skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As much as I hate the title of this post, I think the author has a point.

I've also seen this same thing come up when comparing implementations of quicksort in Haskell to that of other languages. They always show a short, elegant implementation in Haskell, but the issue is that it's not really quicksort as it doesn't do the sort in place.
(edit: The above commenter deleted their post as I wrote my reply. They made the point that the traditional architecture of offloading email and image processing is suitable for background queues/workers and don't necessarily need to be services. This is very true; my reply points out when you might actually want to do it.)

They don't have to be, but they can be.

For image processing, you might to process (and cache) images on the fly. This is very, very useful for companies that manage a lot user uploaded media. Processing images in the background forces you to decide ahead of time what dimensions, formats, filtering, etc you want. Adding another image variant means running a backfill on all existing images. There are a few open source libraries that exist (I contributed to https://github.com/oysterbooks/halfshell, but there are others) and SASS solutions (https://www.imgix.com/).

For sending emails, I've built an API that does more than simply route emails to a 3rd party. The marketing team was given a simple interface to edit transactional email templates, A/B test them, track engagement, manage unsubscribe lists, and embed dynamic content. This service also sent SMS and push notifications.

It really depends.
I tried with the sample pictures on my computer, and it recognized all of them - some with uncanny accuracy.

I uploaded some photos which I took recently. It recognized them to fairly well.

Changing the orientation of an image, even if the orientation is provided in the metadata, seems to trip it up though.

Overall, amazing. Considering that it is from the Wolfram stable, not much of a surprise!
Ys 1.1
Yes, without accent detection, the 'limericks' it finds can generally only be read with forced stresses, and the rhyming schemes it winds up with can be quite weak (rhyming an unstressed 'the' at the end of two lines, for example).

Ironically, by not knowing how to properly handle a stress-unstress syllable pair at the end of a line, this program would completely miscue on any limericks it finds with a first line that ends in 'Nantucket'
Ask HN: Is there a list of “demo days” anywhere?
Agile fails at most companies because they fail to understand that Agile is a culture not a process. Take the first statement of the manifesto, to allow the individuals to interact you have devolve responsibility down to the level where individuals can make decisions without having to run it up the ladder.

This scares the crap out of alpha executives and so they throw process and tools to ensure that the individuals interact in the "correct" way defeating the whole effort.
Wow nice idea.
Why Are Palo Alto's Kids Killing Themselves?
I think that's the problem - there's no effective mechanism to penalize a short-term tenant for excessive noise, parking violations, smoking on premises, etc.

Faced with lack of efficient mechanisms, HOAs or city councils after hearing a few horror stories just throw the baby with the bathwater by outlawing all short-term stays, even if 99% of short-term stays are quiet decent non-confrontational tenants.
Fortunately there's a decent subtitle and we can just use that.
Hey there, what's your seasonal gene expression?
I think what you hear me saying is "never do anything less than perfect work". I'm saying "given your current constraints, don't choose a worse option when a better one is available". Those constraints include time, your skills and beliefs, the environment you work in, the project you're working on, and the problem you're trying to solve.
> The 'free market' doesn't address safety well; that's why we have regulations.

We also have bonding, insurance and civil liability, which serve the same purpose in a more flexible way.
I know. I just wanted a provocative title.
Securing Cloud Hypervisors Without Massive Re-Engineering (2012) [pdf]
> However, I see this same mistake (CS == programming) propagated online by people who should know better.

"CS != Programming" is also a mistake. An over-generalization, at best. A good CS program will involve a lot of programming and be a great foundation for becoming a programmer.
There is a related idea: refactor code that you need to change, don't refactor code if there is no other change you want to make.
It strikes me as a little absurd to say that taking shortcuts is always a bad idea. Let's look at a few shortcuts you might take.

Allow the page to break if the user's browser does not support websockets
If you know that 95% of your target audience uses modern browsers this seems like a reasonable compromise.

Don't write enough unit tests
Maybe you're using a library that is difficult to mock. Maybe most of your logic is happening at the db layer. Eventually you may want to thoroughly test this piece of code, but it's a ton of work to mock a database in a meaningful way.

Write a monolithic service instead of a modular one
While it's bad to let a single service grow too large, when you're starting out, it can be helpful to write it all out, and _then_ see how it can be broken apart. (It's often hard to foresee everything at the design stage.)

