skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really love this. Are there convenience functions to convert existing values to and from your new data types?

I would love to use this library but as C programs often requires third-party libraries I could see many instances of having to use normal C types. Is there a way, for example, to easily convert a float to and from a var (with a Real key/value)? How would I use your library to take hash table values and assign them back into standard struct members? Would I just use traditional casting? Something tells me normal casting is not an option, or at least not so easy.
Haskell

https://github.com/bitemyapp/learnhaskell
Incredible read and a great analysis of the problems with the IT side of the Affordable Healthcare act. Unfortunately, the IT problems with the AHA were just the beginning. The terms are non-negotiable since they carry the weight of law. Agile boils down to having negotiable, discoverable requirements during the engineering process, which is basically the complete opposite.

The AHA was intentionally "overengineered" and unfortunately we're going to be stuck with the damage for a long time :/ The few good things that did come out of the AHA could have been passed in smaller separate bills, for instance, state health exchanges (Why hasn't this been done before?) ...But the point it seems was to drill something down our throats and serve special interests. In the end, not much has changed, yet somehow an incredible tax burden has been levied on the people of the USA :/
Consensus in Bitcoin: One system, many models
Back in 1994, this LEGO Technic set [1] impressed me beyond anything else related to toys until and after that time.

[1] http://www.leg-technic.hu/images/sets/6/lego-8880-super-car....
I was referring to your first sentence.

> Because if you don't require evidence proportional to the claim, your world view can end up including any and all beliefs, which is neither interesting nor useful.

That is only true if you assume that no other belief filter is being used.
https://getscroll.com/r/h1h6t
Interesting. The contact info on these has a twitter page associated with LizardSquad.

https://twitter.com/lizardmafia

Edit: There's a "ryanl" in #tor claiming to be responsible.
This is an instance of the "Maximally Powerful, Minimally Useful" principle from a few days ago [0]. Because the language being described is sufficiently minimal it has multiple valid, meaningful interpretations including the direct "just execute it" interpretation, a theoretical "compile this to some kind of other language and interpret it there", and, most interestingly, interpret these relations as a linear algebra problem.

It should be quite clear that a more "powerful" language would not admit this last meaning/interpretation/denotation.

[0] http://blog.higher-order.com/blog/2014/12/21/maximally-power...
Looks like Mega requires an email address for account creation (and activation?). I'm sure many of these folks will be using disposable accounts, but some of them will probably use an email address that can be traced back, particularly if they're thinking in terms of keeping a lifetime account.

Seems to me that the list of email addresses associated with the 3000 lifetime account activations would be fair game for civil or criminal subpoenas.
I wouldn't say it's completely unbiased. They have a larger share of the education market than iPads.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2855768/why-chromebooks-are-s...
We use teamsnippets.com. I've a love/hate relationship with them. As a part-time employee and a full-time father, the last thing I want to do in the evening is switch context again and type up what I did during the working hours.

On the other hand: I do like reading what my colleagues did during the day....
I think the distinction is that Linux is very different from Windows in a lot of important ways, while Git and Mercurial are relatively similar in what they do and how they work. If someone invented a VCS that completely revolutionized the process (I really don't know how it could, but just hypothetically), then it could serve as true competition to Git.

This is one reason why D has failed to really take off. Both D and Rust are looking to essentially take C++'s place. D is C++ improved, while Rust changes the whole model of managing memory and also introduces some new paradigms (more type inference, pattern matching, etc.). D is clearly better than C++, but the two are just similar enough to make C++ a more preferable choice due to its immense popularity compared to D. Rust changes just enough to give it a chance at being a serious contender: the value may be higher than the cost of leaving C++ for many people.

The same applies to Git (C++) and Mercurial (D). Perhaps even more so, because while Git isn't perfect it generally "just works" for almost all use cases; Mercurial is just some simplicity and elegance on top of some workflows (which are sometimes emulated with wrappers over Git, like Legit). C++ on the other hand has a lot of warts.
What temporary worker shortage? If there was one, there would be rising salaries, as we see in the North Dakota oil patch, but in IT wages are stagnant.

I'm criticizing US immigration, in general, temporary and permanent, because the present system benefits neither the majority of Americans nor the majority if immigrants. Large employers, though, benefit disproportionately.
Anonymous sources of information are generally recognized as less credible (for example, they have less reason to be truthful since they have no credibility on the line).

Of course, the larger problem isn't the anonymity of the authors. It's why the bible should be accepted over any other text. Perhaps it should, but that would have to be argued separately.
John is the "in your face" gospel -- it leads with the conclusions. The other three are more like "come along for the journey" -- they walk you through the process of the disciples coming to understand Jesus. There are divinity claims all over those gospels, but they're more subtle.

