skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Neat idea...but what's up with your age rating?

You must be at least 17 years old to download this application
* Frequent/Intense Mature/Suggestive Themes
* Frequent/Intense Simulated Gambling
* Frequent/Intense Cartoon or Fantasy Violence
* Frequent/Intense Alcohol, Tobacco, or Drug Use or References
* Frequent/Intense Profanity or Crude Humor
* Frequent/Intense Sexual Content or Nudity
* Frequent/Intense Horror/Fear Themes
* Frequent/Intense Realistic Violence
And here's the photo DJN is talking about.

http://wpe.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/0...

I agree, nice photo.
I don't see why taking a half-year off would derail your career in any significant way, if you are at all employable.

But as I said: I doubt you'd really have to leave your job in order to take 6 months off (without pay), if you asked your HR department and explained the circumstances.
Also, anyone behind a firewall at work/school/etc. that blocks Facebook.
This is simply not true. Regardless of how, say Microsoft, uses or doesn't use its patents, they account for a substantial percentage of its value on the books. If the accountants suddenly had to revalue them to $0, it would unquestionably have a big impact on the share price.
Well, I think your Scala concern is somewhat valid, I'd say that anyone who has a lot of programming experience and knows java well can be productive in Scala with minimal learning.

However, it's less likely you could find a junior programmer or beginner to jump right into scala and 'get it'.

Keep in mind, if you go with RoR, you'll have no shortage of developers, but if you're project may encounter issues with scaling. Twitter has documented it's switch from ruby to scala for it's back end quite extensively, may be worth looking into.
I understand that 50%+1 is enough to rule, but is there no value in building consensus? Or at least having a civil debate among sensible people?

Obama's presidency suggests that consensus is not as valuable as one might hope, but I've had quite constructive arguments with people from different political backgrounds here in the Netherlands - which did not end with either side being convinced, but did end up with both sides (or at least me) smarter than before.
That looks fantastic. The current situation with climbing guidebooks varies between out-of-date, having to buy a new guidebook for each area you climb in, and passing around photocopied informal guides. I know this isn't meant to be a full guidebook, but it looks like it could evolve into one.

Some things that I don't see right off, but would love to have:

- Photos of cliff faces, possibly with route overlays.

- GPS integration.

- User submitted photos, reviews, tips.

- User submitted routes.
Seriously? This is your argument? Comparing software patents to slavery trivializes the suffering and evils of slavery.
While I think it is great to put together information like this and I look forward to it becoming more useful as it is expanded, these wiki pages are currently woefully short and contain generalizations that could do more harm than good.

Some examples:

- Only the Code Tells the Truth: "Remember that useful code is used much longer than ever intended."

The author was trying to make the point that you should name variables, methods, etc. well and write code that is not too spaghetti-like, such that those reading your code will easily make sense of it. This statement doesn't convey that.

- Speed Kills: "Professionals do not write bad code — ever."

The point that the author is trying to make is that you should take your time with coding. But professionals do make mistakes, including writing bad code, and they learn from them.

- The Golden Rule of API Design: "That's where the Golden Rule of API Design fits in: It's not enough to write tests for an API you develop; you have to write unit tests for code that uses your API. When you do, you learn first-hand the hurdles that your users will have to overcome when they try to test their code independently."

The point the author is trying to make is that you should use the API you are writing. That is not what is necessarily conveyed.

- Write Tests for People: "It is also a good idea to test your tests."

What this means is tweaking the test/etc. so it fails under each circumstance that it is supposed to test, as much as that is feasible to do. But it sounds like the author is saying to write tests for your tests... Noooooooo! Don't do that, unless absolutely necessary, or an infinite loop of writing tests for tests awaits.

There are a number of other generalizations in them, but basically- there is good intent there, but it is way too early to be looking to these for guidance. Please contribute to them, though.
And perhaps the main reason why they are so successful.

People post with their real names instead of arcane nicknames from the 90ies.

