skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for clarifying -- I'm still not sure which environments are much "more" live than Smalltalk. If you do make changes, usually that code will be executed on the next call?

Or are you talking about some strict old Smalltalk-80?

While you could change a parameter like color in some text-representation of the live code, wouldn't it be more natural (in Smalltalk) to simply change the object [ed: object instance] in question (and see the immediate change)?

I'm considering things like:

http://pharo.gforge.inria.fr/PBE1/PBE1ch7.html#x32-111006r22...

If Smalltalk allows editing values of variables of running code, and hot code loading -- what is missing? Is it the fact that other systems define the source code as "the truth", and consider the byte/compiled code to be a "secondary artefact" that causes (my) confusion?

Because as far as I can tell, Smalltalk does allow you to manipulate the objects that make up your system live?
>If that's not the purpose, why even have copyright at all?

To encourage creative works. This may or may not lead to expanding the public domain, but those are not equivalent.

>These are referenced in the US Constitution itself.

The constitution references encouraging creativity. It does not reference expanding the public domain.
Anecdote: at Google we're called "Software Engineers". In response to this, a very senior and well-respected colleague changed his title to simply "Programmer".
There are SOPs and guidelines, and when you're in an incident command position here, you're given a lot more training on survivability and risk assessment, but as a general principle, there are few firefighters who would not find it the noblest of deaths to die (attempting to) rescue someone.

"I'm going into that building because I have $4,000+ worth of gear on to protect me and bring out someone who doesn't."

versus the same situation where smoke has long since filled to the floor, meaning, in all honesty, that you're doing victim recovery.

But... that doesn't mean we (and especially any commander) should make a decision to increase risk beyond reward for themselves or their crew.

For a good, real insight into the mindset at play - and sincerely without attempting to play the 'hero' card (most of the people I know in Fire/EMS are some of the more humble you'll meet - we get to do an amazing job that, difficult as it is, is utterly rewarding at times), check out Burn: A Year On The Frontlines in Detroit as something real, in what would be unanimously described as the "worst" FD in the country (situation, circumstance, budget, management - not line staff).
Kurzweil's life achievements look more impressive.
This is HN now.
Do those people really exist? It sounds like a stereotype. how can a person translate a business requirement into code automatically? if that was possible I'd think CASE tools would be more prevalent than they are.
> You keep offering your premise 'DRM has no effect on piracy because it be broken' - as an argument, but it's only your opinion, not a fact.

Sorry, but you are wrong. It's not an opinion, but fact which can be demonstrated by observing how fast pirated materials with DRM stripped off appear after DRM-ed releases come out. Q.E.D. DRM never deters piracy. And as you said, dropping DRM can gain as much as 1/3 of sales which are otherwise lost due to users opposing it. So not dropping DRM is simply insane from any business standpoint.

> You don't put up with DRM because it's technically easy for your to circumvent, but a lot of people do and are even willing to forego consuming something until it becomes affordable or accessible.

No, you didn't get what I was saying. That's not how it works. It works like this:

1. DRM-ed release comes out.

2. A few pirates who know how to break DRM break it and make the content available DRM-free to other pirates.

3. Any subsequent pirate who is interested in that content takes it from that DRM-free pirate source never dealing with any DRM.

4. Legitimate users on the other hand are left to deal with DRM junk.

That's it. I'm perplexed that so many people don't get this.

> By your logic, DVD sales and streaming revenue should already be zero because pirated versions are available.

No, not all people are pirates. However dropping DRM will turn part of the current pirates into paying customers increasing current sales of the same content. Plus it will gain sales from those who aren't pirates but simply oppose DRM. Total gain overall.
That was true in 1995. It's now 2014. There has been ample time to fix the many flaws. There's no justifiable reason why, nearly 20 years on, JavaScript is still so inherently busted in so many ways.
Spring IO – A Platform Reinvented
Why not make karma completely invisible?

The most obvious effects of karma, that downvoting blanks out a comment, that you can downvote at a certain threshold, and that the threads are sorted by karma, don't require actually being able to see the number assigned to a poster.
Voltage across your body is not likely to be deadly.

MILLIamps (~50 or so) can be enough to electrically disrupt your heart and put you in a dysrhythmia.
I love playing with this. Thanks for building it.
Well, one could argue that (in the short term) there would be more violence as the current power balance is disrupted and gangs search to expand into other areas to generate their money...
There is really no need for you to engage in petty personal insults like that just because you happen to disagree with what I wrote earlier.

