skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thinking people (as oppose to those dedicated to promotional activities) should stop using the term "data scientist". All scientists are data scientists, otherwise we would call them philosophers. Data for the sake of data is not a science. While you are at it, please also stop using the term "big data", (often people mean: do something with the data), if you need to use a computer cluster and MapReduce because the data doesn't fit in your Mac, then refer to distributed data stores and computing systems. Also, please drop the term "deep learning" when you refer to using more compute power to run more complex models. Thanks.
> Functional programming is about programming with functions

Actually I think the etymology of "functional programming" comes for programming with functions as first-class objects. So a "functional programming language" is one that supports higher-order functions.

> It should be obvious that Functional means functions, and "function" has fairly precise meaning which predates computation, and certainly didn't include anything about side-effects.

It also doesn't say anything about non-termination. If you want to program with mathematical functions I suggest you use something other than Haskell (e.g. Coq, Agda).
It always pains me to see the space program justified on the basis of its spin-offs. The main (civilian) problems that the space program solved were in getting to space, putting a man on the moon, developing a re-usable orbiter, and building the space station. Similarly, if we really want to solve problems of energy or hunger, why not create a dedicated alternative-energy or anti-poverty 'Apollo program'?

One of the greatest engines of technological development in the 20th century was WWII. Fortunately few people argue for new wars by citing the potential for spin-off technologies. But the logic would be about as good. (Arguably the space program itself was a product of the Cold War.)

Aside from that - the linked article doesn't say anything about spin-offs. It says that very prosaic, existing technology for daily life on Earth was adapted for use in the space program.
Exactly. A little social engineering by the police could quickly erode the trust in the network.

Police could set up a ring of their own accounts, facilitate fake transactions amongst each other, leave positive reviews, take down one large player, then shut that ring down. Imagine hundreds of these rings within the network.
Meet Therapist Who Turns Startup Co-Founders Into Silicon Valley Millionaires
Here, all of these : http://startupschool.org/speakers.html

( Their Youtube video are linked )
We already have solutions to all of those problems. People just don't want to put them into practice because nuclear power is so dangerous it causes like 0.05% of the deaths of traditional energy sources and eating mostly vegetarian diets is just unbearable, etc. What they want are solutions that are indistinguishable from what we have now but still somehow solve the problem. I don't think Mars is going to offer us a free lunch.
Thanks for the story. I would be very interested to know how games "AI" are built. Is it very scripted ? Is it more organic ?
I disagree that '"Purely functional" is redundant'. You can have a functional language that still uses mutable state. Lisps are a good example. Pure functional implies no mutable state. Pure functional is the only way to safely achieve laziness. Which seems to be the author's thesis.
From Wikipedia's entry on them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freelancer.com), which helps explain their lack of clues with US types of ID:

"Freelancer is a global outsourcing marketplace, founded in 2009. Its headquarters are located in Sydney, Australia, though also has offices spanning Vancouver, London, Buenos Aires, Manila and Jakarta."

Looking at their web site, I see no sign they have a US office, unless they kept some of the people in their two acquisitions of US marketplace firms. For stakes this small, it sounds like they're essentially judgement proof in the US. Which is no doubt why they can get away with such tactics.
I would like to clarify. He is a monster and she is a natural born victim. Now can you replace my wasted karma please ?
CodeBabes: We're hot, but learning to code is even hotter
I've been thinking about this for a while and my current thought on it is that authoring UIs are fundamentally different than task-oriented UIs, as they are premised more on giving the user expressivity and power of creation. The same might be said of a UI like Photoshop- complex, need to learn how to use it, can do shit with it.
The source for Bloodhound really is clean and simple. I might actually just use the Types.hs file as a my goto reference for the ElasticSearch query format next time I need to write some of those!
Why Science Does Not Disprove God
As long as there are people involved in this somewhere it can never be out of the reach of the law. Al Capone thought he had it all figured out and they got him on income tax evasion. If you build a system that is based on illegal activities instead of legal, all you do is make yourself a fat target and all the rest of us will suffer even if we don't care for the illegal products.
I just don't get Erik Meijer, though I think he's quite entertaining. He seems to enjoy taking the other side wherever he is.

Here's a talk I was at a couple years ago where he makes fun of the ideas he's presenting in this article: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-RAltgH8tw . Key quote: "obsession with monads is a medical condition".
http://doodlec.am/

I wish I had time to build it, but I don't. It's a simple idea, where we had moderately good execution and big ideas for the future. Future plans were to expand to Doodle Packs, with themed artwork (also for sale, perhaps).

