skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll make sure to include some example output in my next article. It's pretty readable - not quite idiomatic C#, but you can almost always see what's going on. It's very conservative C#, and it still uses the same style of coding that the original source used - ADO and `Response.Write`, rather than WebForms or ASP.NET MVC.

This project had the full support of the company, from our newest hires all the way to Joel and Michael. As many people have noted, using this wacky one-off language was a source of a lot of friction in our business, and we felt that spending a few months to get rid of that friction would be a good use of resources (me).
Oh, god. This was one of the things I took as a sign of impending collapse in the dot-com bubble: startups were paying their rent in equity.

We'll never learn, will we?
I predicted about a year ago that nginx/LuaJIT (OpenResty) is the sleeping giant of web development. I've seen more and more companies start using it, and I wouldn't be surprised if people start talking about it as a Node.js alternative in the not so distant future.
Show HN: ‘Parallel psql’, for workflows in PostgreSQL/PostGIS
Hi everyone

I’ve written a tool (par_psql) which makes parallelisation easier for PostgreSQL/PostGIS users, by providing a new piece of syntax.

With —-& inline, it runs queries or groups of queries in parallel.

Without —-&, it synchronises parallel work then runs subsequent code normally.

This allows easy control of parallelism and synchronisation inline within your SQL script.

The tool is backwards compatible with existing psql scripts, and par_psql scripts are backwards compatible with psql. It should work with any version of PostgreSQL. The only dependencies are bash and psql.

Benchmark and example code is provided at http://github.com/gbb/par_psql.

Quick example

create table a as ...
create table a1 as ... —-&
create table a2 as ... —-&
create table c ...

Some cool uses

1. GIS and any other discipline where you prepare diverse source datasets in a multi-stage workflow before integrating them together.

2. Where you have CPU-intensive queries, split the work via one field (e.g. ID) and create parallel temp tables. UNION the results.

3. Add “Preview runs”, that complete progressively using subsets of the data without delaying the main task.

4. Create scripts where several tasks run at fixed times after the script begins (use pg_sleep() and run them in parallel).

It’s available under the postgresql open source license.

It's a quick hack and version 0.1, so please be kind with any criticism/bug reports. That said, it works well for me and it's easier than messing around with Gnu Parallel/BASH/crontab/sql combinations.

Enjoy! :-)

Graeme
Why not HyperLogLog?
Experienced Product Designer Needed at Blockspring
I don't want to make you rewrite this if you've already answered this elsewhere, but...

Could you provide some pointers about how to begin with contributing to the Rust documentation? What are the areas that need the most help or have received the most complaints/confused reactions? I actually like writing docs but I'm not sure where I'd begin. (And of course not super confident in my understanding of Rust in the first place since I'm still learning it myself. But I know a lot more than someone looking at it for the first time.)
I can open a 15MB log file, but my CPU usage skyrockets.
It already has what I would consider spam.
So make it. You've got the theory right there.
Yes, mine are a few black pixels (Lenovo laptop screen). Didn't work for that.
Power Laws in Venture Capital
Interesting to see that Ryan Graves replied to one of the comments.
The pixels in the image don't seem to be the same size as the pixels in my retina display, would this influence the results?
Open source strawpoll implementation
ioquake 3 via emscripten: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/demos/detail/ioquake3js

I need some help getting MP to work with WebRTC. If you're interested: https://github.com/klaussilveira/ioquake3.js
He apparently invented it [1], or at least popularized it via Laplace transforms for solving differential equations.

[1]: http://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/1984/why-is-the-heavi...
Uber and Airbnb taught me to pay attention to what people do, not what they say. By November 2010 I was taking Uber(Cab) once a day around SOMA and absolutey loving it, referring all my friends to it, etc...and yet I still remember letting the pessimism of the online nay sayer crowd infect my brain and convince me it wasn't an awesome service. Live and learn. Airbnb was a little different in that they had a soft pivot from renting out a spare bed/room to mostly full home rentals (it was just a much easier site to use than the other options available at the time), but not too different than Uber in terms of traction once it really hit.
I find it funny you reply to this and not my comment above... what does reinventing hyperlinks get you other than screwing up user experience????

