skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't you think 'dirty snippets' are just a matter of who made them and in which way they're presented? When sharing them as Gist on GitHub (https://gist.github.com) for example, they're very well formatted.

I also think that choosing small libraries wouldn't help us here, because there will always be some stuff that's not being used. And that's exactly what I'm trying to avoid as best as possible here.

Also, what's wrong with copy-and-pasting code? This changes neither the formatting of the code nor makes it less readable, if you ask me (and I'm of course not talking about indenting with spaces, of course - that's terrible).
You could also summarize this article in one sentence: the choice of programming language is driven by the market and not the opinion of a single person. That means that not always the best one wins, but the one which has most appealing properties. And those are not necessarily the "beatifulness" or some academic aspects, but rather: popularity (and easyness of finding programmers), understandability, availability of 3rd party libraries, productivity and more...
Agreed. I had to go back and re-read that sentence when I was reading the article. I was sure I must have misread it. Bush is about as suave as heavy grit sandpaper.
I guess with enough trial and error, you can find solutions to many problems, no matter how flawed your understanding of the problem is.
Reddit button experiment has ended
As some "for instances", in the Soviet Union, Jews were labeled as such on their mandatory internal passports, not Russians or whatever, and their access to higher education was limited, and I'd hope I'd not need to point out how the Han Chinese who run the PRC treat their ethnic neighbors like the Tibetans and Uyghurs.
Poor people or people that don't mind taking a risk for the chance of a reward?

I know fairly wealthy people that still dabble on the lottery. They well aware that the odds are stacked against them and many of them can quote the statistical probability of their making (or not making) a profit on their play, but they still gamble because a). it's amusing and b). because just maybe they'll get lucky and will get a bazillion percent return on their investment - plus, the amount they spend on the lottery is totally meaningless to them.

Eventually you get to a point where the $5 (or whatever it costs) is so trivial it makes zero difference in your life, so why not, right? It's not really that much unlike Venture Capitalists. 95% of startups fail, yet they still get VCs clamoring to invest in them every year because 5% of them may pay off a windfall return. VCs are no slouches in finances; they're sharp, quick witted, ruthless hustlers, yet still they play this lottery.

I would say that the lottery is less a tax on the poor than it is a tax on those that are either ignorant to the math, aren't risk averse or are well off enough that the cost of playing the lottery is much less meaningful to their bottom line than the potential win would be.

After all, at least 1 person wins it most weeks, and every play has an equal chance of being a winner - why not you? I'll spend my $5 on ice cream, because I'd rather do something that will definitely make me feel good now than spend $5 buying a piece of paper that will most probably be garbage in a few hours and make me feel like I wasted the money - in the hope that just perhaps I'll get rich and never have to worry about anything again, supposedly; though, I guess it's no different than people supporting the Leafs, hoping every week that their team will win, only to get crushed when they lose...again. Given they're (allegedly, according to their fans) the richest team in the NHL despite consistently sucking, it would appear that hope is a trillion dollar industry, find a way to sell hope to everyone and you'll make your own windfall.
I have found enaml to be invaluable to my work (writing simple UIs for scientific applications), and much more intuitive to use that PyQt or TraitsUI. It provides an extremely expressive mechanism to react to (nested) changes in the UI or the model.
exactly. Why is everyone so negative? Sure, it hasn't been fully worked out yet. So, isn't still fantastic that we have yet another potential alternative ?
1st Patient Innovation Awards
I don't want thorough. I want one or two examples showing non-trivial interfaces.

