skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're correct on the theoretical side, and writing a value whose type makes GHC crash is fairly easy. But in multiple years of Haskell, I did not encounter nor have I heard of a practical case in which type inference time was a performance issue, let alone a bottleneck or problem.
Pretty cool effect, though as others have stated it looks very resource intensive. Reminds me of an old project from Hakim El Hattab http://hakim.se/projects/meru
My experience is out of date, but I'm a little surprised to hear this. I have a Geeksphone Keon that I played with for a lot of 2013, and it wasn't half bad.

Ironically my biggest complaint was that web browsing would bog down on pages with a lot of content... and I think that might have been a memory thing. Most of the phone/app stuff seemed fine (except the maps application, which was nigh unusable for me, not sure if that was CPU bound, memory bound, bandwidth bound, or just the wrong mapping service).
"legally blind" does not necessarily mean completely without sight. It means your corrected vision is less than 20/200 or your field of view is less than 20. And yes, they do make accessible keyboards with larger, easier to see keys:

https://www.bigkeys.com/

http://www.morekeyboard.com/

http://www.amazon.com/Chester-Creek-VB2-VisionBoard2-Keyboar...
Collaborative filtering recommendation engine implementation in python
Neat! An "open in maps" option would be nice to get directions.
At 6 people you probably have a team office[1]. That's a good thing to have.

Put 100 other people there, and you'll get an open plan office.

[1] Unless you have talkative positions (like sales), and highly intellectual positions sharing that room - if that's the case, you'd better separate them
Show HN: Zeroed Out – A new math and logic game on AppStore for iPhone/iPad
Switzerland is mostly a privacy snake oil in regards to the coercive powers of various legal authorities. Your executives, investors etc are all subject to US law. Swiss law isn't going to protect users.

Switzerland might be a reasonable place to stage civil disobedience from. Phil has credibility in that regard. Would love to see a statement from Silent Circle comparable to Least Authority's https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2010-October/0053...
What cracks me up about the main conclusion of this piece, that once foreign culture X loses its edge as an enemy, the well dries up, has an interesting counterpoint in Arabic language literature.

I will not debate the enemy thing, but the perception is there, with centuries of making literature from the region even more exotic prior thanks to orientalism, and yet there are less than a dozen American uni profs I can name that specialize in Arab literature that are not in fact Arab literateurs that make a living out of their profession/hobby (many write literature themselves, and the community is small and self-feeding).

And yet, you would think people care. But as a former Arabic language major, the amount of interest in learning Arabic while totally circumscrbing the obvious cultural and literary component is hilariously omni-present with the gaggles of wannabe intelligence officers.

I can go on and on, but is nice to see the USSR counterpoint.
Looks like they're stored in a GitHub repo.
It's anecdote, but I've worked in a number of large, corporate environments interacting with a large number of employees.

Across that experience, the most intelligent and productive coworkers I've encountered have also been those who prefer a private workspace and the ability to selectively focus without undue interruptions.

They -- we -- are not anti-social people. Many are also some of the most effective in professional interaction. That includes coming to meetings prepared and being able to define problems and solutions in e.g. half the scheduled meeting time. It includes being able to independently assess and prioritize requests, including being flexible enough to do now what needs to be done, sometimes at the drop of a hat, while also putting off some of the "how do I...?" interruptions in a fashion that quitely prompts people to do their own reading and research of readily available materials before interrupting others' workflow.

Those who have professed a preference for open space plans, including e.g. one of our moves from offices to cubettes (not even enough walls to be a real cubicle)? Well, in large part, those have been the people in endless meetings and constantly "communicating", but whose actual thinking and work I and others like me are constantly correcting.

Maybe that sounds arrogant. But it's true. When you repeatedly receive completed work and find large holes in it within the first five minutes of your attention, something is wrong...

This is just anecdote. But, for me, it spans multiple decades at multiple locations and large number of professional relationships.
Patents may be part of the reason for this.
Designing interactions by Bill Moggridge

Design of every things by Don Norman

Reinventing Organizations - A guide to creating organizations inspired by the next stage of human consciousness (Pay what you want book) http://www.reinventingorganizations.com/
"Up or out" makes sense for the military or a law firm or accounting firm. When a software company does it, then it's just needlessly churning employees.

