skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd be curious as to what exactly you mean by "success stories". If you mean something along the lines of "is it easy to develop, has a robust environment, and doesn't present any hard problems" then I think there's a lot of companies out there. If you mean something like "will it help your company produce something people want"? Then you're asking the wrong question. Tech very rarely determines product-market fit, at least not to the degree that we developers think it does.

I've been using F#/Mono for my small apps for some time now. For an example, my personal news aggregation site, http://newspaper23.com, is running all the time, going out and finding headlines and presenting them to me in plain text. Been meaning to add a text stripper to the mix so I don't have to see any ads or participate in any sticky website nonsense at all; just haven't had time to code it yet.

The nice thing for me, especially for this app, is that I can use F# in a purely functional manner to create little unix-like programs that do a little bit of work at a time. Then I string them together with chron and, instead of the old client-server web model, I have something more resembling a data pipeline. I can monitor flow across the pipeline, distribute parts of it to other machines (scale out) if necessary, and so on. All without having to re-code anything. The entire thing serves up a static web page, which can also be tweaked: served in-place, over a CDN, emailed to a user, etc. Did I mention the "no recoding" part?

As a former .NET guy, I'm happy enough with F#/mono that I can't imagine going back to full-bore .NET no matter what the problem domain. The toolset is way too heavy, the culture is awash in folks marketing to developers instead of helping them build stuff people want, and so on. It was a great ride, but F#/mono is where I get off.

Having said that, I still use the VS IDE to develop, since you can develop in windows and then FTP the code over. That's pretty cool. I've tried and used MonoDevelop. I guess it's okay. I've also done a bit with just straight-out command-line compiling. After all, it's not like you need a huge codebase full of hundreds of files. Or if you do, you're doing something wrong :) An 8 or 10-file F# program is a monster -- and probably means you're trying to do too much at once.
This is as an absurd discussion.

If you think it's without problems that the US have to subsidize many people who have jobs because it's worse in India then we disagree. I think it's problematic that the salaries in the US seem to be pushed into two extremes.

If you think it's a problem that technology ends up pushing those two extremes in the US no matter what happens on the north pole, india or bangladesh, then we agree.

There is nothing inconvenient about other countries living situation. But if you want to play that game then lets also include the people of Scandinavia, France etc who enjoy free healtcare no matter how much they make.

The only thing that seems to be inconvenient here is discussing the situation for those who make 15000 a year. Thats the only reason why for some other worldly reason you want to ignore it by saying other people have it worse.

I am not in the wrong here you are.

You are just trying to push a premise on to me that first of all isn't an argument for anything as I can find countries where people do in fact get more than 15.000USD a year even if they have no job. And who do in fact get free healthcare.

And second of all has nothing to do with what I have been talking about at all.

But I see you guys have made up your mind so nothing fruitful is going to come from this discussion.
That is a cool feature. good use of instant torque. offsets the inertia during windup.
I think it's great that the author found something that worked for him and his daughter, but this particular example seens a little complex. The first code I ever wrote was something like

10 PRINT "HELLO"

20 GOTO 10

That's 3 or 4 steps. No IDE, no GUI, no variables. A program I could re-create completely on my own the next day.
That's not quite true. The problem is more insidious that that.

Think of the memory requirements of the fork() system call. It clones the current process, making an entire copy of it. Sure, there's lots of copy-on-write optimisation going on, but if you want guaranteed, confirmed memory, you need to have a backing store for that new process. The child process has every right to adjust all of its process memory.

So if a 4GB process calls fork(), you will suddenly need to reserve 4GB of RAM or new swap space for it. Or if you can't allocate that, you will have to make the fork() fail.

This can be terrible for users, since most often a process is going to fork() and then exec() a very small program. And it seems nonsensical for fork() to fail with ENOMEM when it appears that there is lots of free memory left. But to ensure memory is strictly handled, that's what you have to do.

