skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The difference in your Agile and pair programming examples is that those interactions are fundamentally between people with similar abilities. In business, the teaching, listening, and understanding are communication between people with similar baud rates. My impression is that you may be projecting your experiences with groups of competent engineers -- who all passed a rigorous screening process and years of performance reviews -- onto the behavior of children drawn at random from the entire population.

Group projects are a tool to adjust the average performance, without any effort on the teacher's part. The effect is more insidious than a simple numerical average would suggest because group projects introduce a time differential. Consider people as an op-amp. Their internal drive to produce a given quality is the reference voltage. What output the currently have (the progess towards the objective) is the input. When you put top performers in a group to pull up the slackers, the feedback gain of that system is artificially reduced. The good students want a certain level of quality, so they will work even harder to try an bring the quality (input signal) up to their standards. Depending on how bad the slackers are, the good student may even reach saturation, running out of hours in the day to compensate for the incompetence of others.

The incompetent teachers intuitively understand this effect. They are not fostering some kind of social nirvana, they are transferring the workload of pulling up the class average onto the bright kids. The bright kid ends up spending twice, three times as long on the group assignment, and that effort gets averaged out to the other group members' grades. The cost to top performers is all that time they could have been improving, moving forward, was stuck doing large amounts of low skill work.
Automating Your Daily iOS Developer Tasks, with Felix Krause
Many years ago, I attempted to cheat this way when writing a JScript quine- but it didn't work because the Windows Scripting Host keeps the source file open while interpreting it, which meant the script couldn't open its own source file because the file was already open in another program!

A proper quine, though, doesn't require input.
My problem with the "finite growth" narrative I see often, is the fact that they always assume that growth is strictly a function of natural, material resources. To paint a caricature: they almost seem to say "We had 100 people and 50 ingots of iron and we produced 200 forks and 30 novels. If we'd have 50 people and 25 ingots of iron, we'd only produce 100 forks and 15 novels." Which is retarded. One of the main (if not THE main) factors of growth is scientific progress - something that is mostly immaterial. The whole Internet revolution was made possible using machines that don't exactly run on steam and copious amount of coal.

We are constantly learning to make more with less.

Until the finite growth theories start incorporating this notion, I will not treat them seriously.

The other problem I have with these theories, is that they tend to draw very weird and bolshevist crowd who want to start redistributing wealth, rationing out food, and breeding a "stable population" as soon as possible.
It looks like the link to the project on that article is down (http://www.sure-sense.com/fhrs/). Is it hosted elsewhere? I'd love to take a look.
at least we have some working streetcars.
It's quite clear from the Ayasdi website that they're targeting enterprise customers. I wish they had an API similar to clarif.ai or wit.ai.
US Postal Service “Informed Delivery” will now show you scans of your snail mail
Chinese, Japanese and Russian: From Newbie to Intermediate in 8 Months
> I'm named|called Steven

It is perfectly normal to use phrasing such as that in some languages apart from English. While not common in English, I think generally it makes more sense this way.
This is the first I've heard of counterfeit Etruscan sites, but it's not entirely dismissable. Early archaeology was a mix of wholesale grave looting and falsifying finds to generate interest in the site and give glory to the discoverer. Egyptian mummies floating around Europe during "Egyptomania" (after Napolean's visit) were often much, MUCH younger than ancient Egypt.

It seems unlikely to me that any modern sites are actually digging up planted relics, but inflating the finds at tourist sites by importing from one site to another, or creating replicas to make up for assumed grave robbery? Almost harder to believe that doesn't happen.
I'm the guy who imported the Queensland and Victoria addresses, and I've been in touch with members of the government in Canberra who are leading out this effort. The new release should supersede the existing Australian datasources in OpenAddresses.io; my expectation is that we'll deprecate them in favor of this one.
Cellular carriers at this point are really just low traffic ISPs anyway.
Dropbox is shutting down Mailbox
Didn't USPS threaten a startup out of business for this very service last year?

Yup, 2013, it was Outbox http://www.wired.com/2013/08/outbox/

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2014/04/29/How-US-Pos...
But at least my car is usable.
That's what you get, and it's bad.

It's so bad these days I can't stand talking on the phone to anyone who isn't using data (facetime, etc) or HD Voice. I literally cannot understand what people are saying half the time. And company support phone numbers? The worst. Their callcenters are using terrible voip with overloaded trunks.

