skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I tried setting up package.el in Emacs 24 last week. "Shaky" is the word.

The big problem may be that I tried to use el-get, based on some dangerously optimistic blog posts which turned out to be obsolete because the author of el-get changed the semantics of his commands slightly at some point in the last six months. (It is vitally important to read the very bottom of the el-get web page.) But it was nothing that I couldn't figure out in two hours of tinkering and reading el-get's source code. (Good luck, beginners!)

Then I still had various packages that needed to be manually deleted, or manually have their status reset. And then I'd randomly call various el-get functions, restart emacs, and wave rubber chickens until the packages magically installed. Which, amazingly, did finally happen.

My conclusion, though, is that emacs packaging is a waste of time for me and I'm sorry I tried using it. Emacs is not Ubuntu, where every package install spreads critical binary files all over your system, has an average of ten dependencies, and is compiled against specific versions of C shared libraries on specific architectures. In Ubuntu, your packaging system is a matter of life and death. But Emacs packages tend to have few dependencies, their assets are made mostly of text files full of nice universal Lisp source, said assets all live nicely together in one directory in the filesystem where they are easy to manage via a single personal Git repository, and they get updated much more rarely than, say, the typical Ruby gem. So for me the bottleneck in adopting an Emacs package is never the time required to locate its source code and type "wget" or "git clone"; it's the time required to figure out how it works, integrate it into my workflow, define keybindings for it in .emacs, et cetera. Packaging systems solve a problem that I don't really have.

If the packaging scripts were rock solid and I could trust that, having now spent hours setting them up, I'll be able to rely on them to reinstall or update packages automatically over the next five years, that would be one thing. But I have no such confidence. I'm legitimately afraid that I will spend more time shaving yaks in the packaging system than I would have spent manually locating and downloading the packages in the first place.
>>This story, “Google programming languages failing to gain traction,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com.

Why the heck did someone repost it on their own blog? Was permission granted?
Can you use an overhead text-shadow to give them a different color border? ie.

text-shadow: 0 0 5px #0000ff;
Gobuzz was basically google alerts for people and companies that matter to you. We would send you an email each day (or more) with news about these people and companies. Near the end we also supported NLP stuff to find new people mentioned alongside your important contacts.

I still think it's a missing piece of the news world, but we lacked experience and did not dig in and focus.
Everytime I visit css-tricks I am more and more impressed by the quality of literally everything on the site.
Given that there’s still no color management of CSS/HTML colors on the web (except as an opt-in feature of Firefox) and web colors are specified to be sRGB, most JPEG images floating around (like those produced by digital cameras) are sRGB, sRGB uses the same primaries as HDTV meaning that it will properly display television and movies, etc. etc., I think an sRGB makes plenty of sense for an iPad.

I don’t know what the color management situation is on iPad apps now, but when I last was looking at iOS development a couple years ago, iPhones/iTouches did no color management of anything, meaning that colors of all apps & content changed from one device generation to another. If that’s still the case, then I think sRGB is the best target display gamut.
Since they started developing Windows Phone? It's a little obvious, but why not study the design decisions of your competitors? Especially when it reveals inefficiencies?
While not exactly a bug, but if you run this code in Java:

for(int i = 0; i< 100; i++){
Random random = new Random(i);
System.out.println(random.nextDouble());
}

It prints the following sequence (at least on JDK 7 and Win 7):

0.730967787376657
0.7308781907032909
0.7311469360199058
0.731057369148862
0.7306094602878371
0.730519863614471
0.7307886238322471
0.7306990420600421
0.7302511331990172
0.7301615514268123

I know that you're not supposed to recreate the Random-instance like that but it's still a bit odd that the initial values in each sequence are so similar to each other.
Following back the chain of links o the original newspaper story [1], there appear to be three books involved. Only "Ender's Game" is named. Based on the account in the complaint, one of the phrases in question certainly does not come from Ender's Game, and refers to "prostitutes having their faces covered with ejaculat[e].' [2]

The district apparently requires an (apparently simple) administrative review of material beyond the prescribed curriculum, which was not done in this case.

So, it may be that EG was the least sinister but most widely known book of the bunch. I, like others here, leap to defend it, but it may not be the actual source of many of the parent's concerns, but included because its inclusion was in violation of the review policy.

