skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ok fellas, we still have some serious work to do.

If it's not already painfully apparent, our current batch of representatives are completely ineligible to pass modern legislation. They're not idiots, they're not morons, they just don't have the relevant backgrounds to represent us anymore. The times have changed around them, and their skills and background are no longer effective or relevant enough.

We need to work hard to get new representatives on the hill that understand and respect technology. The only way non oppressive legislation even stands a chance is if we have representatives that understand the workings of the internet and don't say things like "let google just hire some 16 year old wiz-kid to fix it".

Seriously. It's no longer ok to be a representative and not understand the internet. It is a fundamental part of commerce, free speech, assembly, religion, education, etc. and it's outright dangerous to have people in office who don't understand it attempting to control it.

It's up to us to get relevant, modern representatives in office. We just need to work together and do it.
Cool iPhone/iPad app for finding domain names launched today
> Unions are a cancer
I don't wish to start a flame war so I shall be measured here.

Unions came in to being to fight massive, widespread exploration of workers that today would be considered criminal. Unions are still required for their original purpose across the globe ( http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides)

I agree that the USA has been curiously free of unionisation (having 5% of your population as illegal indentured servants probably helps) but most western countries have had the unions win their important battles and it will take a while, if ever, before unions as they were in late 19c early 20c will be needed again

oddly it feels like movements such as occupy are going to become the new union movement.

Anyway my point was that unions = cancer is such a self evidently wrong thing to say for billions of workers that it even makes cancer cringe.
Is this just an idea, or do you have an actual usable implementation? Sounds interesting but feels like something I'd need to see before believing.
The idea is to drop in and replace jquery on mobile.
Bah. There are so many apps that I purchased that are complete junk, that, IMO, paying a $0.99 for an app that I do use seems to even itself out. And what about completely fraudulent apps (e.g. search for "blacklist" in the App Store). How are they even getting in?

Given the huge amount of crap in the App store, the only real way of finding things that are decent is to go to specialized aggregators. I go to BoardGameGeek in order to find reviews of games. The detailed reviews there mean more to me than the huge stinking pile of games in the App Store. There needs to be a better way of sifting through the stuff in the App Store than using the App Store Application itself.
A link on the same website explains why the Mac Pro will still be relevant. http://www.marco.org/2011/11/02/scaling-down-the-mac-pro

As a point of comparison, almost all desktop-class motherboards today are limited to 16–24 GB of RAM, and the top-end 3.4 GHz Core i7 CPU (available already in the iMac) gets a 64-bit GeekBench score of 12,575. The Mac Pro released more than a year ago maxes out fairly affordably at 48–96 GB, and the top-end dual-2.93 GHz Xeons score a 24,159 in Geekbench. And it’s probably going to be updated to even faster CPUs in a few months.
Windows 8 tablets could be priced right out of contention
I've always been ok with no braces for one line statements. But they have to actually fit on one line and not be another nested block. I recently found a style guide for javascript that recommended only leaving braces out for statements that could be fit on the same line eg:

if (something) doSomething();
for (...) repeatSomething();

What I will disagree with is that braces are completely free. I believe that code which is vertically succinct is a good thing. It allows you to see more context at once which is particularly useful with well designed, well structured short methods and classes. I've always been opposed to excess white space, like the random blank lines within methods that programmers seem to put arbitrarily with no rhyme or reason, other than their personal aesthetics of course. Also spaces around arguments, putting the opening brace on it's own line (which I find terribly redundant anyone can see when a block has started).

I've always liked the K&R style aesthetically, but again I'll agree that Zed has found a decent example of where not using braces just because you can is taken too far.
I must be missing something - why not just hash all the plaintext passwords, store the hases on the new version of your site, and have it so when users login to the new site it does the right thing.

