skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think there are interesting fundamental objections a lot of people seem to have.

Labour laws and conventions almost assume people do not have a choice in their place of employment. That's why a barman's right to a smoke free workplace is more recognized than a patron's. With that in mind I think people feel that employment needs to be accessible to everyone and that this is specifically designed for young singles.

There is also an objection to the cultish nature of this, the opposite of work-life balance. If an employer controls your work life and your home life… I think that's what rayiner is objecting to.

Think about it this way. In one case you have a high priced escort who takes on a select few clients and earns like a star stockbroker. On the other you have a lower end prostitute earning less, in worse conditions and probably and with all the associated social problems of prostitution. To many, they are fundamentally the same thing because being a hooker is the important part, not the consequences of being a hooker.

I'm glad to see experimentation like this. I think if some people really like it, that might outweigh the other cases where people dislike it. In the midst of such a demand for programmers, they should be able to leave.
Think a few steps further down these lines and you'll be able to separate the people worrying about "teaching everyone to code" into evil (companies looking for cheap labor) and stupid (people thinking there are problems that need solving where there aren't any and it is "solutions" that breed problems, in this case a surplus of professionals in one area at the expense of other areas and the workers who've needlessly entered this one area.)

Or maybe self-serving and naive/idealistic would be better terms. But you get the idea.

Indeed any consistent argument in favor of motivating people to program would at least mention aging programmers and no such mention is to be found, or at least I never noticed it.
Came to the comments to say this. Glad to see I'm not the only one thinking it.
There is something fishy about the whole story. Like he's in the hype business rather than the renting business. I have no data either way, but it looks like he's building a "How you can be a guru too" resume.
> MRI devices are handheld and available

Really? Did you mean NMR?

edit: found this, https://pines.berkeley.edu/research/optical_detection which, although not yet handheld MR (imaging), could be quite a big advance.
Start-ups have been hot-housing like this for years. I have friends who went through YC who did it. PG even suggested in one of his essays "Ever notice how much easier it is to hack at home than at work? So why not make work more like home?" [1]

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html

This is just a scaled-up version of what has already existed for years. The reason it's not more common is because it's logistically difficult to organise. I doubt that difficulty will suddenly decrease. The majority of people will always have families or different lifestyle preferences.

So I'm doubtful that society will be "dragged down" to a point where this is the social norm.

Hence, I think that the opprobrium and derision in this thread is stronger than it needs to be.
Also, there is somewhat of a support for transactional operations - you can declare a queue as transactional - which will return the message to the queue if the client fails.

However, there is no concept of poison queue - or integration with TransactionScope.
The problem with Prolog is that to get reasonably performant code at all you have to understand the underlying unification algorithm and manipulate it using cuts to limit backtracking. This means that you have to break the core abstractions of the language in order to do anything, which defeats the purpose of logic programming.

Functional programming in Haskell makes it fairly easy to write fast code, though Haskell in particular is tricky to reason about space-wise (due to laziness).
If there's one thing I can say about my invoicing app, it's that it's not cool enough.
Thanks for clarifying. And, just to be clear, I'm a big fan of Octave! I used it extensively in my last project, and it worked great.
This is flawed in its effects. While it may result in more coders, they will be concentrated in the areas with the available money to pay them more. I'd argue that this is very similar to what we are doing already. Programming is chasing the money and not the most pressing problems.
I love the presentation.

If I can be a complete jerk, but improvement is based on feedback, etc., a couple of modifications:

* edit the lower values (2% or less, especially at the center) to reflect unlikely but possible events: most people (rightfully) assume that 0% means: not possible, as in, against the laws of nature. Very unlikely is more 0.1 or 0.01%; it’s a huge hassle, but from experience those are worth all the days spent on that -- I've done it enough times in LaTeX, R and D3.js to know…

* use the team colors for the tone; it's cheesy, but fans would love that;

* use the likelihood to reach that point as an opacity factor: opacity is a fairly intuitive way of expressing something.

Finally, if you want newspapers to re-use it, make version with a black and white background. Yes, I should do all that myself, rather than comment… Yes, it would be easier for you all to comment before I gather the courage and try.
> "the one principle was that waging war for territorial gain is no longer acceptable."

Why is this the only one principle that is relevant? Doesn't grabbing natural resources & other assets [1] constitute as a kind of territorial gain? Why is anything UN related relevant now when it wasn't relevant when the United States was invading Iraq?

>"But actually invading a country which doesn't threaten you and annexing part of its territory? Didn't happen after 1945."

At least the first part of this statement is factually incorrect. I can't think of how Iraq that is nowhere close to the United States was a threat to it. Doesn't destroying an independent country's government and installing your own chosen leaders count as some kind of territorial grab? Sure that isn't the definition of annexing, but if I'm ruling your country and calling it by its old name, what is the difference?

