skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From the Intro, the prerequisites:

"I try to keep the required background knowledge to a minimum in this book. I will assume familiarity with the material from usual discrete math and logic courses taken by undergraduate computer science majors, and I will assume that readers have significant experience programming in one of the ML dialects, in Haskell, or in some other, closely related language. Experience with only dynamically typed functional languages might lead to befuddlement in some places, but a reader who has come to understand Scheme deeply will probably be fine."

Then it is not for me, I am still struggling with Haskell.
Also in the US - my daughter was given ketamine when going into surgery.
Hey–guess what? There really is a hot hand
Don't use || to set default values in JavaScript
Empires on average last for 250 years. It's about time for the US to start losing power. Not only that America really doesn't know what to do about many of the problems that it helped create. American capitalists helped create China, American foreign policy helped create the "new" Middle East. Which is an unstable hell hole and will probably continue to be for the foreseeable future.

http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2014/092814_files/...

page 4.

also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_empires
Does this have anything to do with the measles outbreak and the ensuing vaccination/anti-vaccination debate in California?
This device is 4 inclined planes and a screen. God I wish I could get a couple million in VC for this shit.
This is somewhat amusing to hear for someone who lived in an area with recurring earth quakes :)

It reminds me a bit of having visitors from Israel in Berlin - in Israel when it rains beyond a trickle everyone goes inside to wait it out. This works because it doesn't rain very often and when it does it doesn't usually last very long.

Of course the same behavior in Berlin would mean you can't leave your home for half the year, and my visitors were astound to see stuff like mothers walking their baby strollers in the rain & general "normal life" activities taking place during medium-intensity rain.
WikiLeaks Is Now a Target in the Massive Spam Attack on Bitcoin
Yes, it must be true. I mostly have experience with RPG.
Show HN: Can you draw points at infinity with OpenGL?  Sure, why not?
So I'm working on a webGL version of the space game Oolite. I've reported progress here:

http://aegidian.org/bb/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=17574

When trying to display the stars, I was a bit annoyed by the idea of making the stars as points on a sphere of large radius. I didn't want to pick a fake radius (not nearly as large as interstellar distances) that would fit inside the view frustrum. I wanted to put the stars in a correct scale, that is very far away, or even at infinity.

But then how would they fit into the viewing frustrum? Well, why not creating an infinite frustrum?

That's what I did:

http://grondilu.github.io/oolite/test-coriolis.html
How do you complain about the decade of war and then in the same article complain about countries that the president didn't go to war with? The unique insanity of trying to blame a declining empire on such recent actions... does this happen outside of US politics?
In this case, I'm not sure that's an important distinction.

Whether it's the desktop app driving increased usage or it's heavy users preferring the desktop app, it suggests that one way or another, the desktop app is better for heavy usage.
Airbus flight becomes first electric plane to cross Channel
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The fact that this is the clearest image we have of Pluto reminds me how little we really know about our own solar system, and how much more is out there to be discovered.
If you don't have anything to catch people's interest for some time there's not much reason to add modding support. Modding support is another area of X things you need to add, change, debug, test, adapt to feedback. And without a game in the first place nobody will even look at your modding tools.
Where did you get the 250 figure ? just curious.
tl;dr US should attack other countries more.
See also: http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/radevents/1954USSR1....
Show HN: One App for Web – Read Hacker News, PH, DN, Reddit All in One App
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Another pets.com I do not understand what is so revolutionary about Uber especially in countries which as good Taxi companies. For me Uber is a hyped glorified black taxi.

$50 billion valuation for a taxi company common!
I recently started to write an article describing how java.lang.String was one of the classes that the Java creators got mostly right in Java 1.0. This contrasts to other Java 1.0 classes such as java.util.Date, which, as the usage of Java spread, and some good practices emerged, revealed itself to be poorly implemented.

I wanted to show in my article how one of String's strengths is that String efficiently shares memory with substrings. But then when I looked into Java 8's String source code, I was surprised to find that this was not the case. It seemed I had been working with false assumptions for years.

Now, thanks to Heinz's article (OP), I discover that this was a change in the String class.