It feels like we've spent the last 10 years trying to kill the phone call.
I don't think FI (financially independent) is the right term to divide the world. Why not go with rich? Aren't all retired people FI by definition? I don't think that poor guy down the block will think he should rob grandma, especially if she's barely making it on US social security. I do agree with the concept that we'll have decreasing need for humans working, and wages should trend to drop because of that. We will almost certainly have to move to a guaranteed living income, as some Scandinavian are flirting with.

The other trend I struggle to understand is that there are sectors of the economy with persistent labor shortages, but little clear direction. Two areas: advanced and computer operated manufacturing, welding, and software engineers. The us has really poor educational opportunities to get people into the manufacturing jobs we have, and those that look good for the future in hi tech manu. seem to be the most in demand.

Secondly there is of course the global shortage of programmers. This not for "basic IT" really, where someone can "just" use packaged software to build an application - that seems to be only under a small amount of pressure to find people. I'm thinking that it's the people that write software from scratch, software engineers. Why isn't everyone who is technical/math/scientific and needs pursing this? In Seattle there are more than 10,000 open jobs in this area, all with great money, benefits.

Not everyone is really able to do these two kinds of jobs. But please consider getting training in one of these areas if you are trying to figure out the future.
New Golf Tech startup
As evidenced by some of these HN comments, E-prime encourages a voodoo-like approach to writing, in which you can magically make bad writing better just by doing a search-and-replace on a few words.
More importantly, streetcars also have much higher passenger capacity than buses. This particular bus route in DC is stretched for capacity and already has buses coming every minute or two during rush hour, so they can't just add more buses.
The one liner is right below the larger headline on the landing page, perhaps we should've made it more prominent: "The Placemeter Sensor measures pedestrian, vehicle, and bicycle traffic in real-time."
That's good to know, since with $dayjob, $consulting, and $family, I imagine the times that I'm able to muster enough brain cells to play this in which my time isn't already spoken for will be fleeting, but it looks awesome.

Actually, that's a sort of separate question than the GP. Are there penalties for going through it slowly and/or playing in bursts interspersed with downtime? Depending on the metrics you are looking at, that might be very hard to correctly account for.
Legalese is not unambiguous. It is minimally ambiguous. Ambiguities can still derive from the way the (ideally completely unambiguous) terminology is used. In order to have a perfectly unambiguous legal document it would need to consist of a single well-defined phrase with a single well-defined context.

If legalese were as unambiguous as you seem to think it is, most case law could be fully automated to the point we'd barely ever need actual lawyers and courts.

The only perfect language is the language of mathematics (if we ignore conflicting notations and definitions often being relative to a specific -- though typically well-defined -- problem domain).

As soon as it involves the real world, things get messy and the wider the margin of error becomes. Physics and Chemistry tend to work relatively well (unless you try to accurately predict complex systems). Biology a bit less so. Psychology is where things start to fall apart. Sociology is where it completely breaks down.

But even legalese isn't as well-defined as mathematics. Simply because it has to refer to pre-existing concepts from the start or else it wouldn't be of any actual use (e.g. what's the point of defining "theft" without referring to any real-world interactions -- but once you involve real-world interactions you've left the rational objective domain and rely on the subjective experience of human observers).
I believe the damning thing is that DC already has a fairly reasonable subway network, so I can't see the need for streetcars.
Rube Goldberg Startups
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There is a lot of frustration with the DC subway system. Check out these two (frequently updated!) twitter accounts for example:

https://twitter.com/unsuckdcmetro

https://twitter.com/dcmetrosucks

One area the streetcar plans to serve is the H Street Corridor. It's currently not really served by the subway system, so supposedly the powers-that-be decided it was a lower-cost solution. At $200m and 10 years though (and counting), I wish a subway system expansion would have been implemented.

I would gladly pay more tax dollars for a more extensive (and less sucky) subway network here in DC. Instead, I'm spending that money on Uber, when I find out that the next train comes in 20 minutes.

I should add that a monthly pass for the DC metro costs more than twice than NYC's (the 2nd most expensive in the country), and more than triple San Francisco's.
Senators Demand Info on Ransomware Infections on Government Systems
My what may vary?
Try Lafferty's timeless sci-fi, e.g. the 55-year-old 'Slow Tuesday Night' about human responses to accelerated culture, http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/9781618249203/97816182492...

