skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are still a ton of assembly programmers out there, and it's a mystery to me why any sane application or website would need to crunch that much processing power through a front-end scripting language, like JavaScript. I honestly feel like this is a generation in technology where there is a huge gap between applications and their platforms. It almost makes me wish that Java really had become the dominant language and platform, because in the age of browser apps, mobile apps, and really a dead space of user applications on desktop platforms, it has become the most logical solution to everything.
here are a few arbitrary thoughts:

* superficially, being wealthy offers an advantage to the individual, at least in the short term. it isn't necessarily helpful to other people (e.g. how did that person become wealthy? did they do something useful that contributed to society? did they merely figure out a clever way to reallocate wealth from other people? is it at the cost of long-term environmental damage?)

* the world is not fair (not a justification for anything, just an obvious comment)

* supposing the government is socially progressive and provides everyone with basic welfare, where does the government get the money to do that from? e.g. in our capitalist society [the government's] income might come from income tax, company tax, sale of natural resources, etc. suppose no-one participated in any economic activity because the government's social programs met their basic needs. then it might be difficult for the government to maintain this [since who would be actually doing the work of growing crops, teaching children, fixing potholes, etc?]!

* some governments try to support low-income households to some degree. but there are huge advantages to growing up in a wealthy family. there is certainly no level playing field. there was something in the economist about this a few months ago.

* in itself, i do not think the goal of making money is morally defensible. sure, it can be a means to an end - but the end does not justify the means. there are many ways to make money, some of them have merit, many (most?) of them do not have any merit.

* philosophically, "philosophical" arguments are perhaps irrelevant, as we live in a very flawed society, as flawed individuals. only certain imaginable worlds are feasibly reachable from the one we find ourselves in.

* money can give you power, and status. these are useful, and you are likely to live a more comfortable life with them than without them.

For some reason now I'm reminded of something Chomsky wrote about "expanding the floor of the cage" [1]. This is more relevant if you are in a position where you do not have much opportunity or power, or if you care about those people in such a position:

> Millions of workers have become organized into rural unions which are very rarely discussed. One of the slogans that they use which is relevant here, is that we should "expand the floor of the cage." We know we’re in a cage. We know we’re trapped. We’re going to expand the floor, meaning we will extend to the limits what the cage will allow. And we intend to destroy the cage. But not by attacking the cage when we’re vulnerable, so they’ll murder us.

[1] http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/199704--.htm

edit: it is perhaps useless to think about money without thinking much more broadly about the system that money forms a part of. which human activities are encouraged and discouraged by the system? which individuals benefit? which individuals suffer? is the human economy separate from the physical/natural environment?
This sort-of exists with mailing lists.
Removing down-votes doesn't help unless you've got a fairly sparse sub to begin with. Facebook doesn't have down-votes, and I consider that one of its poorer features.
Riding waves is a good analogy for what's going on with Markoff and similar people. They take the ideas that came out of transhumanism and cyberpunk futurism, and resell them as their own work.

On the one hand it's probably a net-positive that these concepts remain a part of public discourse, but on the other hand it's a bit painful to watch these self-referential imposters get rich and famous for re-packaging ideas mined from subcultures, passing them off as revolutionary concepts they came up with on their own.
L’application Weezchat: un outil pour des rencontres en France
Thanks for your feedback! We are restructuring the website and will elaborate more details at the front.
Related, I hate the uncertainty of tipping. I go out of my way to not take cabs because I never know if I tipped enough or overpaid. Just tell me how much to pay and no attitude.
Not to mention the absolute lack of _usable_ public transportation. It is laughable what they got there compare to any major city in China for example.
What's the difference between money spent by the candidate and money spent by a super pac? If both pools are being managed by campaigning experts, there's not a single difference. Citizen's united established that there is absolutely no limit to the amount of money that a candidate can use to win an election, as long as there's a separate campaign manager for the PAC and they don't collude.

No, the hatred of CU is not absolutely unanimous. But it's pretty widespread, and no amount of word juggling will change the fact that it effectively allows unlimited amounts of anonymous untraceable money to influence elections.
It is hard to know if remote working can be made to work at scale - my feeling is it could once we reach a certain bandwidth, but we are few years out for this.

Online socialising is really important. I lived in a small city in Australia for 7 years and the only way I could mentally survive it was via access to the internet - 10 years earlier and there is no way I could have lived there. I do share you lack of interest in social media though.

I have more than two sets of costs - I have three boys! I have been waiting for real estate to crash for years and every time I think it can’t get any higher something comes along to kick it even higher. I know at some point it will stop rising, but when it does it won’t be pleasant.
> People complain about stale data issues in immutable programming styles not because they're more prevalent, but because they can rule out so many other classes of bugs immediately.

