skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Monte Carlo Tree Search uses Machine Learning indeed! The balance between exploration and exploitation of the game tree is achieved using "bandit" algorithms (a type of Reinforcement Learning algorithm). I recommend reading (Kocsis & Szepesvari, 2006): http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.102....
> This is combined with a very steep purchase price.

Everyone says the $ 20 or so are a steep price, but I paid twice that for Mailmate[1] and it's worth every drop.

It's probably my most used app after Sublime Text (to which it integrates, by the way) and It repaid itself after a couple hours of stress-free operation.

Granted, people lament that this app doesn't work well, but my point is that, as pervasive as mail is, every small bit of improvement in this area may could end up greatly multiplied. $ 20 may be much for a "useless" piece of software, but I think it's wrong to start with that as a general assumption for a mail app.

[1]: Mailmate: http://freron.com/
Is Uber playing pricing games in Boston?
How easily can you find a Fortran programmer as opposed to a Python/C/Java one?

How easily can you integrate a Fortran program in an existent workflow/software?
Executing non-US citizens is fine, apparently. I don't see anyone objecting to that. It's another fine example of US exceptionalism.

Note that I'm talking about executions, not killing as part of warfare.
Or any human being that isn't an immediate threat for that matter.
Since Krebs doesn't live in Canada, what illegal act may he have committed?
You can train anyone to do anything with positive reinforcement that is salary. If he gets money for crappy C code, there's no motivation for him to improve.
The perfect analogy to knots would be planar and nonplanar graphs. It is always possible to draw a graph without intersections in 3D, but in 2D some graphs are impossible to draw without intersections (nonplanar graphs), such as 5-vertices complete graph.
That's what I was wondering too. The site went from 493 pageviews in the first month to 182404 in the second month.
I am under the impression that the information that this suit could have revealed about Mr Jobs' character was potentially far more damaging than any settlement or award the defendants might have to pay.

To put it another way, I get the impression that settlement here is primarily for PR damage control, and only secondarily for limiting what the defendants must ultimately pay.

Does this idea have any support? If I am wrong, please tell me why.
1st smart lighter and app to track smoking debuts on Kickstarter
That's not what is being discussed here. There is difference between a combat situation as part of warfare and targeted executions of induviduals outside of war.
Github is not your resume.

http://osrc.dfm.io/

You can generate an open source report card based on your profile, but you should not see github as your CV:

https://blog.jcoglan.com/2013/11/15/why-github-is-not-your-c...
This Is How iPad Multitasking Should Look
This post has been submitted at least twice before
For eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7715833
I just got two great job offers without showing them a GitHub account. So this is b.s.
Interesting bit of political wonkery ahead.

There's a way to get rid of a president. It's called impeachment. Impeachment is a political trial for political crimes. Basically looking like an idiot. It's not a criminal trial.

Why is that important? Because we don't criminalize politicians doing their job. It's expected that the president do things which would never be acceptable if an average citizen does them: kidnapping spies, blowing up things here or there, sending warships in harm's way, and whatnot. We don't call these crimes because in point of fact somebody has to make decisions like this. It's part of the job.

(I'm not approving of any of this, simply trying to explain how the system works.)

So I agree with Mr. Paul's first sentence, with one change: "I BELIEVE that the systemic killing of American citizens without a trial is an extraordinary concept and deserves serious debate."

Or, in other words, killing any American overseas without a trial is wrong all the time, but I understand presidents do things that are extraordinary. One of the jobs of Congress is to provide a check on his power. (Congress has made a terrible mess of this oversight responsibility. Congress is ultimately at blame in all of this for giving a wink and nob when it was started.) What's, for lack of a better term, evil, is the creation of a system to automatically do things that bend the rules to this degree without the president having any skin in the game at all. He gets this crazy-broad power, and he's not risking his office when the decision is made to use it. That is insane. And I do not believe a debate has anything at all to do with it. It's wrong. It should stop. There's nothing more to be said.

If the president wants to go off on some bone-headed assassination adventure, he won't be the first one, Congress should debate and take action depending on the specifics. But if he wants to create a system whereby robots are used to assassinate citizens abroad on a regular basis without trial? There's no amount of debate in the world that's going to make that work.
Exactly the reason that we need to keep on having these discussions. I frequently see some awfulness going on in these threads, but I also see people standing up to it and engaging in constructive discussion.

We need to keep pushing this forwards. It benefits everyone.
I remember spending a couple of years working on duplicating his success. Though I had fun it was ultimately a failure, and it seems obvious now just how much PoF's success was a combination of Markus's own talent and being a first mover.
I appreciate the views of folks who ask questions like "why is it legal to kill anyone without trial?" But I think these arguments overlook important considerations. Courts only have power to the extent that the political branches of government choose to abide by their pronouncements. When courts overreach, there is the possibility they will be ignored, and as a result such overreach poses a grave threat to the rule of law. It is for this reason that it's important not to confuse the two separate questions of: "is this bad?" and "is this illegal?"

