skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Microsoft didn't just "play hardball"; they abused a monopoly position to extinguish competition, and they lost multiple antitrust suits because of it. The fact that other companies are misbehaving now doesn't negate the damage MS did in the 1990s. OEMs couldn't refuse MS agreements because of MS's monopoly. To an extent the computing world has recovered, so if you weren't old enough or not yet into the computing industry you might not have noticed, but the market would be way more interesting without MS's anticompetitive bullying.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation#Government...
Long time ago, e.g., Fisher Black
was still alive (maybe he's not now).

I hadn't yet heard of James Simons.
The rumor I heard was that Simons
liked to hire mathematical physicists
from Russia.

I had no way to go to Wall Street
and already know all about everything
they they were doing. The martgingale
convergence theorem, measurable selection,
power spectral estimation, sure, all
about Wall Street, no.

When I was in graduate school, people
who understood both measure theory
and martingales, Markov processes, etc.
were like hen's teeth. Or, sure,
essentially every pure math Ph.D.
knows measure theory, but curiously, at
least in the US, they rarely take a
course in graduate probability. It's
tough for me to believe that many
physics students actually work at all
carefully through measure theory.
So, hen's teeth.

So, I thought that
I had relatively good qualifications.
And since I'd read E. Thorpe's book,
Wall Street was one of my goals.
But I couldn't get the time of day from
Wall Street.

Finally, with the letter
back from Fisher Black, I gave up.
I mean, good grief,
a lot of the interest is in
the Brownian motion approach to
the Dirichelet problem and
Black-Scholes, and that was
Fisher Black.

In a sense I can't fault Wall Street:
A lot of people there are making
a lot of money now, with, usually
without, measure theory, etc., so
clearly they don't need me.

Once again, over again, one more time,
in the US the main way to make money
is to own a business and make it
valuable, not to work for someone
else. So, I'm doing a start-up.
Based on some mathematics, including
measure theory? Yes. Having to do
with Wall Street? No.

Right, LTCM: So, let's see, independent
increments with the same distribution
and not much more and satisfy the
central limit theorem and, thus, get
a Gaussian process, really, an
approximation to Brownian motion.
So, ..., and LTCM should have worked,
right? Wrong! Those assumptions are
only approximately correct, and
moreover need some work on the rate
of convergence to a Gaussian, with
good attention to the tails, and, there,
tilt. Boom. Someone kicks over a
bucket of fish heads in Asia and ...,
down goes LTCM.
Except not that many of us had means to access that information. I totally agree with this though: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
> Rovio seems to have forgotten the lesson that the greater your success, the more likely you are not to be able to repeat it.

Well said.

Another way to look at it is if your company can grow very quickly from almost nothing, it's vulnerable to shrinking almost as quickly too.
Probably.

I always thought that an interesting intermediate for cars would be to have a HUD displaying wireframes around detected objects. The motivation being that it can help, but doesn't have nearly the potential for harm as a full self-driving vehicle.

Of course, then you end up with the same problem that we have with aircraft - people become reliant on fallible assists.
I'm well aware of manufacturing: I live in perhaps one of the largest heavy and precision machine manufacturing marketplaces on earth (oil and gas represent!). However, manufacturing doesn't scale like software scales, especially when you're just building a new iteration of a product that's been around for a century. Nanojiggers, or robots, or electric cars, or whatever is one thing...this is razors.

I agree that it's fine to mention them here--that doesn't make them a tech company. Lots of businesses that are high-growth and successful aren't tech companies, and that's okay.

It's really annoying dealing with companies that aren't tech companies but think that they are. They seem to have work environments where the tech is driven in the wrong direction, at once both beholden to the business interests and yet still pursued as though it were an end into itself. This is not a good combination.
No, it generally cannot.

A git repo is always consistent: when putting stuff into the repo, you add complete files to the "loose object" directory, and then modify the ref while holding a lock (and doing a "compare-and-swap" under that lock).

