skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does the highly conversational tone make it easier or harder to parse?

Because, I for one, would feel uncomfortable using such a conversational tone with an algorithm. I'm curious if they are encouraging anthropomorphism because...

Amy will succeed more often in parsing this style of writing?
This is how people *want* to talk to their AI scheduler?
People should think of "Amy" as maybe a little-bit human?
People should *confuse* "Amy" with a human?
The more natural tone will increase user engagement?

I for one would write to my AI scheduler in a much more direct tone. "Will miss tomorrow's 1pm", "Reschedule John, late next week.", "Will get in Wednesday after noon.", etc. No "Hi Amy", no complete sentences, no banter for me at least. It does remind me a bit of "Her", and the premise that one should not be overly colloquial with one's computers.

Edit: I just went to the site and saw the ad copy for 'How it works'. It appears the answer is closer to making the Amy algorithm actually appear human. Users pretend they are CC'ing a real person, and unless the other participants on the email know better, they converse with amy@x.ai as if it really is a human? That is ELIZA territory and trying to actually beat the Turing test is a lofty goal indeed, I think far surpassing the challenge of merely scheduling meetings.
I enjoyed that article too. Bravo.
vim & emacs

Obscure?
The obituary was too technical for Nature.
The question is DOES it follow the most important rule?
I think generally you would tell Amy where you expect to meet up-front, although the example in the ad copy makes it sounds like location is negotiable, and indeed somehow the algorithm can deduce the rules and social mores.

One way to think about it, if the first thing the algorithm can do is score its own confidence in its "level of contextual understanding" and "confidence score in the decision" then X.ai can put thresholds in place that get the threshold emails into the hands of actual humans when they need to be.

If the goal is 'up to 100% automation', the idea is exploit the 80/20 rule to launch quickly, and then pour money into making 80% -> 99%. So I guess the crucial question is, does the algorithm know its own limits?

The interesting pressure relief valve, is if a location isn't calculable with a high enough certainty, Amy would kindly ask her operator for assistance in resolving the quandary.
Free the Entrepreneur Within
Google is moving code to github too !! :)
Indeed there are many different kinds of impacts to consider. For instance if you look at CO2 emission per kilo of food, beef emits apparently more than two times more than farmed salmon and more than four times more than canned tuna (source: http://static.ewg.org/reports/2011/meateaters/pdf/methodolog...).
Come from china, a golang user, for 2 years now.

golang.org and Google is blocked in china by government, so, Google trends and golang.org traffic from China maybe miss leading.

Go is quite popular in china, the reasons can be:

1. A few companies is based on Golang, like qiniu.com.
2. More and more companies are adopting Golang, since it's very powerful for writing network servers. These companies are facing very fast traffic growth. Golang's efficiency and expressiveness are well known. It just fills the gap.
3. China has many software developers spread in a few cities(Beijing, Shanhai, Hangzhou, etc). News spread quite effective among them.
Calling a cable "FTDI" is like calling a vacuum cleaner "a Hoover". Its name is synonymous with USB cabling in the DIY circles. But I guess, when commerce is concern, the correct attribution should be used.
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Is there some kind of git plug in/linter that will check for commit style before accepting a commit? Basically, linting the commit messages.
HN:Anonymous blocks jihadist website in retaliation for Charlie Hebdo attack
If the number one priority is having a secure phone, why would you want to install the notoriously leaky Google apps? Google uses dark patterns and opt-out all over the place to send tons of data back to HQ.

Once again, if security and privacy are your number one priority, why wouldn't you compile TextSecure yourself, or at least get it from a trusted source?
False Hustle
And that's why you should ask for a good salary (the VCs will most likely pay for it)

And it's definitely not a bad experience (of course it's fast paced)
> Umm, you can do this, but in general you should never rename tags. Occasionally a developer will tell me the tag they pushed is incorrect and I'll agree to remove it only if they promise not to re-create it. If you read the man page on git-tag it's clear why you should avoid doing this.

