skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google confounds me. They are one of the largest tech companies as far as just pure reach, they own the top search engine, email service, and mobile operating system, as well as a host of other properties both hardware and software(and a huge pile of money that they're sitting on), yet still to this day make 99% of their revenue from assaulting people with ads on Youtube and in their search results. They attempted to get into hardware by buying Motorola, but later ended up selling it to Lenovo at a loss. They have the capital and resources to expand into pretty much any field that they so desire(including taking another crack at hardware), so why do they put all their eggs in the advertising basket?
What we consider "science" appeared in the 1600's with Galileo/Descartes. People most certainly made progress in medicine prior to that time.
Show HN: Favobooks – favorite books of famous people
Isn't Stephen King an author for Pelican books ?
I started playing around with phabricator a few months ago. It was by far the easiest web application install I've ever done, and works really well.

The only downside is that it doesn't allow you to do code review via git pull request. It originally was just SVN, but now has git and hg support, and it uses the same code-review tool for all of them, so it's a bit less git-centric than github.

That being said, they have a command line tool for submitting pre-push code reviews that is really really nice. I haven't figured out a way to easily do a github pull-request from the command line (though I'm sure there's a tool to do ti somewhere).
No charity is required. Infact it is profitable to hire this guy. What is required is getting rid of pointless constraints.

Part time? You get a talented developer for 30 hours a week, paying the same hourly rate as everyone else.

Working from home? Depending on the role he may be even more productive than those in the office. I have just two more words to say about it: 37 Signals.
Or is it possible, just possible, that freedom has increased in the past few decades? Women can now choose whatever they want to do rather than being guided down the path of housewivery or a couple of other vocations?

Maybe the underlying desires that were always there are being revealed, rather than "innate interests evolving".

But no, you'd rather dismiss that possibility out of hand and presume that "subtle sexist microaggressions" halved the number of women in tech.

Are you suggesting that women have it twice as bad in tech now as they had in the 80s?
Which incentives are wrong?

The post you link seems a bit confused about, for example, why it's important to publish a finding only once. (Hint: So lazy people can't keep regurgitating their old results to seem productive in the eyes of grant-givers.) It also says the Gates decision goes too far, and then suggests something even farther: that the paper would need to be written twice, separately, for public and commercial consumption.

"Would this change undermine the business academic journals are in? The answer is only if they add no value above the raw knowledge an academic could make available themselves."

And the argument is that they are not adding nearly as much value as they are extracting from the system.
You absolutely can have the same power with less capable language (I consider Qt an extended C++).

Then why we have inheritance and virtual functions in a lot of languages, even though they can be emulated just fine by function pointers in C? Why we need templates when they are just glorified macros? Why we have lambdas, when it is just a syntax sugar for functor in C++? Why some languages offer pattern matching when it is just a bunch of "if" or "switch" under the hood? Why we need async/await, coroutines and generators, when the same functionality can be implemented with POSIX threading?

Because these higher abstractions enable us to write programs with faster speed and less bugs. It is also much easier to reason about program behavior with higher abstractions.

So the argument that one can do the same thing in a less capable language without feature X and hence feature X is pointless is a false one. If you resist the usage of higher abstractions, you can write a large complicated program just fine, but you won't know what you are missing, how programming would be much enjoyable had you realized the full potential of abstraction.
As a follower of "Hypercritical," I listened for the Siracusa for awhile, but the meandering chit-chat and interminable sponsor reads eventually soured me on ATP. Maybe I would listen if I had an hour commute to and from work every day, and needed more background noise.
So you're predicating most of your argument on extremely good VR. I'll give you that, but I think VR at that level is quite a ways off.

Specifically in response to

> That generalizes even further: the more freedom and choice you give people, the more they sort themselves. I understand why that freaks some people out, but I find it hard to get worked up over more people getting more of what they want. There are better ways to keep the peace between disparate groups than by forcing them share close quarters.

You've hit my concern on the head. You may be right that this won't create big problems. I'm quite worried that it will, but I admit my confidence in that assessment is low.
I have never understood why people consider Microsoft "Closed". Apple is closed. Microsoft in past too had been extremely open to all sort of partnerships. They built technologies that were relatively ahead of open source world.
> Would a class-action suit really make sense here

Definitely. Their low-end plans are relatively cheap. That means that even if you have legal representation, it often wouldn't be worth suing them. But a class action spreads the legal cost across many plaintiffs.