Which means that, as long as the filesystem does not reorder operations such that later operations are visible before earlier ones (and a sane system does not - in that sense, ext3, ext4 and NTFS are all sane), you are either before the ref change (at the old version) or after the ref change (the new version) - any other state is not accessible.

There is nothing magical about SQLite's transaction support. If the operating system reorders files across an fsync(), both sqlite and git will corrupt. If it doesn't, it won't.

Git is transactional and ACID. And unlike SQLite (or even Oracle for that matter), when "git fsck" says "ok", you know that there is no error in the data (caused by bad memory, undetected disk error, etc). Repository integrity is fundamentally inherent to how git works.

EDIT: Just to point out: fossil does keep SHA1 hashes of everything, so it can find problems just as well as git does - but sqlite itself generally cannot.
Here in Nashville, TN I'm amazed by how many people I see using RedBox kiosks/vending machines. http://www.redbox.com/ They're outside most grocery stores here and seem to be in constant use. Strikes me as a great middle ground between the "brick and mortar" video rental store, and "techy" online video rental options.
I know a lot of people here love DDG, but my experience hasn't been the same. I have tried many times to switch over to DDG, but the quality of search results just isn't the same as google. It's like google just knows what I'm looking for.

Everyone loves a good underdog story; I would love to see DDG catch up and be equivalent to Google search.
Or F#, which is perhaps a more comfortable alternative for people who would otherwise be considering Scala.

Incidentally, I've finally started to sink my teeth into Scala with a larger project. So far my impression has been "Very nearly as good a language for functional programming as C#." It's got ML-ish syntax, but the Java-y OOisms are just way too front-and-center for comfort. Case classes and extractor patterns, I'm looking at you.
Helpful DNS Management Basics
Les Adresses de Franny: Un resto pas prise de tete
Am i missing something, or is there no explanation anywhere on their site of what this actually does at a detailed enough level targeted towards a developer?

Update: never mind, found the docs hiding inside the live demo page.
No offense to the author, but this reads like a 16 old claiming he finally find the girl who is 'the one' for life. __only two years later__, that Another girl shows up and OMG the new chick definitely is the 'true' one.

To put it another way, under extreme circumstances, Mr. Martin Odesky can use even the $&^%$#$ PHP to write safe and efficient airplane flying control software.

The point is the language is hardly matter as much as your kids think. There are far more important things for good software. But language is not only a tool but also a toy and a passion, so I can appreciate the urge to talk about it. :-)
Well, you get what you pay for (again, exempting professional services/staffing firms from this because they don't operate in the labor market under the same rules as individuals). If you offer $60-80k/yr, you're not going to get great developers. If the market rate is $80k and they're offering $60k for H1B developers, that's actually illegal (though unfortunately rarely enforced).

But many projects don't need great engineers: they just need people who can write code that implements business requirements. Someone with a technical certification may be fine for this (which is usually all these offshore developers have anyway). I would argue that it's insane to pay $100k/yr for this kind of work: from a macro perspective, other skilled labor fields such as accounting are equally challenging, but accounting salaries are much lower. If we trained developers like we do accountants, our economy would likely be more productive.
Show HN: Skyler - Shop the weather
This article has been posted three times before. It's interesting to see how opinions change over time.

10 months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7270973)

9 months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7397794)

3 months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8263296)
Apple iPhone 6S Smartphone Rumors Suggest to Launch on Spring 2015
Docker's overreach seems to resemble the overreach of Joyent in the io.js world. It's really hard to regain trust and momentum once the community starts to question you; in economic terms this would be termed as "a spike in transaction costs." If I were Docker, my next project would be a meetup/presentation/etc explaining how my new initiatives are for the benefit of the community, rather than just self-serving wheel reinvention. This isn't a consumer-facing business; the opinions of concerned developers can make or break them.
git's error reporting and command line are not exactly friendly, but reliability and friendliness are orthogonal.

