skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm glad someone said this. I'm an occasional JavaScript programmer, and I looked over ES6 last night and was surprised by how large it's become. And I learned that ES7 is already on the way.

That said, most of the features seem nice, and many are borrowed from stable languages like Python, so perhaps it's not too much. I'll have to try it and see.

It made me wonder what Crockford is up to, and what he thinks of this.

https://github.com/lukehoban/es6features

http://es6-features.org/
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that OP probably doesn't have the appropriate cognitive disposition for programming as a career.

He referred to himself as normal; software programmers as a group have an IQ metric well above normal. BY NO MEANS am I suggesting that he is not smart; in fact, he should trust his feelings even more. Just because he is not a desirable programmer does not mean that he isn't welcomed by the tech community and industry; this thread is clear evidence of that.

There are many lucrative roles in tech that do not rely on programming as a primary activity.
Interesting set of priorities there. Hardware codecs are much slower to market than software due to fixed costs, speed is completely critical in decoding codec performance, and lots of people care about power.
Well, in botany is more a question of: "are the leaves entire, serrulate, serrate, double serrate, dentate, crenulate, crenate, toothed, spiny or undulated?". A lot of people just will walk away when things go a little hard, probably feeling cheated. The problem is that people are just lazy.

I can probably identify thousands of genus plants at least at first sight but is not easy and sometimes is impossible. There are about 3000 spurge species for example (and maybe ten real specialists in the genus Euphorbia in the entire world).

There are also some legal troubles in the field to care for. Some typical recurrent doubts in plant identification in my experience are:

1-"How can I cultivate peyote/cannabis/some ilegal drug in my house?, Is this a male or female plant? Is this cactus in my public park a San Pedro?"

2-"Is this leaf/mushrom/berry that I'm cooking edible or poisonous? (typically with a blurry small photo of some green poor thing that falls between a child in cucumber disguise and an alligator)."

Both 1 and 2 situations could easily escalate to a lawsuit against you. Assure you to put a big disclaimer note in the terms of use.

3-"Urgent!, Urgent!, I want you to do my schoolwork. Identify my entire herbarium, Is for yesterday!."

This guy will not even remember to thank you later most of the times, nor will consider to paid a cent for this (I will gladly charge him for my time if I could otherwise).
Actually if you really need to update large JSON documents efficiently, probably the only really efficient technology would be ToroDB http://www.8kdata.com/torodb/
Thank you for the input. I'll try to make the page more clear when it comes to examples. There's one example listed in the interface part of the page.

http://codeward.org/capdiss/#interface

Same script is also available in the repository saved in file lua/example.capdiss.lua. You can run it this way:

capdiss -f lua/example.capdiss.lua ./your_capture_file.pcap
"Friend" is a really ambiguous word in English. In this context I meant that as a "buddy" which implies an equal, peer relationship. Buddies don't set rules for one another in a way that there is one who always sets the rules and another one who is expected to obey me. Unless you have your child setting the rules which is way outside of my weltanschauung.

I don't really think that's what my child needs from me. We can be buddies _at times_ but overall he looks up to me for help, advice and guidance on a very different level than his BFF. Both types of relationship are crucial but I don't think it my role to meet every bonding need of my child - some things just don't mix well.
Java, or, how "software engineering" can kill a decent enough language with incredible complexity.
I think you'll find that's not exactly true. Many comedians are excellent at improv, that also makes them really good at keeping up the act in front of everyone around them.
I like this guy more and more each day. I've grown so weary of the political parties that I'm desperately seeking a really different candidate who can push a more libertarian agenda. I just hope he sticks to his word.
They do. The project I'm on has been in development for 5 years, has hundreds of people working on it globally, and not a single #ifdef DEBUG in it. It's currently my job to add that in,it's going to take weeks to finish.
He gave a brilliant talk about it: "Growing a Language"[1].

The idea is to make languages that grow—ones that provide a small, uniform core that can be extended by the user. Ideally, these extensions feel like first-class citizens: things added by users should feel on par with built-in language features.

It's still one of the best technical talks I've ever come across.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0
How nice that spread is does depend dramatically on the size of the transaction, though.

I'm guessing a service like Stripe has plenty of customers in B2C markets, where selling something for $10 is hardly unusual. At that price, they are only making a few cents on the transaction in revenues (not profits).

Obviously on a $100 transaction the figures work out much better for them.

