skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think 'artificial' would be a better word here. For example, in Magic the Gathering, there is a very basic turn structure and set of rules that define the game (draw a card, play some cards, attack, play some more cards, done) that is convoluted by several factors, including an increasingly large dictionary of terms relating to abilities and powers of the cards, and a correspondingly dense set of rules to handle the inevitable complexity of all those things.

For example, creature cards have power and toughness. Simple enough. But then at some point, cards were printed that allowed you to modify those values. Now you have to mentally keep track of the actual state of the card. Then consider what happens when you have two effects like "add two to toughness" and "switch power and toughness" applied at the same time. Which one happens first? Much as in software, each new feature of the game inevitably has interactions with other features that have to be analyzed and handled appropriately.

Going back to the main point, this complexity is 'artificial' because it is not an emergent property of the rules themselves, but rather a consequence of the fact that so many rules have been piled on over time.
Prometheus has no scaling model at this time. Sharding is currently described as an exercise for the user. This surprises me if they're actually still using it at SoundCloud.
I too believe it is the best fit, but the "aggregate functions" gets most people. The use of counter columns is very limiting and many engineers don't want to struggle with storing state during streaming writes to precalculate the aggregates on write. Also, engineers tend not to want to do large reads to rebuild large aggregate values on small data changes.

It is what we use, and we use spark streaming for the rollups. We had evaluated Influx, OpenTSDB, and Druid also. So long as you know the exact read patterns for your client I think Cassandra is definitely the best fit for most things.
I'm not super familiar with Dota, but I have thought a fair amount about game theory as it applies to RTS games, and Dota (being a MOBA) has many similarities.

The main thing (from a game theoretical standpoint) that I believe sets RTS games apart from (most) strategy board games is not the real-time nature, but the fact that RTS games are not perfect information games.

Incorporating knowledge about your opponent's playing style is important in chess (and I presume Go), but I believe it is vastly more important in RTS games, so much so that in high-level competitive games it is a primary driver of both players' decisions in the game.

Of course, from a broader (not game theoretical) standpoint, the bigger and more obvious difference between strategy board games and RTS games is that the latter, being real-time, requires substantial physical speed and coordination, which is mostly not the case with the former.
Also: arbitrary rules.

Concrete example: castling[0] in chess

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castling
Yes, if you're located in DC.
A New Degree in Architecture, Computers Is Worth More Than Decades of Experience
I remember playing PlayStation games with a friend when I was a kid, and he always seemed to pick a woman character to play if he could. So apparently there were enough woman characters in those games for that to stand out.
Healthy Eating and Nutritious Low Fat Foods
The reluctance is understandable. But we can't understate the positive: In that very google+ thread, more than one former colleague from Google said something to the effect of "I've always considered you someone to try to hire for my future startup, and I still do."

In other words, even if some wary bosses would see any whistleblowing as a risk factor, the fact is that the large majority of responses she got were positive. People believe her, and people strongly feel she got treated unfairly. She's also, according to many accounts, a talented engineer. Signs for her future employment are very positive.

She also mentioned herself that her current job at Medium is with a very supportive team. (edit: i misunderstood something here)

Once more, none of this is to diminish the understandable concerns with going public with allegations. But in the Ellis case, I think we see that the overall outcome can be quite positive. It's good for the whistleblower, it's good for the tech industry as a whole, it's really just bad only for the small amount of bad people we need to get rid of.
I enjoyed this one: http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/posts/property-based-testin...
And then think a few thoughts further, to "How can I fix it?" and realize there's nothing I can reasonably do which isn't already being done, and, at my most engaged, I could cheer-lead established efforts being lead by people with more social capital than me.

So... consciousness raised and subsequently tamped back down, I suppose.
> because Ubuntu doesn't install bash by default, it uses ash (a small POSIX shell). So, bash has the exact same flaw as Perl for that use case.

Do you have a citation for this? I just checked my boxes and servers and they all have bash and are using it directly as the default shell. I never had to install bash myself on these machines.
Huh? Patrick asked if he could send multiple files. Mike said yes. Again, since the context of this is pedantic arguments, agreeing that Patrick could send multiple files is not the same as agreeing that Mike would consider the multiple files to be a winning submission.
To understand and interact with 99% of Americans, you need to know English. Pretending that English isn't a solid part of the American fabric is silly.
False. Anywhere above 40km/h can kill a pedestrain. That's why speed limits in cities are usually around that value.
Why Pebble Time, Not Android Is Apple Watch's Biggest Competition
Alright, if you insist on an explanation: In this particular comment, I had originally written "white, middle class, males", but then decided that wasn't useful specificity in this particular conversation. I deleted the adjectives and kept the subject noun untouched. I apologize for causing cognitive dissonance for you due to the difference. I assure it is not out of self-hatred, or any sort of intent to make men seem of a different species than women.
I guess it was visual code inspection... Staring at the screen for hours, trying to figure out why the code doesn't work, while it should work.
I had a "software engineer" work for me that didn't know if from while. Literally. He was copy pasting stuff until it "worked". One day he calls me over because his program is hanging. He had something like " while (x) print something; ". I asked how that would work if x never changes in the loop. After I bit of blankness, I said " isn't this just supposed to print once, like maybe use an if? "

"Oh yeah, if. That's the one I wanted."

