skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd like to expand on this just a little; indulge me.

When we write programs, we normally keep them tidy by taking advantage of scoping. Data is localized using local variables. We use parameter passing to communicate among modules and avoid globals. However, imperative concurrent programming is all about globals: the "shared variables" that have to do with the concurrency of the program, violate scoping: necessarily so, because to be shared, they have to be accessible from multiple scopes.

In imperative programming, there is an important reassurance: namely that variables retain their last stored value. If you put 42 into x, then x keeps holding 42 until you put something else in x. If x is globally visible, and you call some function, forgetting that it has a side effect of changing x, it wrecks this assumption. Suddenly, x has mysteriously changed: you could swear you put in 42, but now it somehow has 43. Why? All you did was call foo; that has nothing to do with x. Oh, but someone committed a change, and foo now calls bar, and bar makes several other functiosn calls which end up back in this same unit in another function that frobs x.

In concurrent programming, you are opening the doors to this type of problem: and what is worse is that shared variable x can change at any time, not over some predictable action like calling a function. When you assign 42 to x, x could turn into 43 even before control passes out of the assignment statement and to the next statement.

All the surprises arising from multiple scopes having
visibility over the same shared data become worse thanks to the asynchronous nature and unpredictable scheduling order.

If you keep programming in the same way that you are used to, you are guaranteed to have a problem. Simply to have the same assurance that "x is holding the value I put there in the current thread of control" you need to take special steps, like locking a mutex (consistently, from every user of x) whereas in non-concurrent programming, the assurance comes from good design, like making x local, or simply not branching into any code which might change x for as long as you need x not to change. I.e. you can achieve the basic assumption quite passively in the absence of concurrency (based on what you don't do), whereas you have to be proactively cunning in concurrent programming.
This isn't the metric you are looking for, but I believe the basis of this argument hinges on the proposition that financial need for medical expenses varies from demographic to demographic. I believe this is trivially demonstrated (statistically and from a common-sense standpoint) by looking at different age segments. Older people (baby boomers come to mind now) certainly do need more healthcare than younger people as a product of aging. Citation from 2008: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/05/why-does-us-hea...

Does that mean they would deserve a greater financial allowance? That is for the person designing the policy to decide; the article suggests no. I offer no opinion on this.

My main question is ... having read the article, I don't actually see the libertarian argument here at all. It seems to say it is simply "more libertarian" than what we currently have (with supporting arguments like "smaller government", "cheaper overhead", etc.) - but ultimately, the spirit of this proposal doesn't seem to be in line with these values at all.
Yeah maybe you're right, I just thought that from their price point they weren't targeting Nancy down the street who needs to decipher the spreadsheet with the proceeds of the bake sale. I'd consider myself 'entry-level power user', which I then by elimination thought of as the target market.
"People use their cellphones while driving"

No, some people do. It's illegal and I'm all for increasing policing and penalties to stop them.
If your application is largely fetching a bunch of external resources, say from something slow like a database or a web API, mashing them up and returning a response to a client, you need async.

Node has a very beginner-friendly primitive for doing this.
Funnily, Java's original threads (back in 1997) were green threads, but they got dropped in favor of native threads.
As others here have mentioned, there is no necessary relationship between the awful async syntax so common to JavaScript environments and non-blocking IO. There are plenty of languages/environments that support highly scalable network operations (that is, do not use a new thread or process to handle each new connection) without introducing callback hell.

The Greenhouse framework in Python is one of them (http://teepark.github.io/greenhouse/master/). The docs (linked) have a concise discussion of the various approaches to parallelizing IO operations with pros and cons of each, and, for most database applications, an obvious winner.
> Times have meanings that would be quite difficult to track without the reference points.

Precisely. When's breakfast? About 7 am UTC. And 7 am NZDT. And 7 AM PDT. And so on and so forth.

This proposal only makes sense from the point of a lazy programmer who is arrogant enough to imagine that their local understanding of schedule trumps everyone else's.
I don't get it either. It seems like the receiver should be saturating if it's really receiving concurrently with the transmitter.
But there's no reason Java threads have to be heavy. Flip the question around: suppose you had a good syntax for nonblocking logic, and a library ecosystem where everything was async by default. In such a context (and we're getting there), why would you ever want to use traditional 4k threads? The only answers I can think of are for heavy number crunching and just maybe I/O on very fast dedicated devices.

So I think that's the future we're looking at: most code async, with the likes of LAPACK and some ultra-low-latency I/O libraries (hedge funds and the like) being the only users of traditional heavy threads.
I agree it's stupid. Just as stupid as the harebrained proposals that occasionally pop up to divide a day into perhaps 10,000 seconds. Or to throw out our current calendar and maybe have 10 months of 36 days with 5 extra holidays a year. Etc.