So git crashed and burned. Was anything corrupted?

Now for a question. Say, Mr. Evil Gamma Ray flipped one bit on your data somewhere. Git is guaranteed to detected this. SQLite is unlikely to. There's an actual reliability difference here, and it is in Git's favor.

EDIT: Just to point out: fossil does keep SHA1 hashes of everything, so it can find problems just as well as git does - but sqlite itself generally cannot.
Three tools that newbie Product Managers will find useful
Nope don't see many of them but some.
I would suggest to you that Clojure has a very clear "the Clojure Way" I would say, more so then almost any other language. It goes beyond syntax to a pretty deep design level. Its not even all that unique to clojure, you could do 'the clojure way' in other languages, but they usally dont.

Some of the importent keynotes from some of the early conjs are really importent, and they really went deep in the community, you can see it in almost every major library.

Another commenter has mentioned the notion of 'simple' but thats not really all that clear. I not enougth of a writer to tell you about it, but I can give you the resources:

- This classic got Clojure on the map for many people: Are We There Yet? - Rich Hickey www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hickey

- Simple Made Easy - Rich Hickey - http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy-QCon-Lon...

- Simplicity Ain't Easy - Stuart Halloway - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cidchWg74Y4

- Ousterhout's Dichotomy Isn't (Part 2 of the Simplicity/Power/Focus Series) - Stuart Halloway - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cidchWg74Y4

- The Language of the System - Rich Hickey https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROor6_NGIWU

- Hammock Driven Development - Rich Hickey https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc

In addition to these, there are many talk that are about people trying to run with these ideas. Datomic is a example of taking these ideas to the max, it really standas as a nice example. You can find others in talks by David Nolan for example, but there are tons of applied talks.

- The Design of Datomic - Rich Hickey http://www.infoq.com/presentations/The-Design-of-Datomic
> it looks a lot more like they took a Microsoft embrace-extend-extinguish approach to LXC

That's overstating things slightly, since it appears no Docker employee has ever contributed a single line of code to the LXC implementation itself (that would be hard work, rather than bikeshedding userspace tools, after all). The kernel tree contains only one reference to a Docker bug, fixed by a Red Hat employee, while the LXC tree contains a single reference to a Docker bug, fixed by a Canonical employee who looks to be one of the LXC maintainers.

The reality is replacing Docker isn't all that hard, as we're now seeing with Rocket. The kernel interfaces aren't tied to it (hell, its clear from Git logs the LXC devs are barely even aware of it).

edit: It's simpler to look at Docker and Rocket for what they both are: commercial plays built on the work of others. That work hasn't magically disappeared somewhere, it still exists and is in use (albeit by a slightly less PR/buzz-aware side of the community).

A vendor-independent implementation of containers already exists, as it did long before Docker did. If people are serious about seeing the "container ecosystem" flourish, they should be contributing cash, employment offers, or employee time to the real people and projects doing the work (as opposed to publishing upset blog posts and writing fashionable Go code)
Macros in good code bases are incredibly useful to abstract things away. Usually achieving things that functions can't.

When working in large code bases with languages that don't have macros I find myself seeing people trying to accomplish the same task, but in subtly different ways. These are cases where a helper function usually would not reduce the LOC or complexity.

As with everything, macros can be bad, but I wouldn't be so quick to ban them outright.
Hi all. A few clarifications.

- The meme that we are adding more and more features into the docker binary is unfounded. Please, please, I ask that before repeating it you do your homework and ask for actual examples. For example 1.4 is coming out next week: it has 500+ commits and basically no new features. It's all bugfixes, refactoring and a general focus on quality. That's going to be the trend from now on

- Swarm and Machine are separate binaries. They are not part of the core docker runtime. You can use them in a completely orthogonal way.

- Swarm follows the "batteries included but removable" principle. We are not doing all things to all people! There is a default scheduling backend but we want to make it swappable. In fact we had Mesosphere on stage today as part of a partnership to make Mesos a first-class backend.

