skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This.

I think this is going to be really bad for the web. Next year, we will all be screaming when we see more of "If you want to read this article and much more, download our App!"
There are genuine solar breakthroughs every couple of months, its just the reporting that is garbled due to being dumbed down to science journalism standards. For example, something breaking a record in the lab doesn't mean its ready to be productized, or that it would be cost effective if it was, but we've got a great pipeline of improvements making their way to market.

http://www.nrel.gov/ncpv/images/efficiency_chart.jpg

The recent MIT future of solar report is a good HN-level summary of where solar is now:

https://mitei.mit.edu/futureofsolar

It's not a sales pitch, but the people who are investing billions in solar these days aren't hippies, it's big business now, and they're convinced so the brainwashed masses will eventually twig they've been lied to.
True, but I would like to know that my non-Google browser contacts Googles server every now and then. If the goal is "no surprises", then users should be made aware of this feature and allowed to opt-in or out easily.
I was reluctant to quote Lewis because there is more context to his ideas than can be conveyed in that quote. The negative behaviors you describe aren't typical of just children: they are typical of all of fallen, broken humanity. It's just that children are more honest in being direct about those negative behaviors. :)

Since we associate these negative behaviors with "childishness," we risk throwing out the good with the bad: we lose imagination, wonder, honesty, playfulness, etc.

I realize that you aren't suggesting the author has those negative behaviors. I'm only trying to provide a greater context to Lewis' quote. Perhaps I should have just stated this argument on my own; I apologize for any confusion.
Gypsies Aren't from Persia. They're from Ireland
What?

If any search engine should be the default, at least pick the best or the most privacy friendly. Yahoo is neither. On top of that it is just a relay to Microsoft Bing.

How hard is it to just ask the user which search engine they would like to use on install?
Here is the news: the Jupiter paper is now published.
http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2015/pdf/papers/p183....

I'm not just describing strong scaling. I'm describing a cost-effective way to achieve it; that's what really matters.

Why have subsets of nodes for post-simulation cleanup? Why not just run that cleanup on the same nodes you used for simulation? Or other general nodes? Otherwise, you've got two sets of nodes which are used at lower utilization than they would normally be.
I totally missed that, that's really funny.
here we go, the Jupiter paper is now published:
http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2015/pdf/papers/p183....
15min Video: Securing ChatOps at Box.com
Should be all fixed now. This is quite a tricky text to translate with all the in-jokes and it's absolutely dripping with sarcasm in German, hard to pull that off in English (both English and German are not my native tongues).
See also Bayesian Networks Without Tears[1]

[http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~murphyk/Bayes/Charniak_91.pdf]
This is not vigilante justice. These are off duty police officers working as an officially sanctioned part of the local government, which is obviously failing to get the job done.

A vigilante would shoot the malefactors on the spot, but these officers are arresting the individuals in cooperation with the nopd and their cases are adjudicated like any others.

I don't see any problem with someone who has skin in the game and who is passionate getting involved in local governance and trying to find a better way forward.

The fact that he is rich and politically connected makes him that much more able to tackle the problem. I suppose the optics would be better if he just packed up and left town and left New Orleans to stew in its own juice. Then he couldn't be accused of a rich guy bossing little guys around. However, this guy has a wealth, talent, and influence, and he's choosing to apply them responsibly. He should be applauded.
When my friends ask me what language they should get started in when they want to learn to program without a specific application in mind, I usually suggest Python for all the reasons the article so convincingly presents. So certainly in one sense it's a good modern BASIC equivalent.

However, I don't think that what made BASIC so magical was just that it was easy -- it was easy and you could make the computer do the things you were interested in. And while the capabilities of Python are vastly greater than BASIC of yore, I think a beginner's expectations of what they should be able to do have grown even more quickly.

These days, typically someone who wants to learn to program wants to do one of two things: (1) make a website or (2) create an app. For a lot of types of sites Python is still a great choice (Flask is definitely one of the easiest frameworks out there to pick up, and I'm actually teaching my wife to program by making a basic Flask app with her). However, for other interests Javascript or even Java or Swift may be more appropriate first languages.

I guess that what I'm trying to say is that the best first language is the one that ignites your imagination with its possibilities, rather than the one that's the absolute easiest to learn.
>I expected to see all these things as defaults

Really? You expected what is basically a built-in keylogger?
There is no problem running a JVM on cut-down linux nodes. A JVM is just a process.

Anyway, the issue with JVMs is that they don't have predictable performance, not that the compilers can't be ported.
I remember trying to program some BASIC back in 1st grade, which was 31 years ago. I was terrible at it, but I was hooked.

Fast forward to today: my 4th grader asked me the other day which language he should learn, and I was stumped. I ran through the languages I know well in my head: Java, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, Javascript, Go, Swift... Wasn't sure what to tell him. His expectations are fairly high, due to Minecraft and video games and whatever.

