skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What's wrong with a race to the bottom? Big corporations often run with a profit margin of only 1 to 4 percent. That's great for consumers. Drive those prices as low as they can go. Excellent!

People keep using the phrase "protect consumers". How, exactly? In very precise words please. Making drivers hold appropriate insurance, excellent. That protects me as a consumer. Having extremely constrained medallions that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars? No, that does not protect me as a consumer at all. Forcing Uber to do this bullshit independent driver hack also does not protect me or provide value. It would be far superior if drivers were regular employees of Uber but that puts them under heavy regulation which protects established business players far, far, far more than it protects or serves the consumer.
> In academia, if you're any good, you're a threat to other good people

This may be the case for career academics (professors), but in my experience, as a PhD student, at least in a day-to-day setting my fellow students were remarkably friendly and collaborative. The camaraderie within my advisor's group and within the dept as a whole was great; we were always happy to bounce ideas off of each other, always friendly and encouraging, mostly constructive in criticism, and it was generally pretty productive.

I think this type of rivalry comes out much more between different research groups at different schools. I can recall a number of times we thought some other group's paper was full of crap, and asked questions as such (usually politely) after the conference talk. But that mostly comes from a tradition of academic debate, not a 'shoot down everyone else so I can win' attitude.

I didn't stay for the "go on the job talk circuit and fight for a tenure-track slot" stage (actually I left before the "defend and graduate" stage, oh well), so maybe I'm just pleasantly lacking the visceral experience of that part...
A quick glance makes it look like it grabs it by url in the decoder so I think it is doing another download. That said it's probably not too bad since the browser should cache the image also.
I feel ya. We're definitely a critical community, both for better and worse.
> How did this make the front page of HN being a problem which has already been solved and well documented for almost 200 years? Not to knock the author, as they put in some time apparently, but was just curious.

Zeller's Congruence is an algorithm. This is a formula. It made it to the front page because it was a clever hack and people like me love those.
I have a silly question: how is it determined which side is up and down?
I get the same results with Markdown and Pandoc. Check it out sometime.
Looks like it is hosted in Norway. Loaded instantly for me, but I am close by in Denmark. So it is probably the RTT that is affecting your page load time.
Obviously you are a fool
You Are Ready to Quit Your Job in 2015
US Congress 'Declares War' on Russia
Police have been using choke holds without repercussions for many years. And being incredibly arrogant about it. Here's an astonishing story from Portland Oregon, albeit 29 years old[1]:

On the day the dead man, Lloyd D. Stevenson,
a father of five and a Marine Corps veteran,
was buried in Willamette National Cemetery,
two Portland police officers were suspended
for selling T-shirts with the message:
''Don't Choke 'Em. Smoke 'Em.'' In police slang,
''smoke'' means shoot to death.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/1985/05/05/us/blacks-protest-choke-ho...
> So, you can't really just appeal to the author's authority without addressing a single one of the parents points.

The 'appeal to authority' is addressing one of the parents points/claims: that he seems to be a rookie.
Addresses that have been sent from will be vulnerable because their public key will be displayed in the outgoing transaction. One-use addresses will not be vulnerable, as their public keys are indeed stored only as hashes in the blockchain, but the algorithm is not only RIPE, but something like SHA256(RIPEMD-160(SHA256(Public_Key))). I dont know about RIPE, but sha256 should be QC resistant. Thus if you do not reuse addresses you should be safe against QC.
...and a (deliberate) mistranslation of "et in Arcadia ego". I saw it when it opened in '93 and it made a big impression on me. Stoppard is the Stephenson of the stage.
Everybody did. Russians know shit about their government.
Wanted: Python/Twisted developer for paid work on open-source
How about some wonderful cryptic set of puzzles, where you provide website links that have new puzzles they have to solve before they can continue the puzzle.
I can get similar coherence with N-Grams where N >= 3
Farmers are the direct beneficiaries of large, expensive water projects paid for through taxes and bond measures. You can certainly bet they have thought a lot about California's water problems, but I wouldn't accept their suggestions as impartial.

