skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All is fair in love and war.

Up until now, building a web app seemed a viable alternative to being caught up in a mobile platform you don't own. If you're ad-financed, that way is blocked now.

The Internet used to be a means around those market access controls that were exercised by the powers that be. It's not really a surprise that someone finally found a way to grab this control for themselves, at least for one revenue model.
Does anyone know of a conference that takes a wider view of the job of programming? It has always felt to me like the focus is all about our tools, because tools can look cool, but I'm interested in the process of starting with a messy list of requirements and getting to a completed project in the most successful way, which is often the real challenge in my work.
Imagine a world where Wikipedia isn't an encyclopedia, but a crowd-sourced collection of all code meticulously indexed and documented that could be written for one language.
Using the right language (and technology say, NoSQL vs SQL) for the job: polyglot shouldn't differ from normal software development - it should be the norm. No one language is the right tool for all tasks.
There's more, but a small personal anecdote: I have a boss with similar, if somewhat more relaxed, thinking. "Why stay in the Shangri-La when a [200 Yuan per night] Motel 168 or HomeInn is perfectly clean, safe and more convenient." or "Have a laptop and a standing desk if you like, it saves more than having you unhappy or leave." or "50 Yuan per day travel bonus, enjoy the local food." It is not penny pinching (the opposite, he'll spend where it is needed), it is a true conviction that things should be done differently (from the status quo).

When it encroaches on personal things such as the size of a family (below, from the article's Zhang Yue) I do not like it - work is work and life is life - but there is a deep dislike of the way things are done by the moneyed by a lot of business people (and women are far more represented in this grouping than in large companies operating in China, including multinationals or traditional government backed companies) than a lot of people outside China are aware of.

Further quotes:

> “Don't buy things you only use once, such as newspapers.”

> “Grow your own vegetables.”

> “Most importantly, have only one child, to allow the population of the world to return to a level it can bear.”

> Another company handbook urges staff to brush their teeth twice a day, and to share cars.

> His hair is greying. Dyeing your hair is bad for the environment, he says.

> I have to set an example. My staff imitate me, and they then influence those around them. That's how we influence society.”
Jekyll.

If you are just getting started, you can read this tutorial I wrote for SitePoint:

http://www.sitepoint.com/set-jekyll-blog-5-minutes-poole/
>Let's face it: paywalls don't work.

Citation needed.
> Counterintuitively, if you pass on too many of the "good" candidates, in your overzealousness to reject bad candidates, you're actually INCREASING THE ODDS OF A BAD HIRE.

Yes, but what hiring managers are doing isn't passing over candidates that they know are good, they're passing over candidates that they're not very sure about.

> Because "good" candidates are rare, every time you pass on a good candidate that increases your odds of making a bad hire! This is simple Bayesian reasoning!

Similarly, of course this is true, but again hiring managers aren't passing up candidates that they know to be good, they're passing up on candidates that they're not sure about, whom the acknowledge could be good.

Under certain conditions, every time you pass on a candidate you're not sure about, you decrease your chance of making a bad hire. The conditions are that increasing hiring standards must weed out more bad candidates than good candidates.

Let's work with your model. Suppose 1% of candidates coming for an interview are good and 99% are bad.

Hiring strategy A manages to hire all good candidates it interviews, and 1% of the bad candidates it interviews. End result: for every 100 people you interview, you get 1 good candidate and 1 bad candidate.

Hiring strategy B is more conservative and hires 50% of all good candidates it interviews, and 0.1% of the bad candidates it interviews. End result: for every 100 people you interview, you get 0.5 good candidates and 0.1 bad candidates.

The claim is something like, the team produced by strategy B is better than the team produced by strategy A, even though team B has less good candidates than team B.
The following link is an ongoing set of updates of people who have fallen victim to the so-called "brown scare" - being fired, ostracized, or otherwise penalized for holding right-wing views.