So, on one level I agree with the author: Python (or Ruby) is probably the closest to the original feel of BASIC. You can dive into simple statements without wrapping it in a class. You don't need to worry about functional vs. OOP or methods or functions. You can just write some code.

But, as I thought about it, I realized my son already _is_ programming. He's just using Minecraft's red stones. It isn't turing complete, but it has basic input and output.

What I'd love to see is something like Minecraft, but with a more accessible programming environment. There are a few tools out there that do it, but the gap between the visual building experience and the programming experience is way to wide. I want him to click on a block and write 3 lines of code to change the color and give it some behavior.

tl;dr - Minecraft is the new BASIC for most kids today. It just isn't a very good BASIC.
I think they were talking about the author of Python-prompt-toolkit, though I read it that way too at first.
> But that would be horribly complicated

No it wouldn't. There would be some corner cases, but mostly it would just work for the existing code whereas, from the perspective of the 2.x users, now it just doesn't. I know, I write compilers for living. The maintenance cost from the point of view of the compiler maintainer would almost invisibly increase (there are much less trivial things to worry about) the benefit for the current users would be significant. The reason it wasn't done is much more "political" ("just one way to do it") than technical.

Specifically: once it's declared that print is a function, you don't need to treat the string print as keyword. Then you can notice comparing print expression and print( expression ) that if you know that print is a function the braces aren't giving you any new information. So the difference is do you want to encode the knowledge "print is a function" in the compiler or not. That encoding is trivial, and even if it can be called "a special case" isn't anything that anybody would spend any significant energy maintaining. It obviously appears to be "less elegant" to describe your compiler having "a special knowledge that print is a function" but there are even ways out of that: you can generalize such constructs (function calls without using the return value). But then "there would be more than one way to do it."

But orders of magnitude more 2.x Python programs would "just work" when started under a such 3.x. Of course, once you accept that the transition should be less painful, you'd need provide the way for libraries to also have the "newer" and the "older" ways to do it. "More than one way" is potentially contagious. But, sometimes "worse is better."
For kids learning programming, browsers are more generally available than commandlines with python installed. Doubly so if they want to share what they make like kids used to do with basic on floppies.
Glare of Video Is Shifting Public’s View of Police
* Javascript is highly internally inconsistent (http://wtfjs.com/)

* Javascript is incredibly easy to screw up (http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/182416/A-Collection-of-J...)

* Practical use of Javascript requires understanding of HTML, CSS, the DOM, as well as the concept of browser inconsistencies

Not sure I agree with that article.
Nothing magic about it. Public police have unions and due process rights to protect them from accountability. Private police generally have neither.
Teenage Sex and What the Sun.misc.Unsafe Misery Teaches Us Generally
It existed since 2007 with E-Plus in Germany ;P
Jennifer Aniston and MIT: An unlikely connection?
1.) No, that's asinine. Look up the tax records of someone if you want to know that information. There are reasons people would want to keep their paycheck private, for very legitimate reasons.

2.) That first sentence doesn't make any sense. The second sentence is also asinine. You get on a pay band based on merit at work. If that isn't the case, or if you don't like politics at work, find a new job.. or realize there will always be politics at work.

I'm not sure if you're a huge privacy advocate, but if you are, these ideas are a direct contradiction to privacy. Can't have my phone metadata, but if I can't see your pay stub life isn't fair.
Or wait until there is something more newsworthy occupying the rest of the journalists and then re-open the investigation.
> PyQt is very much usable. It's GPL3 but if you're using it in commercial projects, you shouldn't just pinch your nose because you have to get a commercial license.

But I do and thousands of other people do as well. Today, the value-add is somewhere else, not in language bindings for GUI toolkits.
This policy has zero to do with Pocket if you actually read it. It's about changing the user's search engine and homepage. Unless of course you wanted to get in a completely unrelated jab at Pocket again because reasons.

Get over Pocket. There's no closed source code included. The open source code that integrates with Pocket is never executed due to lazy loading if you don't specifically use Pocket. No money changed hands. It was implemented because users had been asking for the functionality for years and Mozilla determined that it made more sense to partner with the best in breed provider of the service rather than reinvent the service and support it on an ongoing basis themselves. You can right-click and remove it if you don't want it.
I learned Visual Basic 6 as my first language. I appreciated that my application could for the most part run on any Windows machine without a massive framework as a requirement. Don't get me wrong though, I love .NET entirely! I just enjoyed Visual Basic 6, because it felt native, and to some degree was. I still wish there was a native solution with a RAD environment like that, Delphi is nice but the syntax is quite friction filled for a beginner. Nowdays C# is the clear winner, although not yet a native solution and not yet multiplatform without friction.