As a potential user, you've got about 30 seconds to grab my attention.
It's a religious scripture. Unfortunately you need to learn Arabic first. Translations don't do it justice to say the least. The book is called The Quran. It talks about parallel universes, "aliens", super heroes, travelling through space and time, how ants communicate, and even modern superpower alliances. It's a hard read even if you know Arabic. For instance, reading a phrase from the first chapter will not make sense unless you reach later chapters. It even has encrypted letter combinations that have not been unlocked yet. i've read it twice from cover to cover, and about to start my third.
Do you believe “Abortion is Murder?”
The Secret US Mission to Heal Saudi King Ibn Saud
Struggling to get GitHub integration working with a private repository - I'll message you via the help form in the app.
Yes, you can import boards from Trello and Asana. There's a link to https://kantree.io/import/ at the bottom of your dashboard.
A bridging model for parallel computation
Just check the node docs.
How to actually ship your side projects
I am aware of this -- I teach Agda :) But I think Agda is not quite as accessible as Python, that's what I meant. Cheers!
Interestingly, one finds 'reactive' programming in such old systems. What's old is new again!

"From a structural perspective, an ACS may be seen as an instance of a Model-View-Controller (MVC) design[7]. An ACS maintains a ``reactive'' model of the world that is controlled via updates in response to new data sources"
I am curious to see whether the net benefits have been positive. My understanding even in Europe most of the links are unprofitable. Sure, there are positive externalities that may not be factored into the accounting profits, but there is also opportunity cost of the money. Are there good studies on this ?
> it's generally accepted that the first programmer was a woman, Ada Lovelace.

Really? Babbage couldn't program his own machine?

In any case, Heron is a much better bet:

http://www.newscientist.com/blog/technology/2007/07/programm...

Of course, he wasn't likely to have been the first, either.
The most awesome book I'm currently reading is "Custard, Cakes and Category Theory" by Eugenia Cheng [1]. It's already bringing some much needed back ground, some "why", to my much neglected maths education.

On a more spiritual note, I'd also recommend Mindsight by Dan Siegel [2]. An excellent book for getting some intuition into how people's past experiences shape them. The Trauma of Everyday life by Mark Epstien [3] blends teachings of Buddhism and mindfulness with the life long lessons of a Psychotherapist.

[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cakes-Custard-Category-Theory-unders...

[2] http://www.drdansiegel.com/books/mindsight/2/

[3] http://markepsteinmd.com/
I'd go even further and disagree with this statement too:

"By hard coding, I don’t mean you should spread magic numbers and strings across your project’s source code."

The first time you use a magic number or string, put it in directly. It's much easier to find and change in its home environment, and it keeps your code simpler and easier to understand.

Of course, once you use that magic number somewhere else, then you should introduce a constant -- you don't want to get in a situation where somebody changes it in one place but not the other. But until then, don't complicate things.

If you feel that I'm a heretic, then please define the constant where you use it (when it's only used in one place), rather than putting it in a header.
Everything revolving around Musk seems fishy to me. His Tesla and Solar companies are harvesting government subsidies and he writes a half-baked technical paper on hyperloop and suddenly there is money to spend on this boondoggle too. Something just doesn't add up (like Enron or Worldcom from a few years back) and I suspect that Musk and/or associated companies are (willing or unwilling) fronts for the FED to directly push money into the economy. The problem the FED has is that lowering the interest rates no longer works to boost the economy once you are at zero and they still need/want inflation to recover from the mortgage bust. I'd bet that there are academic papers on how to deal with ZIRP when you need to inflate that advocate such direct funding policies.
Open source is definitely important part. The "trust" I was referring to was deliberately ambiguous. There's not just leap of faith that potential users have to make to ensure that there are no deliberate backdoors or flaws in this software - there's also trust that this project will be cared and maintained for over time: bugs will be acknowledged (and even fixed :) ), builds for new platforms will work, security issues will be dealt with...

I'm not suggesting that bugs won't be fixed or there are backdoors, and this is definitely a really interesting project. However there's just very little to convince me that I should trust this project for anything more than a throw-away experiment right now.

"the project was not initially meant to be OpenSourced"

Sounds like an interesting backstory - what's the motivation to open source it so?

"Not being famous does not necessarily means being suspicious."