Why should the users have to know anything?
2 New Tools for the Remote Worker: Hipchat and Vox.io
This is especially fun when renting. After some negative experiences, I actually avoid complexes that offer too good of a sweetheart deal to new tenants because having to move out after a year because rent effectively went up 15-20% is no fun (even if all you have to do is move in the unit down the hall).

It's the same thing as cable and whatever else. I'm feel like I'm constantly canceling services and restarting them to get the better deals (when the threat to do so isn't good enough). If you're willing to go through the hassle of creating new amazon accounts, or whatever it may be, to get the perk, the others are subsidizing you.
If the president were to have the line-item veto, where he could approve of certain parts of a bill and veto others, we could hold him personally responsible whenever bills get loaded up like this. As it is, they can pass what they want and nobody is responsible. That's clearly not the way the system was designed to work. The entire purpose of representative democracies is that while representatives can freely vote against their constituents, the constituents also can throw them out of office based on the representative's decisions.

I've seen this same problem play out in a variety of contexts, and it looks to me like the line-item veto is the only thing that will prevent this corruption of the system we're seeing. While this idea has been a pet cause of conservatives for some time, it looks like supporters of liberty have just as much or more skin in the game as fiscal hawks.

Play out the following scenario in your head: it's late in the year, no budget has been passed by Congress (again), and suddenly some third-rail social program is running out of money. Congress passes a law to help the orphans and grandmothers, everybody climbs on-board with huge majority votes, and way in the back section is another version of SOPA.

If you're the president, what do you do? Note this is a much different political scenario than just threatening a veto -- this is asking if you're willing to risk pissing off huge special interests groups just to make a much smaller number of nerds happy. It's political math, and it works quite simply. You sign the bill, make a public speech about how bad the new SOPA is, and life goes on. If you're smart you send out mailers asking people to donate so you can get rid of the thing you just signed! One party will pick the "side" of SOPA, the other party will pick the other "side". In fact it doesn't matter whether you really support or oppose the bill, whoever paid for it got it passed, huge numbers of politicians got to oppose it, and the public can't point the finger at anybody. There's nobody to throw out of office. There's no feedback loop. The system is broken.

In my mind the only thing that is going to fix that is the line-item veto. A lot of state governors have it. I think it's about time POTUS got it also.
Are You Wearing Camo to Work And Don't Even Know It?
Three Techniques For Finding Your Next Startup Idea
Artificial botany with L-systems and Python
Has anyone tried this in production? Would be nice to be able to host an MySQL on S3 instead of setting up a separate EC2 instance or paying out the wazoo for an RDS instance.
That's exactly it - many 'minimalists' I know live just like this, but never have any money, always need a place to stay or a ride, never want to chip in at the nice restaurants because of point #1, and make it extremely uncomfortable for the rest of us 'consumerists.'

I get it, having less can be good, but not at the cost of friendships and a healthy lifestyle. Oh, and did I mention that many of these clothing items, which get re-used often, get nasty fast.
"Your projects" does have a rather wide applicability, I guess :)

That said, I'm wondering what a /proper/ license for a colour scheme should be. If it's a css file (or even an emacs theme), that doesn't seem to be so hard to imagine.
Is this using twitter bootstrap? It looks like it is, but not sure...either way, love the design!

Also, why did you shut the pigeon one down?
wow. way to put that in perspective. when you really think about it, it makes sense. i'm a raw vegan and feel like i am more of a minimalist than the OP and i own 100+ things.

at first when reading this article, i was imagining my life with only 15 items. then after reading jdietrich post, it made me think a little more..

i would say, i'm very eco-friendly and very aware of my actions. i would not say i'm a minimalist. nothing in my apt is unnatural. no toxic chemicals. from the soap, to the tooth-paste, all the way down to the cleaning products. i compost, recycle, etc..i bike everywhere, use a carshare service (citycarshare), etc etc..

either way, interesting read.
my first thought was: "I bet three of them are macbook pros :)." seriously though...

Where are his toiletries? Stuff for the kitchen? more socks? everyday bag as opposed to that travelling one? a single book he's reading right now, or a reader like a kindle or whatever?

