skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actual legalization would kill this industry. In Washington and Colorado (states which have actually legalized, not merely implemented a medical system or decriminalized) there is no need to see a doctor first. You just walk into the store, show a photo id to establish your age, and hand over cash.

Also: "During Prohibition, Your Doctor Could Write You a Prescription for Booze" http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/during-prohibition-you...
While that's a good point I'm just playing devil's advocate here. It's probably among the least crazy things China has done.

By the way thanks people who disagree with me for the downvotes. Cause that's what they're designed for.
The President has a great deal of indirect control over the FCC. All FCC commissioners are appointed by the President. But they don't turn over immediately, since they're appointed at 5-year intervals. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Communications_Commissi....

Worth reading in this context Joel Brinkley's "Defining Vision", about the history of broadcast HDTV in the US.

Also, history strongly suggests that the GOP's political rhetoric is a load of dingo's kidneys. Do you honestly believe that stuff? Do you have any corroborating examples? Because the GOP that was in power prior to 2008 pretty much exemplified the opposite strategy.
I see some comments like 'how can a calendar app be worth $100M?' but I'd suspect those people have never used Sunrise.

When you first download Sunrise you think 'wow, I can actually enjoy my calendar app!'. It's beautiful, fast, works on every platform and with every calendar provider.

Then you integrate it with all of your other services and you see how calendar can rival email as the center of your digital life. If you think about it, we should be checking our calendars to find out what we need to do, not our email.

Congrats to Joey (shoutout to HackNY!) and the rest of the team. This is a great reward for building a great app in an essential category.
History of Frame Rate
for me it keeps spinning on their own loading widget (the main UI shows up, but the loading bubble at lower left never goes away), and I cannot open any of the emails. This is with firefox 36 beta 6.

Edit: using https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/enable-google... which works much better
Your opinions of Clojure seem to mirror mine. I absolutely love the simplicity of the syntax, and after having learned a bit of Clojure then coming to F# I released it's syntax for describing data collections had forever ruined me. EDN is fantastic.

Unfortunately I have to love Clojure from afar. Partly because I only touch it for Riemann so I'm always rusty, and partly because the JVM. I'm really hoping that all this open source .NET business will bring more attention to ClojureCLR though. ClojureScript is a wonderful thing and I know there are some F# and CIL->JS transpilers but LightTable->ClojureScript->Chrome is a wonderful thing. A similar story, complete with insta-repl, with F# would be crazy cool.
Maybe they actually just want their end users to have a great web search experience? They added DuckDuckGo as an option to their OSes recently and I'm sure they would be happy to not feed any more traffic to Google than strictly necessary.

It could benefit Siri making the built in web search more intelligent instead of leveraging a 3rd party API who might even charge for access since there's no ads.

It might even sell more devices if they make it an Apple device exclusive service, or at least as a gateway to lure new customers kinda like the online versions of icloud/pages/numbers/keynote.
I don't feel that bad since Guitar Center put almost all their competitors out of business. I remember being furious on the days I had to go to Guitar Center because I needed something that afternoon and there was nowhere else to go.

As companies like this are grabbing market share the story is always that if they fail the market can just go back to what it was. It rarely does.

Interesting is that some of the businesses that GC put under might have been able to compete in markets where GC can't, where customer loyalty is important. There's no reason to buy something from Guitar Center that you could order online unless you need it immediately. But a locally owned music shop where you've known the owner for 10 years and always go play guitars on your days off? It feels good spending money there.
Show HN: RPath, an ill-advised way to query XML with just Ruby
This isn't a rational decision, this is war.

Google screwing with phones, Apple will screw with search. Apple isn't running out of money or smart people, so they probably have a shot if they want it.
Was the hitman really an undercover agent? I though it was just someone scamming Ross for as much $ as possible.
How does dependency injection differ from just not using global variables?
> The point is neither the GOP nor the DEM get to decide what net neutrality policy is... that is the FCC's job

The members of the FCC are Democratic and Republican political appointees.

> This isn't a party thing...

Every FCC vote on Open Internet ("net neutrality") rules for the last several years has had a 3-2 divide on party lines (Democrats for Open Internet regs, Republicans against).

How is it not a party thing?
Or perhaps their own projects like Angular and golang.
I disagree, and I disagree because I used to think this way (having lived and breathed programming since age five), until I started to meet people who had started to program in university (which I considered _way_ too late) and who had become excellent programmers. Not adequate-for-a-job programmers, but best-of-breed programmers.

