's what I was supposed to do. I never got it, and I learned that I was abnormal because I didn't really like dolls.

What we tacitly expect of kids does shape them, to an extent.
The article pretty much destroys the concept of bringing back satellites. The only other thing we actually need to bring back is information - and telemetry does that just fine.
This illustrates way better what is wrong with that piece of code: http://stackoverflow.com/a/500531/2570866

The speed shouldn't be the issue. If it is, please start using a library like Lo-Dash [1], a faster version of Underscore.js. Actually, please just do that in general so you won't make mistakes like this.

[1] http://lodash.com/
"I don't get it and I don't get why other people would enjoy it so it must all be terrible."
Sure, it might be awkward at first for girls who don't have a lot of experience in mixed-gender environments. If it's a friendly mixed-gender environment, the awkwardness wears off pretty soon. I've watched it happen.

On the other hand, "foo for women" events are high-pressure environments that put a spotlight on poor newbies. It's a way of saying "You aren't just here to learn something, you're representing women, you're here to prove something for all of us". It implies that the mainstream groups aren't safe or okay places for women to learn. Additionally, they prevent those newbie women from learning the social scripts and memes that will help them fit in with mainstream hacker culture (or even programmer culture), so they get to be total outsiders as juniors instead of as freshmen, which really sucks.
I have been playing with Comcast IPv6 at home. Being able to request a /60 is great. I can have 16 x /64 subnets on my home network. This is going to be an interesting transition for a lot of people who are used to IPv4 and NAT.

If anyone has Comcast and wants to play with IPv6, I recommend setting up a pfSense firewall/router. It has been a good learning experience.
http://www.pfsense.org
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6vT3_2PO1w
I almost posted exactly the same post as simias earlier, your post worries me a bit as you don't seem to understand there's been generations of hackers who had no internet access.

I learnt programming on my school computers in lunch times and on a graphical calculator. I really didn't have much interest in programming at home.

It almost feels like you didn't read the article, the author talks about more generic problem solving, fixing a bit of tech, building with Lego. They're the core of hacking, that's what we need to stop labeling 'boy' in children's minds.

A hacker needs to be encouraged to tinker. They honestly don't need private web access to do that. Most of my time near computers was supervized, though I didn't think of it that way at the time.

And there are a lot of people who are affected by watching people hang. I doubt any parent would allow their 12 yo access to that.
I think the main lesson here is that the App Store isn't immune to the bias that plagues most online communities, namely that suddenly popular content benefits from its high position in the system (be that a forum board or section of the App Store) and then it skyrockets as people trust the often naive equation number of users=quality. This either creates successful franchises or an endless stream of one-hit wonders that perpetuates the winner-takes-all mechanism we all have come to know. An ideal system would surface quality content while ensuring equal footing for up-and-comers and wannabe competitors. It looks to me that the answer lies in a complex ranking algorithm that makes heavy use of statistical analysis instead of a set of unproven assumptions and a devil-may-care attitude toward keeping things simple to meet the lowest expectations and nothing more.
We want to be lovers of our time
"I think they are both valid approaches."

For limited ranges of valid. If you are implementing a low performance requirement CRUD app, certainly you can become an effective programmer without knowing the low level details.

But if you want to be an engineer? Good luck. I've worked with people that didn't know the stuff behind C, and they are pretty useless as soon as performance matters, or you need to talk to hardware, or crank through a lot of numerical computations, minimize watt usage of a cellphone, app, debug complicated situations, and so on. They don't have a good mental model of the machine in their mind, and so they cannot figure out what is going on, reason about the performance of a modern chip, and so on.

There are a lot of arguments for expediency on HN. Probably it is partially justified, but I will always advocate for an engineering education, as opposed to a 'learn rails in 3 weeks and get a job' approach. Education and knowledge enables you to tackle any problem that comes your way.

So, while you can learn to be an effective debugger of a Python script (say) and so on without detailed knowledge of the machine, mastering the fundamentals will make you an effective debugger and enable you to do so much more. To stick with the python, what happens if the python implementation is buggy? There is a large subset of programmers that can not cope with that situation.

Why limit yourself? If this is going to be your career, the way you pay your mortgage, feed your kids, and so on, invest in yourself. I'm having trouble of thinking of the downside of acquiring the knowledge, but I can trivially think of the upside.
wow! that's a nice implementation. Will try to improve my physics!
In 1998, Google’s monthly data center bill was just $8,850
Maybe I'm being too harsh, but I feel like anyone who considers this a good idea isn't a sufficiently-Pythonic thinker to be writing Python anyway. Python isn't just a language--it's a culture, and one of that culture's core principles is that there should be one way to do it.
Bad/Funny Flappy Bird reviews became a meme on its own: http://www.thechocolatelabapps.com/is-twitter-the-fuel-behin...

