skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Expired SSL certificate. Shall I use the site anyway?
The SSL certificate of website of the Italian Consulate General in San Francisco for the online visa appointments has been expired for almost a month. If you had to apply for visa appointment, would you do so anyway?
Physics at A-level in the UK suffers greatly from the efforts to keep each A-level independent, despite the huge overlap between physics and mathematics (particularly the "further mathematics" A-level). The resulting course is simultaneously very easy for students who are doing double mathematics, and very difficult for students who aren't. I wonder how much of the gender difference in the article is simply due to more girls taking physics without mathematics (the article mentions those intending to apply for medicine, who IME usually wouldn't take the mathematics A-level).
Ask HN: Is there a language where FP equals uses an implicit epsilon?
For example, I imagine there might be a language like UnrealScript or RPGMaker catered toward games where it might make sense to always include an epsilon.
Rochester, Michigan, US - Technical Support.
I work for OneStream Software (onestreamsoftware.com) and I'm looking to hire several Technical Support reps with both technical and business skills. The position is in Rochester Michigan and must be in the office. We value our customers and having everyone together is the best way to provide them with the best experience with our software. We also plan to open an office in Europe in the future. Anyone interested can search Monster or LinkedIn for OneStream Software for more details on the position or can eMail jobs@onestreamsoftware.com with a resume. Please put "Technical Support Posting" in the subject.
While the initial reason may be historical, I've found that on smaller monitors 80 character width makes it just about wide enough to have two code windows side-by-side. That's why I usually tend to stick to that limit. Though on bigger monitors I often stick to 100.
This made me smile; wit and astute political observance are rare. :-)

Well done Sir.
Does anyone here volunteer extra tax when they don't have to?
The map example with toplevel pattern matching is really just sugar for the expanded case statements which isn't that far from the Ur equivalent.

map :: forall a b. (a -> b) -> [a] -> [b]
map =
\ (@ a) (@ b) (ds :: a -> b) (ds1 :: [a]) ->
case ds1 of _ {
[] -> [];
: x xs ->
(ds,x,xs) : ((ds,x) ds x) ((ds,xs) map ds xs)
}
In vim I use / all the time to search, and I use f to move within the line or to say dfx or yfx or even d3fx. But is there any way to search for more than one letter without deleting/yanking the whole line? I want d/foo, but only up to foo. Is that possible?
The five most popular end-user Linux distributions
I have tried tweeting to @YSmallBizCare and I really hope they have a solution...
This is very clever idea. But why just look at negative predictions?

We've also made so many steps toward utopia, and sometime utopian patterns are deeply linked to the dystopian patterns. (e.g. elimination of crime and ubiquitous surveillance). It would be even more fascinating to see these together (and substantially less depressing!).

Edit: The intro in the comments addresses this:

"Why so pessimistic?

Agreed, the name Dystopia Tracker is rather gloomy. Yet I’m actually not pessimistic about the future and technology’s role in it. It’s just that I think it’s crucial we stay wary about possible negative developments to get the best possible version of a tech-enabled future. Of course, you’re more than welcome to enter promising predictions and their realisations to the Dystopia Tracker. Not least because for most predictions, different people will have different opinions on whether its realisation would do more good or more harm."
Back in the day, I used punch cards in college computer courses. Languages like FORTRAN, COBOL, and assembler were column dependent, e.g.

Col. 1 : Blank, or a "C" or "*" for comments
Col. 1-5 : Statement label (optional)
Col. 6 : Continuation of previous line (optional)
Col. 7-72 : Statements
Col. 73-80: Sequence number (optional, rarely used today)

With the sequence numbers if you dropped the deck and scrambled the cards, feed the pile through a card sorter machine to put them back in order. If you didn't bother with sequence numbers, another technique was to use a magic marker to draw patterns on the side of the deck to help with resorting it if you dropped it.
When I put together my home 8-disk server back in 2009 it was pretty clear to me I needed to protect against 2 failures. Even if you just look at the 12 hour recovery times.

