skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can you and other nappers here explain how you are able to find somewhere to nap in a busy office environment (and your car isn't available)? For me, lying on the floor would be far too noisy with hundreds of PCs humming away and I would be at constant risk of being stepped on by my colleagues.
Ruby DataMapper Status
This library comes as a .msi (Microsoft installer) and a license in .rtf format ("rich text" -- who uses this anymore?). In short, it's what you'd expect from Microsoft: not open source, not open at all, and the license probably limits you to non-commercial use and non-redistribution.
Ask HN: Handling bounces automatically?
Are you using any tool to handle bounces automatically? Mainly bounces from automated messages from web applications, for example user notifications or reminders of sort.

Even better if each bounce could trigger a rpc based on certain trigger or rules for example?

Is there any such service?
And OSX prior to 10.3 apparently.
I tried using a Wakemate (a dedicated bluetooth wristband that talks to a companion iPhone app) and found it to be pretty close to useless for me -- I move around quite a lot when I sleep, and I found it was consistently waking me up within a minute of the start of the wake period.

That doesn't mean that stuff like this isn't useful for normal people who don't flail around like an animal when they sleep, but an anecdote is an anecdote. I'd also imagine a more sophisticated piece of software might be able to learn your sleep pattern and adjust the sensitivity (i.e. calibrate the threshold based on how much you personally move when you sleep, rather than the hypothetical average person).

(in Wakemate's defense, they have an awesome no-questions-asked 30-day return policy, so I was happily able to return it and get my money back when I wasn't satisfied. They were a true pleasure to deal with.)
Every conference room whiteboard should be paired with a mirror, so that lefties can write backwards.

If you haven't tried it, writing backwards with your left hand is surprisingly easy when you first try it. (easier than writing forwards eith the left hand, or backwards with the right hand, as a rightie) It's just a more natural way to move your hand.
What's interesting to me is the extent to which IRC support and discussion of technical (programming) topics has been taken over by StackOverflow.

This is admittedly anecdotal, but I often see people refer questioners to SO entries as the answer to something and I've had more success getting answers to things by posting a SO question and then throwing the URL for that into an IRC channel than trying to establish everything in the channel itself.

Maybe SO is just acting like a pastie.org that you can also get answers to.
Spatial Data Analysis & Visualisation using R
They cost me $0.
Unbinding the Atlas: Working with Digital Maps
Monte Carlo-ing Your Eventual Consistency Bets
Israeli hacker retaliates in Saudi-Israeli credit card debacle
What I'm seeing here is overengineering of the interview process.

There are three things you want to figure out:

1. Are they able to do the work, and if so, can they do it well?

2. Are they a cultural fit with your company?

3. Do their goals align well enough with yours? (do they have a genuine interest in the space you're in, are they just using you as a stepping stone, etc).

Points 2 and 3 can be discerned by the phone interview, the in-person interview, and the lunch.

Point 1 can be discerned by looking at and talking about a non-trivial open source project that the candidate has built. Basically, you want to dig into architectural or technical difficulties they faced (you always have these in non-trivial projects), and how they surmounted them. The finished product is more than enough to gauge competence and discover excellence. It's only if they DON'T have anything big they can show you that you need to resort to coding assignments.

Logic problems and brain teasers are a relic of a (thankfully) bygone era of bad hiring practices. There's no evidence to support the theory that people who do well at brain teasers do well at architecting and building applications. All you end up doing is potentially pissing off the candidate.

In the end, you need to understand that it's a two-way street. An exceptional candidate is likely to have many offers to choose from. Waste their time, and they'll go with someone else, leaving you with two kinds of people: Those who have a keen enough interest to suffer through your interview process, and those who are desperate enough to suffer through your interview process.
Aforge is an excellent open-source alternative that is years in development:

http://code.google.com/p/aforge/
The $5000 deductible is per year. Your typical decent high-deductible plan will have a $5000 deductible and 100% coverage thereafter until year end.