This generalisation is too broad (as with almost any generalisation).

In any case, I want to mention one interesting experience -- a very large financial portfolio management system that I worked on, over a decade-and-a-half ago.

The system had multiple in-coming tickers, feeding huge amounts of data. The central data structures of the computational pipeline system were immutable. Initially, there was a very haphazard system for determining when a particular piece of data was to be deemed stale. In time, formal definitions were established. However, the software was not amenable to those definitions, since shared data was not `seen' updating instantaneously.

The core was too big to be changed in any non-trivial manner, without risking the entire business.

We ended up introducing an explicit notion of time into every pipeline processor to ameliorate (not entirely solve) the situation.

Every major design decision has its own trade-offs that are specific to the problem on hand. But, those built into the foundations of the system should be made pragmatically, not by adhering to a philosophy!
Great stuff, thanks aditya
Can you give an example how their cooperation over Github is special?
You can get a Regus Gold membership for free if you're a United MileagePlus member (or maybe you need the credit card too, I don't remember). This gets you into the "lounge" area of any Regus location, with wifi, free (bad) coffee, etc.
Amazing Features of CakePHP Which Helps You to Build a Dynamic Business Website
I think it is not healthy to be critical of postmortems written by founders, in general.

* It is usually hard to talk about failures and especially if one has contributed to the failure significantly.

* It gives a counter perspective to the rosy pictures painted about startups by the media and tries to right the balance of views presented to the aspiring entrepreneurs. It helps to provide a reality check of what can really be expected and if startup is really the reader's cup of tea.

* On a personal level, it is an attempt by the founder to lay it all out and move on. So obviously there is some melodrama in it. Considering that, there are so many people in tech who suffer from depression and never talk about it, and we really have to coax some to take help, now that someone really tries to share their turmoil with the broader community, we should rather be welcoming than critical.

After all, no one is going to fail their startup, just to write a melodramatic post on Medium. ;)
Or else the arguments are exceptionally weak.
Damn that is an interesting perspective on it. Maybe show them adds selected to piss them off rather than please them. Popup, modal, moving all over the screen type of ads. If they leave, no money is made and they're gone temporarily. If they fight ads in protest, money is made which can be invested into more frustrating technology.

Let's play!
Well, if politicians will stand up in front of congress/cameras and make the same quality claims, we'll be calling it 'politics,' not bullying or abuse.
Ask HN: Good Ruby codebases
Hi all, I'm currently taking my first stab at Ruby and Rails.

Can you guys recommend some good open source projects I can look at?? I'm also looking to contribute as well as learn on the go. (I'm not new to programming, just new to ruby).

Extra credit if the projects are newbie friendly.
Anyone I've ever heard say "programming is easy" is without fail a terrible programmer.

I'm not really sure how to respond to the idea that exploring a dataset isn't a useful way to help develop questions about it. It's only a "fishing expedition" if you have no idea what you're doing.
Unions, when invented, were a great thing. That anybody thinks there's still any good unions around proves P.T. Barnum right: There's a sucker born every minute.
My father, approaching 70, does Sudoku with his breakfast every morning to keep his mind sharp. I think it would be at least equally beneficial for him to learn Python and write a Sudoku solver in it, and since he knows nothing of programming I imagine this would keep him busy for quite some mornings.
What are the advantages of an FPGA in say, my PC? Because it sounds sexy as hell.
You're being short sighted: I find the endeavor of writing a program to solve sudoku much more intellectually interesting and challenging than solving each grid manually.
..then when they make their drop off, they'll have another fare request waiting for them and their downtime will be absolutely minimal.

If increased demand exists at the airport, pricing increases until capacity is met. This is a much more natural governor than simply creating a queue at projected in demand areas.
Philae Comet Lander Phones Home to Earth Again
Small sample size, but thats the one feature I sorely miss in feed readers: comments and discussion.
What I learned growing from $0 to $1+ million in revenue, twice
academicediting.us or editing@academicediting.us

Just email them your paper and they'll get you back a quotation pretty quick.

I asked them to do mine and they did a great job, its an academic editing company, but they did a really good job on mine.
Ellen Pao: The trolls are winning the Internet
>There is a difference between sprinting away and making planned, sapient decisions to escape.

What's the difference? They're both instinctual responses to a perceived threat.

Now, I'm not saying we should be killing animals indiscriminately. I'm saying that decision has nothing to do with whether the animal knows which direction to flee or how to hide. That's like trying to decide whether to buy a house based on the number in the ones place of its price.
Interior designer Brisbane
For backend monitoring purposes, one common solution is to stand up statsd and consume it from Grafana.
Hey, sorry for the late reply. I have touched on React. But, I am familiar with Ember, Backbone, Vue and Riot. Nonetheless, could you please explain further?
This was not a cargo cult use of such words, as you seem to think it is.
None of these are anything like what harassment laws target. Additionally, a much higher bar is set when talking about a public figure. It's fine to call a politician stupid, and no reasonable person would consider that harassment.
Thanks!
That sounds good, but what should I ask besides putting the site and pitch it?
You could try ASCII - they should have no problem with octal.

