skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I work at a company that is in the middle of a massive COBOL -> Java migration project.

The core transaction processing system has 1.3 million lines of HP3000 COBOL that is pre-compiled to 13 million lines of Micro Focus COBOL, so that code can be compiled to run on UNIX hardware (using a mainframe emulator framework).

So although I'm not a COBOL dev myself, I deal with the issue you describe constantly. Want to give an inventory item an identifier that's longer than 36 characters? Too bad! That field in the legacy system is PIC X(36) so it will get truncated to that length if it's longer (and of course, padded with spaces if it's shorter, so there are lots of String.trim() calls in our Java code).
> A better question would be why the prosecutor didn't conduct this interview during the week the stayed in Sweden after the accusations were officially in the media?

Different prosecutor, one less high up in the system there.

The original prosecutor made the right decision. The chance of a conviction is zero. No sane jury in a civilised country will find a man guilty of raping a woman who made him breakfast and went out with him the next day, tweeted about the incident positively and generally acted as happy as can be until she decided ... much later ... that actually she had been raped. (then she started trying to delete the evidence that she was lying). The case just has no merit at all, which is why Assange thinks it's a set up - the new prosecutor is either a tool of the USA or some kind of bizarre ultra feminist who thinks women never ever lie about rape. Whatever the cause, Assange doesn't want to go there for obvious reasons.
Our API docs are here: http://docs.seed.co

We're actively updating them - lots more to come.
Quinn from Sourcegraph here. Thanks for posting this! It was actually a quick hack project I built on our API for fun last night. It basically uses sourceboxes (https://sourcegraph.com/blog/sourceboxes-a-better-way-to-emb...), which are like Gists but with jump-to-def and doc tooltips, to display the function and type signatures for godoc definitions.

It's pretty rough, but we'd love to hear feedback. And if anyone else wants to build similar tools using sourceboxes or our API, go for it and reach out if I can be helpful (sqs@sourcegraph.com).

BTW, thanks to the awesome @kisielk (gorilla maintainer, etc.) for the gosrc.org domain. You can just go to gosrc.org/github.com/some/pkg to use gosrc.org for any package.
Hallucination with Recurrent Neural Networks (Alex Graves)
That is not too much to ask. I support you!
I know that, but you can't divorce that from the fact that people (specially people in a government that is feeling under attack) will see any funding from a US-based entity as proof that the US is behind attempts to destabilize it.

And to be fair: can you blame them? Every effort by tech companies to support "free speech" during the Arab Spring did end up in massive unrest. Why would the government of Argentina want something like that?

Again, it's a question of 'optics', and the optics are already pretty tainted down there.
Are you seriously asking me for proof that bias or corruption exists in the media? Are you honestly that naive or unsophisticated?

I mean, is this good enough? http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/11/opinion/the-news-we-kept-t...

The media is one of the faultiest institutions in history. It suffers from biases pulling it in every direction, not the least of which is the bias to protect "access", as the story I linked illustrates.

Point being, the idea that it's easy to find sources of information which are more reliable than wikipedia mostly rests on a false idea of how faulty, biased, incomplete, and in some cases outright corrupt every other source of information tends to be.
A crash course in quantum mechanics is what you are asking about!

While the electrons and nucleus (i.e. protons + neutrons) of atoms are indeed 'particles', they are exhibit wave-particle duality: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave%E2%80%93particle_duality

In brief, quantum particles act like waves sometimes (think ripples of water) and act like particles (think tiny billiard balls) at other times. The consequence of that, and a major tenet of quantum mechanics, is the 'wavefunction' of a quantum particle. A wavefunction of a particle, instead of just being a single point in space, amounts to a probability density of position and momentum.

So now that we know the above, in these images, what they are actually measuring is the spatial probability density of the electrons. The lighter values correspond to high density of electrons. The darker values correspond to less electron density. The high density occurs around the nuclei of the atoms. Thus, atomic resolution. However, note that individual electrons are not resolved in these images.

Finally, I want to recommend against thinking of atoms as electron planets orbiting a nucleus sun full of empty space in between. That thinking ignores quantum mechanics. The truth is much more fascinating, which is that electrons are wave-particles that have probabilistic densities.

P.S. Protons and neutrons are themselves made of up more elementary quantum particles: quarks!
I have actually though about a boiled down client with baked in default configuration before. I wasn't considering business applications though but was thinking about the use in podcasting. Never got started on it though.

We work on Mumble in our spare time and as such developer time is scarce. We try to focus on what we think most users are going to benefit from. There's a long "Would be neat to have X" list ;)

One goal for the future is to make Mumble more modular which should make creating such a specialized client feasible without much extra work.