The worst-case scenario with such a plan is that you end up with a chronic condition that requires extensive treatment every year, at which point it will cost you $5000 per year. Oh, and that's typically a per-family deductible, not per-person.

Just to put that in perspective, health care spending in the US as of 4 years ago was about $7400 per person. It's likely higher now. So if we managed to get into a situation where everyone was spending $5000/year on the deductible and $100/month on premiums, that would actually be less spending... and that assumes that everyone is sick all the time.

Now in practice, we won't get there; even high-deductible plans cost have more than $100/month premiums when you take away employer subsidies. But the point is that having high deductibles and HSAs that automatically get money put into them every year for those who can't afford to do so themselves is not a completely unreasonable approach to the situation. Actually getting the politics and details worked out could take some work, of course.
I love naps.
Nice. I have been using Video.js for a while now.
This is a bad idea. As the article points out, the point of insurance is to cover this kind of thing.

What insurers should do is steeply jack up rates for first-time crashes when the driver is doing something irresponsible, and make these consequences public knowledge. But this isn't the best idea either -- now people with poor decision making skills get to choose between insurance and {booze, cell phones, ...}, and the party that loses is the person they hit while driving uninsured.
Let's modify the GP's example--instead of checking if an array contains something, he wants to return a copy where a callback is applied to each element. Kind of like "map". However, if the array contains other arrays, he wants to return an empty array.

No problemo in Ruby:

def map_unless_nested(arr)
arr.map {|v| return [] if v.is_a? Array; yield v}
end

map_unless_nested([2,3,4,5]) {|v| v+1 }
# => [3,4,5,6]
map_unless_nested([2,[3,4],5]) {|v| v+1 }
# => []

This starts looking ugly in JavaScript if we want to generalize "map". Either we can keep "map" clean and wrap our callback so it throws exceptions on array input:

function map(arr, callback) {
var ret = [];
for (var i = 0; i < arr.length; i++) {
ret.push(callback(arr[i]));
}
return ret;
}

function map_unless_nested(arr, callback) {
try {
return map(arr, function(v) {
if (v instanceof Array) throw "nested!";
return callback(v);
});
} catch (e) {
if (e==="nested!") { return []; }
throw e;
}
}

map_unless_nested([2,3,4,5], function(v){ return v + 1; })
// => [3,4,5,6]
map_unless_nested([2,[3,4],5], function(v){ return v + 1; })
// => []

Or, if we want to keep the callback clean, we have to start fiddling with map, and then it's no longer really just map (it's map with halting parameters), and then you're using special return values to inform calling functions that the halting condition was met.

function map_unless_test(arr, callback, test) {
var ret = [];
for (var i = 0; i < arr.length; i++) {
if (test(arr[i])) { return false; }
ret.push(callback(arr[i]));
}
return ret;
}

function map_unless_nested(arr, callback) {
return map_unless_test(arr, callback, function(v) {
return v instanceof Array;
}) || [];
}

If you still think that exceptions are the best language feature to solve this example, consider the situation where you want to do something with those nested arrays. For example, let's take the Ruby example and modify it so it will return a copy of the first-encountered innermost array with the callback applied.

def map_first_innermost(arr, &block)
arr.map do |v|
return map_first_innermost(v, &block) if v.is_a? Array
yield v
end
end

That was easy. You can see that non-local returns become useful very quickly.
Web programs written in C++ are no big deal
Didn't mean to question your understanding of intelligence but of the intelligence of the people your post was commenting on
... so create a category called "do:" and change the signature (clang won't bark at you like GCC).

blocks are closures and they have some semantics like function pointers.
Don't forget the linking open data initiative: http://linkeddata.org/ They've been building a huge distributed data set.
i think this is unfair to linked data. linked data could be hidden behind layers upon layers of distributed sparql queries much like how the human readable works today, with each entity playing it's part, but with hadoop you have to have like 15 different ports opened up between each box in a whole setup before you can even begin.
They could put a paywall in front of it.
and really how many of us can pull out $5000, right now

If you don't have an emergency fund (~$1000) and a few months of living expenses saved up, please try and do so.
Ah, yes. Jerf's CLispScript Principle of Descriptive Programming Linguistics: Any sufficiently popular language contains as many practical features as possible with a C++esque syntax bolted on, and is approximately the same as contemporary sufficiently popular languages.