"A thoughtful-man named Maxwell Mouser had just produced a work of actinic philosophy. It took him seven minutes to write it. To write works of philosophy one used the flexible outlines and the idea indexes; one set the activator for such a wordage in each subsection; an adept would use the paradox, feed-in, and the striking-analogy blender; one calibrated the particular-slant and the personality-signature. It had to come out a good work, for excellence had become the automatic minimum for such productions.

“I will scatter a few nuts on the frosting,” said Maxwell, and he pushed the lever for that. This sifted handfuls of words like chthonic and heuristic and prozymeides through the thing so that nobody could doubt it was a work of philosophy."
important context, thanks for providing
This is actually a guide to increasing your probability of becoming a coder.
You can have a blockchain without bitcoin, but why is that useful or interesting? Isn't the Nakamoto distributed consensus the key innovation of bitcoin as a protocol? Without that incentive structure in place, we can't trust the state of the blockchain without also trusting the participants. This may work fine for banks, but so does ACH.
You could. At some point you will hit a limit, but you could go pretty far solving known problems out there solely by following tutorials.
Pity that he ended up writing a novel in which the main character is stranded on Mars because of an impossible martian storm; then communicates with Earth by absolutely implausible means (while there were many more obvious, among which the most classic "SOS" written on the sand); that he survives by growing potatoes that couldn't possibly germinate, planted in a highly toxic soil, and raised with a light source that does provide only a small fraction of the energy required to grow caloric food...

EDIT: I've already got one downvote, hurray! Would the downvoter(s) be kind enough to point out why and how they disagree with what I've written in the comment? Plus: at least wait to see what I have to say about Charles Stross himself and his novel "Glasshouse". :)
I believe that where possible it makes sense to follow what is already happening in the wider open source ecosystem, rather than trying to design a solution from scratch.

There is a huge demand for constants/variables in CSS, as well as a widespread use of preprocessors. The CSS variable spec does bring a lot of interesting ideas to the table, but it does so at the expense of ignoring how people are shipping code today.

Designing a solution that can be dropped into an existing pipeline can be valuable even if doesn't introduce any new concepts or features. For example Promises in JS are pretty simple and just replicate the functionality of existing libraries, but they normalized existing patterns and made it possible to trust that third party code would have consistent behavior. That was a huge boost.
local machine/work files backed up to external drive with time machine and crashplan.

work files copied to an external drive monthly this is also backed up with crashplan.

photos to external hard drive and backed up to crashplan and burned to DVDs which are taken to my parents house a few times per year and stored there.

We also have physical prints made of our favorite photos.
The end result is an <svg> element with a bunch of with a bunch of <path> <line> <rect> children. Sometimes you can wrangle D3 to generate the <path>s you want. Sometimes it's easier to more directly make them yourself.
> He has taken out a patent on the use of the two drugs for pain relief.

Are you trying to get sued?
Mortgages, Gasoline and Bankruptcy
I disagree, I think if the description is weak you shouldn't be picking anyone up at all. I would argue that "digging deeper", that is picking up more people, would but the police at risk of unlawful detainment.
Javaplex: Persistent Homology and Topological Data Analysis Library (http://appliedtopology.github.io/javaplex/) -- primarily developed by the Computational Topology workgroup at Stanford.
This is only partially true. While you can have a blockchain without bitcoin, you cannot have a blockchain without some sort of native digital asset giving value to the network supporters (in bitcoin terminology, the miners). I think many people don't realize this, and think they can somehow spin up a new blockchain without needing to also create a separate currency and convince enough people to start giving it value.

Realistically, most "blockchain" tech these days is actually using the bitcoin blockchain, because it is the most secure and widely-supported blockchain available.
Ask HN: Mailbox alternatives for OS X?
I'm looking for exactly mailbox, without bugs.

I love the swipe to archive/schedule. I use those features all the time.

Outlook on iOS is the perfect replacement. But what about OS X?

Prediction: Unless a startup comes out of nowhere and does this, MSFT will end up replacing Mailbox.app on OS X (hopefully!)
Yes, you can't redistribute flows politically in any kind of a meaningful fashion. When you do that it's called a planned economy, and is generally inferior at raising living standards to market economies.
This seems especially relevant now that Mailbox is officially being shut down on Feb 26.
You can use SVG to draw a line between points, and set the interpolation
Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox
This article makes it particularly bad by saying things like "blockchain" where should really be "blockchains" or "blockchain technology". I just reads as technically illiterate to me.

