skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
hm, not quite.

It's done this way because running code to authenticate+authorize the user before serving up an image incurs a much higher performance hit than just shoveling the bits directly off a disk. Especially when those bits can come from a content delivery network.

Facebook handles a ridiculously large number of photos - probably an order of magnitude more than any other site - so this trade off, I would guess, is pretty crucial to keeping the site up.
SpaceX targets Nov. 8 launch for Falcon 9 and Dragon
Hahaha, that's all Amazon suggest so I have no control over that.
"Hackerz" - India's 1st hacking magazine  | Indian Cyber Army
Not Dick: Are there any good managers? 
I've seen tons of posts about bad bosses and what makes them so (including the one on HN today), but are there any good managers out there?

I think we've all worked for a few of the 'Dicks' out there, and its easy to complain and gripe about them. Are there also examples of what makes a great manager? Or even some input from managers themselves?
This is how we do it. http://reinh.com/blog/2009/03/02/a-git-workflow-for-agile-te...
I originally said "is known to" but I couldn't find the citation. Thanks for that.
I wonder if it could be possible to see more and more web apps take advantage of the full standard and state clearly on the front page "this website does not work on any IE version. Please use another browser".

This is indeed a hard choice to do, since it means leaving a lot of potential users out of the plate. Maybe startups can afford such bold moves, I don't know. But I think this could be the only way to force Microsoft change their mentality, eroding their browser market share more and more.
Explosion of health care cost graphs (click link in post for slides)
The last chapter (Advice From An Old Programmer) is very thought-provoking and slightly unnerving for someone who is studying CS
nice app, interesting design too... It would probably be good to have the mouse change to a pointer over books...
Ah, I see. Skimming an article on the double diffuser, it seems to just be a creative interpretation of the rules which allows an extra piece of wing to be attached by some means that the rulebook-writers didn't think of. It's not particularly interesting, since it's based more on legalese than on physics.

Personally I find the most frustrating thing about F1 to be the way they keep inventing new rules in an attempt to make the cars slower. Don't they know that people watch Formula 1 because they want to see fast cars race?
When Dick appears, he is a sign that a company is already trending downhill.

you're wise beyond your years.
I was honestly expecting another quick and dirty instant implementation but this is actually very nicely designed. Wish the book covers would slightly faster though.
> 1. Encourage more people to monitor the "new" page, and

Even though I know what "new" does, I seem to interpret it as "create something new" instead of "view new submissions". Maybe I'm just an odd person but I think changing that to "newest" could make a difference if there are more people like me, especially for new users.
This would work if you could search all of your tweets. I don't think that is currently possible, is it?

It also assumes that twitter is going to be around when you finally need the timestamped hashes, and that you can prove that twitter (or any other service for that matter) can't have back-dated hashes inserted.

Posting to a usenet group, like alt.test, where independent systems store and timestamp the message would be a better idea.
I totally agree. I'm making a spreadsheet of all the change requests.
"Black" isn't. There are very dark browns and blues. Despite what the grandparent posting said, fine painters actually do use black, but not to produce darks (at least not in oils); the most common use for lamp black (the most neutral of the black pigments) is to create the iris colour for blue eyes in oil portraiture. For deep shadows, though, black pigments are very problematic in that it is extremely difficult to control the transition out of darkness.

Because painting is a subtractive medium, one can obtain nearly the same level of darkness using other dark pigments in combination. An "old masters" chiaroscuro typically uses burnt umber plus a warm blue, such as aquamarine, for the great lake of "blackness" from which everything else emerges. Each of those pigments alone prevents the reflection of a rather broad segment of the spectrum, and together they approach true blackness. That, then, allows the artist to manage the transition out of darkness into either a warm or cool tone smoothly by decreasing the amount of the unneeded tone before lightening.

Painters who use the Impressionist pallette will never go anywhere near that level of darkness -- their shadows will generally be just below a mid tone using the main colour of the object, cobalt or aquamarine blue, depending on the warmth or coolness of the main tone, and the complementary colour of the main tone, all in juxtaposition rather than as a mixture. The apparent darkness comes from contrast. The same principle, though, is used to create shadows in classical painting techniques (but with mixture) -- a darker version of the main tone plus the complement and often a touch of blue.

These rules apply to oil painting. Pure pigments in oil are darker out of the tube than you might imagine due to the optical properties of the oil (which is why white paints are sold in huge tubes). In a medium like soft pastels, which doesn't encapsulate the pigment in a continuous film of a binding medium, blacks are used to create the bottom end of the spectrum out of necessity. Even then, though, a pure black is almost never used.
> To get the actual link, you have to dig into the Facebook page source

In some browsers, you can just right-click on the image and select properties to view it's URL.
ah ya beat me to it. double vote for bamf right here.
In the past, I've been working with a manager who shared, more or less, your style. The work environment was less formal, with no cubicles but desks which appeared crammed, but were similarly placed to allow the manager to snoop around with zero effort. Comfortable, but privacy was a no-no.

