skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes. Drugs, at least the illegal ones, can/do/will land you in jail and eventually prison. Marijuana possession alone is enough, depending on how much you have and/or how it is packages (ie "with intent to distribute"). This depends on which state you are in, whether you are caught while crossing a state line (air travel) and the colour of the uniform on the officer who catches you (federal v. state). Some states have decriminalized possession but the US fed has not.

As a general rule, US "jails" house people awaiting trial and/or serving short sentences. "Prisons" house people with more than one year to serve. Prisons are generally much nicer places than jails.

(I went to a US law school, spent lots of time dealing with low-level offenders all of which were drug related. It's a horrible horrible system.)
While your comment is sort of true, it's not applicable here really.

We know how to handle errors better than this. Go's error handling is C style. We've since found exceptions, Maybes, and friends which are very powerful.

What you said implies that when Rust chooses to use Maybes they're somehow being bad at something. That's simply false; computer science as a field has advanced and one of these advancements (not even that recent of one) is improved understandings of how strong type systems can be used to make code, including errors, safer. Go completely ignores this of course and they're not doing it for a tradeoff that I can see. They gain nothing in terms of performance for not having this type (everything is already a reflect/Value anyways, so much for not having the baggage that you'd need for generics) and everything in terms of having a worse language.

Being good at something doesn't instantly mean you're bad at something else. In fact, I wouldn't even claim that's the general case.

If you disagree, you're welcome to point out the tradeoffs at work here. I think your comment is just a vaguery that is completely untrue in this instance.
Read the README; this runs a function on other instances in the cloud, on-demand. I agree the title is confusing. For example, you could write a parallelizable, computationally intense function, and have it run in parallel in AWS, directed from a script on your laptop. Without having to set up servers, upload code, etc.
I think this is a better video of above-the-clouds flight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfxdeRx2fLA
Just curious---doesn't that pattern inhibit you to return nil as a meaningful, valid result? Or is nil treated as invalid value in Lua culture?
GET in forms is useful for query interfaces, eg. a search engine. A search should be safe, idempotent and all parameters encoded in the URL. GET is the correct choice for that.
How to Monitor Your Brand in Social Media?
Before you talk yourself out of a startup idea STOP and read this
While all of the images are impressive, I found the hair rendering to be the most interesting. It's very tough to get it right, that is, realistic-appearing. As presented it's very close to that ideal.

An attribute of hair that makes it hard to render is color. At least on my monitor the "blonde" sample seems a bit too reddish. (Blonde is really sort of a dull green.) Another factor is color variation, not only the result of lighting, but also intrinsic to hair growth. (Commonly hair at its "roots" is slightly darker/lighter, and there's natural randomness among individual hairs.)

I hope that doesn't sound like picky criticism, it really does look very promising. Portrait artists I know would empathize with the challenge of convincingly depicting the hair of human heads.
Re: the dead comment below me.

There's nothing mystical about this. The source code is 4 files, which I read. It sends your function to Lambda, and that's cool, and the syntax is really elegant. Enough that I could totally see throwing something together using this to solve some complex problems without really thinking about it.

I don't think this is all the way there, but I really like the idea of programming with APIs like this being as easy to use as language libraries.
So could a service like jsfiddle allow for npm modules to be loaded in? It could be a cool premium feature
Oh, I dunno, maybe the fact that he designed a programming language which practically proves he must have interest in programming languages. Combine that with the fact that Maybe/Options are neither new nor unusual in language design and fairly heavily discussed and I think it would be practically impossible for him to not have known about them a decade ago. Even failing at that, he would doubtlessly have heard of them since because people discuss them in relation to Go so often.

So yeah, that's how he would know about them. They're extremely common in two areas of his interest (Go discussion/criticisms, language design).
These features debuted way before the 80s, arguably with the exception of out of order execution. Take any feature discussed and its wikipedia history section will tell you about CPUs and computers in the 60s that first had them. Caches, SIMD (called vectors back then), speculative execution, branch prediction, virtual machines, virtual memory, accelerated IO bypassing the CPU... all from the 60s.
> This seems reasonable to me, considering how people end up in jail and college, respectively.

On the other hand: we are spending about $35K per prisoner per year, which is more than we spend on college students...
If you haven't watched Koyaanisqatsi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koyaanisqatsi), you really should.
This is largely the architecture behind MapReduce or Hadoop Streaming. Write high-performance code in any language with an isolated parallelizable function, configure some cloud to auto-provision workers that run that function repeatedly on millions of records, execute code & pretend it's local.
10 Free Smartphone Apps That Can Make Money for You
Koyaanisqatsi and Tron both did it in '82. I'm sure there are probably other, earlier examples, too.
One reason would be, as already mentioned, about embedded systems not having floating point support, making number calculations slow(even with fixed point, maybe?).

