skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
a 1700 word article isn't too long to read. But there are dozens of 1700 word articles (and longer) that make the HN frontpage every day, and most of us want to know which of those are worth reading for us -- whether the article has the kind of "meat" we're going for, whether it's mostly fluff, whether the technical details are relevant to our particular interests, etc.

One reason we see so many tl;dr comments even on a very technically inclined place like HN is that articles very often bury their content. We want a thesis out front; we don't want to be strung along for 1600 words and then find the interesting bit between 1601 and 1700.
That's why I personally declare Crocker's rules[0] - if you want to tell me something, I allow you to skip pleasantries and "social hacks", and just get straight to the point.

[0] - http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Crocker%27s_rules
Clementine is great. If you look in the library on the left you can right click "Smart playlists" and select "New smart playlist...". Then you can create a playlist of all your music (or with additional filters) that is either randomized every time you open it or built dynamically as you listen.
There are some people who believe this was a hideous violation of privacy who are now going to have to look to see if any of their personal, friends, or family member's emails are among those that were leaked.

Verifying that no intruders are in the house because some num-nuts left the front door open is a pain in the butt.
Have used RethinkDB with a few projects now, mainly in Go with dancannon's Go driver[1], and have found it very functional and robust and has become my go-to schemaless database.

My largest project has been running a couple of years now and has accumulated a significant amount of data, and RethinkDB hasn't had any trouble at all scaling with my data growth. I'm running it on servers below the recommended requirements too (512MB DO instances) and have been really impressed with how it handles constrained resources.

[1] https://github.com/dancannon/gorethink
haha, yeah I realized that later, thanks :(
This is new syntax that requires at least a new minor version. It can't be back-ported to Python 2.7. You might even say that what people find so appealing about Python 2.7 these days is that its syntax will never change.

Python 3 is not Perl 6, and that's a banal comparison to make. Python 3 has had many releases, and has had most packages ported to it. Perl 6 has had no releases. Ruby 1.9 should be an example that making incompatible changes that force everyone to upgrade is possible as long as you make timely releases.

What gap do you still think there is to be narrowed? We're not on 3.2 anymore. Complaining that "it should not have taken until 3.3" doesn't matter now.

What most people are arguing is quite the opposite of you -- they're saying they could switch to Python 3, and they would if there were a killer feature that mattered to them, but just being cleaner and making the core developers happier isn't enough for them to change the way they use Python. So I say, bring on the killer features.
http://time.com/3826420/bob-iger-star-wars-sphero/
http://www.gosphero.com

It is Sphero, a startup making toys with flywheels. For example a spherical ball-thingy (sphero) you can move/control with your smartphone.
I'm pretty sure I remember my code. I agonize over it, put all my effort into it. I remember code I wrote in the '80. I remember the code I wrote 7 years ago, and refactored last year. Code is my life.

I've had that sneaking suspicion that maybe I'm not really getting any better, yes. But I have independent corroboration - I've worked with another guy for most of that time, and we've got one anothers' code to look at. What one of us learns, the other learns too. He's not cycling, or just writing bad code. And he says the same about me.
hn was never built to be reliable, and has always had reliability issues.. it used to (still is?) run from a single server.
I honestly can't believe some (semi reputable) news sites are spewing this bullshit.

Fuckin please.
There's been some talk of it but they haven't committed to anything.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/rethinkdb/meteor/...
Open source developers work on what they like to do. Guido was the primary developer of asyncio, funded by dropbox, as I understand. The asyncio library depends on some Python 3 features that other developers have implemented. I believe there is some kind of 2.7 backport of asyncio. No one is stopping development but the core Python team is not interested in releasing new versions of the 2.x line.

The gap has been getting smaller. Python 3.5 will include %-style formatting for byte strings. I helped implement that feature since I feel it will make porting code easier (plus it makes some programming tasks, like network protocols, easier). The strict handling of bytes/unicode is what really trips up people from porting and there is just no good way to further smooth that path, IMHO.

I feel the upgrade path has been handled badly. People were wildly optimistic about how fast people could port code and much more effort should have been spent on making the transition easier. A little too much purity instead of practicality. For example, u'foo' style strings were not accepted until Python 3.3. That just made porting more difficult for great reason.

Given the massive amount of Python 2.x code in the world, I fully expect that version to live much longer than most people expect. There is still old Fortran and Cobol code out there for example. Businesses don't want to rewrite a working system. Someone is going to keep making releases of the 2.x branch. Maybe it will be a fork.

At this point, I'd bet money on Python 3 succeeding. The vast majority of users still use 2.7 but there is steady progress of porting. The 3.x branch has received a lot of new and useful improvements and that is where all the development is happening. The memory savings from the new string representation will help my projects a lot. As I said elsewhere, asyncio is really sweet. The core team needs to keep the improvements coming. More carrots and less sticks, IMHO.
"His health was failing; he had been told that he suffered from a heart aneurism. His response: “Let it burst.”