Not gonna happen. But the reason it gets talked about at all is because it's something that ordinary people can think about and propose. It's not rocket science.

As an alternative, wake me up when the USA goes completely metric. That's something much more important and useful and still it hasn't happened in my lifetime, even though I was taught metric in school nearly 50 years ago.
That is where I disagree completely. I think the old fashioned sync/blocking/threaded style is much easier than async.

Of course, C# has great async support; but it is still a complicate thing that programmers must be very cautious about when applying.
Perhaps, but that takes away from much of the conceptual beauty and promise of a BIG, and many people who like the BIG (including myself) are loath to implement a single-payer system.
It's great to see the government finally adopting more practices from recent work in software development.

You know, like git rebase and amending history.
Why do we think developers are special?
Do the papers address how it will deal with the analogue to multipath where the receiver hears a lower power reflected signal later?
Erlang called, and left a message.

The message was "You are all super late to the party lol".
This proposal reminds me of the people that want to redo the world's calendar (every year still has 365 days, but each Jan 1st is always Monday, for example).

Changing something as deeply ingrained as time simply isn't going to happen anytime soon.
Ads, subscriptions and merchandise all come to mind.
Barcelona - Lead Ruby on Rails Developer @ Redbooth

Redbooth (formerly Teambox) is an award-winning collaboration platform for task management, file sharing, and communication. Whether you're a small business or a large global organization, Redbooth helps you and your team be more productive by getting tasks and files out of email, and providing a single place for teams to collaborate and get work done.

Our stack is:

* Ruby / RoR

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What we are looking for:

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Twitch can be 30 seconds to a minute behind so these days having extensive difference between the broadcaster and viewers seems common, sadly.
I meant, where can you rent a car with hud display like this, or I didn't understand what you were trying to say :)
Mmm.. his terrible facial hair made me think it was an amature video. Hilarious that people are paying the guy money to put himself in their product videos and he doesn't even tidy his beard up.
We can argue that thread sucks because it is expensive. But we must measure how expensive it actually is in real world applications, before abandoning it. If a server must maintain a few hundred concurrent threads, it is really nothing.
This is all great stuff. But until Spotify fixes some very low hanging fruit problems, such as not playing a song ever again if I click "don't like", I find it hard to believe they will use anything remotely complex as this.
I think the question is why is it used and what do we mean works well?

It does solve the Byzantium generals problem rather neatly, which is good. But I doubt that is why it is used. It is used partly because it suddenly became free money for a lucky subset of people who found you could exchange something you got for free for something valuable (drugs sex etc) - and those were at such high rates that the people receiving the bitcoins were also basically being given free money (when one read the official exchange rates)

This managed to fuel an interesting cycle. I would be interested in seeing if bitcoins exchange slips have affected it's purchasing power at exactly the same ratio or if it is being used as a barter not a currency (in these dark corners of the drug dealing world)

I would also suggest that (afaik) real drug dealers who do real big deals work on serious guarantees of trust. Things like knowing the person you are dealing with, and where their children go to school. So things like trustless currencies in these environments are not trustless - quite the opposite.
FEMA ALL REGIONS ACTIVATED
The article indicates many states are beginning to supply federal agencies with biometric data including driver's license photographs. It also states a local police force (the NYPD) was a customer of a facial recognition system.

How long until central databases are collecting datapoints on our whereabouts at all times, not only from mobile devices, but just the image of our faces?

I don't think the founders [US-centric post, but I think this applies to most technologically-advanced nations] envisioned this type of surveillance, and thus offered little protection against it. As the technology to employ this type of capability becomes simpler and cheaper, potential resistance in the form of court processes and public opinion will be comparitively slow to form. This will get a lot worse before it gets better.
NYC - Remote Only - Django/Javascript dev.

I'm a freelance Django developer with a lot of projects. I am considering taking a full time job and will need someone to maintain a project or two.

Please help!

You must be comfy with git, django (1.5+) and most importantly, figuring out heaps of code written by people who you will not be able to ask wtf because they are long gone from the project.

find my email in my profile.

Thanks!
The library looks really nice usability wise.

The arrow.get function tries a bit too hard to be user-friendly ; it lets me wondering if a value could have an unexpected interpretation.

One use-case that seem to be missing is time deltas. There is a support for time iteration but I don't see a good way to transform two timestamps into a time interval.
Many people say things like: "I'm just an average guy. I have nothing to hide. My life is boring. I never do anything unusual."