I think Stripe also still charge the same rate for all card types, but behind the scenes they are probably paying significantly higher rates to some card networks than others.
Improv is a well known and legitimate form of comedy. I don't think John Belushi was particularly happy or grounded.
Agree, I lay most productivity problems on an open floor. It isn't so much that an open floor allows "noise" to go around, but it sets the culture and expectation that interruptions are really "collaborating".

I'm all for collaboration, helping out colleagues, etc, but having no walks anywhere is a big target for "come talk to me". I prefer it all to be organized. Send me a Skype message, or an email along the lines of "I need your help when you have a moment." - Fine, I can do that. I'll read the email/skype message when I have a moment to take a break.

There is a colleague that I do work with, I sit right next to him, no wall, and he sends me a message on Skype to help him out when it fits my schedule even though he could just turn to me an interrupt me. I truly value this. If every single person did this, I would be much less hostile to open floor plans. It's not really the open floor that bugs me, but the culture and attitude it attracts.
I agree this seems reasonable and sane.

However there are types of programs which aren't well covered by a test (demo) or set there of.

Sometimes the program is being written to learn a value which is unknown, or for which a simplified example having success insufficiently tests the validity or scalability of the software.

Tests in those cases may work at a unit level, but still provide insufficient insight in to the soundness of the overall results.
I understand the theory behind neural networks quite well, but am not so clear on how you feed them with images, eg how do you build a network that can process megapixel images of random aspect ratios or audio files of predictable length?

I', trying to get a sense of how much effort would be involved to replicate these results if Google isn't inclined to share its internal tools, to do a neural network version of Fractint as it were, which one could train oneself. I have no clue which of the 30-40 deep learning libraries I found would be best to start with, or whether my basic instinct (to develop a node-based tool in ab image/video compositing package) is completely harebrained.

Essentially I'm more interested in experimenting with tools to do this sort of thing by trying out different connections and coefficients than in writing the underlying code. Any suggestions?
I worked on this project. It's a project filled with realizable goals and impossible mandates. SCA is the most useless thing I've ever encountered. The requirement to use CORBA is simply impossible, there is no way you can make a real-time system using CORBA.

The project I worked on recently changed its goal from being the high bandwidth backbone of the Army to

>"The program will demonstrate the HNW version 3.0 waveform
(supports the JC4ISR radio) and then store the waveform in
the DOD Waveform Repository"

From: http://www.dote.osd.mil/pub/reports/FY2014/pdf/army/2014win-...

The technology is there, the need is there, the funding has been there, but the overall management of it by the military is awful. You can't really fault the contractors either, they are just doing what they are told.
Exactly what I think.

When I was reading books before my daughter was born, I came across an idea that really stuck with me. I don't remember source book unfortunately, possibly Brain Rules for Baby, http://www.brainrules.net/brain-rules-for-baby.

It was addressing this topic of parents arguing – an extreme form of disagreeing – in front of the children. Studies have shown that parents arguing can be traumatic for children. It makes them feel unsafe and emotionally threatened, and it results in increased depression, anxiety, aggression, etc.

However, what most of the studies failed to include in their analysis is what happens after the argument. Children who see their parents constructively resolve their argument, e.g., through negotiation and compromise, actually show decreased mental health and behavioral problems when compared to children who never saw their parents argue.

Children learn compassion and how to use love and kindness to solve disagreements. They also learn that disagreeing with somebody you love is okay. It doesn't mean they'll stop loving you.

Not exactly the same as showing a united front or whatever but relevant in my opinion.

The last thing I'll add is that it's also pretty well established that children respond best to clear boundaries. They need to clearly understand what behavior is acceptable and unacceptable, i.e., what is safe and unsafe. If dad gets angry about something and mom doesn't care, it's confusing for them and leads, again, to emotional instability.

So yeah, it's complicated. It can be good to disagree and model healthy resolution behavior, but at the end of the day, both (all) authority figures do need to set similar boundaries.
11 Coolest Startup and Tech Offices in the World
https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPX0SCl7OzWilt9LnuQliat...
Namibia 2.0: Nature conservation with drones
Folklore.org is so great, such a great example of hypertext in addition to the history. I hope it stays as it is for decades.
This kind of hardware quirk is really common in old consoles. In the NES and SNES era, not only were these kinds of issues passed around by tribal knowledge, but half of them were repurposed as features and used to push the hardware further. Not random save corruption issues, obviously, but many other hardware quirks became semi-documented "features" of the console, and years later, emulators would have to reproduce them faithfully or games wouldn't run correctly.
Anything that starts with "obligatory" probably doesn't contribute to the discussion.
Not being able to understand the difference between excess muscle and fat is not semantics.