'Blockchain has the potential...' should probably be 'Blockchains have the potential...'. "Blockchain" is not a single technology but a group, it's like saying "teleporter can move you from place to place" vs "teleporters can move you from place to place". Blockchain isn't a proper noun, but a plural grouping of many implementations.
That doesn't sound very disruptive to me.
Carousel will also be shut down in March: https://blogs.dropbox.com/dropbox/2015/12/saying-goodbye-to-...
Why is there a 4096 character limit on text input in the shell?
> This type of progression in software development is inevitable. Groups of people writing individual lines of code for bespoke apps will one day go the same way looms in factories went after the industrial revolution.
> I run a software company, and we've actually moved away from fixed price projects and only provide development on a day rate. Fixed price/scope/timescale projects are incredibly risky, require massive amounts of project management resource, and can be insanely unprofitable if the specifications for the work are not watertight and the client isn't managed well.

These two sentences don't seem to make sense. On the one hand, you say it's inevitable. On the other hand, as someone who has RUN a software company, you say you couldn't figure it out. Is that correct?
How to Store SSH Passphrases in LastPass
Dropbox Will Shut Down Mailbox in February 2016 and Carousel in March
In general the OSM community errs on the side of vetoing new initiatives -- doing an import properly means raising it on the mailing lists, which invariably attracts vastly more criticism than assistance. Even coordinated (non-automated) remote mapping attracts considerable criticism these days -- most ludicrously, by people suggesting that it's better to leave an area unmapped so that it might one day attract local mappers (rather than remote contributors who will work on it immediately).

There's also the question of the license. Without opening a can of worms about the usefulness of sharealike provisions in general, I think it's safe to say that making a geocoding result trigger sharealike implications in a database is clearly problematic (consider geocoding a database of customer addresses, then being obliged to share the rest of the table!). Unfortunately OSM hasn't yet reached agreement on a geocoding guidance. Consequently a couple dozen of us working on OpenAddresses have gotten the project to over 200 million addresses in less than 2 years. OSM is now a decade old, has millions of registered mappers, and contains less than 60 million addresses.

I don't mean to be all doom and gloom, though. I would love to improve OSM as a home for address data. And I urge those of you who care about this incredibly important resource to join me -- hop on the talk and legal-talk lists and help make the case for a geocoding guidance that makes sense.
> The French prime minister suggested that they may soon make it illegal to merely visit a terrorism-related website, too.

So getting rickrolled could land you in jail? Yeah, that'll go over really effectively.
Enumeration order was indeed (finally) added to the ES2015 spec. Here's a link to the release candidate spec for the [[OwnPropertyKeys]] algorithm:

https://people.mozilla.org/~jorendorff/es6-draft.html#sec-or...
Pivotal does pair-programming, which demands inflexible hours and intensive/stressful workload. Working remote is impossible as you cannot pair with another colleague.
Approval voting would make it safer and easier to run more candidates, as you wouldn't have the vote splitting problem. It does have the problem that running 10 similar candidates makes their viewpoint more likely to win, if I recall correctly, so a party-based system might still be useful in that case.
Arming the rebels fighting in Yemen just for one tiny example. For the worst thing in recent memory, the Shiite death squads in Iraq were well supported by Iran (granted this was a response to Sunni death squads, by that is hardly a rationalizing for murdering innocents).

http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/houthi-rebels-destroy-m1-ab...
Are "Test-case Reducers" different than "shrinking" in Haskell QuickCheck or Clojure test.check? I.e. are those libs useful for Fuzzing as described in the article?
I wanted to see if The Expanse (1) was any good on list.

It was fine until the section on "spaceships with continuous high acceleration fusion-powered motors or similar that don't glow white-hot"

1) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3230854/
This is like saying AT&T should have no interest in VOIP because they already have a PSTN protocols. Banking systems are full of very antiquated technologies hobbled together to allow them to work. They would be dumb not to investigate the benefits of blockchain type systems. Even if the system is limited to trusted parties and forgoes the whole mining incentive, there's still a lot of value there.
>... and doesn't think that a flat white can come in three sizes.

That is some impressive pretension. You could just order the size you think a flat white should be, but no, the mere option of multiple sizes makes Starbucks unacceptable to your refined tastes.
"Cost?" and "Where?" from the FAQ:

> The service is provided at no additional cost for all Informed Delivery users.

> In the Fall of 2015 the service will be available in the New York City metro area
Using JSON Schema with Python to Validate JSON Data