skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not over-diluting that could make it "ropey", it's over-chilling. Try putting a bottle of vodka in a freezer. As you chill spirits their viscosity increases. Shaking high ABV drinks with ice brings their temperature well below 0C. See:

http://www.cookingissues.com/index.html%3Fp=4585.html

Stirring is much less effective than shaking, but very long stirring could approach shaking temperatures. I think it's plausible that the viscosity difference could be perceptible.
The New Dictators Rule by Velvet Fist
Intersect that with what desperately needs doing and I think you're onto something.
To add to this, shaking introduces air into the drink and creates bubbles, changing the texture and look of the drink. A stirred martini will be clearer than a shaken one.
F# does a decent job with ADTs.
My university still teaches with PHP.
Wow, you're right. It didn't even occur to me that the domain would have any effect whatsoever.
It's a religious argument at best. Laravel is keeping php at the cutting edge in terms of frameworks. Php 7 in terms of core features and optimization.

Essentially, the same php naysayer article crops up a few times a year for the past 10 years.

Laravel is a pleasure to work with and excellent for any new company product you might be building no matter how big or small.
He might not be a Linux expert, but as someone who has admin'ed Linux systems since '94, and has used OpenVz in production since 2006, and LXC since 2007, I agree with his assessment of why people are flocking to Docker.

As a longtime OpenVz user it's a given that we have to migrate off it at some point. Until Docker, LXC or KVM were the viable alternatives for me, and neither appealed: LXC seemed too half baked, though the basic elements were there; KVM too heavy for our use.

Docker did appeal to me exactly because it provided a simple story around how to package up and distribute container images that made LXC simple (before they provided their own backend) and let us continue with containers instead of going the VM route.

With respect to the quote you give, it somewhat exaggerates how superficial the differences are, but not all that much: It is largely about how files are laid out and package management. But those are huge things because they pretty much define the whole system and how we interact with them.

Note how many projects out there are even trying to find ways of using Docker and similar to package user-level applications too...
Some results are pretty funny.

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~nitish/nips2014demo/results/84824...

Generated caption: "a man appears to be a banana on a tree"
Heh, this quote brought back memories:

> They use a hack to break the countdown timer just before it expires, creating an open-air LAN party.

I lived in Cuba from 2000-1, and back then the only way online was to buy cards granting a limited amount of dial-up access. I figured out that their accounting system restarted each day, and that if you stayed on over midnight, only the time in the second day was counted against you. So I was online every night from 8 to 12:01, losing only a minute of time. I also figured out the card didn't truly expired until the day after you used it up, so on your last day, you could be on and off as much as you wanted.

My honest guess is that these "hacks" are not only known by the workers but quite possibly created by them, so that they can get around the restrictions themselves. There's a tremendous amount of theft from workplaces in Cuba. How bored does an internet cafe worker have to get before they figure out a way to get online as much as they want. And if others figure it out, who cares?
I find that making ice from hot water produces clearer cubes. The theory behind this is that since cold water absorbs more gas it produces lower quality ice. Hot water may have more solids disolved in it but less gas and there is little opportunity for the water to absorb gas during the freezing process. Try it some time if you doubt this assertion.
I'm not sure I understand this comment enough to agree or disagree with it. The land etc which is Ordos today was appropriated by the state and they built a city on it. It neither destabilized nor affected the operation of the current government of China in the slightest as far as I can tell. This is the same system that decided to flood several cities so that they could build a giant dam. And while their were complaints, it really didn't do the residents much good then either. So I can't imagine a scenario in China where anything the Government chose to do, especially with the reallocation by fiat, of parts of the country to a different purpose, would result in any political instability whatsoever.
Recommended read: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Wrong.html

Hungarian Notation makes a lot more sense after reading that.
Agreed. Wordpress powers 25% of all websites!
I think PHP is good for web development, but the syntax of the language is really bad for people who might potentially go on to learn more languages. One prime example of the really bad sides of PHP is the ambiguity of collections contained within the PHP array(). Gone is the distinction of sets, linked lists, and maps -- they're all contained in this single, uniform data type.

One frustration I encountered at a job this month was attempting to port some code from Java to PHP, but it was a performance hit because some of the Java code being dependent on these primitive data types that were unavailable in PHP's core infrastructure. I heard they've planned to release these primitive data types to resolve the ambiguity, but I have yet to see it released.
What they have to do is prepare to do their jobs in the absence of the kind of programs that will no longer be authorized. Most likely what that means is they're going to do things like hire a bunch of lawyers to handle an increase in the number of requests they make to FISA courts.

What they're really doing here is what bureaucrats always do when you tell them they can't do something - this is the first step in a PR campaign to scare people into forcing Congress to reauthorize expansive data collection.
Show HN: KinWin.js – a minimalist DOM manipulation framework
The Startup as a commodity
And surprisingly, it isn't hard to find things people don't want to do or are too intimidated to do.

