skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is pretty cool. Searching http://www.gifgasm.me/brazil (as they are getting trounced by Germany) brought up some funny stuff
That sentence only means to say that J supports function-level programming, which itself is different from functional programming. The very same Wikipedia page also calls J a functional language -- the fact that it supports function-level programming doesn't contradict the fact that it also supports functional programming.
VNC (even the various 'Tight', 'Lite', 'Whatever' variants) is horribly slow -- usable in a pinch, but every UI/UX interaction is just delayed enough that nothing feels 'right'. Chrome Remote is much more responsive, it feels more like Windows Remote Desktop Protocol speeds, perfectly usable almost as if you were local.

Also it does initial connection handshaking so if you login to chrome from machine B and machine A is already set up for Chrome remote you can just connect there via a list of endpoints without having to know the external-facing IP address and/or setting up firewall tunneling.
that isn't in any generally available release yet, so it doesn't make sense to even mention it.
This terminal.com container has the Jekyll static blogging system used by GitHub ready to go! It also has a simple site example made using Jekyll Bootstrap.
Facebook deploys code twice a day. It used to be once a day but as the org grew they decided to double down. They can deploy even more often if there's a "pusher i haz a hotfix" situation like this.
> Apple has never had any pretense of caring about people or society, including its own customers.

Very true, and it hasn't held them back in the slightest. I bet a lot of people have a closeted respect for that- Apple doesn't try to hide its corporate greed.

Everybody knows Apple is a shark, but Google really hustled us.
I used to get stressed out in open plan offices in my 20s. I was only running at ~25% productivity compared to when I worked on my own projects at home or took the day off and worked from home. The reason I was stressed was because of my own expectations. My employers have never had an issue with my performance. It's just I knew I should be able to get 3-4x as much done each day and I was beating myself up over it.

These days I don't mind that I am much less productive than I could be. I do a couple of hours of really focused work early in the morning before the rest of the office arrives and I use the rest of the day to socialise, network, go to meetings, help the junior devs, and research.
Seeing that route map gave me a pang of nostalgia, since it was the route I walked every day for a year when I was studying at the LSE—back and forth from the Southwark dorm (across the street from the Tate Modern) across the Millennium Bridge or Blackfriar's Bridge, either down Fleet Street or Inner/Middle Temple, and then to the Aldwych. Really beautiful views of the Thames every day—Houses of Parliament and the Eye of London in one direction, Tower Bridge in the other direction.
Also, chances are, if something is difficult to write, it is at least as difficult to read.
Ask HN: Serving rendered html and static content vs. building APIs
Just a quick newbie question. When I was learning flask/django I was taught to use certain python packages to render the html first on the server and then serve it. As I learned more and more technologies on the front end, I realized that letting frameworks render and serve web pages is kind of inefficient (that's why we have nginx and apache, right?) So is it wiser to just build APIs on the framework end and have the static content served separately or have everything come from the framework?
Right, I would have thought you could get tripped up by getting a FileHandle that is invalid, but you wouldn't know it till you get to the point that you use it. Though, I am clearly not familiar with IO API design in Haskel. :)
This wanders in to the bizarre.
It's interesting that this interview really does focus completely on the quality of the user experience, and never says anything about the quality of the content. My impression is that the company has a completely laissez faire attitude to content quality.

It's shocking to discover that 8 years ago, Reddit's front page content looked very similar to Hacker News today: https://web.archive.org/web/20051201042755/http://reddit.com...?

Although the basic user interface hasn't really changed, the content now is totally different. Low quality posts tend to rise to the top, and this effect has become more obvious as the user base has expanded. The lowest common denominator is the meme post (an image with a few words of text).

Obviously this trend is a broader issue which is seen in other social media. But for Reddit, the subreddit concept has worked extremely well, and it has at least extended the site's useful lifetime as a source of good quality content and discussion.
I don't know what Google pays, but I know several interns (including one freshman) working for similarly large companies pulling down $45+/h (Which works out to over $7k/mo before considering the free housing etc.)