With all the psychological and social results that follow.
'Social Network' Goes to Harvard
The title is misleading. It is not node.js that disappoints you.
++ to you for the self-awareness. Personally I saw how libertarian arguments were just so fun to make and just so unworkable in any real world situation and skipped the whole trap, stayed a democrat. But I've made my own meta contrarian points (trying to tell my liberal friends that the iraq war was a good idea) and almost always been borne out wrong by reality.

Turns out if your motivations veers from "truth" to "it feels good to make this argument", you're gonna steer yourself wrong.
Everyone in this sub-thread is right, including you. I've done RNAV and CAT I ILS in a C172(albeit no all-glass cockpit) with no interference from my iPhone(my instructor's phone was also on). I do agree that getting that many people people to turn off their phones(and complying) especially at a critical time would be rather difficult.
A good choice for MS as long as they don't try to influence an "improvement" of WP to .NET.
How China’s Great Firewall Can Make Us More Productive
I don't think a philosophy of "I'm going to force people to use the proprietary, closed, run-by-a-weird-company solution instead of the existing proven free & open solutions, because it's slightly more convenient for me" is going to be very well-received. Nor should it be.
The inconvenience of finding/creating a Facebook account to use in joining Quora is, imo, completely worth the value offered by Quora. You have to choose your battles. At a certain point I would rather have access than have my way.
[thing] = stuff

also works and is more readable IMHO.
Because packing multiple values on the right hand side always creates a tuple, and because the most common use of the feature – multiple assignment – deals with tuples, the “sequence unpacking” feature of Python is often called “tuple unpacking” instead, even by people who understand that any sequence can be unpacked.
Baseline would be the test that you performed prior to the flight.

Take 100 pilots. Test them all right before flying. Instruct 50 to nap during the flight. Instruct 50 not to. Compare each individual's response time after the flight to their response time before the flight. Aggregate by group. Perform a t-test (or another appropriate test) asking whether or not the difference (after minus before) is the same in both groups, or if one group performs better.
This ie exactly what I do each time... look at a question then think, hmm I wonder whats popular on Quora right night but the homepage is totally locked down...
Apple makes you rate anything that has direct access to the Internet as 17+. Any web browser apps on the store will have a similar rating.
I totally agree. From the one-off-not-quite-compatible license to no marketing from Lucent to no real niche to lets try Limbo, Plan 9 never got a firm base with marketing.
Address Validation Using the Google Maps API: A better way to enter addresses?
I really prefer Chapra's due to the cleanliness of the design and clarity of results.
Will it always do that? Are there any implicit allowances? Will there be in the future? For what's true now, I could look it up. But I'd rather not. For what will be in the future, I have no idea. The simplest thing for me to do is use my Facebook account for Facebook only.
Well, for one thing, this becomes a bigger and bigger problem:
http://www.xkcd.com/792/

Yes, it's a ridiculous example, but the vast majority of end users keep the same username and password for all of their online services. Obtain one U/P pair and you could conceivably access their identity anywhere. A centralized, specialized authentication provider could maintain multiple levels of authentication depending on what the service demanded. Perhaps your favorite news aggregator only required that you be authenticated with a username and password, but your bank could be using the same authentication service and demand a physical token or one-time password to continue to the service.

The idea is to maintain the convenience we already demand and practice in a manner which is orders of magnitude more secure.
I'd put more money on enough people finally paying enough attention to DragonFlyBSD for it to really gain traction.

Check out the blurb on their main page (http://www.dragonflybsd.org/):

The DragonFly project's ultimate goal is to provide native clustering support in the kernel. This involves the creation of a sophisticated cache management framework for filesystem namespaces, file spaces, and VM spaces, which allows heavily interactive programs to run across multiple machines with cache coherency fully guaranteed in all respects. This also involves being able to chop up resources, including the cpu by way of a controlled VM context, for safe assignment to unsecured third-party clusters over the internet (though the security of such clusters itself might be in doubt, the first and most important thing is for systems donating resources to not be made vulnerable through their donation).

