skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, thank you for your perspective - I guess I won't be buying any property any time soon - or at least not until I do extensive homework. Thing is - as bad as the situation may look like now compared to 5-10 years ago - I'm just thinking of how much higher real estate prices will be 5-10 years from now. So if I want to reap any future benefits now looks to be the time. I just feel it would be really unlikely to get deals as good as we had a decade ago. I'd like for the bubble to just pop a little bit before I start thinking about purchasing a condo seriously though.
I have a feeling that the market will actually expand dramatically, as the costs of the tech underlying 'ruggedized' versions start to fall along with the consumer models.

However, the buyers in the expanding market won't necessarily be nation states, but instead local law enforcement (eg. SWATs), security companies, and PMCs.

As such, the split off division will likely be a nice acquisition for a company already serving one or more of those markets.
I love this article. I have been at war with some of the tech teams at my company that force reusablilty. Personally I find it a nucance, and in most cases can write a new function in less time. You have articulated this ideology very well, thanks for the insight
I hope you're right Sebastian :( I've been following the progress, Joerg, you, and everyone else pretty religiously and there's nothing I'd love more than that phone! I miss the n900.
Funny I have a saying which is very similar:

"Make it work, Make it work well, Make it work fast"

I would disagree with beauty == performance, most performance problems I have found to be in the last place I would think them to be :-) On one (moderately large) system it was a hashcode() calculation ;-)
FWIW PCRE also includes a JIT.

http://sljit.sourceforge.net/pcre.html
http://www.pcre.org/readme.tx
> "All projects that finish late have this one thing in common: they started late"

McConnell has a really good discussion of this in Rapid Development, calling it "The Fuzzy Front-end" of a project.

"Everyone knows" that certain projects "have" to be undertaken, but they will often just be talked about and talked about and talked about until it's too late to do anything but talk about not talking about things in future.
Do you actually understand what are you measuring in C++ example ? I dont think you have sufficient knowledge to make any benchmarks.
From Hello-World to Web-Launch in 2 Years

http://www.thecaucus.net/#/content/caucus/tech_blog/107

"Promoting/sponsoring is a great way for you to thank the content creators who have made this content possible, and to boost the visibility of inspiring discussions or comments.

Promoting costs US$1, and gives the promoted post a score-boost, thus allowing it to be seen by more people. Promoting can also be free! Everyone receives 1 promote-token every week, which allows you to promote 1 post every week for free.

Sponsoring costs US$4, of which US$3 will be sent to the poster, as a tip for their efforts. It also gives the post an even more significant score-boost, ensuring that it's seen by even more people.

To promote a post, simply click on the up-arrow for any discussion/comment, which you have already up-voted. To sponsor a post, simply click on the up-arrow again, one more time. You can also read here more details about how and why we have this system.

To make your user-experience as smooth as possible, your account will be debited as soon as you click on the promote/sponsor buttons, with no further confirmation prompts. If something has gone horribly wrong and your cat has jumped on your keyboard, just contact us and we will make things right!"
Show HN: AllOrigins – A free alternative to AnyOrigin with support to gzip pages
Notes for Batch Normalization paper
I receive several of these per month. They range variously from bogus conference CFPs (in locations like Hawaii and Rio) to bogus journals to invitations to serve as the editor for a bogus journal. Most of them seem completely automated, scraping authors and emails out of databases of papers.

Most of them stand out as obvious (especially when they spam me based on a journal article that wanted names formatted like "J. Triplett"). But sometimes they have almost enough believability that I could imagine someone not familiar with this type of scam falling for it. Some of them stand up to a quick search, and someone seeing the journal title and CFP, not doing the research on it, sending a draft ("spray and pray"), and following along with the process and any fees. (Some journals charge substantial fees as well, sometimes by the page, with extra for diagrams.)