Claiming that the Sacramento Valley has plenty of water for rice is nonsense. The Sacramento Valley gets its water from the Sacramento River, which is "fully appropriated" and, from the view out my window, is looking a little shallow these days.
Not sure about production use, but I know that Elm is bound to be used at Prezi, where Evan Czaplicky works, if I remember correctly.
OK, I guess I didn't explain what I meant clearly. I've never heard Patrick talk about any particular strategy that gave him his start. You would know better since you know Patrick personally, but from the accounts he's written, it sounds like he basically had clients come to him thanks to his reputation.

Like, let me put it this way: If I were to create an exact clone of Bingo Card Creator the way it looked and behaved a few years back, do you think Joel Spolsky would come knocking at my digital door? I really, really don't think so. You were laughing at the idea that his "Hello World attached to an RNG" is hard to reproduce, but nobody ever thought that was the difficult part — it's the fame that followed from it that gave Patrick a base of good clients, and that seems to be harder to replicate or replace. At least that is my impression.

(Just to be clear, I don't mean any of this to disparage anyone. It's just like I said earlier — this kind of "it's so easy" talk bothers me in the same way as lottery ads.)
> I'm not saying he should have released the documents himself, I'm saying he shouldn't have given anything to the reporters which weren't in the public interest.

That's very much a contradiction in this case. Snowdon found a whole corpus of evidence of illegal action. Since you agree he was capable to evaluate what's illegal or not, the next logic step is to reach out for experts in public interests. Who do you think is more qualified than journalists for this job?
> A few of us would be fantastically wealthy and powerful, but even they would be limited by living in a violent world populated by uneducated and over-exploited masses incapable of doing things like getting an education and finding their own passions that lead to innovation, invention, and creativity.

I'd like to point out that Harvard University precedes the United States by 140 years (1636 -> 1776), and the government before 1776 wasn't exactly "for the people".
What about performance? Replacing every static method call with a class instantiation looks like an overhead for me.
especially in Java :(
Insider Strategies for Defeating Corporate Innovation Initiatives
Is your company jumping on the innovation bandwagon? Innovation groups are one of the more recent management fads. Like all management fads, you can expect the excitement to fade over time. In the meantime, employing these simple strategies will keep short-sighted thinking from disrupting your time-tested corporate management structure.
Yes, I agree, this may become a performance issue, but I strongly believe that a good design is a much more important feature of modern software than its performance (there could be exceptions, of course), see my post about it: http://www.yegor256.com/2014/10/26/hacker-vs-programmer-ment...
Plink – Stepping up the level of mobile platform gaming
XSLT is one of the most powerful and elegant technologies created in the last 15 years. Those who don't understand it and that's why can't use it, should just do their home work and learn better
That's also politics, they have been bouncing service module work between NASA and ESA.
It's bad, but California has the California Water Project, a huge collection of dams, reservoirs, and aqueducts built in the 1960s, to store water and move it around. Here's current reservoir status:

http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/resapp/getResGraphsMain.act...

Levels were slightly lower in 1977, but the population of California was 16 million people lower then. The California Water Project was designed to store enough water to get through 3 years of drought. We just finished drought year 3. (The water year ends Sep. 30, before rainy season starts.)

San Jose has a new sewerage treatment plant so good it can be used to provide drinking water. It just came on line last summer. Right now, it's just being used for irrigation and recharging ground water, but if things get really bad, that backup is available. (http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_26160300/california-dr...)

So, yes, extensive preparations for this were made a long time ago.

Rain so far during this water year, starting Oct. 1, is slightly above normal.
I have a ReST -> rst2html -> wkhtmltopdf pipeline. The advantage is that I can use a standard CSS.
http://www.numerama.com/magazine/31495-the-pirate-bay-sera-b...
Ask HN: Off-the-shelf gamified education platforms exist? (like Codecademy)
I would like to use that style of learning to teach finance. And I see that the hugely successful http://chesscademy.com is using a very similar platform to Codecadamy. Maybe there is something available that my google-fu is failing to find?
The parent's points were literally about his authority, so the response was perfectly fine.
Totally agree, XSLT is a great instrument and it can/should be used in a browser too, see http://www.yegor256.com/2014/06/25/xml-and-xslt-in-browser.h...
> The bigger problem then becomes, if they cater to the laws of every country they serve content into then you have this lowest common denominator of laws EVERY user of github would have to follow.

