skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think part of the reason why programming (and open source especially) allows for very young people to participate easily is simple: bugs always exist. Open source projects need a lot people -- not just A-grade programmers or developers or computer scientists who've had decades of experience. They need documentation, bug reports, patches, active forum/mailing list members, and community organisers to be really successful. It's easy to get started just by hanging out on forums, eventually noticing a bug, reporting the bug, learning more about how the software works by understanding the bug, possibly trying to fix the bug, etc. Over time, it isn't too hard to start making very significant code or documentation contributions to a project.

In contrast, bug-testing Newton's Laws is a waste of time, and bug-testing General Relativity requires a very large budget. Attempting to make a meaningful contribution to physics is very difficult. The same can be said for any pure science.

By definition, any pure science (natural or social) doesn't evolve quickly enough to allow for quick-but-meaningful contributions because pure science is about establishing a base of knowledge that builds directly on previous knowledge. Without an understanding of the "previous knowledge," any newcomer would be lost and wondering what's happening.

In contrast, applied science is often an orchestrated effort that involves experts in different fields and contributions from different fields (e.g. your software is as valuable as its support, and your interface ideas are as good as the person implementing them). Prior knowledge isn't necessarily as valuable as the ability to integrate ideas from different places or collaborate with others.

Would you agree? I ask because part of me feels like I might be missing something.
High Availability for Cloud Computing Database Systems
Next up in the app store: "Terror" - the app that crashes your jumbo jet. This app creates a magic pattern of radio waves that has a 84% chance of crashing the plane you are currently on.

If you plan to use this app for actual terror, be advised to buy an Android phone and not an iPhone, because there is no way this app will be accepted into the Apple app store.
This is a total shameless plug here, but I've been building a site for exactly this reason for a couple months, and would really love to hear feedback.

The site is http://namrr.com

No I'm not doing any front running or any thing like that. I hope to maybe make some affiliate dollars, but really I built this for myself first, because I hate the stupid frustration of trying to find a name, and I want to make it easy. It's a total work in progress. I would love to hear what you think. Hope I don't get flamed for the self promotion...
Re:side effects of prolonged use. Adderall is safe if used responsibly, even over the long term. We even understand how it works, which is more than you can say about eugeroics, like modafinil. Not surprising, given that it's an amphetamine and the US military handed them out like caffeine pills in WW2 and last I heard still used them sometimes. Erdos also used speed the majority of his life. I believe there's a guide to safe long-term amphetamine use on the last psychiatrist, I'd link but I'm on my phone.
iPad, by far.
He acknowledges it after he bought it and as part of the analysis, not before buying it.

Either way, I don't quite buy the argument. Amazon was hailed as the one company that could rival the iPad ecosystem. So its not just a conduit for people buying stuff on amazon. So my expectations for the tablet are pretty high even at that price.
Thanks for this! As a developer who has been slowly learning design by trial and error, I wish I had access to this resource years ago. It's totally frustrating when you know something just looks awful, but don't have the knowledge or background to know how to fix it.
Uncle Bob Denied Entry To UK
Must be hard times at the NYT when journalists have to resort to submitting their own pieces to Hacker News ;-)
Which is fairly untypical.

The typical growth-maturity scenario is that something gets good fast and energetically, and then sits there without much development for some reason. Maybe it does a few more leaps due to competition or new people, but it's rare.

If they can maintain steady progress is an amazing thing of itself.
Yes. I saw them all as they went for dinner. Mostly boys, aged from 13 to 20. They didn't look harassed though, they didn't look like slaves, they looked like kids who had grown faster than others, who bought their own shoes with the money they made in the factory behind.
There is zero risk to a regulator in maintaining a pointless yet harmless regulation. There is nonzero risk to a regulator in revoking a regulation that may be blamed in the future by a crash investigator.

Even if the risk is absolutely 0.0001% -- fear and CYA wins. Our system of regulation and collective transfer of responsibility to regulators ensures that like a federal subsidy, nonsensical regulations are forever.
Yahoo Pulse Becoming Yahoo Profile This Week
Inside your iPod nano, or any other device with a computer chip is a radio transmitter. Inside the cockpit are many radio receivers, some of which are pretty critical to the proper flight of the airplane. Your radio transmitter, and radio transmitters being run by other passengers, mix and mingle their signals, producing an unpredictable effect on these key cockpit receivers.

