skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good post. I can relate to a lot of it after posting my project here on HN a couple weeks ago. (plus it's also a niche website builder)

You didn't ask for any marketing advise but have you considered targeting Christian (or other) missionaries overseas? I have several friends from the US who have moved to Africa or eastern Europe long-term. They are usually sponsored by a US church and qualify as non-profits; but they also rely on recurring support to pay their bills. I think many of them could use something like this.

Well done.
The Simpler Derivation of Logistic Regression
Any time period is going to be essentially arbitrary... but it seems to me that 20 years like patents, or maybe 30 years is plenty of time for the creator to derive value in the marketplace from their work.

These were never meant to be eternal, for good reason, and constantly extending them to me seems very corrupt... that this is favoring one group's interests over another.
This should be fixed now (11:45 AM EST Wed Sep 14)
Pretty sure that the Ars staffer misunderstood the commenter. He was saying that a huge iMac like that is overkill for that work. Someone's earlier comment about getting the same work done with a Win 95 486 and WordPerfect 5.1 was about equivalent.
"accurate information absorption by the audience"

But I'd argue that we can dissect even further -- in this case, into the process of information absorption. Certainly a crucial part of absorbing information is paying attention in the first place. Or understanding what we're seeing. On both of those counts, pie charts do a pretty quick and easy job for many hypothetical audiences.

Some of the graphs and charts offered up in this article as alternatives to pie charts would, quite frankly, confuse the heck out of a lot of audiences. And if your audience doesn't understand what it's seeing, it's not going to absorb the information. Furthermore, if it has to be told what it's seeing, then it's already in an unreceptive psychological state.

I would not advocate lying to an audience, or grossly misrepresenting data. But I certainly would keep two things in mind: 1) the data-sophistication of my audience, and 2) the attention span of my audience. A pie chart may not be terribly precise in its representation of data, but it's clearly, quickly, and almost universally recognized.

Perhaps there's also room for a compromise in any given presentation: a data overview slide, with simple pie charts and other "30,000-foot" graphs, followed by a more detailed breakdown of key measurements in more precise terms. In this case, the first slide captures attention, and the second slide ensures accurate delivery.
This is great news! Hopefully the final version isn't as ugly as the artist's conception: http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/sls/multimedia/galle...

Kind of reminds me of a rocket used for the Apollo missions (although it's not) with some Space Shuttle SRBs attached to the side. The first version shown in the video actually looks kind of cool -- like something SpaceX would have built. It's a good thing progress in the space industry move at a snail's pace. Our aim is to remain the go-to country for space flight yet the first mission is slated for 2017.

It looks like they're trying to save some money by using advancements from the Space Shuttle and Constellation programs. Always a good thing because NASA projects are notorious for going over their budgets (with good reason).

>>It will use a liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propulsion system

A consequence of using previous propulsion tech is that we're still using dangerous, highly explosive liquid hydrogen and oxygen rockets. I'm still hoping we're able to get higher ISP from hybrid rockets in the near future. Much safer and easier to turn off if there is a catastrophic systems failure on the way up.
Catnaps. I just had a baby, and I've found that taking 10-15 minutes here or there (I set a phone alarm to make sure I wake up) helps me stay alert even though I'm somewhat sleep deprived. Sometimes I don't even fall asleep, but just shutting my eyes and allowing myself to ignore my surroundings does the trick and leaves me feeling refreshed.
I've been watching AeroFS for a few months now, and it is a fascinating product that almost meets my needs. Just a few things keep me from using it, some of which I can't quite put my finger on enough to turn in to real feature requests on UserVoice.

- It crashes sometimes. I think it does this less frequently now, but its favorite time to crash is when I suspend & resume my laptop.

