skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Buying $20 bills for $21" does not constitute making money, no matter how many $20 bills you end up with.

So, to be clear, I think our disagreement is fairly narrow. You suggest that the VCs care about the valuation. I agree! But:

1. Uber isn't making money. Its investors no doubt hope that it will make money at some point. But investors are not infallible, and it is entirely possible that Uber will never be profitable, or (more likely) will at some point but profitable, but not profitable enough to justify its lofty valuation.

2. That said, investors don't directly care about whether or not Uber makes money -- they care about its valuation. If Uber starts making money hand over fist, certainly that's one way for its valuation to increase, but there are others. Maybe it will go public and its current investors will cash out and then it will be revealed that robo cars kill Uber and it will crash and burn -- but still be a good investment for current investors. I don't think that's the most likely scenario, but it's possible.

Anyhow, the point is, it is not now "making money," and whether it will ever "make money" in very large scales is currently unknown.
> So why was this added to the language?

For Swift's benefit. The types come across the ObjC-Swift bridge. It's a big pain to deal with arrays typed as [AnyObject] in Swift, so this helps.
link to examples is 404, a possibly correct link https://github.com/stitchfix/pyxley/tree/master/examples
When I think about it, it feels like there is some sort of mental barrier that I have to overcome to make plans with strangers. Maybe when the meetups would be less personal like 20 random people going to a bar or club, I'd rather join in on something. Then nobody would realize if I leave, but if I bond with some people its fine.
It does explain the model - each feature is given a certain number of developer days that are billed out at $450/day. It's all broken down if you click "show calculations".

I personally think their model is pretty shitty, because if you build an app as a checklist of features you'll end up with something users won't want to use, and if you polish all the rough edges and make sure everything integrates well together, you will spend a lot more time on integrations than on implementing the features. (My rule of thumb - across many projects - is that when a project is feature-complete, it is usually between 40-50% shippable. When it ships, it is about 50% "done", where "done" means that all the initial development tasks required to make it stable and useful to users are complete. When it's "done", it's consumed roughly 10% of the calendar time and 50% of the developer time that will ultimately be invested in the project.)

But you can at least judge the model they're using for yourself.
Roughly, self updating html5 compliant browser.
> you have to be wary of using Java and .NET types which are still prone to NPEs

Java8 optionals are a maybe monad

http://stackoverflow.com/a/19932439/4658666
Let's talk content. AMA
Soyuz Users Manual (2012) [pdf]
OrderUp has been acquired by Groupon
Uber creates De Blasio mode
I was about to say it abstracts over canvas and svg with a uniform api, but it looks like fabric might do something similar?
Well, in this case, we're not talking about some graphic designer... We're talking about the Chief Executive Officer of a social media corporation.

I don't LIKE that people get that kind of scrutiny... But I think it should be legal, and we have to live with the unfortunate consequences.

As to the graphic designer... I don't have a good answer for that. Keep your unpopular opinions at arm's length from your professional life...? :(
wikipedia has done a lot of research on this. Their method doesn't block content, doesn't force the user to interact with a dialog, and isn't perennial.

If the website is honestly just a bunch of scraped content which solely exists to solicit donations then go ahead. But if there is another purpose, any other one, than the popup dialog detracts from it in an unnecessarily injurious way.
Sometimes, programming Python just feels like cheating:

from random import SystemRandom
import string
num = SystemRandom().randint(...)
pw = ''.join(SystemRandom().choice(
string.ascii_uppercase + string.digits) for _ in range(26))
> The trolls are winning the battle for the Internet

The trolls aren't "winning" because "the trolls" aren't an organization. They don't have an ideology that they're pushing, or some end-goal that they're hoping to achieve. They're a byproduct of free speech that we all have to deal with.

But most importantly, they're not even able to be categorized uniformly. What is trolling to one person, may be comedy, satire, or even just _disagreement_ to another.
Norvig's code have several qualities to praise

Adherence to Python's best practices / pep-8 are not one of them
My thesis is: unlimited money will always buy results. Money is a shadow of power and the point of power is influencing the world. Your solution of "reducing things to a common denominator" which you claimed to be "the only fair thing" will only make the application of power indirect.

FWIW I think the gradual curbing of the limits of power and hoping for human nature changing (or an alien invasion) is the way to go.
Show HN: Immutable CSS – A CSS linter for immutable selectors
UK ballots are supposed to be secret, but they're not really.

Here's a bit of the history of moving from open votes to secret votes:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-31630588

This article discusses what should happen to ballot slips after and election, compared to what actually happens, and describes the potential for de-anonymizing votes.

http://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,,-1051,00...
>Well, between a run of the mill programmer who happens to indent where he/she should vs Norvig, I will likely choose the latter If I could.

Right.

