skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OK, lets make it long and explicit.

Asserting that an obscure, optional either-of type is some fundamental concept every single language has been overlooked is, of course, nonsense.

The fundamental concept is notion of "nothingness", "emptiness", what other languages call NIL. Without this a language would be very clumsy, like Math without zero.

The notion of empty vs. non-empty is captured in so-called "either-of" types. The most obvious example is '() - an empty list. Conceptually, it is a List, but it is also indicator of "emptiness", of "nothing inside".

A List is an "either-of type" itself, so it does not require any additional specialize type to capture the notion that it could be empty - it already has it.

Another example is so-called "C-strings". There is notion of end-of-string marker, so a string could be viewed as a list instead of an array of characters. In this case (of a list) we don't have define anything special for "empty string" - the notion of "just end-of-string marker" is good-enough.

Again. This Just/Nothing type in Haskell is nothing special or fundamental. It is an optional, non-essential construct.
A list of science-based games
There are many examples where crowd behavior exhibits less "wisdom". Take any market bubble for example. Have we ever looked at a tough scientific problem and came to the conclusion that the best path forward was to collect as many random people off the street and shove them in a room to solve it?

Also bootstrapping or model parameter selection techniques are already heavily used in AI and have not yet brought us this future. I believe that the model you presented has been simplified a bit too much ignoring a lot of important variables.
Good article for getting a woman comfortable with you
Yes, one can't stress enough how much Plan 9 is not Unix.
When Bell Labs eventually gave up on Research Unix and started from scratch they deliberately broke with almost every standard and convention in existence.

The programming language (Plan 9 has its own C dialect), breaking with POSIX, abolishing the process/thread dualism and doing away with the root user just to name a few.

By getting rid of all these inherited liabilities they were able to create a much slicker, much more uniform and most importantly truly network centric OS, which in many aspects (not necessarily in terms of performance) still surpasses modern unix-derived operating systems(you know...the usual suspects).
On the other hand the lack of backwards compatibility and the high barrier of entry prevented Plan 9's widespread adoption outside the research community.

On the contrary if we need new functionality today the way to go seems to be piling new layers of abstraction on top of the already overly complex stuff we gatherd over the years until everything becomes an incomprehensible mess of special cases(16 million loc linux kernel, anyone?).
That of course is a good ol' tradition, which started when we first fumbled network support into the unix kernel and thereby broke the open-read-write-close interface convention.

To summerize:
Plan 9 is not Unix. Thankfully...
For an example of what I mean about Kurzweil's timeline:

2018 10^13 bits (=10 TB) of computer memory—roughly the equivalent of the memory space in a single human brain—will cost $1000.

2023 10^16 calculations per second—roughly the equivalent of one human brain—will cost $1,000.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzwei...
Inequality hurts economic growth, finds OECD research
The general sentiment has been "fuck you linux user" for so long now, it's funny to see how things have changed in the last 15 years or so.
Not quite, that implementation adds an extra flag field, so isn't space efficient (it's 4 words instead of 3, which is suboptimal for long strings)
indutny, as always, great job. I consider you one of the most important persons of Javascript's ecosystem.

It's very pleasant seeing Javascript mixed with everything.
Combine the following two sections:

1) "...while going over the code a developer at the company asked me if I needed the rules of the game explained to me."

2) "...asking a female candidate if they understand a basic sports rule...comes across as belittling and sexist."

It seems pretty explicit that she found it sexist that they asked if she needed the rules explained. If she finds them sexist for asking her the question (as opposed to not asking), she must think they only asked because she's female. I don't see how it can be read otherwise. However, I don't think this makes the lady an OTT feminist.

A possible workaround would be to provide a cheat-sheet with a rules summary. I think one would be less likely to see or assume sexism if there are hard materials on offer to the interviewee - it implies that the same question and materials are used for a number of candidates, and an interviewer is unlikely to withhold the cheat-sheet just because an interviewee is male.
Which academic research caught the public imagination in 2014?
> Something that I think anyone can take away from this lecture is a story of discovering new mathematical relationships. He starts with a function that correlates to a logical problem, changes the inputs in an new (strange) way, then studies the output to form a theory that connects to the original problem.

