skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even if macros and for loops "contaminate" the declarativeness and are unavoidable at scale, it's very easy to analyze the core of spreadsheet logic from the referentially transparent point of view of dataflow programming. The problem is that the direct view of a spreadsheet does not show this layer, even if it is what people program.

Spreadsheets are a small, mostly applicative language with references. We can ignore the "grid" presentation as it's just an easy way to examine the values of each of these references. Instead, we just say that a spreadsheet program is a collection of named formulae in this language where the references each refer to the names of one of the formulae. A program is well-formed if all references have a target.

Evaluation of a spreadsheet language involves seeking a fixed-point of this collection of formulae. If the formulae are not well-formed then their evaluation may become "stuck". If all references are targeted then the spreadsheet may diverge. Generally, both of those cases are uninteresting and we seek convergent programs.

Spreadsheet programs are finally displayed by iterating their formulae to convergence and displaying the result of every formula at once in a grid.

---

If you think about spreadsheets as having the denotation I just described then they are referentially transparent, have a well-defined notion of "variable" as opposed to "assignable", have (restricted) beta equivalence, have a denotational semantics, talk about "what, not how", and, if you do some analysis to find the connected components of your dataflow graph, are implicitly parallelizable.
Once again: if you protect against buffer overflow, an integer overflow that might lead to buffer overflow doesn't matter. The C example doesn't matter because C has neither.
OS X: Homebrew is the preferred method.

Over my dead body. Homebrew messes up my /usr/local, leaving its heaps of crap everywhere. I don't find that acceptable. MacPorts at least has the decency to put itself into /opt/local, which isn't normally used by anything else.
The problem is that pull requests are one-way, read-only collaborations. If I want to make changes, I have to close the contributor's PR and open my own. With write access, I could do:

git fetch origin pull/ID/head:BRANCHNAME
git checkout BRANCHNAME
// make changes
git push origin pull/ID/head
A better way to cut a cake and eat it too
Well, it is AdBlock, not TrackingBlock. There are other extensions out there to help with that problem. Popular ones are NoScript (which improves the web in many more ways, as well) and Ghostery.
its amazing how so many individuals can manage all this bureaucracy just fine... but trendy web startups can not.

srsly. its embarassing.
So you're basically saying that mutually consenting adults shouldn't be able to choose their own taxi arrangements, correct?

Comparing this to food safety is quite ludicrous. You can sell apples without an "apple vendor" license.
Big data doesn't mean big computation, it actually means big data on lots of disks across many nodes. They are completely different things.

You might be into HPC, but that's not what Sanjay and Jeff did. HPC and big data loads are quite different.
It's cheap compared to the rest of the country. Outside of London it's barely worth thinking about taking buses even if there's a direct one. Hell, I've taken a bus that literally dropped me on the doorstep of where I was going and regretted it - the bus was so irregular it'd have been quicker to walk and the tickets overpriced.
This is funny how this research confirms many of gender stereotypes. Men seem to know mostly war and technology related words while women know more about clothes, textiles and gardening.

They also have a pretty interesting vocabulary test. I wonder how they generated pseudowords. They are really tricky and funny.
Interesting 'triple' they use :)

// Our triple struct, used throughout.
type Triple struct {
Sub string `json:"subject"`
Pred string `json:"predicate"`
Obj string `json:"object"`
Provenance string `json:"provenance,omitempty"`
}
It's about the patches not being fit for merging. It might be because of the commit sign-offs, or it might be because it was missing error checking, or any number of things. The real question is which incurs more overhead --- asking the contributor to fix it, and then needing to wonder when/if the contributor will fix it, or to just make the d*mned changes yourself, while preserving bisectability.

Another very common one isn't about bureaucracy, but making the commit messages readable --- including the stack trace of the faliure you are fixable (which again is important for non-toy projects that are being distributed in other products, and where people may cherry-pick fixes into a stable branch used for release purposes). Or if you have contributors from around the world whose native language is not English, and you want to make it easier for other people to understand what the heck is going on without having to read the contents of each and every diff.

This is fundamental to project health, which means that a proper workflow is fundamental to project health. Given that the vast majority of github repos are toy-sized, or end up being abandoned, maybe that's fine for github. But for any project where I have hopes that it will turn into something real (and if I don't have that hope, why would I waste time on it?), I'm not going to accept pull requests from git hub.

It is not just going to happen.
How we got 4,000 visitors and 200 beta testers for our app in two weeks
Protect Your Animal on the 4th of July 
Animals are usually a darling when around the house and this is because some provide security while others are just simply good company.
Makes you wonder how much energy is used, and how much carbon is produced, by every frontend server for Google Web Search in every Google datacenter needing to (at the very least) do an extra string comparison for every search done.
Sure, if by similar you mean completely different.