- Synchronization is a difficult problem to solve, and users need to have confidence that the software Does It Right. Somehow Dropbox achieves this, and I can't put my finger on how; I think part of it is the fact that conflicting files are duplicated and clearly marked. I haven't had conflicting syncs yet with AeroFS, so I'm not sure how it handles them, but I also haven't seen documentation on what happens. It's a combination of an algorithmic problem, which you presumably have solved, and a UI problem to demonstrate to the user that their data is safe and correct.

- It doesn't yet support ignores. There's a feature request for this, and I've upvoted it, so hopefully it's just a matter of time. When I'm syncing a source directory, I don't want the built files synced. Yes, there's version control, but it's really convenient to sync portions of my Eclipse workspace so I can transparently work on the same changes on both my laptop and workstation.

- I don't know how it works. There are two pieces of this that are interesting to me: the network topology and the crypto design. One of AeroFS's selling points is that your data is never shipped to the centralized cloud unless you explicitly use AeroFS cloud storage. However, as a privacy-conscious user, I would like to know exactly where my data is going, when, and how it is protected. Some data seems to be going to AeroFS's servers for coordination; what all data is? File lists, or just peer locations & names of libraries? A diagram what network connections are used and where data is shipped would help users such as myself understand where our data go and what the risk points are. Hopefully this can be documented without jeopardizing your special sauce/value-add. For the crypto side, it would be useful to know exactly what crypto algorithms are in use, where, and in what configurations. Some providers claim Great Crypto, and then they're using Blowfish. You've got some of this - your Features page discusses the use of the 2048-bit RSA keys. But how is the "secure channel" established? How are the RSA keys secured against theft (e.g. the Dropbox steal-the-auth-DB hack)? The crypto documentation could be overlaid on the network infrastructure documentation. In short - why should I believe the security claims? With things like this, I think extensive transparency is the best way to engender trust with your users, particularly when your competition is criticized for transparency-related issues (e.g. the encryption "misunderstanding" with Dropbox).

I think AeroFS has a lot of promise, and I want you guys to succeed. We need some good, secure, strongly-privacy-preserving competition in the cloud file sync space.
ANSI colour support in Windows for the Play Framework 2.0 preview
I'd love to target them. Do you know the best way to do so? I have a feeling it's a pretty fragmented market so it could be difficult to get in front of a large group of them in a single publication, website, or conference.
I am in similar situation. I thought there was 30 day money back guarantee on Parallels 7 - anyone has an idea how easy/hard Parallel's return process is?
Some critique:

I tried with a couple lengthier bits of code that JSLint happily eats and I get an "Illegal token" error with no coordinates or anything to help me. Ah well.

Also not very happy with the custom scrolling in the source text area -- my mouse wheel is set up to scroll 6 lines per wheel click. The source text area scrolls approximately 1.5 at a time.
I think you're a bit confused here. It's the height of the capital M, not the width of the lowercase em, that is generally 1em.
Auto Flash Game Site For Sale, More Than 4600 Games Already Installed
I agree with SeoxyS - 14 days is nothing! I'm just now reaching conclusions about my business and it has been a whole year! Granted my business is very different and conclusions to be made vary based on the character and intentions of what you are doing - but I still hold to the logic that 14 days just isn't enough time to draw conclusions.

Further, you could actually put forth why you disagree with him instead of taking his comment and applying an out-of-context switch with the subject. Comments and articles are completely different from a business on scale and intent (seriously, months to think about a comment? However I do re-read my comments to make sure they are sound, so maybe minutes). What I think you meant to say is that writing and sharing thoughts is okay no matter what stage you are at; in that I agree, but I disagree with writing about weak conclusions (weak because 14 days isn't enough time to gather the data and experience necessary to clearly conclude) based on the fact that as an author on the internet, drawing conclusions too soon can actually hurt your business.
When I get such an error I photograph it with my phone.
There was a bit of a "redefinition" when digital typesetting came along. An em used to be an M-width (and only made sense as a width measurement, as it changed drastically depending on the letterface used at a given font size). But, then, there used to more than 72 points to the inch too.
Yeah, I had enable absolute pointing device unchecked. Silly answer to go with my silly question.
I take it back on StackOverflow - I can see they added a StackExchange login... No more google logins for me.
Racker Culture
It's sounds like you've done a bit of homework, as would be expected of someone with your background. However, when selecting a partner, make sure you spend a great deal of time getting to know them. I can't stress that enough.

