skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why does a statically typed langauge need "type inference"

let suffix str = str ^ "mysuffix";;
val suffix : bytes -> bytes = <fun>

Type inference in action: the OCaml toplevel displays the type of the 'suffix' function as something that takes a value of type bytes and returns a value of type bytes, without any type declaration (though obviously, the type inference system works in much more complex cases as well). You can write entire programs without a single type declaration.

Dynamic languages do not do type inference. They do duck-typing. The big difference is that OCaml will not let you write a program like:

let suffixed_five = suffix 5

You will get:

Error: This expression has type int but an expression was expected of type bytes

Python will not let you concatenate integers and strings, either, but will blow up at runtime.
What Is a Squeeze Page and How to Optimize It
it varies from game to game. most often there is some kind of sparse 'navmesh' containing nodes in a 'grid' for doing the classical part of path finding. its possible to do this sort of thing automatically if you split the world into volumes as well, but its more difficult to get very fast, good results (i.e. you can't hack the data by hand so easily).

as well as that there will be some (usually quite off the cuff, hacky) logic to get a character from wherever they are to the nearest node (or its vicinity) and something to avoid them from hitting each other (too much)

there is nothing special about the 3d part, you just make the mesh in 3d and respect the constraints of gravity, player movement etc. so that you can't connect nodes badly

the floating point number thing is not important. any pathfinding can be made to have this 'extra complexity' if you simply go between the points over time smoothly...
I think that for many programmers there are sufficient applications of CT in their own work that learning it would be a boon. I don't at all disagree that that learning algebra more broadly here is beneficial, too, though!

And hell, you can be absolutely certain that I'd advocate a big math curriculum for programmers with category theory at the top. I don't know that the ROI is there for everyone, but I couldn't not recommend such a thing heartily.

Learn abstract algebra, as a programmer? Of COURSE that will help you.
Awesome and professional system solution :)
There's a difference between "not being super poor anymore" and taking a $6 million payday. Can you name a company where this hasn't resulted in disaster?

As Mark Suster put it, "Not FU money, but 'feed the family' money." What these guys got was FU money.
Edit: ninjaed by detaro
AFAIK, every other audio compression encodes each slice of sound separately. My idea looks at the song as a whole, which I believe would be something new in the audio field.
There is a multicore runtime in progress, with an ETA of "when it's done".
How does insurance work with this? What if my driver is robbed, gets in a crash or decides to pocket my stuff? Do Uber insure the contents or the retailer (or neither)?
How would a component based system solve the problem of removing the entities (or components in this case)?
Disclaimer: I’m talking about my startup :)

StormForger (https://stormforger.com) is cloud based Load Testing as a Service.

If you like to create test cases using a JavaScript DSL, run load tests and performance analysis and let us take care of all the provisioning and data analysis stuff: feel free to sign up for our private beta. Just drop us a line if you have further technical questions.

Talking about big numbers in this thread you may want to read this thread as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7920930
NASA's NuSTAR Captures Possible 'Screams' from Zombie Stars
Night Terrors – Augmented Reality Survival Horror Game
Red Hat will probably stay the biggest one, but there's a huuuuge room for applications in specific areas today that range far beyond the operating system.

In particular, I think Big Data and Open Networking are two of those areas.

Do they need to get as big as Red Hat is now? Defintely not.

Levine's (linked) comment that OSS companies can't execute on Product Management is incredibly short sighted, if done correctly, they have infinitely more data than their proprietary counterparts. But later on he seems to be saying that there can't be another people keeping it as "pure" ... well, no, Red Hat isn't really a product company. I'll get to that.

The first article itself doesn't seem to know what Red Hat really is either, saying "Red Hat has become a technology sommelier that selects the best of open source infrastructure and development software and organizes it into packages to solve enduring problems for enterprise computing.". It's more about support of base OS. Really. All the packaging stuff makes that possible, but the various products that Red Hat buys and sells are tiny in comparison.

