skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I collaborate on PowerPoint presentations every time my organization has a major presentation due (frequently). The Track Changes feature in Microsoft Word is good enough for documents and all of my coworkers understand how it works, but wrangling everyone's changes into PowerPoint and then letting them know what changed is a nightmare.

When I edit a PowerPoint presentation, I usually add a comment to every slide that has changed and describe all changes to the slide. Other people might put a star on slides they updated, leave the original slide plus the new slide so I know which slides have changed, or not mark their changes at all. Also, we have to email the presentation back or forth or edit it from one shared folder (in which case, multiple people can't work on the slides at the same time). It is very inefficient.
I will give them a try. I occasionally use the free tier at nitrous.io, and more frequently use a paid subscription to the Haskell web based IDE at fpcomplete.com. That said, for my main Haskell project (demo at http://haskell.knowledgebooks.com) I find local development using emacs to be more agile.

I saw the real benefits of a web based IDE when I worked at Google last year. They have an awesome chrome web based IDE that integrates really well with their codebase and source code management systems. I would expect other very large tech companies to go in the same direction of a customized development system.
For someone who follows a paleo/keto diet, soylent doesn't seem that healthy to me.

In fact it's more of the same food that makes people obese, just without chewing.
Facebook and Uber Discuss Integration of Car Service Into Messenger
When I read this, I immediately thought this is nothing new with early adopters over the last couple of decades. People get into something new and feel it will be the future. But, I think the sense of scope and vitriol has changed with these sorts of early adopters. There is more of a pointed, hostile vibe now to this. That is essentially what I took away from the piece.
I posted this, but I didn't create it. I came across it while learning OpenGL and thought it was an interesting way to learn more about how pixel (fragment) shaders worked.

That said, I definitely agree that an interactive CUDA guide would be useful! And although my experience with graphics programming is limited to the past few weeks I've certainly experienced some of what you mentioned with regards to debugging. One of the most frustrating things starting out with OpenGL was how forgetting a specific function call would cause nothing to render at all with no hint as to what was going wrong.
In some ways, I think Cringely underestimates IBM's potential. (Or maybe he correctly estimates IBM management's inability to see IBM's potential.)

One way Google kicked the ass of their competition was to radically their cost of computing through smart use of commodity hardware. It seemed like a small thing, but it gave them a lasting advantage, because nobody could afford to deliver the same search features.

Given IBM's deep pockets and deep experience with hardware, I'd think there must be some strategy there that would let them create cloud computing infrastructure with radically lower cost than the competition. We regular people are stuck with off-the-shelf colocation setups, off-the-shelf hardware, off-the-shelf processors, and off-the-shelf software. IBM can afford to change any of that from scratch. Any of it.

I just can't believe that, less than 10 years into the cloud computing era, we have already happened upon the optimum approach.
How did you handle people with no open source contributions? I'd imagine most non-OSS code would be under an NDA or something.
A few places I've applied have given me coding challenges to work on from home. None has taken me more than an hour, were relatively simple and fun, and I've never failed to get an interview afterward. I'm not entirely sure what all of that means.
This. is. awesome.
It means they can't succeed in writing the code. It's not a failure to understand how to use the IDE, or a failure to understand how to compile. It's that the applicant cannot actually write even the most basic code. The fact that this is so hard to believe and yet happens so often is what makes FizzBuzz so interesting.
Let me guess: to stay inside the moving patch of sunlight shining through the window?
Corporations exists because we - that is, society, through our government - allow them to. Ford saw his mandate as having the most beneficial impact on the largest number of people he could, not just his shareholders. I think it's reasonable for us to interpret the law with a similar mindset.
Cheering robots replace real fans at Korean baseball
If these events were completely random, then we would expect them to happen in clusters. Randomness is pretty clumpy.
I also wonder this same thing. I was asked to whiteboard fizzbuzz in pseudocode during an interview, and I actually made a slight mistake, I can't remember what it was now, but I think it would have duplicated the "FizzBuzz" lines. Overall, the accuracy of my 5 minute solution had little to no insight into how I would perform as a developer.

Now, if they were given time to actually compile code that ran a fizz buzz program and test it out before submitting it and STILL got it wrong...that might be questionable. But I think we need more information to really see if it was a bad assessment of their abilities or truly "bad" developers.
The problem isn't that there's a wrong answer, it's that it doesn't immediately admit apples-apples comparisons between candidates, it's hard to structure it so it can do that, and even harder (probably requiring several generations of candidates) to tune the apples-apples criteria to find something that actually predicts how candidates will actually perform the job.

