skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you'd like to elaborate in a way that would be highly visible to 18F, feel free to weigh in on the issues page[1].

I will point out that JSON is recommended as a default, and if there is a compelling reason not to use it in a specific case, that should be fine[2].

[1] https://github.com/18f/api-standards/issues or https://github.com/18F/api-standards/issues/8

[2] https://github.com/18F/api-standards#just-use-json
This is the "I got in today at 8:30 and will leave at 5:30 after taking a one hour lunch" mindset or the "Even if I am inspired at 5:20 I'm out of here at 5:30 and if I get into something right before lunch it doesn't matter because I have lunch plans every day" mentality. I don't think people should be overworked, but clock watchers are productivity killers.
How about lightweight virtualization like linux container, docker?
Such a great book with the absolutely iconic characters of cyber-fiction. If you don't have time to read this book, perhaps you can find time to listen to the book on tape, as read by the author: http://www.bearcave.com/bookrev/neuromancer/neuromancer_audi...
>> In short, they claim they were just laying off their "bottom" 5% a week after doing reviews, and are in the process of hiring an additional 20% new employees.

I note your use of speech marks around the word bottom. I'm just wondering how you put structural technicians on a scale.

In other words, does the effectiveness of an individual in this kind of multiply connected technical environment not basically depend on a lot of other people?

It isn't selling vacuum cleaners really is it?
I can say it's not a subtyping relationship because it happens entirely at runtime and my definition of types—the one consistent with what I referred to as Haskell's standard type analysis—does not include runtime dynamics.

If you want to pick a definition of typing which includes runtime information (and referencing RTTI, clearly you do) then we can shift to that vocabulary and talk about whether such an analysis includes a subtyping judgement. I'm not familiar with it.

But it's certainly not consistent with the standard Haskell type analysis. So there shouldn't be any surprise that the vocab doesn't match up.
The thing I most scratch my head about in my Clojure code is when to optimise function arguments for each of thread-first/thread-last/partial etc. Some patterns are fairly established, like predicate first, coll last, but I'd be intrigued to hear some more rules of thumb.
The answer is no. Not because it's not junk, but because it's not science.
I thought we'd delinkbaitified the title enough last night, but evidently not, so we've sent it in for another round.
I think that's rather unfair, chap. We're at half the price of Vanilla Forums for a comparable service level.

Muut is nice for a beta product, but unless their founders are real geezers, I doubt they're more experienced than me in the internet business.

Regards,
Adrian
> Meat, for example, is usually given in values which are a multiple of 25 g

Those used to be 28g, and called ‘ounces’.
Not going into details, I was/am working on map related data. And still using OSM. And would love to see OSM take off.
... but involves such an overloading of the nature of truthiness! All to match a really ad hoc syntax sugaring of English?

if X ==> if there exists some X
It would be interesting to add up which costs more: Keeping English measurement for some products and engineering (i.e. construction), or having a mixed CDMA/GSM (not to mention iDEN) mobile infrastructure.

Having a global economy doesn't seem to have much impact or those English-sized wrenches made in China should cost more.
1. These are the same authors behind the "Against Intellectual Monopoly" book, which, of course, they cite in this paper. In general, I would not trust anything these authors put out without fact-checking all their claims and actually reading the studies they cite. I have found that they are rather, uh, flexible with their facts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7889290

2. They claim they could find no evidence supporting a relation between patenting and innovation growth, only a relation between patenting and increased patenting. This is false - there are many studies showing positive correlation between patenting and measures of innovation other than patenting, such as R&D expenditure, and diversity of industries in which innovation happens. Just from a quick search:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1513814

http://nw08.american.edu/~wgp/park_lippoldt08.pdf

http://www.dklevine.com/archive/sokoloff-kahn.pdf

http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/cam041/2003043048.pdf

http://www.nber.org/books_in_progress/invention/chapter7.pdf

http://www.nber.org/papers/h0042.pdf?new_window=1

Heck, patenting is also positively correlated with increased prosperity in general:

http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/reports/2013...

3. The bit about the correlation of patenting and productivity growth is also incorrect, and is actually something of a strawman. The theory is innovation results in increased productivity, and patenting is a proxy for innovation, but the relation between innovation and productivity is ambiguous and difficult to quantify:

http://www2.itif.org/2013-competitiveness-innovation-product...

http://elsa.berkeley.edu/pub/users/bhhall/papers/BHH11_Innov...)

But even then, a quick Google suggests that there is evidence of patenting and increased productivity: http://cep.lse.ac.uk/people/bloom/BloomVanReenen.pdf

The authors certainly are aware of Google, so I'm guessing they simply decided to cherrypick studies that support their point of view.

