skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Potato Salad Kickstarter Campaign Just Lost $30K
As of this morning, the campaign was at nearly $70K.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/johngreathouse/2014/07/08/potato-salad-kickstarter-campaign-raises-over-41000/

Now, It's at $40K. This appears to have happened in the last few minutes.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/324283889/potato-salad
An alternative to this is RoboBrowse [1] which is also based on requests + BeautifulSoup4 and seems a lot more mature.

[1] http://robobrowser.readthedocs.org/en/latest/readme.html
I started Clojure this week. It's really fun and it's syntax doesn't boggle my brain as much as Haskell's.
> but what I really don't get is that the loop variables are not defined if you iterate over something that is empty

if you conceptualize how a for-loop has to work as a while-loop using Python's iterator protocol (which is the only way the iterator protocol itself makes sense), it seems pretty intuitive.

That is, this:

for item in items:
...1
else:
...2

becomes, approximately:

try:
while True:
__hidden_iter = items.iter()
try:
item = __hidden_iter.next()
except StopIteration:
raise __NormalLoopExit
...1
except __NormalLoopExit:
...2

If you have an empty loop, the first assignment doesn't complete (instead raising StopIteration in evaluating the right side, which raises the notional exception __NormalLoopExit, which invokes the else: clause, if any) so the variable never gets around to being created.
That's really interesting, I love learning about these manufacturing hurdles that consumers never hear about.

Consumers don't buy Beats because they're shinier though. They buy them because of the image that comes with them, thanks to a successful marketing and endorsement campaign.

That's why knock-off beats are everywhere in Hong Kong. Manufacturers can add a "b" to any old pair of over-ear headphones and they become much more valuable. Consumers value the "b"
> I guess I have enough solitary activities that I regularly partake in that I never gave thought to those that might need to actively seek out such activities.

I actually have to remind myself to partake in activities that involve other people (unless I'm currently working for a client on site). The bigger issue is true aloneness without that pesky internet. It's a powerful addiction.

Honestly, I feel more alone when I'm in the gym actively boxing with people than I do sitting at home where I can't help but check my messages ever couple of minutes.
I didn't look up any sources, but if I remember right, the difference was massive government assistance.

edit: Yep - rural electrification was pretty much completely government driven[1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_electricity#United_State...
just to clarify, you mean fast immutable hash tables that support insertion right? (Which I agree is hard) Otherwise you can just use a BST or something and it's fast enough for lookups.
You are missing part of the story. If scaling is just "using more resources" then I can scale infinitely. I can run "while true" on as many hosts as you want. What I'm trying to point out here is that scaling is about doing more useful work, not just using more resources.

Why would you need more containers on a single host? Because apps are usually not uniform. If you dedicate one host per service, then you need hosts to serve the maximum computation power at the peak consumption required at any point in the app's lifetime. Also, VMs are heavyweight, which means that it is painful to break your app into small, independent services that you can spin up and down quickly. Containers are much better at enabling you to modularize (and thus be able to scale on a finer grain) your application.

Now you may argue that you can spin more AWS instances when under load. But spinning up VMs takes time, much more time than spinning up containers (we're talking on the order of minutes vs milliseconds here). This may seem a small difference, but pair it with socket activation for instance and suddenly you go from having to carefully manage your scaling to getting it quasi-automated for free.

Finally, there's the ecosystem. You can create dedicate nodes/vm instances, sure. But watch a demo of CoreOS's fleet automatically and nearly-instantly spinning up and maintaining coordinated containers [1] and you may get a feeling of why people is so excited about this whole thing.

[1] http://coreos.com/blog/cluster-level-container-orchestration...
Could he pocket the left over money after the event? I could imagine there could be quite a deal left over...
The benefit here is mostly just with larger infrastructures where you're gonna run out of wood names and where agreeing on and enforcing naming standards is a futile and painful process.