This type of mathematical exploration seems to be the story of his life. See Quarter-imaginary base for him doing the same thing in high school.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quater-imaginary_base
Maybe some form of spoiler :P?
It sounds like you want them to add to his public humiliation and announce to the world the full details of why they're cutting ties. Is this your preferred policy for other firing offenses, too? Should companies always make public announcements of why they cut ties with employees? ("Tim Lauffer was fired today for skipping meetings and stealing $328 of office supplies for personal use over the past month." "We let Meg Simmons go last week because she spent several hours each day viewing pornography from her workstation, including content from the following sites...")

Why is is not relevant that a bunch of smart people who were friends of the accused looked over the evidence and concluded that the university should no longer be associated with him? I get the whole "innocent until proven guilty" thing, but it feels like a lot of people here are bending over backward to deny that sexual harassment might have happened.

And as for "the worst kind of sexual predator", that seems more than a little extreme based on what's been said, doesn't it? MIT is under no obligation to reserve punishment for illegal conduct. If they have established community standards for their online spaces that go beyond "no illegal behavior" and they want that community to trust that those standards count for something, this seems like a perfectly reasonable action to take.
It sounds like you've got quite a complicated process there, how did you find handling dependencies with Lambda? The docs include how to add npm dependencies but I couldn't find anything covering dependencies that the node modules might require. Does Lambda just magically figure it out?
My PhD stipend (at Northwestern, a major private US university) was about $1200/month. That's enough for a single, unmarried, childless person who is sharing an apartment with one or more roommates.

It was laughably low for someone like me, married with three children. Health care alone in the US was about $1200/month for my family. Rent was another $1200/month or so. Food cost us a few hundred a month.

Not surprisingly, I ended up doing lots of consulting work during the PhD, something that I had to keep hidden from the program. My wife's earning potential was quite low, so this was the most economical way to do it, if not the most relaxing.

An OK salary is very much relative to the person receiving it, as well as the city in which you are living. We were in Chicago, which is far less expensive than Boston or San Francisco. I can't imagine what we would have done there.
Containers of some kind. Once you have a working system on your dev machine, copy the whole setup from your dev machine to your production machine. This way you are absolutely sure that everything is identical and that you aren't accidentally running different versions of some binary and end up with a situation where you have a bug on your production machines that you cannot reproduce on your test machine.

I learnt that lesson the hard way once when I was running python 2.7.3 on my test machine and python 2.7.2 in production.
my recollection from my windows times, is that cygwin is a pain to install and slow too, so there is no free lunch.
The Freedom Tower Was Supposed to Be the Greenest Building in America
Politicians, old money and the most sociopathic CEOs will rule the world economy, just like they did last century (these categories are not mutually exclusive). Technology doesn't matter at the top; it's just another mechanism for screwing over adversaries. Some of today's behemoths will fall, but more will come out of the shadows to replace them.
Susskind is much more advanced. Realistically speaking you need to understand and internalize the content of Lewin (or comparable) before you take on Susskind.

Lewin = undergraduate-level physics
Susskind = graduate-level physics, converted to minimize math and maximize accessible explanations, but still graduate-level physics.
Dcuk Desktp Wallpaper
Infinite zooming and panning library for HTML pages
You (and the rest of the comments to your post) miss the point: Now you need grunt, a gruntfile, the tools for the build process and grunt specific wrappers.

