skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can get into IoT using a cheap tablet off of eBay: http://ilikekillnerds.com/2015/10/cheap-ebay-android-tablets...

All you need is a device with wifi, preferably running Android as it is more customisable and easier to hack into. For around $50 you can get a decent tablet (no-name brand) with everything you'll ever need (including GPS and sim support).

I created a parking inspector sensor at my old workplace because it was all street parking, but only for the residents and nowhere to really park. So we would all park on the street and occasionally the parking inspector would pay a visit.

What they would do is chalk your tires and then they would come back a little later and see if you had moved or not. What I did was use a cheap IoT connected device with a sim card, it would send a cheap SMS to my real phone when it detected movement (from being chalked). Occasionally it would trigger false positives, but it worked. I was popular at the office, because they knew if I got chalked, they did as well.

Then you would go move your car or wipe off the chalk off of the tyre.
as new programs were installed and wanted to keep adding to PATH.

That's more a problem with those programs than anything about the length of an environment variable.
Actually, even for the Linux kernel, it's only a few hundred megabyte.
> There's no free lunch.

Indeed. It's not at all easy to make 10%+ on a recurring basis.
The Algorithmic Future of Education
> Modularity, indirection and abstraction are not panaceas for this problem. In most cases they reduce local complexity at the cost of global complexity. This is a decision that should be consciously weighed in each case rather than assumed to be an unquestionable win.

This is a very important point, and one that a lot of developers miss, or even believe the opposite of. It's common to approach problems by 1. identifying the abstractions that you'd want to have to solve the problem, 2. implement those abstractions, and 3. use the abstractions to solve the problem.

This is how (by and large) we're taught to program, and it basically attacks the problem in a backwards way. Start specific, implement the whole thing with fairly minimal abstraction, then if the local complexity warrants abstraction, move to something more abstract.

Why? So that you can put off "the point past which you can no longer collectively understand the system". Local complexity is better than global complexity, and defaulting to a globally complex system is a terrible choice.
> It starts in chosing the right tool for the work and ends with structured and usefull documentation.

Usually; I have the misfortune of meeting a non-trivial number of green-behind-the-ear CS grads who don't know where to start looking for tools, let alone pick the right ones.
SHA1 is still good as a checksum against random errors.
Or activate Reader View, if you're using Firefox or Safari.
To the newcomer, autoconf looks really scary. Are there any good tutorials and are there clear advantages of using autoconf over CMake, waf, scons, ninja or other hipster-language-build-systems?

I'm going to start looking at CMake to build HTML and javascript based projects soon.
You both answered my question, thanks. I did a cursory Google search and could not determine why this developer would garner any more interest than others interviewed in this series, for example.
Maybe. But cat mills do that too.
Meh. I've been using Rapid Environment Editor[1] which is a free tool that allows editing environment variables on Windows and has a similar interface for editing PATH.

I've always programmed primarily on UNIX like platforms but one thing that I've realized is that Windows provides a really powerful and stable API which makes tools like this possible. Microsoft likes to provide APIs and let developers build stuff like this.

[1] http://www.rapidee.com/en/about
I'm really torn on this one. In the abstract, I agree with the main argument of this essay. However, it saddens me to see PG planning to write more like he speaks. His writing is so good that it's been life changing for me, but I only find his talks mediocre. It truly would be a pity if he took his own advice to heart and lost some of the essay-writing awesome sauce.
Robots to the rescue: Lessons from emergency robot deployments
Why are mice unter-animals and songbirds are uber-animals that deserve protection?
How do I get a CS job in the privatized space industry?
I'm a software engineer, and I'm considering a career shift toward the space industry. I would love to develop simulations, or do web app development for internal tools or even for public-facing web resources.

From my brief research, it seems like SpaceX has developed a bad reputation for their poor work culture (see Glassdoor for examples). Has anyone heard otherwise? Has anyone heard that the work is rewarding enough to compensate for this? Are there any alternative companies with resources even remotely close to SpaceX that have a better work culture reputation? And finally (greedily), does anyone have insight on what would be most effective to focus on to prepare oneself for this kind of work if the only background they have is a typical Bachelors of CS degree courseload and several years of professional web development?

Thanks in advance for your insight and advice!
http://www.online-tech-tips.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/w...

became

http://cloud.addictivetips.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/wi...

a few years ago. Although I think it's for the worse, it hasn't stayed the same since 1998.
"One of the most..." doesn't mean "the most". It means there is a group of "the most", which can include a large raw number of objects, but this number is still a tiny fraction of the overall number of things, and his is in that group. It could be the last one in that group, but still in that group. Saying "The united states is one of the most populous nations on earth" doesn't mean it's more populous than China or India, simply that it is up in that rarified group of "mosts".
Are you saying this because you work there or you heard about it?
> Greece is a sovereign country

Not quite, being a member of monetary union. Of course, it would be better not to have the hybrid that is Eurozone, but that's the situation.