4. Of course, there are costs imposed by the patent system as well, and there are a number of studies showing these as well, many of which this paper cites. The big question these days is, how can we tune the system optimally so that the benefits outweigh the costs? To get a more nuanced view of the situation, see this metastudy:

"RECENT RESEARCH ON THE ECONOMICS OF PATENTS", Bronwyn H. Hall Dietmar Harhoff
Every particle is exploding and imploding at every  moment of time
Relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/526/
Non-Transparent Memory Safety
Nothing mysterious there; in the Fibonacci sequence, the ratio of the number and the one before it converges to the golden ratio which is almost the same as the conversion rate between km and miles.

I think it is easier to multiply by 0.6. Or do the simpler approximation: n/2 + n/10 + ( n/100 )*2

You can drop the last term if you don't need an accurate result.

Divisions and multiplications by 2, 10 and 100 are really easy.

850km to miles:

425 + 85 + 17 = 527 miles , the correct result is 528.166 miles

258km to miles:

129 + 26 + 5 = 160 miles , correct result is 160.314 miles
no that's actually not the case....i was learning python and i could'nt find a better way of utilizing my skills ..that's all.

hope you tried it ... is it good ????
Never heard of this guy but his startup, Staance, is a really cool, simple idea. Check it out. http://staance.com
One way to measure it could be the length of a chain that looks like this:

"Person A can beat person B with 90% probability, but Person C can beat Person A with 90% probability."

You'd want to limit the people you count to being, say, tournament players with stable ranks, such that e.g. their rank was not altered by the games against the last ten people they played.

My intuition is that, even if we stick to US players, Go ends up with a chain that's a few multiples of the Chess chain in length. This intuition mostly comes from Go's handicap system, where there are many levels of "I can give 9 handicap stones to a worse player and still win, but a better player can give 9 handicap stones to me and still win."

But I could be totally wrong. I've never heard of anyone try to measure this distance before and it would be awesome to get some pointers to such a study if it already exists.

Perhaps the absolute value difference in Elo rank between large communities of Go players vs. Chess players does the same thing, depending on which Elo parameters you use?

(And, uh, to get back on topic -- nice site! I'm doing some problems now.)
Unfortunately this episode brings the point of Amazon being a monopoly ( intentional or unintentional) when it comes to the selling books. This does not sound good for writers or the readers.
Congrats, I am building a project around OSM, that's a bowl of fresh air compared to other platforms!

Weird, no party in SF or Austin? Finally, the "hypest" tech cities are the ones which are the less involved in OSM, that's a surprise!
Subtitles are definitely something we want to add! It's a bit of a time-intensive process for our small team, but it's on the road map.
Seems to me like Clojure is experience a popularity surge on HN lately. I wonder what's driving this.

Maybe my perception is just biased because I'm currently learning Clojure.
Celsius...

0: Freezing point of water

100: Boiling point of water

A lot more precise than the rationale you proposed.
Its true, its not one thing that makes a good product. I think this article lines up with their recent release of their new branding, and this article is trying to turn that social snafoo into a positive. Which is a good move, and is what they should do. I agree nice pictures make a big difference. I was going to put a link to vrbo, but they went and copied airbnb's site. VRBO had average pictures and average functionality for years and the site and is much bigger than airbnb. I think it really all comes down to distribution in the end. Pretty pictures will get people to stay, but aren't end all be all.
Perhaps this stereotype reflects poorly on both men and women. Mothers may be more likely to get involved in a new experience and demonstrate their ignorance, but fathers may be less likely to put themselves through the feelings of vulnerability required to learn something new.

Nobody likes feeling stupid, I would assume, this is magnified by how one wants to appear to their children.

My father liked his website but I had to keep it updated for him, he would not participate in it.
Thanks for the note! We'll look into improving the coloring of the buttons so that they are clearer.
What are some other must reads from cyberpunk genre (beside Count Zero and Mona Liza Overdrive)?
Small correction: distance light travels in...
Don't you feel handicapped having to use a computer to express basic distances?
In the metric system, you have to have some sort of low IQ not to be able to convert from meters to kilomethers on the fly.
Hours to seconds is trickier, and would be much improved by decimal notation.
Thanks for the feedback! I'm actually going through all of the tactics now and adding motif tags and explanations. Hopefully, this will make the solutions a bit more evident.
(not-empty coll)

is the same as

(when (seq coll) coll)
Pretty ridiculous title. I can't believe some people here are ignorant enough to upvote this.
>> "Now about those winters..."

Well, some Minnesotans consider the winters a feature, not a bug. They keep the Californians out.

I accept my downvotes with dignity.
There was also a pretty good BBC Radio dramatisation of it. Sadly, from a quick search, they don't seem to be selling it - but there are copies floating about online. Well worth a listen.
How To Quickly Improve Your Memory
I can't say I agree with the parallels you draw here on disruption. This isn't disruption comparable to Uber or AirBnB, it isn't disruption at all. The examples you give are all companies which have come along and provided an offering on par with or exceeding what is currently being offered by archaic slow moving industries, often both in price and experience.

