skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
* Python has no dots for ranges, it has a range() builtin function and it has slices which uses colon (e.g. some_array[1:42:2]). Both range and slices exclude the upper bound

* the Swift operators makes a surprising amount of sense (where Ruby's make very little): the longer operator yields the longer range and `0..10` yields a range of length 10. Think of it like this: the "center": dot is the range itself, the left dot includes the left bound, and the right dot includes the right bount. Thus `..` is "range with left bound included` and `...` is "range with right bound included"
Sure, they're scheduled months in advanced, but they're moved, re-scheduled and canceled, days in advance. Also the agenda, and thus who has to be there, changes all the time. The meeting may have been scheduled 6 month in advance, but that doesn't mean that you get to find out that you have to be at that meeting more than a couple of days in advance, if you're lucky,
> IMO all sales tax should be regular tax, and road tax/car taxes should just go away. They tax fuel enough to cover for all that and it makes sense to tax on usage.

Government giving up on any tax opportunity? I wish, but not in the world I know...

> What I didn't quite get from the article is how do taxes compare. Looks like they simply got a more similar treatment to standard cars.

They seem to be removing the 50 years lasting subsidy, which makes sense to be honest - at some point it has to finish.

> These cars would be much cheaper to maintain even with the same tax regime as regular cars.

Exactly my thoughts, if these cars are so popular, efficient, and budget saving - they shall do OK without getting government involved.
I did start a company while still employed.. Here is what I did:

- Was upfront with my employer. (having established such a trust-based relationship for a long-time did really help)

- Told him that while I was using my spare time for my 'business'. If it would start getting more of my time, I was willing to negotiate a part-time position (hey, be honest, and if you are really valuable to your employer, there is nothing you should be worried of)

Believe me, people quit their jobs all the time - what employers do not like is getting caught off-guard. Just give them sufficient time in advance before leaving your job -- that will be appreciated most of the time.
If you can actually measure something like a 'crash rate' then you're doing something terribly wrong.
Ok, I added some background on prerequisites for building HTML and ePub, and filed a pull request.
The real premise is to pit SFR against a sane alternative. Even putting panels above (or alongside) all roadways is prohibitive due to the transmission line requirements ($1 - $2 million per mile).

There's far more to be said for siting solar where you use it (e.g., on top of roofs, buildings, parking structures, etc.), or where the siting is optimal, in concentrated locations. Because it turns out we're not hurting for space to put solar cells, but rather, we need to get the costs down. A 100 mile square of solar collectors in the desert would more than provide for all electrical generating needs for the US, and you'd have a small set of long-distance transmission lines from it.
I think the audience for Swift is probably wider and anyway there is definitely inconsistency.

let works differently for structs and classes which if fine and clear as it is the main difference between them. Dictionaries are like structs truly immutable when declared with let. Arrays declared with let on the other hand have a complicated partial mutability and copy on write combination that depends on whether the operation changes their length.

I've got another post that is a work in progress that shows some of the behaviour I find odd. When I've finished it I'll add it to the blog properly but I don't mind people seeing and commenting on it as long as they know it is a WIP:

http://blog.human-friendly.com/J45WpUpm8vqndCJAHgS7J7kZ
I'd really hesitate to mention pulseaudio as a good thing. It's the first thing to go after I install a new machine.
This is probably because many major developers say they at best would gain ~1% more performance out of the change for a decently large investment of man hours. The opinion of those devs (whether you or I agree with them or not) is that time can be better spent making other improvements to their codebases.
Isn't this what SPDY try to implement?
Thunderf00t's video really is exquisite. The glass cost fairly much nails the fundamental problem.
LoveStocks – The simplest way to invest in your favorite brands
Exactly, 2/3 code reduction sounds so great that I would like to be able to see that.
Some IPSes (Intrusion Protection Systems) that perform deep-packet inspection won't pass such traffic.