> If we loan money to Greece, they can simply decide not to pay us back

No, they can't. If they would, they would indeed have to leave the Eurozone. (Although, absurdly enough, it was Greece that canceled German debt after WW2.)

The disagreement wasn't over whether Greece should pay debt; it was over austerity policies, which in fact prevent growth, and make matters worse. The bad investments have already been made, there is no point in trying to "heal" German banks on poor Greeks inside of what is effectively a single economy (Eurozone).

In any case, the decision of ECB to stop liquidity to Greece was obviously political (since ECB itself cannot make that decision). That's what problematic. EU is supposed to be a democracy, and (at least) built on consensus of member states.
> But just imagine calling Picasso "the mercurial Spaniard" when talking to a friend.

Consider the UK talking heads landscape is filled with individuals with a formidable command of the English language and pg's example comes across as very parochial and culturally ignorant.

Perhaps the essay should be 'Write like I talk', because I can't imagine how he would deal with an episode of QI with Stephen Fry holding forth.
Not only Uber used to hire them (I don't know if they still do), it also provided them with burner iPhones and credit cards so that they can continue recruiting and cancelling rides as Lyft tries to ban them from the network. There was a bit of media shitstorm about this some time ago.
I checked some websites but I was interested in a more personal view from someone working there or who worked there for some time. Sure it's all happiness on social networks but inside is different.
Maybe Blizzard employees don't come here often.
Now if only you could change the Path without logging out and back in.
Russian Ships Near Data Cables Are Too Close for U.S. Comfort
`git bundle create` will do what you want.
YouTube’s New Policy Change Affects American Japanese Music Fans
Off-topic: This article has clearly sacrificed too much readability for the "cool" factor.
Diversitas? Take a Closer Look
LEARN bLOGGING oNLINE
The numbers also don't include the absolutely enormous tracking network that Facebook operates through widgets (such as the Like button).

It's likely that nearly 100% of all internet users are tracked by Facebook (with varying degrees of anonymity) as they browse the web.
Haunted by hackers: A suburban family’s digital ghost story – Fusion
What is inappropriate about the style? This is a genuine question. I am not a native speaker and I think I might be missing something that is obvious to you.
Myer Gift Card Competition Malware Scam – MailShark
How to Submit Your Site in More Than 100 Search Engines for Free
That's an interesting justification you've come up with. I hope others realize that there are more options than that. There's plenty of room to both be well-paid and work reasonable hours. Given that it's well understood that creative work falls off to nothing after 8-10 hours/day (and by 12 marginal productivity is often negative), it would be kinda weird if the correlation went the way you suggest.
Pretty much this. A lot of startup and small business devs here are used to just being able to change software at their discretion which is awesome and great, but it just doesn't work that way often at enterprise shops. Changes and requirements come through the product management pipeline via customer interaction. Anything that isn't delivering business value in the form of appeasing existing customers (bug fixes and niche feature requests) or attracting new business (new features or integrations) is basically put into a backlog and forgotten until someone gets frustrated enough to sacrifice a weekend adding/fixing the backlog item.
Some hard data on classism.

Estimated over half of Harvard students are from the top 4%.

Less than 1/5 of Harvard students are from bottom 40% families.
In my experience, there's a major familial component to domestication of cats. I've adopted feral kittens. If you get them young enough, they tolerate people. But they aren't as friendly as typical house cats. However, their kittens tend to be friendlier.
here's a nickel, kid.
1. It's tacky and irritating when people advertise their own company, but don't give a disclaimer. Don't act like you're unbiased and just trying to be helpful.

2. It's even more irritating when the suggested company doesn't even help with the stated problem. InTouch is just a contacts manager, and it doesn't seem to do anything that stock Android doesn't already do.
Castro's Cuba, a society totally hollowed out by communism

How's that again?
So in short, "talk what you write" might be better advice than "write like you talk".
Which are what, exactly? As far as I can tell HFTs playing against each other has no net effect on bystanders, other than providing marginally more liquidity.
Well "if truth was self evidence, eloquence wouldn't be needed."

Most of the time, we should write simply, but there are many times when we should be more colorful.

Also the fact that we must choose simple writing is a shortcoming and a lack of proper education. If the only word I know to express a romantic feeling is "love," well that is going to seriously limit me.
This: http://www.logitech.com/en-au/product/wireless-trackball-m57... (price here is a bit excessive - you can normally pick them up for ~$50).

I've also played with various mice over the years, but love this (I've bought my own one for work, in addition to the one at home). It doesn't tire out your arm or wrist (your thumb does the bulk of the work), and since it doesn't move, you can use it in limited space. My hands are big-ish, but this one is big enough to comfortably rest your hand without cramping it up. It has forward/back buttons for browsing on the frame, and the wheel acts as a third button.

