skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A long time ago I worked on a stock trading system written mostly in Perl. That code may have been a lot of things, but ugly wasn't one of them.

So, it's definitely possible to write non-trivial Perl programs without feeling ill.
Aside from the things others have mentioned, which are all really good, there are some really good books on the subject.

Jose Valim's Crafting Rails Applications[1] is a wonderful resource, since it deliberately sets out to peel back the layers of magic. A lot of the techniques are ones I probably would not use in practice (storing views in the database and rendering them!), but they serve to elucidate the operation of the entire view stack. Really good stuff.

Two other good books are Rails Antipatterns[2] and Objects on Rails[3]. Neither of them has been updated in a long time, but the general principles will still hold. The former is more practical, the latter more theoretical; precscriptive and fanciful food for thought, respectively. Both solid.

1. https://pragprog.com/book/jvrails2/crafting-rails-4-applicat...

2. http://railsantipatterns.com/

3. http://objectsonrails.com/
Either way you've got to admit it's one hell of an echo chamber here though.
So can anyone explain why banks would suddenly close an account like that in the UK? Would they do that in the US? He is despositing a lot of cash and electronically transmitting money from that account. Wouldn't any small business that does a lot of cash transactions run into this same problem?
Certainly compact; as written, though, it has a few deficiencies compared to the Go version:

1. no specific error messages; these take up a good portion of the Go code, although they could certainly be more automatic;

2. does not allow the same code to be used for encoding and decoding (i.e. you don't have to write a list of fields twice, and can specify which format to encode to/decode from once rather than separately specifying the encoding and decoding functions - note that the format may not be uniquely determined by the final type you want in the output, e.g. you just want a generic date value out, but you need to use a specific date format for the JSON conversion).

The first is more of a nitpick (are those going to show up in 'e' anyway?), but the second is important. Do popular Haskell JSON libraries have a way to do that?

Also, reflection is not really stepping outside the language.
This is something I like doing. Something I keep meaning to do is take it further and write my proofs in a proof checking language, or at least write "unit tests" for my proofs with one (interleaved with the natural language proof with org-mode!), but they all seemed pretty unwieldy. Has anyone tried this with any success?
A billing system that doesn't suck (or, Why Floating Point Numbers Are Bad)
Echoing what others have said, tech was kind of tacked on, and SXSWi itself is more of an industry conference than a tech conference if that makes sense. Not that you couldn't find people (anything is possible), but imnsho you're more likely to find a bunch of social media strategists getting shitfaced and attending talks like "knitting a tag cloud for grandma"* than people who know what the fuck a copy constructor is. In other words, if you want Shingies, come on down, if you want Bjarne Stroustrups, stay away.

Source: long-time Austinite and SXSW-avoider; developer-type :)

*not a joke: I think this was at the 2006 SXSWi.
Apple’s plans for Beats-based music service revealed
Awesome work on completing the project in record time! What will Charge Cuz do?
Yes, but that doesn't mean testers shouldn't also be developers.

Automation tests are as much code as the code they're testing.
Not really. Its rare not to see multiple sides of issues represented here, and its not that uncommon to see people on opposing sides each claiming that HN is biased against their viewpoint in favor of the opposing one to the point of completely excluding their viewpoint.

HN isn't perfectly balanced -- there are certainly issues where the one-side or the other has substantially more support on HN. But its far from an echo chamber.
I like the comparison to COBOL. Another IBM language of similar vintage is RPG (Report Generator) and it also uses packed decimals.

The control flow is:

- Run a set of zero or more statements once at the beginning

- Run a set of statements once per input record

- Run a set of zero or more statements once at the end

I was always struck by the similarity to:

BEGIN { ... }

while (<>) {

...

}

END{ ... }
Breach of trust
I do agree that it should be up to the professionals, but consider amateurs moving into professional sports.

