skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had no choice but to set up my computer in my dorm room at college for 4 years. By the end of the third year, my ability to sleep in that room was gone. I also work remotely and I do so from a remote area. Cities are too noisy and the few years in which I lived in SF, it drove me crazy.

This is all my way of saying what works for one person may not work for another. Which is one of the points of remote work, isn't it? To create the perfect environment for you?
I agree that Cassandra CAN be used for basically everything a RDBMS can, but to claim it can be used just as easily is a stretch (based on my experience migrating from PostgreSQL to Cassandra). It lacks many administration tools, and for data with complex, non-hierarchical relationships, data modeling is more complicated and you must do any joins yourself. Sure you can get major performance and scalability gains if you use it correctly, but you also give up being fully ACID.

As a developer, using C for all data in any complex application is going to be harder up front than using a RDBMS. From what I have heard and learned about C, though, it is less painful to use C for a highly performant/scalable database than trying to scale most or all RDBMSs. From what I have read, Mongo is also hard to scale.
Having spent 6 years with ocaml, I can honestly say I both never wrote anything where ocaml offered a benefit haskell does not, and can not even think of such a program.

You pose two questions, one of which is effectively irrelevant, and the other I believe is based on an incorrect assumption. Maybe 5% of code the evaluation strategy matters. It makes no difference whether you are adding strictness for 2% of your code or adding laziness for 2% of your code.

The performance question I think is a misconception. Do you have any evidence to suggest it is easier to write fast code in ocaml? I've never found a person who has used both languages and felt that was the case. I've only found people without haskell experience believing that via second (or third, or fiftieth) hand rumors.

Ocaml offers two things over haskell. One, imperative constructs. This matters for people making a transition to functional programming, but not for people who've finished that transition. Second, the compiler is fast. I don't mean generates fast code, ghc does that too. I mean it generates code quickly. This is an annoyance with ghc, no question.

Haskell offers a lot over ocaml. A useful standard library. Cabal and hackage. Parallelism done right, out of the box (super cheap green threads multiplexed over a pool of OS threads). Tons of libraries that don't exist in ocaml, everywhere from attoparsec and aeson, to binary and lenses, pipes-concurrency and STM. A community that is ten times the size of ocaml's.

There are good reasons it has gone from ocaml having the larger community to haskell dwarfing ocaml in community size, language usage, library availability, etc. in the last decade.
The HuffPo article misunderstood the $30 billion figure. It is provided by a company that sells a cell phone recovery app/service:

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120322005325/en/Look....

It is their estimate of how much lost and stolen phones cost Americans, not the worldwide market for stolen phones.
That evidence will never be available to be used against cops.

This was in Texas. I don't recall the exact details. My bosnian friend was racially profiled (as hispanic) by the police. He was ticketed after not coming to a full stop, then arrested because the officer incorrectly assumed that his real driver's license was fake and that he was not a legal citizen. At the precinct, he was told some racist stuff by a working officer before being put in the cell. A lawyer took up his case, asserting that the conditions leading up to his arrest were not actually legal.

What happened then? On the books, he didn't exist. He supposedly never spent a night in jail, was supposedly never arrested and taken in, the fees he paid for bail were supposedly never received or requested, the surveillance camera footage the night he was put in jail happened to be corrupted, and even if he succeeded in getting the bail money back, he'd be out at least an additional thousand for court an lawyer fees.

Needless to say, they didn't pursue the case further.
Ask PG: Audio recordings of your essays
I see that there are some audio recordings of your essays that are available for a fee. Would you be interested in having them recorded so they're available for free?

I'm not a voice actor or anything, but I was just thinking that they should available for people to listen to if they want.
No sarcasm intended; I should have said that Microsoft made significant changes to the security model in an attempt to improve their security. I personally haven't seen any hard data to suggest how effective it was.
Totally and its great to mentor someone for a little while or occasionally work on a problem together. Pair programming though is practice where two people work together all day everyday until one of them becomes batshit crazy or quits the company.
Noted.

I had participated in a rather contentious thread today and there the nesting had gone way out of hand. That and I did not want my comment to be the dominant conversation on this post.

I got downvoted here, so its likely that my within-post conversation annoyed some. Yes, I know you didn't downvote. Its also possible I came across as a conversation hijacker. That was certainly not my intent. Have to say the blog posts are strikingly well written. In fact quite surprised how a Python aficionado takes to OcaML like duck to water so quickly. (Duck typing pun narrowly avoided)
Bitbucket partial outage!
Could you explain what it is that you actually hate about Windows 8? I keep on seeing this sentiment and I just don't get it. I've been using it since it was released and it just feels like 7 with a flatter desktop and a different start menu. I get that a lot of people lost their minds when there wasn't a button that you could click to get to the start menu but since that's been added in 8.1 if you want to completely ignore the new UI you pretty much can.

