skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The result of Ono and Bruinier is significant, but I don't know if it really belongs on this list.

Euler's pentagonal number theorem already gives a simple algebraic description of the partition numbers. The so-called "finite algebraic formula" of Ono and Bruinier is only more "finite", "algebraic" or "formula" in a very artificial, press-release-exaggerated sense.

Sort of like claiming that any of the contorted "prime formulas" that various people have come up with (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PrimeFormulas.html) provide a better finite description of the primes than the good old sieve of Eratosthenes.

Now, this comparison is not quite fair. Unlike those prime formulas, the Ono-Bruinier result is actually mathematically significant in that it does give you more information about the partition numbers. It's a nice result, but is it more interesting than hundreds of other interesting results in mathematics in the last 5ish years? Even if we just look at the extremely narrow field of mathematics that is the study of partition numbers, there are other nice recent achivements such as Radu's proof of Subbarao's conjecture.

Ono is certainly an excellent mathematician, but he might be even more excellent at getting extreme amounts of publicity for his results. I don't want to give the impression that I'm sour about this. On the contrary, I think it's awesome that mathematics can get this kind of publicity, and Ono earned it (other mathematicians should learn from his example!), but it's something to keep in mind.

Likewise, about HOTT. It's very promising, but is it really an "achivement" yet? Who knows, the hype could turn out to be justified. I guess if you want to assess scientific progress as recent as in the last five years, you have to try to predict the future as well.
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Senior Front-End Developer (St. Louis, MO)
I struggle to see how this adds so much more effort?

You already know you want to refactor it so its not about forgetting to do it, and once the feature is done you'll probably have a better idea of how to refactor everything better and faster. It should actually save time in code productivity vs the extra minutes to do another commit.
I assume the number you're referring to is from Judge Jed S. Rakoff's editorial: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/nov/20/why-inn... ("How prevalent is the phenomenon of innocent people pleading guilty? The few criminologists who have thus far investigated the phenomenon estimate that the overall rate for convicted felons as a whole is between 2 percent and 8 percent...")

So between 92% and 98% of the time, plea bargaining gets things right. The "beyond a reasonable doubt" jury trial standard is unlikely to be more than 95% and is in practice probably 90% or lower: http://federaltaxcrimes.blogspot.com/2014/09/proof-beyond-re.... So if the 2-8% error rate is correct, it's not clear that plea bargaining leads to more innocent people being convicted than jury trials.

Moreover, it's unclear to me that you can do much better than 90-95% accuracy. Say you set the threshold at 99.9%, only convicting when the proof is overwhelming. What would be your rate of false negatives (i.e. where you let a guilty person go)? And how would society react to that? There's a false negative rate beyond which people will push back on the court system as being too lenient on the accused. You can already see this in areas of the law where proof is difficult. For example, I think the crazy administrative proceedings for rape cases in college campuses arose, in part, because of the difficulty of holding guilty people accountable in the court system.
(See the sibling comment with a "10." in it for context.)

7. Seventeen Sudoku Clues. OK, this one is easy to describe :-). The question is how few clues a Sudoku puzzle can have while still having a unique solution. The answer is 17. A bunch of 17-clue puzzles had already been found, so the "only" thing left to do was to prove that 16 clues never suffice. The proof was basically a big computer search, but with some clever innovations to make the search manageable. So the first step was to find all possible completed Sudoku grids. Someone else had already done that. It turns out that there are only about 5 billion "genuinely different" fully-solved Sudoku grids. So now all you have to do (ha!) is to check, for each fully-solved grid, every set of 16 clues, and verify that none leads to a unique solution. Of course this is ridiculously too big a search, and that's where the cleverness comes in.

So, given a completed grid, you can identify some "unavoidable sets", sets of cells such that any solvable puzzle must include one clue from each such set. (They looked for unavoidable sets of size <=12.) And then you can find "hitting sets", sets of size 16 that intersect every one of these unavoidable sets that's been found. Any solvable 16-clue puzzle would need to have its clues form a hitting set. But something could be a hitting set and not a solvable puzzle, so once you've found all the hitting sets you have a bit of checking to do.

And the cleverness lies in finding good ways of finding (enough) unavoidable sets, good heuristic ways of finding all the hitting sets (this problem is NP-complete in general), and efficient ways of testing each hitting set found to see whether it gives a puzzle with a unique solution.