...

Worked with another person of similar skill, that went on to become Microsoft MVP. Do not underestimate how far drag-n-drop and copy paste can take someone with modern timing. Especially if they're good/inclined to tout themselves.
Ask HN: Can I have 15 mins of your time for 15 of mine to try an experiment?
Hi HN. I'm asking for a few of you to join me in a 30 minute Google hangout.

Format First, 15 minutes would be of you walking through our product with myself and a few devs from our team. We're looking for honest candid feedback on our product's first time experience from sophisticated users. The second half is your 15 minutes to ask me anything in a 1 on 1.

Here is the signup form: bit.ly/1AU587C

This will be fun. Now for some FAQ

Q: What is the experiment? A: I'm going to try and do two 1-1s a day. We're going to take the feedback from that day's 1-1 and use that to drive what features our growth team builds for the day. Hopefully the next day we've rolled out improvements and getting fresh advice, incrementally making product better each day.

Q: What kind of things can I provide advice on you ask? A: I've been programming for ~10 years. I went through YC. I've raised a few rounds of capital and lucky to have a built a great team. I probably could best answer things related to my experiences in YC (applications, interviewing, etc), raising capital from angels and VCs, product stuff, recruiting, operating a company, getting your first job in programming/at a startup, etc. I wouldn't make huge life-altering decisions based on my answers but hopefully by sharing my experiences, you'll have another perspective on what ever questions are on your mind.

Q: Why the secrecy? A: I hope you've never seen our product. If we told you before the session and tried it out, it would corrupt the experiment. Once we meet in the 1-1, I'll first introduce myself so you'll get to know everything about me and the product.

Q: What will you do after the experiment. A: I plan to write about it and let others know how it went. I'd like to anonymously share my experience/notes from each 1-1 (with your permission).

Q: When will the 1-1s happen? A: I'd like to do one at 10:00 PST and and other at 10:30 PST. We can do it any day that works best for you.
Tokyo WWII firebombing, the most deadly bombing raid, remembered 70 years on
I thought of something like this too. I was going to put it on the domain ideatester.org
>>4. Inability to comprehend pointers

I love C, it's my favorite language.... but there is no way that pointers are important enough that not knowing them == bad programmer. There are plenty of good developers who've never even had to deal with pointers, even in 2012.
Girls playing boys isn't so much normal as it's the only option they've had.

Also, the solution is simply to offer the option of playing a girl character. Then anyone can play whomever they want. :)
i tough you were more scientific. e.g. looking for lower $/sqf in the same area.
only in some legal jurisdictions with outdated notions of "rape"

And even in those, rape is often the proper word, it's just not used in the legal text for historical reasons.
I got into programming a decade ago with Quake 2 engine forks and Neverwinter Nights private servers. You would never have avenues into that kind of thing from the ios platform at all. It is very much like how anyone from the Windows GUI generation never touched a terminal so they do not even know what a program / file / etc really is to begin with.
Right now, batteries for a realistic replacement car (not a compromise EV like a Leaf) cost about $20,000 per vehicle. That's $10 trillion for 500 million cars. It doesn't look an order of magnitude smaller to me.

As for where the money comes from, doesn't that just fall out of supply and demand? As demand for electricity increases, prices will go up, funding the infrastructure improvements needed to accommodate the increased demand.

The solution may not even lie in the grid. Batteries can solve the grid problem as well as the battery problem. Give every electric car customer enough solar to cover his charging needs and a fixed storage installation to keep the power for when the car comes home, and the grid won't even know the cars are there.

I'm sure this will all be wonderfully challenging for those involved, but it doesn't look like something to worry about from the outside.
> If I were an app maker, the ethical issue of charging for girl characters and not boy characters would be enough reason to change.

I chuckled. App makers (especially the ones in the "top 50 essential apps") are well oiled capitalist money-making machines. Ethics rarely come into play when the A/B tests they run suggest that the product direction go one way (towards money) and not the other ("but what about the children!").

I personally don't feel this way, but you can imagine how businesses at that level would.
>since wealth of parents is already a major factor in whether a person makes irresponsible decisions that end in unemployment

Not necessarily. Poorer parents are likely to be ill informed about the job market and what college degrees will help.

