skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looking at the actions of the Fed after the crises is only evaluating half of the situation. For example, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, hardly a libertarian group, blames the Fed and its chairmen for enabling the crisis to happen in the first place.
I'm not tremendously knowledgeable about automobiles, but in a car with an automatic transaxle, shouldn't dropping it in neutral and switching off the ignition do essentially likewise?

I ask because that's how I practice responding to uncommanded acceleration, which I've done on occasion since I first heard of the failure mode. I've done this a few times a year in each of several cars, and as far as I can tell it's had no ill effect, but if "as far as I can tell" isn't far enough then I'd like to know it.
> All of the praise here for scala can be applied, verbatim, to Java itself.

Ah, but users of plain Java cannot write verbose articles using made-up jargon that sounds very scientific and deep and conveys an aura of competence and significance about a website that could work just as well using PHP or Perl and CGI.
Loren Carpenter did pretty much this back in 1991, using an audience and Pong.

http://vimeo.com/78043173

http://kk.org/outofcontrol/ch2-b.html
I suspect most of their target audience has a dim view of Java. Also, scala's official website has the advantages over Java.

(If you're asking what Scala's advantages over Java are: less verbose to read (general lack of syntactic noise, case classes, UAP), covariance/contravariance for generics, code that's much more explicit about mutability (thanks to val/var), pattern matching, more flexible syntax (particularly for/yield as used with e.g. futures), more powerful/flexible type system (e.g. the typeclass pattern))
It looks like there are lots of implementations of this idea or there. Here's mine in 30 lines of bash:

http://dnr.im/tech/articles/mvdir/
Way to steal someone else's child. You monster.
Because Walnut Creek.
The Federal Reserve came into existence in 1913, and fractional reserve banking was absolutely being practiced in 1929.

If you're going to act all exasperated about something, at least get your facts right.
Somebody needs to solve the out-of-sight-out-of-mind problem then. The technology already exists for easy videoconferencing (Hangouts/GVC), for easy screen-sharing (VNC), for easy code collaboration (GitHub), and for easy code reviews (Rietveld/Gerrit). The problem is that this isn't enough: many of the great ideas that the big tech companies are built on came out of small informal discussions in hallways, in cubes, or over dinner. Until you can hack human nature so that people will randomly say whatever just popped into their head to the avatar sitting next to them, there will still be a strong incentive for creative companies to colocate their employees.
more than syntax, immutable functional idioms are pretty good defaults, shorter both syntactic and semantic wise
just use the ubuntu-upstart stackbrew image.. compatible with all the packages etc..
How to Run Live User Testing, Part 1: Setup
A tad of a chicken-egg dilemma there. While I can only speculate, I'd surmise that the Inuit are / were well aware of their contextual circumstance and designed accordingly, and quite likely iterated on the design.[1]

The issue I raise is a cautionary tale that when we try to use some abstract evaluation well removed from the context, the "data" can end up being non-information. Worse is when design evaluation comes with hidden cognitive bias or underlying ideology.

That is, even a valid concern / complaint of a given design my have no merit given the design context. If we take for example a vehicle, one might complain that it has a lack of cargo space or a child seat restraint. Valid complaint given a very discrete set of design contexts. To follow along the original example in the post, these otherwise valid complaints of a design are moot if the vehicle in question is an F1 automobile designed to be raced in unique circumstances with unique needs.

[1] There is also the possibility that some of the design contexts include more abstract needs such as cultural, religious, historical, aesthetic, or even the darker notions of power dynamics. To diminish the potential influence of these facets would be an ignorance in our design evaluation.

I'd encourage anyone interested in design context to read Marco Van Hout's article on the rather broken UIGarden.net site. Here's a link via the Wayback Machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/20130719161851/http://uigarden.ne...
You might want to check your dates. From wikipedia[1]:

"The Federal Reserve System (also known as the Federal Reserve, and informally as the Fed) is the central banking system of the United States. It was created on December 23, 1913, with the enactment of the Federal Reserve Act, largely in response to a series of financial panics, particularly a severe panic in 1907."

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_System
Actually Haskell is quite nice and does a better job. Practical too.
> Scala’s compiler is very sophisticated–it runs over 25 phases

Sophisticated is not the first term that comes to mind.
I have no clue how European air defense works, but I thought US and Canada have been part of Norad since the bad old days? Thus, while they're not part of a union (as far as I can tell), they share military duties in some areas.
Here's a podcast about the Therac-25 and software safety: http://disastercast.co.uk/episode-13-therac-25-and-software-...

I found it quite interesting.
It makes me very proud to be Australian when the Aussie navy puts their warships between the Japanese whaler fleet and the whales.

The implied statement is "Shoot that harpoon at us and see what happens".

