crm416

We've been using PyO3 and Maturin at Spring for a while now, and happily. The smooth Python interop means we can call out to Rust without much pain for performance-critical codepaths. But the other side-effect is that we can use Rust across the org more broadly, even when Python interop isn't a consideration -- e.g., for isolated services, or applications that need to compile to Windows, or whatever else -- since we're building up the cultural knowledge and shared libraries to do so.

Thanks for the thoughtful feedback--I think these are very fair comments.

When we first designed Jasper, it was just for us to hack around with, so regex matching, the priority system, the single-instance configuration, etc.--these all made a lot of sense for our use case (and the use cases that we foresaw w/r/t casual hackers). Our goal was just to make things simple and accessible (hence our focus on documentation). Since our initial release, Jan Holthuis has taken over much of the development, and he's put a big emphasis on abstracting out the STT and TSS libraries (as you mentioned) and improving the design more generally. My hope is that Jasper will continue to grow and mature, and that the suggestions and possibilities you mention become realities.

It's not necessarily 'irrational'. A 51% miner could profit from Bitcoin's downfall, or by threatening others, or even by bluffing an attack. See, e.g., the Goldfinger Attack in https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~kroll/papers/weis13_bitcoin.pd....

I took the course this semester (and loved it--hope the materials can be helpful to all).

We had one assignment that focused on achieving consensus in the face of adversarial nodes, similar to the systems used in Stellar and Ripple, so those were included in the course, to a degree.

Can't speak highly enough of the Khan Academy internship experience--I interned with Kasra last summer and it was a pretty incredible few months. From the team to the mission to the culture to the work itself, it's A+ all around. If you're looking for a software internship, I highly recommend applying.

(By the way: the Khan Academy iPad app actually shipped _today_. Congrats to everyone back at Khan HQ!)

True, but there's a decent case to be made that (1) transaction fees will have to increase (in general) as the block reward decreases, and (2) transaction fees will have to increase (for these centralized services) if they want to eat the cost of fraud [1].

[1] https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/randomwalker/the-low-tran...

I'm a little confused--the article mentions that letters of recommendation must be turned over, but I believe that's only the case if the writer explicitly waived confidentiality (see http://www.naceweb.org/public/ferpa0808.htm).

"I think the technology used to implement the Bitcoin payment system is fascinating - public ledgers and crypto and block chains will all be game changers. Bitcoins themselves? More of a necessary component to creating a new financial system."

Another article that seems to suggest that the blockchain has value with Bitcoin. I've heard others (pmarca in particular) promote this view, and I think it's far from validated. At the moment, BTC is the most important incentive to mine, and mining is the most important factor in establishing the blockchain's security.

It's true that, in the future, we might be able to come up with other incentive structures to encourage mining (the Bitmessage protocol is one such example). But if we want one blockchain, and we want it to be as secure as possible, how could we ever come up with an incentive that is as universally desirable and infinite as money?

What I worry about is the effect that market price can have on the security of the network (via global hash rate).

The system will reach equilibrium when the revenue generated by mining is equal to the amount spent on mining. When the value of BTC goes down, mining generates proportionally less revenue (if miners are valuing BTC at market price, which they may not be), and the global hash rate will drop.

Imagine if the price plummeted, the hash rate dropped, and someone launched an attack on the network. At that point, consumer confidence in Bitcoin would possibly never recover, and its long-term viability would be severely damaged.

This is awesome. I've played around with React's server-side rendering [1] and was really impressed once I'd hooked it all up. To see React hook up the event handlers and render nothing at all was really satisfying.

I haven't had a chance to use react-router, but it's great to hear that they've put in the work to make server-side rendering a reality. I only hear positive things. Kudos.

[1] http://www.crmarsh.com/react-ssr/

I can testify that there are plenty of remote folk at Khan Academy--can think of six full-time remote devs off the top of my head (in a sub-40 person dev team). It's a very remote-friendly culture.

Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow.

It should be considered required reading these days--couldn't be more timely.

Great suggestions. I've been meaning to take a deeper dive into Wit.ai for a while now. It seems like their intents-entities architecture would actually fit in pretty cleanly with Jasper.

As an aside: I don't think it'd be difficult to developer Jasper modules that use Wit without modifying much of the original source (as long as the speech-to-text systems pick up on the text you'd need to pass to Wit).

Agreed. Even with small tasks, I've found Atom to be noticeably slower. Just as an anecdotal data point, it takes roughly a second to open a file or folder in Atom (i.e., after opening the app, the time b/w dragging any file or folder onto the icon and seeing it appear in the editor is about a second), while the same interval in Sublime is imperceptible.

The divisive effect that Upworth (and BuzzFeed) have had on Facebook users has been interesting to observe.

Personally, the influx of links from these relatively content-less sites has really decreased the usefulness of my news feed--in fact, I get a little bothered whenever I see this stuff appear. That said, it’s evident that _someone_ wants these links to be on Facebook, given that _someone_ had to post them in the first place.