This guy doesnt't look like he's actually living with 15 things, which makes the point kind of moot. He doesn't even have a towel.

Let alone anything like a dress shoes.

I don't think it's possible to get ownership down to 15 things.

Each of the following is an absolutely minimal thing:

1) laptop

2) power adaptor for laptop

3) phone

4) power adapter for phone

5) toothbrush

6) toothpaste

7) underwear

8) underwear

9) underwear

10) pair of socks

11) pair of socks

12) pair of socks

13) shoes

14) jeans

15) jeans

16) everyday bag

17) towel

18) bodywash/shampoo/and shaving cream in one

19) which reminds me: razer BZZZZZZZT over the 15 :) and you're just getting around to being able to shave.

20) shirt

21) shirt

22) shirt

23) sweater

24) sweater

If you add some moisterizing cream and maybe a watch and blazer, maybe a second pair of shoes, you're pretty well set though to move to a new city. You don't need a wallet, that's why jeans have pockets. a belt wouldn't kill you either.
Overall, nice execution. I tested a couple nouns and I could definitely see myself using this in the feature.

I do think the mass of green at the top of the results is a little... too stunning. Do you think the same thing could be achieved with colored text and/or colored borders for each div and/or something else along those lines?
a) Trusted space for collecting backed pledges. Try doing that with PayPal and see how quickly you get shut down.

b) Well branded name with first-mover advantage which brings higher CTR on social campaigns.

c) Centralization of PR - contacts with traditional media which increase chance of mainstream coverage.

d) Volume of curated content makes it interesting to third-party developers, increasing 'virality' (see Twitter's media-in-post for any posted KickStarter link.

...

I could go on. It's pretty easy to build the same strawman argument against many businesses by focusing on a weakly analogous service and conveniently ignoring the laundry list of benefits. The whole 'socially interesting causes shouldn't be for-profit' argument is completely unsupported and drowned in pseudo-intellectual non-sequitur, which incidentally appears to be the raison d'être for this blog.

Name me another form of fundraising for arbitrary projects which doesn't require giving up significant equity at such an early stage. If you want a real target for a poorly-balanced funding arrangement maybe take aim at Dragon's Den. People who KickStart their projects are fully aware of what they're giving up for their seed capital - 5% of cash and no equity. Sounds pretty damn good to me.
You can solve complex things with k-nearest neighbor as long as you use an appropriate distance function. This is the beauty, a distance function abstracts the complexity. I tackled a tricky biology problem by applying a cascade of similarity filters. Check the presentation I gave at the Clojure/conj 2011:
http://prezi.com/zaaoq6pjrl2z/clojure-conj-final/

My startup provides a very fast similarity engine (in a DB of 100 million objects I can find similar objects in under 20 millisec. with one CPU) in case you worry about scalability. URL: http://simmachines.com
Changes of Real GDP per person in different countries since 2007
Rather, they did "SELECT filename WHERE row_num = 100000000".

They're the ones who have repeatedly described it as "looking at the logs". That struck me as weird -- to have a log that ordinally attributes every upload -- however that's how they describe it and is hence why others describe it so.

Honestly, if you're concerned about something like this then you should not be using a third party solution to store your files.

I engaged in the prior argument, and there too this was the common last line of defense.

It misses the point.

Everyone knows that SaaS vendors can access your data and files, so it is bizarre that this keeps getting mentioned like it was unknown. Yet critical businesses engage vendors to hold their most confidential files -- the sorts that auditors grill them over and various bureaucratic organizations monitor them on.

Because they know, or at least believe and hope, that the organizations they entrust with their data use discretion, and have standard policies and standards -- if not actual data security and auditing controls -- to ensure that data is only used on a need basis. For instance for support purposes.

Writing a blog post that flippantly mentions a customer's data sends the wrong message. While we all know it is possible, it gives the entirely wrong impression to customers. Data security is the #1 impediment to the adoption of SaaS.

