skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think we can estimate the expected value exactly, but it nonetheless exists and our only option is to estimate it as accurately as possible (future value discounting the long term impacts of course). If the project doesn't have any practical use but opens up new avenues of research or just has value in any way then those benefits should count of course.
Thanks, Pat. This is an excellent introduction to Halcyon.

See also my recent “Show HN” for Haskell on Heroku — a Heroku buildpack for deploying Haskell apps, built on top of Halcyon:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8945156
Nut Allergy Alert – Santa Maria UK Ltd Is Recalling Its Discovery Taco Seasoning
Show HN: JavaScript Application Design book
Why your grandparents didn’t have food allergies…but you do
An Artist Mints Her Own Take on Bitcoin
I'm amazed you've survived a year at a place like that. I had a very similar environment and quit after 6 weeks. You're right, it's soul crushing and will destroy any interest you have in your career.

Lots of places seem to fall into this trap. It's frustrating because most of the time it's simply a matter of politics rather than merit.

In my own businesses, I make it very clear from the start that no amount of brown-nosing, staying late, passing blame or any other political tactics will work with me. In fact, they have a MASSIVE negative effect.

Let's be honest, not everyone can just leave these kinds of places and startup their own company so often they are stuck. I'm on a bit of a mission right now to improve employee's lives and hopefully that will have a positive effect in the long run.
I think you're misunderstanding a broad question due to the narrow context of the article. The question here wasn't about whether people can drink without harassing people; the question was about whether the presence of alcohol is ideal for events which require
professionalism and critical business decisions.
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist says that something is possible, (s)he is almost certainly right. When (s)he says it is impossible (s)he is very probably wrong." - Arthur C Clarke
How much in total are you paying for your hosting a month under the new plans? That amount is the maximum amount of money you can save by spending days/weeks/months migrating everything to your own server and assuming near-total responsibility for your own hosting.

You'll be in a better position if you can grow your revenue instead.
2014 Aerial Reel
Show HN: Ported My Libgdx Android Game “Battle of Tanks” to Unity3D
I'm an avid waze user due to a long and traffic-dependent commute. It's hard to get worked up about the concerns raised in this article simply because I view where I'm driving essentially as public information (as almost all of my commute is on public property), and because the data collected is so clearly necessary for providing the features the app advertises.

> Your GPS location and driving routes. Of course, some of this is needed to deliver the services described, however it does not need to be stored indefinitely. Waze’s privacy policy states that this information will be used to “create a detailed location history of all the journeys you have made”. The question, of course, is “for whom, exactly?”.

It's for you, and for the Waze community at large. When you drive, your most recent routes are saved and you are allowed to edit some area around your route for some amount of time after. This allows you to update the map both for yourselves an others (new road closure near your house? Mark it on the map), which will affect Waze's routing when giving you directions. Tracking where you've been ensures you only edit areas you're legitimately familiar with.

> To spam you with marketing and advertising materials when using Waze; specifically location-specific advertisements using your GPS history.

These are pretty unobtrusive, and I don't really disagree with them in principal. There are already location-specific ads along my route in the form of billboards and signs.

> To email you marketing and advertising materials

I've never gotten an email from Waze, but I could easily block it if I did. I would only be concerned if they were giving out my email to other third-party advertisers that would be difficult to block.

> To conduct surveys and questionnaires (possibly for others, using your data)

I've seen these a couple of times, they're easy to ignore and dismiss. They only show up when you're stopped somewhere. And they're pretty benign, like "Have you seen one of these brands on the map recently?" (referring to little fast food icons which I find rather helpful)

But the biggest thing to note here is that you can turn off Waze at any time, and if you don't trust it to not use GPS when sleeping, then you can enforce that at the OS level.
Dying beauties: the wooden buildings of Istanbul
The kneejerk response is it reduces the financial value of your data they sell to others.

However, upon reflection, I think that is incorrect. If someone wants to be called "Dana Lone Hill", because that is her name, maybe her marketing spam should call her "Dana Lone Hill", even if facebook thinks its made up or racists don't like her kind and see this as a highly effective harassment technique.

Database columns are cheap. I like going by my initials. Not seeing this as a major technological limitation in 2015.
The car controls really weirdly. When you steer to the right, it slides right off the road to the left.

It's like the center of rotation is in front of the car, instead of beside it.
The Magic Mouse is indeed the best mouse they've built to-date. But I'll still take an original Microsoft Intellimouse Optical because it fits my hand better and has a good weight & glide to it. Apple should design their mice & keyboards around the human form first, with cool design secondary to that.
Something something twitter activists.
Just wait for a few terabytes to download and you're good to go.