The probability that this happens is not zero or low, but very high.
But you can respond by going "But it's silly to exclude X from discussion". Which is why I have been trying (and, evidently failing) to convey.
I currently work in developmental flight test. Any time we add a new piece of electronics to an aircraft (or replace an existing piece with a new version), be it a radio, a computer, or test instrumentation, we have to conduct an Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) Safety of Flight Test (SOFT) to make sure that the new equipment does not interfere in any way with avionics that are critical to safety of flight. Even if it's something that's not being installed per se (e.g. a laptop for collecting test data), it has to be tested. Sometimes there are exceptions, such as very minor upgrades, especially minor software updates.

Generally everything is designed so as to not interfere, but every once in a while something causes unexpected interference. Sometimes it's because the designers screwed up, sometimes it's because a bespoke item wasn't manufactured to the correct spec, and sometimes it's because of something nobody anticipated.

The problem with consumer electronics is that they haven't gone through this process. None of them should cause interference, but we can't be sure because they were never subjected to comprehensive EMC SOFT. Nor would it really make sense to spend that kind of time and money when we can just mitigate the risk of interference by having everyone turn everything off during critical phases of flight.
For a contrary opinion, try Matthew Stewart. His book, "The Management Myth," was nicely excerpted in the Atlantic [1]. He's particularly harsh on Taylor's early experiments, which claimed to be scientific but were anything but.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/06/the-mana...
Water Skiing ; Water Ski Racing What’s It All About.
3 possibilities:

1, Everybody on every flight for the last 20 years has always complied with the order perfectly

2, People haven't complied and caused numerous crashes but they are all covered up by the government

3, Consumer devices have no effect on aircraft
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Oh, but going by usernames, he didn’t!
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Show HN: Lazy rebalancing calculator for fixed-allocation financial portfolios
Designing Forms: Personal Names around the World
It was actually submitted by a different HN user, whose profile, oddly enough, identifies him/her as working for Forbes.
Wow, downvotes on HN with no explanation? Unusual, but I guess that's what happens when a site gets popular.
There are some weird causation conclusions in that article.

From my experience, stimulant proliferation in university is largely dependent on your social circle. Adderall was passed around freely in my fraternity and some of my circles. Have a test coming up? Pop a stimulant like it's nothing.

Yet I was in other circles (squareish students) where the individuals weren't really exposed to stimulants much less the mentality of flippantly popping them under academic stress. They wouldn't really know where to get them, either.

In other words, I have a problem with drawing a conclusion of stim effectiveness from demographics and their respective grades. I don't know anyone who wouldn't consider amphetamine effective for buckling down and burning through some work. You don't need to have ADD to benefit from a flood of dopamine.
That, my friends, is called a ballmer peak. there is a great xkcd comic about this (http://xkcd.com/323/) as well as a great quora thread ( http://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-truth-to-the-Ballmer-Peak ). Just dont take it too far when you read this :)
That's Hedley.
> 712 million passengers flew within the United States in 2010. Let’s assume that just 0.01 percent of those passengers...

> That would mean seven million people on 11 million flights endangered the lives of their fellow passengers.

0.01% of 712M is 71200. </pedantic>
When I think of nootropics, I think of memory and concentration enhancements without the modification of sleep patterns.
s/Telsa/Tesla/

Basically everything Edison supposedly invented was actually pretty much plagiarized by someone else, then credited to himself by way of a patent. Tesla was quite possibly his most-wronged victim. Far from protecting creators, patent law actually enables more effective and insidious means of ripping off the innovators of our culture.

Of course the patent office would love Edison, though, because patents were among Edison's favorite tools for screwing over others.
Thirty seconds of googling reveals that this is a myth: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11031097/ns/technology_and_scien...
Right, I know what the docs say, however, it's fine to use this for cache invalidation (but maybe not other use-cases) in production.

The docs also say:

"While the time complexity for this operation is O(N), the constant times are fairly low. For example, Redis running on an entry level laptop can scan a 1 million key database in 40 milliseconds."

If you have so many keys that this is an issue for cache invalidation, you should be using memcached anyways. (Since it can be distributed, where in Redis distribution is left up to you to figure out)

I wasn't able to dig it up, but I know I read an article about some consulting group making a site for a major shoe company where they did exactly this.

Your hash method isn't the best way either though since it's more efficient to store everything in individual key-value pairs, and hashes cannot be nested.

