skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You know how there are Americans who hate the current government and would like to see it all thrown out, but will stand and defend their nation without hesitation? The Royal Family is a concrete and personal representation of the nation, it's like if Uncle Sam or Lady Liberty were real people who existed outside of national and local politics representing the cultural heritage of the nation as a whole. We would treat them like royalty (ha) and protect them at all costs.
CloudFlare is PCI certified
> There is still no incentive to get paid in BTC

I get paid by clients in bitcoin. It saves me significant wire transfer fees.
> I would hazard that fewer than ten percent of users use a multiple-monitor system on a regular basis, so any benefit would have to be ten times as great as the benefit of features that have broader use.

What kind of logic is that? And how would you even mathematically quantify the "benefit" of such a feature, save through tedious usability studies that could only come after you've implemented it?
It is not just about price. Power consumption is also a massive factor in designing internet of things. And anything running linux will inherently have a lot higher power consumption than something running contiki.
And even then "online digital currencies" aren't really particularly needed where there are satisfactory online digital payment mechanisms denominated in traditional currencies.
I think you're misunderstanding the use of the term "singularity". It does not mean "X will happen, after which we won't be in charge", or "...after which we'll be dead".

Instead, it means that something will become so intelligent that it will be different in kind, in somewhat the same way that we are so different from gravel that gravel cannot hope to understand our behavior.

An optimization process that ends up killing all of us is bad, but it's not a singularity.
Why don't you factor in the possibility of more transactions per block? The idea is that as the Bitcoin transaction volume climbs, the need for a block reward decreases.

Secondly, you're assuming that the mining pool is currently constrained by what is profitable. From what I have read about large mining operations, they are significantly into the green on profit margin right now, so there seems to be room for a decrease in profitability without losing significant portions of the mining network. Every time the mining difficulty changes this is tested already so we know that there is at least some wiggle room in the mining profit margins.
I'm saying that most people who complain about Go's verbosity do not take resource cleanup into consideration. They think they can let exceptions fly without any try/catch or try/finally and everything will be fine, which is obviously untrue.

Sorry, what I meant by "happens all the time" is that there are often cases where you need cleanup code that gets called if the function doesn't exit cleanly.

There's very often no atomic way to perform a series of actions. Please keep in mind, I was being very vague on purpose. There is almost always a list of actions that you want to either all succeed, or else you need to do some cleanup if later ones fail.

In code with exceptions, you don't always know what can throw. Unless you're using java code that has been written with strict checked exceptions, you have to assume any external function you call can throw. Even if it doesn't now, it might when Bob from the next team over decides that now it should.

I really don't think it's at all contrived. I'm not saying you can't write this code with exceptions, I'm saying it's harder than it needs to be, and it's at least as verbose as Go, if you're doing all the right things with your try/catch/finally's.
Poor people in the US are getting shorter so at least when it comes to nutrition they are worse off. Now, if you assume cellphones make up for that it's possible but rather subjective. Afterall poor people in the developing world also have cellphones.
The article makes a fairly compelling case that they're not better off. Do you have anything better than an argument from incredulity?
> there's a reason that Linux has succeeded

I think you mean GNU/Linux? ;)

You are asserting that the real goal of Gittip is to create a new economy, but that's not Chad's goal. You say that this makes him like Stallman, but it also makes him like Linus.

Linus has made it clear that his primary goal isn't to extract revenue, and in many ways he doesn't care much about traditional success metrics. Instead he wants to maximize values like "fun". Chad wants to maximize other values, like "generosity". Is it up to us to say that's wrong?

Also, Gittip has a model of self-funding. Even funding a team of people with different talents. Linux doesn't; it's organized around a code repo, and depends on enthusiasts and enlightened corporations to keep contributions flowing. If you're a marketer or designer who wants to contribute to Linux, you're going to have a lot more trouble. You only think of Linux's model as pragmatic because it's been around for so long, and you've gotten used to the deficiencies.

And when it comes to openness, in big open source projects like the Linux kernel, it's considered rude to have any significant discussions off the mailing lists. I think Chad's insistence on making everything public just updates the principle to modern tools like video chats. I used to work for the Wikimedia Foundation, and we did similar things, so the community could act as a watchdog. Our "full disclosure agreements" were difficult for partners sometimes, but they didn't preclude alliances with Apple or Facebook, or donations from Google.

Now, from where I sit, Chad might have taken the openness tactic a little too far. Some discretion is appropriate, especially when people are just starting to form a relationship. And contributors need privacy. To their credit, the Gittip community is currently reconsidering some of the rules around openness, and Chad has been admirably open to that -- another way in which he's not a Stallman.
> "Poverty" today is not the same as "poverty" decades ago.

