skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is the whole point of an iteration protocol—it’s not supposed to be that generators are like arrays, but rather that generators and arrays share the property of being iterable. I’m imagining that the fuss over this now is because JavaScript simply hasn’t been like this in the past, where languages like Python have been. I do know that I’ve missed it when working in JavaScript as every other language I use tolerably frequently has sound iteration semantics. I’m certainly looking forward to the time when for..of can be considered a baseline feature.
I see you left out ocaml?
This is a pretty weird opinion. How could the idea that F# "delivers where other functional languages didn't" be anything but strange Microsoft hype? or is this a joke?

The existing functional languages (which also notably include ocaml and common lisp on SBCL), "on linux", happen to also run on OS X, BSD, and some of them on Windows too. Could you really think those all suck, but F# is great?
> study modern statistics hard

This is something I've been thinking about doing. My work is in computational materials science, and I often feel there is a complete lack of statistical rigor in analyzing the results. (Peter Gill joked at a conference that the only difference between applied mathematicians and quantum chemists is that the mathematicians calculate the error once they get their answers).

I know basic statistics: distributions, standard error, correlations, etc. But I don't know anything about the terms Bayesian or Frequentist. In your opinion, what would studying these topics provide for me?
Why does Java's hashCode() in String use 31 as a multiplier?
I'm curious, how far into your academic career were you when you dropped out? Post-doc? Grad student?
Mysql fulltext index search returning weird result
The Blind Men and the Elephant
John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887)

It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind.

The First approached the Elephant,
And happening to fall
Against his broad and sturdy side,
At once began to bawl:
"God bless me! but the Elephant
Is very like a WALL!"

The Second, feeling of the tusk,
Cried, "Ho, what have we here,
So very round and smooth and sharp?
To me 'tis mighty clear
This wonder of an Elephant
Is very like a SPEAR!"

The Third approached the animal,
And happening to take
The squirming trunk within his hands,
Thus boldly up and spake:
"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant
Is very like a SNAKE!"

The Fourth reached out an eager hand,
And felt about the knee
"What most this wondrous beast is like
Is mighty plain," quoth he:
"'Tis clear enough the Elephant
Is very like a TREE!"

The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear,
Said: "E'en the blindest man
Can tell what this resembles most;
Deny the fact who can,
This marvel of an Elephant
Is very like a FAN!"

The Sixth no sooner had begun
About the beast to grope,
Than seizing on the swinging tail
That fell within his scope,
"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant
Is very like a ROPE!"

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!
While I don't know whether he's right or wrong, he definitely mentions the industry in the article. He first says, "computer science and engineering are the few fields in which industrial demand makes it sensible to get a Ph.D" and later, "there are hardly any industrial jobs in the physical sciences".

Other professors and PhDs I've talked to have basically said the same things as he says here. There are definitely jobs for PhDs in CS in industry, but whether you would be considered a "scientist" for those jobs is debatable, as most of the time you don't have the same level of freedom you would have in academia (or at least that's what I've been told).
>If you are in a position of leadership in science then you should try to persuade the funding agencies to train fewer Ph.D.s.

or, increase funding for science (academic and otherwise)
And that's the kind of law that should be in a constitutional amendment.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=don%27t+become+a+scientist#!/story...
Yeah, opening an Overton window:

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

Shifting language is not cosmetic. Has actual consequences beyond the realm of language.
> There may be a cautionary tale in there for computer science: once the VC carousel stops the situation in computer science will be quite as bad.