I'll take your word for it, but the git man pages are notoriously unreadable. They might be useful for a git guru, but for someone that is learning the commands they are downright harmful.
*Issy-les-Moulineaux (with -eaux) !
Certainly not for that reason. Actually, as a non-native English speaker, I consider unicode identifiers one of the most useless features for a language.

There are reasons why unicode identifiers have never been widely used, and probably will never be, even though they've been around for more than a decade:

1. You're unlikely to be allowed to use them. Unicode identifiers stagger international collaboration. Do you want your Chinese colleague to commit some hieroglyphical identifiers into your code, and then an Arabic colleague to add right-to-left curvatures? I doubt that :) They are unwanted in outsourcing, freelancing, open-source, any company which does foreign hire, they are a problem when asking on StackOverflow, etc.

2. There is just no problem to use English in the first place. Programmers already use English every day. 80-100% of information (documentation, QA, discussion forums) on any programming topic is in English; native-language sources are lacking at best, often nonexistent. If person is a professional programmer, it's way too late for them to have a couple of words translated.

3. They are not as appealing as you might think. Many languages don't work the same way as English. For example, in expression `print(line)` the word `line` may have to have different morphological form than in `var line = ...`, and yet another form for `if '_' in line`; one form for all uses is very unnatural and requires getting used to (and if you're going to adjust anyway, why not adjust to English then).

4. Mixed-language text is simply harder to type when second alphabet is not latin. It's like 3x harder when foreign words need to be inserted. I have even seen colleagues discussing code in chat using English just for that reason. And since at least language keywords and standard libraries are already using English, mixed is what it gonna be. A person must have some real serious trouble with English to tolerate that.

Even in strictly local projects where all comments are in native language, unicode identifiers are rarely used.

P.S. When I was reading Swift book about unicode identifiers, I immediately thought: "first paragraph of every Swift coding conventions on the planet is going to be, don't use unicode identifiers".
Sony is very nice yet costly and at the same time very limited(PDF only, hard to use dictionary, no add on programs, not rooted yet ).

At CES there was another 13 inch reader presented which should be cheaper and support more standards:
http://the-digital-reader.com/2015/01/08/hands-netronix-6-8-...

There was also a 13 inch USB (plenty of bandwidth for low refresh of e-ink) monitor at CES.

There is a ton of pent up demand for larger screen e-ink readers as Sony found out when people outside their target market wanted to buy the 13 inch DPTS1.
Amazon's Simple Email Service (SES) works well for me. You can use it with any number of AWS tools, or via straight-up SMTP. Nothing fancy, and I've never had any problems with it.
How to Use Street Marketing to Promote Your Business
What Does the Increase of Apple Store Sales Mean to You?
The problem with refactoring is the cost. Its rewriting code to no client perceivable benefit. The retesting, the inevitable new bug introduced during deployment.

As developers I think we need to assume the cost of refactoring and factor that into time estimates for our work. What the author is in effect saying is that we should factor 20% extra into our estimates for rewriting code. Which is fair, I just don't see a need to specify a day for it. Just put it in your project plan.
That would be a really tough argument to make. It goes to great lengths to give control over memory layout and control and lacks a LOT of the features of Haskell's type system. It's a lot more like a prettier D than Haskell. Not only that with every iteration it has been moving farther away from the FP paradigm.
Similar to what I thought also with the likes of screen, tmux, curl and the like.
Maybe github is more convinced, search Go in github and filter by language use go: https://github.com/search?l=Go&o=desc&q=go&s=stars&type=Repo... .
You will find half of popular repos (stars>3000) are created by Chinese developer. And most of popular Go related project's document has complete Chinese translation.
Yes, exactly his point. Scheduling meetings doesn't get more exciting because you strap some statistical natural-language processing to it and call it "AI", as if that was a meaningful term.
Misleading title. A good portion of tools listed are extremely popular.
Depends who you ask, I suppose - I come from sysadmin world so none of these are obscure for me. So I'd say they are mainly less popular with the 'average Joe' user base. Judging by the screenshots, the author seems to be coming from Mac world, where GUI editors appear more popular than vim.
At my current gig we use a set of git hooks, and the pre-commit hook enforces the git comment style, which performs integration with bugtracking/timetracking. We wrote our own and it's just a couple of regexes tied to a couple of warnings.