Of course, Microsoft always has plenty of recent college graduates eagerly applying every year, so there always are replacements.
I don't know about this. Nintendo is now selling these games on the WiiU virtual console.
pairwise .
reverse . map (+1) .
flatten . replicate 2 .
map (*3) $
input

With all the functions being pretty standard (pairwise is my own name for subdivideListEtc, but it seems like a terse name that still explains what the operation is). Every fragment in this composition is smaller than the names you supplied, and all but one of them are standard Prelude functions that should be considered basic knowledge in Haskell. In addition, since the standard functions have parameters passed as values (rather than being part of the name like multiplyAllElementsByThree), this approach is easier to tinker with if one value was wrong (1 change, rather than 3 (name of function at definition, at use, and value in function definition)).
I'm not sure if this is POSIX, but if you program accepts positional arguments, in bash you can do eg.:
diff <(somecommand) <(someothercommand) and the shell will replace these with /dev/fd/<n>, allowing you to also accept standard input without relying on hardcoded file descriptors.
Nothing more than anectdata to offer but you may have better luck at larger/older tech companies. At VMware (at least in my location) most devs have a shared office of two per office, which I think is a good compromise between cost and productivity. A friend of mine at Oracle had a private office.

Also, FogCreek/StackExchange has private offices http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2015/01/why-we-still-believe-i...
The noise thing can easily even be a problem in places with proper offices. I was at a site where taking conference calls on high volume speakerphone with the door wide open struck everybody as natural. Open plan or not, you have to make it OK to ask people to shut up.
So Mozilla's clever idea to attack the low end of the market outside the US has failed and now they want to pivot. The rub is that now they are competing with Android and iPhone, which have years of head start and gigantic app stores. They aren't pursuing compatibility with those existing app stores, so that will be a disadvantage. And they don't have resources like there are behind Windows Phone.

Even to take a niche, they need a remarkable positive differentiator. As the quote in the article says, "In the mass market, that's basically impossible." Rhetoric like "change the world" isn't it - the specifics matter. "Embrace the web" isn't a differentiator when all Smartphones can browse websites. I welcome you to find in that article anything but a few planned features which might just keep Firefox OS alive without necessarily giving it a competitive advantage.

After watching a few years, I'm not sure even Mozilla knows what the differentiator will be to consumers, because what I always see from them in this kind of press-release piece are vague phrases like "the open web". So for years I have been a little confused about exactly what they are trying to do. A possible clue is that whenever you drill down on projects to which these catchphrases have been applied, what it really boils down to is more Javascript. Please try an experiment: every time you see "the open web" mentioned by Mozilla, see if the same sentence makes as much sense substituting "Javascript."

For years this has bothered me because "the open web" does not literally mean "Javascript," yet Mozilla and its fans consistently equivocate between the two. What I realize now is that this isn't because Mozilla is confused about the difference, it's because their core allegiance is to Brandan Eich's brainchild and phrases like "open web" are just a chosen mode of evangelizing Javascript. Maybe Mozilla doesn't know exactly what an all-Javascript world will exactly bring to consumers, but they want it anyway because that is their understanding of their mission.

The problem with this is that Javascript advocacy doesn't necessarily have a lot of benefit to consumers or even to programmers other than diehard Javascript fans. To be plain, basically nobody gives a rat's ass if their phone uses more Javascript than Java. It doesn't make anything more open to use Javascript rather than other technologies, openness is a matter of licensing and maybe development process. In practice you still end up with a lot of Javascript APIs specific to Firefox OS (and therefore a collection of apps).
> Another example: In our office everyone's primary desk is in the open workspace, but we also have enough private rooms that 100% of our team can work from those at the same time if they want. So no one has to work from the open office, and yet most people choose to. I'd guess that open offices are viewed much more favorably when they're not the only option.

I've also read (I can't find the source) that one of the issues with open offices is the less personified work space. The decorations at your desk, the photos on the short walls of your cube, your chair settings all make you feel more at home. The more "open" your office is you lose this.

Your anecdote could lead the conclusion that you drew, but I'm not sure that it does.
Why's (poignant) guide to Ruby
Criminal copyright infringement requires that the infringer acted for the purpose of commercial advantage or private financial gain. There is a higher threshold for criminal infringement. Singing happy birthday in public would be a civil offence, not a criminal one.
I have been using inline styles in React with great results too. I am glad to see more and more adoption. It leads to better portability and greater flexibility.
Thanks for the review.
VCs panel seemed to be very interesting.
Like the comments on Brand growth
Keep in mind that not using Facebook or Google is a bit like not having a Social Security number. Totally possible, but a gratuitous red flag.

It's better to poison the data beast than to try to starve it.
I got that feeling again when I was trying to learn 6502 assembly.

Amusingly at least in gcc

#\\ this appears legal
I want more options for broadband service providers, not less. I want competition and I want an end to the municipal franchise system.

edit: this is actually a more complicated issue and a large part of the blame needs to go to state/local governments who impede progress and competition in broadband infrastructure. http://www.wired.com/2013/07/we-need-to-stop-focusing-on-jus...
That's a very weird naming pattern for articles that phys.org seems to follow: XXX does XYZ. Now I'm quite aware that that's the usual "buzzfeed" approach for naming their posts but I'd expect more from a science website.