In the U.S., the founders expressly rejected the idea that courts and judges might bind the hands of the President and Congress in matters of foreign policy and security. The judicial branch is, by design, a domestic institution. When acting abroad, the American President, advised by Congress, retains all the powers that are inherent in an independent sovereignty. And that includes killing outsiders who pose a security threat. Sovereign nations have always had that power, and I doubt there are any that would explicitly disclaim that power.

Clearly, though, the powers the President can project domestically are circumscribed by the Constitution and can be reviewed by the courts. The touchy part is figuring out how to draw the lines: where does the jurisdiction of the court end and the sovereign foreign-affairs authority of the President begin? It is very dangerous to draw the line in a place that overextends the courts' inherently domestic authority and jurisdiction.

I propose that it's better to kill a terrorist like Al Awalki by drone strike than to degrade the judicial system by trying him in abstentia. Trials in abstentia degenerate to farce, and are illegal under federal law (http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...) as well as under the laws governing the International Criminal Court. Nothing in the Constitution says that due process always requires a trial. Saying that Al Awalki has due process rights, and that those rights are satisfied in his peculiar circumstances by consideration of an executive tribunal, does less violence to the rule of law than trying him in abstentia.
There's an very important distinction between killing someone to prevent imminent bodily harm and putting someone on a kill list and sending the drone out to get them. It's the distinctly non-imminent premeditation that makes the difference.
I think we need to see this story in its proper perspective here.

Yes, this woman received unacceptable messages via twitter.
Yes, there need to be mechanisms to deal with it.

However, from her Twitter history you can clearly see she was online into the early hours stoking the trolls, fanning the flames.

She DM'd some random Twitter employee until he got fed up with her and made his tweets private.

She even @-mentioned Barack Obama, asking him to intervene. Seriously.

She claims that she successfully forced the Bank of England to change the design of a new banknote so that a woman appeared on it. Even though there has previously been a banknote featuring a woman; and every single item of UK currency has a woman on it (the Queen).

Her strategy to seek attention by using Twitter's name is win-win. If they change their policy, she was successful and claims credit. If they don't, she can keep bashing them using their high profile name to attract attention.
Unicode, dealing with text, i18n are never easy and simple. That being said, there are lots of things that work on both Windows and Unix and use Unicode internally, even for file names and paths (e.g. Qt and the already-mentioned Java). Qt is even used by a popular-ish desktop environment. If that approach were that unsuitable and utterly incompatible with the Unix approach on encodings I wonder why it apparently does work.
How Madison Avenue can be more like Silicon Valley
As good a place as any to drop Mr Balko's opus: "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces" which is all about this kind of madness.

http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Warrior-Cop-Militarization-Americ...
What would you do with $10,000? What would your partner do?
Agree that Nominatim is awesome. The way it handles disambiguation is thoughtful.

In my opinion, it's better than any closed source competitor.
How have I never heard of these frameworks? I follow/write node and I'm still out of the loop already.
I usually use zeroconf/avahi for that sort of thing.
"Square Wallet provided a very magical experience but didn’t have a lot of the utility value,” Square’s Ajit Varma said in a recent interview."

I'll admit it - I threw up a little bit in my mouth when I heard "magical" in this context. For me, utility is the magic.

And then this: "That said, the company raised some eyebrows a few weeks back when it said it would charge businesses eight percent for these order-ahead transactions, rather than the 2.75 percent flat rate for most credit card purchases that run through Square’s platform. The reasoning, it said, was that the feature would help bring in new customers."

8%? For a SMB operating on likely thin margins? Merchants would be crazy to sign up for this service.
Where is Square's major market penetration? I'm guessing SF and NYC, but in New York City I think I've only seen it used in one store, and even there I'm not sure the system they were using was Square. I know they also ran a trial handling payments in city taxis, but that trial only tested 13 cabs, and was pulled shortly after starting.
I once gave them a similar amount, probably 10 years ago. They have since spent at least that amount on postage and call center labor asking me for more money. This greatly discourages me from wanting to give more to them, even though I like what they do with their non-outreach funding (however small that may be)
Even if the legal system pretends they never happened, there is no requirement on other people in the US to pretend you never did those things. Which is both good and bad.
WTF Forms
E-commerce Empowers Southeast Asia’s Local Brands
Networking Hack: How To Snag Lunch With A High-Profile Entrepreneur
What language do you do it in?
I've used pretty much all of the big geocoding services, and here are problems I've ran into.

1. Rate limiting: I get it, you have to make money and/or limit your freeloading, but rate limiting has killed things I've built in the past, especially Google's hard rate limit. A soft rate limit, or an alternate way to monetize, would be huge.