Finally, a lot of code ends up being never used. Nobody cares about well-factored well-tested code that isn't used. Sometimes a dirty version is the quickest way to tell if a project makes sense at all.
Makerbook – A directory of free resources for creatives
Advice from a Serial Life Reinventor
Some of the underlying details (mostly non-technical): https://www.imageidentify.com/about/how-it-works

The function in the Wolfram Language is called ImageIdentify (obviously):
http://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/ImageIdentify.html

A blogpost from Stephen Wolfram about this site and related topics:
http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2015/05/wolfram-language-arti...
Hi. There's nothing out of the box for API authentication. But I set up authentication in less than an hour for my app yesterday. You really want to learn how Plug works, and doing that opens up so many possibilities. I'm frustrated that there are so many things missing right now, because I'm used to Rails where everything exists right now. But I'm finding that having to do these things myself helps me really learn how Elixir works and it's opening up a lot of possibilities.
Tldr google no longer use vpns for corp access
I'm struggling to observe any consistency on your part.

You say we are hypersensitized to death, yet also think it's not a big deal.

We are trying to solve the problem of death, yet in doing so we are disconnected to it. The implication being that the drive to achieve immortality and/or extend lifespans is some recent phenomenon that emerged in the last century, which is patently false, and that trying to reason about ending a phenomenon means we are oblivious of its true nature, which is again false, and odd.

In addition, I'm skeptical of your implication that the rate of emotional sensitivity to death increases with more exposure to it. It should be the opposite.
So basically Ocaml was faster because it was FFI?
Until people realize that if you reduce the number of HIV negative people, the odds of winning for those left increase.
Yup, we're aware of and working on the orientation issue! Thanks for trying it!
I don't know that I agree with him, but consider:

As long as people upvote "I learnt something I agree with," and not "I learnt something I disagree with," the effect is the same, the amplification is just tuned a bit. Having a different standard for upvotes and downvotes doesn't do much. If you get less upvotes, it is effectively as if you got more downvotes.
I'm talking about energy as well. In order to project how much energy bitcoin will use, you need to understand the incentives. Could you clarify what you meant by increasing energy use?
If you like this you might like https://twitter.com/anagramatron
As a Santa Monica resident, I think this is great.

Santa Monica has, by some indices, the most expensive hotel rooms in the state. This has driven a huge demand for short rentals near the beach. I have no access to numbers but my personal anecdata is interesting for the number of people I know involved in grey-market short term rentals and the number of people unable to find available apartments, let alone available apartments anywhere near the rents 2-3 years ago pre-AirBnB.

I did protracted apartment searches in the same area of Santa Monica in November 2012 and 2014 and the difference in price and availability was immense. At the same time I had one friend who was making a full time job out of "hosting" for AirBnB-ed condos and apartments either bought or rented in the past year by deep-pocketed "investors" in Malibu and Santa Monica with the sole purpose of short term rentals. I know another young lady who rents three apartments and lives in whichever one is earning the least on AirBnb. She nets about $1000 a month doing this and manages to take 3 single residential units off the market in the process.

There's a lot of people doing variations on this business model and it is absolutely pushing out the longer term residents. I've seen many of my beach friends (mostly involved in entertainment, good living wages but not anything like tech wages) progressively pushed further and further afield as random housing events (unit selling, massive renovation, roommate disputes) mean they cannot afford to relocate anywhere near the place that they are leaving. That is also despite their earnings increasing through normal career progression.

My parents came to visit last Christmas and they used AirBnB to rent a back house for a week a few blocks from my apartment. It was great. Do I think that shouldn't be allowed? No, but considering their host was running a year-round business out of their home I don't think it is unreasonable to treat them like a business.
>But a good programmer always sees a number of solutions to a particular problem. Let's say he sees 10 solutions. Solution 1 costs an hour to implement, but gives crappy code and he knows it. Solution 9 gives good quality code, but takes a week to implement, and he then has to sell this to his boss.

A good programmer will try and improve code the code incrementally, and won't bother trying to sell anything.
I am sure that most developers want to deliver working code of reasonable quality (most likely not hacks)

I am sure that most product/project managers want feature as soon as they can think of it
In the past 15 years I've been in a situation twice where shipping something NOW was more important than taking the time to do the needed cleanup. Simply because the competition was breathing down our neck, and taking a break to refactor stuff would just give them an opportunity to bury us. And who's going to care about your code quality then?

And it wasn't just crappy web apps or throwaway MVP stuff. The first one was in medical systems, where the suits figured we had a 6 month lead on our closest competitor, the other was in consumer electronics (navigation devices), in the time that competition was still stiff in that sector.

In both cases it was decided that releasing something was more important, knowing full well that we had to pay the cost later. Of course not everyone agreed with it, since no one likes having to work with legacy crap, and everyone and their mother always wants to refactor all the things, but guess what: code quality is not the goal of your company, making money is.
It's annoying particularly because Haskellers are perfectly aware of the problems with the example, but have struggled on the mailing list to come up with something which:

1. Could make at least some sense to somebody that knows zero Haskell

2. Isn't too trivial

3. Isn't leaning too heavily on libraries

4. Is at least somewhat "real"/performant

Your example doesn't address any of the constraints of the medium.