If you wish to discuss this further, please return to the topic at hand.
Sending tones in band actually works reasonably well on mobile networks. It's not 100% reliable which is why alternate signaling is used, especially when the signal quality is low.
So just like bittorrent, which is decentralized but has many (centralized) trackers of varying quality.
From the little bit I've seen your game looks very cool. Any tips or recommended resources on game development in Go?
Ask HN – Which inspiring and insightful non-tech books have you read this year?
you put nginx in front of it, which you should do anyways for most things.
In addition, if you were to replace the Rails router with a Ruby trie implementation, it would be even faster. (not that this is encouraged)
Do you have those numbers backwards?
I haven't seen the paper, but presumably the authors used a binary definition of "technical", which I suspect actually means "job that requires higher education", which might also correlate with "job in which fathers tend to have children later".
That's not a very good assumption. A lot of students get their first experience with programming in college.
With more loaded questions:

"Alcohol destroys more lives than any of those drugs: are you saying we should return to the era of prohibition and mafia violence? Should our children die because people can't be responsible? That doesn't sound like small government or liberty to me."
Cool! Does it do anything interesting during a network partition?
There are few choices and/or some combination of the following:

(1) Start committing to Github daily. Make your own project and just go with it until you it's finished and learn what you need too.

My example project: http://austingwalters.com/openbkz/

(2) You can go through online courses in an attempt to learn more and become an expert, many courses are online. You could also start following blogs, read papers and replicate results.

If you are interested in maximizing learning: http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/

(3) The past month I have been writing a blog a day, it increased my productivity and forced me to really master topics:

My explanation on blogging: http://austingwalters.com/learning-through-blogging/

I recommend blogging, videos, or writing stuff down for "teaching" others because it really helps you master a subject and helps you think of ways to use those concepts.
well, just for fun!
Simple. The answer is "yes."

So-called hard drugs are ... well ... they ain't health food.

But presumably I'm writing to an audience of utilitarian thinkers, so it should be trivial to load up the arguments onto a balance beam: for, and against.

We have lived through the against side it. We know exactly what those consequences are, for society. Importantly, criminalization does ZERO to limit demand, and thus, supply. Zero. This is demonstrably true. So, now imagine a world where all of those same people who already choose to abuse drugs to the point where it becomes a severe health and social hazard, except those activities are not illegal anymore.

Yes, you still have the dangers of those people acting irrationally, or even rationally, but just anti-socially, in pursuit of their high. But this happens now, already. With the added negatives of the so-called war on drugs (which in reality is a war on the American people, especially black people), just thrown into the mix.

Like so many others have done, I could write at great length (and so could you, dear reader, most likely; many of you) about this subject. It's completely fucked, in a word.

And I live in Colorado, so if you'd like to hear about what's happened after pot was legal, I can tell you: nada. Zip. Nothing bad. Zero. And that won't ever change, either. Yeah, pot's not cocaine, but believe it or not, doing a few lines of blow doesn't turn a normal human being into a psychopath. Or, if it does, that same person would become just as dangerous after a pint of vodka.
"Well INSERT_NAME_HERE, by hard drugs, you mean three substances which all are regularly administered as prescription drugs? Cocaine as cocaine hydrochloride, meth as desoxyn, and heroin as diamorphine? So to call them hard drugs is a bit of a misnomer used to unfairly elicit a negative connotation.

While decriminalizing all drugs is a controversial issue, a conversation on shifting the focus from drugs as a criminal act to a conversation on health effects and what we as a society can do to help those who have become dependent on these substances, as opposed to taking the inhumane approach of locking them up and throwing away the key."
Lower leg bones are likely to directly relate to body weight where say teeth on the other extreme have little to so with it. Overall, it's note quite BS because it can be somewhat true.

Ex: Sabertooth cat and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narwhal
What is interesting to me is that 36 pixels is also about the size of the best image we have of Pluto, a [formerly known as] planet in our own solar system.
I'm really fascinated by the possibilities of paleontological discoveries. We have excavated such a minuscule portion of our planet (you might just round it down to 0%) that there absolutely must be an enormous amount of fantastic things out there waiting to be discovered.

I hope we can develop things like clear underground imaging from aircraft, and start finding more and more of these incredible types of discoveries.
Until we know what is the best architecture for AI, it's just easier to play with it in software.
I'm sure Peter Thiel changes his "best advice" depending on the situation - therefore making this argument entirely pointless.
Sounds like they are doing excellent work here but it is a pity the license can never be GPL compatible.
I feel like the economist does this every few years.
Free physics books
This part is true for any software developer:

"Nothing is quite so humbling as being forced to watch in silence as some poor play-tester stumbles around your level for 20 minutes, unable to figure out the "obvious" answer that you now realize is completely arbitrary and impossible to figure out."