But this isn't really a "bug" per se; the TCP model is a stream is a stream is a stream. There's no notion of time, packets, or correlation between streams. So browsers (and the OS) are acting only as they can; by treating a TCP connection as two independent streams.

(Though, how could it be otherwise? Assume HTTP over SCTP (sequenced packets). We can't require, or even allow, HTTP servers to ignore response packets that arrive "too early", since it's possible that observers of the client (e.g. Wireshark) may not observe the exact same timing, which would lead to divergent interpretations of the conversation.)

Amazon does this too. Upload APIs will return 4xx errors well before the body is uploaded in the event there's an issue with the headers. Not that (a) most HTTP clients pay attention to this, or (b) they can do anything about it without closing and reopening the connection.
Honestly speaking, I tend to do this. I jump ships quickly to try the new tool because it seems to hold a lot of promise. I have fell face first a few times and learned my lessons. I am much more diligent now.
Edit - Sometimes it has paid off.
I think there is a difference between "let's experiment with it" and "let's make plenty of Roundup-resistant GMOs so that we can put even more junk in the groundwater on a large scale".
Linux is completely unusable for me. For instance, I've never found a good replacement for Calendar on OS X. The nicest calendar program I used on Linux had no CalDAV support (WTF?) and required me to use increment/decrement buttons to input the start/end times of my events. On top of that, it lacked any organisational features such as colour coding or a 5/7 day week view. It felt like a toy.

On OS X, I spend a significant amount of time in the command line but the occasional times I need a GUI, Linux just isn't usable. Most graphical programs lack even the most basic functionality or consideration for user experience. Linux is great for headless environments but it's awful when I occasionally need a GUI.
It's part of your grade, but it is rarely an overriding factor in my experience. Lots of experience plus slightly higher price will beat little experience and slightly lower price, but it won't beat little experience and very low price.

I was recently involved in a bid for a government contract where we got perfect scores on all factors, but still lost the bid to a small company with little to no relevant experience, but who claimed they could to the job for a third of the price.
How one firm came to dominate the world of extreme sports
The Development Of A Hardware Random Number Generator
Well yes there's kinda two different views of the Turing Test:

1) Consciousness is really hard to define so the Turing Test is a handy workable yardstick that AI can use as a milestone until we get a proper working definition of consciousness

2) (Hard-AI, behaviourist position) Appearing to be conscious and being conscious are the same thing. Hence the Turing Test is about as good a definition of consciousness as we are ever likely to get. Perhaps it could be tightened up a little - insisting on really long conversations with lots of complexity etc. But a good judge running a test over a longish time period would see to that.
I see. Not really such a big deal in practice, but nice to have.
JavaScript Package Management – NPM – Bower – Grunt
> STOP CARING ABOUT CODE FORMATTING STYLES

Caring about code formatting is not binary. I've seen code that literally breaks syntax highlight in vim, and I've accepted that sometimes in this job I just have to do syntax-correction commits in order to be able to efficiently work. I'm not a perfectionist about that, but there are limits.

> Every time you make fun of a local company's choices (even if they are badly made), you'll isolate yourself more

I'd say this doesn't only apply to local companies.

Just assume that people you work with are smarter than you.
It feels like this should be named kill the trees or blacken the hands
I launched WonderProxy ( https://wonderproxy.com ) while employed. I actually launched it to solve a problem a co-worker was having. He was a friend, and kept having to stay late to try and test aspects of our website using various free web proxies.

I bought a few VPS in different countries, gave him the password, and it was an instant hit.

They were my first customer, and are still a customer several years later. I launched with like 13 servers. We've got 127 now in 65 different countries.
1 1/2 years ago I started my company http://cutterslounge.de
I didn't quit my job and started working on my company, I've already built a prototype of my product whilst being employed. This gave me the huge advantage of not starting from scratch. It was easier for me to convince my now co-founder to join me and quit his job.

After I quit my job, I had still a good relationship with them, which made it possible for me to work freelance for them from time to time. This means there was cash flow from the very first days.

