skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not quite understanding the focus on NoSQL for this use case set. I love MongoDB in the right place and Redis in others. But when you have a bunch of requirements that lend themselves to traditional DBs, choosing MongoDB or HyperDex feels like choosing a tech because it's cool rather than because it is the proper engineering choice.
From the comments section the author writes:

"You are correct in that it’s technically another set of application layer protocols – I was just being provocative with the title..."

sigh... so it is not a "fifth column"

yes, the bitcoin protocol did provide some interesting things but is not nearly approaching the level of hype and spilled pixels lauding it
Eight (No, Nine) Problems With Big Data
Sorry, I can no longer edit my comment above. You just use Lua coroutines.

For people unfamiliar with Lua coroutines, there is no extra syntax for them. There are functions coroutine.create, coroutine.resume, and coroutine.yield. They do about what you'd expect them to do. If you're familiar with greenlet, the first function is greenlet() and the second two functions do the job of greenlet.switch().

Here is some Moonscript Leafo wrote using coroutines: https://gist.github.com/leafo/6788652
Not quite sure I understand where int he process you need it to be on, but is putting a config script ('/scripts') in the EB deployment repo that sets things up and/or turns on the SSH forwarding that you need?
A quick sed script to replace the SSH forwarding line with one that turns it on and a HUP to the daemon, and you'd be good to go?

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/custom...

Container commands run 'before' your app is deployed, so you can pull in deps/etc.
I am not a game developer, nor do I have access to the SDK program you speak of... It's considered opening it up because it means developers like myself who don't developer for these games can get a glimpse of what is going on under the hood without needing to register for any developer program.

Opening it up as in making it easier for the general public on Github to view. No need for the cynicism.
this isn't a blog post
Similar path for me -- started UCSD Pascal and HP stack programs in 1981, Basic before that (and "stealing" copies of BYTE from my godmother, until she gifted me a subscription). I repeatedly coded a flight simulator on the HP 25 during physics class. RPN was such a pleasure!
Take this as a start:

In vivo non-invasive monitoring of glucose concentration in human epidermis by mid-infrared pulsed photoacoustic spectroscopy
M.Pleitez, T.Lieblein, A.Bauer, O.Hertzberg, H.v.Lilienfeld-Toal, W.Mäntele
Analytical chemistry 85 (2013), 1013-1020

I would be more than happy to send you two publications an an executive summary for potential investors.
Email me at: hn.40.yooy@spamgourmet.com
Except that religious tolerance, including tolerance for religious organization's religiously grounded specific discrimination stances, is specifically enshrined in the Constitution. Businesses have no similar or even remotely analogous protection.

Drawing an analogy between an organized religious organization like a Church and a business like a restaurant is a fundamental misunderstanding of the law. This specific dividing line has been held up over and over again in cases where religious organizations incorporate a business entity, and then wish to push particular discrimination policies specific to their practices into that business.

A White Supremacist church is free to be discriminatory, but the bakery it owns and runs as a separate business entity is not for example.

However, IIR, a religiously owned organization, like a corporation, may choose to discriminate based on religion. So the White Supremacist Church's bakery, let's say it's Lutheran, may choose not to hire non-Lutherans at its bakery. This was actually held up by SCOTUS in a 1987 decision for a Mormon church owned corporation.

edit http://www.ecfa.org/Content/TopicReligiousDiscrim
> is it acceptable to hunt a man down and force him to step down from a job he's highly qualified for

No one forced Eich to do anything. His choice to step down was as free as his choice to donate to Prop. 8.

Plus, I'm not sure there's much evidence that Eich was "highly qualified" for the CEO job -- he was clearly highly qualified for his previous job as CTO, but his appointment was controversial within the Mozilla board even before the Prop. 8 controversy.

> is it acceptable for a corporation such as OkCupid to ruin a man's (otherwise impeccable) professional life for a little PR stunt?

