skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm against net neutrality. To me it looks like more regulation for not enough gain.

I don't see why we should stop the free market; if one internet provider is doing things you don't like, another one will open and the consumer can change to that one if they care. I also feel that companies should have a right to provide some websites at higher speeds. There will always be a trade off; perhaps you could get cheaper internet if you only care about the top few sites.

If they charge the same as internet providers that do have net neutrality, then they will quickly lose market share, and I believe that should be the market's choice, not the government.

Imagine if all those people who signed the petition for new regulations instead signed a petition promising not to use any provider that throttled some websites. That would make a strong market incentive not to throttle sites.

And if the consumers can't do that, why should the government step in to save us?

If you argue that it's very hard to open a new cable internet company (which is the argument I got last time I brought this up), my answer is that enough rich people would be interested enough to open a competitor if there was demand.
They are not eliminating testing. This was really bad wording. When I interviewed in Redmond with Microsoft, I was told that Microsoft used to hire SDE's (software development engineers) and SDET's (software development engineers in testing) as two distinct positions. Now, if you are hired as a "software engineer", you are responsible for writing software as well as writing tests. This was done to decrease friction between what used to be the "software development team" and the "QA testing team", and hopefully lead to faster software releases.
12 Completely Free Email Templates Resources
Perhaps. But our current ruling class should remember that we are slow to anger, and I see plenty of evidence of they do.
I know that, and you know that. I'm not so sure about Comcast or Commissioner Wheeler.

But potatolicious's comment about is good.
Not Entirely True.

Possibly, mainland China is the second last countries in the world, next only to North Korea, where hacker news audience wants to live.

NO INTERNET. End of story.

Disclaimer: Chinese.
Why, pray tell, is a Pre-Calculus book $235?
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0840069421

Our students (and their parents) are being robbed at a monumental rate. What can possibly justify this kind of a price for a subject that has seen no change for decades. Why can't my kid use my pre-calculus book from 30 years ago? Have the definitions of slopes and limits changed during this time?

Even the used versions are highway robbery. A Calculus book ought to not cost more than $20 (or be free).
365 IT SOLUTIONS Named Microsoft Silver Certified Partner
> the March 2014 comparison of Influx is outdated IMO.

I think we expected that, feel free to add comments on the doc for things that are different now.
I disagree strongly. Good types can serve as very adequate reasoning tools for programs at large. This is the source of claims in Haskell/ML/Etc where "if it compiles it works" is used to guide 90% of even massive refactoring endeavors.

It can be hard to believe how useful good types can be.
> Its inadequacies are very well documented.

Which is a very useful trait for a tool to have.
Amazon Kindle Voyage review
They would have their work cut out for them, that I can see. They could reuse the .moarvm bytecode and file format, the NQP compiler and Moar backend [0]. I think many of the test cases are even common between the three backends... So all that's left to re-implement is a bytecode interpreter, IO facilities and FFI. That is, if my understanding of MoarVM is accurate.

[0] (https://github.com/perl6/nqp/tree/master/src/vm)
Future HN comments when things go wrong:

This isn't what we wanted...

We never indented for X to be interpreted that way...

It would have worked, but they didn't go far enough...

It would have worked, but they went too far...

We need this new law X to protect the cable companies because upstart Y's new technology doesn't have to deal with FCC regulation which gives it an unfair advantage...

Give it ten years and the FCC will be about as popular as TSA or the NSA on HN.
>Now this is not to say that some applications will work perfectly fine under this framework.

Probably most handy in line of business applications where a functional UI that works for your entire organization would be preferred over platform specific immersion.
I tried going through "Concrete Mathematics," but I could only do a handful of the problems in the first chapter after trying for a couple weeks. I'm not sure why it seems so hard to me -- I've taken a couple "higher math" courses and am generally considered "pretty good" at math. Perhaps I'm better at bullshit than math...
If you ignore the clickbait use of the word 'reasonable', then there are some valid points made here. The question is – what's the benefit?

There are definite benefits to using a language that it's easy to reason about. In most cases, there's also a cost. That's fine – it means we've got the ability to trade off one against the other as the situation requires.

I'm unlikely to write tiny, single-use scripts in a strict, statically-typed language – mostly because the overhead isn't worth it. Similarly, systems that require higher levels of correctness can benefit from the guarantees that are offered by stricter languages.