With logical mappings, you just use chef/puppet/cmdb to do something like sshnode prod app 1 to connect to the first production app node or sshnode prod app to connect to all the production app nodes. CNAMES can do this too but then you run into potential DNS consistency issues. With this you get the human friendly abstraction and keep the machine friendly determinism.

Of course when your chef server goes down this can be a PITA (I recommend building in some knife search caching!)
[photo showing my field of view wearing HD-280 headphones]

[photo showing my field of view wearing Beats headphones]

Photos have been omitted because they look exactly the same.
Chile Releases Official Study on UFO Photos
I would be interested if anybody could do a comparison between that PinLater and Celery. Feels like there is a bit of NIH involved, unless it's the 100K/sec rate is not something that celery could realize and PinLater can.
No. But that is a very good and common question.

The stock has to come from somewhere, which is usually the broker who finds someone to borrow the stock from and loans it to you to sell. There must be someone willing to loan that stock at the high price, and most likely the price won't stay that high for long.

You must then purchase the same amount of shares of that stock to give back (cover) to your broker who gives those shares back to whoever they borrowed them from.

There would be lots of fees involved (many brokers charge per share) and it would be very difficult to find someone to lend out this stock for someone to sell for the promise of the same number of shares at a future (most like lower) price.

If you do find someone to long you the shares then there's the high chance that the person who longs the stock to you is the main investor and they will drive the price higher by using their traditional techniques (spam, deception, promises of fortune), and then they would demand their stock back and you'd lose money.

It would be extremely unwise to short-sell a penny stock unless you really know what you're doing, the potential loss is infinite.
It almost sounds like a 'hit' from the movies, especially intriguing was the suggestion that this has happened before.
weelllll the effect is supported in mice; likely after absorption. that is, starting with sodium benzoate may not survive the digestion process sufficiently before arrival at the target tissue (possibly the substantia nigra)

besides: cinnamon rolls! (with the more cinnamon the better)
Would be nice to know why RabbitMQ/ZeroMQ didn't fit the bill [scale/speed?] -- I can somewhat understand the not relying on SQS but then there is anyways a reliance on EC2 right ?
And audiophiles are, by definition, a tiny margin of the market. They're not the target audience of beats.
Maybe i read it wrong, but from the article it sounds like the Amazon MT team is at least trying to do more in the way of preventing unnecessary rejections and bad faith task-giving. Not sure if any sort of appeals process was ever put in place, but i really doubt it, since that would create a new non-trivial administrative burden on Amazon that is likely much larger than they are willing to handle.

Seemingly arbitrary rejections always seemed to be a much bigger problem by my estimation, especially for workers already somewhat invested in the system, and needing to maintain approval ratings to even qualify for higher-paying types of work.

If Amazon hasn't implemented anything like a way of expunging old rejection records, it would be a huge benefit to their workers to have some sort of reasonable, semi-automated way of doing so, at least after enough time has passed, or enough more recent positive approvals have occurred.

I'm really out of the loop though, and don't know much about the current state of things. It would just be really nice to have some more in-depth write-ups on the MT worker experience. The article was great but from first-hand experience i know there is a lot more ground to cover.

Senior project / undergrad thesis anyone? Researching / investigating MT from a user interface, user interaction design side of things, giving recommendations for improvements to the worker experience, for HIT providers, etc. would be very interesting and potentially very beneficial for the platform.
He must be making a really nice potato salad.
The idea here is to provide very high speed from the street (which has fiber) to the home or office using existing copper - the last 30 meters. Laying fiber in the street is far easier than running it through buildings where every building has it's own challenges.

Nice intro to the theory around data transmission limits: http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2010/explained-shannon-0115
This'll make some people switch from cable, back to dialup modems (sort of). Which is funny/cool.
Of course, the mention of painkillers is a throwaway line in the review, not from the book.
Didn't telecom get billions of tax $ last decade for broadband deployment, with nothing to show for it?