OkCupid didn't ruin Eich's "(otherwise impeccable) professional life". OkCupid was fairly late in piling on -- insofar as the Prop. 8 controversy damaged Eich, much of that damage had already been done by the time OkCupid acted.
My thoughts exactly. I have a cat and give him catnip every once in a while. I always have mixed feelings when I see him rolling around on the ground. On the one hand he's in pure ecstasy, but on the other I just drugged my cat.

I'd definitely have some words for any company that drugged my cat without consent.
I'd rather have my cat bring me a dead bird (and I love birds) than flyers; if that happened to me, I would not just ignore it, I would do my part to make it backfire as hard as I can. I have to throw enough unread junk mail away each week as is, you could probably build a little house out of the yearly amount, but using animals for this? For shame. But then again we're already decades past exploiting children, and that's even worse.
No, he just had to get the victim to visit a web page he controlled. That's barely social engineering.
To select an example more or less at random, a book review that the actor Rob Lowe recently wrote for this newspaper contained nine trigrams such as “dumbed-down escapist fare” that had never before appeared anywhere in all the petabytes of text indexed by Google. To witness the limitations that big data can have with novelty, Google-translate “dumbed-down escapist fare” into German and then back into English: out comes the incoherent “scaled-flight fare.”

== Amusing anecdote.
Thanks for the link. I don't entirely agree with much of the chapter. I mean, I think there is a lot of cherry picking of evidence to support his theory. For example, I've always heard that one of the reasons people came to the Americas (among some other reasons) was the wealth inequity issue:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/credit/intervi...
The one time where it really blew my mind is when it told me about updates to blogs I visit. I'd visit a blog on my desktop, then when I was checking my phone, it let me know there was an update. It was cool but at the same time a bit bothersome that Google was recording my sites.
My comment was a bit too late to be seen last time [0], so I'll repeat it here:

---

I was heavily involved with the Fit project for a while. (Fit is Ward Cunningham's predecessor to Cucumber. It used HTML tables rather than ASCII sentences.)

I find it interesting, if not surprising, that the Cucumber community is discovering exactly the same issues that we did with Fit: namely, that it encourages brittle integration tests, and that people don't use it for its intended purpose of collobaration.

I've come to believe that these problems are unsolvable.

I worked on and promoted Fit for several years. Eventually, after some deep soul searching, I concluded that Fit (and by extension, Cucumber) is solving the wrong problem. The value of Fit (and Cucumber) comes from discussions with domain experts. The tools encourage a certain amount of rigor, which is good, but you can get that rigor just as easily by discussing concrete examples at a whiteboard.

The actual automation of those examples, which is where Fit and Cucumber focus your attention, has minimal value. In some cases, the tools have negative value. Their tests are fundamentally more complex and less refactorable than ordinary xUnit tests. If you want to automate the examples, you're better off doing it in a programmer tool.

Some people got a lot of value out of Fit, and I'm sure the same is true for Cucumber. They got that value by using it for collaboration and focusing on domain rules rather than end-to-end scenarios. My experience, though, was that the vast majority used it poorly. When a tool is used so badly, so widely, you have to start questioning whether the problem is in the tool itself.

Ward and I ended up retiring Fit [1]. I've written about my reasons for abandoning it before [2] [3].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7514651

[1] http://www.hanselminutes.com/151/fit-is-dead-long-live-fitne...

[2] http://www.jamesshore.com/Blog/The-Problems-With-Acceptance-...

[3] http://www.jamesshore.com/Blog/Acceptance-Testing-Revisited....
Ask HN: What would you do with a Billion dollars?
I love this question. For several years now I've been asking strangers what would they do with a Billion dollars if they had it. I keep asking it because I've discovered several instant friends along the way. It turns brief interactions where you get little time to get to know the other person into high-quality conversations that surface interests and passions you might have never known about. Some of my favorite ones:

- "If it was a million, I'd have fun with it, but a Billion is a job - a responsibility."
- "I'd build a way for researchers to store negative outcome experiments and make those public and easily searchable - it would save tremendous time for the scientific community."

