skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Better still, increment hotness by 2^(dt/λ) where dt is the time since the site was launched (epoch), and λ the halflife of an upvote. No worker process needed.

Doubles will go to infinity after a few years, but you can either reset the epoch at that time, or store the significand and the exponent seperately.
Use git from the command line (not a GUI)
More frameworks like Bootstrap is not a bad idea. But, if you don't want a hundred websites that look like Twitter, then perhaps the right answer is having a themes that are based on Bootstrap - like what http://wrapbootstrap.com/ and http://bootswatch.com/ are doing.
Frighteningly Ambitious People
I was certainly in a great situation. However, we weren't living off any more than my wife's salary (including any DDG investments), so I would say the answer was yes.
What about launchd? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD_s6Fjdri8. Also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launchd.
I know I didn't notice it back then but did notice it now (and it's a neat trick which I didn't encounter before), so for me reposting worked.
We need to focus on inhabiting just one other world, first. The longer-term problem of universal heat death will work itself out.
You do have to know about the bitfield struct syntax which, as C features go, seems to be one of the more obscure.
I'd prefer the logo to be a bit more subdued over the relaxing black background.
Cupertino Apple Campus 2 Project Update
Have you tried the naval observatory master clock at http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/simpletime.html ?
> It can't be that much more work to do the whole interface with UIKit.

It really does take that much more time.

Just to use a simple example of displaying a list of data. An experienced web developer can take a list of data from a database or web service, loop through it, and spit out a decent looking page in 10-15 minutes. Maybe take an 15-30 minutes of tweaking and styling to make it really look professional.

Now, doing the same thing on iOS, you use what is called a UITableView. There is no type of magic data binding included, so you have to wire the whole thing up by hand. A bit more extra work but nothing too terrible so far. Now, tableviews are great if you only need to display text in one of 4 predefined ways, but that usually ends up not being the case. You end up having to make your own UITableCells to get things laid out just the way you want. So you make a cell and start loading it up with different label fields, one for each differently styled piece of text you want, image controls, etc etc. Now, if you are doing this the 'right' way, each of these cells should have their own controller because by now the method that is providing the cells to the UITableView has a ton of logic in it and is acting as the controller for your custom cell. But, you have to maintain this list of controllers seperately inside your UITableViewController, further down the rabbit hole you go.

You think you are all done, but depending on how fancy your cells are and how long your list is, you notice the scrolling is jerky, not smooth, not very 'iPhoneish'. So you read some more and figure out the only way to get really smooth scrolling when dealing with complex cells is to manually draw them yourself and not rely on a collection of controls contained inside the cell. So there you sit, drawing out your individual cells with pen-style graphics methods and blitting text and images like you are a video game developer.

Most of the nice interactions you think of as being native, aren't. They are something that a developer had to do by hand. Even something like not having the keyboard cover up a text field has to be done manually.

I'm not saying it isn't worth the time to do a full native app, but it does require a lot of time, UIKit gives you very little for free.
(Yet Another) Android NDK Blog Posting
It's worth publicly observing that the only libertarian movements that I've seen which really attack not just governments but also government-like institutions, are bizarre anarcho-socialist libertarianisms.

I like to put this in concrete terms like so: we get crappy and overpriced food at the TU Delft because the University contracts with a catering service named Sodexo. It's become a point of ritual that our department saunters down to the canteen, orders a dreary meal, and then complains about it. This is the sort of problem which libertarians want to solve with more competition. That's a noble idea, but what competition, exactly? I don't have the freedom to start up a restaurant of my own nearby -- I would need the university's permission. The university is thus in some sense government-like: it owns territory, demands some sort of 'tax' in the form of tuition from the denizens of that territory, probably charges Sodexo certain 'property tax' analogues for operating there, and businesses cannot operate on their territory without their explicit consent. The Men With Guns that I've heard libertarians talk about are sort of there, but a step removed -- that is, if you did try to open up this restaurant you would probably receive a threat and ultimately the police could escort you away; just as might happen if you sit-in on courses without paying tuition and they catch you. The most major difference is that universities can expel you; usually criminals in a nation get imprisoned, not deported.