So I don't know if it's as simple to suggest it was a pay-for-review scheme, but rather just its own thing.

Same thing happened on Amazon milk reviews:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/09milk.html
Could you elaborate more or give some references on the second and third part? I am done with the first. I seriously need some profound knowledge on second and third, which a lot of people like you talk about. I need to put a plan to get there too. Scheme to C looks fun though :-) . Where should I start first with?
I showed my son how to open the debugger and change the opening width in the pipes to make it easier. After he took a picture of a score >1000 to show his friends, he started to mess with all the other variables.

The he asked me to teach him how to make his own game.

Win.
Interestingly, the Grammy for Best Rap Album of 2013 went to Macklemore and Ryan Lewis' "The Heist," which didn't use any samples expressly to avoid legal issues, but ended up sounding much fresher and original as a result.
this one too?
http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/chris_hedges_jan_27_col...
Oye – simple WebRTC hub
While lambdas and streams (along with default methods, or traits) are certainly the most important features of Java 8, I'm particularly interested in the pluggable type systems[1].

These are pluggable, orthogonal (intersection?) types, that can even be introduced or inferred for code that has already been compiled without them. I'm not a type systems expert by any means, but I haven't seen anything like it in any other language, certainly not a mainstream one.

There are currently Java 8 type systems for nullability, immutability and more.

[1]: http://types.cs.washington.edu/checker-framework/
I can't believe someone skilled enough to do this has actually not realized why it is a colossally bad idea. Having a working compiler is just one tiny aspect of the problem. Unless there is a transparent way to interoperate with the rest of the Python ecosystem (libraries, tools), it is dead in the water.

Even then, this seems like a lot of work to overcome a non-problem, akin to developing a C++11 compiler which uses "begin" and "end" instead of braces because of some emotional attachment to Pascal. Really, if you are a programmer and the only thing stopping you from using Python to solve some problem is its indentation rules, you should stop and reevaluate your priorities.
False. Put all your bullshit math aside because that's what it is, bullshit trying to move the goalpost. The statement I made is absolutely factually true. If everyone has one or less children, the population does not grow exponentially.

We're not talking about how to model population growth, or functions, we're talking about whether every couple having one child results in exponential growth and it simply does not. If the population decreases, that is not exponential growth. An exponential result != exponential growth. You are wrong and we are done.
I think that even with parents doing their best to keep kids off computers, kids will find a way to stay on computers if it is their passion.

Probably about half the time as a 10-16 year old (after 16, my parents stopped caring about what I did or where I went at all) I was banned from computer use for various reasons. That didn't stop me though, I'd go to bed at 10pm, wake up at 2am, then use it until school.

Was four hours of sleep every night good for me? Probably not, but kids can get away with that sort of thing.

(I was also banned from having my own email address, using IRC or any sort of chat program, having my own blog... Basically my parents were deathly afraid that I would talk to any of my peers, even though they were sending me to public school. Most of my computer bans were for violations of these rules. Circumventing enforcement of these various rules was a significant driving factor in my self-education)
I clicked the link hoping to see a coffee machine that used a Bitcoin mining rig as the heat source.
Well, would you say that choice is more important than freedom of religion? The Swiss seem to think so.

In reality, you always have to make compromises. Pure democracy, in which the vox populi is total imperative must lead to isolationism in todays multi-faceted, complicated world. The best IMO best way to deal with todays world is the parlamentary democracy, where the citizens decide on the big questions and choices of direction while the technocrats try to work things out as close as possible to the stated choice of the electorate.

Picking out a tiny fragment of a big international treaty with many interested parties and rejecting that after the fact is childish.
If I had to guess:

He removed Flappy Bird from the App store so that the media would publish headlines like this, increasing attention focused to his app. Then, he has two options: republish, or sell. If he republishes his app, the media will publish another story, increasing downloads. If he chooses to sell the app, he can probably find a buyer in the dozens of offers he is presumably receiving right now (in between death threats of course).
Which is trolling in a discussion that isn't about mathematics.
Are you replying to the wrong submission? I believe there was another submission where people went through these "woe for society" hysterics. As is people may not be empathetic because motives seem curiously in contrast -- I think we're all jaded enough that we don't immediately take what people say as absolute truth.
i dig this.

the author laments the hubris and arrogance present in all societies, as if these exaggerations were bugs, and not features.

the arrogance of the leaders and the peddling of hope are there because we are all afraid, and nobody wants to admit it. he talks about the chasm of human reality and how you get burned if you get closed to it, and i agree - it makes sense. i came out burned. i was mad at the world for a while and wanted to tear the whole thing down, but i went back for a closer look because i figured there must have been something i'm missing. there is beauty at the bottom of it, and we can get through it.