It's hard to measure IQ without a social context.

Humans are unique in that most of our collective learning is shareable and externalised. If you took a human child and kept it completely isolated from all external teaching and human contact until after puberty, it's not obvious that it would appear that much more intelligent than an octopus.

Conversely, if you could give an octopus the genes for a much longer lifespan and less need to be solitary, I don't know what you'd get - but it might be scary smart.
Oh, right, I missed that. No, it's actually generating both every time. CPython can't eliminate one of the sides, since the calls (either to len() or to the slicing method of 's') might have side effects.

In this case, I think it'd make more sense to divide gen_splitted_his into two functions (or one which accepted a parameter), for generating one or the other.
A (python) library that does alot of this (the parallelism, data-flow, flow construction from task units, remote execution, resumable execution...). I'm one of the authors, it's used in various openstack projects (and more)... This article was very much along the ideas of it, so thought it useful to share.

- http://docs.openstack.org/developer/taskflow/

- https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/TaskFlow

We recently had a brown-bag (with a community member from HP and myself from yahoo) that is shareable and maybe useful to folks @ https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1EZoY4FE2SDjfCqMCgBRr...
>scrollaway 9 hours ago | parent | flag

If I leave this up for an hour without refreshing, I'll get:

>scrollaway 10 hours ago | parent | flag

Again, without ever refreshing the page.
Damn though, they are like "Lord of War" but for modern times.
Why more companies are looking at alternative management structures
>But the worst part was that every freaking time the cab driver would give me attitude for the short fare (ostensibly because they have to wait in that long line).

Woah. I thought that only happened in India. Didn't know it was the same story elsewhere. But now, lot of the airport cabbies have decided to join 'the enemy' rather than try and beat it. Lot of them do Uber pick-ups while waiting for their turn at the airports (from what they tell me its a very long queue and they usually get only 1 ride per day).

Its a much worse situation in India, except here as far I know there is no difficulty in obtaining badges/medallion (they hand them out like candy). Instead we have to deal with unionism/thuggery, terrible service and exorbitant rates. Tuk-tuks in most cities ignore meter pricing.

I am scared by the prospect of Uber becoming entrenched, but I think that is a risk we have to take, to break the current status quo. Uber really is a life-changer here. This industry needs to be disrupted, and if Uber has to bend/ignore a few rules (which the existing taxis in India ignore anyway), I think that is a worth-while cost.
The Question of Docker, the Future of OS Virtualization
It makes working with iterators easy - this way you're always talking about one thing at a time, instead of the whole collection/iterator, making efficient computation easy.

Also, the abstraction allows for optimizations like delegating to Apache Spark or other processes/threads.
The question of reduction of the human mind is something many humanists, as well as many STEM people get wrong, but it is quite easy to explain to software developers. The key is this: computation breaks reduction. And by reduction I mean explaining something as the sum of its components, rather than simply describing it as such (although the word explaining requires a definition here which I cannot give). The intractability of simple aggregation of variables makes reduction nigh impossible -- which is why we have physicists, chemists and biologists rather than just physicists -- but computation does so in a much more fundamental way (though it can be said that computation is involved, or emerges, in those aggregations, too). So while an algorithm running on a computer could be described as the physical interactions of electrons in the CPU, explaining and studying the algorithm as a physical process is nearly useless. No computer scientist would reduce a sorting algorithm to physics, and would probably claim that the reduction -- even though it is theoretically possible -- is completely meaningless, as the algorithm transcends the hardware it runs on.

The concept of universal computation says that a machine that is able to perform just a few simple operations, can not only simulate the entire universe it is in, but any universe at all -- with any natural laws. The physical world can therefore contain something that is more general than the world itself. Of course, this is not quite so but only an approximation. As the machine needs to be actually built of earthly materials, it does not have enough degrees of freedom to describe the exact universe it resides in, but even as a bounded approximation, reduction is severely limited.

Of course, much of the "reductionst" study of the mind indeed operates at the "software" level, the algorithm level -- not the hardware level. But the thing about universal computation is that even that is not enough. A computer software can simulate another computer, and the simulated computer cannot be reduced to the workings of the "virtual machine" it runs in. The number of levels of simulation is, of course, bounded by computing resources, but I think it's quite possible that there is at least one simulation layer in the brain.

So while reduction is always necessary to understand the foundations of the next level of abstractions, it can never be a full explanation or even a full explanation mechanism. This is doubly so when computation is involved.