The mails often follow the usual tactics of playing up the recipient's status. And any university IT department would tell you that students and professors are not by any means immune to scams. When one "success" earns hundreds in fees, it wouldn't take a significant success rate to make this scam profitable.
This is a super frustrating article, so I'm going to post the quote I think that sums up the art:

"To write code that’s easy to delete: repeat yourself to avoid creating dependencies, but don’t repeat yourself to manage them."

This is such a hard thing to explain to someone, so I'm impressed the writer described it so accurately and succinctly.
I blame C more than I would praise Erlang.

Java has a threads implementation that actually works which is a lot more than you can say about C/pthreads, although lately they've been tuning up the C memory model.

It may not be easy to write multithreaded code in Java but it is definitely possible. It's actually pretty easy in a lot of cases if you use the Executor, I think most of the carping you will hear about Java these days is because people think they are being clever using Fork-Join or work stealing or actors when in fact they are just screwing up.
tl;dr - why i don't like toasters
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_option

The "nuclear option" was named by Trent Lott (R-Miss.) in 2003 and first seriously threatened by majority leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) in 2005. It got actually invoked by the Democrats in 2013, in the reverse situation: the Democrats had a majority but not a supermajority of the Senate, and a Democratic president.
The message is "late software" is really a failure of decision making at the highest level that waffle on necessary things until they become necessary but move too late on it. I've personally seen plenty of that, so works for me.
Glad you liked it!
There is nothing illegal about copying per se, as long as there are no provisions against it. This is a basic principle of human society. For example, there is nothing illegal about walking without shoes, as long as there is no regulation preventing it as it's the case at some government offices. Your reasoning is just trying to throw away our society principles to justify your behavior. My main contention is not that we shouldn't have free information, but that it is unethical to disregard existing laws just because you don't like them.
:) go for it, I like that too.
The problem is cars. Older cities were designed too, they were just designed for people instead of cars. A lot of what looks like spontaneous generation was just designed so well you can't see the design.
Hey Gonzo, appreciate the comment. I'm the developer of Text Engine. Glad to hear it's been useful for you. Let me know if you have any questions about the utility.
For 3D modeling, there's Spacedraw[1], Qubism[2], Autodesk FormIt[3], 123D Sculpt+[4], d3D Sculptor[5], Project Dev: 3D Design[6] and others.

Whatever made you think mobile platforms don't have those tools?

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.scalisoft....

[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jquinn.qubism....

[3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.autodesk.f...

[4] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.autodesk.S...

[5] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.naticis.d3...

[6] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=xyz.projectdev...
I don't understand this post. Smartphones give you access to the Internet at all times. They are not very well-suited to creation, but are fairly well-suited for communication and consumption. Either that's what you're looking for in a device, or it's not. It's quite clear that consumers want these devices, so what's the problem?

I would never replace my computer with a smartphone, but that hardly seems to be a valid argument for why one shouldn't "like them".

I don't get why this has so many points right now.
The International Fixed Calendar - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar .

> The calendar year has 13 months with 28 days each, divided into exactly 4 weeks (13 × 28 = 364). An extra day added as a holiday at the end of the year (December 29), sometimes called "Year Day", does not belong to any week and brings the total to 365 days. ...

> International Fixed Calendar inserts the extra day in leap year as June 29 - between Saturday June 28 and Sunday Sol 1.

Kodak used it for years. I recall that it helped with business operations because it was easier to compare costs and production between the months.
Be interesting to see whether some of these empty repos get populated: https://github.com/thunder-project
e.g. I don't own a smartphone, because it's a consumption device rather than both consumption and production, is just silly. So is a photoalbum, so is a book, so is a TV, so is a music player.

It's not actually silly because of the mindset some people have. I know many people who bought an iPad or an iPhone with the mindset of, "GREAT! Now I don't need a computer." They went into it thinking that an iPad or an iPhone was a replacement for a computer and then were basically transformed into someone who could easily produce content to someone who could only produce content with difficulty.