If someone here is interested in C++ with Qt and wants to contribute to a FOSS project used by nearly 400,000 users monthly we can always use more hands.
Yahoo Management Doesn't Deserve the Benefit of the Doubt
Using Docker on Joyent vs. AWS
The ideas behind this article are good. The author gives some guidelines that have helped them write better software. However, it makes me think about how we can make "making software" better. It seems like the best current way of going about it is to implement these zen-like self-discipline techniques that have helped the OP.

What's so inherently wrong about software? Why is it so damn difficult to write software that doesn't explode if you don't hold your tongue at the right angle?
Show HN: GraphQL for Postgres
I've just remembered that github does offer access to its repositories via the svn protocol. what aobut that?
My understanding is that desalination doesn't give you crystalline salt, but rather more salty sea water back. Of course you'd have to be careful where you dumped it as a small bay doesn't mix that well. I don't see why you couldn't pipe it out 1-2 miles from the coast. It should mix quite well.
This is indeed very sad news. We at BillForward (YCS14) found the Balanced payments platform for ACH very well designed.

Plaid and Stripe certainly have caught up and both and offer good ACH alternatives. Best of luck to those migrating. Happy to chat with anyone who is interested in help with gateway independent ACH payments and subscription management. I'm on ian AT billforward . NET
Salt Lick and Franklin have fundamentally different approaches to brisket. Totally cool if you don't have a preference, but it's sort of like saying programming language X is no different than language Y.

Franklin dudes have been grinding for years and I'm so stoked that they are starting to get national recognition outside of foodies and chefs.
It's happening on MANY products and ruining Amazon credibility.It has become open and notorious!!!
Spark has a much nicer API than Hadoop and theoretically can give you significant speedups on iterative in-memory work loads. On the other hand, I've had a terrible experience with the stability and debuggability of previous versions of Spark. They do seem to be rapidly improving so it's hard to recommend anything other trying it out and seeing if Spark works for your needs.

(Also, you probably know this already, but many people don't really have data big enough to necessitate a distributed framework. If your datasets are counted in gigabytes, you can do everything more simply on one machine and/or with a traditional database)
Looks like the site went down. Here's a cached link:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:4wvG8zC...
Wow, thank you so much! Your comment made my day!

It's great to hear that our design decisions resonated with you. We worked really hard to make this great for the people using it. We tried to put the user experience ahead of the almighty download. Thanks again for the encouraging comment!
As a meat-loving animal, this made me feeling a bit worse...

What if meat is imported from areas/states/countries where there is no water problem.

And with that, maybe California should open itself to import vegetables/fruits from other states, countries too?
> "I like your solution, but I don't know what's more important: x or y. Let's focus on determining that instead."

Yes exactly. If only people were more rational, solution oriented, and humble. Engineering is about design within tradeoffs.
As for the "Texas Tardigrades" proposal: the name sounds too much like "retard". Even if the local PC committee did not object, the opposing team supporters would have a field day.
Exactly! We're hoping to make even the smallest meetup something fun by using Hobnob.
Fair point, but we're not the only country that enjoys beef, many 1st and 2nd world country import it. Blaming the issues on the US is myopic and wrong-headed. We aren't over-populated. We protect our national parks. We have a functioning democracy. Etc.

Capitalistic demand can be short-sighted and there can be negative externalities, none of that should be surprising. It's up to people who OWN the land (their most valuable asset) to come up with ways to make it sustainably productive.

Like you said, ranching on rainforest land only makes sense in the very short term.
> Smoke for smoke, cannabis and tobacco are probably
> equally harmful.

I feel like you're disagreeing with the article.

If you smoke heavily from 14 and quit at 18, your health risks from tobacco will normalise to that of a non-smoker after x years, but there's a suggestion here that if it's cannabis you're smoking, you've caused yourself irreparable harm
Don't forget that smokeless tobacco causes cancer as well, so there's something other than combustion going on. I've also seen studies that show marijuana use by itself (without also smoking tobacco) doesn't significantly increase lung cancer rates.

http://www.m.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/news/20060523/pot-smoki...

http://www.enewspf.com/latest-news/health-and-fitness/53910-...
very few just-a-laptop desks.
I guess I didn't mean to imply that I live in a world where everyone can have these "pure-truth" arguments. In fact, it's a rare and often rewarding experience if it does happen. I also know that there's a time and a place for debating and it requires consent of all parties. It also requires that some value is being generated, if we're talking about debating in the workplace.

I guess I am having trouble appreciating the relation of this article to gender, for two reasons.

1. The author is claiming that "men are aggressive" and then claiming that "aggression" is the problem, so the point of the article really seemed to be "men are the problem". I find this in some ways offensive, especially since I (a man) think that I don't do the things mentioned in the article. Maybe I'm overreacting to being accused of something based on my gender.

