skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> it's pretty damn sad that something as limited and now - ancient as bash represents some kind of optimum of productivity for many real-world "everyday programming" tasks

I absolutely agree with him on that bit, in it's day the ability to pipe the output of one command to another and the composability that gives you was incredible.

bash is undeniably useful (I use it every day) but I've been transitioning to python/envoy/docopt for a lot of things because despite more than a decades usage with bash I immediately have to hit google as soon as I want to do anything more complex than an if statement, it is just a horrible language (imo).

I like python for this as small single purpose programs are replaced by small (in terms of usage interface not nescessarily complexity) modules but the overall coherence feels better.

There is so much inertia around the tools and approaches I'm not sure how we'll ever move past this stage (Microsofts PowerShell had some promise as an approach for a while).
It seems obvious to me that industry outsiders are going to have a drastically different road map for self driving cars than the entrenched players.

Clearly the end game for self driving automobiles is far, far fewer cars in the world. In 25 years, relatively few people are going to be owning cars at all. You'll subscribe to a self-driving car service (or maybe your government will run it) and whenever you want to go somewhere, you'll enter your automotive needs into your mobile device and five minutes later the appropriate self-driving cycle/car/truck/van will pick you up in front of your house.

There won't be a need for every family to own 3 cars that spend 90% of the day turned off and taking up parking space. Of course Google and Detroit aren't going to see eye to eye on this...
Generally, it is the desired effect. In Haskell, it will be reified in an IO action, will appear in type signatures, and - as a value - can be manipulated and combined with similar values. It will only be a side effect if called with unsafePerformIO or similar, and the Haskell community will rightly condemn you for doing so (outside debugging) without a proof for why it's both okay and necessary in this circumstance - relying on side effects means you lose all kinds of guarantees that the type system usually affords you.
Indian here. One of the biggest problems with Orkut was spam. They did nothing to combat the countless unsolicited "fraandship" requests. A lot of women I know abandoned Orkut early due to the harrassment.
> With replicator technology, a Star Fleet officer could produce all the gold pressed Latinum he wants.

The whole basis for latinum's value as a medium of exchange is the fact that it has some kind of technobabble immunity to replication so, no, they couldn't. (Latinum isn't the only thing which has this kind of problem -- IIRC, as also antimatter, dilithium, certain radioactives, and, well, basically anything that needed to be scarce in at least one episode where they didn't want to invoke the non-availability of the replicators has a similar issue; of course, given that replicators and transporters notionally work on the same principles, but most replicator-immune things have been transported in the series, there is a pretty deep technobabble consistency problem here, but that's a recurring problem in Trek.)
> There is something to be said for companies doing one thing.

Facebook doesn't want to "do one thing". The problem is, Facebook keeps failing at doing other things, so you never hear about them or remember them.

Hey, what do you think people remember best: The facebook phone or the iTunes social network?
UI / UX Design Interviews
Skyforge, 3D printing in the cloud
From the article:

The complaint is long on evidence of false advertising, but shorter on evidence that the "predatory trading" was actually predatory. There's a certain amount of foamy fulmination at "predatory trading," but nowhere is there any evidence suggesting that Barclays's institutional clients were actually harmed by it.

He then goes on to suggest that the lawsuit is therefore essentially frivolous (in his words, "a self-referential argument.")

His reasoning is flawed, of course. For one thing, commercial fraud is always harmful, even if you can't always prove that someone suffered specific losses for it. For another, the banks agreed explicitly agreed to comply with all pertinent legislation (including the Martin Act) in exchange for the privilege of obtaining a charter which allowed them to become banks in the first place. Whether one thinks the Martin Act is overly broad or gives too much leeway to prosecutors is of secondary importance.
"Hold on, let me scan your crotch with my smartphone" is about as likely to happen as "Hold on, please sign this form giving consent" for two people about to fuck. Let's be realistic here.

This also ignores the obvious issue of data leakage. You work/live in a location with objections to the use of birth control. What's stopping your boss from covertly finding out who among his employees is "sinning" or what have you.
I think more of the internet should be displayed in plain text like this!
However the problem these various anti-BC people have (and the court cases that has again bought up IUDs) is that "birth control" drugs are used by huge numbers of people for completely unrelated reasons - numerous thyroid conditions are best treated with "birth control".

Also IUDs are solely for BC, and require (out patient) procedures that fall under the 'religious' exemptions. So you don't get coverage for that either.
I almost flagged this, as I feel that the author is disingenuous; I don't feel he wants to engage in a productive discussion of these issues, makes no concessions to the technologies he brings up, confuses his domain with all domains, and falls back on superficial criticisms.