For example, early in the gospel of Matthew, Jesus quotes the Old Testament saying "You are to worship the Lord your God and serve only him." At the very end of Matthew, Jesus meets the disciples, who worship him, and he does not criticize them or stop them (contrast with Peter in Acts 10.) Once that connection is made, it's an obvious divinity claim -- but it's one that might take time to realize is there.

A few other examples: Psalm 103 says the Lord "is the one who forgives all your sins"; Jesus does it in Mark 2. Both Isaiah 43 and Hosea 13 specify that God alone is Savior, and Luke 1:47 repeats it just prior to calling Jesus the Savior in Luke 2:11. Deuteronomy 10 establishes heaven as entirely God's property, but Jesus claims to be the one controlling entry to heaven in Matthew 7.

Given Jesus' obviously strong knowledge of the Hebrew scriptures, it's hard to get away from the conclusion that he was making intentional claims of being God.
I'd suggest you look closer at the services that teams are already using and try and add value to those by algorithmically generating what you think is useful for people to know.

I agree simply acknowledging what to-do's people have ticked off in the day isn't that useful (BC can already do this for example) but there is room for intelligent insight here. You could determine people's productivity rate towards a milestone and provide predictions if things are on track for a particular milestone date etc.

I think then you would have a valuable service. Just my 2 cents ;-)
I'd be one of those folks in already #rubyonrails at the time. :)
As someone who's ambivalent about free and open source software (put mildly), this is the first one of his articles I really agree with. When I read that bit about universal back doors I smiled, knowing who he is and where he comes from.

I still agree with his point. Is it even worth pointing out such trivial things that might well end up hijacking the top thread here? Richard's message, in its entirety, makes an important point. Let's rather discuss that.
Nerds Can Be Bees, Too
Convex hull visualizations with D3
a more readable version:
https://getscroll.com/r/52pqg
I read it as speaking specifically about the computing you are offloading onto the remote machine, not necessarily all computing that you do on any machine. For example, Microsoft's backdoor is universal on that machine, but doesn't apply to non-Windows hosts outside of that computer. That's what I read, anyways.
Autistic and Searching for a Home
I also live in Hungary and there is a saying "a Hungarian can enter the turnstile after you and leave before you" which is quite true. Everyday life here involves a lot of hacking/tinkering mostly because of the repercussions of bad decisions of our (not only past) leaders.
Too high level IMHO... $(Int,5) is not reasonable, also everything is too opaque for it to be a C library. You can go a long way without creating such a layer of abstraction with just a set of libs implementing data structures, dynamic strings, with simple object-alike structures that are reference counted so that it is trivial to have lists of hashes or alike, but where you can also store raw stuff trivially just changing the "method" to free or dup the objects.

EDIT: AFAIK "$" is not valid ANSI-C, however I would love it... For example in a reference counting system could be cool to have $() and _() to incr/decr references.
A Hackathon Designed by Women, for Women, to Solve the Gender Gap
The Copenhagen Suborbitals are a group of "teenage hackers in a basement" who have cobbled together a midrange ballistic missile, although without any intention of using it as a weapon. The main thing preventing other teenage hackers from doing this is violence — either the police come and arrest you, or your neighbors steal your things, or your neighbors get pissed off about the amount of nitrogen oxides you're wafting over their house and coerce you to stop.
To decide which state to move to. That I (and others) are agents that change the future of the universe by choice within the frameworks of possibility.
Facebook and Google don't care about open source... Their desire is to get people to use their search/system. That's all they care about, regardless of what pretty bow they wrap it up in.

Let's look at Google...

Android - Get people to use Google products on mobile.
Adsense - Add ads to your site.
Analytics - Track how users use stuff to provide better ads.
Gmail - Track your email to serve you better ads.
Google Search - Serve you ads.

Sure they have Dart, Angular, etc which they developed for use internally and then released to the public. But do you honestly think that has anything to do with their business model? They hired smart people, and smart people design things. Those people then released them as open source. But do you honestly believe if Google was to start (theoretically) having money issues, those products would not be the first to go?
Ruby Isn't Dead
Not related to this specific case since I generally think calling people out is bad form. However, I remember back in 2011 when looking at job postings for iOS Positions that "Required" 5+ years developing for "iOS" I could not help but chuckle that the only people that would have that would be the Apple developers who worked on it before it was released. 5+ years in Objective C sure, but at the time iOS was only 3 years old. Recently I've been seeing the same type of postings for "Swift" so it's important to keep in mind that just because the recruiter or first line interviewer does not know A from Z does not mean the organization as a whole is clueless. People make mistakes on job postings and in the case I think it's likely they just did not like him and that was the excuse they came up with to let him save face.
> Please explain why you believe this is true.