The alternative, which most distributions use, is to optimistically allocate memory. Let the fork() and other calls succeed. But you run the risk of the child process crashing at any point in the future when it touches its own 'confirmed' memory and the OS being unable to allocate space for it. So the memory failures are not discovered at system call points. There's no return code to spot the out of memory condition. The OS can't even freeze up until memory is available because there's no guarantee that memory will become available.
See also https://status.aa.net.uk/ from a company we're friendly with - 100% openness but in common with most good status pages, doesn't help a customer to know whether they're affected by a particular issue or not.
https://davenport.geek.nz/bitcoin-day-6/
There's an app called CSTM that takes this concept to another level with custom built furniture. The furniture is more expensive thusly but also more unique.
http://cstm.co/
How about speed? With less kruft it might be faster.
The United States is a nation of immigrants. From everywhere. Privileging one particular group of immigrants, white Europeans, has been a popular activity, but it hasn't been an unmitigatedly good one.

You are taking one very particular aspect of "traditional" marriage (traditional for one narrow group) and seizing upon it, while ignoring all the rest of them. That women can't really own property. That they can't vote. That their husbands can beat them. That marriages were chosen by parents, and children had little say. That marriages happened much younger. That they were tied up in the church. That men kept mistresses. That marrying the wrong race or class could get you lynched. And on, and on, and on.

Regardless, even if you were right, which you aren't, tradition is not sufficient basis for law. Full stop.

That you personally don't see the problem with keeping from other people from marriage is in the "well, duh" bucket. Sure you don't. But your ignorance isn't justification for public policy. And knowing same-sex couples who have had to do all the legal paperwork to have children, you're also wrong. Many thousands of dollars in legal fees were spent, and what they ended up with wasn't as good as marriage. There are plenty of other scenarios, especially with adopted children, that can't be solved privately at all. See the MMA decision for a more detailed explanation of them.

For the record, I'm straight, so my relationship isn't at issue. And really, I can't force people to recognize my relationship as legitimate. For example, if I meet somebody in Vegas and get married the same day, people are free to mock me and call my relationship illegitimate. Billy the Hillbilly Preacher can think me a shocking fornicator and say so to my face. However, it does entitle me to certain legal rights, so, e.g., governments and hospitals can't deny me those.

To deny gay people the same legal recognition requires the various bigots to prove that the state has some legitimate interest in doing so. They have signally failed in that. And they will continue to fail. Because, like you, it's either "God said" or "it's traditional!" Meaning, even they don't really know why gays shouldn't be allowed to marry.

You are welcome, in the fullness of your ignorance of the topic, to continue to not recognize that this is a civil rights issue. 13% of the population still feels that way about interracial marriage, too. Maybe you can form a club with them. But California's Supreme Court and various federal courts disagree with you. You might give passing consideration that they know at least as much about the law as you, and perhaps a bit more.
Black Bloc is a tactic, not a group. The anarchists here have all turned into Maoists who venerate the Naxalite rebellion in India. Chairman Mao figures prominently in the old anarchist space I used to go to back when it was also a hacker space. Peasant armed revolt is ridiculous in a first world country, I stopped going also it's full of state spies to watch for anti pipeline protest planning another good reason to avoid the space.
With the new sgen GC it's viable. The old Bohem-based GC was pretty terrible with F# as it allocates a huge number of transient objects.

As for tools, beyond frameworks Xamarin Studio has a good-enough F# environment. There's also an emacs major mode.
OT: Native english speakers, got some questions. I'm constantly trying to improve my english online, so ..

3:42
"The emissions is extremely low" -> Is low? Are low? Why is?

3:46
"Diesel emissions fuel" -> Is that the canonical way of spelling 'Diesel'? I mean, that's more or less exactly the way I'd spell it, but .. I'm surprised. Usually english doesn't quite like 'i' as in 'ee'. I know that this is a German name after all, but .. I have a number of peers and friends that wouldn't be able to map 'Morpheus' (Matrix), 'Zeus', 'Euler' etc. to the German pronounciation, i.e. you'd get a 'Err.. WHAT?'. Diesel made it 1:1? Or is that debatable and there are people that pronounce it differently?
Mark Seemann made a nice tutorial on Pluralsight, which shows how to build an F# web app.