Also, I'd encourage you to solicit people that have similar interests (possibly expertise in something you wished you knew more about & enjoy), which can potentially turn into your product/business. If you want to spend a significant portion of your life working on something, it might as well be something you enjoy (cause you can grind out a living doing things you don't care about for anyone). When recruiting engineers, let them know what spaces / ideas you are considering. From my experience, passion for a space gets more responses then delineated qualifications.

Best of luck.
I think some of this debate is slightly missing a key point: tables are for showing precise data, but graphics are for showing patterns. If you're expecting your viewer to read accurate values off a chart, you're probably using the wrong tool for the job. If you're trying to use the same chart type to show different kinds of pattern in the same underlying data, you're probably having a "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" problem.

I do agree that pie charts are overused and there is often a better alternative, but do stacked sausage charts really do much better when it comes to showing differences between roughly similar values? Here's an example:

http://imgur.com/zGuwg

Sure, it's obvious which red bars are longest on the left-hand side, because they have a common edge. But in that case, it's not really the length of the bars that the viewer is comparing, it's the position of the right-hand end, just like a simple bar chart.

As soon as you stack thing up, so you're trying to compare sections that don't align at either end such as the green or orange bars here, it is still difficult to see which ones are longer. Something more drastic, such as reversing the order of the bars completely, throws off any comparison, as with the second and fifth lines.

I don't see how a series of sausage charts like this is much better than a series of pie charts if your goal is to allow your viewer to compare the sizes of each category across the series. You need to get the key values onto the same scale to do that effectively, and I would expect a better choice to be something like a multi-bar chart (with the same zero level for each bar, either grouping all categories for each point in the series or isolating each category in a chart of its own) or perhaps some sort of overlapping line chart if the gradients are interesting.
[video] Functional Programming at Facebook
5 Tips to Choosing a Forex Broker
Quick iteration is the goal, but in two weeks you can't possibly gain enough data, experience, and mindshare to properly build a conclusive picture. Sure, iteration means making quick tactical decisions and conclusions, but business is about strategy and that often moves on the scale of months (even in lean startup land). Those that try to make strategic decisions faster than they can figure out what their data and experience means always end up falling over (I've worked for companies that have done this - twice).
Mass Rejection Of AdWords API Developer Tokens
Nope, sharepoint search :D
Hey im the author. Its pretty clear im getting murdered here on how long winded yet incomplete my post is. Next time I'll wait till its done to post :-) and edit a lot more. I lol'd at some of these comments. I certainly don't take myself too seriously but obviously have strong opinions about JS and the direction of harmony. I have used the very hot topic of CS as a hook to talk about something a bit more boring, the standards process and where its taking JS. Thanks so much to those that read the whole thing, I'm sorry it made it to HN before I finished it. Seeing as how I've had all of 5 visitors to my blog I wasn't expecting to get too much visibility to it. It was more a way to organize my thoughts and stop accosting my co-workers at lunch time with my long winded rants. But I am still working on it and will post the other parts and a much shorter min version once its done.
"The Learned Optimism" book is great. I purchased it because somebody here recommended it. I wish I could give copies to all my friends.
Introducing ServerCyde with a (low budget) competition (2nd Prize:steak knives)
Looks really good for alpha. I like the simple layout.
Being able to visualize the location I'm going from and to and the nearby airports is pretty neat. I haven't seen the competition but this is something I'd use when I travel.
sounds like something i could try..thanks!
FaceBook's login hack for people who leave CAPS LOCK on.
Change Back Windows 8 Start Menu Back
HSL color selector using HTML5 and CSS
An example.