What would you do?
"They did what anyone would do after reading one too many astroturf articles on Hacker News. Sure, their system failed, but in a sense, the overall system failed them."

The technology didn't fail them. On the contrary, the technology did exactly what it was supposed to do.
The devs could have (should have) considered these race condition scenarios.
One reason we lack Internet competition: Starting an ISP is hard
There is a 2012 post in Science Based Medicine about the same Harvard study: “Antifluoridation Bad Science” http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/antifluoridation-bad-sci...
As it will be then.

Two big advantages are referential transparency and memory aliasing. The sort of reordering of loops/memory/whatever like described on the Halide page is just the beginning of the kind of optimizations that are possible. Perhaps static analysis could ameliorate this to some extent, but it will take far more computational power, and will always be subject to the halting problem. There's also current problems with the C standard that could change in a new standard, or maybe optionally ignored in the compiler, so it depends on your definition of "C". Examples of this are struct member ordering being fixed, or lack of tail call optimization (at least guaranteed TCO), and perhaps you might include calling conventions in that.

There's also the huge advantages you can get in programmer productivity. Metaprogramming, better type systems, better (and more) abstractions, automatic memory management, automatic parallelization, there's really tons of room for improvement in so many areas. And a lot of these provide lots of room for optimization, in the sense that they put more of the program semantics into the compiler's hands. Compilers will probably be "stupid" for a long time, but at the very least they are very accurate and very fast, so they can try out many possibilities and measure what works best. Chess is a good analog here--computers are far superior to humans these days, and they got there by just trying tons of permutations of simple algorithms and running lots of tests. Writing compilers turns out to be a similar problem, so moving away from C/C++ can have advantages at multiple levels (so meta!).

It's still in a very nascent stage, but the language I've been working on should eventually be the manifestation of lots of these ideas: https://github.com/zwegner/mutagen Most of the ideas are just in my head at this point, and still rather fuzzy, but there's some specifics in the README about possible future directions.
I don't think Apple fears their competitors in quite the way you're insinuating. For better or worse, they're too arrogant for that. I think they "appreciate" their competitors.
Bing Translate is actually better than Google Translate in my experience. Especially for east asian languages translation. It's one of the hidden gems that I though is under-utilize by Microsoft.

I hope Microsoft open up the Bing platform more to devs. That'll be a huge opportunity for Microsoft to ever compete with Google.
I should mention that Aslak Hellesoy (creator of Cucumber) responded with a well thought-out comment about the issues I raised above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7519369
> I find it interesting, if not surprising, that the Cucumber community is discovering exactly the same issues that we did with Fit: namely, that it encourages brittle integration tests, and that people don't use it for its intended purpose of collobaration.

> I've come to believe that these problems are unsolvable.

I think their quite solvable, its just that they aren't technical problems, they are social problems, and technical solutions fail, and the people that are good at solving technical problems often aren't particularly skilled at solving social problems.

I think Cucumber could be a good tool in the right workflow, but establishing the right cross-functional workflow is a very hard social problem that the people that understand the technology very often don't have the skill to solve (and, generally, don't have the social position to effectively champion solutions even if they had them.)
> Yes, so there will be a strong correlation between tight control over flouride in drinking water (e.g. clamping it to 1mg/L or so versus not deflouridating at 10mg/L levels) and a wealthier environment with good infrastructure. I think it's just so hard to "weight" for the differences here.

Except that they used models in many studies, likely with factors for wealth, area, etc. This attempts to control for those factors, meaning they no longer have their intuitive effect on outcomes. Now, I say "attempts", because it corrects for some measurement of wealth and area, not the full underlying structure.

You're basically left with an "empty" correlation between IQ and fluoride in the data, but useless for causation conclusions. By "empty" I mean that you have attempted to correct for all known factors like some measurement of wealth, but there are always still many unknown underlying factors that might cause issues. That's what randomization solves.

