skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I tend to replace them with assertions that blow up the tests. I never leave a compile error.

Usual format:

Assert.Panic("not finished");
> "To start, home screen one is the far left, not the center."

That's a little disappointing. That can leave you up to 6 swipes away from the screen you're trying to get to. As a user who shortcuts everything on one of the screens I would find this annoying. Very minor though in the light of everything else, just a surprising decision.
HELLO! I recently signed up for your service, tested it out a bit, and really wanted to give you $20 for a year's plan, but was dissuaded by the fact that there are no blog entries since November 25th, and by the fact that indexing of PDFs, a feature request which was made about a year ago in one of your polls, is still not done. Can you tell me the status of the PDF indexing, and/or about the general maintenance and updates that are going on behind the scenes? I like your service a bit more than Pinboard, despite their additional features, and I would still like to commit to yours, in the form of a paying customer, but I first want to know that it hasn't been abandoned, or at least that it's not totally on autopilot. Thanks in advance for a detailed reply.

P.S. I really hate to point this out, but $30 per month does not inspire confidence. How do you handle backups, and switching over to another machine if the main one should fail (as well as other such items, which normally incur an extra cost in this kind of setup)?
Yep. All of what you said also applies to ActionScript (and haxe with an AS or JS target) though not many Flash developers pay attention to that.

My code in these languages has evolved over the past few years from a pretty standard serial C style pattern to one that makes use of "blocks", timers, callback functors, continuations, lazy evaluations, etc because the perceived performance in these environments is many times greater once you embrace this style.

The downside is, you have to be really careful to structure your code to make it understandable by others when you do things this way... even when you do a good job, it can be much harder for other developers to really grok your code than it would if you used a more traditional procedural/OO style because of the non-linearity of it.
Lots of people say "read this", "read that", "following this technique". That's just attaching yourself to the problem in a stronger way.

I say take a holiday somewhere nice and peaceful without a computer or book in sight. Just sit and think. Let the noise in the mind pass.
It does seem to highlight digital stuff on the homepage. But if I look at any particular product page, then I see new related category links on the top. Those might help your business.
Most successful YC companies, for instance, cannot simply shut down for the entire month of August. In others, teams are so tightly coupled that the business wants vacations as synchronized as possible. It all depends.

We're certainly in the latter category, so this is an important distinction. I do think groups in product organizations have this freedom where operational groups don't, though something similar may be possible there.

But remember the iron law of supply and demand. If a company provides a benefit (say, "months of paid vacation any time of the year on no notice"), and the market values that benefit, candidates will factor that into their compensation negotiation and the salary the company needs to pay for a given level of quality will decrease. In other words: you're paying for the vacation policy one way or the other.

I don't really think that talent is best thought of as an efficient market. People are empirically quite limited in their ability to perceive ahead of time the situations in which they will be the happiest or most productive, and salaries seem to be primarily determined by societal norms.

For us, the decision mostly hinges upon whether or not our employees will actually be happier, more creative, and ultimately more productive under the new model. The policy might sway a few candidates that would otherwise look elsewhere, and it might retain several candidates confronted with lucrative alternative offers, but ultimately it's how it will effect the team's spirit that really matters.
Maybe it'll hit the Humble Bundle next time around.

I hope so for them, but you realize the HIB is basically the lottery of indie games? A tiny fraction of all indie games get on it, so the chance of each individual game is minuscule.
Same as in the article. The firm themselves chose to give away a pirated version. I am certainly not trying to claim that all piracy is good - only that some who embrace it on themselves do benefit.
Yes, we do need to mention it, since a lot of HN users have deep, deep biases against the idea that anything good happens on reddit :)
(87 unread) - mvarkbari - Yahoo Mail
Aren't you competing with Gravatar, which is free and fairly popular?
It's tempting to say this to avoid getting your hopes up, but there has been solid concrete progress in fusion technology over the last decade. Getting net positive fusion to occur on Earth is an _incredibly_ difficult technical challenge. It's like climbing a scientific mountain, and right now we are a few hundred meters from the top with a few more obstacles to go. So saying you won't believe it until we reach the summit discredits all the progress we have made to date.

This technology is not a matter of 'is it possible?' but 'is it technically feasible?' And the scientific community has been chipping away at the latter for a long time.
How does the government decide what to tax if the government currency is not used for transactions, and paid full salary with btc but at least minimum wage in cash?
So are you saying that if we did the same analysis across Africa, you'd find the same markers throughout the populations in "near-perfect correspondence" for people self-identifying racially as African?

Or is this specific to the populations you studied in the United States?
That's much better. But they're still writing programs in 250-300 lines of code using fancy libraries in a higher-level language that would take around 100 lines of simple and direct C code.
Thanks. I didn't know idlewords was banned & was assuming he'd be by to answer.
> If you're using a car it's taken for granted that you learn how this thing works.