"Reducing" the mind to neurobiology, therefore, does not change Shakespeare being a better explanation to human behavior than neural networks. The two might well operate at two irreducible levels of abstractions, and even if one gives rise to the other, it does not form a sufficient "explanation" (whatever that means).

Dismissing the "reality" or applicability of "literary logic" (e.g. the moon is made of cheese) makes as much sense as dismissing software as less real or less fundamental than the hardware it runs on -- even if the software is simulation a world ruled by laws very different from those governing matter.
And yet ShitRedditSays is allowed to vote brigade as much as it wants.
I usually Uber to the airport and taxi back. The latter costs almost 50% more. If this policy goes through, it will be a welcome change.
Oxford University Is Older Than the Aztecs (2013)
It is if you updated it recently.
How to make programmatic Google Forms
This is a reference to the classic Asimov short story Profession (http://www.inf.ufpr.br/renato/profession.html) and should not have been downvoted.
Wowwww. Too little too late for Aereo, which was a vastly superior service.
Legends in D3
I've done comparisons where I've written the exact same program in C# and F#. The reduction in unneeded type annotations alone is massive. F# required only 1/20th the number of type annotations.
I'm surprised the NRA has never raised this issue.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8966852
I've told this story before on HN but I'll tell it again here. On current Google Maps statistics I used lived 18km/24minutes from the airport in Melbourne while the CBD is 23km/22minutes away (faster roads to get to the CBD). Getting a taxi home one time the driver berated me and told me I shouldn't have taken a cab for such a short trip. It wasn't like he was grumpy, he was literally telling me off in the street, after I'd got out and couldn't see his driver ID of course. According to Google maps it takes 3h30m to walk from the airport back to where I was living so I suppose I should have done that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9613118
Random Austerity Measure Generator
Alternative title:

The destruction of the middle class is so extended that "entrepreneurs" now have to share "company offices" with people's homes

Talk about making a virtue out of necessity...
Belle – Configurable React Components with Great UX
Really? They usually check for ur parking permit? If this works for everyone this is a nice hack.
The Rise of Female Hackers for Good
The problem with censorship rules is that it's very hard to trust anyone with them because the act of enforcing the rule removes all evidence of rule violation from public scrutiny.
I accept that some people don't know how, or don't want to dedicate the time to making a responsive site. I get that, I have sites that don't make sense in mobile, so we don't bother with a mobile design. But don't take away the ability to zoom on mobile if you don't. You lose a good portion of your audience.
I agree that things need to be pragmatic. But there are classes of bugs ruled out absolutely by things like immutable structures and referential transparency.

Now, the thing is that there's always a way to model state, but at least I can rule out things like the term "x" to mean different things depending on how many times f was called beforehand for the most part.
Some feedback - I had a quick skim through the pdf version of the book. I don't know to what extent the generation of the pdf is in your hands.

Page 12: 'function definitioin'.
Page 19: Opportunity for introducing 'with' statement.
Page 28: 'Python doesnâ€TMt', amusingly in a paragraph discussing character encoding.
Page 31: Broken table.
Page 38: 'frame â€”'.
Page 52: 'Hey I dont see' - opportunity for escaped apostrophe.
I've noticed that solving a sudoku is something of a rosetta stone for how people program. Norvig's solution is very straightforward in hindsight, but I think that code was either the result of many iterations or of a career of making progressively more readable code.

Here are some other sudoku solvers that give more insight into the coder than the problem:

Sudoku in APL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmT80OseAGs

Test driven sudoku: http://ronjeffries.com/xprog/articles/sudokumusings/
This is nonsense:

"You needed to claim something like "the vast majority of murderers have non-murder priors""

I am making a claim about whether someone should get a relatively light sentence for the given crime, versus whether someone should get a severe sentence for the given crime. I am not making any claims about which specific sentence applies to which specific crime. My claim applies to all categories of crime, from jaywalking to murder.

Your point about murder is irrelevant to the point I was making. However, I have noticed that when I mention "murder" people assume I must mean first degree murder, even though less than 20% of all murders are first degree. What's much more common is 3rd degree murder, such as drunk driving, or driving while sleepy, or over confidence in one's ability to control a camp fire at a camp grounds, or failure to put out a cigarette properly, or any of the hundreds of other small accidents that people can do that then leads to someone else's death, and which an aggressive district attorney will treat as 3rd degree murder.
What stops them is the lack of incentive. Because fares are regulated and customers have very little control over who their next driver will be, there's literally no incentive to do anything more than the minimum necessary -- they won't earn any more. Quite the contrary, if they don't push for big tips or fill their cars with ads, they'll earn less!
Sinatra is clean and well documented ruby code:
https://github.com/sinatra/sinatra