[1] O&G in Iraq :: most lucrative contracts to American O&G giants. Similar for some other industries in the country.
And why do we need digital literacy any more than machine gun literacy or brain surgery literacy or anything like that? Except Alan Kay, everyone knows perfectly well how useless programming is to anyone but the professional programmer.
So we're going to be enlightened enough to elect an AI president, but we're going to be stuck with our current model of government?
Uhh, what? Stack ranking is terrible and I'm glad MS got rid of it, but how does it justify leaking code in retaliation?

How does it 'absolve him enough'? That's a crazy moral framework.
I read that too. I wonder if you waive that privacy as part of your employment agreement?
In order to avoid confusion, I feel it necessary to point out that it is "Joe Gratz, a San Francisco-based patent lawyer who is representing Twitter in a patent dispute" who said the above quote and not the President of the United States.

While I'm sure that every member of HackerNews would read the article first, clarification may help our visitors who decide to skim the comments =)
And the free E-meter is not to be sniffed at. Those things are pricey.
In case you hadn't heard this rant before, I happen to agree with it ;-)

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
A more in-depth look from the Communications of the ACM, by Alfred Spector, Peter Norvig and Slav Petrov, "Google's Hybrid Approach to Research": http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2012/7/151226-googles-hybrid-a...
AirBnb guests host sex party 'freak fest' in comedians apartment
> I honestly think Github is a much higher quality shop: do one thing and do it extremely well.

You're saying this because you haven't heard about or used atom.io ;)
Maldives first Hackathon
'Eloquent Javascript' (http://eloquentjavascript.net/) and
'Learning JavaScript Design Patterns' (http://addyosmani.com/resources/essentialjsdesignpatterns/bo...) are the best resources so far.
I think that all this "get people to code" movement is bullshit. If you like programming you are going to do it no matter what. For some years I was without a computer, but I still managed to program in my smartphone. I will always like programming regardless of the outcome. If one day I become successful because of this great. If not at least I lived my life the way I like.
That's marvellous - thanks for posting :)
It doesn't seem possible that all the people live in the house, I think they might be glossing that over a bit. Although their jobs page for open contracts it says "food and accommodation are included" haha.
This is a big strategic question. Do you want researchers closer to the market, paid by the person whose P&L they could impact? Or further away, so they can think longer term?

Other companies go through this a lot. Procter & Gamble used to have centralized research. To improve time to market, they decentralized research, and had them report to business unit heads. This was great for singles, but when they wanted more home runs and cross-category innovation, they decentralized again.

One can look at Xerox PARC as the penultimate example of the dangers of isolated innovation labs. They created the technology that everyone else monetized. AT&T struggled with this somewhat too.
Congress has much more freedom/power to pass laws limiting the operation of the Executive than it has over private activities.

This is part of the reason all sorts of government surveillance is structured as private companies that curate data with the goal of providing it to the Government. Companies are much more free to generate whatever databases they like, however they want. Government use then falls under the vague category of accessing "business records" which Congress ultimately doesn't seem to regulate much (except perhaps for medical records and wiretapping).
I think giving them a million dollars to start and teaching them to work gives them a better-than-average chance to avoid "bad luck." Doing nothing at all with the money except living on the interest would give them a middle class salary.
Twitter’s latest experiment hints that it will remove  replies from its service
It's broken in Firefox, FF just starts downloading random named PDFs and those downloads never finish.

Chrome displays the PDF inline correctly.
Malaysian airplane is not missing Its exactly where somebody designed it to be
Flappy Bird Flaps No More
Some of these things are covered on the comparison page I did at http://www.etalabs.net/compare_libcs.html

In regards to fts.h, the version in glibc is not even usable because it only works in 32-bit off_t mode, and stat() randomly fails in this mode due to modern inode numbers being 64-bit. See the recent thread on the glibc mailing list: https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2014-03/msg00408.html and the bug tracker issue linked.

At this point both musl and glibc only cover a very small portion of C11 additions. glibc has a GSoC project proposal (with 3+ students interested in it) to add C11 threads, which is one of the big missing areas. We've been holding off on doing so in musl in an interest of making sure we do it in a way that's ABI-compatible with glibc, so we'll probably add C11 threads in the near future too.
No, it does not count as a territorial grab. Our citizens will not be settling in Iraq any time soon. Big difference.
I think as long as you tell the user then you're ok. If the user wanted to find out what information the Vuforia guys have collected they would have to ask them, pay the £10 (in the UK), and then it would be up to the Vuforia people.

I use to be the "Data Protection Expert" at a firm a few years ago, but really all that happened was they sent me on a course and I read the rules. Never had to actually deal with a case.
The reason is simple:

"hello" is Not a Number. "world" is Not a Number.