There are other mathematical tasks that can be formulated in terms of hitting sets (the paper by McGuire, Tugemann and Civario claims this is true for various problems in computational biology, software testing, databases, etc.); I don't know to what extent their ideas are actually applicable to any of those domains.
This is completely true. Apple's absolute control over their ecosystem is not just a drawback -- it's also a significant benefit of them. There are far fewer apps in the Apple store than the Play store that are DOA, and the general quality of apps is far higher. Although it's somewhat contrary to the modern spirit of development, Apple's policies have proven to be a very good method of quality control.
I'm failing to understand the supposed nobility some people are commenting on. 99% of people don't understand or don't care anyway. Annoying and confusing those people is not noble. The people that do care will likely find that turning off cookies break their favourite sites, so the warning is not practically actionable.

Some sites now offer me the choice of cookies, the choice to participate in a quick survey, a choice to use the iOS app, another iOS app choice that is identical to the first, the choice to instantly connect to a live customer service representative and no choice about watching a partner video. Might as well bring back all the animated GIFs and marquee text.
>> This thoughtless behaviour reminds me of the thousands of websites which include a "(c) YYYY" copyright notice in their footers, despite this being completely irrelevant in modern copyright law.

I'll bite :-) Are you automatically covered then? - companies like Apple still do it .... 'Copyright © 2015 Apple Inc. All rights reserved.'
Different results by search string.

http://i.imgur.com/AJ4iB3D.png
Yes but as soon as you use Google Analytics, you need to include the notice.

As a EU citizen, I think this example shows how stupid laws can come out of good intentions. Why stupid? Because, no matter what the intentions were, the only practical effect is creating a nuisance for web users, who quickly learn to ignore the consent requests.
> No need to power or refresh, but if you have a cruddy SSD you should keep other backups.

No need to power or refresh, but if you have data you value you should keep backups.

Seriously, no matter where you are keeping your data, if you don't have a completely independent copy somewhere, you will lose it some day.
Data Viz with Python and JS: Crafting a Dataviz Tool-Chain for the Web
There are many examples, including "This product may contain traces of ..." and California's Prop 65: "This building contains substances known to the State of California to cause ..." It's required in some cases, but never forbidden, so one can avoid liability by just posting it everywhere, robbing it of its informative content.
Looks good so far! Have a look at unity for inspiration for gui, I've seen plenty of non programers use it very effectively because of how user friendly it is
A Tale of Two Lambdas
I don't know if someone has already written one, but a commit-msg hook could certainly achieve this.

http://git-scm.com/docs/githooks
Browsers already can whitelist and blacklist IPs (though you'd possibly want a extension / addon to help manage that for you).

The problem is that:

1) every site writes cookies and some cookies are needed for sites to behave properly (eg it would be impossible to use online shopping without cookies). So the amount of "do you accept" messages you'd see would be insane. It would get to the point that users would just give up and accept everything (pretty much like we do now, in fact).

As a fun experiment, lynx (the terminal based web browser) asks you to accept cookies by default. So try browsing around the web with that. You'd see how very quickly it becomes the most annoying thing ever!

2) what happens when your tracking cookie comes from the same domain as site which you might want cookies stored from? You either have to accept being tracked or break that site.

3) lastly, there are methods of being tracked without the use of cookies. Cookies are by far the easiest and thus most common. But it's possible to work around disabled cookies.
No more involved than deploying a ruby web app.

At least the erlang/elixir has built-in support for zero-downtime-deploys. You don't have to rely on an app server like Unicorn and USR2 signals.
Hey, we're actually hacking on solving this exact problem at StackHut.com, which is a platform for containerised services that you can call immediately through HTTP. I think your sentiment is super-common: building microservices / container-enabled services and getting all the good stuff that comes with them is still too much of a learning curve for most devs. We're just about to push live the ability to add new services: would love to get your thoughts on what you'd like to see: leo@stackhut.com
Holy hell, hackers. This isn't about you.

Nearly all of the comments in this thread are extremely negative - ranging from hand-wavy about how valuable mobile is to expressing excitement that "[dumb] people will [again] be leaving the Internet." What an incredibly pessimistic and self-centric way of viewing the world.

The incredible thing about a supercomputer that fits in your hand isn't that we're putting them in the hand of hackers who went to MIT 40 years ago. It's not exciting for someone who was going to be sitting behind a Linux terminal anyway. This pretty much changes nothing for them.

But it changes everything for the kid in sub-Saharan Africa who has never had access to a computer. It changes everything for my friend's family in Iran - none of them ever had a computer, and now all of them have a smartphone.

It even changes everything for my father-in-law - a hay farmer who had little interest in using a computer, but inexplicably loves his iPad. He takes it out to the farm and performs what I would consider the most trivial of computing tasks, but it's something he never did before, even when PCs were cheap and ubiquitous and I spent hour after hour teaching him how to scroll and double-click.