It's a lot more pervasive, and has been going on a lot longer than most people think. The Brendan Eich or Pax Dickinson purges are probably the most known to the HN community, but there are many, many more.

https://handleshaus.wordpress.com/2013/12/26/bullied-and-bad...
What Apple’s Tim Cook Overlooked in His Defense of Privacy
PolyConf founder here; the title is indeed misleading, OP exaggerated. There are many great conferences in the same spirit that existed before. And Strange Loop is our primary inspiration.
TSA already misses full metal guns and in some airports guns are completely legal in the USA.

Why even pretend to have gun laws in this country.

But I'll tell you what, we better make mental health care available like going to the supermarket and without stigma in our society or one day there is going to be a mass-murder anniversary for every day of the year.
Unfortunately this is pretty much the problem you will get. It doesn't have to be about good or bad developers, even good developers will start to apply their own flavor and smart solutions in the build scripts and you will end up with very different way of doing things.

Anyone remember using Ant with Java? Same thing I would say. Maven is convention over configuration for a reason.
I know people who only know one language - some Java, some ActionScript... I think it can be easy to get comfy and not bother learning new languages. After all, Blub is enough for what they do, why would they bother spending time learning a new one?

The irony is that one of my Java friends told me that he could pick up any language on a need basis, and that I was ignorant for not knowing design patterns such as Factory, Visitor, Observer/Observable, etc.
Constructing the modules can be parallelized substantially while the tower assembly itself cannot (beyond 6 cranes here).
A few weeks ago I used the same RNN that was used to produce kernel source code to produce MIDI files. It wasn't really a success, but it did generate mostly-valid MIDI files and independently discovered avant garde prog jazz.

Try https://soundcloud.com/david-given/unsigned-composition-1 or https://soundcloud.com/david-given/procedural-jazz-sting.
I know exactly what you mean and I agree, but your scenario doesn't cover most enterprise web developers, who likely live in Visual Studio or Eclipse/NetBeans/IntelliJ 95% of their day, especially if there's strict separation of duties and they aren't allowed to directly touch the DB server/admin console.

I got fed up with this state of affairs a few years ago and stopped looking for .Net or Java developers and started looking for self-described hackers, assuming that would increase the odds that they had some passion for programming and could/would/had pick up whatever tools they needed for the job. It has worked well.

As an aside, though, especially in countries like India, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Bulgaria, Poland, and others which are low cost recipients of outsourcing dollars, "software factories" are common, and in places like this it absolutely is common for an individual programmer to literally spend their time all day, every day doing the same one type of thing. Imho, the higher the CMMI number, the worse this gets (the pinnacle is the "just write a function to pass this test. No, it doesn't matter what it's doing or what this software is for. Just pass the test.", where developers on the front line are plug & play cogs who don't even know what they're working on).
Justin Bieber and Nicky Manaj vs Sly and The Family Stone and Marvin Gaye.
Of course it's not fiction.

Tons of people got shadowbanned and shadowbanning can only be done by the admins.

So stop spreading misinformation please.
Garbage Collection explained in details
Modern C# is a powerful and compelling language; C# vs. C++ on that front is an open debate... one the internet has a great number of easily found topics on.

The old runtime unity uses, despite using newer class libraries and so on from the open source C# stuff from microsoft... well, its terrible. I mean, its usable, but its like C# lite, with none of the features or optimizations from you know, the past 5 years.

C++11 in UE4 is hands down better. C++14 will be even better.

...but their tooling sucks at the moment. Right now, despite the unity runtime, its still a better system to work with as a developer.

In the future, who knows?

Maybe unity will use a new version of C#? (deeply unlikely)

Maybe the UE4 tooling will improve a lot? (very likely)

My advice is 'watch this space'; the UE4 engine has great potential, but right now, despite the good parts, the bad parts are so bad I couldn't recommend using it professionally.