I did not flag it because his frustrations can still be the starting point to useful discussion. Something I would like to point out is that Go was designed with programmer productivity in mind. The author writes this off as "designing for the compiler," and the Go team did purposefully design Go to be quick to compiler. But that was not an end in itself. They designed Go to be quick to compile to make build times faster, so that programmers would spend less time waiting for builds. Rob Pike gave a keynote talk at SPLASH 2012 where he explained all of this in-depth: http://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article I think it's worth noting that the talk is even entitled, "Language Design in the Service of Software Engineering."

So, back to one of my criticisms of the post: the Go team clearly tried to design Go with the programmer in mind. In particular, they were designing for a programmer who works on a code-base of millions of lines who works with dozens (or hundreds) of other developers. If the author wants to claim that the Go team failed at this goal, then that's fair. But I don't think it's fair to claim that this is not their goal.

The rest of the rant feels the same to me. The dig about category theory is clearly aimed at Haskell. I am not fluent in Haskell, but I have been convinced by those that are that being fluent in category theory is not necessary to be fluent in Haskell. Saying so is a boring way to dismiss a language.

Overall, the rant reminds me of an exchange I had with a fellow grad student many years ago. This was back when it was just starting to become clear that single-threaded processor performance was going to hit a wall, and we were going to have to go multicore. When trying to explain this, I was hit with, "I don't care, it's their job, they just need to make it faster!"

The authors goals may be good ones, but he refuses to acknowledge the hard problems people are encountering when trying to build the infrastructure necessary to even start to address those goals. Not granting people their incremental successes just because they did not solve the whole problem is, I feel, disingenuous.
This is why I think the major "car companies" of the future won't be the current "auto companies", but the current major tech companies. The "tech" part is going to become increasingly a bigger competitive advantage, while the "auto" part will be completely commoditized, and you'll see current car companies going bankrupt or being bought out by the major tech companies. I think Tesla is mostly part of the "tech companies" than the auto companies.
Have you missed the memo? Google+ is "Google's central identity" in the new Google. Shutting down Google+ would be akin to Facebook shutting down Facebook.
Um, if you don't trust your parter, the solution is not a gross invasion of privacy.
On a slightly unrelated note, why do blog sub-sites always lack a link to the main web site? It always takes time to realize the blog site's logo links to itself, that there is no obvious link to the main one anywhere on the page, and that you will have to edit the URL by hand. Such a trivial usability issue.
Another product for the Google chopping block...
Sure! It took me a decade as a neuroscientist to realize that sleep is the inverse of stress. That's physiologically speaking - stress is the sympathetic system; sleep is the parasympathetic system.

We're seeing a type of high stress sleep. We don't know what it means or why. But the aim is to continue to drill in - a kind of citizen science of how sleep and stress interact. What questions would folks what to see answered?

I discovered wearing our watch that naps are stress relieving for me. Others see the same effect during meditation, and I wonder if that too is a form of sleep, physiologically speaking.

EDIT: Since it got buried below, this study will turn out to be a huge inflection point in terms of how sleep is understood and taught. Sleep appears to wash away toxins that collect during the stressful day. Sleep seems to be a form of garbage collection.
http://www.nih.gov/news/health/oct2013/ninds-17.htm
Right. It only becomes true when prices soar very very quickly. It's been my experience that rents stabilize with buying cost over the course of a couple years. For example, in the article:

> It is possible to rent a good house for $1800/month. That same house would cost about $700,000.

That situation is no longer true. That situation only became true in the mid-2000s because that $700k house cost $350k the year before. The landlord is in no hurry to bump his rent to $4,500/month because it's not costing him $4,500/mo like it would if he was buying today.

The rent-vs-buy calculation is dead simple: you will never, ever pay less for your rental than it costs the landlord to own it. [Edit: but it will cost less than if you bought that same house today, generally. That's why you can typically rent in a better neighborhood than you can buy in]. That means as sales prices increase, rents increase. Then add demand on top of that, as demand increases so does price.

(Obviously there are other things to consider to determine if owning is right for you, but I'm talking in an theoretical world).
I imagine that would be easily spoofable (though that obviously takes a bit more preparation than lying about having an IUD), and almost certainly raises some privacy concerns.

Not to mention the social aspects. "Awww yeah baby, let's do this thing. Let me just... take out my RF scanner and verify that you have an IUD."
I hope that their next feature is the ability to queue up a bunch of goals for the day. Scheduling something for an hour from now is nice, but being able to say "I would like to do x,y and z today for this many minutes each" would be a nice thing to have. As it stands right now this is pretty similar to the built in clock app.
Problems with CAP, and Yahoo’s little known NoSQL system (2010)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7966247
That's probably typical use. Perfect use is is %99.9.
I think they're speaking more about the much less exciting form of network everyday network monitoring that goes on inside the enterprise - troubleshooting, performance tuning, etc. But you've got an interesting, if not a bit cynical, interpretation there.
Just because you say welfare is the same as an unconditional basic income system, doesn't mean it is. Did it ever occur to you this movement started in some of the safest welfare based nation states on earth?

