skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The thing is, I'm a programmer. I want to extend my tools with code, not configuration. The power of the command line is not so much that it's a command line -- the power is that it is a programmable environment. I'm not limited to configuring what the tools are doing on my behalf. I'm writing my own tools.

I think this is the biggest draw for Emacs. It's a fully featured lisp development environment. If you want to change it, you just write lisp. If your IDE is free software, you can do the same thing, but they aren't always that easy to extend. Emacs, shell script, and the various tools are a set of APIs that you can code against. Most IDEs are geared towards giving you a UI interface to the functionality, not a programming API.

And that's fair, but not really what I'm after most of the time.
HoudahGeo 5: Photo geotagging for Mac got even better
Death by a thousand cuts! Pip is enough for anyone with google.
Who to Hire for Your Production Team
Stunning video. I don't know if it's the setting or the fast forward but the whole thing looked like a video game to me. One that I'd definitely play by the way.
Pretty infantile and obnoxious post, though I agree with the main point - the content you see on Medium's front page is low quality.

That happens because Medium has a bad discovery system - which is a huge bummer, because they have really nailed everything else.

The solution is simple - just allow users to control which content they read, simply by copying what reddit has already figured out how to do. Allow people to follow tags and browse top articles of the week/month/year, and have a separate stream where I can see posts from the people I follow.

Instead, they have an opaque algorithm, and my front page has a bunch of seemingly random posts I would never choose to see.
What are some of the notable startups in WebRTC space?
Agreed. I've just gone about it by refusing to sign the IP agreements, OR by editing the document to say that anything I do on my own time is mine. Have yet to run into an issue with those approaches.

I wonder how much innovation here is stifled because there are still only a handful of major employers, and all of them have blanket IP agreements. Frankly, if I was running UPMC, PNC, or Highmark, I'd set up a VC arm and encourage any employee with a good idea (related to the industry) to start a company with seed capital from the VC arm. UPMC is KIND OF doing this (I work for them now), but they're not quite there yet, and it doesn't seem like current employees can swing over there to start their own company easily. Still, I think they're headed down the right path.
I'm not talking about superficial usage like that. I'm talking about productivity boosts like multiline edits, line swapping, cursor jumping over blocks, and more advanced tricks. Also about where to do all those little tweaks to the configuration you need to google for or ask a coworker about to get a hold of. Those are not discoverable with any GUI.
The problem of software quality is complicated and difficult to reduce to a single set of issues. I don't think anything you've said here contradicts what Seth wrote.

I think he's right, though, that economics is the fundamental problem. We bang out code quickly to meet deadlines measured in months despite the decades-long impact a poor decision can have (see JavaScript for example). When we find ourselves slowing down, we add more people to write more code; why are we surprised when our software becomes bloated?

But if we missed our deadlines too much, we'd lose the market to our competitor, who wrote their software more quickly. And if we didn't hire more programmers, we'd lose again to our competitor, who hired tons of people to add attractive features.

It seems impossible to write good software without losing in the free market. IMO we should be thinking about how to support software projects outside of market-based corporations.
Five Big Banks' Living Wills Rejected by U.S. Banking Agencies
I took military funding for graduate school -- a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship. My reasoning was I was studying pure mathematics, and I knew my work had zero possibility of military applications. So by taking their money I was diverting it to purely peaceful purposes.

And their funding was a bit higher than the NSF fellowship, so that choice dovetailed nicely with self-interest.

It would have been a harder choice if my work did have potential military application. I don't know if I would have had the backbone of the linked professor. I admire his conviction.
There are far too many times a day that I find myself hitting
> alt-tab
> sigh
> shift-alt-tab
> ctrl-tab

I'm not a "keep all the tabs open forever" person, so having the ability to shift this to the O/S would be great. Can see why this would be sub-optimal for someone who regularly has 30+ plus tabs open at once.
Taco Bell's Incredible Two-Year Quest to Melt Cheese Perfectly
As well you should.

That's the evil of these sorts of unconscionable contracts. As a potential employee, it's easy to be in a predicament that would force you to suck it up and accept ridiculous terms of employment.
As well as producing vimcasts.org Drew Neil has also written [Practical Vim](http://pragprog.com/book/dnvim/practical-vim) which is a great companion to Vim/NeoVim.

I particualarly like the way it teaches you efficient text editing without needing plugins.
All Things Considered and Fresh Air are daily things for me, although I listen to the podcasts since I'm not in the US. Planet Money, Wait Wait, This American Life, and Ask Me Another are also regular shows I listen to. I've also been listening to KCRW's Left, Right & Center, and they're part of the NPR network, though I don't know who ends up funding that show.