Kidding. Just a few gigabytes.
MT rand is truly bad at generating security-sensitive randomness. The exploitability of mt_rand is situational, though, and depends on:

* How long a single process with a single bucket of mt_rand state runs and reveals its state (if it's reloaded over and over, you get fewer bites at the apple to recover that state)

* How it's seeded (if you're in a position that requires you to recover state across multiple reloads)

* How much state is actually revealed (classic example: mt_rand instances that extract a single byte at a time, out of its 32 or 64 bit output)

It's never, ever a good idea to use mt_rand for security, but its mere use is probably not necessarily a bona fide vulnerability.
> Must yield right-of-way to other aircraft, manned or unmanned.

Obviously not written by a programmer. This causes a deadlock in the case that two drones encounter each other. :)
quite an insightful article.
and, no, i do now understand frame pointers. ;)
Couldn't we say that you have formed an estimate of both projects in your mind, and your estimate of the present value of all net benefits from project B is higher than your estimate of project A?
> [flu vaccines] still save lives for a very low risk.

"AFAIK that's not actually been proven. It's clear that someone who got the flu vaccine this year is less likely to die than someone who didn't, all else being equal."

Ok, that first sentence says I'm wrong and the second sentence seems to say my statement is correct. I am confused.

"But flu shots only confer partial immunity for 6 months or so, whereas getting the real flu confers partial immunity for decades. At least the last time I looked, I wasn't able to find any convincing evidence that someone getting the flu vaccine every year from birth would be in a better place at age 70 than someone who, say, just got the actual flu every year until they started getting the vaccine at age 70 or whatever. Some relevant research/articles:"

and then three study links with the first one being a study with the line "Contrary to immunity elicited by influenza vaccination, naturally acquired immunity can provide long-lasting protection against subsequent infection by the same viral subtype [22, 23]. For example, when the A(H1N1) virus re-emerged in 1977 after 20 years, people who had been exposed to the virus before 1957 were much less susceptible to infection than those born after 1957 [24]. This long-term protection against influenza viruses of the same type or subtype may be partly due to selection of cross-reactive CTL targeting epitopes on a wide variety of internal proteins [25–27]." - so supporting your statement - sort of

the second an article with no links to any studies from a paper I don't know the reputation.

and the the third having the quote "Our results support the recommendation for annual vaccination, given current vaccine options, as those unvaccinated in the current year appear to be at greater risk when considering both VE and serologic evidence."

So, I have no idea other than I'm just going to keep getting my shot because the years I don't, I get really sick and its not worth the long term gain. I suppose an anti-vaxxer would be screaming "See, See!!!!". I'm not sure I could state they are wrong, either. :(
> Look at the warnings on a Tylenol bottle and then find the one that really matters. Why are we telling everyone all the warnings for prescription drugs?

My pet theory? It's a CYA measure. If you list all, even most rare or absurd possible side effects, you can protect yourself in case someone's body does something weird and the person decides to sue you. Mind you, the "side-effect" can be totally unrelated to your drug, and caused by other illness, genetics, eating something bad the night before, etc. It's often impossible to determine for an average person what caused what in their bodies, but that won't necessarily stop people from going to court.

BTW. on one drug I take I noticed a different way of listing side effects. They divided them into groups labelled (> 1 in 10, > 1 in 100, > 1 in 1000, etc.). This still keeps the CYA value while giving me the ability to prepare myself for what realistically might happen after I take the drug.
git-stats-importer also only imports commits by the user set in the global user.email config. Since you haven't made any commits to the git-stats repo, it doesn't show anything.

Edit: it will use the local user.email if that is set. It also will use the GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL but only as a fallback if user.email is unset
I've always admired memcached use of a hash on the client to know where to store/retrieve data. Unfortunately, it makes it difficult to build ha, but it is a very elegant way to allow scaling horizontally without the need for a catalog server.
I believe the poster means that while the world of start-ups is full of charlatans, it's also where you have to go find the most interesting people and ideas, since anyone inside the 100 meter radius (inside the established software industry) who has an interesting idea is shunned or banished to the world of start-ups.

(Not espousing this view myself, just trying to clarify the analogy.)
> I usually try to help, but never know how far to go.

As far as you would go to help any male colleagues who were being systematically excluded or bullied. Or farther.

There are a number of resources at the Geek Feminism wiki.

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Resources_for_allies#Men:...

I think you might be surprised at how quickly things can change if you do speak up. An extreme example: I used to think that it was a waste of time to tell men not to rape, because obviously a rapist doesn't care about social norms. But here's the weird thing. This result is controversial, but some social scientists have found that rapists think that every man rapes. I bet that $50K sideboob guy probably thinks that every guy with money acts that way. So being vocal about social norms matters more than you would think. When someone is being an asshole to the women in the office he should be socially excluded by the men (instead of the more sadly common outcome, being celebrated for it).