(Number)"hello" == (Number)"world" returns false.

EDIT: Another reason why this is the case is because IEEE mandates it to be. All numbers in JS are 64 bit floating point numbers. This allows for a crazy amount of NaNs (and oh the fun stuff you can do with that). To be sane, NaNs are not the same when comparing them (there is a lot more subtlety in that - comparing quiet and signalling NaNs, and so on and so forth)
Clojure: I like Lisp, but it needs more syntax.
Clojure: I like Java backtraces.
/s
Perhaps this is because big companies are interested in loyal employees in the first place, so they prefer candidates which can learn certain not-so-practical pieces of knowledge just for the sake of passing the interview for that company.
Wow! Isn't there a way to remove the Prime Minister if he or she messes up real bad?
Even if race doesn't matter in 100 years, historians will still mark its importance in the development of the United States (and every other country in the world). Even with a post-racial future, Obama's most significant feature will be that he represented a tremendous milestone in America's racial issues.
I think EVERYONE should learn to code just as everyone learns ARITHMETIC.

Imagine a world where only a few of us knew how to balance an account, or a few of us understood how much will they have left if they spent x amount at the gas station.

Now imagine a world where everybody has a basic ability to develop software.

All the above being said, the beginning is not programming, but learning how to Think, Read, and Write. Not programming language, but human language. When we have learned some basic thinking process (logic), then having the ability to easily program will follow.
if a !== a then a is NaN
It works fine for me in FF. It might be due to the PDF reader you've selected for FF?
More like: "we failed to notice the mistake C made of giving stupid meaningless names to types, rather than introducing meaningful names like int16, int32, int64."

When you say "int", you should get an integer - not an element of a (decided by the author arbitrarily) finite subset of integers.
How could there not be almost nobody but "four-year-olds" in an immature and fast pacing technology sector?
What's your equity offer really worth?
In future generations there will be people who devote their lives to clean up the mess that we made. And it will be good lives too.
Ask HN: What's a good, intermediate-level JS book?
The original idea goes back to around 2005 and frustration at the ever-growing size of glibc and poor (slow) support for UTF-8. At the time I made a prototype and used it personally. In 2010 I relaunched the project with a goal of doing it a lot better and targeting user bases who might actually be looking for a new libc; later on this turned out to include a lot of people unhappy with GPL/LGPL, so we re-licensed from LGPLv2.1+ to MIT.
Conduct Unbecoming of a Hacker
> Any private person can collect license plate data with a computer too. Surely that's not illegal?

Probably not in the US, but in lots of EU countries, just collecting identifying data with an automated system is illegal, or at least has to be declared.

And I think that it's a very good thing.
No. Use isNaN() instead. Or if you have ES6 support, Number.isNaN() is much better an implementation than window.isNaN()
YouTube sure as hell can't silence you, other than by refusing to host your content on its servers, and federal, state, and local governments can exercise similar control over content hosted on government servers.
Langs as seen by...
Thank you for the kind words!

Due to a stupid oversight my iPad is stuck in storage somewhere a few countries over :( I really wish I could, but right now it's just me, white paper, a pen, a scanner and potrace. It's tedious, but workable :)
"Times change" indeed. It's safer now than when you or I were kids. Crime rates have gone down. There are fewer pedestrian deaths. It's harder for kids to get access to tobacco, alcohol, and illegal drugs.

Yes, it's much safer for kids now, so I can see why you would give your kids less freedom than you had.
It is awesome to see technology like Watson being used like this, and it will be interesting to see the results.
DARPA’s Gill Pratt on Google’s robotics investments
This is great! Will test it shortly and probably use it as my main invoicing app. What are some future plans for this?
I'd recommend Eloquent JavaScript. There's also a discussion here on a few books: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7434720
Satellite imagery of possible debris of MH370 by AMSA
A patent troll is a person or company who enforces patent rights against accused infringers in an attempt to collect licensing fees, but does not manufacture products or supply services based upon the patents in question.
musl actually has very little in the way of optimization, premature or otherwise. Most functions are written to be as simple and direct as possible. Often but not always this gives near-optimal size and speed too. The places where more complex approaches are used are _mostly_ situations where the naive solution would have corner cases that fail or corner cases that have pathologically bad performance and could be used as a DoS attack vector. The main exception is things like memcpy, memset, etc.; if they're slow, people are generally very unhappy.

BTW, one difficulty in libc is that it's hard to know what optimizations are "premature" because you can't envision everybody's usage cases without an enormous volume of experience with third-party code.
I hate books with contents like: Variables and Assignment Values, Booleans, Numbers, Operators, Strings,Statements, Functios, Exception Handling, Strict Mode, Variable Scoping and losures, Objects and Constructors, Arrays etc... there are milions books like that. I require from book to introduce me into new language in a manner where i don't have to suffer due to going throught dry facts and definitions. Give me pure examples. I want to create something useful during lecture of book about programming.
as far as I can tell, the Russell's paradox example would be the same without the template "template<typename U, typename V>"?

in other words, both compilers seem to be being consistent with the previous demonstrated behavior using self-recursion, and the more generic template is being ignored altogether.