Really the BEST way to do this in Redis is to use a set containing all they keys related to an object, then clear each of them out when destroying an item.
Your response is an example of the natural tendency of some people to find comfort in authority, even when it is shown to be ineffective. Nothing personal. Lots of people react in the same way. Sad nonetheless.
I think the USPTO tries to use stuff like this as a way to seem like the good guy, distracting from the way its half-assed approach to managing patents just completely screws so much of the US economy.
I found the Silencing Celebs with Arduino to be the most interesting of the lot from a gateway technology point of view. Also following the link for this project further eventually led me to a very cool site, http://www.ladyada.net/.
If you are getting ready for take-off, the plane returns to the gate and you are escorted off the flight and charged with compromising airline safety and ignoring a steward's order. This happened to a guy two rows in front of me on an American Airlines flight a couple of years ago. He twice refused to turn off his mobile phone as we were taxiing towards the runway.
It's worth quoting pg here:

"Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. This pays especially well in technology, where you earn a premium for working fast."

http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

I don't really understand all the backlash in this thread against hard work in pursuit of a big goal.
I seem to recall being told by cabin crew that disobeying well-formed instructions of cabin crew was a violation of Federal law
DO-254 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DO-254] seems like what you're looking for. I'm not familiar with this particular document, but the equivalent certification process for software (DO-178B) is not something that can be affixed lightly on any random product - the overhead it imposes on the development is simply way too high to be viable on commercial software.
This is perfect for me - I have zero connections, and after I graduate I hope to make it in SV. Thanks for posting.
The probability that this happens is not zero or low, but very high.

No, it isn't. If it were, we wouldn't be depending on the honor system.
The method used in that article is just counting flight incidents in some historical data that may possibly have been caused by interference. The evidence that consumer electronics are the cause is just anecdotal:

"In one telling incident, a flight crew stated that a 30-degree navigation error was immediately corrected after a passenger turned off a DVD player and that the error reoccurred when the curious crew asked the passenger to switch the player on again."
I think part of it is that the flight staff want you to pay attention during takeoff and landing. Having your headphones on/in means you're not listening to them.

Another part is that the flight staff wants fewer things potentially flying around the cabin if there's trouble. of course, they don't usually ask you to put away books...

Cell phone companies want you to turn off your phones because they mess with the ground towers. Flying past towers rapidly puts load on the cell network to transfer your phone's connection between towers rapidly. Your phone can also see more towers than usual, causing it to possibly flap between them in unexpected ways.

The bit about it being unsafe due to messing with the plane's avionics is total bunk, though. I never turn off electronics on flights, except to save battery.
So, through Teetotalism, you're able to enter the "mild mental conditions" corresponding to the use of substances that do things like flood your brain with dopamine?

You sure about that? Your stance sounds like it's just based on a self-aggrandizing platform with no experience with said substances.
“Hedy’s Folly”: The movie star behind your cellphone
Most inflight wifi systems give you a 30 minute free trial and deleting your cookies can usually bypass that restriction.
Create Build Destroy
It looks like the writer meant either 0.01 or 1%, as all the other numbers work out to one one-hundredth. It is a common math mistake to mix the decimal representation and the percentile one. The same thing happens occasionally when people mix cents and fractions of a dollar.

I was immediately suspicious when it was implied that a 737 can hold 20,000 passengers.
About the website strange name and url... Since the creator is a french guy, I think it's because it sounds a bit like a way of pronouncing DHTML in french with a strange accent :-) (maybe it's the southern accent, dunno)
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but wouldn't it make sense for Apple to pay to do the testing? Being able to say "The iPhone is the only phone you can use during your whole flight" would be worth quite a bit of money to them.
Thanks for linking the antirez article, I actually haven't seen that one before I wrote the article. I put a link to it in the article.

As far as they keys thing, it's obviously been a major point of contention with my article. I know the warning, I just don't think it's actually a problem for cache invalidation.

See below on another comment of someone having similar concerns for my explanation why.
Google running long G+ commercial over Thanksgiving weekend
Exploit Exercises
Funny how the sub-text of this article is so clearly the pro-government bias of the reporter.

"After all, we know that the only real way to effect social change is through government action" could summarize its message.

Which is doubly funny considering how the first part of the article is outlining just how people are working outside of government to actually get things done.
How do you actually "turn off" a kindle (e-ink)? AFAICT, it's always "on", although you can turn off the radio part (which I rarely have on anyway).
Credit Card Numbers for testing
I don't think you are correct, though you may be partially correct.