Codes of conduct are similarly about stating the obvious sometimes (do we REALLY have to say that this is a safe space for everyone?) but apparently it does send a message. Because so frequently people dismiss a sexist interaction as being a problem between him and her. It should be clear it's also a problem between him and the company.

Also, one of the big ways you can affect your workplace is through hiring. Most programmers (at least those influenced by SF hacker culture) participate in hiring their peers.
Carpet Cleaner for Furry Friends / Baby Food Meats
Personally I don't care for Scala, at least from the viewpoint of a maintenance programmer.

I was working one time on a program that did what should have been trivial parallelism but there was some kind of race condition because we'd put the same answer in and get different answers.

The implementation used actors and the guys who wrote it couldn't tell me much about it (for instance, how it decides how many threads to use.) I spent a day reading docs and messing around with it and didn't get anywhere.

I woke up the next morning and rewrote it using the ExecutorService from Java in 15 min and it worked right the first time and worked ever since.

Personally my experience with Scala has improved my Java programming, but if you want a language that is "Java with fewer warts" you might be interested in C#. C# has real generic without type erasure, all kinds of support for async programming, and even had method handles long before Java did.
Frankly, a name I would have reported a while back would have been "Mark Zuckerberg."

"Hey Facebook, I am SURE this Mark guy made up that last name. I am POSITIVE!"
Did this happen in a business setting? Did either women try to use a potential $50k investment as a tool to gain sexual access?

If not, your friend should probably just be more careful who he buys drinks for.

As for the kissing, you don't provide many details, so I'm going to assume you're talking about your grandmother. In which case, absolutely name and shame. Grandmas have been getting away with that crap for way to long.
This company eliminated email and nothing bad happened
We are currently running a non-profit, 4-minute survey on exactly your (and some other) questions. We posted it on HN but it now has moved down to the 4th page or something like that. Results will be out in a couple of weeks. If you got 4 minutes, take part (or simply wait until the results come out): http://bit.ly/skjlls-EN
Why couldn't Apple stores just function as Tesla dealerships? An Apple edition would be nice for people who want such a thing, but there's no reason to forgo all other channels.
At a glance the signup form looks like it's a form to check if you've been spied on. It redflagged in my mind as that seems like a silly thing to fill out

Looks a bit dodgy. At least if nothing else Betteridge's law of headlines says I've not been spied on, which is a relief!
I think it's a difficult moral judgement to make. If she were to out his name, he would likely have to face extreme consequences. The internet justice mob is relentless and often over-prosecutes. However, by staying silent, she feeds into his power and does absolutely nothing to stop this type of behavior from him or anyone else.

I actually think her strategy was good. She is raising awareness without alerting mob. Since this story hit HN, and will likely be circulated outside of it as well, the investor is more likely to come across it, and any other investors or persons in a position of power in technology are also much more likely to read it.

In today's age, there is an unfortunate balance between what can be responsibly shared online and what cannot. Once you put something out there, it's no longer in your hands. By not naming the investor publically, she also still has power to let individuals like her peers, colleagues, YC, etc. know of his specifics.
I just don't believe this is post-IPO, or for non-managers.
Actually, I'm fine with these titles. It's the "Dummies", "Idiot's", etc titles that I find offensive.

My problem is (usually) ignorance, and I'm looking to correct that. If I'm an idiot, no book will fix that.
There need to be more owners with this philosophy.
Holographic movies: Affordable moving holography may not be too far away
> "#1 is unsustainable outside of the hard sciences"

> I disagree. Why do people go to college? From what I've read, under the GI bill, a lot of people went to college because it was a place to learn. College was cheap - a minimum wage summer job was enough to pay for a year of college even for those without the GI bill. (Colleges were also much more discriminatory, including based on race, ethnicity, and class. But that's a different story.)

You're talking about teaching, which is one side of it. The other side is research. The real ambition for anyone with a Ph.D is to land a tenure-track position, or at least a researching position, and so the only way to increase demand for these people is to increase the level of research being done. I think you could triple the amount of research being done in the hard sciences without even coming close to diminishing returns. Increasing research in the humanities would not be nearly as useful for society; arguably we've already reached and exceeded the point of diminishing returns there.

You could do something more fundamental that decouples research and teaching, but that would be a disservice, particularly in the humanities. Some of my best (undergraduate!) philosophy classes were the ones that tied into the current state of the art in my professors' research. (In the sciences this is less of a concern, probably because the foundations of the sciences are on much firmer ground. Our understanding of graph theory is a lot more certain than our understanding of free will.)

> ... And the number of humanities graduate students is going down.
I don't know if that's typical or not. If it is typical, then it suggests that #2 is not occurring.