2. Accuracy: MapBox's geocoder is not good. Aside from inaccurate map tiles, their geocoder misses entire US zip codes. PLEASE at least include helpful error messages and a path to report incorrect results.

3. A solution for shared IPs and rate limiting. I have helped several small websites that do not come close to approaching Google's daily rate limit, but because their IP was used by someone else, they are not allowed to make geocoding calls. This forced us to use a different service.

Honorable mention: It would be nice to be able to specify what data I get back from a call. If all I need is lat/lng, I don't need another kilobyte of neighborhood/city/time zone info in my result.

Hope this helps.
The code is on github https://github.com/sstephenson/xipd/blob/master/src/index.co.... I wonder if it was just an oversight in parsing the string, rather than deliberate.
i was more going after these angles:

(a) once upon a time, it was _expected_ of a competent developer to be able to run a server with a web server and a resume html file. putting your resume in github is no more impressive than putting your resume in your personal wikipedia profile.

(b) some of us have been programming a lot longer than github has been around, and it does not come close to effectively showing community contribution over such a career.

(c) as someone responding to my original comment noted, not all code can be published. i have a lot of commits, even in github, which you can't see.

All that said, I do expect people increasingly to examine github for recent community work, I would be concerned with someone who had never used it, though outside the fad bubble of the sf mission, a lot of people are using bitbucket and - GASP - hosting their own git repos.

GitHub is a great tool, a useful community 'hub', but also a SPOF and a relatively young player in the source control space.

I can say from experience, however, it's just very frustrating to have a recruiter say that some founders ten years your junior who probably have a great idea and could be great to work for want to see a github profile.

kids, i helped build Rackspace, without which there would be no GitHub. Give those old-timers a call. ;)

Anyway, this debate may not be fair to OP who was just showing how to use GH to host actual resume. There are some advantages, but really, fire up a $5 DigitalOcean VM and show me that you know about code running some way other than foreground in your laptop console.
Using Functional Programming to Build a Better Breakfast Bagel.
It's tricky, right? What percentage of anonymous calls are swattings vs. actual hostage situations? It's a dangerously easy tactic, but I still would guess that it's rare relative to actual calls that require a quick response.

Certainly, law enforcement needs to be thinking hard about how they response. But it's not obvious to me, as an outsider, how to handle this.
Woe is Media: Lessons from Tidemark’s PR
I quite like using Geofabrik's MapCompare tool for things like this. For example, take a look at http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/#14/-39.2756/-71.9824&num=4&mt0...
Scoring is trivial - if the game is actually finished. No human wants to play go games to the finish so essentially all human games are scored by agreement. But a Monte Carlo program just simulates the game vs itself. See the addenum to my post above.
Could we not have captured Anwar Awl Alaki in some form? Could we not have had the Yemen government issue an arrest warrant and have him arrested? Could we not have tried him in absentia? Unfortunately I don't know the answer to all of these and I'm not sure it's possible to know the answer.
Respectfully, I think the author got the reason wrong. In software, there are inherent problems, and non-inherent problems (as observed by No Silver Bullet). Scientists, when writing scientific code, can only encounter/create non-inherent problems: local (or relatively local) bugs in their code. Programmers, otoh, are employed in order to tackle (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) the inherent problems, which mostly distill to the problem of "scale". Note that most of the problems the author listed in those bullets may be described as "this doesn't scale".

So when the author is called to solve a problem created by a colleague, he either gets a very local bug in some scientific code, which is apparently easy to debug (I'm surprised about the concurrency stuff also being easy, but if that's the case - great for him), or a problem with a large code base, badly architected, which we all know is very hard to solve.

The author seems to imply that if software engineers would ditch this extravagance and start writing simple code instead, we would be better off - I highly doubt this. I mean, the code would certainly be easier to understand, but how much duplication would there be? How much more code would we have to understand?
> The tl;dr on CRDTs is that by constraining your operations to only those which are associative, commutative, and idempotent.

Interesting. We have an event stream database implemented in Haskell, and this looks like an excellent way to index it. Especially associative, commutative and idempotent can (probably) all be encoded in the type system!
The linked article (title "Painless Resumes With Markdown") doesn't even mention GitHub.
Two reasons you shouldn't cite James' post as an argument:

1. He blocks HN traffic (hence the idiotic octopus gif)

2. His post is incredibly inaccurate and simply wrong on so many levels
Ask HN: My media startup has every position ready to be filled – except CTO!
Hello, I'm a media startup co-founder who hasn't had luck finding a college-aged/recent graduate to fill our CTO position. I initially found a brilliant recent Caltech graduate who held the position for 3 months; however, he had to back out because of increased responsibilities at Oracle. We're ready to go with an all-star team lineup, but I need to find a young go-getter for the CTO position.<p>I'd appreciate any suggestions or recommendations - can't find a CTO candidate who has an interest in doing some things in the music and entertainment spaces that aren't being done now.
Use Piwik as a web-designer. Use Disconnect.me in your browser.
> She claims that she successfully forced the Bank of England to change the design of a new banknote

She did
It helps a lot, thanks.

re: alternate ways to monetize, what do you propose?
The "hostage taker" analogy is a terrible one. There is no situation in law enforcement where police are allowed to kill a suspect immediately on sight, regardless of circumstance. When Obama added Anwar al-Awlaki to his personal "kill list" (a decision he said was "an easy one"), it became open season on al-Awlaki.
You'd have to be a goddamn idiot to put your phone number and email address directly into a git repo or gist.

