skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why is this being down voted? It is true. When British sites spell things with superfluous letters (colour, for instance,) should HN readers demand that they change it to the more efficient spelling? American English is spoken natively by more people in the world than British English, so therefore must we banish British English from these pages? Of course not. We could argue that the US has the largest number of visitors to HN than any other country. HN is an American site. YC is an American organization. Thus, those not comfortable with American conventions really ought to get over it.

The United States has the world's largest economy, according to the IMF, World Bank and UN. So obviously the US is doing something right. Perhaps the rest of the world ought to adopt American conventions. I say that in jest, but the point is that criticizing the American way of doing things is a popular sport, yet at the end of the day, the American system has resulted in an economic output greater than Germany, the UK, France and Italy combined. The EU has a per-capita GDP of $36,779 and the US is at $54,601. So apparently something is working with the American way of doing things. Just because "the rest of the world" does it doesn't make it better. This whole idea that the American way of doing things is somehow inferior is just as ridiculous as the British/French rivalry.

The fact that the parent comment is the top comment is ridiculous. It's a petty thing about which to complain and adds nothing to the discussion. In fact, the parent comment ought to be down voted for being absolutely irrelevant to the posting in question.
Not to discredit Blender but FYI, Maya has been a programmable environment since it came out. Effectively Maya is a core program written in C++ that then executes ~1500 Mel scripts to implement itself. Everyone of those mel scripts is editable. Every command can be scripted. Every command goes through it's command line. You can see them being executed as you choose features in Maya.

I don't know where Maya got it's inspiration but I'm guessing blender got theirs from Maya. Maya is still heads and tails beyond blender AFAICT.

PS: Just tried the latest version of blender yesterday. All I wanted to do was make a cube, scale it to the shape of cereal box, apply the transformation, then texture the 6 sides. It took > 1hr to figure out how to move UVs. The supposed keys listed in whatever 6 tutorials I found didn't work.

I don't believe it's that unintuitive in pretty much any other modeling package. In most you just pick some vertices and a gizmo shows up letting you manipulate the vertices. That's true in 15+ other modeling packages I've used. Using Blender feels like using some 1980s modal modeling package. It would be nice if they graduated to the mid 90s at least yet it's 2015
My co-tenant pays various utility bills so I already respond that I don't pay an electricity bill, water bill, etc - that usually leaves callers quite puzzled.

It's the pointless interruption I can't stand.
Vital specs are hidden/confusing. I still can't tell what I/O and how many of each it exactly has.
The Packer builds, Vagrant boxes, and Vagrant share are free
Work phone is a Nokia 710, running WP 7.5 .... a no nonsense simple working phone with great battery life. Informative tiles and a clean UI. I am sure WP8/Cortana would be a great improvement. Dropped it in water a week ago and it is recovering... screen is still drying out.

For personal use I have a Nexus4 and use it for camera/apps (Google Authenticator)/Google ecosystem. I prefer the simplicity of the Nokia/WP7 but for some things the Android is necessary. If Google ever ported their apps and services (Youtube, etc) to a Windows Phone I would switch.. or MS needs to create a nice equivalent.
If all goes well, looks like they might be competing directly with AWS soon.
I once picked up a rubik's cube because I thought it would be related to a problem I was trying to solve at work, given the kinds of manipulations you could do on it. Turns out it wasn't at all, but I did learn a couple ways to solve it and got to the point where I could solve it in sub-minute times reliably, just by doing it when someone had messed it up from my desk (and they did this a lot).

It was not at all useful as a skill but it's a decent social experience to teach someone how to solve it, and as you say it makes people think you're a genius for some reason (HA!). Well worth the $10 you would spend on a new one.
A cynic in me feels that someone will figure out the problems with cascade case and insure from failure of insurance companies to pay out insure money. Just like during 2008 financial crisis.
Hi-tech airships heralded as the future of transport in Siberia
changelog: https://tip.golang.org/doc/go1.5

It seems to me like they've included Google's trace viewer[0] into the go tool, nice.

[0]https://github.com/google/trace-viewer
.NET CoreCLR is indeed open source, but I doubt you can use it for Android or iOS.
I asked my compliance officer where I work that question, the answer was the usual "It depends".
How fast is pg_upgrade anyway?
As I understand it yes, that the theory is suggested by academics with appropriate experience. See: http://mentorforensics.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Dr-Joe... for more info.
Reddit shows not every eyeball based asset can be commercialized
That's a bogus analogy.
That sure sounds evil to me! ;)
There are a lot of ways to answer this question (for example: by appealing to human nature of those in power; appealing to 1984's description; appealing to history, such as all the governments where anybody had to watch what they say over the telephone.)