The image detection code (doodle placement) was pretty hacky but functional. The app has about 10,000 downloads, maybe 1,000 active (close to 0 marketing). I envisioned updating it with new doodles, better image code, sharing options, etc, and re-launching in the next couple months...but realistically that probably won't happen. Maybe you could make it happen? :)
And how do you get these new versions? ZTE won't release them, at least here. Root my phone and compile from source? Thanks, I'll pass.
Why are you not optimistic? It takes time, yes, but 7 years is a long time. I personally am optimistic wrt what HTML+CSS can do in terms of typesetting (even PDFs): https://authorea.com/users/3/articles/4675/_show_article
"When 36 years old your code is, look as good it will not ehh."
I am not saying you are right or wrong either. I asked what you meant by "education: uncommon, but then again its not like you find these things everyday." After reading your response a couple times I can't figure out if you answered that question.
I'd imagine there is, but for a payment of 4 figures I doubt litigation is a realistic method of obtaining payment. In any case, you should never have to threaten to sue a freelancing site to get the money that is owed to you. This is a minor issue amplified into serious fuck-up by the lack of half decent customer service. I hope it gets figured out soon for the author's sake.
> You are making an opinion as to the definition of complex software. "Complex software" means different things to different people.

"Complex" math or "complex" engineering means different things to different people, but "mathematical proof" and "deductive reasoning" do not.

> Additionally, you've inserted a requirement of understanding one's systems that seems arbitrary and not universally applicable.

It's not arbitrary, it's how we build systems that work, and work better.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering#Methodology

"By understanding the constraints, engineers derive specifications for the limits within which a viable object or system may be produced and operated."

Without understanding one's system, it is impossible to understand its relation to one's constraints, and it is impossible to define the specifications within which that system operates.

It's possible to build a car or an engine without understanding the math and science behind them, but it's impossible to build an engine of known specifications, it's impossible to provably assert that it operates within those specifications, and it's impossible to engage in directed design based on those specifications and defined operational limits.

The best you can hope for is purely empirical evidence, and empirical evidence is of limited utility without a theoretical framework in which it can be applied to extrapolate further knowledge.

As a result, systems designed and implemented without concern for understanding the theoretical basis of their operation invariably perform more poorly and cannot compete with systems designed and implemented based on building and applying a theoretically driven specification and understanding of constraints.

To willfully prefer ignorance is objectively worse.

> Whatever happened to each his own?

Applied maths. It's either correct and verifiable or it's not.
The "YC Female Founders Conference" was aimed at females interested in startups, but honestly the videos are applicable to everyone.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQ-uHSnFig5PSIanlQ_x6...
Doesn't seem like many people would see them.
No idea how architects handle this, but my guess is, this could be done either by relying on external reputation (i.e. knowing the arbiter outside of the network) or by network somehow rewarding buyers and sellers who take a risk to chose "newbies" as arbiters.
This statement couldn't be more false:

> As a community we used to be able to rely on the fact that pg basically didn't get involved.

PG was heavily involved, right from the beginning. The HN front page has always been a blend of user voting and curation. At no time, ever, was it determined by voting alone. Had it been, HN's quality would have been lower—because quality is only one of the reasons why people upvote stories—and HN would never have been HN.

Other moderators, including me, worked with PG on this. I started in September 2012. One reason he took so long to hand over primary responsibility for HN, despite unsustainable demands on his time, is that he wanted to be sure that the moderators really grasped what he'd been doing all along. I'm thus in a position to assure you that we're not doing anything now that hasn't been done since basically forever—except that we're being a lot more transparent. Even that isn't a policy change (pg answered questions when he could) so much as a consequence of there being a dedicated team for the first time.

It never occurred to me when I started posting these transparency comments that we'd get accused of making insidious changes to (paraphrasing) "how HN has always been", "breaking trust", and so on. But I understand how it could seem that way. There's an upside to being unobtrusive. When stuff just works, people can rely on it and focus on the topics at hand. That goes a long, long way (though it doesn't do so well when stuff doesn't just work).

Edit: For some reason I didn't notice this earlier:

> the criticism of Sam Altman's Barack Obama fundraiser at YC was silently removed the moment it became apparent that nearly all comments were negative

That's not only completely false, it's a shameless misrepresentation that eats half the hope out of my soul. Nothing was "silent" [1] and nothing was "removed"—users flagged the posts and I personally rolled the penalty back at least four times. I said above that I could understand how one misconception might have arisen, but I can't understand this one; it seems devoid of even a grain of good faith.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7612226 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7623254
Carpet Stair Treads
Carpet Stair Treads
There is an element of truth to this. It is also how we get things like Heartbleed.
You're being downvoted for displaying a primitive tribal attitude about proglangs, not because there's a grand Clojure conspiracy working against you.
Elon Musk Sues to Break US Air Force’s National Security Launch Monopoly
Thanks, Dan! :)
His post is one of the most useful post I have read on HN for months.