Uber works because the service you receive is a commodity service - transport. Uber fixes the price across all car tier's so it doesn't matter wether you get Larry or Jim, you're paying the same, their job is to get you from point A to point B. There's essentially no qualitative differentiation. What they offer isn't cheaper than a cab but the experience they offer is arguably superior and more convenient. This works and is disruptive. What AirBnB offer is a platform to connect people with spare beds, with people who want a place to stay. The qualitative offering differs from host to host, and as a result, AirBnB allow Hosts to set their own price per night, so essentially making AirBnB a platform conecting people, but allowing a free market to operate upon it. The end experience is unique, and mostly cheaper than the equivalent experience at a hotel. This works, this is disruptive.

What Fiverr are doing is offering a highly inferior service at a much lower price. They are taking a service which is not a commodity good, one with a huge spectrum of qualitative differentiation, and fixing it at a very low price. When you do that you just get a bad product bought cheap. That is not new, let alone disruptive.

The differentiator between Fiverr design product and a good quality professional designer, isn't that they don't offer the 'bells and whistles'. A 'professional', reputable designer isn't trying to upsell you on the scotch guard for your sofa to make an extra buck or two - pantone references and vector artwork aren't line items on an invoice in design, that's not what you're paying for. The gap is the quality of the final product. This isn't people offering high quality design and somehow making it a leaner, more compelling offering than traditional channels using some kind of an innovative model - this is just poor quality work pedalled on a platform.

Not everyone is prepared to pay for 'good' design. Some people just want 'something'. And there will always be those people. That both want just something, and those that produce it. That pool of people, and the rest, which need, and understand the value of good design aren't in conflict. They're totally separate groups, and they've co existed for years, and will continue to.

I can confidently say that Fiverr will not make me, or any designers I know 'think about the way we sell our services' in the manner you suggest.
Well done, Andrew! I particularly like your team photos. How long did it take to design the site, etc?
This looks sweet! Exactly what I was looking for.

One tip though, the "Start course" button is so grey that I thought it was unclickable.

http://i.imgur.com/CsBRWMB.png
From my experiences, OSM road/track data far surpasses Google Maps or Bing. What I find it lacks is good POI data, like restaurants, stores, etc.
In nearly every mainstream programming language, you call a function like this:

f(a, b, c)

But not in Haskell, where you do it like this:

f a b c

Of course, there is a reason for doing things this way in Haskell, namely making currying a natural part of the language. If f is a function of three variables, f a b binds values to the first two parameters, yielding a function of one variable.

But it's still a change and a bit of a hurdle.
A fun side-by-side comparison of OpenStreetMap in 2007 vs today:

https://mvexel.github.io/thenandnow/#10/52.2644/5.2899
A wood burning stove that generates enough electricity to power your home
This looks awesome.

I also have a question for HN. I'm sure some of you are pretty good chess players. I thought it would be interesting to learn and started looking into where to start a few days ago, but was overwhelmed by the options. Does anyone have some recommendations (in addition to Chesscademy)?
A Two-Step Plan to Stop Hackers
I judge this in part based on some experience in Virginia, where I was working for a startup that just before/as I joined got a couple of "devil" investors who we eventually realized preferred to own all of nothing instead of something of something. Sufficiently bad we retained a law firm and one day most of the company sent in our resignation from its office, 13 people from CEO and President to all the senior engineers.

These "devils" then refused to pay our salaries for the pay period up to that date, and I learned, working with the (former) company lawyer, that doing this was not just a misdemeanor, but there was a state agency staffed with humorless people (they've heard everything) tasked with extracting back pay from employers.

In most other domains there's no criminal law involved nor any special units of government tasked with this. Note also that Virginia is considered by many not to be "worker friendly".

Your example is an interesting one. Perhaps because stiffing builders and people who repair stuff is so easy, and most certainly because this involves real estate or other tangible personal property (e.g. a car), there's legal, but still civil law mechanisms in most/all states to make them whole, they can get what's generally called a Mechanic's Lien: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanic's_lien
This is a really cool concept. I feel there is something to this idea of 'drops', but hard to describe. It is like a delivered time capsule.

I like the use case of people making a prediction 'drop', then have it show right after a specific time. That and possibly long messages to be opened on a significant date or time.

Definitely need to work on putting a value prop up and letting people know what they could possibly do with the app.

edit:
just saw this on TC http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/05/drop-the-location-based-mes...
We're looking to partner with schools districts to add Chesscademy to the academic setting. Optimally, anybody would be able to set up their own chess club using the site and Chesscademy could work well with instructors both in and out of the classroom. For example, a teacher could assign courses to students and track their progress. The in-class lesson material could be derived from these observations.

