skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, this is the sort of thing that scares me away from Ruby.

I'm worried this sort of "screw it just add a library" is going to spread further in my language of choice: Java.

In my time doing open source programming on the side, I've found that it has become more common with the advent of things like mvn and gradle to just slather on layers to your stack even for the simple tasks.

Need a function to turn a byte buffer into a string? Download these 3 Apache commons libraries and their dependencies.

I understand if you are relying on a large portion of a library and you need to use it, but why bring an entire library in for one function.
Short answer: You don't. You can threaten to take it to social media on your support ticket, and maybe threaten a chargeback in the support ticket. That often gets their attention.

Small warning: avoid actually doing a chargeback at all costs. If you do it without permission from Steam, expect your account to be permanently banned, and with their already awful support you're probably never going to get it back.
> While the article seems to criticize rent-seeking behavior only in businesses and professions that require lower levels of education, if we combine this article's statements with the often repeated claim that the US pays roughly twice as much for health care per capita as other developed countries it seems reasonable to ask: Is there a rent seeking problem in the medical and dental fields too?

Wait, are you suggesting that the regulatory barriers to private competition in medicine and dentistry are higher in the US than other developed countries?
AKA reddit flamewar generator
This. Torrents are a terrible solution for the long tail of content.
Soundcloud is so important for the programmer community that it is unthinkable that it will just disappear. All those background music I enjoy as I code, all those chip-tunes, livecoding musics etc. I hope they open some donation so that I can help.
Feedback on Thwock (responsive development tool)
Yeah,I got to the point mentioning the masses of the black holes before and after collision and said, "What, they didn't just lose three solar masses..." But, they did.

Which was the order of predictions I'd read, years back, but egads. Considering how much larger that is than a supernova, I'd be concerned to have such an event happen in this galaxy...
An underground device sensitive enough to detect animals walking around could be useful for other things... (from ecology research to large-scale surveillance)
Avoid shims.

There are lots of libraries that just put one interface on top of another interface. They don't do much actual work. Pulling in shims, especially if they pull in lots of other stuff you're not using, should be avoided.

If the dependency does real work you'd otherwise have to code, then use it.
You asked for evidence backing up the statement "People whose day job is to predict this stuff can't even make good predictions". Managers of active mutual funds are exactly these people. The fact that they can't beat the market is clear evidence they can't make good predictions.

Of course you could say "well, the good managers beat the market, even though on average they don't". But you could also say that the few people who correctly predict three coin flips in a row are "good at predicting coin flips" - it's easy to say this in retrospect but impossible to predict who the "good ones" are upfront.
> Don't bring in more code than you need.

I see it as a sliding scale. If I'm parsing 1 string with the same date format into 1 object, I'm not going to pull in some general purpose time parsing library - I'll write the 10 lines of code myself, a few unit tests, and be happy.

If in the future I start having to deal with different date strings and some need to do more than just throw up a single date on a page somewhere, I'll get a date/time library.
​I used my eyes to control virtual reality, and someday you will too
Both of them have tons of ego.
As with most physics experiments for the last 40 years, nothing new was discovered that we didn’t already predict. Confirming something widely believed to be true isn't nearly as valuable as finding out we don't understand something. This is actually one of the reasons I dropped out of my physics phd program.
This is pretty much what Rob Pike advocates in Go: "A little copying is better than a little dependency."
http://go-proverbs.github.io/
I've heard services force you to compete on price and drive rates down but I suppose it's worth a shot.
LIGO Confirms Breakthrough Prediction of Gravitational Waves
Yes, but not all documents are trivial to convert to a text file because the layout can be quite complex. A PDF file can have little bits of text floating anywhere and when you search inside the file, you can see it highlighted at its actual position.
This thing was a billion light years away. Say it were closer; let's put it at a single light year away.

LIGO measures wave amplitude, as far as I can tell, which goes down linearly with distance (unlike wave energy, which goes down quadratically, since it's proportional to square of the amplitude). So we could expect to see an effect about a billion times bigger.

The detected effect was a change in metric of one part in 6e20 if I'm not mistaken: (4e-3 * (diameter of proton))/4km based on the article's claim of "four one-thousandths of the diameter of a proton". So at one light year distance we could expect an effect of one part in 6e11.

Not really visible on the human scale, seems to me. You could detect it easily with something like the Mössbauer effect, I expect. Your typical lab bench laser interferometer has errors on the order of 1 in 1e6 as far as I can tell, so probably wouldn't be able to pick this up.

Disclaimer: I could be totally off on what a lab bench laser interferometer can do. I'm pretty confident in the rest of the numbers above.
I'm a recent hire at IBM Design and leading a design team.

nfriendly, your experience is what it's like working with a non-IBM Design team. The old way is to have a single designer on something and that person has little to no authority to be the users through the design process. That's all changing now.

