skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's the weird bit. The "nut graf" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nut_graph) in Hughes' essay is:

> At the heart of the conflict of the past few days is a divergent view on how the New Republic — and journalism more broadly — will survive. In one view, it is a “public trust” and not a business. It is something greater than a commercial enterprise, ineffable, an ideal that cannot be touched. Financially, it would be a charity. There is much experimentation in nonprofit journalism – ProPublica and the Texas Tribune are proving the model — and that may be the right path for certain institutions. At the New Republic, I believe we owe it to ourselves and to this institution to aim to become a sustainable business and not position ourselves to rely on the largesse of an unpredictable few. Our success is not guaranteed, but I think it’s critical to try.

So he thinks it's "critical" that TNR be operated as a business, rather than a non-profit. OK, fine. But he never bothers to explain why. Why do they "owe it to ourselves and this institution to become a sustainable business", rather than a non-profit? Non-profits can be "sustainable" too, after all. But he never gets around to mounting an argument for why having TNR be a profitable business is "critical." He just asserts that this is so.

It's like he wants to reply to his critics, but without actually engaging with their arguments in any substantive way. So it comes off reading like an internal monologue rather than a convincing argument.
Just checked http://status.aws.amazon.com/ , Amazon at least doesn't seem to have noticed
I'm curious about this. I went to a good university (though not known for CS), and I thought that most of my classmates were apathetic/just in it for the money. I certainly never saw the sort of enthusiasm that I see from people on HN (or my co-workers at my startup job).

Are places like CMU or MIT utopias of hacking-related discussion?

(I mean at the undergraduate level, that is)
I agree. The problems the author describes happen all too often in the "actual projects" category; it certainly looks like the screenshots were from one such project.
"Valgrind" would be an excellent name for a skateboard manufacturer.
I guess a lot of it depends on how you learn best. I like to go deep, but it has to be on my terms. Sucking in books never gives me a sense of accomplishment unless I'm actively trying to 'rediscover' what is being taught for myself. I prefer to use reference material to open up lines of thought, then I go away and try to 'reinvent' it for myself, baby steps. I come back later to have the material nudge me in the right direction or get me over hurdles. Sometimes it's too hard and I'll drop material for something else, even if it's not as deep, or go without, rather than grind on, because I'd rather not know than 'know' and not truly understand.

Fully-formed 'rational exposition' of a new topic or area of study is just a terrifying thing for me because I'm worried I'll be swept up in all that exposition and not prod the holes in my understanding, perhaps not even see them. Later on I then feel I have to remember 'what the author taught me' rather than unravelling of the topic itself. Visiting a complete exposition later, after a bit of folly, I feel much more confident in both myself and the material. It's very inefficient in terms of time, but then I can spend a lifetime learning and still know next to nothing anyway.
> Python programmers, as a rule, never get around to learning C

Counterexample: I started with Python, learned C, and switched to C for most things. (Python is far too slow. PyPy is better, but still...)
Most of those high-quality sites that contain detailed technical information have something in common: they don't carry Google's advertising, so Google earns no revenue when you visit them. Despite Google's protestations over the last few years, I haven't heard a better explanation for the shift in the nature of the results they return.
For all the comments Go gets on its typesystem, I suppose

if rt, ok := dst.(ReaderFrom); ok {
return rt.ReadFrom(src)
}

Isn't the most terrible way anyone has seen pattern matching implemented.

At least it is better than Java's instanceof + cast.
The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements is a 1951 social psychology book by American writer Eric Hoffer that discusses the psychological causes of fanaticism.

The book analyzes and attempts to explain the motives of the various types of personalities that give rise to mass movements; why and how mass movements start, progress and end; and the similarities between them, whether religious, political, radical or reactionary. Hoffer argues that even when their stated goals or values differ mass movements are interchangeable, that adherents will often flip from one movement to another, and that the motivations for mass movements are interchangeable. Thus, religious, nationalist and social movements, whether radical or reactionary, tend to attract the same type of followers, behave in the same way and use the same tactics and rhetorical tools. As examples, the book often refers to Communism, Fascism, National Socialism, Christianity, Protestantism, and Islam.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_True_Believer
Yes. Haskellers are just too much in love with compilers and parsers. Those are much easier to write in Haskell, but not enough people have grappled, and suffered (and failed) to write one in eg C to appreciate.
There's something to be said about the distinction between "this" and "self" as names for the self-referential instance object. While "self" emphasizes mutability and introspection, "this" evokes a more material, evidentiary abstraction.