Decades ago? Like 1990? 1980? Or 1930?

After half-heartedly searching for some data on living standards in the US, I came across this report that tries to argue the point that poverty isn't all that bad in the US, seeing as how most poor families have coffee makers and a stove (I'd imagine it's difficult to cook food over a fire and remain free from police harassment in most parts of the US...):

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/07/what-is-pov...

It offers such bright points as:

"It is widely supposed that the poor are unable to obtain medical care, but in reality, only 13 percent of poor households report that a family member needed to go to a doctor or hospital at some point in the prior year but was unable because the family could not afford the cost."

"Only" 1 in 7 households needed medical help, but couldn't afford it -- and that's among those that had a family member that needed medical attention for that year.

More in the same vein:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/06/01/astonishi...

(I don't think living on the level of poor people in Finland is quite so glamorous as the commentary makes it out to be)

Some more numbers (less commentary):

http://www.nclej.org/poverty-in-the-us.php

For some links to international numbers:

http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty

eg: http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EXTPREMNET/Resources/EP12...

And: http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/publication/food-p...

I'd love to see some numbers that go further back, though. Some casual googling didn't reveal much (I did not try very hard).
Rich guy says "wealth redistribution" doesn't work.

Suure, let's take that at face value.
Isn't it simply possible that what constitutes poverty has changed over time? If poverty is defined as, say, the bottom tenth of the population income-wise, then poverty will never decrease, by definition.
You are correct. But it's not 100% certain whether we would be capable of setting up a world simulation that would create intelligent agents of the human level. And much less certain, (1) are we able to set up such simulation in the next couple of centuries, and (2) will the simulation produce these intelligent agents after having been running for only a couple of centuries (wall clock time).

Btw, Crystal Nights by Greg Egan is a fascinating short story: http://ttapress.com/553/crystal-nights-by-greg-egan/
I always miss meteor showers. I live in the city so I have to drive for about 30 minutes to see one BUT if the sky cover is over 10% covered it isn't worth it and the moon needs to be gone. I think I might try to figure out a way to let me know when the conditions of a meteor shower, the cloud cover are just right and the moon is not present in the sky and post to my Google Calendar.

Thanks for inspiring me.
I spend 1-2 hrs in the morning reading industry news, research, and studies. The rest of the day (5 hrs) I refine the framework I would follow when/if I get a job.

I view it as an outstanding opportunity to learn and prepare. I did something similar 10 years ago during the dotcom crash. When biz was slow, I spent my time learning about strategic planning. It paid dividends for the next decade.

I've been searching for an opportunity for 1 year now, so the framework is quite robust.

The target position I've been looking for is Ecommerce Manager. I've been very close to landing a few jobs, and the reason I haven't been hired was because I'm "overqualified" or "too much horsepower".
So who is fudging things this time round?
I've a similar attitude towards Bitcoin. To use it I'd need to understand it and why it's seemingly so easy to get taken by an exchange. Understanding that takes an investment of time. I've yet to see something more compelling (to me) than "no charge backs" to justify that investment of time.
This is true, you can drop all return values. However, a lot of functions return a value and an error. If you want to access the value, you need to assign the error to something too. And if you don't then use that error, the compiler will complain about it.

For simply dropping all return values on the ground, there are linters that will complain for you: https://github.com/kisielk/errcheck
Forget about multi-monitors, what about workspaces? That's one of Windows' main failing.

I have a single monitor, but with four workspaces I have a lot of screen real estate.
> (even if it lacked the self awareness to feel the pain of running on a 386)

Now we know the real motivation behind pretty much every sci-fi storyline involving AI revolts.
That struck me too. 'Oh boy I bet the Contiki crew is shaking in their boots: "MSFT is gonna crush us like they crushed iOS & Android!"' lol... if history is any indicator, they don't have much to worry about.
It doesn't really matter though, Dharma is still a superstition. So is not changing socks when your baseball team is in the championships.

Trying to parse it from other superstitions doesn't change the meaning or existence of the word, nor the fact that it's still classified under that category.
American here, out of curiosity, why?
Somehow I feel like the people that are serious about this
level of criminal activity, and capable of actually
accomplishing it, aren't first announcing their intentions
on twitter.

If you're in the secret service and you let the president get assassinated, it would be much more embarrassing if the assassin had announced their intentions in public.