Also note that many of the source studies are from China. This might sound odd to people outside academics, but due to many factors you should generally judge studies from most Chinese universities as less trustworthy than from other countries.
blogsqr.com
Thanks for sharing. Interesting discussion.

I think the author confuses the concept (homoiconicity) and it's practical consequences. I think this quote from the comments below summarizes it:

> But the fact of the matter is that programmers interact with text, not with data structures.

Not Lisp programmers. It's trivial to implement an environment where code will be represented graphically and won't be ever represented as text.

That's, actually, the point: language semantics isn't tied to textual representation.
Read some literature.
Didn't see maps on the agenda.
odesk for physical low/no skill physical labor. Some things just require muscle: moving, yardwork, lifting large furniture, etc. Would be nice to be able to see who's near you and hirable on an hourly basis. Bonus points for verified background checks, etc.
Ask HN: List your SF Services
I'm an intern working in the Bay this summer. My friend and I want to try all those services that you just can't find anywhere else.

What're the top things we should try?

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JwAdYoKAC7Ua2ElB-z1lwzs1fgbWQCFOnitzIvrC3JQ/edit?usp=sharing
Not just for vanity, either - it makes phishing a hidden service harder: if users know the .onion for Agora starts with 'agora', then a phisher has to invest weeks of compute-time just to get a plausible .onion to start his phish with, rather generate than any old .onion in a millisecond.
When you say "GB were indeed 2³⁰", do you mean it was officially defined to be that, or that it was common practice for people to call it that. G- was officially defined in 1960 to be 10^9.
Economically, adding such a layer creates perverse incentives. My router becomes profitable when I make its bandwidth scarce. The same incentive applies to everyone else with a router.

My ISP's gateway agreements become structured around a new definition of efficiency. Extract the maximum possible toll for each bit.

This new definition means, the more spam received The more my email host can raise the tariff. It can hold my incoming mail hostage.

The logic which underpins the idea is the finite pie. It ignores the possibility that network effects offset the cost of infrastructure even though that's what has driven the internet and mobile cell networks to vast scale over the past twenty years.

But it's still a great thought provoking article
Awesome, cant thank enough.
Imagine being Kay and having to watch GUIs get increasingly dumbed down, people using Object Oriented Programming to refer to things nothing like what you created, people not using computers to the full potential you thought you had enabled decades ago. "Guys! You're doing it wrong!"

But this means there's still a lot of room for "innovation" to build on top of his "inventions" (distinction he made in a talk that[1] was posted here yesterday: invention being creating new things, innovation being the task of bringing them to market). Or if that's not your deal, he laid out the kind of environment that's required to create new inventions. You could try to work in such an environment or create one.

It's probably too late to have the same "early life" that he did, but you've learned to read, if you're here you've probably learned to code, and chances are you've still got at least a couple "lives"[2] left in you.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7538063

[2] http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2722
Which do you think is more likely:

- I know! We'll set up a voting ring to game my blog post about a garage door opener onto the front page of Hacker News, even though I don't get any kind of benefit aside from exposure to my cool project!

- Hey $socialnetwork friends, check it out, I submitted last weekend's project that you helped me on to Hacker News!, followed by folks finding the link there upvoting it because it's cool.

You, and pg before you, apparently default to option 1. Even in the way you've worded this comment you are implying malicious intent, as if the author of the blog post tried to game the article onto the front page. Honestly, unless there's a tangible benefit to the traffic such as advertising or leads, there's no reason to game HN and most of the "voting ring" stuff you are likely observing is organic-ish, not intentionally gamed upvotes from social sharing.

Option 2 is something I have personally observed dozens of times and you should account for it in your thinking and code.
"Android-First" implies that iOS (or something) will be second. By the author's own admission, they don't have a big enough team to develop for both platforms so they have to choose one or the other.

