skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It would certainly help to have basic things like a standard, reliable place to find all the relevant tax rates in a sensible machine-readable form and a way to get notifications automatically and in good time if any rate is going to change.

That said, a lot of the madness appears to come directly from the EU rules themselves. Here in the UK, after dropping the ball initially, it seems like HMRC (the national tax collection agency) is trying to be helpful for smaller businesses who have been caught in the cross-fire between big businesses and governments. However, it's already clear that HMRC themselves have limited authority to act unilaterally, and ultimately they are required to enforce the tax rules given to them from above. The situation will only be fixed when European level government realises how badly it's screwed up, but right now they're more concerned with things like whether Greece is going to leave the Eurozone and potentially lead to a collapse in the Eurozone itself, so I'm not sure anyone is really listening as, ironically, they systematically undermine the very free trade that the predecessors of the EU were originally supposed to encourage.
Extremely nice. So many people have gone through these programs, but so few have taken the time to build something that makes it easier for the next people who will want to go through them. I always found that strange.
"If he doesn't respond to that, you could get more extreme by posting your own status and tagging him in it: "I've been working for @[friend] for months, and he hasn't paid me or responded to my emails."

Make possibly defamatory public statements about someone, especially someone you might end up in a legal battle with later, is not a great idea.

And using these kinds of tactics in an attempt to resolve a business dispute could hurt your reputation with potential future business clients.
I appreciate your optimism, but do realize that there isn't really a massive improvement unless you're Google. I don't see this as worthy of the "/2" suffix; Google might like it because it allows them to make their tech standard, but other than that it's unnecessary marketing.

HTTP has never been the bottleneck. I think IPv6 is excellent and a needed, massive improvement especially since IPv4 is no longer tenable. HTTP/1.1, however, still works quite well and keeps a larger feature set in some circumstances. It's less insane because it's not made by W3C or IETF or any other hugely bureaucratic group; however, that doesn't mean it's better either.

I can't wait for HTTP/3! Hopefully this time they won't rush it.
Why on earth would you want to go to Mexico City?

Why wouldn't you want to go to Mexico City? It's said to feel very European, and there's a lot of interesting history and architecture. I'd go there just as soon as I'd go to Bangkok.
Having a Final Solution of "only" deporting Jews - after taking their possessions - and murdering just a few, for a warning or for a bit of fun, is not really that much more humane than the later industrial extermination into which things developed. Or let's say that making a point about difference there is just, well, gross.

Starting to give sources to a revisionist, regarding Nazi persecution of Jews not only as retaliation for a "Judea against Germany" boycott "act of war", is much like starting to play chess with a flock of pigeons. There's no point.
so, in c++ you can do initialization of const value via lambda closures that are immediately evaluated:

const int a = [=](){
//do stuff here that returns an int:
if (condition) { return foo(); } else { return bar(); }
}();

Does this idiom work in swift?
I'd really like it if someone condensed that article and removed all attempts to be funny or sound extremely clever.
Any chance of adding a donate button to remove ads?
Or I can choose to leave a comment on HN and raise the broader issue of lack of context, something that plagues a lot of tech bloggers.

If the first words I see when I arrive on a site are "guest" and "flak," and then there's a misleading headline, and the seventh through ninth word in the post itself is "OpenBSD install kernels" with no further explanation as to what that is then I reserve the right to express both a local and global observation regarding the quality of the information as presented.

I'm amused that this is downvote central but turning a valid observation into a slightly lighter shade of beige isn't refuting my argument.
In fairness, this is followed up with:

> In 1992, while finishing A Bug’s Life, Pixar had to build a digital valley for Buzz Lightyear to drive his Ford® F-150™ pickup through on the way to the hospital so he get a vasectomy.