We have to bear in mind that the entire field of programming languages is still very much evolving, as we gain experience of what works and what doesn't. Type inference, for example, can drastically reduce the overhead of type checking. Or option types, which eliminate a class of errors by providing support for common patterns. No doubt as the field evolves, we'll see that languages emerge which deal with the pain points of both 'reasonable' and 'unreasonable' languages.
Multi-screen engagement during the Superbowl
To "what's the point of immutable objects?": runtime polymorphism + maintaining invariants (since immutable, at the time of construction).
They're wrong on every issue if you assume that Obama is right no every issue. My sense is that Obama is right on some, wrong on some. On most of the issues that he's wrong on, the Republicans are right purely for allowing him to set the agenda.
> As a Republican, it seems to me the FCC has taken a balanced approach to regulation in this case, so I don't see much negative feedback by Congress.

What about the extremist anti-regulatory positions of many in the GOP? Not every Republican thinks that way, but enough to do generate a lot of noise and elect a substantial portion of Congress.
If this is to cut down on if-else code then I'd say it depends on how many if-elses you're saving.

More often I see people take this approach to let end users compose rules for various actions. But this kind of thing tends to be what I call a "Turing complete" feature, where people are always writing rules that go beyond what your model can express. ("If there are two of these, and one is not older than this, and their mean is greater than the most recent of these, and the current time is before 8 a.m. in the time zone of the user who owns this user's account . . .")

In that case, if your users are sophisticated enough (e.g. internal users in a "services" division of your company), you might want to consider going with embedded Javascript instead. You can expose a few objects/functions from your application and let people write JS using them. Then you run their JS and see if it evaluates to true. I've used this in a Ruby context before with the gem therubyracer.

This is nice because your app gets a full-featured scripting language for free. You don't have to design the language or write an interpreter. Javascript is designed to be very secure. It can't do IO or run shell commands. And it's probably the most widely-understood programming language out there, so there's a low learning curve.

Challenges are that your users have to understand a programming language, and you'll probably want to take steps to validate the Javascript they're writing and to surface decent error messages when problems happen. Also therubyracer can use a lot of memory, which may or may not be a concern depending. Another challenge is that the JS will be opaque to an outside computer system. It's hard to break it down and express what it's all about. For instance you couldn't run a query to find all actions that require condition foo.

Good luck!
I don't think I've ever cussed on my HN account, but unfuckingbelievable.

I'm in complete and utter awe that they listened to the people and not the rich corporations for once.
Well, the Uber site isn't distributing illegal content, so should the Uber site be shutdown or should they just be going after Uber via the courts (where a judge could order Uber to suspend operations)?

I was stating that you could see city government trying to get the Uber site blocked to local ISP customers as a way to side-step the court system.
> 2014 was a good year for programming languages

Yeah... another batch of innovative, interesting languages died because "it's not practical", another pile of language features didn't manage to get implemented because "but look at syntax, it's ugly", another bunch of languages took some decades old features, dumbed them down as much as possible and then some more (because "it would be to hard to use otherwise") and marketed them as ground-breaking improvements to the art of programming.

Very good year for PLs, indeed.
>I don't think you can ever truly learn to program without saying, "I don't care, I'm building this."

This is a great point because it's easy to get stuck in analysis paralysis. There's always a tension between needing to stretch out and build something just beyond your capabilities and then having to backfill some of the fundamental knowledge you missed along the way so next time you can reach further.
The down votes of my comments are in all likelihood not connected to the content of this discussion.

In the last couple of months, I made some unpopular comments on HN and since then have seen all of my comments, no matter the subject, receive a downvote or two some time during the wee hours (in US timezones). The intent is, obviously, to discourage my participation on HN in the face of steady karma loss. I am not discouraged, and in time perhaps my karma-detractors will tire of their little game.
Poster seems to have misunderstood, but:

>Like taking HD signals, converting them to "standard definition" and putting those on the line too? So you can then charge more for higher quality "HD" signals which are still transcoded to lower bitrates? Yeah, we can do without that stuff.

The cable company in my town does this. Ostensibly it was to maintain compatibility with CRT/low def. televisions as a convenience to people with obsolete equipment but the scheme persists. It seems to now serve the purpose of allowing them to advertise low prices for this subpar service and then upsell customers to much higher price tiers. Sure, that's a legal tactic, but it probably wouldn't work in a competitive market.
Opportunities for Personalization in the Travel Industry
What about pellets/implants? Aren't they supposed to release more consistently over a longer period?