Edit:

More on topic:

My personal opinion is that scripting languages like Python and Ruby, and for the brave teachers Lisp (Racket, Clojure, etc) make excellent programming languages. Instead of forcing yourself to learn the requirements of C-like languages, you get to focus a lot more on the concepts, and a lot less on syntax issues that I see more than often enough with new students to programming.
I think the reason diaspora hasn't caught on is because micropayments aren't easy for the average user yet. If you want me to use bandwidth and keep a machine running in my house connected to some decentralized p2p facebook thingee, sure some might do it for free but if everyone who used your node tossed you 1/10th of penny or something like that per use maybe it would have a lower barrier to entry.

Not to mention that it needs to be much easier to setup a server securely for the average person, and have a digital wallet to store their micropayments. (I love bitcoin but asking your average facebook user to setup a wallet securely is still too difficult)

This article correctly called out the advertising incentive of today's big companies as not being in the average users' best interest. I wish it had also talked more about what kind of incentives that are missing to get people to become a part of p2p networks. Great article though, I like how the author tied in the slowing rate of discoveries/progress into the problem.
Yesterday I had to explain to my 9-year-old daughter that the bug in her Python script was due to the fact that she indented with a tab and not four spaces. Trying to publish her program so that her friends could use it was a nightmare (it's a console app).

It's 2015 and we have the brightest minds working on this stuff and it's all shit.
Did the developers fix the start up time yet?
Sequel is an absolute joy to use. I've not seen a better thought-out ORM. Jeremy's support efforts are exemplary as well.
What's the strategy in agar.io?
Video: A powerful telescope you can build at home – AAAS
Can I use this for mysql over ssh?
"stopped" is was the article says.

I don't believe it either, just didn't have other sources ;)
Nope, sorry. Python is an easy, good language. Basic was not popular because it was easy, or even good, it was popular because it was everywhere. JavaScript, for all its warts and foibles, is the new basic. It's easy enough, and it's everywhere.
It is (so far) nothing like the Spiegel Affair. The Spiegel Affair started with the Spiegel offices being raided and several Spiegel journalists being arrested.

In the netzpolitik.org case, so far we have merely an investigation that appears to be DOA.
I've played a game with similar controls for years so they were a natural fit for me.
apple and google are scumbag corporations (not only) when it comes to privacy... so is it OK if another big corp joins them? you basically say yes, I say NO.
I think minecraft red stones are turing complete. Someone built a simple processor with those red stones.
> I have tried finding articles in favor of it, just to get a more balanced perspective, but no luck

I believe that The Economist may have had some such. Try "The Economist TPP" in Google for some suggestions. For example, [1].

[1] http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21659716...
I got interested in this so whipped up a notebook for my interpretation of the rules against random sequences of different lengths. Failure rates are the number of sequences that contained an error, not the number of errors in all the sequences (so a sequence that had 3 errors counts as one failure).

A couple of rule descriptions were ambiguous, rules 5 & 6 (at least to me).

I'll upload a PDF output when I get latex installed again (downloading the html file is probably the easiest way of quickly seeing the output)

Edit - updated.

PDF:

http://files.figshare.com/2196604/Analysis_of_the_false_posi...

PDF/HTML/notebook

http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1499204
Didn't VB6 applications in the most part require the visual basic runtime?

(Although I think there was an option to compile to native?)
Why I prefer Vim to RubyMine
San Francisco has a private police force that predates the public one. And is less corrupt.

http://reason.com/archives/2015/07/21/san-franciscos-private...
Edit your resume. Get your friends to help you, professors, post it here and get hacker news to help (brave!), or even hire a professional service to do it. Find a nice template online and use that. I've seen an astonishing number of astonishingly bad resumes. If you are having trouble even getting a phone screen, it says something about your applications (if you're having trouble in phone screens or during on-sites it says something else).

Some common problems I've seen with resumes:

- Grammar, spelling and formatting problems.

- Breadth but not depth - people list a million technologies but don't mention a single thing they did with those technologies.

- Overly long - some people have a six month stint somewhere and yet write two pages of what they did there, filled with technical buzzwords.

- Too short - people worked somewhere for three years and yet only write a single bullet point.

- Unexplained gaps, especially early on. Not necessarily fair, but this can be a red flag for people.

The other trap that I've seen people fall into (less fairly) are technological traps:

- Someone out of school that only knows one big name language like Java. People interpret this as someone who didn't do much outside of class.

- Windows-centric developers in Silicon Valley. There's a lot of bias in SV against Windows developers, and someone with a list of Microsoft centric technologies risks coming off as someone who wants to be a Windows systems engineer in shops that mostly run off of Linux and Mac OS.

Finally, in the definitely not fair front is names. My Chinese and Indian friends have reported that by putting a Western first name on the resume their response rates more than doubled.
I dominated. Quickly got to first place and soon I was sitting at 8/9k score. When you get that high you have a constant drain on your score at about 25/second.