Going from mouse to trackball takes a little bit of getting used to (about a day ;-) ). If you have coworkers that occasionally need to drive your computer, it's a bit of a pain, but Logitech receivers allow pairing of more than one device, so just keep a cheapy 'normal' mouse on your desk for those occasions.

In general, I've used Dell, MS, Logitech, and el-cheapo mice - Logitech wins out every time.
> 1. identifying the abstractions that you'd want to have to solve the problem, 2. implement those abstractions, and 3. use the abstractions to solve the problem.

Also the reason to do it bottom-up is because you never understand the problem perfectly, especially if it has anything to do with real-world things. This means that whatever global domain model you created is wrong, and by the time you discover where exactly, you'll be so invested that it's too late to change it. It's easier to adjust the model when going bottom-up - you can change or discard just the top layers, as soon as you realize your new abstraction level doesn't match the problem domain properly.
Intellectual Ventures is a notorious patent troll, one that routinely uses shell companies to obscure the extent of its abuse of the patent system. It's disappointing to see ignorant people in the press continue to naively conflate "filing lots of patents" with "inventing."

A piece like this that uncritically lionizes Lowell and Intellectual Ventures without even bothering to highlight or address the criticism frequently voiced against the organization feels uncomfortably one-sided if not deliberately misleading.
>(2) It's a few man days of work. Let's say that as a super-exaggerated-extreme estimate, it is still only a few months of work.

This indicates to me that you've never worked in a software company like Microsoft. EVERYTHING that Microsoft does is under a huge amount of scrutiny, and any change to anything generally will piss someone off. So they are careful with every change and they have to be thorough.

It's not just a few months worth of work. Sure, the development change of the UI could be done in a couple of days. But the design first has to be hammered out and agreed to. It has to agree with how the rest of the system would behave. Not to say that this dialog box was in agreement with the rest of the dialog boxes from XP to Windows 8, but if they're going to change it now, then whoever makes the change would need to make sure their version does. This would take man-weeks of meetings just to get right from the PM and designers, etc.

But then there are QA changes that need to be done, just to test it, so add on a couple of weeks for that. It would presumably break all of their automated testing, and then new tests would have to be created. Ballpark figure just for that is 4 man-weeks of QA work.

Then, are there any dependencies on the older version of the UI to other products? Not sure, probably not but it would have to be researched.

What about documentation changes? Not only will the Windows documentation need to change, but then all other software that references adding environment variables need to change. And now, training videos will have to be changed. Don't forget that Microsoft has a bunch of training classes that they offer.

Will enterprise customers be impacted by this? Not sure, but they would probably want to reach out to their most important ones to figure out what

Now, take all the time estimates and then figure out how this compares to other bugs that have been lingering for years as well. Is the current functionality unusable, or is it just kind of sucky. If it's just kind of sucky but people can live with it, then time is probably better spent on other things.

Do this about 6 times on the most widely used piece of software in the world, and you have yourself 20+ years.

Should this dialog have been changed years ago? Yes, it sucks, and almost embarrassing. But it's still usable, so it has relatively low priority. This is how software decisions are generally made in enterprise software companies, especially those like Microsoft.
I'm hoping they open source QNX after the Blackberry disappears. The Blackberry is a dead end, but we really need something solid for embedded work.
It's good that PG didn't follow his own rule, otherwise we would have seen lots of "hmm" in his texts.
I am the lead developer of the open source MathPiper computer algebra system:

http://mathpiper.org

Does solving equations using the following manual step-by-step elementary algebra equation solver interest you?:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYtsQ_PczlY

If so, join the MathPiper developer email list, introduce yourself, and I will teach you how to use it.
No one is talking about limiting high ranking employers/founders to 8 hours. They should work as much as they want because their efforts directly lead to financial gain for themselves (due to large stock holdings, etc).

The problem comes when the bottom of the barrel people are working those same hours. Working 80 hour weeks doesn't really help them unless they really like doing it. Some people legitimately like work. That's great. They shouldn't set the bar, though.
Have what? Over consumed cannabis? Probably not.
Have you had trouble getting your Java projects to work, when Maven is needed?
I never heard of /etc/environment and ~/.pam_environment before, and thought /etc/profile was the place for variables for all users, with only .profile and .bashrc to check for user variables. Looks like Linux is going the Windows way by providing too many places to configure things.
from South Wales

New South Wales is a state of Australia, fyi.
> Well, Rust is a systems language, and so it should be a good fit for OS development. We're still working on bits of it, but it's a stated goal of the language, so testing that out is valuable.