>Reminds me of that blog thread where this design pattern guru hemmed and hawed from his high horse

I read a similar story a while ago. Two programmers are given the task of writing a program for some non-trivial problem.

One of them, Hoity Toity Harry, tries to apply many of the latest and greatest algorithms, techniques, paradigms, etc., to impress people (of course).

The other, Down To Earth Dan, just strives for a good implementation, with reasonably good algorithms, etc. After a while, Dan finishes his program and does a test run. It works well enough for the task. Meanwhile, Harry is not even near to finishing his code, due to struggling with complexities of the techniques he has tried to use.

The boss comes in, sees the results, and congratulates Down To Earth Dan.

Hoity Toity Harry, of course, has to protest, trying to put down Down To Earth Dan's implementation, saying that it uses simple algorithms, etc., while his own code uses sophisticated, state of the art techniques. Dan replies: "Yes, I could also have used those things. But my program runs, and yours doesn't."

Okay, I changed the programmers' names for fun and effect, but I really did read the story, in some good (and pragmatic) software book, a while ago.
Seems like a good book on Python
I'm German as well and I totally agree with you!

...In fact my company started this initiative, so... :)
I've found the documentation (not the codebase itself) to be very hit-or-miss. Some components are very well documented, some not at all. Presumably due to maturity of different parts of the stack and the Boto library, but still frustrating from an end-user perspective.
At least it's not something engineer like every other job in the tech field.
If you liked this, check out my RNeo4j[1] package that was used in this analysis.

[1] https://github.com/nicolewhite/RNeo4j
Totally OT, but Ghostery had a hernia on this page.

ADARA Analytics
Detected tracker source URLs:
http://tag.yieldoptimizer.com/ps/ps?t=s&p=1814&pg=Page
http://tag.yieldoptimizer.com/ps/ps?t=s&p=1814&pg=Page
BlueKai
Brightcove
DoubleClick
DoubleClick Floodlight
Effective Measure
Facebook Connect
Google AdWords Conversion
Google AJAX Search API
Google+ Platform
Grapeshot
LinkedIn Widgets
Maxymiser
Omniture (Adobe Analytics)
Polar Mobile
Quantcast
Sub2
Tapad
Tealium
TRUSTe Notice
Turn Inc.
Twitter Button
ValueClick Media
The way RethinkDB crews co-operate over Github is fantastic. Every workflow is tru github and you can transparently see their operation. I learnt a lot from that and i apply that to my team.
We are building "A Killer" Communication tool using RethinkDB + HTML5. We will be announcing soon.
Scikit-learn.org is down :(
Yeah - perception is everything. Making it cool again is key to drive the market. The problem is that commercial aviation provides a continual reinforcement of why the industry isn't glamorous!

Openairplane is a great company for existing pilots who want to rent planes more easily, especially while traveling.
We already went through that scare and got the Semiconductor Chip Protection Act of 1984 to supplement what was already protected by patents.
The "receipt" could basically be a paper ballet.
Do you have any plans for windows support for your server?
I was super excited when the Leap Motion was announced, and I jumped at the preorder for one. That was however long ago it was, and it's been stored in it's box since. It's very cool technology but I have yet to find a problem that it's a workable solution for (sorry, Alex... I really want to like it.)
This is the truth. People can't do simple statistics, even with advanced degrees. In many cases advanced degrees make things worse. The ability to reason about data and have strong fundamentals in math statistics is what's needed.

Someone else mentioned Gelman's blog. That's a great place to find evidence that phd's do not lead to an increased ability to ferret out "truth" or insight from data. In many cases they just hide the mistakes so that others without that background don't know they're being misled.
I've never had an error where I added the wrong kind of object to an array.

I have, however, spent untold cumulative hours looking up the documentation of a call that took or returned NSArray* just to see what kind of objects it expected or provided in that array.

Cocoa is filled with methods like:

- (NSArray *)items;

What does it return? An array! What's in the array? Items! What class represents items? Who knows!

Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes it's not. Sometimes you have to look up the documentation and see. Sometimes, if you're really unlucky, you have to just print the thing out at runtime and see. It's almost always a pain in the ass.

Good Objective-C code will add a comment to the above to the effect of, // This returns an array of MyFooItem instances. This allows the programmer to quickly see what they can expect. Generics just formalizes this and puts it in a form that the compiler can understand. What's so bad about that?
Munchery Is Hiring iOS, Android, Back End, Front-End, and DevOps Engineers
Uber Injects Politics into App with a Feature Mocking New York Mayor de Blasio
Introducing Shift+Click Chrome Extension
Fixed! Thanks for the catch.
How High Can Bitcoin Prices Go? Our Scientific Guess… $2,456
Don’t Think the F-35 Can Fight? It Does in This Realistic War Game
Public key cryptography in my eyes is the only proper way to do electronic voting, but it has a severe cost - the lack of secrecy. As anyone knows, the lack of secrecy comes with even more severe ramifications, the purchase of votes, pressure from friends/family/employers, the potential to be arrested in a fascist government, the list goes on.
> I can think of illegal speech that was banned because of it being harmful to children (and which is likely less lethal than anti-vaxxer rhetoric).

