skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>What is more likely: that this post was voted to the top despite lack of support in the thread, or that a circle of upvoters voted it up?

You're assuming those are the only two credible possibilities. This thread could also be at the top because of the cumulative lack of upvotes, or the weight of downvotes (which have been biased to count more compared to upvotes), in other threads. Or because of the effect of upvotes on individual posts, or its relative length compared to the others. I think it's too complex and opaque a system to read so definitively, particularly given the effort put into it by the staff to prevent exactly the sort of gaming you're talking about.

Although, yes, given those two scenarios specifically, the 'circle of upvoters' is the more plausible.

>If they want to convince people of their point of view, then why can't they do it legitimately?

That's the problem - what you're calling out as evidence of illegitimate actions could just as well be legitimate. Your evidence is that people apparently agree with and voted up yeahyeah, and that yeahyeah's account seemed insufficiently 'real'. Have you taken into account the possibility that people might actually agree with the post?

>Doing both is much more effective. Otherwise they control the first posts, they make a sense of a false consensus in their favour, and these things really can influence how people think. Don't believe me? Research it yourself.

But I have a hard time believing that people are that malleable, or that such a simple tactic could be so effective. Although there is perhaps a good argument to be made against karma-based systems being in any way meritocratic, 'consensus' on Hacker News doesn't really count for much.
The simplest XFCE panel plugin tutorial ever
I feel like one contributing factor might be your company's culture or process.

I try my best to review every pull request at work, but ultimately any time I spend reviewing code is essentially time I'm spending on Hacker News as far as management is concerned. Time spent on code review can't be logged against any defects or stories, so when the metrics get printed, it looks like I'm pulling less weight than I should be. Sure, I can game the system a bit by logging time against something that I didn't actually work on, but just the fact that I'd have to be dishonest to do something means I'm less inclined to do it.

See if there are any processes in place which would disincentive developers from doing code review. Are the deadlines too tight? Is performance graded against some metric like tickets closed?

And where's your tech lead in all of this? I feel that part of the job of a good tech lead is to be a technical mentor, and that involves reading the code your team is writing.
There are tons of things that are falsifiable about the Bible and Christianity in particular. The Bible - unlike most other religious texts - gives many historic accounts of events, cities, places, timelines, people, kingdoms, lineages, etc. that are all quite easily verifiable.

http://www.reclaimingthemind.org/blog/2013/07/christianity-t...
I was thinking the same thing. Best I could find was the developer email listed for his calculator app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.projectfan...

[Edit] Which makes me realize that the submitter for the original was him: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pr_fancycorn - so that may lead to some way to contact him.
Surprisingly, there's not one comment in this entire thread with either the word "remove" or "uninstall".

Question: If there's a good chance a machine w/ one of the said HD's has the NSA spying app, how do you remove it??
Using the infix special form ~ we can cram in another ^#:

u[n_][a_,b_]:=If[n==0,a b,Nest[a~u[n-1]~#&,1,b]];Nest[#~u[#^#^#^#]~#&,9,9~u@9~9]

I should also note that I'm not confident as to which of

Nest[#~u[#^#^#^#]~#&,9,9~u@9~9]
Nest[#~u@#~#&,9,9~u[9^9^9^9]~9]

is larger.
Great question. Not everyone walks into a position equipped with the experience they need. Some are born with it while others will attempt to be someone they are just not destined or psychologically equipped to be.

Really depends on what stage of the game you are in. As a sole employee / CEO revenue / leads are going to be the guiding factor. You'll be able to "feel" the growth more than anything.

Once you start getting more employees, seeing them working together is usually a good indication you are working well. Does growth just seem to come naturally? Do you find it natural to be firm, but fair?