It should be noted that sufficiently popular languages incorporate as many buzzwords and design patterns as possible, which I suppose can be accounted for as 'features'.

(Excellent article, by the way).
Daily Routine of a 4 Hour Programmer
The body's own clock is amazing. I've done this to wake myself up in the mornings successfully too!

I do it like this: when laying in bed right before falling asleep I imagine a flip-card clock and the whole thing is spinning, just spinning, then I imagine it stopping suddenly on the time that I want to wakeup. The really cool part is when you wake up at exactly that time the next morning with NO alarm clocks!
The fact that it's so much cheaper to teach the liberal arts, yet the same tuition is charged, means that they are already much less subsidized. If you work out tuition paid by students and compare it to department salaries/expenses, humanities departments often turn a net profit for their universities (http://campuscomments.wordpress.com/2010/03/25/ah-bartleby-a...). If you charged students proportionally to the amount it cost to educate them for every credit-hour (i.e. equal subsidies across fields), STEM tuitions would be 20% to 50% higher.

On the other hand, I don't see much reason to subsidize medical education or research across the board, given the huge profits in it; income from patent royalties ought to be sufficient to pay for most of the needed research and education. An exception is harder-to-monetize research, like running clinical trials for old generic medications where it's not profitable for the private sector to do so (since they wouldn't be able to patent the result), or studying diseases that primarily affect poor countries.
The material in the book is most useful when you're working at very large scale (where the RDBMS breaks down). You won't necessarily need the techniques if you're working at smaller scale, but the material will certainly expand your mind on ways to manage and work with data.
Honest question: why can't I have a Facebook Connect on Google search?
Just my 2 cents about XML. Don't use it as a feed for data. It's better to use JSON. Specially for mobile applications.
This is good news, although confusing Laplace transform and Laplace equation makes me think that before using their numeric code I should check it thoroughly.
This misses the point of high-deductable insurance. It's not simply the idea that you should share more of the cost. The idea is, rather:

* Low-deductable insurance is inherently more expensive.

* The difference in premiums between low- and high- deductible insurance gradually funds your HSA.

* When you're young and you start your HSA, you also happen to be actuarially less likely to need the money going into your HSA, so it grows to cover your deductible (or, the savings gradually displaces whatever you deposited to start your HSA; whatever).

In the presumed common case, your deductible is fully funded by your HSA which is itself fully funded by the difference in premiums over a few years. That's all money that would simply have been remitted to your insurer if you had a low-deductible plan. The high-deductible plan leaves you better off.

(There's also the more meta point that health insurance exists to keep you from being bankrupted by e.g. appendicitis, and not as a cost-saving plan for routine care.)
Works well enough that many successful games use it. I'd welcome cocos2d on android.
Really nice. I love the lightweight flash fallback.

I'm assuming Level3 hosts the project for free to encourage Video.js users to host their videos with them too?
MS Cambridge has been developing this for years. I have only done some toy tests on it a couple of years ago. I think it could be very useful, but that license...ouch! So unless you are an academic, student, hobbyist, or (maybe) charity, why bother?
I just have an incredibly hard time imagining how I could nap on a yoga mat in my cubile without everyone else stopping to watch it like a circus, and my manger wanting to discuss why I am literally sleeping on the job.
The government can subsidise certain electronics aimed at blocking criminal content. The only thing people can be aware of are less choices as companies exit due to uncompetitive conditions.