The difference is that CS is something that every company increasingly needs, not just tech companies. Most companies have never needed and will never need science.
Cookies are Hand Stamps and other metaphors (OSS)
This is my simple, open-source attempt to catalogue "geek-speek" as easy-to-understand metaphors. It's a companion site to my TEDx talk last month. Submissions are welcomed, as is critique!
Lekki has some awesome phones. http://lekki.fr/fr/40--original-

Old Ericssons, Siemens, Nokia, and Motorola - including this beautiful rainbow StarTac: http://lekki.fr/fr/mobile/71-startac-rainbow.html#&panel1-1
It's not like this guy is the only one who has observed the problem with academia. I don't really think it's relevant if students liked him as a teacher. The job problem in academia is very, very well-known at this point, and many professors would back him up now.
Thanks, that sounds good. I subscribed, let's see how it goes
What's wrong with the following code?

https://github.com/dart-lang/bleeding_edge/blob/master/dart/...

===============================

class _IntegerImplementation extends _Num {

@inline(INLINE.INTRINSICS) // <============================

int _bitAndFromInteger(int other) native "Integer_bitAndFromInteger";

}

===============================

The same method in CORE_INTEGER_LIB_INTRINSIC_LIST

https://github.com/dart-lang/bleeding_edge/blob/master/dart/...

===============================

V(_IntegerImplementation, _bitAndFromInteger, \
Integer_bitAndFromInteger, 504496713)

===============================

If Dart VM can use "patch class" declarations then why this "@inline" should be considered as a bad?

Maybe your answer in that the "Dart VM ignored all kind of annotations (including type annotations) why it should use this approach".

P.S.

This is a not a direct problem of dynamism (ignore annotations even if they hard coded in source).

Problem in that the Dart VM does not want rely on annotations (dynamism is better, determine everything at runtime or from magic lists).
Bluetooth 4.2 Unveiled: No Mesh Yet, but Big on IoT
The author is a physicist; where would one find employment in the physics industry? The "physics industry" is pretty much academia, with the exception of a few DoD positions. Physics Ph.D.s frequently go into finance and software development, but since neither of those use physics (except limited amounts of software), I think they would fit into the "career change" that he did mention.

I graduated with an B.S. in Physics about the time that he wrote, and his analysis pretty much matched what I saw in the lab I worked in. Of my physics classmates who I know what happened to them, all got jobs doing no physics (including the newly minted Ph.D. who was supervising me). I talked with the postdoc in our lab (her second postdoc position), looked at the number of Ph.D.s and postdocs at Ohio State (lots), looked at the number of open positions in the Physics Department at Ohio State (none), and decided I did not want to postdoc until a professor died and then hope that I get picked. So I said physics was a fun, stimulating, foundational undergraduate choice, felt like I understood the entire world, and promptly pursued software. (Fortunately, I was aided by being tired of school and not really enjoying physics research)

One of my physics classmates did software for a while, then decided to do a Ph.D. in (rocket) propulsion, which is physics-related. "Industry" for him is pretty much limited to NASA (who else is going to employ someone looking into new forms of propulsion?) Turns out he doesn't want to work for NASA bureaucracy, so he switched back to software again.

I think the author is right on, at least for his field of physics.
Hmmm, I still don't think that is a valid metric to measure both by. There are too many variables and analogies to make it a good comparison. There is a huuuuugggeee variable you didn't even talk about which is the electric grid. Huge amounts of land is taken up for this and it is very expensive to maintain. One of the reasons I want solar is because where I live (midwest US) falling trees/branches during wind storms and snow storms causes lots of down time.

I could go on about other things, but I still think comparing the land use of both of them is fairly ridiculous.
Azure updates and human error caused Visual Studio Online outage
1) Err, the other guy got sick and died.

2) Many years have passed since that time mentioned by the parent.

3) Woz is not the type to be "politically correct".
Yes, if you don't care about collisions* or being able to reverse the hash (a pre-image attack) then there's nothing wrong with MD5 per se.
However, MD5 was designed as a secure algorithm, and makes tradeoffs, mainly in speed, to that effect. If you don't need security, you should use something designed for that, like CRC.