Ironically, it is perhaps these people who have the most to lose from surveillance?

As most of you already know, the difference between rich and poor has been increasing since the 70s/80s. Most of the nothing-to-hiders are probably ordinary middle class folks. What if the difference between rich and poor continue to increase? Normally, people could protest against this sort of thing, and get taxes on the rich raised to even things out a bit.

The surveillance-police-state that has been created in the name of fighting terrorism and drugs, could be used for other things, too, no? Like against protesters in favor of some income re-distribution.

I wouldn't be surprised if the nothing-to-hiders will wake up one day, realizing that they are living in a very unpleasant society: A society where the elite is living in luxury and the rest in squalor. A society where "those with connections" don't get punished for crimes, but where the rest are punished harshly. A society where those who win the lottery of birth will do well, but where the average guy has no opportunities.

And because of the surveillance-police-state, they will not be able to change it.
CIS/Russian org crime groups can soon buy a bunch of Stellers with fraudulent cards through Stripe, cash them out through p2p methods. Why bother carding and fencing iphones and laptops when you can just buy Stellers and convert them to bitcoins or wire transfers directly.
> Let's say you're in SF and you want to schedule a conference call with someone in Bangalore. You'll use worldtimebuddy.com or similar to compare your day with theirs, and you'll find that your first thought, 2pm, is 2:30am in Bangalore. So... maybe you can get up early -- 7am for you is 7:30pm for them. Better ask if maybe they'd prefer to meet after dinner, or (since you stay up late) perhaps YOU could call after your dinner and catch them at 9am Bangalore time... that's when the most common working day starts.

And then you discover that you misread the direction of the shift and you actually should have arranged in the early morning for you, or you've checked time in that country's capital rather than in the place your contact is, or they thought the time you gave them was in your timezone... and neither of you realize you've fucked up until meeting time.

Without timezones, you look the timezones up and suggest 7pm, but you've shifted the wrong way and that's the middle of the night for them when you thought it was early afternoon? So you say "how about 7pm" and either they say "no, that's the middle of the night, how about 10am", or they just get up in the middle of the night. But either way, that time you've agreed is completely unambiguous for both of you and there's no way for it to go wrong.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8137857
Data caps seem fine as long as they keep up with technology. The problem is that even 5 years ago 300GB was barely reasonable and it is completely unreasonable today.

What I mean by "fine" is I would rather have a datacap and a higher speed that could potentially exceed the data cap if used 24/7 than a slower speed that creates a soft cap anyway.
EFF to Patent Office: End the Flood of Stupid Software Patents
I absolutely love Quasar. Nevertheless, there's an honest question whether it is actually needed in majority of applications. I think not.
But hidden services are also a mainstay of the nefarious activities carried out on the so-called Dark Net: the home of drug markets, child porn, murder for hire, and a site that does nothing but stream pirated My Little Pony episodes.

My God. Those pony-pirating monsters.
I'm not saying that this is happening here, but isn't the standard line when a c level is pushed out that they are leaving to spend more time with their family?

I actually believe max here.
The key to 100% reliability is data storage. The biggest mistake you can make is relying on bare message passing without ever recording the message anywhere. That approach will break in the mobile world very quickly.

My advice is to build a solid CRUD interface for your chat service and then add a realtime updates mechanism on top of it. This approach is basically bulletproof. I'm a big fan of using long-polling for the push aspect, since it fits cleanly into a REST API and works everywhere.
Be sure to read to the end, or, after you read enough to grasp the idea then skip down to the section "The narrow path has its temptations".
>So to commit any crime at all, I just need to be sure to close my doors and not allow law-enforcement in when they ask to enter. Correct?

Unless they have proper and signed warrant. Which is like any other citizen, eg. me or you, having a permit to go into some place X. If we have to follow those rules (e.g about unauthorised access) then they should too.

Breaking into computer systems (or houses) to find evidence is not playing by the same rules. Nor is getting that kind of power arbitrarily over everyone, as they do, without specifics about a target/case.
"How long until central databases are collecting datapoints on our whereabouts at all times, not only from mobile devices, but just the image of our faces?"

this is a fine question - the DHS has proposed a project with the City of Oakland to prototype just such a thing, described as a combination of NSA surveillance and stop & frisk, which they call the Domain Awareness Center. Originally targeted at the port post 9/11, it has grown to be a prototype of a citywide surveillance system that ties local and national authorities together closer than ever before.

