skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> ...precisely the kind of languages that many programmers will claim are "too hard"

Your argument seems to be that Prolog and Haskell are high-level and Prolog and Haskell are complicated and hard to learn. I agree up to that point. That doesn't imply that any high-level declarative language must be hard to learn. SQL and Excel are declarative high-level languages (more so than Haskell and Prolog in terms of abstraction from the execution model). Both have had much more success with non-programmers than imperative languages have.

Bloom is a much simpler language than, say, Ruby. It doesn't have data-structures. There is no control-flow. Semantics are independent of the order of evaluation. The entire history of execution can be displayed to the user in a useful form. Distributed algorithms can be expressed much more directly (eg their paxos implementation is almost a line for line port of the original pseudo-code definition). We have actually tested Bloom-like systems on non-programmers and had much better results than with imperative or functional languages.

> I bet almost everyone agrees that...

The key part of that quote was "We should use that luxury to implement systems..." ie give up low-level control over performance and memory layout in exchange for simpler reasoning. Note that in both Excel and SQL the user doesn't have to reason about what order things happen in or where things are stored. The same applies to successful dataflow environments like Labview. In contrast, programmer-centric languages like Haskell and Prolog require understanding data-structures and Prolog requires understanding the execution model to reason about cut or to avoid looping forever in dfs.

Excel, SQL and Labview are all flawed in their own ways but we can build on their success rather than writing them off as not real programming.
It actually isn't spooky at all once you understand it properly (but it is almost never explained properly, especially in the popular press). Measurement and entanglement are really the same phenomenon. The process of "measuring" photon A was actually begun when it became entangled with photon B (and vice versa). We call it a "measurement" when a large number of particles (like a measurement apparatus or a brain) become mutually entangled with each other. See:

http://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf

for a more detailed explanation.
As far as I have ever heard, you must collapse the wave function to measure a Q-bit, and that is when entanglement always stops. However if we can create systems where a collapse can always 'retrigger' a new entanglement we could theoretically create computers that run at the Planc Time as the clock rate, but we don't know how to do that yet. That's decades off, or centuries.
A bonus aspect of this kind of approach -- funding can favor the disadvantaged over the people who could probably fund themselves with a little extra effort, (like "live in Mom's basement for a year").

A kickstarter approach effectively blocks people who don't have friends & family with spare cash (and whose mothers don't have houses with spare rooms either).
Because U.S. demographics are rapidly changing, it's important to look at these figures adjusted for the overall aging of the population: http://crr.bc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/IB_14-4.pdf (page 3). The decline in labor force participation rate is much less than it seems if you adjust for age.
Revealing the existence isn't anywhere the same as revealing the guts of its operations, which for all we know could allow compromise or direct access.

PRISM is bad enough in US hands, but can you imagine if Oceania/Arstotzka got their hands on the data? (irrelevant countries as to not have to argue that)
Enriched Pingdom Events? Finally
Do note that this measure is of people aged 16+, so it decreases with both longer education on average and an aging population (where a greater % of people are retired.)
lisper, actually measurement is the act of collapsing the wave, and entanglement only exists before the wave function collapse. It's possible to never measure something, and it could be entangled forever.
I suspect you're exaggerating at least a tiny bit, since the difference between their unemployment rate and the official figure is not constant: theirs has been trending up over the past 4 years, while the official figures are going down.
Look at Google's Python Style Guide: http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/pyguide.ht...

There is almost nothing in there that sounds like a landmine. Rather, some general guidance about "don't use global variables," "x may not be thread safe," and "don't write overly complex lambdas."