Seeing "Researchers first to create a single-molecule diode", "Engineer develops real-time listeria biosensor prototype", "Physicists develop efficient method of signal transmission from nanocomponents" et al. I'm wondering what the intended audience for their articles is.

Anyhow, after researching the article at hand I quickly discovered that the text is actually copied in verbatim from the official news release which was titled "One step closer to a single-molecule device". Maybe we could change the URL to that? (Not sure whether there's a better source than the newswise.com one though - it looks quite official )

http://www.newswise.com/articles/one-step-closer-to-a-single...
Just realized, came back to edit--if possible?
> That doesn't quite fit with "you already know exactly what it does" - you left out a detail.

My mistake. Take it from another perspective. The name is good because it lets you know every single detail about the function except for whether or not it mutates the list.

> Whether it is reasonable to leave that out or not, the point is that it takes a lot of text to unambiguously cover every possible facet of meaning even for tiny, simple operations.

Of course naming is limited, you can't describe an entire program with just names. I'm simply stating a convention: Clarity over elegance. I'd rather make the name as descriptive as possible over as elegant as possible. Perfect clarity and perfect elegance are rarely achievable.

So in short, if I see opportunities to increase clarity, I will do so at the cost of elegance, and I will only increase elegance if there is no sacrifice in clarity.

also:

createReversedListWithOneAddedToEachElementFrom(input_list)
I think it's the other way around. Programmers instinctively want to keep names elegant, similar to how they structure their code. IMO they actually have to kind of step out of their comfort zone if they want to write an ugly (but clear) name.
There is the down-to pseudo-operator --> as in

int x = 3;
while(x --> 0) {
std::cout<<x<<"\n";
}
Who says reverseListAndAddOneToEachElement isn't defined via the composition of smaller "separate things that each do one simple thing?" The naming convention still stands as it is not a "symptom of poor cohesion and separation of concerns."
You need an address to get the slides download link in his case.
I’m a bit conflicted. First, Charter is nowhere near as large as Comcast, so no, it wouldn't create a situation where > 50% of American consumer broadband came through one company.

The other thing is, TWC is terribly managed, completely inept. Yes I know everyone hates their local monopoly, but I’ve lived all over the US in the past five years and can say with some authority that TWC is worse.

Rumor has it that the rank-and-file at TWC was hoping for the Comcast merger to go through because they knew their own management couldn't fix the company. Perhaps Charter could pull it off? They are the one broadband ISP I have no experience with.
I do wonder if the answer to this is more diversity in our engineers. Let me explain:

While I have no doubt that a lot of great companies have awesome engineers, SF/SV tech is filled with white men in their early twenties. Nothing wrong with that, but it seems like diversity in age, race and ethnicity is a token that plays second fiddle to "meritocracy".

The latter really at the end comes down to whether you wear an ironic hoodie, can solve a graph algorithm problem well and can work long hours through the night.

Nothing wrong with all of those, I have done those and been a good mimic. But, the more I think about it, the more I think that it creates an echo chamber where there is only one true way of designing and building products. The ones that that clique can use.

Sometimes, I belong to that clique with things like Hipmunk that I love to use. Sometimes, I am confused as fuck say when it comes to Unix commands. I wonder how many many many users we are missing out because of our focus on building and designing things that are focused towards the needs of the few.
I had to look it up to see what you meant. You are referring to the fact that the book was written in English. But would it not still be considered Russian literature, at least in some sense? I mean, his "true" Russian works are still considered Russian literature even when translated into English, so why would a book by the same author not be considered Russian if he initially wrote it in English? Or are all his books written after moving to the US considered to be English literature? Would that be the case even if one was written in Russian?

These are honest questions, I don't know (and had never thought about) how literature is classified in this sense.
There is still a need for a ucache (in addition to built in opcode cache)... although a lot of high traffic WP sites are turning to redis over memcache for this.
And Microsoft is only able to sell as many thanks to Nokia's brand recognition prior to buying them (Nokia was selling 95% of all of the Windows Phones before Microsoft acquired the phone division - which just shows what a huge impact Nokia's brand name had on Windows Phone, and without it WP would be at <0.5% market share).
Very informative, I really like the visuals, help a lot.
The last time I looked into it, all SilentCircle had was a small sales office in the French part. No engineering, marketing, etc... just a secretary and a sales guy.

I'd be surprised if they move anything substantial besides their servers to Switzerland. It's increasingly difficult for non-europeans to get residence permits here. I doubt Phil, Jon Callas, etc are anywhere near Switzerland, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

As for Switzerland being a 'privacy snakeoil', that's wrong. Privacy rules (especially financial) are strict and followed by the government, unlike in the u.s. There are definitely surveillance operations, for example, the satellite communication program that uncovered the CIA rendition programs, but these are mostly directly outward.
How to Install Ubuntu Linux on your Dell PC
I really want Firefox OS to be a success. After working in AOSP firmware for last 5 years and dealing with vendor walled gardens, I wish there was a truly usable open source phone.
"Nu, Pogodi" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8uFylzinW0 ) is more popular I guess, but "Hedgehog in the fog" has its own kind of charm...
It would be nice to have more detail here, at least why this is "historical" and "unfortunate".