...but hey. Thats just my oppinion. Its free. Download it and try it for yourself. If nothing else, the code is a facinating read in C++ learning.
Map Shows Path of Salem's Witchcraft Rumors
You need to have a Baord level champion who can steamroller any silos and get stuff done.
>Trust. When I see Daring Fireball advertise something, I know it's approved by Gruber.

It's very easy to convince yourself you "approve" something if money coming your way depends on that approval.
How do I report a security vulnerability about a trusted certificate authority?
It's not directly related to the gui but I see the tarsnap service for the first time. The last release of tarsnap was two years ago. Is it so secure that there were not even bug fixes necessary since then?

Apart from that the service with the gui looks quite promising to me and is totally worth a try.
Any scripting language can be properly sandboxed, JavaScript being no exception.
Seems ripe for disruption...introducing PeeCoin a new altcoin to solve the most human needs of society one transaction at a time.
Yup and when it's scaled up there would be warehouses full of parts waiting to be shipped at a moments notice.
Hello, fellow German office here.

We don't know what ethernet is, we thus started unplugging everything we could: pension funds, welfare spending, army spending. We even unplugged portugal, spain and greece, but nothing worked.

Please help.
There is a trade off even in the paper that was linked. You have to disallow distances (d) that are too large when the words are small. If you have an array of words that are within distance 3 of a 3 letter word and you have many 3 letter words, you're going to have every single 3 letter word in your result set.

This is a running issue with fuzzy matching in general, but automatons are especially slow and take forever to build.
Eventually, we got exactly that, a leader the Board would actually listen to and respect.

This was after I'd moved on, but I'm led to believe that things have improved greatly since that change.
> I think it’s more of a philosophical difference rather than technological.

This is where the argument lives but a lot of people don't necessarily understand this kind of decision making.

I like IDEs and I love command line. If I have a choice I will go CLI 90% of the time. Why? I feel most comfortable with the command line and I think it looks good, runs good and allows a ton of customization.

Using R for analytics I use the IDE RStudio

Need a REPL I use Project Juypter (IPython kernel agnostic)

Just about everything else I use VIM.
I can't help but chuckle, seeing the "user friendly GUI" arrive as a wall-of-text mailing list message linking to a source code repository.

No homepage, No installer, not even a screenshot. "There exists code you can compile. Someplace. QED."

Congratulations for staying true to form!
Thanks Sbn, good to hear that. I think Bitbucket connect is very interesting and at GitLab we would like to have something similar. But since it is both used on-premises and as a SaaS this is more difficult. We're thinking about plugins but are afraid the fixed API's will make GitLab hard to refactor. So for now we welcome people contributing Project Services. The downside is that there is no business model for people contributing.
If you are into this kind of stuff (time series density/probability modeling), there are several places to go beyond this.

The simplest example is the RNN-RBM (restricted boltzmann machine) from the Theano deep learning tutorials [1]. There are follow-up papers by Kratarth Goel extending this to LSTM-DBN, and RNN-NADE (neural autoregressive density estimator) has also been explored in this space. The results for MIDI are pretty good.

Ales Graves [2] has done a huge amount of work in sequence modeling for classification and generation. His work with LSTM-GMM for online handwriting modeling can also be applied to speech features (vocoded speech), and seems to work well. No official publication to date on the speech experiments themselves, but the procedure is well documented in his paper [3]

The most recent thing is our paper "A Recurrent Latent Variable Model for Sequential Data" [4]. It operates on raw timeseries (!) even though all intuition would say that an RNN shouldn't handle this well. Adding a recurrent prior seems to preserve style in the handwriting generations at least - I may try on this "Let It Go!" task and see what happens! We are also exploring conditional controls and higher-level speech features, which should result in samples as good or better than LSTM-GMM.

[1] http://deeplearning.net/tutorial/rnnrbm.html#rnnrbm

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yX1SYeDHbg#t=36m50s

[3] http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.0850

[4] http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.02216
So, would this make 3d-printing files of these plastic guns illegal too?