My understanding of Android-first is that you iterate quickly with Android to learn lessons fast while still developing for both platforms. I think it would be foolish, as the article suggests, to only build for Android but that does not mean "Android-first" is a bad option for those building for both platforms.
So this is all cool, and it's incredibly nifty to have the hardware insight while writing software. But these optimizations (loop tiling, loop fusion, etc) could (and, to my knowledge, ARE) part of basic gcc and java compilers. Why are they not more commonly used? Why do we have to specifically provide a flag to say "Hey btw I almost forgot, make my program 50 times faster."

I'm slightly in the dark as to why loop optimizations are not part of the default compile process.
This is the first wiki ever, invented by Ward Cunnigham.
Aside from the fact that this is not a apples to apples comparison, so much of the problems the OP stated in this article are easily solvable and have pretty standard solutions, e.g. use jackson instead of json.org; cache the rendering google map's view when scrolling; and notification sound with Pandora...sounds more like just dealing with the audio streams..

Edit: the entire SMS/email apps for AOSP are open sourced, yes it does not have all the features that the OP wants, but you can get very far with Android's documentations and just reading the source codes.
Without Bing, Google would have a monopoly in search in almost every country in the world. Monopolies never turn out well. We should all hope that Bing is here to stay and that Microsoft continues to funnel dollars into creating a competitive search market.
If they both slide to the left then they would still be in a collision.
I'd love to see Logo have a bit of a revival. It's great in that kids can start making pictures immediately, and learn more sophisticated syntax as they need it. The only thing that would make it more appealing to children would be a physical turtle. Maybe a pen plotter would be a reasonable substitute.

I also like that it can be completely open-ended what kids do, like crayons and paper instead of the awful stuff they have to do in computer labs at school. (play stupid games that drill the facts you'll need on the standardized test; win virtual money you can spend on accessories for your avatar; vomit) See Seymour Papert for similar rants.

All that to say, a slight modernization of UCBLogo would be a fantastic project.
I run a small game development studio and we recently decided to launch Android first. It has proved to be a great decision. There are a number of publishing advantages on Google Play that have helped us iterate and communicate with our players that don't exist on the App Store. For example, build deployment speed, the ability to respond directly and publicly to user reviews, and so on.

Obviously our game and their messaging software are very different but I was compelled to comment to offer a counterpoint since the post title is so emphatic.
I'm not writing off "huge swabs". I'm writing off anyone with enough time to form a formal protest but not enough time to do anything with their career but drive cars and wait tables.
Ask HN: How do you feel about HBO's Silicon Valley?
I guess this is how they manage SSH connection to Pleiades [1]. Cool! I use Pleiades and am constantly impressed by the uptime and quality of service on such a high-end resource.

[1] http://www.nas.nasa.gov/hecc/resources/pleiades.html
Fast Image Processing Using Halide
Oh man, this resonates. I think in any organization you need a certain balance of those two personalities - but the philosophy degree sure makes the questioning/skeptical folks more my type. And until I started my own company, I moved around a lot too. But now that I'm leading things that sort of incisive thinking is a boon (sometimes).

When you say you get uncomfortable with a system, though, d'you mean ethically? Or just bored?
Interesting to hear. I enjoyed programming a stack based machine a lot. Of all three environments, I remember the HP with the most fondness. I think the fun of Pascal was pretty much pounded out of me when I had to use it for a large expression-evaluator and macro-expander project later, in college.
It depends where in the Bay Area you are - there a lot more things in SF proper than South Bay, for example. That said, some of the best things, like Google Shopping Express, cover a ton of ground.
The Rise of the Drones
Would you mind writing these down somewhere? I've done that a few times and now I have no idea if my account is penalized.
I still have a graphite mark in my wrist from over 20years ago. (Jabbed my self by accident in elementary school and the mark never went away.)
Canadian Government to End ‘MintChip’ Digital Currency Program