SaaS depends upon the trust of customers, and DHH is approaching this in the right way. It is quite a contrast from the many laissez faire responses on here.
Is French-style parenting cruel?
The real lesson here is that if you really want your data to be private, you have to take responsibility for encrypting it or not uploading it anywhere.

Even in the best-case scenario, at least some employees can access data as part of their jobs. This has been true of every job I've ever worked at.
Canonical counterexample: Symbolics Lisp Machines.
I think the question is: Is it content that I still want to access in a few years?

For example, Facebook with its terrible URLs and JavaScript everywhere is very fragile. Hard to cache, hard to archive, but who cares? If the whole site went bankrupt in ten years, would many people actually export their data?
Or a blog on Rails, where every article becomes obsolete after a year. Or a restaurant website. Those sites can use all the magic they want.

But if you write about mathematics or art or other things that should pass the test of time, please make it bare-bones, semantic HTML. If I really like it, I can just archive it and show it to my children later. It's like using hover for menus, who'd guessed that this would break for millions of devices one day?
I'm assuming that you mean prosumer apps. I haven't seen these on iOS. The only app that I've seen that is better on iOS is the official Twitter app.

Then again, I haven't seen traditionally big devs on the Mac release Acorn, Flare, and Pixelmator on iOS.
this is where I learnt Theory of Computation from; I'll especially recommend Shai Simonson's lectures, that guy is absolutely brilliant
Thanks for your contribution.

I am somewhat like many people who are unfamiliar with data mining for this type of matching.

For example, I want to provide a "similar items" for Vacation Rentals, where the "dimensions" or attributes, could be "location", "bedrooms", "price", etc. It's hard to quantitfy anything to show something which might be more relevant to someone else based on the previous properties that they have currently been viewing.

Instead I have just taken to approach of creating a bounding box based on the Geo coordinates, and then offer up similar properties within their search price range. But I would really love to eventually implement something like your original article. (Suggestions welcome).
That makes it sound like patents are a real hinderance to getting things done.
I apologize in advance if what I'm about to say may sound harsh, mean or elitist, but the truth is programming isn't for everyone.

While the intent of the article is very noble ("improving the usability of Codecademy"), it also raises very important questions about programming tutorials in general. How much "holding by the hand" should a tutor do, really?

The examples the author gives are very relevant to my point. The behaviour of a web browser when pressing "BackSpace" or of an interpreter when leaving an opening quote unmatched ... Those are perfect examples of the kind of things that a future programmer must learn to figure out by themselves. While I don't argue that the pupil has to necessarily find that out from the first time, I strongly believe it is not up to the tutor to point it out.

To a certain extent, the role of "introductory" tutorials aiming at teaching programming, should be a way to filter potential programmers and select the best from the ones who won't make it. Teaching programming is similar to Martial Arts in the sense that the best teachers are the ones who let their students struggle before earning an achievement.

I can safely assume most of us here found out the "backspace in browser" issue (as well as "unmatched quote" one) without having the solution pointed out to us. We played, tinkered and experimented. This is how we got where we are today.

Holding a student by the hand is not doing him a favor. Often, it's simply delaying his giving up. And I think that the worst thing Codecademy could do is presenting their student with a modified interface for the JS (or whatever language) interpreter, just to make things "nicer".
Does this mean that Jan 18th is cancelled?
Hulu To Debut Its First Original Scripted Show “Battleground” Feb
Ooma CEO Eric Stang Shows Off The New HD2 VoIP Handset
FFS, which way is it? Do dynamic languages have extensive intellisense support or not? Do you need to give it hints or not?

I'm not new to the industry, the day job's MS, but my personal stuff isn't.

If you're sitting there without an IDE in 2012 and looking up or memorising the syntax for every single method call you make it's time to grow up and realise there's a better world out there.

