skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This has been a consistent direction from Microsoft for some time. When Microsoft talks about private cloud or hybrid cloud, they refer to a design approach in which infrastructure and applications are separated. Even today, using the latest versions of Windows Server and System Center, you can manage physical hardware, storage and networking as a "fabric" and even offer self-service server provisioning.

In large shops, this allows for a real separation of roles between infrastructure and applications. I think this is a useful separation. Even in small shops where the same people are doing everything, this mental separation enables better management. Many small and medium sized businesses still operate in the mode that deploying an application or a major upgrade involves starting with deploying a new server.
I mean its the usual story when people post stuff about PHP comparisons.

http://php.net/md5

the example itself uses === although no advice why is given
Is that multiplatform? Because PCSC has a multiplatform version in PCSC Lite http://pcsclite.alioth.debian.org/ and that's what that Python library wraps. I am unaware of any smartcard implementation for Linux.
INETA Closing Doors
> You bought a new car.

There's your problem, wasting money on something that only depreciates in value. Tsk tsk.
this reminds me of
http://ghostswithshitjobs.com/
I'm well aware. That's still pretty often compared to an EV.
Facebook opens up Internet.org to developers, responding to net neutrality
NES controller input has been part of the Linux kernel since at least 2000 (thanks to Vojtech Pavlik of SuSE), so most of the heavy lifting is already completed. Input was originally added (according to the mailing list) to support the NES Power Glove as a mouse input.
Hopefully we will see the influence of standardized testing companies diminish as more robust in-class assessment tools are developed.

Our trust in standardized testing is dependent on the expectation that teachers cannot accurately assess the skills and competencies of their students during regular lessons. To free schools to approach education however they want we just need to find a way to reliably assess students without the need for a centralized gatekeeper.

If the process of developing/proctoring/critiquing assessments was partially standardized (to allow for distribution and certification of assessment elements) and linked to student performance data then we could both reliably integrate this kind of assessment into regular lessons while also mitigating the need for expensive standardized tests.

There are some hints of this in the article; as a HS teacher I'd love to see assessment overhauled in this direction.
How I Hacked My Way from TC to YC
> I lived in Canada as a foreign student a few years ago and it was way cheaper to cook for yourself than to eat at a McDonald. Maybe the situation is different in US, but I doubt it.

McDonald's isn't cheaper than cooking for yourself, but time constraints (consider a single parent with multiple jobs) and/or the up-front costs when bits of your cooking infrastructure is lost, broken, damaged may make the marginal cost of getting the next meal from McDonald's cheaper than the cost of repair plus the next meal. Given that the poor may have limited access to additional credit and litte-no reserves, that marginal cost difference may make McDonald's the only affordable choice, even though the long-term cost is higher.
This reminds me of this http://ghostswithshitjobs.com/
AgencyLogic and Follr CEO Stephen Fells Discusses Leveraging Technology
While your other points are perfectly valid, improved aero isn't an advantage unique to electric cars.
The Voice for Real Estate 21: Home Sales Surge
My son is a black kid with blonde hair and blue eyes. I bet he'd make a fortune.
Only 22 countries have never been invaded by Britain
The "10x" effect is real (not a "myth") but it has more to do with skills and exposure than innate talent. (It's also context-specific. I'm a 10x when I get to pick the tools, but a sub-1x on enterprise Java because I just can't bring myself to give a fuck about some Spring/Hibernate/POJO legacy mess.) That's what missed in this conversation. Yes, those mediocre Java programmers (CommodityScrumDrones) really are a drag, but it's not low IQ that has made them what they are, and they're not genetically destined to remain that way. That aspect of a person can change, and quickly.

At any rate, I've met plenty of high-IQ people who are just awful programmers. Smart as hell, but really bad at writing code. I think that attitude is a major factor. If you think programming is important and genuinely want to learn it (and not just "good enough to get a job") then I think it's quite possible for a lot of people to learn how to do it well enough.

Innate talent might matter at the extreme upper end of competitive programming. Just as most people can run a marathon with enough work, but very few will ever get below 3:00, I'd believe that the percentage of people who can reach the top in programming competitions is smaller than the percentage who can program adequately. So there's probably a talent ceiling there, just as there is in athletics. But real programming is more cooperative than competitive and there are plenty of factors (especially design sense and cross-domain knowledge) that matter in the real world more than innate talent.

Programming has a steep learning curve, but what's missed is that a steep learning curve is a good thing. The 10x effect exists because it's possible (especially in the early stages) to improve your own effectiveness by 20, 50, or even 100+ percent per year... and one becomes a true 10x-er not based on in-born talent but by having several 1.5x growth years in a row.
Comcast now has more Internet users than TV subscribers
I do the same thing, mostly just using manually installed apps for Fastmail and two games (Chess and Go).
That's what I was just thinking.
Very interesting. From my experience, the hard part about parsing CSV isn't to identify the individual cells, but rather parsing those cells afterwards (as numbers, dates, etc).