2. The author states
"Crossing boundaries and using aggression to win an argument includes making personal remarks, interrupting, speaking much more loudly than an opponent, or entering someone's personal space."
I completely agree that these behaviors are unacceptable. But, I think that these are all gender neutral behaviors, and it harms people of any gender when they are used against them. Is it really important to designate men as the ones who must follow these rules?
If you read the article, the author made a distinction between these using the terms "regulated" and "unregulated."
I work for a company that is very much like the bullet points described in the post, and nothing gets done. Sure there are lots of endless meetings and brainstorming sessions, but nobody bangs on the table and nobody steps up. Nobody's negative in public, but returns silently resentful and sometimes even demotivated to their own office. Sometimes the negativity comes out in a back-handed manner, as gossip, or passive aggression. What fighting and discussion gets replaced with is often at least as ugly and detrimental.

The previous company I worked for was the exact opposite, probably a good example for the sort of aggressive and argumentative company the article talks about. Things got done, but the atmosphere was not very good. It helped to be dominant and make a lot of noise.

The writer tries to push for the environment she'd like as the best possible way of achieving whatever that needs achieving, but having worked for several companies on either end of that spectrum, I don't think it's all that clear cut. You might like a non-confrontational style, only positivity and no competing, but I don't think that's a company where everyone wants to work or that would do well in every market.

Finally, I don't want to argue ;) -- but the word aggression is very ambiguous and some of the examples refer rather to violence (war, physical aggression) rather than with fighting spirit (like an athlete).
Search for "golang full text search database".

Lucene & Hadoop meant a big push for the Java eco-system, it's like a lock-in. Native C++ libraries and other free text search implementations have a smaller community and are usually less known. With Go, C++11 and Rust the future looks bright but it will take some time to catch up.
The only way for recruiters to become viable solutions as "middlemen/middlewomen" are to learn about the technical aspects of the roles they are marketing.

So often, a good majority of them do not understand what's an ideal candidate profile vs. what's a potential candidate profile look like.

This all stems from experience and in my experience, many are lacking in that department at the moment.
"We get the software we deserve."

Painfully true. There are techniques for writing better software. They work. They take longer and cost more. They are not widely used outside aerospace.
Someone who's used macros before extensively—

Macros are only unreadable if they're written that way. See, while C can be confusing, it's built using simple tools—you can use the c preprocessor apart from the compiler itself. By default, c without cpp is not pre-processed, so you have entire control of the output. (many OS's cc/libc implementations make extensive use of macros, e.g. assert, hence my "default" qualification).

Writing with this in mind would allow two layers of compilation—once to verify the pre-processor, once to verify the resulting c compilation. While it is annoying, it doesn't require any more skill than a write-compile-debug loop.
If you have a client and a server, you'll most likely need to handle input or state twice. You shouldn't trust the client but you also don't your user to depend exclusively on the server (you want less latency and/or more informative errors).
Normally I don't like these types of ransacking infomercials, but I think you, like PC of Stripe, struck the right notes with your tone. I'm a long-time Stripe user but I'll look into WePay.

Good luck to your team!
I guess the DataFrame API needs to be spelled out for me. Does this mean RDDs will be deprecated in the future if the new DataFrame is faster? As someone who's gateway drug into programming was R it's been fun to watch data frames grow across programming languages. I'm a huge fan of Python's Pandas library and very interested in Spark.
My main take home from the article is that it is important to get all the kids to think. Which requires them to focus and not become distracted. To me introducing technology into the situation actually makes the situation worse because it is far more likely to serve as a distraction regardless of any good intentions. Kids need to learn to sit with their thoughts and really mull over them.

Really all the teacher would need is a RNG for the number of kids in class that would pick randomly with the restriction that you discard numbers that have been picked 2 (or n) addition times from the lowest picked number. That way there is still some fear that even though you have been called on you may still be called on before everyone else has been.
> Capitalistic demand can be short-sighted and there can be negative externalities, none of that should be surprising. It's up to people who OWN the land (their most valuable asset) to come up with ways to make it sustainably productive.

But, as you note, there are negative externalities, which means that there is no incentive for the people that own the land to do so (because they are diffuse harms that also effect the landowners, there may be incentives for them to do so if it is in concert with mandatory restrictions on others taking actions that contribute to the same diffuse harms, but the nature of negative externalities is that the incentives to those involved in the transactions -- including those who own the land at issue -- are not sufficient for the optimal course of action, in terms of social utility, to be rational.)
One would assume that the reader of such a study would already know the flaw of correlation vs causation. It is taught when we learn how to interpret the results of experiments.

