skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why is using var_dump debugging bad practice? Or is he insinuating that using var_dump while testing on a live site is bad practice?
> there are plenty of companies using Groovy, Scala, Clojure as well as Python/Ruby on the JVM

Jython would be by far the least used of those alternatives, whereas Scala the most used. Clojure's coming up strong, JRuby's making slow inroads, Kotlin's getting some traction at Ceylon's expense, whereas Groovy's on the slide.
I have no idea. While searching for an answer I found this which is too interesting to not post. Especially the "table of alphabets". Perhaps some of the "old Hebrew" characters fit?

http://www.gentlewisdom.org/qaya/academic/hebrew/Phoenician....
Racism is a politically loaded term, and it's not possible to use it out of the context of a progressive viewpoint that defines racism to be a culture of White supremacy. In this context, the author is assuming that Black women are as beautiful as Hispanic and White women, but that the racism that pervades our culture causes them to view Black features as unattractive.
Do you know why he didn't just use Arabic characters? Based on a brief survey of the Arabic Wikipedia, it looks like Latin letters are standard for variables in math these days, but what was the reason for using non-Arabic characters back then?
Would you mind elaborating more on what you mean by "Everyone who touches a website should have read Jan Tschichold". A quick search showed that Jan Tschichold has written many books (and many books have been written about him), in German, so I was wondering if there was a particular (preferably English) book you were referring to?
The Islamic Golden Age is pretty fantastic, not the first time I heard about it and usually a cause of pride among my muslim friends (and for good reason).

Too bad we're witnessing the Islamic Dark Ages right now.
Both, of course. People always assume it's developing/Middle Eastern/BRICS-style states that have the monopoly on pissing away their oil bounty, by taking the revenues and spending them rather than investing them - but it's not so, damnit!

(As I understand it, since the UK was never part of OPEC, nor restricted by any self-imposed quota a la pre-peak USA, private companies were allowed to produce as much oil as they could. This meant working through the available resources as quickly as possible, with the resulting excess holding down the prices they were sold at. (The UK - and Norway - were at one point major oil producers.) All in all, not very strategic - though the UK always seemed to do very poorly as a command economy, so, even in retrospect, probably not the wrong thing.)
Interesting, thanks for posting. I new about semi-automatons created for the Turkish rulers for entertainment but not about Al Jazari.

I would like to add that the Persian, Arab and Turkish empires benefited greatly from Chinese, Indian, Roman and Greek math, technology and science that had been developed much earlier. This frequently gets glossed over or completely ignored.
Show HN: Clamp – Common Lisp with Arc Macros and Procedures
+1 for the Setu. Have 4 of them in my office and everyone loves the chair. Design is great and very comfortable. Also a great price for what you get. You can find them for $500 - $550 with some negotiating (all dealers will discount the product for you with enough persistence or if you just ask). A+ chair.
Agreed. John McWhorter brought up a lot of decent and salient points about the words we use to describe individuals, and how simply substituting one for another doesn't really solve the problem (http://time.com/2369/richard-sherman-thug-n-word/). That can be said about a lot of social ailments in swiftly moving, developed civilizations, if I must offer a caveat.

There's a lot of bluster that goes on among certain "progressive" crowds that ultimately sums the solutions up to policing of rhetoric; and while I have to admit they're somewhat onto something with the notions that "language informs impressions", a lot of their approaches seem deeply misguided if only because there's a vacuum of nuance.

I personally don't have the answers to how to remediate the baggage that comes with cultural nomenclature... I do however believe rather sternly, that demanding a change of vernacular is not a silver bullet.
One of the best forex trading platforms there is :)
A lot of people are talking about revamping these old programs. I don't see what the problem is with less, cat, vim, etc...

I've never been using a program and wished for better functionality. Even when this was all new to me, it was never a problem figuring these out, using them, and I was always satisfied with them..

So...here's the question. I don't think these are broken, so what are you fixing?
I really don't like commenting on these threads but I had to bite here.