If anyone truly "gets" cloud computing, it's these guys. And they have the advantage of not being quite as big of a jump from existing systems as Plan 9 is.
Google-Caja: source-to-source translator for securing Javascript-based content
The Social Media Words & Phrases Most Retweeted
http://www.lengthenmyurl.com/urls/c8b23684df9a50a093cc1baa53...

So basically, it's a URL obfuscator?
I thought this would get the original address of a shortened URL. That would actually be useful.
And then his plans switched to GNU/Linux, which had much more success. What's the point of talking about this?
I've been a Plan9 user/dev since 2000. Have been to two of the IWP9 conferences - sadly I won't be going to Seattle for the 5th unless I score some big cash in the next few weeks - http://iwp9.quanstro.net/

* Licensing - Plan9 wasn't open when open was the in thing.

* No web browser - just as the web became a big thing, no web browser is a deathtrap.

* The gap is too great a leap - until the recent LinuxEMU almost NONE of your fave apps were available - unless you really like cmd line tools (I do :)

* Hard to justify in your organisation - when you're one of only 50 people in the world that know how to use an OS, making it part of your infrastructure is a huge risk.

That said, to suggest it is a failure is erroneous. We have at least one successful company using Plan9 in their hardware - Coraid. They have the commitment, income and a few of those 50 people to make it work for them. IBM also use it on Blue Gene and other super computers, as do Sandia National Labs, LANL and others around the world. It was also used at the Sydney Olympics to control the stadium lighting and Lucent use it in their cell phone masts in Real Time mode.

Come and chat to people in irc://irc.freenode.org/#plan9

Oh - there's also a fantastic port of many of the tools into Linux / BSD. http://swtch.com/plan9port
I use them every day - Venti is particularly useful
In my (admittedly terse) response I was trying to say that medical care, or perhaps more appropriately health care, should include preventive care, such as obesity reduction. I suspect that health-related death has a much greater influence on life expectancy than accidents or crime, even if the US homicide rate is 8.7 per 100000, but would accept compelling evidence to the contrary.
Beyond god and atheism: Why I am a 'possibilian'
I would go further and say that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" is misleading at best, just plain wrong at worst. Its an alluring concept that is unsupported by science.
> Your comment is interesting at a number of levels. And by interesting, I mean that I can hardly fathom you wrote it

I imagine a great many people will be "interested" in your response, then.

And really, you choose to be uncivil over a name? Arguing about names is one thing; insulting your opponent because he uses a different name than you do is just childish.

Anyway, since I can't seem to resist trollbait:

> because you called it "tuple unpacking".

It surprises you that historical terminology persists even a decade after limitations have been removed?

> Furthermore, because in functional languages where this feature comes from

Algol 60 had this feature under the name of "multiple assignment" I'll bet long before LISP had "destructuring-bind". This feature did not originate in functional languages.

> That's what the "tuple" is unpacked into, it makes no sense that the name of the pattern would come from there.

Prior to Python 1.5, the expression being unpacked had to be a tuple; now it does not. The name is derived from the original functionality. If you'd spent your effort referring to the Python Language Reference instead of telling the world how you can't fathom someone would use a different name than you would for this sort of assignment, you'd know this :)

> The only other thing frequently unpacked is a list, and Python's tuples are immutable lists

Python's tuples are not immutable lists. See http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-March/03396... for Guido's own words saying it.

> edit: fucking hell, yc's comment format sucks donkey balls.

You could have saved yourself a lot of trouble and others (like myself) a lot of annoyance by simply not commenting.
lately I've been annoyed by how Google's feeds often use their own feedproxy, so when I copy the link from within Reader, I end up with a link my friend can't use. (They never work for him.) And most of them have a forever-long url that they expand to, also. Some way to convert the url quickly and easily to it's final form, stripped of all the BS, would be welcome.