If college football players can't take steroids, they will get __destroyed__ in the NFL. If college players can take steroids, then highschool players will stand no chance at moving up. Likewise, if you make it fine for high school players, middle school gets punished, etc.

I don't doubt that professionals could successfully regulate it and do it (mostly) responsibly. I have a severe lack of faith in desperate parents living vicariously through their kids in little league games.
The insight is that on a modern processor memory bandwidth is scarce but it can issue several floating point ops per clock. So multiplying and adding stuff in L1 or already in registers is cheap. Streaming algorithms that walk large chunks of ram will be repeatedly memory starved, so anything you can do to effectively increase memory b/w is valuable.

Say you have 8bit integers; store them packed in ram, then upon reading, unpack. So instead of striping an array of int[], you have an internal array of long[] and you read them with a function. Your memory read will suck in 8 at once.

The same technique works for floats or ints with a small-ish range and limited precision; you can store a scale and offset, then pack on write / unpack on read. It's common to be able to quadruple your effective memory bandwidth, then the read operation -- ie

// instead of:
double[] _data;
// accessed as
_data[idx];

//instead you do
getd(idx);

// using the below
bytes[] _mem;
float _bias, _scale;
double getd(int idx){
long res = _mem[idx];
return (res + _bias) * _scale;
}

executes entirely from registers, and is essentially free. The price of all this is you have to process your data on ingestion, but if you run iterative algorithms -- like convex optimizers -- that repeatedly walk your entire dataset, this is often a big win. You can often lose some of the low precision bits on the float or double, but those probably don't matter much anyway.

Like anything else, you'll have to measure.
Popcorn Time DMCA takedown of code hosted on github
> 2. Inherited ignorance – if the parents don’t know or care much about history, unbiased politics, mathematics, literature, etc. then the kids won’t either

It's even worse when parents care very much about giving their children wrong information about topics. Many people I know were homeschooled by conservative Christians who specifically wanted their children to believe things that are not actually true: that the Earth is 6,000 years old, that condoms are not effective at preventing pregnancy and tranmissions of STIs, that America's founding fathers intended the place to be a Christian theocracy, that the Bible gives a complete and accurate account of ancient history, and so on.
This reminds me of something I'm curious about: why have L1 caches have been the same size for quite a few generations of Intel Core processors?
Humanity’s deep future
Its like his twitter feed is bizzaro world: https://twitter.com/TomWheelerFCC

Someone who actually makes sense.
Earplugs! I bought a box of foam earplugs that has supplied me for years now. I cut them in half; half an earplug is the perfect length for unobtrusive everyday wear.

I have quantities of half-earplugs stashed in all my pants pockets, in my car, my work bag, and in a little container on my keychain. I wear them in the car, on planes, at the shooting range, when grinding coffee, and escpecially when putting away dishes. Fucking clanging-together dishes are the loudest things I encounter in my regular routine.

For my kids I bought silicone putty plugs. They work perfectly for little ears, and I keep them with the foam plugs. My kids know where the big orange jar of earplugs is, and they've acquired some of my discipline.
Really hope this does not become a pattern of ever decreasing time expectations between learning to code and becoming employable. I attended an actual bootcamp and really still struggle to keep up with everything almost a year later (employed in infosec so somewhat development related). However a 30 day full time course load to go from almost no code background to employable, honestly sounds ridiculous.
IIRC, there's several numeric types that conform to the larger `Numeric` type family: `Rat`, `Int`, and `Num` (which is basically a float).

`Rat` is what falls out of the expressions the OP was working with, specifying you want `Num` is possible.
Right, because those are the only two options!
Unfortunately this is a dark hole of horrible bugs just waiting to happen not to mention the fact that interpreted languages are very liberal with silent type conversion. It is a nightmare to deal with in a large system written by careless programmers.
He is despositing a lot of cash and electronically transmitting money from that account.