Anyway, looks like they were interest free loans vs. outright subsidies. At least something came out of the New Deal, whereas fedgov spending during this recession is pissed away.
> As far as I understand, the only way to get a type that's not nullable is to make a struct.

Well, any value type -- but, yes, a custom type has to be a struct to not be nullable.

> How do you specify that a function can take a non-nullable string?

"string" in C# is the name of a particular reference (and hence, nullable) type. If you want a function that takes a non-nullable sequence of characters, that's quite possible, but the type of its argument won't be string. (The fact that there is no such type predefined and the entire .NET framework library is built around the assumption that if you want a sequence of characters you are going to use the built-in, reference -- and therefore nullable -- string type is an issue with the cost, in programmer-time, of doing this for any substantial use, but its not a "the language doesn't let you have a non-nullable type for any kind of data you want" issue.)
I'll tell you what I tell my team: it's barely more verbose, and the readability is up for extremely serious debate (I mean, everyone understands nested for loops, but the nested list comprehension thing is wierd... why is something that appears way way before the innermost "for" the same as something in that for loop's declaration?)

It may also be less efficient. When I'm shown numbers that the difference between the comprehension and the for loops are (in each specfic instance, or in aggregate for the program in question) is above statistical noise AND it's a significant factor in overall runtime (I won't ever worry about a millisecond when the runtime is 1s), then I'll gladly say: put them in.

Until then, just use the loops. Use of really strange language features that are surprising, not exactly idiomatic (this argument is common for this case) and not shown to be of actual benefit, are detrimental in a polyglot environment.
What I learned in two years at liferay
Yeah, the whole infinite loop thing. Wasn't fully thinking when I wrote my reply. Good catch.
The total assets $39 bit is quality
In some circles, meditation is still viewed as weird.

But your comparison is curious.
Indeed, to a external observer, a person looking at the wall and another doing meditation may look very alike, but what they are doing is the exact opposite of one another.
I found Martin Odersky's Scala course on Coursera to be a great intro, and my background at that time was similar to yours. Scala itself isn't that great for learning FP since it's entirely possible to write in a Java-like style. However the Coursera class uses a functional style and the autograder ensures you do too.
Exactly - this changes nothing. You'd still be paying workcrews to go street-to-street digging things up and running things through conduit.

At the point you're doing that, the marginal cost of getting them there is much higher then the cost of the equipment or cabling they'd be installing.
I assume you mean persistent, not immutable.

a[x] = 1
b = a
a[y] = 2 <---- mutates a
a[x] = 3 <-- is this legal?
b[x] <--- persistent- uh, what is Mathematica's semantics here?
The Case against the Hamburger Menu
Looks like it's been/is being talked about, but no money's gone anywhere yet [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadband_universal_service#Uni...
Well, that was part of it... the other part, that garnered less sympathy was... "But it wasn’t a toy — it was paid off. My husband bought that car in full long before we met. Were we supposed to trade it in for a crappier car we’d have to make payments on? Only to have that less reliable car break down on us?"

A crappier car? Heaven forbid. Payments? Not if you buy an appropriate car...
The distinction between "tuple" and "immutable list" doesn't make any sense outside of a staticly-typed language, since the only difference is what other values a particular value is type-compatible with.
To summarize: Elite was an amazing game that had a gigantic universe, procedurally generated from a carefully chosen and vetted random seed. There's a story on how it was made, discussed here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7892462