* note that even if it isn't immediately obvious, in most situations you really don't want collisions to be an easy thing to cause. For example, many algorithms and structures involving hashes (even a simple in-memory hash map) suffer massively degraded performance when there's a large number of collisions. If your user can craft an input that causes operations to take orders of magnitude longer, that's a denial of service attack.
By permission, we mean that each team's data is hosted on a single document, and when you add a member, they can see both the data in the app and also binary files associated with that data. We don't try to do differing levels of permissions not supported by google
Designing a study to see if “the 10x programmer” is a real thing
Good point. The "good news" cited in the short article weren't really news were they? They were more statement of facts. The roads remained open. The trains remained on time. That's not new.

Could be a combination of bad reporting (due to reporters/writers not used to good news), and the points made by the grandparent post.
"People keep putting generators, callbacks, co, thunks, control flow libraries, and promises into one bucket."

Yes, and that bucket is called a Stream, as used effectively by FRP libs like RxJS and Bacon.js, and by Highland (http://highlandjs.org/, made by the guy who made async).
> study modern statistics hard

Would you recommend some texts that cover this?

A friend suggested:

* Data Analysis: A Bayesian Tutorial
by Devinderjit Sivia, John Skilling

* Bayesian Data Analysis,
by Andrew Gelman, John B. Carlin, Hal S. Stern

* Introduction to Statistical Inference
by Jack C. Kiefer, Gary Lorden

Currently I am working my way through this.

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning
by Christopher M. Bishop

These books are expensive and very time-consuming so it is important to pick the right ones.
Loyalties are cheap on the internet. You can say "no one cares about X". Just look at all the companies that switch between AWS and Azure these days whenever one or the other has an outage. Microsoft is making aggressive moves now.

.NET is a technically superior platform to almost anything else out there. True developers tend to gravitate towards what is the best. To see where .NET is heading you really need to look at Xamarin.

You act like you are the only one to have made those original predictions (re: IE declining market share, and iPhone being a big shake up to the status quo of the time). You weren't. Nobody else apart from you seems to be acting so blasé about predicting the death of .NET. To the contrary, most are thinking on the opposite end of the spectrum. F# is gaining a large amount of traction now (just look at its advance on the TIOBE index). As is Xamarin. As is Azure.

Java is dying a slow death at the hands of Oracle. None of the recent "improvements" to its core language were done correctly . Just look at their type erasure of generics. And their bastardised implementation of lambda expressions. .NET will serve as a natural destination for all those increasingly alienated developers and companies using the Java stack.
Our marketing site is launching next week, any possibility to get a review for that?
Ask HN: Want to sell my Mac app to a new developer
Howdy, gang;
I've got a mildly successful Mac app that I just don't have time to keep up with. It brings in a few hundred dollars of passive income every month, but I feel bad for not having the time to devote to it.

I'd like to sell it to a new developer, but I have no idea how to go about it. Does anyone here have any advice on how to go about such a thing?
I got a PhD in physics in 1993. I think the advice we received still rings true today. Don't attend grad school unless:

1. You are so in love with the subject matter, that you can't think of doing anything else. I'd give the same advice to someone thinking of going to music school (my Plan B when I was a kid).

2. Somebody else is paying for it. My spouse and I finished grad school with no debt.

Without wanting to be too negative about it, I think that the inferiority complex thing, and expecting to receive marketable skills, aren't good enough reasons. Are computational physicists really more employable than common, or garden, computer programmers? A lot of programming can and is done by trial and error or looking up stuff online, and a lot of people doing it are basically self taught. (I'm looking in the mirror when I say those things).

I went to grad school because my parents had science degrees, and seemed to have good careers and happy lives. And I was interested in learning more, in an academic environment. I already knew how to program, but saw it as a drudge job -- easy but ultimately boring if you were doing it for someone else. (My summer internships at a data processing center may have biased my perspective). During the time that I was in school, the people who seemed to be doing the coolest things with computers were the physicists.

