skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Spam prevention is not strictly a security problem, or if you choose to frame it that way it is entirely unlike most other system security challenges. Almost all spam prevention systems have some sort of secret sauce involved, otherwise spammers could train their own systems against it to discover what works. In other words, this is why most open-source security products are extremely competitive with (if not outright better than) their closed-source counterparts, but open-source spam prevention systems (with no disrespect to the people who work hard on them, because as I said, it's a hard problem) suck.
There's probably just as many people using Python as Ruby for web development nowadays. I'm not sure the dichotomy you posed really applies. Better learn both.
More importantly, XMPP has problems delivering the text-message-like experience. It's more of a live-chat protocol. If you want to receive messages when you're offline, things rapidly become a mess.
> [...] but it could have other downsides too.

Like sitting on your ass? (I like Quake, but I wouldn't pretend I play it for anything but fun.)

There's also some research that shows that RTS are the best thing for practicing multitasking and fast decision making under uncertainty.
"Facebook didn’t become Facebook by being the next Google or the next MySpace. It became the first social network that really appealed to people in a broad way and didn’t overdo it with ads."

So Facebook was totally different from Myspace, except it was exactly the same but with less ads. Gotcha.
Otherwise, someone else will probably clone it better.
If someone else acquired WhatsApp, would be the fear.
Do folks from non-US countries attend Google I/O?
Nah why not go all the way, learn Perl
Does 'do no evil' include canonical net-neutrality, or will it end up like Animal Farm: but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Why? Charge as soon as you can make money. Minimum viable product and all that.
> it was that the companies in question weren't always good at capitalising on them

There's lots of fun evidence for this - AT&T had an answering machine 1934 but shelved it for 60 years.

>AT&T firmly believed that the answering machine, and its magnetic tapes, would lead the public to abandon the telephone.

http://thinkofthat.net/2010/12/03/no-answer-how-and-why-att-...
This is wonderful. Adding the soundtrack was a nice touch.
So, in the movie The Social Messenger I hope we see a scene in which Facebook made a Final and Best offer to acquire and this guy said "No. One more billion. Because you turned me down." :-)
Bitcoin ATM Opens in Boston's South Station
Jan Koum: "People starting companies for a quick sale are a disgrace..." [2012]
I think this post now is rather appropriate http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html Imagine a world where he would of given up.
He didn't fit their needs. If he doesn't and H-1B workers do, they should get the job.
The biggest thing that jumps out at me is that the Ruby code is defining a Hash object (map or dict) and not a function.

To say a Ruby programmer would create a Hash object that uses a block instead of write a function seems plain wrong, despite how the algorithm for generating items was implemented.
Doubt that was the reason for him. He was already very established engineering leader at yahoo.
The size isn't really an issue for most desktop or server oriented distributions. Perhaps bigger issues for distros are:

- Symbol versioning: If you have a newer glibc installed when you build your packages, they'll refuse to run on older glibc, even if they don't need any of the new version's features. This makes it hard to make packages that support multiple versions of a distribution (e.g. a stable release with an older glibc and an unstable release with a newer one).

- Awkwardness of upgrading: For example Debian usually wants you to restart X and any daemons that use nss when glibc is updated. There are also atomicity issues during upgrade where there's a race window during which execing programs can fail.

On the other hand, distros are invested in a huge set of packages as well as support for third-party (often non-free) software, all of which are presently linked with glibc. I think musl is a lot more interesting right now to new and upcoming distros that are looking for a fresh start with less baggage than as a migration path for the big distros with major user/customer bases, at least in the short term. In the long term, who knows what will happen... :-)
Just curious, how does that happen? I've never found myself in a situation where PGBouncer can't handle the load but Postgres can.