- there is an ongoing proposal to merge compose into the docker binary. I want to let the design discussion play out, but at the moment I'm leaning towards keeping it separate. Now's the time to comment if you care about this - that's how open design works :)

Yes, our blog post is buzzwordy and enterprise-sounding. I am torn on this, on the one hand it helps make the project credible in IT departments which associates that kind of language with seriousness. We may find that strange but if it helps with the adoption of Docker, then it benefits every Docker user and that's ok with me. On the other hand, it is definitely not popular on HN and has the opposite connotation of dorky pencil holder suit douchiness. Being from that tribe I share that instinctive reaction. But I also realize it's mostly psychological. I care less about the specific choice of words than the substance. And the substance here is that we launched a lot of new stuff today, and put a lot of effort in keeping the focus on a small, reliable runtime, composable tools which do one thing well, pluggability, open APIs, and playing nice with the ecosystem. Basically everything the community has been worrying about recently.
Do snakes use math to create their patterns?
In order to generate a pattern, I played with dots and a sine function, and by accident found something which reminds me of snake skin patterns.

Snake skin photos:
https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=snake+skin&tbm=isch

Generated pattern: (using JavaScript's Math.cos function):

https://twitter.com/TobiReif/status/538442870920085504

Do you know other simple ways of generating patterns which resemble animal patterns?

My pattern consists of sine data - here's a version with different i and x progress showing this:
http://codepen.io/TobiReif/pen/KwdVLV

This version
i ++;
x += canvas.height * 0.00254;
vs this one:
i += 0.5;
x += canvas.height * 0.2;

Perhaps it could be that the snakes generate their patterns based on sine data as well?
I'm curious for others thoughts on what to use for complex statistics if you needed high performance/speed.

Running an R script on a server to process data isn't efficient, but does that mean you have to roll your own stats package if you want to have a Java (for example) back-end?
> I think this might be a situation where Apple being first-mover has been a disadvantage to them

Also, when Android started, music was only sold without DRM. And incompatible flavors of DRM is what this whole thing is about. Windows Phone was around then, but I don't know much about music on it.
Git is ACID too.
I'm a big DDG fan, but I'd hardly call them a Google competitor when they process .008 (4M/500M) queries that G does per day.

That said, their search operators are getting really powerful.
Ask HN: What are the best Docker orchestration tools?
I'm evaluating orchestrators / scheduling tools for Docker containers. Which solutions are the best? What are the strengths and tradeoffs?
Poll: What technology you using?
All the results will be analyzed, graphed for visualization, and published here

C
C++
C#
Java
Apple:Objective-C/Swift
PHP
Ruby
Python
Javascript
Perl
Visual Basic

If you need to specify, please use colons. Example:
Javascript:Node.js
Ruby:RoR
A Review of Microsoft Azure’s API
It's a popular meme in tech journalism that Uber is "under attack" for its nefarious business practices, but how much has this sense pervaded outside the tech bubble?
> pass by value only means code tends to end up as monolithic functions

I've actually found R works very well as a functional language with very lean functions. It's perhaps worth noting that R doesn't copy a dataframe in a function call if you don't modify it, which is a very common use-case for me. (I'm not sure if this extends to other datatypes)

> very slow in loops so lot contorting to move things to matrix operations

This is a fair criticism, I think more modern languages like Julia will win out here. That said, R has huge library support, I've often found there are compiled versions for a lot of what I want to do.

> they just last year got a version out that starts support for vectors and matrices with > 2^31 -1 elements which limits larger data applications

Again, a fair criticism. I've never considered R a "big data" tool, my workflow is usually a funnel where each step involves reducing data size by 1-3 orders of magnitude. For example, I may have 1 PB of transactional data, aggregate it in Hadoop to 20 TB of daily aggregated data, run a query that filters and aggregates it further, and then run my analysis in R on final data. In the end I may end up with 20 GB of data, which R can very easily handle.
I guess I wasn't really clear in my post, sorry. My basic belief is that government / public institutions aren't anymore "holy" then for-profits. The profit motive is transformed into a power motive in public institutions. We can see this with the growing bureaucracy at our public institutions that has raised tuitions and removed resources from students. The quest for grants is in full force and professors are teaching less. The things you list that for-profits can do are done at public universities.