Because Tumblr does it too???

What is the positive???
App Academy's (Real) Tuition Model
I've written many a map-reduce job in a .exs file. It's very easy to do a parallel_map and take advantage of all available cores.
Looking back, I regret not open sourcing it as well. Pre-.NET, we didn't want to spoil our cross-platform competitive advantage. Post-.NET, we didn't think there was much of a market for a VBScript-to-C# transpiler (wouldn't those people prefer VB.NET?), and besides, open sourcing it seemed like a lot of work for basically no benefit.
http://lebo.io/2015/06/22/the-unix-philosophy-and-elixir-as-...
Well shit, why are you downvoted? For linking to documents that dare to "revise" history and look for original source material to determine why the United States went to war?

Most curious in your first link is the fact that of the four states whose declarations of causes were evaluated, South Carolina used more of the document to argue for states' rights than slavery (37%, 20%).

Obviously slavery had a huge part to do with the conflict, but for a state that still had the Confederate States of America's flag over their capital, it seems their primary reason for war was to preserve their rights as a state in the union.
If the dates of the posts are correct, they were moving really really fast.
NixOS

> In NixOS, the entire operating system — the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on — is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it’s purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this.

> You configure a NixOS system by writing a specification of the functionality that you want on your machine in /etc/nixos/configuration.nix.

https://nixos.org/nixos/about.html

and

GuixSD

> The Guix System Distribution supports a consistent whole-system configuration mechanism. By that we mean that all aspects of the global system configuration—such as the available system services, timezone and locale settings, user accounts—are declared in a single place. Such a system configuration can be instantiated—i.e., effected.

> One of the advantages of putting all the system configuration under the control of Guix is that it supports transactional system upgrades, and makes it possible to roll-back to a previous system instantiation, should something go wrong with the new one (see Features). Another one is that it makes it easy to replicate the exact same configuration across different machines, or at different points in time, without having to resort to additional administration tools layered on top of the system’s own tools.

http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/

http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/System-Con...
The synergetic effect of Li polysulfide and LiNO3 to prevent Li dendrite growth
Less an explicit set of questions but more recursively/iteratively asking why/what/when/how at increasingly deeper levels of the problem they're talking about. It requires the interviewer to be at least familiar with the general domain but you don't have to be an expert. It's borrowed from how Elon Musk says he does assessments. People who know their stuff remember everything about every part of something they worked on. They know why they did /didn't do something all the way down to the most trivial level of detail and they have intelligent thoughts about how they would improve and what tradeoffs they made. Most people fail after one or two levels of this "interrogation".
> As a non-Sikh Indian, that's the first time I've come across the meaning of the word "Sardarji".

Sardar in Marathi also means the same thing - "Commander" or "Leader"
>Not to detract from your point, but you don't need the expansion for that

I just used the expansion given in the parent. It also makes it apparent that List is the closure.
Cats!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennelly%E2%80%93Heaviside_lay...
Postmates charges exactly what the retailer charged you plus 9% (it's a transparent markup, not an opaque one like Instacart.)
Safe lightweight references. Arc is garbage collection, and Swift is totally garbage collected. Rust is not. It's a rather important distinction. Because allocations must be thread safe, Swift references are also all atomic. If you do choose to use reference counting in Rust (it is nearly always avoidable), bumping a reference count with Rc is very cheap.

It also means that, like other managed languages, Swift objects that have references taken to them (classes) must in general be allocated on the heap. This means that, unlike Rust but like many higher-level languages, controlling allocations can be difficult and heavily dependent on the whims of the optimizer. Some of Swift's implementation decisions (like copy on write arrays) also suffer. The inability to avoid allocations, combined with much less efficient allocations than are possible with tracing GC, are among the reasons that reference counting is uncommon in production languages (though the Immix collector does very well).