BMI is a tool applied to populations, used on individuals it can be very inaccurate, which is why nobody does it outside of blogs and magazines.
Again, not to be negative, but a complaint about Stripe with 500 up votes and hitting the front page, after having full-time employees in the Stripe channel?

Something is not going well with the CX (Customer Experience) if we're seeing this many complaints in the comments section.
People are confused how these checks work. Banks do not enforce AVS. On the auth, you'll get back status codes whether there was mismatch in the information. Its up to merchant to decide whether or not to put it into the settlement batch so the money is transfer. Regardless, the authorization went through and funds are on hold.
> But as far as I can tell, nutrition is seldom tracked or optimized for

Nutrition optimizations are a harder sell than lots of other optimizations (most of the other optimizations don't rely on end-consumer awareness to pay off -- in many cases, consumer ignorance is beneficial for them.) But there are definitely firms working on nutrition-related optimizations. [0]

[0] e.g., for a couple examples from one firm, http://www.arcadiabio.com/technologies/nutritional-oils and http://www.arcadiabio.com/technologies/enhanced-quality-grai...
I like to see a law or amendment that evens the playing field by making it unlawful for government officials and officers to lie. A federal officer can lie to you but you can't lie to them. I think that's BS.
"When people talk about Napoleon plublicly (on TV for example), it is still very political"

There is a short piece on the BBC News website about how France views Napoleon. Do you feel it's an accurate description?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-eu-33169050
I recently used Postgres for a serious project for the first time and I am really impressed. Certainly much more impressed with it than MySQL or SQL Server. plpgsql is far better than what MySQL offers out of the box, plus you have access to nicer languages out of the box with plv8, plpythonu, plr, etc. Language extensions really are a killer feature and make moving application logic into the database a cinch.
In this case, my favorite back-end language is Scala, with the Play Framework. It has an excellent threading model, asynchronous processing, stateless model, a functional, immutable data programming style that fits well with multi-threading, great performance, and access to a vast array of Java libraries and tooling.
Yes, the O(length of string) is per step in the automaton. Sorry if that was unclear, it was not my intention to mislead. Note however that that is for the naive version. The only point of the naive version is as a pedagogical stepping stone to the second version. I put the section on building the DFA after the naive version because it provides a nice logical progression: when you try to build a DFA you want the number of states to be finite, which leads to the idea that you set all entries >k to k+1. Then that leads to the idea of the sparse vector. If you were actually building a DFA though, you would use the fast automaton to generate the transitions rather than the naive one.

I tried to stay close to the terminology of the paper. They assume that k is fixed. The complexity of 1 step in the non naive automaton is O(k) where k is the max edit distance (1 or 2 in Lucene). Building the DFA is O(nk) where n is the number of states in the DFA. Note however that while the number of states in the DFA is linear in the size of the string, it's actually exponential in k. This is unavoidable, a Levenshtein DFA simply needs an exponential number of states as a function of k. So if k is large it's not a good idea to build the DFA, it's better to use the step() based automaton directly. In fact I'm pretty sure it's better to do that in any case, because it's unlikely that the initial cost of building the DFA will pay off. If k=2 then you're basically updating an array of 5 numbers at every step. Stepping in a DFA isn't going to be much faster than that. You would need a huge number of steps before it starts to pay off, and the whole point of a Levenshtein automaton is that you search only about 200 positions in the index.

> Furthermore, if you have a maximum edit distance k, you can also implement the dynamic programming approach for a pair of strings in O(nk) time

I think you can even do that without knowing the maximum distance beforehand. Maintain a priority queue of entries in the matrix, and repeatedly propagate the minimum. That way you avoid computing most of the matrix if the edit distance turns out to be small. If insert/delete/substitute costs are all 1 you don't even need a full priority queue.
"And Here's the Kicker" by Mike Sacks is a collection of interviews of top comics, from standup to sitcom writing. There was definitely a lot of misery in there. There's the Simpsons writer who graduated from Harvard and still pined over girls who ignored him in high school. Or the creator of the Onion who flat out said, "I'm miserable!" and talked about how humor is connected to pain. In fact Sacks noted to one comedian how unusual it seemed that he didn't have any baggage, and that guy mentioned getting lunch with other comedians is terrible because it's like they all have Asperger syndrome.
I don't know Lisp, so correct me if I am wrong. The whole idea of embedding your own language sound pretty much the same as a growing the language, except that you are doing it yourself, in a non standard way.
Taxes aren't arbitrarily iterative (they only hit once a year), so your "repeat until you're convinced" is kind of a poor analogy. 14.5% is comparable to 15%, and lower (which incentivises people to quit using the capital gains cheat), but not much lower. That level of sophistication in and of itself shows that this is not total crackpottery, but at least somewhat well-thought out.
Debugged a (somewhat similar) problem a few months back on a USB device that would only happen when it was plugged in on non grounded computers (e.g. laptops running on battery). Working in hardware is fun.
I think the sentiment of the parent was that we should avoid (re)writing things in pet language of the week.

