skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
7 Entrepreneur Mistakes to Avoid in Early Meetings
Agreed, but nobody uses it without parsing it. You're not grepping JSON, you're JSON.parse() ing it.
Nathaniel Popper on Bitcoin and Digital Gold (EconTalk Podcast)
Your assessment is right. Triggering attraction is easy for me. And creating rapport is hard. Unbelievably hard. I read about it many times. And I understand it on a logical level. But my brain always snaps back into the loop "1: Demonstrate Value 2: Goto 1".

Lately I try to simply keep quiet more. Because usually I talk a lot. I always have so much ideas to talk about. It helps a bit. But not to the extend that people and I become friends.

Will try to use "we" and see if that helps.
Reflections on OpenStack's startup friendliness, and other OpenStack news
I have been trying to do 5 minutes a day of "ignorant meditation" (just sitting on the floor, clearing up my head, and focusing on breathing), but have seriously slacking off these past weeks.

Are there any worthwhile youtube videos on mindfulness meditation?

And is Vipassana meditation "better" than the other types?
The idea that Rust is a premature optimization is a weird meme.

I don't think the sentence you're referring to is really about Rust per se, but rather the author's feelings about manual memory management. Rust just happened to be the language being discussed at the time:

"To use Rust for writing programs that can afford the overhead of garbage collection would be premature optimization."

The idea being that manual memory management is such a productivity black hole that the lack of GC in a language dominates any 'Flubby' features the language provides.
I agree with this too. Pulling constants out to the top a source file is often a mistake. It's useful if someone is looking at the source file to find the constant, but usually it's more likely that they're reading the code to understand it, and then need to know the value of the constant. In these cases it can be better to have a constant but define it close to where it is used.
They're (wilfully) complacent and indirectly complicit. The more people buy tickets, the more money they make. If someone finds a flaw that causes them to buy a shit ton of tickets, the lottery commission makes a shit ton of cash - a portion of which gets paid out in winnings. If someone exploiting the system makes the lottery commission more money, why on earth would they fix it? They're getting more rich by not fixing it.
It's related to jackpots, so no.

Lets say a lottery is set up to pay out 60% of money in over a year, but those payouts are done by 40% 9 weeks out of 10, and 240% the 10th week. If you only play the lottery on the 10th week, then your EV is +140%, even though the overall EV is still 60%.

From the article it was a version of this that happened.
> kvpbase also allows you to program it - tell it what to do when data is read, written, or deleted - so you can offload heavy tasks from your app.

Isn't that exactly what "every database ever" calls triggers?

From the Postgres docs: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/static/trigger-definition...

> A trigger is a specification that the database should automatically execute a particular function whenever a certain type of operation is performed. Triggers can be attached to tables, views, and foreign tables.

Even NoSQL DB's like redis or riak have the ability to execute user-supplied Lua resp. Erlang.

http://docs.basho.com/riak/latest/dev/advanced/commit-hooks/

http://redis.io/commands/EVAL
I think there's a difference between:

5

embedded in the code, and

const int maxRetries = 5;

at the top of a file. Both are still hardcoded, but there's at least context for the number.
Oh man...

Marco created Galeon, which was my favorite browser back in the 1.2 days. He'll be missed.
This thread is hitting on a lot of things I've been feeling for awhile.
Tim Cook says lack of diversity in tech is 'our fault'
Escape to Bro-topia
Startups shouldn't be afraid to take up any challenge
How to stop worrying and love your Postgres indexes
"The popular theme of denigration of labor and blue collar work in general was carefully followed to the letter in the story,"

You know, I am grateful to those who labor hard on my behalf while I work at a desk, doing a job many of them would hate quite thoroughly... but let's distinguish between "hard labor" and "work that will kill you". Lots of people do hard labor in jobs that do not have an "statistically expected number of fingers lost per decade" meaningfully above zero. I've seen a lot of the show Dirty Jobs, and the vast majority of them still have 10 fingers.
Because the journalists' "Big Book of Stereotypes" says "see Mark Zuckerberg" when you look up coder.
Apple’s plan to rethink pricing formula is overdue
Repost from yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9674606
Not using your morale might be wrong.
I'm from the south west, pretty sure that's legit.
If I understand correctly, when there is no winner the prize is rolled over the next day. The technique involves playing these days specifically, and getting a big enough coverage of the numbers.