Now, a 1 1/2 years later, our product has become passive income with almost no effort now.
My co-founder and me worked as consultants/freelancers while we developed our product. Showing off our product gained us trust and some local fame, which lead to many really cool jobs and investments (right now we ware working on a quite cool project, where we are invested in as well).

I'm happy :-)
> Some IPSes that perform deep-packet inspection won't pass such traffic.

So will those ISPs also not pass Amazon's upload APIs responses? That would be pretty sloppy!
I am starting my own company ( a saas app ) while im still employed. I changed 5 day workweek to 3 day work week so I have more time for my side project. The salary cut is worth it. I rather spend some time in the weekend to rest and preventing burning out. I can survive as well with my current salary so I lower the risk for not having any income.
Because you need the government to decide what is safe for you or not?

I've never understood safety standards for consumer goods. If you want to drive around in a horrible death trap of a car... why should the government stop you?

(Admittedly I guess you don't want driving time bombs, but the majority of NCAP standards are related to occupancy safety).
I am a massive fan of dc.js. Crossfilter is an amazing library, but my JS-fu isn't good enough to use its power without the help from DC.

An example of what I was able to do: http://www.eanalytica.com/google-analytics-cube/ uses the dc, crossfilter and the Google Analytics API to make a simple visualisation
5 Less-Expected Things Astronauts Took To The Moon
I think he meant "IDS" as in "Intrusion Detection System"
A computer just passed the Turing Test–but was it actually the first one?
Minor grip: gray background, gray font. Almost impossible to read unless you're squinting.
>Plus, I am not sure how many people will go through the trouble of putting on goggles in wide range adoption. That being said I think simpler devices like the kinect have more mass market appeal, and thus the adoption of devices like kinect will ultimately be instrumental in the success of more complex interfaces like Oculus, etc...

This got me thinking a lot but I'm not sure things like Kinect will eventually help devices like the Oculus Rift. Case: my girlfriend loves the Kinect i.e. how it will turn on my TV/Xbox with voice commands, sign her in via face recognition and let her navigate to Netflix easily not even having to get out of bed or move. My girlfriend is very non-technical and doesn't care about gadgets like most of us on here do. I couldn't see my girlfriend in a million years wearing a Oculus headset and I'd never hear the end of it if she saw me wearing one...
Not necessarily. These products have hundreds of millions of users. Of course there will be a "rate" for anything. Case in point:

http://bgr.com/2014/03/28/apple-android-app-stability/

As you can see, Google has managed to cut the "crash rate" of KitKat to less than half of Gingerbread and iOS 7.1, even if the crash rate for those is pretty low, too.
I only hope they didn't "downgrade" the expectations of the testers by insisting he was a 13-year-old boy, thus some of his answers might not make sense!

Although the Turing Test is a theoretical challenge with no clear technical and objective benchmarks to achieve, it should not be downplayed. Although this is a remarkable achievement, I will wait until they beat a virtual adult of postgraduate level!
Not because we weren't doing our job, but for example I've been involved in cases where we've had to say "I'm sorry, but there is no way we can hit the deadline without more hours and external resources", and client says "fine, here's some more money, just make sure you hit the deadline"
No. Scala does some interesting things, but it adds a lot of complexity in order to interact with typical JVM code.

Haskell doesn't have that kind of baggage, so at its heart it's a very very simple language (Lambda Calculus + algebraic datatypes + typeclasses). There are a bunch of extensions, but they can be mostly ignored while getting to grips with the basics.

Programming in Haskell can involve a lot of unfamiliar concepts like monoids, functors, monads, etc. but these are just the APIs used by libraries; the language itself doesn't care about them (except for "do" notation). Just like you don't need to understand design patterns to learn how Java works.
> Specifically, are there any strong economic arguments for allowing these?