When I transitioned from PHP to Python, the change in nomenclature (albeit only a social norm in Python) was a big part of what helped me think bigger about this concept.

To this point, this read might have been easier to digest had it started with the section "object this."
Home automation tech might be able to help with those blinds, but then you're adding more moving parts.
Who would complain about a new outlet for long form investigative journalism that's actually massively popular? This podcast is as great as the commentaries/communities that treat it like Game of Thrones are shallow and stupid.

Are there actually people who think that good journalism that gets too popular becomes bad in some way or is this just a way to generate a "hot take" story?

"“I’d rather disappoint many, many people than make some conclusion just because I’ve got to make . . . a satisfying story,” she told Slate’s Mike Pesca. “I hope that’s not where I lead all of my listeners but . . . I don’t know.”

If she doesn’t provide one, argued Pesca in the same interview, “the internet will rise up in a collective wail” and he pleaded with Koenig to reassure him that Serial would not “wind up being a contemplation on the nature of truth”."

Here's the better story, hopefully shithead narcissists like Pesca don't ever try to follow Serial because they would turn it into an exploitative farce.
An interface takes any value for which the required methods are defined on it.

Methods can be defined on any type declared in the package.

A type in go can be a lot more that just a struct; it can be any type in the language. So while it may make sense to have values on interfaces for structs, values don't make any sense for functions, pointers, interfaces, or extensions to built in types.
> Simply put, my assertion is that it is the accompanying prose and diagrams that truly make the code easy to understand. Not its implementation language.

Haskell does help somewhat, in that it's offers you a lot of flexibility in how to structure your program. So you can tailor your program to your explanation. (Knuth's literate programming tools help bring those capabilities and more to more conventional languages.)
No OS-related reason why it shouldn't be; Notes will run happily on Windows, OS X and Linux. It may even have been webbified (not particularly difficult from R5 onward, and really quite easy since Domino 8.x).
No, why would I be under that impression?

I think it depends on the corporation and what they are purchasing.

IBM has tremendous resources and you'd expect very many smart and well educated people on its payroll. It's just interesting which problems they are selecting to solve when there are so many other problems to choose from that they likely could solve.

Why not large scale logistics problems to reduce the cost of the overall food supply chain instead of attempting to extract maximum profit from women with families?

I suppose there is an argument that some might make that that is exactly what you should do to achieve maximum reduction in cost. I don't hear IBM making that argument though. I'm not going to make it either, I think there are likely much larger reductions elsewhere.
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Would touring and concerts not be considered the "consulting" aspect of music?
Haskell has sortBy and comparing, like this:

sortBy (comparing salary) employees

The grammar is not as close to English, but close enough to understand.
They probably are already. (In Haskell, they would be by default. I don't know enough about Agda.)
It's 2014. Don't be a dick about it obviously but it would be cruel to let a beginner learn PHP.
I think that one of the other reasons that people are discouraged from continuing their programming is the information overload that you go through when learning something new (Especially something so large and complicated). I know that many of my friends have shied away because they felt like they where good enough enough to understand the information they where finding online. Hearing discouraging comments from others just helps reinforce that sense of inadequacy.
You misinterpreted what I mean by "monetize". Of course I'm not trying to profit of my work. I meant getting money to do my research. Currently, I have to write papers and then separately write grant applications. This is duplication of effort and a complete waste of many people's time. The solution I'm working on will combine publishing and funding.
I was perhaps was not clear about pre-1949 China: "only" 60-70 million were estimated to have been killed in that period as of the early '80s, and that includes those killed by the Japanese. I attribute more deaths to the Communists than most.

As for famine, if you're trying to suggest events caused by "agrarian reformers" like the Holodomor and Great Leap Forward just happened to have starved a lot of people due to "bad luck" or the like, I don't see us having any basis for discussion.
Amazon just entered the food delivery game
The F35 uses the fuel as hydraulic fluid, too. That may have something to do with it.
Indeed. I remember clearly asking my high-school teacher why, if photosynthesis was so simple, didn't we use it to produce sugar artificially? I felt a little irritated that it turned out we spent so much time, and put so much emphasis on such a simplistic model... when apparently it wasn't very useful for any kind of analysis/further work etc.

There is absolutely an art to finding the correct way to simplify models. I'm reminded of Alan Kay's comment at his Ted talk, where he holds up the Gapminder-project for a useful simplification and highlighting/illustration of (rather complex) data, and derides a 3d model of biological processes in cells -- because they show proteins magically dancing stately around and matching up to form reactions -- which is completely different from what is actually happening (large complex molecules spinning really fast, thus making the incredible improbable matching of to such proteins just so possible).

