skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it is simply economics. Its the new Cobol, lots of lines of code to maintain, lots of developers know Java, so the cost of maintenance can be kept low. So when you build something new, the developers want to use Java because that is what they know and all the tools they have invested in are Java based.
Sadly, the description of arithmetic coding bears almost no resemblance to the actual algorithm (it roughly describes the equal probability case, but that misses most of the point). The description of Shannon-Fano as "bottom up" and Huffman as "top-down" is also exactly backwards (the actual descriptions of those algorithms are accurate, but the labeling is confused).

The article contains a lot of terms you can search for if you are interested in these things, but sadly is not very informative on its own.
Wow nice, and look, and maybe it can even predict a likely future:

http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=vietnam.korea.iraq.rus...
if your definition of "feelings" stops at "happy" and "sad", sure. but feelings quickly become too complicated to express without language.

example: i want to go out to dinner tonight, but i feel like we went out to dinner too many times this week.

example: i am happy that the Yankees won, but i am unhappy with Derek Jeter's performance.

communicating these feelings clearly will, without better technology, require words.

more importantly, interpreting body language is simply prone to error. assuming two honest parties, it is much harder to misinterpret words.
Sacred Economics (2012) [pdf]
Ask HN: “Tell me about the best project that you’ve ever created?”
This question is way too interesting:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8090311
That's because Facebook is still young, and hasn't finished their Company Town yet.

/the little plot of employee housing in Menlo Park is not what I'm referring to - company towns are usually a financial trap
What Python can learn from Haskell
> "The problem is that this method disproportionately hurts people who don't have the time or energy to effectively hold two jobs"

No it doesn't.

I'm a guy who has the "two jobs" by your description. More precisely, it's a job and a hobby. However, my "best/coolest project/work" has always been something I have done for an employer. I can't imagine coming close to that "level" of work by just playing around at home.

If you can't answer the question in the post with a project that you've done at work, and you don't program as a hobby, you simply do not qualify for what OP is looking for.
Maybe I'm being dumb, but I think this could benefit from the inclusion of a Why? section.
Thank you HN: For the Community of Great Developers and Amazing People
Early today, in a deseprate act, I posted this on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8089878. A user nickname 'andor' (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=andor) offered me his help. Indeed he spent with me more than 1 hours helping and mentoring me while setting up in front of me (screenshare) nginx, gunicorn, removing apache and advising about best practices for deployment. He then refused to take any money from me (that's what legends do :) and suggested to donate it to this project http://www.duangle.com/ (which as I know, he has no association with); I gladly did it. I am not new to the Internet world, but I didn't experience this kindness online for a while. That was very inspiring, and I promise to don't spam HN anymore with random links and contribute to discussions with valuable posts only :). Thank you HN!
Context:

Sacred Economics traces the history of money from ancient gift economies to modern capitalism, revealing how the money system has contributed to alienation, competition, and scarcity, destroyed community, and necessitated endless growth. Today, these trends have reached their extreme—but in the wake of their collapse, we may find great opportunity to transition to a more connected, ecological, and sustainable way of being.

This book is about how the money system will have to change—and is already changing—to embody this transition. A broadly integrated synthesis of theory, policy, and practice, Sacred Economics explores avant-garde concepts of the New Economics, including negative-interest currencies, local currencies, resource-based economics, gift economies, and the restoration of the commons. Author Charles Eisenstein also considers the personal dimensions of this transition, speaking to those concerned with "right livelihood" and how to live according to their ideals in a world seemingly ruled by money. Tapping into a rich lineage of conventional and unconventional economic thought, Sacred Economics presents a vision that is original yet commonsense, radical yet gentle, and increasingly relevant as the crises of our civilization deepen.

Sacred Economics official website: http://sacred-economics.com
+1. On German keyboards for example, the backtick is on a dead key, meaning that it is only printed if you press the spacebar afterwards. Thanks to dead keys, you can e.g. get "é" by typing <´> <e>. But it is a severe annoyance if you actually want to get "`" (<Shift>+<´>, <Space>).
As a user of open source software, I love changelogs. It gives me a concise index of high level changes between official releases. But I certainly don't want one line per commit.
I've been aware of the hiring ads on which no comments were allowed, of course. Have moderators been doing things like un-flagging and keeping specific stories they disagree with off the page for so long?

It is entirely possible I was mistaken, but I was under the belief that HN was mostly hands-off when it started. I.e., things other than clear attempts to spam, etc were off the page. Also, I think the focus of the site was narrower and clearer. It was dominated by technology and business with political pieces specifically discouraged. Now, political posts are pretty common. This broadening and blurring of the borders of what's "hacker news" can leave more room for mods to simply boost those they agree with and silence those they disagree with.