In fact, often better programmers than "naturals" because along the way they had learned a lot of discipline that isn't necessary when programming is fun -- but as every "born programmer" turned professional finds out, programming isn't always fun.
Eero Could Do for Wi-Fi What Nest Did for Thermostats
The Apple Maps experience is evidence against that, though. We know that they were working on maps for years and things like PoI search were among the biggest issues. I find it hard to believe they would have done that badly if they had an in-house search team (if only because such a team would have been good at flagging problems and suggesting solutions).
Universal Office Apps Are Now Available on Windows 10
Just curious, but what salary do you think an "engineering product manager" at Apple makes?
WhatsApp Plus Ban and Its Hypocrisy
OK, I'll bite ^_^ (although I don't think I've ever done so at a Waffle House).

FEMA et. al. really need to know the facts on the ground.

People lie. Intentionally (in Katrina, a whole lot of people a short distance away from the National Guard and Coast Guard's constant stream of helicopters depositing the rescued at the stadium ... no way you're going to convince me they didn't notice the monster Chinooks), unintentionally because of poor or incomplete information (ever notice how you can't believe anything in early news reports of this sort?), etc.

But Waffle House has a system, that is part of what keeps them in business, and that system turns out not to lie. The limited menu is fascinating: limited electricity, i.e. running off generators, no waffles for you!

I suspect even Wal-Mart, which has a serious disaster system, also being in disaster prone areas including the southeast, can't match that early on, because they're responding as much to anticipated need as real needs, although maybe they can data mine purchases ... assuming the data link to HQ is still up (don't know if they have a satellite backup).

And they can always reallocate a lot of surplus stuff they didn't turn out to need. Or you just don't worry, in the days after this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Joplin_tornado there was a great surplus of bottled water in the disaster area, increasing stacks and stacks of it everywhere. Figuring out how much was rushed to the area would give you essentially no useful, or at least new data.
Uber and Google are not breaking up quite yet
He wrote his accounts of his wars in Latin, at least.

Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations in Greek. I can't think of any other major Roman figures who are known for writing in anything other than Latin. Plutarch did, but he was Greek so I don't think he counts.
Yeah, I would like to know as well. I tried googling, but got the same results as you.
Under Armour acquires weight loss app, MyFitnessPal, for $475M dollars
How a microbe's non-evolution could confirm Darwin's theory
Similarly, IBM tried to make OS/2 a "better Windows than Windows" by supporting both OS/2 and Windows applications. This just encouraged application developers to write Windows applications because they would run on OS/2 and Windows.
48 hour straight coding session, Charge Cuz was born
The FCC’s net neutrality proposal has a loophole
Meanwhile in Haskell

instance FromJSON Person where
parseJSON = withObject "Person" $ \o -> do
name <- o .: "name"
age <- o .: "age"
return (Person name age)

let person = case decode some_bytestring of
Success p -> p
Error e -> error "Malformed JSON"

It works with arbitrary data types (including enums!), lets you easily, exactly specify what sort of data to accept, and doesn't require stepping outside the language.
I'm really looking forward to playing with these; thanks for releasing them, especially since there is so little failure data out there.
> the President has Zero control over what the FCC does.

Other than appointing the commissioners, and exerting both indirect (and, through the use of the veto, potentially direct) influence over legislation which controls the scope of the FCCs regulatory authority, and appointing members of the Federal judiciary who ultimately resolve disputes over the FCCs actions, sure, the President has zero control over what the FCC does.
Open office space sucks
OP didn't ignore warnings - he was unaware that he was in possession of knives. Under civilized legal systems, either intent or harm is required for a crime to have been committed. Neither is present here.

The proper solution to the larger moral hazard issue is, as always, to appropriately assign liability. Civil recompense for the victim's time, emotional distress, and other damages (including all legal fees). And in extreme cases like the article, put the criminals (TSA goons and "blue shield" cops) in jail.
When the code is significantly faster I'll take some extra work to accomplish a goal.
You know the "ç" character? Well, that thing on the bottom is called a cedilla, and in Unicode you can attach a cedilla to anything. Şȩȩ?̧

You can even attach it to the 💩 character. The result looks like this: 💩̧

In Perl 6, you can make anything into an operator. For example, you can write a summation function and assign it to the Σ operator.

The "unicode tapeworm operator" puts these two concepts together.
Yes, I'm not disagreeing that we're making huge progress. My main argument was that it's only going to advance up to a certain point. For one thing, computing power is reaching it's limits. Many consider Moore's law to be dying [0], at that point the advent of the future will rely on the discovery or implementation of a new material like graphene or a quantum computer. Then we have limits in storage and computation, but of course those can be surmounted using smart software (RAID and hadoop come to mind). I'm not saying you're wrong, just that there's a limit to all of it.

HN seems to be stuck on some singularity, but personally I just think it's a byproduct of futurology. Just look at the past and how they envisioned the future. Heck, we can study the industrial revolution and the reaction of Luddites, but people still have jobs today. Like I said, we might just have to move an abstraction higher, just like how we went from manual labor, to controlling machines that do manual labor.