Sometimes I wish All Things Considered had more details on some of the stories, but if all their stories were longer, I would start picking and choosing what I listen to and not get as much variety.
How best to leverage that resource? I believe that kidnap and ransom is one traditional answer.
Verizon Workers Strike on East Coast After Deadline Passes
I'm not a NeoVim user, but I've been on the edge of becoming one for a while.

What I'm still holding out for is an _embeddable_ NeoVim. The thing I really don't like about IDEs is that I love my Vim configuration but I never get to actually use the damn thing since I do most of my work in an IDE. Now imagine if the IDE could actually just embed NeoVim, and I could use my Vimrc as-is with all the plugins (now managed natively). I know they already have Electron-based UIs for NeoVim, and Electron-based IDEs, so hopefully it's just a matter of time.

That said, does this actually put NeoVim _behind_ in terms of feature parity?
And then of course people like the spacemacs leader-key binding and port it back to vim :-)

https://github.com/jimmay5469/vim-spacemacs
https://github.com/sunaku/vim-shortcut
https://github.com/sthysel/vim-spacemacs
> I'm curious if they tried dosing an animal and a human at the same time to see how human-animal interaction and communication is affected.

Well, they did that with dolphins.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/08/the-dolph... (CTRL-F LSD)
Apparently dolphins don't really react to LSD.
Read the whole article, it's pretty weird.
For me, this would not work. I have 200 open mini tasks that are infeasible to put into a calendar. Most people actually have that many or more todos, they just don't capture and consequently forget them.
What the Americans are doing with private contractors is one thing. But this business was going on in Europe (Austria, Bulgaria, San Marino, etc) where manufacturing weapons to be used in African civil wars is not considered acceptable (or legal). The article details shady business with convicted and/or wanted intenational arms dealers together with shell companies scattered in different countries. And doing that while effectively being on the payroll of Chinese investors who have vested interests in African civil wars (there's a lot of chinese investments going on in Africa).

It's pretty likely that the business surrounding the conversion of the aircraft will lead to criminal investigation and/or convictions in Austria after this exposé.
Their coverage of digital privacy for me is what made me realize NPR has its own biases, albeit more subtle than others. They consistently underrepresent the arguments against encroaching surveillance and give way too much airtime to the other side.
In my opinion, it's worse here- they seem to be really serious and really dogmatic about Agile. (Capital A!) To me that conjures visions of being obligated to do pointless shit because process dictates it. Good people just want to get work done with a minimum of bullshit.

I actually think it's fine if a place claims to be agile based on using jira and having standups. Because I have no interest or investment in "the real thing".
Early on in my undergrad life in Pittsburgh (circa 2001-2005) I remember seeing this Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1985/12/20 . It took a while to really understand the rather negative perception people had of Pittsburgh, but that comic strip helped. After undergrad I moved to NYC and sort of regretted that a little bit. I realized the same things PG mentions: low cost of living and constant influx of young people from the 20+ universities in the area creates the right ecosystem for a startup culture.
Fraiser thinks he can play me.

Fraiser you are a dumb shit nigger who doesn't know what a random number is.
Unite to build a quantum Internet
Makefile hacks: print the value of any variable (2010)
I actually love writing programs in AWK. I use Python for that kind of work now, and AWK is relegated to one-liners, but there's something very satisfying about the way programs fit together. It's like playing with Lego.
Dwight Eisenhower's "Military Industrial Complex" speech noted: "Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."

Furthermore, he warned "Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientifictechnological elite."
Secure quantum transmission experiment reaches 150 miles over fiber-optic
If you have the cursor just before the area you could do: 'dt)' meaning delete to next ), or 'ct)' to delete until next ) and the drop into insert mode. Learning word objects in Vim for me is one of the killer features, and one thing I miss in Emacs.
This awesome hack updates the classic Nintendo Game Boy for today
To add, they sorted it out by adding an option on the site to retrieve the license code. I've now got an Arq 5 license and lifetime upgrades.

I think that having Arq back up to spare space at a Linode VM is a great way to use it.
Xombrero seems to be unmaintained and has severe security problems. It's HTTPS implementation is vulnerable to MitM script injection.

See my post here: https://rya.nc/https-script.html
I've always wondered how web non-contenteditable editors implement WYSIWYG. This is a good guide.
Peabody, World's Largest Coal Producer Files Bankruptcy; 8,300 Jobs in Jeopardy
Men's bicycle and women's bicycle in the UK.
How to Start a Conversation When You Don't Know What to Say
I'm quite a noob at 'nix, so I tend to use nano whenever I need to edit something. Not sure if this is the right place, but could somebody explain the added benefit of spending the time to learn to use vim/emacs? I've tried vim, but it seems very complicated.
I've been using eww (the emacs web browser) for reading docs, I highly recommend it. DDG is the default search engine. Plus you can display the docs right next to your code :)
It should be the standard that every controversial story comes with 2 sides of the coin plus the bonus 3rd side (coin lands standing). If the Internet thought me one thing it's to never judge based on a one sided story.
Coal torpedo
When Medium first launched I believe it was invite only. Which bootstrapped a community of mostly writers who cared about the problem that Medium wanted to solve, a better platform for writing on the web.