Their system is IP-based so censorship is customized depending on where you access Github from.
Yep great article. As a beginner programmer I find functional more intuitive than OOP, there just seems to be less abstract concepts and boilerplate.
Interestingly they got rejected by YC in the first place: http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/18/how-instacart-hacked-yc/
My definition of powerful and elegant is lisp

XML is just death by overengineering
Slides ready to convince investors
> So it wouldn't be worth defending at all, if it weren't being attacked on grounds I strongly disagree with, by people who I believe shouldn't gain any more influence over our culture than they already have.

I'm having trouble understanding what this means, concretely. Do you think it would be a bad thing if computer science became less of a boys club? Or do you not believe that is why people dislike the picture? Who is it exactly that has too much power over "our" culture -- women? Politically correct killjoys?
Aurora for MySQL is coming
Rather than singing the praise of XSLT (which I love) I'll show an example: this tool transforms any rich text to markdown:

http://markitdown.medusis.com

It's about 30 lines of XSLT that run in the browser. [Edit: it's not 30 lines but 230, but I was thinking of the number of "rules" (templates) of which there are only 29.]

There are very few other tools of its kind and I don't think there exists any client-side, with the same simplicity. This attempt for example

https://github.com/domchristie/to-markdown/blob/master/src/t...

is about 180 lines of JS, is incomplete, doesn't work with many special cases, etc.

There is no better templating language than XSLT; every other templating approach (in PHP or Python on the server, in JavaScript on the client) feels like a horrible kludge once you've experienced XSLT.

Yes, XSLT is practically dead, that's a fact. But we should be very sad about it, instead of dancing on the coffin like the OP with its stupid quotes.
The direction of light, from the perspective of the viewer, is the base. Its not about up and down, but rather left or right ..
The P in LAMP stands for PHP, so it's the ONLY application language on a LAMP stack. Hope I'm not being too pedantic.

Symfony 2 is quality engineering. It's quite nice just to browse the source.
I'm not sure I'm following your argument. The point is that many regions of an image simply do not have detail. This is made obvious by sparseness in a wavelet representation, but the representation is not key to the argument. A concrete example might help. If I have an image with some large, flat sky region, then for every piece of sky, an IFS needs to say which other piece of sky it resembles, even though they are all largely the same. That costs bits which do nothing to improve quality.

Davis is not the only one to make the observation (he cites two others in that paper), but he does quantify the magnitude of the problem. It's clear it requires some solution before IFS codecs have a chance of being competitive.

This is complicated by the fact that in an IFS, it's not clear which regions are smooth without doing several iterations, but the decoder needs to do all of its codebook pruning before even the first iteration. I'm not aware of a practical solution ever being demonstrated.
The problem is that it's often misused. Using an XSLT that takes 0.5s to run to transform some XML to HTML during web requests on a busy site? Idiotic.

Using it for async transformations - html to pdf, customer message format to your message format. Fine.
For Loops in Node
I am quite surprised that nothing has been brought to bear against the company, or the management, already.
Looks like 230 lines to me https://github.com/bambax/markitdown.medusis.com/blob/master...
JSON/Javascript is just easier to learn and work with than XML/XSLT. For starters, you don't need to learn a special language that you'll never use for anything else.

Just in case you /do/ need to use XML every day: the primary benefit of XSLT is that it lets you avoid using XML libraries to munge some XML. Because the XML libraries are so horrendous to use from any language.
"it isn't possible to create a pure sample of just one of them."

Oh, to create a pure sample is a trivial task. But unfortunately it racemizes in your body.

It is actually a very interesting compound. Would not be surprised about a come-back.
The problem with XSLT, XML, SOAP, WS-* is that the community is driven by vendors with deep pockets who use their power to kill interoperability.