You can certainly write code in the unsafe dialect of Swift that is just as fast as Rust, C, or any other language. But like unsafe mode in Rust, this won't be the common mode of use in Swift.
Ask HN: Does anybody use a bug tracker for their personal lives?
Or a variant? Though I don't have much experience with issue trackers (except for the occasional issues raised on github, etc), could an issue tracker could be used for one's own personal lives?
The thing is, for real "enterprise" customers who wanted unix you would just bundle Chilisoft ASP into the quote. They would also probably want to use Oracle for the RDBMS which would dwarf the cost of Chillisoft.
I also upgraded (back) to Firefox after using Chrome. The bloat killed me. Soooooo much wasted memory.

Firefox Dev edition, x64 build on windows 8.1 with multi-process enabled runs twice as fast as Chrome ever did on my computer, while consuming less than 25% as much RAM.
Lake fire grew after private drone flights disrupted air drops
I was lucky enough to meet Curtis last year at Uber HQ. Awesome dude, incredibly smart. His Node talk from 2011 was a big contributing factor to me learning node.js. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jups7FveC1E

Edit: And yes, God Mode was for developers. The media should chill and learn to nerd out every once in a while...
I think it only auto-suggests categories for an exact match on the transaction details. And you still have to confirm it. This is actually what I want, because (for example) when I go to the Walgreens (a pharmacy) near my work I want to count that against my spending, and when my wife goes to the one near her work it should count against her spending. The only difference that shows up in the transactions from the bank is a number, eg "Walgreens #4567" and "Walgreens #1234". Having figured out which one is which it can now auto-suggest that match. But it won't try to guess what "Walgreens 9999" should be if it hasn't seen that before.
It's not so rosy for companies. The situation is akin to the one in large companies and bureaucracies where all numbers and estimates in all communications become "padded" and largely fictionalized -- precisely because "everyone is doing it." In such broken games, signals lose their meaning, and everyone ultimately loses.

In academia, someone observed this: "The revolutionary idea of one generation becomes just the stuff you say to get tenure in the next generation."
The difference between a mechanical engineer and a mechanic is the engineer knows the math. A mechanic can pick up everything about engineering on the job, except the math, and without the math he's crippled.

That's why to be an ME, a degree is a gatekeeper. To get a degree, you have to pass the math classes.

Yes, I know engineers who can't do the math, despite having a degree. I've never known a mechanic to learn the math on the job.
European Tech Startup Events 2015 (open list)
> Sikhism is one of the few religions I can't find much to complain about.

You are not allowed to drink alcohol yet all the Sikhs I have met in India drink it.
Crazy reading your answer after i responded. I gotta say we're definitely on the same page here :)
I hate our current lifetime elision rules, as do many people who have been using Rust for a while. There was an RFC (which was closed) to add some back. IMO, the rules largely exist for the sake of making short examples look less threatening, rather than because they actually make Rust more usable.
Had a kind of opposite experience with K.

J seems quite reasonable - intuitively - after reading very good "J for C programmers" (http://jsoftware.com/help/jforc/contents.htm) . And symbols in J chosen for most operations also seem good - at least after some small use. "NB." is immediately "nota bene" (I guess knowing some Latin doesn't hurt - it's "note well", but I always understand it as "note that") - don't some other languages use this acronym for comments as well?

What is IMO particularly good in K is the small size of the interpreter. J is "for the whole math", while K is "for practical 99% of cases" - at least it feels like that. Having small interpreter which fits in CPU cache allows potentially to run faster than with assembler, because K code is packed densely - so less time to wait for slow memory.
Lenovo is planning a retro ThinkPad
Sleep well, eat well and get fit. 100% guaranteed wins.