If a group did attack a military convoy with a remote controlled IED, it wouldn't be an act of terrorism.

Terrorism is the indiscriminate targeting of civilians.

A remote controlled IED isn't indiscriminate, and a military convoy isn't civilian.
Point is they are plentiful - I can hail a cab in minutes but if they become rare I could wait 30 minutes for the 'special' cab to show up.
The Simpsons Tapped Out Hack
Even in NYC, if you need to take a cab from Manhattan to one of the other boroughs, you often have to give them directions.

It's frustrating because there's usually a small language barrier, and they know Manhattan just fine. Some have satnav/smart phones, but usually they do not - and end up relying on my smartphone for turn by turn directions.
I'm thinking of an observation I made when I first committed to working full time on my startup... I'd heard that the only two emotions founders feel are elation and terror, but I didn't know they were at the same damned time!

Right now, I'm still in my first week of full-time startup work. I wake up worrying in the middle of the night.
It's almost like, if they already know you're not a bot, they don't have to try very hard to re-prove it, or something.

Think of it in a Bayesian sense.

If 10% of anonymous users end up being bots (the prior), and the "hard" recaptcha has a 1% false-negative (incorrectly identifying someone as a human) rate, then of the anonymous users who succeed in getting past the recaptcha, .1% will be bots (the posterior).

But if 1% of sign-in users are bots (probably less than that), you only need a recaptcha with a 10% false-negative rate to achieve the same bot throughput limit. And, those users are less frustrated.
Why do you conclude that the unregulated taxi prices aren't lower than they would be with regulation?
All Packt ebooks and videos are $10
Well if Uber or similar cannot serve this population then it would mean competition is not going to totally kill off existing services which do. He is already making a choice not to use public transportation not because it does not support his need but fails to meet his desire.

Not providing a service is not discrimination, refusing to provide is. Uber and others can simply have selection criteria listed for owners who support disabled or even large people. If there is a market for it I am sure people will step up.
This is why it is a good idea for proposed patches to be sent to a mailing list, where other people other than the repo owner can more easily review patches, and then to have those patches tracked via patchwork.

And when I accept a patch, even if I've had to edit the commit summary so it is parsable english (not all of my contributors speak english as a first language), I send a reply via e-mail saying "Thanks, applied".
There's also the parking issue: especially in the rush hour, they can be hard to find parking spots for.
iPod Touch Updated with iSight Camera and available in vibrant colors
Probably. What about something to the effect of just adding, "The representation is created by shuffling and encrypting the password over and over so there's no way to reverse the process" or something like that?
I think there should be an UBER competitor ,that really helps cities build their own clone effectively.

If that's possible politically , it would be interesting : the cities would have regulatory power to win over UBER, this very critical business that's might just be the future of transport will be in public hands and hopefully will be guided to the good of the community, and drivers will be compensated fairly.

But getting the politics right is very difficult.
Teenager builds browser plugin to show you where politicians get their funding
Best Hacks
Does this use Blink? If not, that's a shame.
I hadn't heard of "Sugru" before, so I interpreted this as a phone-typo for "surgery" and was surprised at your dedication to cardboard VR technology :)
> I know of more than one humongous application that still runs on Java 1.2

True, but they're not all like that. We've got a humongous app written originally against .NET 1.1, it's still around, still getting new features, doing refactoring, getting updated with every .NET version bump (runs great on 4.5), still being invested in.

Enterprise does not always equal legacy, etiher.

I'm also working on a project that uses MVC5 and async/await features heavily.

Enterprise is fun because there's usually much better requirement gathering and a very tight feedback loop, because it's actual customers, not prospects, and honestly the developer doesn't have to worry about SEO, marketing, conversion, etc. The sales teams do all that for you.
So any small business or startup without name recognition should be restricted from the marketplace by a higher authority until a government entity approves its service? Is that what you're saying? Wouldn't this basically kill Ycombinator?
The other is that it will cause large segments of society to not trust the beneficial uses of this type of technology. When everything flying over head is a threat what can you say of your quality of life?

Similar to how the co-opting of vaccinations in very much the same countries has lead to killing of doctors who only come to help.

We are teaching a whole new generation to fear technology and it may take another to fix that.
> Spreadsheets are a great example of a declarative ethos.

I kind-of agree. The primitives do have many nice properties.

> You're nitpicking on details which equally applies to prolog too.

I strongly disagree.

When escape hatches exist, I think you have to look at how a language/system is commonly used in order to assess whether it has some of these properties or not. Otherwise everything in which a pure function is definable becomes declarative and the phrase becomes rather useless.

Prolog and spreadsheets differ in a rather fundamental, albeit empirical, way: spreadsheet users tend to make pervasive use of the these imperative features.