For the upcoming Elite: Dangerous, the maker is drawing as much as possible from current astronomy.
i am strongly against qr codes. printed text can be read by both computers and humans. qr codes can only be read by computers, adding an uneeded translation step for the humans.
"intends to develop..." LOL
This Nonexistent Social Network With No Revenues and No Assets Is Worth $4bn
would have been interesting 10 years ago
Xen, Minix 3, QNX, several l4 implementations, etc. OKL4 alone has been shipped on over 1.5 billion devices. QNX was huge. Xen is running everything at AWS, the largest webhosting company in existence (nevermind everywhere else it is used).
Seriously, how is this drivel upvoted, this is so so so dumb.
I wish that whenever Wolfram passes on (no offense!), his heirs will open-source it (at least for non-commercial use, not necessarily BSD-style) as a gift to humanity. (While still maintaining a commercial business-support strucutre)
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe they got tax breaks (tax incentives). The numbers thrown around have tended to be intentionally over-estimated by a huge factor, typically critics will proclaim the telecoms got $200x billion, the real number was closer to the low tens of billions (substantial, but not $200b crazy).
Syntactic naturality seems like it's mostly a function of familiarity. That said, the example has, for a lot of mathematical reasons, a great deal of semantic naturality.

It's far from immediately obvious, but `foldr (:) []` is the way to copy singly-linked lists. In particular, if you look at a linked list as a degenerate tree then what `foldr f z` does is replace all of the nodes with `f` and the single leaf with `z`. Since cons, i.e. (:), creates a node and nil, i.e. [], is that single leaf then `foldr (:) []` is a very natural way to do nothing at all.

So it's kind of the most boring interesting example imaginable.
Thanks very much for your feedback! You have several very good points that I will explore, specifically the various models that might work. Ideally, I'd like to keep the site free and maybe have a couple key sponsors or something, still exploring the idea.
"cheaper, but just as reliable car" are rarely available upfront in used car market (and we're talking 10+ year old cars).

While you can dig up the reliability ratings and Consumer Reports reviews for a brand new vehicle, each used car has its own story and a host of potential problems to surface.

The economic details of the transaction are such that if you need to unload a used car, you're unlikely to get a very good deal for it, but of course when you buy one, you are expected to pay dealer's repair and upkeep costs as well as markup. Plus sales tax to the state. A few hundred dollars lost on accepting suboptimal offer when selling, a few hundred dollars overpaid to drive another used car off the dealer's lot, a few hundred dollars to the state, and we start talking about some real money wasted.
I don't understand the attraction to this service. For me, scanning the notebooks would be good if there is some way of intelligently cataloging it, and make it searchable.

I avoid writing stuff in my notebook that I know I need to find in the future. I put into in an email and search it via Google search. Drawings and sketches are different categories. I would scan then and attached it to an email. The message of the email would provide context.

I think what Mod is providing is only half of the solution. At the moment, it is the same as "only to forget them forever when I leave it in a dusty box somewhere", only digitally. For me at least.
"We're struggling to feed ourselves and our children!"

"but that would have probably taken a fair amount of time and effort -- would it have really been worth it?"

After the first statement? Yes. Heaven forbid it takes time and effort to try to improve your situation.
http://freerice.com/node/2915127
To all the PHP developers: a leg up, please. Help also Open Source people
I am not talking about insane cryptic obfuscation, i am simply stating that advertising services by publicly naming your server what it runs is flat out n3wb stupid.
Here are a couple of 'defaults' I collected over the years from various sources: https://gist.github.com/Walkman/6464603
> Python allows these because "why not?"

No, it allows them because the distinction that those restrictions are founded on is only useful in a statically-typed languages, and Python isn't statically typed.

> For instance, should a Vector be a list or a tuple?

A real vector/array should be its own data type (probably implemented in a C, or similar low-level, extension) that happens to implement the interface expected of an indexable, iterable collection, neither a list nor a tuple.
Looks like it is profiling it's own startup:

Packages->timecop->show
When I see a list comprehension I can see with a single glance what it's doing. Not so with the 4 line for loop. Comprehensions aren't a strange language feature in Python either...it's one of the central features of Python.

