skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Conversely, just because something is published as a scientific paper doesn't mean it's worth the paper it's printed on.
Put.io Redesign
> I'm sure you know that monopolies are illegal in the USA?

Not true: http://www.girardgibbs.com/antitrust-monopoly/
Yeah, hashes or even CRC codes would be non-starters... Unless the hash or cdc was stored in the input being fuzzed, then it's just a matter of iterating over the hash byte by byte.

Constant-time compares however would probably stump the fuzzer.
This thread reminded me of a draft post I've been sitting on for a while, related to ENTITY tags in XML and XXE exploits.

Basically, it's really easy to leave default XML parsing settings (for things like consuming RSS feeds) and accidentally open yourself up to reading files off the filesystem.

I did a full write-up and POC here: http://mikeknoop.com/lxml-xxe-exploit
I don't usually use mobile and my monitors are not stacked tall enough yet to avoid scrolling. I often struggle with pages that have a fixed heading and scrolling body that doesn't usually seem to scroll the correct amount and the header blocks the top part of what I am reading. I think that overlay of translucent links works quite well. It doesn't detract from what I am reading, maximizes the vertical height, and scrolls correctly.
No, monopolies aren't necessarily illegal in the USA. But they can be depending on the behavior of a monopolist.

From http://www.girardgibbs.com/antitrust-monopoly/:

> Monopolies are illegal if they are established or maintained through improper conduct, such as exclusionary or predatory acts. This is known as anticompetitive monopolization.
Although in the past I've implemented Xapian [1] over Sphinx [2], Sphinx today seems to be much better, but both Xapian and Sphinx are under-appreciated compared to Solr [3] and Elasticsearch [4].

[1] http://xapian.org/

[2] http://sphinxsearch.com/

[3] http://lucene.apache.org/solr/

[4] http://www.elasticsearch.org/
Great list, I'm downloading many of them now!
You can get IDE features in vim: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Use_Vim_like_an_IDE
Want your kids to learn coding? These are the best apps out there
Impact of Grothendieck's program on TCS
Pagerank definitely made a difference - but I've always argued that the speed of Google results also was a major factor in winning over consumers (and something I rarely hear people mention). I remember the first time I saw results from Google, I simply couldn't believe they could have delivered them that quickly.

I think Google's success can be attributed to the "4x factor" - that is, that in order to change consumer behavior, you need a solution that is not the same or twice as good as current technology - you need a solution that is, at minimum, 4 times better. That's what Google Search delivered (and the iPhone, Uber, et al).

So for me it is easy to understand why people don't switch to Bing or whatever - their results are maybe, at best, 1.5x as good as Google - not good enough to alter behavior.
I've done professional training, but never in a programming language. Having helped to hire trainers before in front end engineering, CSS, Javascript, HTML 5, etc, I know that their billing rates were very similar to other professional services providers. Specifically, their rate was whatever they felt reasonable. When I traveled for on site training, I would charge $2,500 to $5,000 per day, depending on how far I was traveling, etc. Local on site training was a different story, normally billed at the same exact hourly rate as I provided other clients.
I would say that it was technology + design, rather than technology alone.

It's also very important to remember that Google also looked different than Yahoo!, AltaVista, etc. They were large portals with huge numbers of links. It was pretty confusing. Google was very simple. There was a search bar on a clean white screen.
From memory (sorry, it was a while back) we actually started with Elasticsearch, but it was way to heavy and looked for an alternative solution. Even with a single user it was consuming way too much memory.
I think most people are using embedded Jetty or Netty (or even Tomcat in embedded mode) so deployment is just a jar that can be run with any old JRE.
If the criticism here is that Valve isn't sufficiently focussing its employees' efforts on revenue-earning activities then I don't think that's the case. Aside from Steam, they're raking in money from the monetisation of Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike:Global Offensive, and above all Dota 2 right now. The open-allocation system is apparently backed up by a peer-review system which distributes bonus money in proportion to how much money you've contributed to the profits recently. If anything they seem to be too focussed on chasing monetisation opportunities at the expense of boring and non-lucrative bugfixing.
Greatly appreciate someone able to translate this from parable-speak to logical-speak for me.
>>Java8's lambdas + streams provide significant improvements.

It will take more than a decade before we see any decent adoption of Java 8 in the industry.

You are still going to see piles and piles of getters/setters, Enums, your design patterns taken to far extreme. Writing such pointless ceremonial code is the bloodline of Java community.

Merely introducing a new version hardly changes anything.
What it takes to build a website
Oh, hey! Bubbles!
I know that the old saying of "don't judge a book by its cover" has been around a long time for a very good reason, but I honestly can't get past the title of this article. I find myself incapable of taking it seriously.
A quick google search suggests that the average commute is 25 minutes, and about 0.2% of the population has a megacommute of over 1.5 hours. For comparison 4.3% work from home.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/03/05/america...