Whether we like it or not, if you are building building-block software the expectation is now that these components be OSS. Proprietary software is generally viewed as acceptable in SaaS apps and end-user products, but is growing less acceptable in application substrates, programming languages, and the like.

Red Hat is doing well because of a lot of big (read: bank) customers needing expertise on kernel/hardware related issues, other companies will likely grow differently.

If people are asking for "another" Red Hat, what do they want? It's really a meaningless phrase in a way. I don't think they want Red Hat's various ancillary products, I think they mean something with the teeth of an operating system company.

Red Hat is great, and in many ways still is. There are many more interesting things to do instead. The comparison of thing-that-is-a-company-but-not-in-the-same-space with Red Hat is typical VC meaningless-ness question.

Maybe it's asking "can something get so big without being an OS company". I think it can, because the OS is largely a solved problem, and there is lots to be done is going to appear on top of it - but I'd also rather companies didn't try to get that big, and just concentrate on making one or two awesome things, and there being lots of awesome things.
تحميل الوسيط القاهرة عدد الجمعة 1/5/2015 – تراخيص
> I've spent 1,5 years working on this project

So wouldn't it make more sense to just buy a huge display then? :)
A tad misleading. It's "based" in the UK, but all the actual antennas are in South Africa and Australia.

I'm looking forward to the results from this monster. You can't get much bigger than this without soon leaving the planet.
Trading cards of Scientists and Engineers
wait... its not april 1st? awesome. :)
That's a pity. From what I read, the Padova, Italy bid was better in several ways, so it came down to politics. Apparently, the UK threatened to pull out of the project entirely if their candidate was not chosen.

http://italy.skatelescope.org/2015/03/13/informazioni-sulla-... (Italian)

I'm a bit biased myself, living in Padova, but it's objectively a pretty good place for something like this, just like it was a good place for Galileo in his day.
Waiting for the Dean Kamen trading card to show up on eBay... :-)
Looking for some honest feedback on Maid Referral website
Hey everyone,

A week ago I recently launched my new business, maidsofnj.com, a maid referral business based in NJ. I'm always looking for honest opinions on my work so I thought I'd ask you all to please give me your feedback on my website. I'd like to know what you think when you first visit the website. Does it build trust? If you were a potential customer and you need your home cleaned by a professional, would you pull out your credit card and book an appointment with us with no hesitation?

I'm excited to see how I can improve my website :)
discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8614198 earlier
Software Development Metrics – Interview with David Nicolette
Very cool. But I was surprised to see he chose Mercator.

See: https://xkcd.com/977/
Unless my memory of history is mistaken, armed revolution was a last resort after more reasonable means of redressing political wrongs failed. As for the civil war, the South refused to abide by the outcome of the political process and they were brought back in line through the use of overwhelming force by the lawfully-established government.
So if Justice Roberts was feeling slightly different one morning, we should have punished Obama for trying to pass an unconstitutional law?
these diagrams are ubiquitous - it's funny they are the same diagrams in both electrical engineering and theoretical physics

e.g. Topological Quantum Field Theory
http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/17031/topological-qua...
Apple Watch: My First Impressions on Smart Watch
I sure hope so, on a smaller scale. I fully plan to bite into Matlab's market with GNU Octave. Wish me luck, folks!
First sentences of the article:

"Where the streets have no name," sang rock frontman Bono on one of U2's biggest hits.
"It must be hell being a postman, then," came the sarcastic rejoinder from the music press.

But the system they come up with is still hell for a postman. He either remembers the 111111 three-word combinations for his square kilometer of delivery, or he can't work without an electronic device.

I see the problem, but hope that there are better solutions. Especially ones that are free: A non-free address system is absurd in my opinion, to put it mildly.
Kratka istorija vereničkog prstena
That's roughly what compression algorithms (zip, rar, arj, etc) do, identify repeated bits of information and store where there are ocurrences of these.