I'm inclined to believe those numbers you hear in public.
Ah, much appreciated.
It's odd that we would both comment (at the same time) regarding TN, would you mind giving me your opinion of my post below? I'm referencing people who did moderately well at a non-top teir but established institution with a cost of 40-60k total and vacant positions (albeit contract type) at $40/hr minimum.
Right, my point is ultimately that proper software engineering methodologies means more than more powerful types.
Ahh, thanks for pointing that out. I just filed that at https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph.com/issues/151 and we will fix it soon.
You could build gradients with this, but it wouldn't look nice zoomed in. And, importantly, Apple's current gradient-filled font wouldn't work!
Yes, it's difficult by default, but the solution is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opaque_pointer and it is quite well-known in the C++ world.
It's also important to note that the particular direction of the causality is not necessary for it to be an impediment.
No, this actually goes the other direction. If you have stored your Google login credentials in Safari, then the Google Maps app could login automatically without prompting you. Currently only apps from the same developer can share keychain items.

Apple would rather you buy two iPads than share one, and their OS is designed around that.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=dart+specification#!/story/forever...
Newly Discovered Smallpox Samples
Note that I am not actively arguing against adding some of these solutions. I just don't have an idyllic vision of a world where we have better software simply because null doesn't exist. Specifically, I'm not convinced "all of the null pointer bugs" would have simply been erased and replaced with good working software. Rather, I tend to think they would have just been replaced with similar bugs.
UC Irvine has a couple ICS intro classes. It was ICS 21 back in the day and it was C++ and then Java based. However it is now ICS 31 and it is python based.
Super Gamechat [podcast]
That's not really a problem. There has long been an oversupply of law school graduates relative to jobs in any sort of legal field.
To avoid the politics, something that turned up in later research is that the thing that correlates to bad outcomes (i.e. heart disease) is hostility more than ambition.
Samsung’s virtual reality headset will be called Gear VR, launch at IFA 2014
At first I was confused but then I signed up for the newsletter so mission accomplished I guess?
Having worked on some projects that have more bloody optional variables than I can shake a stick at, I wouldn't claim there are no drawbacks. The cognitive overhead of some of them is bloody heavy. Especially if there is poor judgement on when a parameter is optional or not.
Currently at $44,000. Probably a typo in the title? Though a few suspect pledges have been removed, or cancelled, I think.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/324283889/potato-salad
In the article Fortune refers to Hewlett & Packard as "computer whizzes". Negatory.

They were electronic (vacuum tube) whizzes who staked their entrepreneurialism to advanced instrumentation.

Then world war broke out again and government contracts were very good to them.

Later, solid-state electronics came along, and eventually computers and these were adopted early by HP simply because they were . . . well . . . electronic, and HP was a (non-consumer) electronic leader by then.

Computers were definitely not their main thing when the company was still in possession of its true greatness.
Ask HN: Urgent connection to Twitter support
HN,

For the past few hours Israel and Gaza have been exchanging rocket and missile attacks, with many casualties on both sides.

I am the admin for an automated emergency alert twitter feed that thousands of users depend on to receive alerts on incoming attacks.

Currently, we are approaching API limits and require immediate relaxation of some of the limits.Support tickets have been filed, but no answers just yet, and escalation is required.

Any connections to Twitter support staff that can help us expedite handling of this ticket would be awesome, and would be helpful to many who depend on this feed during this difficult time.

Thanks,
@yuvadm
The rising trend in authorship in scientific articles
The problem is it's not being automated. Does every apartment complex in NY city really need a significantly different lease? I can buy I car without a lawyer why not a house? Do I really need a lawyer before highering a housekeeper?

Something like LegalZoom seems like a reasonable option for 80+% of all deals that currently use a Lawyer.