So I'm pretty sure the author is being deliberately silly.
Exactly, and Microsoft is happy to host your own custom Linux-based environment if you want complete control over your stack:

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virt...

edit: looks like phonon below beat me to it by a few minutes.
Skype used to run entirely on a Postgres cluster before Microsoft bought them. There are lots of examples of large Postgres clusters in the wild. Have you considered hiring an experienced Postgres admin? These types of setups are not impossible.
That makes sense, but I'm sure it's skewed between younger/more tech savvy target audience (ie, Clash of Clans) vs older or less savvy viewers.
But again, that's a totally separate issue from whether it is ok to just ignore the standards process and ship whatever you want, which is what Google is doing here.

But isn't that exactly what happened with SPDY? They shipped it unilaterally first, then later on it got standardized as HTTP2.
I've heard a few people say they were going to build a "Yelp for accelerators," but none of them actually followed through. So I'm glad someone finally did this!
Many startups in YC actually launch during the 3 months they are here. Being successful before entering YC is only true for a small percentage of the companies.
Naval gunnery has had to take account of that for a long time; pretty sure that 110 mile range is taking the ballistic trajectory into account. It's not like this thing fires the projectile at mach 7 in a straight line, than after 110 nm it suddenly stops.
You can instantiate ubuntu servers on azure.
> This attitude is exactly how you make sure that nothing ever changes or improves.

On the contrary, we are in a desperate need of such attitudes in software. We need for everyone to stop jumping to every new thing with silly promises. We need to start choosing quality over quantity. We need substantial well researched improvements.
Erm no. He did not "call" the Euro crisis. I notice he has stopped mentioning Ireland, for example, because it now represents a counter-example to his world view. After a few years of austerity, growth has returned, unemployment is falling and tax revenues are rising in Ireland. All apparently impossible according to Krugman and in fact he explicitly predicted the opposite outcome would result from government policy. He irritates me highly because he is clearly smart but hasn't the tiniest crumb of intellectual honesty - he simply ignores inconvenient facts where other commentators and ecomomists (of various ideological bents) engage with difficult facts in order to explore and refine their own belief systems. I have gone from being a Krugman admirer to considering the guy a lying charleton in the space of 5 years.
Shark Tank: The Lost Pitches
I read it correctly but after all of the Ross Ulbricht news lately, my first thought was along similar lines.
I'd love to know if there's a Windows equivalent to this.
Are you assuming wage decreases?

That's a longer-term trend that I don't think we'd see with a shorter-term 3-5 year deflation.
They say it already does: "Right now, both the Apache and nginx web servers support HTTP/2" http://moz.com/blog/http2-a-fast-secure-bedrock-for-the-futu...

The thinking is, I believe, that "SPDY/4 revision is based upon HTTP/2 wholesale" http://http2.github.io/faq/ and nginx already supports SPDY via ngx_http_spdy_module. http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_spdy_module.html Version 3.1 though...

So it's either there or almost there.
>Take land - demand for it changes over time, the exact same amount is in circulation as there was 200 years ago, the value goes up as population increases and it becomes more scarce

Why is that a good system? Why should people who happened to be here before our time have an inherent economic advantage by owning land? Wouldn't the world be a better place if we could cheaply create all the land we wanted?
The capacitor banks required are currently much too large.
I got a copy of Paul-Henning Kamp's critique "HTTP/2.0 - The IETF is Phoning It In" off the ACM website before the link went dead. Here's a bit of what he said about it:

"Some will expect a major update to the world’s most popular protocol to be a technical masterpiece and textbook example for future students of protocol design. Some will expect that a protocol designed during the Snowden revelations will improve their privacy. Others will more cynically suspect the opposite. There may be a general assumption of "faster." Many will probably also assume it is "greener." And some of us are jaded enough to see the "2.0" and mutter "Uh-oh, Second Systems Syndrome."

The cheat sheet answers are: no, no, probably not, maybe, no and yes.

If that sounds underwhelming, it’s because it is.