The demo isn't using Mono, but I thought it's still relevant if you want to get a feel for what an F# web app might look like.

http://pluralsight.com/training/courses/TableOfContents?cour...
A friend of mine has majored in philosophy at University of Warsaw, Poland, and now works at Google in Mountain View. His wife, also a philosophy grad, has co-founded a startup headquartered in CA, Wellfitting.com.
In any protest movement there will be a group who wants to turn the disagreement into a zero-sum conflict. The first thing to do is convince the people who disagree with you that those on your side who are amenable to compromise are just as radical as you are.

On the other hand, this provides a good opportunity for any group who wants to position themselves as more moderate to do so.

Welcome to politics.
"A web and software developer in Africa earns from $10,000 to $20,000 dollars per annum whereas their colleagues in Europe and the US earns at least $100,000 dollars per year."

I don't think this is factually true.

That said, the article really makes you think how much easy we have it in the developed world, yet we always find the time to complain about everything.
> These things all work out to be positive-sum for humanity. If this wasn't the case, it wouldn't make any economic sense for businesses to automate in the first place.

No, it makes sense for businesses to automate if the effect is positive-sum for the specific businesses owners whose businesses are automating, regardless of the effect on humanity as a whole.
When the cloud was first being introduced one of the core principles was that your instances should be considered ephemeral - and that they can terminate at any time, without any notice or further explanation. I think some people sometimes forgets that this still holds today.

Don't expect your instance to run forever. Design your architecture with this in mind. There is a reason e.g. aws provides multiple availability zones.
No. All you can do is try writing to it and see what happens (you can catch the segfault though).

http://opsmonkey.blogspot.co.uk/2007/01/linux-memory-overcom... has some more info.
Remote Desktop’s Restricted Admin: Is the Cure Worse Than the Disease?
So an individual vm instance in any cloud provider is unreliable. Welcome to the cloud. Its foolish to assume otherwise, keep backups and restore to another instance or go HA. What's unreasonable is to assume they should publish a status update saying that one of their thousands of machines is having an issue. Fwiw, I've had the same 'hypervisor' problem' response from DO one time when i couldn't terminate a droplet.

Otoh when they have whole api outages for creating or destroying vms (like also happened last week) i'd expect and did find a status update. What their threshold is for reporting isn't clear.. but a 1 machine issue isn't something any provider would report on.
> Could you live on 14.500 a year? That 1400USD a month.

1208/mo, actually.
A cab and trailer is probably already something like $200-300k already, so I could see this sort of truck easily being more than $100k more expensive just in the upfront cost.
Protesters Target SF Home of Google Ventures Partner
I'd imagine it would be somewhere beyond where your toilet is typically clogged. That would handle most overflow situations.
Could it be that competition is the mother of productivity?
Got it - I think you're asking why the peak is still so low at 40mph, and why we haven't shifted it toward 55, or 65. The reason there is a peak at all and we aren't most efficient at 5mph is due to (1) for gasoline cars, low efficiency at low loads - a motor may have a maximum of 200hp but only asking 10hp to power you means you'll pay a lot of frictional/throttling losses (at 10hp you'll be in the far bottom left in diagram [4]) (2) "fixed costs" per unit time - power steering, power brakes, alternator for electronics. Those two factors push us out to the right, whereas wind and rolling resistance push us to the left.