Only to a point. I own a car and am perfectly competent to use it, but I have only the vaguest of understanding as to what things like spark plugs and catalytic converters do. I know what a manifold is in mathematics, and I suppose it's a bit similar in a car engine. I deem myself knowledgeable to open the bonnet and add windshield wiper fluid when that's low, but anything more complicated I'll take to a mechanic.

> If you're using it without learning how it works, it's your own fault, if you have an accident.

It's my fault if I drive without, say, learning how to operate the brake pedal, or learning how to turn on the turn signal. But if the accident is due to something wrong with the internals that I know very little about? I don't think any reasonable person believes that getting licensed to drive should require one to have the knowledge of an automobile mechanic.
some related links

https://lasers.llnl.gov/

https://life.llnl.gov/
> Vim is better designed than Emacs for editing.

For you. Not for everyone.
Hello! The service hasn't been abandoned, but feature development has slowed down a bit, sadly, hence PDF indexing taking so long. Apart from that, though, everything is working perfectly, and we do change some small things from time to time or upgrade/maintain components. Downtime should be excellent, though, we've had minimal downtime for the past year.

Right now, everything is served from a single server, which is why we get hit by some datacenter maintenance from time to time. Backups are made daily as well as multiple times a week, so that shouldn't be a concern... Let me know if you have any other questions!
"Failing fast" and "10,000 hours to expert" are two entirely different kinds of learning. "Failing fast" is a lean startup idea where you are trying to learn, as quickly as possible, whether you have a viable product. You do the least you can do to determine this. After you have learned this one thing, if you find that no one is interested in your product, you are done. Move on to the next idea.

"10,000 hours to expert" is a different idea. Here, the idea is that to become an expert in a specific skill, you have to put in 10,000 hours of 'deliberate' practice.

These are two different kinds of learning. The '10,000' hours approach is not the kind of learning you need or want to do to determine the validity of one business idea. In this case, time invested is not necessarily correlated with learning.
Hmmm... I wouldn't leave medicine for "service work" because it doesn't scale and it leaves you open when other people with similar skills enter the market.

That said, it sounds like a great time. If it were me, I would get family or a friend involved. You say it takes 10 days to train someone. So have them literally work with you for 10 days and train on the job.

As far as the time goes, I find it hard to believe your program can't let you take two weeks off. Any sizable institution has to have students with family emergencies and other issues. Also... if you are willing to drop out and abandon your degree, you must also be willing to let your grades drag a bit.
Google is already working to attribute authors to content, think of it as PersonRank. With verified real people (they are getting many signals for this such as android, chrome, checkout, places, voice, plus, etc) they may be able to combat spam like this by ranking news/stories based on the history of the author.
Check out node-lazy, it does something similar and more nicely: https://github.com/pkrumins/node-lazy

var Lazy = require('lazy');

Lazy.range('1..') // infinite list of integers (see readme)
.filter(function (n) {
return n % 5 == 0
})
.take(5)
.join(function (result) {
console.log(result)
})
;

Output:

[ 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 ]
yes. but i'm only planning to charge what is needed to cover the costs. if those are reasonable then i think some people would be willing to pay for something a bit more attractive. if not, well, at least i tried.

(i'm not adverse to making money from this, if it becomes wildly popular, but it's not my main motivation. i did the ground work years ago and then posted a link to my notes in the thread on the robots approach here. someone contacted me about that, asking if i they could use it. i suggested a service, since i wanted to learn gae, and they thought that was a good idea...)
yes..that is an awesome approach...only for the initial 30-45 mins do you have to kinda force yoself...once you start hacking some problems your mind will want to keep hacking!
I totally agree. Just knowing that a problem -is- solvable is a huge advantage on a 'NASA problem.'
Unfortunately due to the complexity and number of challenges, the last rock may fall on your head and knock you back to the bottom again.

I'm not saying it's a valid goal - just until the technology is useful, it's not yet viable.

Compare to unified field theory, the Higgs boson and string theory.

A pessimist is an experienced optimist :)
Reid Hoffman's newest investment: GoInstant. A Webex killer?
Rumor: iPhone 5 Coming to T-Mobile Sept. 25th
Oh hell yes. This method works perfectly :-)
Eliezer may not have been explicit about this but if your genes suck, you likely die before you spawn. Regardless of the complexity of your genome.

So, any harmful incremental change would be eventually selected out of the gene pool (or at least won't spread). Neutral changes are unlikely to become universal. Therefore, only improvements can be universal enough to be build upon.
> That might be true, but where ever you go, there is always bash installed. zsh not so much.

Whaddya wanna bet the same argument is being used elsewhere, except with csh/bash or sh/bash as the simple-shell/advanced-shell duo?