Still though, they should definitely not be saddled with debt.
Would be keen to know what people think about: https://github.com/ambiata/ivory
In case it helps, I've noticed what I'd consider a wart in C that seems to be a common stumbling block with this - including when I first learned C a couple decades ago: * when used for types, has the "opposite" effect when it's used for values/expressions.

int* foo; // The addition of a star here, on a type, means we're converting the type /into/ a pointer-to-int /from/ a plain int.

int i = *foo; // The addition of a star here, on a value, means we're converting the type /from/ a pointer-to-int /into/ a plain int (reference).

I found it much easier to keep the two straight once I segregated their use cases like this. There's a similar duality with & in C++ using references, although not quite as cleanly:

int& foo = ...; // The addition of & here, on a type, means we're converting the type /into/ a reference /from/ a plain int.

p = &foo; // The addition of & here, on a value, means we're converting the type /from/ a reference /into/ a pointer-to-int.

Regardless of "fault", I hope this helps :)

(edit: C++ style comments used even in 'C' code to try and prevent YN from treating stars as formatting... replaced a few instances with 'a star'... changed emphasis to use slashes because it's still eating asterisks characters...)
EE/CE here. I took the intro to data structures class and stopped at that. Been kicking myself for years because that's seemingly the only thing people care about; not actual competency (at least in the context of interviews).

Thing is, I'm a decent programmer, maybe even above average. My career so far has consisted largely of being the only or one of a few technical people and doing whatever needs to be done to make X happen. I built a poor-man's version of the mail sorting machines the USPS (and other postal organizations) use to photograph, OCR and sort mail. I remember everyone's mind's being blown when Outbox (R.I.P.) showed people pictures of their letters, and I built a system like that by myself for a previous employer in about two years while also completely rewriting the website. 65kLOC of VBScript/ASP to 20kLOC of python/django plus a whole bunch of new features.

If you believe sloccount (I don't really) in two years I did about 4 person-years of work that it says is worth a substantial fraction of a million dollars and a substantial multiple of what I got paid.

But I don't remember what a red/black tree is.

Knowing data structures and algorithms isn't the only way to be a competent programmer. To get my EE degree I had to take calc 1,2,3, diffeq, discrete math, linear algebra, senior level statistics, and these were all just pre-reqs to my engineering classes.

I think a lot of people get hung up on computer science == programming. There's a lot of overlap, sure, but huge amounts of programming doesn't have anything to do with computer science.
Other plan9 papers:

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/papers/

A cool gem, the WORM cached file system:

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/who/seanq/cw.pdf
Based on knowing author for 15+ years, he is not the one to make stuff like that up.

By that time they were probably mostly convinced he wasn't the terrorist they suspected initially but still wanted to check a bit more. They didn't have a search warrant. (Note they didn't want to look at files or his computer data either). Also there were Secret Service agents not your average run of the mill municipal cops (if that helps).

And besides if they expected to get any information out of the family members, barging in and scaring them might have been counteproductive.
i use that exact same phrase every time anyone tries to include me on a discussion about tipping. (and then promptly leave said discussion)
The myth destroying America: Social mobility is beyond ordinary people’s control
You say that rape is a colloquial term for a range of specific crimes and chide me for not being more specific. And yet the person I replied to was making a positive claim that certain actions were rape. So how am I supposed to interpret that claim? Does rape take on a different meaning (e.g. a broader feminist definition) in that context?

If rape is defined to be a crime or class of crimes, it's completely unreasonable to selectively ask people to be very specific about which crimes they mean. In the US I don't believe there is any such crime as rape by threatening to fire someone, or if there is it is not a serious crime.
Why isn't there a mvn install X syntactic sugar like npm / gem / pip etc? There could be "mvnx" repository where first come first save simple names replace "groupId-artifactId-version"
e.g. commons-lang will mean org.apache.commons.lang3 latest version...

Is there anything that does that?
the markets are too stupid to have done the maths

Lucky for us, the markets are made up entirely of perfectly-informed, perfectly-rational, perfectly-self-interested frictionless spherical humanoids in uniform harmonic motion.
I've never had to use a front end framework.

I still use jQuery.
> (We severely restrict the amount of shitty girls kid's TV shows, no Barbie, no Disney products, biggest toys are LEGO, etc.)

If they go to public school peer relations and student body culture will override prior teaching. When presented with the girls sitting next to them talking about the shows and toys you never exposed them to, they are met with the decision to have faith in their parents or seek to fit in with the status quo.

It is why it is so hard to break childhood stereotypes, because unless you can get a majority of parents to pressure the disjunction, the culture of their classroom will limit what you can do.
It's only a pointless distraction when people see these challenges and treat them as a game to be tricked. Mike already made it clear the challenge is not about financial compensation (and offered to give Patrick the $100 back even though Patrick did not win, under the very generous assumption that Patrick innocently misunderstood the challenge instead of deliberately tried to subvert it).