My favorite "gotcha" in Python is using e.g. a list as a default argument. That's in the guide, and it sucks, but Python has surprisingly few such problems for newcomers.
My biggest use case for my iPad is reading textbooks and a phone of that size is really only good for reading text that can easily be moved around like a novel.
I guess a part of me was expecting a re-direct to the wikipedia article on PageRank.
I will just call you a troll right off the bat. Entanglement & FTL is such a well known meme, and you make such an obviously false statement. :)
Google's end-to-end key distribution proposal
It is worth noting that this vaccine merely prevents anal infection from monkeys, it is also important that you avoid sharing needles with them.
I agree, but still find it troubling. If a person is laid off, or if a person retires and is not replaced, the net effect is still one less job.

If population growth continues to outpace job growth, we're going to end up with a nasty game of economic musical chairs.
#1 I care more about the number jobs over time, not the unemployment rate. Absolute numbers vs ratios.

#2 I also want to get an idea of how many people are over employed and under employed.

--

Payroll tax receipts show how many people are employed.

Then do a straight forward head count.

Employment rate = jobs / people.

Then guessimate (tally) the number of hours worked.

Yearly Employment load = hours reported / ( people * 2080 )

Why is this hard?

Why do we need sampling, when we can just measure the totals (with a margin of error)?

Why do we have fudge factors like "discouraged workers"? People are either working or they're not. Student, disabled, retired, whatever, they're still unemployed. When elderly people continue to work past 65 and the working poor have multiple jobs, I'm really not terribly interested in splitting hairs. Break up employment rates by demographic group, if it matters that much.
If you just need occasional printing done locally (so you can pick it up, inspect it, or ask questions in person), you can use this site to find a shop doing 3D printing with this website:
http://www.3dhubs.com/

Might be less hassle than renting an actual machine.
It might help mentally, but it won't reduce the number of projections. You'd have to be able to see every point in the whole 3D volume, not just the surface.
An old metaphor: conventional brain-to-brain communication is literally serialization. The thought is serialized as a sequence of letters or sounds, as writing or talking, and deserialized by the reader/listener. As with data structures and JSON/XML, the structures and serial representation might be similar or utterly different. But this mapping is taken care of at each end, so that people can communicate with a common tongue or lingua franca, even when their own internal representations differ greatly from it, and from each other.

My takehome is that without an intermediate serial representation (and mapping to/from), direct brain-to-brain communication will have to tackle mapping between these differences in internal representation in some other way (assuming such differences exist, which I believe they do).
IM and email are different things. People still use email because IM is not meant to replace it.
The undecidability arises from the way that C's lexer hack for types interacts with the way C++ chose to implement templates. There are other approaches to implementing generics that could have avoided this unfortunate interaction while remaining backwards compatible with C (as C does not have generics).
Apple’s New Digital Wallet Patent References ‘Virtualised Currencies’
I've only skimmed the arXiv link briefly, but the method does not rely on interference between photons of two different frequencies. In optical experiments, entangled photons are frequently generated through a nonlinear process in a crystal. High energy photons go in and with some probability lead to the production of two lower energy photons. Energy and momentum conservation lead to constraints on what these can be, such that if you've measured one photon you know all about the other. This is how they are entangled.

In the setup of this experiment (see Fig. 1 of the arXiv link), there are two conversion crystals labeled NL1 and NL2. These convert the pump laser into two longer wavelengths, referred to as the signal wavelength and idler wavelength. The object is probed at the idler wavelength, but the interference depends only on photons at the signal wavelength.
International Megabank Santander Commissions Study on Bitcoin
And if it is?

Well of course there is Russia then there is Russia. Russia the government, or some criminal organization. One could make sarcastic remark "But what is the difference?". And there would be some dose of truth in there.

Besides that, it is interesting how this immediately got to the "retaliation for sanctions" spin. Maybe they have a mole /informant that tipped them off Russian government is behind this using a criminal organization as a front?
Makes you wonder if this is indeed a permanent change in the earth's water distribution, rather than just a time of low flow rates. I don't think our climate models can predict it. Not because of atmosphereic, but because of geothermal. We can predict atmospheric, but geothermal is as unpredictable as earthquakes.
Do you happen to have any recommendations?
Does anyone know of a chart lib has the ability to make a "stacked" area chart where each series gets its own Y-axis, similar to cubism.js?