Edit: As to policy changes, a trade association could reasonably cover all most / all cab companies or even Hospitals.
I was bit by haskell's whitespace - but I think that was connected to a bug with the do-notation or some such syntactic sugar. In general I think significant whitespace is a great way to deliniate blocks
What I love about sourcegraph is that between it and github search/searchcode you can find pretty much every bit of code you need without resorting to Google. Big improvement to my workflow personally as I always have preferred to find an example first and the documentation second.
I haven't found the need to use "tricks." Basic questions work pretty well. I've done a couple of things. 1) Ask, "Do you have any problems reading English?" Some people with poor English skills, or people being honest, or people not reading carefully enough will click "Yes" thinking that I'm asking them if they speak English. 2) If sound is required, I've played an audio clip and asked people what was playing. They have to be able to identify what was happening from a list of words. This makes sure that they have headphones and can speak English. 3) I sometimes will ask people an obvious question about something that was presented on the previous page to make sure people pay attention. For example, if they have to read an essay on baseball, and the word "baseball" is mentioned 20+ times in a paragraph, I might ask them what sport the essay was about. A surprising number of people miss questions like that. 4) As mentioned by another poster, tell them to select a specific choice (e.g. "Strongly disagree"). I try not to do anything too nitpicky out of respect for people's time and because people aren't perfect.
Good point. I suspect that the author is accustomed to a certain narrative - triumph over adversity - or, believes news readers are more keen to that kind of story.
The Cathedral isn't finished and it's crumbling already.

Back to the Bazaar!
If you want to provide evidence of a surplus of rational evidence-based policy in national and economic policy and international relations in the last hundred years or so, I'm sure you can prove my point is bullshit.

But so far all you've done is call me names, which isn't evidence as most people understand it.

Maybe not so ironically, it's a fine example of the kind of angry rhetoric I was talking about.
I worked for years on systems built on top of MTurk (building trust systems, scaling tasks, etc)

The hardest thing is always task design, as the author discusses. It's quite challenging to create a task that will work in all browsers, across cultural and language boundaries, and to pay enough to incentivize the worker (while simultaneously little enough to make all the effort worthwhile).

The final effect is a bit dehumanizing on both ends. The workers feel alienated and mistrusted by the people requesting the tasks. The people requesting the tasks feel that the workers are lazy / "scammers" trying to cheat them.

We don't fully even know how to think about this kind of work yet - ideas like "hourly wage" don't seem to fit for someone working completely independently, at their own pace, possibly distracted or impaired.

Still, despite the trouble, it seems like one of the most promising fields for interaction design. There's the possibility to really improve peoples' lives (or make them worse).
I would suspect that it has something to do with the fact that a scam artist seller will hurt you a lot more with a bad deal on a house than with a bad deal on a car.
Yes and no.

Frankly it irks me that "computer science" is called a "science" rather than a kind of engineering. There's kind of a suggestion here that "engineering" is lower class and that "science" is something more dignified.

Today if you want to write efficient sorting and searching code you need to either think about very advanced algorithms or you need to think about how to get the best performance out of the memory hierarchy and that is all about having a predictable pattern of branching and memory access. If you are not doing that it is much smarter to use the sort() that came with your language.

A little knowledge really is dangerous. If you write your own half-baked algorithms you're going to waste a lot of time adding bugs and slowing down your code. For instance, if you know a little about cryptography you might invent some cypher which is easy to crack, when really you should focus on using established codes such as A.E.S., 3DES, and Twofish and use them correctly rather than inventing something which the NSA can crack in 10 seconds and a high schooler can do in 10 hours.

On the other hand, there are a lot of algorithms that really are interesting today, particularly those that function over partial orderings such as B.S.P. and transitive closure, dynamic programming (it's really amazing you can compute the Levenstein distance as fast as you can), suffix trees (it's counterintuitive that these can be constructed as fast as they can) or the block sorting that underpins bzip2 (it's amazing you can reconstruct the data from it at all.)