If you can think of a better example for that part of the website, it would be welcomed on the mailing list.

I've been watching people try to figure out something that isn't too weak in any of those dimensions for months and now you're going to post an article with a title calling them liars because you want more attention for your blog? What would satisfy you? Renaming the sieve function? What do we need to do to prevent people like you from writing an article like this again?

Edit: There, I fixed it and it's merged https://github.com/haskell-infra/hl/pull/114

We're calling it a filter instead of a sieve.
> Assuming you acknowledge the existence of ideas, a better question would be "is meme theory a useful or accurate model of how ideas behave?"

Yes, exactly. It's like complaining that gravity isn't "real" because nobody's touched it. That may be so, but it's real enough in that we can observe its effects and use those observations to make accurate predictions about the behavior of objects in space. If meme theory can do the same for the behavior of ideas in social groups, it's real enough too.
So, may be KDE should use embedded Servo instead of Qt WebKit? Or even better, make that engine pluggable to allow choice?
Just yesterday somebody posted about their house getting trashed by AirBnB renters. So its started already. Who's insurance is responsible? Is it a civil matter, or criminal? What rights do the owners have, to charge the renter's credit card for damages?
So, where do you draw the line?

Hawaii, for example, is pretty poor. If we halted the renting of property, then presumably available long term housing availability would increase... yada yada yada, housing prices become more affordable.

At the same time, tourism would crater and the locals would have less income.... yada yada yada, housing is relatively expensive again (until some unknown economy evolves).

If you think the idea of letting some unknown economy evolve to make up the deficit from tourism is morally/ethically acceptable, then is it not morally/ethically acceptable for me to say "people should move to where they can afford housing?"

Besides, shouldn't outsiders be allowed to enjoy the natural beauty of a place? They need to sleep somewhere when they visit.

My only concerns are 1) the diminishment of property rights and 2) the idea that we can artificially force equilibrium without negative feedback. I'm not in favor of gentrification, but I do believe property values should reflect demand.

I don't think the idea is black & white, nor is this some libertarian position.
The author does not understand the notion of falsifiability.

It is not necessary that we have the technology to discover the physical manifestation of memes right now for them to be a valid scientific hypothesis, only that in principle we can someday conduct tests that may potentially refute the hypothesis. This does not mean that memes do definitely exist. It just means that the proposal for their existence is scientific and rational, pending further investigation.

On the other hand, the notion of faith in God is, by definition, not a falsifiable theory; no experiments can ever be done, even in principle, to disprove faith, since it is by definition an extra-rational concept that proposes you should accept its veracity without evidence, and indeed despite any evidence that it may not be true. This is an anti-scientific theory.

The two proposals are thus fundamentally different in terms of how they -- on their own terms -- suggest you should evaluate their veracity. One is scientific (that is, falsifiable); the other is not.
> I believe that b!/(b-n)! is asymptotically the same class as b^n

Nope. It looks like it at first glance, but it isn't.

Look at what happens when n == b/C:

b^(b/C) / (b!/(b - b/C)!) ==
b^(b/C) / (b!/(b*(C-1)/C)!) ==
e^(log(b^(b/C)) + log((b/C)!) - log((b*(C-1)/C)!)) ~=
e^(b/C log(b) + [b*(C-1)/C] log (b*(C-1)/C) - [b*(C-1)/C] - b log b + b) ==
e^((b+b (-1+C) log((-1+C)/C))/C) ==
e^(b/C* (1+(C-1)log((C-1)/C)))

(I used Stirling's Approximation, namely the form ln(x!) ~= x ln x - x for large x)

However, note that (1+(C-1)log((C-1)/C)) / C is greater than zero for all C > 1, as 1+(C-1)log((C-1)/C) > 0 for all C > 1. As such, this diverges for all C > 1.
Android Work Profiles has this covered, if you would want to use your own android phone.

It also means you allow your device to be managed remotely by the company (i.e. purged if lost/stolen).
In Europe, RIPE has market place for that.
You can even see transfers there https://www.ripe.net/manage-ips-and-asns/resource-transfers-...
They pass the collected taxes onto the government, and probably have the same opinion on hotel taxes as a retail shop would have on sales tax - it would boost business somewhat, if it were lower, but oh well.

From personal anecdotal experience, when traveling alone for short term, chain hotels are frequently cheaper than AirBnB - the host has to hit you up with cleaning fee per stay, while a large hotel has economies of scale working in its favor as far as cleaning, parking, utility bills and other stuff.
Can someone explain the fascination of the so called 'asian medicine market' with rhino horns, tiger bones and penis and other such endangered animal parts ? I had earnestly hoped that viagra and other erectile dysfunction medication would rid the blackmarket for tiger bones but that hasn't happened in the least bit.
Actually it's very well suited to it (well, in theory at least - haven't tried it yet). You can render the same html on the server as on the client, using node.js, so you can build a page on the server and then let the JS enabled client take over after the initial page load, or let the server do the work for the non-JS enabled browser.
At a fundamental level, video games are about control---what you can control and how, when, in what contexts. It is the interactivity of the game media that separates it from other media.