It's not being famous that matters here. Publishing software anonymously is unusual (I'm sure there are exceptions here, however they're definitely exceptions). Whenever I read of a new web service or software I generally dig into who is behind it and why they're doing it. Code on its own does not convince you to use it.
Aren't your Eneloop's just trademarked top of the line NiMH cells? A quote from the article: "For starters, and this is important, any product that is designed to be used with both rechargeable NiMH and Alkaline primary batteries (a design goal of most good products), must work down to at least 1.1V per cell." IF you can find a device that won't run on a rechargeable (which may be hard to do), then you need an alkaline, thats just how it is.

The other argument is financial. I have a cheap wall clock that runs about a year on a AA. The prices are very hard to understand on Amazon but you're looking at about $4 or more per rechargeable eneloop AA and around 40 cents for an alkaline AA in bulk. I think its fair to compare onsie-twosie rechargeables to bulk disposables; isn't that the entire point of being rechargeable? So I need to keep that clock powered up for more than a decade to run a profit on the rechargeable. Honestly I don't think it'll hold up that long. You need to recharge that dude more than, say, every six months, to run a profit, longer than that and its cheaper to dispose.

Presumably they don't charge $4 for a top of the line NiMH and 40 cents for an alkaline just for fun, I think its extremely safe to estimate the rechargeable causes at least 10x the environmental damage as the alkaline. Obviously the linear damage is 10x alone, some employee somewhere will get that $4 instead of 40 cents and buy gasoline or food or other petrochemical related substance, plus the issues with nickel refining, the electrolyte is somewhat more exciting, etc. So its not just a financial win.
Reading the McCullough biography of the Wright Brothers, I found myself wondering "what if they had read the Hacker News comments for flight?" The answer I found was that they were completely unperturbed by such trivialities, and that was a major part in their success. I'm happy to see somebody's testing out the concept and look forward to continued progress in the areas of transportation.

I will say that the end of the article makes quite the proclamation regarding Hyperloop, with a big "If" but I think measured positivity is certainly warranted here.
Steve at is best at NeXT.
As a long time hospice spouse, I wonder if "Living with cancer" might better capture what matters. The battle metaphor often leads to medical approaches that reduce quality of life and induce pointless suffering. Accepting the inevitable fact of mortality isn't necessarily surrender, sometimes it is innate wisdom.
One can also create a largely generic type, for example a json like object and define polymorphic operators on these objects which handle casting as needed.

The program will need to keep track of the types at runtime, but that's also true of Python, so what?
Around 10 years ago, I bought a house that had two garage doors and each door had it's own separate remote and each were the insecure fixed-code kind.

I was able to easily wire-up a replacement receiver to the opener unit that allowed me to update them them to rolling code systems that were more secure and would allow me to control both on one remote. I remember it being a bit clunky, in that I had to plug the receiver into a wall outlet and run a wire back to the opener unit (I think most newer homes put in outlets in the ceiling for the opener to plug into, but this one was directly wired into a ceiling box), but it wasn't very hard to install and was a lot better than having to replace the entire unit!
Got it, changing now. Thanks
Because I wouldn't have expected to see a bizarre phrase like "one of the most powerful people in coding".
I agree 100%. I see this as the real advantage of boot over leiningen, beyond just generally being less "magical". Scripting has fundamentally changed the way I approach clojure projects.
Given the scruples of those running the house (Lottery, Casinos, Government etc.) I'd say there's nothing illegal, immoral or anything otherwise about it. If a loan shark gets their legs broken and they're robbed of their ill gotten gains, who do you blame? Exploiting people's weakness for quick rich schemes, gambling, alcohol, drugs, insecurities and fears is as immoral as those manipulating their systems for their own ends. As far as I'm concerned, good on them.
Being negative EV does not make it an irrational decision or a tax.

A lottery win, unlikely as it is, could be the only way that poor people can change their life circumstances. What's my chance to buy a house or retire comfortably from the savings on minimum wage with no existing assets? What's my chance by spending some of my disposable income playing the lottery?