A somewhat related thing(not addressed by this yet) is about Electric Imp, who had to switch to a different language from lua(which they started with). The reason was that they needed to store values for an LED array, and the only data type is tables, and all integers are 32 bit.

Not sure but they might have used user defined types, with the arrays stuff being done in C, might have been easier.
There's requirebin already which does that.
I'm not saying that there's no point. I just highlight the real problem -- integrated MCUs running firmware and drivers' binary blolbs that can do pretty much anything without user even noticing, and this project does not address these issues. Sure, you can secure device to a certain degree to make blanket surveillance more costly, but there's nothing now that protects against targeted attacks.
While simple possession could land you in jail, it's very rare for that to happen. There are 750,000 weed arrests in the US and maybe 500 people are in jail for simple possession only.

The big way weed gets you to jail is because it's a conviction that breaks your parole and you get sent back for your previous crime.
Our Plans About the Future of Qards. What to Expect?
Thanks, we changed the url to that from http://www.wired.com/2015/01/josh-begley-prison-map/.

It was posted 4 times previously to HN, including twice 3 years ago, but has not had significant attention.
That sounds incredibly ignorant to me.

If this is the first language you've used where you give that sort of attention to errors, you must not have used and learned from the terrible mistakes of C, which constantly returns errors which are not required to be handled, just like go.

Heck, you must not have learned from bash where every second line is "if [[ $? != 0 ]]" or you just did set -e and fail hard.

For me, the problem with Go's errors isn't even the lines they take up, but the fact that they still don't accomplish anything more than C's errors.

Since C, we've learned that you can use exceptions to force errors to be handled, or Options + matching to ensure each case is handled or extremely explicitly ignored. We've learned that errors can have contexts like call stacks attached to them.

Go ignores all of that and goes back to the C way. It doesn't provide an easy way to chain errors or force them to be handled. It doesn't provide a good idiomatic way to differentiate between the majority of errors from the stdlib because it's discouraged to have multiple error struct types; rather you're encouraged to use errors.New and make an un-differentiatable error type with no good context. It's encouraged to return an err from deep in the stack without including any additional information.

In fact, Go's even inconsistent in how it uses errors in the stdlib. For example, if you look at io, you can see the following: http://golang.org/pkg/io/#pkg-variables

They define their variables as error types which are simply strings. That means you can compare with the constants (e.g. err == io.EOF), but if you add any extra info to that err, such as callstack, you can no longer compare with it. If you look at os, you see "os.IsNotExist(err)" which tells you if an err is of a given type. If you look at net ( http://golang.org/pkg/net/#AddrError ) you can see they implemented their own Error interface implementations which you check by doing `if addrErr, ok := err.(AddrError); ok { // handle error }`.. the fact that the Go authors included three different error patterns in the stdlib already shows that the entire error process in go is poorly thought out. In addition, none of the methods allow you significant flexibility in adding your own info to the error as you pass it up without losing information.

If you don't like try! in rust, you're free to write your errors out explicitly, but if try! fits then it's good to use it.

The majority of bugs in code come from people being unable to keep a sufficient amount of the program state in their head to track program flow accurately. If half of your program flow is errors, then no wonder. There's an old principal that each function body should fit, in full, on one screen because that ensures it can be read without scrolling and reasoned about fairly easily. Error handling wasting space also wastes thought and makes your code provably harder to reason about (if you don't think that's true, look at the incidence of 'mistake checking error return values in c' vs 'mistake checking error return in haskell' vs 'forgot to either catch or annotate throwable for exception in java'. Yeah).
ansible-dashr: setup exploration, task-dashboard and runs (WIP, initial stage)
For the US, UK and Australia, Gooroo has city level salary stats (based on job ads).

https://gooroo.io/analytics
Time for the social sciences
This is awesome. Wonder if it could be possible to make military helms that would prevent solders from disobeying orders or for helping them stay calm and focused by shutting panic part of brain.
Really neat idea :-)

The first thing I thought when I looked closer was "which version(s) of Python does this need?"...

Might be something worth adding to the readme? :-)
> The best theory I've seen put forth is that prison's are a booming for-profit industry in the U.S., and profits breed corruption.

Corruption need not be direct, or directly for profit. The Corrections Officers' Union in California is a formidable force. They can make sure that only those "tough on crime(tm)" get elected; and until recently, they were all for prison expansion, harsher sentencing (remember "three strikes"?), etc.

But, thankfully, recently they seem to have been shown to be defeatable: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/09/california-prison-g...
Unless we're talking life changing money, stay far far away.
Back in the day the Win32 Beep() function was a pretty effective tool for debugging certain multi-threaded and server tasks.

