skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The first reply pretty much nails it: "where is the patch?"

There's a huge difference between going to a mailing list and asking for (unpopular) features and going ahead and implementing it. Provide a patch, along with test cases and practical use case examples and you're making a point. Abstract rambling with 0 lines of code examples is worthless.

What comes to the actual issue: I'm a huge fan of layout based syntax but I do hate writing white space sensitive parsers. I think Haskell's way of having curlies and semicolons in the core syntax and adding layout as a sugar coating hits a particular sweet spot.
Like Google shakes you down: pay us more than your competitor, otherwise we will rank him higher for selected search terms?

Like all bakeries conspire to shake you down: pay us, or you don't get any bread?

ABP is not a monopolist nor do they do anything illegal. Therefore, they are not 'shaking anyone down'.
Ask HN: Which NoSQL DB is best for a node.js newbie?
Which of the popular NoSQL DBs is the easiest to install and use with node.js?

Note: I have very little linux experience, so I prefer solutions like pasting a single command into the terminal and have everything happen automatically, including post-install config ;)
No joke! This is what happens when trolls are classically trained.
Interesting. There will always be high-end stuff I guess. The stuff in this demo was probably about as good as my 1989 Amiga 500 was capable of doing in several hours, but done in 20 seconds.

The Amiga was 7mhz. I'm now running quad core i7 2.2ghz, so I'm - what? - 300 times faster on one chip? 1200 times faster potentially? 20 seconds now would have been (20*300) = 6000 seconds, close to 2 hours. I guess this shouldn't be all that shocking, but it is.
Could Ancient Pottery Improve Spacecraft Tiles?
However, there are companies who care.

Two of the banks I use share the same web engine. They've both bought it from some company that I don't know. Both banks are of the smaller ones so they don't do internal development, hence outsourcing: big banks would probably exhibit a loud NIH syndrome.

Now, one of the banks I use has had it for at least over ten years, having been a customer there, and the user interface hasn't essentially changed much. I remember a couple of cosmetic updates but the pages still look pretty minimal and clean. This is a sign of caring about users because web user interfaces tend to get replaced every few years for the sake of getting renewed. Somebody has clearly had an opinion on how an online banking interface should work, and that somebody has stuck to it. For years.

The login, as is typical in Finland, is a username + password, plus a ever-changing PIN code from a printed table. You need one PIN code for login and another if you issue wire transfers. I've had the same username since 90's and I've changed the password maybe twice. I don't have them on paper. I get a new PIN code table by mail a couple of times a year as soon as the old one is about to run out of codes. Pretty secure and convenient: set of credentials that don't change and another set of simpler credentials that change every time.

Too bad their demo logins are in Finnish and Swedish only, not English. From what I read, this company has awaiting sales in the U.S. :)
One possible topic, which I may be reading in since it's on my mind, is the well-known "problem" with sticking with lower carb diets. I've been ruminating a post on the topic myself, but the core is that it comes down to two basic problems: One, willpower, since we're surrounded by terrible, yet yummy food, all the time, and two, flavor. It is occasionally mumbled, instead of yelled loudly as it should be, that if you want to eat healthy on the long term it isn't just a matter of cutting out something, you need to be happy with the food. And in particular, "The Standard American Diet - carbohydrates" isn't a very pleasing diet. It's very easy for it to become monotonous and feel restrictive.

But I'd submit that's an indictment against the standard diet, not the "- carbs". It's taken me a while to work out how to deal with the correct diet longterm, but it has involved using a lot more oils (sesame, olive, etc), more butter, more oriental ingredients, and learning a lot more about French cooking. And you have to erase the last vestiges of the false idea that fat is bad, and realize that low-fat is bad and is the fad diet, and it should be entirely stomped out of your dietary plans. Now I don't have problems eating properly for years without backsliding; as tempting as the carbs can be, they just aren't as good as what I'm making myself. They're a hollow pleasure.
Did you peruse the summary only or actually look at the study? http://www.ajcn.org/content/63/2/174.full.pdf 6 weeks in a hospitalized environment with a consistent daily diet as measured/provided by the researchers, with a 14-hr fast before and after the 6 weeks. There are statistically significant correlations for some variables and insignificant for others. If the half of 43 participants was all over the map, then I'm sure it wouldn't have passed muster.

I'm not saying this study is the answer, nor does the study attempt to claim that. But to declare it as unworthy of publishing seems extreme.
Asus Transformer Prime bootloader is locked, say xda devs
Rather than a comments system, I'd prefer something which polls around for copies of the link to see if it turns up on HN or whatever, then includes those. Free moderation, better validation.