This could be any statement evaluating to false.

Coffee script returns the result of the last statement. Javascript don't. So, failing to take this into account produces coffeescript that do not have the same behavior than the original javascript.

This is particularly important for iterators that return false for stopping iteration. Or for DOM event handlers that return false for stopping the propagation of the event.
It's pre-beta.
This is a pretty simple and cursory overview - hardly "ultimate".

Also, having seen some actual creative bookings (not full-on penetrations, either), calling this "hacking" is a stretch too. Google things like "fuel dumping" to start learning about actual airfare hacks.
Mapping an EC2 Instance to a Local Drive on OSX
you have to admit.
I, for one, thought that he was going to argue against the overall hierarchical FS metaphor. Personally, I wonder what things would be like if the OS provided a key-value store (or some such NoSQL-ish API) as a core service instead.
Like this? http://ep.yimg.com/ca/I/bizchair1_2174_1598485773

I've always wondered if these are comfortable or not.
Any chart or graph, no matter how precise or sophisticated, can be used to distort. Oftentimes, people will intentionally bombard their audience with hyper-sophisticated and complex data readouts in order to prove how sophisticated their thinking has been (and, by association, how trustworthy their conclusions must be). Hedge funders have been doing a brilliant job of this for decades now. "Kill 'em with complexity" is a time-honored sales tactic.
Obviously the labels are doing it for themselves, but even their argument that they're doing it for the (very old) artists isn't a good one. The purpose of the copyright was to ultimately create a richer culture, and to do that they needed artists to create works of art, but once they do that, the period of time for which they own the copyright should be optimized for "minimization" not maximization, so the society at large can benefit from them.

Copyiright was designed to ultimately help the society. Helping the artists protect their works is just a step towards that goal, not the goal itself. But sadly the labels are trying to make protecting the works the ultimate and only goal of copyright, because they get to benefit even more than the artists themselves from that.
Financial services trusted most with data security by UK consumers
Have not tried the book (waiting on my copy) but if your city has a refresh meetup - you should start there. This is the local chapter in Chicago http://www.meetup.com/Refresh-Chicago/ - well attended and interesting speakers.
If SpaceX and friends can reliably launch cargo and eventually humans into LEO, why can't NASA focus on what to put into space, rather than how to get there? I'm sure I don't understand the mechanics of it, but wouldn't it be possible to put up a few smaller cargo carriers containing fuel and pieces of a trans-mars ship and assemble it in orbit?
I guess Canonical couldn't find any professional type designers who are also free software martyrs. The solution to this problem should be to improve the free tools, not to ask pros to reduce their productivity.
What? CoffeeScript is similar to python and ruby just like Javascript might be considered more similar to C.
You can try http://elegant.ly/ or design conferences
What's wrong with Enterprise Software?
Losing a Million Dollar Sale - MiraMax Media
Thank you for your reply, that's interesting - I hadn't considered walking on the spot.
Now you have to record/stream while you build this. Looking forward to it!
Interesting trick, but I don't think (could be wrong) that's applicable in this instance. I noticed immediately that this doesn't work in the place where you're most likely to see a resize/dimensions-change event: a tablet or phone. When you switch orientation on either, it just resizes the entire page itself. So it's not super useful in the place that most needs it.

Also, though this is much more subjective, I think that really looks terrible. Too much stuff is moving.
Yes, it comes before a conjunction separating independent clauses.

http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/commas.htm
> "On our example, this doesn’t work because we are going from the United States to England and the English Pound is worth more than the US dollar. Additionally, the Iceland Krona is not worth less than a dollar. However, if we were going the reverse way, this would work."

Not quite. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrage

I think the way you are looking at it could cost you a bit of money if you are not careful.
Hook.io demo: Install node packages anywhere
For what it's worth, Googling ""my parents were missionaries" site:news.ycombinator.com" gets you a starting point or two. ;-)
Your "money guy" is right for being very bottom line focused.