Those are the big theoretical problems with questions like that. But the pragmatic problems with it are even worse: they are a lens that focuses and applies subjective biases on the part of interviewers. Developers are terrible psychologists, and subjective interviews are the one time that we demand that software developers perform as psychologists.

The best job interview questions are strictly and (as closely as possible) objectively predictive, and the easiest predictive questions to ask are work-sample questions: "here is a problem we solve routinely in this job, candidate, please solve it yourself."
The land they have is being put to productive use. Unless I am very misled, they have many revenue streams that are profitable. No one is successfully invading their space, so I would argue they are defending their territory quite adequately. Alexander only stopped because his troops wouldn't keep going. Why should Amazon stop?

Also, I liked Eugene Wei's response[1] to the comments of Yglesias and others.

[1]: http://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2013/10/25/amazon-and-the-prof...
Amazon has a profitable business and they have for a long time now. They do not turn a profit because they keep sinking their profits back into expansion. There is a huge difference between being unprofitable because you can't sell product, and being unprofitable because you are choosing to take your earnings and invest them back into growth. Yes, you must be careful not to over-extend yourself, and at some point you've taken over the world and just can't grow anymore. But I haven't heard anyone give argument for either of those being the case, just non-specific fretting about how Amazon still is not profitable.

I'm not even saying Amazon is doing the right thing. But they are doing exactly what they have been doing successfully for the last 17 years. Why do we keep getting worried about it?
Great work! I've got a RoR church scheduling system I've been hacking on for 4 years off and on (mostly off). In a weird twist of fate, we've used the exact same bootstrap template, although I colored mine purple. Going to have to look into integrating my system into your software, since you've got some abstractions and models that I need but have not yet implemented (families, for one).
Glory to God! :-) It's just my passion. I really hope someone does build this as a slick hosted service. I don't do well dealing with customers :-)
A high multiple of earnings doesn't mean anything if they're barely profitable.
It's a hypothetical question. Don't be hasty.
I have to ask. Why isn't it installed via Docker?
> This is largely due to increased susceptibility to injury and medical complications among older drivers rather than an increased tendency to get into crashes

So it's not that they are more likely to get into crashes, it's that they are more likely to die from the injuries that a crash causes while a younger person would survive if they received the same injuries.
>>"Church" definitely is the generic English word for place of (particularly, Christian) worship

Not particularly. Only. As in, the word "church" only refers to Christian places of worship.

Honestly it is pretty bizarre that you and tptacek are claiming otherwise. Maybe we're talking past each other. I just don't know any Muslims who say "I'm going to the church tomorrow," or any Buddhists say "I was at the church yesterday". I also don't know of any Christians who refer to synagogues as "churches."

Now, if you are saying that "church" means any Christian place of worship - as in, people don't differentiate between church and cathedral, which are different things - then yes, I can agree with that. But that's not how I read your comments.
I suspect that the FAA's reaction is mostly just "Oh shit, we need a ruling on this before it gets out of hand and something becomes fait accompli. We'll default to no and let up later once we have some visibility."

However, if you want reasons:

1) Hazard to the uninvolved

A car is confined roughly to roads. A car failing on a road is unlikely to deviate much from the road (likely to encounter telephone poles, trees, curbs, guardrails, etc.) and is unlikely to kill unrelated people even it it hurts another motorist.

A drone falling from the sky is a hazard to non-drone people--when it fails it IS coming out of the sky.

Sure, you could confine the drones to over roads, but the disruptive effects, as you point out, are mostly about NOT being confined to a road.

2) Liability

How do you trace that failed drone back to the person controlling it? It's wireless. Now all drones need to be registered.

3) Autonomy

Do you want a drone to have some autonomy? Before you say no, I would personally rather have a functioning drone fly home safely if it loses radio link rather than drop out of the sky. Who's responsible for that autonomy?

4) Collisions

Drones would be a huge hazard near where planes are flying. Sure, banning drones near airports can be done. However, commercial airplanes have fairly heavily traffic corridors by virtue of the ATC system, and some of the corridors go over land in the middle of nowhere where drones would like to be operating.