I get enough spam from recruiters on LinkedIn thank-you-very-much.
to be clear, CCP (caroline criado-perez) has been reporting these threats to the police for months and months.

Also, why shouldn't services be responsible for users using their service to abuse others?

If you haven't heard of CCP before, you should take some time to read about the amount of abuse she's faced for campaigning on important women's issues over the last year or so. She's not just some random blogger, she's an important figure in the UK due to the campaigning she's done and the abuse she's received through twitter. This belongs on Hacker News exactly because it's about the intersection of Tech and human beings, and the lack of foresight which has allowed some of this abuse to occur.

Startups should be paying attention to stories like this when they look to design services that are safe spaces that everyone can use without being abused or terrorised by other users.
Not every adult finds Harry Potter fun to read.
You Don’t Hate Monopoly, You Just Suck at It
Is it really "non-violent" to make the cops think there is a hostage situation going on?
> At least it is a start. Once the killing of US citizen without a trial is accepted as undesirable, then we will move on to attempting to have our compatriots reflect on the morality of killing foreigners

I was under the impression that killing US citizens without a trial had been considered pretty much unthinkable until a few years ago, when your president allowed it. I may be mistaken, as I'm not from the US and so not immersed in the culture on a daily basis.

If that's true, I would say that the current development is in the opposite direction of more restraint.
> Executing non-US citizens is fine, apparently. I don't see anyone objecting to that. It's another fine example of US exceptionalism.

Not all Americans agree with this behavior.
Totally agree. Seems he has a bit of a chip on his shoulder, by frequently mentioning "software engineering" in quotes.

And as someone who had the grave misfortune of having some experience in scientific code, all I can do is laugh at the OP's link. Yeah sure, scientist's are great at programming. I say let them off at it, because I want nothing to do with it. I value my sanity too much :)
Did you click on this link? It is not the same as the one you linked to.
How does one get on a kill list?

I could be wrong but I'd tend to believe it is because they are a clear threat and not because one has poor choice in friends or makes suspicious trips to unusual destinations.
or just configure your environment correctly.
Uber's offering private jets for the rich kids of Cannes
Review of bet365 what makes bet365 one of the better online betting agencies
> or is it some village next to Shitfuckistan?

Wow, where did that come from?
Bit off topic, but can anyone recommend a good tutorial/book/whatever for python 2 programmers looking to move to (or at least become familiar with) python 3?
A better analogy are the fatwas issued by the Ayatollahs of Iran.
That doesn't have ANYTHING tto do with the grandparent's comment.
There is http://nip.io as well, which does resolutions quite straight forward:

$ dig 127.0.0.1.nip.io
;; ANSWER SECTION:
127.0.0.1.nip.io.	432000	IN	A	127.0.0.1
C++ REPL in 400KLOC
I'm pretty sure that would be a wasted effort. Basically, you could be nearly NSA-proof only if you use your own cert and are prepared to shut down the whole thing when the Feds demand private keys. But then it wouldn't be useful for general email: it will get blacklisted by various parties you would want to exchange email with, unless you use a CA.

Really the only readily-practical approach for NSA-proofing will be something that's user-friendly in the UI and encrypts end to end. This prevents snooping in transit, but still exposes metadata, and of course there are endpoint attacks.
A Test for School Reform in Newark
No it's not. Github only shows an extremely small portion of the story. If you plan to be seen as a straight code monkey - sure. My github is practically empty because I'm doing high quality work that people would prefer I not share. Also, github doesn't capture much more than the capability to slign code.
Oh, I see my mistake! Thank you very much!

I'm not very math savvy and I was trying to get this right.

Anyway, thank you very much for making this clear!

Cheers!
netgrafio isn't interacting with the IP traffic directly. You can easily parse tshark/tcpdump output and convert the output to JSON. netgrafio will just listen for JSON packets and forward them to the web application.
Thanks, but it's too late, we're fallen under the geo spell.
We're very familiar with nominatim (it's many strengths, but also significant weaknesses), and the challenge of geocoding across many different parts of the world, which as you mention are not trivial.
Why can't the API offer both options so you can use what makes sense on a case by case basis.