Comments can be important if you're trying to build a community or what have you and want people to stay on site longer. But most people use aggregators of one stripe or another, whether RSS or a link site or Facebook.
In the same hardware (my 2008 Macbook). It was pretty much non-optimized at any level, and got out of hand when I added refraction and shadows the same day: the inner loops were a mess... I decided to refactor and grew tired before optimizing the loops 8-)
A Santa letter service strikes me as exactly the kind of thing that people will love when free, but not see the value proposition if they have to pay. Plus they're gonna use it just once.

Combine those factors and yeah I think you're better off just trying to get people to pay up front rather than trying to subsidize millions of free users with the handful that will pay.

On the other hand, many other types of services need to be demonstrated and repeated use will add progressive value that tips the scales to paid conversions that never would have signed up off the bat.

Yeah freemium is often a pain in the ass, but it's popular for a reason.

PS. As far as emails are concerned, people will flag any opt-out scheme, they will most definitely not read your copy, and getting angry about it does nothing but raise your blood pressure. The solution is to use a paid service like SendGrid, manage your reputation, and go opt-in if you're still having problems.
Apple's Internal 'GameStore' Testing App Accidentally Appears in App Store
FYI: http://LessFilms.com shot the video with a canon 7d, the location was inside the "pits" of a fast lube oil change.
Incredible. It is so great to see a conference have a sense of humour.

Instead of:

DullCon hopes to redefine strategy definition in the context of an ever-changing global business ecosystem

Congrats!
Apple will stop being cool in 2012, IBD says
It's a stupid situation: the interface is so unclear and messy that you're afraid to do something wrong(and nobody wants mistakes with the money), so you just use the online banking for small amounts of money.

Also in my bank the password need to be shorter than 15 characters, I will never understand this.

https://simple.com/ is the way to go.
Thanks Richard, we're really good at being silly.
ING has a pretty great banking interface. Simple, easy to use, powerful enough to do anything I've needed so far.
How does it work? Nothing happens here.
I'm on RHEL 6.2 with FF 3.6.24
If we are able to get satellites into a low-level orbit, with the technology to connect those on the ground - surely a bigger risk is space debris and the possibility of colliding with other objects in space? From what I understand most, if not all space agencies do spend a fair bit of resources tracking and projecting the trajectories of all objects in space - and constantly altering the paths of those under their control to avoid such items? ... not saying it isn't impossible - but surely that's another challenge to take into account?
Belarus is one of the last authoritarian regime in Europe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarus#Politics
Yeah, exactly. It's good for mothers and no tech people. But for hackers, I'd use something else.
>> And that's an argument? Why not include static typing, or single inheritance, GOTO while we're at it? I'm sure there are those who happen to like them.

Why is static typing in that list? Unlike single inheritance or GOTO's, static typing is a good thing. Dynamic typing is often used in interpreted languages because once you're writing an interpreter, there's going to be a massive performance hit anyway and dynamic typing won't make it a lot worse. Dynamic typing makes compiling efficient code very difficult.

Of course, a good static typing programming language should have at least some kind of type inference mechanism to allow the programmer to leave out explicit type declarations when a compile can infer them from the program source code.

Boo is a statically typed, type-inferring language for the CLR that has a Python-like syntax. It seems pretty nice, I've written a few toy projects with it.
Below is the key concept here. The quicker education administrators and teachers realize this the better off we'll be.

>>"With modern technology, if all there is is lectures, we don't need faculty to do it," Redish says. "Get 'em to do it once, put it on the Web, and fire the faculty."

>>Some faculty are threatened by this, but Mazur says they don't have to be. Instead, they need to realize that their role has changed.

>>"It used to be just be the 'sage on the stage,' the source of knowledge and information," he says. "We now know that it's not good enough to have a source of information."

>>Mazur sees himself now as the "guide on the side" – a kind of coach, working to help students understand all the knowledge and information that they have at their fingertips. Mazur says this new role is a more important one.
IT NEW YEAR. YOU SUCK. TIME TO DESTROY SUCK, BE AWESOME INSTEAD.
Check this blog post about freemium, i've found it quite interesting: http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2010/08/18/why-free-plans-dont-...
I haven't still decided yet about using freemium or not for the project i'm working on
If they want to limit network access why don't they just prohibit routing at the ISP level? They could set up VPN for authorized foreign network access.
The freemium model certainly has appropriate application to be successful, where success yields customers satisfied enough that they're willing to pay you for a higher level of service. Finding that mix for one's service is the secret sauce. That said, freemium is not always the best route.

I don't find this guy's experience as an indictment of that model, however. And certainly equating spam complaints from follow-on emails isn't an issue with the freemium model, unless you believe the value of your service is enhanced by unsolicited email.