1: http://www.aikenstandard.com/story/0315Followup-with-school-...
2: http://www.wrdw.com/home/headlines/Student_claims_Aiken_Co_m...
On becoming a machine
I always thought this would be a perfect fit for https://gumroad.com/ .
That's an interesting way to put it. We've focused on the "pull" method for a few years with MuckRock.com, and I'd never thought of that but it speaks to why we've gotten the type of audience/userbase we have.
I haven't gotten a chance to read the article yet, but is he planning on landing at all? I would imagine it would be much easier to just go there and back, without landing...? Much more fuel efficient and technically still "round trip."
For the free builder we added a feature to immediately upgrade and save your work in progress in your dashboard, instead of just telling you to upgrade, forcing you to decide between losing your work or doing it all over again.
Isn't the argument more that SVG sucks, rather than that there is anything fundamentally wrong with vector graphics?
See Feynman's discussion of confirmation bias in the measurement of the charge of the electron...

Confirmation bias indeed affects science, but only as a sort of drag. In the end, the measurements Feynman refers to did converge on the correct result, because people kept performing experiments and testing their hypothesis. The same is true for climate research.

The difference between science and politics is that politics converges on the popular answer and science converges on the truth.
I disagree that you can handwave around public editing of executable code that is by convention copied and pasted to hundreds of machines by invoking "WikiNature".
Mobitest is now Open Source
8 great exhibitors at SXSW and what we learnt from them
Maven is a bad dependency/package manager because of the complicated nuance, XML, etc. Java 8 is even planning on using Project Jigsaw to get rid of it (IIRC). Something like Grape or Buildr would be a better model.
How to manufacture creative success (by designing the work space)
(yeah, they're British)
Someone on Reddit bothered to read the actual paper and found the following:

4.4 Accounting for High Rate Components
The FSM power model does not cover RAM and Organic LED screen (OLED) since these components are accessed at much higher rates (and hence called high rate components) resulting in high overheads in event based modeling. [...] we leave RAM/OLED accounting as future work.

If I'm understanding that correctly it's a rather big factor to decide to casually ignore.

source: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/r39lz/free_apps_...
I think this is a bit uppity.

Many people are graciously letting people share in stuff that they themselves need to have. It's laughable to obligate the guy throwing the free picnic or donating his used couch to anything and similarly so for given code.
I'm surprised that this is not the obvious reply.

The author puts it a bit as if setting up a working documentation website is the difficult part. Building up good content is the real value here, not how is managed.

He suggests that emacs related projects should move to github. Heck, he's free to to keep is own repository of branches there if the license allows it, which in almost every case does.
Who's stopping him from starting an emacs related wiki on github, if he so likes it (not being sarcastic)?
A team room can be a great solution if it's done thoughtfully. The big drawback to private offices is that it can inhibit the cross-polination of projects that results in revolutionary ideas. A few rules about group offices that seem to help:

-The team decides the furniture layout.

-The team members don't have to be on the same project, but they should perform similar functions. Don't put the project managers in the same room as the developers!

-There should be ample meeting space separate from the group office space.

-The team needs someone who is senior enough to lead the group if they need rules on distractions and interruptions. For example, in one group office we sent questions to each other over IM even though we were literally elbow-to-elbow. In another group office, we talked almost constantly because we each brought specialized, non-intersecting knowledge to the project.

-The team doesn't last forever. When projects or people start to turn over, it's a good idea to re-form the groups.

(edit: list format looked terrible)
> suggests that PG might want to improve his filter process a bit.

I'm not sure how this is related. From what I've observed, PG selects promising founders, not great site-builders. Is it fair to expect all of them to create beautiful sites?
I don't know you, but I feel similarly. I think ambition drives us to stay up late and arise early. It's not a common trait in mankind I'm finding.

This may be silly, but are you keeping up with the basics? Do you make time to exercise? To write down your day in a journal? To recreate somehow daily? Simple things like this I've found are essential for my personal mental well-being.

Another point a prof taught me--take time to celebrate small accomplishments. Fix a particularly nasty bug? Go for a short walk, or shoot some hoops in the hallway trashcan. That way you aren't deluded with problems like a bad day of rain.

Good luck, friend.
BTW, thanks for all the positive feedback. If you are working on a language translator to JS and end up including sourcemap support, just ping me on G+ and I'll put it into a directory of source-map enabled tools.
Thankyou, that has made it at least slightly more clear to me I think :)

So what you need basically in the core of your server is some data structure (possibly keyed by the client's IP address and TCP port number?) that contains a bunch of functions with prepopulated arguments (curried functions?).

The prepopulated arguments are basically the state set by the previous request. When a new request comes in you somehow match it up with your data structure and execute?

I guess the continuation part is to force the I/O to happen at the right point, i.e make the next request depend on the execution of the first?

Of course Javascript is not really functional so that needn't be explicit.
I'm a developer currently in the Midwest. It's such a great place for families.