"If you replace them with administrators who want to serve shareholders instead of students"

To the point, I don't believe a lot of administrators are thinking of the student first. I see a lot of "integrity of the institution" which leaks over into free speech and open discussion suppression. Admins do not serve the student first, they serve the politicians and the next step in their career.

As always, their are exceptions, but I don't see many of the dreamers and idealists left.
This is a surprisingly strong response.. I mean no disrespect to lawyers but they're expensive and often unnecessary for simple matters. If for whatever reason Google gives you the run around, by all means, get a lawyer involved -- it's not like there's a deadline to retrieve your data.

> If you think that banks gleefully return money to a decedent's family after death you haven't dealt with this issue much.

I actually just went through this and to be honest, it was completely painless. Maybe it was a good bank compared to most, and it was definitely a small-balance account, but a single form verifying next-of-kin faxed with a copy of the death certificate was enough to get access to the account.
This looks great. I'd like to know:
1) how does this differ from bootstrap?
2) why a whole new framework, instead of extending bootstrap?
How much does Uber spend? How could they possibly need to raise that much?
> No offense to the author, but this reads like a 16 old claiming he finally find the girl who is 'the one' for his whole life.

I think thats what he was going for.

> There are far more important things for good software.

Everybody knows this, but people still like to talk about programming languages.
I took that quote to mean he wanted Scala to be idiomatic. There's much mileage to be had from linguistic idiomaticity.

Like you said, "software patterns tend to help drive synergy." I don't think your opinion and the authors are all that far apart.
Ok found the answer
http://michaelrbernste.in/2014/10/21/should-i-read-papers.ht...
Discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8699957
How can something be both compelling and at home/comfortable? If you're using the definition of compelling that you appear to be, they're concepts on opposite sides of the same spectrum.

This framework stands in contrast to that, making things dull and boring.

Dull and boring sounds UI to me exactly like at home and comfortable. Compelling sounds like the day to day trend hopping that we see all the time. The frantic activity means it can pick up usability and interaction improvements at a faster clip, but that's a byproduct.

But the entire reason for this conversation could have little to do with Flakes' decisions and be more reflective of the way design will overloads existing words with new vague meanings and create statements that are illegible to people not versed in the existing narrative.
Not necessarily true: in a simple relational DB, it could be that 'region_cd' is part of the primary key. This would have the same effect, and was probably driven by a then-reasonable initial requirement. It seems very likely that no 'delete' ability was added to support this.
I'd like some clarification to the opening line: Turning Point: The top E.U. court orders Google to grant the “right to be forgotten.'’

Is he decrying that development as indicative of Orwellian reality or praising it as a positive development? (my understating is he meant the former)
Wow. $40 Billion valuation, hiring 1 million people in the coming year, opening new sites at the rate of almost 1/day.

Neither Travis Kalanick or any current senior execs sold any stock in the current round.

Uber will either be the biggest boom or bust story there's been in quite some time. This will be fun to watch.
I'm confused about your scare quotes around functional. LINQ is, for all intents and purposes, a functional extension of collections.
Under the same leadership?
Say you want to refer to the JavaScript docs, you can type:

"!javascript function" and it will take you immediately to the documentation.
Hey guys, developer/designer here.

Happy to share our new shopping platform: it combines weather and fashion to give you styling recommendations from our collection of hand picked products.

We (team of two) built it on Meteor. Tell us what you think!
What technologies are HackerNews people using
Comment your stack in this post.

All answers will be analyzed and published
Cool! But seems to work only on Firefox, you should fix it for Chrome too.
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