I don't have the slightest sympathy for the manufacturers who face difficulties when building phones. I do have sympathy for people who buy crap hardware (because that's all that exists) and suffer because of it. And I am especially annoyed when I buy crap hardware because all the reviews were fake, like you suggest them to be.
> The builder ended up stealing our down payment and evicted us from the house.

i'm now in my 30s and many of my family and friends own their own property or own rental property. having been personally involved in and witness to many, many real estate deals including ones that have gone completely south and/or had extremely tenuous goings, i am wondering how exactly this is possible.

the entire system is regulated to prevent this sort of thing from happening unless you just fork over a bunch of cash directly to a seller, in which case - that's your problem.

the older i get, the more skeptical i am of these cases in which the protagonist finds himself in financial trouble over and over again. being a victim is incredibly addicting because nothing is ever your fault.

sorry if i come off as an asshole but those are my thoughts on this matter. he posted it publicly on a blog and it ended up on HN and i'm offering feedback.
Much of the functionality stems from being able to use .NET objects in the scripts, and that the result of commands are objects rather than text. For example you can pass the output of ls to a foreach loop that outputs either the absolute or relative path of each file, or various other file properties like size or modification date.

You do have to be careful in some cases because UNIX style syntax is supported but the result may be different because of the underlying implementation. Like if you output text to a file using redirection, by default the output is UTF-16. It can make you crazy if you're not aware of things like that.
For Java development I would recommend 'Effective Java'.
As far as I know the argument for that is not very strong. Despite all the mythology around entrepreneurship startups are known to be good at piecing together existing technology into scalable businesses, not primary research. Moonshot level breakthroughs need large sums of money being thrown into the unknown. And that is something for the state like in the foundation of SV[1] or large monopolies like Bell Labs inventing the transistor.

[1] http://steveblank.com/secret-history/
> for a payment of 4 figures I doubt litigation is a realistic method of obtaining payment.

This is what the small claims courts are for - although it is unclear whether Freelancer.com have any kind of presence in the US, which in this case is what seems to be the real blocker.
Doesn't this guy know how to use Google?

There are tens of blog posts about Freelancer.com's customer support and their shady payment tactics.
>The Go language designers noticed that people were relying on the fact that keys were normally stored in the order they were added in, so they randomized the order in which the keys are iterated over.

Um, I'm just a first-year CS student here, but isn't that a core part of how hash tables work?

They can so efficiently store and lookup data because they essentially store contents in a list with the indices as the hashes of the content.

As such, one can never reliably predict the order of the keys in a hash table, by design. That's not a feature of Go.
Nice post. I admire the tenacity of the golang team to keep pushing this language forward. Adoption was slow at first, and Google can be somewhat quick to drop projects as we all know, so it's nice to see this one moving on.
Someone working on a product is likely more familiar with it than a regular user of it.
Carpet Stair Treads
A 118b web app converting any file to dataURI
eternalban, that "more civilized than the Empire" line is the most interesting thing I've heard in a long time. Please email me.
Hey it's using Twitter Bootstrap.
Minneapolis Renames Columbus Day As Indigenous People's Day
Thankfully, his knowledge of English (which I'll bet is better than your knowledge of Japanese) did not stop him from giving translation a go for our benefit.

Why not contact him and volunteer your stellar English skills to make these project write ups better?

Also you used a comma where a semi-colon was clearly in order. Bastard.
I don't think you are getting the point of the article or the comment above.

This is a p2p system meaning that by definition you cannot take the market down by arresting a single person. It doesn't say it is secure against everything. It just says that as long as the source code/binary is somehow available, it will not be possible to completely shutdown.

The beauty is security vulnerabilities come and go (as in gets patched) so those are not the main concerns here. Even if they decide to tap every communication to identify the transactions and manage to decrypt it, it is going to help for a single raid and then it will get patched.
Here is a big kudo : )
Do you consume a lot of hi-quality scans from museums/archives/libraries? This is the common standard. The LoC distributes all of the high quality scans in tiff format:

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/service/pnp/cph/3b40000/3b48000/3b4880...

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/service/pnp/cph/3b40000/3b48000/3b4880...

Why do so many projects still distribute gz or bz tarballs when xz is the best?
Some Internet wisdom on R documentation
On the other hand, because PNaCL is a sane IR, its composeability and implementability vastly exceeds that of asm.js, which requires not only a full JavaScript stack, but additionally, a complex JavaScript JIT system capable of executing it with additional asm.js-specific optimizations.

I can take PNaCL today and deploy it on alternative stacks, irrespective of the web stack. I can inter-operate cleanly with alternative libraries and environments, I can adopt efficient host platform ABIs, I can run it with a sandbox or without. I could even use it as a generic cross-platform sandboxed in-kernel driver layer.