What you instead could have had was a simple script running the tools with the proper command line arguments.
No. I refuse. I use CoffeeScript and SCSS and often install components via bower. I like grunt watch+serve+livereload to drive my development server environment. I like continuous testing with karma. Grunt helps me manage all of this centrally. npm simply does not have the functionality to be a legitimate replacement.
So something like Docker?
I agree and one thing that is missing from this discussion is that many document databases are atomic around a document update. That gives the developer a very easy model to work with for a lot of things, you can update any part of a document without conflicts. In a relational system that would probably require updates/reads from multiple tables. Of course it won't work for everything but you can get an easy model to understand.
Docker works, but there are lots of ways to get the same result. I'm not trying preach any specific method.
I keep mistaking your nick for pg's on comment threads. I am gonna call you "the other paul"(of yc) in my head from now on if you don't mind :)
I'd suggest technology is a key attraction. People involved in startups are there not only because it might get big, but also because the technology they are using excites them.
Ask HN: Do we need a different kind of social networks?
This is rather nice. I'm not sure I see a use case for it, but it's fun to play with nonetheless.

One tweak I'd make.. have a static box attached to one corner that doesn't zoom with the rest of the page for a user defined message, eg "F2 to reset". If you've zoomed out a long way it's very easy to get lost, so a reminder of how to get back to the content is critical. Alternatively, limit the zoom so the user always has some portion of the content visible.
How does cash enter and exit this system? Software doesn't quite solve that part yet.
While modernizing and redesigning the Plan 9 UI is a valiant cause, it may not be the most efficient way to accomplish your goals.

I'd venture to say that Plan 9 was never meant to be a mainstream OS. It essentially served as a playpen for new OS/systems ideas and research at Bell Labs at the time.

A lot of those ideas were pretty influential: union mounts, per-process namespaces, user-space file systems, UTF8, human-readable protocols, rfork(), file-object interface ubiquity, concurrent programming model, etc. You can see how these ideas have pervaded our current systems landscape.

The implementation of Plan 9 itself is great, but I don't think success of the Plan 9 project should be limited to whether or not its specific implementation stays current and modern. The UX was never designed with the common user in-mind, and it arguably was never the core focus for the system. A greater success would be to see its actual core ideas spread out into other mainstream systems.

So instead of making the Plan 9 UX more modern, why not work on getting some of its missing features into Linux instead? Last time I checked, Linux still needs a union-mount implementation. This way, the world benefits.

BTW, you might like this: http://swtch.com/plan9port/
Yes, exactly.

However, you will need the database or training data fed into that lock system. Without the data, you won't be able to test it at home.
I hear this a lot from my foreign friends. It's 2014 and even Ryanair don't sell £20 return flights any more (£30-40 is pushing it. E.g LGW-DUB in Feb is £40).

Also, the Eurozone isn't all that cheap any more. Prior to 2008, £1 bought you 1.4-1.5 EUR. Since then it's typically been between 1.1 and 1.3 EUR. And prices have risen all over Europe.

Even if you found a £20 flight, it'll be the cheapest part of the trip! If you do anything other than a backpacking budget, your flight cost will be eclipsed by: baggage fees, travel to/lunch at the airport, accommodation, transport, entertainment and food.

It starts with a cheap flight and before you know it you've spent £200-400/pp for a couple of days away.
Pretty amazing, well done!
I know very little about neural networks, other than at the conceptual level, so I could be very off here, but couldn't an algorithm be defined to look for meta signals surrounding the activation pathways which could be regularly 'audited'?

What I mean is, humans have a 6th sense that tells us when things are 'off', and require further examination. This comes from having 5 senses that are highly tuned to the world around us, and work incredibly well together. In some ways, physical hardware has limitations on it's ability to 'sense' the outside world, but in other ways, the ability to analyze and collect hard data is significantly more powerful than what humans can achieve, even at a subconscious level. Do current neural network algorithms not have this kind of failsafe?
It didn't seem pretentious so much as unfairly entitled and demanding, and potentially insensitive to the needs and interests of possible co-workers.

But it's interesting to watch someone coming at it from that angle, instead of the usual 'give employers anything they want' view.
Last plaintiff in iTunes lawsuit disqualified, lawyers search for replacement
> Not as absurd as you equating private decisions by a privately-run educational institution with legal process.