Once the assassin has been identified, if they had a tweet from a month ago saying "I am going to assassinate the president in a month" you can bet that will be on the front page of every newspaper, making you look like an idiot.

And if your anti-embarrassment system should prevent a real assassination, so much the better.
Show HN: HackerQueue a news conglomerator for Computer Science related topics
I see no difference behind the glory.

Why? Once you changed the word "password" to "passphrase", and get rid of those insane password requirements (must contains 1 upper case, 1 lower case, up to X length, 1 symbol, must not repeat same character twice or consecutively, etc), people start to use passphrase. But with enough attacks, you will build a passphrase table and people who use passphrase then will use the same passphrase on multiple sites which means it is the same as password and then site developers will come out and say "we will implement additional requirements - at least this length with these complexity".

A password which is 12 chars long and complex enough is hard to break. The problem is that people use the same password and credentials gets stolen every day. Can you trust random forums today running your password?
Currently the cost of Bitcoin transaction is already at around $50

That's a meaningless soundbite.

The figure you cite is a function of the current network difficulty/hash-rate, tx-rate and USD/BTC exchange rate. It's devoid of any meaning when looked at in isolation because it is by definition already factored into the exchange rate.
"Growth has been good for decades, so why do we still have 10% of people who are poorer than the remaining 90% of the people?

Debating policy based on a chart showing one clean* variable -- growth -- and one that a faceless bureaucracy sets by fiat every year is not a brilliant idea.

As ever, Adam Smith, writing in 1776, had the right idea. Here is how he defined poverty: “By [poverty] I understand, not only the [lack of] commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. . .But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt. . .Custom, in the same manner, has rendered leather shoes a necessary of life in England. The poorest creditable person of either sex would be ashamed to appear in public without them. . .Under necessaries, therefore, I comprehend, not only those things which nature, but those things which the established rules of decency have rendered necessary to the lowest rank of people.”

* The growth variable isn't clean, either. Much of the alleged growth is in transfers, government, and credit.
> people who are automated out of work generally aren't participants (and recipients) of that growth.

Not directly, no. But in the end it is better for humanity as a whole, plus you get money from the government if you are unemployed for a while and prove that you are trying to get employed.
Doesn't anyone does 4) ?

I mean, it's free. Sure, it requires a proper email client so that you don't go insane with all the web interface nonsense.
It's only one data point, but observe how much more intelligent humans are than the next most intelligent species on Earth.
I'm sure it was an innocent oversight for you to leave off the remainder of the 9/11 commission's quote;

"""

A single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda purchased 95 percent of the UAL puts on September 6 as part of a trading strategy that also included buying 115,000 shares of American on September 10.

Similarly, much of the seemingly suspicious trading in American on September 10 was traced to a specific U.S.-based options trading newsletter, faxed to its subscribers on Sunday, September 9, which recommended these trades. The SEC and FBI, aided by other agencies and the securities industry, devoted enormous resources to investigating this issue, including securing the cooperation of many foreign governments.

"""
Ah, come now. We can start a village in central Detroit. It'll be just like the 50s (just without the job prospects). ;-)
Is that because houses are now twice as big?

http://www.google.com/search?q=housing+sizes+in+1950s
I was playing with it a bit this morning porting a helper XML parsing class[0] I have over to it and building a simple RSS Reader project.

I'm one of those people that really likes objective-c but I was surprised that when I had to go back to working in objective-c this afternoon I started to realise how much time Swift would save me. I feel like at a glance it's harder to understand the code but it requires way fewer keystrokes and overtime will probably become much easier to understand at a glance.

Overall I really like it. I'll have to write a lot more code in it first but I could see myself switching to this for all my iOS code when iOS 8 is released.

[0] https://github.com/KieranMcGrady/KMXMLParser
Why your proposals suck
Right now it's possible though. I'm not sure it was like that in the past. Maybe it was, I'm not saying it wasn't, but from what I heard people in general were a lot less wealthy in the past. The bottom 20% of society (in terms of income) still walks around in rich clothes compared to the top 20% a few hundred years ago while not working more hours.
That's an awesome idea. Would kill for that.
I agree with you. There is a lot to like in Go, but even I can see (and I've only been programming for ~10 years) that it ignored a lot of good stuff from other languages.

They keep saying they would add generics if they feel they could "do it right" but I'm starting to not believe that. I like that the language tooling is extremely disciplined and enforces even small things, like style, but this rankles a bit considering other parts of the language design seem a bit inconsistent or haphazard. Just IMO, of course.
Jason Holtman, New Hires, Luckey’s Tale, and E3
> What are the odds that this wasn't "insider trading" with the attackers?