I'm not an automotive engineer so I don't understand the overall system equations, but I suspect for a given vehicle weight of ~3000lb, drag coefficient ~0.30, and 4-cylinder gasoline motor characteristic that provided sufficient passing acceleration, the "solved equation" for economy cars happens to end up in in the 35-45 optimal range. Gearing can't move the peak so much as make the decline less severe. (In my experience 4 speed autos generally had similar top gear ratios to 5 speed manuals of the time, but had other losses/at in-between speeds)

If you wanted to just shift the peak to the right, you could (1) equip an engine that is very large/extremely inefficient at low power outputs, and had higher parasitic losses and (2) reduce drag. Thus, it would make sense to drive faster, to move your motor out of the extreme bottom right in [4], and "spread out" those parasitic losses over a larger distance.

Adding more gears makes the slope go down less steeply after 40mph (but it's always going down consistently - see the Motor Trend article). The reason I used a 90mph example is I believe most 6 speed transmissions today already have 6th gear optimized for ~70mph cruising due to their motivation in post-2006 EPA testing. By optimized, that doesn't mean the optimal MPG in that gear occurs at 70mph, just that we've eliminated the gearing mismatches/inefficiencies compared to a CVT, which always has "perfect gear ratio". You could still add a 7th and find improvements at 80/90 probably.

So if 5th gear (in a 6-speed) had optimized 40mph, and 40mph is inherently more efficient, we would be driving there instead for overall peak MPG. I was trying to say that with enough gears, you don't need to be in top gear for optimal MPG due to drag. Hope that makes sense
The problem is that pretty much every one of them have probably given one or more services access to download their contact data to connect them to their friends, so any number of services other than their e-mail likely contains these personalized e-mail addresses.

Someone has likely been hacked or sold/leaked data, but he should assume that those addresses have been spread quite a bit voluntarily by his friends/associates.
What are the advantages of nosql btw ?
Maybe among IT people they were but, IT isn't everything. If you had shown 1kX to a physicist, he would've automatically assumed that you were talking about 10^3 times X no matter what X was. I actually live (and grew up) in an SI country and the system works beautifully. Sure, people say kilo to refer to 1kg, but this practice gets a huge amount of criticism from teachers over here, who keep insisting that kilo=1000.
BitTitan on the Autobahn: A Look back at World Hosting Days Germany
NORX cipher for CAESAR competition
I'm interested, but where would an author get people to vote on the piece? While a fiction story could get votes from various communities, I imagine it would fail for specific posts? Feel free to email, mail at namanyayg dot com
Note the commit hash
Wow that's great. Thanks for the tip. I'm going to check it out.
I like the focus on variables and values - very cool! congrats!
Scrypt libraries for building language bindings
Now stable and comes in rpm, .deb and FreeBSD ports.
No one really knows if HFT is good or bad
Africa is a big place. From what I hear, Nairobi is one of the most interesting places to be an entrepreneur these days. Yes, there are huge challenges all over africa including, but not limited to, corruption, unreliable power, political instability, and terrible infrastructure.

But this very constraint is what drives projects like M-PESA, and Ushahidi, and BRCK.

Also, Software Developers in the US and Europe don't necessarily make 100,000 Dollars. In some spots you'd be luck y to make half that.
I, in Italy, as a junior software developer, earn €17000/year.

And genuinely I'm not complaining.
Where can I go download a plugin for Safari on OS X?
Hipster self-epiphany
There's also Blockly [0], which you can use to build similar software.

[0]: https://code.google.com/p/blockly/
Many didn't like GEB and found it a bit vacuous and longer than the material merited.
Raccoons are about the only group that should be protesting Kevin Rose.
I don't have kids, but even if I had this entry would still be totally worthless for me. It's touching and nice, but can anyone learn anything from it? I don't really think that there are any useful tips on teaching 7 year old anything, I would even say that it's quite opposite, how could anyone post code like this in such context:
@property (nonatomic) IBOutlet UILabel* label; ?
"Everything is feasible except"

Perhaps someone could comment on the possible prison time if an approach like this was taken without the authorization that this person had in advance?