Note that I have to be careful what I say about programming, in a nest of programmers. ;-) I really have a lot of respect for what folks are doing, but am describing the limited environment that I was exposed to 20+ years ago.
Github most popular languages 2014:

Rank 19. Clojure
Rank 46. F#

Source https://jaxbot.me/articles/github-most-popular-languages

FWIW on that TIOBE list Delphi/Pascal is listed as more popular than F#.
Generators don't have either memory locality or fast indexing, which are basically the two defining features of an array in virtually every programming language.

They're nothing like arrays, except that you can iterate over them. That is, they're no more like arrays than trees, lists, and other iterable data structures are like arrays, which is to say, not particularly.
I think there's an argument to be made for an invitation only group. There's a psychological advantage of making users feel exclusive and invested in a community, as well as a practical advantage to scaling server hardware and moderation time.

And curious, why hide the fact that you're interested in crypto from your friends / colleagues?
~ 1000 page views per day.
I agree and in light of your points, I feel like my comment is out of line.
I see. You are saying that because a library/framework is not calling one of its own functions in a certain configuration nobody ever going to call this function in that configuration, right? I am not sure I can join you in this belief, after all there are not that many fully recursive libraries so some functions will never be called in almost every library.
The `yield` operator is entirely about control flow. I'm not sure how you can see generators as being "like arrays" and not about control flow. Generators are related to continuations, not arrays.

It's this extra flexibility in control flow that lets you write nicer asynchronous code.
Just look how out of place it looks next to their mascot.

I think it it's a great logo and a beautiful presentation, but it doesn't represent any of the art that I associate with Deviant Art.
Jerry Seinfeld Gets Brutally Honest About Advertising
Lyft for Work
What we can learn about effective, meaningful and diverse organizations
I can't recall a single time, ever, that the news gave me actionable information that I didn't already get from other sources. Basically, when you subtract all the feel-good stories and all the scare stories, what is left is the weather, information that affects my commute and extraordinary events. The weather i get from looking out the window in the morning. If something affects my commute i have to try to make it anyway, so knowing ahead of time just gives me more stress. And extraordinary events will be told to me in other ways.

Taking your examples: (1) nobody should need to tell you to protect your kids, (2) you should always vote, (3) you can see whether you need a raincoat in the morning.

Basically, the actionable content of the news is exactly zero. When i watch it, i don't expect to take action, i expect to be informed about the zeitgeist so i can gossip along with everybody else. We like to gossip about bad things more than good things, so if the news tells us only good things, it's not giving us what we want.
Watson’s Nobel Prize Medal for Decoding DNA Fetches $4.1M at an Auction
> after it was launched

That is quite a while ago, back then it was mainly one guy who write a compiler, by kmow we have a awesome build and project tool, pretty good editor options, CSP, logic prrogramming, static typesystems, awesome validatiin librarys, a fantastic pattern match ...

In terms of organisation, I would suggest looking at the 'components' library, it takrs the good things of OOP design for things like managing services. Clojure has great namespaces also.
Those Usians... no sense of humour!
Email me: edoceo@gmail.com I'd love to show off
> Rendering engines are okay. Its the Javascript execution engine that is not allowed.

No, they must use WebKit:

"Apps that browse the web must use the iOS WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript"

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/
"People keep putting generators, callbacks, co, thunks, control flow libraries, and promises, and 'streams' into one bucket."
Boom 2 transforms Mac audio
Exposed: NSA program for hacking any cell phone network, no matter where it is
The lowest end of our senior band is $150k. Pretty standard for similar companies. This is SF.
Grow up please.
Things cannot be done by pure good wills...
Seriously don't care about whether my analysis is insulting or not.

But you really think, that the whistleblowers were just held back, because they didn't have a website to post their stuff to?