Framed this way, it's understandable. And perhaps it's preferable that the government runs it, rather than someone acting unethically. Commerce (and mafia) know they can afford to run a less fair or reliable lottery than government normally chooses to, and empirically, that's what they do.

The government should rather put in place support and security, acting to reduce systematic inequality, so that poor people don't have to resort to unfair lotteries as their only financial solace.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_game
Object-Ively JavaScript – JS Object Fundamentals
[0; 'a'; fun x -> x + 1];;

The common type is object, or perhaps more specifically, non-nil object (object!), if 0 is not treated as nil (value type).

If you try to interact with an object (add it to a number, call a method, etc.), your language has to decide what to do: fail because that method is not part of the type object, or force people to cast to the proper sub-type, or allow a kind of dependent typing/casting (if type(it)=int: it+1 else if type=char: it.uppercase), or (like boo, python, ruby, etc.) allow "duck typing": allow any calls/methods on the object, and check it at run-time instead of compile-time
Luxury. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo
Doing More with Boot Scripting (clojure)
Agreed with most of the above, with the caveat that I actually like JavaScript. Sure, I have grumbled about JavaScript more than about various niche languages that are in some ways more mathematically elegant, but that's for the same reason I have grumbled about C, C++ and Python - they are all languages that get enough of the important things right that I've ended up actually using them enough to run into the rough edges.
The fastest train time I can find between London and Cologne (almost the same distance as Los Angeles to San Francisco) is 4 hours, 11 minutes, about 130 km/hr or 81 miles/hour. Paris to Nuremberg (also a similar distance) is 9 hours, 53 minutes. Berlin to Stuttgart (within the same country) is 6 hours, 9 minutes.
http://www.privacyparrot.com

Similar -> Uses Baysean classifier to classify privacy policies vs rely on humans maintaining. More coverage.

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3222334
Why are you using Sam Soffes'[1] photo for a testimonial by someone called 'Luke B'?

[1] http://soff.es/about/
Appreciate the point of view condensed into a one minute read. Reminds me to a) read less, do more and b) let users broadly dictate and test features.
> Because they're people, and people make gifted coders?

Generally not, no. The headline is garbage because most women, being people, do not make good programmers.
Why can't self driving cars be public transport? Why will there always be non self driving cars - especially 20 years out? If they're inherently riskier and cause minor irritations (slow down traffic) to major irritations (human driven cars are 6x more likely to cause a human death than a self driving car etc) then how long will we the "i'm in a hurry" allow the indulgence? And interstates are multiple lanes so 2 dedicated lanes to self driving vs 1 or 2 to human driven while we transition.
Ok, found the summary on Wikipedia [0], which matched my recollection from a TV news magazine report from a few years ago when this came out.

When the jackpot reached a certain point, they'd increase the payout on the lower tier prizes (match 5, 4, 3) from ($4000, $150, $5) to something more significant.