Then Medium opened the doors to everyone. This caused the inevitable problem that those who came flooding in didn't necessarily care as much about the craft of writing. They just wanted to ride the wave of popularity and have their advert hosted on Medium.

The only way to solve this is careful curation which comes with it's own set of problems. The takeaway is that any platform that intends to open the doors to the general public eventually will inevitably exhibit a degradation of content. It should never be a surprise. If you don't want to be part of the next Buzzfeed then be aware going in that this is the eventual fate of all open access and free platforms for content publishing.
The Great Suspender, which actually suspends the processes of these tabs, very useful if you have lots of tabs

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...
There are already various servers you can set up at home or on a personal server based on CardDAV, which is an open standard for exactly this purpose. I set one up for myself in a day, and I can easily access it on my phone and, from a web UI, on my computers, in my email client, etc.

It's fairly widely supported and you can use it with various calendar apps and programs, but unfortunately the standard is a bit awkward and it's still not as widely supported as things like Google Calendar.
As the article goes into, I think you're conflating "NPR" with the stuff that airs on public radio stations in various cities like Boston and New York--much of which programming is also available as podcasts. Thus Radiolab for example (which certainly qualifies for audio-documentary experience) is produced by WNYC and is not NPR.

"NPR" gets used as a shorthand for a lot of the programming that touches public radio stations (or that is created by people who are/were associated with public radio)--I do so myself--but it's not accurate.
These are probably mostly sales reps. Telemarketing (sorry, "inside sales") involves getting a lot of young people, just out of college, and burning through them quickly.
Docker Engine Port for Windows Released
Not at all like SpaceX for NASA (which is mostly civilian operations, and pretty transparent when it's for DOD).

The article describes an operation where the Chinese were funding the manufacture of light attack aircraft to be used to guard special interests in the civil wars of corrupt African nations.
I think Talky(https://talky.io/) is a pioneer here.
> The commitee factor is a problem in anything provided internationally to millions of users, as well as in anything sold for hundreed thousands of dollars to single customers.

As with anything in life, things are never black and white but filled with grays. For example, I'd much rather my banking software or the avionics of a plane that I am about to board be designed and built by committee rather than the local hotshot cowboy coder who wants to rebuild everything from scratch with whatever happens to be the tech stack-of-the-month. Great software is often boring and un-sexy and not everything can be built by two developers in a bedroom.
appear.in use it
How to Make Slack Better
A document? Nope. You'd have to lurk on the mailing list.
If you keep reading you'll realize that it was Mugabe and Zimbabwe's dysfunctional mechanisms of accountability that allowed Chachengwa's land to be taken from her.

Frankly, I'd be looking very closely to find links between multi-nationals that straddle two developing countries, and the larger, better known corps. It would be just too convenient to do business like that through an easily-defended, easily discarded puppet company.

The unfortunate truth is that there's nothing we can or should do, above and beyond our general promotion of free speech and suffrage. It's not our country, and there are plenty of examples of the strong preying on the weak here to keep anyone inclined to injustice-fighting quite busy.
Profile Guided Optimization: Optimizing D's virtual calls
Is non-lethal weaponry actually any safer overall?

Say you had some hypothetical situation where you did decide it was morally and legally justified to use force to stop something happening, like a genocide in a civil war or something like that.

How much longer would it take to end the genocide, and how many more people would be hurt and have their means of supporting themselves destroyed if everyone's running around with a non-lethal weapon like a taser or something, compared to rifles?

To a certain extent, when you decide that you unfortunately must use violence, I think it can be better to use a lot of violence very quickly and very well targeted, rather than messing around for ages using other means.
Depending on the city, they report exactly the same data as Uber/Lyft: pickup location, dropoff location, date & time, fare amount.
It's built on chromium and atom, but written in JavaScript and CSS, so technically I guess you could say that it's a browser in a browser.
DIY Redshift Write Performance Benchmarks
All Things Considered, Fresh Air, and Wait Wait are all traditional NPR broadcast programs, but since you're not listening via broadcast, your listening behavior is covered here, and it's important to understand why (I'll get into that in a bit).

The rest of the shows are either strictly podcasts (Planet Money), not NPR produced (This American Life, Left Right & Center) or built specifically to fight this trend (Ask Me Another).