As a self-made CEO for going on 6 years now, I find that my internal dialogue is the best indicator for how things are going. If you don't have a mentor, get one. If you can't find one, at least find someone who is a CEO that you can bounce things off of from time to time that will give you honest feedback. And remember, feedback aren't orders they are suggestions. Not all feedback I've been given over the years (even with the best intentions) have worked out. Learn from your mistakes and good luck!
It has also influenced a lot of other genres. I'm not a huge fan of the original bands but I like the extreme metal bands like Alcest, Dernier Martyr etc who were influenced by the period. Even stuff like Ihsahn's 'After' record, which was pretty successful has some influence in the clean guitar sound.
How TS Eliot invented the hipster
Would it be the wrong temperature if what you want to know _is_ the rod temperature?

I would agree the liquid surrounding the rod vertically would also be above the average liquid temperature. It seems like you could use a different material and shape farther up to get a more accurate liquid temperature.
Throw it in the garbage and get a new one?
Devops can definitely be used as a very expensive bandaid around poor engineering practices.

But there's more to it... sometimes the engineering work it takes to prevent something from crashing is much less than just monitoring and restarting when failures are detected. Maybe "failure engineering" is a good term for a lot of the value Devops techniques can bring to a team?
I think you are missing some basic concepts here. There is a single Turing machine (of constant size) which, when given any integer n, outputs A(n). This is the statement that A(n) is computable. One can prove that there is no such Turing machine for the function BB(n) or any function f(n) that bounds BB(n). Such a function would be used to solve the Halting problem as follows: given a TM M and a string x, compute k = f(|M|) and run the TM on x for k steps. If the simulation halts within k steps, output "halt" and otherwise output "loops forever."

Your example of foo/bar(x) is not quite correct. If you fix a program bar, then it is not necessarily impossible to characterize (and hence compute) the set of strings for which bar(x) halts. This is not the statement of the Halting problem, and as far as I know there is no theorem that says such a function "bar" exists.
I agree. How come as software engineers, we like to talk about larger emergent behavior from large groups of simple pieces, but when we talk about governments and nations (large groups of complex pieces) we use analogies to simple systems? For example, the national debt does not operate like a household debt. The cacophony of systems at work in a nation makes it exponentially more nuanced. Some rules are emergent only at the larger scale. Or, international relations. Nation to nation relations don't consist of just the heads of state, but whole organizations of people interacting. Again, a large group of complex things (people) interacting probably creates some emergent behavior not visible in small groups. It's frustrating to see these systems reduced without any thought.
IEEE division by zero gives positive (or negative) infinity (with the sign determined by the sign of the zero). NaN crops up with e.g. sqrt(-1) and infinity - infinity for which there is no way to define a sane answer.
In the UK 3kw kettles are common, so we can make tea in a reasonable time. Running costs can easily be 60GBP a year. Considerably higher if you are really into Tea
Has anyone actually produced any mathematical proof of CAP?

Great question!

This presentation, linked by the article, explains the misunderstanding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp08EmQtP44#t=1273

The paper you are looking for is this: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=564601

Also available here: http://webpages.cs.luc.edu/~pld/353/gilbert_lynch_brewer_pro...
"We" and by that I mean software engineers, used to do the 'Think carefully and create deliberately' all the time, we called it software architecture. But "They", and by they I mean software engineers with a 'ship it' culture, got stuff to market faster and improved it faster, and called it 'ship and iterate'.

Lots of people were called out as "old fogeys" or "dinosaurs" when they asked to think through some of the ramifications of shipping things. Those folks got trained that such behavior is a quick way to get managed out of an organization.

It would be interesting if, as an industry, wave 3 (which like wave 2 before it is a decimal order more engineers than its preceding wave) decided to go back to a more mindful way of developing software. And if so they could remain employed amongst the wave 4 cohort.
From this report I conclude that horses are 50% as dangerous to scientists as unshielded plutonium cores.
Yes. The research culture that produced Haskell, for example, is far from the "shipping culture" that produced JavaScript 1.0, and yet:

> let x = 0/0
> x
NaN
> x == x
False
> :type x
x :: Double

(and yes, Double is an instance of the Num type class)

The author programs in C++ and D. I wonder if he knows the value of (NaN == NaN) in those languages?
>3. ISIS are not the result of the Iraq war

So killing hundreds of thousands of civilians had no effect whatsoever in allowing extremism and hatred of the US to thrive? How about our arming of the Syrian rebels, do you also believe our policy of handing out weapons like they're candy did nothing in assisting warmongers to engage in war?