I think that's your answer right there. Small businesses usually have personal connections with their bank and can easily dispel any suspicions of money laundering as well.
Awesome now I don't have to check my
Phone to see if it needs charging
Apple Is Talking to TV Programmers About Its Own Web TV Service
EmailJS – Send emails directly from JavaScript
> out of compliance with their peering rules

I'm not a networking expert so someone please correct me if I'm wrong here, but those peering terms also specify shortest-exit routing, in which case the 1.8:1 traffic ratio is necessary to ensure that one peer does not do dramatically more "work" in terms of bit-miles.

It seems like Netflix and a consumer ISP are never going to be able to peer with traffic ratio requirements. If the consumer ISP offered best-exit routed settlement-free peering options, though, Netflix could easily comply.

It is my impression that a consumer ISPs refusing to offer settlement-free peering with a best-exit routing policy is apparently charging for access to its customers, not charging for access to its network.
Why is that? The element that graphene is made of is far more abundant, and if the band gap can be engineered, it can perhaps be suited to the application.
It's my understanding that under the WA system, some things still require a doctor's recommendation.

EDIT: A recommendation increases the amount of marijuana or marijuana-based product one can legally possess (strictly speaking, it offers an affirmative defense for people possessing more than the amount authorized by I-502).

Source: http://www.doh.wa.gov/YouandYourFamily/Marijuana/MedicalMari...
This is very much appreciated:

1. As mentioned by others, there really is very little data on HD failure rates.

2. When you first published your blog on failure rates across HD brands/models and SMART attributes many, myself included, suggested it might be more illuminating as a predictive modelling exercise. This data allows others to do that now, which is great!
Medical cannabis still exists in Colorado. You can still go to a doctor and get a recommendation, and many dispensaries will give a discount to qualified patients.

(Edit: wording)
There's more variance in homeschooling, but it can be more effective than either private or public schooling if it's managed effectively. The major benefit is approaching teaching without as much spoon-feeding (better critical thinking/doing skills) and zapping curioisity with pointless memorization.
Peter Sarnak, a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, says that one day he ran into Zhang and said hello, and Zhang said hello, then Zhang said that it was the first word he’d spoken to anyone in ten days. Sarnak thought that was excessive, even for a mathematician, and he invited Zhang to have lunch once a week.
By the time it gets to this, it's hard to view the writer as anything other than a quack.

Second, it did so just as the housing fraud and financial insanity which characterized the late 1990s and early 2000s nearly destroyed the U.S. dollar and left us with martial law.
Just do something small. A tiny .js library for something. Whatever. Open source something tiny and useful, put it on Github, done. It probably won't take you more than 8 hours total.
Take a look at spray.io (Scala) then. The project has been acquired by Typesafe and a new version will soon be integrated into Akka as Akka-HTTP.
What value does this provide on top postageapp's api? I have to imagine most companies would (read:should) standardize on one provider.
FabFriday: A Favour over at Kickstarter?
I find it mildly embarrassing that people still manage to screw up PMTUD, a big CDN, no less ... but then again, I guess I appreciate that they did actually care to fix it once they noticed, which is not something to take for granted, and at least it was not the idiotic idea of filtering ICMP (has Amazon ever managed to fix EC2?), but an actual oversight.

However, that blog article seems somewhat misinformed: In addition to tunnels, one major reason for PMTUs smaller than the standard Ethernet MTU of 1500 are DSL connections based on PPPoE, both for IPv4 and for IPv6. The only reason most people don't notice the breakage caused by incompetent admins (in the let's filter ICMP case) is because home routers tend to mess with the TCP options in SYN packets, adding an MSS matching the MTU of the DSL connection. Of course, that's a braindead fix, as it doesn't work for anything other than TCP.

BTW: I doubt it was that small a number of users that noticed, a customer of mine also noticed (native IPv6 over ADSL), but given that this usually is caused by intentionally clueless admins, I just told them that the server admin probably was incompetent rather than reporting the problem to cloudflare ...
Rational-as-default seems like an odd choice. It prevents catastrophic cancellation (the ".1 + .2 - .3" from the article is an example) but at the cost of pathological complexity for some operands. For instance, summing the harmonic series (nth term is 1/n) means doing massive amounts of factoring to keep intermediate results in lowest terms...
Errors do indeed percolate down to 'e' at the end.