The reason why the way you listen matters is because NPR gets its money from broadcast stations. Every time they do something that has a whiff of asking listeners to donate directly to them, there is a backlash from the stations they are bound by contract to serve. If you listen via podcast and you don't donate to your local public radio station, there's no very good way for NPR to get paid for that listening. Ads exist, but they generally do not support this type of programming entirely and NPR has a complicated relationship with them anyway.
It's not clear to me what is burnout. Sometimes I'm really exhausted for a few weeks, but I just keep pushing and then it goes away. Is it a bad thing? Could that develop into a real burnout..? Would it be preferable to take a few days off when that happens? Personally, when I feel like that, vacations don't feel good at all, so I'd much rather work and get shit done and take vacation when I feel better.
Everything the tech world says about marketing is wrong
>Ah yes, the Vietnam War, a last-ditch attempt to preserve some freedom and democracy (albeit imperfect) from a bloodthirsty regime which killed tens or hundreds of thousands of people, not in war but in post-war executions.

So, the US killed tens or hundreds of thousands of people to save them from being killed later in post-war executions?

Let's put it in real terms: a last-ditch attempt to preserve control of the SE area region and US strategic interests, by people who couldn't not care less about human lives and bad regimes, as evident by the fact that they supported (armed, financial support, good diplomatic relations, all the way down to staging coups for them etc) all kinds of bloodthirsty dictatorships in Latin America and elsewhere.

The same people, for example, didn't have much of a bone with Suharto, for example, killing 500.000 to 1.000.000 people around the same time. Actually, they've helped him, and had him in good standing for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Indonesia#An...

As for the human toll in post war vietnam, besides the bad regime, those things happened following a bloody civil war, with people collaborating with this or that side, what did you expect? Hugs and flowers from those who won but had seen relatives, cities etc perish because of the other side (including people collaborating with the enemy)?
Dr. Kuipers was my grad school advisor at the University of Texas. I found his adherence to principles of pacifism and nonviolence, rooted in Quakerism, to be very inspirational.

Certainly, as a graduate student, I would have had an easier time if we could take DARPA money instead of only applying for grants from civilian institutions (NSF, NASA, etc). I don't regret it.

Yes, many (most?) of our technological advances have come from military motivations. But people like Kuipers who take principled positions of nonviolence help create a vision of a society where that's not true any more. We may never get there, but that doesn't matter.

There's a definitely similarity between Kuipers and Richard Stallman in that regard... taking a strong principled position, even if it's not "practical", can be very important. And both of them came out of the MIT AI lab at about the same time :)

Kuipers trivia: he implemented the Common LISP "print" facility's ability to render numbers as Roman numerals, as a joke, and submitted it to Guy Steele, who was working on "Comon LISP: The Language". Steele included it in the book and now it's part of LISP forever.
The author said in the comments section: "honestly, i didn’t come here to follow people. i came here to build an audience"

He also said in the article: "Medium has become overloaded with loud, obnoxious idiots and I am no longer comfortable telling people, ‘Yeah I post on Medium, check me out.’"

To me, this sounds like he is concerned about his personal brand / reputation, which he aggregates with the content of Medium as a whole. As such, I think that lucasnemeth's points are reasonable.
Baikal [1] is another alternative. It works fine for me.

Unfortunately CalDAV is quite an awkward standard for calendars and not supported by everything, so none of these implementations are perfect, but for my purposes it works well and I've found enough things that support it. It also supports CardDAV which can be used for contact syncing.

[1] http://baikal-server.com/
Using their network, you are limited to 8 units per layer it seems.

So, I ported their swiss roll dataset to python and threw together a shallow network trainer with theano:

https://gist.github.com/notmatthancock/68d52af2e8cde7fbff1c9...

Then, I trained a shallow network with 36 hidden units (your deep net has 6 units and 6 layers):

http://i.imgur.com/I0pXaTK.png

edit: I forgot to mention that the shallow network above takes only the two coordinates (x1 and x2) as input features.
Ask HN: Is it actually possible to hide metadata?
user A wants to talk with user B using any available services (fb,twitter,.....)

Is it possible to hide "A wants to talk to B" without exchanging keys (or place to talk, fake account name) before hand
The articles on modern agile seemed very prescriptive. Where I am right now the team does do scrum (yes it has its problems) but the team has figured out how to get it to work for them and so can get on with delivering and over time cutting out the parts of the process that doesn't work. Common sense should prevail when it comes to any software development methodology.

I could be wrong and the practices described in the articles come out of a team working together over a prolonged period of time (based on obie's comment above it looks like these come out of good experience but they should still adapt to the team).
The irrational man is responsible for change in the world, once again.
Agreed. Vim is one of the best investments in learning I've made to date.
Depriving the world's militaries of research brains isn't going to prevent or lessen violence.

It's not going to increase violence either though, and if nothing else, when it comes to war and violence, maintaining the status quo is definitely better than making things worse.