I just wanted to repeat this bit for emphasis.

MIT does not wield the state's authority. Only the state can effect censorship; private choices are not enforced by state power.
If it's more than several lines, I write it out in a separate bash/js script and use grunt to call it, via shell or require() depending.

Not saying it's better than make or something else, but it's easy for everyone on the team to use & modify.
This is a fantastic visual demonstration of a simple, but surprising (if you haven't seen it before) effect! Congrats to Vi Hart & Nicky Case (I presume Nicky did the web/javascript side of things?).

This isn't just about race / skin colour either - you can see exactly the same effects in things like political viewpoints where people also tend to segregate into areas or simply social circles of people that share their own preferences. (pace the praphrased quote: "How could politician X win the election? Nobody I know would vote for them!")
Didi Dache, One of China’s Taxi App Firms, Received $700M
94 Brazilian Technology Companies to Watch in 2015
It can also be described as two different story-tellers in your brain: one is concerned about present, but the other one sees the long-term story. Invoking a long-term storyteller shifts motivational focus away from "I am not in the right mood" excuses.
"One machine can do the work of 50 ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." Elbert Hubbard
Your third sentence seems to be missing a not
Delhi bans Internet taxi services
What does it say that anything over 75-85% "segregationism" leads to an almost completely desegregated community of shapes over time (though, they are constantly moving)?
Malaria deaths halved over last decade
The Uber driver app uses Apple Maps...
> the ever loosening definition of sexual harassment

> so called "social justice warriors"

Go home, pick-up artist. Take your mens rights advocacy someplace that cares. Your butt-hurt is unwelcome here.
Sinatra is better performance-wise IIRC.

Then again, Node comes with the convenience of having the same programming language on the both the front and the back end of things.

If you don't need performance, it's just preference. Stick to Sinatra if you want to bang out the app quickly.
This is exactly why I don't use it. I do iOS development since the first SDK public release, I have a love/hate relationship with Interface Builder. I used to use it a lot, but now I use it only in small projects. Storyboard is awesome for small apps.

But for my big projects I do 100% of the UI in the code, if the UI use a lot of custom control, it just not worth it to use IB, the end result is that what you see is not at all what you get. BUT it improved a lot with Xcode 6, because now it can render custom views live in Interface Builder.

Auto layout on the other side.... it's just broken.... Every time I try to use it I got what you mentioned in your first paragraph. And I do a lot of animations in my apps, and playing with 10 constrains instead of a simple frame is just .... too much of a burden.

Again, for big custom apps I don't use it, but I love those functionalities for small & simple apps.
harveywi never suggested that a PhD program was all doom and gloom nor that it was personal anecdote. I, for one, agree with harveywi's observations.

Carl Vogel - one of the people questioned on the site - does too, in the comment: "The world is full of miserable grad students. Stressed-out, depressed, uncertain about when or if they’ll graduate and what will happen to them when they do. Far more people go into Ph.D. programs than should."

Vogel is the least optimistic about graduate school of the people interviewed, and also the only one who is neither a PhD nor a current PhD student. This is in line with harveywi's comment about survivorship bias. Your response assumes the same bias, by only considering those finish a PhD from a top school, and diminishing the 50% who did not finish by saying they were "underqualified" or solely at fault for making a suboptimal decision, not recognizing that resolving that question of staying in school (and the potential to be hired at Google) vs. leaving (and being branded 'underqualified' by people like you) is no simple matter.
Snowdrift: matching patronage system for free/open projects
Developing Good Software Is Damn Hard
I'm not sure what precisly you're referring to (proprietary software/drivers?), I love linux, used it almost exclusively for 5 years before my current .NET job.

I'm talking here about pure javascript npm packages, something you can legitimatly expect to be able to build on windows and yet some people make childish judgements on windows users and choose tools which exclude a part of the community (not always the case or the reason but it happens).