Also, just a nitpick but all that google maps OCR was done by humans via Captcha.

[0]: http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1319330
I agree. I don't think you can hide hiring the right search people. They have pulled in a few search companies, but nothing at the scale necessary (e.g. Topsy).
Mario's not hiding any "well, kinda" bits when he says libGDX will run everywhere he mentioned--there are no second-class citizens in their world and it really benefits from that approach. RoboVM really is killer, and libGDX is too. Those guys certainly don't need me to validate their work, it speaks for itself, but anybody who is comfortable on the JVM and wants to make a game for the platforms libGDX supports should check it out.
We've been played:
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1F4A9/index.htm

http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/327/index.htm
Oh, I see what you were saying. You were saying that you can know everything there is to know about a person from a few posts on the internet. No wonder you believe in trolls.

But If I were to follow that line of reasoning, I would be forced to conclude that your incompetence here is simply an innate part of your being. But I don't believe that, even if you think I should.

So try to do a little better, ok?
That could make for an interesting filter bubble
> Part of the reason I began studying math, is that I felt it was my limiting factor. The range of problems I could tackle as a programmer was limited by math. It turns out this was partly true.

I started studying math intensely (doing every exercise in books, etc) when I realized the same thing: math was a limiting factor for my programming ability. Michael Abrash hints about this in some article, and I sneered at it until I realized it was true.

I considered going back to do a math degree but the amount of hassle involved, as well as other life changes required, made that impossible.

I would like to know how it worked out for you. Are you glad you did a degree program? Do you feel you met people and made connections that were valuable, that couldn't be made by an autodidact?
Super interesting article. I used to be a big fan of Codecademy and other online website to learn to code. The author is right, at some point you need motivation, like in any new thing, and that's where I think most of them are failing.

Without a real project or a constant progress that you can follow, you easily end up abandoning that site.

I built CloudAcademy.com more than a year ago and even if we are focues on Cloud Computing platforms like AWS, one the things we are trying to solve is providing good, constant information to our students on their progresses. That's the most important thing. In our case they really need those skills to they have a very high motivation to complete the courses, but still, I see this as a priority for an e-learning platform.
The only thing I don't like about Perl, is that it's a dynamic language and therefore unsuitable for large (as in, significantly longer than will fit on the screen at one time) programs. But "use strict;" helps with that, and apparently more recent versions (work has 5.8.8) allow subroutines to more easily declare a specific number of arguments.

I'm actually learning more of it right now, so I can clean up and modularize some of my scripts. Because my other options (ksh93, Progress 4GL, and maybe older versions of Java or C++) are even less suitable.
Try this:

perl -C -E 'say "\x{1F4A9}\x{0327}"'
Sealing prototypes is easy - V8 already "pseudo"seals them: it removes the map checks against prototypes and instead deoptimizes the code depending on hidden classes when somebody changes them.

Similar pseudo-sealing technique can be applied to objects: when optimizing some code you can assume that if some hidden class is a leaf in the transition tree it is no likely to change - then make the code depend on this assumption. This would mean you only need to check this once.

I think the most interesting part that stricter-minus-types mode brings to the table (at least it's informally described part) are hole-less arrays. This is something that is missing from the ES as it is described now: new Array(N) is producing a hole-full array. V8 is capable of tracking whether array is containing holes or not - but the way to efficiently preallocate holeless version is simply missing from the ECMAScript.
One might have thought the OP highlighted the inherent problems in making assumptions about the meaning of meta-keys for all of your users, all around the world.

But of course the OP continued to make the same mistake, which I pointed out way up at the beginning of this branch.
I think that assumes such a high level of venality that I wouldn't bet on it.

The people I consider most dangerous to the public in regulatory positions aren't the ones who actively aim to undermine. They're they ones who just have such a strong sympathy with the regulated that they can't conceive of other ways to look at it.

Good regulation requires both deep respect and deep skepticism. Think, for example, of people who make sure restaurant kitchens are safe for the public. They have to respect the purpose of restaurants and the people who run them; otherwise they'll be ineffectively fussy or crabby. But their whole job is to never let those people slide. So as much as they understand and empathize with how hard and expensive it is run a restaurant, they still have to be willing to take the consumer's side say, "Yes, it's expensive, but you still have to throw out that $2k of meat." And mean it.
Hipchats stability is laughable.
Is it fair to call it regulation when the corporation benefits? (regulation tends to mean "regulation against corporations")
If someone is the first to post about a particular site specializing in illegal transactions, and it's publicly determinable that they were, before that, soliciting for developers familiar with the kind of infrastructure the site would need, and, that person also is the intended recipient of a package of false identity documents, and...