Sure, Rust has a great following, but so does GO. Which is the "right" choice for a new codec? I don't think there is a clear answer.
This Is Twitter's Top Secret Project Lightning – BuzzFeed News
I might add as a former lobbyist, everything he said in the article about my former profession is absolutely correct. Every day we analyzed policy to find ways for our clients (corporations) to increase profits, decrease costs, and eliminate taxes. On the other hand we did a lot of good for small and medium sized business. Unfortunately working for small and mid-sized businesses, and average citizens, doesn't pay the bills. I just bought my first house, and I'm starting to save and budget wisely for my family. Anything anyone - be it the President, congress, or otherwise - can do to reduce my tax burden, reduce government involvement in my life, and increase money for my family, is a good thing in my book. Like I said in my last comment: I'm so sick of both parties that I'm less interesting in "Republican" or "Democrat" and more interested in the actual person.
I think the case can be made that Java was too simple. It's inability to express very much within itself is what led to explosion of external tools to make it "better", or indeed, "work".

I think it was deliberately designed as a simple language to be used by large groups of people in simple ways, but actually failed so epically at that goal because of being too simple that it actually destroyed the entire idea of building a language deliberately for large corporate use. (Note that it has grown a lot since then; it had to.) Go's the first language I've seen since Java try for that niche. I've said it before: In the short term Go may be stealing from Python and Node, but in the long term, Java's the one that needs to be worried about Go.

Edit: Literally six minutes later, my feeds produce for me: http://www.businessinsider.com/google-go-update-from-jason-b...
Performing due diligence on startups in Africa: analyzing investment opportunity
The day (or month, or year) you want to send a probe to Pluto and the day you want to send one to Mercury, not to mention the direction, are going to be totally different, and aren't easy to schedule — you might have a 3-day window to be sure something can get to Saturn, since you're relying on a gravity assist from Mars and a configuration of the planets that only happens every couple decades. Also, even if such a thing could be organized, there's simply no way the budget will support 10 missions launching at once. They have to be tracked, developed, and funded separately for a lot of really good reasons. Stuff that's shared (launch vehicles, software) can be co-developed but each mission has wildly different timelines and requirements.
Disappointed that the porn site didn't incorporate ketchup
"software over-engineering"
Ask HN: Web Analytics That Doesnt Fight Reactjs?
I'm working with Reactjs, and have been trying to install analytics to better understand user behavior. Heap Analytics would get in the way of ajax calls and would cause my json variables to load as nil. Mixpanel doesn't receive data ~60% of the time. Has anybody tackled this issue before? I really don't want to have to build something in house.
That experiment does not support any of your claims.
not sure I see the value for backers? most open source communities provide support and forums without paying.
Are launch costs still high?
i forgot my /s
Yes, I think of Rust as a promising target for parser generators. Thinking about text parsing, if Bison generated Rust, then you'd have a memory-safe parser that should be about as efficient as C. Something like this probably already exists or is being worked on. Ideally existing code generators could target Rust also to get memory safety.

There are some SIMD optimizations in parsers though that I don't know how easily you could express in Rust. The quintessential example of this for text parsing is Clang's optimization that uses SSE to skip over C++ comments 16 bytes at a time:

https://github.com/llvm-mirror/clang/blob/61f6bf2c8a8e94c4fa...
It would be interesting to know what happens if instead of tweaking it to better match a banana, they tweaked it to better match a banana and NOT match everything else.
Are you a geolibertarian?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism
The 'standard' thing is both a gift and an issue. You're free to fulfill your needs, but everyone will do so. The community needs to be mature and sensitive, sharing good ideas, not building silos.
What was the research plan here? We want to investigate a diets impact on aging? What are the negative results then?

These are two extraordinarily complex, intertwined topics that to come up with a hypothesis like this on the limited evidence ends up appearing to be just a random search for correlations, terminating once you find one that has the right p value.
Those have been implemented in hardware too.