So far, it's been a lot of posturing. Many hundreds of whales have been saved.
Fun with Zurl, the HTTP/WebSocket client daemon
Show HN: Snippet Repo
Icarus found you, run while you can
On Quantifying Design
Fast Web API Deployment on Windows Azure
You forgot Tipjoy (W08) and Snapjoy (S11).

Another thing YC companies love is using "hello@" for their contact email address.
Imagine that, successful artists being well grounded in the lessons of the past...
"Beeves" is a little archaic, and if you were to poll most ranchers and traders today, they'd probably use "beefs." But it's still acceptable, and it hasn't completely fallen out of usage. (Nor has referring to a cow as a "beef" fallen out of usage, especially in the livestock trade. It's convenient to refer to a cow bred for consumption as a "beef," to differentiate it from a cow bred for dairy.)
Central banking is possibly the greatest human invention since sanitation.

No, that's either packet switching, internal combustion, penicillin, or sliced bread.
How do you find a designer for personal projects?
Whether it be for pay or for just a piece for their portfolio.

I can never find a designer for various projects.
At first, I thought it was a nation created by those that speak Ladin, which would not be surprising considering the autonomous stature of the region.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladin_language
Eng: http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1154751/li-ka-shi...
But your boss isn't going to offer you the same wage in each - they will be able to offer you more Dollars than DeflataDollars after adjusting for inflation, because he needs to take into account the expected value when he's liable to trade the currency for something else, not just the relative values now. If you want to trade for things immediately (say, buy some groceries on the way home from work) you might very well prefer the Dollars. If you plan on keeping your wages under your mattress for 20 years, obviously you should prefer the DeflataDollars, but that's not what most people do.

"Any rational actor would of course choose to be paid in the currency that won't lose 97% of its value every hundred or so years."

Right, because that time horizon is totally what is relevant when I'm being paid today and turning that money into other things tomorrow.
Here are the slides if anyone is interested. I love the ParSeqViewLike trait on the 3rd slide. There are tons and tons of these Scala WTFs throughout the talk. It's really interesting.

http://www.slideshare.net/extempore/a-scala-corrections-libr...
"Refactoring a statically typed language is easier than refactoring an interpreted one ... even Python is a difficult chore that engineers shy away from because modifications are likely to create more bugs than they fix."

Well said, I think refactoring being "fun" is more important then coding being "fun" for projects that are not a piece of throw-away code (unlike data analysis for example).
Curious on the downvote -- was my question too offtopic?
Hong Kong Billionaire Li Ka-shing denies offering get-rich-quick tips online
I'd say having automatic compile-time checks and vs having to be "extra careful" + necessity for more umit tests is a world of difference.

AFAIK, Google doesn't use dynamic-typed languages for any of its projects (except where their hand was forced - they inherited the codebase in an acquisition) and they sure as hell are experienced in large-scale software development (for small to medium projects, the drawbacks of
python etc. aren't as apparent).
It turns out certain subsets of things you need to do with Dates are pretty easy. In my case all I needed was to convert a date format to another. All I wanted was something like

Date thing = new Date(someStringWithaDate,"MMM dd, yyyy");
String newDateThing = thing.convertDateFormat("yyyy-mm-dd");

and be done with it. Or at worst

Date thing = new Date(someStringWithaDate,"MMM dd, yyyy");
Date newDateThing = thing.convertDateFormat("yyyy-mm-dd");
String someStringWithaDateButFormattedLikeIWant = newDateThing.toString();

But the overwrought standard library just completely got in the way and I don't even remember how many lines of code and objects I ended up with just to do this before I said "fuck it" and did the equivalent of (with a some utilities to convert abreviated dates to numbers.

String.replaceAll("([A-Z]{3}) (\d{2}), (\d{4})","$3-$2-$1");

Of course now I'm not getting whatever date validation the Date class might offer (if it does), and I ended up using a 50 cent solution when I really needed a $1.50 solution, but the standard library only offered an overpriced $20 way that I didn't need.

The end result is that we're all poorer for it.
I just started to promote my side project[0] and I guess I am in a more or less comparable situation. I work alone and my time for this is limited.

First I focused on getting the product usable and that the documentation is somehow understandable with some code examples.
My design skills are very limited, and since I build something for a technical audience, I though that the look of my website would not matter that much.

That was until Zach from headlinr[1] made me change the layout. Since I have a more or less decent looking website I get significantly more sign-ups and the logs show that visitors take more time to explore the content.

So with this new knowledge, I would vote for nice and shiny with minimal functionality first. Get something online as soon as possible. Just to get indexed etc. but do not underestimate the rejection caused by bad design.

[0] http://template2pdf.com/

[1] http://headlinr.com/
"The ultimate point is not to have a startup, to get acquired, to make money. The ultimate point is to make something cool, something different, something technologically innovative."