It got pretty boring as small ships could / would run away and any bigger ships were still much much smaller and I could win just through attrition.
Optimizing Elasticsearch: How Many Shards per Index?
>The number of naysayers here is saddening, if not surprising. At the risk of sounding like RMS, you simply cannot say in the same breath that you honestly value the FSF and then go onto declare that you still buy into Windows.

Only a Sith speaks in absolutes. Very few people can, or want to live like RMS and never compromise on their beliefs. Most of us have responsibilities or hobbies that require us to manage our time. The negativity is a reflection that Linux works great until it doesn't. An update disables your network card, your GPU doesn't fully run under linux, an update to GCC removes your ability to update a port. At some point, people get tired of having to fix things and just want the OS to work out of the box. That being said, there are plenty of free software projects that do work well on Windows, such as Emacs and Firefox.

>Although many of you use GNU/Linux daily, it seems that most have failed to truly understand the value, the very significant importance, that the GNU project and the FSF represent in our world.

It's Linux, not GNU/Linux; only RMS calls it that because he's a poor marketer. Speaking of which, the FSF does not realize the value it brings to people. It's not free software. The trend for most people is they simply do not care, because the FSF is terrible at marketing. If people do not respond to your campaign, it's not valuable. The value of the FSF is not in freedom, it's in protecting people's choice. It's in ensuring that there are alternate products, such as Linux, Emacs, Firefox, etc that people can use if they want to avoid the consequences of using proprietary software.

>In fact, if more people actually internalized what computing freedom means, and what the technology landscape could one day look like, then GNU/Hurd would already be finished, it would look like Windows 10, and there would be far fewer proprietary software apologists on Hacker News, dismissing this post.

To paraphrase Carl Sagan, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. The Hurd project is a (poorly managed) volunteer effort, and is suffering the usual fate. The issue is not with supply, there are plenty of well qualified people who could focus on Hurd and get it done, but they won't because it's not worth their time. Trying to incentivize people with freedom only goes so far. At some point, the hierarchy of needs changes, and people don't want spin their wheels on something that offers them no tangible benefit. The FSF would do well to understand why the linux kernel. won.
One of the included batteries is a built-in Turtle graphics system. A bare Python installation is far better than the BASIC of my day. It's just much more difficult to get into since our machines don't just boot into an interpreter or even ship with one in the case of Windows.
A couple days for a conference.

From what I've read in this topic and elsewhere, the cost of living is very high.

I'd rather not live in a city with as much of a chance of an earthquake as SF has. Living in a known disaster area just seems kinda off...

Then there's just personal preference.

I live in a city of less that 200K, and I find it to be larger than I like. The other day I hit stop and go traffic in a larger city, and found myself wondering why anyone would subject themselves to that on a regular basis. Or subject themselves to crowded mass transit systems, those crowds are a big part of why I use my car instead in my city.

And so on...
One would hope so, but I doubt it'll ever happen
you mean the next version after 10, when they get things right again? nah, I'll skip to version 23, or 42 to be sure (but they might screw their new feces sampling API to be little too intrusive for my taste...)
>EDIT: When I say that Python is the new BASIC, I mean it as a compliment, to say that Python is in the best position to become a lingua franca for non-programmers to learn programming.

I think it is much more common for novice non-programmers to look at some HTML/Javascript that they're curious about and then tweak the javascript a little to change the behavior of the webpage. The tweaking may come from copying a stackoverflow.com answer without unerstanding the underlying principles (aka "cargo cult"). However, these humble beginnings act as the gateway to more systematic learning (.e.g read "Java - The Good Parts by D Crockford", etc).

Because of Javascript's pervasiveness[1], it is much more likely for a beginner to hack around with others' Javascript and then eventually write their own .js rather than download Python and start writing .py files.

Those are my personal observations. Do others see total more beginners downloading Python rather than dipping their toes into Javascript?

[1]
google.com search "get started Javascript" ~211 million hits:

https://www.google.com/search?q=get+started+with+javascript

google.com search "get started Python" ~33 million hits:

https://www.google.com/search?q=get+started+with+python
Kim Dotcom: ‘I don’t think your data is safe on Mega anymore’
Brilliant. That would help with security as well, I bet.
The rise of append-only, immutable data stores
Show HN: Tilepad – Your Twitter at a Glance
Yes! Thank you!

These controls are almost exactly the same but without the reverse thrust. Have you been playing since the Steam launch? I'm in game a lot, same alias as here if you ever want to chat.

I have been destroying this game for the last two hours. Sitting at 8/9k got boring so I just quit.
shhh nobody tell him they did the same thing in Windows 8.1
I believe hello world in ruby is even shorter than python (if that is what counts as a measurement here), since you can just use "p" as short of "puts", so:

p 'Hello world'