I will always remember that quote.
Which is also my point, both mongodb and rethinkdb has the same feature in this regards but different defaults. Does that makes one worse than the other one?
I don't think it's correct to assume that working from home results in reduced communication, communication takes on different forms but good communication out of the office is equally as much of a challenge as good communication inside the office.

Both require a smart approach to communication, both are negatively affected by too little or too much.

The best thing we did outside the office was short term to-do lists in Trello (one list per team member, limited to around 5-6 items for the day.) This has a lot of the benefits of a stand-up meeting, but is very useful because it's updated through the day and you can easily see what everyone's working on right now. We use this to complement our task management system (Jira) and have been very happy with the results so far.

Apart from that, the rest of our communication requirements are covered with Google Apps (email, groups, chat, video hangouts with screen sharing for adhoc comms and meetings) and we haven't had any more communication issues than when we used to all be in the office together.
So, I found this very interesting to read.

I created an empty file, a la the original true, named truth and placed it at the beginning of my $PATH.

$ time truth

real 0m0.002s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.003s

I then realized that since true is a builtin, I'd need to call the true binary with its full path. I'd hate to give one an unfair advantage by having to search the path vs being called by name. So....

$ time /usr/bin/true

real 0m0.001s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000s

$ time /usr/local/sbin/truth

real 0m0.003s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000s

$ time true # The builtin

real 0m0.000s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000s

Clearly my 2KB true binary is superior to an empty file. The builtin (obviously) outperforms both, by at least one order of magnitude (estimated).

This post is not intended to be a serious performance comparison.
Pandoc is great. I'm writing my book in markdown and using some Lua scripts and a latex style file with Pandoc to produce a nicely formatted pdf. (It's also one of the more prominent Haskell products but you wouldn't even know because it just works!)

I'm looking forward to increasing support for things like figure labelling (Automatically linking figure numbers and labels e.g. see figure 1.2) at the moment I handle this manually.
Thats great news. I love RethinkDB; but not having a Java driver made it a no-go for a couple of projects.
I wonder if the name came from some version of this pithy one-liner:

To err is human, to really fuck things up requires a computer.
You know... I've seen this notation on discussion forums (and probably IRC etc.) for years, and had no idea until now that it was a reference to this shell capability lol
Off Topic: Does anyone know if there are anything similar for Ruby in the work?

P.S - Ruby's issues system is hard to follow.
filll for finance. fill yourself in.
Sorry, I'm not really seeing why asking people to donate for one reason is ok but another is morally deplorable.

> The email implies a specific intent of soliciting individual donations toward a cause (in this case, a politician) which is directly beneficial to the interests of the organization as a whole.

Sure, agreed. Makes sense to me. Why is this "deplorable"?

I founded a startup. Is it wrong to email my employees and ask them to support tax breaks for startups? Or to contribute directly to the politicians who implement those tax breaks?
> Perl 6 has had no releases

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rakudo_Perl_6
I forgot to mention that in my sibling comment but I agree, because 2.x is so stable is the main reason it is and will continue to be so popular. You can't have it both ways (new features and stability).

Python 2.x is not going anywhere soon. The idea that is going to become unmaintained is ridiculous. If you like it, keep using it, I say. However, maybe take a look at the "What's new in Python 3.x" documents sometime. There are a lot of nifty new features, even if none of them are "killer".
This is very cool, I'll need to spend some time playing with it.

I used abuse an old Powerbook's CPU by using Logic's Time Machine at the maxium settings and clicking through the all the warnings that it might harm the processor, and repeat several times. I made a whole album doing that: https://josephpost.bandcamp.com/
Press me: the buttons that lie to you
Bitcoin is a game within a game
It ain't what you know, it's who you know.
Canadian Snowboard Instructors call that "Positive, to and try"
i.e.

That's great! To make it read files faster, next time let's try xyz.
Pics of IDF women soldiers helped hackers to breach Israeli Military Servers
As I understand, the point is precisely that optimizations are not a restricted class of algorithms, because you need entirely new optimization techniques for new domains.
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Guys, we've spotted the Mormon here... he was this close to pooh-poohing that article about the positive productivity effects of coffee, but a curse word used in an extremely minimalist command-line tool has gone too far!
While the call-me-maybe series is definitely informative... it's worth noting that they've called out flaws in every distributed system they've tested against. What it comes down to is, are those flaws fatal in practice. The truth is, it depends.... If you lose a comment on a social media site, no big deal. If you lose part of a transaction for a multi million dollar stock trade, very big deal.