Imagine LISP, but in the hands of Sauron or Palpatine. That's the XML group of technology.
+1 - I have to deal with structured documents encoded in XML on a daily base, and most of the time there is no other tool for me than to write an XSLT stylesheet.

I really like the computational model of XSLT (push vs. pull), it is so elegant. But it takes a quite some time to fully understand what is going on.

What I think is bad, is that the infrastructure for XSLT is not perferct. There is only one good XSLT 2 processor that I know of, everything else is XSLT 1.

I am currently eliminating some XSLT scripts with custom (Go) programs, because of speed issues.
Yes, the content - that means unlike h.264 licensing there's no separate license for streaming (page 7 of http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avcweb.pdf)

But with h.264, _codec_ licensing is for non-commercial (and internal business) use only (page 8).

There's no clear statement that HEVC licensing is for any and all purposes, and their use of the term "End user" in MPEG-LA's (non-binding) public material across patent pools is quite inconsistent, so it may mean only non-commercial users.

Given that it's MPEG-LA that we're talking about here, and their history, I assume there will be nasty surprises unless there's hard evidence that there aren't.
I think the problem is more that it was written with a specific conclusion in mind, without checking if the logic actually held up in the end. Terminology does get a bit stretched, at best...

>> if you make the mistake of defining public “setter” methods, then the instance variables with setter methods become effectively global variables: if the value of the instance variable is incorrect at some point, that incorrect value might have been set anywhere in your code.

You can end up in the same situation by spreading a pointer to your local int variable into e.g. a global pointer just as easily, without so much as a struct. Or more frequently in practice: By finding someone else's buffer overflows, when coding in C. This is a problem, but it's less of an OOP problem and more of a "mutable data with nonobvious mutators" problem (or a "OOP as practiced distressingly frequently" problem?)

This starts to go away when your memory access is safe, and when your variables (be they objects or not) are constant (which you'd get enforced for free in a purely functional language - and which I enforce by overusing const in C++ - either of which is compatible with OOP). To a lesser extent, it starts to go away when your variables are only referenced locally - but that's left me wondering about previous values all too often.
apples and oranges? There is no other way of encoding structured documents these days than XML. Like it or not, XML is the de facto standard for data exchange (export from databases, product information software,....)

XML might be overengeneered (which, except for a few things I don't agree with), but there is currently no alternative for it.
> My definition of powerful and elegant is lisp

Dude, XML is just s-exprs and XSLT is macros.
Clojure is beautiful. EDN is beautiful. I've honestly never known anyone to start learning Clojure and not become enthralled with its syntax.

I don't even use Clojure outside of Riemann for work but when I was learning Clojure the more I learned the more fantastic I felt it's syntax was.

I have also started investing a lot of my spare time into learning F# which I also really like. It's my first ML and the aspects that assist with domain modeling are fantastic(discriminated unions, option types, etc, etc). Fsharp interactive opens up a lot of possibilities too. While I like it's syntax better than Scala's and it's very terse, it still just bolstered my opinion on the elegance of Clojure.
How startups became safe for the enterprise
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer
Sounds like a fun way to practice deep scuba techniques - learning 'for real' in large water bodies is full of additional risks. However I'm a bit concerned at the 'caves' [not shown on the diagram]. Martyn Farr's book (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Darkness_Beckons a rather short, blunt and to the point entry which makes sobering reading) makes it pretty clear that cave diving is pretty incompatible with long life (many people he talks about were killed on cave dives). Anyone I know who has done any sort of confined space dives has a terror story of things going wrong in even the most benign of holes. I think adding caves to the pool is a disaster waiting to happen - regardless of whether they are there to train techniques or not.
They're watching from under water but not below the divers. That tunnel seems to only be a few meters from the surface.

http://sourceable.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/italypool2....
The author's website:

https://sites.google.com/a/umn.edu/daniel-griffin/home

Has a PDF of the study:

http://www.tc.umn.edu/~griffin9/pubs/griffin_anchukaitis_201...
Ask HN: Landing a Job Interview at Microsoft Research ?
I have spent one and half year in software development along with working in NLP topics like Summarization, Topic Extraction and Classification.
I would like to have a career at Microsoft Research. Can anyone please guide me how to lang interview at Microsoft Research or any other leading research institute/company in Natural Language Processing
I don't want that, but you can always get there by replacing x by floor(x) everywhere it occurs, or, in strongly typed languages, by declaring the function to take an integer value.