(Before anyone gets confused: tcsh is the advanced-shell BSDs come with. csh is the simple one.)
You're right. I hadn't thought of that, but it strikes me as one of the nastier attacks I've heard of in a while. Just think of how many downloadable packages require root privileges to install.
Gruber is an excellent writer, no denying. I am not even going there. English is not my native language.

My idea was 'Back to Mac' version of Daring Fireball.
One major factor to consider when talking about race isn't how YOU self-identify, but how other's identify you. So perhaps "self-identification" will correspond more closely to the markers than if I was to identify the racial category.

As well, that study looked at the US population which is clumped by historical factors in ways that may not apply worldwide.
Not yet. I'm working on the "simplest thing that could possibly work" version, that sets out the architecture. I'm hopeful that, when its released, it will be compelling enough that people will want to jump in and help me build it out. But at this point, it would take too much explaining to get the idea across. Once the simplest thing is done, I'll be able to ship it with a simple demo/tutorial which will hopefully be setting off lightbulbs above people's heads.
This seems to be pretty "complete": http://code.google.com/p/public-transport-enabler/

It's used by Öffi (https://market.android.com/details?id=de.schildbach.oeffi...) AFAIK.
Yes. I computed it reverse. Thanks.
The New Silicon Valley Bribe - Robert Scoble
Hidden Features in Python: Slicing and Sliding
If this works as advertised, it would have important (bad) consequences for SEO, right?
Existing frameworks remove a lot of the problems that come with attempting to roll your own code all the time. From security to just making things simpler.

I would suggest usually using a framework when you can.
I'm not colorblind, but the color pattern looks very similar to all "If you're colorblind, you can't see the difference" images out there..

Of course, I could be wrong, but if I were you, I'd have a colorblind person test this.
I couldn't get past the 2nd paragraph. the guy's infomercial salesman writing style was hurting my head.
I am using follow function for cd which does basically the same though i can iterate through the last arguments with alt+.

cd () {
if [[ -f $1 ]]
then
builtin cd $1:h
else
builtin cd "$@"
fi
}
It's not required, but you'd have to write your own generator function:

Enumerable
.Generate((function() {
var i = 0;
return function() {
return i++;
};
})())
.Take(10)
.ToArray()

Output:

0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9
Could your avatar steal your soul?
Hmmm very interesting. First of all thanks for posting that, it works perfectly as well, using the Grab++ tool.

The method that Skalman posted using the Firefox Web Console works perfectly as well, although in the CNN video that I posted above, that method seems to download a .flv file, whereas your method seems to be downloading a .mov file. Interesting....

EDIT: Both the .flv and the .mov seem to be the same file. They are both exactly 11,840,167 bytes, so that leads me to believe that they are the same file. It is interesting however that your method and Skalman's method download the same exact file just with a different file extension. I wonder why this is.
Seconded. If it's not in my Google Reader, I'll never visit it again, unless somebody happens to post a link to it on FB or HN or I accidentally google it.
It's a funny label to apply. Arguably, all that it really takes to become a redditor is a username, password, and a captcha.
Search.

I hardly ever browse by category, they're too generic. Whenever I'm looking for something on Amazon, I go right for the search bar.

This new design makes an emphasis on search so I'm guessing Amazon noticed that other people use the same the same way I do.
The billions of dollars of investment is nothing compared to the positive effect that this will have on our society.

The fact that this looks difficult from where we sit is not a good reason to not do the research. Many of the biggest discoveries in history looked impossible before they became ubiquitous.
When you need 48GB of RAM, having 50 VPSs with 1GB of RAM doesn't do you much good, not to mention the i/o issues he describes.
Family ownership can give a strong, long-term focus, compared to the usual public company.
oh, that's a very good point. thanks. first thought is that relying less on variations in hue and using more variations in intensity would help. hmmm. going to experiment. thanks again.
You're right about LuaJIT, but there's no reason the VM can't also optimize code paths related to high-level string operations.
For Apple it was due to a transition period. As far as the customer is concerned, the customer notices that there's a plastic MacBook, and it's cheaper than the aluminum one.
Weird, he does LEGO in capitals like the company wants, but still uses an S to make it plural.

Also, his numbers seem to be off, both for years and number of missions.
I'm not 100% sure, but I recall a story about a division of Samsung that made watches, being banned from selling them in Germany or somewhere like that. They copied/cloned something that Rolex did (Maybe the quartz crystal or something like that). Does anyone know the actual details about this story?
""When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”
When I spoke to Brian in May, I think he said that he and a few volunteers would continue to support the app (and I'm assuming the volunteers are local)
Hackathon 2011: 130 projects, pitched in 60 second, created in 24 hours
Doesn't moving out of the state mean they're no longer taking advantage of the things that CA taxes buy?
I've started modelling based on the GTFS data model. The schema I've created so far is at http://vocab.org/transit - it's close to GTFS, modified by conversations with other transit data developers. Example of data using this schema is at http://beta.kasabi.com/dataset/mta-new-york-city-transit
#2 is bad for users unless Chrome is shipping on all hardware and operating systems users use. In fact, that's the same reason any sort of web-related monopoly is bad.