I guess what I'm saying is, It's not just "economic ways you can control an honest man", but there are potentially many ways to implement an authoritarian state inside a libertarian utopia -- and to me that just sounds like "there's something wrong here." It's like a security vulnerability in a political stance, or so.

I don't know; I don't have the answers. I was a libertarian once and then I got a bit too perplexed by this sort of thing.
It may be possible that EMF sensitivity is a medical condition. If that happens to become accepted however, I for one would like to have some actual data on that (what EM frequencies, power, exposure time, who is most at risk, etc.) instead of a 'ban everything, btw we sell a miracle protection' style fearmongering. 'I have heard things' are anecdota, not data - I have heard five impossible things before the breakfast, doesn't necessarily mean they're true or false.
Goto decorator for python
I'm aware of them, but I'm under the impression that they make up a tiny sliver of any given country.

And for what it's worth I didn't downvote you (nor can I).
Firesign Theater's Peter Bergman: 1939-2012
I never said his morality had to be "Responsible, Serious and Altruistic." It looks like you're assuming that morality is a simple construct used only by politicians for deception. In reality, almost every significant, powerful figure I've read about has some guidelines to his or her behavior, even if it's a pluralistic framework.

Additionally, it was strange that you projected your own Utilitarian belief system onto pg. I've never read or heard him articulate his moral position; he alludes to one in "Things you can't say," but obviously doesn't say it.

I think a lot of the HN crowd is very good at examining hard subjects like science but is under-developed in the humanities. That's an obvious statement due to the nature of this forum, but it doesn't hurt as a reminder that maybe there are unknown unknowns to the human condition you may have not considered.
Snackr: Burn the Ships If You Want Success | Entrepreneur Stories
John Gruber is extremely well versed in typography. He talks at great length about typefaces in his podcast and has worked for Bare Bones Software on BBEdit, a well known text editor. I would tend to trust his judgements on this matter.
I have to say, that Android Design minisite is full of useful nuggets of information on app design. It's worth a look regardless of your thoughts on Roboto.
He mentions this at the end as his next article. But it should be in this list as a must do.

A problem with marketing is often peoples opinion of there skill out-weighs the reality. And you will have an influential person like a senior exec trying to add things to pages or do their own messaging. With A/B testing this is fine, you make a few versions of the page and then the results give answer. It really forces people to back their opinion and not just throw it out there. And shuts up those people that are consistently wrong. All while being much less personal than duking it out over opinions that can create friction.... yes it is essential.
Microsoft develops a new vocal translator
Out of curiosity, how would you mitigate a similar DDOS attack against your system? Do you believe that your system would hold up against a DDOS similar to what NameCheap is experiencing?
Holy crap, that's way beyond what I would have expected. Thanks for reporting this.
Tell me I'm not the first to see the irony of a page full of comments debating ntp, GPS and atomic clocks, while there are two interesting front page stories about the value of ambitious goals.
It does not do clock sync/accuracy determination. Time.is is rather unique that way. However, I'm skeptical over the importance of that feature.

disclosure: worldtimebuddy founder.
Please don't let the haters hold you back. The entire creative world is awash with re-mixes. This is nothing to be ashamed of or to avoid. Contrary to what some seem to believe, NOTHING is created in a vacuum. Everyone is influenced by others. The extent to which you show your influences in your work is really just part of your creative process in my opinion.

I hope you find a way to make your game regardless of all the "original" people that think they are better somehow than those who are re-mixing to create something new with the culture they love.
There is case law that says that calling functions from something else does not make your code a derivative work of that something else. This issue arose when people started making unauthorized third party games for video game consoles that made use of code in the ROMs of those consoles.

The SFLC says that calling a function does make your code a derivative work of that function's code. I've never seen any analysis from them that explains why they think the video game cases don't apply. They are a free software advocacy organization--they naturally tend to take the most free software friendly interpretation possible of law, and I think that often takes them a little past what the law actually is into what they wish it was.