Sure, I'd be willing to work for a startup again. But relocation to SF would be a challenge, due to the difference in CoL, housing prices, and level of services.
> I get 9 months at 20 MBit/s [1] which is kind of low for a blu-ray

Blu-Ray bitrates are bloated for various reasons, like older encoders, film transfer, and a lack of anything better to do with the space. You don't need 20mbps with modern H.264 High encoders, it's just a waste. Anything past 10 is at best questionable

> By then we will at least have 4k and probably a bitrate in ~100 MBit/s

Even if 50mbps were something that we would ever need at 1080p (it's not), 4k would not justify a doubling in compressed size, there is no reason to have 100mbps compressed video.

4k is also way beyond reasonable for home display. Just 3840x2160 on a 60" display would be something like 23 arc seconds at 3 meters, you physically cannot see that.

> 60 TB is only 15 times more than we have to day in a single drive

4TB is already orders of magnitude more than most workloads will ever need. I was using video to demonstrate the absurdity of thinking typical workloads would actively use 60TB, because it's not a typical workload, it's a worst-case scenario.
You know, this is a really interesting point to make. I always loved Facebook because it cut back on the bullshit and emphasized data over everything. I wanted to use these services keep in touch with people, not to see them try and express themselves. But when you see too much data fly by it all starts to blur and look the same. It's easy to get cynical about people when all you see is the surface data they express about themselves – by default the least interesting things they could possibly share.

The legendary architect Christopher Alexander has a theory on how life flourishes: at its core is this idea that the world consists of overlapping "centers" – basically places where living things gather. Centers can overlap, so on Facebook your feed and your profile are each centers. By connecting centers, you encourage movement between them and a newer, greater center exists.

I feel that Facebook and Twitter are excellent at encouraging this movement between centers of data. But they're not good at making that data matter. MySpace and Geocities were awful at communication (remember MySpace bulletins?), but they were always about creating something unique for yourself, not about connecting you to anybody else.

Is there a way to do both at once? I'm not sure, but this is something I've been thinking about for a few years now. In high school I did some work for http://zoints.com, which was trying to create a network of connected forums to allow for both personal expression and information density, but their tool was way too cerebral for anybody else to catch on. The closest I think I've seen any site come to this is Tumblr, because it both allows for uniquely designed blogs and a central aggregator, but Tumblr is so bad at conversation that it makes holding lengthy conversations ugly and frustrating.

The theoretical solution to this would be to let users define their own centers: give them controls for looking at information in a unique way of their choosing. In a sense, this solution is the Internet, and things like email and RSS are how we connect disparate online entities, but those are very crude tools. The subtler interactions you allow for, the more you'll let people express themselves without getting in each others' ways – but it's hard to define just what these interactions ought to be.

Looking back I'd say the pinnacle (for me) was Facebook's Graffiti Wall app, back when apps were just starting to be a thing. People interacting through pictures and illustrations lent to much more creative back-and-forth than text ever did. But that wasn't ideal either. I love capturing and organizing information, but I agree with you that something's been lost. Reclaiming it without sacrificing the new will be an enormous challenge.
Open plan offices can solve some problems really well - providing fresh air and daylight to a large number of people efficiently, when executed well.

They can provide a creative, collaborative and egalitarian studio like environment, again when executed well.

What they struggle with primarily is sound isolation, attenuation, and masking. Secondarily they struggle with visual and olfactory distractions.

Designing an open office to look like an Apple store is a mistake. Apple stores are designed to be lively and animated - there's a reason for all those hard surfaces, particularly the glass ceiling. That reason is that they reflect sound. There's also a reason coffee shops provide big overstuffed chairs and carpeted floors.
That's one awesome site =)

I keep looking at it finding new WTFs...
I have the opposite criticism.

This feels like data porn. There's no love in here. I'm not sure why I should read through this data. I don't know what the point is, or what relevance it has to ... well anything.

Data display is not the same as analysis.

This is one of the reasons why i hate all the stupid supposed "data-visualizations" images that people always repost from the net. They don't provide people context for the information they're supposedly displaying, nor any way for people to view the source of the analyses.

In that light, i am delighted that a site like this provides ways to interact w/ the data and dive back to the source of the data. And I do hope that these guys will keep experimenting, but I kind of have a "what's the point?" reaction at the moment.
It looks reasonable enough to me. I suppose you could quibble with some of the details of how they assign hardware utilization to software components. Apps with heavy same-resource utilization independent of ad serving might face some mischaracterization, although the basic message (advertising represents a non-negligible power drain) remains intact.

Am I missing something? I admit to having only read the paper once.
That's the one people linked to before. But it forces you to pay by typing in your credit card, which has too much friction and most people will avoid. So it's not a good solution.
CityGrid Publisher Showcase: UpNext Maps
yes. If you in theory pick the "best of the best" you expect .... the "best". that include the visual packaging and presentation of the companies products / services.
I'd like to see someone set up a turnkey solution, soup to nuts (i.e. website, paypal or other payment service, content delivery) with some simple pricing model. It would then be easy to standardize in terms of format, TOS, etc.
Such is life as a games company employee. Been there, done that and will likely never go back unless a LOT of things change in that industry.