Knuth's books cover ground that has been done to death where you really ought to lean on the standard library.
Banks Dreading Computer Hacks Call for Cyber War Council
Forbes is wrong about the food photo. Almost any photo of actual food is probably going to look a bit grim. There's a reason food photographers use boat varnish.
The difference is that the gov't is a bureaucracy and there is a diffusion of responsibility. They make sure no one person is responsible for any financial decisions. So that if the funding doesn't pay off or bring the results they want, they can blame the process/procedures
Facebook.. Yeah..
At some point or on some level, there's someone whose immediate superior Congress ... who controls the purse strings, I believe. Thus, in a very indirect way, accountable to the electorate (or, keeping appearances when they succeed at avoiding any accountability).
How to destroy programmer productivity
I wrote this when I was in grad school:

http://www.honeylocust.com/RngPack/

even in the 1990s there were much better random number generators than anything that Knuth or the Numerical Recipes people talked about (and I'm saying that as somebody who was lucky enough to take a class in Numerical Methods from Saul Teukolsky.)
None of us at Sourcegraph write Haskell, but if you know of anybody who would be interested in helping us add it (on a contract basis), please let me know! sqs at sourcegraph.com
Music is not dying...
Very cool idea!

Couldn't you do the same thing without crowdsourcing the opinions of what the most beautiful route by simply using exif data on troves of say, flickr images? I assume that you could tell which routes are more beautiful or interesting by the sheer number of images that are taken at specific locations.
Mean latency RSD was EC2: 8.9%; Azure: 10.3%; DigitalOcean: 23.7%; GCE: 8.9%; Rackspace: 6.1%; SoftLayer: 16.8%.
One of my lecturers at Imperial College called it the most beautiful unknown algorithm. :)
I second that. I visited the site and that's what I was looking for. I have a couple of projects at the moment that would benefit greatly from a service such as this. They are projects that I've deemed too small for me to focus on. Someone else might just have the right audience, skill set etc. to benefit from it.

However, nice work! The site looks great and the service looks helpful from a tech perspective.
Is the user prompted to understand how the extension can affect them, when it was installed, and where it is syncing from?

To put it another way: if I am a regular end-user and Chrome pops up a dialog asking me to allow the official sounding "Google Remote Desktop App", then why wouldn't I? That doesn't sound scary at all - it's from Google!
Thanks Paul! We're targeting both markets, but our primary focus is on SMBs.

We'd love to get your feedback on it if you have any suggestions or ideas.
Laziness is a run time question. Nullability is a compile time question. Nullness, given nullability, is a run time question. Laziness in no way enters into this.
Like all questions, it really depends.

I would build out your project entirely first then look for possible optimizations like this. You will need to see how often this content changes, how often it is requested and the cost of regenerating it. In addition to this, you will want to look at the added engineering costs of this.

If it's something that rarely changes, I usually just have a background job generate it and serve it as static content, but only if it is accessed a lot.
I haven't really thought about it in that key.

I wrote it as a small game for people to see how well they know modern movie industry. Which actors work better with which directors and genres. Poster generation was just a nifty thing to make it look cuter. Meat of the project is an algorithm determining success of each movie in terms of rating/box office.

I did contemplate adding ability to upload own images (not photos as you described), but that has a problem of content moderation. Don't want to see pornography/gore/etc be used just for the shock value.

Thanks for this idea about Facebook, i may as well consider adding such feature.
But I think this is an oversimplification. Not all of the Arab world is resource cursed. Egypt, as an example, only gets 7% of its GDP from Oil and Gas. Agriculture accounts for almost 20%. (of course you could possibly argue that tourism is the resource that Egypt is cursed with)

One of the interesting things I've also read about the development of South Korea is that U.S. advisors pushed South Korea to develop its agribusiness, but this was rejected by the Park administration in favor of the export-driven focus because of the poor and highly variable economic performance of agriculture.

Basically you can feed people if you grow rice, but you can feed them twice as much if you sell cars.