Also it would seem that it would be fairly easy if you are in physical proximity to the target to use social engineering (as opposed to a bump key - opening the front door) to gain physical access to the premises and find the wifi password right under the router. Or plant something on the network that gives you access - you get the picture. Or plant a keylogger that might not be noticed for months. Or drop a USB key (wouldn't work with an infosec guy but maybe if it was mailed to him and it looked like it came from a reliable source it would).
One big thing to watch out for is GC differences. Now that Mono has sgen the gap between it and MS's CLR isn't so huge, but you will definitely want to do some memory and CPU profiling direct on the webserver to spot any issues.

In my case when rolling out the JSIL compiler (mostly C#, but using some F# applications as test cases etc) certain BCL containers had dramatically different GC pressure profiles, and GCs would trigger at different rates and with different costs. F# tends to generate a lot of GC pressure so you want to be proactive about this.

Side-by-side, though, sgen works pretty well. I've used it extensively and it does the job.
Nightvision by Luke Shepard
Have you been thinking of switching to computer science because you enjoy the part-time job you have coding? Do you love coding? Is it something you kinda enjoy, but are thinking it might be a good career?

I didn't go to university, and am damn happy that I didn't. I was very fortunate to work for a large conglomerate when I was 20, where every few months somebody would come along and say " we need somebody to do xyz (Customer Service, Retail Buying, Food & Bev, Accounting, IT, Marketing, Public Relations, etc, etc). This gave me experience in a huge diversity of areas, and was a ton of fun and constant learning.

The reason I mention this, is maybe you need some time away from university? I'm pretty sure most universities offer their students a way to take a semester off or something, don't they? If you took 6 months off, could you work in two different areas that interest you for 3 months each, and see what you like?

Or maybe you could continue at uni, but reduce your coarse load while you figure out what direction to take.

You may even decide that university isn't important. I think I'd struggle to get through a Google interview, with all the data structure type questions, but I've built some cool industry leading stuff and have a great time in my career so far.

You want to dedicate time to SOMETHING YOU WANT TO DO, than dedicate time to finding what it is you want to do.

My one other bit of advice is this. If a university degree is something you always thought you'd have, and something that you truly want, don't take too much time working in the real world. I think it gets tough to go back to school after a certain age or time has passed. Also, you get used to have a (hopefully good) income, and you won't want to loose that.

Lastly, have you spoken to your friends about your not wanting to talk? Have they noticed a difference? The reason I ask, is it is important to learn how to ask for help, it is important to talk about these sorts of things your thinking with your inner circle. You may find that everybody is feeling the same way, which may go a bit to alleviate your feelings. If not, you can be proud that you didn't cower away in the corner when you've had an issue.

Hope that helps.
why is this even on the frontpage of HN ? (sorry if I sound like a redditor)
In the Midwest, 60K/yr is not uncommon. I know a dev with 7 years experience making ~50K. But the cost of living here is nothing. I spend under 20K/yr and I eat out plenty, live in a 1000 sq ft apartment, etc. My friend making 50K supports his wife and kid easily in the new house they just got. Cost of living is huge factor when taking into account salary and location.

10K in the vast majority of African countries puts you way above average.
[scam] Healbe GoBe: The Only Way to Automatically Measure Calorie Intake
In the starting days of Reddit and then HN this really bugged me a lot.

One of the solutions I wanted to try was to partition the user base on a similar way that posts are filtered to you. That is based on the up votes you give. Now I'm not sure if it happens here but at least on Reddit you have it on your customised first page.

I believe that it isn't the user base that gets worse but that it gets much more diversified and people entrench themselves in groups and the "How bout dem Cowboys" problem arises.

Think of it as user and posts clustering, the secret sauce would be how those clusters interact, I don't have a tentative answer for that. This idea would top current aggregators by valuing discussion and intervenients in the same way that posts are valued.
I've contributed to Lift in 2013 and was fairly involved in their community. They're quite nice there, but admittedly David is a bit of an ass. He doesn't try to be, if that's any consolation.

Also, Naftoli won the "Happy Lift'r Prize" about a year ago:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/liftweb/dCA89xrW01E/_dUL5KzQ...