If you want to build software that is easy to use, you need to watch people use your software.
The document very explicitly states that they contacted Life360 to work out a patent licensing arrangement, not with a lawsuit. So they did exactly what you suggested.

It looks like the suit wasn't filed until they were called a "Piece of Shit" for attempting to work something out.
Yes, you can use 2FA with Facebook... via Google Authenticator. :) They also support SMS but you should really use Authenticator or equivalent.
To anyone that is considering using WePay, I STRONGLY urge you to select Balanced Payments instead. I personally had a $2,000+ order cancelled by WePay, even though my account was 2 years old and had done many thousands of dollars worth of previous transactions. The "stated reason" by their support team was that I included a line item for an "electronic physical item" in the invoice displayed on the checkout page, which was for consulting purposes. If you actually check their prohibited businesses/items, electronic items are not included.

Overall, WePay's support is generally horrendous. You should expect to have your orders randomly cancelled, funds frozen, and no explanation given... Unless of course you're a major figure and raise a big deal about it.
If your telco has broken voicemail, I suggest using Google Voice and doing the dance to forward your no-answer/busy calls there.
Yet based on this definition, what constitutes "BigData" may vary from person to person.

The other day I performed a simple aggregate against 100M-record dataset in both Hadoop and Postgres. My company thinks we need a BigData (Hadoop + Hive + else) stack to perform such aggregations, sporadically.

The results speak for themselves:
- Hadoop : 58 minutes
- Postgres : 2 minutes

Your mileage may vary...
Direct manipulation of the program's state (as opposed to writing/editing code that changes the state) is always live of course in any language. So ya, Smalltalk objects are "live", but Smalltalk code is not. So when Hancock invented this term called "live programming" back in 2003, he was focusing on the code (keep in mind, this work exists in a world where Smalltalk is well known, the Morphic paper came out in 1995, and Seymour Papert of Mindstorms/Logo fame is Hancock's adviser).

The problem with editing the program's objects directly is that it is not very powerful in its capability: fine if you want w to always be red, but not fine if their are a hundred w's to edit individually, or if w is red because of some kind of active condition. In any case, hot code replacement doesn't really help either; its useful for sure, but the next step is to change the program's state retroactively [1] to match the new code. Smalltalk never went there, and probably couldn't given the hardware constraints of the time. But now, I think we can go there.

The Pharo folks are claiming that their system supports live programming capabilities, but it is just the same old live object/fix-and-continue features that Smalltalk has had for ages. I suspect that they just really don't know what live programming means, and are latching onto the word because its "trendy."

[1] http://dynamicaspects.org/blog/2012/08/15/changing-the-past-...
So your company doesn't own any patents?
At what point does it make sense to have a separate crypto-core / offload-engine?

You could provide all of the isolation and funky instructions that you want without affecting the general purpose CPU. It may also be more efficient as it is a special purpose processor.
As it turns out, they took the bait, clicking on the link and revealing a ClearWire IP address, which is probably neither static nor traceable.

Anyone got any ideas? (Getting them to click another link would probably be possible, but to what end?)
Do you have any examples of where your theory has become reality? Because there are several examples of the opposite happening (e.g. overall less crime in Portugal).
web developers like the OP can very easily go the way of any other field that has been killed by sufficient automation. i don't see CRUD-app development as a robust, long term skill, despite how well paying it has been the last decade.

if you consider 'surfing' to mean always being up on the latest web framework or library, as many do, then I think that is too narrow a scope to consider yourself immune from being automated out of a job. if you consider 'surfing' to be looking at broader strokes in other areas of computer science and software eating the world in general, then that's a different story. you have to diversify.
Ask HN: How to tell your friend his idea sucks
I have a friend from a top notch business background, but no startup experience. His ideas may sound cool or work once it already has gained momentum but he simply doesn't understand how hard it is to launch something and get it to hit. How would you tell one of your best friends that his latest idea will never work (unless he started with like 10m in funding)...
Those of us who have been around for a while will remember hearing that claim made about the JVM back in the late 1990s, back when HotSpot came onto the scene.

Obviously, those claims did not hold true in practice.

HotSpot has had some very talented people work on it. And Java bytecode is much more suited to such optimization than asm.js is, too. If it wasn't accomplished there, then it's doubtful it'll be done elsewhere.

So maybe it's theoretically possible, but we just haven't seen it happen in practice. There's little to suggest that it ever will happen, too.
I found your post really insightful so I went over to Dice and Craigslist to read through some of the job listings. I tried to read in-between the lines to figure out what kind of organization was behind the ad.