How much does this change if you are using modern SSDs?
Disqus is! http://grnh.se/vj71bo

Small problems become very interesting problems when you have the kind of scale we do. (details on scale: http://blog.disqus.com/post/62187806135/scaling-django-to-8-...)

Django/Python, Js, iOS, Designers. We are hiring them all!
Propably the shortest story on the list
/Dwan Ev ceremoniously soldered the final connection with gold. The eyes of a dozen television cameras watched him and the subether bore throughout the universe a dozen pictures of what he was doing.
He straightened and nodded to Dwar Reyn, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the contact when he threw it. The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe -- ninety-six billion planets -- into the supercircuit that would connect them all into one supercalculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies.
Dwar Reyn spoke briefly to the watching and listening trillions. Then after a moment's silence he said, "Now, Dwar Ev."
Dwar Ev threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power from ninety-six billion planets. Lights flashed and quieted along the miles-long panel.
Dwar Ev stepped back and drew a deep breath. "The honor of asking the first question is yours, Dwar Reyn."
"Thank you," said Dwar Reyn. "It shall be a question which no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer."
He turned to face the machine. "Is there a God?"
The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of a single relay.
"Yes, now there is a God."
Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch.
A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut./ (Fredric Brown, "Answer")
Would you speculate on Levison's motive in your sequence of events? It's a solid analysis, but why would Levison do all of that?

Your analysis changed my view about Levison. I think people mostly equate Levison's actions to Snowden's without really thinking about the differences. Thought experiment: what if a mole was selling US secrets to other countries? If Levison would respond in the same fashion as in this Snowden case, then that obviously would be detrimental to the US's interests. But would he?

Here's where it gets tricky. It's my understanding that Levison complied with past US orders. So that begs the question: why did Levison choose that moment to be rebellious? Was he trying to protect Snowden? (Did anyone even know who Snowden was or what he did at that point? My memory is hazy on the timeline.)

It's certainly a convenient excuse to say that Levison was protecting Snowden. But if it's true, how would you feel about his actions in light of that fact?

If Levison wasn't protecting Snowden, then why did he choose that particular hill to die on, and not any of the past compliance orders? It seems like Levison had some knowledge that prompted him to act the way he did. But if this all happened before Snowden became public knowledge, then what knowledge could have possibly converted him from someone who obediently follows government requests into someone who would "bait the FBI"?

Beyond all of that, I'm interested to hear your thoughts on whether there's any possible excuse for Levison's actions which you personally would find redeeming.
I personally don't see how my posts are any less applicable than those posted by companies who submit the exact same thing month after month after month. If my posts were irrelevant (or spam) no one would click on them and I'd stop wasting time here. :)

Anyway, the fact that people do click indicates interest, however since all comments here are negative I'll refrain from making any further posts to these threads. I don't want to tarnish the site in the name of getting some additional clicks.
> If there's a real correlation between A and B (i.e. the correlation isn't a coincidence), that must mean that either A causes B, B causes A, or a third factor causes both A and B.

How can you ever tell that the correlation isn't a coincidence? (see: pirates are correlated with global warming http://sparrowism.soc.srcf.net/home/pirates.html) that seems a bit hand-wavey.

"Oh, that's not a REAL correlation..." sounds a bit like "Oh, that's not a TRUE Scotsman..."
Or more directly:

julia> +(a::Int, b::Int) = if a==b==2 5 else a-(-b) end
julia> 2+2
5
julia> 3+1
4

(The else part can't use + or it will cause infinite recursion).
http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Avoid_the_escape_key

See the 'jj' part in the 'Mappings' section.
Hi, can you fix my page? https://www.facebook.com/OricrewOfficial
All my fans get this error when they try to share my content.