"The number of humanities graduate students going down" is exactly what I meant by #2, at least in part.

> Regarding #3, what you said is of course true. Mine laborers are also easily replaced, as are garment workers, teamsters, shoemakers, and . There's a well-known solution; unionize and require it be a union shop. This of course won't work in so-called "right-to-work" states, which I consider them to be anti-free market laws.

They're anti-free-market laws in the exact same way antitrust laws are anti-free-market. In any case, that doesn't really solve the basic problem, it just weeds people out from academic careers earlier on, in a much more final way, instead of letting them float around in a limbo between success and failure.

Besides, I'm skeptical that unions will help. There are unions for baseball players and Hollywood actors, and that doesn't stop people from scraping by trying to break into those fields.

Introducing a union also has the downside of adding another layer of bureaucracy into the mix, and judging from the entire rest of your comment it sounds like you're not fond of added bureaucracy. (Who is, really?) Besides, it really is just that simple: lots and lots of people volunteer to be part-time professors at shitty pay rates, and almost no one volunteers to be a part-time bureaucrat at shitty pay rates.
Plus of course, if only "being polite" at the dinner table over a hand on a leg was all that was going on...

I recently spoke with a fellow lady friend involved in the Cocoa community on the topic of harassment, and between the two of us, we came up with a list of men in the community we knew that crossed the line in some fashion or another. It sadly added new information to a list I already had in my head from other conversations and personal experiences. Everything from cheating and STIs to physical assault and rape. We don't speak out because people don't care, people wouldn't believe us (no level of proof is ever enough), and sometimes we try to speak out but those people in question are loved no matter what shit gets thrown their way. It isn't worth _our_ ruined reputations and huge emotional toll for telling the truth.

And yet some people still manage to express surprise that I'm actively working towards leaving the industry... tech is special, people don't even get sent to sexual harassment training. :(
Harmful Gotos, Premature Optimizations, and Programming Myths
> This is certainly true for the Apple keyboard. It is totally an-organic. Give me a cheap standard Logitec keyboard over an Apple keyboard anytime.

The problem is that there is no such thing as "better" when it comes to stuff like keyboards.

I used to prefer mechanical keyboards -- I grew up with electric typewriters and the Mac extended keyboard -- but I found that the aluminum Apple keyboard was actually fine for me. I recently switched to Windows, so the keyboard layout of the Apple keyboard didn't work for me.

I tried out a bunch of mechanical keyboards with Cherry switches, and just found that I now hated the mechanical feel (and yes, I tried all the Cherry colors), which totally surprised me, given what I thought my preferences were. I ended up getting a dome keyboard (a Steelseries Apex), because I preferred the feel.

Instead of taking advice from "keyboard experts", people should just try a bunch of keyboards and buy the one that feels "right" for them, whether it's an Apple keyboard, a cheap standard Logitech keyboard, or something else.
Law enforcement would certainly want their drones to be allowed to fly over crowds.

But from a safety standpoint I don't see why they should be getting an exception. If the FAA judges that it's not possible for civilians to do this safely then it's certainly not easier for law enforcement. If law enforcement can do it safely, then there's no reason why civilians can't get the same certification.
Truth is, YMMV. I have only worked at startups and smaller companies (& a mid-sized non-profit for my first job), and I mentor my junior developers quite frequently on improving code quality & code design. They also get the space to work on features & sink or swim based on their decisions so the lessons hit harder - the responsibilities are great, and they aren't just siloed into maintaining existing code. They also get to see the difference between excellent code & code that they have written.

It is hard to speak for all startups since they're a dime in a dozen.
It is absolutely the individuals, but it's also the culture that allows someone to write a blog post saying "this investor assaulted me while dangling $50k in front of me" and a sizable minority of the comments are some variation of "there is probably another side of the story" or "she didn't do enough [before|after]."

Edit: To clarify, I agree there might be another side to this but until/unless the person the post's author is referring to makes a statement there is almost nothing to be gained by dismissing the author's account as some sort of half truth.
>People nowdays see the failure of trust and strive to design systems that don't depend on trusting its actors at all. I'm not sure it's a good direction. As we increasingly don't expect trustworthiness from other people, we're digging ourselves deeper into the hole.

It's an extremely bad move: at the sociological level, trust shows up as coordination. To reduce the level of trust means reducing the level of coordination, increasing the chances that someone does something stupid and harmful for what turns out to be no good reason.

>So yes, anti-vaxxers, anti-GMOs, anti-nuclear, et al. are wrong. Stupidly wrong. But it's hard for me to blame them. They've been lied to so many times that it's hard for them to trust authorities anymore.

Moreover, it's not like anyone bothered to teach them the actual truth-finding and truth-tracking methods of science, so that they could understand the difference between science and authority.