I'm baffled by the naivete of your world view.
> power or usefulness of Information Technology.

in what regard? communication?
To play devil's advocate, maybe they were only going to adjust the routing behavior of a certain netblock? Still very out-of-bounds if you ask me.
> My deductive reasoning is not the evidence I'm citing here.

You have no evidence, only (invalid) deductions.

> We counted the total number of ways that a function could go wrong

If you did this it would be deduction.

> and saw that in pure Haskell code, the number is drastically reduced.

No.

Say you have an IO function with two parts, a non-IO part to compute a directory name using some input, and an IO part to remove that directory:

rmrf_steamroot some_input =
-- some code to compute a directory name using some_input
...
-- some code to remove that directory
...

Now, the first part does not perform IO, so let's extract that into a non-IO function:

compute_directory_name some_input =
-- some code to compute a directory name using some_input
...

rmrf_steamroot some_input =
let directory_name = compute_directory_name some_input
-- some code to remove that directory
...

How many bugs were removed by doing this? None. It's the same code, just moved about a bit.

Sure, the code in the non-IO function "compute_directory_name" does not perform IO (and therefore does not have IO bugs) but that code did not perform IO (and therefore did not have IO bugs) when it was in the original IO function "rmrf_steamroot"! So there is no bug reduction.

> those numbers do provide empirical evidence (observational, not experimental)

That is not empirical evidence. Perhaps it may help you to read this introduction to the topic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empirical_evidence

(And where it says "observation or experimentation" it may help if you follow those links.)

> If you absolutely insist on experimental evidence, we have that too

As you said earlier, they "rewrote a substantial groovy app in Haskell". There are too many confounding variables there.
I think people confuse the nature of NaN with the result of isNaN() a lot, this being the source of this confusion.
That's a very accurate article. One downside that he didn't mention, which is actually the same as one of his upsides, is that you're always a visitor — especially if you have the Schengen problem like he described. It's hard to feel comfortable, acclimated, at home, when you change cities so often. Now I take particular relish in coming back to places I've been before, and I hope I can find an easy way to attain residency in Europe so I don't have to do the UK-Schengen-Balkans thing every 3 months.
Facebook Patents tricky way of Advertising
It's neither silly nor absurd. I can't get a crunchbang-like setup from Debian, and many who can don't care to spend the days it takes to do so (it's not just Debian with Openbox... go try it yourself?). Debian's stability and security is sought by many Linux users, but the default DE is a far cry from what certain users are looking for. That group of users ranges from novices to the skilled users who are developing crunchbang's successor at the moment.
> Age of abundance or feudal hellhole.

Why not both? We certainly have all kinds of societies on earth today. What makes you think we won't have areas that are highly progressive but also areas that are extremely sadistic in the treatment of their people?
I understand the point perfectly. However, if I have a NaN which is captured in a lexical variable (perhaps the result of a division by zero, as you note) then in fact I do have a particular infinity: whatever object is inside that darned variable! If I do another division by zero, then sure, hit me with a different NaN which doesn't compare equal to the first one I got. But don't make my variable not equal to itself.
Putin is no hero, but Russia's response to a USA sponsered coup of a Democratic Ukraine is hardly surprising. God-honest Nazis run Ukraine, i'm not joking, NEO-NAZIs, that is the sort of people US policy planners are willing to support in their idiotic attempts to create failed state on the border of Russia. What do you think US response would be if China or Russia or Iran tried that same bullshit in Mexico?
Stack Overflow thread on changing order of execution of JavaScript using Deferred
How about "full-stack developer"?
Ideally, the common factor would be that you're all people who wanted "out".
Hmm, I don’t think so. If you have a dozen similar queries, then you can factor out the similarity (say, into a view, or a Ruby subroutine that generates the SQL). If you have a thousand that vary in a lot of different ways, a few subroutines isn’t enough; you need a DSL to factor out the similarity, aka “automate away” the queries.

