skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The same way that the fire department has to respond to every single fire alarm,

I discovered this isn't true, at least not in Lowell, MA (a bit north of Boston, MA). A few years ago I bought a 3-family rental property. There was a big blizzard that froze the badly insulated water pipes in the house, which resulted in the pipes bursting on the 3rd floor. That caused what amounted to a waterfall inside the 2nd and 1st floors.

When I arrived, the fire alarms were on. I was going to head down to the basement to turn off the water main but then I realized I had no idea where the water main was (I had just bought the house) and I figured that venturing into a dark basement full of water with live wires running everywhere probably wasn't the brightest idea.

So I called 911, explained the situation, and waited. They told me they'd "send someone". 20 minutes went by. The waterfall was still going. I called again. They told me they'd send someone. 10 minutes went back. I called a 3rd time and was told "they're busy clearing snow from fire hydrants around the city". I happen to be standing next to a light switch in the house and I happened to smell something that smelled like smoke. "But I smell smoke", I said to the dispatcher.

"Smoke?!", she replied. "We'll send someone immediately."

And within 3 minutes I had a dozen firefighters in the house.
mkdown does private. Gist.io does not support private. +1 for mkdown!
For an example of why officers can't just shoot suspects on sight: in the Dorner manhunt, LAPD shot at a truck just because they thought it fit the description of Dorner's, and ended up shooting innocent people instead.
Create Native iOS, Android, Mac and Windows apps in C#
I get that Armin runs into pain points with Py3, but on the other hand I get annoyed with the heavily English centric criticims - its easy to think py2 was better when you're only ever dealing with ASCII text anyway.

Fact is, most of the world doesn't speak english and needs accents, symbols, or completely different alphabets or characters to represent their language. If POSIX has a problem with that then yes, it is wrong.

Even simple things like french or german accents can make the Py2 csv module explode, while Py3 works like a dream. And anyone who thinks they can just replace accented characters with ASCII equivalents needs to take some language lessons - the result is as borked and nonsensical as if, in some parallel univese, I had to replace every "e" with an "a" in order to load simple english text.
Show HN: HerokuOn – Keep your cloud instances awake and responsive
I'm a programmer and I've worked with scientists (planetary geology). The code is usually pretty bad, but ignoring how "pretty" or maintainable it might be, from the outside it ran way too slow, used too much memory, and botched edge conditions. On the good side, the intentions were pretty clear and the mathematics were sound. So it was pretty easy to fix things up to handle needed data volume and deal with the missed edge cases. As long as I was brought in within a certain window of time it was easy indeed.

The real issue is not best practices, per se, but what passes for them in some rather large circles. Yosefk's "DriverController, ControllerManager, DriverManager, ManagerController, controlDriver ad infinitum" is a fine warning sign. Nothing there is named after anything in the problem domain, and that's a sure sign of trouble. It's a sign that the programmer thinks the problem domain is software engineering or computer science, but that's wrong.

I've always seen becoming intimate with the problem domain as an integral part of programmimg in the real world. I've succeeded to the extent that I have been occasionally asked to provide help outside of software, by top people. How can anyone do a good job providing software solutions otherwise?
> Most important -- risk. Risk that stuff will break.

that's what test coverage is for. if you don't have coverage, then your code is already broken.
Wow! I mean WOW!!! You guys must read those comments on New York Times website. Especially those NYT/Readers' Picks. WOW! Really EYE OPENING! WOW!
Is TDD dead? Part 2
> To a modern physicist, perhaps the most interesting thing about the Oklo reactor is that it gives us one of the biggest levers on the question "Have the laws of physics changed over time?"

I don't think it really does, because our interpretation of the causes that produced the effects that we can see now as something which supports the conclusion that the laws of physics were the same then itself rests on the assumption that the laws of physics were the same then.
tldr; Our ability for deep reading is being affected by the internet medium we are operating in.

[Coming from a person who grew up without internet]

In this internet age, there is SO much text that we are forced to skim over, deciding whether it is relevant or not. If we didn't , and devoted 100% attention to every article/tutorial we came upon, we'd never get our tasks done.

We're retraining our brains from the slow-paced deep reading required of an offline novel.

Kids have no previous neural wiring that required deep immersive concentration into a static simple book of tatooed dead tree leaves.
The first thing they are encountering is swaths of internet text, flashing, changing, interaction - too much stimulation for a developing brain. No wonder they can't concentrate, let alone, sit still and be engaged with a single text for a half hour or so.
I'll quote Don Draper here: "Technology is a glittering lure"[0]

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHUUyx0d7qw
Has proof of that he was involved in any plots been publicly presented anywhere? Based on the public record it looks like he was killed for exercising his First Amendment rights, albiet in a repugnant fashion.
Start a small project.
Was just going to post this :)
I think everything you say here is correct. It sounded as if the comment I was replying to was recommending a practice that I've tried to follow, and I was explaining how trying use a functional style in an OO ecosystem caused me problems.