From my understanding, there have only been a couple of hundred products (in the 3 years since IBM Design was created) that have been updated using IBM Design Thinking. There is actually a dedicated design team (min 5 designers) working on each product that is getting attention at that moment in time.

But there are over 5000 products that IBM sells, so it's going to take a while to get to them all (also assuming some of these will be consolidated as the design cycles address the user's needs). There will be a lot of time that passes before all the engineers at IBM (with it's 400K+ employees) get to have a dedicated design team on their product.

Having been a number of startups and advertising agencies before this, the "design culture" is strong here with a lot of smart folks fighting to turn around a very very big ship.
enlighten us. :)
Cisco open source its Vector Packet Processing technology
Countries are paying back what they owe. How does your original reply add anything or even make sense? If you are this worried about it you should probably at least understand what you are talking about.
Show HN: Embed, Control and Automate Major Browsers in .Net Applications
agree 100% on EDM and soundcloud, OTOH there also are a LOT of musicians that deal with film scoring, it seems very used for demo / mockup purposes so that would be difficult for them as well if it closed
If it weren't for the "fastcall" convention using ECX for an actual argument value, they could have used "MOV ECX,EDI" and then the change to a "JMP $-5" would have been possible with a single byte store to the opcode (0x89 -> 0xeb), removing any worries about a two-byte store straddling a cache-line or page boundary.
"In case you haven't heard ... I'm kind of a big deal."
I am not restricting myself to looking at the role of judges in a vacuum. Prosecutors, police, regulators, etc. all make individual decisions that amount to "I will fuck this guy up, because I don't like them". They typically have absolute immunity in making those decisions - as do judges, actually. It makes no sense to condemn judges for exercising mercy contrary to the law in one breath, and in another give prosecutors absolute immunity for their charging or investigatory decisions, regardless on what basis they were made. We evidently wanted a system where no state actor ever faces punishment for any decision they make, and now we have it.
We built our auto-updated to use its own signatures in addition to https and Mac app signing because we don't trust CAs.
They've no prejudice and they question every status quo;
Lowering interest rates encourages private borrowing. Lower interest rates discourage buying treasuries from a government because the rates are lower. You didn't say anything about either because you didn't realize that's what you were referring to.
Your app/library inherits the technical debt of all its dependencies.

There's a natural tension between code reuse and avoiding dependencies. If you can avoid a big dependency by writing a couple hundred lines of low-maintenance code, its probably worth it.
Ah, it would seem so.
Regardless of what happens with IBM, this sounds like someone with a chip on his shoulder. He wrote a book about how bad it is, then blogs about it.

It is like someone who got out of a relationship (didn't he work there?), but then keeps obsessing and talking to everyone else about it for 10 years after.
Actually quite the opposite - from what I read, MixCloud did get into arrangements with numerous labels/rights holders and therefore the risk of having a mix taken down is greatly reduced - and it's why MixCloud doesn't approve of people uploading individual tracks.

DJs are in the derivative work business, no matter how much they claim to be innovative or 'making something new!' by mixing tracks together, and while I'm an advocate for Copyright Reform, for now the way laws and commercial rules are written, DJs making and uploading mixes don't have a leg to stand on in the SoundCloud model.
Yup, the IBM Design Language is a growing library/guidelines for all new IBM Designed products. Still a work in progress, but there is finally a unified look/feel/function for future apps/sites.
It's generally unfortunate when major batches of content--whether MP3s or an online magazine--end up inaccessible to the future. And I find it a bit worrisome that a relatively small non-profit plays such an outsized role in archiving the Internet.

That said, a huge number of works that people create have always ended up in the trash, thrown out, or archived only in a few obscure places. What makes it a bit frustrating with digital is that it's relatively practical to save so much more--if perhaps not necessarily everything that's even been posted to a public site--but few really good mechanisms (or funding) to do so.
Vanguard's Low Blow
Sprout Life adds reproduction, mutation, and evolution to Conway's Game of Life
My obligatory show HN link: https://octave.is is the Vimeo to Soundcloud's Youtube. No crap comments, no ads, no garbage on your artist page.
Well, they do accept money -- they have a €5/month donation plan available here: https://soundcloud.com/pro
There are ideas floating around that make it appealing to do just that. For example, the commons library might be considered "battle-tested," and who really knows what could happen with your own custom byte-buffer-to-string function? Maybe you missed something? Maybe there is some "best practice" that you didn't follow? Maybe the commons library is optimized? And writing your own thing doesn't add business value. Developer time is more expensive than dependencies. And so on.

Me, I very often prefer to write things myself, in a way that can get labelled as NIH. My inclination is based on bad experiences with trying to debug external libraries. Sometimes I look at open source library code and find staggering complexity that I have no need for. Yes, maybe the library is great, but if its combinatorial size is 10,000 times the functionality that we need, then depending on its correctness becomes scary to me. And when I need to customize it, due to some requirements alteration, I will find it difficult and tedious.