HTTP/2.0 is not a technical masterpiece. It has layering violations, inconsistencies, needless complexity, bad compromises, misses a lot of ripe opportunities, etc. I would flunk students in my (hypothetical) protocol design class if they submitted it. HTTP/2.0 also does not improve your privacy. Wrapping HTTP/2.0 in SSL/TLS may or may not improve your privacy, as would wrapping HTTP/1.1 or any other protocol in SSL/TLS. But HTTP/2.0 itself does nothing to improve your privacy. This is almost triply ironic, because the major drags on HTTP are the cookies, which are such a major privacy problem, that the EU has legislated a notice requirement for them. HTTP/2.0 could have done away with cookies, replacing them instead with a client controlled session identifier. That would put users squarely in charge of when they want to be tracked and when they don't want to—a major improvement in privacy. It would also save bandwidth and packets. But the proposed protocol does not do this.

[He goes on to tear a strip off the IETF and the politics behind HTTP/2.0 ...]
Thanks for the feedback! Since today you can save and share combo from the web app :)
"Migrating from DO/AWS/Linode isn't fun and productive." Huh? You can run more or less the same type of services on Azure that you can on AWS. I wouldn't even consider DO due to lack of load balancers and file backup services.
Does anyone know if Cloudflare has plans to implement HTTP/2? RIght now they support SPDY.

I found the answer from their blog:

"Part of the service CloudFlare provides is being on top of the latest advances in Internet and web technologies. We've stayed on top of SPDY and will continue to roll out updates as the protocol evolves (and we'll support HTTP/2 just as soon as it is practical)."
> Your #2 problem is that you think writing code is the most important skill of a programmer. It's not. Learning is. Are you a fast learner? If so, there are hundreds of companies that need you.

I'm told in my interviews that I don't program well enough for them.

I'm not so stupid that I don't know what you're talking about. I'm not the fastest learner that I know of. I do like learning new things, however.

Given your answer, I'm thinking you aren't a hiring manager or don't get involved in interviewing much. If a candidate takes too long to answer a question, even if they get it right eventually, it's as bad as getting it wrong, in the eyes of management.

> You also keep talking about "engineering". The majority of software companies aren't writing code in a way that could be called "engineering". It's sloppy, and the developers are embarrassed by it. But that's what you do when your time/budget are very limited.

It's industry parlance for the area of the company that writes novel code, as you put it.
Stop it with the "open and porting". They are not going to do it.
SHEET PILING
>If you're not restricting access to SSH using a firewall, then you're a bigger idiot than I thought you were.

I'm not sure name calling is really appropriate here. Yes, firewalling stuff is certainly appropriate, particularly administrative things, but key based auth is pretty secure, firewall or no.

You're also nitpicking on a single point when he mentions other things that are definitely not usually firewalled. Your mail and web servers are generally open to the world, regardless of whether or not SSH is.
> One big question this video begs is, what causes the giant fireball? Rail guns are supposed to be powered solely by electricity, and don't use explosives of any kind for propellant. Babb told PopSci the answer: The flames are from pieces of the projectile disintegrating; the 7-pound slug is jammed so firmly between the rails that when it's fired, pieces shear off and ignite in the air.

http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-space/article/2008-0...
My boyfriend is a house director for an organization that takes care of developmentally disabled adults. Unlike the author of the article, he's been doing it for 14 years and loves the work. At his company, each house (there are a dozen houses) has 4-6 adults with full time staff and 24/7 care. It's not an "institution," it's a nice little New England home in the suburbs, everyone has their own bedroom, everyone has jobs or activities they go to every day, they get help managing their finances, they all contribute to cooking (as much as they're able), meal-planning, activity and event decisions. They focus a lot on independence and goal-setting, get their medical appointments managed by people who have known them for years (no getting "lost in the system"), and the organization as a whole has really low turnover -- both with staff, and the clients living in the house (so they form really close friendships). It's really a great place, and most of it is paid for by the state (food stamps, welfare, various grants).