"A Link in Your Post Might Be Unsafe
It looks like your post contains a link that might be unsafe:

http://facebook.com/__id__/776193565769703

Please remove this link from your post or enter the security code below if you’re sure you want to include it."
It's funny to start seeing more and more questions from people who started using computers with Windows 95.

Actually, not it's not, little punks making me feel old, get off my lawn.
I'm not aware of any ISPs in Denmark that support IPv6. This sucks. I'm switching to the first ISP that will offer it. But as of right now, if I switch off IPv4 I go offline.
That's definitely the case. It was the early 80's. Calculus in high school was still not widespread. We took it at 7 in the morning, before the regular school day, from the physics teacher who was delighted to finally teach calculus for the first time ever. He basically followed a mainstream college curriculum in class.

But the subsequent college course followed the same pattern, and I don't think it was atypical for the time. It took a couple tries to drive it into my skull, but I did end up majoring in math.

Turning math into a series of multiple choice questions that are answered by cranking through memorized algorithms... don't get me started.
Your email bounces back for some reason. Any other way I can get in touch?
> in Croydon

Wow, at first I thought "Croydon? That's not even in London!", but as it turns out, apparently it's possible to go from Croydon Rail station to London Bridge in 14 minutes! From London Bridge, it's less 15 mins to Mayfair, City and Shoredich, so it's really quite close in terms of commute!
This is the standard in any business school that teaches using the case method.
I usually use 100 or 120. It is very useful for having many windows on emacs on a 1920x1080 monitor. Also it is good for github. Anything bigger would need to scroll horizontally for reading the code and that sucks
I think the main point this year is highlighting and shaming ISP which still haven't gotten their act together.

Wikipedia has a nice list¹ that can be used for this.

Go ask for native IPv6.

Sadly my broadband provider, Telia, is one of those nice old telecom companies who're still living in the stone age. Can't switch over to anything else either as my lessor has a monopoly agreement with them.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_deployment
We work with large volumes of subtitles here and that's basically what we are aiming to do. There's a couple commercial solutions that still do a poor job for a hefty price tag, if that's the only thing you need from them. Not profitable compared with human sync unless you have to sync more than a couple hundred hours of content.
Whatever existing information and biases you're using for your personal opinion are probably just as flawed.
This is exactly how "d/foo" works for me, both in vim, and in nvi (the "bug-for-bug" clone of the original vi). Perhaps you have a script installed that's changing the default behavior?
Why we're not wired to think scientifically (and what can be done about it)
this guy is way off base. can't see the forest, etc.

personal, private transportation isn't going ANYWHERE.

Google isn't required, nor are they attempting, to reinvent propulsion mechanisms.
So if you wanted good service beyond what is easily accomodated by wireless, you'd have to live in a 'high end' neighborhood?

Also, I'd like more information on the city not 'letting' Verizon wire Baltimore. It's possible this is what's going on, but the coverage I've seen is that Verizon simply chose not to, presumably because their market analysis was that it wouldn't be profitable enough. (I live in Baltimore too). http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Baltimore-Still-Begging-V...
Somewhat related concept: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain

The estimated time for a Boltzmann Brain to appear in the dead vacuum of space from random spontaneous entropy decrease is on the order of 10^10^50 years[0]. No time at all, compared to infinity.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Post...
Hello, I'm nick from 42 (YC W14) (http://42debut.com)!
We're building the best point-of-sale analytics software for physical and online retailers.

Our customers are not scientists or engineers; They run multimillion dollar businesses using intuition and excel. We can do better. In the past few months, we've built a product that provides more value than the multi-million dollar consulting packages offered by our competitors.

We're looking for our first engineering hire:

- Proficient in at least two of these languages (We use Node mostly, but we're not religious):
JavaScript/CoffeeScript, Python, Ruby, Go, Java, C/C++, Julia, R, SQL

- Familiar with modern frontend stacks (we use AngularJS, d3 heavily).

- Linux experience (we use Gentoo, ArchLinux & CoreOS)

- Experience with designing/building systems, not just MVPs.