"You're not supposed to know the internal state of a class, and you shouldn't care if it's changing."

A recent headache was caused by trying to use a library (forgive the vagueness, I don't want to pick on anybody) that interfaced with an external service. One method was documented as returning a piece of information that had been previously stored in the main object through which you interact with the service. But when you invoke it the library makes additional API calls to the service and changes other data in the object. If you use the method in some expression that calls it 20 times it will make the set of API calls 20 times. There is no way to know this (ahead of time) unless you read the code. It's not documented because "You're not supposed to know the internal state of a class, and you shouldn't care if it's changing.". The author made assumptions about why you were using the method and what you were going to do next.

So what appears to be a function for retrieving a single value actually returns several values, returning one as a result, stuffing others silently into an object, and initiating network activity. This kind of lack of orthogonality and hiding behavior from the programmer is what motivates me to learn functional programming and avoid OO systems - although I understand they are a good match for programming GUIs and similar things.
Please go visit some redwoods or beaches or wineries or dim sum or taquerias, too. Our fair city is more than just a tech hub.

I think the Maker Faire is that weekend, about 20 minutes south of SF in San Mateo, if that kind of hacking is your thing.
Attend a Haskell mini-conference! http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/BayHac2014
Liberal Civil War in San Francisco: Immigrants And Hipsters Attack Tech Workers
I just happened to release an article about this today!
http://flippinawesome.org/2014/05/12/beef-up-your-skills-wit...
...rate limiting has killed things I've built in the past, especially Google's hard rate limit.

Sometimes it's possible to shift queries to the client, and then build in enough intelligence to: run only ten queries at a time, delay queries by a period that backs off, save results in localStorage, etc.

This won't solve all problems, and perhaps it annoys users to see the first ten locations pop up immediately while subsequent locations have some random delay the first time they visit a particular resource, but it does make some things possible that would not be otherwise.
I don't see any reason to treat it any differently than any other unprovoked attack by one nation onto the soil of another, and take it to whatever U.N. bodies have oversight over such activities (Security Council?).
I wasn't aware of that, though now that you mention it, I do have a vague memory about this. Would you post a link?
In the case of mobile, the term is used differently, at least as far as I have seen.

Native apps are often used to describe apps using the platforms own UI toolkit, widgets and API libraries (that is, they look and feel like platform apps and they integrate into the platforms services/notifications/...)

So for FirefoxOS, HTML apps could be considered "native" by this definition.
Ultra-fast, the bionic arm can catch objects on the fly
How to Cultivate Culture on a Website
Is there a good reason why CCP continues to even use Twitter in the face of all this abuse? I'm not suggesting that the assaulters are in any way justified in what they're doing, but leaving Twitter and finding different ways to communicate with people seems like an obvious solution to the problem.

Maybe it's harder for me to grok as someone who never really got into Twitter in the first place.
What problems? The only people I know who look on the ACLU with scorn are right-wing Christian bigots. Screw them.

What other things do you not do, in case it upsets wingnuts?
That's not a correct characterization of what happened with chess. Computer chess programs do not work the same way as the human mind. The human mind uses very strong heuristics, and then simulates the game to a relatively small set of positions. We do not really understand how that heuristic part works. On the other hand, computers use very simple and weak heuristics, but search a huge space of possible moves. I'd argue that we learned relatively little about how humans play chess from chess AI. The same goes for most other kinds of AI. AI/machine learning isn't studying how the human mind does it an replicating that, it is developing a method that is effective for computers.
In the great 1957 scifi novel "Niourk" [1], men have (mostly) abandoned Earth, the oceans dried away and octopi became larger, cleverer and are becoming the dominant species.
Spoiler alert: don't look at the wikipedia page in case you plan to read the book :)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niourk
Heads up, these responses from external DNS servers may be blocked by some recursive resolvers.

Allowing this on your network opens you up to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_rebinding attacks.
The United Arab Emirates “Drones for Good” Award
You're right, I was lazily responding to the article on its own terms rather than engaging properly with go's string handling.

I think the approach of keeping strings encoded has promise but it would need to be supported by a stronger type system than go's. When you're carrying around two encoded byte arrays it's really important that you know what their encodings are and don't try and e.g. concatenate them. Ruby can do this right because it can give you a runtime type error, but that's not acceptable in a compiled language. So you need to distinguish between byte arrays with statically known encodings, byte arrays with dynamically known encodings and byte arrays with unknown encodings. And you should really e.g. disallow slicing a byte array that represents a string, so that you don't cut a character in half.