Far from being "institutionalized" the guys he works with (and they're all male -- there's are separate homes for women) really feel like a family, and they get better, and more knowledgeable, support in the house than they often might living with aging, or distant relatives.

I know homes like these have gotten a bad reputation, but there are some really excellent organizations out there, and there's no shame in saying "you'd probably be better off at a place that's designed to support your needs."
What about just let them fall to earth from a pretty high orbit?
This is a smart move for Microsoft. Most companies will not utilize the credit, a few will use some but not all of the credit, and there will probably be one or two breakout companies from the batch with huge computing costs. If they snag one of these breakout unicorns, $500K in free computing is a reasonable expense.
That's an extremely fair comparison because it shows how it is possible to avoid odd optimisations like the one you mentioned.
I don't think anyone's selling it as the next new, big thing. It's just a version increment on HTTP; the one that includes DNS/DNSSEC/IPv6 changes can be called HTTP/3000 for all I care. You don't have to use these features if you don't like; they may make sites from companies like Google harder to reverse engineer, but HTTP is currently used for a lot more than text data. You just seem to confuse "corporations want it" with "bad".

And honestly, IPv6 is probably the biggest "big corporate" feature out there. Any big company providing access to more than 16 million devices (and yes, they do exist) has a very urgent need since the 10.0.0.0/8 network only contains ~16 million addresses.

At the end of the day, it's only a standard. As proven by SPDY, "big corporations" like Google are going to implement whatever the heck they want to, then ask for it to be included in the standard. I'm all for a system that makes it easier for companies to get their technologies standardized as part of an open standard - they're spending the investment dollars, but we all benefit from the capability.
Pretty much all cloud providers are the same. Once you have your service topology figured out deploying to AWS, Azure, or RackSpace is the easy part.
Have there been tangible environmental gains from all the money being invested?
This post reads like he's experimenting with the Uncanny Valley of Auto-generated Blogging.
It will be interesting to see if Microsoft uses this to push their PaaS offerings. All too often people jump into cloud services with IaaS whereas the Azure Websites offering will provide a lower cost for run while allowing easier scale out, management, and tie-ins with other Azure services like Azure Storage (various types), HDInsight (Hadoop), and Azure Machine Learning.
Also, last time I heard, they were shooting for pixel-perfect rendering, which is really interesting.
Yes, I figure out how dots are connected.

In sustaining engineering, if it's not assigned to you, you can't really do it. I'd thought about doing what you suggested many times, but throughput is the #1 thing about bug fixing. I wanted to do a lot of things to improve process and the products I've worked on but it's not only not allowed, it's practically insubordination.

Bugs bugs bugs -- fix fix fix. No time to spend on anything else, my manager told me.
Still, as I remember, the release notes were still only presented to developers.
The article does highlight that there is an interesting game-theoretic issue here. Given a crowd of N people, with such-and-such dynamics, is the damage that 1 person can do bounded or unbounded? Is it better to control the number of bad actors, or to restrict the actions any one actor may take?

I'm un-aware of results in this area, but as online communities become more important, and bots become more sophisticated, the stakes will raise. Having some community models, analysis tools, or heuristics, would be very interesting.
I'll give it a shot:

> Buzz Lightyear walks into a bar called the "Uncanny Valley" and asks the bartender for a vodka soda. The bartender gives him a vasectomy. Voice recognition is important!
You're right, it could be considered extortion. I'll retract that as even an implied recommendation.

In this case, it doesn't seem like they have a contract, so the remedy might be to just "undo" the deal as best they can.

Unfortunately, without a contract, there probably isn't a statutory remedy, and they'd have to go to court. That's why I said s/he definitely should not actually revert the code.

My suggestion also took into account the 1st Amendment, which protects speech that has content. In this case, s/he's saying "this is how I feel about it" and "it would be morally justified", both of which have content beyond any sort of implied threat.