That doesn't mean managers will realize that value.

They will, when you're gone.
or this: http://www.skyscanner.net/jobs
It's going to get so exciting when we can mix VR and the real world. Racing is a bit boring though, I hope more interesting games arise.
Is this a buy opertunity for Cray stock?
It's not surprising, but it is disturbing. Because this result holds independent of the content being communicated. A good presentation doesn't just affect your evaluation of opinions, ethical arguments, or he-said-she-said judgements. It affects your evaluation of proofs, engineering decisions, and concrete physical evidence. Decisions that are formal enough, in the mathematical sense of the word, that we should be relegating them to computers if at all possible. That's disturbing.
Still confusingly, when you do select Sheets, the domain is still docs.google.com (as is the URL for the sheet itself).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9523128
That's not the case as I understand it. Portions of USA Patriot have sunset provisions - all Congress has to do to make them go away is nothing. They're not acting to stop anything.
Often once you do what nobody wants to do, those who declined the opportunity themselves have incentives to downplay the work you did and/or discredit you.

Quite frustrating.
Heroku Down – elb029931-26494784.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com [50.16.232.45]
Download Free 5KPlayer, best free media player with built-in AirPlay
I'm a PM at Microsoft and this post hits close to home. I think there are a good number of PMs that you're talking about. It's easy for the PM role to evolve into pure politics because our job is to represent the customer. Just like our government's politicians sometimes claim to represent the people and end up making selfish decisions, PMs aren't immune from that weakness. The role attracts people who are good at politics, so you tend to see a high concentration there.

Why do I still do the role? Well, it kind of fits what I wanted to do for a living. I always enjoyed doing lots of diversity in my job and trying all kinds of new technologies out. I get to be a customer for a living. I try out our product and think about where I want it to go. I can be annoying (a real customer would probably be a bit annoying sometimes too, they challenge your product and your hard worked design). I get to care for a living. As an engineer, I could see myself needing to let things go because it's gotta get out the door. As a PM, I know a customer is going to hit that issue and I need to get it in front of people so we can fix it. I'm building applications using our technology and competitors and technology not obviously related just to see if could be relevant.

The problems with PMs vs Engineers is that it is super hard to tell a good PM from a bad PM who is good at politics; but I'm still super happy the role exists. I'd likely have to become an evangelist to do the things I do everyday still, but I'd have less influence with the engineers and it'd often be reactive if I wasn't on the product team. To any people considering a job as a PM, do me and your other future customers a favor and ask if you can care more about your customer than having your job or being promoted? I've held fast to the notion that customers are why I'm here and my career hasn't been too bad so far, management still recognizes good work with customers. But if it all goes to hell, I can always find some other job and be happy with myself.
I agree.

Many middle class Danes still have less material wealth than most poor Americans. Whether material wealth buys happiness or a better lifestyle is a different question.

In the US people have the option to live wonderful lives but also the freedom to screw up (and a system that encourages some screw ups). In Denmark that wonderful life is materially limited more but there is less freedom to screw up.
Offline Chromebook Apps for Daily Use
The relevance (to Nash's death):
"Books one and two were clearly systems for encoding messages and were the first books written on cryptography, Dr. Reeds said." Very interesting if true.

The joke:

Trithemius offered plenty of hints, Dr. Reeds said. "He says that
there are elaborate calculations that you have to do, and he tells you
that you have to read the tables," he said. When Trithemius said that
people can send messages without using letters he probably just meant
they could use number codes instead.

Here's the article describing the solution:

Reeds, Jim. "Solved: the ciphers in book III of Trithemius's steganographia." Cryptologia 22.4 (1998): 291-317
http://profs.sci.univr.it/~giaco/download/Watermarking-Obfus...

The cipher used in book III is very simple, however. Throw out null values, reduce modulo 25, and map in reverse alphabetical order to Latin letters. The first two books of the Steganographia contain a "mind numbing variety" of other encoding methods.
Functional programming in Scala, one of my favorite functional programming books if you take the time to do each and every exercise. Coupled with it's solid Github repo (https://github.com/fpinscala/fpinscala) and companion book (https://leanpub.com/fpinscalacompanion), it's a winner.
Show HN: Mailnva: Outsource emails
> Also, since they're provably correct the "maintenance" metaphor is no longer applicable.

If you want your software to never change, then sure, a proof of correctness is enough. But I've yet to see a piece of software that is both relevant and never has to adapt to new requirements.
No but I'm necessarily right because I know how a foreclosure works. You don't lose your house after 2 months of non-payment, it takes months and there is a precise legal procedure that has to be complete. Mine was "fast" and it took 9 months.
At least one tech-oriented IRC channel has this, probably dozens more.
Many people fail to understand how Powershell is actually closer to the workflow from Xerox PARC OSes than UNIX shells.