So there are two alternatives -- spreadsheet programmers are all completely inexperienced and have no idea what's good for them, or there are fundamental limits to the declarative features of the spreadsheet model, beyond which they become imperative.

I think the answer is a bit of both. Spreadsheet users tend to not be trained software engineers, but they aren't idiots and basic programming is not rocket science. None-the-less, lots of spreadsheets end up with pervasive use of imperative features (which causes real problems in terms of maintainability)

So assuming a huge population of users are at least kind-of competent/intelligent, there appear to be fundamental limitations to the basic model, beyond which it can't be used to solve common problems effectively in a declarative way.

Which of course should be interpreted by those who really like spreadsheet programming as a call to arms (education and/or refinements to the model) rather than a categorical criticism...
If they become rare, wouldn't the market supply more cabs? I mean, how do you think food supply works?
I'm really not trying to troll here, but what then of military attacks on civilian targets?
Compared to the power used by the client computers dealing with Google's increasingly heavy search pages? Pretty much nothing.
war crime?
984 Ways the United States Can Advance to the Next Round of the World Cup
They clearly already have a very extensible framework to give different results page formats depending on the search term.
Ghent University Vocabulary Test
I agree, but "we" (western media, etc.) tended to call attacks on the occupation forces terrorism, too. The pretense was the war was "over", so the occupation forces were there for law and order, not war, so attacks on them were criminal/terrorist/etc. vs. "legitimate warfare".

Pressure/etc. detonated IEDs are sort of a grey area, honestly, as are military landmines, cluster munitions where you know a large fraction will become UXO, especially in civilian areas, and inaccurate area attacks like WW2 airstrikes.
Hmm... what if I re-post a legal-sounding statement as my status that refuses to give Facebook permission to use my information? That would work, right?

http://www.snopes.com/computer/facebook/privacy.asp
That's a very interesting project.

I've been working on another tool, http://crossclj.info focused on cross-referencing a large parte of the open-source ecosystem for Clojure and ClojureScript (some 3600+ projects).

You can browse both the source code (jumping to definitions across projects) and the auto-generated docs of the whole codebase.
Maybe you're right, but terrorism has really no clear cut definition. I am pretty sure I have never heard a suicide bomber detonating in a military base being described otherwise than "terrorist".
I'm using MITs StarCluster to quickly spin up a bunch of AWS Spot Instances, run some calculations and shut them down again.

http://star.mit.edu/cluster/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ym7epCYnSk
My point is that this weakens the argument that having a complicated language isn't such a big deal since you can just use a subset of the language.
It's just a ruby script, and it works on Linux/Mac/Windows.
FIFA World Cup 2014 in the workplace
Got some love for iBeacon games?
VEER: Finally, Parking in the Modern Age
What a bunch of whiney nerds.
There are already two powerful forces protecting consumers, reputation and tort law. A taxi service with poor service will not be in business for long, because its reputation will crumble, and if the service is truly negligent (for example, by driving vehicles that are in dangerously poor shape), the customer who is harmed can sue, not to mention traffic laws that already punish any driver who endangers other drivers on the road.

You say that foreigners don't know anything, but I think most travelers would disagree. When I travel to a foreign country, I am still fully capable of researching the best hotels and restaurants, despite not speaking the native tongue. Taxi service isn't any different.

I'm not saying all consumer protection laws are unnecessary, but you have to remember that regulation has a cost. Of course, there's the cost in tax money, but also the fact that regulations are slow to change when necessary. Perhaps the largest risk is regulatory capture, which we've clearly seen in the taxi industry in a number of places. For example, from the linked article:

> In France, the proposed remedy was simple: a mandated delay of 15 minutes between ordering a ride from Uber and the passenger pick-up.

I find it inconceivable that this sort of regulation is meant to protect consumers. Clearly its only purpose is to protect the profits of traditional taxis.
Hoe meet je zelf je bloedsuikerwaarden? | Leef Nu Gezonder
Where is the line between war and security drawn? Terrorism can't be "defeated" like an advisory in a traditional war, it's more of a mindset. Therefore one could argue that adequate security should continuously identify and address threats to the state. Does this mean we're in a continuous war? I don't think the semantics matters.
I really do not see the problem with the rails commit history. Having those merge messages that point back to a pull request leaves lots of documentation about what was done and why it was done. I really do not know why people are so particular about their git log either. It shows an accurate history of the repo, not a revised cleaned up history.

However being able to edit pull request before merging was a good thing to learn. However I think in the long run I would want to learn it with plain old git rather than tack on another tool to my workflow.
GP: > Edward Snowden revealed that the USA was monitoring its citizens and storing that data in a way that far outstrips anything the KGB was ever capable of. Should he fear repression?

Me: > There is little evidence that the NSA monitoring was used for repression of citizens, and even less evidence of the sort of repression that was rampant in the Soviet bloc

You: > Do you think that people who want fundamental change in the US are not harassed and repressed, and their activities criminalized?