I'm guessing it's a situation where you are running a large volume of very easy queries, for example primary key lookups with no joins?
Elon cannot work for someone else. He is freaking Elon!
A job is for the next few years (or so). A wife hopefully lasts you longer. And you should probably have more fun on the 20 first dates than on 20 interviews.
Like many people, I found the price staggering. However, given that WhatsApp is growing and may pass FB in active users in the next 2-3 years AND WA has a great monetization strategy... It's not crazy to think that in a few years 1B people would be paying $1 per year. Want to double revenues? How 'bout $2/year. $5? $20 in US and other first world markets, $2 in developing countries? Why not? In addition to the defensive move, this is about disrupting a multi hundred billion dollar wireless industry. I wouldn't have had the guts to do it, but I don't think Zuck is stupid.
For contrived examples this is true but these are a bit contrived.

For && vs and, by the time you hit the need to differentiate those in ruby, you'll likely be at the port of operator precedence being a thing that is understandable.

The ternary operator shouldn't even come into play for a beginner in my not so humble opinion ruby/c/c++ or not.

Instead of using the ternary, for ruby i'd be advocating more:

a = if some_truthy_operation/variable
c
else
d
end

Way more verbose sure, but then when they get the hang of that, they can start to learn when the ternary operator is useful, if even. Generally I avoid it.

For the regexp match, I'd rather show them "abc"[/[a-z]{3}/]. That makes a short leap into the === operator and all its varied uses. But to be more close you could also do /[a-z]{3}/.match("abc"), this is admittedly half a dozen of one 6 of the other.

I got nothing for the map bit, but I also know smalltalk so admittedly I'm going to be biased. :)

That said both Python and Ruby have good uses. I'm converting a bunch of my own Ruby stuff to Python for work, and the rest to good old C. So I'm biased, but generally don't give a shit. :D I'd be looking for more information on the background of the person learning and what they want to achieve from programming.

In the end, learning any language, I'll even begrudgingly include PHP in there (just picking on you guys) is a good thing.
Amazon Coins Aren’t Bitcoin; They’re Microsoft Points
The ruby code [in the linked article] is complete rubbish. In addition, the Ruby implementation is memoized while the Python example isn't. Clearly that means there is a significant performance difference. I'd like to see the memoized Python implementation in one line.
To be fair, we don't know what position he was interviewing for at Facebook.
Under that logic any app that gets enough users is going to be a thread to Facebook? That doesn't make any sense.
> Something happened in the course of evolution to make the human brain different

Not just the human brain, a great number of animals share the very same characteristics as the human brain we find ourselves closer and closer to them every single day as new researches on animal neurology and animal behavior get published. It would be very wrong to suggest that intelligence is only a human thing.
"The reality is that product/market fit is much more powerful force than programming capabilities of any single engineer." -
kkowalczyk

I'll start using this quote! May I know your full name for proper attribution? :)

Are you Kacper Kowalczyk of https://github.com/kkowalczyk ?
Doesn't matter. Pick one and learn it. What you can do in python, you can do in ruby.
It’s Snack Time in the Cosmos
Jumped around a bit, handful of companies you've probably never heard of but paid better than FB due to geography and talent shortage. Worked on a lot of fun projects for smaller and more adventurous groups that I wouldn't have ever gotten a chance to touch at a big corp like FB.

Everything from sneaking around pop-up blockers (sorry everyone) to video chat applications to real time messaging platforms to media conversion clusters to penetration testing (I use that term very lightly, but correctly... I wasn't cracking WPA or trashing stacks to pop boxes, just abusing poorly designed systems with permission and stuff with a touch of forensics and systems hardening).

I think back at the opportunity and I was devastated that I didn't make the cut, but honestly, I'm pretty happy I was left to find my own way... it's lead to a lot of great experiences over the past 7 years and I wasn't able to just slide by on resume fodder and has left me the freedom to live in MIA, NYC, and LA... cross the country via road trip multiple times (once on motorcycle!), and met a lot of very talented peers along the way. Not all of the best and brightest are in the Valley... just the chest thumpingist.
I usually don't like to neatpick, but please say speed when you mean it. Velocity is a vector, it is a speed and a trajectory. Thanks.
Unless money wasn't driving your exit. WhatsApp isn't Tesla or Spacex though.
Reverse acquisition?
X86 assembly is the real deal.
Hierarchical Temporal Memory is the closest model to the brain that I've seen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_temporal_memory). They are capable of generalized learning and excel in the same way that humans do. They are capable of abstraction, self categorization, and online learning.