It's not in place yet, and stopping it in Oakland, where all politics are driven by law enforcement / public safety policy, despite decades of data that show pouring money into the police department has not reduced crime, may be a good way to at least delay this across the country.
Some time ago I wrote my thoughts in a blog post:

https://idea.popcount.org/2013-09-05-it-aint-about-the-callb...

Basically, it's easy to show that callbacks are a much harder paradigm to work with considering flow control.

That's it. There is a place to use callbacks, but if you need anything that is not trivial and won't blow up at some point, you should use threads. Greenlets, processes or whatever you call it, things with stack that take time to context switch.

I strongly believe threads are better, if not anything else is due to the fact that when you do "spawn", you make an explicit statement, saying: here we demultiplex - programmer beware of flow control here!
I hope somebody told the poster about putting a proxy server (squid, apache, nginx, varnish, etc.) between the application server and the client.

Proxy deals with slow client delays. App server serves app requests at speed. Tune number of proxy connections to keep app servers reasonably busy. Scale each layer individually.

IMO Whether the proxy is async or not is a matter of taste.
One problem is that people (and even software) often don't include timezones. By having none, you always now what time they mean.

Knowing the best time to call someone in another area of the world seems like a problem that wouldn't really change, neither for the better nor for the worse; instead of having wordtimebuddy.com tell you the time there, it'd tell you the working hours (eg. 2m - 10am).
Volume silicon manufacture is planned

I highly doubt it. But if it's true, that would be the missing link for all open source hardware design.

It would also be nice if they gave some idea of the kind of performance or implementation they are considering.
I found that argument a little bit weird. Most people I hear about the most efficient speed of their car tell me it's around 110 km/h. That's 68 mi/h.

Maybe European cars are different?
To be precise, threads suck because thread _scheduling_ is expensive. From a logical pov, structured programming still rules, and threads are an excellent way to implement structured programming.
Who are these employees? I don't know any developers who get paid overtime. Even at shitty companies with shitty pay I have worked at least 55 hrs/week and during launches over 70 hrs/week.
I don't think that's how modern democracy works, if it works at all. Direct democracy in 4 b.C Athens, maybe.
Given that the paper is by people from Google, where Go is fairly well adopted, and that both Go's and this algorithm's primary use-cases are server-related, that makes kind of sense.
I think you are right. I like the ideas behind it: it empowers people, decentralizes power, could spur innovation, and is actually something people on the far left and far right can agree upon.

I also think it is hopelessly naive. You are talking about a change that would dismantle numerous massive government programs and completely restructure social and economic life in this country. Not only, as you pointed out, is that going to be very hard to push through both to the populace and within the parties themselves, but it is way too hand wavy.

Every grand political idea has promised, "just do this and it will fix everything". But there's always unintended consequences, and in a policy this far-reaching, those possible consequences are wide-ranging.

It just isn't going to happen without some massive shift in political opinion in the next few decades.
Freedom of choice allows consumers to select the services and packages which would most benefit them, and single payer healthcare does not allow this.

The vast majority of consumers are incapable of making those determinations. The few exceptional people that take the lead in their own diagnosis and treatment and become more informed than the medical professionals they interact with are dwarfed by the vastly greater number of people that just want to be told which pills to take at what intervals. There's a massive Dunning-Krueger effect when it comes to self-administration of healthcare. I've met a lot of people who proclaim themselves wiser than doctors but who, when pressed, are unable to properly articulate even the symptomology of their condition.

Customer feedback (through selection of providers of goods and services) is critical, as it allows bad firms to fail, and good ones to continue. The basic income does not interfere with this type of signal, but the single payer system completely destroys it.

Incompetent or unethical mdeical professionals often cling to their positions for years in the private sector, just like they sometimes do in the public sector. Likewise, the public sector is capable of firing or barring such from practice. If you ever live in a country with socialized healthcare for any length of time, then you'll also notice that hospitals and clinics get shut down for lack of efficiency, eg tiny rural hospitals left behind by demographic shifts.

Fully free markets depend on participants being fully informed about market product and services, and upon the ability to defer, invest, or divest whenever it is most economically advantageous to do so. Neither of these conditions obtain where healthcare is concerned. The first I have mentioned above; as for the second, you can manage your risk to some degree, but your ability to predict your medical care requirements is pretty poor - strokes, heart attacks,a nd other less common medical conditions often strike without warning and while they can be insured against (in similar fashion to a derivative) most people are no better at being actuaries than they are being doctors. Don't even get me started on people's inability to choose their own genetic makeup.

I think it's economically inefficient to expect people to develop the huge amount of expertise they need to be better predictors of their own healthcare needs than a doctor or insurer of median competence.