I felt violated, for lack of a better word, in that environment. The reason was twofold. First, nobody can judge how productively I spend my time on my desk by what I was doing the moment they glanced at my screen. Making such claims is hypocritical, and taking work decisions about me on such claims is unfair. Secondly, not being allowed at least a little bit of privacy from any and all prying eyes communicates lack of trust from my manager's side.

I'm not sure whether I'd call it "bad management" because it might be working for you and your teammates, but it's not working for me.
> The only solution I can think of is having an application server serve the pictures after authenticating the request.

Or, make the URL fbcdn.com/p/timestamp/hash of internal salt + timestamp/unique ID.jpg. If the timestamp isn't from within the past 2 minutes, don't serve the image. Almost every static server offers this as a plugin, and it doesn't need to touch a database. AWS offers something similar as a time-limited "access key".
He does more without a job than most people do with one.
Yes, but in addition they also assume that:
- That the only way you know the photo ID is by having access to the photo.
- If you had access to the photo at some point, you have access to it forever (even if it is revoked later on).

It may be industry wide practice as you have noted but the bottom line is that the privacy settings are not explicitly checked on every photo access. Makes you wonder where else they are using similar logic.
I personally don’t like [git's] index. I feel that git encourages people to check in changesets that contain code which they’ve never tested (or even built) because the index is such a prominent part of git’s workflow.

This doesn't make sense.

Git has the concept of the "index", which is the set of changes to be committed. This can be (and usually is) different from "every modified file in the working directory."

For example: when working on a change that spans multiple files, I frequently work on one file, add it to the index, and continue in that fashion. By the time I'm done the index reflects every file necessary for the [feature|bug fix|whatever] and is easily committed.

The index doesn't encourage commits any more than having modified files in the working directory does.
A cabal of voters could easily be setup on HN. That is problematic.
First, there is the issue of those Windows idioms that you expect on Windows. iTunes and Safari both essentially forgo any pretense of adopting Windows standards and instead keep their own way of doing things. It would be as if Office for Mac didn't use the menu bar on Apple, and instead, simply copied what they did on Windows.

It also doesn't work well with the OS. Things you can quickly and easily do in WMP are painful in iTunes.

I'm sure some people found iTunes a pleasant experience, but most people I know only have it installed because they have an iPod or an iPhone, and are forced to use it.

Basically, it works well enough, but it's not a polished application.
It was quick and dirty and I wished it did more but that's all I could get done for the hackathon. I have plans to add a few more features and making it a bit more social.
http://www.amazon.com/Silent-Vibrating-Personal-Alarm-Shake-...

$30, with a $25 restaurant.com gift card.
Nice to learn some of AWK.

Sorry, Brian, I MUCH prefer ObjectRexx.
> Tab complete does not make using long arguments any easier.

False. See other replies.

And as I said in first post history. I use aliases, they have their place. But, if you're not learning and using the entire Unix toolbox you are severely handicapping yourself.
There was a neat article a while back on building a Starcraft bot using F# for the AI and a C++/C# stack for interfacing with the game at a lower level.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1625939
Well, the original goal was for it to be workouts you do at home. The value proposition is that you can get a gym quality workout with a personal trainer in the comfort of your home without having to pay gym membership fees or for an expensive personal trainer.

That said, we do plan on writing apps for both iOS and Andriod so you can take it with you to the gym if you would like to. It's not JUST body weight exercises though and we have exercises for dumbbells and exercise bands (things people are likely to have at home). And we do plan on adding exercises that incorporate gym or home gym equipment as well.

The advantage over something like p90X or Insanity is that these workouts are customized for you based on your current fitness levels and your fitness goals by an actual personal trainer. Every workout is unique and different so you're not doing the same thing week in and week out. It's not just some generic program that is the same for everyone who is doing it.
I once worked at a company whose culture slogan was "by hackers, for hackers." They're renouned for hiring top-notch programmers, and they really do. Ironically, since hackers don't understand management, they tended to evaluate managers only on their technical skills, not (much) on their people or organizational skills. As an added bonus, the company was in a protected industry and their first product (created in startup mode when they were really small) was a game-changer, so they were wildly successful. So they basically had the attitude "we're really successful, therefore we don't have any big problems or need to make any big changes."