Even my bloody text editor has basic intellisense.
A bit of both. I have a working prototype, but it is not ready for serious use. In the next post I'm planning to have screenshots and work through some small practical task while explaining some of the features.
That was the most beautifully typeset rant I've ever read
Symantec Buys Cloud-Based Email Archiving Co LiveOffice For $115M
No Turning Back ~ 2012 | The Hacker News (THN)
TinyProj Shuts Down, Users Sent To TechStars GroupTalent
That's kind of the point of log files. As a contrived example, what if users suddenly couldn't upload files that ended in .jpeg instead of .jpg. How would they be able to diagnose the problem if they didn't store data about image filenames?

Obviously they filter passwords and other sensitive data, but I think they should rightly have access to whatever they judge necessary to do their job.

There will always be people who have the ability to access data they are not supposed to, but in the end it comes down to who you will trust with your data.

To me, the transparency and contributions of 37signals qualifies them to have that trust. With that, I trust them to make good decisions about who they hire and what they store in their log files.
I made my (non-programming) girlfriend try codecademy and she had the same kind of troubles. I had to go at lengths to explain to her what a console was.

She also told me that codecademy assumes too much stuff is known, like booleans or whatever. All the things that we take for granted and innate are extremely complicated to teach through a human-computer interaction.

In the end she went and googled "javascript tutorial", clicked one of the results and told me "this is much clearer". The tutorial was in classic textual form. I think codecademy looks very appealing for developers because it looks like it's easy to learn on it, but that's because we are developers, not laypeople.
I laughed. I may even put this one up on my desk.

In reality, the corporate world is a lot worse (more complex).

I'd actually like to see an xkcd huge size poster on the types of job titles and responsibilities you see at a corporation, and the vendors and regulators, oh my.
Former US CIO Kundra Joins Salesforce: EVP Of Emerging Markets
This is winning a battle, not a war. There is going to be more legislation, both in the US, and the World.

The internet is unique in that what makes it powerful is it's interconnectedness. It doesn't make sense for some nodes to have different rules than others. I believe the internet needs it's own bill of rights, but it should be presented in an international forum.

It's probably a pipe dream, but the idea of the US being able to take down international nodes by any method is devastating to me.
Atlassian’s 2011 Revenues Were $102 Million With No Sales People
A) is a thin wrapper around Amazon Payments.

B) gives KS an advantage in the market. But as the article mentions, it doesn't justify gouging your customers just because you can.

D) Is "curating" content really worth 5%? Would you pay e.g. HN 5% for 6 weeks for linking to your site?
It just occurred to me that some might not see the parallel between the "nighty-niners" and the bolsheviks. Both words mean "members of the majority".
Codecademy have done a great job at reducing something that can be very difficult down to laymans terms but its difficult deciding just how far down the rabbit go they need to go.

While the problems with the REPL and trying to delete text are obviously a problem (and a hard one to solve), I'm not sure the issue with leaving out the quotes is. Obviously if the text was replaced with "I don't know anything called liz" instead of "liz is not defined" would be a minor improvement -- but at the same time anyone should be able to sit back, look at what they were asked to code ("Ryan".length) and notice the difference to what they typed (liz.length). The "Oops, try again" might be enough of a message there.
There's well over 15 things in the picture. Not shown: toothbrush, soap, wash linens, contacts fluid, deodorant, etc. This seems like vanity over minimalism/utility, much like the EDC "every day carry" crowd with their $150 flashlights and $50 pens.

Focus on frugality, not brands and numbers.
I think if you upload your data to some cloud service, you should assume that the employees of the company can look at it. The error here was some employee leaking information to the public (the name of a file).
Never heard of NAU shirts, so I did a minimal look-up, and the minimum price appears to be $72, but they claim to be sustainable, whatever that is.
I agree the black on bright green text is intense and not very readable. I like the idea but I think you need to tweak the design a little. The layout is pretty good just need to play around with the colors a little bit.
8 Free Battery Manager Apps for iOS