This study however does not stand by itself. There will be more, if there aren't already, and all they are doing is backing up the conventional wisdom about the effects of marijuana.

It definitely makes you forget. I grew up with two parents who smoked it, DAILY. They remembered nothing. Seriously.
It's on my list, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. I am quite excited to see what Ron Gilbert does with Thimbleweed Park, which is purposefully old school in concept.
So the whole thing is a love poem then, with "cipher" actually meaning "zero", "nothing", or "negate".

Cool.
Rotifers support a billion dollar's human industries currently.

They are the preys for breeding the tiny larvae of marine fishes in our future spacial stations so don't go out your planet without some of them.

You don't want just to put some humans in mars. You'll need to move entire reliable trophic chains, and humans are only the cherry at the top. So take with you some rotifers, some Chlorella also and... well, maybe a big bag of dehydrated eggs of desert pupfishes.
> What if meat is imported from areas/states/countries where there is no water problem.

It often is.

> And with that, maybe California should open itself to import vegetables/fruits from other states, countries too?

California imports fruits and vegetables from other states and countries already.
From Edsger Dijkstra: https://youtu.be/RCCigccBzIU?t=13m54s

> ...just after the first successful moon landing [...] I knew that each Apollo flight required some 40,000 new lines of code. [...] I was duly impressed that they got so many lines of code correct. So when I met Joel, I said, "how did you do that? [...] Getting that software right." [...] He said that in one of the calculations of the orbit of the lunar module the moon had been defined as repelling instead of attracting. They had discovered that error by accident. Imagine, by accident five days before the shot.

Sound familiar to anyone?

Some 16 years experience myself, the clarity of "the problem of time" has become the foremost factor of bad software that I knowingly write. I imagine NASA has the same problems that we do.

I've been through about 5 cycles that all occur in the same form: 1) We put the under-performing developers on maintaining "legacy" systems and the seniors begin on the next one. 2) Time is purposely estimated shorter than viable, corners get cut in the software, prototypes are put into production once again, and a new legacy system is born. 3) The good programmers leave, some juniors become seniors and others are hired, and the cycle repeats.

There are many additional mismanagement mistakes that accumulate, but limited time always seems to be at the center of the problem for me. I whole-heartily believe that really great software can be authored by just two or three high quality engineers over the span of a few to many years with a clear vision.
Definitely a mature approach, and it's definitely better for Balanced customers to have a migration plan. However, I don't think we can assume that Balanced "[left itself] enough runway to look after [its] customers" or that the primary motivation is maturity.

Balanced may have offered to sell their customer base to Stripe (or sell the company to Stripe, which presumably was refused). If Stripe accepted a deal to purchase Balanced's customer base, then it might have provided as payment, in part, an injection of cash to keep Balanced running for 90 days to implement the migration and hold up their side of the deal. Balanced might have suspended operations already if not for the hypothetical cash payment.

I'm not saying it would be wrong for Balanced to make that decision -- it's certainly better than shutting down! I'm just pointing out that Balanced may have other/more complex motivations for doing this than maturity, altruism, and leaving behind a good legacy. Balanced might be equally looking after its own shareholders by selling its (perhaps) most valuable asset: the customers. (The value of that asset crashes once Balanced ceases operations or announces its intention to do so, since its customers will immediately move to a competitor. Thus, this asset can only be sold while Balanced is still operating.)

I have no data - I'm just speculating. However, would a responsible board allow a company to continue to operate and burn cash for 90 days solely for the purpose of migrating customers to a competitor, and taking further losses in the process, when it could shut down instead and disburse its remaining assets to shareholders and creditors? (I do not intend to cast asperions on Stripe or Balanced. There's nothing wrong about this if it's what happened - it's rational and in everyone's interest.)
This was posted the other day, but surprisingly sank unnoticed. Here's a repost of the comment I left then:

O.o
The micro pumping and capillary action are extremely interesting, but seeing how it deforms in response to an electrical current is just eye-popping. Naturally I want to see what happens if you send AC signals rather than static DC...at the least I would expect something similar to the behavior of ferrofluids on a speaker cone, eg https://vimeo.com/65815077 or even suspensions of cornstarch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dS9LNBQE2Jw which has a handy how-to at the end.
The supplementary material is available free even though the article is paywalled and is a great read. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.201405438/su.... The alloy is described here: https://gmwgroup.harvard.edu/pubs/pdf/1014.pdf
According to the supplementary, the aluminum flake 'fuel' is not consumed but breaks up into tiny fragments and eventually diffuses to the surface, causing the reaction to tail off. This seems like fairly fundamental research.
I approve of this startup.
When people don't like the result of a study, the very existence of "causality" all of sudden turns into a point of contention.