Also, stop smoking/drinking. Hard battles, guaranteed wins.
Uber drivers driving into joblessness
It is rather ironic Uber drivers embrace and dream about being able to work on their own schedule, when recent news of Uber poaching Carnegie Melon researchers clearly indicates their long term plan to eliminate these jobs almost entirely. It's almost as if Uber drivers are helping contribute (buying Uber more time.. bc w/o drivers, no business..) to their own joblessness. This fate is inevitable anyways.... if they don't do it, Google will. Thoughts anyone??
Fast money, slow data
LIVE Bitcoin Jeopardy Game. Play for Real Money. Winners Get Paid Instantly
No argument against the fact that Sikhs are a hard-working people, but its a stretch to say Indian cuisine found in most Indian restaurants in the West is Punjabi cuisine. What gets served is generic North Indian food which is based on the Mughlai cuisine. For instance you almost never find Sarson da Saag or Makki di roti in any restaurant, so cannot really call it Punjabi food.
The good thing about NGINX is that it's perceived as language agnostic. So no matter what your codebase lang, you can always put an nginx on top. While Node tools, are only good if you use them within a Node stack (see Strongloop). As far as I know nginx is powering 150M websites/apps.
I've seen people use project management software for their personal lives. Trello and the ilk, as example. I've attempted it, but never manage to maintain it very long.
Saw the same thing. Someone give her a million dollars and 3 years...
Possibly the DPI scaling?
HAProxy will be using Lua in future releases for similar reasons. Interesting trend!
I've used Trello. Project management seems like a more appropriate model than issue tracking.
Moldbug did not simply "mention the existence of slavery."

He explicitly celebrated it. He talked about it being a natural order. He argued that "the innate character and intelligence of some is more suited to mastery than slavery."

This is pure, racist drivel. This is an evil way of thinking. There is a reason that racism, genocide, slavery are so abhorred in the modern world; they are poisonous ideas that have caused some of the largest atrocities history has known.

He also explicitly argues for a dictatorship beholden only to landowners: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/seces.... He admits that his influences and design are similar to those of the Nazism and Stalinism.

He is a fascist, arguing for a violent dictatorship, and arguing that slavery is a natural order. These are not mere rhetorical devices; this is the core of his argument. His entire argument is steeped in violence.
I do this all the time, the number of my installed Emacs packages and Firefox add-ons looks like a sawtooth wave when plotted over time.
Also this: http://ubercab.tumblr.com/post/485301492/entrepreneurial-roc...
I'm in.

In a Previous Age, there were “rumors that there would be interest in opening up the language if there would be enough community response around it”—wonder if they amounted to anything [1]. Interest in k is only growing it appears.

[1] http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/11/14/22741/791
Scheduled Webhooks – Aka Cron for the Cloud
Reading Comprehension a Hidden Disability
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/ad-hominem.html

"An Ad Hominem is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument."

http://www.skepdic.com/adhominem.html

"Ad hominem is Latin for "to the man." The ad hominem fallacy occurs when one asserts that somebody's claim is wrong because of something about the person making the claim. The ad hominem fallacy is often confused with the legitimate provision of evidence that a person is not to be trusted. Calling into question the reliability of a witness is relevant when the issue is whether to trust the witness. It is irrelevant, however, to call into question the reliability or morality or anything else about a person when the issue is whether that person's reasons for making a claim are good enough reasons to support the claim."

http://www.logicalfallacies.info/relevance/ad-hominem/

"It is important to note that the label “ad hominem” is ambiguous, and that not every kind of ad hominem argument is fallacious. In one sense, an ad hominem argument is an argument in which you offer premises that you the arguer don’t accept, but which you know the listener does accept, in order to show that his position is incoherent (as in, for example, the Euthyphro dilemma). There is nothing wrong with this type of argument ad hominem."

http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

"An ad hominem attack is not quite as weak as mere name-calling. It might actually carry some weight. For example, if a senator wrote an article saying senators' salaries should be increased, one could respond:

"Of course he would say that. He's a senator.