I know that one of the UTF-8 guys worked on go and I'm sure go will work well when everything's in UTF-8. But all languages work well when everything's in UTF-8; if anything this makes me more worried that go's authors won't give proper support to those who have to work with strings in non-UTF8 encodings. (By contrast one of the reasons Ruby's support is good is that the author is Japanese and therefore pretty much has to work with strings in multiple non-unicode encodings, because of han unification)
The Most Coveted Banana in the World?
Regarding the comment toward the end of the article questioning why the west doesn't sell CANDU reactors to Iran; I would guess that's probably to do with the political situation in Canada with the ruling Conservative Party. Some parts of the party tend to be quite jingoistic, and I'm sure would never support building in Iran, despite there being CANDU reactors in India, Pakistan and China. Also, despite heavy water reactors not being a good source of enriched uranium, they still do produce tritium which can be used to do nasty things.
LCG can be used for serious work, depending on your definition of serious. You need to use multiplication instead of modulus.
Vagrant, Hyper-V, and Dynamic Hosts
Surprised no one mentioned: http://zero-k.info/

This is an extremely polished open source game (spiritually based on Total Annihilation). Everyone should check it out.
NSHipster Quiz #5
When I want to learn a new language/framework/technique/etc. I pick a side project and write that new project with whatever I'm trying to learn. There's no shortage of reference material on the internet to assist with this, and I think there's really no substitute for this method.
CVE-2014-0196 Linux
Thomas Hobbes wrote that, in the absence of organised societies/government to pass and enforce laws, people are in a "state of nature" where every person has a natural liberty to do anything they think necessary to preserve their own life (what he termed war of all against all).

Civil governments remove this "state of nature", curtailing liberties and creating rights - for example, giving you the right not to be murdered by while taking away your liberty to murder other people.

As there is no government of governments to pass or enforce international laws, nations are in a permanent state of nature. One nation bombing another over some land is like one wolf fighting another over some dead prey - they're just doing what they naturally do. It's not like the wolf-police are going to stop them.
This is definitely aligned with OT. OT typically comes in two steps—merge and simplify. Merge takes two divergent histories and puts them together into a collective view. Simplify takes that collective view and reduces it to a single "consistent" view according to domain rules.

With CRDTs the merge operation is made such that the simplify operation is id.

It's also interesting to note that the merge operation is just a pullback in the appropriate category.
I think about half the coffee shops in Seattle take Square.

It is SUPER ubiquitous when you go to a comic book convention; anyone who is at all serious about sitting behind a table selling their comics will have a Square reader. I'm one of those people, and we LOVE Square because it's made it a lot easier to make a sale.

When I go to the local farmer's market, a lot of the people there use Square as well. There's a fair number of clunky single-purpose credit card devices, and some other credit card acceptance methods that work much like Square, but over the past year or two I've seen people mostly shifting to Square.

Note that the two classes of itinerant merchants I cite usually don't work with Wallet; that requires having a fairly permanent place of doing business.
There's not a listings/event site that aggregates all of this stuff?

(He says with mild surprise from London)
[EDIT: Two immediate downvotes and neither has the courage to explain why. Wow. Is the inconvenient truth hitting to close to home?]

Relying on ad revenue is a moral failing.

Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. – Tyler Durden, Fight Club

Anyone who is truly honest with themselves will admit that 90 to 99% of ads deceive and manipulate people into consuming a product[1]. The rationalization that allowing ads allows you to give your product free to users is a self-serving shame-allaying delusion[2].

[1] Even an ad that tells no outright lie is lying if it is selectively tells a partial truth. The moral test is whether you sell that product with the same pitch to a friend who does not have money to blow. Would you leave out the cons of your product and the pros of a competing one? Would you use psychological tricks to convince your friend she needs it, even though in honesty you know she doesn't?

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773
According to an interesting book of a Russian paleontologist Kirill Eskov [1] there were a lot of "evolutionary tries" to create a multicellular life. And as soon as it became "profitable" the regular try conquered the world.

IIRC it was related to increased oxygen level.

[1] "История Земли и жизни на ней" ("History of the Earth and its lifeforms")
I love the comparison of the octopus with a smart alien. We might not completely understand them, but something about them tells us they are intelligent beings.
Yes, that does make it harder.

But a few things make it easier too:

1. Twitter can see all messages from the sender -- if the stream contains a lot of suspect material and was created recently (for example), that makes any individual Tweet more suspect. No individual mail client can do this.
2. A 'false positive' in Twitter has a lower cost than in email. People ignore tweets all the time, so hiding the wrong thing sometimes won't matter so much.
3. Twitter is a more constrained platform, so the problem domain is presumably more limited.