Of course, hackers are right: That smartphone is not be as good at editing photos as your 15-inch Macbook Pro. And it's a horror to write code from. But, to borrow an analogy from Peter Thiel, the difference between editing photos on your phone and editing them on a computer may be a move from 1 to n for hackers. Hackers, who have been at n for years, are rational in not caring. For this Iranian family, and for my father-in-law, however, this is a move from 0 to 1. And that's a big deal.

Are the operating systems more closed than hackers would like them to be? Yes. But my friend's family in Iran has neither the interest nor the ability to hack on the kernel of some mobile operating system, so they don't really care. Is it harder for them to type on a phone than it is on a keyboard? Of course, but now they're typing something. It works, and they're using it, and that's a big, big deal.

This isn't necessarily a revolution of what it's possible to do with computers, but a revolution of who can do things with computers. We'll soon be reaching economies of scale we could never imagine. Access, where there previously was none.

That you can call an Uber because it's in your pocket and happens to include GPS, in my mind, is just a side-benefit.
Facebook hack login breach discovered
Why? I have a 1TB Samsung 840 EVO and I updated the firmware earlier this year as the previous version apparently had some performance problems with data written long ago.

Should I be worried?
Someone just bought a slab of pavement in London for £125,000
Google's new project captures finger motions
> directive isn't as dumb as many believe it to be,

I think directive is exactly as dumb as the effect it causes. Regardless of lawmakers intentions or even the letter of the law.
That suggestion is absurd. Why should you have to work around limitations in your razors? Just pay an extra 50c for the branded ones.
I never understood why they didn't force the requirement onto browser makers instead of website operators. Then users could actually enforce their cookie choice by opting out, instead of having to trust every website to be honest in their cookie use.
Really nice, I have a few apps I will use this on.
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At least some of the complaints of indie devs like Cabel Sasser relate to the technical restrictions that Apple places on Mac App Store apps. Based on statements by Apple, these restrictions are, to Apple, important from a security standpoint.

Thus it's probably going to take more than complaints to resolve them. It's going to take Apple engineers figuring out how to permit more power for good devs without creating holes for malware.

Apple is well aware of the shortcomings of the Mac App Store model, which is why they continue to provide an official, supported path for apps to be installed on Macs from outside of the App Store.

From a money standpoint, Taylor Swift is getting 1.5% more from Apple than App Store developers are...doesn't seem like that much to me. As far as I know, there is no "download and try it for 90 days" feature in the App Store.
Nice article. I was shocked by how much gender preferences aligned with the artists gender, and how I didn't recognize 90% of the female biased artists. What's going on there? I don't know. Also, it seems like artists preferred by the gentler sex are also targeted to young people. Does this mean that adult women are cool with kid music, or does it mean the majority of female listeners are young, or something else? Again, don't know.
I think the (C) YYYY notice is more for people who "forget" that items are copywritten automatically.
There is at least one:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/peeshkot/idfkeeahc...

I don't recommend using it though. Last time I looked at it it used a very broad heuristic to find the cookie consent buttons. I wouldn't trust it not to click something more important by mistake.
5 Killer User Engagement Metrics for Growth
I really wish the other browsers would have something like this to quickly turn on/off settings for specific sites:

http://i.imgur.com/9qvdOfW.png

(Opera, before it turned into yet-another-webkit-browser - and removed that very useful feature.)

Since I have JS (and cookies) off by default I don't get the cookie messages much if at all, but for sites which need JS or cookies, it's almost trivial to enable them immediately.
I get "Diego Maradona" as the 2nd result (the HN thread is the 1st one :) . I'm in Uruguay (South America) where the FIFA news are huge, and logged into my Google account, so that must be it. Interesting to see the "bubble effect".

I opened on an incognito window and it gives me answers similar to the ones posted above.

Edit2: for the curious, the link it gives me is
"Diego Maradona would like to be the next president of FIFA"

http://ftw.usatoday.com/2015/06/diego-maradona-would-like-to...
> You should first check if the compiler doesn't do it for you.

No, compiler cannot rewrite your bytecode into a threaded code.

> Otherwise you're just making your code harder to maintain and less portable for zero gain.

No. Threaded code is almost always faster, even if run only once.

> a proper jump table

I'm not talking about jump tables. I'm talking about replacing the bytecode indices with jump addresses once (yes, with a precalculated table) and then doing an indirect jump for each translated opcode from the input stream.

An example: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/blob/trunk/byterun/interp.c

(see the Next macro definition)
It really isn't homoiconicity if you can't compile an AST with it.

What you're describing are just simple data structures. Erlang has no user-definable data structures. I don't recall anything I've read explicitly stating this, but I've believed for a while that this was the case because it made moving terms across the network simpler. Thus, libraries aren't "exploiting" a few basic data types... they're stuck with a few basic data types. There's no alternative.