there is still new land to be explored - we just can't get there by walking or sailing. the ENTIRE GALAXY awaits us if we can just get off this damned rock. let's peddle all the hope we need and beat our chests all day long; let's spread the gospel to heathen civilizations on other planets if that's what it takes for us to move out of this place and into another one. maybe we're just delaying the inevitable and the end of the galactic civilization will be that much more spectacular when it comes, but it's not as if we can go back in time to change all the "best guesses" our world was built on and the gentle lies that sustain it.

we are now heathens living on easter island. we know our civilization is built on a lie. we can either stop telling that lie and kill each other out of anger over mistakes our ancestors made doing the best they could, or we could all keep telling the lie, keep playing our assigned parts with a wink and a nod, and put fewer resources into enforcing what everybody knows is a sham story, and devote all our efforts into finding the new land we think might be out there over the great waters.

the only way through is forward. the only way out is up.
Yay. They finally caught up to C# 6 years later.

[Edit: to the haters -- where am I wrong other than that I'm making fun of your favorite language?]
> There is absolutely nothing a human can do in space that a machine can't do better, except die

I would love to hear you explain how to perform, for example, research on the effects of long-term zero-gravity on humans using only machines.

Or to take another example: I suppose it would have been possible to develop robots to repair the Hubble, but the cost of developing said robots to a point at which they can perform without failure is going to be equal - if not greater - than the cost of actually sending someone up to do the repair work in the first place.
Sure, but how do you deal with the long tail? Flappy Bird is not an app that would have surfaced until it was well on its way to becoming what it is today (or was yesterday, I guess).
I didn't say anything about Google.

And, from what I can tell, Paris Hilton's hair color is pretty consistently blond: https://www.google.com/search?q=paris+hilton+hair+color&clie...
Some of them don't have the always-on kettle. Mine requires you to pour in water in for each serving, and the Brew button heats it up at that time.
Actually, it's not inherently about fame. It has to do with whether the hackers are skilled. Pg goes into why it's difficult to compare hacker skill in one of his essays, though I forget which. But the summary is that nobody knows who the most talented hackers are, because you have to work with them to know how talented they are. Therefore fame is the only metric that makes sense in this case to derive hard evidence. Fame is a proxy for many people having recognized their talent, and the original question was about talent.
The examples kind of feel like an introductory page to coffeescript, in reverse. I think it does a great job of showing why meaningful indentation is cleaner. Now I want it for ruby :)
Some externals that had a huge influence on Flappy Bird are Vine and then a couple of huge play along YouTubers (such as "pewdiepie"). I made the analogy before that Flappy Bird is the 2 girls 1 cup of games, and while I saved myself from ever seeing that video, it became famous in reaction videos. Exactly the same thing happened with Flappy Bird, first on Vine in early January, and then as the mega-YouTubers picked it up in late January. It was likely pewdiepie who yielded the enormous uptick at the end of January.
Those were particularly sample heavy albums (Paul's boutique samples more than 100 songs), which are impossible to do today unless you're Kanye West or too underground to matter.

After Biz Markie was sued, sampling changed completely: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Upright_Music,_Ltd._v._Wa....
from __future__ import braces

File "<stdin>", line 1

SyntaxError: not a chance
Don't apologize, the flowery language was quite refreshing on a site like this, programmers are usually really poor expositors and can really make you forget how enjoyable good writing is. On this site, you usually only get conciseness without elegance or verbosity without elegance, basically rarely any elegance!
> the only way through is forward. the only way out is up.

And that is going in the quote archive. Nice :)
Why is Zuck worth $28.8 billion? Private property rights and a tremendous success. How do you know he's just going to sit on it? You don't, which null and voids your entire premise.

Spreading money out, ie redistribution of previously existing funds through service based consumption industries, is a very mediocre example of "keeping the economy going." Production is what bolsters an economy, not consumption. The faltering US economy has been demonstrating how that works in practice for decades, while China's production-centric economy demonstrated the exact opposite (and the same principle that the US economy was originally built on: production creates wealth, consumption destroys wealth, which is easy to deduce logically).

And sitting on wealth is a tremendously benevolent thing: it removes that purchasing power from circulation, boosting the net purchasing power of every other person holding, for example, dollars. If Zuck puts his $28.8 billion in a bank account, it does two wonderful things for the economy: it becomes available to be lent out by the bank in question, to help fund businesses or similar, and it temporarily removes $28.8 billion worth of dollars from the economy, increasing what other people's dollars can buy.
Under those terms sample-based music cannot exist, so you are de facto against sample-based music. I, and many others, disagree.
To take your idea one step further: because it's so costly to get stuff into space, the less we come back with the better. The astronauts can come back, but once they launch a bunch of infrastructure, tools, etc into space those should stay there and remain usable. The ISS is a good example of this concept
I would've thought most non-developers would find a developer and ask them to partner or quote? Or try Wufoo or Weebly or something like that.
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