- We want to upgrade our data processing infrastructure, so include any relevant experience please!

- (bonus) Analytics / Machine learning experience

- (bonus) Experience with Hadoop, Spark, Storm, etc..

- (bonus) Experience with Postgres, Redshift, Memsql, CitusDB, Neo4J, HBase, Cassandra, etc.

- (bonus) Experience with filesystems like zfs, btrfs, aufs, etc.

- (bonus) Experience with OpenStack, Docker, CoreOS, SOA and distributed architectures, etc.

We're a funded early stage startup, so we'll hook you up:

- All the gear

- Full benefits package

- Equity & options as early employee

- We're based in SOMA, and we'll help you relocate if need be.

If that sounds good, send me an email: nick@42debut.com
For now we can get away with other tricks like ZFS's ditto blocks but at some point the whole redundant storage system will need to be re-though.
Austin, TX / AndrewHarper.com / Full-Time / No Remote

For 34 years, Andrew Harper has been the leader in high-end, unbiased, luxury travel reviews. We’re starting a new chapter in our business geared toward changing the way travelers research, book, and enjoy extraordinary travel.

On the technology front this translates to ambitious projects centered around our core data and exposed via an open API. Leveraging these two assets we’re building a suite of rich HTML5 apps, intelligent machine learning algorithms, and creating cutting edge products and services for the sophisticated traveler.

We’re hiring full-stack python developers to help lead our growing web team. Ideal candidates will be able to contribute to the vision of our development roadmap, translate functional requirements into technical specifications, and understand how to prioritize features to deliver top notch products on deadline.

Andrew Harper offers competitive salaries and great benefits -- including a personal travel fund. Please send inquiries to isentilles[at]andrewharper.com and include "HN Hiring" in the subject line to be considered.
Java programmers have variables longer than 80 characters now a days.
I was talking about South Africa, which presumably also counts as an underdeveloped country.
Lyashko vs. RNBO Secretary FIGHT  Live News Bloopers
Lyashko vs RNBO Secretary FIGHT ! Live News Bloopers | 1 June 2014
Beautiful. This has a modern application. When fed with a slow trickle of water, it will empty itself periodically, and formed the basis of automatic-flush urinals before the electronic valves became commonplace.
Yep. It's literally a waste of time for me as I know the salaries will be so low.
Main thing for me is most new languages have a large userbase in vim (as well as emacs).

So for example, Clojure has vim-fireplace for an excellent clojure experience. Same thing with Haskell.

Go to where the users are and your life will be easier.
80 characters is also comfortably within the limits for presenting code in most books, except for pocket reference sized books. The actual limits for most books are about 85 characters, so that leaves some leeway.

Even if I have the screen real estate, I don't think I'd want to intentionally write wide code, and I like self-explanatory names. On a 4k screen I might like Eclipse layouts that put the logging next to the code, rather than have very wide code.

Has anyone created examples of code that gains readability from being wider?
Because an Emacs window split into two 80x25 frames fits perfectly on a 13" Macbook Air. ;)
I always thought that it was because you might need to read or edit a file on a dumb terminal while troubleshooting a problematic system (eg, from single user mode or a rescue disk)
Gigabit does, but sadly Gigabit is present only at very few places.

Every year I email the major Danish ISPs, and every year I get the same answer: “Unfortunately we do not yet offer IPv6”. I hope Gigabit will be availbale in my area soon.
I wasn't much a fan last time I tried it. If you know more than the very basic vim movements, you'll find they start conflicting with the emacs keybindings; and it's frustrating to remember which one does which.

In emacs i just gave up and tried to learn vanilla emacs even though i am a vim user.
Could be really nice. Please add contract positions and get the damn rates displayed else it's a waste of time.