The particular article above is disturbing to see suppressed since it's clearly factual, isn't spam or similar and it's about the bay area tech scene, but apparently it's politically inconvenient.
The shell looks great, good work!

On a side note, I have to say I love README's that look like this. The author did a couple things I really like. 1) They attributed feature ideas to the people they got them from. 2) They listed the good things right along with the bad/lacking. 3) Screenshots.
It's been reposted, I suppose, in response to this submission regarding a similar 'library', Basil: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8089382
It's actually very simple. This document is just way too hard to read.

Prefix with the type of the change. Put the scope of the change in the parentheses. Put the description afterwards.

Did you fix the caramel filling in the ChocolateFactory? `fix(ChocolateFactory): make caramel filling work`

Here's a more succint description: https://github.com/ajoslin/conventional-changelog/blob/maste...
Sorry this is just excuse
> If a large mall can provide more goods to people that smaller shops that take the same area, then it is better.

What if the people live better, more peaceful lives in the city with smaller shops? Is raw efficiency the only criterion that matters?
It's a false dichotomy to say the only two choices are 1) Acceptance of the Mediocrity Principle or 2) Believing you are the center of the universe.
I can easily posit a third option where some aspect of our Universe and existence is special without needing to be the center of it all.
I love being a liberal too. Let's circlejerk.
Uh.. I would say that "well-articulated" is debatable, unless the whole article was meant as satire.
It was phrased as a scientific question, but I think of it more on philosophical, ethical and human behavior lines. If you accept that you are not special, you will tend to be nicer to other human beings. If you accept that your country is not special you might avoid the aggressive behaviors that lead to wars because "God is on your side".
Attackers abusing IE to enumerate software and detect security products
>If you want to address Black or Latino racism then show the group power which is oppressing whites.

This doesn't really address what I was talking about. I'm not saying that whites didn't oppress blacks(because they did) or that white people are now being oppressed by minorities(because they aren't). I was simply explaining that racism is not a synonym for racial oppression. Racism is a specific word with a specific meaning. There are racist members of every ethnicity because being racist has absolutely nothing to do with a person's or a group's ability to oppress a group of people.
Poll: Product Search, whats most important?
When searching for a product, what do you care about most?
delivery speed
Wow, read that book when I was young and loved it, will have to read it again, sent chills down my spine.
you're a sad, selfish man
> I also thought it would be interesting to remove the time aspect and simply look at these Series A rounds as a progression of deals, regardless of when they took place. This graph looks at the 10 deal moving average of Series A round size.

That's not how moving averages work. You can't just take an unordered univariate and smooth it however you want.

You argue in your first chart that time is a relevant factor; therefore, you must smooth as a time series for that analysis to make any sense. (which wouldn't make sense in this case anyways, due to the nonconsistancy in timing of seed funding.)

Also, the annotations in the first chart make absolutely no sense since they are not relevant in any way. (unless you are asserting that correlation of these events implies the causation of the increase, which is very bad logic unless you have proof otherwise)
be really good and nice to the employer
I think one of the points of the test is to see how intrinsically motivated the applicants are about the job. You can throw as much money and perks at someone as you want, but it probably wont work as well as intrinsic motivation.
He or she is writing in English. English has rules. Some rules are made to be broken. Capitalization is not one of them when it comes to writing coherent prose.
Satire? Seems like it.
Is it possible these days to trap keystrokes like Ctrl+W in browsers? The last time I tried a web browser-hosted SSH client, Ctrl+W (and co) didn't get sent remotely but instead closed the local tab like normal.
Yes, it is worth reading. You hinted at change or transformation. I personally think this subject is what makes the book such a classic. The books shows his transformation from a "mascot", "Homeboy", "Harelemnite", "Minister Malcolm X" to "El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz". Those are the titles of a couple of the chapters. The voice of each chapter is almost written from that view. It's fascinating because you can see the transformation of his life and views. It's probably one of my favorite books because it shows how a man can change.
Well, part of this is that some of these are just "solved problems". For example, once you have arithmetic coding, you never have to worry about the actual bitwise encoding again (anything on top of that is just speed optimization). That reduces the problem to modeling and probability estimation.

There's an inherent limit at the entropy of the source, and usually it is not too hard to get within a few percent of that entropy (as near as we are able to model it). After that, you can do increasingly complex things, but for rapidly diminishing returns. For example, there are definitely lossless audio compressors that can make things smaller than FLAC, but usually only by a percent or two, and they are an order of magnitude or more slower.