The context of the discussion is literally about whether the US is better than the Soviet Union. And is is, by a huge margin.

It's not about settling, it's about not derailing a discussion about NSA overreach and legitimate democratic issues in the US (and most other western countries) by making hyperbolic comparisons that aren't even in the same league.

But even then, the article you linked to is not even remotely evidence of anyone being "harassed and repressed, and their activities criminalized" in any sense, Soviet or otherwise. To the contrary, it's evidence that there exists freedom to openly discuss big and fundamental issues of government without fearing repression.
There's two differences there: 1) those suits are the result of special laws ("dram shop laws") that extend liability to bars; 2) liability in those cases arises when the bar did something negligent (serve someone who appeared to be drunk, serve a minor, etc).

Absent a special law, you can only sue a business for the negligence of its employees under the theory of respondeat superior: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respondeat_superior. The essence of the theory is that businesses should be liable for the risks created by their employees acting within the scope of their employment.

However, respondeat superior does not apply when the tortfeasor (the person who acted negligently) is an independent contractor. When it comes to employees, a business can reduce incidences of negligence through training, setting procedures, etc. They exert a great deal of control over how the employee does his work. That's not true in the case of independent contractors, like Uber drivers.
Openlink Virtuoso (and any other RDF store that supports them) does with the Property Paths feature of SPARQL 1.1.
Obamacare Will Suck the Life Out of the Economy
It appears to be implemented in JS... so... none?
> I've used Uber and really like the service when I'm going a fare (sorry) distance. But they are just as bad, if not worse, than cabs when it's only a short trip around the city.

I'm interested in hearing more about your Uber experiences. In my experience (and that of everyone I know), Uber has been great for short and longer distances. The Uber drivers don't even know where you want them to go until you're already in the car, so there's no way for them to discriminate.
Migrating from bash to zsh
"Civilian" targets can become valid military targets. For example, if an enemy force forms a line of resistance within an urban or suburban area, then it is legitimate to attack and destroy that area. A civilian area that is not occupied by an enemy force is not a legitimate target, and attacking it constitutes a war crime.
How to Make Money from Flipping Websites and Domains
What's the glitch?
The first x86 assembly program I wrote ran almost perfectly the first time. That was over 15 years ago and I don't remember what it actually did, but I remember being impressed with myself.

Then the screen filled with junk and my P133 rebooted. When it happened a second time I resigned myself to actually read the assembly manual section about DOS programs properly (i.e. not stop after the part which said .COM files are the simplest way to get started).

The idea of asking the OS to unload my application wasn't obvious to me at all :) At the same time, realising why not asking the OS to unload my application produced the results it did was a lightbulb moment.
Should I Use a QR Code?
Sad to see no SPARQL support as of yet, it looks like it's on their longer term goals though as they are query language agnostic.

Interesting to see more products entering this space.
Transport is the lifeblood of a city, and is extremely important to that city's economy. I think it's reasonable to say that it's a little different than the next photo-sharing app.
Retail stores most definitely do follow you around and track every move you make in their store and on the parking lot.
Funny I thought of "Time To Live"
phew thankfully I'm safe from the terrorists on IRC, the newsgroups, my BBSs, and while sending unix wall messages.
"The home secretary says internet phone systems Skype and Facetime, as well as
social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, have become "safe
havens" for organised criminals and terrorists"

and ..

"It would also have extended laws to cover new online forms of communication, such as
Skype, and there were suggestions it could also give intelligence services real-time
access to the data."

In a world where recent controversy has caused a greater proportion of traffic to make use of increasingly strong encryption, it's hard not interpret this as a plaintive demand
to subvert free enterprise, law and technology -- so that all the old fun toys work once again.

What they really want is to render privacy and encryption moot by making it a legal requirement that any service that facilitates communication, in any form, be required to backdoor or log everything and provide it on a whim.

And how're they going to sell it? The age old "think of the children" refrain. Class.
How do you know? Is there a study that shows cabs need government regulation.
Things I’ve learned launching a side project
The "Opera Mini" mode renders webpages into a specialised format (OBML), so they function more like interactive images; I'd bet they finally implemented a OBML rendering/UX layer for iOS. "Opera Turbo" would be a standard iOS UIWebView except it routes your requests through a caching and optimisation server for smaller payload and quicker downloads.

Chrome on iOS renders in a UIWebView, too, and enables a similar "bandwidth saving proxy" technique by default which achieves similar results.

More about Opera Mini's compression, OBML (outdated but gives a good overview): http://dev.opera.com/articles/opera-binary-markup-language/

Sadly, I seem to only be able to install the previous version of the app which is a vastly different experience to the screenshots in the App Store. It might not have caught up to Australia's cache servers yet.