I call bullshit on this. 18 months of maths is a completely vacuous measure of anything and this is pandering to teachers getting even more lazy and dependent on technology as a magic bullet.

As a parent in the UK with three children at school, I can safely say that the problem is that mathematics teaching is just totally shit. The methods are totally ineffective and the fundamentals just aren't taught. It's about teaching the mechanics of passing tests, particularly at primary level which is about the SATs and nothing else. That's why this seems like such a wonderful headline and the BBC sensationalises it.

Teachers buy in every technical measure and scheme that avoids introspection and looking at the real problem.
We've reached the end of build it yourself software
Yeah there definitely comes a point with .NET/Java where, to get very high performance, you are fighting the language/runtime.

The general argument is that you are still more productive by writing 90% or 95% of you app in a managed language, in the idiomatic way. Then you use crazy tricks to tune the last 10/5%. Rather than doing the whole thing in C/C++, which will give better performance, but may not be quicker (more productive) to write.

I don't know much about D, it's interesting to find that you can opt out of GC like that.
Well good luck with the Ross Ulbricht canonization effort, sir.
Surprised "social tv" hasn't taken off more, though I guess people commenting using twitter during broadcasts kind of killed that idea I liked the pirated streams that had open chatrooms with just enough moderation to kill spam and wild political ranting where you could joke about what you're watching, kind of how taima.tv and JustinTV used to operate.
my brother, that is a bit out of context. Don't be sad about it. Success passes on to those, who work hard for the greater cause. One should have rivals, but no enemies ;)
I've heard nothing good about CenturyLink. People I know who have them as a provider almost universally hate it.
If you read one billion's materials, iPads are used as they last longer in the environment they're kept in and get better battery life. When you're charging for a day's use from solar, that matters.

The apps are also written in a cross platform framework. If a good enough Android tablet comes along, it can be used. Their Maths age 3-5 app is available on Google Play.

Disclosure: I'm familiar with the team.
> CL makes it hard not to write recursive.

Say what? Are you sure that you don't mean Scheme? CL has LOOP…
Actually, the UK half-heartedly considered joining OPEC at one point.
You realize Rackspace doesn't compete with Digital Ocean?
Basic Sublime text for the uninitiated
Sans often appears on signage, especially in Europe, where it works very well.
I'm not sure selection is a good way to think this particular problem, or management in general.

Selection operates by replicating or destroying an immutable unit (a genetic variant). People cannot be replicated, only fired. Furthermore, people are not immutable; most importantly, they can learn from their mistakes, and they can be taught.

Someone who fails at forecasting something correctly the first time might be someone who goes back, looks deeply at why they were wrong, and improves their method. Someone who succeeds might merely have gotten lucky. These people will not be identified correctly by a selection mechanism. Time and judgment, collaboration and the inculcation of expertise seem better tools in this regard.
Slight correction in the article:

"Hobbyists will tell you that making one’s own furniture is hard to justify economically"

He meant to write at the lowest levels of quality, like particle board, maybe with photographic veneer, or at most the lower levels of plywood.

There's a binary furniture market of $50 particle board that looks nice for about a month till it falls apart, and the four figure "if you have to ask, you can't afford it" market of somewhat decent stuff.

This is based on a couple decades of homeowner and wood butcher experience.

As subset of quality is I enjoy radical customization. I don't find a bookcase to fit an obscure corner, I make it to fit perfectly.

Its also extraordinarily cheap given the labor cost of zero. If I were not risking my digits on my table saw I'd likely be watching brainless TV or drinking or some other waste of time... this hobby provides something useful at a very low $$$ per hour cost.
Ask HN: How do you manage ideas, tasks, notes and other stuff?
I have tried almost all the tools but nothing scales well. What do you use and how?
Honestly I have no worries about this or any other "technical" issue like financial fraud cases. If a cop can learn enough to catch someone then it is possible to explain that to a nurse or an electrician.