Unfortunately, I don't believe the census tracks time spent fucking around at work.
I don't think the mechanics of how you quote it to them matter all that much, to be honest. They're more concerned with a) what they get and b) what the cost is than how you break down your line items. Instead, I would prepare a few backup plans such that you can negotiate scope rather than negotiating rate if they come back with the answer that your initial quote is out of the budget.

Example:

Proposal A: Curriculum creation + 15 hours live training for 23 attendees = $25,000

Proposal B: Everything in A plus (fill in the blank) = $35,000

Proposal C: Everything in B plus (fill in the blank) = $50,000

So you could potentially have a conversation like "Alright, the budget is only $40k, so we can't afford the proposal." "No problem, we just move the (email support or whatever) out of scope and then we can do the $35k option." "Oh great." or "$50k sounds a little steep." "If you'd like a less expensive option to get started, we can just move (the email support or whatever) out of scope and do the $35k option." "Well we really want the email support." "Sure, that makes a lot of sense. After all, you have 23 developers working on this project, so if we shave a day off your delivery timeline that saves you, hmm, $23k or so, right?" "Sounds about right." "I think its quite reasonable to expect that personalized email support about their exact blocking issues might let us shave at least a day off delivery timelines, don't you agree?" "Plausible." "So seen in that light, it's virtually guaranteed ROI for you to go for the email support in addition to the training, right?" "Alright, sure, let's do it."
I'm sure you don't mean it this way, but you should know that culturally, using people's names when replying to them the way you're doing often comes across as condescending.
Doesn't matter if things cost more in the US - the numbers given are adjusted for purchasing power. They represent the fact that in the US, a given worker produces a larger basket of goods.
I don't know, I think these projects just reduce interactive fiction to the level of a Choose Your Own Adventure, and are often even less interactive than that. There is a lot more room for complex puzzles and interactivity with true interactive fiction games.

As for moving to the Web, Parchment has done a pretty good job of doing that with the Z-Machine:

http://iplayif.com/?story=http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-arc...
And one is about the Tandy corporation and their PC projects, the other is about working retail in a Radio Shack store. VERY easy to see that there could be wildly different perceptionns there. And I do recall a time in the mid/late 1980s when Tandy PCs were among some of the better PC clones of the day.
OptAr: archive data to paper
Where will they go for services though?
I was on #apple on freenode a while back asking for help with a strange HDD driver failure I was getting on my macbook after installing Linux on a secondary disk.

A channel mod informed me that, because Linux didn't use Apple's proprietary advanced power management protocols (which don't exist, by the way), Linux would overheat and utterly destroy my CPU.

After insisting that this was not my issue, and that what he was saying was ridiculous, he permabanned me. I looked him up online, thinking this was surely a joke, and it turns out this guy is a well-known weirdo with a pathological fear of open source software. It was very strange, and I have no idea how such a person got a mod position in a tech channel.
I think this may belong in a different submission.
Uber is now compliant but less convenient in India
Addendum:

The other real serious mischaracterization here is likening software to a physical product, even one as complicated as a skyscraper.

Software is a factory that makes products, whether they're html pages, or graphics on a screen, or inputs to an industrial controller. You start looking at how to engineer and design and manage factories and a lot of the chaos of computing looks very familiar. E.g."367 days since someone lost a limb in a major industrial accident."
Manufacturing’s false promise of a decent payday
Which would work for a version of two until they and everybody else realized Googles proprietary version is far superior, and they pay Google a licensing fee for every install, because they have no other choice.

I don't think Google is going to do that, they don't have to because Ads make them so much money, but they could.
I love this app! If you haven't tried it yet, you should check it out.
Eclipse for java/groovy project
vim as linux/unix general editor
notepad++ as windows general editor
PHP vs ASP.NET hosting prices are close to parity now.

Some ASP.NET web hosts offers $10/mo plans (a bit more if you want to use SQL Server). Or go with Azure Websites (Shared), starting from ~$15/mo if you think you need to scale up real soon.

The same goes with development costs as well (if you are using a Windows machine already).

Visual Studio Community edition is free and has support for extensions (where Express does not). They are great for freelancers. Do note that commercial licensing kicks in for > 5 developers.
Just thinking out loud, but if you are going to have 23 students to 1 instructor in a single class, it may be hard to manage depending on how you setup your curriculum. Having done a few of these types of things on large dev teams (not 3rd parties really), the number of questions can get overwhelming quickly even if you try and set aside question time separate from lecture. Specifically, I am thinking if you are doing a hands on training versus pure lecture.

Not saying it can't be done, but I would think for teaching a programming language or a framework that a ratio of 1:10 would be more manageable when doing hands on training. If purely lecture than it is likely not an issue.