Anyone looking for a PHP/Python dev contract, shout me up!
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We're a profitable and growing home services technology platform that allows customers to easily book their next cleaning appointment online with our network of professional Upkeepers. We currently operate in the Los Angeles area but plan to scale to other popular metropolitan areas of the country soon. Our goal is to make it easy for anyone to maintain their home by letting Upkeep handle their cleaning, gardening, pool service, home repair, or any other home service related issue. We are looking for a senior Ruby on Rails engineer to help us scale our operations and backend. If working at a full-stack startup interests you, do yourself a favor and apply! We make heavy use of Slack and Trello when it comes to communicating with our distributed workforce.

Contact me at james[at]tryupkeep[dot]com
> The map example with toplevel pattern matching is really just sugar for the expanded case statements which isn't that far from the Ur equivalent

And both the Ur and the Haskell are really just sugar for a load of machine code. The reason I prefer the more compact Haskell version is that it allows me to express what I mean more precisely; other things being equal, a more compact notation will be higher-level and thus closer to how humans think.
I don't use any storage level redundancy at all. I found that misconfiguration (my fault, on two occasions) made it more unreliable that just a single disk. I rely on cloud backup, and I'll take the hit if/when I need to rebuild my machines
So the advice is "help people whenever you feel like it"?
IME, there is a very strong correlation between good developers and short lines. Bad devs doesn't mind if some lines are 150+ chars long and require horizontal scrolling. They also don't care that much about consistent naming of symbols or having correctly indented code. There are very strong reasons for keeping your lines short, naming consistent and indentation in check. But at the end of the day, you either "get" it or you don't.
Clever, but isn't there some danger that if you tipped it the wrong way when drinking out of it, even before the "gluttony" level, that you'd start up the siphon action, causing it to empty out onto the floor? At the very least you can imagine you'd get a bit of wine trapped in the curve, which would then drip out of the hole at the bottom.
Actually, this wasn't a drop. I had just washed it and was holding it by the handle. I gave it a shake to get rid of the remaining water and it snapped.

I think the joint is somewhat plastic, to the point that it feels slightly flimsy, possibly to prevent drop failure.
I never bothered with sequence numbers. Boy was it a joy to put your card deck in the reader and wait at the self serve printer, and have your program compile, run, and produce the correct output the very first time !
Does anyone know Yahoo Small Business' support phonenumber?
Sure, it's syntactic sugar, but there's no "just" about it -- being able to express ideas more concisely helps readability.
That's a thoughtful post, and you shouldn't be afraid to say that something is inferior or superior (and "in my opinion" is assumed). My first programming experiences were on the Apple IIe, and it was much more similar to Windows than to vi or Emacs, and I don't believe my ability to edit files was particularly harmed by not using these editors.

Moreover, although I use vi on occasion (because it's ubiquitously installed and readily accessible in a terminal) I don't like it at all. It fails almost totally on the level of discoverability. That is, those wonderfully composable commands are impossible to discover in vi itself. It also fails at the level of giving good feedback about what you're doing right now. Finally, it fails because it's confusing because modal editing is confusing. It makes much more sense to me to use "out of band" input (like meta keys and mouse input) which is psychologically orthogonal to actually entering text. Not to mention the fact that in situations where you want to move and edit a lot, you actually add a LOT of keystrokes.

I agree that composability is a very cool feature of vi, but the negatives dominate this. (This is the reverse argument that people seem to ignore about javascript: the ubiquity and power of js absolutely dominates, by several orders of magnitude, it's weaknesses as a language and runtime.)

In any event, arguing about text editors truly is like religious argument: if you enjoy using emacs, vi, or notepad, I'm happy for you! In the end, if it works for you then it's good, and it seems rather counter-productive to try to convince people one way or another.
Proposed realization of Fahrenheit 451:
"2012 You don't own your eBooks."

...nah

That said, systematically tracking predictions made by speculative fiction is one of the better ideas I've had and never bothered to start implementing, so nice to see someone working on it.
60 to 90 characters per column is widely used in typesetting for good readability. It’s probably not a good idea to go very far beyond 80 characters or so purely for readability, no matter the context.