In Australia, the mandatory Internet Filter failed. But conspicuously, the government is throwing money at ISPs who voluntarily filter. Now most biggest ISPs are adopting it. I predict when companies adopt NBN to leave the one digit megabit era, they'll have to have "appropriate criminal content filters in place" in order to be eligible (Taking a note from UK's internet censorship).

tl;dr: The government can use capitalism to kill freedom of choice. Slower, silent yet deadly.

Edit: The government could make an Internet User Owns Device Act that dictates that the hardware bought can not be sold with such remote access to removing content on the device. The user has to specifically opt-in for the remote removal service. Essentially, people can own their own devices they bought.
It's not really magical, but yeah, that's how it's always worked.

Yes, someone has to actually fix the working conditions, but it's not going to be you or me, it's going to be the Chinese workers themselves. American and British workers formed unions and engaged in often violent struggles to improve pay and working conditions; some enlightened industrialists like Henry Ford voluntarily and profitably improved pay and working conditions on their own as well. The same thing will eventually happen in China as soon as the country has enough wealth to bargain for. It'll probably happen easier because the Chinese can learn from our history.
sorry - I sometimes delete comments minutes after posting them if I subsequently decide they're low value.

Your post came in as I deleted. Thanks for response, I'll pick it up.

> what OS are you running and what don't you like
> about irssi?

I use linux console via putty. The way I have it configured I have a window at the top that traps comments from any channel directed to me, and then the chat in the bottom.

Things I'm not thrilled about - the way it's set up, by default it loads new chat windows over the top of my hilight buffer. I couldn't find a way to isolate that window, and have it create down the bottom.

> when I'm AFK and someone privatemessages

Ah not quite. I'm not talking about that kind of directed messages. Rather - when someone says "cturner:" in channel (a public directed message). In that case I'd like to know that I'll get their message.

Also, I fiddled quite a bit trying to get autologin to freenode and channel join to work without luck.

Irssi is the best I've found, and I try to stick to console apps so that's a plus and it mostly works for me. But I thought my needs were quite simple and hence thought it wouldn't be too much to think that there'd be something that worked my way out of the box.
Also try craigslist. These burr grinders last forever. I got one for $5 that's probably 20 years old. Grinds are nice an consistent.
Not the OP, but my experience is similar. I shower in the mornings, so I think for me it's more of an association of "wake up = shower"
The built-in "strcpy" function has the exact same limitation. Does the author have a problem with it as well?

Yes. From the linked chapter:

we avoided classic style C strings in this book

From an earlier chapter on strings:

The source of almost all bugs in C come from forgetting to have enough space, or forgetting to put a '\0' at the end of a string. In fact it's so common and hard to get right that the majority of good C code just doesn't use C style strings. In later exercises we'll actually learn how to avoid C strings completely.

This is the author's opinion, of course – it's from a book, that should go without saying – but it's not as if the idea of avoiding C strings in general, and "strcpy" in particular, is an oddball or unique point of view. See e.g.:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/610238/c-strcpy-evil
Anonymous goes after Nazis worldwide
I don't see the first 10 thousand boards lasting very long on their shelves. I can't wait to get my hands on one.
I think all National Firewalls of Purity should block sites which contain the word "Shoes" in the URL. How else would they protect their country's precious bodily essence?
Not even in Spain or Portugal? My last hope...
It's sufficiently painful to express myself on the tiny keyboard that I tend to avoid it. Not to mention if you want to sketch something.
Twenty minute naps leave me in a horrid state of disarray. It takes me about an hour to recover from the grogginess, so I tend to stay as far away from them as possible. I've experimented with time and location variations, but never with any success. It makes me sad, because I know tons of people who work naps into their day with fantastic results.
I don't see his point, really. Yes, C doesn't have a statically testable string type. And yes, the convention is that a C "string" is just an array of character data with a trailing NUL-Byte. He constructs an array without a trailing NUL-Byte - so that's not a string, but an array of characters.