That's very interesting. Could you elaborate please? I'd really like to know more.
Yes, coming soon. See https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/1100 to track development progress.
Assuming that smart autodidacts can't obtain sound statistics knowledge is selling many people short.
Robot passes “self awareness test”
New Google Patents with Integrated Scholar Results
> the inability of some voters in 2000 in Florida to fully punch a paper ballot

Blame the user?

The fault lies with the election administrator who had not followed procedures and properly cleared the voting machines of chads from prior elections.

> don't write off all the advantages of an electronic system (error correct, instant results, etc)

None of which are true. The sole advantage to electronic voting systems is to expedite the transfer of public monies to cronies. Well, a second advantage is to obfuscate the whole process.
Nothing wrong with a nice bit of CS dogma! You're welcome to ignore what those fancy pants doctors with their clever titles tell you to do. After all, they just read a few books, and books could say anything. But for my part, I think this is a good move, since I don't think "practically never" is a very high bar ;)

With static checks, you can guarantee this absolutely never happens. Whether Objective-C's checks reach are as exhaustive as they could be, I don't know, but I think this seems to be one case where the future is turning out to be actual genuine progress rather than merely the inevitable outcome of the passage of time.
You won't get a license if you aren't a safe pilot :) The training isn't like learning to drive a car...much more rigorous.

Aviation is safe when pilots don't do stupid shit. Just like drivers killing themselves (and others) driving drunk or while texting.
Objective-C in a Swift World
Studies have shown you make a lot more from IOS apps than Android. There is a culture of "we already have it, and it's free" with Android that makes monetization tough.
IMHO what's more interesting is how wealth alter the choices one might make. A new 4x4 because it's "safer" vs. taking public transport - when in fact a new 4x4 is costly to the environment and makes one less fit than public transport. Seems to me that wealth brings more choices that are often no better than the poor persons choice. That's a shame.
Well... it may solve the riddle of life, but that article sure doesn't explain how at all. This is a criticism of the article, not the theory, as my point is that the article is not describing this well enough to be critical of a theory that I still don't have any idea about.
I think your post only takes non-null values into account, which is what OP seems to talk about. What would this code do?

Optional<Int> foo = null;
foo.flatMap(x -> Optional.of(x));

Obeying the Monad laws would mean getting null as a result, via `m.flatMap(x -> Optional.of(x)) = m` for all m (or `m >>= pure = m` if you prefer Haskell syntax).
> Nice lambda. You've defended yourself admirably.

Thanks!

> Did you know there's an `operator.itemgetter` function that does that?

Yes, I'm quite aware! Are you aware the "useless" functional solution with lambda is two characters shorter?

>>> len('lambda item: item[1]')
20
>>> len('operator.itemgetter(1)')
22

Cause you're apparently not aware that I was demonstrating a use-case for lambdas as one-off functions that are passed to other functions (which is an abstract concept from the particular function used), and you didn't demonstrate how list comprehensions or generators make them not-needed. Of course, that's because it was a leading question and the answer is that the concepts are orthogonal so it cannot be demonstrated.
Thats very nice to hear, Can't wait for Reliable change feeds.
Btw it would be just awesome if you would spread the word about that initiative. (always with the hashtag #supportgreekstartups of course ^^)

Also Producthunt could be an option :)
these generics finally let you use property notation with arrays; you can now do something like 'names[i].length' or 'self.tableView.tableColumns.firstObject.identifier'.

Of course since you are programming since 14 years, maybe you never switched to property notation? In that case you'll at least profit from better autocomplete.
KDE Devs Working to Bring Android Apps on Linux
Sort of, but keep in mind that if another probe is in a similar part of the sky as New Horizons then they will compete for dish time.
One form of hacking or another, prevention must occur in both types. Old school is busing people you want to vote a certain way to the booths and leaving others behind, having some vote at multiple stations, even through absentee votes for people who you know won't vote or cannot; the dead being an example.

I would say than an effective electronic system would need to be open from code to monitoring. There is no reason to have the voting machines nor machines which accumulate the vote to be connected to any external network.

You have to start trusting somewhere.
“Where’s My Cut?”: On Unpaid Emotional Labor
Extracting + sharing images: now easy as Shift!
That's not really what I mean. I have no problem with, say, reddit deciding that a "fat people hate" forum is not fit for its site. It's their site, they get to decide that.

Rather, what I am concerned about is the broader conversation which takes place in articles like TFA, by prominent people such as Pao, and by journalists. This broader conversation uses the word "troll" - but who gets to decide which opinions are in that bucket, and therefore not acceptable?