I don't mean to say it's easy or even "not very hard" to pull this off -- just that it is either well within Twitter's capabilities, or soon could be.
This isn't exactly an answer to the question, but I wish that it was more common for projects to provide high-level conceptual overviews. More often they just dive into code and expect you to pick up the big picture through osmosis.

For example, when I was trying to learn about React.js, I spent a day or two of research to write this, which is the kind of documentation I wish had existed in the first place: http://blog.reverberate.org/2014/02/react-demystified.html
If every single order you get through it is an order that you definitely would have never received without the system, then it's a good deal. Other than that, it's maybe good once, but when customers start using it on a repeat basis, there's no benefit to the store.

They're justifying it as a customer acquisition expense, but you have to pay for it in perpetuity. Not good.
If you are serious about your career path as software engineer stay away from windows technologies.
Why Women Won’t Submit…to Speak at Your Event
My comments were not specific to C. They were a general statement about runtime library provided random number functions across all languages - a risk to be aware of.

There are other mitigations. For example, Java's RNG uses an LCG, but returns the high 32 bits and uses a 48-bit modulus to counter this weakness.
+1 what's wrong in using referrals. Every web company out there is earning money more or less the same way.
Ahhhhhhh. yes yes. Nice.

Weirdly enough I am implementing a CRDT list today (not a set). The TreeDoc example in the main paper has a problem I think, if two writes with same key go in, the disambiguator keeps an ordering. But if that occurs, you now can't insert between those two edits because the disambiguators are not dense.

The set stuff looks good though.
What examples do you have (Go?), and do you have any charts that you drew insight from to say that? Of course, I have already been Googling the issue, but we aren't necessarily looking at the same sources.

So where are you getting your information that Python is losing to the "it" languages?
why? seems to be a fine choice for tens of thousands of devs
Come up with a pet project and code a prototype in the language you're interested in (or, more generally, using the set of tools you're interested in). If you like what you experience, extend the project, solving more difficult problems, step by step deepening your knowledge.
Serious question here, what do you hope to accomplish by Tweeting something like this? Vigilante justice from fellow bicyclists?
The only British woman to win a Nobel science prize gets a doodle
Hoeveel kost een treinticket?
I find those activities troubling and I don't think it serves the purpose of ameliorating them to pull international terrorists under the umbrella of police and criminal enforcement. The protections available to ordinary criminal defendants has already become quite eroded and distorted by the necessity of accommodating enforcement against organized crime and drug kingpins within the same framework.
10 Facebook Tools for Business and Marketing in 2014
Stop the Slow Lane
Left for Dead has robust AI. It is made so that a scenario can be played over and over again with different layouts of computer players. The design of the zombies requires teamwork. I believe the key to the fun of that game is in the single player is the AI. Without good AI it would be no fun at all.

It is not open source but I did see a presentation about its pathing on the internet.
Relevant work I've done in the past:

http://christophermeiklejohn.com/coq/2013/06/11/distributed-...

Also, see related papers from PaPEC '14:

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2596631
What is a 'cloud-optimized library'? Does it mean 'small' or have I underestimated it?
> I think on the face of it I do like the Go approach of "everything is a byte string in utf-8" a lot

That isn't actually the case in Go: strings do not enforce UTF-8. However, the libraries that deal with text, as well as the compiler, are opinionated about treating strings as UTF-8.
I don't think I've ever tried simply absorbing the language or framework without building something in it.

Two summers ago, I had a Ruby/Rails internship, and before the internship I'd never touched Ruby or Rails. Since I needed to learn on the job, I built myself tiny applications in Sinatra, then Rails — and then could apply it at work.

The key, I think, is trying to build something specific with your tools.
Thorium: the wonder fuel that wasn't
You reported a flooded building and they didn't send anyone. You then reported the hint of a fire and they sent out people very quickly.

Your anecdote seems to support the statement "the fire department has to respond to every fire alarm".
Tablets for Schools’ Work on Tablet Addiction Hits the News and Social Media
I don't think you can do very much that is too nasty with tritium unless you already have a working fission bomb (i.e. boosting the fission weapon or using the tritium as part of a multi-stage weapon).
> It took a bit to wrap my head around this when I first read about it[0], but now that I think about it, I think it's the right way to go[1].

I don't actually think it's the right way to go: I'd prefer if strings enforced that they were UTF-8. That saves a lot of error checking by clients that consume it and want to be defensive. It's most efficient to have the type system do the work.
This would all be a moot point if there had been a trial held (even in absentia).

These guys are destroying the best parts of America because they're lazy, they're incompetent and/or they don't respect the Rule of Law. Any of these three reasons is sufficient not to allow anyone involved in these criminal acts to prosper, flourish, or succeed in any meaningful way in our country.
I would most definitely like to also know why? There are many developers that work using Microsoft technology, everyone organisation does not build their services or products on open source.