Furthermore, if Assange wanted, he could easily spread the leaks anonymously and be quite persistent about it. That would actually preclude him or anyone else of being a martyr. Sounds like a win-win to me, unless, of course, you want either to stroke your ego or follow your own political agenda.
mentioning the genre would be good.
Check out the guys over at 8th light: http://blog.8thlight.com/

Uncle Bob in particular (the author of Clean Code[0], The Clean Coder[1], and the Clean Coders videos[2]) is a lot like Wozniak.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Clean-Code-Handbook-Software-Craftsman...

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Clean-Coder-Conduct-Professional-Progr...

[2] http://cleancoders.com/
We are building Sclera, an extensible SQL engine that enables you to push your analytics operations into a SQL query. The idea is to tame the code complexity through a declarative interface to analytics libraries. You can add your own libraries using the Sclera Extensions SDK. http://www.scleradb.com/doc/sdk/sdkintro

From the FAQ: http://www.scleradb.com/doc/info/faq#i-am-an-analytics-consu...
why-do-i-need-sclera
> Specifically, Sclera separates the analytics logic from the processing and data access. The analytics logic is specified declaratively as SQL queries with Sclera’s analytics extensions. This is just a few lines of code, which can be changed easily. The analytics libraries, database systems and external data sources form their own modules and are separated from the analytics logic. The analytics queries are compiled by Sclera into optimized workflows that dynamically tie everything together.
Watch this awesome keynote by Brian Goetz, he talks about valie types and generics.

Brian Goetz - Stewardship: the Sobering Parts

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2y5Pv4yN0b0
The Drugging of the American Boy
What is the existing vendor-independent standard for packaging apps for containerization? Are you going to say tarball?
My honest advice is to do absolutely nothing with it for a few months. Don't move it, don't spend it, don't invest it, don't loan it to friends...and most importantly don't tell anybody about it.

Just give yourself some time to cool off and get over the adrenaline-pumping feeling of "holy shit, look at all that money". This will likely take a while to wear off. Only once you're calm about it should you trust yourself making decisions.
The High Interest Credit Card of Technical Debt
Check out Flippa maybe. You won't get much for it.
I was personally interested if there are any leaks on Russia and China. Nothing really of note. But somehow those two countries don't strike me as somehow less likely to do creepy shit than U.S.
You're right, it's a typo, the sum was on the wrong side. I fixed the equation. Thanks for catching it. Please let me know if you find any other issues. I wrote the original notes a while ago and I had to do some adjustments to make the LaTeX source work with MathJax so there might be other typos.

BTW, |u> = u_i |e_i> would be the correct equation in Einstein notation where the u_i |e_i> would be a contraction in which the summation along repeated indices is implicit. When you're dealing with a lot of tensor multiplication this notation is very useful because of its clarity and compactness.
No, he put a trademark on whistleblowing and that's it.
In Defense of Uber: An Objective Opinion
Many startups in SF already offer a reimbursement for work related travel but many employees don't follow up on it due to the inconvenience involved. This is a really good idea and I wonder how long until Uber announces the same.
For those looking for an alternative, there are some open-source messaging applications that encrypt messages on the device, making it impossible for the company to read them. Can't remember the URLs right now though.
That's exactly the point. For whistleblowing Assange shouldn't matter at all. His personality shouldn't be front stage like that.

He centralised whistleblowing in the public's mind, whereas it should be decentralised by definition.
The 50% divorce rate stat is a myth, so why won’t it die?
Since one of Firefoxes selling points for the desktop is its plethora of extensions, will those be available on iOS? If not, what's the difference with this and Safari?
Scott Manley on Orion:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd83B85CUI8&list=UUxzC4EngIs...
Try using a google site search:

(Type this into a google search)
site:news.ycombinator.com yoursite.com
This was very widely discussed on HN a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8631022

The consensus was that Express.js had not burned Netflix, but rather Netflix had used a tool that it didn't understand.
They won't be available nor can they be. Firefox on iOS will be a Firefox UI over Mobile Safari, like all other browsers on iOS. Firefox's extensions are made to work with the rendering engine in proper Firefox as you'd use on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Platforms where you can install your choice of browser.