Sadly, this service isn't that.
Post it here! Or someplace we can access, if it's useful.
Unpacking applies to iterables. That seems obvious and easy, but the feature is commonly called "tuple unpacking" in the Python world despite the fact that more than tuples can be unpacked. I resolve the apparent conflict by thinking of the term as referring to the most common form of the literal on the left side of the statement, the same syntax as a tuple. If that's not the actual origin, fine, you win the pissing match. But where the name came from has zero bearing on the actual behavior of the language feature, and the point remains that the language feature is simple, consistent, and basic enough that if you don't understand it when you see it, you need to learn the language better.

The only other thing frequently unpacked is a list

Which isn't a tuple. You're the one trying to be pedantic, but you want to ding me for making this distinction?

it does not stretch the imagination that a read-only feature of tuples would work on their mutable cousin as well.

I agree, it doesn't. I don't see how it stretches the imagination that it works on general iterables, either.
Microsoft has been very supportive of the PHP community, and has worked to ensure PHP runs well on Windows. While they have .NET, they do a lot to make PHP apart of their architecture. This is, of course, a smart business move.
Want Twitter to Help You Find More Followers? Pay Up For a “Promoted Account”
Life may be complicated, but the antitrust laws are very simple. Competitors may not collude. Ever. Even if some random blogger whines about it.
Similar situation to why weren't other featureful alternative OSs more popular? Like BeOS? Imagine how different today's world would be if Apple had bought BeOS instead of NeXTSTEP (which included Steve Jobs)? Often it's some large corporation's decisions that dictate what technology gets adopted, what fails.
It's not the Twitter data I care about, or what happens to the Twitter data. It's not even the difficulty of creating a throwaway Twitter account. I just personally prefer to keep all of my accounts segregated from each other, each for their own assigned purpose, is all.
On a somewhat related note:

http://www.urlshorteningservicefortwitter.com/
I like his take on this. I normally describe myself as an atheist but only because I don't believe that any of the religions I've studied are true. But I am open to other possibilities and I think this guy describes that well.
Yep you're right. Sorry only had a really quick look at the Roundcube page.
was reminded of something on a similar note, shadyurl (http://shadyurl.com). "don't just shorten your url, make it suspicious and frightening..."

it generates similarly ridiculous urls like:

http://5z8.info/michaelangelo-virus_l6h3k_openme.exe

and this project compresses files by making them much, much bigger:

http://tac-compression.com/
this is the thing about monopoly - the only recourse one has against it is to whine.
I think that http://hugeurl.com/ probably has first dibs on this joke by a couple of years.
Highlights of the First Week
I would like to add my own little anecdote. I first started to suspect that the iPad [1] might substantially change how we use and perceive computers after my sister told me that instead of magazines the hairdresser recently offered her an iPad. This is not some trendy big-town hairdresser [2], this happened in a small town in Germany. My sister loved being able to check Facebook [3] while her hair were cut.

There is just something different about the iPad [1], it has qualities which make it ideal for certain uses, uses for which laptops or netbooks are just not right.

[1] It’s just the iPad now but I’m sure there will be many similar devices in the future.

[2] Ok, maybe somewhat trendy: http://www.projecth.net/

[3] The privacy implications make me cringe. I suspect that many customers forget to log out, but that’s just a software problem and doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.
Plus, we offer EVERY customer 15 days free.
First improvement of fundamental algorithm in 10 years
Then it should make a method which returns its known, sole entry. Returning a list of entries from a widget which will always contain only one entry is the logical equivalent to converting a function return value to a string and then expecting the client to convert it back from a string. That is to say, it's necessary in a general case (e.g., a Widget super class) but should not be exposed that way in some specific cases (e.g., your subclass wherein you know there will always be one entry).