There are elements of past AI models in the HTM model, however to reduce HTM's or any deep learning algorithm to a mere combination of past AI concepts overlooks the power of the right model when it is achieved. It would be like saying that Facebook is just a news feed. Sure, that's what gets most of the eyeballs, but there's a lot more there which would drastically reduce its value if not present.

What I think is most interesting is that we may find that Humans learn pretty inefficiently from the perspective of the amount of input data required over time. This may seem silly at first, but when you consider how many neurons cover the surface area of our ears and eyes and then consider the fact that it takes anywhere from 12 to 14 months for a child to speak its first word, you might start to agree with this line of thought. Also, when I consider the fact that this processing all happens in parallel even further pushes me in this direction.

Whatever the case may be, HTMs are definitely a cool area of research. For those who are interested, you should definitely check out more of Jeff Hawkins work at Numenta. They've been able to demonstrate some pretty novel things. He wrote a book back in 2006 that blew my mind. Went into deeper explanation about how HTMs could model everything from deep learning, to consciousness, creativity, and bunch of other things.
Think how many active daily users the global phone network has. And how many of those calls don't have ads injected into them.
Sure. Lots. Vipassana. Shamanic journeys. Dream yoga. Alchemy. Many teachings arise from a very small set of essential principles (we are, after all, talking about the play of Consciousness). They come in a lot of forms, appropriate for the culture and for the individual.

I guess the followup question is: what are you looking for right now?
I'm currently staying in Bangalore.

I had to join WhatsApp because most of relatives on Facebook moved on to WhatsApp and there are atleast like 6-7 groups on my WhatsApp. Friends, Office colleagues, cousins and other people.

I'm rarely seeing FB updates from my friends these days. Most of it happens on WhatsApp channels.

So its not a surprise FB bought them. Because if they don't they risk losing all users to WhatsApp, at least that's how it is here in India.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FVbyyDLzvg
Have you seen PHP?
Security through obscurity is not an invalid strategy. If the capabilities of your adversary are low (e.g., bottomfeeding spammers) and the obscurity changes often (e.g., churn in API) it can work just fine.
> Ruby: a && b # `and` is available but is generally not recommended due to operator precedence

They're low priority in both languages. I use and see others using `and` and `or` all the time. In 15 years I can't say I've blown my foot off yet.

> Ruby: a = b ? c : d

If I'm really wanting a oneliner I'll tend to write

a = if b then c else d end

You can of course spread it across a few lines:

a = if b
c
else
d
end

More typically it's constructs like:

a ||= b
a = b if c
a = b unless c

> Ruby: "abc" =~ /[a-z]{3}/

/[a-z]{3}/.match("abc")

If you prefer.
Jekyll, actually. Doesn't matter.
FCC thinks it can overturn state laws that restrict public broadband
re: learning Ruby: at the SF Ruby conference in 2012, Steven! Ragnarök gave an interesting talk called "Sugar-Free Ruby" about an object-first approach to teaching/learning Ruby. Start with methods on objects, and introduce syntactic sugar like `a + b` later.

video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNbBC2pSiVw

slides: https://speakerdeck.com/nuclearsandwich/sugar-free-ruby
Seeking Bay Area HNer: AngelList API weekend paid project
build something cool with the angellist api

one day all day down in the south bay (11am-7pm) - that's it :)

your customer will be in the room :) (real time customer development! Don't do it exactly as we say - ask us about our problem and solve it the way you think is right)

rails, django, meteor, node+angular/knockout, whatever. I'm a rails/node guy, but totally up to you

anon1@alumni.stanford.edu
I think most people who read the book know that this is far alarming news and frankly surprised more stories have not come out. A couple weeks ago, the stories came out about holding wages down for engineers with Jobs at the center.