Simple example. Suppose BadCo has 10,000 customers who each pay $1000 per year, for annual revenues of $10m. If they can cheat each customer out of an additional $100 (say by overbilling), then they'll make $1m, which is enough money to be tempting. But very few people will go to the time and trouble of a lawsuit just to get $100 back. But a class action lawyer might happily take the suit thinking they could make 25% of that million.
Is paying for backlinks for SEO ethical? Do you do it?
I set up a blog a while ago and wanted to grow it organically. It turns out google really put a lot of weight on how many backlinks you have and from where they are coming.
So how do you handle this?
Toptal has very low rates for US-based developers.
I'll give you a hint, it's not the consumer.
Some (many) people are distracted by non-participating neighbors. It's somewhat like second-hand smoke.
First time I participated in internal-hackathon, we ended up Second Runner-up. Reading your article felt like unknowingly we did almost all the things you said, especially keeping it simple.
Start Your Own Business
Maybe proprietary isn't the right word. I don't like that the only way to do pre-commit code review is using a CLI tool that only works with Phabricator. Contrast this with the GH-style system where you use a standard Git client and a web app. The GH-style system is just much more accessible.
True, if I'm never challenged in my work then I never find reason to get new tools. Hopefully we're working on things that do challenge us and do expose us to the weaknesses in our tools - and force us to say "There's got to be a better way, how does everyone else do this?"
I'd suggest taking a look at Coq if you want something more pure than Haskell. I'll warn you that this comes with some degree of added sophistication! Coq is not just a programming language but instead a proof system which can be used to verify programs as correct (not just unit tested) and then extract the skeletal, underlying program as OCaml, Haskell, or Scheme code.

http://adam.chlipala.net/cpdt/

True purity actually doesn't look much like Go at all. Instead, it means that every expression literally can be evaluated and replaced with its value in a completely arbitrary order. This massively simplifies the meaning of a language and opens it up to bear much more structure (such as that of a mathematical proof).
Wow, a lot of the replies here are so typical of what genuinely sick people experience every day. You don't need to posit a cause, you don't need to suggest cures and you don't need to critique his lifestyle.

The point of the article is not to try to explain all of that shit to you, but to try to make you understand what it's like to be that sick all the time. Try to take in that message first, and when you think you have the slightest idea what it's like to live like that, maybe you are then qualified to add a response.
I guess for historical and stylistic reasons the OCaml people wanted to allow redefining variables while using the old values in the definition.

So you can say

let process data =
let data = sanitize data in
f(data)

instead of

let process data0 =
let data1 = sanitize data0 in
f(data1)

And because OCaml uses the same let syntax for variables and functions, this also lets you to

let f x = x * x
let f x = f (f x)

# now f(3) will be 81

So we can define new f using the definition of old f.

In some cases I can see the point of overwriting variables, instead of using new names like data0, data1, data2, but in the case of functions, redefining functions while utilizing the previous definition in the body of new definition will probably not catch on.

But anyway, because this is possible, OCaml needs another way to signify the that f used in the definition of f is not meant to refer to a previous definition, but the current one.

Hence, let rec.

Also, while marking a single function recursive maybe does not make much difference when reading source code, it's kind of nice to read code when a group of mutually recursive functions is explicitly marked as such.
I'm not quite sure what you mean with this concern but Kerberos is really flexible and a Kerberos realm could act a lot more like roles than by domains (which is the typical correlation). Most enterprise networks I've worked with are extremely fragmented from decades of competing business units rolling their own thing and so the default in most enterprise networks is already quite restricted in many respects, and that is ironically a bit of a help for security by reducing the impact crater of an intrusion. Also, we have plenty of different accounts used by one physical user all the time, so nothing keeps administrators from requiring different accounts for different roles on top of realms. I don't necessarily mean that you need to create user1.support and user1.dev in the same domain but Kerberos solves a lot of problems that ssh alone just doesn't answer, which is a big reason why I reach for that after I have an ok ssh setup.

Nothing says you can't put resources in multiple Kerberos realms either. Then you can establish a digraph of trust chains across Kerberos realms to transfer tickets across realms based upon some business rules.

There's many reasons that Active Directory (LDAP + Kerberos + some magical bits of quirks and features) is the gold standard for large corporations and the reason is not "nobody got fired for buying Microsoft."
The "startup culture" also valorizes camping out in a rundown house with your cofounders/roommates and subsisting on ramen while pulling 100-hour work weeks. Young people with fewer obligations are obviously better suited to such a lifestyle.
I don't mean to trash anything, these are known bugs (there are lots of them issued there: https://bugs.launchpad.net/dateutil).

It seems that dateutil has just not been receiving much love from its developers lately.
It's almost like there should be a mechanism when marking a question as a duplicate to automatically move the answers from the new question to the old question... along with a 301 redirect on the removed-as-duplicate URL.
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Ask any DEC Field Service Engineer for a wire-wrap tool and they all reached for their back pockets. Used to amaze me to see them sitting on the floor, a step-by-step guide next to them, wire-wrapping some field service change into the backplane.