Long ago, a man who had been programming for 30 years told me about his theory of the half-life of programming knowledge being roughly 18 months. Today, Java has made me believe his theory a little bit more.
http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2014/092814_files/...

page 4.

also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_empires
What you said does not disagree with me. You can have wheels depending on external dynamic libs. Or you can package them together. Both ways have good and bad sides, but if you leave them external, it's very useful to have the right dependencies.
My sincere apologies if it seemed harsh, it wasn't my intention to offend anyone. I'd edit that comment if HN allowed me to.

But the entire discussion seems to keep falling back to "Germans suffered because they deserved". Whatever Germany did to Greece in the war does not change the fact that the situations in current Greece and post-WW2 Germany are not at all comparable.

I don't have any hatred towards Greece or Germany in this matter. But it makes no sense to say "look, Germans got part of their debts forgiven and now don't want the same for Greeks", when Germans were surviving on 1000 calories per day, and Greeks still enjoy full retirements and unemployment payouts.
My sincere apologies, it wasn't my intention to be uncivil with anyone.
Not directly related to the topic, but after skimming through the readmes of the various exploits HT used, it seems to me, that they rely heavily on social engineering and rather amateurish mistakes done by the targets (opening fake news sites, download and open documents and apps, etc.) as well as certain assumptions about the system like flash beeing active, unchanged default passwords on jailbreaked iphones …

While no doubt, this works very well for industrial espionage and probably against journalists, I have a hard time believing, that it works well against actual criminals who must expect beeing targeted all the time. Or am I overestimating the tech savviness of modern criminals?

All assuming the agencies are not messing heavily with the whole network at the same time, which i think is pretty dependent on the country it is used in.
I actually think the "blame" is not so much Javascript's - after all it has existed since 1996 and it wasn't like that at all for many years.

I wonder how much the rise of Github's / npm have to do with it. In the last 5 years or so it has become so much easier to create and share projects. Not only so - it has become a requirement, people use Github as their CV, we are all _expected_ to have side projects and stuff.
Title correction: "Computer program optimizes the speed of image filters".
Great stuff by Leslie. He is also the author of Sales Learning Curve, a framework to figure out when to ramp up your sales force.

Likewise, technology companies shouldn't expect to sell their 1.0 product without undergoing a learning curve around the needed feature set, the competitive response, the right type of channel and sales rep, optimal pricing, etc. And yet, nearly every business plan I have seen shifts gears directly from Development to Sales, staffed by a growing number of experienced sales reps charged to sell their regular quota of product.

The consequence of skipping the Sales Learning Curve in a business plan is all too common: the company fails to meet the plan, sales reps are fired, eventually the VP Sales is fired, and the company has to raise a highly dilutive down round of capital to stay in business.

Leslie's prescription for success and capital efficiency is a plan that includes the Sales Learning Curve. Accept that until we're out there selling, we can't know what we don't know about the selling process. The goal at this point is to maximize runway, since you can't rush science. As my erudite partner and Harvard Business School Professor Felda Hardymon likes to instruct, "run the business like a one story whorehouse" (with no fucking overhead). Hire only two or three creative, guerilla-style reps and a VP who knows how to experiment with multiple channels.

It may take 4, 7, or 10 quarters to climb the curve. Only then, when your sales force is a profit center (with two quarters where contribution exceeds twice the sales costs) is it time to flick the switch. At this point, raise lots of capital and hire as many talented reps as you can possibly find! This kind of prescriptive framework for clearly distinguishing the phases of a company is so much more actionable than the wishy-washy approach of hesitantly adding more and more sales reps over time.

http://whohastimeforthis.blogspot.in/2005/09/best-startup-ad...

https://hbr.org/2006/07/the-sales-learning-curve
> Yes, detecting the overflow is free but reacting to it is expensive.

Who cares??
There should not be integer overflow in your program, so the 'reaction time' is free because it isn't used.

If you have an overflow, then there is a bug in your program, and in C it's perfectly legal to STOP your program in case of integer overflow, so again the reaction time doesn't matter.
To be fair, Kickstarter et al. are not shops. We had this discussion many times over the year, the point of crowdfunding was to invest in potentially interesting ideas, and not to have a preordering venue. So the risk of a project not delivering was always there, a part of the game. But when Kickstarter was busy explaining people they're not a preorder store, startups and VCs figured out that crowdfunding is an excellent marketing channel, so I don't know if anyone is sure what the whole concept is supposed to be anymore.