Look in any git project's .git/hooks/ directory for some sample scripts.
Ask HN: What are optimal size of discussion participants?
What are the optimal sizes of discussions or conversations? What are limits on the syntax, semantics of language (e.g. English)? What are possible UX we can structure our modes of dialogue, Q&A (Quora), AMA (Reddit), mixture, free form etc.
On the git-tag help page, there is a section "On Re-tagging" [0]. It looks quite readable to me.

[0] https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-tag.htm...
One thing to consider also is a society's ability to change. Rapid industrialization and urbanization were hugely disruptive but were probably manageable, though it took some time to solve all the problems. With people living longer and job often requiring many years of education and training in order to become proficient in a given career choice, the changes over the next 50 years or so might be harder to absorb.

Software development is probably a decent model of what's coming for the rest of the population. Rapid technological change is already reducing the career expectancy of programmers to about 10 years before moves into management or consulting are considered necessary. The cost is that a lot of expertise is lost and the results are often inefficient with many wheels getting re-invented.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under ActiveRecord
Social media analysis of many kinds is our full-time focus right now. It's a rapidly changing field. The demands of customers shift as they become more educated about what to expect from social media and how to push the boundaries of technology.
Eh, a lot of this looks cool, but doesn't solve any really hard problems.

It's easy to mess up a null check, but it's equally easy to find the bug and fix it.

It's easy to mess up a string format, but it's equally easy to find the bug and fix it.

It's easy to mess up a chain of Rx event streams and when you do--you're out of luck buddy. Have fun debugging that.

Async rewriting for error handling does solve a really difficult problem, but there are much deeper problems with using C# for the kind of imperative threading code where that problem comes up. I wouldn't write that in C#, that's certain.
Why not start with Xpath and CSS selectors and pre-/post-process in js as needed?
Ask HN: Automatically download and reference external website scripts?
Dear HNers,

I'm trying automate downloading the latest versions of all external scripts (jquery, prototype etc.) on our website and load them locally in order to improve page load times.

Writing a script like that seems fairly easy but just wondering if there's a well built solution out there.
Another example: had Apple not removed the TPM from its computers and used it for the firmware crypto checks, the Thunderstrike exploit would have faced quite a hurdle. Such a delicate balance.
If :has is not fast, then it's not very useful, otherwise it's great for, say, selecting previous siblings (which is impossible at the moment).
Appelbaum is a software guy. I suspect that he is out of his depth here.
This is awesome! contains a lot of detail!
"Some later interest was fuelled by Loyd offering a $1,000 prize for anyone who could provide a solution for achieving a particular combination specified by Loyd, namely reversing the 14 and 15.[13] This was impossible, as had been shown over a decade earlier by Johnson & Story (1879), as it required a transformation from an even to an odd combination."
10 things I learned from PMP Mock Examination
I noticed that one of the scam sites is currently listed for sale on Flippa. On their listing, they even openly boast that the best way to use the site is to use its Google News status to scam Google's search results:

https://flippa.com/3500230-google-news-approved-site-with-14...

Here's a mirror, in case it gets modified or deleted: https://archive.today/Jzubr
English law: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2002/31/section/1

You can change the information if you are the manufacturer or you have the written permission of the manufacturer. Owning the phone is not enough.

I don't know what the laws are like for other countries, or if other countries even have such specific laws.
Why shredding files on journaled filesystems may not work
I recall reading a similar post about Node.js a few years ago. For what it's worth, it might just be that China's programming community is growing (and interacting more with the West). The Alexa map is actually not too dissimilar from a population by country map.