Is it just the fact that things have changed that causes all the hate or is there some rational explanation that I'm completely missing? You're right the Windows Store is pretty feeble but if you hate it's easy to ignore.
in the immortal words of The Dude - you're not wrong, zed, you're just an asshole. escalating discussions into flamewars by being unnecessarily inflammatory hurts the quality of the discussion for everyone.
That's great, because "Windows on a laptop" isn't exactly a novel idea.
That's not a very coherent argument.

Ayn Rand wrote for over two decades about how Objectivism was specifically opposed to the anarchy that is at the core of libertarian belief (formed by Rothbard & Co.).

You need to read up on subjects more before you try to talk about them with authority.
Show HN: restlight: Scaffold your Node.js single page app's REST backend
But a googleOS that just connects to google services, supplimented with a few apps? I could see that making headway in small businesses.
Apple: This Is Ridiculous
I'm still working through the details at the moment, but: your rent payment depends on the previous transaction's signature. Since that was changed, it's no longer valid.

They effectively forked the sandwich payment, and your rent payment is only valid on your branch. The rent money will come back under your control because the transaction will be refused, but you'll have to make a new transaction (on top of the now-valid mutated branch) to actually pay it.
Knuth's MMIX[0] architecture also has a "hardware" stack (scare quotes because it isn't implemented in real hardware)

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMIX
I am using http://www.browserstack.com. They have really great service for what you have described.
Just a reminder, here is a Bitcoin price alert service
I'd speculate that the modern diet is responsible for more problems than obesity and poor health. Low wages for fast-food employees, increased environmental demand for disposable goods, deforestation for palm oil/cattle farms, etc.
Any idea how big this partial outage is?
They can always lie about you. Control what you have control over. If you force them to lie, maybe you can force them to lie stupidly, and that may save you some point down the line.

The point is that there is no way that talking will help you. They are trying to make a case against you.
And probably breaks some browser-based enterprise apps that are bug-dependent on IE6.
I think it's great to see North American developers reach out to their South American brethren. We spend so much time thinking about Europe and Asia that we often forget about our next door neighbors.

South America may not have such a high GDP, but they are also a lot more receptive to partnership. Europe and Asia mostly want to be left alone to do their own thing.
> and it was a necessary upgrade to properly take advantage of 64 bit computing.

Huh? I ran Windows XP x64 Edition with no problems before Vista even arrived.
I also have never done drugs, have never drank alcohol, never smoked

Go for it, it'll either make you less of a tool or cause you a life of suffering. Both sound good.
GPS pioneer warns on network’s security
Two posts in and already my favourite blog. The editorial rigour, attention to detail and depth of knowledge are outstanding.
I made this site a while ago to watch over Bitcoin prices for myself, and shared it maybe a month ago with HN.

Seeing as how prices lately have been tanking, here's a repost to hopefully help some people out while the prices are so volatile.

The service currently supports text/sms and e-mail alerts for most of the big exchanges (mtgox, bitstamp, coinbase, btce), and new users can get 20 free credits today.
They'd be there in larger numbers too with a pandemic due to availability of health care and also the closer proximity that lower-class people are forced to live near each other.

Lower-classes get fucked in greater numbers when there is any social turmoil. They are a proportionately larger group of people. I don't have any numbers to look at but I think it's pretty likely that more than 60% of the French population during the Revolution was working class or peasants...so proportionately they may have fared better, because you have to look at their numbers in the population, not the percentages from who was killed.

Anyway, the long-term social effect was (from where I'm sitting) positive.
Cool, I agree no one should use PGP servers the way I described, but you never know what people are doing out there. To do things the proper way, as you described, is difficult in practice for lots of people.

To answer the question, the point isn't to get an (email address, GPG-key) mapping. It's to get a (public-internet-identity, GPG-key) mapping. People sometimes do this today in an adhoc manner (e.g. tweeting your GPG fingerprint). We want it to be checkable by user-friendly software.
I think 'netbook' was predominant that anomaly. It was the dawn before low-cost tablets and, to its credit, created a whole new segment in low-cost computing.

Much of those segment are now diverted into iPads and low-cost Android tablets. Too bad Intel focused on 'ultrabook' instead of improving the Atom chip as fast as they could.
The new era is becoming more entrepreneur encouraged. Totally agree good employee in corporate is a completely waste of life. People just need time to transition their mind from good old 70's. There is no more evil Soviet Union, the middle class is a merit on your own, a right than a welfare. Those grown up from last century aren't used to it but will be soon.
Secret recording is illegal in 12 states, the ones that are two-party consent states. These states require all parties to know that they are being recorded.

Openly recording the police is prohibited in two states - Illinois and Massachusetts. Every other state, you have the right to record the police, as long as you do it openly.