But the simplest is this: suppose someone gets to watch whenever my girlfriend and I have sex, and make comments about us (interrupting, us, etc.) and suppose that someone is the government and we have no choice about whether to have a live commentary. Is it possible that this does not equate to totalitarian rule?

No, it is not possible, because nobody would choose to have that happen, people have an expectation of privacy and so it is totalitarian for the government to have a say into this private communication and relationship.

This is a generalization of private communication and privacy: people simply have a right to a "protocol" of privacy. That means the government is automatically by definition totalitarian if it removes the possibility of this protocol, by acknowledging that it is overseeing it. (This is an extreme example, but imagine you can no longer tell your friend a joke, because you have to include the government in on the joke. If they don't get it they will just come up to you later ask, "Hi, I'm the one who was surveilling you. Could you explain the joke about the blonde and the physicist, I didn't get it.")

You may think that my two examples are extreme: but they're not - on a human protocol level, this is exactly what happens when surveillance of private communication and relationships occurs and is acknowledged. It's not possible for it not to be authoritarian.

That's why I am very happy that these things are denied by the government. It would be a much scarier, and far worse world, if they weren't. People simply have a right to privacy, that you and I and everyone enjoys, it's best if it is never broken by anyone. They relinquish that right only when they do something like create a ransomware virus or some brazen criminal act that hurts everyone. You can't say it doesn't happen, because it does every day.

If the government has no extraordinary powers in these cases, that means it's up to everyone to personally armor up. That's a ridiculous waste of resources, and one of the primary reasons we have a government to begin with! (Public safety.)
"It is not logical" is an informal way of saying that a position is not logically valid or sound, such as the position that "My project will somehow not be successful if I use a language that has arrogant users".
This seems like a big stretch. Because there are a few similarities, we can predict 10-20 years of economic performance? As far as I know, even the most sophisticted governments, econoimsts, investors, and businesses haven't cracked the code on predicting future economic performance.

I also disagree on the similarities. They are/were very different countries. Japan was an advanced economy, with an advanced stock market, banking system, as well as a democratic government; China is a developing economy, with an immature banking system and market, and is run by a corrupt authoritarian dictatorship (is there any other kind?). The stock market is small relative to its economy[1].

Crucially, China's government's legitimacy comes mainly from economic performance -- that's their justification for ruling the country, nobody elected them. If it loses legitimacy and the people want a new government, there is no mechanism to replace it (such as the elections in democratic countries), creating a risk of political upheaval in the largest country and one of the largest economies in the world.

[1] http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/07/chinas-s...
It's a good idea, but then you are tied to one compiler.

So, what if Clang implements it, but not GCC? Or what if Clang and GCC implement it, but not the Sun or Intel compilers? Or what about all the GCC copies every board maker forks when they create something custom?

It's tricky making in-compiler behavior non-standard (though, I guess that's what compiler flags are for).
Microsoft to Cut Up to 7,800 Jobs, Mostly in Its Phone Unit
have a look at https://www.startus.cc/
Have you checked out https://www.cofounderslab.com/ ?

When I was looking around, this seemed like the best option.
Don Syme calls F# a "functional first" programming language, which I think it more accurate. While it supports imperative constructs, they're not enabled by default. The idea is you make a language that makes it difficult for your code to be accidentally imperative.

That's the big difference between (Erlang, F#, OCaml) and (Java, JS, Ruby, Python, C++). I can't speak for Clojure because I don't know it.
https://i.imgur.com/kzLT82B.png :P
here you go -> 282% of GDP http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-08/china-s-ve...
I did not know that was ever a thing. I knew that bit counts had been lower - 5 or 6 - but assumed once we hit 8, the whole power-of-2 thing was too comfortable in a binary system to ever be anything besides a power of 2 again - and sure enough, we get 16 bit, 32 bit, and 64 bit systems, and double-byte and triple-byte char sets, etc. Need more space? Take another byte.

Was the 9th bit special? Or just a standard bit in the byte?
One thing to remember in high write environments: if you're storing a uuid attribute and it's indexed, use datomics squuid (sequential uuid). Rewriting the indexes will go MUCH faster and prevent latency spikes on queries.
It is true that I over-simplified and used careers that aren't very similar, but that was kind of the point.

> Of course they won't care because it makes no difference to them.

Exactly. My point is that it also shouldn't matter to programmers, in the same fashion. Why does it matter if you use Emacs or Vim or Notepad? Why does it matter if you use Ubuntu or Windows or OSX? If you can produce high-quality work that is maintainable in roughly the same amount of time as someone else, the tool you use doesn't matter.