I like how cubism visualizes streams of data where each needs its own Y-axis but they are related on the X axis (usually a time domain.) However cubism's mechanism of updating is sort of weird, and each value needs to be one pixel. I tried to use d3's "streams" example but quickly got lost there.

On another note, I've had good luck using Rickshaw and updating the `graph.series[i].data` array using shift and push then re-calling `graph.render()`. This is what Rickshaw's `FixedDuration` appears to do under the covers (see source of this example http://code.shutterstock.com/rickshaw/examples/fixed.html) - but I don't actually use FixedDuration, just update the data array.
> In other words the big question was: "will Amazon ditch their only reason to sell hardware?"
Amazon's hardware products are gateways to the paid-for content they sell; they're completely designed -- software wise -- to attend that purpose.

I think the idea is that there's a trade-off between ineffectiveness of this strategy and screw-the-userness, and the parent comment was thinking that maybe they'd realize they should move more down the spectrum towards a better product for the user (i.e. that they were coming on too strong with the lock-in).

Aside from whatever ethical qualms you might have about various degrees of lock-in, it's not unreasonable to think that people didn't respond favorably to the level of lock-in Amazon tried with their tablets: hence the hope that they might try an alternative strategy of lock-in (or another way to promote their products) without sacrificing user experience.

As an example of two points on the spectrum, imagine a comparison between shipping Chrome that only allows Google Search in the omnibox and the way Chrome actually is, which allows you to pick your search engine. Obviously Google is getting some advantage out of even a Chrome browser in which the search engine can be changed, but it's clearly further along the spectrum towards better user experience (and less effective lock-in) than a Google-Search-only omnibox would be.
Scientists Turn Bad Memories into Good Inside the Brains of Mice
Waffle on Social Media
I think you misunderstood my point somewhat. I'm not saying that Excel solved the version control problem - far from it. Manual version control by emailing copies of spreadsheets was identified as a major cause of errors in various studies.

My point is that for end-user programming to work we need version control, deployment, packaging etc to scale down as well as up. The software industry has a tendency to fetishize scaling up and ignore scaling down.

Experienced professional programmers still struggle with git in their day-to-day workflow (http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Users/bend/ppig2014/13Church-Soderbe...). The average end-user has no chance. Even if the underlying data model is something like git, the experience for the user needs to be more like undo-tree or etherpad.

Excel smooths the learning curve for calculation/simulation - you can get started by just putting in some numbers and learning a few basic functions. If that's all you need, that's all you have to learn. I want to see the same pay-as-you-go approach for all our tools.
57% tax rate. Not much regard for personal liberties, harsh laws on drugs.
Show HN : Banyan- Social collaboration iPhone app
I can help you as I sell health insurance...You may be eligible for a subsidy...I am a Licensed and bonded agent. I can answer many questions for you if you want to talk. You will not want Cobra as it will be more expensive then you need to pay. Remember Cobra is the full cost of your Insurance with no help from your employer. kaufmanins@gmail.com
High-Tech Sleuthing Cracks Mystery of Death Valley's Moving Rocks
Craigslist for iOS
But with a shorter block time, they can make more attempts in the same time span... Even if each attempt has a low probability of success on its own, wouldn't the higher number of attempts make it more likely to succeed at least once?

I was led to believe the purpose of slow (long) confirmations was to reduce the risk of an attacker mining an alternative chain in secret (to be revealed later as a hijack and a double spend), by making it unlikely to be able to sustain a high hashrate (multiplied by "luck"?)
This SHODAN search query will show you other 418s:

http://www.shodanhq.com/search?q=port%3A80+HTTP%2F1.0+418+te...
Please read the linked posts and papers for answers to your questions.
AMS Employment survey – 2012-2013 math PhDs (pdf, 1.3MB)
Some more tips from someone who does this every day.