...things add up and produce enough cause to get a warrant. Given the analysis from opsec people, it's not surprising that there was eventually a warrant and an arrest and a trial; given that he was leaking so much information about who he was and what he was doing, the surprising thing is that the feds didn't catch him even sooner.
Internet Warlords versus Governments
I live in San Diego and my son is a few years away from entering HS, but I had no idea GMC existed. Even worse, I used to live in Fletcher Hills about a block away from the school. Thanks!
I like to catch conservative radio when I go on road trips. I find it entertaining but I also find that it's valuable to listen to the so-called "other side" every once in a while. I heard something on Limbaugh's show several months ago on one of these trips that has stuck with me ever since.

A caller was telling Rush about a new bathroom policy in his neighborhood's public elementary school that allowed transgendered children to use whichever bathroom most closely aligned with their sexual identity.

To the caller, this was the height of liberal filth. He rejected not only the idea that transgendered people really exist, but that a child would even HAVE a sexual identity at an early age. He was furious that he was having to explain to his son why a person who was "obviously a girl" got to use "his" restroom. The upshot of all this was that he claimed that this was the point he realized he was an alien in a secular universe, and that it was time to pull his children out of public school and homeschool them.

Why did I tell that story? Why did it stick with me? Because, to me, it highlights a feeling I've been having about something very profound that's happening to America. I don't know if it's a wonderful thing or a disaster (or both), but I have an irresistible gut feeling that it's happening.

I'm talking about the emergence of a new national mitosis.

North vs South, Red State vs Blue State, liberal vs conservative, religious vs secular. Whatever you want to call it, Americans - it seems - are separating themselves into two (or more) distinct and ideologically opposed groups. This is nothing new, of course, but what IS new (at least in my memory) is that there are fewer and fewer opportunities for common discourse. All sides are not only furious at each other, they are genuinely mystified by each other. That's why I found Rush's caller so interesting. I could hear something in his and Rush's voice that was far beyond anger and the usual partisan name-calling. It was pure cultural shock and confusion; like a martian landing in Times Square.

So what does that all have to do with techies homeschooling their kids? It strikes me as significant that though there is no simple way to divide these two groups (and there is definitely overlap), both of them are beginning to eschew public education. If you are passionately pro "tech" or passionately pro "God", it seems there is little left that public schools (and mainstream society itself) can offer you and your children.

These two groups have more alike than might first appear. Both groups feel that there is something so rotten at the core as to be nigh unfixable (whether loss of Biblical values on the one side or complete loss of intellectual curiosity on the other).

I don't have any deep insights as to why we seem to be splitting into multiple Americas or what might happen next, but I can feel that it's happening. If you want to watch the proverbial canaries in the coal mine, watch who homeschools their kids.
Interesting! I wonder what drove their decision to use rational number representation.
Is it possible to turn this feature off and use floating point instead (for performance reasons, let's say)?
This is a focus for Java 10 — value types. John Rose is actually one of the guys working on it. He mentions this several times in the presentation as a key issue to solve in the JVM.

https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=value+t...
App search, itunes search, search on their own e-commerce website....there's at least a dozen more likely scenarios than a Google clone.
Another good explanation, this one with a javascript simulation of HLL:
http://research.neustar.biz/2012/10/25/sketch-of-the-day-hyp...
It is the Unicode Pile of Poo [1] with a Combining Cedilla [2]. In Perl 6, a language that makes Haskell look shy with its operators, you can presumably make this into an operator. You definitely can with the pile of poo itself [3], but I don't know if throwing a combining character in there does anything bad since I've never done it myself.

[1]: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f4a9/index.htm

[2]: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/327/index.htm

[3]: http://blog.mattoates.co.uk/2012/02/perl6-and-fun-with-unico...
Years ago, I used something like this to access my home computer from behind an http-only proxy: http://http-tunnel.sourceforge.net/

Is crowbar intended for the same purpose?
I think most home schoolers that I talk to know all these dangers, and have developed ways around it. For one thing, a single homeschooling parent is rare in my area. There are tons of coops and other groups who get together on a regular basis. Each parent reaches what they know, there are social gatherings, and the parent can support each other while the kids learn.

Also, much more curriculum is available online these days, including online schools so you can have a teacher helping your child through their work, even while home schooled. The online coursework also reduces how much you need to be the teacher... but does not completely replace it.

We have our kids that home school do the bulk of their work online, and then I review their progress and their areas of struggle, and help them specifically with problem areas, then they go read and write for a while,m and spend the afternoon with less structured time to follow their own interests.

It isn't perfect, and you do need to make sure your children are getting a good education. But that is also true of sending your kids to a school. As a parent, we are responsible for the education, no matter where they actually sit during the day.