The fact that copy() now happily runs through memory is the expected result of the bug in the calling code. No, it's not useful. Yes, there are problems with the whole approach of using a terminating value - but this doesn't seem to be his point (otherwise he would also have mentioned the linear runtime complexity of strlen() and the problems that arise when a string itself contains a NUL-byte, I suppose).

Now, what is his point? This is chapter 55 [!] in a book called "Learn C The Hard Way" and the author complains about well-know problems with the standard-lib string convention, optional braces, and the common C idiom of doing assignment and value-testing at the same time, _and_ calls all of this 'Deconstructing "K&R C"'?

Maybe a "What I personally don't like about C" would have been a better title. The K&R examples are flawless. The language and stdlib are not. That's well-known. What is new?
China has been blatantly capitalist since the economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping, similar to the USSR after the 1965 economic reform.

Don't fool yourself - China is capitalist. It is capitalist regardless of what its leadership claims or the extent to which it uses state mechanisms or market mechanisms.
> You don't need to be sympathetic with the workers either. They're just negotiating for higher pay in a unique way. Completely within their rights. Nobody is jumping. The ones who are going to jump won't advertise it or ask for anything beforehand.

This is bizarre to me. Shouldn't we be sympathetic to the workers? Some of us are really lucky to have been born in a country where the industrial revolution already took place and labor union struggles already succeeded in establishing the ability to take group action against your employers for better working conditions. So what if paying a fair wage or giving better conditions hurts Foxconn's bottom line?

Also, it is not true that those that threaten suicide do not intend to follow through. This story is an unusual situation since it is group action against an employer, but people threaten and commit suicide for a variety of reasons the world over and your statement erases those peoples experiences.
Most young people would (a) be better served in the immediacy by the highest possible deductible and (b) once established in one, grow into middle-aged people who have set aside that deductible just by maintaining their HSA.

Converting to high-deductible is a problem if you're living at or above your means and are approaching middle age. But presumably regardless of your socioeconomic status, if you're just starting out in the market, given the choice between high- and low-, you're better served with high-.
"If a human went to wolfram.data, there’d be a structured summary of what data the organization behind it wanted to expose. And if a computational system went there, it’d find just what it needs to ingest the data, and begin computing with it."

This sounds to me like a high-level description of how the web is supposed to work today, only implemented using a new TLD instead of HTTP headers.

It sounds odd to me, coming from someone whose major web service sends all results -- even text and tables -- as GIF.
For me the download link does not work in any browser.
Cookies can solve that. If that's how it works is another question.
Live re-rendering of data -- imagine if the (now) "24 minutes ago" timestamp next to your handle was always accurate, instead of just reflecting when I loaded the page.

Easier implementation of otherwise difficult features. Doing a client-side autocomplete of people's names is trivial when you already have all of the other accounts in your organization modeled in JavaScript ... but not as fun when you have to ajax for server-rendered HTML for it.

Live updates of pushed data. When another reader +1's a post that you're currently looking at, if the server pushes that data to you, and you have a model for that post -- it's easy to increment the counter. If the server has to push the re-rendered HTML for the entire post, it's much more difficult.

... and those are just the tip of the iceberg.
I agree about Google's styleguides... I used to code like that and line up all the :'s vertically, and i finally realized I was making my code harder to read.

So i refactored all my existing code to have every statement on one line. Yeah it's long, but my huge monitor and xcode in full screen remedies that.
python, for starters. scipy/matplotlib dont work with osx's shipped python
Upgrading the system Python on Mac OS X isn't easy because it's not something you should do. See http://stackoverflow.com/a/1541850 for something of an explanation about this.
Continuous Integration in the Cloud
Sorry, I don't know what "Backbone" is. I see links to New Relic and Pivotal Labs, but no links to anything called "Backbone".

I guess this blog post was maybe not meant for purely technical people, but it would be nice to understand what "Backbone" is, and exactly why it would solve their problems.
Why bosses who are civilized and caring but incompetent are horrible