All that said, I'm not a lawyer, and no one should take anything I say as legal advice.
let x: String = {
if 3 == 4 {
return "Hello"
} else {
return "Goodbye"
}
}()

Although in this case, I'd just use ternary.

let x = (3 == 4) ? "Hello" : "Goodbye"
I'm well aware of how the situation works today; this was a hypothetical different structure. And I'm specifically suggesting that dividends and salaries should both effectively be treated as "costs" that reduce profits.
Many of the sites I visit frequently are exactly like that: tons of requests with tiny payloads.

The nytimes.com homepage makes 100+ requests to tiny images.

Same thing for the yahoo.com homepage.

An ebay.com listing page makes many requests to small thumbnails of items on sale.

And so on... This makes it a perfectly fair benchmark IMHO.
It is not defamatory because it's provably true. Defamation must be false.
Microsoft has been really trying to entice devs for the last few years. My experience with their cloud service has been terrible, although I haven't used it in a couple of years. It was seriously bad then, and some of their recent missteps haven't done much to change my mind. But MS is definitely trying, so I wonder if Google or AWS will respond to this latest move.
We have a bunch of Microsofties at YC today, but reach out to Steve or me directly at (founders@microsoft.com) if you're a Winter 2015 batch company and for some reason not at YC today.

It's also worth pointing out that our $60k offer for YC companies is still around, if you're in one of the older batches.
Why is extreme portability opposed to multithreading?
OT and CRDT are conflict-free (from the applications point of view). If there is a conflict, it is automatically resolved by the underlying OT / CRDT algorithm and the application always gets a clean data structure to work with.

You can build your data structures so that if there is a conflict (in your domain model) it'll be handled by your application. But that happens logically at a level above OT / CRDT.
>Don't look at the official numbers. They changed the method of calculating inflation to make it seem lower. Look at reality

They change the method, then retroactively recalculate the values, because our basket of consumed goods changes over time.

The way the CPI numbers are calculated are free for anyone to look at, and they closely match the Billion Price Project. There is no conspiracy.

>The economic benefits that have been proposed as a result of this policy haven't appeared

I'm not sure how you can say that. If you ask me, the policy has been successful, despite massive political pushback. Again, that's the tough part of economics; it's very hard to separate all the conflating effects of a specific policy.
Confused as to the downvote..but maybe I can clarify here. People wanting to apply deep learning tend to fall in to one of two camps: heavy CS with some applied ML experience and mathematicians who might not have as much experience building things. In karpathy's case, he's likely going to get a mix of students who have taken different classes. There's a lot of variance either way.
Might help to compete against Amazon as they and Akamai have the lions share of YCombinator sites - http://trends.builtwith.com/tech-reports/Y-Combinator/hostin...
This uses ad spend for the tv spot and correlates it to its effectiveness on the internet.
> benchmarks

The linked benchmark is flawed, as dlubarov noted above. I wanted to note that it is easy to write a flawed benchmark. And in this case, benchmarks are unhelpful, because my major lament is not efficiency or lack thereof, it is the lack of any new features or any consideration to any of the other pain points that exist on the Web today.

> doesn't mean all benchmarks are unhelpful

Didn't mean to imply that, although I can see how it could be read that way. Rest assured, I only believe benchmarks are unhelpful here. Oftentimes a benchmark is the best way to quantify usability, such as DoYouEvenBench (http://www.petehunt.net/react/tastejs/benchmark.html)

> backpedalling

I won't backpedal. This is important, actually, because the name it's given lends it some intrinsic hype. Let's say you're Google, and you're pushing a web standard that benefits you more than anyone else. What's more likely to be adopted, "HTTP/1.2" or "HTTP/2" ? It is important, in my opinion.
Did you read the article? "That incident" was a frathouse at MIT dumping sodium into the river... If a kid gets into MIT, gets into a fraternity, and doesn't have some sort of scientific yearning kindled in him, I really don't think sodium in the Charles is going to do it.
Strange Fight Over Mark Zuckerberg's Bedroom