Now, there are a few things that go along with this. You are not allowed to interfere with the investigation. So, for example, you can stand a respectful distance away and start recording. You cannot run up to the cop's face and yell "AM I BEING DETAINED?!"
This is great.

I remember the first time I watched Moon and felt like I recognised the style of the design. Then later in the film when I saw the vehicles I thought to myself "That looks like massively like Gav's design"; referring to Gavin Rothery who I'd worked with a number of years earlier at a games company called Pure Entertainment.

We both worked on a title called Lunatik, which was a futuristic space game - I did the Playstation 3D graphics engine and he worked on the concept models for the spaceships, cities, etc. Very bladerunner-esque.

When I left the company we lost touch, so it was very nice to see his name up in lights on the credits 10 years later - and to just recognise his style without knowing that he'd worked on it.
I see this issue a lot with blogs related to tracking companies (Mixpanel, for example). These companies are serving their blog CSS from the same hostname as they serve their tracking code, so Ghostery blocks it.
It looks like midas007’s comment has an answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7225851
A LOT of drivers were not available for xp 64, otherwise you are right, it was just fine.
And this comment does not grasp the issue. For practical purposes, you'd better assume there are no cops who are that good. In cop land, that would be 'saintly'
This is why, although I don't do it, I don't have a problem with folks lying on their resume in order to be that perfect fit. If you can fool an employer into hiring you (and can fake it pretty well once you're in the building) you deserve that career.
Never underestimate mob mentality. When one officer apologizes for another, its simply a case of good cop bad cop and that officer excusing themselves for the same behavior on a different day.

This is the problem with creating an underclass of criminals in the first place, it excuses vast overreach in the execution of even the simplest tasks of law enforcement, to intimidate and exert power over another, and to simply abuse.
It almost sounds like Microsoft would be better off adopting the Ubuntu model - two consumer releases supported for a shorter period followed by one long term supported Pro release. The consumer release can be priced to sell the pro one can retain today's Windows 8 Pro pricing.

The consumer release can push the boundaries in terms of features and experimentation, while the pro release can pickup stabilized Pro centric features and security updates from it.

While they are at it they can also deemphasize Metro from the Pro edition, leaving it as a mostly consumer feature.
I'm with you in this. The question is, however, how it affects the number of shares? Did anyone take A/B testing with this?
Overzealous drug laws make normally-regular people be defined as criminals. As such, they are forced into contact with other criminals. Some of these criminals break moral laws as well as legal ones.
Mutual funds and stock portfolios aren't banks.
WH Petition to block Comcast buyout of Time Warner Cable
What does this do? The mobile site has zero information, just a form to sign up.
I'm more in the camp that "functional" is just too much an umbrella term to mean much. I think it's completely fair to say that anything with light syntax for lambdas and the regular "list combinator zoo" of (map/fold/zip/unfold/scan/take) is "functional" enough for me.

All the other features are orthogonal and specialized.
Rule zero of Hacker News: never make an utterance without some appeal to an established authority.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

It's pretty obvious what they do and how they do it. If you think entrepreneurs have a lot of overlap here, I'd hate to think of what you consider being successful in business, because you'd have to either not be looking or be a sociopath. I already mentioned patent trolls as an obvious example of rent-seeking behavior here.

You're fixated on the mechanics of how a class war happens, which isn't even worth discussing because that's predicting the unknowable. Maybe you seem to think it only happens in the way you picture it in your head?

When you have a society that denies quality health care to the majority of its citizens, has a militaristic police force and imprisons large and biased proportions of its population, YOU ALREADY HAVE CLASS WAR. It's happening right now and you don't even realize it.
Definitely! And I know I'm missing out on a lot... ;)

I don't get to use C++ enough, so I haven't been digging into the depths of what it's capable of.

I mostly program for embedded computers, when I get anywhere near C or C++, so not to much incentive to go digging... :-/

I still have an old copy of "The C++ Programming Language" on my shelf - unfortunately collecting dust...

Thanks for the link! I really look forward to hearing what his thoughts are on modern programming!
Mac + iOS Outsells Windows
I spun up a VM of Windows 7 to do some browser testing and I was like, wow this OS is amazing, in comparison to Windows 8. Windows 7 is just simple and intuitive. Windows 8 is considerably busy. It makes sense why people don't want to update.
seems to be a lot of confusion here. excellent explanation of this by Ron Minnich, directly from the 9fans mailing list
http://9fans.net/archive/2014/02/75
Only when you're logged in.
The advice given for dealing with cops seems like the advice given for being in a bad area of town.

"Keep your head down, don't give them any lip. Don't say anything unless you don't have to and certainly don't diss them in any way, you'll probably be fine..."
I have filled out job applications that ask if you have ever been arrested, specifically clarifying "whether or not convicted".