I guess some orientations of bits are already illegal. Is there a(n automated) way to check if a file is illegal?
>> For applications where you need performance like native Java, then sure, you need to optimize--add type hinting, use Java's mutable data structures, and more. I can't say too much about it because I'm not an expert on optimizing Clojure for high performance--I don't have to be.

This is what I'm talking about. Performance-wise, Clojure is all about scaling, not absolute performance.
From my point of view (lots of low-level, embedded, real-time,DSP,C,C++, etc). I personally get appalled at the performance that is left on the table when using idiomatic Clojure (and even Java)...
(Try doing an FFT in pure-idiomatic Clojure and compare to even a naive C implementation running on a lowly PIC32 or ARM...) it would be interesting what level of microcontroller your i7 is now reduced to.

I love the ideas behind Clojure and scalability is great... but when you're talking about scaling an application, make sure you're not throwing away silly amounts of performance before you scale it horizontally.
What about the pump-n-dump that someone was running during 2013 and mid 2014? Was that Mt Gox or someone who had pwned it? The article doesn't even mention the issue.
>as if the local agencies are somehow less dangerous

And in what way are they dangerous? And if not these experts, who should do this (expert) work?
Un-spoiler: As far as I can tell, this article tells nothing new about what happened, and in particular doesn't actually say anything about how Mt. Gox lost all its Bitcoins.
All it takes for a "friend" to donate some new shiny to a MP who then plugs it and its game over.
On your website it says you are based in Bath.
flagged hoping that the moderators will change the title or simply delete it. Unless your goal is to attack Intel, I don't see the point to posting this – licenses are a real concern and everyone involved seems to be acting like professionals trying to reconcile it.
Christopher Lee dies at the age of 93
Programmers should obviously be polyglots to some extent, but the question here is if conferences should be. Basically do you want 14 high level introductions to 14 different languages or 14 presentations digging deeper and deeper in to one specific language? I can certainly see advantages to both.

I'm sure even your golfer might be interested in attending a masterclass that only covered putting.
4) Understand that every IT system is vulnerable as long as people are involved
Is big bang necessary for this or does any amount of photons of insanely high energy crystallize in matter in those proportions?
It get's even better: According to some reports[1], the german IT-security office (BSI) recommended completely replacing the IT-infrastructure with new hardware and software. They say the situation has gone out of control and that they are unable to stop the leaking of data from parliament computers to unknown third parties.

[1] http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Nach-Trojaner-Angriff...
Yes - We're planning an Android version.
The Millionaires Maker Review Binary Need to Know
Well they would have to go back to paper and maybe even voting physically rather than pushing a button remotely.
How's Togethera 38x faster at photo sharing than Facebook?
There is a whole Software Craftsmanship movement with a bunch of conferences around the world.
Great quotes, the "only one child" quote is only meant for certain countries i guess. In Germany we have a problem with the population growing older and older because young people get less and less kids. That taxes the health care system and skews politics towards the old among other things.
Then why does the parliament not have some one looking after it's cyber security and answerable directly to it.
I hadn't read about this case before, and after some quick reading I frankly find myself disagreeing with most if not all of Yarvin's political views and perhaps even doubting that I would like to hear him speak.

But in my opinion, personal convictions are irrelevant in technical talks, and any presenter with any modicum of professionalism would do well to keep the two as separated as possible, especially in this type of setting.

In the case of an expert presenting research or some such in their capacity as an expert, I don't care (nor should I know) what their personal politics are (as long as they don't overlap with the topic at hand) - precisely because there is a danger of biases running amok.

In addition, as others have already mentioned: whatever the organizers should do depends on their motivations and goals.

Work and worker are not inextricably linked, nor do they necessarily reflect upon each other.
There are plenty of examples of people that have accomplished major achievements in some fields while being perfectly irrational and/or plainly mean in others.