But then you need someone to write down the idiosyncratic bits of each query, the thing that makes it different from the other thousand, in your DSL. For a lot of systems, the right DSL is in fact SQL itself, but even if it’s not, you still need people to write in it.

In short, nonprogrammers writing cobbled-together SQL queries are the result of automating away the non-idiosyncratic aspects of the queries.
Javascript has become the defacto browser programming language, even though it's objectively awful for complex software. The only reason it's achieved it's high status is because browser developers refused to cooperate and develop something better. Microsoft and Apple view software lockin as a competitive advantage and have actively undermined technologies they thought were threatening(java and flash amongst others). The explosion of Html5 and javascript was more of a 'nature will find a way' type development and can almost entirely be credited to Google and various web companies pushing it and making it better.

It's still a very flawed technology stack for complex web-apps though and it's very reasonable to suggest that we could do a lot better.
But isn't that what all systems engineering is all about? Feedback loops with resiliency. Why is it that the software folks think they have discovered something new?
I think it'd be pretty difficult to do for arbitrary liquids, because i imagine there would be some non-trivial temperature gradients. You'd probably have to account for the heat capacity and thermal conductivity of your soup to get it close to right. Simpler and cheaper to just use an old-fashioned thermocouple that clips onto the mug wall or something.
A couple of years ago, I experimented with not even maintaining an email address for a bit. It's great to be in that position if your job enables you to do so: communication then occurs using live channels such as telephone, Skype, etc., or using a forum. I'd add Slack to that list if I were to do it again nowadays.

The next best thing is to make your contacts prefer to not use email. At one point, I went as far as setting up an auto-reply that went something like: "Note: I do emails once per day between 5 and 6pm. Please prefer Skype or telephone if your communication needs a timely reply or is longer than a few short sentences." It sets the expectation that responses will be slow and that long emails basically won't be read.
NaN literally means "not a number." Lots of things aren't numbers. The letter a is not a number. The square root of negative 1 is not a number (at least, not one representable in floating point math). a is not equal to the square root of negative 1.
This developer could have at least chosen a different name.

Two programs, same funcionality, same name. Haven't we learnt anything?
You could... if you're a teabag-using plebe!

(Just kidding... but no, seriously. Loose leaf or bust.)
If you think Javascript is bad for complex software, you should try C++.
It's more of a business necessity then a philosophical point of view.

The history of software development is littered with companies that failed because they spent so long polishing the beautiful crystal tower they were developing that someone released a concrete one instead and everyone bought that, and then no one needed a crystal one any more.

Unfortunately, it can be really hard to find out about these companies because of how hard they've been trodden into the ground by their successors, but Xerox and Netscape would be two high profile examples.

Shipping constantly may not be the best thing for technology, it may not be the best thing for quality and it may not, at times, even be the best thing for your users. But if you don't, someone else will.
British Special Forces warned to 'Save the Last Bullet for Yourself'
So how do you protect yourself against this? Is there something you can put in the initial contract to prevent reverse splitting in the future?
I use Ruby and love it. I've never had to write anything truly performant with it, but I will enjoy the challenge of writing a C extension when the time finally comes.

The reason I love it is because it offers really, really powerful ways of handling crazy amounts of abstraction. I'm absolutely willing to pay a performance penalty if it means I can, when I really start to need the performance, refactor the code in a day to where I can replace the needed bits with a C extension, and then spend the next day writing said extension.