Plus the banter:
"You done yet?"
"Two more. Got a screwdriver?"
"No. How 'bout a rum and coke?"
"What's this power switch do?"
"Haha, very funny."
That seems like a compelling position until you're exposed to a million such cases. There's no end to the number of weird, malfunctioning pieces of equipment or complicated many-body systems for which we have a theory that sort of explains them with a few poorly understood wrinkles.
Comcast, Stop Scamming Me So I Can Stop Scamming You
Is there a study on this? Personally I've never felt distracted by non-participating neighbors (with the notable exception of one guy next to me who spent an 80-minute class looking for porn on Google Images), but for all I know my peers have.
Talk to some teachers, because it affects them. Teaching a group of uninterested people takes its toll. Why bother making your class a good one if no-one cares? May as well just phone it in. Sure, you could argue "just do it for the ones that do care", but that's easier said than done. And if the teacher is phoning it in, that does affect you.
Essentially it's the same thing, it's just about who is responsible for what part of the budgeting. E.g. You get $100k of which $4k can only be used towards publishing expenses vs you get $100k and promise to publish open access and figure out the alotment on your own.
If you don't want cheap startup hosting TOS, don't use cheap startup hosting.
They have an auto-complete for adding people to groups too which is similar to what you're seeing. It's a tradeoff between convenience and privacy, your account existence is not a secret but everything on your profile can be [1].

[1] param's profile https://bitbucket.org/param
How the Pentagon’s Skynet Would Automate War
I think hostility to discussion is what separates SO from reddit. What SO trying to be is not the place to discover new knowledge through discussion, but rather repository of existing knowledge as shared by experts.

That said, anyone wants to start a site oriented specifically towards discussion and discovering new solutions? Just need a workable idea on how to keep discussions from deteriorating into holy flame wars or getting philosophical.
I'm seeing 265 KB for Facebook's CSS.

http://cssstats.com/stats?url=http%3A%2F%2Ffacebook.com&name...
Abstract of the policy paper the article heavily references:

This paper examines policy, legal, ethical, and strategy implications for national security of the accelerating science, technology, and engineering (ST&E) revolutions underway in five broad areas: biology, robotics, information, nanotechnology, and energy (BRINE), with a particular emphasis on how they are interacting. The paper considers the timeframe between now and 2030 but emphasizes policy and related choices that need to be made in the next few years to shape the future competitive space favorably, and focuses on those decisions that are within U.S. Department of Defense’s (DOD) purview. The pace and complexity of technological change mean that linear predictions of current needs cannot be the basis for effective guidance or management for the future. These are issues for policymakers and commanders, not just technical specialists.

http://ctnsp.dodlive.mil/2014/09/12/dtp-106-policy-challenge...
this kind of monitoring is often required by law. when the shit hits the fan, it is bad to not be able to get all the data on _company_ channels. But, if you want to own your communication, use _your_ cell phone.
A use doesn't have to fall under all four factors to be "fair". Educational, noncommercial use can certainly be fair use.
$5k is surely high, but from a researcher/professor point of view I don't think it's prohibitive, especially if you compare it with papers accepted to conferences where you need to cover travel and staying, sometimes maybe for 2 people. It's just sad that you have to pay for openness.
So if you are in a remote location or do not fit a specific demographic you are basically a robot.
Facebook, Please Don’t Let the Mullahs Troll Us [WSJ]
Very interesting. I think 青 is my favorite color!

http://google.com/search?q=%E9%9D%92&tbm=isch&tbs=isz:l
Yup! Make administration less confidential, but try and keep it as secure as possible. Inside attacks are a big problem in the financial industry too. I like the idea of controlling it through a hardened web-app, but may need a little help getting there.
I forgot to mention another thing he didn't know was useful

d) BCD instructions, which he thinks are "kind of silly", and perhaps they are now that computers run at many GHz. But they were very useful in the old days. E.g. CBASIC [1] implemented BCD floating point math. Here's what Wiki says about it:

CBASIC proved very popular because it
incorporated 14-digit binary-coded decimal
(BCD) math which eliminated MBASIC's rounding
errors that were sometimes troublesome for
accounting.

As the reference manual linked [2] from Wiki says:

Real numbers are stored in eight bytes of
memory. The first byte is the sign and
exponent. The exponent is maintained in
excess 64 code. The seven remaining bytes
contain a normalized mantissa stored as
packed decimal digits. The high order four
bits of the rightmost byte is the most
significant digit of the mantissa.

That was of course long before IEEE 754 floating point.[3] BTW did anyone know that IEEE defined decimal floating point? I didn't know that until just now. It's probably not that popular.