Steve Jobs is incredible and arguably the greatest entrepreneur of all time. But he is an extreme outlier and anomaly to say the least. He got away with so much being the best. Although one could argue with the way he changed the world we live in, we're not terribly unhappy with news like this.
Back in the day, I remember using AIM for group chat with friends and instant messaging. Although I've never used Whatsapp, it seems like a mobile equivalent of AIM.
The flip side is that the value is also very ephemeral: WhatsApp has no commitments or unique selling points other than their install base. If they try to charge for the service, have a prolonged outage, etc. or a competitor ups their game, it all disappears quickly enough to raise the question of whether what's changed is actually wealth or just valuations.
Shortcut for comments regarding Apple - http://www.macrumors.com/2014/02/19/tesla-ceo-acquisition-un...
It does sound difficult to find someone who has an engineering degree, a stadium-touring band and practices ninpo.
It seems far easier to learn Ruby just by the sheer support it has from all the online coding resources like Treehouse, One Month Rails, etc. I have yet to find a similar type of course or resource for Python.

Anecdotally, it was far easier for me to get a simple web app up and running with rails than it was with django, but this has much more to do with the resources I had available to me (like the ones I mentioned earlier) that walked me through rails that I didn't have for django.
That would be interesting if Apple didn't have essentially the world's largest hedge fund. I hope these were only partnership talks as I believe a free Elon Musk is a net gain for society.
You're right, but what I listed are generally considered the most idiomatic (the ternary one will be situational though). So when a beginner is trying to read someone else's code, they're likely to see those.

But if they read some Python code that a seasoned veteran wrote, they're a lot less likely to see anything particularly confusing.

I think Ruby does generally look more elegant, but if I was a beginner again I sure as hell would have a much easier time reading Python code compared to Ruby code.
It's just one more line - wrapping the function with the memoization decorator from the stdlib:

http://docs.python.org/3/library/functools.html#functools.lr...
Is this an IOS only apps only? Can't find it on android.
What do you see as the new hotness that has replaced them?
How does javascript compare as a first language (vs python/ ruby)?
QE is most certainly responsible for the crazy SV valuations. While the Fed is printing money to solve depressions in Alabama and Illinois, places like SV, which are growing a >10% a year, are getting all capital benefits.
You don't have to transmit the power. You can manufacture energy-intensive things right there and then transmit the end products.

It's really easy to send stuff from orbit to Earth. The trick is keeping it from burning up on the way in.
IMHO, the entire point of the story is that causality has become twisted into a counterintuitive shape.

From a naive literal point of view, no, the universe above theirs is independent. Diane's hypothesis/theorem is that, because their universe is at or near a fixed point, they have in effect invented a way to have unlimited control over their own universe. While there is no causal relationship from their universe the one up the chain, the symmetry implies their actions are mirrored.

I've read some of this author's other works. He likes playing with paradoxes like this. It's a twist on causality (and free will), inventing a new way for your actions to have an impact on the universe in the absence of a traditional causal link. It's pretty damn clever.
A hunch about the benefits of Quake is fine. But, elevating that to a status of belief in such short order seems a little wacky, even if you turn out to be right.

"Onto something" is far from "got something".
Code sample 3 says, "Lists (known as arrays in other languages)", etc. Maybe a small point, but this could be confusing. Python lists are not what are usually meant by "arrays", and in fact Python provides an array module in its standard library (and there is numpy, which provides more array stuff).

Since much of the "slow" Python code out there is slow at least in part due to use of inappropriate data types, it might be best not to start beginners off by mixing these things up.
ELON MUSK: I'm Not Sure We Could've Come Back Without The Help Of Social Media
Maybe I'm not down with the kids, but I'm not understanding what any of these message apps offer over plain old fashioned email. It alerts me on my phone, it works on my computer, it sends to groups, everyone already has it, it sends photos, it stores a history of all my past communications in one place accessible from anywhere. It's not completely secure but at least you don't have to trust any foreign corporation (Facebook, WhatsApp, etc) with your private messages and can run your own server if you like.