The specifics are still up in the air, and we think being part of the Imagine K12 cohort this year will provide us with the educational expertise to create a product to sell to schools.
In every interview I've been in during the last few decades, I've been asked (in addition to this question) what I'm currently making "in order for us to form an offer". I've tried explaining that I believe my compensation should reflect my skill levels and experience based on the current market, and not my current salary (since that was the sole reason for leaving some of my previous jobs [0]). Even when I tell them that I'm not allowed (by my current employer) to divulge that information (which was true on some cases), they were adamant that they cannot make me an offer or even "we cannot continue this interview" until I disclose my current salary. I've never walked out of an interview in a huff as I don't see that as being professional, but I've also never been able to get past this question - even though I question the ethics of asking it.

[0]: One particular company I worked for had an a cap on what percentage raise you could receive, even when changing to completely different positions in different departments. There was as running joke that "the only way to make money here is to leave and come back". Once I left and realized just how horrifically underpaid I was there, I saw no reason to return.
There's a page that describes a range of solutions:

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/The_JavaScript_Problem
Foursquare doesn't use OSM for places:

https://developer.foursquare.com/overview/venues

I guess Google is doing their own thing, Bing is listed as using Factual:

http://factual.com/

(Along with Yelp, Trulia, GroupOn, others).

Facebook is also in the business of having a landing page for every semi interesting place (I think this is one of the things that drove Google to push Google+ so hard).
Awesome. Was just reading this earlier today, because I decided to pick it back up again after never finishing years ago. I do really enjoy it, and would like to read the rest of the Sprawl Trilogy.

A friend had a mousepad printed with this depiction of Chiba City (and I presume Case and Molly), which I use at work. :)

http://sourgasm.deviantart.com/art/Neuromancer-CGHub-Illustr...
Couldn't that be solved with xmlns?
Thanks for the feedback! We'll work on improving the contrast so that the buttons are more obvious.
Yea it's simple. Do not nest function calls when possible. Use the rich and widely available composition facilities of the language to compose functions instead of nest them. This will generally amount to a much cleaner design in the end anyways - in any language. But Haskell is one of the few languages that is abstract enough to give the ability to write these combinators.
Parkinson’s Law of Triviality in Design
I think we're talking different scales here. At the scale of things that are roughly cache sized your point makes sense. The big concern about pauses is mostly coming from users with heaps in the 10s of GB and it's pretty unlikely on a PC you'll have more than 100MB of L2.

When it comes to designing the data structures your app uses you have a point but I think it's not directly to your app or runtime's policy for reclaiming freed objects. This does raise an idea that hadn't occurred to me before though: once you have a generational moving collector you may actually get virtuous cache effects because your nursery is densely packed with live objects.

...

Ok, it turns out that this has not only been studied a little but but at least PyPy tried this at one point (I looked at the code but couldn't find it).

http://books.google.com/books?id=zVbbkWnxDP8C&lpg=PA99&ots=1...

http://pypy.readthedocs.org/en/latest/garbage_collection.htm...
Amazon is solving a problem that the individual author or reader does not share: they are making the delivery of books more efficient to the marketplace.

Books are in a strange place because the time invested consuming them far outweighs the equivalent cost of purchasing the book. I am not limited by price to the number of books I can consume each month; I am limited by time. Already many readers end up buying more books than they can read. In addition, free books are available at this place called the library.

Music, movies, and the rest of digital content is not like this. You can pick up a video game and play it for an hour, then put it down. (In fact, the stats show most apps are only used a few times, then never used again)

In an author-reader relationship, the author is trying to provide enough value for the reader to spend dozens of hours and many days consuming the material -- and more to the point, the express purpose is to somehow change the mindscape of the consumer. Good books require lots of time and change the reader forever.

So what Amazon is effectively doing is destroying the concept of reading by making it nothing more than an extended version of an mp3 song. But since you can't just consume a book in 3 minutes, more books will be sold and more books will remain unread. Books -- long form content -- will become superfluous. It's all low attention span, immediate pleasure consumption now. I imagine we'll see more and more readers buy an ebook and read a few pages and stop. The nature of reading will change.

And while this might result in more overall book sales, it doesn't do much for the individual relationship an author has with a particular reader.

There's nothing wrong with making books like every other form of digital content. Everything is bits, and bits gotta be free. But as a consumer of good books, Amazon does not have my best interests at heart. It's just playing a numbers game. My best interests actually might be books that cost 100x what they currently do: make me feel some pain and spend some careful thought about what I'm going to spend my time on.

I am not interested in delivering the maximum number of unread ebooks to the most number of non-readers. I am interested in choosing those 5 or 6 books each year that are worth my investment in time to experience. And as an author, I am not interested in maximizing sales. I am interested in maximizing impact. Amazon is friend to neither of us.