Don't use something until it's proven to yield a great benefit is a very conservative approach. That may be appropriate in some cases, but I'm very glad that I am not in such a team since that would be incredibly frustrating. I much prefer an approach where you go with the choice that's most likely the better one, even if it's not 100% proven better or not a big difference.
Apple's customers should probably care that they are going to be ripped off on headphones. The issue isn't "audiophiles don't like them". It's that you can pay a lot less money and get much better headphones.
We let users run arbitrary shell scripts, so you can use that to run C code -- either by compiling binaries for x86-64 and including them in your project, or by running a shell script that first compiles your code, and then executes the resulting binaries. It hasn't been a common use case, but we definitely have some folks doing that.
I'd like that to be true, but I think it's still some years away from being a similar experience. Sage is impressive but still very much shows its seams: it's trying to glue together a bunch of separately developed projects, with their own ideas about things (everything from Maxima to R), and the glue is often pretty noticeable if you do anything remotely complex.

(That said, I also avoid using Mathematica for most things because I'm squeamish about ending up with any significant project too closely tied to a proprietary platform.)
First, are you actually saying charging people for something they consume directly instead of charging them indirectly through advertising[1] is greed? Does that mean my corner grocer is greedy for asking me to pay for my milk rather than slapping ads all over the carton?

Second, I'm amazed that you decry greed and in the same breadth promote advertising. I don't know whether to cry or laugh. Advertising is predominantly (some would say almost entirely) manipulative and dishonest.

-

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773
This is a really interesting point. I admire how Beats have managed to differentiate themselves so effectively.
Well, there is corruption here and many of the papers I personally read from China are not very good. That being said, MSR-Asia is still MSR even if we are located in China, and we have very high standards. I would also suggest that quality can come from China, its a numbers game: we have a lot of people in this region, and there is bound to be some gems that you might encounter if you are objective. Casting a stereotype over a whole region just isn't useful in that regards.

All I'm asking for is fairness. Too many of my colleagues have to disguise where they are from to even get by double blind review (there is a bias against China-based papers, and so we take careful care to extra-anonymyze our papers). This is ridiculous and immoral.
Aaron Swartz and 21st-Century Martyrdom
Actually, you could define alignment as part of the language. I have some ideas...stay tuned.
No, it's also the view of many Chinese people, many of them are well aware of the issues of their own country.
Security Do's and Don'ts for Early-Stage Companies
Let's be fair here. If you get to redefine "computer" to exclude embedded systems, even though they vastly outnumber "computers as computers" (whatever that really means), then you get to be right. But really all that does is show your limited view of the the field. For example, QNX runs 10s of millions of cars alone and who knows how many Cisco routers running IOS-XR. If that is "overstating" success, I'm not really sure what success looks like.
4th Dimension Explained
Click-bait headline. Add "30 meters" to the headline and it would drop.
Kaspersky Internet Security 2015 v15.0.0.463A
Leaked Documents Show How Yelp Thinks It’s Getting Screwed By Google
No, I meant lists of rules like {a->1,b->2}, which capture the same kind of patterns as in the previous example but in an immutable (and copy-on-write) way.
Of course, the key components of the analytic solution (knowing the volume formula for spherical caps, spheres, and cylinders) also don't exist on most problems.
Your Startup And The “Why” Driven Product Roadmap
I just want some competition in high speed connectivity. I don't care if it's fiber, copper, wireless, coax, power line, or sewer. If this makes it cheaper for me to get 100 Mbps or higher, sounds good to me.
It's interesting what (the generic) you think of as poor. On one hand it is a lot of the homeless downtown. On the other, I could 20 miles from a state capital working Fire / EMS, and be down dirt, overgrown trails to people living in double wides that honestly would be condemned on any number of levels, from health and safety, hygiene, let alone "how the hell is that still standing". I saw families of rats in living rooms, tarps over ceiling holes, holes through the floor to bare dirt beneath, people using swamp coolers and outdoor 'fridges' due to a lack of electricity... most of this is never seen, and never expected.
Further, it potentially heads off any challenge from an upstart or established player taking that road.
The pros and cons of open sourcing your code