Data.Aeson.TH[1] can automatically generate JSON decoders and encoders for data types, if that's what you want.

[1] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/aeson-0.8.0.2/docs/Data-A...
The CLR has had value types from the onset.
The Kindle Voyage came out 4 months ago. This article is as old. What's this doing on the HN front page?
Downloaded it. Love it hey when is the iPhone version coming out? serioisly you need to go easy in the redbull
[Thanks, I should have checked!]

>I don't think it obligates the US and Iceland to cooperate solely under that framework //

Yes, agreed. But the statement by the FBI [cf previous Scribd link] claimed they used the Convention to acquire cooperation.

>"Although the Complaint and search warrants in this case refer to the request as a “Mutual Legal
Assistance Treaty request,” this description is not technically correct, as the United States does
not have an MLAT with Iceland. The request was instead an official request to Iceland issued
pursuant to the 2001 Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime and other relevant law of
Iceland, and as a matter of comity."

That statement is sketchy as anything ("we said it was MLAT but it wasn't"): it absolutely _looks_ like they concocted the rationale allowing the search after the fact and without due process.

I'm not sure if the treaty has anything about bypassing its terms either.
I see a story about a protagonist who was not only supremely arrogant, he was supremely incompetent at opsec (pretty boring and tough to make a sympathetic protagonist out of that).

A movie framing the cops as the protagonists would be just as boring, as it would include a scene with someone googling something and finding the crumb they need to nail Ulbricht, followed by a scene of the arrest where they don't even need to crack the encryption on his laptop to get every single thing they needed to convict him.

A video of his arrest at the public library might have made an entertaining/viral youtube video, though.
Suppose your child were exceptionally gifted. The "IEP"-ish customized learning at one's own (accelerated) pace be homeschooling's major advantage: to unlimit progress without being hindered by an impersonal, one-sized-fits-all class. The critical part of homeschooling seems to be providing a mix of play and unstructured learning with other bright kids. How would that work with homeschooling in urban, suburban and rural areas? (I've seen some homeschooling in rural areas, where kids have neighbors to play and go on "field trips" with, but there isn't much choice in terms of other bright kids able to work on science and maker projects together.)
I don't think he means innovation which seems to be what you are implying. If you take a current working computer system, there are no "mysteries" in the existing hardware where the hardware designer just threw up their hands and decided to hope it would work. Sure when you throw in environmental factors there is certainly unpredictability in terms of hardware failure, but actually understanding what the system is doing? We know what it does. With something like the human body, it doesn't seem that we can be nearly as confident.
He made the post mentioning Silk Road on Jan 29, 2011.

He made the post looking for a developer 9 months later, on October 11, 2011.

And as I mentioned below, the fake ID issue seems to have come up after the email warrant was issued, so it wasn't a factor there.
This is maybe a little bit off topic, but I am glad to see that Doctors on Demand would be doing general medical house calls in the US. This seems like a good idea, I hope it spreads.

I don't live in the US myself, but I've always wondered why doctors doing house calls was a UK thing but wasn't a North American thing, even in Canada.

Are there real obstacles preventing doctors from making house calls in the US, or is it just tradition to "go see your doctor" instead of them coming to see you?
It's an important question whether or not these countries can grow their agriculture (which implies infrastructure and institutions as well) at an exponential rate. If they can't, then Malthus was right. If they can, Malthus was wrong.

Seeing as sub-Saharan African countries are struggling to feed the billion people they have already, no they can't handle another billion. We're talking about the poorest people on the planet here. Somehow we're so caught up in being PC that we can't tell people it's a bad idea to have so many kids for numerous reasons.