That really has nothing to do with 'homoiconicity'. Erlang code is not a data structure, and it is not spelled in Erlang terms. And that would generally not be a good thing! Erlang's already plenty verbose without also having to be expressed as legal Erlang data terms.

(The generally loosy-goosy typing that results is one of the reasons I don't like Erlang and am moving away from it. But YMMV.)
Taylor Swift is young and wants to be richer now and not wait 50 years until streaming nets here the same. Indies will have to make they money from live events and t-shirts anyways.
Very nice work, and thanks for releasing under MIT.

Cheers. The hard work goes to BB, their initial library, though :)

Interesting that Backblaze decided to go with 17+3 configuration.

Yeah. It seems they don't go for any RAID within a storage pod, but instead uses raw ext4, and distributes shards across pods instead of hard drives in a single pod. [1]

This would of course mean that a single pod isn't loaded when a drive is replaced, but it is distributed across 17 other pods.

[1] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architect...
As I understand it (but I am no lawyer), it was only a requirement in the US until 1989. So if you are a company operating outside the US and none of your copyrighted material dates from before that, I don't see why you should include it. Also, for websites there are many more reliable methods of demonstrating the time of creation.

So for some it might have a use, but it seems to me that thousands of webmasters (including myself) have been copying this pre-1989 US-only best-practice, just because it is nice to have something to put it the footer :-)
This seems to echo something I said in another thread; the hackers are further away from their users:

Even for technical people, having access to analytics is helpful. Being informed about product metrics helps developers see the ‘why’ behind their work — a key ingredient to high performance

You mean that the technical people who actually implement the software are so alienated from their users that they have to wait for a royal decree to spur them to work?

I wonder how few of their ideas flow back up to the top.

I like the article; it's nice to see one use case of ETL. Too often people directly hit the production database to get reports instead of ETLing into a read-only db that won't affect site performance.
In developped western countries, we live in a world where being original and creative is supposed to be the norm. It is not the same in other parts of the planet, and it was not always like that in the West. Allow me to question this new party line. There are many other values that can be prefered in a human being, like being reliable, good to others, respectful, etc. I also think that being ambitious is not always the best way to get an happy life.

I happen to live in China, and there encouraging some creativity in children is quite required, because the education system is very strict and allow only few expression of the self, if any. But in the West, we went too far, and kids and their parents feel easily frustrated if the offspring is no Mozart, that's why I would not encourage more in this context, and certainly would not push my kids (who are doing well, thanks) to Rock Star Schools of any kind (I certainly do encourage drawing the things they want the way they want, but I usually do not post their drawings to my social medias in the hope of showing who genious they are).
I just moved to Europe and this started annoying me to no end. Thankfully, this Chrome extension kills them all https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/i-dont-care-about-...
State tests to grade schools are an accountability measure from NCLB. Most likely, tests to grade teachers are driven by that. Common core adoption may also be driven by the results of NCLB driven tests, if it's percieved as more effective in bringing the bottom up as NCLB focuses on.

But I don't see a casual relationship from Common Core to teacher-grading tests. Where's the link, beyond a temporal association.
"Decent" programming is a wiggle word. I'm of course obliged to agree with you when you define it. In a similar way, decent programming can be done with Turing Machines, punch cards, raw circuitry, brainfuck, what-have-you. Each would require a notion of "decent" in line with the style of the tool, but there is no hard place to push against when defining "decent".

My belief about type theory is that it serves, for purposes of PL, as a massively more difficult challenge than merely making a programming language which also happens to spawn programming languages on accident.

This is really important because as we've seen—PL design without some deeper driving purpose or mechanism for making tradeoffs can wind up wherever you want it to be. LOLCODE is a real thing and without Type Theory the only way we can talk about our distaste for it is to say that it's "indecent" for deeply personal reasons.

Type Theory wouldn't accept this because its goal is to be a good foundational system for all logic and mathematics.

It's also important to note that Type Theory doesn't serve this purpose by being aligned to some arbitrary goal. It works because the goal of "being a good foundational system for all logic and mathematics" is not so dissimilar from the goal of a PL which might be "represent all interesting thoughts of a programmer in a computable fashion". If Type Theory happened to stumble across non-computable mechanisms then it would be a poor fit, but because it turns out to be the case that the best foundational system must respect computability... things match up.

And ultimately that's the joy of learning Type Theory and programming with it: things match up. I say this flippantly because I lack the words for the enormity of the "matching up" that occurs.

Before I knew Type Theory I felt that PLs were cute and arbitrary. It was interesting to learn them anthropologically, but frustrating to use them because I was building on foundations of sand. After learning Type Theory I understand where the hard places are, where the foundation exists, and I know how to build things which I feel confident can last hundreds of years.