skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Spanish native speaker here. I'm still waiting for my ah-ha moment (I'm learning Japanese for the past 4 months at a rate of 4 hours per week), I do hope it arrives. It took me probably 5 years to be fluent in English, and probably 4 more to actually be good enough as to read/write government proposals, abstracts/CFP, and finally co-authoring a published book "Java 7 Recipes"; my accent still lingers (javapubhouse.com if you want to hear it), the Ys, Js all come out with the same sound for me. I did learn French for 5 years, but lost most of it due to not practicing it. Learning French coming from Spanish felt a little weird because there are gender swaps (for the inanimate objects) that do trip you up. Did try to learn German for 5 months just after finishing French, so I ended up sounding like a French speaking German, which my teacher hated (and whom scared me away from the language!)

I noticed that I'm not really going anywhere fast with my Japanese and I think I might be doing it wrong (listen to one hour podcast while running / biking). Some stuff sticks but in general it does seem that my progress is nowhere near what I had when learning the other languages in a more structured format.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_theorem_proving
Where and how everday people can fact-check breaking news
Interruptions Are Even Worse Than We Thought
19 YR OLD SENT TO JAIL FOR 25 YRS WITHOUT EVIDENCE
YC is #STACKED
To provide a bit of a counterpoint to this post, I would say that coding is a creative pursuit, and we wouldn't expect an artist or a woodworker to say they weren't in love with their craft. The only difference is that programming happens to pay better.

Yes, there are jobs for the rough carpenters of the programming world who just know how to cut and nail and follow a plan, but the best jobs are always going to go to the fine craftsmen who devote some significant chunk of their lives to the pursuit.
When using `set -eu`, how do you check the number of arguments?:

if [ -z "$1" ]; then
usage();
exit 1;
fi;

If I'm using `set -eu`, that dies on the `$1` with a nasty error message, rather than printing my usage message. I've resorted to moving `set -eu` to after these kind of checks, but that makes me uneasy.
From my experience I feel its a right move. Large code bases are indeed difficult to maintain in a dynamically typed language. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/06/why-do...
Long, long overdue.

The absurdity of calling "its free to download bits to your computer but you have to pay us to use them" free was too much.
The Trouble With Pop Economics
Golang libs released by Prevoty
Upstart offers “super chill” loans
Using a VPN as a Verizon FiOS user can increase Netflix speeds by 10X?
Your body: A new dating app
I picked up a 1 mW pointer for £1.98 on eBay. That's about $3.38 USD.
Here is an interview with John Carmack where he shares his opinion on the importance of math in game engine programming which is one of the math heavier areas of programming. It's the first question asked so you don't need to skip ahead.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hapCuhAs1nA
"One big reason that mathematics is much more like language than programming, is that doing mathematics involves resolving ambiguities. In programming you have a compiler/interpreter that just dictates how an ambiguity resolves. But in mathematics, as in real language, you have to resolve them yourself based on context."

Along this line, I recently noticed how similar legal contracts to programming. One partner contract I had to read over looked very much like a huge if/elseif statement, and the definitions section looked a lot like setting up variables.

After reading this article it seems the similarities between legaleze and math proofs are pretty strong as well. I wonder if anyone has ever tried to process legal documents or laws with mathematical formulas to try finding loopholes.
The Rise and Fall of the Fireman’s Pole
For the love of god, have a chart in an article like this
I completely see both sides of this -

On one hand if we just gave up research of space exploration, we end up caught with our hands in our pockets when the timing becomes even more critical. Not to mention the awe and wonder the study of science creates to forward us as a species.

But still at the end of the day, there are A LOT of issues right here in front of us that we barely try and tackle. One of my favorite spoken word artists, the late Gil Scott Heron, wrote about the same issue here, and if I were him, I'd be pissed off:

Whitey on the Moon - http://www.gilscottheron.com/lywhitey.html
New and Free SAT exam test Sample Questions with answers
Yes, it's been known for a while that people can upload illegal bits into blockchains. Don't think transaction steganography would hold up in court though. You could do similar things with DNS records, etc.

File storage services though have the added concern that they're specifically designed to distribute files. Filecoin addresses this by (a) encouraging everyone to pre-encrypt before adding, and (b) creating a fluid market based on incentives. Nodes aren't required to store every file, only strongly incentivized to do so. Nodes are free to follow strong counter incentives (say, a well-known list of "illegal hashes" published by authorities).

In reality, the way many courts handle things like this is to target the entry points: the websites advertising which are the illegal hashes and how to get them. (e.g. the piratebay instead of bittorrent inc.)
3d TVs (and HD audio) are like an inferior analogue of something else. While I could see people eventually getting used to the audio, the TV thing hasn't caught on because it's not that great and there's no content (I described in another post on this thread how content creation will go for holograms).