I think a lot of people feel that way about Unix features that interact awkwardly with threads. I tend to feel that threads are the unfortunate part, but that seems to be minority opinion.
don't downvote posts that you disagree with. Feel free to downvote low quality posts, posts against the guidelines or other but far too often I am seeing posts get "ganged up on" from a group of people downvoting an opinion that isn't popular.
Microsoftie chiming in: Open offices "are the future" here. Some coworkers in other orgs still have single offices, but this is mostly legacy, unfortunately. You could probably get on a team that has single offices, but it'd be a dart throw, and you'd have iffy guarantees as to how long it'll last.
There's no way 3.5" is the "sweet spot" these days. Maybe for primary school students, at most. Otherwise kids want phones with larger screens these days, too. I'd say 4.3" should be the minimum for just about anyone. Phones are more compact than the days of iPhone 1, and most of them are 16:9 now, which would make 3.5" way too cramped for using the keyboard.
Yeah, it doesn't help that conference organizers tend to discourage the audience from doing their own recordings.
Both of those seem silly to me. Aesthetics isn't a fact about the universe, but nor is it something people just make up. Aesthetics is an objective property of how an individual human's brain will react to a stimulus, summed across whatever group-size you want to talk about (humanity in general, some culture/subculture, etc.)

And those brains are pretty predictable; you can figure out what someone's "tastes" will be from their DNA and formative experience far in advance of actually exposing them to the stimuli in question.

Or, to put it another way, "human aesthetics are an arbitrary result; they 'could have' been anything. That doesn't mean you should ignore them—your arbitrary path-dependent values are literally all you are."

(This is just the aesthetics interpretation of the LessWrong http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Metaethics_sequence, if you're wondering.)
I agree. I've worked on small highly collaborative teams for the last 10 years and any time we're not in the same room, it's annoyingly and obviously less productive. I'm sure that the productivity studies are not taking this kind of work style into consideration.

Anyone who says this is a black and white issue and science has revealed the truth has somehow overlooked the long history of failed attempts at trying to measure productivity of software development teams (Most of which confuse activity with progress).

There's quite a lot more to programming than how many hours of uninterrupted typing you have.
Seems like a great way to ensure you have mediocre talent.

Maybe I've just been on my own too long, but I at least want the allusion that I'm being paid a fair market rate, instead of that which is 'fair' to my co-workers or company.

Those of us who are passionate about what we do, and work very hard, should run from something like this. I'm very open to conversation as to why that's not a good idea.

Buffer is an example of what seems like a cool product and company...but their salary system, IMO, favors Buffer. Not the people building the product. I'd never work for them.
Getting It Right
Look at the ratio in size WRT who would "infect" who.
I experienced this myself after almost 14 years at my first software employer.

My skills were narrow--desktop app development (no web, no mobile, no databases)--my salary had stagnated, and I had lost motivation.

I highly recommend programmers who have stayed at one job for a long time to move on to a new job, preferably one that stretches you technically or personally in some substantial way. Also, start a side project and begin learning new technologies.
Charter is smaller but it's still a regional monopoly just like Comcast and TWC are. Yes the Comcast + TWC regional monopoly would have been more monstrous than the Charter + TWC one, but that doesn't mean that either is good. They're both bad.

TWC's internal issues are completely and entirely beside the point.
Could be pretty cool if they allowed Rust apps.
A web that connects
There wouldn't be a threat of a lawsuit, ASCAP charges $356 for a yearly license for most businesses. It is part of how artists are compensated, and we don't have a better system yet.
There's UK, and then there's London. Could easily be a different country.
Yep. I've also seen a few people using the same strategy I do of user+sitename.com@example.com so they can recognize when email addresses get abused and trivially filter them.

For what it's worth, I have cleaned up enough servers hacked by spammers that I'll never send one. I guess I should mention that.
> In my experience it's the elderly people who have no desire to learn something new that are the issue.

I personally think there is a little bit of give and take. I grew up with Nokia phones where usability was absolutely terrible. I used to spend hours initially playing with the menu grokking it before I would be versatile with it. I still remember the technology attitude where being "smart" to use your product was prized.

Then came along Steve Jobs and the iPhone. He designed something that my mom could use with a few touches.

Now one is free to design products for whoever they wish to target, the select clientele those who get it. That is fine. After all, Unix is still used, even by me on a day to day basis and I kind of hate how unintuitive the commands are.

BUT, there is a space for intuitive design that targets everyone. I would bet that building a product that addresses those issues ground up makes for more money. Again, personally speaking.