No software system is perfect, but there are definitely practical balances to be made. Especially when you are beyond what a single database/server can offer in terms of write throughput. The fact is, when your traffic needs exceed what a single database can keep up with in terms of writes, you have to give up some level of reliability.
I too read those guidelines in their entirety and there is nothing there at all about the poignant use of so-called "swear words."

Also:

http://thefuckingweather.com/

http://www.whatthefuckshouldimakefordinner.com/

etc.
> Therefore we should design programming languages that on the surface look very unoptimized, but specify enough information that compilers can do a really good job. It sounds like no one knows what such a programming language would look like.

This entire post would be painfully familiar to anyone working with probabilistic programming. An intriguing overview of the state of the art was posted here a little while ago: https://moalquraishi.wordpress.com/2015/03/29/the-state-of-p...

The task here (I'm adapting an older comment of mine) is that the human should write a relatively simple procedural program that says "if we were to fix a bunch of properties/states of the natural world and provide them as input, here's the output/reading you'd hypothetically get," and then from that, the "compiler" and runtime create a function that, given a large number of outputs/readings, provides a posterior probability distribution over those hidden properties/states of the world. The implementation choices for this "function" can make a difference of days or weeks of runtime on huge computer clusters.

The problem is that machine learning researchers use all sorts of insights to make manual optimizations when hand-rolling machine learning code - for instance, if there are real-world reasons why a certain type of search over your space may be well-suited or ill-suited to the problem domain. And not only can the languages not capture these insights yet, but even if they could, there's fragmentation in the community (since it's at such an early stage), and there's no standardized way to map heuristics detecting optimizable patterns to actual optimizations.

I'd imagine optimizing compilers looked very similar at one point, though... so only time will tell how far the community progresses!
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One difference is that before only bursts needed to be super tight, now idle performance have to be in addition.
Maybe his rule is still valid, but the two cases do seem a little bit different to me.

Previously it used to be about optimizing that innermost loop that was only a few instructions long so it went twice as fast. A small local change with inline assembly.

But idle behaviour involves architectural optimizations. Like pushing events instead of polling for them.
More Weight Doesn't Mean More Wait
Chromium Blog: A QUIC update on Google’s experimental transport
For the big guys it's not about trust. They just hit the limits of the current tried and true before anyone else does and as a result they have to forge new ground.

If you don't run at the same scale as those guys you won't hit those same limits. But if you do reach the scale of those guy's you will find that your needs are suddenly very much a unique snowflake that will require you either creating something new or heavily tweaking something that already exists.

Plenty of time for that when you reach the scale that justifies it though.
Ask HN: Open Source approach to distributed repository
Does anyone have thoughts on how to approach this applications? We may be willing to contribute monetarily to a good open source approach. Application: Repository for Sales Presentations, Catalogs, and Documents
Documents: PPT, PDF, Word (Can convert to PDF, but not ideal)

Platform: IPAD (Required) ; Android Tablet (Desired); OS X (Desired)

Requirements:

1) Synchronization between server and remote copies for offline mobile presentation (2GB of files) 2) Permissions/Group structure for multiple groups and users.
3) Ability to log document views on remote device then upload data to server

4) As much as possible open source (widely used platform) or low cost cloud storage.

5) Unviewed files highlighted.

Desired:

1) Keyword Searchable 2) HTML5 Based
3) The ability to create a sales presentation session and send download links to a customer.
Pagedip is coming 5.15.15
Real Grey Alien Caught on Tape in Basement
There is no such thing as a C calling convention. It isn't in the language spec.

Also I am not sure which one in common use behaves exactly as you say. On ia32 it's usually all stack. (Though I think Microsoft uses ECX for the c++ this pointer.) On amd64 it's common to use registers for the first few integers. (Say, 4 of them.)

Further, within a non-exported function it's fair game to break ABIs/calling conventions.
A parochial old boys (and girls) club? You don't say?!
FlashEK Strikes Again via Google's DoubleClick
AXS Partner Summit Keynote (2014)
From what I know of Google's infrastructure, they are very unlikely to be consuming this internally, just like the rest of GCP. Just because they use containers doesn't mean they use this container repository. Just because they use Java web servers doesn't mean they use AppEngine.
> now idle performance have to be in addition.

Your idle time should be with all processes blocked in select()/poll()/epoll() and friends, and the CPU fully shut off with no code at all running.

If your CPU isn't fully asleep -- if it's running instructions -- you've already lost. There was a bug with my cellphone where a service was holding a wakelock and preventing the CPU from shutting off. This was enough to drain enough power that it would drain even while on the charger.
The Wrights also did considerable wind tunnel research on air foils until they got the right shape of wing. The exhibit at the Smithsonian taught me a lot, of which I remember only vague bits. It went something like this.

In the 19th C, some airflow work led to a constant, having a value of N; the Wrights used that constant for years, and their craft would not fly.