That said, when it comes to mechanics, I think most realize that the model is naive -- students don't feel "deceived" -- and the ratios etc do actually translate to some useful intuitions when doing real-world work (eg: clearing rocks with wire, winch and tackle).
> Many of these people are now forced to sell out to big corporate record labels...

Mostly look at the word "now". At what time did musicians not need to "sell out" to "big corporate" record labels?
I knew this was coming for a long time. I work for an Aluminium products manufacturer in NW Kansas and we've been building material handling solutions for Amazon for over a year now.
Because he doesn't want to continuously throw money down a bottomless pit? He may be ok with it not providing much financial return, but is it too much to not want to lose millions year after year?
The author of that article is also the author of the Goji framework (very nice web framework for Golang): https://goji.io/
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To start with assembly is great if one wants to learn programming instead of building websites.
The purpose of the interface is to abstract how something is done.

In your example, GetVar() can be implemented in a number of ways. Returning Var field of Blah struct is only one such way (and if there was only one implementation, there would be no need for an interface).

In that light, adding variables as part of interface doesn't make sense. Variables are fixing the thing that interface is meant to make flexible.

In Go, you can achieve re-using of a bunch of variables (and their methods) by embedding - put the variables you want to re-use into a separate struct and embed that struct in other structs. See https://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#embedding
This seems a bit tortuous. You can do this sort of thing in Blender or After Effects (even very old versions that you can get cheap or free) very easily, and skip the PNG conversion stage altogether.
Looking into Heterogeneity: When Simple Is Faster [pdf]
Kickstarter seems to work pretty well. Why can't there be such a model for non-technological creations?
Sure, this is improperly titled -- needs "(2013)" -- but downvote me instead anyway.

It's pretty disappointing to get to the bottom of an article linked from HN only to find that the existing discussion is more than a year old and fairly stale. The HN community as a whole must have decided they agree because old posts get marked as such with their year in the title.
The solution to this "problem" is remarkably simple from a repo owner's standpoint: Verbiage in your README along the lines of "This is an unstable project and pull requests will not be honored - you are welcome to fork the project, however!"

This makes it appear on the very front page of your project and is hard to miss. (How to deal with people that contribute without reading first is an exercise for the reader)

The attitude I'm seeing in here is really quite disgusting. You've put your code up on what is basically the Facebook of coders - you really should not feel put-upon when the unspoken social contract of a collaborative code editing platform is acted on by someone else.

Every culture has one, and GitHub's is shared collaboration on code bases. If you want to violate that norm, fine, it's your project, but then kindly call it out ahead of time and stop whining that the community that's made GitHub awesome is the way that it is.
Thanks for providing an actual example of this. As someone whose hobbies include fixing and improving things, that sounds like a spring that's ringing. I think you could dampen it if you could identify the exact one and put some sound-absorbing material on it, or if you find the end-stop some part is hitting sharply on, put something soft on that.

As another datapoint, service manuals for various equipment (including cameras) are another difficult thing to find, as Google really thinks you want the usual brief and increasingly useless instruction manual even if you very explicitly type "service manual" in your query.
Sexy Russian spy ‘tried to seduce’ Snowden
Reading through documents like this really pains me because I it seems like such interesting work and I immediately want to understand it better, but then realize the time required to acquire the knowledge and experience necessary to understand and apply this technology is so great, that it almost seems like a waste of time. After all, think of all the things one could build in the 2 full-time years it would take to fully comprehend all of this to the point where it's useful in any practical application.
Yeah. The main benefit of digital technology is the ability to copy and transmit data freely. Nobody complains when the email I sent is still sitting in a folder in my mailbox. I don't have to hand write a second copy for my own records. This is progress. It's the same as buggy whip makers complaining that automobiles put them out of a job. Only in this century, the buggy whip manufacturers have a much larger and louder lobby.
He also fails to state in any clear way what, concretely, Foer, Wieseltier, Ioffe, et al wanted that was inconsistent with his idea of a "businesslike" mode of operation, whatever that means...
I'm going to quote from that link:

"""
On the subject of famine it is also important to have some perspective regarding the incredible pressures the communist countries were subjected to, and the desperate programs of industrialization they were forced to adopt. From the outset, the west was intensely hostile to communism and placed it under perpetual threat of military defeat. This was true from the early invasion of the newly declared USSR by WWI allied governments, to the runup to and ultimate defeat of Nazism by the Soviet Union, to the Cold war, to the western backing of the Nationalist government in China, to Eisenhower's threats of catastrophic nuclear retaliation against China during the 1950s. In every case, it was absolutely imperative that the communist governments industrialize as rapidly and as thoroughly as possible, costs be damned. In the USSR, the wisdom of the industrialization policy was proven by the defeat of fascism in 1945; but throwing every possible hour of labor into industrialization meant that other aspects of the economy were neglected and catastrophic mistakes like the famine in Ukraine could occur. The exact same motivation and consequence were what caused the Great Leap Forward and the famine associated with it."""