When a CPU runs at 1 MHz instead of 3 GHz, doing FP in BCD means much simpler and much faster conversion between internal representation and display. A lot of early microcomputers were used by small business. BCD is inferior for complicated scientific calculations, but is ideal for simple small business accounting, which was CBASICs target market.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBASIC
[2] http://www.cpm.z80.de/manuals/cbasic-m.pdf
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_floating_point
Craigslist is now mobile friendly
Is Google Going Back into China?
Most of the stuff is already digitized. They moved over to leveraging it against their maps (building numbers, etc).
Wouldn't have to be. You don't have to partner with SO to allow folks to ask questions about your product; they just have to be programming questions. Ideally good ones. Also helps a lot if you answer them.

If you want to go further than that, there are various levels of sponsorship possible for a tag, and [internet-explorer] has been sponsored at some level for at least a year. These grant you various advertising and branding privileges, but do not otherwise affect how questions are asked/answered within that tag.

Disclaimer: I work for Stack Exchange but am not involved in the sales or marketing side of things.
> Has the good professor considered the fact that the sneering condescension of his hard no texting/no e-mailing rules encourages the very breakdown in civility that he's studying?

The professor has a responsibility to teach his students. Not just an ethical one, but a financial one too. If he can't teach effectively with people texting/emailing then he has a responsibility to restrict those activities such that all his students are getting what they paid for.

I might suggest that a student failing to heed his classroom rules might constitute a breach of civility. He could easily have made getting caught equate to failing the class (this is a class on civility after all!) but he didn't, which indicates to me that he has some understanding of what civility is. He merely asked her to leave.
Anything you can experience in "the real world" can be reproduced at arbitrarily-fine resolution in a sufficiently advanced digital system.

How do you experience smells in a digital system, without reverting to sci-fi magic?

Edit: to be clearer, a lot of human communication involves non-verbal cues, often made unconsciously.
Yes. At PayPal we had one of the very first. And then at Eventbrite as well. They are most definitely overused.
That's a convincing argument, though there's also value in having a set of utilities that are maintained competently by someone you can have confidence in – I know that the functions in underscore, lodash, etc. are (at least mostly) bug-free and fast, whereas it's a hassle to evaluate the quality of every microlibrary I come across.
Awesome, appreciate that!!!
How to Move Without Screwing Over Your Buddy
Sorry, what I meant was that it may be very distracting for the professor who's trying to give a lecture and answer questions while faced with a large number of lecture attendees who seem to be engaged in other tasks. Effective public speaking means making eye contact with people in the audience to get a sense of how your remarks are being received; if there's no feedback available it's likely to negatively impact the delivery of the lecture.

From the student/neighbor perspective I personally do find it distracting to have people around me doing irrelevant stuff in a context like that, but I have a pretty bad ADD so I know that's not typical of others' experience.
> I'm beginning to feel that the real advantages of FP are being obfuscated by unusual syntax.

Or that unusual syntax is precisely motivated by trying to seamlessly and naturally express FP code.

Either that or they were just being intentionally obtuse... come on, man. Which sounds more likely of these two? I'd personally never want to program in a language with the semantics of Haskell, and the syntax of a C-like language.

> With better references and immutable variables, we should be able to split calculations up over several lines and have the compiler figure out how to optimize it into basically FP code.

Or just dive the code up into whatever temporary and intermediate steps that you need with let-in expressions and where-declarations? I mean, why not? If what you want the compiler to process is FP code, then just divide it up like you would divide up FP code. FP /= one liners.
While I'm not disagreeing with your point, I'd like to point out that

> working harder than the men, taking care of the details many men overlook for far longer, and too often earning far less money and respect

is a problem not just for women, but something I see constantly across our industry in general. Definitely something we should deal with better. Thankfully, the steps we should be taking to bring more women into this industry and deal with this problem are possibly interrelated, so it's one of the many cases where we can help everyone :)
I'd ask him if I could work for him once I get out of undergrad.
I started slant.co for this.

Closed question: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/2254/what-are...

Open Question: http://www.slant.co/topics/1150/~what-are-the-best-keyboards...
I did read a study on this at some point in the past year, but my google-fu is failing me today. IIRC the results were that neighbors using laptops were distracting to surrounding students.
Idris is Turing Complete. Total functions are opt-in.
For that audience I agree with dipping toes. I just want to place hedges and guards against making "FP" (whatever that means) out to being better syntax for some kinds of streaming operations when it has much, much more to offer.
https://www.google.com/finance?q=OTCBB%3AFNMA
https://www.google.com/finance?q=OTCBB%3AFMCC
it would be really good if the people reverse engineering malicious software knew how computers worked:

"This Regin driver recurrently checks
that the current IRQL (Interrupt Request Level)
is set to PASSIVE_LEVEL using the KeGetCurrentIrql()
function in many parts of the code, probably in order
to operate as silently as possible and to prevent
possible IRQL confusion. This technique is another
example of the level of precaution the developers
took while designing this malware framework."

what does that even MEAN?!