Eventually, having made every adjustment they could think to make, they began to question some of the expert work upon which they relied.

In the end, they built their own wind tunnel, ran many of the classic 19th C. experiments, and discovered that errors had been made, and that the constant in question had an actual value of 2N (might even have been 10N, it's late, I'm lazy and on my way to bed).

Important work. They were extremely methodical....
Yes, jitsi for desktop and if you need mobile, csipsimple is a nice option
This is very normal and how most business works.
> The next piece of news would come from me.

Although the article is fascinating, I don't buy the dramatic claim. I grew up in southwest Missouri (near the Kansas border) and have read this (typeof) story before. It may not be widely known, but it wasn't a deep secret as far I knew. Einstein's brain was in Kansas and with a scientist. I've seen pictures of it in previous articles growing up as a kid. I remember this fondly actually as it was just as fascinating then as it is now.
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I just finished a blog post on exactly the topic you're bringing up. There's so much money in tech that it permits a criminal degree of mismanagement. https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2015/04/17/can-tech-fix...
I've seen the pros/cons of working from home.

At my current job I can choose whether to work from home or not. Some days I'll spend the whole days at the office, some days I'll spend at home, and sometimes I'll do half and half. I like the "half and half" strategy because it gets some time in for the organic discussions that happen and the office and time for serious work that is better with silence.

Tried working from home for two weeks straight, and I just got cabin fever. Ironically it may be more difficult for introverts to work from home for long periods since they may be less likely to try to maintain contacts outside of work.

It helps if the workforce is really distributed. Before, a few on the core team were in the office, but the other lead on the project was in a city about an hour away, and we had others working out of two other states and Nova Scotia. Now, I'm separated from a different team by a few time zones, and the only ones in the office are new to the team, so I expect to be working from home more. It's also mostly open-source work, so I wouldn't interact with most collaborators in-person anyway.

Regardless of personal pros/cons, it's good for an organization to allow work from home so that they get access to a larger talent pool. It may be harder with a startup, but that's just speculation on my part.
Be mindful of the gap between your title and your skill set
> So ignore the activists, outside of publishing stuff to make your point.

That's been tried, and it results in them getting their misinformation heard by the public (who simply don't have the scientific knowledge to figure out it's bullshit) without a counter-argument. See: anti-vaccination movement.

> I don't like the appeal to consensus. Give people the tools and let them make up their own minds.

One of the tools necessary is a graduate-level education in the topics at hand. I don't get to do my own cancer treatment or prescribe myself lab tests for the same reasons random yahoos shouldn't get to evaluate climate science - we don't have the requisite training and knowledge. That's why we have experts, who nearly unanimously agree.

> The companies were not alone in this; they had millions of customers. Still do.

And the taxes are intended, in part, to prevent new customers. Teenagers pause a bit at the idea of picking up a $10/day habit.
> Something like Aspartame, at least in a subset of the population, induces headaches.

Possibly, probably not:

> Headaches are the most common symptom reported by consumers.[8] While one small review noted aspartame is likely one of many dietary triggers of migraines, in a list that includes "cheese, chocolate, citrus fruits, hot dogs, monosodium glutamate, aspartame, fatty foods, ice cream, caffeine withdrawal, and alcoholic drinks, especially red wine and beer,"[66] other reviews have noted conflicting studies about headaches[8][67] and still more reviews lack any evidence and references to support this claim.[38][41][65]

(Don't make me copy and paste all of the citations. You know I'll do it.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame
The future suffers from apologizing for silly things. Self-censorship is good in many ways, but it gets perverted by everyone's desire to not "get in trouble" combined with the ease of upsetting someone and having that upset amplified unjustifiably. This is crowd-sourcing big brother and absolutely should not be celebrated.
I appreciate the idea of "content-aware" shuffling, but I wish the author had not stated that random shuffling "lacks fairness and uniform distribution." If that is true then the shuffle isn't very random. People have enough trouble with randomness and its characteristics.
Here is a list of how to be awesome, including a definition of AWE-some. Perhaps that can go on your list! http://www.developerspringboard.com/advance-towards-your-goa...
> During the beta period you will be charged only for the Google Cloud Storage storage and network egress consumed by your Docker images.

Is there any guarantee the cost will be a linear function of those things? Quadratic? Quartic? Exponential?

Fine print, fine print everywhere.
IMHO the following are much more useful to read over:

* https://review.openstack.org/#/c/153298/

* http://techspot.zzzeek.org/2015/02/15/asynchronous-python-an...

* http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2014-Febr...

And others...
Apparently Evan Spiegel and Dick Costolo have some kind of Ancient Greek thing going on. Nothing else could explain his being so enamored of such a mediocre mind.
I see nothing shocking or even interesting here. Yes, people who know each other communicate with one another?