Examples include:

-John Lennon (wife-beater)

-Tim Hunt (sexist)

-James Watson (racist)

-Luc Montagnier (anti-vaccer)

-Knut Hamsun and Martin Heidegger (known and argued nazi sympathizers, respectively)

-Steve Jobs (asshole), arguably

Some of these are Nobel laureates.
Their work isn't any less great because it was performed by jerks.

There are, of course, cases to be made for boycotting certain products and presentations (by certain people with certain attitudes, performing certain actions or with certain ties), but if the conference's ultimate goal is to disseminate knowledge I think the choice should be left up to the audience.

I guess you could try to weigh how much damage the rescinding of his invitation does to his (unrelated) cause vs. how much damage is done to the community by denying him to spread his knowledge through this arena, though this would likely depend on a host of personal variables.
I don't think that invalidates anything, Bristol and Bath are very close to each other.
Double spending refers to attacking the bitcoin network to rewrite history and use the same coins twice. It is merely infeasible.

In the case of Mt Gox, poor internal accounting controls made it possible to make repeated withdrawals.

Say a standard transfer is initiated by sending Mt Gox a message, [Mt Gox, send me money.], which causes Mt Gox to check that the funds are available, initiate a legitimate bitcoin transaction and debit the Mt Gox account for that amount. Their system was set up so that if you sent a specially formed message like [Mt Gox, send me MORE money.], it would check that the funds were available, initiate a legitimate bitcoin transaction and not bother debiting the Mt Gox account.

That isn't quite technically accurate (the attack involved getting Mt Gox to respond to a different message than ended up on the consensus blockchain), but it captures where the problem was, Mt Gox wasn't keeping track of funds in a careful way.
What primary school did you go to, where you had to multiply those kinds of numbers in your head?
Building an S3 Object Store with Docker, Cassandra and Kubernetes
Running, then cleaning and then having a dataset that still needs interpretation.

I'd take the 30 minute interview route and risk not hiring a clever programmer.
Trine – A utility library for functional programming in JavaScript
Good point. A conference where different challenges are solved with different programming languages and the people can present their results and conclude the advantages of a certain language for a certain challenge. I believe this always existed in tech world, but, its good that it is getting formalized as a conference. Maybe it could turn out to be like a programming language expo :)
So then the people who would otherwise use plastic guns to get past metal detectors would say "oh, well those are illegal now, I'd better not."
http://the-programmers-stone.com/the-original-talks/day-1-th...

The author might be wrong in a few details, but similar intuitions and insight could be found in writings of variety of thinkers, from Navokov to and J. Krishnamurti to Chomsky (who suggested that language acquisition process is, well, a processes) and the inventors of NLP (with the notions of the deep structure and the surface structure) to Marvin Minsky with his Emotion Machine book.
It's more pronounced in Southern France, where every town and little mountain village will have fountains spouting a constant stream of what amounts to essentially Evian for anybody off the street to drink and fill bottles from.

Then they charge you to pee.

Create a problem. Charge for the solution. Genius.
With these prefab buildings, if you have built one, you have built them all. With software that works quite differently. Unless of course you consider "copying" to be equal to "building", in which case, software is moving even faster!
Specifically, for these kinds of sequences (chord sequences, etc.) check out models that uses note-level features but with joint probability (RNN with sigmoid out and cross-entropy loss, RBM, NADE, etc.). It should do even better!
> English people tend to openly despise it and will often refuse it even when they're perfectly aware that it's legal tender.

Group A don't know it's legal tender, so they refuse to accept them.

Group B do know it's legal tender, but also know that group A is quite large. Hence some members (group BA) avoid the currency because they know it will make transactions with group A more difficult.

The remaining people, group BB, also know that group BA will try to avoid the currency. Some of those (group BBA) will avoid the currency because it makes transactions with group BA more difficult.

And so on.
In what way are foreign agencies dangerous? Now remember that they do the same thing.

The other question is pretty easy: Every involved party should use own trusted experts for the hardware/software part it manages.

If you are a parlamentarian and it feels suspicious to you that a secret service wants to get your phone: Don't hand it.