In reality, you shouldn't be mucking with the entries of a widget at all; you should tell the widget what to do and it should adjust its entries as necessary). Demeter's law and all.
Really the best solution for this is to provide as many options as possible. You should develop your authentication services in a way that allows OAuth to be used just as easily as a "custom login". In addition to that, anyone who says that having "your own" login isnot worth the time to develop it is just plain silly. It takes almost no time to develop and anyone who has been in the web business for longer than 1 website knows this. As a startup I want to make sure that I am not alienating any user from my service.

On that note, It is important to realize that certain sites or services on the web require some sort of social graph integration that require a login with a social networking account. In cases like this, you are developing an app for a user base that is not on FB or Twitter and then (purposely) alienating the rest.
> Am I expecting too much from Linux

Yes. I know people won't like me saying this, but the number of local (user->root or user->kernel) exploits on Linux is staggering. And, given Linus et al.'s policy of silently fixing bugs, probably larger than previously thought.
Excellent point. It's like when I was selling education software to large schools. That startup never really succeeded, but they were more receptive to a $2,000 ticket than a $500 ticket. And even $2k was seen as cheap.
We also commonly use tuples as light-weight types (a kind of heterogeneous collection).
It always scares me when I go to 'log in with twitter' and it tells me "$APP wants permission to ... update your feed." I always hit DENY and forget the service if that happens.

Maybe I'm being harsh, and the app doesn't actually want to tweet in my name, but twitter doesn't allow it to request read-only access. Still, the permissions as displayed are clearly not what I want to grant, and I don't get to veto only the update ability.

I would rather not use a service than offer it the possibility of spamming in my name, and I have made that choice a few times now.
I deleted Gourmet Live as soon as I saw it requires you to cough up Facebook or Twitter logins to use fully. I have both but don't trust Gourmet to not spam my friends. Facebook is especially hostile to privacy and I will never use Connect.
Microsoft has been doing this for some time. Outsourcing and linking to services that people are using. Windows Live is integrated into a LOT of services. It's actually pretty nice. They plug into these systems that already exist, and leverage them for their own customers.

It's really smart.
This is exactly why I wouldn't join your site. I don't want you crawling my list of friends, likes/dislikes, etc... to determine if I should be able to buy a T-Shirt (or whatever product it is that you sell).

With that said, my Facebook account probably wouldn't pass your test as I recently removed all my pictures, and removed all my likes disklikes, and most of my "friends". And have virtually no activity on it.
That is a pretty common problem in machine learning. There are tons of solutions, but they are usually classifier specific. For example, if using a decision tree, one can take test data and determine for each leaf node in the tree what fraction of instances are classified correctly. For leaf nodes with accuracy below X, change the output of that node to "give up".
It's only a problem if the plane doesn't fail.

However, if it fails with those 500 then that's all you need to know to say "phones can down the plane". If you need more detail you can keep researching.
>> I wrote at home, in the mornings, in three separate, highly focused 90 minute sessions. By the time I finished the last one, I was usually exhausted — physically, mentally and emotionally. I ate lunch and then took a 20 to 30 minute nap on a Barcalounger chair, which I bought just for that purpose.

>> When I awoke, I felt incredibly rejuvenated. Where I might otherwise have dragged myself through the afternoon, I was able to focus effectively on work other than writing until 7 pm or so, without feeling fatigued.

I actually work on a very similar system except it is 2 3x45 minute sessions instead of 3 90-minute sessions. Like the author though, I find I can't do anymore programming after 4.5 hours of productive work but after taking a nap , I have lots of energy to do other activities that interest me.
If facebook deletes your account then you run the risk of losing your account on other sties. I don't sign-up using facebook and so our site will have the option to use Facebook but won't require it.
I'll never require it, but clients want it. Demand it. Even if they can't articulate why. We can strongly disrecommend it as a strategy and advise them to why but I'm not walking away from business right now. Because if we refuse to do it, someone else will do so gladly. At least we've tried to educate them as to why it's a bad idea, and maybe some day they'll come back and ask us to remove it.
Very C-like, I'd wager.
PHP needs to die. What will replace it?