For lossy audio compression algorithms like mp3 and ogg, they use psychoacustic techniques, removing information the human ear can't hear, like very high or very low frequencies (that's why they're lossy). MP3 does something like slicing the signal in small fragments, applying some mathematical functions to them, like the Modified Discrete Cosine Transform (similar to Fourier Transform or FFT), then removing some components of it.

The technique you're describing would pretty much be equivalent of using samples and sequence them, which would be akin to reinventing the .mod format (.mod, .s3m, .xm etc)

To use samples though, you need the individual samples. To identify and extract the samples from the song would be much more difficult, unless maybe each instrument was in its own track or channel.
Yeah I know right. No wonder this game crashes. When you press the space bar it sends a message, when you move your mouse it sends a message. The message is in function U() (its the Y position, X position and some other value I've confirmed its not magnitude don't really know what it does). As soon as the connection is established it starts sending, although if you don't move the mouse it doesn't send a message. Then there is a message to update the players view of the game.
"GPL, however, is nearly useless in the cloud."

Only as a commercial weapon (which was never the intent) - for other readers, MySQL is dual licensedm and it's possible to use it already without being subject to the GPL, obviously. There wasn't much pickup for Affero, all told. In many ways, it's nicer, because people who are not distributing apps are more likely to use GPL applications (though if they understand linkage, they shouldn't fear it anyway). License choices are not that important.

There are definitely ways to build proprietary application components without requiring GPL. (i.e. solutions around a GPL application that don't require directly extending the core of it with proprietary bits). Numerous examples.

The other model is basically building something that is a software consultancy / helpdesk / services org. And that's a lot of what Red Hat is.

Today, it seems many more projects are actually going full Apache. Because it's easy to extend something, it's not declining. It's accelerating.

If you make your own extensions to something and don't get them upstream, you lose the advantage of being able to consume easily what happens upstream. And that upstream development is increasingly funded by people who work at companies using those solutions - or selling them.

Cloud just makes everything to deploy faster and on even larger scale; being able to host something behind a .com in pre-widescale-cloud days was still a thing.
Bjarne Stroustrup: Thoughts about C++17 [pdf]
Instagram using expired SSL certificate
GitHub could extend their offerings to the broader market of distributed/collaborative content creation.
I thought that too, but on the other hand it is not readily apparent where you'd get a good non-mercator map raster.
Instagram SSL cert expired
This guy "loves world maps" but chose Mercator for the wall of his room? I guess there's no accounting for taste. There are hundreds of projections to choose from, why choose the one optimized for navigation by compass?
If I was going to pick a relational database system, I'm not sure these would be the criteria I'd use:

CSV support - if you do that much CSV extract/transform/load (or indeed, any kind of ETL work), use an ETL tool. SQL Server comes with SQL Server Integration Services for that kind of thing.

Ergonomics of dropping and creating tables and stored procedures - the author's example is probably the toughest way I can think of to drop a table. It's easier to check sys.all_objects (which will catch anything - functions, views, procs, etc).

Operating system choice - well, in 2015, if you're going to mention that, you should be thinking cloud services anyway. They're both available in the cloud - and at which point, who cares what OS it runs on?

Goes on and on. I'm a SQL Server guy, and if I was going to make a list of how to choose a relational database platform, here's what I'd probably list:

* Up-front cost (license, maintenance)

* Ease of finding staff, and their costs

* Ease of finding tooling, and its cost

* Ease of finding scalable patterns (proven ways to grow it)

I don't think either platform is a loser on those counts - it's hard to go wrong with either one.
If the police are a menace, then protest to the mayor and city council. If the city council and mayor are not responsive, then vote them out of office. There is also recourse to the state government and the media as needed. Ghandi faced a much worse situation in India and succeeded without looting or rioting.
Boston Bitcoin Startup [Circle] Adds $50M from Goldman Sachs, IDG
I notice python3 is twice as slow.
Level 3 and Verizon Enter into Interconnection Agreement
The fact that you even have to use phrases like "a very native like experience" should be enough to show you that JS+HTML5 is not yet enough.
How to Maximize Your Rental Space
This was also my first reaction. "Nice Africa-sized Greenland you have there.."
Because there isn't a law against enacting unconstitutional laws. Actions are legal by default.