It is easy to say racists are trolls, it's uncontroversial for the most part. But what about, say, gender-critical radical feminists? These are people who challenge certain received beliefs around what gender means, or should mean. They are not hateful, and they are 100% serious about making the world better for women, yet are often accused of transphobia (and worse) for what they believe. They get death threats (from other people who also call themselves feminists) and the rest of it. And it would be so easy to place them in the "troll" category.
I took exception to the opening line: Your housekeeper spies on you

Maybe that one did, but that only reflects on her. My wife had a housecleaning business for a few years. She simply didn't have time to snoop on anyone. She specialized in cleaning houses in upscale neighborhoods (go where the money is!) and they were large and time consuming. She typically had just enough time to finish in the time she estimated, and then it was often a drive across town to the next house.

Guess it's different if you're working for someone else.
Reading that article it seems that Kevin Rose really had the most interesting & useful tips.
NASA’s TransFormers Could Make Harsh Lunar Environments Robot Friendly
Awesomeness , Confirmed.
One thing that should be mentioned is that one of the easier ways to avoid interruptions is to simply say "No" more often. As it goes with most simple advice, it's much easier said than done, but delegating tasks better is one skill as a manager that I think must be learned and practiced over time than something that is innate to people in any way.

Unfortunately, it's extremely hard to stop the habits of a bunch of people unless you actually change things enough around them to encourage change.

Becoming a single point of failure as a human resource is no different of a problem to me than neglecting to design your systems for high availability, failover, and sufficient redundancy. Bus factor is something that does matter but people seem to only realize these things are so terrible in hindsight of a disaster. Unfortunately, I've found that most organizations being reactive by nature rather than proactive tend to require disasters in order to have a sufficient shock to their workflows and methodologies.
Yes, I think that's definitely it. That's what I meant by being too trollish. It's too much like something a troll would say. But I never even realized the anti-gay term was based on flamboyant, although it makes perfect sense. Thanks for pointing that out.
A Look at Vim: Does Extensibility Lead to Longevity?
Here's the link to the Pandas DataFrame source: https://github.com/pydata/pandas/blob/master/pandas/core/fra...

We spent a month of Sundays going through this in the NYC Python office hours. You learn a lot about this object by reading the source, and the WTF per minute rate is fairly low.

The style is also fairly non-controversial.
Whenever I see a new graph visualization tool, I instantly start dragging the nodes around like a madman to see how well the graph "balances" in the viewport. I soon noticed there was a tutorial was running while I was manipulating the position of the nodes, and regardless of how much stretching and pulling I did to try breaking the tutorial, it worked flawlessly as if I wasn't even touching it. That, I thought, was really awesome. Well done!
And posted by the HN user whose only purpose is posting the atlasobscura links.
I didn't say they don't. I said that 'hurt feelings' are not grounds for a criminal nor civil legal case.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHMoDt3nSHs
Windows 10 Pro users will be able to deter updates.
Can't they change their mind?
Hey swah- do you want to develop apps for home country or for the US?

I used to have an android version- but it was so difficult to maintain two code bases.

Also it's very difficult to make (decent) money in the app store just by selling your app.
These principles are useful when learning anything really: human language (immersion), programming (build something), sports (practice), etc.

That said, as someone who worked in software engineering for 5 years without a degree, and recently returned to school, I would say be careful not to discount studying theory at the same time you're practicing your craft. I really think a combined approach of structured university courses and MOOCs, including reading textbooks, along with applying the knowledge has been the best approach for me.

I was arrogant about "not needing" a degree for years, feeling justified by the fact that I was making very valuable contributions as an engineer, until I finally went back to school and realized how valuable theoretical knowledge can be.
Observation works pretty good.

You can be a poll inspector, a poll judge, a poll observer, watch the central count, attend the public certification hearings.

Different jurisdictions have different rules, so YMMV.

But the basic ideas are a) Australian ballot system b) verify the physical chain of custody c) private voting, public counting.

Happy hunting.
Java 9 Unsafe issue – The parts you never read
So, on a minimum three-node setup, three replicas + three shards per table are doable? Are there any caveats?
There's nothing wrong with that, it's nice. But that's all it is IMHO -- just nice. So I'm not sure why they're bothering to add it to Objective-C now.

One of the reasons I've always liked Obj-C is that it is (was) such a thin layer over C, and the amount of new syntax was minimal. Devising new ways to litter code with <> brackets smells suspiciously like C++.
Capitalism works because having money gives the people an incentive to work harder and fit within the "system" of the government. This is why it's generally seen as a more favorable system than communism/socialism.
Retrospectively.

I wonder why most people don't realize that if journalists had nearly the informational value people think, they wouldn't be journalists, they'd be monstrously rich.