Respect his money: Don't (DON'T!) even think to invest A DIME into logo or any other 'cool' marketing materials that you see big (and not so big) companies have. Invest EVERY minute and some money to FIND OUT what your customers WANT, sell it, if they want to buy it, build it, THEN invest money into marketing that WORKS.
Hosted Continuous Integration for iOS and Mac
I don't know about the person you're replying to, but I'll inject interactive components after page load (blocking them out so as not to cause reflowing, and hiding those blocks via media queries on inapplicable devices). Images, etc. are certainly trickier, I haven't found a good way to do that.
I'm worried they'll build half of this and then cancel it.
The notion that design can be "hacked" is unfathomable to me, really. I can't think of a less hack-oriented profession.
Save or not to save - Compulsive Hoarding
> Where is it recorded when the OS kernel loses access to persistent storage?

When your drive/chipset dies and you reboot, you'll get an error saying that no bootable drive is found. It'll be pretty obvious what happened at that point.
I think that the advertisement incident in the UK a few yeats back was telling. A full page advert with a list of artists that supposedly supported the copyright extension. People noticed that some of the artists on the list weren't even alive, and some artists came out that they were never asked if they supported it or not.
Flightm8 is about 3 years old now and largely unfinished. I suppose the reason I'm asking wether it's a worthwhile endeavour is because I would probably want to start again. I've learnt a lot in 3 years.

I've thought about it a lot today, and I think Google Flights looks like it's on course to offer what Flightm8 would like offer.....

I doubt that's a battle FlightM8 could win. Google has the talent, the reach and most importantly, the data. I have a Dreamhost account a book on "Pro Javascript Techniques" and rent to pay. David and Goliath battles need a killer idea. FlightM8 is just a nice idea.
Now you can build a realtime chat site in 10 min
Maltese Falcon Will SMASH -- DETROIT
"Hacker" has the gone the way of "geek" and "begs the question." Diluted to the point of having no meaning whatsoever. I'm pretty sure that in fewer than 5 years "hacker" will mean what "geek" means today, which is anyone with a cell phone or who has ever played Mario Bros.

I read TechCrunch, I'm a hacker I'm a hacker!

-----

Edit: I'll consolidate my responses into one post to keep the attack surface small and reply from here.

@dsmithn: The word 'hacker' hasn't been redefined. There isn't a governing body of words that decided one day to change what hacker means. It just changed with some people using it differently because they thought it made them sound cooler. Then other people wanted to sound cooler. Now everyone is cooler. At this point auto mechanics are hackers.

@budu: Excellent work, you've proven my point quite nicely. Thank you. And I don't worry about the down-voting. I saved up enough imaginary points so that I don't have to worry about nerd rage. My comment is just off-topic.
If this piece reveals anything about the larger educational picture, perhaps it's that the pendulum is swinging back to more austere forms of upbringing.

It is peculiar, however, that the austerity would be growing out from Positive Psychology, which traditionally was more laid back and unrestricted. This mash-up of seemingly opposite worldviews makes sense if you consider the trend of the last 20 or 30 years to reconcile differences in cultural. I invite you to read David Brook's Bobos in Paradise for an incredibly lucid account of the convergence of Bohemia and Bourgeois values in the last few decades.
It's just as easy once you set it up. What I mean is for most people who buy an iOS device Apple already has their credit card details because of iTunes. All they need to do is type in a password to start making purchases. It is less likely that Google has your credit card info and you will have to set that up when you by an Android device. Apple also accept a wider range of card types. One of the most popular cards in the UK is Maestro (a Mastercard debit card). Google Checkout does not accept it which means fewer people using it.
3 science-based approaches to time travel that aren't crazy
BetterLesson - open sourcing BallBearing (Alpha) JS framework
I'm in DC and there is a Refresh meetup in rockville. I might join.
http://puffer.heroku.com/admin