People should have preferences and they should be able to use the tools that are comfortable for them. However, any self-important feelings based on these preferences are silly and don't really make sense. That was my intended point originally.
> I'd argue that Google is an advertising company. Software, search and phones are just delivery mechanisms for the ads (which brings in the money)

That is exactly like saying "The New York Times is an advertising company. Newspaper and website are just delivery mechanisms for the ads (which brings in the money)"

Software/AI is a Google core-competency, calling it a "mechanism for ads" seems to be under-selling them, especially when a huge chunk of the software they produce has nothing to do with ad-delivery
That was a great read! And thank you for providing sources on the laws.

I've been getting cell phone calls for years now, several times a week, from companies asking for someone who isn't me, mostly debt collectors, but also home security sales. It's always the same name, and I'm pretty sure this person is using my phone number as a fake number for themselves (or maybe it's just an area code mistake or something). I've told them many times they have a wrong number and to stop calling.

Do you know if this still applies when someone else has a relationship with the business but is providing false information?

I'm not great at reading legal documents, but it seems like the definition of telemarketer only applies to sales and charitable donations (so it won't apply to the creditors)?
No, just no. Saying that one shouldn't be a programmer because they won't choose a language/tool because they perceive the community as hostile or toxic is exactly the kind of arrogance the tweet was talking about.

It is entirely logical to consider the group of people that you're going to have to interact with on a regular basis to get help while you're starting, and decide you don't have the energy to deal with those assholes.

And while every group has some assholes, some have more than others.
Oh god stories like this scare me.

One of my friends used to intern for a very large company that maintained software for flight control towers. His entire summer was spent writing bash tests for these old Fortran apps that kept planes from running into each other. Most of the mainframes still had tape.

That's the code that keeps track of our planes.
(In the UK) Young people must ‘earn or learn’
DO has really benefitted from Linode stalling over the past few years. I admire Linode for remaining a bootstrapped business but it feels as though the owners lost their fighting spirit and energy... Perhaps because the small pool of Linode owners felt they made enough money already.

DOs announment talks about a storage product, which is strategically important and crucially something Linode has sorely needed for a long time. And yet the biggest development in recent years at Linode has been a proprietary stats and monitoring system built as an upsell, which doesn't really do anything distinctive that Nagios or another package couldn't provide.

Instead Linode is now switching their entire platform from Xen to KVM, a curious move which will create risk and cost velocity that could have been spent on product development.

I have been a huge supporter of Linode over the years, and the startup I co-founded is one of their biggest customers, but at this point DO seems like the winning horse to back.
I've seen them. They are nice and very alluring. So are a lot of false things. :) And I should note that I am mainly asserting this as false so that I can further explore the idea.

The idea to generate a new word that is hard to blur from existing ones and depends entirely on context is amusing in this context.

That is, what separates complicated from complex is one of context. Yet... contexts change. And often the first thing you do when building a solution to a problem is to reduce the problem to something easier to solve.

In this angle, I fully agree. Simplify your problem as much as you can. But do not be misled into thinking you can keep it simplified. As you add in more and more of the realities of the problem, they will reflect in the solution. And, often, the worst thing you can do is to try and cling to the "simple" solution that solved a different problem.

That is, understand the simple things well. See how they map onto the complicated things. Don't cling to the idea that they can be merely composed into the complicated solution. Often, several simple solutions can be subsumed by a more complicated one. Much in the same way that higher math can subsume lower maths.
Collaboration Platform for business users
Top June Articles from Leading E-Commerce Blogs
Sounds like they're pulling the plug on Windows Phone and Nokia...
You guys crack me up. It was a facetious parenthetical comment that seems to have become the focal point. I run Tor, operate a legit hidden service, run an anonymous proxy on several of my machines, and use encryption all over the place. In no way whatsoever do I think Tor should be shut down. It has a purpose - but is being abused by criminals which is disappointing and potential detrimental to those that use if for a legitimate purpose.

As for LE, I mentioned in the article that I contacted them, as a courtesy, twice during the project. The last time was a few days before the hidden services were shut down. I let them know that I had a pedo honeypot running and was about to take it offline, giving them the opportunity to take over the VM or scrape the data gathered.

As for personal demons - we all have them and I won't argue that I may have more than most - it's all a part of life experiences. I've dealt with LE and CPS on child abuse issues for years and it has certainly tainted my view. Then again, I have a vantage point that most do not have - a much closer, clear view of the problem.
I Dunno.

http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/minsky/
Have they implemented IP failover already? I haven't heard anything. Having your own LB without being able to fail over the IP is not HA. If the LB does down so does your business.
Desperate call to all bros, Oculus immersive SEX almost reach a Glorious Climax
My team is working on a new Oculus toy that will give you the longest orgasm. We are going to launch an orgasmic Kickstarter project but alas, we have to hold it.

I was told there is a patent for VR sex toys, "Method and Device for Interactive Virtual Control of Sexual Aids Using Digital Computer Networks”. The patent was granted on 1998. The coverage is very generic, any sex devices connected to a display device and computer become a target for this patent. The only way to avoid the troll if we could find a previous work before the patent. Something that shows or describe a sex toy with some sort of computer and display device.