The point to make money is no more selfless and noble than the point of making something technologically cool.

I think the only selfless goal is to find and solve a problem that needs a solution.
A Sochi Olympics API
Using the twitch chat for anything constructive is guaranteed to fail. pls no coperino ravioli.
much smaller - around 25k+. i gave up after becoming frustrated by the atrociously compile times. haven't used sbt .13 though but i don't expect it to solve miracles given how inherently complex the scala compiler code is. according to paul phillips, core scala committer, there are large portions of the compiler code that nobody touches because nobody understands it. and as per him this along with bunch of other limitations guarantees that you won't see huge gains in compile times unless they rewrite the whole compiler...
Windows 8 Designer Seems Unconcerned About Microsoft Response to Reddit Talk
Hi - just to be clear up front I co-authored the article. Thanks for raising this very valid point of confusion.

Let's address the issues one at a time.

1) What's the point in Local?

The goal is to give people the option to ignore the complexity involved with time zone rules. People are intuitively familiar with what these things mean. If you have a calendar on your wall above your desk: that's a LocalDate. If you have a clock on the wall: that's LocalTime. With respect to how they work in the presence of DST, they will automatically change time. For many use cases LocalDate and LocalTime is entirely suitable and people shouldn't be forced to put up with the unbearable complexity of timezones when they don't need to.

2) Why are they called Local?

As I mentioned above they represent the perspective of a clock on your wall or a calendar on your desk. They are local in this sense. I appreciate that these things might be a bit weird when you first get used to them and there was some discussion about renaming the classes during development. It was concluded that there were no better class names at the time. Furthermore if you looks at ISO 8601 [0] which is the most relevant standard to this API the same concept is also referred to as Local, Jodatime also uses the term Local.

3) Birthdays, Holidays and relative points in time

If you want to handle something like a birthday then there is a "MonthDay" class in JSR-310 which is designed for this exact purpose. It is a composite class of a month and a day and has an API consistent with the other classes in 310. If you want to handle 'relative' points in time then you might want to consider using the Duration or Period classes.

Hope that helps!

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
Ask HN: Software for Troubleshooting
Can anyone recommend any software for workflow management, specifically for troubleshooting 'something'?

I build a commercial product , and in the engineering team, I don't typically deal with customers. We have support engineers, sales engineers that DO work with live appliances and do all our up front , first level support. If they can't fix something, they escalate.

Is there any software that I can set up a workflow, or a script for them to follow before escalating to me?

chris.
My application for membership just got rejected for not making enough money.

Rich get richer, I guess. If I was in a different mood I would write a blog post in outrage.
The voting interval made the game too slow to be enjoyable, so players rebelled by spamming the start button until the creator rolled back the change.
I think moving south to Silicon Beach is a better idea.

http://www.accuweather.com/en/us/santa-monica-ca/90401/daily...
Yup, pipe() is actually a great, minimal solution. POSIX guarantees PIPE_BUF to be at least 512 bytes, so you are guaranteed atomicity for any size pointer. I think on Linux the unit of atomicity is 4096 bytes, which is a page.

Yeah, there are a million ways to use C++. To be fair, most people have their architecture forced upon them, rather than creating it from scratch. And the C++ world does have a culture of spaghetti with shared mutable state and threads. In Erlang you have the opposite culture. So I can understand the association that people make with a language, even though it's more a matter of culture.

In addition, C++ doesn't even have a thread safe queue in the STL (although I was pointed to a draft for one in the next version of C++ by a coworker). pipe() is a good solution I would use, but not portable to other OSes.
Sucking in the Seventies
have done many, obviously there's a lot of legwork with links and content, but it's not some technically groundbreaking thing or mass-mystery like it used to be. Maybe I've just gotten used to it.
"Note that the shell script must run the daemon without letting it daemonize/fork it. Usually, daemons provide a command line flag or a config file option for that."

fghack is an anti-backgrounding tool.
http://cr.yp.to/daemontools/fghack.html
US Cash is often used for Legal transactions outside the US. Basically, people often trust USD more than there local currency's. Either from inflation concerns or simply there ability to spend it outside of there home country.
Also happened to be the guy who wrote the most Scala code on the planet, and he quit Typesafe last year.
>>It is in fact a major bug that you effectively lose just by holding.

Not taking sides here, but I think it could be argued that devaluation is good because it encourages economic activity (i.e. spending) instead of mindless hoarding.

I mean, money is supposed to be a medium of transfer, not an investment/saving mechanism. We don't want people hoarding cash in a bank account. We want them to invest that cash in actual assets that can then be developed.
Sochi-mash anyone?
They do mention LXC on their site. It isn't necessary to harp on it everywhere. I don't see that people are confused about what is going on.