That means that if the (global) prize becomes big enough, then for this day the lottery gives out more money that it cashed, but it's actually money they accumulated during the days there was no grand prize winner.

So in average the lottery doesn't lose money.
Every greyhound bus I've been in has a tiolet in the back, maybe not the most amazing experience but it sure beats pissing into a water bottle.
Gotta say, the C++ source is pretty gorgeous as well. (Disclaimer: not a colleague or friend)
The entire point of being a VC is that the Expected Value should be greater than the investment.

If a VC generates the same return as investments in the lottery, that VC would quickly cease operations.
Yea, I think just "doing" is the biggest part of the battle. Because even though they're side projects, they're still real work, that can take equally as long.
Apple Said to Build High-Speed Network for Fast Content Delivery
Indeed, it is in fact the lottery organizers that are scamming people out of their money by giving false impressions about the expected returns.
Indian government includes open source in RFPs
> ... they should devote their energy to try to apply their results to solve real problems.

You might instead have said this about any researcher in abstract mathematics, computer science, and even theoretical physics.

Some people enjoy working directly on "real problems", and that is fine. But plenty of other people enjoy working simply to push the frontier of our knowledge, and that's also fine.

pi-calculus and lambda calculus are both theoretical frameworks, engineered for clarity of notation and thought, in order to reason better about theoretical problems in computation. Neither of them were designed to be practical programming tools, and their merit does not rest on whether they happen to inspire such tools.
Open educational resources from Raspberry Pi
I understand why someone would do this....

but as someone who paid their student loans, pays their mortgage, and other bills, I sure feel like I'm getting the raw end of the deal for honoring my commitments.

Making it acceptable to default on or get bailed out of debt (whatever the source) is a recipe for financial ruin for us AND our children.

In the end, your decision to take a loan commitment (under whatever pretenses or promises) and then default, is fucking the honest American. Thanks!
Ah, good point - legacy assets in the template, they'll need updating.
Why Does Bad Customer Service Still Exist?
People don't like meta-discussion. It's not punishing you for calling out someone they like, it's about burying discussion topics they don't want to see derail the conversation.

I did not vote down.
I've always found Arch to be among the easiest
distros to keep tidy. There's people that have
been running the same install for many years.

Is this uncommon for desktop Linux?
I'm quite sure this scenario was modeled extensively and they were well aware of it and had worked to ensure they were still profitable (or perhaps more so) even if the flaw was exploited.
Typing in the Haskell et. al. tradition don't like subtyping. And they also like their parametericity.
Corporations are amoral entities and taxation is an amoral endeavor.

It's essentially a very complicated structure of IF/THEN/ELSE conditions. If it's possible to decrease its tax burden while complying with the law, that's what a corporation is supposed to do. It's not cheating to follow the rules. If one doesn't like the outcome, one should seek to change the law.
> (although I think casinos have good reason to forbid the technique, as the alternative would be to get rid of Blackjack).

Another alternative is to play less deep into the shoe before reshuffling. Reshuffle often enough and the house has an advantage over card counters. However, this slows down play and therefore the reduces the rate they bring in money from people who don't counting cards (or count cards poorly).
Using Payara Embedded and Payara Micro with Maven
The Failable type in the article looks like this Result project on GitHub [1]. It makes for interesting related reading.