Death acts as a convenient lose-state because it's at first approximation a loss of control---transitioning from life to death (for a player-controlled avatar) is transitioning from a state where you can control an aspect of the world directly via your will to a point where your will no longer has bearing on the simulation playing out. It's convenient to use that no-control state as an indication that the player has done something "incorrect," i.e. "You messed up, we're going to punish you by time-out in the corner" (even if the time-out is just the few moments it takes to respawn).

All of that having been said, I wouldn't agree with the author that death in games is a "crutch," per se, but I think there are other facets of death that are explorable that most games do not. Some games do; Wing Commander and the much-maligned Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor have the interesting aspect in that your decisions in play would cost you members of your team---and those costs were permanent (for a given session of the game's linear narrative). But in terms of what the player directly experiences, death is often just cutting of the strings between the controller and the on-screen avatar. Maybe there's room to grow there?
>Seriously every vulnerability will have it's own cool name and a website now?

is your argument that awareness of this issue would have been better if there wasn't a cool name and website?
The discussion is over here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9538437

Other sources:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9541450 (securityaffairs.co)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9541500 (thehacktimes.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9541369 (zdnet.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9539206 (tripwire.com)
The discussion is over here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9538437

Other sources:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9541450 (securityaffairs.co)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9541500 (thehacktimes.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9541369 (zdnet.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9538583 (tripwire.com)
Really late, but thanks! It works!
The discussion is over here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9538437

Other sources:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9541450 (securityaffairs.co)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9541500 (thehacktimes.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9539206 (tripwire.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9538583 (tripwire.com)
Not knowing is the important part. If you know the question is unsolved, you already have an 'answer' for it: it's 'unsolved.'
The discussion is over here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9538437

Other sources:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9541500 (thehacktimes.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9541369 (zdnet.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9539206 (tripwire.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9538583 (tripwire.com)
You have like 1.000.000 js libs from external sources, mostly from Social Networks and you think about maintance and third party dependencies?
Oh my god..

Dude, there are so many Tools around JavaScript at that time, that you should prolly stop integrating 1 million Social Sites and instead focus on JavaScript and testing.
Especially when you want your site to be faster.
> One he rents very cheap via some sort of rent control/housing assistance program

He is probably not untitled to housing assistance if he has another apartment. He should make as much money as possible and stop that scheme because if he get caught doing that he may go to prison for fraud.
The discussion is over here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9538437

Other sources:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9541450 (securityaffairs.co)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9541369 (zdnet.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9539206 (tripwire.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9538583 (tripwire.com)
Watch this kid's YouTube channel - you don't need anything as fancy as a 3D printer or even a lathe. Basic welding or even just sawing off pipes gets you a lot. Here's a handgun he made at home:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFzmt3q3msQ
I'm starting to believe that debt is the wrong metaphor. Imagine you have 1k in debt and 2k in the bank. You're free to pay down that debt, so you do. If you later realize that you actually need that 1k used for the debt, you can simply take out a new loan and effectively undo that step. This is precisely where the tech-debt analogy breaks. When you invest a month into fixing tech debt, you can't get that month back. That decision is final.
Long-Range Iris Scanning Is Here
Drexler's name is synonymous with the idea of a nano-robots and self-replication. I think he also coined the term "clanking replicator" to describe a traditional robotic approach to replication (eg. RepRaps, robot arms, etc.)

Ralph Merkle (of public key cryptograpy fame) has done some recent theoretical work, eg. his on "nanofactory", which consists of exponentially-smaller gantry-like systems (a bit like the print head on a cartesian 3D printer). He's also looked at "mechanochemistry" (forming molecules by moving specific atoms together in the right ways) and concrete studies of particular molecules, the energy levels and forces required, etc.

His most recent work I can find on Google Scholar are patents from a few years ago.

Some links:

http://www.molecularassembler.com/

http://www.molecularassembler.com/Nanofactory/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqyZ9bFl_qg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_nanotechnology

http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/04/six-degree-of-freedom-atomi...

Those are all "grey goo" ideas, ie. 'real' machines. There's also the "green goo" approach, repurposing biological systems like DNA, proteins and ribosomes, eg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_origami
Someone with more experience can correct me, but "low-level Haskell" is Haskell that takes into consideration things like evaluation order and thunks. It is stuff that many other languages would still consider way-high-level.
What is Lavaboom?