Assuming a C extension is even called for. For something like a server, what I would do is, with Ruby, nail down the one thing that server needs to do, say, take requests and write them to a database. Then write that exact server in short and sweet Go or C++.

In fact, I can easily envision a time in the not-too-distant future where the broad strokes of my coding practices are set down and I'm down to refining them so they work faster and better, working towards a clean mix of Ruby and C where I can refactor concepts into and out of both languages as needed.

With Ruby, I can spend less time implementing and more time thinking hard about my domain model. Ruby is not ugly to me, it's incredibly beautiful, particularly its object model. It's great because I can write ugly code to make something work with an eye towards making it easy to clean up later. When I write something ugly, I know that there's a domain concept that is going to need to be let out at some point, the wonderful thing is that I don't have to do it immediately. Ruby lets me manage a monstrous mess of interrelated concepts and abstractions, manage the process of starting ugly and iterating towards clean. And I can do it all by myself.

I see nothing wrong with choosing to start with a faster language if that's where your skills lie. But you can pry Ruby from my cold, dead hands. Does Ruby scale? I wouldn't want to try with anything else. It's not just connections per second that needs to scale, it's everything else too.
The Extraordinary Story of America’s Most Successful Industry
I've "solved" the problem for myself by buying a pen-sized Thermaltake food thermometer. You heat your water until it's slightly above the right temp and then let it cool a bit while measuring.

I like having a more scientific approach to my tea-drinking. :)
next step is hiding malware using silicon backdoors (fake boundary chain), or seeding infected firmware at the source (manufacturer)
As a signatory to the NPT, which has been ratified by the United States and is therefore law, Iran is legally entitled to have a nuclear energy program.

It's not particularly easy to tell facilities for making enriched uranium (viable as fuel) from facilities making weapons-grade HEU.
The Lynching of Sureshbhai Patel
That's a good point. Perhaps an infrared sensor pointed down from the handle would give you meaningful data.
So I don't have any real proof but there's a common belief that I also share that microwaved water tastes different from kettle-boiled water. I realize many people will dismiss this, but most of them probably aren't tea drinkers. And that all said, I'm sure there are a lot of people who use microwaved water for tea and are very happy with it.

Also, if you're making a pot of tea a kettle generally works better. Not sure if I'd want to put a whole teapot in my microwave.

Anyway, the real solution is to own one of these: http://www.zojirushi.com/app/category/water-boilers
A lot of teas need the water to be a specific temperature before they are put into cups/have the tea leaves inserted. Even if "the water ends up in the same uninsulated cup", the process of getting the water to the correct temperature will be more efficient in an insulated container.

Also, it's hard to believe that this would substantially decrease the amount of water heated. If you were super anal about only heating the water needed, then that's do-able with a tea kettle. If you're not, then even under the new model you would probably just use a kettle or pot most of the time.
I used to use these. Convenient on the go, always amazed my fellow travelers. But then I read an Amazon review where the guy used a multimeter to demonstrate that his model conducted electricity into his cup... and I decided to stick to normal kettles from then on!
How to kill your Google account: Access it via Tor
Grandparent's point is that any model of reality that doesn't acknowledge the fact that sometimes powerful actors will refuse to cooperate is a flawed model of reality.

Who's the "we" in your comment and the original article? HN readers? The programming community at large? You and anyone else reading this article are free to write a compiler for a much better language than Javascript. There is no guarantee that Microsoft or Apple or Google will not actively undermine you too if it looks like your application is becoming a threat. More likely, such a language wouldn't serve the needs of most developers, and it'd be ignored like many other brilliant research languages that cannot get popular adoption.
Determining something exactly does not mean providing its digits. It means uniquely identifying the semantic meaning of an expression. As an analogy, you can know what a word means when it's spoken to you even if you can't spell it. Or you can understand what a program written down on paper computes (and prove that it computes that thing) without knowing the explicit output of a particular input.