Your argument from analogy is not apt because nobody buys a photoalbum thinking, "GREAT! Now I don't need a camera."
Scientists have discovered how to 'delete' unwanted memories
The point people are making is that if it's the only thing on the shelf it's not easy to opt out.
The latter use case is easily handled by Dataflow (something that AWS lacks. See https://cloud.google.com/blog/big-data/2016/02/comparing-the...).

One may also say that Google has a single Global seamlessly scalable durable message delivery service and Amazon has two that are neither global nor seamlessly scalable. Firehose is AWS itself admitting to this argument... And then there's firebase :)
Unicorns Seemingly Reach a Tipping Point
I recommend Dan Drowns Digital Fortress: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Fortress
the book is filled with Cryptography, Quantum computing, NSA, Assasins... _i.e sorted me out pretty well_
Funny you mention it, I'm also a bit anti-chaining for the same reasons.

Do we need a cute name to describe the practice of optimizing code for maintainability? "Craftsmanship" speaks to the building process, what should we call it when we make code that is understandable and straightforward to change?
More structured is probably going to look a bit like UML, Petri Nets, or RETE networks.
This isn't a new idea. In Arthur C. Clarke's "Imperil Earth", the future Earth has only four time zones, and there's thought of moving to just one.

(If my memory is correct; it's been a while.)
In this case, almost certainly left-to-right consistency. But depending on the diagram, sometimes you do care more about the Y axis than the X axis; I wouldn't say I have a consistent reading order between the two, though generally I'll look at the diagram caption first.

For the graphed data itself, I suspect people do tend to pay more attention to the Y axis, and more specifically to the extremes; the results in most papers tend to talk about those extremes (with the exception of the rare graph that highlights consistency across a range of results). Given that, it makes sense to check the scale for "how high" or "how low" first, and then check "by varying what".
Can you, on stock Android, just go and delete system files? Or even do something as simple as editing hosts? Kill system processes? Make multiple users with various rights? Set file/folder permissions? Share files over local network? Install drivers for new hardware?

And just for the record, I'm talking about 7, not 10.

Comparing the amount of (sub)items listed in control panels with what you get in the settings of most stock Androids should give enough of a hint ^^
MuScalpel: Automated Source Code Transplantation
dat bias doee
Ways surrogacy is helping to fight against infertility
The government and especially municipal bodies are staffed by people from the community. If you want the government to change, there is a way to do so: generate more interest in what it does, how it functions. Get more people involved/interested, including yourself :) .
We could always make some camel/cow hybrid using mad science. Or regular science if you don't want to be dramatic about it.
You missed the point. People aren't posting better algorithms, they're posting domain specific knowledge to improve efficiency. The kind of stuff that takes you away from building new features that add value. Benchmarking and efficiency is an important datapoint when picking a language. It's important to understand how un-optimized code performs too.
Things you should know about JavaScript events
> "What’s really wrong with us software
folks is that we’re continually beating ourselves up for something that’s somebody else’s fault."

Amen to that.
'Place I think it to be' is completely orthogonal to beautiful code. :P

From my own experience, many, many times, definitely a majority of them, when I have had performance issues, and finally found the bottleneck, and fixed it, my code was more beautiful afterwards. Algorithms were simplified, duplicated effort was removed, etc. One major one in my mind was where code was attempted to be reused, but in doing so it caused an O(n^2) behavior, where an O(n) could have been done instead. Upon finding it, and refactoring it, the code had fewer interdependencies, the logic was far more straightforward, both things I find to make for 'beautiful' code, and it ran far, far faster (from 'this particular operation takes an hour' to 'this particular operation takes < 1 second'). Had I invested time up front after making it work to clean up the code (rather than stop at 'it works, good enough') I would have stumbled upon the same fix, even before seeing the performance issue.
Museum of Endangered Sounds
It is true that non-technical customers often don't care. Although, they do care when they buy a 1 TB drive and get told by Windows (but not OSX) that it is only 916 GB.