> there is a very high correlation between "birth rate" and "infant mortality rate", so as you reduce the infant mortality rate, the number of children per woman reduces drastically.

No. Correlation does not imply causation. A third factor is that infant mortality rates drop as modes of living change. It's apparently urbanization that causes people to choose to stop having so many children.
and then how do you implement super with your system? because that's the point of prototypes,the fact that you're not overloading methods but you have access to the prototype chain.much harder to do with your method.
I would get really frustrated at that question as well. Due to those same circumstances. Family, Work, etc. Especially, when I was trying to get into an entry level programming gig. I think what ultimately got me over this hurdle was getting on GitHub. GitHub allowed me to have this public place that I could point to. At first, it was very sparse. But as time moved forward and I forced myself to upload even the most trivial things, I began to collect a lot of my coding samples. Whenever I wanted to learn a new technology like RoR or whatever, I committed it to GitHub. It became my playground. Now, I actually have something I can point people to. Overtime, you can clean it up and point people to your better stuff.
That would require them to file bugs against the browser. In the case of the sparse array issue, nobody had filed anything until a Mozillian read about the issue here on HN. It was fixed in Nightly the same day.
If you haven't already, I highly suggest looking on metacpan.org for modules, and searching for highly rated[1] and recent ones. Things like Path::Tiny[2], Try::Tiny[3] and Function::Parameters[4] can make a huge difference in productivity and readability. Task::Kensho[5] is also useful for getting a good base set of medern modules to choose from for many tasks.

1: https://metacpan.org/favorite/leaderboard

2: https://metacpan.org/release/Path-Tiny

3: https://metacpan.org/release/Try-Tiny

4: https://metacpan.org/pod/Function::Parameters

5: https://metacpan.org/pod/Task::Kensho
Rational decisions are the only way to win a war.

Apple operates as though they do not have competitors, they only care about making the best possible devices they can, which is why they are so profitable. Chasing Google is the opposite of The Apple Way.

Apple has a very hard time attracting and keeping the best people, just like Google, Facebook, and everyone else. By definition the best people are always going to be scarce. Not everyone can be above average, and only a few can be the best.
I almost gave up after your own first sentence. Your post could've been simply this:

A better headline, less link-baity, would be "Meadow (YC W15) hires doctors for {just in time|on demand|favourite term here} medical marijuana evaluation."
I can't stand the way I get asked, "how much are you looking to pay?" every time I go in there...

Seeing Guitar Center flail is like seeing McDonald's flail... I don't feel bad at all and hope for a speedy decimation.
I couldn't finish the article. Terrible writing. Melodramatic would be an improvement.
Typing Sucks
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Seconded. This seems like a way-too-dramatic writeup of private company which comes to the same conclusion folks have been coming to for a while, based on my 30 second Google search.

I guess it's relevant for musicians and Bain Capital, but he does come across as a hyper quack.
"nothing could be done over the phone, though I was welcome to walk into a branch and try my luck there" - This is sadly common with UK banks. They want you to go to the branch for all sorts of things that really don't need it, but the branch is always closed or overcrowded when you have time to get there. It doesn't help that you have to use your own branch, not any of the others - as if they don't have a computer network between them? Or perhaps they feel the local staff somehow remember who you are and what your tedious banking problems are? Somehow they decide there's no need to be open in the morning, evening or Saturday afternoons, even though they're turning people away and squeezing the bloated queue inside the doors so they can get ready to close. I was also overseas when I was told the only way to get the few thousand pounds from my account was to go the the branch. Eventually they found another way.
What bunkydoo is saying, is that doctors touting cannabis may still be a thing, because it's legal to tout cannabis as a health product. Which is an interesting thought, because doctors totally used to do that with alcohol and tobacco.

https://www.google.com/search?q=doctor+recommended+cigarette...
Simple but different...like it...
http://www.glassdoor.com/GD/Salary/Apple-San-Francisco-Salar...
They would have a small business account with the bank instead of a personal account I'd say.