You set up uniquely pitched beeps for certain events, and then listen for the order in which the events occur. It worked because a call into Beep() halted the entire process and all of its threads for the duration of the beep. It prevents multiple threads from beeping at the same time, and it slowed everything down just enough so that you could pick up each individual event with your ear. It beat the hell out of staring at a massive log file.
The problem might be that, during most of history, The majority of African groups either didn't have enough resources in order to accumulate enough wealth to afford working organized structures/states or were too fragmented. Most European states were also plundered countless times but the lands are richer so they were able to recoup. The French have a complicated history with franceafrique but you can say the same thing with any great power at some moment in time.
My experience is that it was an awesome brain hack! Sit around do nothing and gain extraordinary clarity and
intense focus. My thoughts were "how did i get here? do they put something in the food?". Then i served 10 days(prep'd food) and witnessed others similarly affected.
If you have an expensive computation task and you're paying for computing time, do you really want to be using JavaScript for the purpose?
Meh, I think cloudfront can handle it. That's what CDNs are for.
I think he just knew his way around so well that it wasn't an issue. He had a compartmentalised box in his workshop where he put all the bits. The other thing is that the various washers and bolts are of standard sizes.

After 35 years of working full time fixing motor vehicles I guess you have a pretty clear picture of how everything comes apart and goes back together again.

After he'd reconstructed the engine we were about to hoist it in the car and I asked how he was sure it was to work. He said that because he'd put every last part in himself (after reconditioning them) he could guarantee it to be correct. To humour me he fired it up while it was still on the ground, started without any problem.
Show HN: I'mBusy
Cool! As someone with more experience than me in this, would you mind responding quickly to these points? I will give my personal opinions but if you can trump with more info that would be cool too. :)

1. I agree that JMS sounds like a hassle but is that really necessary? I would think that you can batch process data on an EC2 instance, then pick it up in your local code directly using AWS APIs... not sure.

2. I am not so familiar with the Lambda system but I'm also not sure how it would scale db as necessary (item "g" in your list) thus overall processing time would still be bottlenecked by other resources (database IO, for example), no?
I agree with your points but in all these cloud-compute scenarios I always wonder "Are we trying to reach a theoretical limit of fastest-possible computation, or just reach some reasonable saturation point close to the natural bottlenecks/throttles of our system integrations?".

3. Having been burned a few times now by over-optimizing when considering cloud I would probably now first consider just picking a slightly oversized EC2 instance and throwing some high-performing code onto it (Java, C++). Dynamic languages + auto-scalable resources (though I'm talking about web hosting in particular now) seems to drain clients wallets more than anything. At this point I'd actually recommend anyone with new web infrastructure to just buy a static instance and write optimized Java rather than trying their hand at auto-scaling Ruby/Python/Node. Do you notice a similar issue with your clients regarding code optimization vs. auto-scaling?
To my understanding, this library is intended to run in a some-what fixed environment ( server-side node.js ).

I'm unsure if you will run into any of the serialization issues mentioned by Kangax, as developers will be using the same ( if not very similar ) versions of v8.
Authy (YC W12) Is Hiring a Senior Remote API Developer
David Cameron: We want your private keys
>Those policies are dictated by an elected government.

Oligarchy is responsible for the biggest abuses of the prison system, NOT "dictatorship by an elected government".

The fundamental driving forces of the high number of prisoners is the push for more draconian policies by corporations that build prisons (> profits) and corporations that use them as a cheap source of labor (> profits).

>America prides itself on being "tough" on crime

"Tough on crime" was the marketing message used to ensure compliance by the electorate. Like all sales pitches, it did not accurately depict the actual product - e.g. mandatory sentencing for non-violent drug offences.
Please do some research on this. I guarantee you there are more than 500 people in jail at any given time for possession of weed. At least two out of roughly 40 people in my pod when I spent a week in jail were there for possession of marijuana alone.
IITs igniting startup fever in their campuses
Choir.io[1] is very much like that.

[1]: https://choir.io/
They don't even need to invalidate the patent, they can just run the lawsuit out for decades and most likely get the patent holder to settle for a pittance.
That makes me remember way back as an intern when I turned our testing tool into a crude music player by using a table of note frequencies and a text file format based on sheet music to make Chopin's Etudes play over the PC speaker by calling Beep().
Its sad that in India most of the start-ups come only from IITians. IITians constitute less 3% of the total graduates India produce every year.
Of course. It's just a bit broken in an article that concentrates on the properties of extreme cold - it's like "xeroxing a floppy disk". Which someone has allegedly done.
Yeah, I mean, that can work, but I feel like the phrase "in modern C++" always has the hidden caveat of "Unless you're stuck with a bunch of legacy junk". A lot of times you end up having to use legacy code you can't trust. Your stuff is RAII, but this old legacy code you have to link with... and nobody wants to rewrite it... you probably get the point.