Imagine a customer with a 7.7 GB file (as reported by Windows) who purchase an 8 GB thumb drive to hold it. The inconsistent units mean that it won't fit. We should make our units consistent and we should use base-10 because people.
who says romance is dead?!
Self-reporting surveys are of questionable value in general, and especially now, when everyone understands that pretty much everything you ever do and say in public becomes part of your Google persona.

My point? It is at least possible that these teens are now wise enough to know admitting to any sort of nefarious behavior, no matter the setting, is just a dumb thing to do.
Heh, of course not. Making a power-user focused flagship doesn't make a lot of business sense. From that point of view, iOS is more capable (of making money) and better in general due to ease of use.

But "ease of use" is not the primary thing I'm looking for when I think of smartphones.
Its not that simple. Sure, it was much more complicated back then since you had to think of trams and public transportation whereas now you just build highways. But, the amount of corruption in public projects has increased tremendously, spending on infrastructure has reduced etc.
Quite. I knew it would be an unpopular sentiment here. But I got karma to burn :-)
Why PHP 7 will be a game changer for WordPress
Obese people overestimate distances, study finds
Sri Srivanasan
Or more abstract or declarative like Haskell or SQL...
You might like this 'Marble Adding Machine':

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcDshWmhF4A
A lost interview with ENIAC co-inventor J. Presper Eckert (1989)
There's an update for Akka version, which measures 12/8/4.4 seconds on subsequent attempts, so yes, warmup is important... but somehow that seems kinda unfair for other languages too.
Fair enough; in that case Go 1.0 is just about 4 years old:

https://blog.golang.org/go-version-1-is-released
Just gonna put this out there: Scala is full of these scenarios where very small changes to the code have disproportionately large changes to the outcome. It's one of the reasons I'm really not a fan of the language. There are so many features that are mentioned in the literature and lore that you have to learn to not use, for fear of pervasive performance penalties.

This is a great example. I've done a lot of Scala and o found the original version very obvious to read, but only experience tells me why the compiler can't make it efficient. Your version is not really worse in any way, but I think it's fair to say that it shouldn't be obvious to everyone why one is suboptimal at first glance.
This doesn't look too bad, certainly not that kind of bad your parent complained about.
MLC (http://searchsolidstatestorage.techtarget.com/definition/mul..., http://birchtree.me/blog/nand-flash-party/), which is used quite a bit in consumer flash, is base n>2.

Those links claim devices use n=4, 8, 16,... but apart from practicalities, I don't see a reason why n=3, 4, 5,... wouldn't work.

Also, these devices may get produced in power of two sizes units, but they all use error-correcting codes that turn their effective size in something non-power of two.
> It's still a silly distinction and pedantic.

No, it's a crucial one, for a simple reason: you're not supposed to change the firmware of your car, but you change the software in your palmtop computer quite often. Car firmware is special purpose (let's ignore some high-end multimedia stuff), while your palmtop computer can and does run any program.

Nothing technically prevents you from tethering a keyboard, mouse, and big screen to your palmtop computer —just like you do with some laptops when you dock them. Heck, it would be damn useful, to centralise all your computing in the palm of your hand.

The fact that your computer fits in the palm of your hand and can hook up to a phone network is not a good reason to have its usage restricted. The only reason people got tricked into thinking this is somehow okay, is because those computers are misnamed "smartphones".

No. They're networked computers. "Phone" is a distant second by now.
Why PowerPoint Slides Are a Waste of Time
FWIW: navigation is done using the arrow keys on your keyboard or swiping when on mobile.
How is this about CBC and not exclusively about MAC-then-encrypt? Wouldn't CBC be fine in a MAC'd ciphertext protocol?
Teen pregnancy in 1958 does not even come close to measuring the same thing that "teen pregnancy" does today. Today, almost all teen pregnancies are unwanted -- which was emphatically not the case in 1958.