I think more important is the early and strong rejection in South Korea of Communist and Socialist economic ideas in favor of growth oriented chrony-capitalist ones. Notable is that Korean conglomerates who went along with the government plan and met their economic targets were given tremendous leeway, while ones that didn't hit their targets or were against the government goals, were simply ripped apart and bankrupted.
Dave Scott's added support for a low-bandwidth channel into XL with the intention of reusing virtio-rng (and virtio-serial and friends).
http://lists.xen.org/archives/html/xen-devel/2014-06/msg0293...

On the other hand, I disagree that we're reinventing an ABI given that:

1) virtio isn't the supported PV interface in Xen -- rndfront/back follows the same design principles as net/blk/fb/usb/pci/console etc.

2) The Xen shared-ring interface is older than virtio, and much simpler for pure PV guests such as Mirage (no PCI emulation to worry about). I do wonder what happened to that GSoC project from a few years to add virtio support to Xen though...I don't think any patches ever appeared.
PunchClock: Fun With iBeacons
Yes, that's true. It does have drawbacks, but overall I think it is better than say, JavaScript. In JavaScript, a key can be not present in an object, be undefined, be null, be set to some other value, or be present in the prototype. The difference between these can cause very subtle bugs.

//Let's define some object
var obj = {a: true, b: true, c: true, d: true, hasOwnProperty: true}

//Now let's make them falsy in different ways
obj.a = undefined; //set to undefined
obj.b = null; //set to null
obj.c = false; //set to false
delete obj.d; //delete key
delete obj.hasOwnProperty //delete key, but present in prototype

console.log(obj.a) //--> undefined
console.log(obj.b) //--> null
console.log(obj.c) //--> false
console.log(obj.d) //--> undefined
console.log(obj.hasOwnProperty) //--> [Function]

console.log('a' in obj) //--> true
console.log('b' in obj) //--> true
console.log('c' in obj) //--> true
console.log('d' in obj) //--> false
console.log('hasOwnProperty' in obj) //--> true

console.log(obj.a == null) //--> true
console.log(obj.b == null) //--> true
console.log(obj.c == null) //--> false
console.log(obj.d == null) //--> true
console.log(obj.hasOwnProperty == null) //--> false

for(var key in obj) {
console.log(key) //--> prints a, b, c
}

In Lua, the only data structure is a hashtable, which maps any non-nil value to any other non-nil value. It can also be set in the objects __index metamethod/table

local tab = {a = true, b = true, c = true}

-- by default there are none, but we can defined a fallback metatable similar to a prototype method like js's obj.prototype.hasOwnProperty

setmetatable(tab, {__index={c='meta c', d='meta d'}})

-- if it is important that a key is explicitly set to false, do so, otherwise simply remove it
tab.a = false --set to false
tab.b = nil --set to nil
tab.c = nil --set to nil, present in fallback table
tab.d = false --set to false, present in fallback table

print(tab.a) --false
print(tab.b) --nil
print(tab.c) --meta c
print(tab.d) --false

The rules for Lua are simple: Look for the key in the table, if it's not there, check the fallback defined in the metatable, if not, then return nil.

This is especially important in Lua, because any value can be a key, you would have to be sure to delete the key otherwise it could not be garbage collected.
local tab1 = {1,2,3,4,5}
local tab2 = {}
tab2[tab1] = true
for k,v in pairs(tab2) do
tab[k] = nil
end

If this worked like JavaScript, then tab2[tab1] would return nil, but tab1 could not be garbage collected until tab2 is. Because JavaScript objects can only have strings for keys, this is less of an issue.
If something returns Maybe FileHandle, and it can't provide you a valid FileHandle, it'll provide Nothing (and if it can provide a valid FileHandle, it will provide "Just" that filehandle).

Edited to add:

Note that this can be the case in Haskell when you're relying on exceptions for error handling. That's the opposite approach from option types, though.
Thank David. Thanks so much for answering!

Couple of questions:
- Are you always sticking w/ CC3000 or are there other WiFi modules you intend to support?

My main question, might have gone unnoticed in my long post... Is there a service of yours that I need to pay for to get these features, or do I get the benefits you outlined above by running your firmware and deploying your open source cloud code on my system?

Do you have plans to go closed source in the future?