My questions was not well formulated. Let me rephrase it: C is also a system language and there are plenty of OS libraries written in C. C++ could be seen as another system language. Even the syntax of Rust is similar to C/C++ according to Wikipedia article. So, what's the advantage of Rust over other systems language? Better support for autonomous systems? Reflective model? Do you have a paper? It is a research project? Do you plan to replace Linux or something like that?
Build a successful email list – Bloggers advice
I have to agree. Adding tons of whitespace is generally going to make things harder to read.

Personally, I'm very much into Ratliff (or banner style) indentation and using two spaces for your indent. I know that 4 is the standard for a lot of people, but my feeling is that this is generally the result of people using VeryLongVariableNamesThatGoOnForever and blocks that go on for a many lines.

The more concise code becomes and the shorter your blocks get, I have found that it becomes much more annoying to have to skip your eye further. This gets especially silly if you have anything with deep nesting.

Ratliff style just makes it so so easy to tell where a block terminates though. I have basically no idea why it isn't wildly popular.

Probably because editors don't support it.
It's mostly that songbirds are more interesting, I think. But there's also the fact that mice, for the most part, are non-native species. Most songbirds, on the other hand, are native. And there are numerous species.
Completely agreed.

I know that when I try to make important points on the fly, I'm more than likely to ramble and not speak entirely eloquently, but it seems clear that what PG is saying is ultimately just "Don't confuse your reader by trying to sound to smart."
This varies a lot from place to place, a big part of the cause of the problem is supply side. For a lot of people working in GameDev or doing artistic work is a "dream job" so there tends to be no shortage of fairly talented young folks who are willing to put up with anything just to get into the business. And often that labor pool is abused by big companies. But that's not always the case, it's just more common than elsewhere in tech.
It really depends. Paul illustrates a clear difference between the way people write and the way people talk. I would argue that while this is true, there are cases where people write better than they talk.
Show HN: POPRISM – An internet browser for the Roku
This is a PR piece.

> Facebook’s rocky experience since it brought Internet.org to India in February shows that good intentions and technological savvy are not enough to achieve a noble goal like universal Internet access.

Such lofty ideals. This could've applied to the EFF or the Internet Archive, but Facebook is a far cry.
This is similar to the joke about someone running a lottery for $1, with a chance of winning a live donkey. 1000 people buy tickets, and the winner comes to claim their prize, and discovers a dead donkey instead. So he complains, and the lottery runner give him back his $1.

The key is to fine them for every patient, not just the patients that complain, because every patient is being defrauded, not just the ones who complain. Then 1.5x will actually be meaningful.
I agree with pg, but I do think he could be more open minded to critical theory kind of stuff in the humanities. Yeah a lot of it is truly terrible to read, just following some weirdly abstract chain of logic that leads nowhere... but some of it is actually pretty enlightening or at least makes you think about things more critically, in ways that are ultimately useful. For me the good stuff are the thinkers fleshing out the position that Hegel introduced, which arguably is still the shadow that philosophy lives in. I'm CS, not humanities, but even so I see a lot of connections between developing philosophy and improving society, and a lot of these contemporary thinkers blend in philosophy of mind which could be useful for AI.
This is why when you go home you work on your tiny SAAS aimed at a specific group of people who will shell out some money each month for it.
Indeed, IFLS would better be called IFL The Natural World - not quite so catchy though I guess. IFL Nature?
Nicotine is a powerful anti-psychotic. This has been known for many years and was one of reasons doctors used to prescribe smoking to patients. Most schizophrenics use it for that effect; the idea it causes it is somewhat ludicrous.
> "I knew how to do this in the old system, this new stuff has so many bells and whistles it is impossible to get anything done."

I can only guess you have not seen full stack laravel. Hey digging in 50 lines of stacktraces is recreation. And is almost impossible to get to the real sql code there only with grep.
Richard Feynman on fire
I'd say that another big factor is the financial part. Take your average game studio, even large-ish ones always have a very uncertain future after their next game. When your ability to make payroll depends on getting your game out at the deadline agreed with/imposed by the publisher, this is going to mean plenty of crunch time. And then you may get laid off once the game is out, because the studio doesn't need a lot of programmers during the pre-production phase of their next game.
I think the point of the article is where you draw your ethics line, decides what you might call a success and what you might call a drawback.
How Steve Jobs (allegedly) Explained OOP. (Reddit)
Bird watching is a popular hobby. I've never heard of mouse watching.
Even though Docker's disk and transport format are technically tar, I think that this is still a wrong statement.

tarballs are ubiquitous already. Docker actively hides that it uses tarballs (it abstracts away all interactions with them, to the point that it really is an implementation detail excluding docker export/import).
But wait a second. An easy counter argument to the theory is that smoking has significantly decreased all over the Western world. So, if the number of schizophrenics hasn't decreased proportionally, then tobacco smoking can't be a major factor.
This is what a personal diary is for. Just write down your thoughts and don't care what other people think. You will likely be embarrassed by some of your entries 20 years from now, but who cares, that's the whole point of a diary.