To me, a lot of the interesting research at this point is exploring the compression/speed trade-off. That's what makes LZMA interesting (it dominates bzip2 on both axes). Google has also done some interesting work in this space. This matters when your goal is to save network transmission time: if you're only sending the data once, anything you do has to be faster than just sending more data on the wire.
You've captured a very fundamental perspective here since the time spent on maintaining software is significantly more than building it (not sure what the Fred Brooks percentage is but I would guess 80/20 for the larger orgs).

Do you know of any small companies that grew to a point and said "Well, we've got a hiring bottleneck since there are much fewer good Python devs out there. So let's migrate to Java which will then pay dividends over the years since the cost of maintenance will be low."
Nonsensical comparison between value ($) and GDP ($/yr): check.
Why did you submit an article you know to be bogus?
I barely put pants on most days and I'm making more now than I ever did when I was shaving and wearing a suit.
You can still talk about some project from the past. If you never had any hobbyist pet-project (during studying? while learning first language(s)? before getting a job?), then it's quite likely that you're not the person the author is looking for, no matter if you have or don't have time for a hobby now.
Surely tennis-fandom can be proven? (I know, not your point, but that's what makes religion complicated). At least I'm a 100% sure tennis exists.
My thinking here is that YC would try to get better at helping companies with their Series A with each deal... regardless of what amount of time elapsed between these deals. I think it fits well with the way investors think about the learning process, which is why I tried it out.

Regarding annotations in the 1st chart, they are to set context for readers who do not necessarily follow major milestones in the private markets landscape.
Analytics for startups – A new Idea
One thing jumped out at me:

"we encourage programmers to become better professionals [by] staying lean on the... user interface, and user experience specialists"

That's a major difference between now and then. In the past 14 years there's been a huge shift towards better respecting UI design as a professional speciality. It definitely used to be a thing that programmers didn't respect as much, like sales & marketing. And software has gotten a lot better as a result.
Ugh it would have been nice if they had settled on a standard async api E.g. Node style callbacks or promises instead of their own random one.

Edit: it would be nice if the documentation mentioned the promise support.
That could be the kernel of a scifi story. What if Theia had life on it and it spread to earth.
Check this release directly on a Terminal.com Container! at https://terminal.com/tiny/MO3qmBrMRI
It has everything your need to deploy this new Joomla version in matter of seconds.
Huh? What does that have to do with changing the meaning of words?
The Single Best Interview Question And The Best Answer
FYI: This has absolutely nothing to do with bootloaders.
I'm talking about development time. I can use LLVM/Clang and develop significantly faster than I ever could using GCC. I'm not seeing there waiting as long for the C++ compiler to do its work.

If I need better optimization of binaries that I'm preparing for release, then I can always use GCC or ICC instead, for a single compilation.

That way, LLVM/Clang save me a huge amount of time on a daily basis. Then on the relatively rare occasion when I need better optimization, I'm only subjected to GCC's noticeably worse performance for a short period of time.
Ask HN: Would you pay $10 for to be certified by an expert coder
We're developing a platform for self-taught coders who want to be validated in the industry by the top industry experts. Your code will be seen by companies like Google and Microsoft. You think you'll be good enough to pass the test?

Call 514 578 9003
I'm also on skype - sharongai9
About some of the other comments: We need a term on HN for this is something you'd understand if you weren't apt to take things so literally and see it as a logical argument.
The concept of race has no scientific value.

If you want to stop scientists from using the word "race", at least propose an alternative. Like people who don't like that male pronouns are used for gender-neutral cases in English at least propose alternatives such the singular "they", "he/she", etc. If you think scientists need a new word for "race" because other people have poisoned it so much, your cause would probably be more successful if you actually tried to propose and promote that new word. Because scientists aren't going to just stop all research related to "race", that would be ridiculous.

"Broad cluster of people with fairly similar genes relative to other broad clusters of people" doesn't quite roll off the tongue.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-specific_and_gender-neut...
Java was marketed in the 1990s as a cross-platform language that was basically a better version of C++ for use on the web. Of the languages that were associated with the early web, Java was the only one with large corporate support. (Contrast to the then-dominant web language, Perl. And consider that the phrase "open source" had not yet been coined.) First from Sun, and then from other companies like IBM and Oracle that feared an all Microsoft future.

Thanks to the corporate support that went into it, Java built strong ecosystems in a number of areas. The viability of multiple strong corporate supporters made it a safe choice for any enterprise that wanted an option that was tied to the web which wasn't tied to Microsoft. This gave them a base that it never lost.

It is worth noting that Microsoft took note of this competitor, and did their standard "embrace, extend, extinguish" approach. However they got sued by Sun for adding Windows only extensions, and after they lost that, Sun was able to ensure continued consistency.

Random note. Java is far from the first portable cross-platform language to be marketed on that basis. See COBOL.