What is the performance of those operations (e.g. parsing YYYY-MM-DD dates to Unix timestamps) when performed on the GPU ?

My company actually picked another optimization strategy, by making the tokenization significantly longer, but it de-duplicates the tokenized cells so that each distinct cell value (a date, a number, a string) can be parsed exactly once. We have seen some fairly good results out of this, compared to the naive approach of stream-token-parse:

https://github.com/Lokad/lokad-flatfiles
Nuclear is the safe bet. However, in your block out the sun scenario, we will have lots and lots of problems beside just power generation. Such as crops.
>~17% of packages on PyPI support Python 3

And how is that determined? Setuptools/distutils classifiers? Then is completely meaningless, most don't even bother including those.

And a big chunk of the packages will never be Python 3 compatible simply because they're abandoned and shouldn't be counted either in my opinion.
No, that fits pretty fine too.

You're jumping at shadows, man. Chill.
Connecting animals to the cloud could help predict earthquakes
The WellMed system described in that article was interesting. Most doctors (especially primary care) do want to spend more time helping fewer patients, but the financial incentives push them in the opposite direction. If the ACA's Pay-for-Performance experiments work out then hopefully we will be able to properly incentivise healthcare.
In which case it becomes bimodal in the sense there are people who consider themselves programmers but who do not meet enough skill to be considered one.
"Formal logical proofs, and therefore programs – formal logical proofs that particular computations are possible, expressed in a formal system called a programming language – are utterly meaningless. To write a computer program you have to come to terms with this, to accept that whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion. In the test the consistent group showed a pre-acceptance of this fact: they are capable of seeing mathematical calculation problems in terms of rules, and can follow those rules wheresoever they may lead. The inconsistent group, on the other hand, looks for meaning where it is not. The blank group knows that it is looking at meaninglessness, and refuses to deal with it"

http://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-fr...

http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/paper1.pdf
Inline::Perl5 is just a very thin layer to communicate with a Perl 5 process. This works well for small things but it's not practical for more complex ones. You can call code of any language from any language using this technique, that doesn't mean the languages are integrated.
IANASpy either, but I've worked on some cleared projects. Clearance (and need to know) _is_ what we use to determine what someone can look at. If a co-worker needs a document, I verify that he's cleared for it, then I give it to him. There is no alternate system where I can look up: "Bob has a Top Secret Clearance, but also a spy so don't share anything with him."
A good introduction is here:

http://examine.com/faq/does-metabolism-vary-between-two-peop...

> Metabolic rate does vary, and technically there could be large variance. However, statistically speaking it is unlikely the variance would apply to you. The majority of the population exists in a range of 200-300kcal from each other and do not possess hugely different metabolic rates.

Note that caloric intake is exceptionally difficult to measure accurately (even for people who consistently log calories), so it would probably be unwise to attempt to self-diagnose. If you suspect you have a problem, you should consult a physician.
You sure about that? They're doing better than Rackspace and Google:

http://cdn.geekwire.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/RightScal...
I haven't really seen any evidence that this is true.

The talent myth as Adrian describes it is one of stereotyping: there's no data to accurately measure skill in programming so we simplify things in our heads and believe you're either talented or not. This myth appears to directly support your claim: untalented individuals are a cost burden on the enterprise. If this were true there would be far fewer enterprises to match the number of actually talented programmers: that is to say you and I are not likely one of them.

The reality I've experienced suggests that deliberate process correlates strongly to quality. In the absence of true talent we can still write great software by leveraging processes and tools to wrangle complexity and manage defects. We see this in plenty of engineering disciplines. Why is software so special?
Don't sell a product, sell an experience. And give everything else away for free
If this interests you, you might want to check out Freenet:
https://freenetproject.org/

It's a similar concept layered on top of UDP, but it is designed as an anonymous system. Theoretically such store-and-forward systems may provide better anonymity than tor due to the lack of a realtime demand.

I'm interested in seeing what comes of these proposals. However they are unlikely to even try to tackle the privacy/anonymity issues. Every router knows every piece of content you request, not just the host you connect to.
Open dev tools console:

document.getElementsByTagName("video")[0].playbackRate = 3.0;
After reading that article I don't see the 'stiff' competition that the clickbait title claims. It says 'Samsung SDI Co Ltd, LG Chem Ltd, Saft Groupe SA, and array of small companies' but it doesn't go into their actual offerings. The article only spoke of Tesla and a vague idea that there is competition with no actual proof. It did mention the state of Cali's initiative to subsidized green energy but without providing any substance.

I don't think Tesla has a lot of competition and that's why they released their patents. They need more minds focused on green technology because they aren't able to solve all the major issues.