5) Law enforcement/military

Drones render terrain control suspect. This has NOT sunk in to most law enforcement (and probably not much military, either, since the US hasn't yet fought an enemy armed with drones of its own.). Using a drone to put even something as simple as a flashbang behind a police line would cause total chaos. Police are used to winning by surrounding--smaller overall force, but only deployed as a greater number against a smaller number in terrain control. Drones can come from any direction, can be totally automated, and are extremely hard to target (we use shotguns for bird hunting instead of rifles for a reason). I would be stunned if some of the drug gangs aren't already deploying drones--we're talking about people who deploy submarines for crying out loud.

There are good reasons for the FAA to knee-jerk to "NO! STOP!"
Very well done. Kudos!
> Do one thing well.

For example, be an outstanding VM, IDE and a thriving ecosystem of libraries for development in a quite nice (and becoming better with each version) Lisp dialect.

Anyway, that's really a matter of preference. It's ok if you want to tell the world about yours, but try to word it in a way which isn't confrontational for people who have different preferences.
Essential Blogging Tips for Strippers: Lessons in Clarity
>They do not turn a profit because they keep sinking their profits back into expansion.

Uh, that's pretty much the definition of "unprofitable".
HTTP? What does it mean? all HTTP requests except for the following domain?
I don't think it's the fault of the Fed. If somebody making $16 million a year can't be held responsible for their choices, it's a sad world we live in.

But I do think cheap money has let IBM coast a little. Our business culture has a theory, one I think mainly dumb, that if we tie executive rewards to stock prices, they'll do good things for their companies. In this case, cheap money lets them get paid without doing anything useful.
It's used primarily by small groups that meet in homes or whatever - that way the church as a whole can engage with anyone who stops attending (sometimes sign of personal/life issues that the church should be there to help with).
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/ blacklists the whole AWS IP range.

I think http://www.gutenberg.org/ does the same.
it is difficult. there are a few legitimate reasons and at least one questionable reason i can think of off the top of my head.

attendance tracking would be good for "care" ("hey - it's been a while, is everything ok?"), for decision-making ("we average 35 people at 8am but 400 at 10:30am, what should we do?").

unfortunately, i can also see it used to target "marketing" messages for donations.
Now it's totally down... Bad SysAdmin day?
Margins on services are much higher than margins on hardware. While they're much lower than margins on software, margins on consulting services are also much harder to attack.
That would be awesome!!! I've been thinking about adding some scheduling stuff, so that could be a great pairing!
Taco Bell is NOT Mexican food by any stretch of imagination. (I'm Mexican, and I can enjoy Taco Bell, it's just not Mexican food, Maybe Tex-Mex)
Yes. 2 of our 3 best hires in the last 18 months were extremely awkward in interviews, so much so that we had to carefully edit out negative feedback that obviously derived from the candidate's discomfort in the interview.

My thesis is that practically all software developers are bad interviewers. I'm not suggesting that there are a couple bad apples that turn into tyrants during interviewers, but rather that the interview process is a vector that pushes software developers into a subtly bad place, in a Stanley Milgram sort of way.
It’s really the difference between “rich text” (what you get from Markdown, what you used to get in Wordpad, sort of what HTML2 is like) and “styled text” (what you get from CSS.)

In professional publishing tools (InDesign, Publisher), these are rightly thought of as two separate formats: your content is rich text, written by a journalist or copywriter and saved as .rtf. Your publication is a set of flows, each of which has a data binding to a separate rich-text document, and a set of styling information applied on top.

Really, I’d be just fine if pasting text kept the bold parts bold, the italics italicized, and the links linked (i.e. kept the “rich text” parts) between, say, an HTML page and a Word document. What I don’t want is for the Word document to render the text in 11pt #222222 Helvetica, just because that’s what the page was styled like. That’s a property of the flow the text was in, not the text itself.
Deis Pull: Docker-Native PaaS in Action
> In criminal matters, you typically need both intent and some act forbidden by statute before a finding of guilt. You can't indict someone for ill will.

Obtaining goods by deception seems to cover this. Especially with the public admission of "I siged on, and had to pay, but discovered that my colleague did not have to pay so I was deceptive about the equipment I used, and the only reason I was deceptive was to avoid the requirement to pay".

There is no element in the discussion about needing to change user agent for work or anything else.
That's true, I guess I didn't fully describe what I meant.