Perhaps many people get into programming by fixing bugs, but that never appealed to me, and didn't really appeal to many people I know. It's good advice for newbies trying to get better, I suppose, but it's not very satisfying work (for many).

I got into programming by exploring my computer, websites, and slowly piecing together an understanding of the machine. Eventually, I learned a programming language to (mostly) proficiency. And then another. And then another. I still don't feel like a pro, but I'm getting there. And I still hate fixing other peoples' bugs, or my own.
I have heard that Groupon's sales folk are incentivized to have merchants not cap their offers, despite how bad it is long-term for both Groupon and the merchant (if the merchant can't time-shift the purchase, say requiring scheduling)... it's a quick win.

This is a logical pressure coming from the rushed IPO and lack of strategic planning for competition.
Agreed. This article reads like people have just found a stronger form of coffee.
So you weren't able to raise money because the VCs were scared you'd be incarcerated?
As someone who sees dozens of portfolios every day, I think you vastly overestimate the "quality" of most people who call themselves professional photographers–especially those who shoot weddings and portraits.

Also, the latest version of Instagram saves high-res versions of manipulated images to your camera roll. With the iPhone 4s having an 8mp camera, resolution is not the issue.

Yes, Instagram's filters are exaggerated and images are cropped square, but they aren't that far off from a lot of things I see people doing for money.

People buy a DSLR at Costco for $600 and a website for $250 (hopefully from me), and they are now a "professional" and shooting weddings on Craigslist for $800 or portraits for their Facebook friends. Without technical skills, high-contrast, over-saturation, blown-out, tinted looks become "in".

Similar to the bible verse, "Photoshop filters cover a multitude of sins"
"any increased risk is unacceptable if it is avoidable."

And yet 40 years after the first studies recommending them - they still don't fit smoke hoods
Author of rsyslogd: What I don't like about journald
Like most such devices, if you hold down the power switch for several seconds it will turn itself off completely. That said, I'd be surprised if more than a tiny fraction of Kindle owners know this option exists.
Startups creating fewer jobs
I was debating the Fire vs. the Playbook given the similar prices. It sounds like you get a lot more with the Playbook.
You haven't made good use of your Arduino until you have it controlling your half-million dollar vehicle.

http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1254445743
"I recall years ago you were not permitted to use a cellphone on the forecourt of a gas station. No one seems to remember or bother about that now."

Some woman started yelling at me in a gas station forecourt last year (2010) because I was talking on the phone while sitting in my car with the door open. "You're going to blow us all up!" she yelled at me (twice), then sped off far too quickly to have been a safe speed for leaving a gas station parking lot. :/
At least for me, part of the reason I like the Fire is that it isn't the full Android experience - I have a Archos tablet, that I don't use for any reason other than to test things. With the Fire I look past/don't see the parts of Android that I dislike - and I think a lot of that is that I really only use the Kindle for the occasional E-Book/App, watch a streaming video, or listen to music.

For the subset of things that I actually want it for, it does well - very well in my opinion. I'm sure it likely falls flat if you expect more out of it (which it sounds like he did).
Airlines should encourage passengers to keep their mobile devices on.

That would allow pilots to test their equipment and make sure there is no dangerous interference with passengers' mobile devices.
Lessons I learned building a mobile friendly web app
Is this what you were after? http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/reviews/2011/11/lean-mean-con...
It's no authoritative source, but I'm obviously not the only one that thinks this: http://www.webdevelopment-blog.com/2011/07/puma-on-redis/
As for slave labor for yourself: it still is. Peer pressurized slave labor is still slave labor

Not only is this factually incorrect, it is offensive to those suffering in real, actual slavery.

This the same reasoning that objects to the use of the term "wage slavery"

Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison stated that the use of the term "wage slavery" (in a time when chattel slavery was still common) was an "abuse of language."[25] Most abolitionists believed that wage workers were "neither wronged nor oppressed".[26] Former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass described his elation when he took a paying job, declaring that "Now I am my own master." According to Douglass, wage labor did not represent oppression but fair exchange and former slaves for the first time receiving the fruits of their labor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery
Agreed. I do think you could push for the decision makers bit (for the levels he was raising it could be "seed" and not need a full partnership vote) but getting 4+ firms to all do it on the same day? Seems impossible due to prior obligations unless you scheduled like 2-3 months ahead of time.

And overall still impossible for a first timer.