Random amusing note. While Java was marketed as being cross-platform, it used threading in a way that Solaris was designed for and competing Unix systems were not. I've never considered it coincidence that Solaris wound up soundly beating the other Unix systems in "portable Java benchmarks" and that was when it became the dominant version of Unix.
I disagree. I think the bar is "does this text accurately convey the intended meaning and is comfortable to read?", and I think it's interesting and worth thinking about that written English largely still meets that bar when you remove capitalization. Capizalization mostly doesn't encode significant additional information (yes, there are counter-examples - the article we're talking about actually does capitalize acronyms) or enhances ergonomics all that much.

This is really more a social thing and about what the choice not to use capitalization communicates, i.e. you may be reacting negatively because you read it as a "I do not care to conform" or "I do not care about your appraisal of my writing" marker. Which is understandable, but I wonder if that isn't a too-quick judgement to serve as a rule.
I switched to using a compose key instead of dead keys, because I just end up writing much more code (and english) anyway, so it's more efficient than actually having dead keys in the end.
I've always found the "cars are freedom" angle a little odd. There's no bigger interface between your typical middle class American and the police/legal system than the automobile. The very fact of driving a dangerous two-ton machine around on expensive publicly-owned infrastructure spawns registration, taxation, regulation, enforcement (traffic cops, DUI checkpoints, ticketing, traffic courts), etc. A car isn't freedom, it's just the easiest way to get in trouble with the law.

Another thing I find interesting is that suburbia is spawning manufactured human-scale areas. E.g. Atlantic station in Atlanta: http://vccusa.com/i/projects/atlantic_station1.jpg. Reston Town Center in Virginia: http://www.fairfaxcountyeda.org/sites/default/files/photos/r.... They're planning on building an above-street level plaza in Tysons near the new Silver Line stop, because the street level of that area is beyond redemption: http://assets.macerichepicenter.com/FileManager/Tysons/Heade....
Select any Procfile on Heroku
A side-project I'm working on will alert you when SSL certificates are about to expire, preventing these things from happening. It'll also show you a overview of all the expiration dates of your certificates and domains, updated automatically.

It's not live yet, but if you're interested you can sign up for the launch mail here:

http://www.domainsquire.com
I don't tunnel HTTP/HTTPS requests to doubleclick.net at all to begin with (I use a whitelist for HTTP/HTTS), but if someone were to do too many DNS requests for the same domain in a short period of time I drop those requests as it means the Source IP I'm seeing is actually the IP of the victim of a DNS Amplification attack and sending them the response would make me a participant in that attack.
You can clearly see that it was done with some sort of statistical method, though. Impressive, but not really "decoding" brain activity.
Fairchild and Honeywell once considered a merger.

New name of the company ... "Fairwell, Honeychild".
People can be proud of either of those accomplishments as well.

Honestly, I doubt "most proud" versus "best" makes a difference at all. Candidates generally explain their answers to these open ended questions. If they (for some reason) don't recognize the implicit, "And why?" part of the question, you just follow up with it.

The conversation will never be just, "Foobaz, next question." One way or the other, it will be, "Foobaz because..." It saved the company $2M/year. Or users really loved it. Or it improved the engineering process and made releases faster and lower risk. Or it was a really tough problem that required a lot of creative thinking. Or it taught me a lot about 3D game programming.
"Since Alice had never received any religious instruction, and since she had led a blameless life, she never thought of her awful luck as being anything but accidents in a very busy place. Good for her." - Kurt Vonnegut (about his sister's death from cancer)
As a Cornell Computer Science undergraduate from India myself, I find this post very thought provoking. Other factors that I personally would probably take into account is gaining some industry experience before one jumps into entrepreneurship in India and simply acquiring some capital from a few years of employment in the US which can you lean back on during your difficult startup days back in India. Just a thought.
> even that up on Malcolm X

Then you shouldn't comment on a subject that you know nothing about. Read his book, listen to his speeches, watch the movie, study the civil rights movements and then comment on what you feel is "iffy".
Launch risk does seem to be a function of experience -- the Russians have been flying pretty much the same rocket for nearly 50 years. That provides a lot of opportunity for incremental improvement. Combine this with early Russian practice (based largely on lack of sophisticated testing equipment) of testing rocket designs through live flight.

But risk in general is also a function of use and operational time. This has been borne out in many contexts, including both space flight and aviation. Systems degrade in nondeterministic ways over time, increasing failure risk. Even very minor variations in design -- a few mm of protrusion in a fuel-oil heat exchanger in the Boeing 777, implicated in the British Airways 38 Heathrow crash, given a specific set of circumstances in in-flight ambient temperatures and engine throttle settings resulting in ice-induced fuel starvation -- can have profound impacts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_38

It'll be interesting to see how re-use, risk, and cost play out with Space-X.
BitBucket is down