"This wouldn't refute the author's argument, but it may at least be relevant to the case."
The Progressive Programmer
I love the ThinkPad keyboard and 'erase head' pointer: so much so that I bought the ThinkPad USB keyboard and use it for my desktop work.

This intrigues me and if it comes true, I hope the hardware plays nice with Linux as it might become a long term companion.
But you still have to do the development and debugging.

I've used lots of closed-source "substitute, but just as good for porting" packages over the years. They NEVER work--sure they get the easy 70%, but they all miss the 30% of edge cases that code somehow always manages to trigger. I am not interested in debugging your porting library so you can make more money, thanks--especially if it is likely to piss off a customer. I will control my customer experience as that is my money.

The only exception to this is if you release your code open-source. Then I might adopt it since I can fix a showstopping bug myself if I need to for a customer.

Here's my litmus test if your closed-source package on Unix might be acceptable: Do you support FreeBSD? My team is smart enough to abstract code in such a way that it can run on Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris without killing ourselves. If your team can't do that, it's just going to get in our way.
Totally agree 100%. Also, have a creative hobby (if you're in any way so inclined). Learn to play a musical instrument, or paint, write, or what-have-you. Whether you create new things or learn to preform existing works you will have something to show for your efforts.
Really impressive work!
And Lua is taking off because of these reasons such as the ability to extend Nginx or HAproxy. Plus, is simple to use, easy to learn and highly efficient, without the need to touch C/C++.
Maybe.

If the pixels are being interpolated they'll be less likely to be completely white or completely black. I'm not sure how much that matters, but if you're going to leave this site on for a while it seems like you might as well go to the effort of turning off pixel scaling.
Plus, if you have a big task it's a whole lot easier to add CPUs to do additional work in Elixir/Erlang than in any of those languages-- C/C++/Java/Ruby/Python/etc.

If your work requires more than one node, Elixir is a lot faster than trying to create distributed system in another language-- you can just spread the work over many machines almost trivially by comparison.

Literally just tell other nodes to run the function.
Functions in particular are a programming language construct and as such not easily extended across programming languages, processes and networks, mostly due to different type systems and error states [...] it's not an accident or historical vestige that Unix philosophy uses the word "program". It has technical as well as social implications that have barely changed in the past 50 years.

Insightful.
> We're ignoring credentials because we are finding that they have no predictive power whatsoever for competence.

I disagree with that actually.

It's my own anecdotal evidence, but from what I've seen, people with degrees write generally better code. They have a better understanding of algorithms, are more aware that what they're writing in a high level language isn't running by magic but is being translated into lower level constructs which may or may not be very efficient, they're more likely to realize there's an existing algorithm for what they're doing, etc.

I guess I would sum it up that people without degrees tend to work harder and not smarter.
Honestly if there is a bubble and if it does burst, I'm putting my money on Postmates as the first company that will go out of business.
Localhost Is Killing Software Delivery
Two rival self-driving cars have close call in California
You don't get to a valuation of $40B in 6 years moving slowly ;)
One diet trick I learned, sort of related to fitness, is to cut out almost all carbs. In crunch mode I don't really have time to work out and tend to snack 24/7. Carbs pack on the pounds. Now I just eat nuts (almonds), bacon, cheese, hot dogs (no bun), whatever, and it hardly makes a difference.
Singing videos
Muzik dinleme sitesi
FogBugz was originally an internal tool meant to facilitate writing Fog Creek's original first product (CityDesk, a CMS). It seems pretty reasonable to go with whatever's most comfortable for an internal tool that you don't expect to sell, let alone to have different people running on different OSes.

That is to say, it seems like they did choose the better technology stack for the job at hand. If you're going that direction, the real problems started when Joel got a job at Microsoft.
Long-Term and Short-Term Challenges to Ensuring the Safety of AI Systems