Also what if Facebook lock your account because they don't like your name, or WhatsApp go bust and shut down in a few years time? Then you've lost everything, because it was locked into their proprietary little system. I don't understand how anyone would chose one of these as their primary method of communication.

Especially as they are all newcomers, and email was well established as what the world used to communicate before they arrived. No-one buys a phone and then decides 'Hmm shall I install email or WhatsApp'; no, you buy a phone, you set-up the email account that you've already had for 20 years, and then after that you maybe decide to install another app. This app offers nothing over email, yet you and all your friends abandon email and use the new app instead? That is some powerful marketing they must have done.
The problem of AI is that it has much more complexity than we used to think. Even best guys like Minsky have grossly underestimated the complexity, so they got stuck, and now are in a process of developing more subtle, refined theories. In some sense the story of modern AI is a story of how Minsky assigned to figure scene decomposition for robotic vision as a summer project, and now teaching Society of mind and calling for entirely different approach to what is intelligence. It is not, of course, some massively parallel recursive problem solver implemented in neurons, it is too naive view, so there is no use to search for one.) It is as complicated as actions of whole humanity with a billions of semiindependent agents.
Vim-howdoi: A Vim frontend for howdoi
The best part is most womenfolk at home, can use unlimited messaging if all they is a wifi connection and absolutely no balance on their pre paid cards.

Essentially WhatsApp is free messaging as long as you have a internet connection. And that's pretty cheap these days.
They might have just discussed an integration of Apple technology into Tesla cars. Android manufacturers are already pursuing it, and it would seem like a logical fit for Apple to partner with a company like Telsa first.
I think the game mechanics are off slightly, compared to the iOS app.

I had this layout (with some other unrelated tiles):

- - - -
- - - -
1 - - -
2 - - -

And, pressed down to combine the 1 and 2, but it wouldn't let me until the column was full of tiles to "push" them together. In the iOS app, swiping down at that point would have combined the 1 and 2 into a 3 at the bottom-left position.

I hate to nitpick though. Great job overall.

edit: Strange. I just tried again and can't reproduce that behavior now.
What was wrong with MJ?
They could just over more `premium' services for more than 1$ per year.
Wayne.
Which is precisely why a re-nationalized telecommunications provider was such a terrible, terrible idea. Google cannot install fiber in Australia even if it wanted to, because competition to the NBN is illegal. It's now 7 years since it was announced, virtually nobody has it, and private companies like Google are precluded from filling in the gap, and the local telcos have just let their existing network go to ruin because they are being paid to rip it up. A shocking outcome.
And, caveat to all of that other comment:

I heard Gregg Braden speak recently about his new book, Turning Point. I admire his skill at communicating. He is able to talk about this kind of shadow-side work without freaking people out.

He explains it like this. That there are vast changes going on right now in the world. That people are waiting for "things to get back to normal". And he gently leads the person to understanding that ... this is the new normal. And accepting that, you can adapt to the conditions that have already change. And to do that, you need to look at what is going on instead of avoiding it.

I have not started his book, though it is in my queue. The subject matter interest me as much as his communication skill. Maybe I can learn to speak in a way that won't freak people out about shadow-side work :-)
As someone about to start architecting their first reasonably sized deployment automation project, what do you think one should be using instead? (Currently planning on Chef.)
Acton is 40 years old. I wonder how much his age had to do with his rejections four years ago? At 36 he certainly would've stood out at Facebook in 2009.
Isn't Planck length just an arbitrary and abstract distance?

I was under the impression that it had no basis in the physical structure of the universe.
Nope. Nothing like that. I don't see any colors in Google. Just plain old black and white. (Or black and whatever this HN background is.)

But I sure see the McCollough colors. They won't go away!
I don't have a facebook account, but I do have my whatsapp... now I feel trapped.
Photos, videos, chats: A look at WhatsApp