Jurors don't switch off because they are learning how to move money between banks or break into servers - they switch off because it takes three months to present a case.
The Banū Mūsā brothers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ban%C5%AB_M%C5%ABs%C4%81

"The most popular of their publications was the Kitāb al-Ḥiyal (The Tricks Book), which was mostly the work of Aḥmad, the middle brother, was a book filled with one hundred mechanical devices. There were some real practical inventions in the book including a lamp that would mechanically dim, alternating fountains, and a clamshell grab. Eighty of these devices were described as "trick vessels" that showed a real mastery of mechanics, with a real focus on the use of light pressure. Some of the devices seem to be replications of earlier Greek works, but the rest were much more advanced than what the Greeks had done."
If It Sounds Like Writing, Rewrite It (2001)
> Hopefully the FBI won't be shooting people dead as a means of preparing a legal case

It's certainly a novel approach to jury selection. Probably would be popular amongst a few State Bars.
Actually, [spamd](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamd) configured to [blacklist-only](http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD-current/man8/...) works quite awesomely. I reduced my spam volume from several dozens a day to no more than a pair a week. I haven't had any loss in legitimate email, or anyone complaining about inapropiate bounces.

I'm actually surprised, since I actually expected more spam to get through.
I love this video and I'm glad it's getting attention on HN. It captures a bunch of stuff - pride in your work; actually making something non-trivial; etc.

(I posted a link to it a year ago in a comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6116806#up_6117341 )
I've seen this before, this and another, younger Italian guy. Excellent and impressive display of mechanical skill.
> I really should be using a programmable tracer like SystemTap

I was gonna say, I have done exactly this using SystemTap.

Looking at your script, stap has a lot more "batteries included" so such a script ends up being a lot shorter.

Even with a custom guru-mode function to pull more data out the skb, such as window size or retransmission timer, it's easy to do this in under 30 lines using SystemTap.

SystemTap also has the advantage of being able to modify data in the running kernel, not just read it. I haven't used this a great deal, but some other guys at work have used it to reproduce corruption bugs which would otherwise take months to re-appear.
First we're not a monolith. Second, I don't see people advocating for due process so much as I see outright advocacy and willful ignorance of the idea that it's possible for the FBI to indict someone without violating their due process.
And the judge who released him from prison expressed skepticism about that.

Regardless, two wrongs...
Are you a cop? You gotta tell me if you are.
IRC is for multi-user on-topic chats (eg: support, help channels, or specific topics, etc), while XMPP is more for personal IM. Plus, XMPP is open, standard, and decentralized.
He is saying using `var_dump` on a live server is a bad practice.
With that kind of thinking you might like the site/book at betterexplained.com.
Sure they do. http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/
Yeah, I'm pretty certain that he means using var_dump on a live server (especially of $_SERVER) is incredibly dumb.
Did you read the blog post? Here's what he fixed:

>So, now it:

>Speaks terminfo (X/Open Curses) instead of ancient BSD termcap

>Uses glob(3C) instead of a hack involving the shell and a helper program (lessecho, which
I've removed from my tree.)

>Functions properly as /usr/bin/more, both with and without -e (even on broken xterms)

>Is fully ANSI C (or ISO C, if you prefer)

>Passes illumos' cstyle code style checks

>Is lint(1) clean
Yes, but that's not why he was released. Those charges are still untested, he was let off the hook due to the venue.
The simple pairing heap has excellent practical performance
That's really interesting. It would be great to read more about the different open source contributions and the people involved. Haven't played it for a long time. E.g., how did a person that is perceived as poisonous become a maintainer of a seemingly important tool of the community? He must've done some things right, or not?
I haven't done it, but according to a tutorial [1] you can directly access malloc / free and bypass the gc

[1] http://qznc.github.io/d-tut/memory.html
Hotels, food, drink and other necessities for the 1000 party-goers, plus hiring local staff to run the event. Bud light is not really going to support you for three days straight.
The slight difference is the FBI is investigating the source of the Silk Road (not illegal), vs. trying to obtain private information of folks from ATT (illegal).
It is odd, given that other scientists did use Arabic characters to notate their diagrams (notably, Al-khwarizmi and Ibn Al-Haytham). Perhaps it's because of his roots.
Every browser has supported this since forever
From the status of the Ubuntu ppa, and (I thought) comments on his site. Thanks for pointing out that's not the case.
No, it competes with Linode. Having used both, I found Linode vastly superior in every way. (Currently using Linode for rationalwiki.org. Cheap and reliable.)
Wasn't 9/11 funded by some options trades or short selling made just before the event? Not exactly a cash business either.
Facebook's New 'Privacy Dinosaur'
Pretty awesome guy. And this is sad: "mechanics are nowadays mere fitters" ...