On a similar subject, I stopped counting the times I've seen someone get told to get a Mac when discussing a problem on cross platform tools.
The LiDAR part is neat. Anyone knows if Google uses this too for mapping?
rand(3) recommends random(3) and arc4random(3)

rand48(3) recommends random(3)

random(3) recommends arc4random(3)

So no excuses.
Popular Myths about C++, Part 1
Where you can and can't fly a drone
I need help for turning this into a collaborative tool... Anyone? twitter: @JosephErnest
Curiosity Mars rover 'solves mountain riddle'
Distributed computation platforms
What are your thoughts about distributed computation platforms, and how would you use it?

http://beta.graphcpu.com/
Your comparison to OS/2 may be apt. The details are a bit murky for me, but as far as I can tell from Wikipedia[1], OS/2 3.0 was at some point simply renamed to Windows NT, which of course is the underlying technology for Windows as we know it today.

That is; Plan 9 is a research project and it is relevant the way research is relevant: For the future.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2
Union filesystems are (finally) supported in mainline Linux as of the most recent (3.18) release.

https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux....
Video in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-QNAwUdHUQ
Consider that these people updated, you just don't share their conditional probabilities. In particular, they might think that P(response by MIT as given|harassment nonexistent or relatively trivial) is fairly high, given their understanding of or experience with the academic climate in the recent years, internal politics in academia, standards of institutional ass-covering etc. It's also notable (given that sexual harassment is a crime) that no involvement by authorities is described or even hinted at.

You do make a good point. "no harassment happened" shouldn't be the strong default belief (I'm not sure it actually is for many people here). But based on the statement and what is known about the relevant politics in academia, "serious harassment definitely occurred" shouldn't be one either.
I will check this thread in a month. Write me back how everything works for you (:
Great to see James Joyce mentioned on HN!
IMHO play games (matrix style)
I meant one way prices. To my Canadian ears £40 one way is still very cheap.

Berlin, £50 round trip in March, £40 in January. Copenhagen, £50 in March. BCN, £50. Porto, £58.

Stansted Express, round trip 30 days in advance, £16.

Baggage fees, why? For a week or less, even the aggressive easyJet carryon size is sufficient.

Lunch at the airport... it's like you're trying to make a trip expensive.

Food... yep, you'll have to eat anywhere, and nowhere is that cheap. Considering UK grocery prices it might well be cheaper to travel. Dinner for two incl beer, tax and tip for 449 CZK? That's cheaper than cheap places in Seattle.

Was it cheaper in 2007? Maybe, I wasn't here, can't comment. Is it still miles better than travel options out of SEA or SFO? Yep.

(Cheapest SEA-SFO return is £113. SFO-SAN £107 return. Anywhere more unusual is pricier. LON-KEF is half the price of SEA-ANC. London-Split, £142 round trip, occasional £81 deal. SFO-HNL £290 round trip, London-Gran Canaria is £156 return, occasional £75 Norwegian deal, and it's not like Hawaii or LA or even the resorts in Mexico are particularly cheap. Well, I suppose it's cheaper to go to Vegas from SF.)
There are already factories that can run unsupervised. It's called "lights out manufacturing" and one of those factories is building robots:

"Robots are building other robots at a rate of about 50 per 24-hour shift and can run unsupervised for as long as 30 days at a time"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_out_%28manufacturing%29
So are human brains.
Tutorial: Writing a simple WordPress plugin from scratch
Fractal Platformer
I believe the OpenCourseWare materials were made available under a permissive license. And the lectures are available on archive.org e.g.

https://archive.org/details/MIT8.01F99

I can understand MITs decision to remove the materials from OpenCourseWare, OpenCourseWare is not a library. Removing his materials from there distances themselves from him, and his actions. They have however allowed them to be made available elsewhere.
Considering there are some events filling up sporting arenas in the US already, I don't think it's too farfetched. I was at IEM last weekend in San Jose at that SAP Center; the LoL season 9 championships had it filled up to about 3/4 capacity!