Also, the only actual competition Tesla has in the current fossil energy market. They are trying to disrupt that market, they aren't cost competitive yet but they are getting there.

tldr; The article is a flame article with little to no substance about Tesla's competition. It lacks specifics.
Glad to see this ~700 word essay refute years and years of economic study and theory.
http://xkcd.com/1513/

Treat this as an education opportunity, one that can be used to mentor the new hire. Just having her/him rewrite the code from scratch will not help prevent a repeat of the problem.
"I'm sorry, I don't think I'd like that job. Thanks for your time."
How we hacked our way in a startup accelerator
Oh, sorry, I should have been clearer: I wasn't trying to disparage Nim at all (it's on my list of languages to play with). I was just clearing up some points about Rust :)

Edit:

> Well I was not talking about iterating through a list, but rather maintaining arbitrary indexes to a mutable list. Eg, a Sprite which contains a index to a Texture array. In that scenario it's just as easy to miscalculate and crash your program via a bounds-checking error as it is to crash by nil-deref.

The solution here is to just use a reference instead of an arbitrary index. If you hand out references you can lean on the compiler to enforce memory safety -- the compiler won't let you access data that is no longer alive, won't let you accidentally share across thread boundaries if you don't explicitly want that, etc. And if that was a shared mutable list, it's doubly important to let the compiler help you reason about it, since shared, mutable state is the main source of data races.

This is one of those cases where leveraging the compiler allows you to write better, safer code.
I was in the Azure TAP program many years ago and they talked about this extensively to the participants. I would echo the consistency of direction on this. I had a vague sense that it was an attempt to quell enterprise fears about the cloud and lock-in, but perhaps not.
HITLER BLACK Cigarettes Sell for Only 0.001578 Bitcoins in India
Twitter Turns Off MS-DOS Game Embeds in Tweets
It doesn't have to be an All Or Nothing situation. Nobody has asserted that nobody should ever provide limited internet access to developing countries. It's just that Facebooks attempt have some very serious, and potentially malicious problems, which have been stated in this thread.
Kubernetes is going to support rkt
Reminiscent of the untimely death of Douglas Adams [1] (author of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", etc.) at 49, post-exercise:

Adams died of a heart attack on 11 May 2001, aged 49, after resting from his regular workout at a private gym in Montecito, California. He had unknowingly suffered a gradual narrowing of the coronary arteries, which led at that moment to a myocardial infarction and a fatal cardiac arrhythmia.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Adams#Death_and_legacy
If you would just set me and my friends up as dictators,
then we'd build a faux democracy and call it
totalandcompletefreedom.org. Soon, everyone will benefit
from the fake freedom and realize how amazing it is to
be free.
Dave Goldberg, Silicon Valley Executive, Said to Have Died After Exercising
He's completely ignoring the effects on the grid, which will be huge. Batteries are also a complement to wind, for example. Here's one piece discussing that dynamic; there are many others at e.g. Greentechmedia.com.

http://rameznaam.com/2015/04/14/energy-storage-about-to-get-...
I'd say it's all a question of bandwidth. Geniuses just have enough capacity to converge quickly. "Incapable" people are below the threshold, so everything ends up as a cache miss, lock contention, pipeline flush; progress is so slow that they're directed onto other things. Wise people can attempt to craft their learning to converge smoothly too, they have patience to focus energy and wait for data to emerge, because they went through the slow discovery before, like a longer timeout.

With time you may grow very impressively, realize that stuff eluded your senses and mind, eureka, but time is an expensive resource.
IMO it's not a talent. It's a result of thousands of hours of work. I learned programming at 12 years. I programmed a lot. I didn't have a computer and I was programming in sheets of paper (computer was in school and I didn't always had access to it). I wrote by own object-oriented GUI library in sheets of paper and that library was never written in computer but it was in my head and I learned a lot while thinking about it and its design. There was time when I was spending 10-12 hours programming or reading programming books.

I wouldn't call myself talented programmer. I spent a lot of time to learn how to write good enough code and be productive.

What I had is a passion to program. I never programmed because I had to force myself. I enjoyed it. It's a beautiful art. That beauty forced by to program. And I still find that beauty in programs.

Unfortunately I don't know how to learn others to enjoy programming. I saw a lot of programmers and most of them didn't really like their job, they just did it because they went to CS faculty after school and programming is paid well enough.
A burger (double) and a medium shake. No fries.
Singapore Prime Minister's C++ Sudoku Solver Source Code
This is a critical subtlety to this discussion that is never mentioned as evidenced by the comments in this thread. Just like "piano player" is a continuum, so is programmer. I will never be able to work at Google because I lack the requisite skill set in the same way I'll never play Carnegie Hall because I'm not good enough. But that doesn't mean I can't provide quite a lot of value to businesses who don't require the kind of talent Google does.