But hey, this guy got something valuable out of this, but not in how he's stated it. He blames the users, but I blame email. Take email out of the equation, and I bet his subscriber take rate increases.
+1 on finding the exercise you enjoy doing.

Just as a caution though, if anyone is reading this and is on the fence about taking up exercise and starting going to the gym, please give it a shot and don't assume you'll be demoralized. You never know until you try.

For me, going to the gym turned out to be quite moralizing, as it put me in that "exercise mode" (surrounded by exercisey stuff). I also associated it with getting better/fitter, so going to the gym == improvement == positive feelings.

Some of my friends hate running and love biking. I love running. If you told me 3 years ago that I'd be saying that last thing, I would be laughing in your face in disbelief. But you never know till you try.
Uhm, he's a dictator. So yes, by definition - this is just controlling the media.
Stuart Hall of Discovr Apps talks shop on Cidercast
Stuart Hall of Discovr Apps talks about iOS/Mac development on the recent Cidercast from the 1 hour mark.
MongoDB seems to be the easiest one to install and to start using.

You will get packages ready for most of distributions and the installation is really simple:
http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Ubuntu+and+Debian+packag...

I can create test database with web frontend just to test and experiment a little - please let me know if you are interested (at beta@ninjaci.com).
Employing a Freemium model without having a strong path to the "mium" part (i.e. converting free users to paid users) is a weak model. In this case, it didn't even sound like a real freemium model anyways - a free version and a paid version of the same one-time purchase is a pretty weak place to start with freemium. Better would have been to giveaway the first purchase and then aggressively upsell on an annual subscription offering that included variations for all holidays or something similar.

By offering a free one-time purchase and positioning it against a paid one-time purchase you are making it too easy for people to choose free. Especially when they have to figure out if the higher res and other extras are worth the extra $$. Free is always a no brainer. In this case, it sounds a bit like the OP was giving away the razor and the blades in the freemium version, and better blades in the paid version.

With a little bit more thinking and tinkering, I bet the author could get freemium working to his advantage.
Because they wanna get people paying bans.
Briefly Potent, Chronically Ineffective
I recently switched to using this for a web app from Prawn. The main app is in Ruby, but this was so much nicer (simpler API, much, much faster PDF generation) than Prawn for our particular use case (PDFs with lots of exact positioning of text and images) that I actually set up an entire Node server just to use PDFKit. Give it a shot if you generate a lot of PDFs.
The Twitter archive that no one knows about
Filevault isn't supported by the major media editing apps. I travel a lot and rely on having a 'fake' account on my drive that I can login to if asked that has pretty much nothing on it.
She might just want to be friends...
Top job boards for software devs
If the atmosphere is thick enough to support your balloon, its thick enough that something as low thrust as an ion engine basically won't be able to let you reach a meaningful velocity.
You know why the fringe nutbags propose this stuff, when it will (at least in Indiana) never go through? Because people like livescience are dumb enough to report on it, and people -- even in HN -- are dumb enough to post about it.

The best way to make your fringe belief not seem so fringe is to keep a steady trickle of attention on it, so people get used to hearing about it. It gives the illusion that the fringe belief has a bigger following than it does, and to people not educated in logic and rhetoric, the bandwagon approach can be pretty powerful.
I'm pretty sure everything has a back door. I was a consultant writing test code for software that managed the license creation process for my state's DMV and we had two separate doors for the FBI and CIA.

They could just type any information in they wanted to, upload a picture, hit print, and the process would mail them a drivers license like everyone else.
Moore’s law squared
Google is trialing one of its biggest changes
Use dynamic linking and object stripping, if space is a concern. You'll have tiny objects then.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6115459/small-haskell-pro...
the data is pretty meaningless unless they include a definition of downtime and how they are measuring it.

For instance, they could be monitoring from an internal network and their methodology might not pick up external network outages that take their DC off the air (just an example of why the method and definition are important...).

I don't doubt that they have a great track record of reliability, but this presentation seems a bit thin.
I'm also dual booting OS X and Ubuntu with a shared home partition formatted as HFS+. Getting the encryption to work nicely in Linux sounded pretty easy, but I couldn't figure out how to do it in OS X. My current solution is to store anything particularly sensitive in a TrueCrypt file...obviously not the best solution.

Out of personal interest: Did you get Linux to mount the HFS+ partition with R/W access with journaling enabled? I am also curious if you make any progress with encrypting the entire partition.
I don't understand why people down voted you, anyway, how do you know your customers have 'flagged the email as spam!' ?
This is something we may make available in the future, but we believe this presentation is easier to digest for the majority of our customers. Right now Pingdom data is going straight into our internal metrics dashboard which produces the public pages, so minus our internal annotations, it's exactly what you'd see in Pingdom. In the past we used a different site monitoring product, and we had to import all the data before closing our account there. (So we can't make that available directly anymore.)
The first three are pretty reasonable, but what is the idea behind drinking milk before and after exercise?