Black-box type libraries for isolated complicated tasks like codecs and crypto I will happily use.

Otherwise, I'm a fan of the "design patterns" approach to reuse, which is all about learning from others, but without creating reusable formal abstractions in library form. So if you teach me how to write an URL router, I can then use your insights without depending on your code base, and I can adapt the idea so it fits my application perfectly.
The first person to spot gravitational waves
Okay, so let's say that China is gutted, with a real estate bubble that makes 2008 look rosy by comparison, massively low consumption, a nonsense stock market propped up by 1 trillion USD, and thus China's due for a globally relevant collapse.

If I have let say 100k in capital, is there any instrument through which I can short China's real economy?
Seems like the author just has trouble making good choices.
C doesn't have tagged unions, which makes it a terrible language to write pretty much anything in. Most of the other pieces you need for good programming you can write yourself in C, but you can't make a safe tagged union out of thin air, and if you rely on helper functions or macros then your tools won't understand them.

It's also so bad at expressing literal values that I've seen a serious recommendation to write literal strings and parse them instead ( http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/string-interfaces ).

The type system doesn't even do generics, never mind higher kinds. Maybe you could keep a web framework small enough that that wouldn't be too big a deal.
What makes you think we're insignificant?

Maybe it's the psychology of how we (fail to) deal with different scales. Discovering new, larger, more wonderful places in the Universe doesn't make the Earth any smaller or less wonderful than it is. Our brains might "zoom out" our mental map to fit these new places in, which makes us appear smaller, but in fact it's our horizons that have grown.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_pe... there were nearly 200,000 books published in the UK in 2011. That doesn't make the works of Shakespeare insignificant.
$44million is an awful lot of donations.
Hacker News gets a solid D.

https://securityheaders.io/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator...
That's an orthogonal issue. You won't accidentally bring in something completely unrelated because you forgot to remove it from the "include"s, but nothing technically stops you from having a deep dependency chain. Culturally the Go community is aware of the issue, though.

Still, it isn't hard to bring in a chain accidentally. I have a program than needs to do a query against the local LDAP system to extract members of a specified group. The LDAP library brings in five more libraries for parsing all the various bits of LDAP. Since this isn't C, I'm a bit less nervous about pulling in, say, a BER decoding library, because at least Go is generally memory-safe, but, still, that's a somewhat large stack for such a simple query. (Traditionally in C, you might as well just expect any library that decodes anything remotely binary-esque will have buffer overflows. C is a DSL for writing buffer overflows.)

And yet, I'd be insane to try to implement some sort of just-barely-minimal LDAP client to do it myself.

Looking at my local godoc instance's full set of packages that have gotten pulled in one way or another is still sort of intimidating. Some of them are cases where I'm just pulling in a subdir and got an entire large repo (the golang experimental repos do that a lot), but, still, I've got a lot of stuff in there. If you're a go programmer and you haven't run godoc locally and had a look at the packages page, have a look. You may be surprised.
RIP Windows Phone: the smartphone market is back to being a two-horse race
> "but to a first approximation, nobody actually uses Freenet"

There's a very good reason for that. The people that know about Freenet and could promote it won't because of the issues it has with CP. Due to the distributed nature of the platform, and the high volume of CP that is supposedly hosted there (I've never used it, but that's what I've heard) you basically can't use Freenet without hosting CP.
Completely agree. We have a long way to go.
One thing I don't quite understand - how can the "chirp" from LIGO be unambiguously categorized as extraterrestrial in origin? The waveform shown onscreen in the NYtimes video looks like an extremely noisy signal - not sure if that's the actual sampled data or just an artistic rendition. Couldn't there be a variety of physical disturbances that explain a sine-tone sweep like that, given how sensitive the instrument is to physical vibrations?
My guess is that the arc through air gap is functioning as both the detector and speaker here. I suspect that the arc can only be sustained in one direction, probably from ground to the cable, which would give us the required clipping. At the same time, I assume the arc is acting as a plasma speaker, and, as you say, the air and our ear provides the low-pass filtering.
Ask HN: Seen my stolen truck in the Bay Area?
Sorry to post something like this on here, but we're getting desperate. My wife's truck was stolen out of our apartment complex garage in Santa Clara on Sunday. We think it's been dumped somewhere in the Bay Area by now. We're offering a $500 cash reward to anyone who finds it. I know it's a longshot, but like I said, we're desperate.

Here are the details:

2003 Ford F-250, tan color (looks like gold), 4 door with extended bed used for hauling (photo here: http://hire.gs/f250.jpg), 5th wheel hitch installed in bed

License Plate: 7D88687 (California)

Last 5 digits of VIN: 16985

If you see this truck parked anywhere, please call or text 818-233-0707.

Thank you for your help!