If it isn't asking for too much, I wonder if you could list a few job ads that would be the sort of thing worth applying for. You seem like someone who has experience sifting through non-sense.
Excuse my ignorance, but is it legitimate for subordinate entities in a federalist system to simply not fund enforcement of policies they don't agree with? For example, would it be possible to have a vice squad with a budget of 1 dollar, effectively preventing enforcement of drug-related crime?
Wow, awesome response.
Regarding drug policy, the biggest misstep of the past 40 years has been taking a public heath issue

It's never been a public health issue for its major proponents. The war on drugs has always been about racism, corruption, the militarization of police forces, civil forfeiture and the prison-industrial complex.
Seriously, why did they pick the 4 clause BSD license and Apache 1.0 license? Is it just out of spite for the GPL?

This whole thing seems kind of childish. The website and slides are especially unprofessional - not just amateurish, I think it takes work to make the slides as bad as they are. What is the point?
If these known concerns could be enforced by policy makers it might be good for us all.

Nobody ever said mob rule was the ideal form of government.

And that's why I say..... constitutions are algorithms. Or at least crude attempts at them. The idea is that the system confines and survives the administrators.

And yes, the general wishes of the populace are represented. As they should be. But when wishes serve to oppress others or create long term damage to selves or future others this is a problem. Particularly when wishes can apparently be bought and sold by those who control what we see.

This situation is where algorithm vs. individual leader is useful to society in general. And this was, I believe, the initial idea behind the US constitution, at least, and probably most others.
Gulp-app – run gulp commands from the OS X task bar
If you're hoping to see patent reform, this dispute seems to be the wrong one to focus on. This strikes me as more of a genuine argument, and not a flagrant abuse of the system that would likely lead to change:

* AGIS seems to be a genuine company, that filed its own patents, and has a real product. There are much clearer examples of trolls out there.

* The patent claims are highly specific. This is not a "...on the Internet" type patent.

* Life360 is not (yet) claiming they don't infringe; they are focusing on obviousness.

* The patent system now has a relatively straightforward, quick and inexpensive system for getting a patent re-examined. Life360 hasn't (yet) said they will do that.

* The Life360 strategy seems to be primarily PR-driven: attention-grabbing language, posting things on Twitter, contacting journalists, etc. This reminds me of the legal saying: "If you’re weak on the facts and strong on the law, pound the law. If you’re weak on the law and strong on the facts, pound the facts. If you’re weak on both, pound the table."

To my mind, this argument seems more likely to boil down to "should ideas be protected by patents", instead of "should we do something about shell companies that abuse patent law to extort money".
React js tutorial from scratch
Not only that, but the slides are JPG with horrible artifacts, and the text is JPG too, making it look bad and not be compatible with screen readers.
I find it very weird that you'll take the same comment on faith enough to direct an expression of respect ("I could not let my respect for what you do get in the way"), but won't take it on faith enough to allow it to indicate personal experience.
I always thought it was more about religion and politics than those.
The notion of sincerity and karma is rather apropos for me at the moment. Recently someone mentioned that they noticed a high-karma commenter had deleted some comments that were being downvoted and opined that this was a good way to game karma because it meant that they were refunded the negative karma when the comment was deleted. Is this an accurate description of the karma accounting?

As luck would have it elsewhere on HN I am hemorrhaging karma at the moment for expressing an unwelcome opinion. I am not ashamed of the content or the manner in which I expressed my opinion so I have no intention of deleting my comments. As far as I am concerned by clicking the reply button I am implicitly stating that my comment is sincere. It seems that HN could introduce an implicit sincere flag if commenters did not get a refund for deleting karma-negative comments.
Loving what I used to hate
They didn't pick the license. The new code is ISC licensed, but the bulk of the code is from OpenSSL, so the project as a whole is stuck with OpenSSL's license.
The real mismatch is handling failures. The HPC world has grown up handling failures by failing the entire computation. As a defense against failure, they usually checkpoint the entire computation.

Part of this is the fault of the MPI standardization process: MPI didn't even try to deal with dynamic-but-expected changes to the computation (much less changes caused by "node" failure) because not all of the initial systems MPI was targeting could handle nodes coming or going. In this way, MPI was sort of a step backwards - PVM was much more flexible than MPI from the get-go.

I haven't paid much attention to MPI in a few years, so maybe some of the MPI-FT approaches have caught on.

One of the initial targets for YARN was MPI, but it was never clear to me that any MPI users actually wanted to use YARN.

With just a few tweaks, PVM and AFS could have given us a pretty good Big Data stack 15 years ago (And in the case of security, a better stack than what we've got today.) The hardware wasn't quite cheap enough to make the case as compelling as it is today, and the MapReduce programming model helped sell the entire approach, but it was a real missed opportunity.