Wouldn't you be more likely to regurgitate your stomach's contents by drinking milk before exercise?

I have some bad experiences from eating and then exercising...
neat, i had an idea along those lines recently but never bothered to implement it. basically directory-aware environmental bits.

in short i got sick of django's use of env vars for key features, and wanted to have those set only when i'm in the project dirs. that's how the idea came to me.

it looks like direnv would enable that solution and a lot more.
Gym-Pact Fines You for Not Exercising
And if you drop them at the same time, Ball #1 would probably arc towards the blackhole changing the length of time it took to hit...if it manages to stay outside of the blackhole's event horizon.
Well, of course free users cost more money than paying users: they aren't paying! The question is: how many conversions of free to paid users did he get? Because it may still be better to have a business with lots of annoying free users than with no users at all.
Fully agree. The rules have to be versioned and validated. In fact in our use case we have to go a step further and have another dimension to support validation - the notion of the phase/stage the rules are in: work-in-progress rules vs activated rules.
It is great indeed, and nobody would recommend people eat lots of sugar, but I found this a good article with some nuances about the specifics mentioned in that long video:
http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/01/29/the-bitter-truth-ab...
We use pingdom to measure external uptime, so network issues will count as downtime as well.

Do you have any other questions about methodology? I'd be happy to elaborate.
Whitespace blocks means my editor can not correctly reindent when I shift levels of indentation and instruct the editor to pretty-reformat. This wastes my time because I have to manually sort things out. It also means that things I can't see are affecting my code. It's a pain to work with in Python and a pain to work with in Haskell. My experience is that it's an epically bad idea made attractive by revulsion from C++/Java.

Curlies or Lisp-like curves play a ton nicer with tooling and visual inspection.
The problem becomes even more interesting when you start considering that it matters which frame of reference the timing is done from, if each ball has its own timer contained within then you get to have fun with relativity.
Not to toot my own horn too loudly, but I built a realtime (unicode) raytracer in javascript:
https://github.com/trevlovett/AsciiTracer
Hate to say it, but the santa image isn't very nice, almost sinister:

http://www.letterfromsanta.org/santa-letter-example.php

Perhaps some more cheerful designs for paid customers would have helped.
When is the best time to launch? season? month? day of week?
To maximize success, when should you launch your startup? Is there a best time of year? Do certain months have advantages? Days of week? Times of day? Any amount if detail is valuable.
Mailchimp for example, provides this information. It's one reason why Mailchimp and SendGrid et al are so useful. It pays for itself when we send out a newsletter to thousands of emails.
Thanks for the feed back. This data is based on external checks every 10 seconds.

(We also have thousands of internal health checks and alerts for other metrics.)

The key here is this reflects the view of the customer. (In other words if we down a system internally but there is no customer facing outage, yay redundancy and failover, then it would not show up here as long as the site was continuing to function with full health.)
What I miss the most with python is multi-line closures and "can't put statements in lambdas'. For instance:

# Not valid.
my_button.on('click', lambda x: raise 'unimplemented')
my_button.on('click', lambda _: some_var = 'clicked')

I believe the whitespace delimiters is the main reason why we aren't allowed to have multi-lines lambdas. (CoffeeScript proves us wrong on that, but from my experience, multi-lines whitespaced functions look better in CS than in Python.)

Also, I'd like to point out that "where's the patch" is really unfair. Python programmers are 'users/customers'. So, it's like if a customer asked for a feature and you'd tell her to implement it..
What if the key doesn't exist?

The point of a hidden OS is plausible deniability. When used correctly, there shouldn't be any evidence that another OS exists. For instance: what if there wasn't a hidden OS, and you do keep random data in your unused HD space? They'd be jailing you for refusing to give something that doesn't exist.
Connected TVs are a Dead-end
1. It's extremely hateful to see how much information Facebook shares, and by default. I am fairly certain I never saw a permissions dialog to a lot of these sites.

I also really hate how you can't allow or deny any given permission; 99% of apps I've seen use Twitter or Facebook as a single sign on. There is absolutely no reason for any of these to have that much access to personal information.

2. It requires Facebook in order to leave a comment? I extremely hate how this has become a "thing". I mourn the loss of anonymity on the internet.

3. The above site could be great for phishing.
Github is convenient and all, but for a popularity contest like that couldn't you accept just any email/account url? Or Ohloh committers, which are looked up in a number of forges?
Love these promos.