Please excuse my ignorance on this, I am in Canada, have been blessed with naturally high T levels, and have no experience with anti-aging clinics, but I'm fascinated by the subject.
Yahoo to include Small Business unit (Viaweb) in Alibaba stake spinoff deal
I had the option to quit to work on learning to code for 3-6 months and I chose to bite the bullet and stay employed. I woke up at 4am to get in a few hours of coding before work and kept my working hours to a minimum so I could have a few hours after work to code. Weekends were 12+ hours of coding both days. It doesn't leave a lot of room for social life or other activities, but the job search was a lot less stressful knowing I still had a paycheck coming in instead of burning through my savings. YMMV!
Fair point the need to Box things is a bit of a nuisance. Also staying pure and immutable gets tricky as soon as you hit the Cocoa APIs but it is definitely a step in the correct direction and I still like it.
My pleasure. I developed a data product for both instruments.
"Computer science" can mean many different things, but theoretical CS is largely considered a branch of mathematics. While there is some 'code', it has all of the same formalisms, equations and proofs. CS papers can be just as inaccessible as other types of math, if not more so.
I have this weird feeling that this whole drama was a long con by Obama and Wheeler to tease out as much vocal support as possible by playing the villain. Like Wheeler was a heel in professional wrestling. They put out a shitty proposal that the ISPs would love just to show them how strong public opposition would be so they'd be perfectly positioned to go full neutrality and claim a public mandate.
MIT OCW has plenty of number theory courses up from beginner to graduate level. Serge Lang has a good book on Number Theory as well.

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-781-theory-of-numb...
I lived in China for 6 months and saw plenty of cops with guns and saw undercover cops roughly throw around a street vendor who had gotten too close to the forbidden city for their liking. Your view here seems to be willfully obscured.

Having your opinion formed by the media is a necessity of living in a world where you can't get first hand information for everything, i.e. a constraint imposed by reality. the difference is that in the west you can choose what media you want to pay attention to, and the media itself is free to report what it wants.
Get ready for GitHub Universe
But the state isn't making Bitcoin legal tender, and states don't make dollars legal tender, either.

"Legal tender" is something that can be used to pay debts and that a creditor is legally required to accept. Dollars being legal tender is something instituted by the federal government.

States, on the other hand, must accept dollars to pay state taxes (as that's legal tender), but they can also accept anything else they like in lieu of dollars (if both the state and the person paying taxes agree on this alternate payment), whether that's Bitcoins, chickens, or performances of the Thriller dance.
"... was convinced that the seemingly normal programmers I ran into were actually sociopaths who had experienced, then repressed, the trauma of learning to code."

It's true. The saddest part is that we forget who we were before we crossed over, and lose the ability to sympathise with people who haven't been through it.
Roughly, "hearsay" means that the person testifying to a fact was not a witness to it themselves or does not have direct knowledge over it. So it's entirely possible that some parts of the affidavit are hearsay while others are acceptable testimony.
Yes - I used to work as a product manager in an un-named large tech company (think FB/Google/Apples of the world) that had 2 engineers on my team get surgery.

On my team alone! And they only told me during a team outing where alcohol was involved and their barrier to personal discussion was low. I can't imagine others who are embarrassed at the idea that they needed to get plastic surgery to do a job that they love that should be focused on mental processing / problem solving, not looks.
In my experience, one thing that can make the path feel more progressive and monotonic is having a set of problems that need to be solved, with a wide range of difficulties. This provides consistent short-term gratification while also providing long-term gratification and utility.

For me, as an earth scientist, there have always been small calculations or simulations that are quite valuable, even though they are not overly difficult or complex. This provided the motivation to learn basic Matlab. As my skills and ambition grew, and I learned new languages and techniques, the class of problems that I wanted to solve grew in scope and complexity. I also learned to recognize new problems and their probable solutions as my tools developed. Programming changed the way I look at the earth, and at statistics, personal finance and a range of other things in which quantification is enlightening.

In contrast, I have had a hard time picking up new languages or programming paradigms when I don't have an immediate need. I've spent time mucking around on various 'learn to code' websites, and read and sometimes completed tutorials on databases or Haskell or whatever, but it feels very different: meandering, non-essential, hard to gauge in scope (how much do I need to know to be useful, how deep is the water really), hard to link up to the rest of my life. Programming for me is a powerful and enjoyable means to many ends, but not something that I am inclined to do for its own sake.

I think if I had said, "I want to learn to program so I can build web apps" without actually having a simple and truly useful web app that needed to be built, I would very quickly move on. If I had said, "I want to learn to program so I can find a new job that pays more money" I would stick with it for a bit longer but it would be incredibly frustrating, because it doesn't seem like there is a very straight path without formal guidance (such as going to school of some sort).

I suspect many people feel the same, but I don't necessarily know how smaller, less formal education systems can work on that. Students always need some amount of self-motivation, and useful results are a long ways off in some areas.
If you can't logically reason about programs written in a language, how is it ever a good choice to use?

You can never perfectly logically reason about any program – your ability to reason about a given program varies on a scale of 'easy to reason about' to 'difficult to reason about'.