EDIT: to commenters responding - fair enough. There's no equity so technically it's not investing. Maybe "patronage" is a better word.
Considering the performance of Atom, is it a good idea to build desktop apps with Node.js?
I'm not so sure. I think it should be possible to get something done with 2-3 people in 3 years, not 10. But before I start a serious attempt I'd certainly want to learn basic things first, like how to make a fighting system. These things are only hard and time consuming when you figure them out the first time. The second or third time you are much faster.

One example I have from own experience is that one topic like that for the program I wrote in my thesis: Took me 3-6 months depending on how you count start and end date. But last week I had to do the same thing for another project and it only took me half a day. I didn't need to google anything, I didn't need to compare different variations. I knew what worked, what were the disadvantages of the most common options, choose one in 5 seconds and got it implemented. I didn't run into any of the things that took days to debug in the first attempt, because I knew where the problem areas were.

Therefore I would assume that while the first attempt of an RPG for a group of noobs might take a year or three for a prototype, a small team of experienced developers can put together a basic prototype in a few weeks.
Relevant paper http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2737974&CFID=526962266&CFT...
I'm not sure americans are for anything in the current mess. China was a strong power for centuries thanks to its huge population and territory. It just lagged a bit behind and just catched up.
Middle east has also been a mess for centuries ( at the minimum). Shiites vs sunnites is a forever running war, and you can't tell the US are really the root cause of it.

As for saying "empires on average" , i don't think it means anything. Some lasted for more than 1000 years, other less than 5. But we don't have enough statistics to assume anything is "about time".
no; read the article it's in the 50's
>rationale to this decision

They probably argued that the test was more like surveying defenses than an experiment. i.e. "we need to try it because we need to know if we should be concerned about the Soviets doing it with seriously harmful bacteria."

Additionally, when you do anything involving a group that large there's bound to be an few outliers. Winning the lottery, getting bitten by a shark and dying from complications caused by normally harmless bacteria are all incredibly uncommon but they still happen.
First electric planes fly over English Channel
I've been programming in Java since Java 1.1.8 and I hazily recall several regression problems under Sun's stewardship. My gut feeling is that the rate of regressions in Java updates has remained steady.

If the rate has increased significantly under Oracle's stewardship, this is something I'd like to write about in my Java newsletter.

Do you have some statistics to demonstrate that regressions have become substantially worse since Oracle took over Java? I'd happily acknowledge you as a source!
Personally I dislike disqus. I guess there's nothing wrong with it, but if you have a kind of service users will need to register with anyway - why not create your own system that you can customize however you want, and keep your own data, etc, etc?

On the other hand if you are just working on MVP, and comments are not your main value prop, and you just don't want to bother with implementing your own system - sure, whatever, go for it. There's nothing too horrible about disqus, it's fine.
Joseph A. Tainter had the best theory about empire collapse. The empire usually has some way of making an economic profit. They exploit it till it starts returning negative returns and then they try all kinds of counterproductive things that only make things more complicated to try and save that little scheme they've got going.
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I'm dubious as to whether this change will occur. It's been tried before, and given up due to complexity.

I think it is an excellent idea, but in practice too awkward to implement seamlessly.
Hacking Team Shows the World How Not to Stockpile Exploits
And Apple, and Microsoft, and Oracle...

I think now companies are more conscious about the innovator dilemma and they can acquire innovators before they grow and integrate or kill them into their ecosystem.

Although the innovator dilemma is real, company profits came also from support contracts, so acquiring a cheaper more innovative product will also include a big support contract.
It looks actually really good, much better than expected from an indie title! Kudos!
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Isn't the startup mantra "fake it til you make it"?

\sarcasm.
Would be good to know how that figure came about! Are you sure this isn't skewed by maritime empires, such as the British and Spanish? The landmass based empires I study with interest have typically lasted more than twice that. The Roman Empire is one, which holds true if you consider both the Byzantine empire as separate and a continuation. The Ottomans, although not my interest, I do know lasted a long time. The HRE lasted much longer too.

I understand that the average case is pulled in either direction from multiple empires but I think it's useful to compare with empires with similar qualities and their longevity as opposed to comparing against the average case.

For example, comparing to Britain wouldn't make sense since the base of power was a much smaller landmass with a strong central governing tradition within the nation proper. Their empire was based on supreme naval and economic dominance, which was outmoded by the natural advance of technology.