Am I perhaps missing a reason it was included?
Would also love Hover to show the name of the team. I don't know all the logos.
I'm not implying it is evil. I just imagined what would the world look like if everyone was doing that.
Snipes was jailed for failure to file.

The US generally does not believe in debtors prisons and even has legal routes like bankruptcy to discharge debt.
Show HN: 2048 Tetris
> My personal view is that scanning and checking against lists is fine but the data for any vehicles not believed to be wanted/committing an offence should then be immediately destroyed. I haven't fully signed up for the consultation to understand what question is being asked though.

That's reasonable. I would add that at no point should any picture ever be committed to nonvolatile memory unless it has been confirmed to match one of the watchlists. If the license plate is not on a list at the time of scanning, it should never be stored outside of RAM.
It was only a matter of time. Flappy bird simply made way too much passive money.
support for other currencies?
In a perfect world, you don't login at all because your device knows your identity and there are standardized identity federation protocols that applications and devices can participate in.

(Android already has this. Android developers: Please use AccountManager. I am highly unlikely to create an account with you.)

I can't count the number of times I've just "oh well, nevermind" when I couldn't remember the stupid credentials I used with some application, or couldn't be bothered to create new ones. Not to mention the well-documented security problems with asking users to manage passwords.

Blech I say. Blech. I'm sad that it's 2014 and this is still unsolved.
This is a slippery slope. On the one hand, companies don't want their secrets being leaked. On the other hand, they need employees that can trust them.

If I were Microsoft I'd tighten internal controls rather than try to make an example of a former employee. They're legally in the right, but the question is: is that good for their reputation and their recruiting efforts?
This is an actual in-use therapy approach, and one that will probably become much more widespread now that VR hardware is getting affordable and accessible. (Also used for social anxieties, like a fear of public speaking.)
You are loading the JavaScript library from the CDN into a browser. The data also goes to the browser, not to their CDN. So if sending your data to them is the show stopper for you, that shouldn't stop the show since that's not what happens.
That is pretty darn cool!
The coalition of the willing didn't have the UNs approval when they went in to Iraq. They got it retroactively.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council...

On September 16, 2004 Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan, speaking on the invasion, said, "I have indicated it was not in conformity with the UN Charter. From our point of view, from the charter point of view, it was illegal."[1]
If you’d take the time to read the free online copy (which OP links to) you’d see that there are plenty of “pure examples” in the book. In fact, there’s a code example for every two paragraphs of text, or so.
> to any of Bloomberg's current customers.

I'm not the only person to have thought about this - what about new guys who can use 'a Bloomberg' but can't afford the price? Is there a way forward for these guys to create new customers?
Ugh. So you're willing to give up your privacy as long as others do so as well?

Sounds like the "utopia" described by David Brin et al. Count me out of that future society. My desire for privacy is not affected by others desire for same.

EDIT: I also think public servants, including cops and judges, absolutely deserve privacy. It's just that privacy does not apply to actions taken on the job or in the capacity of a public servant.
You are correct. The Contra example is not different from the much simpler program

#include <iostream>

int main()
{
static bool p = !p;
std::cout << p << std::endl;
}

The static storage specification ensures that p is initialized to 0 before main is executed, and the standard's scoping rules (§3.3.2) allows a variable to reference itself right after declaration.

The same thing happens with Russell's Paradox, with the added twist that HasElement<M, M> always resolves to the specialization HasElement<M, T> (it 'fits' better) rather than the general version, which is never used.
> Research at Google is unique. Because so much of what we do hasn't been done before...

How is that any different from regular research?
Those are co-founder relationships, which are substantially different from employer-employee relationships.
It's still no surprise that some of the most powerful languages on that list are so because they didn't really "attack" other languages. Lisp and Prolog.
I find this doubtful.

Up to now, Margaret Thatcher is not primarily remembered for being female, a comparable and unmatched milestone. She is remembered more for what she achieved in office (for good or for bad).

The changes that allowed America to have its first black president did not happen on the day of the election in 2008, nor during Obama's time in office. To suggest that he will be remembered for this is to suggest that he has done nothing of historical note.
I have yet to find an invoice app that supports Greek characters :(
I guess the UV exposure makes it easier (for bacteria, since UV helps breaking the plastic down)
That's true. I am doing far better than just scraping by but I also don't have much in terms of savings. One challenge is that I live in Brooklyn, which has a high cost of living.