Good luck to all the guys who were laid off, I'm sure things will work out!
Agreed. Samsung has really outdone itself.
Slightly forced connection in the intro to the design of Apple stores. Open plan offices have been around plenty longer than Apple shops.

It is good to have a mix of spaces, but designing people's main work space to be a place for constant interruptions does seem to be a fundamental flaw. Breakout rooms and private spaces should be in the mix.
Is mars established as a credible planet/nation zone, or does it count as space (international)? Its an interesting perspective that the "zone" of mars could be a place of legal jurisdiction. But it seems that space is a free for all "zone", so maybe your lawsuit would be void?
We had this setup at Apple (early Infinite Loop days) and it rocked. The best environment I've ever done engineering in, period.

Being able to shut your door for a few hours to crank stuff out is incredibly important. Being able to walk a few feet and collaborate is also incredibly important. They're not at odds.

It doesn't take rocket science to design a space that works. It takes something harder: Money, and the ability for non-engineers to listen to people who haven't been drinking the latest silver bullet kool-aid.

"People can't concentrate in noisy environments." How hard is that to get?
Roadmap to Scala 3
Ads implant false memories..
There seems to be confusion in this thread, caused by this message. Z-fighting is specifically caused by very near, parallel/co-planar polygons having similar z values, which is not the observed issue with the page. The issue with the page is more akin to rendering using the painter's algorithm but sporadically sorting incorrectly.
Peopleware has some great data about how listening to music can lower distractions but also reduces problem solving ability. The upshot was that test subjects could plow through code while listening to music, but tended to miss optimizations and shortcuts.
Which of his plays did you read, perchance?
> Quite simply that is not true.

There seems to be evidence that this is, at least statistically, true. There will of course be good developers in the Midwest. But when you combine the draw of the valley, with the fact that most of the best developers got to where they are by the interactions they have with other developers. Add in that the best programmers are driven by their trade, and highly likely to move to where they can get the best, most challenging problems. I could easily see this to be true.

Then, when most developers are hired by personal reference, how do you expect us to find these amazing developers hiding in the Midwest?
Ask HN: Does Anyone Write Code With an iPad?
Here's the situation - my main development machine (an early 2008 MacBook) is on its way out. It has served me well, but the wireless card is shot, there are stress fractures and missing bits in the case, and the display is just plain beat up. I've been mulling getting a MacBook Air or Pro (or an Ultrabook running ArchLinux), but I've also been considering one of the new LTE iPads.

I remember seeing an article on HN a few months back written by a guy who had started writing code on his VPS through an iPad. This is roughly the same setup I'm looking at. Has anyone else tried this? Would they recommend it? Am I just better off getting an actual computer?

Thanks, HN.
Maybe someone should make an ACID-like rendering compliance test for typography?
Doesn't RSS already do this for you?
> The truth is, the vast majority of technology companies in the Valley emerged from either Cold War DARPA funded research, from decidedly corporate AT&T Bell Laboratories and Xerox PARC, or from federally funded research at Stanford University and SRI. Hewlett-Packard, Shockley, Fairchild, Intel, Cisco, Sun, etc. all came from one or more of those sources.

Hewlett-Packard was started by two people. Their first product was built in a garage.

(http://www8.hp.com/us/en/hp-information/about-hp/history/his...)

I haven't been to the garage, but it's still there.
It will be enabled by default in Firefox 13.
I'm a developer. I like to interact with customers some of the time and wouldn't even mind taking some support calls once in a while. I feel like it keeps me in touch with reality, like you're saying, and I like knowing that people are out there using my stuff.

But most developers don't feel this way. Forcing them to take support calls just to satisfy the boss' idea of how their ego should be adjusted just doesn't sound to me like something that's likely to be productive.
Graduate Student to be or not to be by an IITian
Your DVD collection uses the largely obsolete MPEG-2. DVD-quality video in h.264 is a fraction of the size.
He may be right for the population in general, but I can tell you that the "Pricing" header is something that I, personally, immediately look for.

No point wasting my team reading anything on that site if the price is out of my league.

Edit: Apparently just like you.
You know, you're absolutely right. Terminator 2 was a terrible movie.

Not all sequels, especially when they're in the hands of James Cameron, are bad.

And yes, I'd like to see Avatar 2, as well.
The general
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Well, there goes my relaxing afternoon. ;)

At least I'm pretty sure I don't have many emacs packages that originally came from a file on Emacswiki...
Twitter: Promoted Tweets on Mobile
What? An entire race of intelligent beings is wiped out and the teacher complains about _nudity_?