I thought virtual remote sex has been around long before 1998?!

To all my bros and for the sake of sex innovation, let me know if you know any materials related to teledildonic before 1998. In return, I will give you a super early bird discount when we launch.

Thanks bros!

https://www.google.com.sg/patents/US6368268

http://www.courthousenews.com/2010/11/24/32095.htm

ps. Slashdong, are you there?
Most 'non-fuctional' languages have function pointers too, it just might be less idiomatic.
> Is there a single Windows Phone user that asked for that?!

Sounds like a wonderful feature to me.

One of the things that annoys me about Windows Phone currently is that it won't play with bluetooth keyboards (like the android phone I use as my backup device does). Sometimes when travelling it is useful to be able to rattle off some messages longer than are convenient to write with the on-screen keyboard without needing to have my tablet or laptop with me (OK so I need to be carrying the little bluetooth keyboard with me, but that takes less room when folded away than the laptop or tablet).

Using it as a mini PC is going further, but in a way that I might also find useful. Hopefully in going further they have not neglected the simpler use case on their way past though...
Burning CPU time and memory bandwidth is what ssh does on purpose to make things secure. So from this perspective, ssh seems like a great match for them making more money.
User Study of Tracking Protection in Firefox Nightly
AWS doesn't target the same audience or have the same product line. They're related, but not at all the same product market. To illustrate this, AWS is infrastructure management tools, and DO is infrastructure management. The fact that AWS has infrastructure management as well (built on top of their own tools) is only relevant for the people that build out the rest of their infrastructure. DO is for folks that don't want to have to learn and understand infrastructure much at all. That's very doable these days for a lot of aspects of development, but it's also not at all what AWS is going for.

DO is closer to competing with just Elastic Beanstalk and maybe RDS (from the standpoint of a managed RDBM service, not the feature set).
Indeed it does not mean what I think it meant, I was thinking the opposite of ingenious.

My claim is that, for a fixed hardware, this exponential cascade cannot happen as rapidly as some claim, if it ever happens (whatever 'exponential intelligence' means). We're already improving AI using an intelligence that will only be available to the AIs themselves in a very long time, and yet this rate of improvement is not a scary doomsday rate.

Look at hardware for example. We've been using computers to design better computers for a very long time. And yet, the use of computers in this design is effectively limited by some non decisive, local optimizations, like achieving good routing and good electromagnetic compatibility. If you had supercomputers from 30 years ago you could still run the software that designs computers today -- whereas if you followed this "self-improvement" logic we should be using almost all of our computational power right now to achieve more computational power. The problem is that we are still vastly more capable of building theories and designing than computers. By the time an AI gets much better than we currently are at independently improving it's software, it will likely already be seeing diminishing returns; to achieve notable improvement it will need to improve hardware as well, which has the same problem, and an additional one that it's very hard for an AI to independently improve it's own hardware (it requires a global manufacturing supply chain).
OT, but incidentally, gold is more valuable than platinum at the moment:

http://www.kitco.com/charts/livegold.html

http://www.kitco.com/charts/liveplatinum.html
I fixed this for the demo already :)
Absolutely. But if retail banking were run predominantly by non-profits, we'd pay a lot less of it.

Mortgages are secured loans, so an individual default is no problem. The primary risk is of mass default (a housing crash).

If you agree with the pseudo-MMT view of the world, then the mortgage is created out of thin air in the first place, so if everybody defaults all that happens is that the money supply increases permanently instead of temporarily.
A company that is based in the US without a US bank account might be a red flag to any payment processor. The easy answer is open a US based account for the business and have the funds transferred, however, there are likely some tax consequences you would have to explore.

Stripe isn't perfect, but my bet is that they don't get to make a lot of these types of decisions. From my understanding when you become a gateway/clearing house there are all kinds of rules Visa/Mastercard etc place on you. It is a risk profile that those "banks" define and Stripe and others must keep all their clients within the profile. So if you don't fit within that risk profile you are out of luck. Generally the risk profiles are the same at almost all clearing houses so you won't find a lot of differences, unless the company also has worked within your countries banking system too.

Paypal works differently than a traditional merchant gateway from my understanding as well they have worked through issues in other countries to be compliant letting them process credit card transactions natively in those locations. But with that comes some of the crazy things they do, like locking up your funds for months and trickling them out to you if your volume changes too rapidly, amongst other reasons.

Good luck.
But do they want to? AWS is going for a high price for a super super deep stack of 600 little services. I kind of like that DO focuses on their core VM thing.

Obviously you can't fake some things with just VMs (rolling your own VPC for example is kind of hard to do), but a lot of people don't need Redshift or SQS or any of the amazon SAAS things...