The thing is that 3d for movies etc. hasn't been done very well. Avatar is still the high water mark in terms of technical polish, but in general it has only been used to build up special effects a little, and there's no visual grammar in the way that one exists for the frame itself. It doesn't add a whole lot extra to the film experience, and it adds even less to the TV experience. Few games were developed to take advantage of the technology, which was a mistake. Projected holograms, however, combine very well with interactive applications. At a later stage you may well see narrative art in hologram form, which could lead to a revival of theatrical performance for a mass audience, but that's 10 years off.
Programming is like writing a recipe. That includes a little bit of math if you want, but not necessarily.
Definitely agreed. The networks I'm typically dealing with are bigger. I would definitely say the feature space needs to be large enough to get good results.

That being said, most problems now a days (at least for my customers are bigger numbers of params anyways)
It depends on your needs and the needs of your application. These days, I almost never even consider Passenger because I find Unicorn and Puma easier to setup and scale. The benefit of Passenger being "deploy many apps on one machine" sounds like a good way to get yourself into a single point of failure situation for all of your applications.

I almost always start with Puma[0]. It uses threads, so your code, as well as any gems you are using, have to be threadsafe. Chances are you'll be ok. Puma shines for applications that do a lot of IO, which is most Rails applications. The type of performance you get out of Puma depends on the hardware underneath, but on a 1:1 comparison Puma tends to outperform Unicorn.

In the odd chance that your app is CPU bound a lot, go with Unicorn. It's fairly performant but due to it's single threaded nature you'll need to run more Unicorn workers and thus use more RAM.

As far as deployment, Capistrano is a lot better since version 3. If you're only deploying to one machine checkout Mina[1] or Recap[2]. Mina actually generates a shell script of your deployment tasks, which is pretty neat. Recap only works for Ubuntu.

0 - http://puma.io

1 - https://github.com/mina-deploy/mina

2 - https://github.com/tomafro/recap
Little content, no analysis. Just hypocrisy-seeking.

Looking for hypocrisy: the standard maneuver when narcissism is confronted with a greater power.
It depends what you are programming. It's like saying, writing is not poetry.
Thanks for teaching me about datums: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datum_(geodesy)
Does anyone know if there are similar laws in the UK?
Sorry for that, original link should work again.
+1 to this. It's like we're back in Xcode 3.x again with Swift.
Before there were Computer Science university schools, programming was taught at Math, Physics and Engineering schools (like the mentioned FORTRAN), it wasn't taught (still isn't) in language schools. There's some relationship between math and programming, and in any case math can be seen as a language as well.
That is pretty content-light for HN. Of course the price of an employee matters and if their minimum wage goes up they will be subject to greater competition from others.
Altered States: The Terror and Bliss of Sleep Paralysis
Use the `$#` variable which contains the number of arguments.
I'm not sure you can realistically wire together pieces of functionality written in a statically typed language without understanding its underlying type system. Sure, by the time it compiles without errors the code probably needs less debugging than in a dynamically-typed language, but getting to that point can be difficult and frustrating. (Speaking from experience as a TA.)
We moved to a rural area (nearest large city is a 4 hour drive) four years ago and I'd agree with the other commenters that housing is the only cost that decreased any - and even that is almost irrelevant as people fleeing cities have increased house prices and/or market manipulation has worked to keep housing costs relatively high. Sure you can buy a double-wide or a serious fixer-upper here that you'd never find in the city, but if you want a typical 3 bedroom middle class house you aren't getting much of a discount.

The truth is, I feel more compelled to increase my income and saving now because of the lack of opportunities in the local economy. My income is entirely from non-local customers and if my sales pipeline ever dried up I'd have no option but to move. This is basically at the heart of why I don't move to the midwest (where my wife would prefer to be) because it would be the same thing - you'd be the big fish in a small pond.
> I'm kind of surprised this is HN-worthy news.

It isn't. I just overwrote a bunch of data by mistake and cancelled some penalties that are normally applied to these.

Will fix.

Edit: Fixed.

It's tempting to turn all that off on purpose, just to see what would happen. But we won't.
What if both the price paid by the user and thus paid to the miner is lower than S3, how would you arbitrage that? What would drive the price up to s3 prices? Scarcity?
Worth mentioning:

"Silly over-extrapolations of local memes, jargon and concepts are posted to LessWrong quite a lot; almost all are just downvoted and ignored. But for this one, Eliezer Yudkowsky, the site's founder and patriarch, reacted to it hugely. The basilisk is completely banned from discussion on LessWrong, where almost any mention of it is deleted.[4]"
I think the author is confusing mathematics and logic, as is the referenced blogger.
>You don’t go around telling people you only code for the money while you still need a coding job, that’s suicide. You have to say you code for the challenge at minimum, or the beauty of naked logic or the unlimited power to create, if you want to really sell it. [...] I am not a sociologist, but I believe pretty firmly that this is the most fundamental thing keeping tech from being more diverse. It asks us to fundamentally change how we portray ourselves, to be programmers first and everything else merely in the last twenty characters of our twitter bio.