I'd defer to people who have done more of this though as my experience is limited. As for pricing, to me it is all about client value, and you already got awesome advice.
If ART is based off of the llvm toolchain how easy would it be to create a C++ frontend for it?
The Ideal Age to Launch a Startup Is Older Than You Think
I agree with the first half of the article but find the "kernel" concept lacking. Here's why: It doesn't mention actual programming theory.

SCRUM, Extreme Programming, Waterfall, etc. These are all about management and business practices, not about what we do. Extreme Programming has some craft related "practices" (TDD, CI) but even these are mostly in the QA corner.

I think we need a theory about classes of programming problems and their solutions. We need to analyze our code bases, and how we grew those, in order to understand the trade-offs and nature of our approaches. And by this I really mean analyze the code base, the "project idioms", the abstractions, their cooperation.

Examples I recall are from the Lisp world where the bottom-up onion is a well liked strategy (layering toolboxes on toolboxes, each made up of many small pieces which can be combined effectively). Another such observation is the many types with few methods vs many functions on few types debate. This is what I want to see researched (and research myself).
This is just wrong. Android forks were never successful (see eg Amazon's fire phone) an will never be - the lock-in factor is incredible.

In the opposite direction, more and more customers want "pure" software and good hardware is increasingly available from many different manufacturers. Nokia arguably has made the best hardware and hardly sold any phones with WP because customers wanted Android. Google knows this and moves more and more parts from AOSP in its proprietary play framework because manufacturers are way more dependent on Android than Google is dependent on any single manufacturer (including Samsung).
I was hoping this would be about the equivalent to the great works of the ancient and modern worlds, the pyramids, the manhattan project...Disappointed...
Thought so.

This is a pretty risky thing for a mainstream scientist to say. Most of the people in the field would be terrified of publishing such a paper even if they believed in it.

But I'd be glad if someone knowledgeable could comment on the validity of the claims in the paper.

The idea that Eugenics might actually work is too disturbing to even consider.
Note, this is coming from the same guy who programs in x, which was also implemented in C(++). Like the JVM, CLR ad nauseum. :)
Good concerns.

One thing to add here is that often times in household HVAC system the thermostat relay doesn't handle the current for the heating/cooling element. Rather, it is the on/off relay for the main relay inside the heating/cooling device.
Laura Willson – my coding journey thus far and Spotify Hackathon
NASA Orion Details
Just uninstalled the Uber app this morning. Never used it, and, given the way they treat their employees and their customers, I see there's absolutely no reason to start.
"They don't really use it in the construction process either (in practice, design tends to continue alongside construction)..."

For something like a high-rise office tower, the design decisions you can change after construction is in progress are quite limited. For example, you can't add ten more floors to the building as an afterthought, since that would involve adding extra elevator shafts, emergency stairways, water and sewage lines, etc. that would cause significant disruption to the floors of the building that have already been built. Similarly, redesigning the layout of a floor to accommodate twice as many people would require similar changes to stay compliant with building and safety codes.

I suppose if you're constructing a single-family house, there's much more leeway to change the design during construction - but it would still be costly.
Inform 7 is an great thing to be exposed to simply to see what a natural English programming language looks like. Some complex things are simple, some simple things are incredibly complex. Having to remember precise incantations in an imprecise language like English is an interesting experience, especially when you want to represent something that is not explicitly established in the language (for example, adding RPG elements to an adventure).
Why CTF
"in reality, France’s 35-hour week has become largely symbolic, as employees across the country pull longer hours and work more intensely, with productivity per hour about 13 percent higher than the eurozone average. And a welter of loopholes lets many French employers outmaneuver the law."

So then, what's all the hubbub? Why bother changing something that's obviously ineffective?
Kip Thorne: The science of Interstellar
You'd be wrong. It's been proven highly effective for humanitarian purposes. It's also quite effective in animals.

https://www.jewishgenetics.org/dor-yeshorim

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_breeding

Are you really arguing that the theory of evolution (which is all you need for eugenics to be scientifically valid) has been "thoroughly discredited"?

Note: Nazi science teaches us how to send a rocket to the moon, and also how to drop bombs on people. You don't need to declare rocketry as "discredited" to argue against dropping bombs on people.
An obvious question that I didn't hit on in the blog is "what about host crashes"? The nice thing is, every index knows exactly which messages it covers - and we can quite quickly (within an hour or so for an entire server) scan all mailboxes and index the missing messages - it's more efficient than doing it in a real time, because you are often indexing multiple messages in the same mailbox.