If I had to hypothesise about golang in particular, I'd say it might have something with Docker (Baidu is using Docker for its PaaS for example) although it's difficult to say if the relationship is the other way around.
glad to be on Mac OS X!
I'll quote myself from an earlier thread of a similar list of awesome tools; this one deserves to be in it so much:

An ncurses disk usage analyzer: http://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu

I find this an extremely handy alternative to du, it's somewhat similar to TreeView on Windows.
I'll bite - email address submitted, but I still don't know exactly what it is I'm waiting for. ;)
Clang MapReduce – Automatic C++ Refactoring at Google Scale
If I could compile VS myself, on my own box, that would be massive in ways that are hard to articulate. I wouldn't be contributing to VS. I'd be modifying VS for my own purposes, which is what open source is about.
Would be lovely if someone try to something similar with Trillek's computer. should be more easy to do a little OS, as there isn't MMU, segments or privileged levels to be worried. A simple 32 bit cpu with a flat memory model, and a simple instruction set.
I'm not an RPN expert, but I think the nSpire is holistically better between "good enough" speed and readability. I use Lisp so it's not like I hate alternative notation, I just think classic math notation makes more sense for math.
Where's Matt Cutts when you need him? [1]

[1] - https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/on-leave/
56 bytes “Hello World” in D
I read this as "18th-Century Fonts"... which I would also totally expect to find on this page.
15 facts about Real Programmers
Only problem with the nSpire is its a usability disaster. Great for education but as a productive device its horrible. I tried using one (nSpire CAS) for a bit but I felt like I had to do battle with it, not use it.
A tip for intermediate and professional users to avoid headaches: http://subversion.apache.org/
Definitely worth looking into http://esofund.com/
PayPal's new buttons
Nailing the Hard Things by Ben Horowitz(Netscape Co-founder)
Generally speaking, there's a decent chance that they wouldn't be able to afford honoring the agreements. I would speculate that what would happen would be up to whatever regulatory body that oversees this. Most actuaries I've met consider life to stop no later than 120, and products reflects this.

You can compare the price of insuring against invalidity as e.g. a 30 year old with the price of a life annuity to see just how expensive it could be.
Charlie Hebdo Police Investigator Commits Suicide
Which is in contradiction with the HTTP spec. Because who lets a user just add and remove resources without using a process or handler to handle the user input?

I would not use such a framework, because it did not understand HTTP and HTML specs in the first place.
This tool is a must-have for any on-call sysadmin.
Why do you imply that the committee made a bad decision? Have you read and thought about the HTTP and the HTML specs? I guess not.
Why VS? So when things are removed, "we" can continue to maintain them. Sure, that provides no benefit for Microsoft but it does to its customers. It will also show the are serious about being "all open", rather than a few self-satisfying token gestures.
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We Know How You Feel
Jesus Christ, if you people are going to argue about something as silly as which language had a minor feature first, maybe spend some time learning about programming languages first? Python and Ruby have had equally sophisticated string interpolation since before Scala existed. Perl has had similar string interpolation features for at least 20 years. And it wouldn't surprise me if lisp did it before Perl.
The first edition of SICP form 1985 already has a discussion of numeric capabilities in Scheme as an example of programming style based on generic procedures. It might don't have the term Numerical Tower but the ideas were well-developed before 1985. Original HP lectures of Abelson and Sussman explicitly explain the how and whys. Brian Harvey's CS61A has it.

Smalltalk also has Numerical Tower for the very same reasons - to have "generic" '+ '* '/ etc.

Here classic discussion of the topic: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

Note when he emphasize how generic '+ procedure is used. This btw is one of most important realization in a whole course. It is justification behind the Numerical Tower.
Did you take any special measures for protecting your blog, like caching ? Or are you running beefy enough hardware ?
hacker news group hug man
Hi

are you using git version control? so you could hook in the needed libraries as submodules. that would keep them updated and you just have to commit the changes once to have it locally accessible.

best regards
I agree, but I think we live in an idealist bubble on Hacker News. Some of my freelancing clients maintain a bit of (Unicode free) English-German code.