Two observations...

First, I'm not sure why this was submitted to HN since I presume that HN's demographic genuinely likes/loves to program and they do not wear a fake mask pretending they do. HN is the wrong audience for this message.

Second, whenever a topic about companies expressing a preference for "passionate programmers who also do it as a hobby", many forum posters will emphatically push back with "it's enough I code for 8 hours a day". What's unknown is what % of programmers worldwide express that sentiment publicly among their coworkers (and possibly managers) as opposed to keeping it a secret.
Hey sorry for the OT but shouldn't this be on the new Show section? just saying...
Yeah, the payment effectively buys storage for a certain amount of time. Read the discussion on Rewards here: http://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf
We have a lot of trails that hikers, bikes and horses share. But then some of the trails will allow hikers and horses but not bikes. This really pisses off the bikers, since there doesn't seem to be a reason for it. And in general, a lot of people are really pissed off that dog owners can get fined for not picking up a tiny dog turd while equestrians see no threat of that for their horse dropping a huge load in the middle of the trail.
Prostitution is a victimless crime. Why is it that two people can't agree to exchange sex for money? You can't legislate morals into existence (not saying prostitution is immoral, but people who want to outlaw it probably do). The world's oldest profession will probably be outlawed for some time to come because adding support for prostitution to your platform is political suicide.

EDIT: Since I don't want to reply to everyone individually:

I am not condoning prostitution as a career. I am saying that criminalizing prostitution hurts all parties involved. There is a common misconception that wanting to repeal a law means you support whatever that law outlawed. I don't think prostitution should be illegal.

The rule of law is not a place to push morality. There is no reason for the government to interfere in a consensual transaction between two people. If a pimp is forcing a prostitute to sell themselves, that's called slavery, and it is illegal. Selling a prostitute to someone else against their will is illegal, and it is called human trafficking. Simply selling your body harms no third party against their will.
"Modded", not voted.
Filecoin providers may feasibly beat S3 on price in USD if (i) they're betting on the protocol because up-front losses may be more than compensated for in investment returns on Filecoin or (ii) the alternate for them is making no money on unused disk space.
You guys know that I can't impact your careers anymore

Unless they're planning on applying to YC ;)
Tommorrow on HN. How to switch to the HMTL5 player on Youtube.
I wanted to quickly chime in here and second these thoughts. Dalton and Alexis have also been very helpful to 7 Cups of Tea.

Dalton is always super fast to respond to emails. I've gone back and forth with him, asking lots of questions, and really drilling down to make sure I understand what he is suggesting. Without fail, he'll get back to me within a matter of hours and respond in-depth to my questions. I think his background in psychology and experience working with younger populations gives him very insightful perspectives. He is also very honest and supportive.

Alexis is one of the people I most admire. The guy has real integrity. I think he understands what is truly important in life and lives in a manner that holds up these values. They are implicit in how he relates to others. He is also an amazing worker. I remember asking him for a consult on a Saturday morning. I was thinking we'd connect later on that next week. He got right back to me and called me on a Saturday morning. I apologized for bugging him and he said not to worry that if I'm working he is working. Then, to take things a step further, he connected me with Ashley Dawkins (his Outreach Director). She is also awesome, quick to respond, and very helpful. The last point I'll highlight is Alexis is really hopeful. Hope is pretty damn powerful and I think he gets that in manner that few people understand.
Getting it running this way on a desktop is trivial. But does anybody have experience setting up my DD-WRT router so that everybody in the network benefits from it? That's a bit past my skill level, and so would be very interesting to me at least.
Going off-topic a bit, I highly recommend you peruse the forum over at the Reviewing the Kanji site (koohii.com). Even if you have no interest in the book the site is based around (Heisig's Remembering the Kanji) there are troves of great advice and methods for Japanese self-study to be found there.
Note for the author:

http://timecapsuledead.org/stats.html actually points to http://karankurani.com/post/92163518998/%20http://timecapsul...

Judging by the %20 in the href, you accidentally put a space.
Startup Design Framework – Suit Up your Startup – Designmodo
The authors say they aren't sure, as if this was a unique experiment making it hard to drw conclusions from. However, there have been other places where prostitution has been decriminalised. The Netherlands, for example. Surely there has been research on the effects there, the results of which can be compared to this situation?
> People concerned with collecting a paycheck have excellent work ethics, and the industry would benefit from more of them in it.

Typically, no they do not. They may have excellent "butt in seat" metrics, but that means very little for quality of work.