They benefit the employer, since it limits the job prospects of the employee.
"People" here refers more to the hardcore gamers than anything else. Regular folks seem to love playing games designed for it.
It's so refreshing to know that there are other people applying (what I previously assumed was ubiquitous) common sense rationale to these issues.

What's frightening is how far and wide you need to search to find comments like yours. Most are simply mindlessly perpetuating one side or another of the artificial polarity:

"You 'hate' GMO, so you hate science" vs "GMO is evil, without any merit"

Childish, tiring. It has also begun to fracture society into more factions, more extremes. It's time for us to grow up.

My opinion is: GMOs are most likely a very useful tool, however the people in-charge of the direction appear to lack the emotional maturity to handle the greater responsibility. Until better people are in the driver's seat, we should proceed with extreme caution (which we are not doing).
I used to like functional programming. Now I think that it's -- more often than not -- a solution in search of a problem. I can understand some of the things FP gets you (although those come at a cost, which I'll get to later); I'm just not so sure these are the things we need, or that FP is the best solution for them.

One is code reuse: yes FP code is definitely more reusable. The problem is that the kind of code it enables reuse of more than OO is very small, simple loops. This is never a big issue. Writing the same 4 line method -- which could have been abstracted with a monad -- 10 times in a 50-150K LOC project is never a big problem, and these methods rarely contain bugs. On the other hand, OO code is often easier to refactor and modify. Sometimes -- in Java for example -- dynamic linking combined with OO, lets you modify/add functionality without even re-compiling existing code. Heck, it let's you add and load new polymorphic type implementations at runtime. It is much more malleable than FP code.

Another is state management: yes, FP is one solution to the problem of managing state, especially in a multicore environment. But it is neither the only solution, nor is it the best. The Clojure solution of -- for lack of a better name -- "transactional" mutable state is simpler than the pure FP one, and just as safe. I.e. there are ways to make side-effects safe without restricting them so much that they become a nuisance (after all, all software, possibly with the exception of compilers, exists for the sake of its side effects).

Finally (and I've said this before on HN), a language like Haskell discounts the very useful choice of reasoning about your code after it runs, favoring, instead, all-upfront reasoning, often at the expense of facilitating the former. There are some domains where figuring everything up front is very important. Others, where trial and error is far more productive.

So pure FP increases code reuse, but of code that's not that important to reuse. It helps deal with the hard problem of state management, but other, simpler solutions exist. Finally, it makes it hard to "feel" how your code runs, to debug it, to profile it, and more. I think it is based on the premise that if programming could be made more formal -- more mathematical , if you will -- it will become easier/"better". But that premise has not been shown to be true. The lack of magically bug-free, FP OSs, drivers, control software, and large applications, shows that even the biggest supposed benefits of languages like Haskell, are yet to be demonstrated in the real world.

EDIT: Just to clarify: Unfortunately FP does not have a definition, so, when I was saying "FP", I meant "FP as the article's author practices", which means "statically typed, pure FP". FP using Java streams, FP in Clojure/Erlang, and FP in Haskell mean very different things.
If there were kickbacks given to California public officials they will end up in jail. I'm sure their finances are under considerable scrutiny.
No, I meant "IPS", "Intrusion Protection System".
If you disable logging in with the root user, ...do you allow Sudo for another user? Then, what's the point?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rhythm: /ˈɹɪ.ð(ə)m/

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pattern: /ˈpat(ə)n/ or /ˈpædəɹn/
You can't always do b) since your object has to, well, do something. Personally, I'd like to make inheritance strictly opt-in (as in, classes marked final per default), if anything this may be enough to make some people think twice about the let's-use-inheritance-to-share-code antipattern.
Notes on CloudKit
It's http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/M-1m. I don't think I'll ever switch from it. Very narrow and efficient font.
IPS (Intrusion Protection System), not ISP. And yes, they'd drop the connection on such an error response if configured to do so. (Which is likely what you want to do anyway in this case. Amazon's engineers had the foresight not to respond early in the case of a successful upload thankfully.)
One of the elements in SPDY is that responses to requests can be pushed by the server anticipating a request. But that's a relatively new development compared to when I figured out that this 'feature' is supported by just about every browser out there. And it's kind of logical, if you implement HTTP in the most straightforward way then the network stack will buffer the response until the next read, regardless of what the rest of the program is doing. So when the browser issues that read (either in a separate reader thread or in the same one if it is programmed single threaded write-then-read style) it immediately finds the answer to the request it just sent out.