Getting involved with "the system" in any way, even if you're not guilty, appears to be a red flag for some employers.
Am I correct in thinking that this would not prevent a targeted MITM where an attacker generates a "valid" cert that allows them to serve up a modified response for the Twitter and Github public key verification requests (say, providing you with an alternative public key)?
Absolutely right. War demands men of merit at the helm. When the risks of incompetence include utter annihilation, parasites are routed rapidly.

In addition, war demands investment in the most rational enterprises at the state level. The biggest of which? Science and technology (Manhattan, Apollo, etc.). There is no time or resources for consumerism and advertising. The civilization that is the most efficient, and invests most rationally, will win. Compare this with modern publicly funded research, which is receiving cut after cut and appears doomed to stagnation and decline.

Contrast a president like Eisenhower with Obama based on political platform, policies enacted, and individual merit. Absolute night and day, and a concise yet poignant case study on the decline of American society.
True. But perhaps a bump here will get people to update the information. I see that you had a list of projects that you are working on. My partner and I have a project that is on ice currently. We ran into some technical issues that were beyond our skill set, but we still have high hopes for launching. If you are interested, I'd love to talk to you more about it. It's a marketplace competitor. Email me at brer.frank at gmail.
http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2014/feb/11/florida-highway-p...

Unfortunately, there are a lot of police officers who are thugs.

It's frustrating; I personally know a few cops who are decent enough people, but they protect their own. They don't do this because they like protecting shitbags; they do it because if they don't protect everyone, they run the risk of getting their own careers ruined by bullshit accusations. The result, of course, is that the good cops get protected from bullshit, but at the cost of protecting the bad ones as well.

They are completely inflexible about it. Their attitude is, "Well, that's too bad for the poor bastards who get brutalized. I have a wife and kids to feed, and I care far more about their future than the well-being of some random guy."

So, people who violate this sort of immunity get bullied and harassed.

I understand this mindset, although I find it repulsive. I think that the only way to prevent this is to smarten the review process and make it easier to get to the bottom of complaints. This would require constant video recording and a smart Internal Review staff who can differentiate between abuse and the necessary use of force.
Cops are in a weird place. People don't like them until they need them. I work with a lot of cops and most of them are good (and yes they can occasionally get overreaching) but that generalization widens the divide between on-duty police officers and civilians. I would say if we treated them like I get treated being part time Military (hand shaken, dinners, etc) that they will be better people. You'll also see less of this.

Humans like positive situations, they like being praised, they like feeling loved and needed. They will defend the things they hold dear.
I love sks as much as the next GPG user, but this is about as clean as I'd expect from a user friendly keyserver.

Sounds like a datamining goldmine too, but what do you expect from OkCupid founders.

btw had to do it. https://i.imgflip.com/6w8mc.jpg
Way to go Adam (http://twitter.com/Adam_B_Long) for getting covered in The New Yorker!

If it is no secret: did you get in touch with them or did they seek you out? Did you have a press kit[1] ready, or was this done on the fly?

I'd also be interested to hear about the technology you're using, and how it compares to the pattern-based approach of LanguageTool, e.g.,[2].

[1] http://www.austenallred.com/the-hackers-guide-to-getting-pre...
[2] https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool/blob/master...
59.151.34.14
Seems like to have a service nefarious users can't abuse, you have to throttle cpu, memory, disk, and requests volume. That's quiet a tall order. Do any of the PAAS solutions address all four?
What I don't understand is why the music companies license their entire catalogs to the likes of Spotify and Google All Access, which is a direct replacement for buying music, but want to drive true Internet Radio like Pandora and indie stations out of business. It makes no sense.
Your message made me realize something I should have known all along.

You wrote,
> Getting people and businesses to upgrade again when they just did so in the past few years is a tougher sell. [...]Only in the past 3-4 months have the updated models from most manufacturers made it into stores ...[which serve as] reasons for people to actually want to buy a new PC.

Microsoft needs the Win8 upgrade so they can get revenue. They also needed to get new features into peoples' hands (security, new APIs including touch, etc). But the customers aren't crying out for these features, as seen by the continued demand for XP.

Apple needed the Mavericks upgrade so they could get new features (security, new APIs including tighter integration with iOS, etc). But like Microsoft's customers, Apple's customers aren't crying out for these features either.

Which is why Apple priced it for free, and was "rewarded" by huge uptake (in their much smaller installed base: according to this they are about even with Windows 8: http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share....)

I don't know what Mavericks' penetration in the Apple base is but I would guess it's still under 15% if some articles from December are to be believed). Better than Windows 8, though: how big is the Windows upgrade market vs wait-for-a-new-PC market? I'd bet at this point the Windows upgrade market is close to nil.

Since Apple makes their profits from hardware and add ons (a few apps, plus the huge iTunes ecology) they can afford to do this. Microsoft cannot.
I don't think it was a bad example. Are 911 dispatchers law enforcement officers? They seem like they're usually wrong in the advice they give.