It would be interesting for someone to write a simple blogging system with a plugin interface that is compatible with Wordpress' plugin interface, and put it in the public domain.

Then anyone making a plugin could claim that they actually wrote it for the public domain system, and that is what they are a derivative work of rather than Wordpress. It would be amusing to see what the SFLC would make of that.

Something like this actually happened once, in the early '90s. Someone was distributing a secure email system that used RSA. It used RSA via the RSAREF library, which was freely distributable but not free software. The email system was distributed in source form. When you compiled it, you could compile it to use either the BSD arbitrary precision math library or GMP. Basically, the source had #if statements that selected whether it should assume the BSD library or GMP. (I believe GMP was under GPL, not LGPL, at the time).

Stallman didn't like this. The author of the email system then wrote a toy arbitrary precision library that had the same interface as GMP, and that satisfied Stallman.
We need to focus on managing the one that we've got, first.

And so far we're doing a piss-poor job of it.
The idea is you can scan it with your phone and not have to type the URL in. Not sure how many people actually do that though.
Have you seen the average bomb dog? is not a labradoodle...

And google ethiopian rat, is not that ugly/scary like black rats and others.
In C you're used to less-than-one loops though. for(i = 0; i < 5; i++) terminates on 4. And it's what you want if you're going through an array.
A Better Way To Program
Aldebaran Secures Major Financial Backing Opening The Door For Consumer Robotics
Famed USS Enterprise Takes Its Final Voyage
Actually, the WebOS version (which wasn't developed in-house) shares no code with the iPad one.
No, it's not like that at all. RoR is a very specific application, if you can't write a controller then you probably don't know RoR, but it doesn't say you don't know programming in general.

Yes, you can have relational database that doesn't use SQL at all - how many of those are around and popular though? There are some, but not many. What are the chances that you worked with a lot RDBMS, yet never encountered SQL even at the basic level, and it is not immediately evident from your resume, which still says "SQL"? But OK, if that's the situation, you can say "you know, I worked with non-SQL relational databases, and let me tell you about this cool thing I've done that is way better than SQL JOIN can do" - and that might be fine too. Usually though the case is just that people inflate their resumes and think they won't be called out on it. It's very unpleasant because when you interview somebody whose resume looks good, you unconsciously plan that you'd get a great addition to your team - and then you discover he doesn't even know joins... Bummer.

BTW, inner join has nothing to do with MySQL inner nuances - it exists in virtually any SQL implementation out there AFAIK.
How Frictionless Sharing Could Undermine Your Legal Right to Privacy
You seemed to be suggesting that it had something to do with margins, which is actually a different issue than column width. In a newspaper, you can have a lot of columns with small margins, for example.

You also seemed to be suggesting that it had something to do with separating different stories on the same page.
"Man, mentally, was one. He consisted of a trillion, trillion, trillion ageless bodies, each in its place...minds of all the bodies freely melted one into the other"
Seems it's going to be true. When you google for something it's already some kind of thought of Man. For now connections between individuals are very slow, but it will be solved soon. I'll have a chip in my head which will allow me to share my thoughts immediately with anybody.
Similar in C++11: https://github.com/d5/node.native

And a simple example of using it (for a hello world benchmark): http://www.devthought.com/2012/02/08/node-http-hello-world-s...
Well, he clearly felt that three adjectives to describe the font was sufficient. I would have to agree. Of course everything on Daring Fireball is normally in the context of how a certain topic pertains to Apple which the rest of the article covers succinctly.
Yeah, Facebook has a special authentication mode for devices where browser OAuth isn't an option.

My Samsung feature phone also gets full permissions when it logs in.
> I've never read or heard him articulate his moral position; he alludes to one in "Things you can't say," but obviously doesn't say it.

Funny side note: moral positions, in the abstract, aren't usually things you can't say. They usually sound eminently reasonable, until you work out the consequences. This is more or less the history of ethics.
How about you trust your own eyes and feelings about this sort of things?
Ask HN: How does LinkedIn know so much about me?
So browsing through my linked in account, it does a great job of recommending people I know (people I graduated with ... people from work, etc).