Where's Chrome for PPC processors? Chrome for ARM (being worked on, but no there yet)? Chrome for whatever architecture or OS users might want tomorrow?

The right comparison here in your success scenario may not be VBScript but ActiveX, except without the security issues ActiveX had. If ActiveX were required for use of gmail today, how would you feel about it? How would you have felt about it in 2002?
Just to play devil's advocate, here's what that example would look like with exceptions and something like `using()` in C# (here, any curly block can implicitly be treated like a try block, like in Ruby):

package main

import (
"io"
"log"
"os"
)

func cat(name string) {
using (f := os.Open(name)) {
io.Copy(os.Stdout, f)
}
}

func main() {
for _, arg := range os.Args[1:] {
cat(arg);
} catch (err os.Error) {
log.Print(err)
}
}
I think that a lot of folks get really caught up in competition. Big deal. Competition drives innovation. If there is a market, competitors will come regardless. I'd almost argue that competition can validate a market.

I believe that if businesses focused more on customer service and solving one or two key problems really well, then they'll have a higher likelihood of succeeding.
Harvard CS 264: Massively Parallel Computing
So far we have 1 recommendation to use a framework, and 1 recommendation to use KohanaPHP IF you choose to use a framework. Any other recommendations or thoughts?
I am sorry but I found the tone of the article a bit offensive. You are not coming out as playful or funny, but as arrogant. Drop the attitude mate, try the guitar if you want to be a rockstar. Apart from that, this is a nice example of how versatile the language can be.
I'm an algoholic, not in the SEO sense pls, gimme something NASA-big to solve then ;)
Yes, I use them liberally in C# projects. In fact, I prefer to use them over the standard looping constructs because of the pipe-like characteristics. It's very useful.
I hope this doesn't get worse, because I'm seeing quite a few connection failures between various instances set up in this region.
Bah, why is it that I always miss this kind of stuff until it's too late
Because one currency for one continent has been working out so well for Europe....
I think your concerns are absolutely spot on, and they match mine almost exactly - I've spent practically my whole working life modeling complex systems, and pathologies are the rule, not the exception, so it strikes me as unbelievably naive to just assume that there's something magical about free markets when in reality they are made up of millions of different entities with different objectives, costs, and constraints. Even when you're simulating a system that's provably stable, when simulation errors and noise creep in, you're batting about 50/50 as to whether your particular simulation method will go off the rails or not (as anyone that's ever tried to simulate a damped harmonic oscillator starting from Newton's laws and the obvious method of approximating a derivative knows quite well). In simulation we take stability arguments and proofs very seriously, the presumption being that if you can't prove that a system is stable, you can't assume anything about it (the exception being physical processes, where stability of the underlying can usually be taken as a given because of anthropic principal arguments and we're merely tasked with finding the proof, as well as a simulation scheme that doesn't screw up - that's a lot more difficult than it sounds, especially for complex systems like fully relativistic gravity).

These concerns are of the utmost priority in most fields that involve complex systems, especially processes that we have a hand in influencing, except for economics and politics, where everyone's pet arguments are balls to the wall, and tend to either imply that we should be living with full blown communism or complete unregulated anarchy (okay, I suppose contract law and the military are typically carved out as the exceptions). It's one of the few areas I've ever seen where none of the popular arguments seem to have any sort of balance - and I'm not talking "balance" as in fairness, I'm talking about "balance" as in trivial idea that if both extremes suck (which they usually do, whatever particular idea or disagreement you're arguing over), and something in between is better, then there exists some optimum between the extremes. Step one involves admitting that either extreme has a problem, but instead everyone seems to keep arguing that the whole problem is just that we're not actually at that extreme, 100%.
Come on. With the GUI?
Happy to see that they didn't try to create their own little programming language, which was the first thing that I thought they'd done once I heard "programming with drop-down menus". Instead, it's more like an IDE for Wiring, with some nice visualizations of what your inputs and outputs are doing. Wouldn't be inclined to pay more than I'd fork over for a regular Arduino, but I can see this have its uses in (high school) education.
What are the practical implications of your pessimism?
I don't really see the point of this article. It's not the difficulty of your solution--it's the quality of your solution and whether it resonates with customers. I've seen some very profitable startups solving "LEGO" problems in elegant and interesting ways. Meanwhile, any competitive advantage you think you built solving "NASA" problems with complex technology is fleeting at best.
Yeah, the idea of deliberately leaving something unfinished so you know exactly where to start from next time you sit down has helped me greatly. http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2011/01/leave-your-tasks-unfini...