I suspect that if you try to write a coherent rule set that would punish those who vote to enact unconstitutional laws, you might find the solution worse than the problem. For instance, think about the relationship between punishable votes and secret elections.
Does anybody offer a cheap (like $5 a month cheap) VPS you could run GNU/Hurd on? I am feeling a perverse need to run a website on it. Or maybe that's still a bad idea at this point?
HTML5 Shoot-Out: How Chrome, Safari, Firefox, IE, and Opera Measure Up
Apple Watch Review
It's pretty clear that he's not talking about asymptotically faster than n log(n), but faster on real machines. While optimisations---like in-place partitioning, tail recursion, and using insertion sort when your problem size falls below a threshold (e.g. less than 16 objects)---won't change asymptotical complexity, they will make your implementation run five times faster.

Asymptotic notation hides the constant factors, which is good when you're talking about asymptotic growth. But when you want a practically fast algorithm, constant factors matter!
تياترو مصر اليوم الجمعة 1-5-2015
Also IPython is moving towards splitting the notebook part(Jupyter) and python part(IPython), so you can run any language in notebook (like IHaskell).

Details are in IPython changelog:

> 3.x will be the last monolithic release of IPython, as the next release cycle will see the growing project split into its Python-specific and language-agnostic components. Language-agnostic projects (notebook, qtconsole, etc.) will move under the umbrella of the new Project Jupyter name

https://jupyter.org/

http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/3/whatsnew/version3.html
>It's a shame stuff like this doesn't occur more often, it really adds flavour to the game.

I'm not sure. WoW as of today looks like it's engineered to avoid the slightest inconvenience or annoyance to players. :P
"Scheme to eradicate" means that eradication was the goal, doesn't mean that the scheme was successful.
Contrarily I would expect a clause prohibiting unconstitutional laws in pretty much every single constitution ever written.

As you say however, constitutions rarely define crimes, and so making the passing of unconstitutional laws a crime would be an unexpected outlier. This is not however what I am talking about.

In passing a law that knowingly violates the constitution, the politicians are acting to _enable_ crimes, or rather, actions considered crimes under existing legislation. This action takes place before the new (later to be hopefully struck down) law is passed, and should be considered a criminal act.

As far as knowing what they are doing affecting their conviction or punishment, I fully agree that not understanding that their actions will lead to "necessarily criminal" consequences, should be considered a mitigating factor.
Maybe because he used Google Maps, and they use Mercator?
They're free to work for whoever they want. No one is forcing anyone to drive for Uber, they're doing it voluntarily. Why forcibly stop consensual behaviour?
Quietly is a funny way to put it since I've heard it in the news three or four times lately.

Each time I hear about it I think of a hollywood heist movie that starts and finishes quickly when the robbers simply figure out how to manipulate things so they're the uber driver delivering the package they want.
Does anyone know how to achieve this for individual states of India? I would like to have huge maps printed for individual states which shows even the big villages.Is this possible? Or atleast can we do this for big cities like Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi?
Hm, is the use of the preeny library really necessary to get nginx reading from stdin? Couldn't you just 'cat' your fuzzed input files to 'nc' which then connects to the socket nginx is listening to?
After seeing the title I assumed the verdict would be that MS SQL is way better. If I wrote a comparison that's how the result would end up. I've used MS SQL from 1998 and PostgreSQL from 2001 and have found MS SQL much easier to use. Different strokes for different folks I guess.
Yep. I drove a cab for about a year (2003ish, college town of ~200,000 people), and the company I drove for did this. It wasn't a big business, but there were a few substantial accounts, notably the local university hospital system, which sent around a lot of specimens in very serious-looking containers. Pre-ubiquitous GPS, shared taxi dispatching and routing involved a lot of yelling and guessing.
Privacy updates: Some revisions to our policies (EU accounts moved to Ireland)
I see what you mean. Without the rule of law, effective policing, healthcare, transportation networks, etc, investment in education meets resistance to use. The best Intel engineer can't make microchips if sent back to a Paleolithic beach. She's still missing civilization.
Hilarious that i've tried this one but not the IPython one.