Note that this is very different than the famines we know about that were actually engineered by a government, such as, to pick just one example, the Bengal Famine of 1943 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943)
Neither is easy. Or conversely, both are about equally difficult.

Also, it's not so much the languages that are the steep learning curve, but the frameworks.
It's hard for me to see how you can fault Apple for charging "too much." That is how capitalism is supposed work.

Cook probably shouldn't have started with the trash talk, but to be honest I agree with him. And I think a lot less people would use Facebook if they were upfront about the information they were collecting on their users.
It's entropy at work, most of the population is of average intelligence and many of us come from superstitious primates. It's about the scale of large societies, the advancement of technology and biological costs.
ok, let me rephrase after a downvote: he is the owner, right? why is it unreasonable for him to want this publication he owns to be a business? Why does that require an explanation?
That's a fair point. I did not consider the limited range of colours on most terminals.

Bold text might also be an option, though it wouldn't immediately distinguish between added and removed characters.
> A much more interesting observation would have been to note that you could accomplish the same thing by introducing a new language construct that explicitly noted that the order of two calls doesn't matter

This would be the case for a pure function: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_function

One of the selling points of pure functional languages is the potential optimizations the compiler can theoretically do, including using multiple cores to evaluate a program, without any explicit hints from the programmer.
This is pretty much spot on. I live in San Mateo. Firstly, what I pay for my basic apartment here would have easily put me in one of the nicest places back home. Nightlife doesn't exist. The traffic is horrible if you are headed up into SF or down into San Jose. I manage to save $1K per month on my six figure salary. At first, that sounds like I'm doing pretty well; however, look up the cost of a house in the Bay Area. In August when my lease is up, I'm taking what I have managed to save, and I'm going home to where I can afford to live, not merely sleep.
>Train travel is also impractical because no train is ever going to be competitive with an airplane on a Chicago-Houston, Chicago-Boston, or (heh) Chicago-Seattle route

When the weather is good.

In the post-winter-break rush the last few years, air traffic on the East Coast went down for a few days and was backed up for several more. The only New Yorkers who made it back to school in time were the ones who got seats on the Lake Shore Limited.

When air traffic is functioning smoothly, it's faster, but in a serious winter storm/holiday travel fiasco, ~24 hours on a train beats ~1 week of delays for a flight.
You can if the partition uses new storage rather than swapping in-place (which is likely what you want anyway for horizontal parallelism, see below): pick multiple pivots and insert elements into a bucket depending on how many pivots they're greater than. This turns out to be called samplesort, with some extra detail regarding picking the buckets.

However, once you give up on in-place you should probably use radix sort instead, as long as your elements, or their hashes, have some semblance of uniform distribution: this avoids having to calculate greater-than on a large number of pivots, although depending on the architecture it may be possible to do the latter reasonably quickly, and I suppose you may end up saturating memory bandwidth anyway...

Anyway, you can run a single partition in parallel - just not in place - by dividing the input data and having separate output queues per core. You probably need to merge the buckets back into the original array anyway, so this doesn't hurt; even if you want to keep the buckets separated (but individually contiguous) for some reason, e.g. if you don't need the final output as an array and want to save some difficult-to-parallelize merging, it just makes the partition a bit trickier with some atomic stuff.
Because Forks aren't easily discoverable (discussed elsewhere on this thread as well), the fork would be unlikely to gain critical mass, especially without an official sanction and prominent shoutout by the original repo. If the maintenance has truly lapsed, the owner may be too lazy to even tell people about the fork. This is backed up by the fact that they obviously haven't anointed a successor, as it were.
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The enlightenment was wrong about the mind:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ
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ffmpeg is the ImageMagick of video.

(GraphicsMagick is the ImageMagick of pictures, for me. IM has a few more features, but GM is more stable and usually much faster.)
It's not unreasonable, of course. Except for the special case that he's worth $800m and the publication in question is the New Republic. And, as he notes, there is a trend of journalistic organizations eschewing the traditional for-profit model in order to sustain themselves and provide the quality journalism our country and world needs.