[1]: https://github.com/antitypical/Result
The "configuration hell" described here is what working in Spring was like (Spring.NET in my case). That style of coding takes the no-hard-coding mantra to an impressively ridiculous degree. And it really was hell, partially because your app is half "real code" and half XML, but also because you could break everything at any time by making a mistake in the config. Easy enough to check for that with smoke tests but it's still a terrible way to write apps. I think I'm still recovering.
Thanks for the education laggyluke, much appreciated
I'm working to implement an SDK in Swift+Realm.io and make it general purpose.

myOfflineManager.POST(
url, // the URL to call
header:header, // [String:String] header for this call
params:params, // [String:AnyObject] the body for the call
storeResponse:true, // if i want to store the server response in the DB (for example to get Photo)
fromCache:false); // if you found already an response into the DB then take it right now

For receiving the response I'm implementing NSNotificationCenter, so i know the status:
queue // the call is putted into the DB
progress // i'm starting the call
done // call is done
and of course the server response ;)

Everything is working right now, but ... is strange that there are no free open source SDK.
Maybe i can release it on GIT.
Demo boards indeed would be great!

We haven't designed Kantree as a "better alternative to Trello" (this submission isn't ours!), we made Kantree to offer a fully-customizable kanban tool.
I guess he would downvote me? I don't get HN any more...
Yes, but this isn't a database, it's an object store. Block, file, and object storage platforms have yet to implement similar functionality. Block and file platforms are in particular very closed.
Thanks eatonphil, it's mostly custom made, but we're using bootstrap's grid to help with the formatting/scaling.
I could not afford my loans...I was basically unemployed (looking for work) with loans on permanent forbearance. It took a 4.5 year stint in the Army to pay mine off (student loan repayment program), but I did, and I'm all the better for it. I have zero sympathy for this person.
Totally false? So what are the typical demographics of the tech industry? How homogeneous is the age range, the racial percentages, the gender makeup?

Seriously, look at the report from Google just for a much-discussed recent example. It's not like this hasn't been discussed at length on HN.
I'd far rather have the 5 embedded in the code. It should be obvious from the code that the 5 is the number of retries, and it's often important to know at least the magnitude of the number when reading the code. Don't make me hunt for the number unless you have a good reason for doing so.

If the name is required to understand the code, then putting your "const int maxRetries = 5;" in the code is better than a comment that says the same thing. Just don't put it at the top of the file. Put it on the line before you use it.
> Another problem is that I always think everybody should worship me and my big ideas.

This sounds very narcissistic.
As somebody who is currently struggling with a huge amount of student debt, this strikes me as quite... self-righteous?

I can understand the idea that the government should give free education, or that they should support education with grants instead of loans, or that college tuition should be cheaper. I'm all for people advocating for those causes.

But if you take a loan, you've entered a contract. Breaking that contract isn't something to be proud of. Saying that his options were boring career with debt and soul crushing career without debt is disingenuous. If you took $60k (or whatever) of somebody elses money, be willing to put in the work to pay it off, then you get to do what you want. If you aren't willing to do that, then find a way to subvert the system that doesn't involve you taking large amounts of other peoples money, or at least admit that you made a poor decision.
Yes, but every VC knows that it's still a gamble that may not, and probably won't pay off. They spread their risk across many startups in order to minimize losses that are covered by huge windfalls the come from the big winners. At the end of the day though, it's still a gamble. They could end up losing it all.
I find the happy medium here is a command line parameter. Hard code the default to something sensible, and have a command line parameter (-v) which overrides the sensible default. No need to recompile, no need to worry about the parameter 99% of the time.
After U.S. Freedom Act, UK. Agencies Face Legal Challenge Over Domestic Dragnets
On that note, I really liked this conversation of D. G. Mayers (who died of cancer in September) regarding this topic. A small excerpt:

"Tony Gwynn died recently, just last month, of salivary gland cancer. (…) He was a great ball player, and a great man. He had salivary gland cancer for 8 years. (…) Every article about Gwynn's death quite rightly celebrated his prowess on the ball field and what a wonderful man he was. The last 4 and a half years of his life disappeared from all of the accounts. The only thing they ever said was that he had a 4-and-a-half year "battle" with cancer. And you know how much I hate that word, "battle." (…) You know, his experience of it--he continued to coach baseball at San Diego State. How did it affect his coaching? What did it do to his religious faith? How did it alter his relationship with his wife? All of this went unsaid, and it just disappeared into one word--battle."