It's actually quite nice and very promising but still a little raw and rough around the edges. It's just great to see an open source project to compete with the commercial ones that seem to be popping up all over the place. And it's very modular so it could be used for more than just Spark based jobs.
I was hoping to see what he learned was projections.

Still better than no map on the wall. The style looks lovely at this scale! I would have made my own map from NE and OSM data but not everyone knows how much great data is available for free and how easy making maps with it is. We who know should do a better job of sharing.
I tried 5% of what you did and failed... Basically I would pay for one... I guess this one is saved on the project list backburner.

www.kayatilev.com most of my work is furniture. Finishing up a coffee table would love feedback.
quite this is first worlders trying to nickle and dime poor third world country's

Access to clean water and basic medical services will do far more.
Remind me all you want but forward looking statements made with certitude about brand new services require at a minimum something that allows you to look into the future. Either that or they are premature at best and possibly quite wrong.
One of America's great strengths has always been its respect for authority and commitment to law and order. The founders of America were also realists and they knew that governments tend to accrue power when left the opportunity to do so. Having an armed citizenry serves as a protective measure of last resort and was based on the model of Switzerland. The intent is not to allow people to run around shooting people up as a form of protest against lawful government action; but as a means to protect against unlawful government tyranny.
>Rather difficult to extinguish an open source project that in no way depends on Microsoft.

ahem, There was a court case about this sort of thing, U.S. v. Microsoft. Java wasn't open source, yet but I still think it is relevant to your first comment. The issue is not what MS can do to Arduino, but what MS can do that causes trouble for people on other OS platforms.

I'm not proposing that this is an MS strategy, but that sort of thing is not unprecedented in MS' past, so it's not unreasonable that some might be skeptical of MS' intentions. In reality, the open source hardware hobbyist movement is so small that it defies good sense to think it could be a critical part of a MS dirty tricks campaign. OTOH, maybe MS is really bullish for the IoT.

>You can buy Arduino clones from China - I've never paid the 'official' Arduino or Sparkfun mark up.

Good for you!

> You can make your own minimalistic board since the bootloader is freely available.

You're right in that the bootloader is a big part of the magic here. A freely available bootloader, and a barely-passable IDE (that runs on any platform) are the two things that set Arduino apart from all of the other similarly capable kits that came before it. If you appreciate the bootloader, you might consider paying the "'official' Arduino markup" at least once.

>You could even go barebones and learn to code for AVR chips without Arduino getting in the way (it's cheaper and leaner).

You could, but it's not cheaper, since you'll need an AVRISP, or something similar, you'll also need to spend a lot of time learning about microprocessor minutiae before you ever get to anything interesting.

No, worst case is more like Arduino focuses on MSVS interoperability and sort of abandons the cross-platform IDE; but it wouldn't make much difference now anyway. I hope it turns out well and ends up introducing more people to open source hardware; and I doubt it will cause anyone to adopt Windows over Linux or OSX.
Also, is doing flow control using exceptions an acceptable pattern in the OCaml world?

Like in Java:

try {
print(awesomeObj.getSomeState());
} catch(NullPointerException npe) {
awesomeObj = AwesomeObj.getInstance();
}

would be considered very bad. You would instead be expected to do:

if (awesomeObj == null) awesomeObj = AwesomeObj.getInstance();
print(awesomeObj.getSomeState());

(how do you <code-wrap> stuff on here?)
nope, AFL is highly tuned and won't run external programs, if it did, performance would take an incredible dive.
Or a decent high res LED projector, would have cost less than the foam board he stuck the map to and he could have it done in a day.