I'm not against C++ exceptions, I just think there are legit reasons for shops to avoid it in that particular language . But I like exceptions in general.
Chile, and not just the Galápagos, inspired Darwin
That's what "perfectly healthy" means too, though.
True, but I fail to see why it's relevant. Every mention of generic here (at time of reading) is along the lines of "this pattern could be generalised if we had generics", which IMO is a fair point to make when discussing ways to make a repetitive design pattern less painful.
I don't know if I can trust it
Sorry you had to go through that. I wonder if anyone here can help me understand why the evasion and control is a necessary part of this process for meditation? Why does it have to feel so weird to be effective? Is it even effective? It seems like a cult like setting is a terrible platform through which to bring people calm and peace of mind.
I think it's important to point to the best person in the room and say, be more like that guy. He may not be a paragon of scientific values, but at least he's well above the rest.

You're basically asking the junior developer to question all the senior developers, the lead developers, and the executive managers. There is only so many people a person can say are wrong. It's not possible for him to know everything, for all he knew he was wrong, and the professors were merely unwilling to take the time to explain it (or bring in an outside professor to explain it). That smelled wrong enough for him to get out, but he probably had a nagging thought in the back of his mind that he simply didn't understand.
This is cool. I'm pretty excited about AWS lambda.
Keep in mind the current limitations of the AWS lambda at present:
A process can't take longer than 60s.
Only 25 concurrent executions.
The zipped package containing your code and all dependant libraries can't be larger than 20MB.
Sorry should clarify, meant high level technical mentorship
Beautiful admin app to manage complex data
This is slightly off topic, but I am really amazed at how many in the HN community have attended these retreats. How did you justify a 10 day split from the world, or rather, how did you actually make it happen? This seems really intense, and must have taken a lot of preparation, you must have been really driven, I'm really interested in hearing more about what drives people to sign up for such an extreme experience.

Also, I see a lot of these ask for donations and have no fixed price, how much did HNers pay or donate for these retreats?
One-on-one, technical
In China, Projects to Make Great Wall Feel Small
Regular naps are 'key to learning'
Oh, right, I had heard about that. Not a bad idea, but not my ideal.
Think of it from the other direction - if the agreement didn't exist, the startup wouldn't even talk to the bigger company, potentially hurting the employee and everyone else in the company.

For a startup, losing a key employee is a big deal and a big risk. A non solicitation agreement doesn't prevent the employee from applying for a job at the bigger company, but merely allow the startup to be more open t
o a potential competitor.
You act like security vulnerabilities aren't important. If Google found that security vulnerability, how much black hat already found it or are going to find it in the next 90 days? Sadly we can't know, that's why we need to set a schedule, there's no soon enough.
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I know a guy who went to the Midwest to sell small amounts of weed. Some "Silm Shady" type bought from said friend. Slim Shady decided to shoot someone over a bag. Said friend is in
jail for 20 years. Said friend knew nothing of the murder, but the judge felt said friend should be punished--because he
supplied an Idiot with weed, and broke federal and state law.
The sad part is somehow he talked his brother into joining him
in the Midwest. 'Hay, leave your Waiter position. We can sell small amounts of Mendocino's finest, and as long as we keep the weight low; we can live comfortably, with low risk.' His older brother got caught up in the drama, and was thrown in ail along with his brother. The judge called them Drug Kingpings. They found less than a pound of weed in the house, but still threw the book at the two.
True, but node.js would still screw up bound function's wouldn't it ?
Thus if you want to schedule a function you would needed guarantee across all it's dependencies that bind hasn't been used.

While this might not be a problem for some use cases, I guess at least the documentation could discuss the topic such that the users of the library use the functionality with the restrictions in mind.
You're right. I was a bit sloppy, I'm from Finland which is not geographically Scandinavia, and it's somewhat colder here than in Scandinavian population centers which are south of 60°N. Though the Golf stream helps us too, it's much warmer here than in Alaska at same latitudes.

[edit] It is true that modern cars don't need a block heater to start up successfully, but heating the engine before starting reduces fuel consumption and emissions radically.
Personally I feel like they should allow stuff like 2 days more, but they would need to be really strict about it.

Reading the comments on the ticket however, I really feel like Microsoft was in the wrong here. They asked 4 days ago to push it for a whole month and then now they are fine for their January release. I really feel like they start to feel the pressure of the 90 days so being strict about it is a good choice from Google.
You mean that people who care about their health are "nutters"?

Count me in. I am a nutter!