Maybe because when you give people the right to freely copy, use and redistribute your code it's a bit hard to then ask them to pay for it.
It's also not the kind of environment that fosters high-energy physicists, but we're talking about a regime that has indigenously developed nuclear weapons.

A minor quibble, but North Korea did not indigenously develop nuclear weapons - they acquired most of their knowledge and capabilities from Pakistan via the Khan network. They most certainly spent a great deal of effort internally to convert said knowledge into functional nuclear devices, but by no means did they develop everything internally.
Link bait ?

Original article: http://habrahabr.ru/post/148901/
Post date: 2012

More from the same author: http://habrahabr.ru/users/skidanovalex/topics/
Stallmans ideas on economics make sense when you factor in his $1m grant from the MacArthur foundation, another $1m from the Takeda foundation, and tenure at MIT. If you have all that sure, give software away for free!
I had this when I was a kid. Stuck the wires into a mains socket once, sent sparks flying, blew a fuse and probably closely escaped electrocuting myself. Oh well, lesson learned about 230v AC at an early age.

And yes they were ace. What's the modern equivalent for a 5 year old? Maybe something with a robotics spin?
Yeah, that part made me cringe. Among other parts. This whole post is a mess tbh and makes it seem like the person is not fluent in English maybe?
Playing with my son
Ask HN: How to start a consulting business in Bay Area, CA?
Does anyone have a link to some legal resources on how to start a consulting business in Bay Area?
I think it's unlikely that there are many more untraceable über hackers out there with the resources to take down the gaming networks.
OR you choose to delegate the burden of running and maintaining this software to someone that will do it in a more cost-effective way than you ever could.
a more readable version:
https://getscroll.com/r/ba19m
Is Berta Lovejoy the greatest online troll?
Sure, and you could hack together a CRM in a weekend. And a project management tool. And you can set up IRC instead of Slack. And you could make a mailing list with google spreadsheets and a little script.

One of the most crucial skills when you don't have a boss telling you what to do is figuring our where to spend your precious time.

If a weekend project means, say, 16 hours of work, you need to value your time at less than $6.50 for this to be worth one year at the cheap plan.
... everything looks like a thumb.
But he wasn't writing the gospels. So we don't know what he intended, only what the reporter wrote down. And they were in the storey. So the possibility of slant is clear.
Well, I'm sorry you aren't imaginative enough to design a business model which generates revenue from anything other than controlling the supply and charging admission prices.

Some ways to milk $ out of free software include:

- Being the de-facto expert in your product (hello sweet 6-7 figure consulting contracts when an Enterprise picks it up)

- Training

- Tech support (hand-holding)

- Publish books about the subject

The list goes on. If enough people adopt a free software project, that doesn't preclude the person (or persons) who release it from turning a profit. It just ensures they can't do so at the expense of the liberty of their users.
Google? Facebook? Are you kidding? These companies have lots of great open source projects. But the core of their business is certainly not open.

Try to find Goog's SERP ranking algorithm on GitHub. Or their Adwords scoring/pricing code. What about Google Doc's text editor? Also, most Google apps on Android are closed.
Lua is quite fast. The algorithms you can implement in Lua are all slow unless you want to make an optimized structure for every kind of lookup you want to do. Lua reminds me of a hobbled javascript.
Stallman is basically saying that it's unethical to outsource a software function that it's possible to run on-premises, which is just... a losing argument. Any given user can decide whether the (almost purely abstract) "freedom" of running free software one's own server outweighs the convenience of, say, not having to administer a mail server. I'm not sure what free software buys you versus hosted software with good data export features.
Let C be C. For the people who don't like C for one reason or another, there are a ton of alternatives available, from x64/x86 targeting languages to manages stacks. Adding these libraries to C might look nice, but if you want to experience the things it brings to the table use a language where it's been borrowed from.
Still 5 .. 10 times slower compared to a well defined binary format. In addition its impossible to do partial reads. Its required to parse from start of message, even for reading a single attribute. Using text based encodings in protocols is dumb, but popular unfortunately :-)
I don't know, he seems pretty obviously divine in all the gospels. As for him claiming to be divine, I don't really understand the argument, because if we would assume that a report that he claimed to be divine is accurate, why wouldn't we assume that a report of clearly divine actions and attributes is accurate?
I'm not certain why one would want to rotate the secret on a regular basis; it'd only need to be changed in case of exposure. A truly robust system would have a way to easily say 'rotate the secret' rather than have to manually change it.

Basically, it's a poor man's capability system: once one has a URL to one's graphs, one can easily share them around, but if one doesn't have the URL and doesn't have the secret, one cannot determine the URL, thanks to the power of a decent hash function in the HMAC.
I'd expect some of the bigger R&D moonshots to go first - Loon, Wing, etc. The open source contributions are good PR with the software development community.
I believe this technique is by Valiant?