Though I am sure there are plenty of passionate, talented engineers around, just like him, it's just the world that changed and it's not all bad.
RAX is more full-service, sure, but it seems the market isn't as sustainable there.
One thing I have noticed is that less's filtering ('&<pattern>') is sloooooooooow compared to grep.

If that were improved I'd never have to use tail -f ever again.

Someday, I'll look into it.
Of course they do. In the sense that a smartphone app competes with a printed book.

While they are completely different things, for many users in many circumstances they are substitutes.

I worked for a startup that got into the rackspace program and had several thousand $/month free in rackspace services. The same amount of raw power on DO would have cost 200$/month, but a couple of 20$/month DO VMs would have been ample.

And for prototyping you usually don't need anything more sophisticated than a VM (or a free heroku account for that matter ...)
Hetzner down in multiple locations
It's definitely bad practice on a live server, and frankly its a pretty painful way to debug PHP, at least without xdebug.
Yes I do indeed like that site and have purchased the ebook already!

I have actually self-taught my oldest two their entire mathematical knowledge outside of school (bar that, physics and software engineering, I know little else) and they've done wonderfully compared to their peers because they understand the meaning and not just the method. That's the real tragedy of the education system here.
Business cards? Writing down their address? Smartphones? Bluetooth? Etc.
The problem is why there's no pharma companies in those countries.

And why they don't have refrigerators, and why they're eating bushmeat in the first place?

Are they just too lazy to raise cows like everybody else?
Rolling Stone.

Cosmopolitan magazine.

Vice has been mentioned.
Owning an Undergraduate Student.DeepWeb,Bitcoins and a Social Engineering Plan
Thanks for your response!

It seems like the basic idea could be used for anything. There's nothing about zooming that makes it particularly appropriate for a book launch; a simple comic would do to mark the occasion and Pixels could have launched later. So the use of this idea for this project is a choice and the deadline is entirely self-imposed.

(Also I do enjoy the occasional hackathon, though I won't stay up late for it. I'll stay up late for entirely different and probably just as bad reasons.)
I'm not attacking the Common Lisp community. If I were, I certainly would not have opened my comments with the idea that the community places a hurdle before itself when marketing the language it loves. And one of the things I love about Lisp is the way in which I share a love for the language with the larger community.[1]

I have nothing against commercial tools. I've spent many thousands of my own dollars on shrinkwrapped bits over the years. That doesn't change the fact that shrinkwrapped bits are continuing to diminish in popularity due to thirty years of Stallmanism running in parallel with nearly thirty years of "greed is good" and even more years of a hacker ethos where spending 80 hours to pirate fifty dollars worth of software is a hobby.

Why care if the Common Lisp community likes me? It don't like most people. It would be foolish to its dislike personally. In fact, why blame them when Hell is other people?

The upshot is that I care enough to say something constructive. I don't wish the Common Lisp community anything but success. I'm not a jaded ex-lover. I hope it meets someone new and that someone turns out to be its soul mate.

[1] Going so far as to coin the term "love song to Lisp": https://hn.algolia.com/?q=love+songs+to+lisp#!/comment/forev...
Not for string search, but I got fed up with the extremely long time it takes less to precalculate line counts on large files when I was working with log files of a size in the order of GBs. The result is here: https://github.com/nhaehnle/less

Since it was only a small hack to scratch the itch I was having at the time, I never really completed that project. For example, backwards line counting is not sped up, which can sometimes be noticeable.