It seems to me that when people use 'accident' to describe something they are trying to remove attribution or disconnect causes.
I don't like making job applicants do work -- even something as simple as fizzbuzz -- if it's unlikely I'm going to hire them. Just seems unfair. Also, if I'm giving someone a test, I'd prefer they work on it in front of me, which means it won't be the first screen. And finally, I don't think struggling on FizzBuzz necessarily means "No Hire."

(I actually don't really give these sort of tests at all anymore. Didn't seem that useful in practice.)
Nobody is successfully invading their space because those spaces are, to painfully stretch the analogy, still under martial law: Amazon is aggressively subsidizing them with sweet terms for customers.
I have done a fair share of interviewing and have asked people to do things similar to FizzBuzz in their own favourite language. When they fail, it's not about the details. (I don't mind mistakes, although I do ask and see if the candidate can spot them when given a hint.) It's amazing how many people completely and utterly fail at the task. They can't produce a loop, they can't come up with the necessary if statements, they can't even explain in pseudocode or verbally which steps need to be taken. They don't even know where to start. Sometimes it's because of anxiety or stress, but usually when it's an indication someone has no practical programming experience.
Woo! Love this tool :)
People pay more attention to airplane accidents right after a large accident event.. Google plane accidents and you will see that they happen all the time, they just don't get the world wide news coverage.
If both sides of this debate are in some way correct, it's clear that the "church is a Christian term" side of the debate is more correct, so if just getting that on the table and stipulating it to be true ends an unproductive discussion: it is so stipulated.
Excellent, inspiration for me to finish it. I've been working on abstracting/gemifying most of it lately, specifically for integrating it into other projects, so this is perfect. Not yet on Github. Thanks again for making your stuff public.
Project CARS game’s PC System Requirements Revealed
People use what they know. Many office employees used PowerPoint before the online solutions were even an option, and many of these same people will continue to do so until something happens that forces them to relearn something else (and relearning is non-trivial). Inertia is a powerful thing, and PowerPoint has enough mindshare that its common to hear people say "make a powerpoint" instead of "make a slideshow".
>'In no other job capacity do software developer's subjective beliefs and opinions get applied so directly to business outcomes.'

Absolutely.

I think several of the responses to this post are missing the key word here - subjective. Asking subjective questions and qualifying them with subjective criteria like 'reasonable' is necessarily going to allow for the subjective beliefs and opinions of the developer turned 'CEO for an interview' to affect the business.
Possibly naive question: will there ever be a C for GPUs? That is, a minimal, portable "assembly language"? Or will there continue to be heterogeneity?

I think that's what OpenCL and such are trying to be, but I know it is nascent and has competitors. I don't know enough about the hardware to tell if languages will eventually consolidated like C (with basically all higher level languages built on top of C), or if there is some fundamental heterogeneity or evolutionary divergence that means there can't be one language.
When do you use the word 'accident'?
90.88%, actually

https://github.com/bevacqua/contra?1#comparison-with-async
Airhelp and Fixed help you fight airlines and parking tickets
This is part of their powerpack add-on, so not everyone may have it right out the box.
Add a call to action. I got to the bottom and was like "Where do I put my email?" I want to read this, but I worry I will forget about by the time it is done.
Google is collecting medical data to paint a picture of perfect human health
Thanks for the reply! I'll try out the demo or freelancer version and email you this weekend when I'm more familiar with how it works. :)
It doesn't. You can use whatever identifier you'd like, just as with every node module.
Abstraction to the Rescue
FlutterWireless: $20 wireless ARM-powered platform
That's why I like it. I add "and what would you change about it if you could?" to identify those candidates who really think about their tools.
That's because EmacsWiki is old, poorly organized and not always up to date. It's to be expected when the area to cover is this huge. "Meanwhile", in recent Emacsen, what you want is

linum-mode

You can also customize this with

M-x customize-group RET linum

where you can set font, format for numbers and enable/disable line numbers globally.
Non-technical people aren't like technical people. They don't look at general-purpose software and think "hey, that's for me!" They look at general-purpose software and think "if that was for me, it would say so on the box."

For this reason, software that is specifically targeted and marketed into a niche/vertical will usually get more traction in that vertical than a general-purpose alternative, even if both have the exact same feature set. (Or even, in many cases, if the general-purpose alternative has more features.) People need that little push of being explicitly told that the software is right for them.
[tangential topic]

I don't like techcrunch, I expect very little to no journalism from them. But that was one of the worst written, contentless, fluff writing bordering on vapid that I have had poor fortune to read.
Project CARS game ?