What would you do if you had to write one of the gazillion business software systems we never see here on HN, and you had to codify boring terms like Boolean rightToGiveExtraordinaryNoticeOfTermination (in any other language)? The client/superior has not provided you with an English translation, and your English is mediocre. I can see how non-English code is the least evil in this situation.

I have also inherited outsourced code from Russia once and it had Russian (cyrillic) comments above every English identifier, so apparently some people don't mind switching between keyboard layouts while typing :)
Pretend the company is valued at $1m. Pretend you consider a standard programmer's salary to be $100k. If they offer you a $75k salaray, you are saving them $25k/year. Assuming you'd be there for 4 years (because that's how often most vesting periods are), you are saving them $100k. $100k of the company's $1m comes from your substandard salary. So you should get $100k in equity. That's 10%.

If they try to convince you that you don't deserve that much because the value of the company will rise in the future, ask them where the signed term sheets for the next round are.
So the big deal is that we're now allowed to modify the code of a few libraries?

Fair enough.
Looking forward to the 'What happens when a post about a post that hits #1 on Hacker News, hits #1 on Hacker News?' post.
I was able to get hold of my hosting provider (virtuaal.com) and upgrade to their biggest package in about 15 mins.
I don't understand this:

> int? length = customers?.Length; // null if customers is null

Surely, a primitive int cannot be null (at least in Java).
TPM wouldn't have helped any since it's a passive component.
As long as you get to overwrite the code faster (or more persistently) than it can check itself (with or without support from TPM), you win.
I don't have a family, but I found two things to be really helpful: Going for a 30 minute walk outside around lunch every day, and having lunch or coffee with friends who challenge my thinking once a week. These two things let me reset during the day and lower my frustration at work.

As they say, rest and vest. The goal of this job is to bring in enough money to support you and your family while you work on your fun thing. You can do it!
The 'int? length' declares length as a nullable int.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/1t3y8s4s.aspx
>Your position could still be accurately tracked though.

If by triangulation alone...
Maybe you don't need full ASN.1 but only TLV?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type-length-value
Why conversational tone on hn
Hn users programmers
Understand efficient style
Sarcasm in post
We'll start to see the re-emergence of tools from old-school NLP, but now augmented with the powerful statistical tools and data-oriented automation of new-school NLP. IBM's Watson already does this to some extent.

This is not a new trend. As early as 1997, Steven Abney augmented [1] attribute-value grammars with discriminative modelling (maximum entropy models) in this case to form 'stochastic attribute-value grammars'. There is a lot of work on efficiently extracting the best parse from packed forests, etc. Most systems that rely on unification grammars (e.g. HPSG grammars) already use stochastic models.

In the early to mid 2000s when the modelling of association strengths using structured or unstructured text became popular, old-school parsers have been adopting such techniques to learn selectional preferences that cannot be learnt from the usually small hand-annotated treebanks. E.g. in languages that normally have SVO (subject-verb-object) for main clauses but also permit OVS order, parsers trained on small hand-annotated treebanks would often be set on the wrong path when the direct object is fronted (analyzing the direct object as subject). Techniques from association strength modelling were used to learn selectional preferences such as 'bread is usually the subject of eat' from automatically annotated text [2].

In recent years, learning word vector representations using neural networks has become popular. Again, not surprisingly, people have been integrating vectors as features in the disambiguation components of old-school NLP parsers. In some cases with great success.

tl;dr, the flow of ideas and tools from new-school NLP to old-school NLP has been going on ever since the statistical NLP revolution started.

[1] http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/acl/J/J97/J97-4005.pdf

[2] http://www.let.rug.nl/vannoord/papers/iwptbook.pdf