I like to think of ecosystems in discussions like this. Yes, the Google/Carnegie Hall ecosystem requires the talents of rockstars. But the places I work are a totally different ecosystem and require a different type of individual.
Yes.

Key phrases: "enterprise on-premise data center" and "private cloud solution for IT pros and makes it easier for developers to scale their apps across their existing data centers and then boost to the cloud if they need more capacity on short notice" (emphasis mine).

The "Azure Stack" with those features apparently won't be available until 2016, however.
The New Women’s Bathroom Sign You Are Going to Love
Very nice article. It reminds me to this quote from "Hackers and Painters" by Paul Graham.

"In general, people outside some very demanding field don't realize the extent to
which success depends on constant (though often unconscious) effort. For
example, most people seem to consider the ability to draw as some kind of
innate quality, like being tall. In fact, most people who "can draw" like drawing,
and have spent many hours doing it; that's why they're good at it."
This was a fun read, but unfortunately, the electric car isn't practical yet in the environment it should excel the most at - the city. It's only a feasible option if you're a home owner with a garage. I could totally afford a tesla, and I love them, but I don't want to own anything beyond a condo in the city, and that means street parking. Even in the best neighborhoods where I wouldn't worry about the car getting stolen/vandalized, there's still no where to charge it! Residential city areas are never going to be lined with charger plugs for people to parallel park outside their apartments and use.

So, the only people it's practical for, are suburban (or very well off urban) people who don't drive often. I just don't see the infrastructure needed happening in a city the size of Chicago within my lifetime, and since populations are still centered there, I don't see gas cars going away in my lifetime, as much as I'd love them to.
The illusion of a U-shaped talent curve is just that - an illusion. Specifically, it's an illusion brought on by selection bias. We see more of the people beyond a particular point in the curve. Maybe we even see them because they're exponentially more productive than people further back, but at most that means the work product distribution is bimodal. The skill or talent distributions surely have a bump or two here and there, but remain basically normal.
It is an all or nothing situation. You're asserting that you would take away internet.org. Since there is no alternative, that would leave the folks who must use internet.org with nothing.

I apologize for the account swapping -- HN decided I was commenting too much on my other account, and I wanted to continue our discussion while it was still fresh in both our minds.
BlockScore (YC S14) Is Hiring a Senior Back-End Engineer
The difficulties that beset you initially are not the same as those that make programming effectively a difficult task. For anything but toy problems, 'soft' skills like being able to organize your thoughts and having good judgement become important, and not all quick-starters make the transition easily.
I agree that any talent shortage is likely to be an upstream problem from hiring.

I don't agree that eliminating a bimodal model is desirable though. We don't really need more people in the middle of the talent trough because they don't actually add much value and can often detract value (in my experience). Successful programming is the grappling with immense complexity. You really only want the best and brightest doing it. As long as the people with the desire and capability are being given the opportunity to enter the field, I think we've succeeded. Trying to lower the bar or get people who wouldn't excel into development would be a mistake though.
.net is a bridgehead.
And if you're going to load it, you may as well parse it on the way in.
Have you never heard of the caste system?
It's not just versioning that's "unstable". Inspired by Smalltalk, Ruby allows developers to make (nearly?) any object respond to any message by extending the language. A pining-for-C-Rubyist can change String to add characters and nobody who doesn't have to live with the consequences need ever know or care.
Real world facts: LEAFs tested in Phoenix and discharged to under 5% capacity twice a day lost 22-26% of their initial capacity after just 40,000 miles.

That's basically the worst case scenario and it still doesn't come anywhere close to supporting your claim of "on its last legs" at only 10,000 miles on the clock.

Personally I think the LEAF's lack of active thermal management for the battery is a serious mistake, and your link reflects that. But even then it's not nearly as bad as you said. With more normal use in a more normal climate it'll be vastly better still.

"EVs suck now" not even close. Full disclosure: I own a Model S. It is the envy of everyone I show it to. There are a lot of articles out there talking about how it's an awesome car. Those articles are wrong: it's far better than they say. The only objections people can come up with to it are based in fiction. "What if you want to do a road trip?" Well, I take advantage of the vast supercharger network. "What about battery degradation?" The battery was engineered to last 10 years and reports from the fleet so far is that they're doing better than expected. "Is it hard to find places to charge it?" No, it's really easy, because I charge it in my garage every day and never have to charge anywhere else in normal driving.

"Tesla is losing money hand over foot" is another example of this concerted campaign of anti-EV disinformation. They make a healthy profit selling cars. (Average profit per car is something like 28%.) That profit just gets poured into capital expenditures rather than being returned to the shareholders at the moment, because they're trying to expand at a rapid pace.
Scaling microservices at Gilt [CraftConf takeaways]