Instead of needing to match all 6 numbers (range 1..46), you could get a good return by only trying to match a smaller set. I guess they worked out a good distribution of tickets to purchase that covered a large percentage of those possibilities. They were purchasing 300k tickets to guarantee their 15-20% ROI.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Lottery#Cash_Winf...
The Challenges of Working as a Distributed Team
But just like every casino, the house always wins. The more tickets sold, the more money the lottery makes. This is why despite knowing the flaws in the system, it doesn't get fixed, they don't care... in fact, it's in their favor to ignore it because those attempting to exploit the flaw only line the lottery's pockets more. It's more profitable for them to ignore it and hope that as little ruckus as possible draws attention to this corruption.
As an aside the enaml codebase makes for great reading material - it's one of the cleanest python codebases I have seen. Disclaimer - Chris is an ex colleague and personal friend.
Congratulations on your launch! I'd love to hear some regular updates on how the company is doing and how the product is being received. So often I read this exciting and interesting launch announcement, and then... nothing. Did they succeed? Did they flop? I'm always interested in hearing things beyond the launch. Keep us updated!
So what about it, then? Is cultural fit supposed to be completely ignored? It's important, and assuming that it means illegal discrimination is totally false.
YES! No system is harder to maintain than one that consists of a huge mesh of configuration files.
No kidding, I have worked on a large company-wide reporting system where the easiest changes to make were to the code. Code changes could be made, tested and released in a fairly straightforward way.
The harder things to change were to configuration files (Spring, things like that). Because they had global effect, and contained elements that were specific to a dev/test/production environment, making and deploying changes to one were more difficult.
But the very hardest things to make changes in were the report and process parameters stored in the database. They were impossible to isolate the effects of since we had no easy way to trace to what functions they might affect, and were generally treated as immutable legacy that you worked around changing rather than touch.
(I wouldn't claim this was a good system)

When you put something in a configuration file, you need to define who is going to change it, and how they are going to test their change. Otherwise you're in danger of muddling together different levels of abstraction, and breaking encapsulation all over the place.
USB Type-C Configuration Channel Pin Function
Thanks! How about deployment, monitoring etc? Any regrets on the stack you've chosen or changes you'd make?

If I may also ask, how did you fund it, and what's your revenue model? I'd like to make the leap one day to having some SaaS revenue, but all the apps I've seen seem (on the surface at least) like pretty hard markets to stand out in...
I mostly agree with exception of: it heavily depends on where you work. The exact logging configuration example is a prime example of what an ISV customer would want to change - many of our customers (and QA) go as far as writing their own adapters so they need to be able to completely customize the configuration.

You have to draw the line somewhere, though. I tend to err on the side of "unconfigurable" until a request is made to make something configurable. E.g. Someone had the smart idea of having all our logging messages in a config file all the years back when the logging component was written, which is an incredibly frustrating anti-pattern. That was never needed and the messages should have been stored elsewhere.
> I see nothing morally wrong with that.

Exactly - if the loan shark has his legs broken and is robbed of his ill-gotten fortune, how immoral is that?
I don't agree that people forcing themselves to take interest in things they aren't interested in is healthy.

There are all kinds of people in the world. Very smart ones are a rarity.
10 Stress Management Tips
The whole shamus projects, from books (I read his autobiography) to programming posts are awesome. His game "Good Robot" was greenlighted recently so we are going to see his first released game soon, which is pretty interesting coming from a guy who talked so openly about it http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=20638
It was also going fine for me up to that section but for different reasons: I think it makes sense to postpone/avoid externalizing configuration, but in case where a configuration is the default format (e.g. logging), going the extra mile to define that in code is both time-consuming and produces a less readable result. So I think the goal should not be to avoid configuration files, just avoid wasting time in making things configurable which probably never need to be re-configured.

Your point is also very valid though.
They must be lessening the chances of winning or the amount per win for other players?! After all I am pretty sure that lottery is a zero sum game.
They can be. And in fact, in plenty of electronic devices they are since operating from a variable supply voltage is not an option so the typical battery powered device uses dc-dc converter like the one in the article only it does not operate on a single cell but on all cells in series. And that works just fine.
Quite a lot of people see gambling as fun and/or random activity. Play some blackjack with friends: everyone wins/loses and have a great time. Then along comes someone who counts cards and... game ceases to be fun and players just drop out.

There is nothing neither wrong nor immoral about such behaviour, just a huge portion of others (those who just play for fun or are envious) sees such activity as an act of jerkiness.
If you're ever in the Scranton PA area in the summer, visit the Lackawanna Coal Mine, part of the Anthracite Heritage Museum. Cost is $10. Take a light jacket as it's cool down there.

Fact I learned on the tour - the wooden supports you see in the old mines aren't there to support the roof. They're there to provide warning (when they break) that the roof is coming down.