Gabe
Right, but LIGO detects wave amplitude, not wave energy, which goes down as 1/r.
OpsWorks is a pile of shit.
is there a reason you decided to list all of these apps unsolicited? nobody is going to read these
Try it with just site:scripting.com

Is mirror.scripting.com really the most important page on scripting.com (and it's currently unavailable). That's what's turning up as the top result, more important than the scripting.com homepage.
Anti-rant?

I got the "you must login to continue" prompt on Facebook, but managed to save the video and upload as a good old static mp4...

the video is low quality, as is the version on FB.

http://ozimg.s3.amazonaws.com/video/RF_energy_through_jumper...
Chart Shows Who Marries CEOs, Doctors, Chefs and Janitors
I take it to mean, "don't marginalize, punish, and otherwise manage like an asshole. It will ruin your team faster than layoffs."
That was interesting, and a surprising result. Thanks for sharing.

There is a bit of magic: the Epstein Drive, allowing for 1G continuous acceleration 'torch ships'. IIRC if they're gone I don't think it breaks the plot much, but without them it's hard to imagine that there'd be quite such a thriving solar system society; it'd be much less interconnected and a much smaller economy without the ability to support large-scale stations by shipping large volumes of necessary supplies (e.g. ice) around easily.
This is a great read that can be applied to node.js very much. I've seen apps that include 10, maybe 20 dependencies but when you flatten out the full dependency tree? Thousands. It's incredible and if one of those dependencies screws up semantic versioning or just screws up in general it can be a nightmare to debug and fix.

This is why every 1.0 product I work on I include every dependency that speeds up my development. In 2.0 the first things to do is prune all unnecessary dependencies and start minor rewrites when a dependency can be done in house (yeah yeah reinventing the wheel is a problem but most npm dependencies are small and many can be recreated internally without issue).

This is even more important if you're creating a library / module. My msngr.js library uses zero dependencies and yet can make http calls in node and the browser because it was easy to implement the minimal solution I needed without bringing in dependencies to support a single way of calling http.
What were the problems with the previous site? I used it without major problems.

Wouldn't a browser plugin require you to actively be using HN, or at least have a tab open? Getting an email notification four hours later that someone replied to you on HN, so you may want to take a look is nice (if you don't want to be a slave to HN, don't check your email as often or don't deal immediately with this email).

Additionally, in a browser extension, there's then a lot of people grabbing the comment history rather than a single program, which necessarily puts a higher load on HN.
There is a very interesting learn-to-draw book, "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain", which takes a similar tack. Its premise is the reason people find drawing realistic scenes hard is because your mind is busy categorizing what it sees in to nice big-picture abstractions like "house" or "eye". You need to re-focus you mind to be able to see what is in front of you (how the lines converge, how shading affects shape, etc.), and once you do that, it becomes easy to draw in a realistic style, and not have your drawings come out like they did when you were 8 years old. Some of the exercises in the book are to copy line drawings that are turned upside down. This is so that it is easier for your mind to ignore the high level concepts, and just be able to copy down the lines as they are. I was certainly impressed and I wouldn't have guessed that by reading just one book and working the exercises I could have learned to draw so well. Highly recommended.

https://www.google.com/search?q=drawing+on+the+right+side+of...

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=site:news.ycombinator.c...
what's the point?
none of them are realistic.

"no code" - well, it's there for a reason.
"own it" - do i really want to write my own minimal implementation?

i understand that dependency is a pita but this post doesn't provide anything worthwhile.
Yeah, it's such a critical concept that I feel gets lost in the mix of frameworks, languages and fads of the day.

In the end it's just Data all the way down, just Data.

Want to update something in your app on the fly? Just change the Data. Need adjust your UI? Again, data. Once you grasp that then all sorts of composability and techniques become possible.

Lisp takes this to a nice logical conclusion where everything is S-expressions and code is just data.
Isign, you sign, now we all can sign apps
Us dorks who have been hacking away on ways to 'decentralize' the net feel vindicated by this kind of thing.
I hope Kip Thorne gets a Nobel Prize for this, ideally while he's still alive.
Here's a copy...

http://ozimg.s3.amazonaws.com/video/RF_energy_through_jumper...

which I will remove at some point
I use the Outlook (Microsoft) app which as a Focused Inbox that notifies important ones. It helps keep the mail notifications in check.
That's not native, and is much bulkier and slower.
There are two independent sites, 2000 miles apart. Additionally, each site has two perpendicular experiments: one shows contraction when the perpendicular one shows expansion. Orientations at both sites are aligned I presume.
Show HN: Intellexer API – natural language processing and text analysis API
Hey everyone. I'm proud to open source this, as it's one of the coolest things I've ever done – a reimplementation of Apple's code signing (well, enough for re-signing) that works on Linux.
Clickable link to photo: http://hire.gs/f250.jpg