Here's the thing though, it's too good. For example, it just recommended I connect with a SCUBA instructor I met with once in Florida. I saw this guy once, 2 years ago, haven't seen him since and have no other connections to him. The only way I can figure this out is if they somehow have access to my gmail account. I'm fairly certain I never connected gmail to linked inn, and even if someone did, surely they don't have permission to parse their entire e-mail history...

How do they know so much?
You can already:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Roboto:regular,medium...;

See this post:

https://plus.google.com/108761828584265913206/posts/JyBRu1gs...
So we are in agreement and the question becomes: how can we debunk the belief that these languages offer any real difference in productivity?

Presumably if we could show this then the world's programmers could focus on porting old code into "Codesperanto" and everyone would be happy(er).
Gruber does seem to know a lot, thought I'm not sure that talking about type on your podcast or working for a company that develops a text editor exactly proves that. That said, he's clearly got a snarky agenda about Android, which makes me take anything he writes about it with a grain of salt.

What annoys me is not so much Gruber or other bloggers having an opinion, it's the followers who take what they write as fact. Roboto probably isn't a font for the ages, but it seems to do what it set out to do very well. The people who worked on it aren't idiots.

Android has its issues, but I'm sick of the little cabal of Apple writers who portray it and everything surrounding it as a trainwreck.
Would be great to see a Stylish version for Firefox (and Chrome) users. Nice work.
Is it possible that he gave LinkedIn access to his email account and he has your address in his email? Alternatively, could he have viewed your LinkedIn page? Maybe LinkedIn recommend connections that way also.
Which lands and populations do you suggest Africans raid for resources and labour?
Obviously goto is a bad idea. However this code implies it's possible to add new syntax to Python from within Python. That is pretty cool.
I think it's fairly understandable why - of all of Asimov's shorts - The Last Question tends to have so much gravity with HN readers. For those that haven't read the story before, I can also see why it's worth the up vote. I do find it perplexing, however, to learn how many times it has landed on the front page. This is personally the third time I've found it front page in the last 3-4 years - and I'm not a die-hard HN reader.

At any rate, given how many readers are probably new to the The Last Question, it's probably worth citing another Asimov piece that is oft-mistaken for The Last Question - The Last Answer. It's a more recent work, and a bit more obscure, but worth the read if you're into Asimov.

http://www.thrivenotes.com/the-last-answer/
Oh yeah, forgot about that...
The weird cause of Swords & Soldiers network errors
People should stop using the word "success" so much, because it really does seem to mean different things to different people. Of course you can abstract away the precise meaning and talk useful things about "success" and get to some generally useful conclusions - but there is limit to what you can say in general, without talking about specific values one measure one's success with. This word often seems to be a good candidate for a taboo game[1].

[1] http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Rationalist_taboo
I'm not sure how to compute the average bomb dog but Labradors are in fact very common sniffer dogs:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2010-09-30-1Adogs30_ST...

Lots of German Shepherds as well and plenty of other breeds. No, the're not 'doodles' but a pack of angry Jack Russels isn't a pic-nick either. The point is that people are somewhat used to bomb sniffer dogs because they associate them with the dogs they already know. With rats they will also associate them with the rats they already know, and that association is not going to be a good one.

That rat looks like this:

http://www.viewchange.org/videos/africa-bomb-squad-rats

So, you'll be testing your rat-on-a-leash in a crowded airport ---->>> there

and meanwhile I'll be

<-------- over there.

I hate being trampled by screaming tourists.
Would someone who had a mortgage, and kids to pay tuition for had that luxury though?
Censorship By Top Social Media Websites
But the point is alternate and arguably more effective methods exist, particularly scaled to a smaller airport. I would say that even if you patted everyone down at the airport, the cost would be less but that's just speculation on my part.

However, I would like to post an excerpt from the last link that I shared.