Once the indexes are up to date, we can switch back to being masters again. We index on all the replicas independently so that they are always ready.
(during a clean shutdown, we copy all the indexes over to the SSD, and they get compacted to data in the next day's compact run)
This point is really hard to overstate. I'd go so far as to say the majority of the usefulness of the modern web can be attributed to Google making it usable. It was like adding power to a circuit.
> That said, this sort of arrangement seems to be extremely rare in the US

No, this is pretty common in government and government contracting. It's called an RDO: "regular day off"... more commonly known outside the US as a "rostered day off".

When I was a contractor we had even more flexible arrangements: we could work whatever hours we wanted, as long as they added up to 80 every two weeks. Eventually this got abused enough it was cut down so you could shift at most 10 hours between week 1 and week 2, but you could still, say, work just four 10-hour days every week.
I struggle to come up with a distinction between the two, with respect to the original post. The design work that goes into programming is largely irrespective of the problem. In fact, if you stick to common design methodologies you often won't even see a significant difference between "front end" and "back end" work – and I might even suggest the line is completely arbitrary.
Sorry Alfie, your memory fails. We started with Sphinx.

We use Elasticsearch elsewhere (ELK stack), but not for mail search.
I've addressed this in several comments elsewhere. But briefly: if research is conducted with an overt agenda and with predetermined conclusions, then its validity is called strongly into question. At the very least, those reading the research should be exceptionally skeptical.

As a specific example concerning Richard Lynn, his division of "three major racial groups" (see the SPLC article linked elsewhere here) falls flat in the face of numerous fallacies, among them that "negroid" isn't a single racial category (whatever that means), but as a collective of all indigenous populations of Africa is generally held to represent greater diversity than all other human populations combined.

It's just bad science.

If the assumption is that humans are destined to ever greater intelligence -- well, that may well not be true either. Evolution is not teleological, it is not goal-oriented. It is variation subject to selection.

I do think that the question of what selective pressures are being exerted on human populations presently is an open question. That genetic drift and the cost and complexity of sustaining our complicated brains is an interesting area for research. It's exceptionally fraught though. And the affiliations of the researcher and institutions in question, as well as my source on this, lead me to question its value strongly.
> Of the products you listed, Youtube is the only one that I think is really orthogonal in the sense that it could bring in significant revenue if google's core product were disrupted.

Not to be too picky, but instead of "orthogonal"
independent would be better. Or independent does
imply orthogonal, but orthogonal does not imply
independent. Orthogonal does imply independent in
the Gaussian case.
I have attended two of these courses, and have benefited extremely from them, and I know they try very, very hard to make sure that they do not become a cult. They are very anti-cult, and I think it is important that this remains a priority.

I was diagnosed with panic disorder and no treatment worked, but after attending a course I was able to get it under control.
How is this churn any different to other languages at the height of the popularity? Every other web programming language seems to have it's defining framework (whether it be a collection of quality packages or entirely first party code). From Rails to Django to Symfony to MVC, plus not forgetting that each language also has a popular "slim" framework also.

I see no reason why that would differ in the JavaScript world - whether it be front-end or back-end. Angular's changes may have burned a lot of developers but it could just be teething problems - learnt some critical lessons on the first round and resolving them before it's too late. I fully expect to see a solid MVC framework on the backend, whether it's Sails.js or something else that comes along.
Since there seems to be an attack on the source and not the science it is interesting that Jim Flynn (Flynn effect) does agree with the premise of dysgenics.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objecti...

(The contraception in the water supply he clarified later was a joke)
Personally, I think that the act of lumping everything into the advertising bucket is part of the problem. Google basically has free license to do anything they want no matter how silly it is, then claim it's all an effort to get paid on the back-end through ads, and voila, it's magically justified.
Yes, that's a good point. I'd still be cautious because a bug in your program could make your system run amok. And it could go either way with a home furnace: Shutting down during the winter could be as bad as running full-on, due to the danger of pipes freezing.

At the very least, thinking through a failure mode analysis is a good mental exercise -- especially for folks who are accustomed to living in the world of pure software.
unless someone has been in the same space as you they won't have a clue how to market your product as we can only speculate as to whether a market fit exists or not.

lets say this is a great market fit, then you can try content marketing and blogging.
If you're Valve, a place where tons of people want to work and that has a solid revenue stream, I don't see why you can't have your cake and eat it too. Why not have a team of people who will do the boring, less-glamorous work with the aspiration of making it to the "A" team that gets to pursue whatever they want? Heck, I'd do it. That's how law firms work (i.e. making partner after a number of years and solid performance), but maybe software engineering doesn't work well that way.
While I would not be surprised if Humanity is sliding downward, I am cautious about trying to draw conclusions about how evolution works. I feel that evolution works a little bit like that episode in South Park where the disabled turkey named Gobbles is the only turkey to survive the slaughter house because its neck is bent (reference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Keller!_The_Musical).
Show HN: Emacs code playground