Specially when they take UNIX way of computing as the only way, without room for any improvement.
> Why is it necessary to compare "language sizes" at all?

It seems relevant in the context of how difficult it is to master a given language, which spawned this thread of debate. Do you disagree that language size is any sort of barrier?

Again, only one metric, to be taken with a measure of salt. But would you prefer we compare languages based on gut feel? Or is comparing languages unnecessary as well?

> It's as pointless as the classic vim vs. emacs argument.

Understanding the merits of vim vs. emacs informs you which you might prefer. The answer to that argument, over which is "ultimately better" is certainly pointless. You can simply choose whichever works best for you, especially as you can change your mind mostly at will.

But people don't simply have the choice of "choose whichever works best for you" when it comes to programming languages on a team project. Nor are languages as fungible as editors when it comes to changing your mind - switching languages mid-project is a massive time sink, and frequently fatal to the project.
The difference between theory in practice is greater in practice than in theory.

NSA does not view itself bound by the US constitution (or the whole executive branch as a whole) and view it as a nuisance that must be at best circumvented to do their perceived job. (To the NSA guy reading this comment - have a nice day, it is tedious)
If that's earned as a salary then the answer is usually going to be managing a team of developers. Very few high earning developers get that much for actually writing code.
This was no accident.
Why not pawn the glock? Because you might get attacked by criminals while homeless?
When I was driving across the US with my wife and 4 kids a few years ago, we somehow ended up in Las Vegas one night with about $5 in change and nowhere to stay, thanks to extreme levels of stupidity by my bank which froze my cards (Thanks HSBC!!!). Faced with the possibility of sleeping overnight in a local park, I'm really, really glad we had firearms with us...
UNUM Predicts the Stanley Cup – UNANIMOUS A.I
Watch Robert De Niro tell graduates about dealing with rejection
Virtuozzo / OpenVZ brought container technology to hosting providers and according to Odin has now had over 1 million containers deployed. We use them for our company and wouldn't be able to achieve the reliability nor the performance without them.

We're also excited about Docker, because it brings a whole new set of tools to help complete the whole picture. The container system is just one small part of Docker, it's the whole toolset and platform which is why it's so popular. The best thing is, Docker will run in nested containers with Virtuozzo / OpenVZ, so you can take direct advantage of both technologies.
17 Year Old “Swatter” Admits to 23 Offenses of Extortion and Criminal Harrassment
No, it's just common sense when it comes to finance. But common sense isn't really all that common. I have the nice house and car, but I also have enough saved that if I my wife and I were both to lose our jobs tomorrow we could live for 6 to 10 years unemployed.

That is not a brag; nor is it a situation I want to be in. The point is that people need to be responsible and live below their means. There are trade offs to be made. I like sports cars, but I waited to get one until I could pay it off and not be carrying a huge loan. There is something to be said for delayed gratification.
To be fair shouldn't your manger be the one shielding you from all this crap.

Thats how things work in my job - which is in the "non-software" engineering world. I'm an engineer I do technical work it is the responsibility of my manager, (who is a former engineer) to sit in on all the meetings so I can get on with my work if something relevent to me or our team comes up he disseminates it to us.

We had an issue last year. Our team was working on a largish project and we had one of those micromanaging PM's who was bugging a collegaue and I, similar thing to your complaints constainly demanding status updates from us trying to sneak scope/specification changes through the backdoor etc. All it took was one complaint to our manager and he tore the meddling PM a new one.

After that everything came down through the approriate chanels and we were able to deal with things in peace, we didn't have to waste hours dealing with an incompetant project manager. I'm not usually a fan of "top heavy" management structures but in this case perfect example of management working as intended.
Thanks for that. Yes, there are definitely some circumstances where thinking in terms of risk is a plus.

As a bit of a dovetail, I had another random thought after typing the previous message. Technical debt is a little bit different than monetary debt because if I borrow money to leverage the business, the business (hopefully) grows in the same currency that I borrowed. I make more money and can pay it back.

Technical debt is different because even if I make a lot of money by taking a technical short cut, it doesn't mean I will have the capability of repaying the "loan". The people who made that short cut may not be capable of refactoring the code. Hiring people who can do the work seems like it would help, but then you have all the problems discussed in the original article.

Looking at it from the risk perspective, it can be a lot clearer that you might want to avoid the situation right from the off. Although the person who prompted me to write my response has unfortunately been entirely unhelpful, I suspect that's what they were ultimately thinking. "Will you actually be able to pay off this technical debt even if you grow the business?" Sometimes you can look at your staff and say that the risk of failure is nearly 100% ;-)
Presumably we believe people wouldn't invest time and energy going to great lengths to present something that isn't true in a well-designed and complex way. Which is stupid really, because the effort someone will put in is almost always related to the reward they get out rather than anything to do with truth - if presenting something false has a high return people will go to great lengths to present it extremely well.
That is natural selection - evolution can happen without natural selection.
I'm not sure I understand what Obama had to do with anything?
PHP is a fantastic hackers language.