Their second product was a much larger engineering effort than the first, probably 4x as many engineers working on it. I had friends working on it, they had lots of stories about poor management. In the end, it was many years late and over budget, and a year or two after the financial crisis hit, the launch partner pulled out, and the company now had a reputation of not delivering, so nobody else would touch them. (Protected industries are generally conservative, they were lucky to find one customer willing to take a chance.)

tl;dr: good hackers don't know much about management, so when left to choose managers, they're likely to choose bad ones.
Yeah, #startups is the de facto IRC channel for HN.
But people can see your house in the woods. I think it's more like: see that forest out there? In one of those trees, I drilled a hole in the trunk and stuck a rolled-up $100 bill in it. Even though I told you it's out there, good luck finding it, unless I tell you which tree.
He didn't cover defining first-class functions that I could see in a quick check, didn't cover generators, and I think most disappointingly, didn't cover __metaclass__. That's some critical stuff for Python programming right there, everybody needs __metaclass__.

Ahem.

You have to pick what to cover. For a beginning Python book, I'm underwhelmed by the need to drag an entirely new and foreign(-to-Python) paradigm into the beginning Python. I say this as someone who does a lot of functional programming, someone who is using a lot of lambda, filter, map, and reduce is someone who is stubbornly refusing to program with the native idioms, which are named functions (defined inline is fine), list comprehension or loop, list comprehension or loop, and loop respectively. It is not that enormous a gain, and will lose from Python fighting you all the way. (Plus you'll probably miss some opportunities to use generators, overload the special methods, and the other things you can do with native idioms, if you're trying to program Haskell in Python.)
How Toy Story can be explained by the Psychology of Slavery
I'll Tell You What is Causing Pain for Almost Everyone in the Western World
Good point. Really, looking at the list of the newest submissions should be exciting, but most people seem to see it as a chore.

I'd do A/B testing by changing it to "Hot Fresh Exciting New Links!" and see how many people now click on it.
I think compelling user interfaces will be how a lot of new startups differentiate themselves. I came to this realization after seeing hipmunk. From a tech standpoint, there wasn't anything new. Just api calls. But the way the info was displayed was novel and intuitive. Same can be said for this app.

Now I'm trying to teach myself how to "do UI". All that said, so...how do you make the book titles smoothly re-arrange? Not sure how to do this.
It's actually really annoying when someone can just walk up behind you and see what you're doing and interrupt. It's probably MORE annoying when this happens when you are trying to do work, vs. farmville or whatever you suspect they are doing.

Most people given the choice do not want to look at a wall
or the person across the pod from them. They either want to be able to look out a window, or into an open room.
Do Big Companies Really Kill Startups?
Somewhere I read an article about how easy it is to create your own view engine for MVC. Given F#'s facility with DSLs, it seems it wouldn't be too infeasible to make an F# view engine too.
This entire article is ridiculous. Even if were true, it wouldn't be interesting as very few smartphone users know what OS kernel their phones run, and fewer still care.

And even as a developer you won't get very far trying to develop applications for iOS, Android or RIM's QNX based devices using the original Unix API.

It would be much truer to say that the rise of smartphones represents the "revenge" of ARM over Intel.
I can't speak for leftcoaster, but what drives me crazy about the upgrade process is this: http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA041/Upgrading+JI...

I'm just upgrading from 4.0 to 4.1, I shouldn't need to create a new installation, a whole new database, re-download, install, and configure every plugin I use, disable e-mail access, etc...

I want to be able to run an upgrade script, or drop in a new war and when it starts up it asks if I want to upgrade things. Or an inline upgrade. Look at Wordpress, Gallery, MS Office, any OS, etc... for examples.

My startup uses Crowd, Jira, and Confluence. However, due to the complexity and risk (we've had issues crop up in the past) of upgrading, we tend to run several versions behind, waiting until there's some "must have" new feature or improvement.

And while we do use Crowd (and while I generally really like Atlassian products) the Crowd LDAP support is really lacking, and the complexity of hooking Jira/Confluence into Crowd is a pain (no write support for Fedora 389?). It should be a simple flag, maybe even changable from the admin. Not a bunch of hacking in .properties, .xml, and libs.
I don't disagree. But that very lack of restriction on developers is what allows Amazon to set up their own separate app store and bypass the perceived deficiencies of the Market. That's why I think this is a positive sign. And if you don't like it, you're free to try to do better; I can't say that about iOS.
QuickSand jquery plugin. I used to be a Flex guy and Flex has been doing this for years now. I've only recently seen it on javascript through QuickSand.
Neil Patel on Mixergy
Unless I rent a bloodhound for an afternoon for $50...
Humour from Plan 9 Space
It's not really "security by obscurity", because the security mechanism is known to all. There's an authentication token that controls access to the image.

There are only two unusual factors. The token is contained in the URL instead of a cookie (which actually reduces the obscurity, but has no other effect). Also, the token is per-resource as opposed to per-user (which has both advantages and disadvantages).
> It's a bit like a Catholic doing an AMA and then not answering the questions about child abuse, homosexuality and bloodshed and ridiculous things in the bible.