I'm not sure that delayed childbirth is really such a good thing for society. If you delay too long, you increase the risk of complications and birth defects, hence the US's increasing infant mortality rate. But more importantly, it weakens families by not having as many generations around for as long. My grandmother was 45 when my older brother was born. Now, our parents will be over 60 at their grandchild's birth. Our great-grandparents were around until our teenage years, but our children won't have the same privilege, because our grandparents are all dead.
VeraCrypt 1.17 (February 13th, 2016) – CVE-2016-1281
Show HN: Automated config tool for Apache2, NGINX etc.
I mistakenly posted on the Q&A forum so apologies for anyone seeing this twice.

As we all know spending time configuring apache2 for our favorite framework can be time consuming and tedious.

We are currently developing Qonfigure.com - a basic web based configurator to speed up the set up of apache2 with mod_wsgi to serve python apps, apache2 with passenger for ruby on rails, and apache2 with mod_php for your favorite php framework. Our configurator will also enable you to add SSL, or even make your dev environment SSL only.

We're actively developing the product and adding platforms, distributions, features etc. and while we are not at the point to ask for feedback about UI/X, I'd be interested in hearing your problems and how Qonfigure could solve them. For example, we got some recent feedback that a solution NGINX might be more compelling than Apache2...

If you'd like to try Qonfigure, I'm happy to set up a trial. Email me at wschubin@treadstoneinteractive.com
The whole Meego thing was a mess.

Maemo had from the early days been Debian based.

Then came Intel's Moblin in an attempt at pushing Atom for mobile devices (reason being that Intel had opted to forgo PCI on that variant to save power, and Microsoft balked at doing Windows on a x86 chip without PCI). Mobilin 1.0 was also Debian based.

So at that point it seemed sensible for Nokia and Intel to combine their efforts and create Meego.

But just as the jointed project was unveiled, Intel finalized Moblin 2.0. And it was RPM based. And Intel was heavily pushing for Meego to be that as well.

Never mind that the N9 was really a last gen Maemo with some additions to make it Meego compatible.
Google Cloud SQL 2.0 is pretty neat
http://www.ubuntu.com/phone/devices

https://shop.goldelico.com/wiki.php?page=GTA04%20Complete

(soon?) http://neo900.org/
this case added to https://github.com/golang/go/issues/14325
Ask HN: How to encourage my team to learn more and improve our skill set
I work for a fairly large Data consultancy of about 150 people. We do mostly data management projects, and data analytics.

Most of our house uses SAS, SQL (Microsoft) and Qlik technologies. We have varying skill sets, with about 60% having Engineering or Math/Stats background.

The problem's that we seem to be grooming more 'people managers' than technical people, even our juniors join the team with little coding background, but end up not wanting to program.

What ways can I try to get them into more work that requires using Python, R, JVM family, JS etc. ?

Some people in the team feel like we're falling behind what rest of world does in terms of analytics. It would be great for us to change this position.

Thanks
Over the past few years Square Enix has be re-releasing the old Final Fantasy games (I - IV and maybe more) for mobile (iOS & android) and as far as I remember all of them require always active internet connections to play. I tried to play on a plane recently and could not unless i paid for the wifi. For a single player game that originally had no network connectivity. Or you can download an android emulator and rom and play without needing internet. Now this is not ideal because the input is not the best. The native apps have built for mobile controls, but require internet.
How micromanagement kills creativity and productivity of developers
It never occurred to me to use either, so I used the spacebar and backspace to move forward and backward.
"Figure out how to solve the problem first, spend all your efforts on that, then figure out how to clean up your code and make things nice/performant/secure/etc."

I think this explains it neatly.
Show HN: Our attempt at simplifying web security via ASTRA WAF
> And if you can get close enough to accurately cut the airhose, why not just stab them in the heart?

Because the hose is easier, but your first point applies.
This and many other great essays are included in Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot [0] which would probably be my "pick one for a desert island" book.

[0]: http://www.amazon.com/Thoughts-Philosophical-Fighter-Pilot-R...