The difference is this. It isn't completely different, just different in this one way, UNCONDITIONAL. Your dole is anything but. Unconditional income gives options that the dole does not. It gives extra safety the dole does not.

Here[1] are a couple reasons people are supporting these movements from an Anglo perspective, I assume you have more or less the same type of welfare and obviously we have shared culture, so perhaps some of these apply to Australia and how this differs from what we have now.

[1] http://basicincome.org.uk/reasons-support-basic-income/
Firstly, this is about what you did, not about you. Relax, we're just folks talking about stuff on the Internet, I'm not calling you Satan or accusing you of treason! No one's going to die if we can't agree.

Secondly, you said this, "If colonization were a matter of just moving from one to the other, it would have happened already." I'm trying to understand why you feel you're qualified to make a statement like that. Are you an expert on this topic? If not, that's okay!

You say you're agreeing with NASA's practice, but I guess that's just the flip side of the same coin, isn't it?

What I'm trying to get at is why people (not just you, and you've hardly "sinned" at all here) do this broad stating of opinions on scientific topics like this. It seems to lend credence to the idea that all thoughts are equally important, when we all know that's not true.

To me, this feels like the same kind of thing that we get on the news, when we see "experts" deny climate change by pontificating broadly with the same level of apparent airtime as actual experts who argue in favor of it using their expertise and their experimentation results.
Standard rules of ethics for experiments on human subjects say that (with a few exceptions) subjects should always be informed about the study. If that changes the subjects' behavior such that the study is no longer valid, it's the researcher's obligation to come up with a better design that works in the face of informed consent, or to give up and study something easier.

It's been fairly well established that "I wanted to learn something" isn't an adequate excuse for doing things to people without informing them or receiving their consent.

Before you talk about peoples' "clueless 'ethics'", you might want to read the professional standards of the field, for example the American Psychological Association's Ethics Code. The section on "informed consent to research" is here: http://www.apa.org/ethics/code/index.aspx?item=11#802
Really great - played first lesson. Second lesson crashed on https://getinstinct.com/courses/intro-to-guitar/amazing-grac... before I could play along with the review of part-1.

Would like regular music notation as I already know that. Also it's a bit quiet, would love to have a voice guide rather than just reading the prompts.

One slight problem is that on parts where the section to play starts on the same note as the end, and uses an open string, the sustained note of the string automatically skips the first note of the repeat playthrough. Perhaps the algo needs to look for an amplitude peak at the start of the students playthrough to avoid this?

Incidentally the tuner is better than any of the simple tuners I've used on Android, haven't tried it on my phone however. It coped with my children talking over it and still helped me tune very quickly.
I agree. I've never had a use for Groups other than stumbling upon a thread within Groups while researching a bug, or trying to get something new done on linux that I've never done before. I don't see this less-than-absolutely-massive userbase aligning with Google's current interests. Especially while trying to take over the social-discussion world with Plus.
Hmm...I am not sure what difference the author is making between closures and blocks, the terms at least overlap substantially.

For example, Smalltalk blocks have been "upgraded" to closures in most dialects (and not implementing them as closures in the first place was not a choice of semantics, but one of implementation simplicity).

Also, Swift closures are the same as Objective-C blocks.

+(void)logMe: (void (^)(void))block
{
NSLog(@"object of class: %@",[(id)block class]);
}

Called from Swift with a closure:

func applicationDidFinishLaunching(aNotification: NSNotification?) {
logger.logMe( { } );
}

Results in:

2014-06-30 19:55:37.973 SwifTest[94782:303] object of class: __NSMallocBlock__

So much ado about nothing?
MuteMachine: Automatically skip tracks on Hype Machine
Any plans for other instruments? Would be really interested in a piano version
Do you really need a radio emitter so close to egg DNA?
Orkut could have been facebook if it wasn't for the stupid name.
In non-committed relationships, or in the early days of a relationship, surely it's sensible to use condoms anyway - as much for protection against STDs as for having to trust that your partner isn't lying when she says she's using a contraceptive.

I might be an outlier and I've also got the benefit of free health care and sexual health clinics being in the UK, but it seems like sensible practice to not stop using condoms until you've both had an STD screen - which takes all of ten minutes plus a week to get results - just to be safe. Especially since it's possible to have an STD while also being unaware of it.
Interesting that two years before the main crash was triggered, this article went down and identified almost all of points that led to it from a housing perspective by looking at one of the more extreme housing markets in the US.

- Prices disconnected from fundamentals

- Risky "home equity loans"

- Extreme use of leverage

- Surplus of speculators

- Trouble at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

I wonder whether similar "canary in the coal mine" approaches could be used for other large market or societal shifts in the US?
Ask HN:How long should my startup stay in "beta?
Interesting to see that this happened around when Orkut Buyukkokten, the site's founder recently quit Google for Hello Networks.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/orkutb
Get Microsoft Office for under $10 – no cheating involved
If you don't earn enough money, it is unconditional. So it's a guaranteed basic income.