Moreover, should NaCL/PNaCL be successful, there exists the possibility for optimization on the silicon-level via the introduction of new instruction sets that optimize for in-process sandboxing of untrusted code, much in the same way that trap-and-emulate VMs led to much higher performing silicon-implementations of the same ideas.

Issues of performance can be solved given a well-designed system that applies only as much complexity as is needed, at the level that it is needed. asm.js is a hack inserted at an inappropriate layer of the technology stack; NaCL/PNaCL is a coherent compositionally-sane design that opens the door to later optimizations and significant improvements of the underlying technologies on which it rests.
Why I do love python so much: How it all started
I agree that having to root the phone, and manufacturers making their builds public is an issue. Mozilla can't quite control this, as they can't legally redistribute proprietary and closed source binary blobs that are the hardware drivers. But I've brought it up numerous times to the legal dept that the requirements for both should be part of the branding requirements.

Rooting is a PITA, granted, but you shouldn't be afraid of compiling from source, ever, especially if you're reading "hacker" news.
Sorry, lost the original.
I will try to recreate it:

The big advantages of TeX are:

(1) The purpose of TeX was and is to
lower the labor and cost of high quality
document preparation
of heavily mathematical material
and to permit authors to prepare
such documents themselves.
For such
work, TeX is and near the beginning
long has been the very welcome, highly
respected, unchallenged international
standard. For people writing such documents,
TeX is nearly essential. Before TeX, just the
'typing' could be more work than the
work the typing was communicating. Before TeX,
preparation of documents with mathematical
material was grim for authors, typists, publishers, etc.

(2) The TeX software has produced almost exactly the
same output from the same input on nearly any computer over decades.

(3) The software is essentially totally free
of bugs.

(4) Knuth's documentation is exemplary.

In a sense, TeX is yet another word processing
text markup language;
the big differences are high quality output,
especially of mathematical material,
and the macro language.

For more, TeX was not to cut new
ground in graphical arts;
instead, essentially TeX looked backwards, not
forwards, in that the documents were and are to be
essentially just black
marks on white paper much like huge examples
going back 100+ years on the shelves of
the research libraries. TeX was to
ease the production of such documents and not to
produce different documents.

So, TeX is not for just everything that
can be put on paper, a screen, a cereal box,
or a billboard;
it is not for animated foils, animated movies,
interactive user interfaces,
engineering drawing,
Web pages, routine text documents,
routine e-mail, etc.

TeX is not for average customers of Apple or
Microsoft Word or some
high end graphical arts software from Adobe.

Criticisms of TeX seem mostly to be from people
who don't need TeX. For people who really need
TeX, the criticisms are from not very important
down to irrelevant.
Mitigated by EMET.

If you are on Windows and you are not running EMET, you should really drop everything right now and install it.

http://www.microsoft.com/emet
Controlled Demolition of El Paso City Hall
Entertaining cat photo
A very interesting and entertaining picture of a cat!
http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspi...

Not my usual cup of tea but I watch it once in a while.
Google doesn't exactly tie itself in knots that they built a few hundred billion dollars on top of "We're going to crawl the entire Internet and datamine it for our own purposes. Nobody will agree to this, so we won't ask them. Instead, we will offer easy ways to opt out after having achieved hegemonic control of Internet navigation."
I would advise against the Geeksphones unless you're looking to use them as purely test devices. They were intended as developer phones, not for consumers. They also have some really frustrating issues:

* Both devices still run (AFAIK) FXOS 1.1, which is really very out-of-date. You can flash them with updated versions from Mozilla, but you have to do it yourself. OTA updates will probably not happen. New devices still ship with old versions of FXOS.

* The Peak has a very large screen, which was not something that was fully supported when it first shipped. Some of this has been sorted out after updates, but I occasionally still see people frustrated by poorly scaled interfaces.

* The Peak suffers from a bulging battery issue. The manufacturer has assured everyone that the issue is within tolerances, but it made me uneasy. The battery bulges enough that the back cover of the phone does not sit properly.

* Both devices suffer from charging issues. If you completely drain the batteries, it becomes nearly impossible to charge them. As soon as you plug the device in, it tries to boot, which saps whatever charge it just received. The device shuts itself off, then tries to boot again as soon as it has the tiniest amount of charge. If this happens, your device is basically useless.
> personally attacking

Personal attack? What personal attack? Are you reading the same comment I am? He identified someone. If identification amounts to a personal attack, then that would seem to indicate severe problems with the image of the person being identified!
It's amazing the amount of damage just an accusation can do in a world where drama = page clicks and page clicks = money.
That is a very unreasonable expectation. This is the first time ever i have personally seen any criticism of freelancer.com online and i read a lot of online tech news and work as an online freelancer myself. Without an ongoing history of negative press about them, there is no reason for someone to suspect that their business is fraudulent and to go looking for such information.