Weird, I just read one about an Atheist -> Catholic conversion, and he side-stepped those issues as well. (And I say 'as well', I mean 'also', because he didn't do as good of a job as the Microsoft rep did.)
To IPO or not to IPO (or the IPO market is actually pretty good)
Hi - looks awesome. Looked through your profile to contact you to ask some questions and found this link - "http://hnofficehours.com/profile/wushupork/ This doesn't seem to work. Is there another way to contact you?
The four stages of (functional) programming
The idea of sentient toys becomes horrifying in all sorts of ways if you take it seriously. How many of your once-loved childhood toys have now been sealed in cold dark boxes for years? How many have been ripped to pieces or discarded in garbage dumps?

On the other hand, another thing that bugs me about many American writers about slavery is that they only consider it in the context of 19th-century America, rather than as something that occurred in nearly all parts of the world for nearly all of history.
Do yourself a favor: slow down & put some thought into naming things. Future-you will reap the benefits.

Do yourself a bigger favor: Go back and re-read all 4 paragraphs in the section "Naming Things". This is solid gold and one of the most overlooked aspects of building good code.

I have slowed down many times and named things (variables, function names, labels, etc.) exactly the way I wanted. Then came back 2 days later, unable to understand what I had just written. Because the names were still not good enough.

Naming things can be an iterative process. And it's not a waste of time. Coming up with just the right name is hard, but it really makes you think about what you're doing, how you're doing it, and why. These are the things we should be spending time on.

This reminds me of Harry Beckwith, the marketing consultant from the east coast who called on clients in California. On the plane trip home, he worked on coming up with just the right name for his client. Invariably, he came up with the perfect name over Lake Tahoe. The next day, he reviewed this name and realized that it was a good first try, but still not right. He came up with the term "Lake Tahoe name" to remind himself that he still wasn't done.

Don't leave Lake Tahoe names in your code. You're not done yet.

[Harry Beckwith reference: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/What-Clients-Love/Harry-Bec...]
Obviously you don't know me, but the implication that I'm not a "good" programmer because I like some of the features that an issue/task tracker provides over a text file is silly. Jira + Mylyn + Eclipse makes identifying which commits were related to what task just a few clicks away. Likewise I can open a ticket and Eclipse automatically opens all the files I was working with last time I worked on that ticket. If one of my friends wants to help out, I can just assign him a few tickets, and he gets the same benefits, plus I can know what he's working on ATM and what's been completed. Handling customer/client issues in a trackable public way is great, and easy release notes with links to the tickets are way better than cutting/pasting some text todo list.
I'd love to hear what it is you don't like about Tropo's API.

Also, what IM issues did you have? IMified's tech is what's driving the Tropo IM integration, and I'm one of the IMified founders, so I can probably help you with you with that.
twitter @pekpongpaet
If you'd like to have more influence over Congress, here are some suggestions:

1. Writing paper letters is great, but they take a long time to arrive, and many of them spend time in decontamination, etc., because of the various anthrax scares. Phone calls seem to work reasonably well, and they get there immediately.

2. Get a smart phone app for calling your Senators and Representatives, and for tracking legislation. On Android, I'm extremely fond of "Congress" from Sunlight Labs (which is apparently available as "Real-Time Congress" on the iPhone). Using this, you can make phone calls, track legislation, find related news stories, and so on. The current bill, for example, is apparently "S. 3804".

3. Before talking to your Senators' or Representatives' offices, write down some notes about what you want to say. Make sure you include the bill number, your background/job title (if it's relevant), where you live, and what you think they should do: vote for it, vote against it, etc.

4. Be polite.

I'm told that if you're _really_ serious, the next steps are figuring out how to reach the specific staffers who handle the issues you care about, and to start building networks in your home state. Organize 20 or 30 like-minded hackers, and you, too, can flood your Congresspeople with intelligent calls, ask to meet with them when they're in town, and so on.

Any other suggestions?
> Of course I can always ask on the web, but having to break off from coding, pose a question, and then wait for it

I've been programming professionally for almost 20 years. What you described right there is the fundamental skill/activity I have performed. Whether waiting for a spec, or decision if this feature is going in, or most commonly like your self looking for answer to some problem I don't get.

Good programmers either know everything (ha) or know how to learn/find the answer quickly. It's a great skill to start honing now.
I don't know that full rudder deflection is really a corner case! In fact, the roll orientation of a plane shouldn't affect the effacacy of the rudder so long as the plane isn't in a slip or spin. The whole purpose of a rudder is to correct for a difference in lift between the wings in a bank. If there is no bank, and therefore no difference, the rudder should cause one.
... and I'm asking him to explicitly state the value proposition. I'm not trying to insult or antyhing.
Another nice idea.
The difference is that keys and passwords are managed in a more careful way (think encrypted key stores), whereas URLs are not handled with the same care.

Apart from that, I agree with you.