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/07/dg_myers_on_can.htm...
Are you implying stuff like Tinder, Instagram, Pinterest or Etsy aren't used by women?
Certainly true as a matter of those states' fundamental hypocrisy, but I believe PopeOfNope was referring to the Left's deployment of those terms as offensive weapons - which also happened. For example, the USSR was very big on paying lip-service to anti-colonialism as a form of soft power over the non-aligned block[1]. This did not seem to noticeably affect her behaviour towards Afghanistan in the Soviet-Afghan War[2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Aligned_Movement
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Afghan_War
Nice read! Unfortunately, on mobile it's difficult to figure out what the options do individually. Too bad they're not easily predictable. It would be nice if they were written in long form and short form for people like me. I'll have to read through the man page later.
Reading between the lines, there is a very strong hint that lottery officials violated lottery rules to enable the exploitation, possibly for indirect benefits. What the students is very similar to how card counting is supposed to not work: they violated the maximum bet. And lottery officials let them, against the rule of the lottery system.

It seems like no real harm done though: they guaranteed themselves winnings, causing the jackpot to never grow, before anyone else bought tickets against the larger jackpot. So in a sense they just stomped the game before it started, no other players got screwed out of their chance at any existing jackpot.
How we chose the right office for our startup
Site that makes overviews of terms of services
More precisely, Lady Lovelace wrote programs for the machine Babbage designed. Whether Babbage could or couldn't write them isn't, to my knowledge, recorded (presumably he could if he wanted to). The fact that Lady Lovelace did, is.
Fair points. But:

- The software industry is more than just twenty-something males writing dating and social media applications.

- The software industry will produce what it thinks it can make a profit on, which is an imperfect proxy for what people (and governments) want, which in turn is an imperfect proxy for what society needs. But, absent a centrally planned economy or other non-market mechanism, two imperfect proxies are the best we've got.

- Much software is general purpose, and can be applied equally to frivolous and worthy matters: operating systems, databases, networking, web browsers & servers, office tools, etc.

- If one is going to complain that the software industry is not addressing society's problems, it would help if one would specify what those problems are.
I must admit a certain trepidation anytime I hear the phrase, "and replace it with a constraint solver!" Not that they aren't useful and powerful tools. That's exactly the problem, they're very powerful tools. I'm not entirely convinced that doing website layout should require so much computing power.

Also, ironically, the site looks pretty bad on mobile and the entire left side of the page is chopped off. I don't take any "new ideas in style" page seriously if the mobile (or desktop, or whatever I'm using) experience on that page is bad.
You have to make your site accessible to search engines, so as long as you're not doing something weird like using javascript for styling and layout, just treating users who have disabled javascript as search engines should work just fine.
Thanks for that link to his criticism of institutional CS, it gets me firmly into territory where I can apply the Gell-Mann Amnesia principle. Upon which I find the thesis sorely lacking, if you accept the principle as discussed in the comments that it's OK for research to be "wasteful" as long as "1%" of it turns out to be useful, especially in the long term (e.g. I do not accept that all interesting computing is going to limited to the context of the current context of the cloud and supercomputers masquerading as smart phones ("mobile"; I started my computing career in 1977, when the 90 MHz Cray 1 was the pinnacle of number crunching, although I have to confess that I don't know the 64 bit floating point performance of typical smartphone ARM CPUs)).

More specifically, his criticism of Haskell seems to be misplaced by his criteria of developing useful software, if you accept that the seL4 microkernel is useful, which I gather it is, otherwise General Dynamics et. al. are wasting money. I can't tell, it's perhaps a bit early to get a list of hardware using it, but previous L4 versions have been used in billions of Qualcomm chips and apparently all iOS devices.