> If you can fake it for interviews and in order to advance your career, you’ll definitely go further, but never feel bad about either faking it or not being able to.

If by faking it you mean a little embellishment or studying up before an interview then that's fine. But I have a good knack for catching phonies. And once I find you've been dishonest about your experience or knowledge I throw that resume out and interview is over. Be prepared, honest, and enthusiastic.

Basically with any profession you need to be motivated to excel. I wouldn't hire a medical assistant who just wanted a paycheck. I'd want someone who wants to help people, learn and grow.
You might be overestimating the passion people here have for programming. If you're starting a company, programming is really a means to an end. Some people here are non-technical cofounders who don't code at all.
What Happens When Detroit Shuts Off the Water of 100,000 People
You can use default values to avoid the nasty error. ${1:-} will expand to an empty string if your script is called without arguments.
Fuck no, programming in not math. I learned that the hard way, when I tried to take college level calculus as a refresher, after years of neglecting my basic algebra, and assumed that my interim programming experience would be sufficient to tide me over.

The notation is similar, but mathematics is much more rigid in terms of correct results, and is sprinkled with a completely different body of vocabulary, history, facts and trivia, which may selectively overlap and intersect with computer science, but often times not with perfect analogies or exact synonyms.

Not to mention that programming is often accomplished using products distributed by large for-profit companies that have been tailored to maximize convenience for the end-user, which in many cases might be a paying customer, or a large, vocal client community that is deeply intolerant of defects and anti-patterns. Math may be assisted by tools, but the tools are often times fraught with limitations that demand careful and sometimes creative application to a given problem.
Well it does prove that for $15 a month you can bypass all the childish behavior of the companies involved. I think that makes it worthy.
I write software that runs on various jet engines. There is a lot of software that goes onto a modern commercial engine, but the general theme of the software I focus on is the modeling of the underlying engine dynamics using sensor data. It's very math- and physics-based. A thorough knowledge of linear algebra, signal processing, regressions, and clustering/neural network algorithms is essential, among other things.

It's not the kind of environment where typical startup aphorisms apply ("fail fast, fail often", "don't be afraid to pivot", etc). So every month or so when another "programmers don't need to know math" article comes out, usually written by a web programmer, I have an impulse to represent the other side of the divide, but I usually find so many misconceptions and poor assumptions in the original article that I conclude it's too much work. So I am glad that the author has done the job for me here.

What I have observed, again anecdotally, is that web programmers are generally more vocal about programming than systems programmers and scientific programmers. It makes sense in the historical context of the internet, but I don't think that this bias is properly accounted for when people on Twitter/HN/etc discuss "programming" and what it requires.

I don't think it should be controversial that programming is founded upon the study formal languages, mathematics in particular. So even if you don't need math to do your programming work on a day to day basis, it's because a lot of very smart people have solved some very difficult math and language problems over the decades so that you have the luxury of ignoring the mathematics your code relies on. This is all ok. But the implicit hostility towards mathematics that a lot of these articles demonstrate really makes me concerned about the influence it will have on the next generation of programmers. Moore's Law has allowed a certain level of indifference to mathematics in the past few decades since you could always throw a newer processor and more memory at a problem, rather than solving it via a better algorithm. But that situation won't last forever.
500px for Chrome Tabs: JenPx
"I, for one, am glad that hitting back is not the only strategy available to ensure that the chances of this happening again are minimized."

Hitting back should not be the only strategy, but it should be available as a last resort. There are still evil people (and governments) still left in this world and sometimes the only way to stop them is by force.
Discussion from two days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8038974
Do we really need Bitcoin?
It seems more like the middleman sucking queueing time away from third parties and converting it into money, really.
I'm surprised the whitepaper didn't cite PermaCoin [1], which addresses the same problem with proofs-of-retrievability and uses the BitCoin blockchain for storage. Would the authors like to comment on how their work differs?

[1] http://cs.umd.edu/~amiller/permacoin.pdf
Did something very similar for a final project in a physics/electronics course.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ox5wxmnhzg045b4/Final.pdf
Let me copy part of my comment to another submission:

Different people view programming very differently. For example for me programming is mainly a way to understand things. I program things I want to learn about. My understanding of programming helps me understand computers and computing. Then I have a friend who couldn't care less about how exactly things work under the hood, or in theory. All he cares about is making a product, and programming is his tool.

I think this is one of the main distinctions. Some are motivated by curiosity and love of tinkering with the machine and see it all as a playfield with toys, while some others are motivated by the opportunities to build things and make money out of it, seeing it all as a tool and material. I am not saying this is the dichotomy or that one even exists, but it illustrates that "programmer" doesn't really say all that much. We're a broad and varying bunch!
well it's only 17pts at this moment - but it's a timely post since it's another good reminder that it's the last day to send net neutrality comments to FCC http://www.fcc.gov/comments.