If you feel like working on less-speedup issues, feel free to drop me a line.
People would just release versions with the adverts cut. What do you think goes on with HDTV releases at the moment?
Avicenna is awesome, the equivalent of the greatest of the ancient Greeks. His name comes up these days mostly courtesy alternative medicine woo pushers, which is way worse than he deserves.
What was the subject of the post that was deleted? (Is there an archive of it?)

Edit: from other comments: http://machinesentience.com/why_you_should_never_pay_for_onl...
Thanks for the link, that's nice to know.

You get some of that functionality in .NET, with the new GC mode SustainedLowLatency [1]. But it doesn't guarantee no GC, it just tried to avoid it.

> Enables garbage collection that tries to minimize latency over an extended period. The collector tries to perform only generation 0, generation 1, and concurrent generation 2 collections. Full blocking collections may still occur if the system is under memory pressure.

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.runtime.gclat...
I only noticed today after somebody sent me a screenshot that i'd been viewing my own website zoomed in at two levels. I updated the stylesheet and bumped the size up earlier but it might not come through without a hard refresh because of crazy caching™
Why? How much revenue do the teams and leagues get from TV per-viewer now? Why couldn't they get more by cutting out the middlemen (cable companies and TV networks) and just get subscription fees directly from viewers, and ad revenue directly from advertisers?
FACTORIE has some nice features, but it's not as robust as Mallet. Factorie is a ML incubator more than a robust library, it's in Scala, another inculator platform which also doesn't help. Factorie has some interesting features for sure, but the quality of programming is just not there. It's developed and maintained mainly by students which makes absolute sense given that it appears that Factorie is more for tutorials.
>So...here's the question. I don't think these are broken, so what are you fixing?

First, it's not just about something not working. It's about creating tools that are extensible and understandable and hackable. Open Source is not just about "working", it's about being modifiable by the end user. All this cruft (a mess of 200 obsolete architectures, dead code and deprecated library support that nobody used since 1988) works against that goal.

Second, there are things that would be essential for some people, like international users (e.g proper multibyte support) that cannot be added due to dependancy of some custom methods of handling encodings. That's not some wishy washy magical unicorn feature request, it's essential for the main operation of what less does for those that have to deal with these encodings.

Third, there's nothing wrong in taking pride and crafting finely your tools. UNIX is supposed to be made of things that "do one thing and do it well". Less having its own utf-8 support breaks this division of responsibility. We have libaries for that. Same for getopts vs it's custom options parsing.
There are more people that care about things like this than you'd think... I worked on a 31 Alpha Romero gas tank a few weeks ago, with a friend. There are old cars that people really care about, as well as old boats and airplanes. There are machinists who make miniature engines, just like this guy, and all sorts of other things. That type of craftsmanship is hardly dead (although it is getting very hard to find!)

I'm into black smithing, which is an even more rare type of craftsmanship. There are all sorts of resources online. Check out ABANA [http://abana.org/] to start. But whatever it is that you're into there is bound to be someone else into it. Try the SCA [http://www.sca.org/] if you want some really old-school stuff.
Sure, but this was a rangefinder lens to begin with, and I like it better on a rangefinder camera. :D

(Besides, I knew a guy and it was a little cheaper than usual.)
I miss Aereo and the ability to watch live local broadcast channels on my Mac Mini.

Copyright recently has killed a few venues online where I was paying to watch their content. I'd still pay them directly for an Aereo service if they provided it. I will never pay for Cable TV again .. bloated, over priced junk in which you have to deal with horrible customer service! No thanks!

I do see Dish is coming out with an over the top cable like service. It's sure to hobbled at first, but maybe in the long term it will provide a solid experience.
The title of the post was: "Why you should never pay for online dating". This appears to be a rehosted version of it:

http://static.izs.me/why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dat...
Emacs with HTML, Zencoding and YASnippet
I'm no mechanical engineer but doesn't two crank shaft decrease efficiency quite a bit? Also introduces a lot more moving parts.