For those that dislike taking powers of x, try this in Python:

def f(x):
return 62648012/4**x - 4*(15662003/4**x) + 28

map( f, xrange( 1, 13))
http://markitdown.medusis.com/xsl/html2mk.xsl

It looks like 234 lines of code to me.

>This attempt for example https://github.com/domchristie/to-markdown/blob/master/src/t....

Is badly written, but still written in a better language. They're using regexps to parse HTML (omfg!), but that kind of nastiness doesn't excuse XSLT as a language.

>There is no better templating language than XSLT

Except mako, jinja2, django templating language, liquid, etc.
Well, Taiwan is arguably China.
I am sorry but Javascript is not much better than XSLT. Horrible legacy technology full of bugs nobody was bothered to fix.
Since it is the hot topic of the day, let me add this perspective: http://www.snoyman.com/blog/2012/04/xslt-rant.html

Quote

> I'm not even talking about the hideously verbose syntax, or the completely obtuse data model. The fact that you can't know what any single line of code does without reviewing every other line in the program makes this language an abomination.
Are You Up?
I signed up and extracted tutorial video URLs that can give you an idea how it looks (video files names have titles):

http://101d1.http.tor01.cdn.softlayer.net/Welcome-Assets/mar...

http://101d1.http.tor01.cdn.softlayer.net/Welcome-Assets/ope...

http://101d1.http.tor01.cdn.softlayer.net/Welcome-Assets/sam...

http://101d1.http.tor01.cdn.softlayer.net/Welcome-Assets/mar...

http://101d1.http.tor01.cdn.softlayer.net/Welcome-Assets/sam...

http://101d1.http.tor01.cdn.softlayer.net/Welcome-Assets/hr1...

http://101d1.http.tor01.cdn.softlayer.net/Welcome-Assets/sal...

http://101d1.http.tor01.cdn.softlayer.net/Welcome-Assets/fin...

http://101d1.http.tor01.cdn.softlayer.net/Welcome-Assets/it1...

http://101d1.http.tor01.cdn.softlayer.net/Welcome-Assets/sal...

http://101d1.http.tor01.cdn.softlayer.net/Welcome-Assets/sam...

http://101d1.http.tor01.cdn.softlayer.net/Welcome-Assets/mar...

http://101d1.http.tor01.cdn.softlayer.net/Welcome-Assets/sam...
The problem is not that it is misused. The problem is that there is a small subset of problems for which it works passably (like many other technologies) and a large universe of problems for which it will cause you massive pain.
What kind of students did Harvard have back then? Was it mainly rich upper class people, or people from "the people" too?
Disney Research Captures More Realistic Eyes
Mercedonius – 13th month in Roman calendar
You're right, it's 230 lines; I updated my post accordingly. I wrote the thing 3 years ago and remembered the number of rules (templates) instead of the number of actual lines. But a line's a line, so I was wrong.

"written in a better language" doesn't mean much, however. A better language for what? I'm not picking on JavaScript, which I love and use every day; but templating in JS versus XSLT is crazy.

The templating languages that you mention are, in my opinion, extremely complex and very unpalatable; and they only work server-side.

But that's all a matter of taste, I guess. What I don't understand is why so many people go out of their way to declare their hate of XSLT (and all things XML), especially now that XSLT is all but dead...?
The site in question lists several alternatives, some of which are widely in use especially in cases where XML falls short: brevity, fast to parse, easily readable... Most of all, calling it the de facto standard is either dishonest or clueless.
> Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the string of 54 bits 001000010000011000100000101000001001000000000110000111

That's the sign we should really be looking for!
Taiwan de facto is its own government and has laws against fabbing in china, as do most countries in that region.