And the related academic Barrelfish OS researchers seem to me to be doing something useful, and the languages they are using are C, with various bits of that generated by Haskell (e.g. hardware descriptions -> C).

It's a pity that Urbit now has no chance of greater success, the SJWs of computing going so far as to say it "has neoreactionary politics hard-coded into the network layer" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9675512), which is obviously worse than the "monarchy" of superuser vs. user.
I think you may have misinterpreted. I didn't run dist-upgrade frequently, rather, the ratio of failure was high.

(This my memory from 6-7 years ago. For all I know, it could have failed twice because I did something stupid, didn't know it, and moved on.)

My central point is calling someone's else's experience bullshit, is, well, bullshit. My comment has little to do with anything else.
That's interesting. I have memory issues, I have worked on it, nothing helps, but it made me good at documenting (mainly for my own sake but everybody gains from it). That's also why I tend not to play card games, because most of them seems to be based on recollecting where the cards are.
The Irish National Lottery format used to be 36 choose 6, giving odds of a jackpot win at 1 in 1,947,792. The cost of a single ticket was £0.50; therefore you could buy up the entire "space" for £973,896.

Thus, when the jackpot rose above this value, it became economically viable to buy up the entire "space" to guarantee a win; this would result in a profit so as long as no one else bought a winning ticket. This is what a group of individuals attempted to do in May 1992.[0]

They were limited by the physical requirement of filling out all such possible combinations on the paper tickets, but they attempted to spread out the work by pre-filling out combinations over several months and waiting for the jackpot to rise to a large value before "deploying" the tickets.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Lottery_(Ireland)#His...
Cheers, spelling has improved :-/ damned sausage fingers!

Our servers are currently in the US as that's where the market is (from what we've found, so far). It's something we've thought about and we will be looking at doing international deployments as soon as there is demand.

For API performance, a cloud-based setup does mean an increase in latency, but that is why our solution can be self-hosted too, it's a trade-off that works on a scale, you can start off with a cloud service, with quite straightforward integration and then as your API usage grows look at using Tyk within your own data centers.
This is great. This link is here today because of a reedit.com/r/showerthoughts post wishijg for such a site, and tosdr got linked in the comments. Then someone reposted it to /r/internetisbeautiful. Both posts made reedit front page, and then an HNer reposted here.

You have the much-maligned reedit frontpage community to thank for this.
Personally, if I'm reading the code, seeing `maxRetries` is more meaningful than 5. `maxRetries` both abstracts away the 5 (which could change at whim), and makes it so I don't have to parse the surrounding code to identify exactly what that loop is doing (unless it's not working, in which case I have to parse that loop anyways).

It also encourages you (for better or worse) to use `maxRetries` in multiple places.

The value of 5 is, in the long run, meaningless. It could have easily been 3 or 10.
NSA whistleblower warns of surveillance state
Some environmentalists, sure, but also the fossil industry, which has provided a lot of anti-nuclear propaganda. Also, the chair of the DOE when it canceled the IFR had deep ties to fossil fuels.

We should certainly deploy as much wind and solar as we can right now. Using fossil as backup is better than using it as primary. But so far it doesn't look like renewables alone are the fastest way to get off fossil fuels entirely. Adding nuclear baseload would make things a lot easier.
The Tao of Programming, by Geoffrey James.
They've been working on the Apple Watch app, other than that I think Trello is pretty feature complete. What other features do you think they need to add?
This is where the rest of the country rolls its eyes and casts aspersions at San Francisco.
>I know fairly wealthy people that still dabble on the lottery.

This might be obvious to everyone, but gambling expenditure is higher (as a percentage) in low-income households, and still doesn't exceed 1% of disposable income in any income group in the UK.

Ref: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/family-spending/family-spendin...

People with more economic power can participate in forms of gambling with a lower rake: we might call those investments.