The money goes into your bank account, you can spend it on beer and smokes if you want to.
Google's Material Design is Skeuomorphic
Part of the performance record might well be due to not everyone taking the pill remembering to always take it. If you miss the odd day, I'd imagine that the chance of accidental pregnancy goes up a fair bit.
I haven't tried Instinct, but having learned guitar off and on many years ago, the biggest 'leap' I made between knowing a few chords, and a few riffs, and actually learning enough to pick up a guitar at a party without embarrassing myself occurred when I started learning full-length songs.

There are a plethora of very simple songs that are super easy to play, and if you learn some that people might like singing along to (even guiltily, like "Bon Jovi's Wanted Dead or Alive"), you'll likely bound ahead in skill by a lot.

To that effect, I'd recommend hitting up YouTube for an instructor like Marty Schwartz (user 'martyzsongs') and finding some of his easy tutorials, then learning a few songs to string together. Get 15-20 of those easy songs under your belt, and everything starts getting a lot easier from there.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=martyzsings+easy
Pump and dumps (and dump and pumps, respectively) can happen only till there are new inexperienced idiots joining the bubble. And, fortunately, just like the number of smart people, the number of idiots with money is a finite number.
Enabling Contributions to the Visual F# IDE Tools
There are Market Makers on IEX. Look at the Brokers at the end of this list: http://www.iextrading.com/services/

Virtu, SUN, etc. They are market makers.
Is This The End Of SoundCloud For DJs?
SoundCloud gives Universal the ability to remove music with no means of appeal or review.
10 common mistakes a Java developer makes with SQL
Good point - thanks for the feedback! Yes, it's been about 75% on the R16 games. It's also fully interactive - so you can change the weights to explore relationships with historical data that might be interesting.
I usually say that I don't have trouble sleeping, my trouble is with changing states :)

I seldom go to bed in time because I hate to lay there trying to get asleep. Wanting to make more use of my day also doesn't help; I don't get home before 7:30pm, and I don't want to just dine and go to bed...

Then comes the morning and I just can't wake up, even after 9, 10hs. I put my alarm clock far away from my bed because I used to just turn it off and keep sleeping. It doesn't help that much though: I "wake up", walk to it, turn it off and go back to under my sheets. "Wake up" as in I'm walking but I'm not totally conscious. It's like I'm drunk, I'll always find a nonsense reason to justify going back to bed, like "hell, I need to go back to my bed now, or it will get too light and float away"
> The problem is, that the intention of the reform was to prevent parties with no own production to sue other companies because of patent infringements. And such a move would of course block some patent trolls (not all) but also would massively harm small or single person inventors.

You're claiming that small inventors would be unable to enforce their patents against larger competitors, what I'm saying is that that is the status quo. Future passage of patent reform cannot cause that to happen because it has already happened and causality requires the cause to precede the effect. Patent reform could allow small inventors to better enforce their patents because they wouldn't have to worry as much about counterclaims using low quality patents that would currently cause them to be bankrupted with litigation costs.

> I have seen so many reforms in other areas, that just made things worse -- I would even say most of the "reforms" I have seen.

That isn't an argument. You're effectively saying that most change is bad therefore all change is bad. The premise is questionable and the conclusion doesn't follow from it in any event.
Q:"what is the best form of birth control?"

A:"Mineral water"

Q:"Before or after?"

A:"Instead"
I think you'd be okay with any format, such as HTML, that you can eyeball in a plain text editor; you just need to eschew binary formats. So diagrams in SVG in preference to PNG?
This correction might seem pedantic, but I think it is important. One of the lessons of these "paradoxes" (more roads = more congestion) is that one must take into account the whole traffic system.

I'd add that another salient factor is people's housing choices relative to jobs and other destinations -- there is an interplay between road-building and housing construction.
He could charge for the usage of the data.
> while the "auto" part will be completely commoditized

To some extent this is already the case with some manufacturers, many models across a range are built on a consistent platform http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile_platform

There is a point where physical improvements on platforms are well into diminishing returns and the bigger improvements are in software and control (the classic "software is eating the world" thing applies here).

I don't have a problem with this but I suspect the automotive industry might ;)
see the charts from Incapsula in this article which show a third of the bots are not executing javascript
https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140623200557-8...
I'm curious why this is being downvoted. Isn't congestion a textbook externality?
If you want to learn streams the hard way try to implement any non trivial build process with gulp.js

Just a warrning. Node.js had 3 versions of streams so far and some packages that implement stream functionality don't all work properly with latest version. Also two types bytestream and object stream.