1) Be careful with CSV files and UNIX tools - most big CSV files with text fields have some subset of fields that are text quoted and character-escaped. This means that you might have "," in the middle of a string. Anything (like cut or awk) that depends on comma as a delimiter will not handle this situation well.

2) "cut" has shorter, easier to remember syntax than awk for selecting fields from a delimited file.

3) Did you know that you can do a database-style join directly in UNIX with common command line tools? See "join" - assumes your input files are sorted by join key.

4) As others have said - you almost invevitably want to run sort before you run uniq, since uniq only works on adjacent records.

5) sed doesn't get enough love: sed '1d' to delete the first line of a file. Useful for removing those pesky headers that interfere with later steps. Not to mention regex replacing, etc.

6) By the time you're doing most of this, you should probably be using python or R.
Signed up for Pluralsight this month, and I'm getting a fair amount of value from it so far, but I don't feel like that value is going to be a straight line over time.

I feel pretty confident that it's going to decline as I consume more material of interest to me and less material that I'm interested is created simultaneously.

At $29 / month it's a good value for me now, but in a couple of months I'm pretty sure I'm going to drop my membership until something comes a long that I must watch. (This time Hanselman and Conery's Art of Public Speaking got me to sign up.)
Post-mortem for Ludum Dare game made with my rapid game dev engine/tool 'cgame'
Thank you for doing this, it is really fucking cool.
Highcharts is amazing, but it is not distributable with open source software. My team at edX recently migrated away from Highcharts to nvd3 for this very reason. The state of charting is such that good packages are expensive. There are some mediocre packages for free. D3 is the only package we found that met our needs.
For work, we had to fork jqplot to add features like heatmaps, zooming, etc.:
https://github.com/scattering/jqplot.science

We also have the notion of "interactors" which allow you to add draggable widgets to a plot:
http://ncnr.nist.gov/instruments/magik/calculators/calcR_wf....

To see the heatmap in action, you can look at:
http://ncnr.nist.gov/ipeek/singleplotwindow.html?instrument=...

There are of course glitches, but hopefully you find some of this useful!
Who's in the Office? The American Workday in One Graph
Few, if any. Highcharts is an awesome package.
Yoshua Bengio on Deep Learning
Lunch Pitch – Validate Your Business Ideas
He's not saying features don't matter. He's saying that a printer with tons of features that can't make a decent print is not a good printer.
I believe you have confused undefined behavior and implementation defined behavior. Undefined behavior means that the code is not legal, and if the compiler encounters it, it is allowed to eliminate it, and all consequential code. (The linked posts and papers have lots of examples of this.)

Implementation defined behavior means that the code is legal, but the compiler has freedom to decide what to do. It, however, is not allowed to eliminate it.
You aren't aware just how many security-critical C programs invoke potentially undefined behaviour today.

Every time you write '+' in a C program between two signed values, do you do an overflow check beforehand? Do you know what it takes to write that overflow check? Or do you do a global dataflow analysis of the program to prove that it can't overflow?

Saying that 95% (at a conservative guess, IMO) of C programs out there are wrong makes for a strong argument for this proposal, not against it. Arguing for a technical correctness that is observably almost impossible to achieve in the wild is what's really pointless.
Ask HN: Companies that don't use whiteboard coding interviews?
In light of the recent submission on how almost everyone sucks at technical interviewing, I was wondering if anyone knows of some good companies that don't use the "write code at the whiteboard" approach of interviewing.

Background: I'm a junior level engineer. I can talk about technical topics (I was a math TA in grad school, and I have no problem talking about code I've written), but coding in front of anyone induces extreme performance anxiety. I'm therefore interested more in companies that do a homework type problem and then have candidates talk about their solution in the interview.