Easy to pick up, easy to code, powerful, lots of quick tips and google answers any problem. I'll be using it till the very end.
Show HN: MindFind: Find your ideal mastermind group
I like how two of the options to this one (http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~nitish/nips2014demo/results/84291...), of a guy at the gym, are

"a woman in a kitchen, leaps in the air while attempting to balance a glass cup in one hand."

and

"a young man playing wii in front of a large knife."
Agreed. When I said "maintenance" I was referring to the continuous post hoc work needed to uphold the original functionality as it encounters the full range of it's potential input.
The Shift in Assets
Is there a culture of civic disobedience in Australia?

You could have some people teaching number theory to people in public places as a form of protest.
Lessons in Growing Revenue from Twitter’s Latest Acquisition, TellApart [video]
Las radiaciones inalambricas, principales riesgos en espacios de trabajo
It doesn't matter what Powershell does and doesn't do. People aren't going to learn yet another shell scripting language just because someone at Microsoft wanted to get promoted and rolled a new one. I want Windows shell to look like UNIX, to be scriptable exactly the same, and to have a proper SSH remote login. Apple managed to do this with OS X. Microsoft is denying the reality and substituting it with their own.
There are many caveats* to consider when routing through Tor. It would be a bad idea to just silently do so when the user engages private mode. Incorporating Tor as a 'super-private' mode or whatever would be great, but it should be possible to use normal private mode without it.

*In particular the information that you share with the exit node. Especially if you're not aware you're using Tor, it would be easy to share identifiable information.
At first I was suspicious of this.. Slack sends every channel message out to be parsed by a script? That's not good! But once I looked at the source it all made sense. Yes, in order to operate properly you need to be sending every message in a channel to heroku so that it can do the .05% probability matching and not give a reply every time (or only on specific keywords). This is how most slack web hooks work.

Looking at the source is very educational! I can't wait to take this whole solution and modify it with some company-specific features. It's really a wonderful introduction into using this Slack feature and to Heroku as well. Thanks for posting!
Britain's 180-year-old laws about horses and pigs could block driverless cars
Head First Design Patterns [pdf]
Some tech startups in Germany
"In practice we find that algorithms in P usually have small exponents."

We find that algorithms we have identified in P usually have small exponents. This may simply be selection bias, if we are poor at coming up with n^4+ algorithms.
Sure, push notification needs a central server. But guys, we so badly need a mobile IM that meets similar security standards as this project. Do it, and the world will honor you.

Should the central server be the only missing component of a reliable, secure-paranoid, mobile IM system, I would be happy donating some dollars.
Pro gamer earning six figures quit playing sports
Chomsky on the current media landscape
>> if you can care more about your customer than
>> having your job or being promoted

The honest answer to that is "no" 100% of the time, for any rational person. Anyone who says otherwise is either stupid, or trying to BS you, or both.

Simply put, incentives should align to desired outcomes, otherwise you get the outcomes your incentives _do_ align with.
Amazon to Stop Funneling European Sales Through Low-Tax Haven
You're kidding me that Confucius has degree 5 way over on far left.... There's far more connections between East and West thought than this reveals.

This is very much a biased history, from what seems like a single interpretation's perspective.

So -- it's propaganda.
Behind the Downfall at BlackBerry
The Government’s Consumer Data Watchdog
Members of Congress Ask for Review of Dropped Espionage Case
Thanks, OpenTable, but I Like Being an Anonymous Diner
Shocker: Americans Don’t Think Their Data Can Stay Private
The Next Roomba May Recognize All Your Crap
How the agency views itself is irrelevant. Congress knows what they're doing and has always known. What you're seeing right now is the system working.
Understanding Elm
LOL. phamilton thinks Joel is some kind of authority on software engineering. What's next, links to Coding Horror?

If you want to appeal to authority figures, I got one for you, too: "Encoding the type of a function into the name (so-called Hungarian notation) is brain damaged - the compiler knows the types anyway and can check those, and it only confuses the programmer. No wonder MicroSoft makes buggy programs." Said one Linus Torvalds.
Was the problem when you tried to build existing tests or when you tried to write your own code using the library? In any case I'd be happy to help.
> We're also excited about Docker, because it brings a whole new set of tools to help complete the whole picture.

>___> there's never going to be a complete picture.

There will always be a new shiny toy out there to play with and to go with that complete picture.

Google probably have other shiny toys that complement those containers that they haven't talked about yet. They had borg for a long time and even now we're barely getting some of those, Mesos & Kubernates.