I thought it was clear that Docker intended to abstract some of the platform-specific details like using LXC, and focus on making a standard interface for encapsulating and managing services.

I find it misleading to talk like Docker is just LXC, or a shell script for running LXC, with no contribution of its own.
I wouldn't be surprised if they were just manually adding a header.

I've seen it done like that before, using a browser extension to add a header and then mod_rewrite to apply a special set of rules if that exists.
They only committed one sin - Greed.

It's a pretty normal human affliction, and in large I agree with you - while the effects were catastrophic - the actual act is not something that should be demonized, the people are not the problem, the system is - fixing the system is the solution, not blaming the people.

I'd go on even further and argue this kind of behavior is normal, and even healthy, and seen in any 'insider' group - I run SciFi conventions (so do nearly all my friends), and we were building a cards against humanity work-alike, many of the jokes were jibes against the attendees or the community within which we operate, no one thought anything of it, because its a cathartic way of dealing with the stresses of our hobby, in their case, its a cathartic way of dealing with the stresses of a very very stressful industry, and ribald and in poor taste it is - but as often is the case, poor taste can be quite funny.
Java's future API is inadequate - you can only block on a future or poll it, not ask to be notified when it completes, so you end up needing a thread for each future which loses a lot of the benefits.

I haven't used Qasar specifically but I did use other java extensions that add some scala features for a while (Lombok and the Checkers Framework). The thing is, once you're using those you're effectively using a different language ("extended java") with its own bugs - and the community for that language is much smaller than that for scala.
Disruption, Regulation And Regulatory Hacks. | VentureStab
So these are military or police BTRs/APCs?

I was under the impression that the military was staying out and would likely intervene on behalf of the public and not the police.
People were generally opposed because it felt like "cheating". I'm sort of on this side -- I think the "anarchy" experiment is pretty fun to watch, though I do think a "democracy" experiment would be interesting to run separately.

The stream can now vote between the two modes and it'll switch if one receives enough votes.
We've had the same experience with Scala. It's the most enjoyable language I've ever coded in. We switched away from Java for most new development a while back already. The anti-Scala rants are just confusing to us. Most of the people complaining just seem to be random non-Scala developers recycling other peoples' criticisms.
This keeps coming back to HN every n months. At this point i would expect every HN reader to fully understand that ideas are, at best, a potential starting point from which opportunities might be discovered. The vast majority of ideas anyone generates do not align with real opportunities and, therefore, would be foolish to pursue. An idea backed up by a tangible and real opportunity could very well be like finding a diamond in dirt. The value is in opportunities.

I'd rather someone come to me with an opportunity than an idea. You can throw money at an opportunity and have it multiply. Not so with ideas.

Now, to be fair, sometimes it is really hard to recognize and even quantify the opportunity. Examples abound. Facebook, eBay and Pinterest come to mind.
Discover Drive – Learn to build an application using the Google Drive API
I've only been working with Docker for a couple of months, and I find this discussion really interesting. The goal of trying to get containers to behave more like a full system across various lifecycle events is somewhat orthogonal to my own aims, which have been to get my containers as close to stateless as I can.

Like some other posters here I view containers less as a lightweight VM, and more as a process sandbox. In the context of a scalable architecture I would like a container to represent a single abstract component, which can be spun up (perhaps in response to autoscaling events), grabs its config, connects to the appropriate resources, streams its logs/events out to sinks, reads and writes files from external volumes, and runs until it faults or you shut it down.

Ideally there would be nothing inside the container at shutdown that you care about. After shutdown the container, and potentially the instance it was running on, disappear. Spinning up another one is a matter of launching a new container from a reference image.

So far, in cases where I have needed daemons running in the container, I have pointed my CMD at a launch script that starts the appropriate services, and then launches the application components, typically using supervisord. That has worked fine, but I admit to not understanding the PID1 issue well-enough up to this point.
This is the SEC trying to protect the "little guy". This is why they can only let "accredited" investors invest that have over a certain amount of money/income. If you're outraged, make sure to point your outrage at the government.
It should be noted that Bitcoin doesn't prevent fractional reserve banking; the currency is fairly irrelevant, as long as your depositors and regulations allow you to only keep a percentage of the deposits with immediate liquidity.
This is definitely one of the cases where you completely trust the other person. Like a work colleague, or very good friend.
"Ultimately though, if money were represented directly by time or something I think that would be far more ideal as it would be guaranteed to be stable."

I'm not sure what that means. Jokes about relativity aside, time doing what? If you mean individual's labor (which has been tried a few times, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithaca_Hours), then that seems unlikely to even be fungible, much less stable.
Find a designer that has already designed something. That's what I did for a webmail.

Ask him/her to use his/her work. behance & dribbble are full of skillful designers.