"TSA acknowledges that it takes 10-12 seconds per passenger to go through the scanner while only 2 seconds is needed for the metal detector. Since the scanners have a 54% false positive rate, approximately half of those using the scanners receive some form of pat-down, further slowing the process. When hundreds of people are in line, that additional 8 to 30 seconds each adds up, resulting in substantial delays.

So while TSA claims that the scanners speed up the screening process, the opposite, in fact, is true."
My Last Will and Testament
Free Indie Games not featured on TIGS / Indiegames: Love [Hubol Gordon]
You don't happen to work for Microsoft "R&D" do you?
What other leading candidates can you think of?
JC almighty.

Why do so many people need to have such STRONG OPINIONS about everything that isn't what they happen to own?
We have kids and a mortgage.
I think it swings on the definition of optimal being used I'm assuming optimal with respect to an impartial but omniscient third party.
How to push your code to your remote web server with Git
I was in the Data analysis with Pandas talk and it was scary cool. Everybody in the sci-py community seems to be using the IPython web notebook to do their presentations and Wes had us work through examples in our own notebooks. I still have the tab open :)
In the future, everyone will be threatened with death for 15 minutes.
I'd argue we need to do both, but that getting off-planet is actually the bigger priority: even if we run our planets poorly, we'll be safe from complete extinction, which gives us time to optimize in the long run.
Venus and Jupiter to pass in the night sky
Be did initially make BeBoxes, but BeOS later ran on off-the-shelf x86 hardware (provided it had drivers, of course, but basic graphics worked on pretty much anything of the era). BeOS R5 at least also had a TCP/IP stack, and while it wasn't highly regarded (Be was rewriting it when it went under) it more or less worked.

By this argument, OS X should be a lot lighter than Windows, which it isn't.
that reminds me - todo: http://whatsthetime.in/
That's not exactly a new idea:
http://entrian.com/goto/

Jokes aside, Kay Schluehr did a package called generator_tools:
http://www.fiber-space.de/generator_tools/doc/generator_tool...

I used it to do iterators serialisation in Python, which is quite an ambitious task (BTW, it should be supported by the language really).
Neat. I'd sometimes wondered if munging the AST in a decorator to add some new control flow was practical. The code looks a bit fragile but not excessively painful.
Send and receive any file using iMessage with SendAny and RecieceAny [Tweak]
How this works, for the interested:

Python internally compiles to a bytecode for a stack-based virtual machine. If you import the module `dis` and execute `dis.dis` on a function, you can see this bytecode.

Like most bytecode VMs, there are jump instructions for compiling for and while loops to. For example,

def foo(n):
a, b = 0, 1
for i in range(n):
a, b = b, a + b
return a

compiles to

2 0 LOAD_CONST 3 ((0, 1))
3 UNPACK_SEQUENCE 2
6 STORE_FAST 1 (a)
9 STORE_FAST 2 (b)

3 12 SETUP_LOOP 37 (to 52)
15 LOAD_GLOBAL 0 (range)
18 LOAD_FAST 0 (n)
21 CALL_FUNCTION 1
24 GET_ITER
>> 25 FOR_ITER 23 (to 51)
28 STORE_FAST 3 (i)

4 31 LOAD_FAST 2 (b)
34 LOAD_FAST 1 (a)
37 LOAD_FAST 2 (b)
40 BINARY_ADD
41 ROT_TWO
42 STORE_FAST 1 (a)
45 STORE_FAST 2 (b)
48 JUMP_ABSOLUTE 25
>> 51 POP_BLOCK

5 >> 52 LOAD_FAST 1 (a)
55 RETURN_VALUE

Note the `JUMP_ABSOLUTE` bytecode at position 48 (which jumps to the `FOR_ITER` at position 25). What we want to do is insert more of these instructions by manually modifying bytecode (something Python allows us to do).

The rest is a simple job of identifying the syntax (`goto .x` is really `goto.x`, an attribute access, which is simple to identify as the `LOAD_ATTR` instruction) and inserting the proper jumps. So in fact this is a pure-python modification, which works solely by changing how Python compiles to bytecode.