Strictly speaking extra bytes sent past the end of the response to the current request (or before even any request has been sent) is a protocol violation but I'm really not complaining about this one, after all, that line in the spec does not actually specify the timing. We all just read between the lines to see what we expect to see: ping ... pong.
Do we really need to learn to code?
Is it even legal to fire a person for a single tweet (when tweeting is not their job)?
JetBrains launches new IDE for DBAs and SQL developers
Thanks. Hubspot looks pretty cool. I think you are right though - its an overkill for small b/s. The tool needs to be dead simple to use (even if it means limited options)
Ask HN: How Does Photo Finish Software Identify Finishers?
FinshLynx (http://www.finishlynx.com/) is a line scan camera system used at track meets. It displays results as soon as runners cross the finish line. Runners wear numbers on their shirt and/or hip but these often fall off. Runners occlude each other and, in many races, don't finish in lanes. The system is very impressive. How is it identifying runners so quickly?
Ah! Complete reading fail on my end. (thanks for the edit, it is much clearer now, I apparently substituted ISP for IPS).

I don't think it is possible to respond early in case of a successful upload, after all, that means the upload can still fail for a variety of reasons. Success indicates that you can move to the next state, and an 'early success' might still turn into a late failure.
Privacy As A Competitive Vector – AVC
Perl is actually no different. There are a lot of cool things happening in the Perl universe too. But the problem is, the older issues persist. There is a big legacy baggage to carry, and in the overalls the feature adoption is generally slow.
Running it on a different port is only protection against random attacks (sweeping ip addresses looking for common passwords). This seems much more like a targeted attack, someone took the time and effort to try to get in. A small port scan isn't hard, and will get around changing the port. Of course, the other things you've listed are solutions for this.

I was just posting a single option to complement the other comments.
If you don't give your name or other identification, how would they hold you responsible if you abused the connection?
I wonder how they log from applications in Docker, we found it to be one of the blockers that kept us from using Docker.
If you sysprep generalize the machine before you swap the board it'll work afterwards. It's like moaning that your brain transplant resulted in you not being able to move your arms or something similar.
Is Negative SEO Becoming A Bigger Problem For Businesses?
>didn't Adobe say they'd abandon 64bit support on Linux?

No, Adobe abandoned NPAPI Flash, the one used by Firefox. Flash on Chrome uses PPAPI, which is still officially supported (my guess is that it's maintained/developed mostly by the Chrome guys, but it's just a guess).
Show HN: WebGL Multiplayer Game (wizardwarz.nergal.se)
Just launched a very early beta of a multiplayer "FPS" made in WebGL using ThreeJS library. (possible to switch between FPS and 3rd person) Just a hobby project that I would love to get some feedback on, in order to see if I should continue working on it or not.

Note; It will add the project to github as open source once I've spent some time cleaning up the code.

URL: http://wizardwarz.nergal.se
The server is a nodejs based server that generates the world dynamically. Each map is therefore always unique.
A Chatbot Has 'Passed' The Turing Test For The First Time
CPython is very slow at various things that are common, like function calls and attribute lookup. There is no good reason for this and few runtimes are quite this slow. This sort of overhead adds up and is often annoying to deal with.

Yes, I have run non-trivial applications on PyPy and they were significantly faster. Its only downside is libraries that depend on CPython extensions, but there are few of those left.

Pandas doesn't do much for removing function call overhead. I don't necessarily have large mathematical datasets, I just want my web service to be easier to write, by not having to care about what CPython is terribly slow at.