Perhaps it’s just evidence of the split between newsfeed presence and wall presence (i.e., it could be consistent to argue that those who post Upworth yadn BuzzFeed links don’t necessarily want them to gain attention beyond the Wall on which they’re posted), but I prefer to see it as a microcosm of two contrasting groups of Facebook users: one that sees Facebook as a way to share “fun”, “light” content, and another that wants it to be a meaningful exchange of personal information and ideas.

As a Princeton student, it's been pretty frustrating to watch this devolve into (drawing from comments on this page) a "sham study by Princeton", with this response being a criticism of "Princeton's methodology", and that "Princeton was deserving of a response like this".

It's been pointed out by a few other HNers, but this type of logic does a massive injustice and disservice to all the institution's undergraduate and graduate students, as well as its professors, who work hard to produce some of the highest-quality research in the world.

To say that this is a "Princeton study" is to present this as if it were endorsed or produced by the administration or some department or even a tenured professor. Instead, let's remind ourselves that this was a pre-peer reviewed paper posted on _arXiv_ by two PhD students (who have likely been at the university for a few years, tops). To paint this as the Princeton community getting together as a collective and putting forth their best attempt to "debunk" Facebook is just hilariously unfair.

Look, there's a thick anti-higher education slant on HN. People love referencing the higher education bubble and the 'demise' of the current university system or whatnot. But it'd be nice if we could keep things in perspective here and at least do better than the media, who can't wait to pounce on a Princeton vs. Facebook feud.

Seconded--canvas support would be great. I too had to mix D3 with some canvas drawing. The specific use case was that I had a number of diagrams, most of which were handled by D3, but one of which required pixel-by-pixel rendering (i.e., each pixel in the canvas was colored according to some data).

Highly recommend D3. I've used it for a large-scale project this summer, handling thousands (millions, even) of data points in the browser. Mike Bostock has created an immense body of examples and is constantly found answering questions on SO, etc. Kudos to Mike and D3 as a whole.

EDIT: oops, typo

Latex, with the TikZ package: http://www.texample.net/tikz/

Steep learning curve, but there are plenty of examples around the Internet, and it's certainly worth the investment.

I only have ~300 and I can do this. IIRC, I've always been able to.

I see your point, but isn't it also common among those from whom the thieves have stolen?

Revolutionary.

In all seriousness, this was a feature that I've been waiting on for a while--without reminders, I've had to go back-and-forth between the native OS X Reminders app and Evernote. In a way, this has sculpted my relationships with the two apps: I use Reminders for anything short-term (even things that might be considered 'Notes') and Evernote for anything long-term. Maybe that will change.

As someone who only discovered functional programming this year (and now do almost all my programming in OCaml), I would say that the biggest revelation that I came to (and didn't really appreciate until I'd studied the subject for a while) was the lack of mutability in (pure) functional programming. This allows you to maintain invariants and makes it much easier to reason about your code, which has huge advantages when you're working with concurrency or parallelism.

Here's one of my favorite examples. Say we have a set S and an element x, as in the following code:

"let S = Set.empty () in let S = Set.add S x in f (); if (Set.mem S x) then..."

If our code is purely functional, then it's impossible that x is no longer in S after our call "f ()". However, if we're using mutability, then maybe in our function f, we remove x from S. If that's the case, we really can't be sure what will happen when we reach our if-statement.

Aaronson is fabulous. In my opinion, possibly the best technical author around these days. If you haven't already, his new book[1] is absolutely worth checking out, especially if you're unfamiliar with quantum.

---

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Computing-since-Democritus-Aar...

To me, the problem with the 'he could have just hit unsubscribe' argument is that there is no rational user that --wouldn't-- unsubscribe after receiving that many emails. So either they're totally ignorant of the sheer bulk of emails they're sending, or their strategy is to spam users until they unsubscribe.

I'm not sure how well-supported this product has been (the website itself seems down, if that's any indicator), but https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/buy-back-your-vote/id5350143... was done as a project last year in one of my university courses.

OP here, and Director of Community at Toptal. This is the first live article, but we've got loads more in progress covering a bunch of different projects and technologies.

Submitted title matched the page, but it's been changed by the mods

I have hugely mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I don't see how this strategy could play out well in the long-run. The founder comes off as excessively desperate and even untrustworthy. What's weirder is that for him to have any chance of success with this strategy, it would eventually have to become apparent that he was lying. Which makes it all seem even sleazier. To top all of that, there's no way he maintains any long-term positive relationship with the press.

On the other hand, there is evidently some payoff from this strategy--I had never heard of this service before this little stunt. Given his actions, though, I wouldn't use it even if I needed it.

No lecture videos as of yet, but perhaps eventually. Princeton began a partnership with Coursera last year and the CS department has been relatively active, e.g., our algorithms course is now on the site [1], and I believe that they actually 'flipped' the course over the past semesters, i.e., students were expected to watch the lectures online and typical lecture hours were replaced with professors fielding questions / working through examples.

[1] https://www.coursera.org/course/algs4partI