From the previous post, I know Matasano and npm do this. Who else?
I guess it would depend on your throughput rate. We've been using a port of jqplot:
https://github.com/scattering/jqplot.science

You can see it in action at:
http://ncnr.nist.gov/ipeek/

We developed this to allow people to monitor experiments from the comfort of their hotel room. Our rates are relatively slow on most instruments (no faster than 1 pt/sec, where a pt may be effectively an image, or just a single datapoint).

Right now, we're not running, but it's fun to watch when it's updating.
I always figured that sampling, and electoral voting, are legacy mechanics from when it wasn't as easy to tally large numbers quickly (via technology). Real, per-person voting (there's probably a term for that?) -- and even itemized taxation (e.g. choose schools, sanitation, law enforcement, 'defense', etc.) -- should be entirely within our capabilities now. But, of course, politics is a slow-rolling stone.
I opened my LendingClub account in a roth IRA for the same reason. Its not a very tax efficient investment, and I don't want to deal with it at tax time.

Be forewarned, though, that you can't buy or sell loans on the 3rd party exchange with a tax advantaged account.
You're right about the drug harshness: that's a bit disappointing.

Where do you see that personal liberties are a problem? (http://freedomhouse.org/country/sweden makes it sound fine)

As for taxes: they have great education, health, and other social benefits. For some people, that's worthwhile.
It was hard sticking to $25 but other than that one investment I was able to remain patient even though it took me almost 6 weeks to invest my full amount. There was just one person I really felt like I could take the extra risk. Incidentally that person paid off the entire loan in the first payment.
I'm not sure how helpful this will be to a lot of new and aspiring business-owners. In my work, I've had to spend a lot of time reminding both engineers and business-types that You Are Not Google.

Engineers are particularly bad on this front. I've seen teams blow huge amounts of time building massive, distributed, fail-over systems, because that's what Google does. Even though the load could be handled by a couple of dedicated boxes, and existing customers are screaming for crucial functionality.

Scaling is a problem you deal with when your growth rate says you have to -- not when your servers are sitting idle, waiting for a sudden rush of customers will come any day now.

There's nothing wrong trying to learn as much as you can from a bunch of smart people, but that's not the same as copying the things that they've done because "it worked for them and they're successful now".

Statistically speaking, your company is probably a lot smaller than Google, and you have very different problems than Google does.
https://www.google.com.ni/maps/place/Amazon/@9.966497,-84.11...
How Cops and Hackers Will Abuse California’s New Phone Kill-Switch Law

FTFY
Actually not correct.

They report inflation and other economic figures using the methods that the government previously used before "moving the goalposts" in order to report more "convenient" numbers.
Nowhere in the forms[1] does it seem to have an indication for race. Are you saying that after being accepted to the country, and seeing your colour, that they'd suddenly find an excuse to deport you?

I'm aware the country is very homogeneous, but never heard of explicit discrimination.

1 https://www.migrationsverket.se/download/18.5e83388f141c129b...
Here's the article in Nature:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v512/n7515/full/nature1...

The abstract is much more useful than the Symmetry Magazine summary. Physicists have been measuring solar neutrinos for decades, and doing so in real time. The important news here is that they've detected the p-p neutrinos for the first time. It's a long-sought detection.

Though it's tiny in the Nature preview, Figure 3 is the result.

Congratulations, Borexino!

The Scientific American article is also more instructive:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/solar-neutrinos-de...
I learned the same lesson long ago with printed circuit boards.

Renting has the additional advantage that you're not stuck with the particular technology that you bought. If two jobs benefit from 2 printing technologies, you can have both.

On the other hand, a benefit of having your own proto shop is that if you're skilled, you can prototype and modify quicker than you can specify. And don't overlook ancient methods. You can still do a lot with woodworking tools.
On the contrary, it's better to look close. Death to the public squeamishness about human biology, I say! Know and understand how your body travels through life, don't fear it and put it out of your mind :)
I think of those stacked charts as a stack of multiple charts that happen to share a timeline. With rickshaw I just stack a bunch of graphs on top of each other in the page, and give the bottom one an X axis.