EDIT: I've just noted the link below. I wouldn't say that the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist at that point but was perhaps less strong. Is the fall of an empire the decline in strength or the point in which it is no longer deemed an empire?
Gameplay loop, what's the big fuss?
Obvious troll but I'll bite.

They were testing the distribution method and trying to do so in a harmless way.

A better comparison would be "we're gonna load a shipping container with a bomb casing full of concrete and irradiated enough to look like a live nuclear weapon, then try to sneak it into the port and see if we get caught."
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Ottoman empire 250 years ?? I didn't read the whole book but to my knowledge, it started around 1300 and ended brutaly after WW1.
Same goes for roman empire, they make it stop at 200AD, but i've always learned it lastest till 4th century.

With those kind of figure bending you can pretty much say anything you want.
Yes I know America as a country loves to meddle everywhere but completely refuses to take responsibility for any of its actions. As for averages, see above. Yes we have a list of all human empires and there are outliers that are 1000 years old. I don't think America will be an outlier.
The US rose as a significant international power only after WWI, so I guess it still has a way to go...
Of some, definitely, with the meaning of "make it" not related to making a working product.
Well, for me USA is still great. For cultural reasons mostly(, because I'm already from a rich country). For instance, I'd like to go and work in Silicon Valley for a while. If I could get a Visa. ;)
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I think we should score pancakes:
http://www.scorethings.com/scores/new?thingId=Q44541
Damn! There goes my "Get those Hippies" theory..
For PyParallel I just altered the decl for global variables to be TLS static, then tweaked initialization, and voila, thread safe globals.

E.g. https://bitbucket.org/tpn/pyparallel/src/3be2954508f9938b85a...
Is that allowed on Kickstarter? Kind of defeats the purpose...
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Still, a sole year is hardly an evidence of quality.
Can you share it with us? =)
In absolute terms I think there are more people than ever programming this way today. Just doesn't feel that way because there are even more people doing stuff differently.
Hacking Team has a horrid history of not keeping their word, the Sudan connection for example they explicitly denied, among others. I don't get the shitstorm for the CP strings, even after a cursory look at the files uploaded there is quite a lot of stuff I'm more concerned about :d
It's funny how people talk about voluntary trade when the whole point of advertising and marketing is to remove the 'voluntary' part.
Ottoman empire stopped expanding and pretty much stagnated after about 250 years. America could see a similar fate. With robotics and economy and global problems it can't do much about... even meddle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagnation_and_reform_of_the_O...
Ask HN: What do you do if someone lies about being a cofounder?
A few months ago, I hired an independent contractor for a few months. He turned out to be a con man (misrepresented past work experience, got no work done, lied a lot, and stole a lot from us, etc) and was eventually let go. While he has no equity in the company, was never an employee of the company, and was not there for the founding, he claims that he is a co-founder on Linkedin.

I would like to never be associated with this person, as I believe him to be a negative signal for all future investors. Plus, just thinking about him as a "co-founder" makes me cringe.

What recourse do I have to tell him to stop calling him a co-founder?
The sharing economy is not caused by income equality, it is caused by entrepreneurs doing new things, finding ways around regulation which normally prevents competition and protects established business, and finally because many people are always looking for a means to supplement their income. That last point is usually most important as many tend to over extend their resources let alone many who do operate as uber drivers are not poor considering they own and insure a car
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I spoke with an old friend from university recently.

Apparently his younger brother (also at university with us in the late 90's) struck it lucky with a company he helped start up, and is now rich enough that he doesn't need to work. He is planning on consulting part time, as he wants something to fill his days (other than just kayaking - we all met through the university kayak club).
Yes that is what I mean. Is it really more common that people do substring and expect the rest to be thrown away than the other way around? I would like to argue that this is an optimization aimed at sloppy code while it's penalizing well-written code.
In the short term maybe but what about long term reputation? These kinds of projects damage the Kickstarter brand.
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the HRE was not really an empire, more of a loose confederation ('In a famous assessment of the name, the French Enlightenment writer Voltaire remarked sardonically: "This agglomeration which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire."'[1])

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Empire#Name
And general programs like MS Word...
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I don't think there's any blaming or complaining in this article. It's merely statements of America's in/actions, and the global perceptions of them over the last 15 years.