While it's not always the case, it's easy to see that in some situations the cost of making a language easier to reason about can outweigh the benefits. The 'goodness' or otherwise of a language must factor in the difficult of reasoning about it, but that itself is not a sufficient condition to describe its quality.
GWT has supported Java 7 for over a year.
Well...this New Republic article from a year back profiles a plastic surgeon who claims to have seen booming business among SV men:

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117088/silicons-valleys-b...

> In talking to dozens of people around Silicon Valley over the past eight months—engineers, entrepreneurs, moneymen, uncomfortably inquisitive cosmetic surgeons—I got the distinct sense that it’s better to be perceived as naïve and immature than to have voted in the 1980s.1 And so it has fallen to Matarasso to make older workers look like they still belong at the office. “It’s really morphed into, ‘Hey, I’m forty years old and I have to get in front of a board of fresh-faced kids. I can’t look like I have a wife and two-point-five kids and a mortgage,’ ” he told me.

> Unsurprisingly, Matarasso has drawn several conclusions from this sociological experiment in miniature. First, the age at which people seek him out is dropping—Matarasso routinely turns away tech workers in their twenties. A few months ago, a 26-year-old came in seeking hair transplants to ward off his looming baldness. “I told him I wouldn’t let him. His hair pattern isn’t even established,” Matarasso said. The techies also place a premium on subtlety. “They’re not walking into their office in front of thirteen-year-old co-workers looking swollen and deformed. They’d rather go slow, do it gradually,” he told me. This helps explain why Fridays are his busiest days for tech-industry patients: They can recover over the weekend and show up Monday morning looking like an ever-so-slightly more youthful version of themselves, as though they’d resorted to nothing more invasive than a Napa getaway.

> Matarasso told me that, in ascending order of popularity, the male techies favor laser treatments to clear up broken blood vessels and skin splotches. Next is a treatment called ultherapy—essentially an ultrasound that tightens the skin. “I’ve had it done of course. I was back at work the next day. There’s zero downtime.” But, as yet, there is no technology that trumps good old-fashioned toxins, the most common treatment for the men of tech. They will go in for a little Botox between the eyes and around the mouth. Like most overachievers, they are preoccupied with the jugular. “Men really like the neck,” Matarasso said, pointing out the spot in my own platysma muscle where he would inject some toxin to firm things up.
Linguists must be rolling their eyes at this study. If you want to study language evolution, phonemes are the last thing you should look at. Languages change, fast, and the sounds of a language change drastically over generations. Compare modern Icelandic and Old Norse (by which we usually mean Old Icelandic)—Icelandic is supposed to be one of the most conservative languages and is still quite close to Old Icelandic in spite of centuries of separation in areas like syntax and vocabulary. But if you compare the pronunciations, they are quite different. The sounds of a language are among its least stable aspects.

Similarities in pronunciation between languages spoken over the same region are part of a phenomenon well known to linguists and do not imply that the languages are related. For example in terms of a pronunciation feature called coda devoicing, Slovene dialects near the Austrian border will pattern with German, those near the Croatian border will pattern with Croatian, while Standard Slovene will have something in the middle. Slovene and German are only very distantly related.

There may be something there about closely related population groups ending up using similar sounds even if their languages are not closely related, but I doubt the researchers even thought about that and used phonemic distance as a shorthand for actual linguistic distance.
Whistleblower John Kiriakou, only person jailed over CIA torture program, freed
I'm not claiming the price is justified, but it's not just about the "definitions of slopes and limits" changing. In some subjects, there may be improvements in pedagogy that justify new texts even if the material itself is unchanged.
C'mon, all of those things you listed (brain surgeon, rocket scientist, lawyer) are WAY harder and more expensive/time-intensive to get into than software engineering.

If you feel like your knowledge is getting flushed away with a new platform, then you've been learning the wrong things.
The purpose is not to create currency competition. The purpose would be to make it easier for citizens to interact with their Government.
The parties involved in the UN are member states. AQAP is not a member state. ISIS is not a member state. The KKK is not a member state. The Donetsk separatists are not a member state. None of these organizations can demand any kind of due process from the UN. The UN exclusively governs relationships between its members. The UN is by design not a "World Court" to which arbitrary parties can appeal.

The only two member states with standing in the AQAP conflict are Yemen and the US. Both members agree on the action. Similarly, the US doesn't need the permission of the UN Security Council to raid the compound of a Montana militia group.

The UN Security Council is simply not implicated in the conflict with AQAP in Yemen.

Should Yemen withdraw its permission for the US to use air resources to combat AQAP in Yemen, that would change.

We aren't discussing the US invasion of Iraq, nor is the premise of this discussion that the US has never skirted the UN; clearly they have, just as Russia did in the Ukraine, the UK did in the Falklands, Turkey did in Cypress, and so on. So it does your argument no good to point out that the US has in the past not respected the UN. That has no bearing on the situation in Yemen.