Extremely high.

http://www.snopes.com/rumors/putcall.asp
Extra bank holiday on their jubilees.
Objective-C supports GCD just fine. In fact, I make use of that far more often than "perform selector..." and I'd say I'm probably not in the minority on this.
Who is going to be the first device manufacturer to provide Stingray protection for their phones? Apple? Google?
> So, your argument is that - because you actually see
> some code that simply propagates an error, it's easier
> to reason about where the error ends up being handled?

Not just where the error gets handled, but how it flows through the execution path of your code -- but, yes.

> That's like saying you'd rather search for a needle in
> a haystack than a needle on a platter.

I'm sorry, but I don't see how this follows at all.

> With Golang, I have to spend way more energy analyzing
> every caller in the stack because they all touch my
> error.

Spending time thinking about the error path for all of your code is time well spent, because it's necessary if your code is going to function correctly. Deferring consideration of failure results in dangerous (at best) and/or broken (at worst) systems. I hope this is noncontroversial.
I don't find the author's contortions compelling in the slightest. I mean he doesn't even define poverty because it would poke giant holes in his story.
I am going to require job candidates to read one of these and discuss it with me.
You're putting the whole thing inside GameModel? Are you serious?
It's great that the results page has the password right in the URL as a GET variable. Makes it much easier to share it on Facebook.
Or maybe this was the dev who posted the warning and is pointing out he made it because of the NSA.
No, that would work very similarly to the greedy version. The backtracking happens because the \d gets matched to the '1' and the whole thing has to be rolled back when the $ attempts match and instead finds '2' (this would happen again if there were more digits for \d to speculatively match on). So the backtracking is not caused by the laziness or greediness of the \D* ; we really do want to gobble up all of the non-digits.

On the two options generally:

/(\d)\D*$/

is problematic if you have a lot of digits, while

/.*(\d)/

is problematic if you have a lot of text after the last digit. Both could potentially be optimized by the engine to run right-to-left (the former because it's anchored to the end and the latter because it greedily matches to the beginning), and then both would do well. I'm not sure if that happens in practice.

Overall, I prefer the latter, both because I think it's clearer and because its perf characteristics hold up under a wider variety of inputs.

Edit: how do you make literal asterisks on HN without having a space after them?
Marmalade's cross-platform SDK is now free
People here downvote when they don't agree with you, when they're in a bad mood, when they want to hide what you've written, when they had some bad soup, etc. In some contexts one can take a little bit of pride in being downvoted. Downvoting doesn't mean much here, unfortunately.
Cool article. I really like repetition that model complexity is not a pancea. Seems like the industrial AI/ML movement as a whole has gone down a road where practitioners will, by default, throw the most powerful model they know at a problem and see how it pans out. Works well on benchmarks(if you regularize/validate carefully) but isn't a very sustainable way to engineer a system.

Separately, I do find it curious that his list of "pretty standard machine-learning methods" included Logistic Regression, K-means and....deep neural nets? Sure they're white hot in terms of popularity and the experts have done astounding things, but unless I've missed some major improvements in their off-the-shelf usability they strike me as out of place in this list.
Do you have a source for that? I would imagine it has more to do with immigration.
Edward Snowden’s statement in support of Reset the Net
I love that many of the responses to this are basically advocating yes that developers should just try to live on $40,000 and move overseas to live cheaper. This hardly smacks of "sustainability." Now, Gittip has to convince programmers that they should want to live with no low income and then therefore be able to use the service.

As an aside, as others mentioned, the health care in most Southeast Asian countries is not as bad as you might think.
So Long TC, And Hello GV
For those who have been using Bitcoin for years now it's completely fascinating that people still doubt a technology like this that's seen _so many_ ups and downs and yet it just refuses to die. It stubbornly refuses to fail despite everyone's best wishes that it inevitably should.
PostgreSQL columnar store benchmarks on SSDs
Actually, healthcare access has improved for everybody in the last 60 years, enough so that life expectancy has increased by 10 years.

Homicide (and presumably other violent crime) is about the same as 1950.

Further, "poor" people have always had lower social status and higher stress, so there's no change there.

In 1950 it wasn't uncommon for people to still use outhouses and not have electricity.

Life expectancy reference:
http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/unpp/panel_indicators.htm

homicide rate reference:
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0873729.html
Given that laptop screens tend to be smaller than desktop screens, the benefits of a second monitor for a laptop seem even greater than for a desktop.

Sent from the second monitor attached to my laptop.
That is good news! Finally I can say to my customers that my products work on all significant platforms.