Leslie G. Valiant: General Context-Free Recognition in Less than Cubic Time. J. Comput. Syst. Sci. 10(2): 308-315 (1975)
It was discontinued, but looks to be available again here (old parts or comparable with new)

http://www.iqkey.jp/
I thought these days you could pretty much purchase a DDOS on the open market from the botnet owners.
In theory it is possible, as I'm sure swift was in skunkworks at Apple for a good time before its public release.
He's saying it has ethical implications.

Making that decision in an informed way starts with having some idea of what you're giving up.

In the case of SaaSS, you're often not sure what you're giving up precisely because the operation of the server is so opaque to you. E.g. is the server copying all your email to a hostile foreign government? The operator /says/ it isn't.

Indeed, it can be a bit abstract-- but many other important tradeoffs we weigh also involve abstract implications or effects at a distance.
ESPN Doesn't Do More Great Journalism Because Its Viewers Don’t Want It To
> we found WMDs after the attack

The text you quote confirms chemical weapons but not weapons on mass destruction
Developers can benefit from learning classic languages.

By learning the classics, especially those that are radically different from what you already know, you expand your mind and your sense of what is possible. It helps you get a different perspective on any given problem you may run in to, having seen radically different approaches to similar problems in the past. It puts another tool in your toolset and lets you select the best tool for the job.

Not that the above is not possible to get with exposure to hot new technologies, but whatever's hot in the market tends to be much more of a monoculture and popular due to being not too different from what most developers already know (Clojure and Scala being perfect examples).
I haven't been as excited about anything in awhile as I am about Mesos. Program against the data center. Distributed by default. Fault tolerant everything. Lower your AWS bill.
For some reason, I used to play with some non-functioning Capsela capsules along with my Lego sets. Thanks for writing this; I didn't know what they were called.
I don't really like this argument. (This is a bit different from saying that I disagree.) There's a tradeoff here, and it's more than a cliche in this particular case.

The same argument would imply that you shouldn't do computing on VPSes or similar services that other people own. This might be strictly true, but the alternative for lots of people is that they just won't be doing that computing. At least with free software, we can say that it's usually monetarily cheaper than proprietary software. Buying and running your own server is much more expensive than running an EC2 box for pennies per hour. A lot of people's first introduction to free operating systems, these days, tends to be on a remote server instead of their personal computer. I don't think we should halt that.

The same argument would imply that you shouldn't use the email or shell account from your university, and you should self-host. While I actually do believe that to some extent, I get the feeling that Richard doesn't.

And even if you do end up self-hosting everything, chances are you won't be responding to security issues as quickly as a full-time team of professionals on call. At that point, anyone who wants to take your freedom can do so. This doesn't seem like a win.

I appreciate the goal, but we have a long way to go to the day when this becomes the right advice.
Am I supposed to disagree with that? High atmospheric oxygen content is suggestive of biology. So is seasonal blooms of methane on a planet like Mars. Is that suggestive that there is life on Mars? Yes! Can we definitively infer that there is presently life on Mars? Not yet.
> "leap of faith to believe ... the accounts recorded over 2000 years ago are still preserved the way they were."

It's not so much a leap of faith as a study of manuscript integrity. The field of study is called "textual criticism". I can't do it justice in a single Hacker News comment, but you can find fairly substantial scholarly books and articles on the subject.

When it comes to the New Testament, one of the keys for analysis is the multitude of spread-out manuscripts. They have subtle differences from each other, like spelling mistakes (which help us trace lineage -- the same spelling error often appears in later copies from the same source), but the core stories are extremely well preserved -- not changing from early to late manuscripts, or from region to region.

It's also worth reading through the other writings of the early church, from the first 2 centuries, which extensively quote/reference those same accounts.

The sum total of the evidence is that the current version of the Biblical accounts of who Jesus was were written within about 30 years of his death and well-preserved from that time period onward.

(There's also what we call "higher criticism", which looks at how the contents of the text correspond to known history etc. That also establishes the gospels as written ~30 years after Jesus' death. My favorite oddball data: statistical distributions of the names in the gospels compared to names uncovered in archaeological digs -- the common names are correct for first century Palestinian Jews, not Egyptian or Greek Jews.)

There are definitely leaps of faith involved in Christianity. "Does my book of Matthew match the first century book of Matthew?" is not one of them.
What if you're a coder who has no interest in any of those things? Many people get into SaaS specifically so they don't have to work with bureaucracies any more.

Book publishing can sometimes be alternative, but what if your code is so intuitive and easy to understand that no one needs a book about it? Or what if you're a bad communicator and someone else writes a much better book?
Open Source business models exist, but they are nowhere near lucrative enough to sustain all software developers. Who are you supposed to train or publish books to if every developer is somehow trying to eke out a living in this "open source" world?