The point of a challenge like this is the same as the point of the Randi challenge: to provide a means to demonstrate that impossible claims are impossible (in this case, that of being able to compress truly random data, and in the case of the Randi challenge, supernatural/magical abilities such as ESP). After all, if any such claim were valid, then the claimant would be able to defeat the challenge, assuming that the stated rules are fair (and they are).

Which is to say, the point of a challenge like this is not actually to have anyone enter. It's just to be.

> This type of challenge should never be made or accepted, if financial incentives are involved, without an impartial adjudicator.

Did you read the whole page? Mike did offer an impartial adjudicator:

> I would gladly submit any such submission to an impartial ombudsman to determine the question of
whether data compression has occurred.
> Feminists are trying to do this in order to call attention to sexual harassment

Not at all. Feminists are doing it to call attention to the true nature of power, and the fact that power is expressed in many ways -- only one of them is physical violence. When your attacker possesses power and you don't, that means that you don't have options (or that they are severely restricted). If you don't have options because someone else restricts them, well, that's the definition of coercion, and sex under coercion means rape.

The definition hasn't changed; rape has always been sex under coercion. All that's changed is that now the law reflects our better understanding of power.
> What industry are history and political science adjuncts supposed to work in? Government?

This is something you should have figured out before borrowing money for grad school. If there's truly no outlets commensurate with the debt, that's a powerful signal you should pay attention to.

Which brings up rule #2: if you can't convince someone to pay your way through grad school, don't borrow for one.
Aside from the point being made in the article, the language and expressions used in it suggest to me that it's gone through a fair bit of editing / authorship by an adult writer before being published. Either that or I am seriously underestimating the writing style of a 12 year old girl.

I understand that every article goes through a revision process. But it started by saying "I am a 12 year old girl" and I wonder how many filters the text and the thesis went through before being published. I just find something strange about adults using the identity of a child to inject their own words, if this is indeed the case.
Samsung receives record pre-orders for S6, Edge
Yet another fine example of why ESR seriously needs to stop pretending to be the arbiter of "hacker culture" as if he speaks for all of us.
I interviewed a "Senior Architect" from a large company, and he had a masters in compsci. Very impressive sounding, much more than me. I asked a simple question on searching a sorted array and literally got a laugh. He was incredulous that anyone would be expected to know basic, and I mean basic, data structures and algorithms.

People dismiss these questions with a "I'm not gonna be writing a stdlib". No, but the concepts appear everywhere. Someone that doesn't understand them is likely to, I dunno, use a SQL DB, then put a separate index on each column to " make it fast ". Whereas someone that understands the basics will stop and think a bit before assuming platforms are pure magic.

(And BTW, I've seen enough people with patents to know that just having one is more a measure of going through the process than necessarily having technical invention capability.)
I find it doubtful that tech is worse than, for example, the finance industry (with its rich history of decadence and debauchery). I also find it "interesting" that the tech industry seems to have replaced the finance industry (whose shenanigans put the West into recession) as the focus of media critique.
First, I don't blame them, but wonder if more could not have been done. However, I do appreciate how that is your only take away. Kudos.
Sure, but they still have time before we get there and like I said before there is a lot of room for improvement in terms of web browsing on mobile. There is a reason people prefer to use apps instead of the web on mobile but not the desktop.
So does it actually accomplish any privacy protection? There are two cases:

You blindly type in your search query into the Awesomebar and it works correctly. For users that do this, it works just like Chrome, no privacy protection.

You use the provided search bar for searches, and Awesomebar for URL's. Your searches are in no way protected. This does protect the URL's you type in, such that example.com is not sent to Google/Bing/Yahoo/DDG/etc. as you type out "example". Did Mozilla actually show that this is worth protecting, and that most people don't just type in "example", hit Enter, go to Google, then click on the first link? This is what I see 99.9% of users doing already.

Note that the autocomplete can pick up the difference between a URL and a search by the presence of a pattern that doesn't follow a URL. Chrome does this. Type in "example.com" vs "?example.com". The "?" is specifically there to indicate that you want search. Perhaps privacy conscious FF users could learn this shortcut, and everyone else can get the convenience they expect?

I am not trying to downplay the importance of privacy in browser implementations, just questioning the privacy implications of this feature.
I think that would be a great time to introduce her to gamehacking... attempt to turn that annoyance into a learning experience instead of a learned helplessness. Teaching her that she can make her device do what she wants is the first step (and that corporations seem to be slowly trying to take that freedom away might be a good lead-on to the perils of locked-down devices... if she understands enough, that is.)